Homeland (36 page)
"Give me a sec," she said. "These cuffs are so tight I can barely move my hands, and wriggling like that didn't help."
"Take your time," I said. "Can you get the phone into my hand?" I backed up until my fingers brushed hers and she pressed the phone into my hand.
While she flexed her fingers and wrists, trying to get the blood to circulate, I turned my phone around in my hands behind my back. I remembered the days when phones had actual buttons you could find by touch and dial without seeing them. I could feel the phone in my hand, in its familiar grip, my thumb over the power button. I turned it on and ran my finger over the screen, feeling the familiar haptic buzz -- the little vibrations the phone emitted each time my finger brushed over a "hot" region on the screen to let me know that I was in a spot that could make the phone do something. Running my fingertip up the screen, I carefully counted out the four buzzes from bottom to top, and the three from left to right, trying to figure out where the number pad layout was drawn. This was the lock screen for my phone, which I'd configured to take a super-strong eight-digit password. Because, you know, I'm paranoid like that.
Gee, thanks, paranoid me. I was going to have to try to key in eight numbers correctly, blind, with half-numb hands. Without alerting the police.
"What are you doing?" the girl in front of me asked.
"I
think
my finger is on the number one. Is that right?"
"I don't know, you're holding the phone upside down."
Oh, this was going to be
great. I rotated my wrists around so that the screen was facing her. Incidentally, this also made my fingers feel like I was trying to do the world's stupidest and hardest magic trick.
"Your fingers are on the one, the nine, the three, and the six."
Now I rearranged my hand again so that only one of my index fingers was on the glass. So now I had my hands in the stupid-magic-trick pose,
and
was gripping the phone only by its edges.
"Now your finger is on the one."
I moved it. "Three, right?"
"Right, but you got the two on the way."
I bit my tongue and started to count in my head. When I got to twenty, she said, "Okay, it's reset."
It took six tries. After the fifth try, the phone locked itself and we had to wait for ten tense minutes until it unlocked itself. Security is awesome.
"Okay, you've done it," she said. I could barely feel my hands.
"Who do we call first?"
"My mom," she said. "She knows a crapload of lawyers."
It took more fumbling to press the button that brought up the dialer and then an eternity to get her mom's number keyed in correctly. At least the dialer let me press the backspace button when I screwed up.
"You've done it!" she said, loud enough that people in the other seats shifted and looked around. I closed my hand around my phone, trying to hide it without inadvertently pressing any of the buttons. We waited until everyone had gone back to their solitary misery and then I said, "Okay how do we do this?"
"Do what?"
"I'm going to call your mom, right? How are you going to talk to her from up there, when the phone is down here?"
"Oh."
"Yeah."
"How high can you get your arms?"
I tried. It actually felt good to lift them some, working the kinks out of my shoulder blades, but I was left wishing I'd gone to more yoga classes with Ange. The woman -- I still didn't know her name, isn't that funny? -- shifted behind me, and I felt her prod the call button with her nose or tongue, and then my fingertips tingled with the sound of the phone ringing. From where I sat, I saw several of my fellow prisoners watching with expressions ranging from bemusement to delight to fear. I heard/felt someone answer, a kind of
buzz-buzz?
that my fingers translated as
Hello?
and then the girl whispered, "Mama," and started to talk in a low, urgent whisper, speaking a language I didn't know -- Arabic, I guess? Is that what they speak in Egypt?
The bus was brightly lit, but we had been locked in it for ages -- hours, it felt like -- since the last prisoners were brought in. Surely the guard at the front was half asleep or bored stupid, or maybe he was stupid to begin with. Either way, I felt a welcome sense of superiority. They might be heavily armed, they might be able to arrest us and stick us in their plastic cuffs, they might be able to jail us and try us for crimes they'd invented just for the occasion, but they couldn't control us utterly and totally. Here we were, right in the belly of the beast, and we'd cooperated to establish a channel to the outside world. Between the gas and the violence and the sleep deprivation, I felt a strange madness creep over me, a sense that I was invulnerable and invincible, that I was destined to win, because I was able to do the things that the hero of a story would do, and don't heroes always win?
The first clue I had as to my total vincibility, my utter vulnerability, was when the eyes of the prisoners behind me on the bus widened in unison, turning to comical expressions of horror that made them all look like they were somehow related, cousins in a family of genetically frightened people.
The next clue was the terrified squeak from the girl behind me, and then the final clue a bare instant later: the phone knocked out of my hands, my wrists grabbed by a gloved hand and yanked so high and so fast that I barely had time to lever myself out of the seat, bending almost double, forehead impacting painfully with the floor as I sought to escape the wrenching, tearing agony in my shoulders.
Then there was a face beside mine, so close I heard the click of its teeth in my ear, so close I could smell the gum on its breath. It belonged to my tormentor, who said, "Kid, no one likes a smart-ass." My hands were released and I whimpered as my arms snapped back, my fists kind of bouncing off my butt, my face grinding into the dirty floor of the bus.
Before I could get my breath, the same hands had my ankles and the familiar, dread sound of plastic handcuffs being ratcheted along their closure mechanism ripped through the air as one ankle, then the other, were cinched tight enough to hurt. The hands kept moving. My wrists were jerked back as the plastic between them was caught and hauled back up, the man working over me grunting softly -- a curiously tender sound -- and another set of cuffs were attached to the plastic between them. Then my ankles were hauled up toward my wrists and my fogged-over brain realized that I was about to be hogtied.
I kicked and bucked and shouted something, I don't know what -- maybe not even words. Just a kind of howl, a
NO
that ripped from my guts to my throat. I began to worm my way down the length of the bus, trying to get away from the tormentor and his hands. The other prisoners got their feet out of the way, giving me passage, and I heard them shout things at the guard who was pursuing me: "Shame!" in a dozen voices.
I reached the cage at the back of the bus and squirmed and wormed my way around on it, turning to face back up the aisle. The police officer -- a young white guy whose hat had been knocked off, a look on his face like a vengeful god -- was trying to come after me, but the other prisoners on the bus had stretched their ankles back into the aisles, making a forest of legs that the cop had to bull past. He reached for the night stick on his belt, had it halfway out of its ring, when he seemed to think better of it and shifted his grip to his can of mace.
He lifted it up like bug spray, shifting the mask around his neck over his face as he did, settling the goggles around his eyes with gloved fingers. The prisoners who saw what he was doing retracted their legs, one by one, until the way between the guard and me was open.
He blinked twice at me.
"It's okay," I said. "I'll sit quietly. You don't have to tie me up --"
He took two steps toward me, holding the mace in front of him like a vampire hunter holding up a crucifix. Like a vampire, I shrank away from it. My world telescoped down to the nozzle of the mace bottle, the square aperture with the little round nozzle within. "Please," I said. His finger tightened on the trigger. The bottle was inches from my face, aimed right at a spot midway between my mouth and nose.
Mace in the face, a commercial interlude
In case you were wondering, I
do
try and put these interludes at the moment of maximum suspense. I mean,
duh
.
By now, I'm hoping you know the drill. This is my job, and I get to do it because you buy my books. You can
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, or you can buy one from one of the stores below. If you don't need a copy,
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).
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Canada:
"Tom," a voice called from the front of the bus. "What the hell is going on here?"
The guard's finger froze. He slipped the bottle back into its pouch on his Batman belt, turned around on his heel, looked up the length of the bus at an older cop with a couple stripes on his shoulder, an inspector.
The guard walked the length of the bus to his boss and the two of them had a quiet, intense conversation. Every pair of eyes on the bus was glued to them, every ear cocked for them. "Tom"'s back was to me, and I could see from where I stood that his shoulders were as tight as a tennis racket. It was clear to me that he was getting some kind of dressing-down. I confess that I felt a little smug to see this guy get told off, but mostly I was still crapping myself with residual fear.
"Tom" got off the bus, and the inspector marched down the bus without a word, grabbed me by the arm and half-dragged me back to my seat, while I tried to keep upright by shuffling my bound feet in a frantic penguin-gait. He pushed me impersonally into my seat and turned on his heel without a word.
"You should have called the lawyers first," the guy beside me said.
I didn't say anything. The lights in the bus went off and the engine roared to life and we were off.
The girl in front of me apologized over the bump and the growl of the bus as we rattled through the night. The irony was that her mom had been so freaked out that the girl hadn't managed to convey anything useful to her. On the plus side, the girl -- whose name was Dalia -- managed to retrieve my phone after Officer Friendly knocked it out of my hands. She'd managed to drop it into one of her boot cuffs, and promised to get it back to me as soon as she had the chance. I wasn't too optimistic about such a chance coming up, being bound hand and foot as I was, but I appreciated the thought. In the meantime, I gave her my name and told her that if she wouldn't mind googling me and getting my email address to get me the phone back when the time came, I'd appreciate it an awful lot.
The bus wasn't going very fast or very far. Out the window, it was all a confusion of traffic -- lots of other police buses -- and long delays. Several times we stopped for long periods -- it felt like hours, and certainly my arms and shoulders told me it was an eternity -- before moving on. I dozed several times, once flopping onto the guy with the broken arm, who made a weak whimper that was worse than a scream.
We got to where we were going just as the sun was coming up. It was a nondescript warehouse-type building, swarming with cops. They took us off the bus two at a time, spaced out by ten or twenty minutes. I guessed that this must be "processing." They left the people who couldn't walk until last. Two burly cops carried me off the bus like a sack of garbage, then went back for my seatmate. I shouted that he needed medical attention. They pretended they didn't hear.
No one asked me why I was bound at the ankles, and no one moved to release me. I was hefted from one station to the next. First I was propped up in a chair in front of a trestle table where a couple of bleary cops with ruggedized laptops -- about one millionth as cool and military-looking as the ones that Timmy and Knothead had -- fingerprinted me, retina-scanned me, swabbed my cheek for DNA, and then took my name and address and Social Security number. I told them I declined to answer any further questions. I told them I wanted to see a lawyer. I told them I needed to pee. I asked them what I was under arrest for. (I'd drilled this routine a zillion times, but it was a lot harder to do in handcuffs than it was in front of the bedroom mirror when I was having what Mom called
collywobbles
about the thought of being arrested some day.)
They weren't impressed. Their responses, in order, were "Spell Yallow again?" "We don't have any further questions," "Later," "Later," and "Disorderly conduct and conspiracy to disturb the peace."
They called out to someone else and then I was picked up -- the whole chair came with me this time -- and taken to a fingerprinting station.
Then they took me indoors and led me to a cold, bright room that looked like it had once been a supervisor's office, or maybe a foreman's room, and strip-searched me. At least they cut loose my cuffs for this. I chafed at my wrists and ankles, doing my best not to whimper as the blood started to flow to them again. There were fifteen or twenty other guys in there, and we avoided one another's eyes as we stripped off our clothes and stood shivering and naked while more bored cops went from one person to the next, searching our clothes with hands clad in surgical gloves, like we were infected with some kind of vermin or virus. They looked in our armpits, under our testicles, up our butts. It was one of the most humiliating experiences of my life, partly because it was so bored and clinical. These guys had nothing personal against us. They could have been government health workers inspecting beef on the way to market.