Silence Under Forty Feet

The ceiling is the first thing she checks. Forty feet of coffered plaster and gilt, vaulting over Bates Hall like the inside of something that has never once been interrupted. She tilts her head back just slightly — a tourist's gesture, which she is not — and lets herself appreciate the joke. All that architecture.

All that intention. The Boston Public Library built this room to make people feel the weight of accumulated human knowledge pressing down on them, and here she is, third table from the east wall, with a bullet vibrator in her cardigan pocket. She finds this very funny. She has found it funny since the 86 bus, when she put the thing in her pocket instead of her bag, specifically so she would have to sit with it there the whole ride over.

The wool skirt holds its shape when she settles into the chair. She can feel the hem's resistance against the back of her knees, the slight pressure where the fabric pulls taut across her thighs. She has been sitting with her knees together since she sat down — not from habit, not from nerves, but because she is still in the part of this where she gets to decide what happens next. She likes this part.

She has always liked this part. She opens the book she brought. Turns a page. The sound it makes is almost nothing, absorbed immediately by the room, by the carpet runners, by the breathing of two dozen strangers who believe they are here to read.

Her right hand is in her lap. Her left hand is in her pocket. The bullet is smaller than her thumb. She knew this when she bought it, but she is still, somehow, charmed by how small it is — this small, specific thing she has carried into a room full of marble and scholarship and the particular self-seriousness of a Tuesday afternoon.

She runs her thumb across the single button without pressing it. Just to feel the edge of it. Just to remind herself what she is about to do. Somewhere in the room, a page turns.

Someone shifts in their chair. She looks back up at the ceiling — not quite tilting her head, just lifting her eyes, the way you'd look at someone you weren't supposed to be thinking about. Forty feet. Cold plaster.

A room designed to make you feel small and serious and devoted to something larger than yourself. She presses the button. The sound is nothing. A faint hum that doesn't leave her pocket.

The sensation arrives a half-second later, and the exhale that comes with it is short — cut off before it becomes audible, swallowed back somewhere below her sternum, though her lips part slightly with the effort of keeping it there. Her left hand stays still. Her right hand, in her lap, presses once, lightly, against the wool of her skirt — just the flat of her palm, just for a moment — and then goes still too. Her knees are still together.

She turns a page she has not read.