He confesses to me on our first date. We're at a bar, or an analogue of one, a purple-lit high-chaired affair nestled in the crook of Circular Road beneath the shadow of the CBD. Over his glass of twelve-dollar rum-and-coke, he pulls out his man-pouch to show me the contents of his phone.

"Look here," he says, "I don't care if you tell anyone about this."

On his phone screen is a video taken in a storage unit. There are no windows, and the lights are dim. Across the screen are bodies upon bodies, wrapped in plastic, neatly aligned in a row. I jump, mostly out of surprise than of shock. Months of true crime podcasts have not prepared me for this.

On closer inspection, the bodies are all the same height. They are all in perfect alignment, not a shoulder out of place. But then the lighting shifts, and recognition dawns.

"The cardboard policeman!" I exclaim.

He nods somberly. "That's him."

"Is this - some kind of art project?"

"I guess," he says. "The first few were a bit of an accident -- my mom ran a Sheng Shiong, and had a whole patrol of these in the back room when it closed. They're surprisingly light - you could probably load half a dozen of these into the back of your car by yourself."

"So you're saying the rest of them -- "

"Fairprices, Watsonses, Capitaland mall entrances. You'd be surprised how much people let you get away with when you wear a uniform."

The video pans closer to one of the bodies. The inimitable officer's flawless skin gleams in the dim, beaming with his chiseled corrugated lines. I discern, upon closer inspection, that he is but one of a series of officers, stacked and wrapped in sets of ten so as to give an illusion of depth. All in all, there must have been hundreds of them in the room.

"Nicely packed. You're taking really good care of them," I observe.

"They are living a comfortable life, these Ryans. This one was lifted from the front of a community centre. This one's from the airport. This one, with the slight line running through his middle -- I had to bend him through a toilet window, god rest his soul."

"What are you going to do with them?"

"Huh." He stops to stare at his drink. Around us, law-abiding citizens are sipping their margaritas and daiquiris, their hard lemonades and highballs. "Sell it? I don't know. What's the point of any collection, anyway?"

I stare at the cardboard policemen. Each of them are stern, their palms outstretched in the darkness. They stand firm, indomitable, a perfect wall against crime. Identically-massed, they exude a certain power I am not sober enough to dissect. Like the tessellations of a mosque, it is the same power of the mundane-made-iconic, multiplied into infinity, into a kind of divinity, into a kind of Platonic ideal.

"It's beautiful," I mutter.

"I'm glad you agree," he says, relieved.

"You sure you aren't going to do anything with them?"

"Why?" He narrows his eyes. "If you're saying I should return them -- "

I hand him back his phone. "Call a Grab," I say. "I'll pay for the drinks."

We leave the bar through the back door.