Short story about a cop and a robber

Dear diary,

For this entry, I’m just gonna write a short experimental story. So, if you’re one of those diaries that only wants to hear personal confessions of the day’s events, then go be someone else’s diary, cuz I can’t please you.

By the way, before I start, I’ll have you know that my good friend Noah named the following story as one of the two stories that he would take with him “on the next submarine”. (He didn’t name the second story, but I suspect it’s something superb.)

STORY

During the Thousand Years of Peace, two best friends, a cop and a robber, go out to the local park to take a walk together, and they see what they think might’ve been a premeditated homicide in the woods; so the cop takes a photo of the event, but the robber steals his camera and develops the film herself. Thru a process of enlarging a certain detail of the image, the robber arrives at a picture that she labels an abstract artwork, giving it the title “MacGuffin, No. 2”; and it ends up selling for fifteen million francs.

The cop is enraged, because this blurry spot in the original photograph represents, he believes, the evidence of the crime that he has captured on film; therefore, as long as his friend’s manipulated creation is considered a masterpiece by all the curators, dealers, and critics of the Art World (a realm which he sees as a total sham), someone is getting away with murder.

Anyway, the two friends go on a plane ride in the cop’s private jet; and while cruising at a very high altitude, they hear the voice of the Secret Government speaking over the radio, asking them if they would like to be shot down. The robber is out of the cockpit at the moment, for she had opted to put her half of the control board on autopilot so that she could spend some time in the jet’s private gym; so the cop answers for both of them, the way that one might order for two at a restaurant: “Yes, everyone aboard agrees: please do this thing.” So, when the robber returns, the jet has already entered a tailspin; and, after the crash, both friends are immediately taken into custody by mercenaries.

Now, while they are sitting in the prison cell together, smoking cigarettes and playing a card game at a small wooden table, a subordinate is sent in to find out if the cop and the robber would like to become members of the Secret Government. If their answer is yes, the subordinate has been instructed to invite them to dinner; and, if no, the subordinate has orders to respect this choice and simply try again later with a more enticing offer.

The cop accepts; the robber declines.

During the meal, the cop and the Secret Government discover that they have many interests in common. This is spun by the Secret Government, in an attempt to flatter their dinner guest, as proof that solidarity not only exists between the respective spheres of power but that it even crosses class boundaries.

The cop is escorted to a 1929 Isotta Fraschini (in perfect shape), and an extremely deferential chauffeur drives him back to the prison. From there, the cop and the robber are transferred to a maximum-security War Camp, where they meet a colorful group of ex-leaders of American countries.

One night, when everyone in the camp is fast asleep, the pristine silence is broken when, inexplicably, all the ex-leaders awake at the very same instant and burst into tears. The cop and the robber dash over to help: they gently pat the ex-leaders on their back and ask them what’s wrong. The ex-leaders explain that they sorely miss governing their respective populaces.

As a result of the above disruption, a representative from the Secret Government storms into the cell, grabs the cop and the robber, and drags them off to be placed in solitary confinement together. The cop and the robber suffer horribly the pangs of being deprived of the companionship of any of the ex-leaders of the Americas, now that they’re left with no one beyond their own selves to wow them — for they had grown accustomed to being wowed by the nightly recitals of all the coups & kidnappings that those ousted sovereigns underwent.

So the cop and the robber decide to dig an escape tunnel.

Yet, just before the tunnel is completed, the Secret Government grants them their freedom, and they are released into the world.

Thus the two friends, now freshly freed, resolve on trying to locate the approximate place where their escape tunnel was projected to have ended, and to finish the project from without; so as to break back into the prison, just to prove that they can do it (& also to spite the system that forced them to experience this unwanted liberty) — so they spend most of that afternoon and part of the evening digging in the grass around a certain part of the local park.

Eventually they hit their mark: in a certain place, instead of more thick dirt, they notice hollow darkness beneath the stroke of their pickaxe; and they hasten to clear away the rest of the ground in that area: thus they end up successfully connecting the final link that was left undug.

They then crawl down thru the end of their escape tunnel, back to what was supposed to be its beginning, in thru the wall of their former cell. In other words, they re-infiltrate the prison: They take one last look around, for the sake of sentimentality.

Then they crawl back out to the free world, and seal up the tunnel. They fill its entirety with high-grade concrete.

It should be noted that the place where their escape tunnel opens at the end — that is, its man-sized exit hole at the park — is in the exact same place as the blur on the photo that the cop snapped at the start of this story; therefore it probably wasn’t a murder that he caught on film but rather their own future selves escaping from prison. (There was perhaps some time-reversal or dimensional shifting involved.) But this could not be admitted into the courtroom as evidence of a crime, because the culprits had already been released from prison at the moment the picture was taken:

So it turns out that the robber’s artwork really was beautiful. For, in this instance, not only was that opinion deemed accurate in the eye of the beholder, but it ended up being the proven, objective truth.