“You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say or do can and will be held against you in a court of law. You have the right to speak to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you. Do you understand these rights as they have been read to you?”

Officer Tang had mixed feelings about the Miranda Rights.  It had never been successfully explained to her why criminals had any rights at all.  If they wanted rights, they shouldn’t have broken the law.  In general, she paid very little attention to the post-arrest stages of criminal procedure, which she often found confusing and/or unsatisfying.  In her ideal world, you got the bad guy, and that was it (Officer Tang was one of the few people whose ideal world still had bad guys in it).

On the other hand, reading an arrestee her Miranda Rights was a symbol of victory.  It was a way of showing you had won, like saying “Checkmate!” or hearing your country’s national anthem or dumping a barrel of Gatorade on the coach.  Every time she got to say, “You have the right to remain silent,” it was a reminder of another job well done.  So she relished the delivery of the lines, even if the philosophical background behind them made her somewhat uneasy.

Most of the time she did not care whether or not they waived their rights.  It didn’t matter to her if they said anything compromising—that was all for the detectives to take care of.  In fact, she generally preferred that her arrestees keep quiet; after all, what had they done to earn the privilege of talking?  Officer Tang was not the first cop to reinterpret, “You have the right to remain silent” as meaning, “You have lost your freedom of speech.”

But this time she wanted something.  She had to know.  What had the woman been doing down there for all those months?  The mystery had consumed her like no previous case ever had.  She had the assault charge, and that was enough to bring the woman in, but it was not enough to satisfy Officer Tang; it was just an excuse.  You could hardly say that Al Capone’s great criminal act was failing to pay his taxes.

“Thought you could get away with it, didn’t you?”  Lacking experience actually talking to suspects instead of just reciting at them, she was forced to rely almost exclusively on clichés.  “Well, you might have somewhere else, but not in my town.  You didn’t reckon with the Crescenton Police Department!”

The old woman was in no mood to respond.  She had arrived at Grief Stage Four: Depression.  She was never going to get out.  No one was ever going to listen to her.  She would die in that subway station, and it would most likely be several days before anyone even noticed.  And, because apparently that wasn’t funny enough for the universe, it had decided to throw this disagreeable police officer at her as well.

“I bet you’re wondering what kind of sentence you’ve got to look forward to for what you did,” Officer Tang continued.  She certainly was.  “Five-to-ten?  Twenty?  Life?  I hear there’s a proposition in the legislature to get rid of the death penalty here in the state of Ohio, but I wouldn’t count on that to save you.”

“I’m already serving a life sentence.”  She didn’t want to talk to the police officer.  Then again, she couldn’t remember the last time she had done something because she wanted to.  If it was her lot in life to be toyed with for others’ amusement, she might as well play along.  Stage Five: Acceptance.

“So you’re a repeat offender!”  It was all coming together now: a hardened criminal spends decades digging an escape tunnel with spoons stolen from the prison cafeteria.  One night she jumps in, claws her way to undeserved freedom and finds herself in the subway system.  That explained why she had just been sitting there for months.  She was laying low until the whole thing blew over.  “Where were you doing time?”

“Here.”

Officer Tang faltered, but just for a moment.  She couldn’t possibly mean here here.  She must mean, “in the state of Ohio.”  “Well then, you’re in luck.  We can put you back where you belong in no time.  Just need to run you by the station to do a little paperwork and you’ll be on your way.”

The woman laughed.  It wasn’t funny, really; it was just . . . fair.  For the first time, her situation was going to cause problems for someone else instead of just for her.  “If only it were that easy.”

“What?”  She tightened her grip on the woman’s arm.  “Ma’am, you’re in enough trouble as it is.  You don’t want to add resisting arrest on top of it.”  Officer Tang didn’t want any complications, and she certainly didn’t want to have to beat an old woman into submission.  She just wanted the intruder out of her station.

The woman kept laughing.  It hurt her throat, but she couldn’t stop.  Sometimes all you can do is laugh—it’s not one of the stages of grief, but maybe it should be.  “I’m not resisting.  Believe me, I would love to go with you.  But like I said: it’s not that easy.”

Officer Tang was starting to feel very uncomfortable.  The people she arrested did not usually laugh.  Cartoon supervillains laugh.  Real criminals don’t laugh.  “What the hell are you talking about?”

The laughter finally subsided.  “You’ll see.”

“Hang on a second.  I don’t remember ever hearing this thing.  It just sort of appeared in my head.”  Denial: the first stage of grief.

The woman frowned.  It was not a good look for her, though she wasn’t terribly nice to look at in the first place.  “That’s the part I’m not sure about.”

“But it was you, right?  You’re the one that hit me.  It didn’t start until after that, and then it went away when I came back.”  Stage Two: Blame.

The frown deepened, turning her wrinkles into great valleys of consternation.  “But it’s the Song of Mastery.  I didn’t sing anything.  I wasn’t trying to put this on you.  You can’t force a guy to do what you want just by hitting him.  The world would be a much simpler place if that was true.  Not a very nice place, either.”

“Whatever.  The details aren’t important.”  Stage Three: Bargaining (the lawyers are best at this one).  “You said that if I do what you say, it’ll all go away?”

She looked up at him.  Months of making her pitch and constantly getting rejected had caused her to seriously doubt her ability to judge people, if she had ever had much of one in the first place.  Was this kid any different?  The only way to find out was to try him.

“Seems that way.”

“Great.  You’ve got a deal.”  He extended his hand, knowing full well that a handshake is as legally binding as an unsigned contract or a pinky swear.  He wasn’t actually planning to be ordered around by a madwoman; he would simply play along until a better option presented itself.  Much to his chagrin, Peter was having a great deal of trouble thinking up better options.

The woman smiled but did not take the hand.  Peter retracted it awkwardly.  Then he told himself that he probably didn’t want to shake hands with someone who appeared to spend all her time sitting on the floor of a subway station.  “What do you want me to do?”

“It’s simple,” she lied.  It was an obvious lie, one that Peter would have recognized even if he hadn’t been training for the legal profession or grown up with a younger sibling.  “Get me out of here.”

Peter looked around.  No forbidding iron gates or barred doors had appeared in the station since he was last there.  Could it be that the woman couldn’t walk?  No, she had been capable—more than capable—of moving around that morning.  He rolled up his sleeve and saw that there was a definite mark where she had seized his arm.  If she was enfeebled, then he had all the muscular strength of a gelatin mold.

“I don’t understand.”

The woman continued to smile.  “I don’t understand it completely myself, but I can tell you that it’s going to involve at least two steps.  The second one will be a bit . . . complicated, but the first part should be pretty clear-cut.  I need you to get me out of these.”

She shifted uncomfortably around and gestured toward her back with her chin.  Peter noticed for the first time the she was sitting not only next to a pillar but also right up against a garbage can.  The “can” was not really a can at all, but simply a bag ringed by a framework of long metal bars.  In between the bars—and, at either end, around the woman’s wrists—someone had placed a pair of handcuffs.

Every lawyer must prepare for the situation of a witness spouting out something that seems to mean nothing at all.  The best reaction is to pretend that you understood completely and move on as if nothing unusual has happened.  Other possibilities include making it seem as though what they said is unimportant or even accusing them of using words that an ordinary person—such as the ordinary people on the jury—couldn’t possibly be expected to be familiar with.

Peter chose to sit down.  The floor was as nasty as you would expect, but the station was all but deserted in the early afternoon, so at least there was little risk of being stepped on.  The glorious joy of escaping from the evil tune was slowly being replaced by a vague dizziness, and it didn’t seem like things would be getting better any time soon.  “What did you say?”

“It’s German.”  He had guessed that.  Though he had never studied, Peter had the basic American’s understanding of European languages: flowing, pretentious-sounding words are French; long, angry-sounding words are German; words that are fifteen letters long and contain no vowels are Welsh.  “It means ‘Song of Mastery’ or something like that.”

It was at this point—and also at numerous other points later on—that Peter seriously considered leaving.  He had never gotten the pleasure of meeting Almirante Loco, but he was well aware that there are people in the world who, for whatever reason, say a lot of things that don’t make sense.  Sometimes such people can be amusing: if they seem harmless and respect your physical space, it’s okay to stick around and listen.  But when they ask for money, or turn violent, or rattle off bizarre, fantasy-esque terms as if they actually mean something, then it’s time to walk away.

But he couldn’t walk away, because if he did, the song—the Bearhairshunglead?—might come back.

Still, he decided to tread lightly.  She had already hit him once, and that time he hadn’t even done anything.  He did not want to think about what she might do if he started questioning her beliefs, no matter how crazy they may have been.

“So, when you say, ‘under the effect,’ you mean . . .?”

“It’s simple.  You pretty much just described it.  If you hear the Beherrschunglied, you’re bound to the will of the person who performed it.  Basically you have to do whatever they want.  If you don’t—if you resist, or try to run, or fight it—then the song gradually takes over your mind.  It grows louder, more insistent, blocking off anything else you try to focus on.  It shouldn’t drive you completely insane, because then you wouldn’t be any use to anyone, but, like you said, it’s not exactly pleasant.”

Peter tried to pretend he was at the doctor’s office.  After all, doctors (like lawyers) use lots of words that don’t seem to make any sense, and their explanations are, if you think about it, kind of unbelievable: “If you don’t swallow this mystery object that has god-only-knows-what inside, then millions of tiny things floating around inside your body are going to kill you.”  He asked the only question it makes sense to ask a doctor: “Is there a cure?”

“Sure.  Just follow orders.”

Any good lawyer knows that the ordering of your questions is crucial.  The exact same set of responses can, when arranged differently, tell a completely different story, or no story at all.  Usually you have to build it up, starting by setting the scene with mundane facts until arriving at the climax, sometimes tossing in quiet harbingers of things to come among the seemingly meaningless trivia.  Anyone who says cross-examination isn’t an art isn’t doing it properly.

But preparing this sequence of questions takes time.  Even veteran trial lawyers spend hours and days directing the flow of information like a pack of engineers preparing to set a river on a new course.  If you try to wing it, as the rookies so often do, you end up telling the wrong story, or your story doesn’t make sense.  Sometimes you even repeat yourself, which can be used as a technique to trip up a not particularly bright witness for the other side, but it’s not recommended for general use.

Peter was in no mood for a slow build-up.  He was in no state to spend time preparing.  He wanted an answer now.

“What the hell did you do to me?”

The woman, on the other hand, was quite well prepared to answer.  She had spent much of the morning thinking about what she had done, what she could have done differently, how it had affected her already bothersome existence.  She hadn’t even been asking people the Question.  It was an unusual day for her.

“I yelled at you and I hit you,” she replied calmly.  As a matter of fact, they were both calm, though one was a before-the-storm calm and the other an after-the-storm calm.  “But that doesn’t seem to explain why you’re back.”

In court, people swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.  Most people assume that two out of three ain’t bad, and if they’re going to skip one, it might as well be that one in the middle.  Peter had been familiar with this popular strategy since long before he started law school; anyone who grew up with a sibling knows all about it.  He had employed it himself, and he definitely knew when it was being used on him.

“I’ve been yelled at before, and I’ve been hit before.”  Not often, but two can play at the lie of omission game.  “I’ve never been through anything like this.”

“So tell me about it.”  It was nice for once not to have to be the one trying to lead the conversation.  She found it strangely comforting, a nice reprieve in a life that had given her so many sources of discomfort lately.

Peter recounted the tale of his day thus far, trying not to think about the fact that it was only half over.  He continued to omit certain facts that other people might have considered especially relevant.  She didn’t need to know about his rude awakening.  She didn’t need to know about the Speech.  It was a tale of trials and tribulations, but he had narrowed it down to the ones that he felt he could link directly to her.  Given more time, he might have been able to come up with a way to pin the alarm clock on her as well, but he was doing this on the fly.

As he delivered his saga of woe, he kept close attention on the woman’s face.  It is a common rookie mistake to only watch witnesses when they’re responding to your questions, thinking the most important thing is to try to tell whether or not they’re lying.  An experienced lawyer, however, knows that most witnesses have practiced their speeches before coming in and have been coached about how to deliver them without showing signs of falsification.  It is in their responses to what you say—the part of the script they haven’t heard before—that they are most likely to let something slip.

Listening to the story of the maddening mystery tune, the old woman first registered shock, and then she shifted to a look of understanding.  At the end of the tale, her face showed mild bemusement.  This told Peter . . . not much of anything, actually, but keep in mind that by this point he was very tired.

The woman couldn’t help but smile.  Like everyone else, she didn’t like to admit it, but, like everyone else, she was helpless to resist the power of schadenfreude.  “You’re under the effect of the Beherrschunglied.”

“Shut it off!  SHUT IT OFF!  SHUTITOFF SHUTITOFF SHUTITOFF!”

Everyone stared at him.  Only Wachowsky, who was blessed with the considerable inertia owed to a man who consumed more tortes in a week than most people did in their entire lives, was able to take the outburst in stride.

“The kid’s right,” he grumbled in his usual, semi-comprehensible manner.  He gestured at the screen.  “This damn fool doesn’t have any idea what he’s talking about!”

BUM BA DA DA DEE BA BUUUM

At that moment a voice pierced through the rapidly hardening concrete sludge that was filling Peter’s mind.  It did not replace the music, nor was it louder than the music, yet somehow he was able to understand it.  He looked around the room to see who commanded this magical voice, but no one was talking to him; they were all arguing with Wachowsky, who was arguing with the man on the screen.

In a moment of clarity (or insanity, depending on how you look at it), Peter realized that the voice belonged to the woman who had attacked him in the subway station.

“This is it?” the voice asked.  “This is how you spend your time?  Sitting in a room listening to rich old men bickering about what words to use in a document that you don’t know anything about?  This is what’s so important that you’re too busy to help me?”

Peter, now convinced that he was losing his mind, gave up.

“Excuse me,” he said, standing up quickly and not even noticing the pain when he slammed both his knees into the thick mahogany table.  “I need to go home.”

He exited the room as quickly as possible, taking three tries to find the door handle, and pinwheeled dangerously back through the hallway to the elevator.  He hit all the buttons, unable even to guess which was which, and collapsed into the car, hanging onto the railing as if it was the only thing preventing him from plummeting into the Grand Canyon.

Peter wasn’t sure how he got out of the building without being stopped by security.  He had no memory of the process.  He wondered if this was what it was like to be on drugs.  The only comparable experience in his life—the day he got his wisdom teeth removed—patterned similarly.  His first memory was of gradually regaining awareness, accompanied by a slow realization of dull, throbbing pain, this time in his knees as opposed to the back of his mouth.

Then he heard a loud sound: “TZAMON BOG, TZAMON BOG.  EXADON YULITE.”

He was on the subway.  And he was home.

For about a second, Peter thought that having been able to get from Millbury Tower, across Dipaoli Plaza, and onto the subway without getting himself killed was the most amazing thing that had happened to him all day.  Then the ramifications of the fact that he had actually heard the subway announcement hit him.

The world was no longer simply a whirlwind of hateful noise.  The strange tune was not gone, but it was significantly softer and less menacing.  As he stepped off the subway into Simon Park Station, it grew softer still.

A wave of euphoria washed over him.  He felt like skipping all the way home—that is, until he remembered that his legs still felt like someone had taken a baseball bat to them.  Even so, as he limped through the turnstile and toward the exit, he relished the diminishing of the music that had nearly melted his brain with every step he took.  When it was gone completely, he stopped, took a deep breath, and let out a shout of pure glee.

He heard a noise to his right, presumably in response to his outburst.  Since being able to hear things again was still something of a novelty, he decided to check it out.  Then he froze like a man who has just realized he is about to step on the third rail.

Peter was staring at the old woman.  He was standing in the exact same spot where she had grabbed him several hours earlier.

A curious blend of emotions was running through the recently decongested paths inside Peter’s head, so when he said, “You did say I’d be back,” he probably looked about the same as he did when she had slapped him.

The woman stared back, looking just as shocked as he did.  “Yeah,” she finally got out, “but I didn’t believe me.”

Some time later, Mr. Victorino got off the elevator.  At first it seemed like he might have simply pushed the wrong button; other than Mr. Abrahamson, the only partner who ever came to the clerk cage was Mr. Brandon, who used to have an office on the 12th floor and had trouble remembering that he was now on 10.

But Mr. Victorino, it seemed, was in the right place after all.  Rather than staring around in bewilderment for a few seconds before turning right around and hitting the elevator button, he began examining the cubicles, hunting for whatever clerks might happen to be around.  There was only one for him to find.

“Peter!” he exclaimed, trying to look as much like Santa Claus holding a sackful of toys as a lawyer can.  “How would you like to sit in on a drafting meeting?”

Bum ba da da dee ba buuum

Actually, Peter understood him perfectly well.  Having failed in every attempt to rid his mind of the offensive noise, he had spent the previous hour or so watching subtitled videos on YouTube in the hope of teaching himself how to read lips.  He was pleased—and, frankly, a little startled—at his success, but his excitement was significantly dampened by the fact that, unless he could find some way to get the tune out of his head, this could be the only way he would ever be able to understand anyone again.

Speaking of dampened spirits, a drafting meeting is not the kind of treat you would like to wake up to on Christmas morning.  It’s not even something you’d like to have at the end of a long Thanksgiving, simply as a break from watching football and eating turkey and playing football and eating more turkey and watching more football.  Every job has many aspects that may seem boring to people who don’t understand them, and every job usually has at least one thing that’s a little boring even when you know what’s going on.  Drafting meetings had been known to put to sleep people who were dosed up on speed.

Then again, Peter had already tried the interesting stuff, the things that are supposed to distract you, the things that are designed to make you forget what you’re doing, what you’re thinking about, and which decade it is.  None of it had helped to get the song out of his head.  He didn’t really think it would work, but without any better ideas, he decided to give extreme tedium a shot.

“Sure,” he said, lying through his teeth.  “Sounds like fun.”

Bum ba da da dee ba buuum

The elevator ride was awkward, but only a bit.  Peter’s newfound lip-reading talent was next to useless when he wasn’t looking at the person head-on, so Victorino’s explanation of the brief they were going to be drafting was lost on him.  But Mr. Victorino, like most of the partners, was perfectly capable of carrying on a conversation all by himself, so at least it was only awkward for one of them.

For Peter it was just painful.  He didn’t care much for the elevator music.

Bum ba da da dee ba buuum

They got off on 19, and Peter, who was starting to feel disoriented and could barely keep putting one foot in front of the other, followed Mr. Victorino to a large conference room.  All the bigwigs were there: Abrahamson and his all-penetrating gaze, Wachowsky and his prodigious mustache, Brandon and his deer-in-the-headlights look.  Fortunately they were all focused on a screen, half of which was displaying a document and the other half the just slightly too-close-for-comfort image of the face of one of their associates from another branch.  They hardly even noticed Peter and Victorino’s entrance, which Peter appreciated, especially when he tried to sit down in his chair and missed.

BUM BA DA DA DEE BA BUUUM

There was no mistaking the fact that the tune was now louder than ever.  Peter felt like his whole body was vibrating, as though he were sitting a few inches away from a speaker at a heavy metal concert.  He kept reaching up to touch his ears, certain that they were going to start bleeding at any second.  Even if the brief they were discussing had been the most fascinating document in the history of the legal profession, Peter would not have been able to pay attention; you might as well have asked him to listen to their conversation from the far side of the moon.

BUM BA DA DA DEE BA BUUUM

Eventually a sensation got through to him.  One of the lawyers was tapping him on the shoulder.  He looked up.  Victorino appeared to be asking his opinion on something.  He had no idea what.  He was too far gone to try to read lips.  He didn’t even think he could read period.

Peter tried to come up with some plausible response, but he just couldn’t overcome the noise.

BUM BA DA DA DEE BA BUUUM

He hadn’t expected sitting down in his cube to cure him, or to make him feel any more comfortable; in fact, the tune was at its loudest yet.  But in his cube there was a computer, and the computer could be used to do research.  He had expected to use it for that purpose every day, but this was his first significant online investigation at work since Wachowsky had told him to look up some information about “tortes.”  Because he had plenty of spare time, and because he thought there was at least a small chance that Wachowsky had actually meant to include the final e, Peter did the project twice, once about breaches of civil duty and once about cakes.  However, worried that the latter could be interpreted as a crack about the partner’s weight, he only turned in the former.  For whatever reason, Wachowsky had never since asked him to do research.

It was rough going.  He Wikipedia-ed “Song stuck in your head,” but it wasn’t very helpful.  He learned that the phenomenon can be called earworm, music meme, humsickness, repetunitis, or tune wedgy, and that it is more likely to seriously bother women than men, but he found these facts somewhat less than helpful.  The entire article contained only one sentence on cures: “The best way to eliminate an unwanted earworm is to simply play a different song.”

Peter had tried that.  He continued to try it, blasting random songs he found on the internet at volumes that must have pissed off his fellow clerks.  Presumably they only let him get away with it because they felt that an Abrahamson thrashing was more than enough for one person to be put through in a day.

Bum ba da da dee ba buuum

It didn’t work.

Web MD was also a bust.  He actually found an article on the topic, which was more than he had expected, since as far as he knew getting a song stuck in your head wasn’t considered a disease.  Unfortunately, the conclusion was the same as everywhere else: no known way to improve the situation, and definitely no cure.  The article did include a list of the Top Ten Most Stick-able Songs according to a 2003 study.  On any other day, reading this list would have been a nightmare and destroyed his already limited productivity.  Peter tried to use them as ammunition; surely one of these awfully invasive jingles, TV themes, and one-hit wonder hits would be strong enough to defeat the one that was currently occupying his mind.  But even the worst that the Baha Men, the Village People, and Disneyworld could offer wasn’t enough to dislodge it.

Bum ba da da dee ba buuum

After that his “research” became increasingly less directed.  He looked up several hallucinogenic drugs but was distressed to find that, by most accounts, they made music more intense.  He went back to Web MD in search of information on lobotomies, such as how much they cost and whether the aftereffects were really as bad as they seemed.  He considered contacting his old high school band director before deciding that even after giving the Speech he was not up to writing the most awkward email of his life (“Dear Ms. Lackland: How have you been?  So, there’s this song stuck in my head . . .”).

He also tried downloading some free composition software.  Listening to music had failed to solve his problem, but what about writing music?  He tossed a few notes onto the page and played back his new piece, which he had titled: “Ode to a Clear Mind.”  It sounded something like this:

Bum ba da da dee ba buuum

After that, he spent a lot of time staring at the ceiling.  He thought about sleeping, since the “Go to bed and feel better in the morning” school of medicine had often served him well in the past.  He certainly wouldn’t have been the first summer law clerk to incorporate nap time into his “busy” schedule.  But what if he dreamed?  After all, dreams reside in the subconscious, and wouldn’t it make sense to think that this is also the lair of the vile Earworm?  What if the tune took over?  What if he never woke up?

Of course, because of his severe lack of sleep the night before, even this horrifying possibility was not enough to prevent his eyelids from sliding shut.  Perhaps fortunately, the mystery song was annoying enough to keep him from ever drifting into actual sleep.  Instead he drifted into an unrestful stupor, the kind airline passengers often find themselves in when they are flying over the Pacific Ocean at 1 AM local time (not that “local time” has any meaning for them at that point).

Shortly before noon the daily baseball game ended, as usual (Pilots 3, Racers 2- a showdown between National League Central Division gutter teams).  As usual, his coworkers came over to invite Peter to lunch, though a bit more hesitantly than usual—after the way he had stood up to the wrath of Abrahamson, some of the other clerks had wondered if he was really human.  As usual, Peter did not accept.  Unlike usual, instead of providing an excuse, he simply said no and made a difficult-to-interpret head motion.  He also said, “Have lunch,” which was probably supposed to be, “Have a good lunch,” but for once in his life Peter was not paying attention to what he was saying.

Bum ba da da dee ba buuum

Though some people don’t like to admit it, there are actually a lot of problems in life that can be solved by ignoring them.  If your car gets buried in snow, you don’t need to spend hours digging it out; just wait until spring and you can drive again, as long as you don’t mind having severely rusted brakes and a steering wheel so sluggish you could kill it with salt.  The dumpster outside your house doesn’t have to be emptied every week; eventually one of your neighbors, unable to stand the sight and the smell, will do it for you.  As you can probably imagine, these solutions tend to lead to a whole new set of problems, but the point is that the original undesirable situation was fixed simply by not thinking about it.

Peter’s dilemma was not this kind of dilemma.

Bum ba da da dee ba buuum

Despite Peter’s trying to focus all his thoughts on baseball, wheat, or anticipatory repudiation, the mystery tune remained stuck in his head for the entire seven-minute, forty-two-second duration of the subway ride (staring at his watch was yet another way in which he had tried to distract himself).  All the while, it kept getting louder.  It also seemed to be getting lazier, for around the four-minute mark it stopped repeating the whole six-second sequence and started “skipping,” playing only the first seven notes over and over again.

Bum ba da da dee ba buuum

It was a good thing that the few available spaces left in his mind were crammed full of numbers and times, because that was the only way he could have known when to get off the train.  The blaring music made it impossible to make any sense of the stop announcement—not that it would have made any sense on a normal day, either: “MFYXT (static): MREEPARONI PFAZZZZZZ.”  (NEXT STOP: DIPAOLI PLAZA).

The tune was not entirely without its advantages.  It came in very handy when he stepped off the elevator, which he only did because the person next to him nudged him sharply and said something that might have been, “This is your floor, right?”  Or it could have been, “Have you seen my frog suit?”  As a life-long debater, he had always been better at speaking than listening, but that morning his comprehension skills were so sub-par that he was ready to chuck his putter, his driver, and the whole rest of his bag of clubs into the water.  This childish but satisfying mental image tantrum—along with everything else that had gone wrong since he entered the subway—distracted him from the Par-4, 500-yard, double dogleg 18th hole ahead: an outraged Mr. Abrahamson.

Bum ba da da dee ba buuum

It wasn’t as bad as he thought it would be.  Or, to put it another way, Peter had no idea how bad it was.  Mr. Abrahamson did not shout, scream, snarl, spit or flail his arms around like he was boxing an invisible kangaroo.  That was not his style.  He could take apart a mind much more subtly, like a safecracker.  A seemingly gentle phrase here, a possibly meaningless question there, and before you knew it you would be bawling like a baby and agreeing with anything he said, admitting that you killed Jimmy Hoffa, that you were Jack the Ripper, that you murdered Julius Caesar.

Of course, that was all dependent on you being able to hear a single word he was saying.  To Peter it just looked like he was being calmly lectured by a man with a vaguely disappointed look on his face, every once in a while taking a step to the left or the right, now and again fixing him with a piercing stare that was rather unsettling even though he had no idea what he was talking about.

Bum ba da da dee ba buuum

“I’m sorry, Mr. Abrahamson.  It won’t happen again.”

Mr. Abrahamson, nodding in mild satisfaction tinged with regret, said, “See that it doesn’t.” (Or possibly, “Word to your mother.”)  After the old man had retreated to the elevator, Peter’s coworkers, who had watched the entire thing from various unsuccessful hiding positions, approached with looks of wonder.

“Dude, that was . . . brutal.”

“I’m surprised you’re still standing.”

“You sure you’re feeling okay?”

“You need a shot of something?  I’ve got a bottle of the good stuff in my cube.”

“It’s no big deal,” Peter said modestly.  “You just have to think of yourself as a rock on the beach and let the waves wash over you.”

That is, that’s what he would have said if he had been able to hear them.  Instead he nodded and smiled, looking like a person with a mild concussion trying to convince everyone that he’s fine.  He said his Hellos and his Good Mornings and quickly worked his way to his cubicle.

Bum ba da da dee ba buuum

As Peter dropped down onto the subway seat, and the doors slid roughly shut behind him, he could not shake the feeling that not all was right with the world.  Being woken up against one’s will at four in the morning is a crime that no just, caring universe would permit, but he thought that there might be more than just that.

The encounter with the woman was unsettling but not entirely unexpected; as his father liked to say, you can’t have a city of a million and a half people without getting a few unusual characters thrown in.  And it seemed like he had made a clean getaway.  But as the train pulled out of the station, he couldn’t help but wonder: was it an escape, or a retreat?

Peter Hamlin did not run from a fight.  Even on days when he hadn’t spent hours giving a speech persuading people to charge the Black Gate of Mordor or march on Washington or turn their car into a cake, he liked to think that he did not back down from a challenge.  He really didn’t understand the woman’s situation; after all, she hadn’t done a very good job of explaining her problem and was probably crazy to boot.  He had no idea whether he should be fighting against her or the people who wronged her, whoever they were.  In either case, it was hard not to see leaping on the subway just as it was leaving as a way of avoiding the issue rather than facing it.

He told himself that the woman had nothing to do with him, that she probably gave that same crazy speech to everyone who walked through there.  You have to pick your battles, and he had gone for the one he felt had much more to do with his own future.  Peter finally took the glance at his watch that he had first attempted when the woman snagged his arm.

7:56.  He wasn’t going to make it.

No wonder the train was so empty; ordinarily he shouldn’t have been able to sit down, much less have a bench all to himself.  He was going to have to face the wrath of Abrahamson.  He had no idea what it would be like, because none of the clerks had dared to be late before.  His lack of information, however, did not stop him from imagining what fate awaited him when he got off the elevator on the 12th floor.  A lifetime of service as a chained oarsman on an ancient Roman galley?  Or worse, a life sentence to be spent proofreading everything composed by Misters Victorino and Wachowsky?

It would be safe to say that his lack of sleep was affecting his judgment and preventing reality from getting much involved in his imagining the potential punishments.  Sulfur and brimstone may have even made an appearance.

With a groan he dropped his head into his hands—so forcefully, in fact, that it hurt, at least on one side.  He held his left cheek, which still stung a bit from the slap.  That little old woman sure packed a wallop.  His ears were even ringing.

Or was it just ringing?  Between the sound of his own thoughts and the rattling of the train on the tracks, he thought he could just recognize a tune echoing softly.

Bum ba da da dee ba buuum, bum ba da dee-da deee, dee-da deee, dee da ba buum

He looked around to see where the sound was coming from, but he couldn’t spot any obvious source.  The itinerant musicians and obnoxious stereo-toting teenagers didn’t usually start to ride the rails until later in the day.  The car was so empty that it would have been blatantly obvious if someone was singing, whistling, or even humming, but the other passengers were just as sullenly inactive as one would expect on a pre-8 AM train ride.  It certainly wasn’t being produced by the PA system, which only ever spat out things like: “MFYXT (static): BRRPON BEEEEEEEEEP” (NEXT STOP: THIRD AND WALKER).

If it wasn’t coming from outside his head, then there was only one other possibility.  It didn’t seem very likely either, because Peter couldn’t think of any place he had ever heard the tune before.  He supposed that was often the way when you get a song stuck in your head, but no matter how hard he thought about it, he couldn’t identify its origin.  It wasn’t from a movie.  It wasn’t a song that regularly came up on the radio in the carpool.  It wasn’t the annoying jingle from an even more annoying TV commercial.

Bum ba da da dee ba buuum, bum ba da dee-da deee, dee-da deee, dee da ba buum

The tune itself wasn’t particularly unpleasant, but it was short, and it kept repeating over and over again, and the more he heard it the more it got on his nerves.  Where did it come from?  Peter was positive he had never heard it before, not even as the background music from a cartoon he had watched in elementary school, which had  lain dormant for the past fifteen years before suddenly reappearing that morning.  He did another, more thorough check for external sources, looking out the windows, under his seat, into the creepy room at the end of the car that seems like it should have someone in it but never does.  He even searched the other passengers (from a distance—thankfully he wasn’t that out of his mind) for headphones, thinking it was possible that someone had turned them up to an eardrum-rupturing, blood-vessel-bursting volume that could be heard across the car, but no luck.

And as he searched, he could swear that the tune was getting louder.

Bum ba da da dee ba buuum, bum ba da dee-da deee, dee-da deee, dee da ba buum

He tried humming another song, otherwise known as the Escalation Method of Song Unsticking.  The ones he tried were real doozies, too, tunes so horrifyingly catchy that it would be inappropriate to repeat them here.  But no matter what he tried, the moment he stopped humming, the mystery tune came back, louder than before.  He wasn’t even sure how a sound that was only inside his head could be louder or softer, but it was definitely louder.

After a couple minutes he gave up.  The only way to get a song out of your head, he decided, was to think about something else entirely.  So he stopped humming other things and focused on baseball: a depressing topic for a Crescentonian, but also one that it was really easy to get worked up about.  Surely, with his mind distracted by thoughts of how terrible the Gems were, the unknown tune would eventually work its way out of his system, right?  Right?

Bum ba da da dee ba buuum, bum ba da dee-da deee, dee-da deee, dee da ba buum

Wrong move.  The woman slapped it away so hard you could see it spinning through the air—at least, you could have if you were able to pull your gaze away from the two orbs of rage in the middle of her face.  “ARE YOU EVEN LISTENING TO ME?  I’m not asking for your money!  I’m not looking for spiritual salvation, I don’t want to be psychoanalyzed, and I couldn’t care less who wins this year’s World Series!  I want freedom! I WANT TO GET OUT OF HERE!”

This declaration was punctuated not so much by an exclamation point as it was by the woman’s wrinkled palm, which struck Peter’s cheek with a SMACK that reverberated so loudly it surely must have registered on the USGS seismometer in Morgantown, West Virginia.

She never would have slapped him if she wasn’t so worked up.  For one thing, she was not a violent person by nature.  For another, if she hadn’t been motivated by the all-consuming wrath that had developed from being ignored for weeks and weeks, she might have remembered to do her math.  One hand to knock the wallet away.  A second to smack him in the face.  No hand left to hold onto his arm.

Peter was off and running.  The woman sagged.  The demon of anger slowly left her.  She once again understood that slapping people around is probably not the best way to get them to help you.  As one final meaningless gesture, she called after him half-heartedly: “You’ll be back!”

The young man, unlike ninety percent of the people she encountered in Simon Park Station, actually took the time to respond.  “Not likely!” he shouted back, just before jumping onto the subway as the doors were closing.

The woman leaned back against her pillar, ready to sink down and await the next rush.  Except she couldn’t.  This time, someone was holding onto her.

She turned, and the first thing she saw was the smile.  It was a smile of triumph—no, it was more than that.  It was a wicked smile.  It was a smile that should not be allowed.  It resembled nothing more than the Nazis in Raiders of the Lost Ark, just before their faces started melting.  The woman couldn’t remember whether or not she had seen that movie, but anyone who had could have told her the description was perfectly apt.

It was only after taking in the awful smile that she noticed the uniform.

“Now that,” said Officer Tang, who was only able to restrain her giddiness because of her years of training (and even then she didn’t do a great job of it), “was Assault.”