“Forgive me―we’re looking for Mr. Zeigler?”

These people are old. The wife, Mrs. Barnstable, sounded chirpy enough for high school on the phone. In the flesh she’s over 70, and her husband looks octogenarian. She seems elegant but muted: long beige dress, short beige-blond hair, agate eyes. He’s loud in a wide-lapelled sport jacket with a hound’s tooth pattern, a blazing blue-and-orange tie. Both look like they were laughing before I opened the door, as if recognizing the absurdity of people their age seeking a fidelity test.

“He’s our new chiropractor,” adds Mr. Barnstable. I realize this is a joke when they laugh again―in his case, a wicked cough, meanwhile she tries pressing her lips together but the mirth still seeps through her nostrils. She starts to smack his hand and ends up squeezing it. 

Lie to them. Get them out of here.

“I’m Trevor Zeigler,” I say, “but I’m not going to crack your back.”

A gasp; Mrs. Barnstable raises a red folder she was holding at her side and hugs it, schoolgirl-like, against her chest. “But you’re a woman. You sounded…”

I’m tempted to curtsey but content myself with saying:

“I’ve always had a deep voice.”

“A ma’am not a man,” says Mr. Barnstable, and his laugh-cough caps it like a drummer’s rim shot. “Life hands you a surprise every day.”

I should be annoyed―the ma’ams have increased since I passed 45―but Barnstable regards me appreciatively. Not leering at my legs or anything like that; his smile is for all of me, though definitely the female me. I give him back my standard Examiner’s face: features arranged pleasantly, just short of a smile.

“I never considered it,” Mrs. Barnstable says, “but how many women―”

“―are Polygraphists? Maybe five percent. But, like every profession, Mrs. Barnstable, we’ve proven we can handle this. Incidentally, Trevor is my name. My father expected a boy.”

Actually Vickie named me Elizabeth Ann but I started to go by Trevor (my father’s middle name) at 15, to annoy her; and continued to use it professionally because people expect Polygraphists to be men and I didn’t want to lose half my clients before I met them. Besides, a man’s name makes me sexier. To some men.

“I really don’t mean to sound rude,” Mrs. Barnstable said, “frankly I think it’s wonderful!”

“I’m the one being rude. Come on in.” Are you crazy? But now I’m leading them through the waiting area into my office and examining room. Bringing them over to the couch where they’ll have a good view of the equipment while I interview them. “Please sit down.  Can I get you anything?  Some water?”

“I’d love coffee, Trevor,” says Barnstable, the cushion huffing as he sits, “but my love says I can’t have any.” He smiles like an innocent man, but also like a man who knows how to bluff. Never speculate, Alfred said. That’s the first rule.

“Water is fine.” Mrs. Barnstable sits noiselessly. She places the red folder on the glass table. Now I see that she’s taller than her husband, not only younger but in better health. Skinny arms but fleshy breasts, surprisingly exposed enough by her otherwise modest dress to show the cleft between them. While her skin is neither white nor taut it seems untouched, as if a wrapper was just removed. He looks shrunken and fat at the same time, his belly jammed into his chest. That cough marks him as a reprobate smoker. Sun and alcohol have made his skin as dense as graph paper. Yet it’s hard to separate his decay from his vitality; deferring to his wife, and to me, he still owns the room.

I put three glasses and Deer Parks on the table. “OK. Ready to get started? I understand you’re here for a fidelity examination?”

“Yes,” she says, and he says, “I’m here because my love wants me to be here.” His gnarled hands twist off the caps of all three Deer Parks. He pours his wife’s water and hands her the glass―brushing her fingers―then swivels back to pour mine as well. Then he drinks straight from his own bottle. I like the way he moves his hips.

“Now how long have you been married?”

“50 years in April,” he says proudly. “Couldn’t wait for a June wedding. She was too beautiful.”

She laughs, her leg touching his. “He was too impatient.” Shakes her head. “We both were.”

“Well, congratulations. But why”―and I lean forward in sudden, intimate sympathy; one of my ploys―“why, after 50 years, do you want to do this?”

“Because I have to.” Mrs. Barnstable’s expression changes. No, her skin changes, turns agate like her eyes, translucent, liquid; like her whole body is about to weep. “I have to.”

“Trevor, I’ll be honest with you,” says Barnstable. “Well. Sure you hear that line a lot. But this is ridiculous. My love here is crazy.”

“I see.” Reverting at once to my pleasant mask. “She accuses you of being unfaithful, and you deny it.”

“Sure I deny it. But I don’t object. No right to object. So that’s the lie detector?” He smiles past my shoulder at the set-up behind me. I nod. “How long is this going to take anyway?”

“Not too long. There are three steps to a polygraph examination. To make sure the results are as accurate as possible”―once, I’d’ve just said accurate―“we have to go through each step. OK?”

“Please,” says Mrs. Barnstable.

“OK. Step one is the pre-test. What we’re doing now. I ask you some personal information, explain how the test works, and then we create the questions. Step two is chart collection. That’s where I hook you up to the polygraph, Mr. Barnstable―”

“Sid.”

“Sid. I hook you up, ask you the questions, record your physiological responses. Step three, I analyze the charts and give an opinion.”

“What do you mean, ‘physiological responses’?”

“The machine records data from three body systems―respiratory, skin, and cardiovascular. Incidentally, you didn’t have to dress up. I’ll be attaching things to your arms and chest. I thought I mentioned that on the phone?”

“You did,” says Mrs. Barnstable, and a glance passes between her and Sid, and both giggle like pair of kids who’ve just discovered sex. Although his giggle instantly bursts into a cough that shoves him forward, and hers vanishes as she pats his back and her lips soothe his neck.

 “Forgive us,” she says, and he adds, after another swig of water, “Merry and me, we make getting dressed into a cross-country trip with detours. She puts on a dress, I put on cashmere. I wear a tie, she gets out the special earrings. Then we get distracted, if you know what I mean, and have to start all over again.”

“Excuse me.”  I stand, turn my back to them, walk over to my desk, grab a pen and start grinding lines deep into a legal pad. This should calm me, but my choice of location is a mistake, because right in front of me is the portrait of Vickie and Alfred on their 40^th wedding anniversary. Courtesy of my married boyfriend of that moment, whose name escapes me, who compulsively took pictures of everything, including me in some raunchy poses. He captured them all right, Vickie dressed as usual like a 20-year-old and flirting with both camera and photographer, and Alfred in one of his black suits, like an English-Jewish FBI man, his skin whiter than his shirt, not even smiling but his arm wrapped absolutely around the waist of his wife.

* * *

These two are nothing like them. Don’t dress like them, don’t act like them. Alfred never owned a cashmere anything. Alfred’s polygraph was both God and temple, and less intense colleagues like Lyle Reece would call him “Rebbe Truth”; Sid Barnstable looks like a man who’s made a fortune doing something he’s never taken seriously. While Alfred never smoked, drank, overate, or exposed himself to the sun, Sid’s the one who’s still here. Vickie would admire Mrs. Barnstable’s cleavage, but otherwise judge this woman boring, timid, a waste of every moment’s opportunity to gain male attention. Not enough lipstick! Hair too short! Just earrings (beautiful, though; pearls circled by diamonds) and a wedding band! And that dress―putting aside the color, you could sweep the floor with it―a woman’s legs are meant to be seen. I’ve heard this all my life, and while I ignore every other Vickie directive, and dress in black like Alfred (though unlike him, I wear black underwear too), my skirts always stop above the knee. 

Nothing like them, I tell myself. Except two things: the look that passes between them―like a secret language, an obsession that utterly contradicts their characters―and the fact that one of them is certain the other is cheating and a polygraph examination is the only way to prove otherwise.

I sit back down, my face as pleasant as before. Another Alfred rule: to find the truth, hide the truth of whatever you feel. (A rule he rigorously followed until…) “OK, I’ve got your full name, Sidney Barnstable. And you…”

“Merry Barnstable.”

“Meredith Delisa Larner Barnstable.” Sid says this as if it’s the eighth wonder.

“Please,” she says. “Just Merry.”

“Like Merry Christmas. Lucky me. Merry Christmas every day.”

“Age?”

“Seventy-seven,” Merry says.

“Really,” I say. Better than Vickie at that age and, unlike Vickie, honest. 

“You’d never know it, would you? I’m seventy-five. Bet that’s a shocker too,” he adds, again proudly. “She looks the same as the day I married her. Let’s not talk about how I look.”

“People always thought I was older,” says Merry, “mature for my age. Now they say I look young! Makes me wonder if I ever lived.”

“You’re going strong,” he says, and swiveling to me: “I’m way past my prime, she hasn’t even reached hers yet.”

He’s full of shit, I think. Sounding like he means every word of it. He’s a bum, and I’d have jumped him in his prime. His whole attitude swings like those hips. Bad husband, great ride.

“Occupation?”

“Plastics. Just kidding. Import export. Done pretty well.”

“He’s done extremely well,” says Merry. “I, on the other hand…”

“She’s better than me. I just make money. She knows how to live.”

“That’s news to me.” She looks at me, both apologetic and exasperated.  “Wife and mother―”

“Best wife a man could have. Mother of two terrific kids.”

Merry makes a strange noise―“Pah!” or “Gah!”―and a chopping motion.

“Gives herself no credit for them either. And she deserves all of it.”

I’ve never been a wife-and-mother. Not because I dismiss it. And not because Vickie botched it. It’s a profession with the how-to written in code, requiring absurd capacities for melodrama and boredom. Hence my preference for games of chance over relationships, black leather at Hellfire Club over champagne and endearments at the Plaza. I’ll take lies, chart spikes, and countermeasures over him and the baby any day. 

“I’ve worked as a secretary. That’s how I met Sid. I got a masters in art and did nothing with it. And I’m a hospice volunteer…and that’s pretty much it.”

“Gives ‘em half our money too,” Sid says. “Why the hell not.”

“Those who have should give something, money, time, to those who have not.  It’s that simple. It’s so simple people can’t face it. They hide behind cynicism. That’s why this country needs new leaders―don’t you think? We need people with simple ideals and the honesty to live by them and set an example…” 

Her eyes roam my face, failing to find purchase anywhere.

“Yeah well…I don’t think you’ve come across that person yet,” he says. For once their shared glance seems to make him uncomfortable.

“Medications?”

“She has a heart condition, but she won’t take anything.”

“I don’t take drugs. I believe in naturatherapy.”

I look at Sid, and he says coughing, “I’m fat but my heart is good and so are my bloods! My lungs…that’s why I quit smoking six months of every year. I have a lot of will power. When I want to.”

“OK,” I say. So forget meds as an excuse to get rid of them. I’ve decided I don’t want to get rid of them. “Why”―I linger on the word; address it directly at Merry―“why are you here?”

 “She thinks I’m lying to her. Even though I’ve told and told her I’m not.”

“Well, based on experience, dear, I shouldn’t believe something just because it’s something you’ve told me.”

“Yeah, that again. It’s been 25 years, but I guess so.”

“Please don’t be angry.”

“Not angry.”

“You think he’s lying,” I say.

Reluctantly she turns from Sid to look back at me. Her skin wavers, her eyes seem all white. But her nod is resolute.

“OK. What specific incident is he lying about?”

Silence. 

“There is no goddamn incident,” Sid says.

“OK. Then what set this―you calling me―into motion?”

“I set it in motion. Twenty-five years ago sticking both hands in the cookie jar and getting caught.”

“Wait a minute…so you admit it?” 

What do you want me to admit? Vickie says. That I like people? That I liked Lyle? That it’s not fair we die? Darling, I admit it all. But not that. I would never… 

“Sure I do. But she doesn’t believe.” 

“I’m sorry. I don’t follow you.”

“She doesn’t believe I stopped.” His head jerks back, as from a punch in the face.

“What Sid says is…accurate. I caught him―that word disgusts me―I caught him twice, first just a week after our 19^th anniversary. He denied it, and then he confessed.”

“Confessed to what?” Massage-parlor handjobs? Multiple affairs of the heart? Dirty weekends in Vegas with bad girls like me?

“…having sex with other women. He…admitted to doing it many times. But he never really told me much. Just that he was sorry, sorry, sorry. Promised me it would never happen again. Then I caught him again, six years later. Again he denied it and again he confessed and again he was sorry…sorry. Begged me for a last chance. Promised on his life it would never happen again.”

“And it hasn’t.” Sid shakes his head. “She refuses to believe me. And why should she? Do you?”

I don’t expect you to believe me. Vickie laughs. You of all people…you only see the worst in me.

“I don’t have an opinion.” Meanwhile glaring at her as if she’s the liar. Another ploy, but I don’t have to fake my disapproval.

“Trevor, I see things. Little things. Cards from nightclubs. Receipts for items of clothing―women’s―that could only be personal gifts. A smell on his jacket. I want to believe Sid but I refuse to pretend I don’t notice things that are right in front of me.”

“That’s business,” he says. “I entertain customers. Customers are men and women. Customers like nightclubs, and wear perfume, and can be softened up with gifts. That’s all.”

“But these are the things I saw before…when you were…” 

“My love, I stopped cheating. I never stopped working. See?” He swivels back to me, his hands falling with a thud on the table. “She tortures herself. I deserve to have my throat cut.”

“Merry. If you’ve been noticing these things for 25 years, why are you so sure now that he’s unfaithful?”

I don’t care what the charts said. Alfred speaks as flatly as ever though he has just committed blasphemy. You saw how she carried on. Ready to jump in there with him. You have to help me, Trevor.

“I’m not sure of anything. I guess I never have been. But I thought it would be beautiful, on our 50^th wedding anniversary, to renew our vows. Have our children, their children, a few friends join us to celebrate. For a year I’ve been making the arrangements, picking the place, creating invitations, making sure everyone can make it. The minister, musicians, the menu, flowers and table settings…”

“The Waldorf,” he says, “first class all the way. Like she does everything.”

“…and the vows themselves. This time I wanted the vows to be more…our own. So we wrote them.”

“She wrote ‘em. I can’t write two sentences.”

“Don’t listen to him,” and she squeezes his thigh playfully, “I used to type his memos. We wrote them together and they are beautiful and I can’t wait for us to say them and…one night I just opened my eyes, 3 a.m., I never wake up in the middle of the night, but I sat bolt upright, and I thought, I don’t know. How can I say these, in front of all these people, when I don’t even know if he’s…?”

I won’t be part of this, I say to Alfred. This is between you and your wife.

Your mother, he says.

“Please try to understand,” she says to my silence, “at this point in my life, with the kids grown and gone, all I have is my marriage and my husband.” Her eyes close and open. “I have to know this is real.”

“Merry, I don’t do it anymore. I love you and always only you. Don’t I kiss you every day? Don’t we still make love…the way you like it…my wife’s a little squirrel, excuse me, I shouldn’t give away our secrets! I tell you every day. What else can I do?”

“Take the test,” she says, without looking at him. And to me: “If he’s not telling the truth, I will divorce him. I will not be violated again.”

Sid’s skin darkens: finally, I think, the real him, maybe he’ll hit her: but it boomerangs, snaps his head back again. Then he looks down, chin covering the knot of his tie, breathing heavily.

“Maybe you two need to talk…you both have to want to do this…”

“I do want to!” he shouts. “Sorry. She’s all I have. Work―I work so she doesn’t have to. She’s my accomplishment…that this beautiful woman can put her mind and soul on better things. I knew I wanted to marry her the minute I saw her and I’ve never regretted it for a second.”

I stare at him. This is ridiculous. I believe him.

* * *

A few years ago it suddenly dawned on my parents that I would never get married. When they asked me why, I said: “Because I’ve seen the perfect marriage…and that’s enough for me.” That was a joke, of course―“ridiculous” and “idiotic” were words that I thought would better describe Alfred and Vickie’s union―but I did think they had released me, somehow, from any need to get married myself. Freed me to pursue my own interests: sex with attached men, gambling, and especially the polygraph.

My love for the machine began before I was born, in 1934, in a dreary room in Bristol, where 13-year-old Alfred Zeigler and his classmates received a polygraph demonstration by some local police. Volunteers were requested; Alfred raised his hand; the poly caught him in an obvious lie, and he knew his destiny. Somehow he ended up in New Jersey, but nothing diverted him from the path of becoming the avatar of lie detection. (He never hesitated to use that term: detecting lies was what the machine did.) He developed into one of the top Polygraphists in the country; helped evolve the equipment and methodology; co-founded the American Polygraph Association; and despite an antisocial personality, pushed himself to teach, lecture, appear on TV, and testify before judges and Senate committees in his quest to expand the authority of the polygraph in law and life. He saw the machine as the unstoppable source of Truth, and the polygraphist as merely the means of obtaining it. When Lyle (not only a colleague but one of his few friends) would, after a few drinks, tease Alfred to admit that sometimes it was possible to “sting” the polygraph, Alfred would have none of it: “The machine always knows,” he said, “machines don’t get stung…only sloppy Examiners, Lyle.” 

Only Vickie seriously challenged the machine for his attention. Vickie: a waitress at the diner where Alfred ate unsweetened grapefruit every morning; pretty in an obvious way, lazy and sentimental; adored shopping, jewelry, parties, drinking; as addicted to flirting as I am to poker. The last woman you’d associate with Alfred―yet with her he would laugh, to her he would chatter, and his white hands couldn’t refrain from touching her. (And in the bedroom, Vickie once told me, my 150-pound father was 140 pounds of cock.) She had no interest in his profession; in his presence joking “He never knows when I lie to him” and bragging that she could get him to do anything. As a femme fatale, she was strictly dinner theatre; but Alfred, denying her boasts, would close his eyes and grimace like a happy narcoleptic. 

As for me? Well, Alfred did not believe in God. He did not believe in any afterlife. He did believe in having a son to carry on his work. And he molded me, relentlessly and despite my gender, in his image. “For God’s sake, give her a chance,” Vickie would say, when he bought me my own complete poly set at the age of 10, or took me with him to observe examinations, or made me study charts after doing my homework. “Give the girl a chance to be a girl.”

I remember him at their 40^th anniversary: 71 years old, still working but less intensely, almost mellowing. He even laughed at the jokes Lyle Reece made about him when giving the toast. And then a month later Lyle keeled over dead while administering a Guilty Knowledge Test. Alfred begged off giving the eulogy because he really did think Lyle, while competent, was “sloppy” in his examinations, and, of course, Alfred always spoke the truth. No need to cause more pain to his widow. Vickie did that for him. At the graveside, while Lyle’s wife wept in silence, Vickie first sobbed, then wailed, then collapsed near the edge, and had to be helped away by Alfred and me.

I was embarrassed, but that was Vickie, theatrical even in grief, making herself the focus of every scene. And, as I later reminded Alfred, Lyle had been as much her friend as his, the two of them sharing a love for drinking, and being seen at trendy New York restaurants. Alfred, who had treasured this woman’s act for 40 years, knew instantly that she had betrayed him. She had made love with Lyle. She was in love with him, all these years. He told her so the next morning. Vickie denied it. First laughing at him as only she dared, then bursting into tears again: “Darling it was you I could see in the grave, and that’s what tore me apart.” She reminded him that they had just celebrated their anniversary and this made no sense. But Alfred knew. With cold, stalking rage he set out to expose her. He insisted that she undergo a polygraph examination. He made a reluctant colleague conduct it. Vickie passed it, aced it―“You can be a happy man today, Mr. Zeigler,” the Examiner said (even peers called him Mr. Zeigler). Alfred was not happy. He didn’t believe the charts. For the first time in his life he said the polygraph was wrong. He made Vickie take the test again. And he made me administer it.

Why me? Well, of course any Examiner would tell you (and I told him) that my father had simply lost his mind. But even so, I could see how his mind was working. All my life I had followed the path he set for me. After he was gone I would carry on his sacred mission. I may have been wayward or strange in other ways, but when it came to the polygraph, I was Alfred’s creation. He knew Vickie was lying, and he knew I would deliver the proof.

What he couldn’t know was that all along I had betrayed him more surely than Vickie. I’ve never believed that the polygraph was God, or Truth. To me it’s a camera obscura, claiming to conjure the actual and producing nothing but shadows. To me there’s no such thing as a False Positive: all people are guilty, and if they aren’t lying about the issue in question they’re surely lying about something else. I love watching them try to act truthful, not realizing that if they fool the machine they can never fool me, and I can spin the data to match what I know. I never have, but this sensation of power is like an orgasm, with the bonus that nobody hears me gasping. 

When this all started, I must admit I enjoyed Vickie’s fall from grace: he finally got your number, bitch. I relished the idea of her being exposed. Yet, when Alfred asked me to conduct her second polygraph test, I couldn’t speak, I felt a blind panic. “This is crazy,” I finally said. I told him he was violating every APA code of ethics. He couldn’t possibly expect me to be objective. So what if their marriage was a joke―as Vickie said, destroying it now made no sense. Actually, I didn’t say that last part out loud; but that was why I agreed to administer the examination after all. I knew she was guilty, I knew I could make the charts prove her innocence, and I knew Alfred would trust me and put an end to this nonsense.

Vickie didn’t need my help anyway. Her behavior throughout the exam―alternatively giggling and sobbing, accusing me of having made up my mind, complimenting my clothes (the same clothes she had always mocked), telling me that while Alfred was a workaholic and a bore, he was still a fantastic lay, so why would she need someone else―confirmed why I despised her. Still, I came away thinking that she was, technically, innocent. But Alfred refused to believe it. Even from me. 

“Look, you know I can’t stand her,” I said. “But she’s telling the truth. For God’s sake, please drop this. Please…” I was pleading. I was desperate. I was desperate to save their ridiculous, idiotic marriage. As desperate to save them as I would have been to save myself.

 Alfred shook his head, and walked out of my office. He knew. He never worked again, and he never again spoke to me or his wife. Though there were no grounds for it, using his legal connections he obtained a divorce from Vickie a week before their 41^st anniversary.

* * *

“OK. Let’s get down to it then. Let’s review your questions.”

My tone has shifted, deliberately. Merry notices, hesitates, then opens her red folder; removes three sheets of paper, hands one to Sid and one to me. The paper is thick, textured like parchment, and covered with calligraphy. “Don’t they look beautiful? But they’re really meant to be heard:
            “ ‘Fifty years ago, I joined my hand and heart with yours.’ (Just imagine, Trevor, that we each repeat these, one after the other.)

“ ‘Today I am here to recognize our sacred union, to celebrate it, and to renew it forever and forever.

“ ‘You are my only true love, and always will be.

“ ‘I respect you in every way, at every moment, whether in your company or outside your sight―’ ”

“Merry. Excuse me. This is very nice, sweet as sugar, in fact, but it has nothing to do finding out if your husband is fucking around.”

Did I really say that? I’ll say anything. I want Merry to walk out of here and call the APA to have my license revoked. I can’t let this go forward. And yet I know it’s pointless: she’ll just go to another Examiner. And then I realize she’s not even getting up.

 “Well…I do get to that. ‘I am always honest with you. I am totally faithful in mind, act, and heart―’ ”

“Merry, stop! Stop this nonsense. You’re looking for answers. These aren’t even questions. They will reveal nothing. Isn’t that what you want? To reveal him?”

My voice is suddenly high-pitched, and Sid says, “You better take it easy.” My look is enough to silence him, although with a puzzled smile he continues to meet my eyes. Oh yes, I’m sure he’s technically innocent, just like my dear mother. And he should have his throat cut. 

“If you’re determined to do this, you have to do it right. The exam has to be in the form of questions. I ask them, he answers. Preferably the questions should be designed for him to answer ‘no’, because denial is the best indicator of both truthfulness and deception. For example, ‘On June 28^th 1999, did you rob the First National Bank in Cleveland?’ Do you follow?”

“Like I’m a criminal,” Sid says.

“That’s right. Like a criminal. Do you want to get at the truth or don’t you?”

 “I do.” Her voice quiet, but implacable.

“OK! What questions?”

“Well…” Merry says to Sid: “Do you really love me?”

“No. Too vague. And we want ‘no’ answers.”

“I gave you a second…” A lump moves up and down Merry’s throat, “a third chance. Have you violated my trust?”

“No! Not specific enough. He could lie and still pass. Come on!”

“Did you…” Merry shifts in my direction, as if asking me the question: “During the past 25 years, did you have sex with anyone other than me?”

“That’s perfect.” I laugh loudly. “You nailed it, Merry. You don’t have to ask anything else. We’ll just wrap some control questions around it―” 

“Fine. Fine.” Her voice is almost as nasty as mine. Sid reaches for her but she waves off his hand. And makes that “Gah!” sound again.

“No,” Sid says. “No, I haven’t had sex with anyone other than you in the past 25 years. I may have wanted to once or twice, but I haven’t. I couldn’t. I’ll say that as many times as you want.”

Merry’s head shakes, or rather circles, round and round. “I wanted this to be an affirmation.”

“Well,” Sid says, “I do too. You know, I have a question. You can hook both of us up, right?” 

“Not at the same time, but―sure, we can test you sequentially.”

Merry looks from Sid to me and back. “You want to test me?”

“Why not? While we’re here, my love.” He takes her hand, as if about to propose. “When the machine proves I’m telling the truth…will you believe it?”

He turns to me: “Sorry. This one has to be a ‘yes’.”

His question is too vague, of course. Too speculative in form. But I say, “OK. If that’s what you want, Sid.”

“It’s what I want.”

“And what you want, Merry?”

Merry’s skin leaks all color, then all pallor, until I imagine I’m seeing the tracery of ribs over organs….She smiles faintly, and murmurs something, but I don’t hear her words. I hear the man say, “Is this your father?” Yes, Alfred, on his back, eyes open. He was unshaven, and Alfred shaved twice every day. He was naked, and I couldn’t remember a moment when Alfred had appeared before me with even his sleeves rolled back. But after receiving the news Vickie was under heavy sedation, and I, the only other family member, I heard myself say, “Yes.” They told me that Alfred was struck by an ice cream truck after he crossed the street against the light. Alfred never crossed a street, no matter how much of a hurry he was in, unless every light was in his favor. 

Merry is still sitting there. I stand. “OK. I want you two to go back into the waiting room while I write up the control questions. Then we’ll test you, Sid, first, and then Merry.”

“Can I smoke in there?” Sid shakes his head. “What am I saying, nothing to smoke anyway. Unless you got cigarettes?”

“No,” I say with a laugh.

“Trevor, can you…” Merry has recovered the copies of their vows, tucked them back into the folder, and is once again holding it against her breast. “Forgive me.  Can you give us an idea…how long you will be?”

“No, I can’t.” I shrug. “A little while.”

I usher them into the waiting room. I return to my examining room, close the door, and lean over my desk again, both hands bracing me on either side of the pad with the lines etched into it. I do not sit, or pick up the pen, I just keep my hands pressed flat in front of me in unclasped prayer. I wait.

And, presently, in the form of a dull thump, the answer comes. I open the door, and the waiting room is empty.