Twelve Minutes, Tights Still On

Twelve minutes. I know because I checked my phone before I locked the door, and I'm checking it again in my head the way you count down a parking meter — not because you're leaving, but because the number makes the whole thing feel contained and therefore acceptable.

I told myself I wouldn't bring it. I told myself that in my apartment on the North Side while I was packing the laptop bag, and then I told myself again on the Blue Line with the bullet in my coat pocket, small as a lip balm, completely deniable. I believed myself both times. And then I sat through three hours of breakout sessions with a presenter who kept clicking his laser pointer at a slide titled UNLOCKING ORGANIZATIONAL POTENTIAL, and something in me went flat and mean and decided: no.

The bathroom is a single-stall. Fluorescent light that turns my skin the color of old paper. The lock is a push-button, the kind that doesn't feel serious, and I've checked it twice. Outside, I can hear the corridor: the soft collision of conference lanyards, someone's rolling suitcase, a man laughing too loudly at something that probably wasn't funny. The sounds of people being professionally pleasant. I am not being professionally pleasant right now.

I'm sitting on the closed lid with my blazer still on — I'm not an animal — and the bullet is in my right hand, already switched to the lowest setting. The hum is barely audible. I press it against the front of my tights and the nylon diffuses everything, softens the vibration into something ambient, almost polite. Which is annoying. I want it to be less polite.

My left hand is flat on my thigh, holding the fabric taut. My jaw is set. I'm not relaxed. Relaxed would mean I'd made peace with this, and I haven't — I'm still arguing with myself in real time, the part of me that has a performance review in six weeks telling the other part to put it away and go get a sandwich.

I don't put it away.

The tights are thin enough that I can feel the shape of the vibration without feeling the object itself, and that distance — the thin nylon membrane between what I'm doing and what I'm doing — is the only thing keeping this from feeling completely reckless. My breath comes out slow and deliberate, the way you breathe when you're trying not to be heard. I'm aware of my own face in the mirror above the sink. I don't look at it.

I look at the door.

Nine minutes. The keynote slides are still cycling behind my eyes — bar graphs, blue and orange — and the buzz against the nylon is getting harder to categorize as anything other than what it is. My blazer is buttoned. My shoes are flat on the tile. From the outside I would look like someone waiting out a headache.

The corridor fills briefly with voices, then empties. Eight minutes. The fluorescent light hums at exactly the wrong frequency, or exactly the right one. I haven't decided which.