The Theta Patient
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One after another, Bradburn watched as the drugs took hold of each man. The facial muscles in Anthony Station’s cheeks became relaxed. His brow, which had been furrowed and tight, relented. Half an hour later, when it was Logan Ford’s turn, the patient who had been screaming and trying to thrash his arms, bobbed forward slightly. If he hadn’t been restrained, he might have fallen over completely. Instead of yelling, Ford gave little grunts that were barely audible. Dewey Leonard, who had been perfectly still before the injection, remained that way. His eyelids were the indicator that he was under the influence. They fluttered and closed, leaving Bradburn guessing if the man was almost asleep or trying not to cry.
The black box, the idea that it could scare someone into believing the Tyranny knew their thoughts, was no where to be found during the second interview.
Bradburn sat across from each patient. Even without the sheet of paper, he knew which questions to ask.
“Have you ever been to Burnley Park before?” he said.
Anthony Station’s eyes were downward, putting his unkempt hair on display.
“Burnley Park?”
“Yes.”
“Burnley Park?”
“Yes.”
The patient seemed more confused than anything else, his lips moving and fingers tapping in incredibly slow motion, but no words at first.
Then he said, “My parents took me there when I was a kid.”
It was a completely different answer—much more sane than being abducted by aliens—but it didn’t mean anything, and Bradburn hoped Agent Cooper realized that as well. Patients often went into and out of paranoid or delusional states that could affect their line of thinking. A different answer now could simply mean that Station had been in the middle of an episode during the first interview whereas now he wasn’t.
“How about as an adult?” Bradburn said.
“Once, doc?” the patient mumbled, but from the way he asked, Bradburn could tell he really didn’t know.
Half an hour later, during Logan Ford’s session, Bradburn re-asked the same question. Ford took a deep breath. His blond eyebrows seemed to disappear in the ill-lit room.
“Have you ever been to Burnley Park before?” Bradburn asked.
Ford’s hands were restrained by his sides. The doctor could see, however, that Ford’s impulse to rub his eyes was still taking control of some part of his mind. From where they rested, the hands made slight circular movements as if the patient didn’t realize that he wasn’t actually rubbing his eyes the way he had been during the first interview.
“More times than I can count,” Ford mumbled, his words slurred. “Almost every day for the past two decades.” After a pause he added, “I liked it more before the new coffee shop was built. Too foo-foo.”
Another thirty minutes later, he was asking the question of Dewey Leonard. After a day and a half of being in the hospital, Leonard’s stubble had gone from looking neatly trimmed and intentional to taking over too much of his face. The result made him look gaunt and sickly. His eyes no longer scanned the room. He didn’t look at anything except his hands, which were resting on the edge of the table.
“Yes,” the third patient said upon being asked the same question.
“When was the last time?”
Leonard gave a slight groan. “Two days ago.”
“What were you doing?”
“I don’t know.”
“You still don’t know?” Bradburn said, frowning.
A pause. Then, “No.”
Bradburn had followed up that question by asking each patient if they believed in time travel.
“Sure, doc,” Anthony Station said. And then, a moment later, “But I also don’t.”
When Logan Ford was asked, it took him an entire minute to answer. Bradburn thought the man might have fallen asleep.
“Of course,” Ford finally said.
“You do?”
“I think so.” And then, barely audible, almost unintelligible: “It’s all physics. They just need to figure it out.”
“Who is they?” Bradburn said, expecting the response to be ‘Thinkers.’
Ford looked up and squinted at the doctor. Even behind the stupor of drugs, a small part of the man wanted to reach out and slap Bradburn for asking such a stupid question.
Ford muttered, “Scientists, you moron.”
Later, when he asked Dewey Leonard the question, the third patient groaned again, but finally said yes.
“You do?”
“Yes,” Leonard said again.
Bradburn looked behind him at the mirrored glass to see if Cooper wanted him to continue asking about this topic. But instead of seeing an agent from the Tyranny, all he saw was himself looking as confused as ever and in over his head.
Bradburn asked each of the patients if the world was a better place today than it was a hundred years ago.
Station sighed and shook his head slightly.
“It’s always getting worse, doc.” He looked as if he were going to go to sleep, then blinked and said, “Every day, the aliens find better ways to torture us. Every single freakin’ day.”
Ford said there was no way of knowing if the world was a better place or not. Not only that, but that it was pointless to ask the question. When he mumbled the words, he sneered at Bradburn through the haze of chemicals in his brain.
Dewey Leonard, his eyes shut, paused for a while before saying the world was worse.
“Why?”
“Come on,” Leonard said, almost whining, and Bradburn couldn’t be sure if he thought the answer was obvious or if he didn’t want to have to field any more questions. Then Leonard grumbled more words and the doctor knew. “War. Suffering. It’s all too much.”
Bradburn had then asked each of them what event they would change if they could go back in time.
Station’s hair bobbed slightly when the man’s head fell forward and then, the patient waking up again, snapped back.
“That’s a good question, doc,” he answered, the same as he had said before, except it took him three times as long to pronounce the words that were whispered. “I don’t know. I really don’t know.”
After being asked the same question, Logan Ford’s hands moved in wider circles, still wanting to rub his eyes, his wrists still tied to the arms of the chair he was sitting in.
“I would’ve killed the bastard who made the printing press,” he said. A minute went by with Ford’s lips moving but no sounds being offered, then the man began to sob and he said, “All the hate that has been preserved on paper. All the hate.”
Bradburn looked behind him at the mirror, hoping Cooper was there, hoping he was as unamused as Bradburn was by this spectacle.
When he asked the same question to the third patient, he got a response he never expected. Dewey Leonard groaned but remained silent. Bradburn repeated the question. Half a minute went by before Leonard whispered something that couldn’t be understood. The doctor repeated the question a third time. Leonard groaned again. His eyes fluttered the entire time.
Bradburn had seen the reaction before. The patient had enough wherewithal to know his mind was under the control of drugs but didn’t have the ability to do much about it.
“Dewey,” Bradburn said, “If you could go back in time and change one event, what would it be?”
He could see the little bit of the real Leonard that was left, the part of him that was hidden away deep behind the sway of the truth serum, fighting with all of his might to resist the question. His version of fighting, though, was merely staying quiet as long as he could, trying to keep his mind focused.
Bradburn repeated the question again.
Leonard gave a slight objection, his hands shooing the question away. A single sob shook him.
“If you could go back in time and change one event, what—”
“Do you want to know what I’d do?” the third patient mumbled. “I’d go all the way back to Adam and Eve.” Even though his words were still slurred, his voice was growing
louder. “Before they ate the forbidden fruit.”
Bradburn breathed a sigh of relief, thinking the man in front of him wanted to save the entire human race.
But then Leonard said, “I’d take an axe and chop down the entire damn tree.” He was almost yelling now, even through the effects of the drugs. “I’d dare God to do the worst thing he could possibly do because no matter what he did he couldn’t do anything worse than what the Tyranny is doing.”
And then the single sob turned into crying.
The doctor slumped down in his chair. The interview was over. There was no point asking the final questions. Agent Cooper was probably already on his way into the room to arrest the man.
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