Shaylene looks wildly toward the door and I see it shake on its hinges—the battering ram. I take that final step toward her.
Lie down on the ground, I say. Put your hands behind your head.
She doesn’t say anything, just does it, and I lie on top of her, my hands on my head too, so they can’t shoot her, so they can’t kill her and then say that they thought she was holding the gun.
I can feel her saying something, feel her ribs expanding, her diaphragm lifting; I don’t know, a prayer or something, a mantra; I don’t hear the words, obviously. I remember when I was about five years old. Shaylene put some music on and turned it up way loud. Then she took my hands and put them on the speakers, so I could feel the beat—the whole room throbbing with it, as if filled with energy; Shaylene too, the pulse of the music moving her limbs, her head.
And then we danced together, me holding on to the speaker, and time spiraled out forever.
For the longest time after that, and this is the bit I don’t remember, Shaylene says I went around touching things, thinking I’d be able to hear them. Like, I put my hands on a horse, at the petting zoo, so that I could know what it was saying. On stones; on trees—feeling for that vibration from within.
Not that it seemed so stupid, when she and I read through a high school physics book years later and learned about electrons, spinning around their neutrons like the earth around the sun, vast subatomic distances between them. Which means that inside a stone, inside a tree, is a whole galaxy, a universe, of spinning things, dancing things, all moving, all making music.
You could hear it if you wanted, only not with your hands; they’re not sensitive enough.
From the corner of my eye, I see the door come off its hinges.
So the door does come down, I think. Just afterward. In the Dreaming, it was all backward.
Something hard and metal and round rolls into the room, spewing white gas. The gas pokes sharp little fingers into my eyes and my nose and my mouth; I cough and maybe I scream, I can’t know.
Then black-clad men burst in, their guns raised, one of them crouching down, another behind him, covering him, then they move quickly when they see us on the ground, surrounding us. One of them secures the shotgun; cracks it and drops the shells on the ground. Rough hands pull me up, hold my arms behind my back.
I see one of the cop’s mouths moving, as he stands over Shaylene. You are under arrest for kidnapping, aggravated assault, and [ ], you have the right to remain silent, you have the right to an attorney, if you cannot …
Then whoever is holding me turns and walks me out of there, as if I were nothing more heavy than a grocery bag. I twist my head as I’m carried out and see them kneeling by Shaylene, grabbing her hands. My eyes are streaming; it feels as if chili peppers have been rubbed in there.
Out on the walkway, I am pushed along, and then toward a black Cadillac with tinted windows.
I say, Please.
The guy carrying me pauses. He turns me around and looks at me.
I just want to see her, I say.
A long moment passes.
Then he nods. He lets me stand there and wait for her to come out.
I watch from the parking lot below as they hustle Shaylene out through the door of Room 22. Her hands are cuffed behind her and she’s stumbling, crying, some of it the gas, some of it for real. She doesn’t see me until she’s nearly at the bottom of the stairs. She turns to me, as they start hauling her off toward another vehicle. All around us, men are talking into radios and to one another, but it’s like time doesn’t really exist anymore, there’s just the two of us, looking at each other, standing on tarmac as cars streak by at sixty miles an hour, surrounded by armed men.
Then I see her say something to one of the men escorting her. He shakes his head. But she keeps insisting. There’s a pause. Another guy comes over, someone more in charge, I guess. Shaylene talks to him and he does a sort of slump that involves the shoulders, and which has a very precise meaning, it means I really don’t want to deal with this, but it turns out I’m the one who has to decide right now, and whatever I decide is going to come back on me.
Then he nods.
The first guy, the one who shook his head, takes something from his pocket and sort of presses it to Shaylene’s wrists, which are locked behind her back. I realize he’s releasing her handcuffs.
Then, like it’s in slow motion, she turns to me and lifts her hands.
Very deliberately, she tells me something in sign, a sequence of gestures so obvious it would be understandable even without an interpreter to turn it into spoken words that vibrate through the air; hell, a child could tell you what she says; probably there is a dog walking past that knows.
She points to herself.
She puts her hand over her heart.
Then she points to me.
For a moment, the world hangs in suspension, a ball at the top of its arc. Everything is still—the cars are no longer passing; their trails of red and yellow light are static threads, stretched, caramel drawn out to a taut length, about to snap.
Then I raise my own hands. One of the guys near me flinches but another puts a hand on his shoulder, and he stops.
I say …
No.
I’m not going to tell you what I say. It’s not important. I mean, it’s not important to you. But it’s important to me, and it’s the only thing that is mine in this world and can’t be taken from me, by anyone.
She nods, sodium light making the tears on her face shine, and then they lock her cuffs again and march her away, still nodding, and put a hand on the top of her head, and she disappears into the big black car.
What was that? says the cop beside me, who apparently does need an interpreter, who apparently understands less than a dog. What did you say?
Nothing, I say. Nothing.