Full Immersion - chapter 4 (with images) (Patreon)

The water is wrong before I'm in it. Too hot at the ankle, fine at the knee, and by the time I'm standing in the middle of the basin it's settled into the thing it is, warm everywhere, and Syra has her hand flat between my shoulder blades, tipping me forward, and I let it happen because that's what the morning is.

She's old. I knew that and it didn't mean anything until I saw her with her sleeves pinned up past her elbows, her hands knotted at the knuckles and spotted, the wedding ring worn to a wire on her finger. She's been washing people in this house for thirty years. She caught me when I was born, and that arrived whole and unlearned with everything else, and the other thing I know is that I was born in Columbus in a hospital on Olentangy River Road, and both of those are in my head at the same time and I can't hold either one away from the other.

"Stand straight," she says. "You fold in like a girl carrying something."

The cloth is gray and soft from being boiled and it smells of ash and lavender, the soap somebody made in the kitchen and cut into squares. She starts at my shoulders and goes down my back in long strokes, and the strokes are the same as any laundress's, steady, thorough. A hand under my arm to lift it. The cloth working into the hollow under my arm where the skin is thin and the sensation is immediate and strange, because that place has never been washed by anyone but me, and it tickles, and I don't laugh because Syra is not being funny and neither am I.

She turns me by the shoulder and does my chest. Lifts each breast with the back of her hand, washes beneath it, and the skin there is warm from the water and the cloth drags a little, and the nipple tightens from the cold of the cloth, and neither of us remarks on it. She does my stomach, and her hand goes lower, and between my legs with the same cloth and the same total lack of event as my elbows, and I stand there with my eyes on the wall past her ear and I let her. The wall has a water stain shaped like a boot.

"Arms up."

She works down each arm to the hands, and does each finger, the cloth going between them one by one, and cleans under my nails with a wooden stick. My nails have grown out rounded and clean and she buffs them on the cloth anyway, each one held up to the lamp and inspected. My hands in her hands. Mine are smaller, and the fingers are longer, and the skin is softer than any skin I remember having, because it has never held a rein or a hammer or a pen.

"Eat the bread they bring you today," she says. "Even if you don't want it. A woman looks better in the face with bread in her."

She crouches. It costs her. I hear it in her breathing, the little catch at the top, and she does my legs front and back, and the cloth on the backs of my knees is a thing I've never felt before because nobody has ever washed the backs of my knees for me, and the skin there is thin and the cloth is warm and the water drips off me onto the stone and runs toward the drain channel cut in the floor.

My feet. Each toe. The heels where the skin has gone rough from the garden stones. She rubs at them with the cloth and then with her thumb, testing, and says something about the garden shoes I won't wear, and then she's done with my feet and she stands up with a sound that's half effort and half habit.

She dries me the same way. Shoulders first. The towel is rougher than the washing cloth, linen gone thin from years of the same use, and it smells of the chest where it was stored, cedar and something underneath that might be the last person it was used on. She dries between my legs with one pass of the cloth, folded over, and I'm dry there like I'm dry at the elbows.

The oil comes next. A jar, something sharp in it, rosemary, and she rubs it into my arms and my back until the skin stops taking it. The oil is cool and then warm from her hands, and where it's on me the air touches it and the skin tightens, and my nipples go hard again and stay that way. I don't look at them. Neither does she.

"You were the easiest baby I ever washed," she says. "You'd go limp like a rabbit. I always said you'd be easy your whole life and I was wrong about that and glad of it."

I don't know what she means. She doesn't explain. She's already moving to my hair.

The comb is bone, and she works from the ends up, patient, and the comb catches on a tangle and she holds the hair above it so it doesn't pull my scalp, and I sit on the stool with the towel wrapped around me and the oil drying and the smell of rosemary in my nose. My hair when it's wet is heavier than I expect. It pulls at the back of my neck where it's gathered in her hand, and the weight of it shifts when she moves me, and I feel the whole length of it down my back, each strand separate where it touches the oil on my skin.

She puts it up. Then takes it down. Sabina's instructions said loose, and Syra does it a third way, and pins one strand back with the plainest pin in the box, and says, "Unadorned takes the longest of anything."

The shift is thin, undyed, and opens down the front with two ties instead of going over the head. She puts it on me in four seconds, ties it, and steps back and looks at me for a moment.

The bread comes while she's finishing. Prima brings it on a plate with a cloth over it, still warm, and the smell of it fills the room, yeast and something charred where the crust caught against the oven floor. My hands go for it before I do, tearing rather than cutting, and the crust is hard and the inside is dense and I eat it because Syra told me to, and it tastes better than anything I've eaten since I got here, or everything tastes like that now, I can't tell anymore.

Syra puts my hair up, then gathers her jars and her cloths and folds the towel over her arm, and she looks at me once more, and her hand comes up flat to my cheek, dry and warm and rough as the cloth, and then she turns to gather the last of it, and Prima comes in behind her, saying the steward wants the blue room cleared because of the other thing today, the thing that isn't my thing.

"Half of Rome on the roads for the games," Syra says from the door, "and my boy couldn't find me a cart this morning. I walked from the Subura before cockcrow and I'm too old for it."

She holds up one spotted hand and looks at it.

"These have delivered four hundred children. They can't hail a cart."

"Did you walk alone?"

"My grandson walked me. He's eleven and he carried the bag and told me the whole way about a dog he means to have." She ties the bag closed. "He's not getting the dog."

She goes. Delia comes in as she leaves, the two of them passing at the door, and something in how they nod at each other puts a small cold spot under my ribs. Delia crosses to me and doesn't start on my hair or my face or any of the hundred small jobs there would be, and that's when I know.

"She doesn't want me in the room," Delia says. "Sabina. She travels with her own woman for the record and her woman holds the lamp and the instruments, and she says the room holds who the record needs and no one more. It's in her terms. The steward agreed before anyone asked me."

"Delia."

"I asked him. I asked him twice." She's looking at the shift's tie, which she's retied for no reason, and now her hands have nothing to do and go still. "The witnesses have to be women of standing in the household, that's Syra and the cook and the steward's wife, because their names carry something. Mine doesn't carry anything. It was never about who you wanted in the room. It's about whose mark means something."

"I want you in the room."

"I know." She says it quickly, quietly, and glances at the door. "I'll be right outside it. That's not nothing. If you want anything after, I'll be the first one you see."

She is apologizing for a decision made by three names on a list, none of them hers, and her face is doing the patient settling thing it does, and I understand suddenly that she spent something on this. She asked the steward twice. A slave doesn't ask a steward twice without it being remembered.

"You shouldn't have asked him twice," my mouth says, and it's my own voice this time, or close enough, flat and quiet.

"I'd have asked him a third time," Delia says, "but the cook told me to stop before it cost me more than the asking was worth."

She smooths the shift at my shoulders. Through the wall the house is all motion, furniture going somewhere, Threptus's voice going down the corridor in its carrying register, and underneath it the kitchen, where they are frying something sweet, because the household is going out today, all of it, and there has to be food for that, and a senator's daughter's inspection is one item in a morning that also contains a quarter of a million people and the biggest races of the spring.

"They'll come for you when it's time," Delia says. "Eat the bread first. Syra will have told you. She's right."

The bread is gone. I ate it without noticing. Prima comes back with water and I drink it standing up because sitting down means this is taking longer than I want it to, and the water is cold and tastes of the clay of the cup, and I drink it too fast and some of it runs down my chin and onto the shift, and Delia wipes it off with the edge of the cloth and doesn't say anything.

They come for me before I've decided I'm ready. Prima and the steward's wife together, one at each elbow without exactly touching me, and on the way down the corridor the smell of the frying follows us, honey and oil, and it will be there when I come back, cold by then, and someone will have covered it with a cloth.

The room they've picked is the small dining room off the atrium, the one nobody uses in spring because it has the best light in the house in the morning and the family eats where the light is worse and the air is warmer. The light is the point.

Delia peels away at the door, and she touches my hand once, low, where nobody's watching, and then I'm inside and the door is at my back and the room is bright and full of women and smells of lamp oil and cold iron.

There's a sharp soap under the lamp oil, and Sabina's woman is working it into a lather at the stand. The couch has been dragged out from the wall and made up like a bed, somebody's good linen gone thin from washing laid over the cushions, and the sun comes through the open shutters and lies along the whole length of it.

Sabina is smaller than her fee. Sixty, gray knotted tight at the back of her head, brown arms. She dries her hands and looks me over once, the way a buyer looks at cloth, and takes the ring off her right hand and gives it to her woman without turning around. Her thumbnails are cut short to the quick. I notice that, and I am grateful for it, and I hate that I'm grateful for it, and all of that takes a second.

"Up, then," she says.

Syra is at my elbow and the ties come open under her fingers and the shift is off and folded over her arm before I've lifted a hand to help. The air touches every part of me at once. When I lie back, my breasts slide sideways toward my armpits, and I have to stop myself from gathering them back, because there's nowhere to gather them to. My hair is on the linen, still damp at the ends where Syra's comb didn't dry it.

"Heels up. Nearer to you." The instruction and the hand arrive together, her palm around my ankle, moving it. "Knees out. Let them stay out."

Her hands press my knees apart a few inches past where I had them, and I am open to the light and the room, and the sun is warm on my stomach and nothing else is warm. The cook is at the wall with flour still on her forearms. Syra nearby, my shift on her arm. The steward's wife stands behind Sabina.

Her woman brings the lamp down and holds it at the height of her own waist, and the heat of it touches the inside of my thigh where the sun doesn't reach. Sabina sits on the stool between my heels and looks.

She looks for a long time. There's nothing happening and it goes on anyway, a stranger seated between my legs with all morning's patience, and the steward's wife asks whether the portico will be finished by the vintage, and the cook says they'll be lucky if it's finished by the wedding, and somebody laughs, and Sabina looks.

"The oil," she says.

The jar sat on the stone and the oil took the cold of it. The first touch of her fingers makes me pull up and away, and she says "Easy," which she'd say to anyone, and her fingers come back.

One finger first. I've had a doctor's glove once, years ago, two seconds, and I braced for that, and this is not that. She doesn't hurry, and the push of it travels further in than a finger has any business going, and the feeling isn't pain, it's occupancy. There's something inside me, in a place that has never held anything, and the place gives around her knuckles, slowly, and it isn't deciding to give. She is deciding.

"Breathe out."

I breathe out, and on the slack of it she goes deeper, and that's how I learn that breathing changes how much of her fits.

Then two fingers, and the stretch of that is wider and duller, a full ache, and I try once to close against her, to slow her down with the muscle, to see if I can.

"Don't fight," she says, not looking up. "It takes longer."

I stop fighting. Her other hand comes down flat and low on my belly and presses, and I feel her two hands find each other through me, the one outside bearing down, the one inside coming up to meet it, and the place where they meet is me.

There's a right answer to somebody having your hips. You get an elbow between you and the weight and you turn out from underneath it. My arms start toward it and stop, and it isn't the thing in my head that stops them.

She's feeling for things. I am the thing she's feeling through.

She turns her wrist, slowly, a whole slow circuit. The front drags in a way that pulls my breath short. Deep at the end her fingertips reach the limit of me and something there answers with a dull bloom, like a bruise starting, and my whole middle tightens, and she backs off it without being asked and doesn't go there again. Mapping. She's done this so many times she can do it by feel while listening to the cook.

"The carts," the cook is saying. "If my master doesn't leave by the third hour they'll eat dust behind the water carts the whole way down. My nephew carries for the Blues. He says the horses get better bread than he does."

"He's probably right," says the steward's wife.

The wetness starts with no build at all. It's just there, and then there's more of it, a slow seep I can feel traveling, warm where it starts and cooling where the air reaches it on my skin. It's a response, a thing the place does when it's worked, and it keeps arriving, and I can't stop it, and I can't see it, and everyone else can.

As a man, arousal was a flag. You could see it from across the room, and you could will it down, sometimes, or hide it, and either way it was yours to manage. This announces itself to the whole room and not to me. I find out how much there is by how her hand changes, the soft drag going to an easy slide, and by the sound her hand starts to make, quiet, regular, and by the cool stripe of it on the inside of my thigh where it's spread.

Sabina works in it. It doesn't slow her and it doesn't hurry her and she doesn't wipe her hand or remark on it, because it's nothing to her. A body doing what bodies do. I've never been so visible in my life and I am lying in full sun while three women talk about carts over the top of me, and the thing everyone can see is the one thing nobody mentions.

The steward's wife looks down at the wrong moment. I watch her see it, the shine on Sabina's fingers, and her eyes go to the window and stay there, and she asks the cook, a little too quickly, whether her nephew will be at the start or the finish.

"Wherever the water is," the cook says.

Then Sabina's thumb moves, or the side of her hand, and it passes over the place I found eleven nights ago in the dark with my own hand, and I know the timing of it before it lands, and it lands, and everything in me jumps. My hips lift off the cloth. A gasp gets out of me, small.

"Hold still," Sabina says. "We're nearly done."

Nobody laughs. Nobody looks at me. The cook says her nephew has been at the races since he could walk, and Sabina's hand settles back to its slow circuit, and the place keeps answering after she's passed it, a pulse going and going, and I hold still.

Nearly done is not done. It goes on. Her fingers come most of the way out and go back in and turn again, and she holds me open with one hand and looks once more, close, in the lamplight, and the air is cool where the wetness is, and I try to count something, anything, and the counting keeps being interrupted by what she's doing, because what she's doing jumps the queue of everything I try to think.

Then her fingers come out, slow, all the way, and the place stays open a moment after her. I can feel that. It holds her shape and then closes by degrees, and there's a pulse there, deep, that goes on by itself.

"Breathe out," she says once more, though nothing is in me now, and she stands, and her woman has the cloth ready before the hand is up. Sabina wipes her fingers one at a time, the way Syra cleaned mine this morning, and nods at the tablet.

"Write it."

Her woman takes the stylus.

"Examined this day, Livia Aurelia, daughter of the senator Aurelius Rufus, in the presence of the women of the house." She says it at a walking pace, watching her woman keep up. "The girl is sound in all her parts. The token of her virginity whole and untouched, the passage closed as it should be closed. Fit to be contracted. Fit to bear." She dries her hands a second time. "Put that she is well made and well kept. They like to read it."

"Bring them," Sabina says.

The steward's wife goes first. She takes the stylus and puts her mark at the bottom, three strokes, and steps back still watching the window, out toward the street where the carts will be lining up. The cook makes a cross and rubs her thumb clean on her apron.

Syra comes last. She takes the stylus and stands over the wax a moment. Those hands washed me this morning, every part of me, the same ones that caught me when I was born, and now her mark goes under a sentence about another woman's fingers, and if she thinks anything about that it doesn't reach her face. She makes her mark, small and neat, and gives the stylus back.

"There," she says. "It's done."

Sabina's woman writes the names beside the marks and blows on the wax and closes the tablet in its case, and the instruments that were never taken out go in after it, and the room starts coming apart like a camp does. The cook is already gone. The steward's wife asks someone in the corridor the time, and gets it, and goes.

I am still lying in the sun with my heels up, because nobody has told me to move.

Syra's hand comes under my shoulders. "Up now. Slowly."

My legs don't want to come together. She waits while they learn it, and puts a cloth in my hand - "For the oil" - and I press it between my thighs and it comes away damp and shining, and she takes it back and folds it so the shine is inside, and hands me the shift. I put it on wrong and she redoes the ties, and my own fingers watch hers do it.

Sabina is washing her hands again, scrubbing, her woman pouring the water. She'll do this at another house before the week is out, some other daughter in some other bright room, and she'll write the same letter with the name changed and believe it every time. She says something to Syra about her knees, and Syra tells her about a salve, two old women trading remedies, and neither of them is talking about me anymore.

The sun has moved off the couch. The cloths have a damp spot one of the slaves will wash out and never mention. My whole body feels like a room after the visitors have gone.

Delia is in the corridor, exactly where she said she'd be. She looks at my face and doesn't ask anything. She takes me by the wrist, not the elbow, and we go down past the empty blue room and the garden door standing open, and the house smells of cold oil and the honeyed frying from breakfast, long over.

In my room the bread is on the plate under its cloth, one bite gone. I sit on the bed and eat it, all of it, because Syra told me to, and it's gone hard at the edges, and Delia pours me water and stands there while I drink it, and neither of us says anything. From the street comes the noise of the household loading up for the games.

The litter stops two streets short of the Circus because there is no street left. People have been flowing downhill since before dawn and by midmorning the flow is a wall, and the bearers put the poles down and Delia pulls the curtain aside and the noise comes in like heat off an opened oven.

You hear it before you see anything. Not the crowd in the street. The crowd inside, a quarter mile away, doing something I can't name yet, a sound with a floor to it, a low continuous rumble with the street noise sitting on top of it.

Rufus walks. A senator could ride to the very gate and a few of them do, carried through with men shoving ahead, but Rufus likes to be seen liking the games, so we walk, and the street is all color. Green everywhere. Scarves, ribbons, whole faces painted, a man with a green dog. A boy in our colors sits on his father's shoulders eating a honeyed thing the size of his own head, and the honey has run down both his wrists to the elbow, and his father doesn't care or doesn't know.

Delia has me by the sleeve, at the elbow, and she steers me around the worst of the crush with the skill of someone who's done crowds her whole life. My hem needs one hand, and the veil needs attention whenever the wind turns, and I have no hands left for myself. The stola is heavier than anything I've worn here, layers of it, and the day is going to be hot.

At the senators' section there are cushions and an awning and slaves with damp cloths, and a man Rufus knows, Flaccus, who has been there since dawn and has a cushion saved and a wineskin already half done. Rufus and Flaccus embrace and immediately begin talking about the Blues' new driver. Hilarus is already seated, dressed well but not like a senator, and he rises for me and bows exactly the right amount, and sits back down and goes back to watching the crowd fill in rather than the track.

The cook got leave to come, which I gather happens about once a decade. Her nephew carries water for the Blues. She's sitting four rows below us with the better class of tradesmen and she keeps turning around to report things to nobody in particular.

"There's a hundred thousand here already," she says to the row behind her, which accepts this.

Delia settles beside me with the fan and the square of damp linen for the dust, and she has rationed my morning cup without being asked, one mouthful of wine in a lot of water, because there is nowhere for a senator's daughter to go until evening and we both know it now. My scalp already aches faintly where the pins are, and it will be worse by the last race, and there is nothing to do about that either.

Below us the track is long and tan and already cut up from the morning, the spine down the middle with its statues and its turning posts at the ends, the posts sheathed and painted and standing in the sun. At the far end the barriers. Above the whole bowl the awning ropes run up to the masts, and when the wind shifts the shade shifts with it, and a seam of sun crawls across the seats and everyone in its path covers up and waits for it to pass.

The procession comes through first, statues carried on poles, dancers, a boy scattering petals that are trodden into the dust within a minute. Then the first races, two-horse heats, and I learn the rhythm of the place.

It's the turns. Coming out of the back straight the whole crowd inhales at once, a quarter-million lungs, an audible gathering, and the sound that follows depends on what happens at the post. Clean turn, and it breaks into a roar with approval in it. Bad turn, and the roar has a different grain, appetite in it. The crowd wants the crash almost as much as it wants the win, and you can hear which one it's getting before you see anything, if you're seated where I am with the far post half hidden by the spine.

In the third heat a White driver takes the near post too tight. The chariot goes up on one wheel and then over, slow, and the sound the crowd makes is nothing like the sound for a win. It drops first, a huge collective suck of breath, and then it comes up out of the bowl as something between a moan and a cheer. The driver is thrown clear and rolls and does not get up. One of his horses keeps going with the wreck behind it. Men run out with hooks and a plank.

I am on my feet. I didn't decide to stand. Everyone is standing, and my legs are under me, and my hands are up at my own face, and there is a sound coming out of me, high and wordless, that I also didn't decide. Around me a quarter of a million people are making their version of it. Delia's hand is flat on my back.

They carry him off on the plank with his arm hanging down and his head wrong, and men with rakes come out and work the dark place in the sand until it's only sand again, and the crowd sits down and starts eating. Those are grown bodies down there. They heal the way I heal.

Rufus wagers with Flaccus on the fourth heat and loses and pays with good grace, and the sum changing hands would run this household for a month, and neither of them looks at the coins. Between heats the egg man tips down the wooden eggs that count the laps, and his assistant sits on the steps behind him eating grapes and spitting the skins onto the steps. A man in the cheap seats across the track has been asleep upright since the procession, through all of it, head back, mouth open, and no one near him has bothered to wake him for anything.

An hour before the big race the water carts come out and wet the track, and the smell of wet dust comes up off it, and the crowd gets louder and starts to self-sort by color, sections of green and blue and red going up in cheers that answer each other around the bowl. Hilarus stands for the first time all day. He still doesn't watch the track. He looks around at the seats, section by section, the way Threptus looks at a column of figures, and whatever he totals up makes him smile.

The four-horse is the last race, and everything before it turns out to have been rehearsal for the crowd. The barriers open on a dropped white cloth and four chariots come out of them at a dead run and the noise is instant and total, no build, as if a door had opened on a fire.

Scorpus has the second position from the inside and takes the rail before the first post, the four grays running as one animal, and the Green sections stand as one and I am standing with them, and the damp cloth is in my hand and I have no memory of picking it up. The Blues' driver, Diocles, sits in third and waits, and even I can see him waiting, holding his team a half-stride off, saving something.

Seven laps is a long time. The middle of the race has a shape I'd never have known from anywhere but here, the teams settling, the drivers leaning, the inside horses doing the brutal work at the posts while the outside horses run loose and beautiful and do less. Twice Diocles moves up and twice Scorpus closes the line without seeming to, a drift left of half a chariot's width, and the second time the Blue wheels come within a hand's span of his and the crowd's sound goes up an octave. My thighs are trembling. I discover this because Delia puts a hand on my arm and I feel it in both places.

On the last lap Diocles spends what he saved. Coming down the back straight the Blue team draws level and then half a length past, and the Blue sections are up and the sound is enormous, and Scorpus lets him have the outside into the final turn and I understand nothing about what happens next except that the inside is shorter and the turn is everything and Scorpus holds the rail by the width of a plank, and Diocles has to go the long way around at full speed with four horses who cannot turn any tighter, and they come out of the turn level and the straight is a hundred yards long.

The finish is a green blur and a blue blur and a judge's flag, and then the noise has no top to it. Rufus is shouting with his fists up. Flaccus pounds his back. The Green hymn goes up ragged and then gathers itself into something like music, and down on the track Scorpus takes the palm and makes his lap at a walk, one arm up, and the crowd sings at him, and his mouth is moving with the words, and his mouth is a half a word behind them.

It could be exhaustion. He just ran seven laps at the edge of a wreck. Nobody near me sees anything but the champion singing along.

Rufus takes my face in both hands and kisses my forehead, hard, as if I'd won something. "There," he says. "There's your man, Livia." Flaccus is already telling him the Blues will want a rematch at the next games and Rufus is saying let them want it.

Afterward, down where the seating meets the track wall, the family gathers in the shade of the arch while Threptus sends for the litters, and that is where Scorpus finds us, naked above the waist, dusty, the lines of sweat through it, the palm in his right hand. He smells of horse and leather and something hot underneath, and he is lit from inside, talking too fast to Rufus about the turn, and then he sees me.

"Domina." He takes my hand, which is permitted, everyone does it, and then his grip slides down to my wrist and he draws me a half step closer, out of the family and toward him, and his hand closes all the way around my wrist with room to spare. "You bring me luck. One more of these, and there's nothing left to win but you."

His face is very close. The dust is in his eyebrows. I can feel my own heartbeat in the place his thumb lies, and I know he can feel it too, and he is reading it as one thing and it is another.

Then Hilarus is at his elbow asking about the purse, warmly, and Delia is there with the damp cloth saying domina the dust, and Rufus has a hand on Scorpus's dusty shoulder turning him toward Flaccus, who wants to hear about the turn again, and Threptus is saying the litters, and it all happens in about two breaths and with total courtesy, a rearrangement of people so smooth you'd swear nobody arranged it. Scorpus laughs, squeezes my wrist once, and lets go.

The relief goes through me cool and immediate, like drinking. It's the worst thing I feel all day.

The ride home is long because the streets are still full, the whole city going the same direction singing the hymn badly, and the litter sways and my feet have swollen in the sandals and my scalp throbs where the pins have been all day. Delia works them out one at a time as we go, and each one is a small bright pain and then relief, and when the last one comes my hair falls down across my shoulders and forward over my face and the weight of it is almost pleasant.

At the house the fountain is running. Prima has fallen asleep on the bench by the door waiting for us, the cloth for covering the food still in her hand, and the cook shakes her awake without unkindness and goes off to tell someone what the nephew did at the Blues' water station, which she saw with her own eyes and will be telling people about until winter.

In my room Delia brings water and I wash my hands twice. My right hand smells of horse, where he held it, of leather and horse and the salt of another person, and the second washing gets it except under the nails. I stand there working the nails against the cloth.

The day keeps ringing in my ears after the lamps are lit. A quarter-million people breathing in at once, just before something happens at a post.