“How many drinks have you had tonight, sir?”
“Just a couple.”
“What is a couple? Two? Three? Ten?”
“Maybe three.”
“Three, huh?”
“I'm pretty sure it was three.”
“Sir, due to the unusual conditions I'm unable to perform a field sobriety test. Because I have reason to believe your blood alcohol level is over the legal limit permitted to operate a motor vehicle in this state, you'll need to come to my squad car, where I will perform a breathalyzer test. If you are over the legal limit I will be forced to arrest you for driving under the influence.”
In a way I'm fairly sure this isn't happening at all. My feet are almost completely below the surface of the mud. I'm woozy and dizzy and I wouldn't even be on my feet if I weren't holding onto the car door. There is no way this is a real situation. I'm a regular guy with a regular life. Right now I should be at home, getting ready for bed, and the worst thing on my mind should be tomorrow morning's commute. A guy like me doesn't get arrested for driving drunk. I don't even get pulled over. Ever.
“Do you think you can make it up that slope?” he asks, gesturing toward his car on the cloverleaf, right about where I went off the road.
I've lost my job. I've lost my wife. I'm about to find out what the inside of a jail cell is like. A real jail cell, not a cubicle. What the hell have I done?
If you think all this has sobered me up, you're wrong. My head is swimming. My heart thuds in my chest like a subwoofer.
“Yes, sir,” I finally answer. “I can make it.”
“Then let's go.”
My feet seem to weigh fifty pounds apiece, covered in mud as they are, and I lose my balance after only a few steps. My hands plunge forward, into the mud. They sink so deep that I can't figure out how to stand up again. I've got no leverage, nothing solid to push against. I feel like an ant who walked into a honey spill and can't get back out again.
“Would you like some help, sir?”
“No, I've got it.”
“Sirâ”
Eventually, I'm not sure how, I manage to pull myself upâ¦and then fall down again three steps later. We haven't begun to ascend the steep part of the hill yet.
“You only had three drinks, sir?” the officer asks.
“It's this mud. It's not easy to walk in.”
“You're right. It isn't easy. But you've fallen twice and I haven't lost my balance.”
By now the officer has dropped any pretense of being professional, or even funny. Now he just sounds pissed off.
The ground dries out and hardens as we move away from the low spot and ascend the hill. But my feet are still heavy and slippery from the mud, and I fall again as the incline increases.
“You going to make it?”
“Of course I am. I'm not drunk. It's the mud.”
“Right,” he says. “The mud.”
I wonder if I'll be put in a cell by myself? Probably not. I'm sure there's a place where all the drunk losers are kept for the night. Most of them will have been to jail before. I'll probably end up in a fistfight.
All I can hope for is the cop to have mercy on me, or that my blood alcohol has dropped a little since I left Sherri's house.
After a few more steps I fall down again.
Halfway to the top I am forced to get down on all fours and crawl like a baby.
TWENTY-EIGHT
A
few minutes later I find myself inside a police car for the first time in my life. The officer joins me in the front seat, and between us sits a row of radios that looks like it belongs in the space shuttle. He retrieves a small clipboard from somewhere out of sight and spends a few moments writing what I assume is the citation. Then he reaches across the seat, into the glove box, and pulls out a device that looks like an MP3 player with a stubby tube sticking out of it.
“This will test your blood alcohol concentration,” the officer says, and pushes a button to activate the device. He places a protective guard over the tube and hands the thing to me. “Put your mouth here and blow a full breath into it.”
Being a social drinker, I've imagined this moment on many occasions in the pastâdriving home after happy hour, after too many beers watching football with my buddies, after parties with Gloria buzzing in the seat next to me. Like I told you before, I've never considered myself a drunk driver, not like the scumbags who run over children in the middle of the afternoon. I've never come close to having an accident.
But nothing I ever imagined could have prepared me for this level of humiliation. Being asked to blow into a tube while the officer watches feels like something a father would force his five-year-old son to do. As if I am so immature I need another adult to decide if I am making the correct life choices. I am overcome with self-loathing as the officer watches me breathe into the device. The readout is a red LED display, and I wait for a beep, some signal that my breath has been analyzed, assuming the output will be an astronomical number, two or three times over the legal limit.
Instead, nothing happens, except I run out of breath. I take my mouth off the tube and inhale a lungful of fresh air.
The officer isn't pleased.
“It didn't register,” he says, and presses a button on the breathalyzer while it's still in my hand. “Try it again.”
So it's the same humiliation all over again, another deep breath pushed into the little tube, until my lungs are empty, and still not a peep from the device.
“Here,” the officer says. “Let me see that thing.”
He presses buttons until the device beeps and the display changes. For good measure he goes through the button-pushing sequence again, with the same result. Then he hands the device back to me.
I blow into it again with the same result: nothing.
“What on earth?” he says, and grabs the breathalyzer from my hands. He finds another protective guard, puts it on, and to my surprise blows into it himself. This time it beeps cheerfully and produces a number of the LED display: 0.0.
Now he produces a third protective guard and hands the breathalyzer back to me. There's no point in describing again what happens, because I'm sure by now you can guess.
The officer suspects I'm fooling the device. He opens his mouth to say something, but apparently thinks better of it. We sit there in silence.
Finally, he says, “The breathalyzer seems to be malfunctioning. I'm still going to detain you for suspicion of driving under the influence. I'm taking you into custody and will transport you to the station, where you'll be given another test to measure your blood alcohol content. This is not an arrest, and you will not receive a Miranda warning at this time. Do you understand?”
I nod, absently, but my mind is racing, considering the implications of this failed test. The machine worked on him but not on me. It failed three times on me. I think about the conversation at Sherri's, how I am the protagonist of this simulation, of this story. Apparently, for whatever reason, I'm not supposed to be arrested for driving drunk. That's why the breathalyzer won't work on me.
Do you have a better explanation?
“Please step out of the car,” he says. “You'll have to ride in the back on the way to the station.”
“What about my car?”
“Your car will be impounded. It will be towed to a lot at your expense. Please step out of the car.”
I open the door and climb out, and the most ridiculous urge to run comes over me. There's nowhere to go and even if there were I am in no condition to flee. But I still feel like running, anyway, because I'm afraid once I go to jail I will never leave.
The officer approaches from the other side of the vehicle.
“Put your arms behind your back, please.”
“What? I only had a couple of drinks.”
“It's standard procedure, sir.”
“I'm not a criminal. I just made a dumb decision to drive home after a couple of drinks.”
The officer grabs my wrists, roughly, and whips the cuffs around one and then the other.
“That hurts. Do you have to put them on so tight?”
Instead of answering, the officer takes my arm and guides me toward the back of the squad car, opens the door, and pushes me toward the back seat.
“Watch your head,” he says.
As we drive off the cloverleaf and back onto the highway, in the direction of downtown, I stare out the window, up at the dark night sky, looking for Jupiter, wondering what Gloria might be doing. Wondering if I will ever see her again.
TWENTY-NINE
T
he cop escorts me into the police station through a back door, down a short hallway, and into a room that looks something like a doctor's office. You probably don't need a description, but here's one anyway: white walls, examination bed, a few medical instruments and machines. Pathetic, I know, but I'm so exhausted it's like I haven't slept in years.
“Have a seat there,” he says, motioning toward the bed. “I need some general information from you, and then a nurse will arrive to take a blood sample. You may decline the blood test if you like, but that doesn't mean you won't be arrested. Do you agree to the test?”
If I decline, it probably means I'm admitting guilt. And yet the more I think about it, the more I suspect the test will fail, just like the breathalyzer did. Three times it failed, even though for the officer it worked perfectly. And if I'm correct, if the blood test does fail, what then? Are there other types of tests or measuring devices that don't work on me? Like radar guns, for instance? Is that why I've never been pulled over for speeding?
All this seems hopelessly absurd, I totally know that, but what would you do if you were me? When you read something in a novel or see it in a movie, it's easy to become disconnected from what's happening because you know it isn't real. But pretend for a moment all this really was happening to you. What would you think? Honestly? And if you refused to accept any of it, if you truly believed you were delusional, then what? Check into a mental hospital? Crawl into bed and stay there? Drink yourself into oblivion (I already tried that)? Kill yourself?
“I'll take the test.”
As promised, he gathers some personal information, like my full name and Social Security number and date of birth. Some other questions about what I did tonight, how much alcohol I consumed, etc. I tell him I hung out with friends. I tell him I had three drinks over a four-hour period. The officer laughs to himself.
“Still sticking to that three-drink story?”
This makes me angry even though we both know I'm lying to him.
A few moments later a nurse enters the room. She is dark-skinned and her brown hair is pinned back in a bun. She prepares the machine, swabs my arm, finds a vein. When she asks me to expect a small prick of pain, I look up at her and realize she is gorgeous and somehow familiar. In fact I'm sure I've seen her somewhere before. Just like everyone I meet, apparently. She draws blood into a little vial. Drops the vial into a slot in the machine.
While we wait, my mind spins like a hard drive searching for a file, but so far I can't remember where I've seen the nurse.
“We used to have to send the sample to a lab,” the officer tells me. “But with this new machine we can get the results back immediately. And it also does a simple scan for several high-profile illicit drugs. If any of those registers positive, we'll take another blood sample and send it to the lab for a more detailed analysis.”
Holy shit. Illegal drugs? I could go to prison for that. Real prison.
“Everything okay?” the officer asks me, smirking. “You look a little pale.”
“No,” I whisper. “I'm fine.”
“You look like you might be sick.”
“I'm fine.”
“Anything you want to tell me? You might get leniency from the judge if you tell the truth.”
Even though I would never fall for a ploy so obvious, I'm so frightened my insides feel like they're melting.
Finally the machine makes a sound, a deep beeping sound, and the nurse looks at it quizzically. Nothing displays on the front panel.
“What the hell?” asks the officer. “Come on. Not again.”
“The machine seems to be malfunctioning,” says the nurse.
“It can't be.”
“This happens every once in a while. I have to unplug the machine for a minute or so and plug it back in. It gets confused sometimes. I just have to reboot it.”
He looks at her and then looks at me.
“Funny how this happened again,” he says.
“Is it?”
“But I don't need a positive blood test to arrest you. Failing a field sobriety test demonstrates impairment, and so does your behavior.”
At this point the nurse and the officer look at each other and exchange smiles.
“You did drive off the highway,” he adds helpfully.
I don't say anything about that because I don't have to. All I have to do is sit here and wait for that machine to malfunction again, and then we'll see how confident the officer is about his sobriety tests. Every minute that goes by is a minute I'm a little less drunk.
The nurse unplugs the machine from the wall and stands there holding the cord in her hand. Her shoes are dirty. They're supposed to be white, but they have smudges of brown across the front, as if she walked through a field to get here today. Her ankles are extremely thin, the same as her wrists. They remind me of something, a memory so vague it could be from another life, and yet I know this memory is real. I knew this nurse once. Knew her intimately. She laughs like a birdâ¦high-pitched, staccato bursts. She hums when she is sexually aroused. Sheâ
She bends over and inserts the plug into the receptacle.
The machine switches on. Hums for a few seconds. Fades to silence.
“I want to do it again,” she says. “From the beginning.”
She draws more blood from me, into the little vial, and once again drops the vial into the machine. I wonder if I should protestâ¦how does she know the machine won't continue to fail? How much blood are they allowed to take? But I don't protest. We all stand there and watch. The officer occasionally glances at the nurse, who pretends not to notice. Silence swells around us, blocking out everything except a faint whirring from inside the machine. I wonder briefly if there are Fornits in there, I wonder about bullets, flexible bullets, I wonder about the insanity that certainty brings.