The machine makes a sound, a deep beeping sound, and the nurse looks at it strangely. Nothing displays on the front panel.
“This is ridiculous,” says the officer.
“I don't understand,” says the nurse. “This never happens. I've never once seen this machine fail twice in a row.”
“It doesn't matter,” the officer growls. “I'm going to administer a field sobriety test now. You can be my witness. Mr. Phillips, will you please stand up?”
In any profession, varying levels of skill exist. People express outrage when they hear about a cop making some kind of mistake, but policemen are no more perfect than the rest of us. This officer bleeds enthusiasm, but it's the enthusiasm that drives his apparent ineptitude. I don't know anything about police procedure but I'm sure he could book me on probable cause, having smelled alcohol on my breath and finding my car at the bottom of a freeway cloverleaf. And yet he seems fixated on this field sobriety test. By now, I must admit I'm feeling a lot less drunk. We've been at the station for at least half an hour, it took at least twenty or thirty minutes to drive here from the freeway cloverleaf, and you can add another half hour when you consider the initial conversation at my car and the slow, muddy journey up the hill.
In fact, I drank my last cocktail at Sherri's house close to two hours ago, and took the coke and mushrooms just before that. By now that whole situation seems ancient. Ever since this all started I can't be sure of anything when it comes to time. Every minute and every hour seems plastic, like passing through a labyrinth of wormholes, where you can never really say exactly when you are, or when you were, or if you ever were at all.
The officer pulls a pen from his front pocket and holds it in the air to the right of my head.
“I want you to hold your head still and follow this pen with your eyes as I move it to your left. Do you understand?”
“Sure.”
Now he drags the pen across my field of vision, and I follow it carefully, never losing sight of the pen, confident I have passed the test.
And yet the officer smiles. His eyes glance up at the nurse.
“Now I want you to walk toward that table over there,” he says. “Heel to toe, like this. Walk to the table, turn around, and walk back the way you came.”
This time I'm forced to actually concentrate. My balance is still a bit off. To be honest my balance hasn't really been
on
since the blue orb appeared to me in church. Is this even a fair test? What if you just happen to be uncoordinated?
Nevertheless, I walk carefully forward, one foot in front of the other, heel-to-toe. In nine steps I reach the table, where I pivot 180 degrees and begin back the way I came. Counting as I walk back toward the office. 8â¦7â¦6â¦5â¦4â¦4â¦.
I wobble a little and put my foot out to catch myself.
3â¦2â¦1.
“Okay,” the officer says. “Nowâ”
“Did I fail?”
“I'm not obligated to give you feedback, sir. Nowâ”
“I can tell by the look in your eyes that you think I failed. But how many people are coordinated enough to pass this test sober? This is completely subjective. It doesn't take into consideration the various levels of dexterity inherent in the human population.”
“Sirâ”
“In fact,” I say, “there are plenty of people with valid driver's licenses who drive worse sober than I do drunk. Standardized tests don't account for individual skills. This is stupid.”
The officer looks like he wants to say something, but he doesn't.
“People aren't all the same,” I add, and even as the words come out of my mouth I realize their inherent irony, when you consider the officer and the nurse may be nothing more than two-dimensional minor characters. “People aren't robots. We don't all share the same source code.”
You should see the look in the officer's eyes. Like I'm someone else's dog he agreed to watch, like he's being patient because there is no other choice. I imagine how smug he must feel right now, holding power over me, him being the arbiter of my continued freedom in this world.
Fuck him.
“Now,” he says, “I want you to raise your right leg in the air like this and stand on your left.”
“No.”
“Sir, this isn't a voluntary exercise. If you do not comply, I will be forced toâ”
“You're going to arrest me anyway.”
“Sirâ”
“I'm not doing it.”
“Let's go, then. I'm placing you under arrest for driving under the influence of alcohol and possible other controlled substances. May I please have your driver's license?”
“You mean they aren't going to take my belongings when I get to the jail?”
“Yes, but I am required by law to confiscate your license upon arrest. Your license is immediately suspended.”
I retrieve the license from my wallet and hand it to him.
“Let's go,” he says. He grabs my arm and ushers me out the door. We head down a couple of hallways, wait for an elevator, and descend deeper into the station. When the elevator door opens we round a corner and come upon a desk standing in front of a steel door with a small, rectangular window above the knob. A portly police officer sits at the desk.
“Give me your belt,” he growls. “And your shoes and everything in your pockets. Put them in this container here.”
The container is a gray, plastic receptacle like what you encounter in an airport security line.
“Hi, Frank,” the portly officer says. “Busy night?”
“Not until this one.”
“Deuce?”
Frank reaches into a notebook and pulls out what I assume is the ticket, and some other paperwork as well.
“Yep.”
The portly officer looks at me.
“You must've done something to piss off Frank. He's usually pretty lenient to drunk drivers.”
“I'm not drunk.”
“That's too bad,” he says. “All your friends in there are. Sucks being the only sober guy at a party.”
“Can I order a beer, then?”
The officer laughs. Even Officer Frank laughs at that.
“You'll want to watch your ass in there, funny guy,” the portly officer says. “Drunk tank's no picnic.”
THIRTY
T
he drunk tank is not at all what I expected. It's not one big cell but a bank of them. And there are no bars. The cells, if you can believe, it, are more like cubicles. A row of Plexiglas cubicles, actually, one after another, each of them marked with a brushed aluminum door handle. Inside these cells are a variety of men and a woman or two, all of whom I must assume are drunk or high in various degrees. Most of the prisoners are lying on cots that also seem to be made of a sort of Plexiglas, which couldn't possibly be comfortable, until you see the mattresses mounted on these Plexiglas cots. The mattresses are built out of a translucent and reflective material, like clear, soft fiberglass made of very fine filaments. Very strange. The whole facility has the sort of modern, opaque look you might find in a stylistic science fiction film, and doesn't resemble any jail you would expect to see in real life.
“Hey, Thomas.”
I look around, startled, because it wasn't the portly officer who said that. It was one of the prisoners. Had to be. But no one seems to be paying attention to me. And not only that, but the voice was clear and loud, and all of these people are separated from me by Plexiglas.
“What?” I say and stop walking. “Hello?”
“Over here.”
The voice is clear and right next to me, and yet no one is there. The person closest to me, besides the officer, is inside a cell, lying on one of those clear fiber cots. He's wearing a dirty flannel shirt and has a nasty brown beard and there's no way he's speaking to me through the Plexiglas. Especially since he appears to be asleep.
“I need a quarter from you.”
The voice is coming from the direction of the door handle immediately in front of me, the door of the cell where the flannel shirt man is sleeping.
“A quarter?”
“Used to be a thirty-one cents,” the voice says. “Now it's a quarter. Damned economy.”
The portly officer finally notices I'm not following him anymore.
“What do you think you're doing?” he says. “Get over here.”
“Someone is talking to me.”
“Yeah, that someone is me, and I'm telling you to get your butt over here.”
“The voice seems to be coming from this door,” I say. “Is there a speaker in the door? Is this a joke?”
“Ah, shit,” the officer says, walking back. “Ignore that damn door. Is it asking you for a quarter?”
“How did you know that?”
“Cheap doors. That's the government for you. Apparently we got âem from some company that went belly up. Some outfit that used to manufacture fee-charging doors. They were supposed to be deprogrammed but this particular door is a pain in the ass.”
“Fee-charging doors?”
“Yeah. You don't see 'em much yet but apparently they're coming. Someday they'll be ubiquitous. Capitalism at its finest.”
“I don't understand the concept of a fee-charging door. Especially the door to a jail cell.”
“You aren't here to understand. You're just here to do what we tell you. Now follow me.”
He leads me again down the row of cells. As I pass each door on my left I expect another one to speak to me, but none does. Finally he stops and slides a magnetic key card into one of the cell doors.
“You're lucky,” the officer says. “It's a slow night. Sometimes there are three and four prisoners in each cell. Tonight you just have the one. Normal guy like yourself. I'm doing you a favor, pal. Don't let me down.”
“How would I let you down?”
“Don't get any funny ideas in your head.”
“What do you mean, funny ideas? You're locking me in a cell.”
“I mean don't think you got this whole thing figured out, because you don't.”
A little jolt of adrenaline shoots into my bloodstream as he swings open the door and motions for me to step inside the cell.
“What do you mean, âthis whole thing'?”
“Get in the cell.”
“Wait. What did you mean when you said that? What whole thing are you talking about?”
The officer puts his hand on the butt of his baton.
“I'm not gonna ask you again.”
“Please,” I say, moving in the direction of the open door but still facing him. “Please, if you know something, will you tell me? I'm confused and I'm tired and I have no idea what I'm supposed to be doing.”
“Buddy, I don't know what the hell you're talking about. All I meant is don't be thinking you can escape. Don't think you're going anywhere.”
“But you saidâ”
“I don't know how much you had to drink, but I think you need to sleep it off.”
I'm all the way inside the cell now. He moves to shut the door behind me.
“Please.”
“You'll be released in the morning, assuming you're sober by then. You'll need to arrange for someone to pick you up since your car will be impounded. Your license is automatically suspended but you'll receive a temporary one before you're discharged. Is there someone you can call to pick you up?”
Gloria. God, I never called her. She could be worried sick. Or she might not have checked on me at all.
“Can I make a call right now?”
“'Fraid not. No calls 'til morning.”
“But my wife doesn't know where I am. If I could just call her and let her know I'm okay.”
“Sorry, sir. It'll be morning in a few hours. You can call her then.”
“Come on, man. You must have a wife. Put yourself in my shoes.”
The officer doesn't answer right away. We stand there looking at each other. A beat of time passes, and another. Then a look passes across his face, a ripple of confusion, as if something just occurred to him that he cannot reconcile.
It hits me.
“Are you married?”
“I don't answer questions, perp.”
“But you are, right?”
“That's enough. We'll see you in the morning.”
“What's her name? Do you know her name?”
The ripple of confusion becomes a wave. A tidal wave. The officer shuts the door, which locks audibly, a loud
thunk!
that reverberates throughout the Plexiglas cell. He turns to walk away, but then looks back at me, and by now the confusion is fear.
“You don't know her name, do you?”
I don't know if he can hear me, but he keeps looking in this direction. His features are slack. His eyes look vacant, even lifeless.
People say they want to know the truth, but really they don't.
THIRTY-ONE
Y
ou ever notice how you sometimes miss little details that later seem obvious and glaring and you wonder how you ever missed them in the first place?
There is a toilet in the back of the cell, right in the middle of the wall. This is something about jail I hadn't considered, that if I want to pee, I'll have to do it in front of my cell mate and anyone else here who can see me. Which is a problem since I'm one of those people with a shy bladder. You know us. We can't make anything come out if someone else is in the room. The valves won't open. Hell, I know a guy at work named Tom Mix who can't use a public toilet at all, ever. He can only go if the toilet is in someone's house, like where he can see wallpaper and monogrammed towels and fluffy bathmats. He intentionally lives in a neighborhood less than two miles from work, and every time he has to pee he gets in his car and drives home. Consequently Tom doesn't drink much water during the day. He doesn't drink anything with caffeine in it. Poor guy.
My case isn't as severe as Tom's. For instance I have no problem being interrupted while peeing. Like at the beginning of the story when I saw (or think I saw) the guy in the church bathroom, I was totally fine. But nowâ¦I have no idea what I'm going to do when I have to pee, because I'll have to at some point, right? After all the alcohol you would think I'd be going every five minutes. In factâ