These Violent Delights

by Micah Nemerever

  The victim’s pain wasn’t real, of course, but the subjects thought it was. The subjects squirmed, giggled with alarm, occasionally even asked the researchers whether this was really all right. But they didn’t stop. Even when the dial said the voltage had edged from painful into dangerous; even when the unseen victim’s pleas faded away, and he stopped responding at all. They didn’t question it, because the researchers wore white coats and spoke with authority, and that meant they must know what they were doing.

  The subjects weren’t cruel people, the narration claimed. They just didn’t think.

  Before the film played, Julian had told Strauss it was the reason he’d chosen to study social psychology. Paul felt an unwanted surge of fury toward him now for having the capacity to be fascinated—for the way Julian could look at the truth, even feel it, without it overwhelming him.

  The light afterward was a shock. Strauss lifted the projection screen with a clatter; behind it on the blackboard, the milgram experiment had been scrawled large.

  Strauss rested his hands on his hips before speaking. The chalk left silver shadows on his clothes.

  “Mr. Fromme,” he said, “perhaps you can get us started. What was so controversial about this experiment?”

  Paul didn’t even parse the question at first, because it was inconceivable that Strauss wanted them to argue about the mechanics of the experiment itself. It missed the point so decisively that it felt deliberate.

  “What was controversial about it? Honestly, the fact that nobody liked the results,” Julian said. “I mean, they dress it up in a lot of hand-wringing about informed consent and whether the subjects experienced undue distress and all that. But I think if the findings had made us feel good about ourselves, nobody would care one way or the other about the methodology.”

  “Oh, come on, we spend half this class talking about how science has a responsibility to treat ‘the human variable’ with kid gloves,” said the girl from Physics. “But when it’s your discipline, suddenly it’s hand-wringing.”

  “The difference is, the human variable chose its own outcome this time. The experiment was about the decisions the subjects would make—they made them under false pretenses, sure, but they made them of their own free will. If they got their feelings hurt because they learned they were Eichmanns waiting for a Hitler, that’s on them.”

  “In other words, it’s all right to mess with their heads because they had it coming,” Brady interjected. “It’s a nasty trap to spring, and I don’t even think you can make broad inferences from it—it’s such an artificial scenario, so to extrapolate from it into real-life applications . . .”

  “And if there’s really no way to gather that data without inflicting that kind of distress on the subjects, even if the data were informative,” the girl went on, “I don’t see how it’s even worth it to try.”

  Strauss was busy making notes on the chalkboard. The room had turned decisively against Julian. Several students were nodding along; others still wore their looks of mild disgust, as if the experiment was just another film-strip horror that had failed to touch them.

  Under the accumulated weight of their indifference, something inside him collapsed.

  “It is worth it.”

  Paul’s voice trembled, but it still left silence in its wake.

  “You don’t get to complain about a test being a ‘trap’ when it’s your own decisions that cause you to fail it.” His stammer was rising to the surface, but he didn’t care. “It’s—the experiment proves that people only respond to the authority, they have no sense of morality themselves—we need to know that, science needs to know that. I don’t care how upset they got about learning what they were.”

  “Mr. Fleischer certainly isn’t alone,” said Strauss quickly, as if to smooth things over before they got out of hand, “in finding the ethical implications of the results themselves disturbing—”

  “Hold on now,” Brady said, affronted but calm, holding up his hands as if in self-defense. “At the end of the day, these are ordinary people. It’s natural to trust authority, so of course most people do. This experiment was predicated on abusing that trust. Drawing the worst imaginable conclusions about the subjects, based solely on an extreme and contrived situation that put them under immense stress—”

  “Crying crocodile tears afterwards about the atrocities you commit isn’t morally exculpatory.” Red flooded the edges of Paul’s vision. He could feel his pulse in his teeth. “Tell me what makes them different from every Nazi who ‘just followed orders’ and only felt bad about it after the fact. Don’t you dare ask me to fucking pity them.”

  The high wave of adrenaline swelled through him and then receded into the shallows.

  In the ringing quiet, the others all stared. Some were irritated, others on the verge of nervous laughter, but none showed any sign of comprehension. All they could see was the rule he had broken, one of the innumerable unwritten boundaries of politeness designed to protect them.

  Only Strauss was grim with compassion, as if he understood too well for his own comfort. His hands reminded Paul sharply of his father’s—fine dark hairs, knuckles thickened by early-stage arthritis. It was Strauss, in the end, whose presence Paul couldn’t bear any longer.

  He didn’t speak; he wasn’t sure he could. He retreated up the lecture hall steps as quickly as he could without running. He realized too late that he’d left his belongings at his desk, but he refused to turn back. The hallway was deserted. Paul ducked into the bathroom—empty, cold, lit by fluorescence so that every detail screamed. He filled his hands with frigid water and cradled his face and throat, then lifted his glasses to splash another handful over his eyes.

  Slowly, Paul turned off the faucet. There was a strange sound in the room, rapid and rhythmic, that Paul thought at first must be coming from a faulty pipe. It took him a long time to recognize it as his own breathing. His reflection looked inhuman and barely familiar.

  He didn’t see Julian follow him into the washroom; he just wicked into being like a ghost. He leaned against the counter, already dressed to leave, Paul’s knapsack and coat draped over one arm. The harsh light clarified the filaments of artery in the whites of Julian’s eyes.

  “I’ve had all the bourgeois apologetics I can stomach for one day, I think,” said Julian. “We can go once you’re ready.”

  “Where are we going?” Paul asked, but Julian only shrugged. Paul tried to scrutinize his reflection, but he could hardly stand to meet his own eyes. “Do I look normal? I can’t tell if I look normal.”

  “You never do,” said Julian dismissively. “Thank god for it.”

  “You know what I mean, though, do I look—you know—”

  Julian handed him his coat, gentle and impatient in equal measure.

  “You’re fine. Not that you need to care. Think for a second about what ‘normal’ means.”

  They were headed to the river; that was all either of them bothered to know. Paul waited in the snow while Julian conned a liquor store clerk out of a bottle of bourbon. It shouldn’t have worked, but even from the other side of the plate glass it was a convincing pantomime—Julian searching his wallet for a nonexistent driver’s license, all apologies and sheepish smiles, until it yielded an Okay, just this once. “You can get away with anything,” Julian had told him beforehand, “as long as you act like an authority on the truth.” It sickened Paul a little to watch Julian prove this right.

  “So what happened after I left?”

  They were passing the bottle between them as they walked, as if there were no chance anyone might notice them, as if they were the authority on whether or not they were visible. There was a hum of unease in Paul’s body, but he didn’t think it was from the drink. He couldn’t remember his heartbeat slowing since they left.

  “Don’t pay attention to them,” said Julian bitterly. “I mean it. You use other people’s useless fucking opinions as an excuse to hate yourself—”

  “I don’t care what th
ey think. I just need to know whether I have to drop the class.”

  Julian considered this around a mouthful of alcohol. Then he swallowed hard and shrugged. It was a superficially careless gesture, but Paul recognized it as the first gust at the head of a hurricane—Julian’s face was the mask of vibrant serenity that always marked his cruelest whims.

  “It’s a very complex case,” he said, but it was no longer him speaking. His body language was changing; his gestures became less expansive, emphatic but constrained, hands held awkwardly, as if he had been an ungainly child long ago and had never quite forgotten it. “There is, as you can imagine, a fair bit of historical resonance, some still very recent—”

  “Stop that.”

  “—was intended, certainly, to provoke a discussion, and it’s natural for emotions to run high.” Julian brought his free hand to his face, as if to push a pair of wire-framed glasses up the bridge of his nose. There was no trace of him left; he’d even borrowed Strauss’s voice, dropping from tenor to baritone as if the shape of his throat had changed. “We cannot fault any of our colleagues for responding to the real-world implications—”

  “Stop it,” Paul pleaded. “I mean it. It’s horrible—”

  “If you can’t be objective, the least you can do is recognize your own bias.” Julian had shifted to Brady’s self-satisfaction and blunt gestures as easily as donning a coat. “Put in the effort to gain some distance, or recuse yourself before you hurt your argument by—”

  “I’ll knock your teeth in if you don’t stop.” Paul didn’t know whether he was talking to Julian or to the simulacrum of Brady, and he didn’t care. “I mean it, I swear to god—”

  It was over as suddenly as it had begun. Julian relaxed back into his own body and flashed Paul a wide showman’s grin.

  “Not bad, right? That’s my party trick—five minutes of observation, and I can do anyone. I do a great one of my dad. His underlings all love it, and he can’t stand it.”

  Paul took the bottle and drank; it seemed the only thing to do before making what he already knew would be a mistake. The alcohol scorched the inside of his throat.

  “So you’d be able to do me,” he said. “Wouldn’t you?”

  A pause.

  “I could, I suppose,” said Julian. “But you wouldn’t want me to.”

  “Don’t tell me what I want.”

  Julian stopped walking. He looked very young in that moment, wind-bitten and flush with drink, and Paul could see the effort it took for him to keep his gaze steady. His smile had become opaque and careful.

  “Go on.” Paul stood in front of him, watching, not sure what he expected or wanted to expect. At his side he held the bottle by the neck; its brown wrapper was freckled with melted snow. “I want you to. I won’t be angry.”

  He could see Julian’s disbelief, then the impulsive resolve as he decided to make the mistake along with him. Without asking if he could, Julian reached forward and pulled Paul’s glasses from his face.

  “If you insist,” he said. When he put on the glasses, he disappeared behind them.

  There was nothing cruel about it, except for its accuracy. Paul hadn’t already noticed all the details Julian observed in him, but he still knew instinctively that they were true, the same way he would have known his own face even after years without a mirror. He watched Julian’s shoulders sag as he curled in on himself like a too-tall weed growing in the shade. He recognized the solemn bow of his head and the anxious sharp line of his jaw, and the truth in the way his hands moved, their halting delicate gestures like fine-petaled flowers bowing in a breeze.

  Paul could have accepted it if not for the frailty there, the uncertainty and the overwhelming fear. He couldn’t see anything about himself that was immune to yielding to the right lie—to biting his tongue and saying “Yes, okay, just this once.” The transformation was perverse and unforgivable. It was evolution in reverse.

  Julian only maintained the illusion for a few seconds. He exhaled hard when he let it fall.

  “How do you stay sane, Pablo?” The sincerity in Julian’s voice took both of them by surprise. “It’s exhausting. Everything’s so bright and sharp, it’s like there’s nothing protecting you—”

  Paul didn’t notice that Julian was reaching toward him until he’d already snatched his glasses back and turned away. He walked quickly, barely noticing the cold.

  It took Julian some effort to catch up. There was a hazy echo in his breathing, like music from a dusty speaker.

  “You said you wouldn’t be angry,” he said. He took firm hold of Paul’s arm, as if to hinder his pace, but when Paul slowed down, he didn’t let go.

  “I’m not. Not at you.”

  “Don’t even try,” said Julian almost gently. “You know you’re just about the worst liar I’ve ever met.”

  Down toward the river. The bottle was drunk down enough by now that it sloshed like a full stomach. They crossed over the railyard on a pedestrian bridge caked in graffiti; as they made their way along the waterfront, the sidewalk gradually crumbled from the outside in, until the asphalt finally gave way to tar-blackened gravel and long gray grass.

  They came upon an abandoned building. It had been a slaughterhouse once, according to the fading letters whitewashed onto the brick. Moss streaked the windows and climbed the walls; the corrugated metal doors were creased with rust. The only sign of life was a mushroom cloud spray-painted onto one of the doors, captioned, in jaunty block letters, walk it off sunshine.

  Julian climbed over the chain-link fence, holding his cigarette between his teeth. Paul passed the bottle to Julian and dropped his knapsack onto the gravel, then cautiously followed after him. The rusting wires shivered and squealed under Paul’s weight, and it took him a moment to convince himself to climb the rest of the way.

  “How long has it just been sitting here, do you know?”

  Paul shook his head. Julian finished his cigarette and ashed it on the heel of his boot. With his coat collar turned up, leaning carelessly against the fence, he looked like a film still of James Dean. Paul could never decide if Julian was borrowing mannerisms from the movies or if it was the other way around—that the movies were trying to synthesize an image that came to Julian naturally.

  Paul turned away and tucked his glasses into his breast pocket. Then he scooped up a rock, tossed it from his right hand to his left, and pitched it straight through a windowpane.

  He thought he heard Julian speak, but a wool-thick quiet had settled over him, and no sound could penetrate. He worked his way along the bank of windows, smashing them column by column, each filthy mirror to the sky collapsing backward into black. Empty panes gaped, ringed with fragments of glass like broken teeth. He could imagine nothing beyond this moment; there was no reason, no goal. He had been here all his life.

  Then the final pane fell away and he had a body again—sore muscles and roaring blood and fierce mortal heart, skin taut against the chill and damp snow. The air splintered in his chest, and what was left of his father lay in a box in the frozen earth with a tunnel through his skull, and for all that he raged against it, nothing had changed.

  Paul sank down to the tangled grass and brushed the dirt from his hands. He was too exhausted to cry, or to hate himself for wanting to. He wasn’t certain, once he sat down, that he would be able to stand again.

  Julian stood in front of him, carrying the bottle by its throat. His lips were chapped, his nose and fingertips pink from the cold. For the first time since Paul had known him, he looked uncertain. He offered the bottle, but Paul shook his head. He couldn’t put a name to what he felt, but he knew it would be dishonest not to feel it. He fought against what the alcohol was already doing; he wanted the world to stay clear and sharp and unbearable.

  Julian emptied the bottle into the snow. He knelt beside Paul cautiously, as if he were approaching a wounded dog. When he touched Paul’s face, the gesture seemed at least as experimental as it was affectionate.

  “I don’
t want to talk about it.”

  “You don’t have to.” Julian brushed Paul’s hair back from his face and darted forward to press a kiss to his forehead. The gesture seemed to startle him far more than it did Paul. “But there has to be something I can do. I can’t stand it. What am I supposed to do?”

  He didn’t remember how to speak. He couldn’t have given the answer even if he’d had one.

  8.

  He would never get used to the scar. It looked like a dead tree, milk-white, bare branches grasping. The whole right side of Julian’s torso was given over to it. He claimed it didn’t hurt anymore, though he’d had it for so long that Paul wasn’t sure how Julian could know what his body had felt like before. The lung inside was so heavy with dead tissue that it didn’t remember how to be a lung anymore. When Paul put his ear to Julian’s back, he could hear the asymmetry, the way the left lung had to drink in almost more than it could hold in order to keep its twin from drowning.

  He had pictured Julian’s body wrought from marble, flawless and intangible even under his undeserving touch. “You said you wouldn’t stop me,” Paul would say, and Julian would let him take what he wanted, because he’d promised he would. But even in his most shameful fantasies, that was all Paul let himself expect. He never allowed himself to imagine Julian wanting him. In Paul’s mind Julian only ever made himself an object. He was pliant and receptive; he would surrender to him as smooth unbroken skin, as hips and collarbones and acquiescent mouth. But if the imaginary Julian ever deigned to kiss him back, it was only to draw forth another unanswered I love you. Paul could never reach past Julian’s surface, no matter what he did to him.