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“Christ, Jerry,” Bradford gleans. “You’re a sight.”
I don’t have the benefit of a mirror currently, but I suppose the bags underneath my eyes are ever more pronounced- the accumulated damage of a particularly miserable day can’t be hidden after a certain point. I notice something rattling inside my jacket. One of the prescription bottles. I toss it aside, it bounces down the steps and rolls to a halt.
Bradford isn’t wet, so I figure he’s been waiting down here all day for me. Or maybe there’s some water-repellent capability he’s got I’m not aware of, he can weather any storm and look casual through it, because he’s in control and knows as much. You know the old myth- they don’t sweat- they’re always dry, smooth to the touch...
“Hi, Vern,” I flourish. “Just checking up on things, ‘s all. Didn’t know you would be in today. Nice to see you, though. Ya haven’t been here in a while.”
“I could say the same.”
He isn’t smiling.
I shove my fists deep into my pockets, slick my bangs back over my bandages, slump into a heap at the corner on the farthest end of the room, feeling the little flecks of cement which have chipped off under the years. They form small indentations in my palms, both of which are red. I blink at him through my perspiration, he’s distant even if he’s seven feet from me, but growing in size and prominence, the reality of what this event must imply is dawning on me.
“Up, Jerry.” He grabs my arm, I shirk it off but he’s not playing, he hauls me to my feet with inhuman strength, the sort of force I didn’t know someone his age was capable of, although to be fair I’m not in any position to resist. He slings his left arm over my shoulder, gets close to my face until I can feel his hair skirt mine, and his breath on my neck.
He punches me then, right in the stomach. In the split second it takes for his blow to make contact with my gut, I tense my muscles- I learned this from countless scraps when I was young, it’s a reflex now more than anything. I don’t even work out, but I know not to leave my insides vulnerable or to risk organ failure. Something goes wrong in the process, I’m only able to flex them halfway- and a needle of pain erupts from the crater he leaves, sharp and vibrant, worse than any hail could induce, pain I don’t bring upon myself. Pain I don’t deserve, warranted deftly by a man I now thoroughly hate. Hate is too weak a word, perhaps.
I’m brought to my knees and he stands over me, then I go and collapse in the corner again. Time passes, shapes fly. The light bars above flicker ever so slightly, obviously jarred by the storm, which may develop into something legitimately fatal as the night wears on.
“You thought you were clever,” he smirks.
“Honest, Vern,” I moan. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. No fucking idea.”
“Oh, sure,” he recites. “Sure you don’t know. That’s what they all say, all twenty something of them we’ve had. I’ve had this conversation twenty times, you know. And each time it plays out the same, you know that? ‘I don’t know’ leads to ‘I do know,’ and then- well, if you think you’re in a spot, imagine how it is for me, to live the same life over again every year.”
“Why have the checks kept arriving?”
“Because we don’t want you to leave,” he says. “We kind of like you, Jerry, in fact. I’m going to cut it straight with you here. You’re our favorite, so far. The others- they were too unimaginative. You possess problem-solving capabilities above your grade. My supervisor, McDowell, says that you remind him of himself when he was just starting out. The way you noticed the surveillance panel in the hallway next to Nil’s room- that was smart of you. Nobody else we’ve got has foresight like that.”
“They trusted you.”
“Well, in simple terms, yes,” he taps his fingers idly. “They all assumed we had their best interests in mind. They were stupid. They’d never have made it.”
“And you found out about the damage, of course. I don’t know what I was thinking, leaving like that. Of course you did. It all flew apart.”
“Oh, yes,” he reassures me. “The room was half burnt by the time you left, we had to hire a team of specialists to come in and repair it according to our specifications. I’ll say this- you noticed the surveillance panel, and that’s something nobody else has bothered to check, when we left the door open- but you failed to notice the camera up above, in the rafters, clear of the fire, which transmits off-site directly to the offices of my superiors.”
“Why place one to watch you?”
“Because they don’t trust me,” he sighs. “They don’t trust me to do my job watching you at your post, the same way I don’t trust you. Nobody implicitly trusts each other here, we all keep each other in check.”
“You create a climate of fear.”
“Well, I’d say a climate of fear is conducive to a climate of trust, but that’s largely semantic.”
He pulls out a pack of cigarettes from his polo, removes the crisp plastic wrapper- I remember that sound so well. He flips his lighter, flicks a few ashes onto the ground and extinguishes them with his heel. The stick lies propped up between his supple lips, clenched with determination and indignation in equal measure.
“What’d you do to the others? Kill them?” I look down at where he hit me- there’s a dark violet bruise spreading, yet the pain has subsided. I wince and repeat the litany against internal bleeding over and over in my head, will my mind to properly clot any arteries and suture any veins, to repair on its own terms. I won’t die tonight.
“No,” he responds. “That’s bad practice. We got them new positions, as test subjects in our laboratories. In- other places. That’s besides the point. The point is, all of them have, in some way, tried to prematurely force the experiment to conclude. We understand why- it’s extremely boring and nobody can actually be presumed to operate at peak efficiency. To plumb the depths of a mind that empty- well, it takes infinite patience, just as his head holds an infinite capacity. And infinity isn’t something humans reckon well with, historically speaking. To actually yield results, by our standards, you might have to spend an infinite amount of time in there.”
“Why set up an impossible task?” I counter. “Why subject anyone to this? Why leave him in there to suffer? What’s the end goal?”
“Science has no end goal, Jerry. There is no singular point where it is complete. It’s a neverending process of discovery, of trial and error, of tests and further tests, on down the line, forever. You of all people should know that.”
“It’s infinite.” I struggle not to laugh.
“In a sense, yes.”
A momentary pause while he absentmindedly grabs another cigarette, spills the last one all over the floor, relights.
“Do you fear me?”
“I don’t know,” I wheeze. “I fucking hate you, man. I’ll tell you that much. You represent something vile, something I thought died out a long time ago. You shouldn’t be here, yet you are. I had no idea.”
“Of course you didn’t,” he retorts. “Nobody has any idea before they step outside their comfort zone, nobody sees the full picture. People live their entire lives oblivious to all sorts of things. They assume- incorrectly- that realization comes from expanding one’s immediate purview in the sense of actual visual stimuli. They’ll buy yachts to travel the world, book trips on space shuttles, visit dozens of cities and ports of call. That’s not how you learn.”
“I had this idea,” he continues. “The first year I was assigned to this room, in fact. I was the first one to monitor him, before I was promoted. That was probably around 2003 or so. I’d been working with the company since ‘79. I was- well, transferred here- about 1985. I’d always been in Pueblo, mind you, but a different Pueblo. Where I came from, Pueblo was actually the state capitol, if you believe that. Huge parades, festivals, great minds, national recognition, actually more than Denver gets today. I get here, it’s nothing. Very empty, back in those days. Hardly anything to do. It was demoralizing, to see my city reduce like that, in the blink of an eye. But I went along with it, because it was my station.”
“You’re insane,” I conclude. “Actually fucking insane. I said it, the first time I came in here, and I stand by it.”
“Maybe so,” he says. “You tend to lose a little bit of yourself, when you initially transfer between universes. But that’s besides the point.”
“I realized,” he goes on, “That I preferred the new Pueblo because it was smaller, because when things are on a smaller scale, they’re more manageable, you can learn more about people and who they really are. And I realized, too, that expanding your perspective outward is less fruitful than expanding your perspective inward. Smaller and smaller, forever, drawing to one tiny point on a grid that just flashes past you, you know- like the matter that compresses to form a black hole- that’s where you find it.”
“Find what?”
“Can’t say,” he chuckles. “If you haven’t found it yet, maybe you’ll never find it. But there is hope for you yet. Absolution, clarity, truth. Call it what you will. You’ll know it once you have it. It’s wonderful, Jerry.”
“I don’t want it,” I whisper. “I don’t want it, whatever it is. I want to go back. I want to be at home, with my wife.”
“There’s no going back from here, Jerry. You’re going to work with us.” He pauses.
“Oh,” he pretends to recall. “And speaking of your wife- I have something here which concerns her.” He pulls a stack of around seven polaroid photos from his wallet, they’re gathered together with scotch tape and he shuffles them around before squatting to flash them in front of my face. Sharp inhalation of breath. No. It can’t be.
There, rendered on crystal clear instant film in so many colors, shot through the driver’s side, me and Nadene in the parking lot, her arms wrapped over my shoulders. My expression is not visibly uncomfortable, rather I seem locked in tranquility and bliss. Each photo is captured in sequential order, over the span of- well, it couldn’t have been more than seven seconds- but that’s enough for his purposes.
“Recognize?”
“So it’s blackmail,” I spit. “You’re going to show these to her.”
“Very much so,” he grins. “Good old fashioned arrangement. Our photographer did a wonderful job. Better than we expected, if I’m being honest. He’s been watching you ever since the incident, waiting for something we can pin you with. That happened to be the night.”
“Eddie and Nad work for you? This was planned from the start...?”
“Oh, heavens, no,” he chortles. “We’d never think of hiring trash like them. They led you to this because they’re as clueless as you are, and you don’t hang out with the right type for your best interests. You don’t need us to hand you the rope so you can tie your own noose, Jerry. You already have the rope. You’re an idiot, you destroy yourself entirely of your own volition. There’s no way out for you anymore. We will show these to her. If-”
“If what?”
“If you don’t come down here,” he answers, “And fulfill your role exactly as we tell you to. To the letter. No more mistakes, no more bending the rules. We’ll be watching. And at the first sign that anything is off, these show up on her pillow.”
“You bastard.”
“I am, eh?” he tucks the photos back into his wallet. “Well, yeah, I guess I am. You have one month, Jerry. One month to get results. Our way.”
His shoe lunges forward abruptly and catches me in the ribs, hooks underneath the cage just so. I don’t have time to flinch. It’s horrible, worse than anything I’ve endured today, and I scream, but nobody is around to hear. Bradford pulls back, I shut my eyes and fall onto my side and clutch my waist. Need to reach for my pills. My heart is catching. That bottle I threw earlier- it’s not one of Todd’s. It’s my heart medication. Two feet beyond my grasp.
“You report in Monday,” he dictates. “Bright and early. You have one month.” Then he turns, begins his ascent up towards the deafening sounds of weather. I can hear him over all that, though, inexplicably, as my mind reels and my capillaries all seem to burst.
“Welcome to the family.”