KYPC is off for the holidays. See you next week.

Peter moved to sit down, but then he remembered where he was.  The woman may have been fine sitting on the subway station floor, but she wasn’t wearing a suit (also, she was handcuffed to a garbage can).  He felt bad for her, though not yet as bad as he felt for himself.  He had nothing else he needed to be doing, and that song was still in his head . . . somewhere . . . probably.  He figured he might as well listen to what she had to say.

“I’ve been here for seven months.  All this time, I’ve been trying to get people to go on an adventure.  And you know what I’ve finally realized?  People don’t want to go on an adventure.  No one in this crowd does, anyway.”  She indicated the stream of subway passengers with her nose.  “It’s like I’m a beer vendor, and it took me more than half a year to realize that I had set up shop outside an AA meeting instead of at a baseball game.”

“Yeah, I can think of much better places to look for potential adventurers.”  Space Camp.  The first day of an Introduction to Archaeology class.  Wal-Mart.  “Why didn’t you try asking for help in a more normal way?”

“Because I have an abnormal problem.  And I don’t know if you noticed, but apparently I’m not very popular with the police.”  She rattled the cuffs.  “And how about you?  Are you an adventurer?”

Saying “no” would have felt like a betrayal of the Speech he had given that morning, so Peter did what any good lawyer would: he didn’t answer the question.  “I’m still not convinced that what you’re selling is an adventure.  Waltzing into the police station and trying to make off with a key doesn’t sound like much of one to me.”

“I know.”  She groaned again.  “This just came up today.  Now I don’t even have the thing that no one wants.  That crazy policewoman confiscated my beer and replaced it with week-old fish.”

“But it wouldn’t have been that different, would it?  It still would have involved this . . . crazy music stuff?”  He couldn’t help but be somewhat intrigued by the suggestion of adventure, so long as he wasn’t the one that had to go on it.  For a moment he was slightly glad that the only thing he could use his flute for at that point was to inspire pity.

The old woman eyed him carefully.  Despite her months of practice, she was not at all good at manipulating people.  She was no better at working angles than she had been in high school geometry class.  But even the guy batting .167 gets a hit now and then.  “You don’t believe, do you?  You were actually under the spell of the Beherrschunglied, and you still don’t believe.”

Like 82% of Americans, Peter was not comfortable discussing his beliefs with strangers (those who are, though they make up only 18% of the population, occupy 95% of the volume).  “If you keep saying things like ‘under the spell,’ I’m going to believe it even less,” he replied awkwardly.

“No,” she pressed, all the while thinking, Don’t screw this up don’t screw this up don’t screw this up.  “You’re not the type to be convinced by words.  You need to see it in action.  That’s the only way you’ll know for sure.”

An alarm went off in the back of Peter’s head.  He hadn’t had very good luck with alarms that day.  Or with things at the back of his head, for that matter.  His eyes narrowed.  “What are you talking about?”

“Nothing despicable.”  She shrugged, demonstrating that shrugging is yet another thing you can’t do comfortably when you’re handcuffed to a garbage can.  “I’ll teach you the song, and then you can go out and try it.  If it doesn’t work, then I’m a crazy old woman and you don’t have to worry about anything I say.  If it does, you can command the person to do something completely harmless like wave at you and be done with it.  No keys or police stations involved.  What do you say?”

Peter said nothing.  It sounded like a trick.

“Don’t you just put your lips together and blow?”

“I think that’s whistling.”

“Isn’t it basically the same?”

“No.  Have you ever played the flute?”

“Not that I can remember.”

“Then why are you giving me advice?”

“You look like you could use it.”

Simon Park Station was getting busier.  The people who took off early on Friday afternoons—who made up a significant portion of the downtown workforce—were streaming through, hoping to refresh themselves before going out again or to fall asleep watching TV.  Not a one of them was interested in the conversation between the old woman and a young man holding a flute.

“You could say that again,” Peter told her.  He liked to get things done on his own if he could, but he was not opposed to asking others for advice.  So far that day his only advisors had been the old woman, a variety of semi-reliable websites, and a sleep-deprived Peter Hamlin.  It was no wonder that things had gone so poorly.

“So, can we get started, then?”  The woman shifted awkwardly to remind him that she was handcuffed to a garbage can.  She didn’t see how anyone could forget something like that, but the boy hadn’t yet proven himself to be all that bright.

Peter didn’t answer right away.  He was still thinking about advice.  Unfortunately he couldn’t spot anyone around who looked particularly helpful.  He wished there was a police officer around who could tell him what the deal with this woman was, but there was none to be seen.  Shouldn’t there have been someone on duty?  For that matter, what about the cop that had handcuffed the old woman?  Where had she gone?  Why hadn’t she come back?

He sighed.  “No, I don’t think we can.  I just told you that I can’t really play this thing anymore.”  He looked down at the flute and felt a pang of guilt—guilt for not being able to help the woman, or guilt for losing a skill he had once had?  “And anyway, I don’t like your plan.  I’m not going to force someone else to break into the police station for me.  That’s despicable.”

“You’re going to give up now?  When you’ve done this much already?  You can’t back out!  You’re in too deep!”

“I’m ‘in too deep’?  What are you talking about?  You make it sound like I’m working for the mob.”  He briefly considered the possibility that the woman was part of the mob, which just goes to show how messed up his thought process was.  “What have I done?”

“You stole that flute!”

“I borrowed this flute—which I used to own—from my mother.  I don’t think they’re going to send me to prison for that one.”

The woman groaned.  “God, I’m bad at this.”

To the right of the door was a closet.  He pulled the door open and was greeted by a rush of wind, smelling of things that are too old to touch.  The closet was dark and expansive; god only knew exactly what had accumulated there over the centuries.  In the center, however, a shaft of light fell from an opening high above, a tiny hole far too distant to see.  All around were innumerable treasures, ranging from the dimly lit to the completely invisible, but Peter saw only the light.  He stepped forward carefully, looking now at his feet, now at his destination, knowing that the slightest misstep could spell doom.  The walk felt like an eternity.  The further he got from the door, the dimmer the light from the exterior became, until eventually it was only him and the pedestal that stood in the column of illumination.

Peter stood there, his goal within arm’s reach, for quite some time.  This was it.  This was what he had come for.  But he was afraid.  Afraid of what?  He couldn’t tell you—though in the murky depths of the ancient temple, being afraid of everything was always the safest bet.  He closed his eyes and thought of his mission.  Reaching down blindly, moving as gingerly as a safecracker, he traced the edge of the stone pedestal, and then his fingers spiraled inward, slowly advancing until they reached the hard plastic case.  With easy familiarity he flipped open one latch, then the other, then he gently lifted the lid.  Then, though they felt as heavy as one of the temple’s great stone doors, he raised his eyelids.

There it was: the flute, glimmering in the beam of light like a treasure worthy of an ancient king.  Before he really knew what was happening it was in his hands.  A tune started to play, seemingly from nowhere, starting softly but growing as he raised his prize up to eye level, and then climbing in a triumphant crescendo as he thrust it skyward, as if the flute could somehow carry him up the beam of light to safety.

And then he turned around and saw a huge boulder rolling toward him.  Yeah, right.

As before, Peter’s fantasy was based on a hint of truth: in this case, the amount of time it took him to search the closet.  It was nowhere near as spacious as an ancient temple chamber—either real or imaginary—but you could still have hired a professional treasure hunter to dig through it and felt that the expense was justified.  Mom and Dad’s opinions differed on many subjects, including cat naming, but one thing they agreed upon was organization.  They agreed it was overrated.

He eventually located it on a shelf, hidden behind a very old sport coat.  He decided to carry out any further investigation elsewhere, because the room still made him a little uncomfortable, partly because it was the place where (presumably) his sister had been conceived and partly because of thoughts of poison-tipped darts shooting out of holes in the wall.  He walked cautiously out of the closet, watching out not for differently colored stones that would trigger traps but trying to make sure he didn’t trip over any shoes or old tennis rackets.

Peter went out to the kitchen.  Sourdough turned his head around to watch.  Sourdough had a curious nature, but he also was smart enough to know what happened to curious cats, so he did his best to act like he wasn’t.  He relocated from the windowsill to the back of the couch and promptly pretended to fall asleep.

Peter opened the case, not as slowly as he would have if he had really found it on a dusty stone pedestal, but not as quickly as when he had been playing it every day, either.  It seemed to be in pretty good condition.  Knowing Mom, she probably dug it out once a month or so to polish and maybe even try a few notes.  Then she would return it to the mysterious morass of the closet.  He wondered how long before she noticed it was missing.

His concern, however, was not with the condition of the flute; it was with the condition of the player.  He hadn’t even touched the thing in six years.  Peter had no idea whether the forgetting curve for instruments was more like the one for bicycle riding (pick it up twenty years later and you’re still fine) or the one for calculus (stop doing it for a month and forget everything you ever learned).  His fingers found the appropriate keys quickly enough, and he raised it up, resting the instrument above his chin and just below his lower lip.  Then he blew.

About the best thing you could say for the performance is that it didn’t cause Sourdough to yowl, leap up, and run down to the basement to join Cicero.  It took him four tries to get any kind of sound out of it at all, and when he finally succeeded the noise was feeble and grainy.  He tried a couple renditions of “Hot Cross Buns,” which was the only tune for which he could remember the fingering.  It sounded like “Hot Cross Buns” always sounds, which is to say, pretty bad, because the only people who ever perform “Hot Cross Buns” are ten-year-olds who picked up their instrument for the first time less than three weeks earlier.

He stared at the flute accusingly, then turned to his audience to see the reaction.  Sourdough stared back, as inscrutably as you would expect a cat to do.  Possibly to himself, possibly to the cat, or possibly to the flute, Peter said, “This isn’t going to work.”

But with the possibility of inquisitive family members returning at any time looming—not to mention the Beherrschunglied—he packed it up and took it with him back to the subway station.

The door to the old Hamlin place creaked open, seeming to move almost of its own accord.  A strange sound rang out from some distant inner room—it could have been laughter, and if it was, it definitely wasn’t someone laughing with you.  A thick layer of dust coated the floor; no one had crossed that threshold in decades, except . . . were those footprints?  Hoofprints? A small shadow darted past the open door.  It was probably just a cat.  That’s it, just a cat.  Please let it just be a cat . . .

It would be difficult to explain why exactly Peter envisioned his return home—something he did almost every week—as though he had been triple dog dared to step inside the rotting mansion on the hill at the outskirts of town.  Suffice it to say, his imagination was running wild.  Thinking realistically hadn’t served him all that well so far that day.

The door did creak a little, but it certainly didn’t move of its own accord.  Peter had to put his shoulder into it, just as he had done every summer for as long as he could remember.  He stutter-stepped, hopped automatically over the three or four pairs of shoes that were inevitably lying right in the middle of the entryway, and skidded to a halt just before crashing into the inconveniently positioned coat tree.  It wasn’t the most subtle entrance, but Peter was pretty sure that no one was home, much more sure than he would have been if he was really walking into a house where no one had lived for generations.

Mom and Dad both started work early and left early, so on any other day of the week they would either already be back or be arriving shortly.  But Friday was Mom’s grocery shopping day, and she was one of those people who refused to buy anything premade and insisted on inspecting every purchase thoroughly, so it was a very time-consuming activity (often involving multiple stores).  Dad stayed late at work for extra-curricular activities.  Dizzy, being a teenager, was never in the house unless she was contractually obligated to be, especially during the summer.

So Peter was alone, and he was quite glad to be.  He sure as hell didn’t want to try to explain why he wasn’t at work.

Well, not entirely alone.  Shortly after regaining his balance, he was greeted by Sourdough, the more sociable of their two cats.  He rubbed up against his leg, consented to be petted for a few seconds, and then returned to his windowsill perch to get back to more important matters: scanning the backyard for birds, chipmunks, and other dangerous invaders.  Peter assumed that Cicero was down in the basement, because Cicero was always down in the basement.  Cicero only emerged at feeding time, when guests who were allergic to cats came over, or during thunderstorms—though in the last case she only came up so she could hide under his parents’ bed.  Mom liked to say that she was so shy because she was a girl who had been given a boy’s name, but Dad stubbornly insisted that they had agreed to each name one of the cats, and he wasn’t about to change anything now.  If the cat couldn’t handle being named after one of history’s greatest orators, well, that was his problem.  Err, her problem.

But Peter was not there to get reacquainted with his pets.  He was on a mission.  It comforted him to think of it as a mission, because the alternative was admitting that he was running silly errands for a crazy homeless woman in order to avoid joining her in madness because of an annoying song.  Yes, “mission” was definitely the better option.

He had told the old woman that he wasn’t sure where the flute was, but really, he could think of only one place it could possibly be.  Peter made his way to the master bedroom, hesitating only slightly to enter a place that for so many years of his life had been presented as the domain of his parents, well beyond the realm of children.  Of course, Mom and Dad did still sleep in the room, but Peter was too old to feel nervous just because of that . . . right?

Peter walked up the stairs slowly, one at a time, but not because he realized just how dangerous his earlier descent had been.  With every step, he worried that his mind would once again be assaulted by that hateful tune, but it never came.  The preposterousness of the woman’s explanation was gradually being outweighed by the fact that the behavior of the earworm was completely consistent with what she said.

Perhaps the strangest thing about it was that he couldn’t remember what the song sounded like.  His usual experience with music stuck in his head was that any related thought would trigger a relapse.  Even when he worried about it returning, something that would usually guarantee that it did, it didn’t come.  He had heard it hundreds of times that very day, but now when he tried to hum it, he couldn’t figure out the notes.

Peter did not find this reassuring.

What he did find reassuring was the sunlight, and being outside again, and the fact that Simon Park was pleasantly quiet.  It was as hot as you’d expect of an afternoon in late June, and he was still wearing his suit, but a little sweat was nothing compared to what he’d been through.  For a moment it was just another Friday, and he was simply going home early from work.

But, like most moments in the sun, it didn’t last.  This was no ordinary Friday, for so many reasons.  For one thing, he was going home because he had a job to do.  For another, the home he was going to was not the usual one.

As he crossed Simon Park—which did not take long, because it was really more like a glorified courtyard—he thought about the woman.  He asked questions that many people had asked before: Who was she?  What was she doing there?  He was, however, only the third person to give serious consideration to the answers.

She was a suspicious character, and not just for the obvious reasons.  He may not have been having his best day, but Peter still did his best to size up his opponent (or co-conspirator, or boss, or whatever she was); he had been trained by a father whose work constantly reminded him that surface explanations are not always (or even often) the most accurate.

First, her description of the magical “Song of Mastery” was surprisingly undetailed; one would ordinarily expect a magician or other con artist to have a more elaborate tale to support her tricks.  What did she have to gain by feigning ignorance?  Or was it feigned?  Second, the little “mission” she had assigned for him was tossing him right in the deep end.  Everyone knows that if you’re trying to gain someone’s confidence, you start with little things and then work your way up until the mark is so tightly bound to you that he can’t escape.  You don’t throw the cub off the cliff right off the bat and expect him to crawl back to you.  Third, she wasn’t a great actor.  Although she was famous as . . . that is, famous on the internet as . . . well, she was once mentioned on a blog with more than a hundred followers as “The Old Woman in Simon Park Station,” but it didn’t feel right.  She looked old, but she didn’t act old.

After weighing the information, Peter laid out the possibilities: she was a very bad confidence trickster (50% chance), she was an advanced confidence trickster who knew the usual methods won’t always work (35% chance), or she was on the level (15% chance).

All skepticism aside, though, she seemed to be in genuine distress.  He figured it would take serious commitment to handcuff oneself to a garbage can in a subway station, and he didn’t see what she could possibly gain that would make it worth it.  Maybe her aim was to use him to distract the police, but he doubted that he could occupy enough officers for long enough for someone to accomplish much of anything.  And if she thought he might actually succeed, then she was less intelligent than he had given her credit for.

His assessment was put on hold when he reached the other end of the park and had to cross the street.  One more block of brisk walking in the summer heat brought him to the entrance to the Carmine Street Station.  As a matter of fact, Peter had been riding the subway about once a week since the beginning of the summer.  Simon Park was the closest station to his apartment, but he had never been in it before that day; it was on the Green Line, which could only take him downtown or out east.  If he wanted to go out to the western suburbs, he needed the Red Line.

As he walked down the treacherous, poorly-lit stairs, Peter wondered if any of this would have happened to him if his family lived in, say, Forest Heights instead of Park Prairie.  If he was a regular Green Line rider, then he might have met the woman before.  Maybe he would have learned to avoid her.  Maybe he would have a car and not need to ride the subway, since everyone knew that all the kids from Forest Heights were cake eaters whose parents bought them anything they wanted.

He strolled through the station—keeping a careful eye out for any mystery women who might be lurking around the pillars—and got on a westbound train.  Since there wasn’t much else to do on the seventeen-minute ride, he spent the time wondering what it would have been like to go through middle school never being taunted by the kids from other suburbs for living in “PP.”

She immediately perked up as though buoyed by a mysterious muffin left by an unknown benefactor.  “What did you play?”

He hesitated a bit.  “Flute.  But I haven’t touched it since high school.”

“I bet you could still play if you tried.”  She sat up straighter.  Her eyes were bright.  She had found him.  After asking thousands of people, she had finally found the one who was going to get her out.  His only qualifications were that he had answered “I used to” to her second question and given an inconclusive response to her first, but she had lowered her standards considerably since she started.  She certainly wasn’t going to let the guy get away just because he was a little out of practice.  “Do you still have it?”

“Not with me.”  The flute he used had once belonged to his mother.  He couldn’t imagine that she had sold it.

“Go get it.”

“Now wait.  I haven’t agreed to anything yet.”

Despite its surprising success the first time, the woman was doing her best to keep herself from resorting to slapping him again.  But she was excited, more excited than she had been . . . ever, as far as she could remember.  With very great effort, she reminded herself that, unlike her, he was new to the whole situation and would need time to absorb it.

“I’m not asking you to do anything other than get the flute.  You don’t have any problem with that, right?  It’s what I want you to do, so you should be able to leave without being bothered by the Beherr—I mean, the Song of Mastery.  Just run the errand, take some time to think about everything, and come back here.  I’ll be waiting.”

It sounded simple enough.  Like most people with common sense, he had a deep distrust of things that sound simple.  But he did want to help the woman if he could, and he didn’t have anything else he needed to be doing.  After the ridiculous display he put on, he thought it was best not to try going back to work.  Hopefully the weekend would give him time to come up with an explanation for his behavior.  He did not expect this explanation to contain the word “Beherrschunglied.”

“You could be waiting a while.  I’m not sure where it is.”

She sighed, but she was smiling afterwards.  “You have no idea how long I’ve been waiting,” she said, forgetting that she had screamed the exact amount of time into his face earlier that day.  “I can wait a little longer.”  She tried to lean back and smacked her head against the garbage can.  “But don’t take too long, okay?  This really isn’t as comfortable as it looks.”

Around them the daily routine of Simon Park Station continued as ever before.  The regular passengers had gotten used to the old woman and her bizarre habits a long time ago.  She sat on the floor, and sometimes she talked to people.  Sometimes the people talked back—both in the neutral sense of “talk back” and the negative sense.  They always walked away in the end.  From their point of view there was nothing new going on.

But the woman saw something different.  She saw a person who listened to her proposal, considered it, and then gave an answer that proved he had actually been paying attention.  She saw a man who chose to fight the Beherrschunglied because the alternative went against his principles.  It was kind of heroic, when she thought about it.

Of course, she might have only seen these qualities because the alternative was watching the best chance of getting out she had found in eight months of searching walk away.

“And what about after that?” she shouted.

The angry approach hadn’t worked—well, technically it had, but not in a way that seemed possible to duplicate.  So she fell back on the usual.  It had never worked before, but there’s a first time for everything.

“You want to go home and forget about everything that happened today?  After the way you described it, I suppose you probably would.  And maybe you’d be happy, for a while.  You’d get back in your routine, go to work every day—you look like someone whose job doesn’t change much.  You could live a life without risking being arrested, without crazy old women telling you what to do, without angry German music stuck in your head.  But what would you have instead?”

Peter stopped.  He couldn’t tell you exactly why (then again, considering the day he’d had, you’d be lucky if he could tell you his own address or phone number).  Maybe the woman’s words struck home; maybe he couldn’t stand the thought of spending the whole rest of the summer killing time in the Clerk Cage knowing that he gave up the chance to do something else.  It could be that he remembered that the reason he wanted to be a lawyer was not simply to show off his speaking skills but also to help others.  Of course, it’s also possible that, as he approached the exit, the faintest hint of the tune began to reverberate at the back of his mind again.

He walked back to where the woman was seated and squatted down, trying to ignore the smell of the garbage can.  “Look, I’d like to help you.  I don’t know what you did to get in trouble with the police, but whatever it is, I’m sure you don’t deserve to be locked up and then abandoned here.  But you’re asking me to go into a building full of cops and steal something that belongs to them.  I don’t think you’ve got the right man for the job.”

We’ll find out for sure in a minute, the woman thought.  “And if you could get someone else to do it for you?”

“I don’t see how that’s any better.  You’re just adding a conspiracy charge on top of things.”  Still, his curiosity could not be denied.  “What are you talking about?”

“The Beherrschunglied.”

“Can’t we just call it by the English name?”

“Fine.  The Song of Mastery.”

“The song that you used on me—”

“Not intentionally!”

“—to force me to do what you want.”

“Right.”

“But I don’t know it.”  This was only one of many problems with her suggestion.  It was the most obvious, however, so he felt he might as well start with it.

“I can teach it to you.”  She took a deep breath.  This was it.  “Can you play a musical instrument?”

“No.”  But, on this one occasion, as he watched her head sink gloomily onto her chest, he felt compelled to tell the whole truth.  “I mean, not anymore.”

“Let me get this straight: you want me to get you out of those handcuffs.”

“For a start.”

Peter frowned.  You never get a good answer when you start with “Let me get this straight.”  “And how would you suggest I go about doing that?”

Though she hadn’t done it in a while, in the early days of her captivity the old woman had spent some time imagining who her rescuer might be.  They came in a variety of sizes and colors, but one thing they all had in common was that they were heroic.  In her mind one of the defining characteristics of heroism was the ability to take charge of a situation.  Heroes do not need to be led by the hand every step of the way.  But after two hundred thirty-three days, she was not about to start looking gift horses in the mouth.

“The most basic way would be to go at them with some kind of saw, I suppose.”  She had spent many hours planning exactly how to direct her champion, should he ever appear.  It seemed perfectly in keeping with her luck that when he finally did, the first problem they would have to deal with would be something that hadn’t come up until that very morning.  “But it sounds like you’re having a pretty jittery day, so I don’t think I trust you with sharp objects.”

“Apparently, if you ordered me to use the saw, my mind would be crystal clear.”  Sarcasm: also not an official stage of grief, but useful nonetheless.

“No thanks.  You’re just going to have to get the key.”

“The key.”

“Yes.”

“The key to the handcuffs.”

“That’s the one.”

“The key to the handcuffs, which is in the police station.”

“That’s where I would keep it if I was the police.”

“And that’s exactly where they’d want to keep me if I tried to steal it!”

Peter didn’t like the idea of trying to get a job at a law firm with an attempted theft from a government building on his record.  He didn’t like standing around discussing the crime with someone whom the police had already tried to arrest once that day and were probably coming around to get a second time.  He didn’t like her explanation of the song in his head, which he only believed because it happened to stop when he was near her.  He especially didn’t like that he was essentially rewarding this woman for smacking him in the face—lawyers know all about setting bad precedents.

“Forget it,” he said.  “I’ll take my chances with the earworm.”  He turned around and walked toward the exit.

Tracy Tang had had more than enough of these cryptic mind games.  She wasn’t in the CIA; she was a police officer.  The life of a police officer is supposed to be simple.  There is right, and there is wrong.  You stop one and defend the other.

She cuffed the old woman and took her by the arm, just as she had done a hundred times before and just as she would do a hundred times again.  The routine was comforting while it lasted.  It lasted as far as the stairs.

At first she thought that the old woman had tripped her.  She regained her balance and spun around, ready for the chase.  But the woman wasn’t running.  She just stood there calmly with an awkward smile.  “See what I mean?”

Officer Tang ignored her.  She grabbed the criminal’s arm and pulled.  Nothing happened.  The woman clearly wasn’t exerting any effort at all, but suddenly she was harder to move than if she was made of lead.  Officer Tang tried using both arms.  She wouldn’t budge.  The officer got down off the stairs, went around to the woman’s back, and pushed.  Nothing.  She tried pulling in the opposite direction: easy as pie.  But when she went back to pushing, the woman went right up to the edge of the first step, and then it was like she had hit an invisible wall.  No amount or type of exertion on the part of Officer Tang—and believe me, she got creative—could get her up the stairs.

“I’m stuck here,” the woman said, without a trace of her former smile.  “Neither you, nor the army, nor anybody else can get me out.”

But Officer Tang was not beaten that easily.  There was more than one way out of the station.  She had the woman do an about-face and brought her back through the turnstile, past her pillar, and onto the platform.

“It won’t work,” the old woman said sadly.

“You have the right to remain silent,” Officer Tang reminded her.

A train pulled in a few minutes later, and the officer spent every instant of the twenty seconds the doors were open trying to force the woman on.  She might as well have tried to push a jumbo jet up the Grand Canyon.  A number of subway passengers watched curiously.  A few who wanted to board through the door she was occupying expressed their displeasure.  “Official police business!” she bellowed, and she kept on working at it until the doors slid shut.  In fact, she was so absorbed in her effort that she continued to try even after the train was gone.  Luckily for both of them, the mysterious force preventing the woman from getting on the train also stopped her from being knocked onto the tracks.

After failing to get the woman out through two different maintenance tunnels, even Officer Tang was ready to admit that she would not be able to bring this perp in on her own.  It was time to call for backup.  In fact, it was time to go ask for backup in person, because she wasn’t sure she could explain the situation effectively over the radio, if she could at all.

But what about the criminal?  Could she really leave her there alone among all those innocent citizens, leaving them at risk of being slapped to within an inch of their lives at any moment?

“Stay here,” she ordered, looking around wildly in the desperate hope that another officer might happen to be walking by at that very moment.  “Don’t think you’re getting out of it because of . . . whatever this is.  I’ll be back to arrest you properly soon.”

The old woman was smiling again.  She was sore all over, but it was nothing compared to what she had done to herself in her own attempts to get past the unfathomable barriers blocking every exit.  “Like I have any choice.  I’ll try not to commit any crimes while you’re away.”

Officer Tang’s wandering eyes settled on a nearby garbage can.  “Oh, you’d better believe you won’t.”

As she sat there attached to the waste receptacle—a new low in a life that had set the bar underground since Day One—she decided that the handcuffs were a punishment for her being amused by the officer’s distress.  She made a promise to herself to never again take pleasure from another person’s misery.  It was a promise she kept for almost five hours.