by Forish, E.
“You’ve gotta be shittin’ me —”
I hop back inside the Camry and kill the ignition
[lxxxvi] before grabbing a tin that contains the last bit of my marijuana from the center console. I pluck from the canister the only decent-sized nugget left and shove it inside the glass bowl. I scatter the rest of the bud, mainly shake, across the passenger’s side floor and toss the tin in the backseat as I secure the loaded pipe inside my panties.
As I hastily rummage through my vehicle to conceal any other incriminating evidence, the police vehicle slows to a stop on the opposite side of the road, and the officers inside immediately flick on the lights.
Lights? Is that really necessary? I think. I haven’t even done anything yet.
Within seconds an older officer appears at the driver’s side door and taps on the glass. I cringe, for, cursed with automatic windows, I have no choice but to place the key back in the ignition and restart the vehicle.
A chilled breeze permeates the sanctuary of my car as I roll down the window, exposing myself to the officer’s scrutiny.
“Everything okay?” he asks.
“Uh, yeah,” I say through slurred speech. “Just skid on some black ice and got a little stuck is all, but it’s fine. Everything’s fine.”
A doubtful expression flashes across his face. “License and registration, please.”
“For skidding on some ice?” I question innocently.
“No, for the alcohol on your breath.”
Fuck. Not again. Dear god, not again.
I clumsily dig through my purse and glove box to produce the proper documentation, which, once located, the officer eagerly snatches from my hand. He swaggers back to the cruiser to check the validity of my license and registration as I sit and wait in silent torment for the moment of truth to erupt like fallen mirrors splintering into thousands of shards, jagged as knives and piercing as needles.
The officer quickly returns to my car window, this time with his younger partner in tow.
“We’re going to have to ask you to step out of the car, Ms. Carroll,” says the older cop. I notice for the first time that his badge identifies him as a sergeant.
“For what?” My tone comes across strained as the anxiety lodged inside my chest begins to mount and suffocate my vocal chords.
“For a Field Sobriety Test.”
I close my eyes and inhale deeply, but my lungs feel deprived of air and my brain deprived of oxygen, and my whole body, consequently, enters a brief state of paralysis, where basic motor controls succumb completely to the overpowering presence of dread and anguish that, like anchors designed for a substantially-sized vessel, attach themselves to my psyche and reinforce my immobility.
I need air.
At some very primitive level, where instinct alone carries the body forward, I satisfy the basic need to breathe by stepping out of the vehicle and into the fresh country air, but the sergeant’s condemnatory stare demolishes any opportunity for respiratory reprieve.
Without saying a word, the sergeant starts to shine the beam of a miniature flashlight into my glossy eyes. Unprepared for the sudden barrage of light aimed directly at my pupils, I quickly turn my head away.
“It’ll be a lot easier if you just cooperate, Ms. Carroll.”
“How can I cooperate if you don’t even tell me what’yer doin’?”
The sergeant gruffly grunts in disgusted response to my rather mundane question.
“Just follow the light,” he orders.
I attempt to follow the tiny dot of blinding whiteness, but the flashing police lights in the near background distract my gaze.
I blink rapidly for a second or two to readjust my line of vision and to regain focus on the task required of me, but before I can recover my concentration, the sergeant ceases to administer the test.
“Alright, let’s move this along,” he says. “I’m going to ask you to walk along the white line” He continues to recite the directions to the next portion of the Field Sobriety Test, but, plagued by the anxiety accumulating inside my body and rising to the surface of my skin, I can’t even endeavor to listen.
“ Do you understand?” he finishes.
With an expression that markedly evinces my mindstate of pure dissociation; I nod slowly and then avert my vacuous stare towards the pavement. I cautiously position my feet atop the white line and walk toe-to-heal for ten steps
[lxxxvii] before turning like a ballerina but without the grace. I stumble severely, relinquishing any thought of passing the second test, and walk back towards the officers with no adherence to the line on the pavement.
“Is it over yet?” I ask.
“Just one more,” says the younger cop, participating in the conversation for the first time, but before he has the opportunity to expound, his partner interjects, forever insistent upon domineering the situation. As the sergeant provides detailed instructions for the final test, he exhausts his energies on this disobliging listener, for his words fall upon the ears of an individual incapable of hearing or processing the informative drivel that ejects from his mouth. I observe the fluent movement of his lips, but the sound waves fail at audibility, for my internal thoughts scream louder than his external vocalizations.
As my sense of hearing neglects to register his words, the grave sounds of imaginary church bells, harmonized by the haunting refrain of Chopin’s “Piano Sonata No. 2
[lxxxviii] ,” drown out all other noise, reverberating throughout my skull, which reels with questions whose answers promise alternative outcomes to the evening’s events:
What if I hadn’t lost Blake?
What if I had found Blake later on?
What if I hadn’t broken into my own car?
What if I had taken a cab?
What if I hadn’t set course for Granville?
What if I had skid out further down the road?
What if I hadn’t skidded out at all?
What if I had rolled down the window beforehand?
What if but the rhetorical questions shall remain forever unanswered as the resonance of the bells amplifies inside my head, reaching deafening levels as they give voice to the paramount sense of trepidation that pounds through my arteries and poisons my bloodstream. As their noxious echoes incite the fulfillment of hollow promises regarding the dubious outcome of my immediate future, I literally feel hope emitting from my heart and exiting through the grimy pores of my decrepit flesh, returning to the limitless beyond to hunt for a soul more capable of spiritual prosperity.
“Ms. Carroll?” The sergeant’s abrasive voice cuts through the clanging, orchestral clamor of my dwindling sanity, and my private death march suddenly condenses into a stunningly pure moment of absolute silence.
“Huh?”
“Do you understand or not?” he queries.
“Um”
“We need you to stand on one foot” the sergeant starts again, irritated by the chore of needing to repeat himself, but I cut his well-practiced spiel short.
“Oh, yeah. Yeah, I got it.”
I position myself on my right foot and poise my left toe in the air. I immediately extend my arms for balance before lowering my foot down twice to prevent my body from plummeting towards the pavement. As I suspend my leg back into midair, I realize that I must simultaneously count aloud, but remain clueless as to what number I must reach. I decide to start at one and recite the integers in their proper order, but manage to skip over the number seven, speed through the numbers sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen, and desperately concede defeat by number twenty.
The sergeant grunts amusedly as he announces the ultimate hindrance to my freedom. “We’re going to conduct a breathalyzer now.”
“No, you’re not,” I say flatly.
He stares at me with an expression that conveys his dissatisfaction regarding my abrupt resolution.
“Do you understand that by refusing the breathalyzer your license will be automatically suspended for six months?” he
asks.
“Yes,” I say with conviction, for I did understand the consequences of my refusal
[lxxxix] , but after quickly considering the amount of evidence already collected against me, I decide it would be ill-advised to embarrass myself further by adding an outrageous blood-alcohol content to the official records.
“Then you’re under arrest for operating a motor vehicle under the influence of alcohol,” the sergeant perfunctorily states as he secures the handcuffs tightly around my wrists and escorts me to the police vehicle.
The emotional time bomb finally detonates into a fit of hysteria, causing my entire body to convulse and shake and ripple with disdain for itself and its owner, and as I writhe in the backseat – tears, snot, and saliva all pouring down my face – my psyche collapses in its grand finale, plummeting into an infinite and private Hell that seems so familiar tonight yet, nonetheless, more depraved than ever. I slip away into the remote and mysterious oblivions of my fractured psyche, but, somehow, manage to compensate for the painstaking memories of this forever tunnel of descent by reverting back to the basic instincts of a child.
“I want my cat,” I say in between wailing sobs.
“Your what?” asks the sergeant.
“My cat. My stuffed cat. He’s in the car. On the passenger’s seat,” I manage to articulate in between the choking cries of mental anguish.
“Okay —” He shoots his partner a curious look that signals him to fetch the stuffed animal before the madwoman in the backseat loses it completely.
The young cop disappears briefly before returning to the squad car with the cat in hand. The sergeant instructs him not to hand me the toy, but the tears subside slightly with the comforting knowledge that my favorite stuffed animal since I was five-years-old would accompany me to the police station.
As the sergeant shifts the S.U.V. into gear, he informs me that we are en route to the Russell State Barracks. My insanity immediately escalates, yet again, exceeding the degree of my previous hysteria tenfold as I falsely think, But I know people at the Westfield Barracks, not Russell. After all, I’m a mothafuckin’ Carroll.
Vocalizing such inner apprehensions, however, becomes impossible as the maniacal crying consumes my capability to control all other behaviors, for a sense of absolute futility besieges the miniscule region of my mind normally occupied by mental stability. As the tears surge from my eyes in an irrepressible torrent, I soon start to babble incoherently, for the movement of my lips and the utterances of language act as corporal reminders of my ability to interact naturally with other humankind.
“I just need to talk right now,” I say, frazzled. “I’m bipolar, and I’m freaking out, and sometimes talking helps. Keeps me from getting caught up inside my head.”
“You’re bipolar?” the sergeant asks.
“Yeah. Oh god, yeah.”
The younger officer intercedes with a tone of genuine concern. “Do you need to be brought to a hospital?”
No need to complicate things with an emergency intake to a psych ward, I think.
“No,” I respond without hesitation. “No, that’s not necessary. I just need to talk.”
And as we travel the monotonous back roads towards the Russell Barracks, my intellect fabricates nonsensical banter between myself and the police officers, but soon even conversation fails to approximate the sensation of humanness. I resume sobbing quietly to myself, for I’d rather feel the mental torment that has always plagued my psyche, the default perspective that spawns from a deeply-embedded sense of derangement, than some cheap awareness of Self constructed by trite human interactions, but even once the tears subside and the distress loses its fervor, a single mantra perseveres its circulation amongst my deranged pattern of thought: What if… but all deliberations end there.
CHAPTER XI: A LESSON ON LEGALITY
“Collected my belongings, and I left the jail. Well, thanks for the time… I had to think awhile
[xc] .”
4:00 A.M:
We arrive at the station, and the tears return full force. Due to my emotional state and level of intoxication I require the support and guidance of the young officer out of the vehicle and through the doors. The sergeant instructs me to take a seat on a small bench inside the station. Across from me stands a group of state troopers, laughing and drinking coffee at the station’s desk. An awkward silence momentarily befalls the room when I enter, a disheveled drunken mess with eyes red, puffy, and dripping with mascara.
The troopers quickly resume conversation, while the sergeant, meanwhile, and commence the intake process. As he passes my purse and stuffed cat to a nearby trooper in order to take a full inventory of my belongings, I stand motionless in the center of a perceivably inauspicious room, melting into a state of oblivion. I remain inobservant of the mechanical movements and routine charades performed by the troopers whom, to me, all appear to be under the control of some imperceptible puppeteer, for I believe that some cosmic force must be in command, twisting and tugging upon the twine that manipulates each and every soul’s heartstrings, all in an effort to interfere with my potential to rewrite the past and, ultimately, also to redesign my future.
My paralyzed body remains suspended in a moment void of time, like a buoy anchored at the center of an aquatic vortex, as my mind reels from the nauseating flood of raw anxiety. The walls appear to swivel around my frozen form until their disorientating rotations eventually devour my ability to grasp onto the final particle of equanimity left within the core of my being.
I squeeze my eyes shut and retreat inward in an attempt to alleviate the sense of panic that festers inside my chest, but I fail to escape from the overwhelming sensation of guilt, for guilt always forms due to the belief that one has committed moral violations not merely against society and those lost within it, but, more critically, against the self.
“Have you ever been arrested before?” asks the trooper, but his voice fails to disrupt my thoughts.
As the concept of guilt plagues my entire stream of conscious thought, it bludgeons my composure and, subsequently, maims my ability to concentrate on the next lie necessary to rectify the current legal situation at bay. I feel suddenly violated, for I have failed to achieve the full potential of the life appointed unto me, and, thereby, I have caused yet another mental obstacle to encroach upon my life course, for I do not stand on the bordering sands of the Pacific Ocean; I never wrote my novel; etc. I never cared to maintain healthy relationships with others, all in a vain attempt to satisfy my mind and body with the relief of temporary, chemical gratifications.
“Have you ever been arrested before, ma’am?” he repeats.
The tears fall harder now as I panic, finally comprehending the severity of my actions. My brain cannot imagine, let alone comprehend, the severity of the repercussions for a second offense D.U.I., but it can fathom the concept that I have paused the fate of my future by obstructing the guilt of my past, for guilt always dissolves upon the recognition of the discrepancy that exists between maintaining one’s personal welfare and, simultaneously, not compromising the welfare of others.
Salty droplets pour down my cheeks as I avoid the question and become lost in my internal ethical debate, but then Blake’s words suddenly hit my memory hard: “Vermont doesn’t release its criminal records to other states.”
It’s worth a shot. At worst I’ll only be caught in another lie.
“Ms. Carroll? Have you ever —”
“No,” I mutter without a hint of confidence.
Time freezes as I wait in anxious anticipation for the trooper’s reaction, and, despite my ethical epiphany, the guilt continues to swell inside me as I stand paralyzed inside the Barracks. As the feeling climaxes at its peak intensity, he just stares vacuously at the computer screen without a flinch of facial muscle, scanning the data to see if my name appears on the list of previous offenders. As he does so, I realize the my self-gratifying motives have put the conflicting interests of others in jeopardy, and, thusly, such
behaviors have resulted in the loss of trust amongst all those whom come into contact with my existence, for I have always presumed that I possess an immunity to consequence.
“Albert Carroll —” he grumbles under his breath.
And not a hint of guilt — instigated by the betrayal of myself to others through the acts of falsifying my character and pretending to possess the qualities of more decent human beings — has ever once crept under the corroded flesh of this maniacal creature, filled with deceit and delusion, until this present moment, and now it burrows deep beneath the skin like the hallucinatory maggots known by meth addicts and straight into the aortic valve that then floods my entire heart with metallic heat and mental toxins.
“I am not my father,” I say firmly.
I allow the feeling of guilt to wash away from my last nerves like electrons that pull away from their natural subatomic orbit, deflecting into the great unknown and leaving only trust in its wake. While my brain cells wait to regroup from the unusual purgatorial space that they currently inhabit, blissfully void of time, I attempt to reassemble a sense of logical recognition of the immediate facts enclosing upon the imminent situation.
The trooper lifts his head to stare at me momentarily before turning his attention back towards the screen. “Yeah, she checks out,” he tells the sergeant.
The sergeant, reading over the trooper’s shoulder, grunts slightly and walks towards me.
“C’mon, get up,” he commands. “We’re going to do a breathalyzer.”
“No, we’re not,” I manage to choke out in between tears.