Thomas World

by Richard Cox

  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

  The 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 bird…high-pitched, staccato bursts. She hums when she is sexually aroused. She—

  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 protest…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.

  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. 8…7…6…5…4…4….

  I wobble a little and put my foot out to catch myself.

  3…2…1.

  “Okay,” the officer says. “Now—”

  “Did I fail?”

  “I’m not obligated to give you feedback, sir. Now—”

  “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.”

  “Sir—”

  “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 to—”

  “You’re going to arrest me anyway.”

  “Sir—”

  “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

  The 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?”

&
nbsp; “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 ‘em 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.”