I live in a cluttered, run-down mansion. I've never explored the whole place. Elegant antiques next to junk--sculpture supplies, weird masks.

One day I find, deep in the back, a suite taken over by a clinic. A specialty clinic--they only do one surgery, its name so long and Greek I'm unclear what it means. Yet the receptionist recognizes me--I'm on the waiting list myself! I ask her nurse "Roughly how long do I have to wait, and how should I prepare?" She snaps me "Keep your distance!" and scowls at me. "Don't come in here unmasked. You need to leave."

Like I'm the intruder! They set up here without my permission--in my home! I have an oversize white lab coat with big lapels. Turn the collar up and hide my mouth & nose, and stay. Ask her again. She caves in--grudgingly looks up and reads off my appointment time. For whatever it is...

I go on exploring. What else hides in our maze? I find another unexpected suite out back--my parents' bedroom! No, the whole HOUSE that I grew up in! An Eichler home, a mass-produced Frank Lloyd Wright design. Yet it's my childhood. Future and past in one.

I look out the sliding glass door. In the back yard is a crew of carpenters carrying tools. Are they going to help renovate the place? Sure needs it.

One knocks. Insistently. I slide the door open. "Yes?"

He says "Ma'm, we have a warrant to search the premises." Hands me a huge envelope, maybe 30 x 45 cm. "You've been accused of stealing..." this long list of stuff. None of it mine, or anything I recognize.

No wonder. The name on the warrant-envelope says Mem Loi. I say "I'm not Mem Loi. And I've lived here 25 years; she's never lived here."

He says "Ma'm, we still have to search."

"Not if you call me Ma'm. You KNOW I'm not her. You expect me to treat you like real cops when you have the wrong uniforms, wrong name on the warrant, wrong gender, wrong race... wrong house."

He sighs and says "We're required to search, ma'm. You could be hiding her, you could be her..."

I'm a tall bony white male. Not a ma'm, not Asian, not Mem Loi. Yet he keeps calling me that!

But they do seem to be real cops, and the FBI were real the last time they mistakenly raided us... so I let them in. By now I'm resigned; a homeless person who resents a housemate of ours has been accusing us of random crimes. Cops at our door have become a weekly thing.

Deep in the maze, they find another business I didn't know of--a cafe. Small but busy. I worry the cops will hassle me for their illegal business. I don't recognize anyone here--customers or staff. Whoever they are, they didn't invest much. Thrift store furniture. Lurid Balinese and Mexican demon-masks wart the walls. Ugly.

A cop points at the ugliest mask of all--a big red lumpy face. Takes it down. "This matches the description of a stolen item." I don't care a bit if the cops take that! But suddenly the guy looks lost. I lead him out through dim, cluttered halls that confuse even me at first, but at last make it to the front door. He puts the mask in the back seat of a cruiser and looks apologetic. He seems worried he can't get back to the cafe and his buddies removing the rest of the junk, excuse me, stolen art treasures.

I'm reduced to this--helping cops who claim I'm not me--who want to loot my home, but only of junk--and can't without my help, for they get lost!

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Labyrinth-home: 1: a rambling mansion I recently saw. 2: my friends Mike & Nic's cluttered house. 3: on Miss Fisher, Melbourne University around 1930.
• Big lab coat: science! Article in Science News on physics pioneer Wu Chien-shiung. Many ignored her evidence for entanglement; to support her could risk your job. But eventually her work copped a Nobel--for her male colleagues. Left her out!
  
• Mem Loi: saw an ad for bikini wear, a line called Memoi. So: sex? Ooh, I had a sexual thought! Call the cops!
• Why Mem Loi not of Memoi? Loi: law in French. Mem Loi: "remember the law."
• Covid, masks: I read Alfred Crosby's America's Forgotten Pandemic (1989) on the 1918 flu. He wrote "masks can't work--coarse-fibered cloth can't possibly filter a virus." So he ignored that it did! Deathrates dropped in cities requiring masks, but Crosby knows it can't work, so he dismisses all that mere data! Trump didn't start the anti-masking mindset--medicine's long been biased toward drugs and shots, not masks. Drugs and shots are of course patentable & thus profitable; masks, not. Pure coincidence I'm sure.
• "The cops were real that other time:" in 2017, FBI agents and cops came to my door and questioned me. Comcast had told them our house was a nest of internet criminals. Nice of them! We quit Comcast and got Monkeybrains. They charge less, crash less, and hardly ever finger us to the FBI.
• Round, red, warty: popular image of the covid virus! So the mask-hunting cops are likely my immune system.
• MEANING: avoid the American medical system as long as I can; it misdiagnosed me for decades and I expect it to mistreat me in old age, too. Not out of malice! Just incompetence. But my immune system's not too smart either...

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