My desk is always heaped with paperwork, and today is no exception. So many case folders cover the tabletop that I can't find a place to set my coffee. In those folders, more often than not, is all the information I need to do my job. By the time I have finished my coffee, I'll have closed three cases over the phone. Three more anonymous buff folders will then take their place. It is a rare day that I go into the field.

I have been asked, more than a few times, how I feel about my job. The unspoken subtext is always, does it bother you?

There is, I'm afraid, not much to be bothered about. It isn't a case of not seeing the forest for the trees; I am so mired in the minutiae of the profession that it is more like not being able to see the tree for the bark. It is all statistics: looking for the deviations from the norm. I wouldn't know half my clients if I saw them on the street. What I know are their telephone bills, mortgage payments, medical histories, grammar school grades, even preferences in movie rentals.

Some would argue that it is easier to do my job thus insulated. They are right, but not the way they mean it. It is simply that there is less to remember this way.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

My mother's wrists are chafed from the restraints. Two years ago she dove from her bed stomach-first onto the floor. The D.C. lawyer and his wife who were waiting for the baby got a million-five from the Broward Special Corrections Department for mental anguish. My mother got padded leather handcuffs.

When I look at the raw spots on her arms, I notice that she's tensing her muscles so hard the veins stand out like the surface of a relief map. Her face is completely composed for the cameras, however. I don't know what to make of this, but I am careful not to stare, nor look away too quickly. I'm rewarded with the ghost of a smile too quick to register until it's passed. So, I was meant to notice the flexing.

A guard comes in, they call them matrons here. This is a deliberate choice with 1950s connotations, I think. She stands next to the table, stolid and dumb in her blue blouse and skirt, and signals us that the visit is over. It is less than half the time normally allotted to mandated visits. This is my mother's small victory: our silence makes them too uncomfortable to endure watching for long. I think my mother would like to say that she is proud of me today, but cannot. To say that would be a tacit confession of her guilt. Any approval of me would mean she was wrong 30 years ago when she tried to flush my fetus out of her body. Still, it is this tacit understanding that allows me to go on with my life and my job.

Our eyes do not meet while the matron is in the room, and my mother is led away without looking back.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

My mother finally narrowed it down to three advertisements that looked amateurish enough not to have been planted by the NRA, and were ambiguous enough so as to draw minimal attention. All three were for Riviera Diet Supplements -- bootleg Roussel Uclaf pills -- black market abortions being too dangerous, too easy to track, or both. She went to the library then, and looked up back issues of the magazines. Two of the ads had run for several prior issues, so it was a good bet that they were already under surveillance. The third was brand new.

The next step was a driver's license under the name of a cousin who'd died as a child, with an SRO address. The rooming house address served two purposes. First, when it was time to get a post office box, it was less likely that an SRO address would trip a flag in the postal computer; it was entirely reasonable for someone living in a rented room to get their mail at a P.O. box. Post office boxes in middle-class residential neighborhoods, which ours was, usually alerted the Postal Inspection Service to a violation of the mail obscenity laws. The second reason for the SRO address was that, in Florida, there were far too many to register their tenants weekly, or even monthly. The annual, retroactive registration would turn up my mother's nom de guerre, but by then she'd be just another desperate, half-remembered face in the clerk's mind.

All of this cost money -- a mid-quality forged license (ones that could pass at a DWI checkpoint cost much more than paper good enough to fool a bored postal clerk), P.O. box rental -- and the pills. They came in lots of six, packaged like vitamins. Some unlucky women had gone through all this, in fact, and had gotten nothing but vitamins. There were six to make sure the job was done. The feminist underground calls them étuis, French for "small purses." The NRA agents call them six-guns.

In the long run, of course, it was still cheaper than having another baby and staying home for the prescribed two years. That same week she found work as a secretary in an insurance company.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

I come back from lunch and find that the pattern section has left a list on my desk. Only two names are in my area of responsibility; Evans, Theresa J, and Frawley, Taneka (none). Evans can be put off; I request a background jacket and set her name aside until it comes through. The Frawley folder is on my desk, so I will start with that one.

It is, as I recall, a fairly obvious case. Multiple postal flags, feminist literature subscription -- cancelled fairly recently, unmarried, works as a B-girl in a beach club on the strip. Associate's degree in accounting. Dangerous because she is smart enough to know she's got a high profile. If at all possible I will perform the search while she is at work.

I bring the folder to the Warrants window, where an NRA administrative justice signs, dates, and seals a premises/vehicle paper. I kill 15 minutes waiting for the warrant to register by Teletype with the local police. I use the time to check my weapon: I don't often go into the field, and I go to the shooting range even less frequently. My Glock automatic has a 17-round clip, and I carry a spare clip in my jacket pocket. If this is not overkill, I am in the wrong line of work.

The folder stays on my desk -- too many classified sources to leave the building -- but I slip Frawley's photo I.D. out, an enlargement of her Florida driver's license, to take with me. She is a common looking black woman, over 30, with an old-style "natural" hairdo. In the picture she is smiling.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

The light in the visiting room is always bad -- the cameras can record in the infrared if need be -- adding to my mother's washed-out look. She has just delivered the 35th baby of her sentence. There is no telling how many more she will bear; she has, in the grim double-entendre of Special Corrections, consecutive life sentences.

Since she did not try to throw herself on her stomach to crush the fetus, drink her own urine to poison the fetus, or commit any other act of fetal assault, my mother is entitled to smoke cigarettes and drink coffee during her 70-day recovery period. Then it's back to a strict pregnancy regimen as an incubator for some other privileged couple.

She draws hard on her Marlboro. In the silence of the visiting room the stale, dry commissary cigarette pops and crackles like a miniature forest fire. We stare at each other through the smoke. Her arms are no longer raw from the restraints, but she's built up a pad of callus tissue on the inside of each wrist. There are other changes, as well.

I suddenly realize that she has a facial tic, even though she seems otherwise composed. I have never, in fact, seen her other than utterly composed, so this pad of flesh twitching under her right eye seems the equivalent of a scream. I almost comment, but then the tic stops, and reappears under the other eye.

Could she, I wonder, be doing this deliberately? If so it is a phenomenal display of fine muscle control.

The tic stops again, and for a few minutes we sit in companionable, if absolute, silence. She stubs the cigarette out and sits forward, her arms resting on the table. After a moment, I realize that the flesh on the inside of her forearm jumps every few seconds. This reminds me of the last visit, and her vein-popping muscle tensioning. That will have to be enough for today, whatever it means. The matron, battleship-like in her stiff blue uniform leads my mother back to her dormitory area.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

One of the most common mistakes women in my mother's position made was using the P.O. box solely for their illegal transactions. As camouflage, my mother used the P.O. box for all kinds of things under her assumed name: she sent away for free recipes, subscribed to inexpensive magazines, ordered little things from mail-order catalogs, and wrote herself long, innocuous letters on her word processor at work, signing them with one of three fictional childhood friends' names that she'd picked at random from out-of-state telephone books.

She said at one point that, if nothing else, assuming her white-bread, straitlaced alter ego's mindset had replaced her contempt for women on the rolls with sympathy. It was always the good girls who got into trouble, too timid to go through the NRA's red tape to apply for birth control, and too afraid to buy on the graymarket. As a result, they bred themselves deeper and deeper into poverty, using their own loneliness and the scant infant stipend as justification.

On the day the pills arrived, my mother was careful to not vary her routine. She checked her box at lunchtime, as usual, and put the pills in her purse, then went off to lunch with her friends. After work, she picked my brother and sister up at daycare, took them home, made dinner, did homework with them, and read them their bedtime stories. She put the pills in a waterproof container and hid them inside the toilet tank float, a place, in her limited experience, she thought startlingly novel.

Two days after the pills arrived, my mother was ready to go through with the abortion. She waited until a Friday night so that she would have the whole weekend for the pill to work. She called the three girlfriends most likely to phone her, and said she was taking my brother and sister upstate to an amusement park (one she'd taken them to before -- no break in the pattern there), and wouldn't be back until Sunday night. She unplugged the phone and set the answering machine. Then she sat down at the kitchen table and tried to think of anything she might have missed.

All of this, she said later, made her feel as if she were planning her own suicide.

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