She

by Shireen Jeejeebhoy

chapter seventeen

  CATCHING TRANSGRESSIONS

  MR. MINTKEN LEADS her through glass doors to a reception desk in a cramped waiting room on the fourteenth floor of a sterile Toronto office building, with its low ceilings and flimsy walls. It’s 10:00 a.m. and almost a year after that horrible vocational assessment. Discovery time. He tells her to sit while he goes to see if the others are here. She sits. And she waits. And she thinks. She thinks about Mintken’s instructions: keep answers short; only answer what they ask; pause before answering in case he considers the question inappropriate and needs a chance to interrupt before she answers; answer only what is asked; stick to the truth; don’t embellish. She leans her head back, hoping she can do this, yearning for company, reliving all the “no” responses when she’d asked her grandmother and her friends if they’d come with her, of their stated busy-ness, of their importance to others in their work and personal lives, their implication of her non-importance. Grandmother had simply said to her that she didn’t need her physical presence, that she could do it on her own, that she had her lawyer.

  Fear not.

  She snorts, straightens her head, and looks at the magazines on the small round table beside her, but reading is no longer stress busting; it’s unnerving, all those words rising up off the page and disappearing into meaninglessness, twisting and turning themselves into other words, making her read the first sentence over and over, pushing her to concentrate harder and harder until finally it makes sense. And then it’s on to the second sentence. She fishes her iPod Mini out of her pocket, puts the earbuds in, and presses it to start. Tick tick tick tick tick, the clock of Madonna’s Hung Up ticks into her brain until her eyes droop.

  “We’re up,” Mintken says, snapping her awake. She stops the Mini, stuffs it into her purse, picks up her lunch bag, and follows him down a narrow corridor lined with doors until they get to the end. They enter the only open door on the left and almost bump into the back of a court reporter, who’s sitting at one end of a black rectangular conference table, facing the windows looking out onto the cool May day, with its cloud-interrupted blue skies.

  The reporter’s all set up ready to go. The other two occupants of the room are standing, joking. The laughter stops as they see her appear from behind Mintken. They take their seats solemnly. She and Mintken sit on the left of the reporter; the men on the right. The lawyer directly across from her speaks.

  “Hello, I’m Mr. Lance, and this is my colleague Mr. Brill. I am representing the government body within the government that oversees Akaesman and his activities. Mr. Brill is representing the Shadow Court. We are here for discoveries, that is, to determine the extent of your Akaesman syndrome, or even if you have it, as you have represented it to the Court. I will be conducting most of the interview, but my colleague Mr. Brill may occasionally ask his own questions. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” she replies as she recalls Mr. Mintken’s instructions: don’t nod or shake your head; answer in short sentences; don’t elaborate. She worries about her all-pervading fatigue, how listening will suck what energy she has dry. She hopes she’ll understand the questions and answers what they actually asked instead of what she thinks they asked. She braces herself against the back of the chair.

  Mr. Lance opens a file folder and moves a piece of paper from one side of his folder to the other. Looks at it for a bit, then raises his well-coiffed head, shoots his cufflinked-cuff out of his jacket, laces his hands together on top of the folder, clears his throat, and asks, “Tell me about the night in question, in your own words.”

  “Um, well,” she sits up, shifts a bit, and thinks back to the time she’s sick of thinking back to. Maybe this will be the last time. Yeah, right. “It was a nice night,” she begins calmly, slowly, in a low voice. “It was actually morning. Not long after midnight.” She remembers the exact time, but decides that extra detail isn’t needed. She continues in a monotone. “We were driving on Horseshoe Road. I mean, I mean Horseshoe Hill Road. Back to Toronto when we, when we entered the woods. A forest. It was dark. The sky was clear. I don’t know why the sky was so clear when it was so dark in those woods.” She stops in thought. “I wanted to leave. But …” She realizes that speaking against Jim was a detail best left out, pauses, and then clears her throat and continues, “Jim, well, Jim was driving. Anyway. Um, this wind came out of nowhere. It hit my side of the car. It s-s-spun us around. Jim got us righted again and out of the forest f-f-fast.”

  “Jim was speeding?”

  “No.”

  “But you said fast.”

  “Well, but, but, it was a highway. You go fast on a highway. He wanted to get us out of the way fast, s-s-safe.”

  “Safe?”

  “Yes safe. Jim got us out of the s-s-spin the wind sent us into. Without us hitting anything.”

  “You’re sure he didn’t hit anything?”

  She nods then remembers to speak, “Yes, I’m sure.”

  “We may have documentation proving that Jim went into the ditch and hit a tree. It wasn’t the wind that caused the damage to the car.”

  She stares at him. Blinks twice. “Your documentation is lying. Jim hit nothing. We didn’t s-s-stop. We slowed down, and he pulled us out of the s-s-spin. He sped back up to get us out of the f-f-forest.”

  “So he was speeding.”

  Are these lawyers stupid? She gawks at him for a moment as she appraises his intent. No, not stupid, playing word games. Fury fights her neutral calm, “He wasn’t. He didn’t even reach highway speed even though it was a highway. We didn’t hit anything.” Anyone who says we did is lying, but she doesn’t say that last bit out loud.

  “Alright,” he makes a note and then looks back up at her. “Continue your story.”

  “Well,” she starts, neutral again. “Somehow the wind cracked the window on my s-s-side. I felt air all over me. But that f-f-feeling left me once we cleared the f-f-forest. On the other s-s-side a cop waved us over. Well, um,” she frowns and pauses. “It wasn’t a cop exactly. He called himself the, the Akae-Ak-Akae-Akaes-s-sman Patrol. There was some sort of ambulance there too with a, with a paramedic. We were asked to get out, and, and the paramedic checked me over.”

  “And what did that paramedic find?”

  “She said, she said I had some mild s-s-strains in my neck and shoulder. The cop, I mean the Akae-Akae-Akaesman Patrol said I should go s-s-see my GP. I did.”

  “Alright, let’s go back into your history. You’re an only child, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And your parents died when you were …?”

  “Nine.”

  “Who took care of you?”

  “My grandmother.”

  “That must’ve been traumatic for you.”

  “I guess.”

  “Losing your parents is a big trauma.”

  Was it? She guesses it was, but it’s only three years after her encounter with Akaesman, while it’s too many years to count after her parents died. And that old pre-Akaesman life is fading. It’s become the story of another person, still her but not related to her current story. She’s started unpacking those boxes Sunny had talked about; she finally understood that she had to in order to stay sane because she’d changed so much from whom she used to be. She had thought her whole life that losing her parents was the worst thing that could happen to her. She was wrong. Losing herself is. Watching another gobble her up, being unable to do anything about it, still being alive: that was traumatic.

  “So your parents, losing them is a big trauma,” Mr. Lance interrupts her reverie, a bit impatiently.

  Is, he’d said. She suddenly realizes he’s using the present tense. “It was. But this is worse.”

  “I see,” Mr. Lance looks over at Mr. Brill, who’s leaning back in his chair, his hands locked over his paunch, his frilly hair an exclamation mark at the top of him. He shakes his head. Mr. Lance looks back down at his notes. “So you lived with your grandmother. You were sick a lot?”

  “Huh?
”

  “That kind of trauma, it must’ve caused you a lot of time off from school, made you sick?”

  “Uh, no. Grandmother ensured I went to s-s-school every day. I hardly got a cold.”

  “I see.” He flips a page to the next one. “Tell me about Jim.”

  “Jim?”

  “Yes. What was your relationship like before the incident?”

  “It was good.” Memories surface of their times together, of meeting at Baskin Robbins when both were working there one summer, feeling an instant connection, meeting up at the subway and walking to class together hand in hand after university resumed, him asking her to marry him. She softens as she sees him once again kneeling down in the autumn leaves before her and pulling out the ring as if by magic when they were out on their regular weekend ravine walk and then finding their house, their very own house, just the right kind of fixer upper, with lots of windows, after many months of searching, planning on what they were going to do, starting their careers, and supporting each other …

  “Your relationship was good? Really? No problems, no bad days?” Mr. Lance interrupts her memories.

  “It was good,” she repeats in a monotone.

  “It was good?”

  “Yes,” and suddenly tears erupt, washing her corneas with salty water. She blinks, inhales, braces her heart, nothing works. She’s about to go into full sobbing mode in front of these men who’re trying to crucify her, in front of the automaton reporter, in front of her lawyer. No way. She stands up, her chair flying backwards, hops over the electrical cords sprouting from the reporter’s equipment, yanks open the door, and speeds toward the bathroom. She hates public bathrooms, but right now this one is a haven from those men. They can’t follow her in.

  She stands in front of the mirror, bracing herself against the counter, head bowed over the sink, heaving tears, pouring out her pain onto the porcelain and Formica. She’d cried only once for Jim after he had left; it was as if he’d never been in her life. She didn’t miss him; doesn’t miss him. But then nobody asks her about him, not since those first few phone calls immediately upon him leaving. Her friends had expected her to get over him. They had told her only days after he’d left that it was time for her to move on, to find another man. Yet Belinda takes weeks or months to get over her breakups, and she’d seen acquaintances fall into a deep depression, looking like they were almost catatonic when their mates had left. She hadn’t done that. And no one had found it strange. Belinda had said only that it proved they weren’t meant for each other, that she hadn’t really loved him. But she knows. She knows that Akaesman has blocked all her emotions from her; only questions — intrusive questions from people who are her enemy — can break through that block and pull her emotions out.

  Suddenly they’re gone. She looks up into the mirror. Her eyes are red but dry. Sighing, she turns on the cold water, splashes her face, and pats it dry. “You’re strong,” she tells her reflection. “You can do this. You may be on your own, everyone having jobs to do, busy-ness to indulge, but Mintken is on your side.”

  And not only Mintken.

  She frowns at the voice. There’s another presence, a faint light of strength surrounding her, buoying her into peace. She pulls open the bathroom door partially with her pinky — people who don’t wash their hands really gross her out — and then fully open with her foot and heads back to the conference room for more “discovery” questions.

  They’re in the coffee room next door. Laughing and chatting, they stop as soon as they see her.

  “Give me a moment with my client, would you?” Mr. Mintken asks. The other two nod and leave for the conference room. When they’re gone, Mintken asks, “How are you?”

  “Fine.”

  “Are you ready to continue?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. You’re doing fine. Remember don’t elaborate. Don’t argue with them, just answer their questions with as few words as possible. Keep it short. Give them nothing to chew on. Okay?”

  “Okay. I’ll do better now.”

  He nods, encouragingly, “Would you like a coffee before we go back in?”

  She nods yes. Mintken pours some out for her, hands her the Styrofoam cup. She’d found some organic sugar packets at Whole Foods that she can take around with her so that she can avoid the chemical-tasting white sugar. She retrieves a couple of packets from her purse, rips them open, and pours them into the scalding black liquid. Nothing she can do about the milk, having no organic dairy on her person, but black coffee with sugar is good enough. She takes a couple of the flimsy plastic stir sticks and stirs slowly. They walk back to the conference room and sit in their chairs. She takes a sip and puts down her cup carefully. Leaning back, she lifts her head and bores her eyes into Mr. Lance. Now she is ready.

  ~~~*~~~