Boo! Don't blame the audience!

> Then Ulbricht walked into the public library and sat down at the table directly in front of me, and suddenly as I was reading I could look up and see exactly the chair he had been in, where the plainclothes police had positioned themselves, how they had arranged a distraction.

Alternately:

> Ulbricht had walked into the public library

gives the game away.

If you still want to play around a bit:

> I could see where Ulbricht walked into the public library. The table he sat at. I looked up and saw where the plainclothes police had positioned themselves, how they had arranged a distraction.

That way you are leaving some ambiguity, but are not directly lying with the tenses.

I think you could have told it as experiencing the events without making your post confusing, but you'd have to redo your first paragraph. Your first paragraph is external, meta, and places his arrest in your past, which throws off the effect when that suddenly changes in the next sentence. It's not the audience's fault that that is hard to parse.

> it seems I overestimated my audience

I was willing to give you the benefit of the doubt, somebody who aspires to be a better writer. But, no, this clarifies that you're just pretentious.

Can you form vivid mental images in your head?

Many of us can't. Personally, for nearly three decades I thought the ability to vividly experience a book this way was just some overused and extremely exaggerated metaphor - and then I discovered aphantasia is a thing, and I score close to top of its severity scale.

So perhaps it's less about your starting point, and more about describing a frame of mind some in the audience don't have, and can't relate to.

Curiously, I don't recall ever seeing this particular style of writing before, in any of the books I ever read.

I found it interesting and could visualize you as you were visualizing it while reading. The only part that made me go back was I thought he sat down to your table until I reread you could see the table he sat down at years ago.

> I overestimated my audience

How many languages do you speak? A large part of this site speaks at least two, and usually English is not the first one of them.

I've seen this type of thing recently and also have been told some comments were "obviously" meaning something else. I think people must've stopped reading books and lost interpretation skills.

I enjoyed it, personally.