It wasn’t me. It must have been someone else who just looked like me. I’ve never robbed a bank. I never would have. Why would I? I have a decent job, a decent home, a decent wife. I’m a decent man. I didn’t do it. It wasn’t me.
But when they arrest you for robbing a bank, you naturally begin to doubt yourself. You ask “When was this?” And you try to remember where you were, and what you were doing at the time. It’s hard to remember like that, because nobody told you at the time that you should mark the time and place for future reference.
When Kennedy was assassinated, or at 9-11, you remember where you were and what you were doing because that was a historic event, and you witnessed it, and you knew immediately it was important. But, otherwise, pick a ho-hum day in a ho-hum month in your ho-hum past and you probably don’t remember where you were or what you were doing.
It’s hard to remember, but it’s easy to doubt yourself. What is an identity, anyway? What makes a person like me think that he knows himself. I look in the mirror and there I am, but I don’t see anything deeper than my skin and the hairs on my chin, at least if I squint.
There’s grandfather’s axe. Grandfather had an axe that was made with a wooden handle, a big piece of flint, and a leather strap to tie the flint to the handle. Well, the strap breaks, so he replaced the strap. Later, your father has the axe and its handle breaks, so he made a new handle. It’s still the same axe, right? But now you own it and the flint breaks. After you tie on a new flint, is it the same axe? Maybe no. The same with a person. How many things need to change before you are no longer you? Can you possibly always be you even after everything has changed so much that you can’t remember being a different person, actually a bank robber? I couldn’t remember. I guess my memories have changed, so I’m not that guy any more.
Then there’s the feeling I had that I had been there before, in that same bank, when actually, honestly, I don’t think I had ever been there before. I was there only by accident because I wanted to cash a check. So why did the security guard seem familiar, the way he looked at me? Why did I have that feeling? Had I been there before in a parallel universe? I mean, did I experience some kind of mind meld with an echo of me in a parallel universe, but that parallel me was actually a bank robber? Can this kind of thing actually happen? If so, I guess I was accidentally in that parallel universe, because they say that the bank robbery occurred in the universe in which I found myself.
It didn’t seem to me that this could really be happening. I couldn’t really be arrested for having robbed that bank. Maybe it was a dream. Maybe I had been hypnotized and made to feel guilty for something I had never done. It was a joke and soon I would wake up and everyone would laugh. Only thing. I didn’t wake up.
They let me have a phone call, so I called my decent wife. She actually answered her phone, so that was a good sign that I wasn’t crazy. I told her about my predicament, and asked her where I had been and what was I doing when the bank was being robbed. “Oh, I don’t know, honey,” she said. “That’s a while a go.” So I asked her to get me a lawyer.
I knew the lawyer would get me released because I know I didn’t do it and because I believed in justice. Right.
Adam Green was the lawyer. He asked me whether they had any physical evidence, any fingerprint or loose hair that fell on the counter by the window. “I don’t know,” I said. “How could they if I’d never been there before?”
Little did I know that after I called my wife and after she called Adam Green, detectives were there at my decent home with a forensic team, looking for the loot, I guess, or the gun that I had allegedly pulled on the teller who says she never forgets a face.
Never forgets a face? Do people really say that in real life, or only in the movies?
Well, if all they had was a grainy security video and a teller who says she never forgets a face, I thought that Mr. Green would get me swiftly released. After all, the me I know isn’t going to go on the lam for a crime I didn’t commit.
They say that nobody on death row admits they made the killing. If you listen to them, none of them committed the crime.
Boy was I surprised when they said that they had found the gun at my home, and that I had paid cash for the place right after the bank was robbed. Mr. Green was of no use to me at all.
Monologues