American Nocturne

by Hank Schwaeble

  Philo finished his drink in one long gulp and stood. “Would you like some more?”

  “No, thank you.” Seth drained the rest of his glass and handed it to Philo. “Very refreshing. Now, are you going to answer my question?”

  Philo took the glass from Seth, gestured for him to take a seat, and headed back toward the kitchen. “You’re here, because I want you to admit that I was right and you were wrong,” he said over his shoulder just before he disappeared from the room.

  Seth tilted his head back and leaned against the cushion of the loveseat, rubbing his hands over his face. He should have known. Son of a bitch. Philo had dragged him here to be a captive debate opponent. Wonderful.

  “I certainly hope that’s not the only reason, Philo,” Seth said, his voice raised so it would carry into the next room.

  Seth heard the sound of a faucet, more clinking.

  “I told you I had proof for you, and I meant it, if that’s what you mean,” Philo said reentering the room. “But first, I’d like you to admit it. That’s the purpose of proof, isn‘t it? To force an admission?”

  “Admit what, Philo? That you didn’t falsify your research?”

  “No. You rather conclusively established that, didn’t you? I’m man enough to admit it. But that really doesn’t disprove my thesis, now, does it?”

  “What’re you saying?”

  “I’m saying I want you to admit my side is correct. That humanity, human behavior, the human personality, is overwhelmingly the product of environmental conditioning.”

  Seth gave a mild snort and looked down, shaking his head. “Get real,” he said. “I know that’s not true.”

  “Oh, you do? And how can you be so sure?” Philo eased himself down into the chair on the other side of the coffee table. “I’m talking about behavior, Seth,” he said, his eyes narrowing. “Not disease markers or glandular disorders or eye color. I mean who we are and how we perceive the world.”

  “You told me you had proof to show me. If you don’t, you can just take me back now.”

  “In a minute. Please, just relax and pretend we’re not enemies. If you could let go of your biases, you’d see that I was right.”

  “Jesus, Philo. We‘ve gone over this, in print and in person, at least a dozen times. I’m the one on solid ground, here.”

  “But what is your proof? You talk genetics and make associations and demand proof, but where’s yours?”

  “Twins, Philo. How many times do we have to do this? There’s no getting around the Twin Studies.”

  Philo did not immediately respond. He merely stared at Seth expectantly, like he was waiting for him to finish his sentence. Seth wasn’t surprised Philo had no rejoinder. Studies of twins separated at birth provided compelling evidence that an incredible amount of human behavior was genetically predetermined. Although the separation of identicals at birth was a relatively rare occurrence, the few cases that were analyzed in the 1980s, and several since, revealed twins raised in separate households grew up to lead strikingly similar lives. They had the same hobbies, the same kinds of jobs, the same tastes in movies, the same books on their shelves and the same styles of clothes in their closets. In a famous case, one set of twins moved to the same suburb as adults even though each was raised in a different state, married women with the same first names and occupations, and had the same number of children. One of those twins had been raised in the home of a wealthy doctor and his socialite wife; the other by a construction worker whose wife worked at a supermarket. The odds against such similarities occurring by chance were too astronomical to calculate.

  “Those studies are hardly conclusive,” Philo said a few moments later. “Plenty of twins show highly individualized characteristics.”

  Seth sighed, audibly. “Yes, except when they are separated at birth. Once you remove their desire to differentiate themselves from one another, take away their awareness of their twin, you see their natural genetic programming takeover.”

  “So, it all comes down to fate in your eyes, then? We’re all just playing out our destinies, dictated at conception.”

  Seth’s eyes dropped to the coffee table in front of him. He knew this was the one inconsistency in his outlook. If character was fate, and if character was mostly predetermined, then human lives indeed were determined by fate. But, like his father, Seth believed in free will, the ability of people to make their own choices and decisions. His father had instilled such a belief in him at an early age, and Seth had watched the man defy his genetic hardwiring for years beyond his diagnosed life expectancy through sheer willpower. The role of free will remained the unresolved question in his belief structure.

  “What we are is outside of our control. What we make out of what we are doesn’t have to be.”

  It was Philo’s turn to snort. “What kind of drivel is that, coming from a scientist? Tell me, Seth, did you happen to overhear some oncologist tell your mother her husband was genetically predisposed? Did that make it seem like God Himself had imprinted your father’s fate in his cells?” Philo leaned forward. “Are you still trying to figure out what caused Daddy’s death? Why you had to grow up fatherless?”

  The muscles in Seth’s jaw balled up into tiny fists. Seth’s father may not have been around for much of his youth, but Seth never thought of himself as fatherless. Kent Wilson had become more of a presence in death than he had been in life. Seth’s mother need only ask the question, what would your father think, and all thought of misbehavior or disobedience evaporated. He was an ever-present figure.

  “Leave my father out of this.”

  “I meant no offense. But surely you see how his death has clouded your objectivity. Robbed you of your scientific detachment.”

  Seth saw no such thing. His belief in free will notwithstanding, genes, he knew, predicted everything. He knew it viscerally, so much so that his investigation and research seemed more like exercises in confirmation than discovery. People were not, contrary to popular opinion, blank slates. They were organic machines constructed according to precise blueprints, the performance of which was dictated by the specifications in the plans. Outside factors could influence how the machine performed, but only to a degree allowed by the genetic design. A genius may add a few IQ points through rigorous education, but he’d never become an idiot by dropping out of school. And an idiot couldn’t become a genius by hitting the books. He could only become a well-read idiot.

  “Philo, I’m not going to sit here and debate this with you. I’ve set out my arguments in numerous articles. How else do you explain separated twins who never knew each other developing identical personalities and interests?”

  “But those samplings are too small to be reliable.”

  “Small, shmall… that’s a cop-out. Don’t be… such… a…” The words swam through Seth’s head as he tried to say them, and he realized he was slurring his speech. His voice seemed detached from his thoughts as it left his mouth, like it belonged to someone else. “Wha… what?”

  “Chloral hydrate. Crude, as they say, but effective. Orange juice reduces the bitterness.”

  “You… poisoned me? You son of a bitch... you poisoned me?”

  “No, no. I only administered about 10 grams. A bit toxic, perhaps. But for a grown man, it would take twice that much to be fatal. I only wanted to disable you.”

  “Wh… wh…”

  “Because I want to prove it to you, Seth. Don’t worry. You’ll see.”

  Seth staggered toward the front door, stumbled before making it, crashed to the floor. He felt a sharp pain in his hand as he landed on it, and he wanted to grab it with his other hand, hold it, protect it, but he didn’t have the strength to move. He barely had the strength to listen. The sounds around him, Philo’s voice, his own breathing, seemed loud and deep and hollow. Distant echoes, screaming at him.

  Another crash, and for an instant Seth thought he somehow fell again, but the noise faded into a rumble, followed by some flashes of light and a louder crash. T
hunder. It’s just a storm, Seth thought. Just a storm, just a storm, just a storm, and he tried to remember whether that was good or bad.

  “Did you know that the real Mickey Finn was a laxative developed for horses?” Philo said. He took a sip of juice and peered deep into the glass as he swallowed. “Bartenders used to slip it to unruly patrons to clear them out of their bars. ‘Slipping someone a Mickey’ meant something totally different before Hollywood created a false truth that everyone now thinks they ‘know’. Kind of like you, Seth. Like you, and your lies about how humanity is nothing more than a collection of biotic puppets acting out an inherited program.”

  Seth tried to respond, tried to say that wasn’t the case, though he wasn’t sure what he was denying, tried to say he was only telling the truth, though he couldn’t remember what that was. He felt overcome by sudden wave of nausea. Other than a long groan, the only things that came out of his mouth before he passed out, slack-jawed, face down on the floor, were the end of his tongue and a considerable amount of saliva.

  * * *

  He knew it was a dream, but that didn’t make it any less real. It was two days before his eleventh birthday, and he was in that room again, that still, noiseless place outfitted like a hospital ward, smelling of decay and Lysol. He was watching his father. There was virtually nothing left of him by that point, a spent cadaver of a man, wraith-like. It was as if his father wouldn’t allow death to claim him all at once, so it instead took him bit by bit each day, leaving so little by the time it was over it was hard for Seth to say exactly when he first considered his father dead. He only knew it was sometime before this. He had been standing at his father’s bedside more and more, but seeing him as alive less and less. He knew long before his mother entered, long before she looked at his father lying there, a quizzical expression settling onto her face, and asked Seth to wait in the living room. A few minutes later she would walk past him to the kitchen, where he would hear her make her quiet phone call. Then she would sit Seth down on the couch and tell him his father had passed on at some point during the night. It was like hearing official election results the day after the concession speech. Seth had not heard his father’s voice in weeks, and had never expected to again. He would cry anyway, like he always did.

  * * *

  When Seth woke his first awareness was of rain sizzling off the roof, gusts of it occasionally pelting a window to his right with a sound similar to clumps of sand being thrown against the pane. That awareness was quickly replaced by a feeling of extreme discomfort. There was a pulsing pain in his head, shooting up through his neck and circling the back of his skull, knifing into his eye. His muscles felt stiff. He winced at the light in his eyes as his lids flickered open, but he was unable to turn his head away. He was unable to move his head at all. The same was true for his arms. And his legs. His whole body was immobilized. He could feel his limbs, open and close his hands, squirm his body beneath his restraints. He just couldn’t move.

  He was in the middle of a room, propped a few feet from the walls on each side. It was not the room in his dream, but a completely different one, though it smelled vaguely similar to the one of his youth. The wall to his left stopped short of the vaulted ceiling, and he knew he was in the cabin, adjacent to the room where he and Philo had been talking. He was strapped down, and strapped down tightly. His arms were extended out from his shoulders, bound to some type of wood. Two-by-fours, perhaps; he couldn’t tell. His legs were slightly parted, each wrapped by a strap to a separate post. Seth couldn’t see much, unable as he was to move his head, but he could make out a thick leather belt around his chest, what felt like a carpeted board behind him. His head was secured to a kind of block, with something stretched firmly across his forehead and another one just beneath his jaw, binding him. It was stuck to his skin, like thick tape.

  He began to tense his muscles against the resistance and realized he was all but naked, wearing nothing but his boxer briefs. His body was on an incline, his head elevated relative to his feet, positioned at a forty-five degree angle to the floor. His heart began to race as he took stock of his predicament, as he remembered that Philo had brought him to this place, lured him and then drugged him. He pulled and twisted and shimmied but the constraints were too strong. Straps at the wrist and ankles, the biceps and quadriceps, across the chest and abdomen. No slack anywhere. He felt exhausted after a few seconds, but kept trying until fatigue forced him to rest. For a moment, he thought he felt whatever he was strapped to rock to the side a tiny bit, but that was the most he could accomplish.

  “Ah. I see you are awake.”

  Seth’s eyes snapped in the direction of the voice. There was a delay before Philo crossed into his field of vision.

  “Let me out of here!” Seth yelled. Blood thumped violently in his temples. He started to pant.

  Philo stopped in front of him. He lifted a hand and patted the air with it.

  “Calm down, Seth.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “I told you, Seth. I want you to acknowledge I was right. That my theories are right and yours are wrong.”

  “Yes, okay! You’re right! Now let me go!”

  Philo shook his head. “Now, that wasn’t very sincere. I don’t want you to just mouth the words, Seth. You have to admit it to yourself, as well. Otherwise—” Philo lifted his hands, palms up, “—I have to prove it to you.”

  “Fine, I admit it! Really. You were right. Honest. Now, please, let me go.”

  “Seth, Seth, Seth. You’re not listening. I want you to look me in the eye and tell me that your theories are wrong and mine are right. And I want you to really mean it. Look at me, and tell me my thesis, the one you humiliated me over, is correct.”

  Philo moved next to him, leaning over him from the space between Seth’s right arm and his rib cage, staring into Seth’s eyes. The hazel-gray irises the color of an overcast sky that fastened on Seth’s didn’t look angry, they didn’t look insane, they didn’t even look excited. If anything, Seth thought they looked harmless, perhaps a bit melancholy. Kind even. But as Seth studied them at such a close distance he saw something else. They also looked like if he were to gaze in deeply enough, if he were able to get beyond the reflective glare concealing whatever lay on the other side, he’d find there was nothing there. Nothing at all.

  Philo was not going to let him go. Seth knew it, and was surprised at how certain of that fact he suddenly became. It didn’t matter what he admitted or how much he pleaded or if he passed a polygraph about how he underwent a complete change of heart regarding the role of genetics in society. Philo had already committed several felonies. Whatever his intentions, whatever his plans, Philo had crossed his Rubicon.

  “No,” Seth said. Anger welled up inside him as he said it, the ire pressing against the backs of his eyeballs. It seemed like every muscle in his body was straining at their bonds.

  Philo cocked his head slightly. “Excuse me?”

  “I said no, Philo. I won’t admit it.” The rage was boiling over. Not being able to gesture, his head completely immobilized, he felt like a pressure cooker. “And go fuck yourself, while you’re at it. You were wrong. Are wrong. Your theory is shit. Your research was fabricated, and now everybody knows that, thanks to me. Your scholarship has always been shoddy, and your views have always been based on a bunch of feel-good psycho-babble bullshit packaged in pseudo-scientific nonsense tailor-made to support your touchy-feely world view, or some bleeding-heart social agenda, or whatever. Regardless of why, you’re wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.”

  Philo brought his hands together in front of him with a loud clap.

  “Very well, then. Can’t say I didn’t give you a chance.”

  Seth watched Philo walk around him, saw him leave his field of vision in the direction he came. Exerting his muscles to their limit, he made another vain attempt to free himself. The pain in his joints grew intense. He paused, sucking a few deep breaths. Somewhere in an adjacent room, he could hear rummag
ing, things being moved, the clank of something here, the sliding of something there. Then the shuffling stopped, and he thought he heard the faint, quick-paced footfalls of someone descending stairs. Seconds stretched by until he heard footsteps again, this time coming closer.

  Seth was straining against the straps again when Philo crossed into view. Philo was carrying several items in a bundle pinned to his chest. A few bottles. A roll of gauze. An extension cord. Some towels. In one hand he held a syringe, in the other a utensil of some sort, shaped like a pair of scissors with a blunt, flat end. He set all the items except for the extension cord on a table in the corner of the room.

  “What are you doing?” Seth asked.

  Philo pointed his index finger upward and held the hand out toward Seth without taking his eyes off the objects. He seemed to be counting them. A flash of recognition washed across his face and he gave a small nod. With a sober, but satisfied look, he unraveled the extension cord and plugged it into a wall outlet.

  “Back in a flash,” he said, then left again. When he returned he was wearing a white smock tied behind his neck and around his waist, carrying rubber gloves, a pair of goggles and an electric circular saw in his hands. “Almost forgot the apron. Hate to imagine it.”

  “Philo… Philo, what the hell are you doing?”

  “Sorry it had to come to this, Seth. You’ll understand, in due time. Or perhaps I should say, you’ll comprehend. It’s all part of the proof.”

  Philo set the saw on the floor and dragged the table over until it was within a few feet of Seth’s right arm. He arranged the articles on the table, placing them in a particular order Seth didn’t understand. Once finished, Philo picked up the syringe, removed a plastic cover from the point of the needle, and turned to Seth.

  “An anesthetic,” Philo said, flicking the tube with his finger as he aimed the needle toward the ceiling and gave the plunger a quick press. A thin jet of clear liquid shot into the air, arcing into droplets. Some of them landed on Seth’s stomach. “Just a local. Wouldn’t want it to spread throughout your tissue.”