by John Altman
Another push forward; and he was inside up to his chest. The bag pressed tight against him. His back, legs, and hips all flush against the compartment’s boundaries. He breathed. Pushed again—inserting himself up to his shoulders.
Two minutes later, a final effort. The last of his body disappeared beneath the seat.
His right hand still could achieve limited motion. It found the panel, fit it back into place, jiggled it until it fell into the grooves.
He closed his eyes and found the icy place again.
Outside, the leaves hissed teasing riddles. A thunderclap cracked. Then lightning flashed, sending ragged shadows japing across the porch of number sixty-two Sycamore Drive.
The storm died down, ruminated, and gained force.
Thomas Warren II looked again at the red numbers of the clock: ten minutes past three A.M. He forced his eyes closed, and returned to the half-dream.
In his mind’s eye, the man who was not a man was pulling rabbits from a hat. Behind him, kudzu draped a dilapidated barn. Before him knelt Ali Zattout. Zattout was wearing a navy blue business suit, tugging at his collar like Rodney Dangerfield. Thomas Warren, Senior, had loved that hoary old bit: I don’t get no respect.
But Zattout wasn’t tugging at his collar to get a laugh. He was doing it to expose his throat. Then he was laying his exposed throat on a tree stump—a makeshift chopping block. The small man who was not a man kept pulling rabbits from his hat. But his last and best trick, Warren understood suddenly, would be to produce an axe. Then he would whip the blade down, decapitating Zattout. Abracadabra, presto.
Why? They were part of the same faction, this man and Zattout.
No—not quite. The small magician in black had killed the others in the cell. The small magician murdered his own.
But that wasn’t exactly right, either. He did not murder his own; for he was not one of them. He was something different. An outsider.
From the hat came small pink balls. The magician began to juggle. Three balls, then four, then six, then ten, until the air was so thick with bobbling pink projectiles that Warren could no longer see the man who was keeping them aloft. Smoke and mirrors, he thought. A plane passed overhead; above it, a beeping satellite. But the balls kept the magician concealed, from planes and satellites and Warren’s own eyes.
He still could see Zattout, however—his throat exposed on the chopping block. Waiting patiently. For he had nowhere to run. He could not get away.
The magician in black had killed the others in the cell. And now he would kill Zattout, just as soon as he had finished his juggling trick.
Then the balls were tumbling to the earth. The magician’s performance was wrapping up. The wind gusted. The kudzu fluttered against the barn. The dark magician gestured over the hat, then began to withdraw something else. Warren saw the glitter of a blade, razor-sharp.
Zattout watched his executioner with disconsolate eyes.
Did he know this man—this wicked thing that was about to take his life? Not precisely. For the magician was not one of them. He was something different. An outsider. Yet he dealt with the Arabs. He dealt with al Qaeda …
Warren’s eyes opened.
Right in front of his face. So close he hadn’t even seen it.
Zattout already was in custody. Quinlan was gone; but a description of the fugitive could be put to the prisoner—
—and perhaps Zattout could offer some insight into the nature of the beast.
He clawed for the phone by the bedside, sending loose change and cigarettes scattering across the floor.
Finney poured.
He handed the first glass to James Hawthorne. Hawthorne, clearly rattled, bolted the drink without waiting for Finney to fix a second.
The tempest lashed at the windowpanes but made no observable impression on the men. They sat opposite each other in a room lighted by a single weak lamp, with candlesticks on the mantel whirring softly.
Before administering the first shock, Finney had injected propofol and succinylcholine chloride—anesthesia and muscle relaxant—to reduce the risk of fractured bones. The Molac II delivered a current hundreds of thousands of times greater than the usual electric activity of the brain. Violent muscle spasms resulted. Until ECT administrators had started using muscle paralyzers, broken bones had been a common occurrence during treatment, with cracked spines a particularly frequent injury.
Electrodes had been attached to Zattout’s bilateral frontal lobes. The first shock, at 190 volts, continued for three seconds. The resulting convulsion lasted forty-nine seconds. Before proceeding, Finney checked for life-threatening complications: apnea or cardiac arrest.
Cerebral atrophy, heart arrhythmia, ventricular tachycardia, epilepsy; thanks to the treatment, Zattout might manifest any of them in the near future. All in a day’s work, Finney thought bitterly. Hippocratic Oath? He supposed he had heard of it. But he couldn’t quite bring it to mind at the moment.
The second shock, at 100 volts, lasted two seconds.
The third, four seconds.
One could live a full life, the doctor in him thought, after receiving ECT.
Witness Susan Franklin. Eight months after she had been released from their care, Finney had gone with Noble to pay their ex-patient a visit. Their purpose had been to determine the extent to which her conditioning remained intact. Perhaps Noble had conducted similar follow-up visits in ensuing years; but by then Finney had separated himself from his mentor, and he had no way of knowing.
The clinic was set behind gothic iron gates, on a sprawling lawn dotted with daylilies and hydrangea. After a brief consultation with a sour-faced Dr. Young, they were led to the game room. There they found Susan Franklin absentmindedly doing needlepoint before a flickering television. She had gained a surprising amount of weight; her appealing face had gone from gaunt to fleshy. But Finney recognized her immediately. He recognized her eyes.
If the recognition went both ways, she gave no sign. Thanks to a combination of posthypnotic suggestion and electroshock amnesia, it was entirely possible that she had no conscious memory of the experiment. When sour-faced Dr. Young introduced them only as his “colleagues,” she reacted with nothing more than a remote flicker.
They bade the doctor good day. Then Finney, Noble, and Susan Franklin took a walk around the clinic’s garden paths. Noble talked softly, reasonably, soothingly. He remarked on the mild weather, asked about the clinic’s food. Susan Franklin listened, answering quietly whenever a question was put to her. She seemed painfully shy, but cogent.
As the stroll continued, Noble’s questions became more searching. Had she been feeling well over the past eight months? Was she satisfied with her treatment here at Carter Clinic? In reply, she spoke of patterns in illnesses, patterns in therapy. With the help of Dr. Young, she was learning to identify her patterns and change them. The speech was delivered with a cadence that struck Finney as exceedingly familiar. Then he realized that it had belonged to Young himself; she had memorized not only the words, but every inflection.
They kept walking, past a gardener with a hose, then a stand of golden forsythia. Noble casually began to whistle beneath his breath. It was the lilting opening notes of an aria of Mimi’s from La Bohème—the “signal cue” used to access Robin, the strongest of Susan Franklin’s secondary identities.
They had found seven discrete personas within the woman’s psyche. All had been formed during early childhood, initially taking the guise of imaginary friends. Susan had put faces to these identities, visible only in her bedroom mirror. With time, Robin—an unusually sharp-tongued and observant personality—had forced the other identities to recede. She had become the primary repository for Susan’s negative feelings, of anger and sorrow and grief. And she had held obstinately onto childhood, remaining forever young even as Susan Franklin and her other personas aged.
Noble finished whistling, then looked at Susan sideways. Searching for nausea, Finney knew. Paleness, shortness of breath, rapid blinking.
But the woman kept walking, undisturbed. The aria was only an aria to her.
The damage they had inflicted, it seemed, had begun to wear off.
Noble returned to small talk. He tried to forge a connection by broaching the subject of handsome box-office stars of the day: Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, John Wayne. Susan responded politely but distantly.
Then Noble was whistling another tune. This had been the signal cue for an identity named James. Again, Susan Franklin manifested no obvious reaction. Noble stopped whistling. He commented on the beauty of the gardens they were passing. A poem was brought to his mind: A song of the good green grass! A song no more of the city streets; a song of farms—a song of the soil of fields.
If Nina—the identity they had accessed using the stanza’s final line—heard the words, she kept it to herself. Susan Franklin merely listened, then nodded. Indeed, she agreed, the gardens were lovely.
By the time they returned to the clinic Noble had attempted to contact four of the seven personalities. At each turn, he had failed. When they thanked Susan for her time and took their leave, Finney had allowed himself to believe that she might enjoy a full recovery. They had damaged her, but perhaps not irrevocably.
In the years since, he sometimes had wondered if Noble had left it at that. At the time of the visit, he and Noble had been within months of their split; tensions were running high. His mentor would not have pushed Susan Franklin too hard, in Finney’s presence, risking an argument. But perhaps he had gone back to the clinic on his own, that year or another, seeking to uncover the personalities they once had accessed so easily. Perhaps he even had removed Susan Franklin from Carter Clinic, returning her to a cell and a regimen of electroshock, hypnosis, and drugs …
… or perhaps she had recovered completely. And lived a full life, despite the games they had played inside her head.
A phone was ringing.
Hawthorne had poured himself a second drink. He set it down, found the phone at his belt, and flipped it open. “Yes,” he said.
He listened.
“I think we’re making progress,” he said.
Finney found the bottle and refilled his glass.
“Right here,” Hawthorne said, and handed over the phone.
Cold fire had blossomed in his extremities.
It might have been pain, he thought. If he still had been occupying his body, that cold fire might have burned hot. But he was somewhere else, somewhere high in the mountains south of the Caspian Sea. Counting heartbeats.
His heart rate had slowed to barely forty beats per minute. After counting twenty thousand, he entered back into himself just enough to take measure of the situation. The rain, playing an intricate tattoo on the car around him. The blood not moving fast enough through his hands and feet; the cold fire blooming. But it was to be expected. When he moved again, the blood would move with him.
He counted another ten thousand heartbeats.
His leg pulsed. The leg wanted to distract him, to pull him back to reality. But without meditation, he would lose his mind to claustrophobia. He isolated the pain in his leg and set it cautiously outside himself, on the window ledge of his consciousness.
The air was surprisingly cold. The sensation was a curiosity, nothing more. He was calm, patient. He was a quiet little mouse. He had all the time in the world—all the heartbeats in infinity.
Still the rain fell.
The next time he returned to himself, something had called him back. A sound; a sensation. The engine of the Honda had turned over, he realized distantly. It was thrumming all around him, vibrating in his bones.
So it was morning.
A moment later, the car was moving.
He couldn’t tell if they were turning right or left; he was thrown both ways, one after the other. Something sharp jabbed into his temple, not quite hard enough to draw blood. The rear tires whispered smoothly, close to his ears. Then the engine was opening up. He retained enough awareness to tighten his grip on the panel, to hold it in place. He couldn’t feel the hand, nor the panel. But he could see them through the gloom: black and ghostly.
Air leaked into the compartment through invisible cracks. There was wetness, amid the cold.
Time passed—unknowable time, time without qualities.
They were idling again.
Then moving again. He heard a sound like blatting geese. Too close to this world, now. He needed to return to his spirit state, to shut himself down for another few hours. He went back to the place he had been, high in the cold mountains.
Yet part of him remained aware: of another turn, then of the pavement beneath the tires turning to crunching gravel. And then, as they pulled to a stop again, of voices, coming to his ears through bolts of cotton.
“… new car, Miz Lane?”
“You won’t believe it, Ray. I won it in a contest.”
“You’re right. I don’t believe it.”
“I never won anything in my life,” she said.
More conversation, lost to the wind. Then: “… hate to do this, but … out of the car?”
The trunk was opening. Then closing. The back doors were opening. Then closing.
“Sorry about that, Miz Lane. Just needed to be sure …”
“Have a good day, Ray.”
“You too, Miz Lane. Looks like a lousy one. But I’ll do my best.”
Once again, the car moved.
He deepened his breathing, saturating his lungs with oxygen, returning his heart to its frigid half-beat. More hours of stillness lay ahead. More hours of calm and patience. He could not give in to the leap of excitement in his belly, not yet.
But the excitement was there. For the car continued to roll through the rainy morning that he could not see. He could not see, but he knew: He had done it.
He was inside the gates.
Finney finished speaking, and watched closely.
He had doubted that the description would produce any discernible reaction. Therapy had been conducted recently enough that the subject, even if he achieved consciousness, would remain in a state of catatonia. But there was a response to the words he had used, etched clearly into Zattout’s face.
It was the child-contortion again: the brow tightening, the nostrils flaring. A small man, Finney had said, using words provided by Thomas Warren. Dark clothes. Wiry build. Skilled at the art of evasion …
Zattout moaned.
He tossed his head to the left.
Finney leaned back, considering.
The depatterning already had begun to take hold. The childlike fear in the subject’s face—the same fear Finney had seen in Zattout’s reaction to the guard dog—indicated that his regression had accelerated. As the adult persona broke down, the child-identity was coming to the fore. And the child-identity was very afraid.
But it was not rational fear. This was something else. Fear of the words he had used, Finney thought. They meant something to Zattout—something more than they meant to him.
It was another path that could be explored. Or could have been explored, if he’d had the information hours before. Now, however, depatterning had commenced. Zattout no longer was capable of speech.
But until the second treatment was administered he still could hear, and react.
“I want you to find a good feeling inside yourself,” Finney said.
The subject’s face twitched. “A good feeling,” Finney repeated. “A feeling of strength, and comfort, and fulfillment. Locate it within your body.”
Zattout gave another moan, low and unhappy.
“It’s all right,” Finney said gently. “Let yourself feel good. There’s been enough suffering, hasn’t there?”
More signs of distress. Zattout was determined to resist. Let it go, Finney thought. Continue with the depatterning.
But the process of psychic driving would consume months; and Thomas Warren’s need for information had sounded urgent. The man on whom he required insight was a fugitive, a member of a sleeper cell that he thou
ght might be known to Zattout. Along with the brief description, Warren had offered a startling detail. This man had been eliminating the members of his cell, one after another. In fact …
… here Warren had hesitated, as if aware that the possibility he was about to voice sounded preposterous …
… it was possible, he added, that the man in black would seek to dispose of Zattout himself.
He’d quickly rushed on. Security forces would make short work of any intruder at the compound. But it was something to keep in mind, when Finney put his description to the prisoner—a possible fulcrum from which leverage might be gained.
Finney went over it again.
A man was eliminating members of his own terrorist cell.
Zattout may have been next on the list of targets.
When a description of the man had been offered, Zattout had reacted.
He had reacted with a child-part of himself, a part that had been brought iatrogenically to the forefront of his brain.
That part of him, at least, believed that he was vulnerable. And that part was profoundly afraid. Zattout did not know of the hidden sensors, nor the strength of the marine guard. To him, the thought of an intruder was far from inconceivable.
“Have you found the good feeling?” he asked in a murmur.
No reaction.
“Look into the feeling. Imagine that a child is feeling this. Children feel pure things, don’t they? How wonderful and pure it must feel, to the child.”
Zattout mumbled, vowels without consonants.
“Let the child come up inside you. Let the child know that you’re there to help with the suffering—that it’s all right to feel the good feeling.”
“Aaa,” Zattout said.
Finney paused.
“Aaa.”
“The child is you, isn’t it?”
Zattout’s head tossed the other way, to the right.
“We can stop, if you like. But wouldn’t you like to embrace the good feeling? If we can make the child feel better, you’ll feel better. But to do this, you must accept the child. Hold it close.”
For the next several heartbeats, Zattout fought. Then a change occurred. His face washed with acceptance; then with frightened shame.