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did. I couldn’t. Too risky. Instead, I just watched him through his window. Over time, I lost interest and started following someone else. But Swanson was the first. He was the first person I knew.
    This, I assume, is exactly the kind of information you want from me. You want me to go back through elementary school and middle school and high school and college, and you want meto talk about all the things that supposedly made me who I am. And maybe I’ll do that, assuming these sessions go well and we need to keep digging for bones. Maybe I will and maybe I won’t. But—right now—I want to accelerate. I want to talk about why I built the suit and why I developed the cream. You could argue, I suppose, that those things were not necessary. Certainly, there are easier means of surveillance. Wiretapping, for one. Hidden cameras, motion detectors. I had an intense interest in hidden cameras, and I used them on my roommates during college. Very often, hiding under a bed or inside ceiling panels can accomplish the same goals, at least in a limited capacity. But none of those things can truly reflect the sense of being inside a room. If you want to be in a room, you need to be in the room , you know? Even though that’s an infinitely more difficult endeavor. Even though the suit and the cream are uncomfortable, and even though the physical toll it takes on my body is ludicrous. I’ll never feel the same. I’ll never be the same. But it had to be done.
    [Note to C. Bumpus: In retrospect, I should have stopped Y____ at this juncture and asked him to provide greater details about “the suit and the cream.” He might have complied. However, in my defense, I want to stress that I was still under the impression that “the suit and the cream” were part of Y____’s fantasy life and not tangible artifacts. I was also trying very hard to comply with Y____’s prearranged conditions, which demanded that I not interject during his monologues. At the time, gaining his emotional trust seemed more important than the credulity of his claims. If you’re wondering what I was thinking internally when he started talking about the suit and the cream, my answer is simple: I thought, “This is interesting. I wonder where this is going?” I assumed Y____ was doing something many patients do when they begin to feel relaxed around a therapist—I assumed he was expressing an obvious metaphor about how he viewed himself. Theidea of donning a special “suit” or costume is a common symbol for someone hiding his true self from the world. The concept of “the cream” initially struck me as sexual, which was a subject Y____ had never alluded to previously. I was genuinely excited by these revelations and wanted to hear more. Only later did I discover my silence had been a mistake. I waited one session too long.]
    As I believe I already mentioned, research and development for the suit and the cream was financed by the second Bush administration, technically through standard grants but ultimately via the NSA. 6 This was when I was in Hawaii. It started as an extension of optical camouflage, which originally came from the University of Tokyo, but—at Chaminade—we were more occupied with metamaterials. Now, to this day, I still don’t know if the original intention for the suit was warfare or reconnaissance. As you might expect, there was a lot of debate about this among the staff at the lab. There was always an issue over whether we could accept funding for this research if the suit and the cream were going to be used in actual combat, since that would essentially make them weapons. None of those eggheads wanted to be working on weaponry. They were overt moralists. It was a little different for me, partially because I was younger but mostly because this was not my first rodeo. I was young, but this experience was arguably my fifth or sixth intellectual undertaking: I had started in chemical engineering as an undergrad, but then I pursued