Your Sixty Seconds

Your daughters, the Little One and the Big One, are sitting at the kitchen table, their faces shades of bruise. At some point in the late afternoon, probably while you were busy stain-sticking evidence of your recent travels from your old moss cardigan, the two of them used permanent markers on each other to disguise themselves as monarch butterflies. Turns out they’re called permanent markers for a reason; you just spent twenty minutes in the bathroom trying to soap off orange and black Sharpie as the girls sat hip-to-hip on the counter-top—four eyes squeezed shut, four lips pressed closed. Your whole body hurt, and so you surrendered with the job two-thirds done, both faces still canvasses of deep purples and grays. Black paper towels, heavy as rain-soaked roadkill, are piled in soggy mounds in their periwinkle sinks. 

“When’s Daddy getting home?”

“How long until dinner?”

It’s almost 7:00 and you are just now beginning to cook. You’re dazed, like you’ve been awakened mid-dream. The whole day has been catch up—your flight from Atlanta was late, the interstate was construction-clogged, you left the girls waiting for fifteen minutes inside the secured lobby of the elementary school, the lines at the grocery store were endless, the breakfast dishes were sitting on the counter—bloated cereal bobbing in warm pools of beige milk.

“Can we go for ice cream later?”

You can hardly hold the mixing spoon. Two of your knuckles are cut, and you think your pinkie might be broken. Your neck is sore and there is something wrong with your elbow, but you haven’t looked. 

“Daddy said we could go for ice cream when you got back.”

“We’ll see,” you say. 

He knows where you’ve been, and later—after ice cream, after the Little One rolled the scoop clean off the sugar cone on the first lick and the perfectly round mudball of Rocky Road suicided on the sidewalk, after you got her a new one (“in a dish this time! a dish!” the Big One warned), after a reading log and a simple machine worksheet and stranger danger flash cards, after bathing away the faded remains of the butterflies until faces were pink from scrubbing, after the thirty-five minutes of piecemeal stalling that always preceded actual sleep (and where is that cat/dolphin/zebra? and how about a cold glass of water? colder! colder! and while you’re at it will you sleep in my room, maybe right there at the end of the bed so if I open my eyes in the middle of the night you are the very first thing I see?), after the rhythmic rise and fall of young chests finally at rest, after you escape into the master bath to soak your hands in warm water—he knocks. 

The first time you went, last spring outside Spokane, you weren’t even close to getting into the room. There must have been five hundred women in line in front of you. You’d heard the stories, so you knew the first ten would likely kill the man. What you didn’t know was that there’d be nothing left to ravage after the next hundred women got their sixty seconds—that afterwards, the officers would clean up with a hose. A few years ago, when the first suicide pilots nose-dived their 747 near Chicago, you’d read that the largest piece of mechanical debris found in Oak Park was no larger than a suitcase, and that vultures circled the neighborhoods for weeks, swooping down to eat millions of bits of human debris too small to see. If a fraction of an obliterated airplane was no bigger than a suitcase, what was the equivalent fraction of an obliterated man? A fingernail? An eyelash? A sliver of skin? Flying home from Spokane, you wondered, after the man in the room was dismantled, had women like you—normal women with children and jobs and SUVs and periwinkle sinks—swooped in and eaten his debris?

The System—now in its second year of existence—is necessary. It meets a need. Helpless, directionless rage costs society too much, makes women sick, keeps them from work, keeps them from buying goods, leads to abused and neglected children, to drug use, to drunk driving, to taking the law into their own hands, risking the lives of innocents, leading to more helpless, directionless rage. Even the simple act of standing in the lines, government studies have shown, improves the productivity of women; a shared sense of purpose, a community of wrath, combined with the possibility of releasing some of the rage, was its own kind of therapy, its own release. In rooms where decisions like these are made, the practice of allowing a volunteer army of private citizens to use their bare hands to execute men convicted of violent crimes against women is regularly referred to as killing two birds with one stone.

He doesn’t ask how it was. He doesn’t want to know the criminal’s name, the nature of the crime, how much his victims suffered, if the case was airtight. He doesn’t want to know who was in line with you, the ratio of black to white, old to young, rich to poor. He doesn’t ask what you did when you entered the room, what you saw. All he cares about is one thing:

“You got in?” 

He’s seen your hands; he knows the answer. But he asks anyway.

“Yes,” you say. “But—”

“So that’s it,” he says inside a deep exhale you recognize as relief. “It’s over.”

“Yes,” you say. You’d made him a promise months ago when this started, that if you got into the room just once, you’d never get in line again. Three times before you were shut out. The last time, outside Minneapolis, you’d arrived twenty-four hours in advance and nearly made it; there’d only been four women between you and the deserted 7-11 when the officer came out and said it was done, that there wasn’t anything left. 

He comes up behind you and wraps his arms around your waist, tilts his face onto your shoulder and breathes into it. You cringe from the contact but allow it. He is your best friend, your champion and your enabler. He has installed a hundred locks and retrieved a thousand prescriptions. On the country’s ugliest days, he shuts off the internet so your home is a bubble of board games and grilled cheese sandwiches. 

He accepted the unsettling fact of your desire to participate in The System, to line up, to reach the room, and you know that not all husbands do. He allowed you this obsession that you were never able to explain. 

His eyes are on your hands in the water. He won’t touch them, and you’re glad for that. They do not belong to him. 

Home invaders always draw the longest lines. You knew this, but you chose one this time anyway; people just like you were exactly the reason these lines were so long, a thick gulping snake of unchecked anxiety, fashioned of women who had something precious to defend. Women your age. Women who have children. Women who had children. Home invasions have quadrupled every year for the last decade, each story more terrifying than the last—a family like yours, eating dinner, set upon. There are stories like this every week in People magazine. You remember when People was pictures of movie stars, celebrity recipes, an easy crossword. 

Lines for supermarket shooters were always long as well, because of the capriciousness of the crime, the unreconcilable bad luck of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But really there was no right place anymore. Shootings happened every weekend on quiet streets once defined by lemonade stands. At first, runners were the popular target. When women stopped running, the new target became dog walkers.

Of course everyone has a gun. It would be madness not to. Your family has three. There is one in the glove compartment of your car. Last month, ten blocks from your house, a man shot a young mother who glared at him for rolling through a stop sign. When they found her body slumped against the steering wheel, she had a pistol in her hand; if she’d been a few seconds faster, she’d be putting her kids to bed right now too. The night she was killed you practiced snatching the gun from the glove compartment without fumbling, one fluid motion, imagining the man, his face burning with rage, approaching. 

Technically, you are not connected to a victim. You are in the minority of the personally unscathed. Your house, like all the houses in your privately patrolled neighborhood, is a fortress of deadbolts and cameras. No one has ever pushed through your front door, or shot at one of your children. One state over, your parents are fine, your sister un-murdered. You have never had a friend blown from the sky by a homegrown misogynist. 

Why then? he wondered silently for the last year, every time you planned another trip. You could see this question clearly in the lines of his face, though he never asked it. 

What are you so goddamn furious about?

Three days ago, you deplaned in Atlanta. You had a carry-on and a fold-up chair. You took a Lyft to the site. The sites are different but the same. They are empty buildings in small towns outside cities, belly-up Dollar Trees and mom-and-pop restaurants from another age. They are fitted for execution, furnishings stripped, windows sealed, interior doors boarded over. A single room, vacant, generic, vacuumed to remove anything solid that could be used as a tool, even a wood chip, or a dime. This is a hands-only affair. Well, hands and feet, knees and elbows, heads, teeth. Your body is the only weapon allowed. The convicted criminal is conscious but sedated, aware of his punishment but unable to defend himself. One exit door in the back, covered by officers. One entry door in the front, also covered by officers, from which the line stretches. 

The event outside Atlanta was still two days off when you arrived. Your heart leapt when you got out of the Lyft; there were only twelve or fifteen people in line. You would make it. You would not get in on the killing, but you didn’t want in on it anyway. With only a dozen people ahead of you, what was left of the body would be enough for you to finally purge your rage. You had put your life on hold for the last time. It had been six months, four trips, north east south west, to feed this hunger you felt could not be sated in any other way. You knew he’d leave you if you went again, after this one, would leave you and take your daughters, even though you were a good mother. He was your champion and your enabler, but he had his limits. He would have to say to a judge, she can’t stop going, can’t stop lining up. He would have to say, our children are the real victims here. 

Other mothers have lost their children this way, ironically. It seems to you that there is no end to ways you can lose your children. 

The woman in front of you outside Atlanta did not tell you her name, but she told you her story. She was in her late fifties, married, kids grown. She was from Boston and this was her fourteenth time in line. Three months ago, she’d had sixty seconds near Tallahassee with a live one. She’d been seventh in line and he was still breathing when the door closed behind her, lying on his side, blood spilling from one socket missing an eye. She got down on her knees, she said. She straddled him and put her hands around his thick neck but her hands were too small to strangle him, so she flipped him onto his back and covered his nose and mouth with her hands and pressed until she could feel his teeth through his lips and kept pressing and then just a few seconds later the buzzer sounded and she didn’t want to stop but she did. If you didn’t stop when your time was up, the officers at the back door pulled you off, tased you if necessary, dragged you out the back door, and you lost the right to participate again. 

“He was still alive when I left,” she said. “Not for long. The lady behind me’d lost her daughter. Abducted. Didn’t find the body for a month. I figured she wouldn’t need her sixty to finish things up.”

In the morning, when you wake up, you hear the clinking of spoons in cereal bowls. It’s Saturday. He’s let you sleep late, and miraculously, for the first time in a year, you have. You hear the girls chattering, giggling, arguing. You hear them putting on their shoes, going out the back door. You hear them in the yard on the swing set, the creak of chain on carabiner. 

There is a ten-foot fence around your backyard. Someone one street over built a roof across the top of their ten-foot fence. Just last week, you asked for the name of their contractor. 

He comes into the room. He is surprised to find you awake.

“I just woke up,” you say. “Just now. I slept for twelve hours.”

“You needed it,” he says. He crosses the room and sits down on the edge of the bed, though he is not close enough to touch. “Do you feel better?” he asks.

Better? You can hardly place the word. But you do feel something. You feel like getting up, so you do. Your body aches, but you feel like putting on your clothes and your sneakers, so you do that too. And then you go outside to your backyard and push your girls on their creaky swings. Last week you pushed them and when they said higher! you said that’s high enough. 

Higher, they say now, again. Higher. 

You push until sweat breaks cold on your temples, until one of the cuts on your knuckles splits. You push until their feet are higher than the fence. You cannot roof your yard; where will their toes go?

Outside Atlanta, the door opened at 8:00 a.m. and the officer came out and exchanged words with the first woman in line. You stood up, stretched your achy legs, packed your few belongings. When you moved up to third in line you gave your personal items to an officer who would carry them around back and hand them to you after, on your way out. This was his job, to take a carry-on bag from one version of you and return it to another version of you. He scanned your ID with a wand. You signed a screen that said you understood that in the unlikely event of your death, no one but you was responsible. You initialed the appropriate clauses. 

“I’m sure he’s dead,” the woman from Boston said, turning back to you. “But I’m still excited.”

She went in. Behind you, the line breathed. 

Once, as a child, you’d sat on a sea wall between your mother and your father, the concrete chilling your thighs through your thin shorts as they argued about something that was happening in the wider world, a world you didn’t yet understand. They were short with each other, but you could tell they were frightened, their anger free-floating, landing on the nearest stretch of land. Anyway, you were more interested in the seagulls, their sudden plummets toward the whitecaps, their precision, the water shooting from the tips of their wings as they lifted from sea to sky, prey in beak. Today is the beginning of the end, your father had said, to which your mother had replied, So is tomorrow. And every day after.

The officer at the door said, “Next.”

You stepped into the room on buckling knees and saw the body slouched against a bloody wall where the woman from Boston had just been slamming its dented head. The body was dead. It was swollen and twisted and dripping into a slick puddle, but it was intact, still a recognizable human form, legs and arms, feet, elbows, ears, all the same pieces as your parents and your daughters. You felt yourself propelled forward and dropped to your knees at its back, aghast. You tumbled into it, gathering the broken body in your arms and pressing it against your chest, your hands covering its wounds, your breaths ragged against its warmth and weight. 

When the officers came for you, they thought you would be docile, because you held the body gently. They were wrong. When they came for you, after your sixty seconds were up, when they tried to pull you away, you screamed and flailed. You spit and pinched and slapped. When they lifted you from the floor, you clenched your bloody fists and struck them again and again.