The blood-pressure band has closed around my left arm, like a drunk with long, sad stories to tell. I feel an obstreperous pulse there and hurt. The polygraph examiner (a twenty-year cop who has just begun lie-detector training) will now cinch his black spiral elastic tube across my chest. It is fatbellied, sensitive as moist night crawlers are. I exhale against the tube: breath, too, can snitch on you. Just behind, three styli scribble a Dow Jones of my moral metabolism, buy and sell, across graph paper. I can’t see the cop: in that, lie detection might resemble couch analysis. Left hand and wrist are turning moussaka purple with too much enforced truth. I go over my private rap sheet. What can he get me on? Forgot to write Uncle Edward, uh, didn’t take Nyquil only as directed, uh, put a rubber band around my cat’s head once, uh. . . . But the cop is starting his mild interrogation.
“Are you a United States citizen?”
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