No.3 Handcuffs

“We arrest you,” the police officer said. However I couldn’t understand.
“Is that me? Am I a suspect?”
I felt as if had been dreaming a dream of nightmare. It was difficult to understand what the matter was going. My mind went blank. At the same time I was violently-disturbed.
But it was unimaginable for me to resist because, as I wrote yesterday, I thought the police was a friend of just causes. I noticed I was in a flood of a flashlight from the right hand. It was another police officer. The flash was so uncommon for my 2 year-old son that he innocently asked him, “What’s this?” “It’s a camera,” answered the officer.
“Are you ready to leave? We are taking you.”
“How long will it take?”
“A couple of days.”
“I can come back in only a few days,” I accepted his words. I was upset due to a baseless arrest at that time, but I calmed myself to hear this.
“How much money is needed?” I asked.
“Twenty-thirty thousand yen is good enough.”
As the day was right after my pay day, I had such amount in my wallet. When I was preparing for departure, my mobile phone started ringing. The police officer stopped me from answering the call. Later, after release on bail, the telephone message informed me that they were from my coworkers. I heard their repeated voices, “It’s an emergency, Oguro-san.” “What are you doing? Why don’t you answer me?” My friends thought I had gone out to have a fun because I took a paid holiday on 1 November. Later I told my coworkers that it was me who was in trouble then. No one could imagine what was going on with me. And little did I consider that my comrades were also arrested.
When I got ready and was hauled by the police, the officer said, “I’ll clap handcuffs on you, OK?” In the police dramas I had seen on TV, the police officer snap handcuffs violently with a big noise. It was different. He handcuffed my right wrist, and then, left wrist gently. However they were so heavy. I was surprised to find them terribly heavy.
“Why am I handcuffed?” I was seized by a depressed feeling which was as heavy as lead due to the weight of the handcuffs and pressure. In my life till now, I have never experienced such a feeling. At that time I was so full of my own affairs that I couldn’t think much of my wife and little son who were watching an entire scene. When I think back, I always feel sorry for them as her husband and his father.I got out, speaking to my wife, ”I’ll eat pork cutlet on rice before coming back.” But my wife said nothing. Her face looked pale.