But once it was in me, even with the acid fracturing my brain, I knew immediately what it was. They’d been testing ketamine as a truth serum. And I’d felt a light sample once. This was not a light sample.
A young man—maybe eighteen—was escorted by two men into the room and they closed the door behind him. He stripped and came over to me, got on his knees, and began sucking my penis. I’d seen this, or something like it, happen to others in the program. The point was to compromise the agent by documenting him in certain positions—and homosexual activities were a popular way to leverage your total loyalty. I stared at the light and felt the boy’s mouth up and down the length of my penis. It felt amazing, and my head rolled back, and I moaned for what seemed like a very long time. He didn’t stop. I heard the door open. I heard cameras flash. Their light exploding behind my eyelids at irregular intervals. But I didn’t care. Nothing but lights and the feeling I’d be blind soon when I closed my eyes, and this blurred, distorted, beautiful boy in my lap when I opened them. I felt on the verge of orgasm for what seemed like an hour, but I never had one.
A man’s voice ordered the boy to stop.
I was already compromised. Whatever footage and recording they had were plenty. I felt the boy’s hands on my thighs as he started to stand, and I asked him to wait. I felt his erect penis hard up against my ribs as he got up and pressed into me.
“Please kiss me,” I said.
He sat on my lap and we kissed, my mouth open to the glorious invasion of his tongue. The ketamine had me floating endlessly—one of its effects was that it made you feel weightless and like you were drifting down slowly into a void without any bottom. My head grew cloudy with images. I tried to touch the boy, but my hands were still tied. I’d never felt someone lick my neck and I couldn’t believe the feeling. He kissed me again, and it was like we were alone, together, drifting and falling ecstatically through endless floating space and I never wanted to leave. Someone pulled him away from me.
I stayed locked naked and bound in that room. My mind stayed bent. The ketamine leveled off and faded about two hours later, but the grip of the acid was suffocating. I wanted it over. More than anything.
They turned the room temperature below freezing. I lost all control and shivered and shook while they interrogated me for an hour. My penis remained embarrassingly erect from whatever the chemist had shot me with. I tried to think of a chemical that would have this effect, but among the acid and the cold and the rapid aggressive questions, I couldn’t focus on any thoughts of my own. I saw my breath. The concrete floor that agonized my feet seemed somehow even colder than the air.
A man brought in a strobe light. Another came with a small table that he put down in front of me. The first man positioned the light in front of my eyes. They fastened a neck brace on me—one that totally restricted my head and left my eyes helpless to whatever assault they had planned. The overhead light went out seconds before the strobe started.
From a speaker in the wall, the faceless interrogator barked questions at me.
“What is your name?”
I had no idea at first. I laughed.
The strobe light made me sick. I tried to swing my head away, but I was completely bound. I vomited all over myself and felt it grow shockingly cold on my chest and legs. I could barely talk, but I finally answered my name.
“Have you ever betrayed the agency in any way?”
Answering was so difficult. I had no control of my body. I was falling into hypothermia—that much I knew. Every breath hurt. And the strobe light relentlessly attacked what little control I had of my mind. I spasmed repeatedly and lost control of my bowels and they left me in my own mess, never cleaning me the rest of the day. It turned cold. Soon, I would sit in my own frozen waste.
The interrogator said, “Answer me. And open your eyes.”
When I pushed my thighs against my bindings, I found that my vomit had formed a fragile skin of ice. When I moved—as little as I could—the sound of ice quietly cracking came from the vomit falling on the chair. I faded in and out of consciousness.
“Open your eyes!”
I did as I was told. With what little control I had left, I fought to not say anything that could make me a security risk.
He yelled the question again.
The strobe light had turned me blind. The questions kept coming. Are you trustworthy? Would you ever betray your country? Would you ever betray your country for the country you’d left? You’re not walking out of this room until you’re broken. Tell us that. Tell us you’re not walking out of this room until you’re broken.
I knew enough. They might be killing me, but I wasn’t giving them the satisfaction of a reason to do so. Plus, I was barely able to form a sentence. Whatever their plan was, they’d rendered me useless. I tried to think. To tell myself all drugs have their half-life and will fade. That I was a chemist. I knew this. But still, life kaleidoscoped and strobed and attacked. Light was a glorious enemy. Beautiful one second, jackhammering the brain the next.
I struggled to speak. “Then I am not walking out of this room.”
The cold was close to killing me. I screamed in pain. I screamed, thinking it was my last chance to be saved. I screamed. It was all that was left of me. Two men came in the room and untied me and brought me to a warmer room and covered me in blankets. I was going to live. And that could be very good—or very bad—news. The men stood over me. I still couldn’t make out faces. Objects I knew were stationary—bookcases, unoccupied chairs, a vase of flowers—swelled and moved like trees in a windstorm.
Maybe thirty minutes later, they brought me back to the room and tied me to the chair, the strobe light away from it. The room was comfortable with the heat cranking. Maybe eighty degrees. But I knew the room would shortly be heated to a hundred and five degrees and the interrogation would resume. The strobe came back on. The room grew hotter and hotter. A hundred and ten. A hundred and fifteen. By a hundred and twenty, I’d seen men start to die of heatstroke. One twenty-five or thirty, and you were sure to die.
I don’t know how long it lasted. I passed out.
I woke naked in a sealed box no wider than a couple of coffins. Tall enough to get on my hands and knees, but that was all. I’d been shot with ketamine again and it was starting to peak. The acid still raged inside of me. I was overcome with my own stink. I threw up.
Lights lined the walls and a voice kept repeating the phrase “You can stop this at any time.” How many times can you hear a sentence repeated for over an hour? Maybe thousands? You can stop this at any time. You can stop this any time. You can … It could have been ten hours or ten days. I thought about those we left to sleep for six months of this. I would live in this box and listen to that sentence until I died. I screamed and wept constantly and begged them for it to end. Never an answer, just the same recorded message over and over. I’d vomited so often it was impossible not to crawl or lie in it.
Telling them anything they wanted started to feel like a welcome manner to end this hell.
Every hour, they opened the box. I heard it and saw blurry figures. Muffled men’s voices. I would feel another shot, and the familiar floating sensation of ketamine would come raging back. They would close and lock the box again.
I felt myself suspended, drifting down again. But without the boy. I was locked in the box, my box, and set off to drift in the infinite loneliness of the universe.
At some point I was removed. I couldn’t stand. Weak and disoriented. I screamed again, weeping and gulping breaths as a man carried me to a bed and placed covers over me. I didn’t sleep all night. I think it was night. I remember hearing my constant screams. At one point, I collapsed on the way to the bathroom, dragged myself onto the tile, and then couldn’t stand or see shapes, and I passed out in my spreading pool of urine, only understanding my situation when I was dragged back to bed and tied down, still wet and stinking in all my waste.
I’d remember that boy forever. Maybe there have been only a h
andful of days that I haven’t thought about him. I still feel him on my skin. He lasted forever.
I don’t feel the torture anymore.
They didn’t break me. They didn’t kill me. But they became my silent enemy, and I knew I would try to destroy them if I could.
1981
It took a year after the interrogations for me to find an opening to leave the agency. That life. To begin my series of new identities and new lives. But every new person I became always looked over his shoulder. Though I don’t think I ever knew fear again after they’d finished with me in that room.
They tried to destroy all of the MK-ULTRA papers in 1973. Helms, the head of the CIA, did it at Gottlieb’s request, and Helms knew this was something that could never become public. However, twenty thousand pages were misfiled and never destroyed, and they were released under the Freedom of Information Act in 1975. Congress held hearings. People were shocked. But nothing happened. More hearings in 1977. The same—brief horror followed by everyone forgetting about it and moving on.
A couple years later, I started sharing the stories with some investigative reporters who I trusted could keep a secret. I knew experiments that were not covered in those twenty thousand pages. But my attempts at anonymity, I realized early, were futile. And the stories have yet to appear.
I’ve sent copies of everything to Hans. I’ve sent copies to a PO Box in Portland, Maine, and one in Lincoln, Nebraska, and mailed the keys to the Times journalist, who’s mailed it to a friend. A friend now at risk. I hope there is no way the agency can know about that. But I also know they are everywhere. Nowhere and everywhere.
1951
I was a graduate school chemist at Northwestern University. I remember snow, which I know I will never see again. I wasn’t this man. With only one different choice somewhere along the way, maybe I would have never been this man. I don’t remember the man I was before the agency. He disappeared when the man from the agency appeared.
1981
A new message from Hans told me to call him and he left the number and time. We hadn’t spoken in decades. When I called, all he said was, “I can’t protect you anymore. They’re on their way.”
When I went to hurry home, I burned my hand on the car handle. And on the steering wheel again. It can be damn near impossible to even drive out here.
Still, this cruel landscape has become my home.
Since I heard from Hans, I haven’t so much as left my cabin in three days. Nor have I slept. Methamphetamines are one of the easiest drugs to make. My brain slips here and there from sleep deprivation, but I have enough control to see this through.
They’ll come soon, and I’ll make sure I’m awake.
And when they open my door—front or back—they will be dosed with one of the early experiments with the VX nerve agent. I’ve carried it and made deadly gasses for years. The hard thing was picking one that would kill them within a minute or less, but have its power dissipate to safe levels so that when we’re all found, no one else will be in danger.
Never leave an institution that seeks to kill you without the means to kill them.
I have a gas mask for the VX. I put it on, and the vision glass fogs. I wear two pairs of latex gloves. Even though this is mainly an airborne weapon, you can kill yourself if you break the skin.
I’ve turned off the swamp cooler. It blows too much air for me to hear them coming. I spread the nerve agent over the middle of the floor and by the doors.
I have a cyanide capsule in my mouth that will end it soon after I watch them take their last breaths. My life is over. Somehow, this brings waves of relief.
Inhaling twenty-five to thirty micrograms of this VX strain is enough to kill a person in minutes. Once they open my door, they’ll be dosed with over two hundred micrograms. It immediately begins to paralyze the muscles. And then freezes the diaphragm, which causes the suffocation and death.
A car pulls up outside. I sit in my corner chair.
I’m covered in sweat. No swamp cooler, and in the confining rubber of the mask. The increasingly sweltering wet mask limits my vision a bit. But I can still make out their faces and thick, cruel bodies. They are the same as the agency killers I knew in the fifties. One replaced by a clone, and so on. A seemingly enormous supply of men with no skills other than to overpower and kill. Any agency with enemies will forever need these limited men.
The sunlight through the window illuminates dust specks in the air. The nerve agent hits them as soon as they fully enter. They shout at me to hold up my hands. Which I do, but the gas is already starting to kill them. They can no longer speak. The coughing has started. I watch to see if they will be able to step forward and try to beat me to death. The shorter one holds a gun on me—the taller man a baseball bat. The gun falls out of the short man’s hand, and he drops to the floor. The man with the bat takes two steps toward me and collapses. They look at each other. At me. They gasp for air that will never again come, terror in their eyes.
Briefly, I wonder whether or not it matters if I witness them die, or if knowing is enough. I close my eyes. I breathe. My face slippery from the sweat. I keep my eyes closed. I have seen enough death, caused enough death, to ever want to see another one. I bite down on the capsule and wait for it all to end.
PART III
EVERYTHING HAPPENS TO ME
THE STAND-IN
BY J.D. HORN
Deepwell
“I learned about the Kennedy assassination while I was stripping for the prison guard.” Donna waited for the line to land, then sensing a tough room, stepped it up. “Tits out and squatting in front of this Mack truck with a vagina, and she just bursts into tears.”
The kid sitting across from her—couldn’t be more than thirty, corn-silk hair, weak chin, done up like a newly minted missionary in a white short-sleeve button-up—shifted in his seat but said nothing. Donna didn’t make a habit of letting just anyone into her house, but after the kid called two days earlier and asked to meet her, she got help at the senior center looking him up on the Internet. She found his résumé—a fancy school, followed by a meandering mishmash of jobs, pictures of him and his girlfriend drinking beer in Puerto Vallarta, pictures of him and his girlfriend drinking beer in Portland, videos of their tiny muttsy, whateveradoodle dog. The kid seemed rudderless, but harmless. He was interested, and Donna was bored, so she figured why the hell not? She’d talk to him. Besides, Sally was waiting nearby if Donna needed her help.
It was July. She turned off the AC to discourage a too-long visit. Outside it was a buck twenty, and even with the shades drawn and the ceiling fan turning, it was pushing ninety in her kitchen. The smell of fresh paint—one of her boys had talked her into letting him paint her cabinets white and the wall behind them chartreuse, because one or the other would “pop”—lingered a full week after the work, growing sharper in the mounting heat. It was starting to get to her, but the kid didn’t seem bothered.
A fat fly that had followed him in buzzed overhead, circling like it was waiting for permission to land.
“A grown damned woman,” she mumbled, her own enthusiasm waning. “Bawling.” Donna had been dining and drinking on the story of her incarceration and the events leading up to it for fifty-odd years. The kid’s dubious stare wasn’t the reaction she’d come to expect.
“I wasn’t aware,” he said, enunciating with the smarmy cool diction of an NPR correspondent, “they had prisoners squat as part of the intake process in 1963.” He folded his hands on the table next to the white robot-looking microphone recording their talk to his laptop. Across from him sat the box of chardonnay she’d demanded as compensation for speaking with him. If she knew he was going to be a pain in the ass, she would’ve demanded bourbon.
Donna raised her eyes to the faces of the Rat Pack staring down from a black-and-white photo on the wall behind him and offered up a silent prayer for strength to the city’s patron saints. “I don’t know. Don’t remember.” She scratched her temple at the edge of he
r lace-front wig’s nylon cap. “Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t.”
“Details are important to establishing the veracity of your account.”
“Veracity?” she said, rolling her eyes at the kid’s shameless sincerity. “You can’t tell a story as long as I have without embellishing a point here and there.”
“The unembellished, and with any luck verifiable, truth will go a long way in helping me help you set the record straight.”
Donna swatted at the fly. “This is Palm Springs. About the only thing left around here anymore that’s straight is the record.” She allowed herself a cackle at that one. “Not that I mind the boys. My boys. They adore me. They see me as dangerous, glamorous. Beautiful, like I used to be. Not this wheezing colostomy bag I’ve become.”
The kid tapped his fingers on the table’s Formica top. Genuine midcentury modern, a succession of her boys had cooed about her chrome dining set when first they laid eyes on the “antique” Donna had bought new. The kid stopped midstrum, as if he realized the sound was being picked up on the recording. Or maybe he misread her contemplation of herself as another midcentury modern relic as irritation. He polished a spot with his shirt cuff.
Donna felt an inexplicable flash of sympathy for him. She sighed. “Maybe it is the truth. Who the hell knows after all these years? Who the hell cares? After this long, it’s the story that matters, not the truth.”
“The truth is why I’ve come.”
“Then I’ll sow a few grains in from time to time.” She placed her cup beneath the wine box spigot and held it there till it was half full. “So, this program you’re doing …?”
“It’s a podcast. You are familiar—” he began, the obvious—given her age—question forming.
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