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Thomas Walker or whatever, since they could not possibly be sending a tiny army of police to arrest him, this Thomas Walker, who hadn’t done anything seriously illegal since his pot-smoking days as a college student.
    If they really did tell him why he was being arrested, as they later claimed in court, he never heard it. He refused counsel. He asked them to recheck the name, address, and age ofthis Thomas Walker they were after. He knew it was all a mistake and continued working with that assumption even after they carried his computer and monitor into the barren little room where he was seated behind a pitted wooden conference table; even after they plugged it in and booted it up and clicked through the image files till they came to a pornographic image and asked him if he had downloaded it from the Internet, and did he understand that it was a crime in the state of New York to possess child pornography. As he looked hard at the picture on the screen it began slowly and terrifyingly to sink in that it wasn’t a mistake at all, that he was indeed the man they had come to arrest.
    The quiet in the little room at that moment was extraordinary. He wasn’t breathing, nor, it seemed, was anyone else. There were no uniformed officers present. The detective across from him, on the right of the computer, was probably in his forties, though he looked older, with bags under his eyes and developing jowls and graying hair combed over the center of his head where the hair had thinned to balding. An unattractive young woman, probably in her early thirties, leaned over the table on the other side of the computer. She was stick-figure thin, and her clothes—K-mart-quality blue slacks and maroon blouse—flopped around the bony projections of her shoulders, elbows, and knees. She was the one asking the questions while the others watched intently. It was as if somehow everyone understood that he was just then comprehending the situation.
    He studied the picture on the monitor. In a cheap, wood-paneledroom that suggested the interior of a trailer in the closeness of its space, a pale-skinned older woman lay on a faded green sofa holding a young girl gently in her arms. He’d guess the woman was in her forties. The girl, though fully developed, was clearly very young. She might not yet have even reached her teens. They were both without clothes. Most of the woman’s body was covered by the girl’s. On the woman’s face was a benevolent, loving, motherly expression. She held the girl in a protecting embrace, one hand smoothing the girl’s hair, the other wrapped around her back, holding her shoulder. The girl’s cheek was pressed between the woman’s breasts. Her eyes were closed and her mouth was open in an expression of sexual ecstasy, the kind of look a woman might have in the moment before climax. The older woman’s face and body were not unattractive, only worn by age. Her skin was slack and pale, furrowed with creases and lines and splotched here and there with mild discolorations. The girl in her arms was still perfect. Her skin was vibrant, her breasts full, her face utterly unmarked by time or experience. Her body seemed to glow in that woman’s arms as, in the bottom left foreground of the picture, seen only from the back and side, a man hunched over slightly in the act of penetrating the girl as the woman held her, and the girl pressed her cheek into the woman’s breast and opened her mouth in that moan almost audible in the picture. The hirsute body of the man was bulky and thick, bear-like in its partial crouch. He looked to be of an age with the woman, though his face wasn’t visible, only his body, the bulk of it weighing down the bottom of the picture,his erection sliding into the downy hair that filled the perfect V between the girl’s legs.
    The stick-figure woman asked the question again: Was he aware that it was a crime in the state of New York to possess child pornography?
    T looked up from the picture to the