by J. S. Monroe
Jar smiles as they approach, relieved, but they seem tense and avoid eye contact. Perhaps they are surprised to see him, or have been told not to interact with the people who work here. It’s what Carl calls ‘corporate apartheid’. (He and Carl used to leave notes for the night cleaning staff at work, telling them to help themselves to the various freebies that had been sent to the office that day.)
Jar doesn’t know whether to say goodnight or good morning, so he settles on an ‘OK now?’ There’s no acknowledgement from either of them, not even a smile. They speed up as they pass, one of them glancing back towards the swing doors and then at Jar.
Jar hesitates for a moment, looking up and down the corridor, then returns to Max’s office, locking the door behind him.
85
Cromer, 2012
A fell very quiet when I told her, asked me to repeat exactly how it happened, explain why I returned with only one dog. I didn’t tell her why, but the how was an easier story to tell.
A and I used to go out for a morning walk together, in the days after I lost my job, both of us hoping for better things, ‘new beginnings’, as if all that was wrong with our marriage would disappear because I was suddenly at home all day. But it wasn’t to be.
So after breakfast today I went out on my own with Belka and Strelka. I wasn’t given the dogs as a leaving present from colleagues, as Rosa used to joke (like father, like daughter), although it’s true we did use beagles a lot in our experiments. A and I got the pair of bitches from a rescue home in Norwich a few weeks before I knew I was leaving. Another false dawn. I named them after two Russian dogs who were put into space in 1960 on Sputnik 5, along with forty-two mice, two rats and a rabbit. Belka was mine, Strelka was A’s. That’s how we came to see them anyway.
My walk’s always the same: down the road to the water meadow, along the river, across the rail track, and back around to the house. A good twenty minutes at a brisk pace. This morning, Strelka was pulling at the leash from the off. A has always spoiled her, hasn’t disciplined her as she should. I only ever let them off the leash once we’ve crossed the river on a small footbridge, then I allow them to run in the water meadow beside the railway, where there’s good fencing.
Except today. The gate where the footpath crosses the railway line had been left open. I should say that on the far side there’s a smaller strip of meadow, where rabbits often play. Strelka saw the rabbits before I did and ran along the fencing, desperate to get through. Belka was less interested, looping in small circles around me as I walked.
I saw the open gate before I heard the train, but I knew there was time to reach for the dog whistle I keep in the pocket of my waxed jacket. My hand found the whistle but I held it tight in my fist and watched.
Strelka was getting closer to the gate, barely five yards away from it, desperate to reach the rabbits. If I blew the whistle then, it would overrule her visceral urges and she would return to my side.
The whistle remained in my pocket as Strelka ran through the gate. She saw the approaching train but still headed up the low bank and on to the railway line, where certain death awaited her. It wasn’t suicide, of course, just a healthy appetite for rabbits, but a life could have been saved. I didn’t look away. Instead, I stood transfixed by the consequences of my inaction as Strelka’s body was knocked backwards into the air by the front of the train and then landed on the track, before disappearing under the wheels.
The driver glanced across at me, accusation in his eyes, as the train continued on its way. Belka fell quiet at my side. Perhaps her sister emitted a sound that I hadn’t heard: fear in a higher register than the human ear can detect. I didn’t hear anything at the moment of impact, just a dull thud.
There was no point in bringing Strelka back to the house. Nor did I tell A that what was left of her was scattered down the track in bloody clumps.
86
Jar is still reading. He can’t stop. Amy loved Strelka. Like a child, he remembers Rosa telling him. When she finds out what really happened, she will leave him. Perhaps she has tried before. He wonders if he should call her now, make sure she reads the journal, discuss with her whether the police should be informed. Keeping someone on benzos like that must count as domestic abuse.
His train of thought is interrupted by the sound of movement again in the corridor, swing doors closing. Have the cleaners returned? Jar glances at his watch. It’s 3.30 a.m. Max told him the place would start to get busy at dawn: early risers, trading stocks in Hong Kong and the Far East.
He turns back to the screen, thinking of Amy, Rosa, Strelka, but then he hears a second sound, like a muffled scream, and swallows hard. He tries to ignore what he’s just heard, but he can’t. It was too human.
Out in the corridor, Jar looks both ways. The journal has confused him, heightened his paranoia. The sound was nothing, he tells himself, but he is unable to shake off the image of the cleaners as they rushed to leave the floor half an hour earlier, unsmiling, eyes averted.
He walks down to the swing doors and pushes them open. Nothing. The lifts stand silent, in repose, waiting for the morning rush. And then he sees a peaked cap on the floor, by the fire exit, beside an empty chair. He goes over to pick it up. The inside is still warm, the lining torn at the back. Jar looks around again and then pushes open the heavy fire door.
‘Hello?’ he calls out, his voice echoing up and down the stairwell. Silence. He lets the door close and places the hat on the chair, trying to ignore its clammy warmth. The guard will return shortly to collect it, Jar reasons, as he walks back down to Max’s office, locking the door again behind him. His heart is racing.
87
North Norfolk, 2013
The bitch is suspended from the ceiling of the lab, constrained in a rubberised cloth hammock, just as Seligman prescribed in 1967, her limbs hanging down below her through four holes in the harness. I haven’t been able to replicate all the original details, but enough to make the experiment valid. The shock source is a twelve-volt car battery and a parallel voltage divider, conducted through brass-plate electrodes (first covered with commercial electrode paste), one of which has been taped to the bottom of the bitch’s foot. The shock intensity is 20 mA, based on skin resistance of 1,000 ohms.
Her head, protected by a riveted black leather muzzle, is held in position, again exactly as Seligman prescribed, by a panel on either side of it, connected by a yoke across her neck. She can press either panel with her head, in the hope that this will make the current stop, but there is no causal connection between pressing the panels and termination of the electricity.
The only difference from Seligman’s equipment is that I have made the harness out of material similar in colour to the jumpsuits worn by high-value detainees: Guantánamo orange.
I’ve just checked to see that the video is working and am picturing the colleagues around the world who are watching: disenfranchised scientists, CIA psychologists, the odd terrorist, perhaps.
Seligman’s theory is that dogs who are administered a series of inescapable electric shocks while in a harness, and have no control over the shocks, do not try to escape from further pain when they are subsequently put into a different situation – a ‘shuttlebox’ with two joining cubicles – where they can easily avoid it. In his original experiment, a second control group of dogs was placed in the constrained harnesses and, when they pressed the panels with their heads, the shock stopped. This second group went on to escape pain when they were put into the shuttlebox, unlike the first, who felt that they had no control over their environment.
The test I’m currently conducting is, therefore, only part one. Later, she will be placed, unharnessed, into a shuttlebox where she will receive further shocks (administered through a metal grid on the floor) and can move freely to a connecting cubicle to avoid them. If Seligman is right, she will choose not to escape to the pain-free environment but will instead cower and whimper in a state of learned helplessness.
Her body convulsed with
impressive vigour when the first electric shock ran through it.
At the second electric shock, enough to initiate sustained muscular contractions, I worried for the harness as her whole body twisted like a beached fish, so I’ve just checked where it’s fastened to the ceiling. She banged her head against the panels and emitted a high-pitched screeching sound.
The automatic relay circuitry proceeded to administer a series of decreasing shocks, totalling 226 seconds.
We must now wait twenty-four hours before placing her in the shuttlebox’s adjoining cubicles to see how she reacts to further pain. Will she try to escape? Or has her failure to terminate the shocks while in the harness – her inability to control her environment – induced a state of true learned helplessness?
88
Jar wipes the sick away with the back of his hand and leans over again, bent double, gripping the sides of the bin in Max’s office. He should ring Max, tell him what he’s just read. Give it a few minutes, he thinks. First he needs to go for a walk, get some fresh air, clear his head.
The bitch is suspended from the ceiling of the lab.
He heads out into the corridor, walking towards the bank of lifts. As he reaches the swing doors, the fire alarm goes off. It’s just an early-morning drill, he tells himself, trying to stay calm. The sound makes him flinch, much more than it should. His nerves are shot. A recorded voice, far from reassuring, is telling people to evacuate the tower using the stairs.
He considers going back inside Max’s office, locking the door and ignoring the alarm (no one knows he’s here), but he needs to get away from the place, put some distance between himself and Martin’s journal.
The lifts have been disabled. Jar turns to the fire exit, glancing at the peaked cap, still on the chair. He tries not to think about its owner, where the guard has gone.
At the second electric shock, enough to initiate sustained muscular contractions…
Martin was torturing a dog, Jar tries in vain to reason, as he pushes open the door. Maybe it was just a made-up story and Strelka didn’t die on the tracks? This time the stairwell is no longer silent. Loud extraction fans are churning somewhere far below, keeping the stairs ventilated. He listens for footsteps. No one else is evacuating the building. He looks up. There, slumped in the corner of the stairwell above, is the security guard.
Jar approaches the body, struggling to suppress a rising nausea. The guard’s eyes are closed, a bruise beginning to blossom on his forehead. Jar feels for a pulse and is relieved to find one, even more relieved when the guard manages a faint moan. He knows he should ring the police, but the desire to get out of the building, away from the alarm, the fans, the video, is overwhelming.
‘You’ll be OK now,’ Jar says, as much to reassure himself as the guard, and begins the long descent to the ground, twenty floors below. Despite himself, he accelerates, taking the stairs two at a time. After three floors, he stops, catching his breath. He can hear footsteps above the din of the fans. Someone is on the stairs higher up.
Jar starts to descend again, forcing himself to maintain a steady pace. If he goes any faster, he’ll fall down the unnaturally steep steps. He looks up and sees a familiar tall figure, two floors above him. Is it the same man who tried to board his train in Paddington, who took Rosa away on the cliffs in Cornwall?
Jaysus. Jar runs down the stairs, taking them three at a time now, too fast to keep his balance. He falls and lands heavily, his momentum carrying him down the next flight of steps.
When he comes to rest, he lies stunned, trying to assess where the most pain is coming from. Blood is gathering around his cheek on the cool concrete floor. He thinks of the guard, his warm hat. Someone is walking down the stairs, standing above him. Jar closes his eyes and offers up a prayer for the first time in years, waiting for his life to flash before him. All he can see is Rosa on a clifftop.
At the sound of a gun being cocked – mundane, existential – Jar grabs at the man’s legs, wrapping his arms around them. The man topples and falls, pulling Jar down with him. They tumble down several stairs together before Jar manages to extricate himself. He watches as the man’s body folds and turns beneath him, before it comes to a halt at an awkward angle. On a step between them is the gun, the same one that had been pointed at him in Cornwall.
Jar knows nothing about guns, but he picks it up, finds the safety catch and slips the weapon inside the pocket of his suede jacket. For a moment he imagines shooting the slumped figure below him. It’s what he should have done on the cliffs, seized the gun from him and stopped Rosa being taken away. Instead, he turns and runs.
*
‘Christ, are you still there, at the office?’ Max asks, sounding half asleep.
‘Someone just tried to kill me,’ Jar says, his voice cracking with emotion.
‘What? I can hardly hear you.’
‘I thought I was going to die, Max. In the tower. The man who took Rosa, he chased me down the stairwell, tried to kill me.’
‘Where are you now?’
‘I’m at the bottom of the tower, by the DLR.’
‘And you’re safe?’
‘I’m not sure.’ Jar wipes some blood from his mouth as he looks around him. Dawn is breaking. He is cut and bruised from the fall, nothing more.
‘You need to tell me exactly what happened,’ Max says quietly.
Max is familiar with panicked, confused calls in the dead of the night, Jar thinks. It’s his job to deal with them, calm the caller, assess the collateral damage.
‘It was when he started to talk about “the bitch”,’ Jar continues. ‘That’s when I knew.’
‘Knew what?’
‘He hired a car in the name of John Bingham. For his pal who just tried to kill me. The tall fella.’
‘Who, Jar? You’re not making any sense.’
‘Rosa wasn’t taken away by the police, or the spooks, or kept in Guantánamo. She’s being held by Martin.’
‘Martin?’ There’s a long pause. ‘Her uncle Martin?’
‘Her uncle Martin.’
89
North Norfolk, 2013
Seligman was very specific about the equipment he used for the second half of his 1967 experiment, ‘escape/avoidance training’, and I have tried to follow it to the letter, despite the limited resources out here.
In Seligman’s experiment, those dogs that had been in control of their environment in part one – when they’d pressed the panels with their heads, the shocks had stopped – quickly learnt in part two how to hop over the barrier between one cubicle of the shuttlebox and the other. But those dogs that had no control of their environment in part one – pressing the panels had failed to stop the shocks – made little or no effort to escape the shocks in the shuttlebox. (Seventy-five per cent of them stayed in the cubicle for a full fifty seconds, painful electricity coursing through their bodies.)
This was the tenth and last time – Seligman specified conducting the test ten times – and the results were exactly the same.
The lights went out and I counted down the seconds until the shock began. When the current started, her whole body began to shake and she emitted a low growling sound that built in intensity. She made no effort to rise to her feet and climb over the partition into the sanctuary of the other cubicle. Instead, she just sat there on her haunches, staring back at me, a textbook picture of learned helplessness.
She is still looking at me now, slumped in the corner of the left cubicle.
90
‘Can we hold back on the details?’ Max says. ‘You know, until we’ve dropped the kids off?’
‘Of course, sorry,’ Jar says, glancing in the Land Rover’s rearview mirror at Max’s two young children, rolling around on the back seat, school bags and lunchboxes beside them.
‘The next generation needs to know what was done at Guantánamo in the name of Western democracy, but maybe wait until they’re a little older. When they’re ten, say.’
Jar manages a half smile, watchi
ng as Max pulls up outside the primary school in Dulwich. Earlier, Max had insisted on driving over to pick him up from Canary Wharf, even though it was 4.30 a.m. Jar had slept for a couple of hours on the sofa, much to the excitement of Max’s children, who had peered wide eyed around the sitting-room door when he stirred.
‘What’s your name?’ the girl had asked.
‘Jar,’ he replied, guessing they were about six years old, twins but not identical.
‘Jar,’ the girl said, ‘what’s the matter with your head?’
‘That’s a funny name,’ the boy interrupted, before Jar had time to explain why, for the second time in two weeks, he was sporting a bandage, this time courtesy of Max’s wife.
‘My friends call me Jam,’ he said.
‘Daddy, the funny man’s called Jam Jar,’ they chimed, running off to the kitchen.
Jar had struggled to stop himself from crying, wishing he could wind back the clock, to when life had been simple.
Now, as the children climb out of the Land Rover and walk over to the school gates, a wave of fear washes over Jar. He was wrong to come with Max on the school run, put his kids in danger. The man in the stairwell was unconscious but breathing.
‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have called you or come over to your place,’ he says, glancing up and down the street.
‘Why on earth not?’
‘He could have followed me here.’
‘I thought you left him for dead,’ Max says, starting up the Land Rover.
‘I did.’
‘I’m more worried about the police. There’s CCTV all over the tower.’
‘I couldn’t see any in the stairwell.’
‘Maybe not.’ Max pauses, checking either way for traffic. ‘It wouldn’t be the first time someone’s injured themselves during a fire practice. A girl in the next-door office broke her ankle the last time the building was evacuated. People can get a bit freaked out using those stairs – the crowds, the noise of the fans.’