by Blake Crouch
I look toward my feet, and the man’s face racks into focus. He’s staring at me through the face shield of an aluminized hazmat suit with a self-contained breathing apparatus.
Glancing at the woman behind my head, he says, “One, two, three.”
They hoist me onto a gurney and lock padded restraints around my ankles and wrists.
“Only for your protection, Dr. Dessen.”
I watch the ceiling scroll past, forty or fifty feet above.
Where the hell am I? A hangar?
I catch a glint of memory—a needle puncturing my neck. I was injected with something. This is some crazy hallucination.
A radio squawks, “Extraction team, report. Over.”
The woman says with excitement bleeding through her voice, “We have Dessen. We’re en route. Over.”
I hear the squeak of wheels rolling.
“Copy that. Initial condition assessment? Over.”
She reaches down with a gloved hand and wakes some kind of monitoring device that’s been Velcroed to my left arm.
“Pulse rate: one-fifteen. BP: one-forty over ninety-two. Temp: ninety-eight-point-nine. Oh-two sat: ninety-five percent. Gamma: point-eight seven. ETA thirty seconds. Out.”
A buzzing sound startles me.
We move through a pair of vaultlike doors that are slowly opening.
Jesus Christ.
Stay calm. This isn’t real.
The wheels squeak faster, more urgently.
We’re in a corridor lined with plastic, my eyes squinting against the onslaught of light from fluorescent bulbs shining overhead.
The doors behind us slam shut with an ominous clang, like the gates to a keep.
They wheel me into an operating room toward an imposing figure in a positive pressure suit, standing under an array of surgical lights.
He smiles down at me through his face shield and says, as if he knows me, “Welcome back, Jason. Congratulations. You did it.”
Back?
I can only see his eyes, but they don’t remind me of anyone I’ve ever met.
“Are you experiencing any pain?” he asks.
I shake my head.
“Do you know how you got the cuts and bruises on your face?”
Shake.
“Do you know who you are?”
I nod.
“Do you know where you are?”
Shake.
“Do you recognize me?”
Shake.
“I’m Leighton Vance, chief executive and medical officer. We’re colleagues and friends.” He holds up a pair of surgical shears. “I need to get you out of these clothes.”
He removes the monitoring device and goes to work on my jeans and boxer shorts, tossing them into a metal tray. As he cuts off my shirt, I gaze up at the lights burning down on me, trying not to panic.
But I’m naked and strapped to a gurney.
No, I remind myself, I’m hallucinating that I’m naked and strapped to a gurney. Because none of this is real.
Leighton lifts the tray holding my shoes and clothes and hands it to someone behind my head, outside my line of sight. “Test everything.”
Footsteps rush out of the room.
I note the sharp bite of isopropyl alcohol a second before Leighton cleans a swatch of skin on the underside of my arm.
He ties a tourniquet above my elbow.
“Just drawing some blood,” he says, taking a large-gauge hypodermic needle from the instrument tray.
He’s good. I don’t even feel the sting.
When he’s finished, Leighton rolls the gurney toward the far side of the OR to a glass door with a touchscreen mounted on the wall beside it.
“Wish I could tell you this is the fun part,” he says. “If you’re too disoriented to remember what’s about to happen, that’s probably for the best.”
I try to ask what’s happening, but words still elude me. Leighton’s fingers dance across the touchscreen. The glass door opens, and he pushes me into a chamber that’s just large enough to hold the gurney.
“Ninety seconds,” he says. “You’ll be fine. It never killed any of the test subjects.”
There’s a pneumatic hiss, and then the glass door glides shut.
Recessed lights in the ceiling glow a chilled blue.
I crane my neck.
The walls on either side of me are covered with elaborate apertures.
A fine, supercooled mist sprays out of the ceiling, coating me head to toe.
My body tenses, the frigid droplets beading on my skin and freezing solid.
As I shiver, the walls of the chamber begin to hum.
A white vapor trickles out of the apertures with a sustained hiss that grows louder and louder.
It gushes.
Then jets.
Opposing streams crash into each other over the gurney, filling the chamber with a dense fog that blots out the overhead light. Where it touches my skin, the frozen droplets explode in bursts of agony.
The fans reverse.
Within five seconds, the gas is sucked out of the chamber, which now holds a peculiar smell, like the air on a summer afternoon moments before a thunderstorm—dry lightning and ozone.
The reaction of the gas and the supercooled liquid on my skin has created a sizzling foam that burns like an acid bath.
I’m grunting, thrashing against the restraints and wondering how much longer this could possibly be allowed to go on. My threshold for pain is high, and this is straddling the line of make-it-stop or kill me.
My thoughts fire at the speed of light.
Is there even a drug capable of this? Creating hallucinations and pain at this level of horrifying clarity?
This is too intense, too real.
What if this is actually happening?
Is this some CIA shit? Am I in a black clinic in the throes of human experimentation? Have I been kidnapped by these people?
Glorious, warm water shoots out of the ceiling with the force of a fire hose, pummeling the excruciating foam away.
When the water shuts off, heated air roars out of the apertures, blasting my skin like a hot desert wind.
The pain vanishes.
I’m wide-awake.
The door behind me opens and the gurney rolls back out.
Leighton looks down at me. “Wasn’t so bad, right?” He pushes me through the OR into an adjoining patient room and unlocks the restraints around my ankles and wrists.
With a gloved hand, he pulls me up on the gurney, my head swimming, the room spinning for a moment before the world finally rights itself.
He observes me.
“Better?”
I nod.
There’s a bed and a dresser with a change of clothes folded neatly on top. The walls are padded. There are no sharp edges. As I slide to the edge of the stretcher, Leighton takes hold of my arm above the elbow and helps me to stand.
My legs are rubber, worthless.
He leads me over to the bed.
“I’ll leave you to get dressed and come back when your lab work is in. It won’t take long. Are you all right for me to step out for a minute?”
I finally find my voice: “I don’t understand what’s happening. I don’t know where I—”
“The disorientation will pass. I’ll be closely monitoring. We’ll get you through this.”
He wheels the gurney to the door but stops in the threshold, glancing back at me through his face shield. “It’s really good to see you again, brother. Feels like Mission Control when Apollo Thirteen returned. We’re all real proud of you.”
The door closes after him.
Three deadbolts fire into their housings like a trio of gunshots.
I rise from the bed and walk over to the dresser, unstable on my feet.
I’m so weak it takes me several minutes to get the clothes on—good slacks, a linen shirt, no belt.
From just above the door, a surveillance camera watches me.
I return to the bed, sit alone in th
is sterile, silent room, trying to conjure my last concrete memory. The mere attempt feels like drowning ten feet from shore. There are pieces of memory lying on the beach, and I can see them, I can almost touch them, but my lungs are filling up with water. I can’t keep my head above the surface. The more I strain to assemble the pieces, the more energy I expend, the more I flail, the more I panic.
All I have as I sit in this white, padded room is—
Thelonious Monk.
The smell of red wine.
Standing in a kitchen chopping an onion.
A teenager drawing.
Wait.
Not a teenager.
My teenager.
My son.
Not a kitchen.
My kitchen.
My home.
It was family night. We were cooking together. I can see Daniela’s smile. I can hear her voice and the jazz. Smell the onion, the sour sweetness of wine on Daniela’s breath. See the glassiness in her eyes. What a safe and perfect place, our kitchen on family night.
But I didn’t stay. For some reason, I left. Why?
I’m right there, on the brink of recollection….
The deadbolts retract, rapid-fire, and the door to the patient room opens. Leighton has traded the positive pressure suit for a classic lab coat, and he’s standing in the door frame grinning, as if he’s barely keeping a lid on a wellspring of anticipation. I can now see that he’s roughly my age and boarding-school handsome, his face peppered conservatively with five-o’clock shadow.
“Good news,” he says. “All clear.”
“Clear of what?”
“Radiation exposure, biohazards, infectious disease. We’ll have complete results from your blood scan in the morning, but you’re cleared from quarantine. Oh. I have this for you.”
He hands me a Ziploc bag containing a set of keys and a money clip.
“Jason Dessen” has been scrawled in black Sharpie on a piece of masking tape affixed to the plastic.
“Shall we? They’re all waiting for you.”
I pocket what are apparently my personal effects and follow Leighton through the OR.
Back in the corridor, a half-dozen workers are busy pulling the plastic down from the walls.
When they see me, they all begin to applaud.
A woman shouts, “You rock, Dessen!”
Glass doors whisk apart as we approach.
My strength and balance are returning.
He leads me into a stairwell, and we ascend, the metal steps clanging under our footfalls.
“You all right on these?” Leighton asks.
“Yeah. Where are we going?”
“Debrief.”
“But I don’t even—”
“It’s better if you just hold your thoughts for the interview. You know—protocol and shit.”
Two flights up, he opens a glass door that’s an inch thick. We enter another corridor with floor-to-ceiling windows on one side. They look out over a hangar, which the corridors appear to encircle—four levels in all—like an atrium.
I drift toward the windows to get a better look, but Leighton guides me instead through the second door on the left, ushering me into a dimly lit room, where a woman in a black pantsuit is standing behind a table as if awaiting my arrival.
“Hi, Jason,” she says.
“Hi.”
Her eyes capture my stare for a moment as Leighton straps the monitoring device around my left arm.
“You don’t mind, do you?” he asks. “I’d feel better keeping tabs on your vitals a little while longer. We’ll be out of the woods soon.”
Leighton gently presses his hand into the small of my back and urges me the rest of the way inside.
I hear the door close behind me.
The woman is fortyish. Short, black hair with bangs just skirting striking eyes that somehow manage to be concurrently kind and penetrating.
The lighting is soft and unthreatening, like a movie theater moments before the film begins.
There are two straight-backed wooden chairs, and on the small table a laptop, a pitcher of water, two drinking glasses, a steel carafe, and a steaming mug that fills the room with the aroma of good coffee.
The walls and ceiling are made of smoked glass.
“Jason, if you have a seat, we can get started.”
I hesitate for five long seconds, debating just walking out, but something tells me that would be a bad, possibly catastrophic, idea.
So I sit in the chair, reach for the pitcher, and pour myself a glass of water.
The woman says, “If you’re hungry, we can have food brought in.”
“No thanks.”
Finally taking her seat across from me, she pushes her glasses up the bridge of her nose and types something on the laptop.
“It is—” She checks her wristwatch. “—12:07 a.m., October the second. I’m Amanda Lucas, employee ID number nine-five-six-seven, and I’m joined tonight by…” She gestures to me.
“Um, Jason Dessen.”
“Thank you, Jason. By way of background, and for the record, at approximately 10:59 p.m. on October first, Technician Chad Hodge, during a routine interior locality audit, discovered Dr. Dessen lying unconscious on the floor of the hangar. The extraction team was activated, and Dr. Dessen was removed to quarantine at 11:24 p.m. Following decontamination and primary lab work clearance by Dr. Leighton Vance, Dr. Dessen was escorted to the conference theater on sublevel two, where our first debriefing interview begins.”
She looks up at me, smiling now.
“Jason, we are thrilled to have you back. The hour is late, but most of the team rushed in from the city for this. As you might have guessed, they’re all looking on behind the glass.”
Applause breaks out all around us, accompanied by cheers and several people shouting my name.
The lights come up just enough for me to see through the walls. Theater seating surrounds the glassed-in interview cubicle. Fifteen or twenty people are on their feet, most smiling, a few even wiping their eyes as if I’ve returned from some heroic mission.
I notice that two of them are armed, the butts of their pistols gleaming under the lights.
These men aren’t smiling or clapping.
Amanda scoots her chair back and, rising, begins to clap along with the others.
She seems to be deeply moved as well.
And all I can think is, What the hell has happened to me?
When the applause subsides, Amanda settles back into her seat.
She says, “Pardon our enthusiasm, but so far, you’re the only one to return.”
I have no idea what she’s talking about. Part of me wants to say just that, but part of me suspects that maybe I shouldn’t.
The lights dim back down.
I clutch my glass of water in my hands like a lifeline.
“Do you know how long you’ve been gone?” she asks.
Gone where?
“No.”
“Fourteen months.”
Jesus.
“Is that a shock to you, Jason?”
“You could say that.”
“Well, pins and needles and bated breath and asses on the edges of our seats. We’ve been waiting for over a year to ask these questions: What did you see? Where did you go? How did you get back? Tell us everything, and please start from the beginning.”
I take a sip of water, clinging to my last solid memory like a crumbling handhold on a cliff face—leaving my house on family night.
And then…
I walked down the sidewalk through a cool, autumn night. I could hear the noise of the Cubs game in all the bars.
To where?
Where was I going?
“Just take your time, Jason. We’re in no rush.”
Ryan Holder.
That’s who I was going to see.
I walked to Village Tap and had a drink—two drinks, world-class Scotch, to be exact—with my old college roommate, Ryan Holder.
Is he somehow resp
onsible for this?
I wonder again: Is this actually happening?
I raise the glass of water. It looks perfectly real, right down to the way it sweats and the cold wetness of it on my fingertips.
I look into Amanda’s eyes.
I examine the walls.
They’re not melting.
If this is some drug-induced trip, it’s like none I’ve ever heard of. No visual or auditory distortions. No euphoria. It’s not that this place doesn’t feel real. I just shouldn’t be here. It’s somehow my presence that’s the lie. I’m not even exactly sure what that means, only that I feel it in my core.
No, this is not a hallucination. This is something else entirely.
“Let’s try a different approach,” Amanda says. “What’s the last thing you remember before waking up in the hangar?”
“I was at a bar.”
“What were you doing there?”
“Seeing an old friend.”
“And where was this bar?” she asks.
“Logan Square.”
“So you were still in Chicago.”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, can you describe…?”
Her voice drops off into silence.
I see the El.
It’s dark.
It’s quiet.
Too quiet for Chicago.
Someone is coming.
Someone who wants to hurt me.
My heart begins to race.
My hands sweat.
I set the glass down on the table.
“Jason, Leighton is telling me your vitals are becoming elevated.”
Her voice is back but still an ocean away.
Is this a trick?
Am I being messed with?
No, do not ask her that. Do not say those words. Be the man they think you are. These people are cool, calm, and two of them are armed. Whatever they need to hear you say, say it. Because if they realize you aren’t the person they think you are, then what?
Then maybe you never leave this place.
My head is beginning to throb. Reaching up, I touch the back of my skull and graze a knot that’s so tender it causes me to wince.
“Jason?”
Was I hurt?
Did someone attack me? What if I was brought here? What if these people, despite how nice they seem, are in league with the person who did this to me?
I touch the side of my head, feel the damage from a second blow.
“Jason.”
I see a geisha mask.
I’m naked and helpless.