“My apologies, Gwendolyn,” she says. “It’s Gwendolyn, right? Not Gwen?”
Her voice. I knew that’s what it would sound like. Chirpy and calm.
I open my mouth to speak, but there’s no sound. Just a gummy dryness and saliva thick as school paste.
“Oh, I’m sorry—water!” she says brightly, fetching a foam cup with a bending straw from a stainless steel tray. “Ice chips,” she says, pressing a button on the bed that raises my back. “Baby sips, now—can’t have too much too soon.”
Instinctively, I move my hands to take the cup, but a biting pain stops me. A pair of wide leather cuffs hold my wrists to the hospital bed. I can see the skin below and above them, red and raw, covered in tiny scabs. Another pair of cuffs are fastened to my ankles, and the skin around them is in the same condition.
“Use the straw,” the woman says. “Some of it must have melted by now.”
My lips close around the end, but even such a simple thing is suddenly difficult. My lips hurt, and they tremble, and the first of the water I suck through the straw runs down my chin. On the second attempt, I manage to swallow a few drops. It burns its way down my throat like vodka.
The woman presses a towel to my chin, then wipes my mouth. “We’ve met before. Do you remember?”
I nod, though I’m still not sure where.
“Prague,” she says.
* * *
Another dream now, vivid as reality, or at least this reality, if this is reality.
A hotel suite, a comfy couch, a comfy bathrobe. And a needle.
A psychiatrist, I was told. Sent to help me get through the debrief.
I’d led her through it all, how I’d rescued my father, how he’d been shot in the process. How I’d sent him away with someone named Sam. How I’d capped off the night by murdering a dozen men with rat poison.
But this was of no interest to her. Was never of interest to her. What she was after were the bank accounts my father had discovered, the accounts I’d tracked down, the accounts I’d just emptied and, in turn, saw emptied by someone else.
She had given me something, injected it into my arm. Something to help you relax, she said. To relax and remember.
Her name is Dr. Simon.
I pull uselessly at the restraints, shake my head violently until I feel the blood slosh around and my brain bounce off the insides of my skull. Wake the fuck up now. But when I open my eyes again, I’m still here in the hospital room smelling of disinfectant, and she’s still here, the average of all averages, smelling of menace. In fact, she’s stroking my head now, shushing me, telling me it’s all right. Everything’s all right. A beeping sound in the background begins to slow, and I realize I’m attached to a heart monitor. “Shhh,” she says, eyes on the readout. “Shhh.”
The cup again, and a few more sucks of water through the straw. Easier this time.
“The anxiety you feel is normal,” she says, hand still stroking my hair, not moving from my side. “I’ve been tapering you off the sedatives since I got here. When I found out what they were doing—Gwendolyn, I want to tell you how sorry I am.”
She holds both sides of my head in her hands and stares into my eyes, sincere as anyone’s ever been to me. “Barbarism,” she says. “There’s no other word for it.”
The chirping of the heart monitor is more even now. I see the readout over her shoulder. 102, 102, 101, 99.
She sighs, shakes her head. “You have no reason to trust me, I know that. But even so—what they did, it’s over now. Okay? Over. Nod if you understand.”
I nod.
* * *
She’s waiting for me in a chair when I wake up again, laptop braced on her knees. It’s a thick, black laptop. Rubberized. Ruggedized. Made for environments more demanding than a hospital room in—
“Where am I?” I say, my voice gravelly and small.
Dr. Simon looks up, gives a quick smile, and closes her laptop. Her nails, medium pink—the average of all pinks—drum on the plastic lid. “Sleep well?” she asks.
I nod, try to raise myself, but the leather cuffs hold me in place. Dr. Simon slips the laptop into a tasteful briefcase, brown pebbled leather—you can find it in the local mall if you want one. In a moment she’s at my side, pressing the button that raises my back. There’s melted ice again through the straw, and it’s like a blade down the center of my body.
“Where am I?” I say again.
She arches her eyebrows. “A research facility. Like a hospital.”
“So, not a prison.”
“Oh, no,” she says. “Not a prison at all.”
“So I can go? If I want?”
Pursed lips, you know better than that. “We’re under contract from the American government. To keep you safe, Gwendolyn.” Dr. Simon retakes her seat and crosses her legs primly. “How did you like South America?”
I don’t answer.
“Did it agree with you? The climate, the people?”
I turn away. “Where is he?”
“Who, your father?” she says. “Or Terrance?”
“Either. Both.”
“We found the apartment in Montevideo,” she says.
Despite my attempt to hold it back, there’s a little tick in the corner of my mouth. She sees it. I’m sure she does.
She continues. “But he had already, you know, poof. Disappeared. Vanished.”
I look back at her. “Good.”
“Your landlord, she identified the both of you. Gone dos semanas, she said.”
Two weeks. They missed him by two weeks.
“I don’t know where he went,” I say.
“No,” she says. “Of course you don’t. And that’s okay. We can talk about that later.”
“What about Terrance?” I ask. “Where is he? Do you have him?”
“We did, but not anymore. Terrance is back in the States. We’re helping him find a college. We’re very grateful to him, actually.”
No emotion on her face, not even a little smirk of victory.
“Grateful for what?” I say, already knowing the answer.
“For giving us you,” she says, the answer I already knew.
Twenty-Six
There can be no conversation after that. We both know it. So, instead, she turns to a glass dome in the corner of the room and says to it, “Go ahead, cue up the tape.” There’s a moment’s pause, a moment in which everything on me from my eyes to my teeth to my asshole clench shut, before the recording begins with a digital hiss, of ones and zeros coming together into a string of human words in the shape of a bit-crushed voice that belongs to Terrance Mutai the Fourth.
He’s whispering, less to be quiet than because the words hurt him to say.
Terrance: She saved me, okay? She saved me. The guy she strangled, he was there to kill us.
Male voice: Gwendolyn’s going to be fine. We have no interest in punishing her.
Terrance: Then why did you send, whoever he was …
Male voice: We didn’t, we didn’t, Terrance …
Terrance: Bullshit.
Male voice: Not our style, Terrance.
The recording scrubs forward, the voices of Terrance and the other man melting into racing tones, a dense burst of dissonant mi so la’s, do fa mi’s. Then it slows, the tones sucking back into a pair of human voices.
Male voice: Terrance, listen to me, Terrance, this is important.
Terrance: I’m listening. Goddammit, I’m listening.
Male voice: We want to protect her, we want her to be safe.…
Terrance: Cut the shit. She’s already safe with me.
Male voice: Terrance, if you love her like you say you do …
Terrance: Fuck you, using that like it’s some bargaining …
Male voice: If you love her, you’ll tell us where she is.
(Pause, crackling sound in background, Terrance’s breathing.)
Terrance: She’s here. In the shower.
Male voice: At the hotel? The Obelisk Grande?
Terrance: If you fucking hurt her …
The recording ends with a gasp from me, the taste of blood in my mouth from where I’ve bitten into my lower lip. Dr. Simon stands, makes a slashing motion at her throat.
Through the tears, I see her approach, compassion, or something resembling it, in her slow, deliberate movements. She presses a tissue to my right eye, then my left. Uses another to wipe my cheeks. Uses another to dab my eyes again.
“What is it you’re feeling?” she says. “Right now. First word.”
“Betrayal.”
“Yes.” She nods. “Yes.”
“I hate him,” I seethe. “I hate you more.”
“And you’re not wrong to feel that way. But what I’d like to show you, Gwendolyn, what I’d like to demonstrate”—she crouches next to me, her voice just a whisper—“is that it just might be exactly as Terrance says. That he did what he did out of love.”
I shake my head violently, wrenching at the restraints—I can feel them breaking through the skin again—and let out a sound that might be a scream, except I can’t hear it.
“This hurts,” Dr. Simon says, still gentle, still quiet. “I know it does. Getting well always hurts. Seeing reality, especially—you’ve been unwell for so long.”
She touches my cheek, I recoil. She touches my other cheek, I recoil the other way.
* * *
The following day, the restraints come off and I’m brought to an office and seated in an armchair, comfortable by clinical standards, with tan vinyl upholstery and real wood armrests. Dr. Simon sits in an identical chair across from me, like a peer, an equal. It’s still a hospital room, but only in the sense of still being a room in a hospital. The fluorescent lights hanging from the concrete ceiling are dark, so we can see each other by the light of two floor lamps. There’s even a rug, a carpet rectangle the same color as the vinyl on the chair. From my seat, I can’t even see the guard standing behind me.
“Would you like some coffee or tea? I think your body is ready for some, if you want it.”
I nod. “Coffee.”
“Milk or sugar?”
“Both.”
Dr. Simon rises and gets it for me herself from a stainless steel tray on a cart against the far wall. “Usually, at this stage, I’d caution against stimulants,” she says, turning to me as she stirs a foam cup, “but it’s just a little caffeine, right?”
She hands it to me and I hold it with both hands. My wrists are a disaster, bright red, scabby. My ankles are, too, but I can’t see them beneath the pants of the pink hospital scrubs and paper slippers. “Thanks for the coffee,” I say.
She settles into her chair and waits until I take a sip. There’s no laptop or even a paper notepad on her knees. Just two people talking seems to be the theme she’s going for.
“It’s a failure on our part,” Dr. Simon says. “Everything. We accept full responsibility. This should have never happened.”
Through concentration and will, I’m able to keep my breathing slow, my voice calm. “What does ‘everything’ mean?”
She holds out her hands, palms up. “All of it. That you felt you needed to run, that you felt in danger. This—machine. The state. Our government. It’s a blunt instrument, Gwendolyn.” She crosses her legs, shakes her head. If this sadness I’m seeing in her, this contrition, isn’t real, it’s a very good performance. “The state, when you’re outside of it, it can crush you, crush anyone. That’s why it’s important you’re on the inside again. Where it’s safe.”
“I’m inside it now,” I say. “And, funny thing. I don’t feel safe at all.”
A polite smile and nod. “That’s what I’m talking about. Men with guns, that psychological monstrosity they put you through. But I came as soon as I heard, Gwendolyn. You don’t have to worry about all that anymore. We’ll focus on getting you well. And getting you home.”
I look down, study the swirl of curdled creamer in the coffee, the shelf-stable chemical dispensed from a plastic thimble meant to be milk.
There’s no way I can manage anymore. The tension inside me, it’s a steel coil, winding up, pulling me in on myself, squeezing everything else out. The sob comes out as a gasp, then a sad little girl’s moan.
I take a handful of tissues from the box on the table and press them to my face. Dr. Simon sits patiently, no attempt to quiet me. I take another handful and blow my nose, filling it with snot and spit and tears. When I’m done, the tissues are balled up on my lap. I inhale sharply, sucking air through my nostrils to clear them. “How did you do it?” I manage to say. “Get Terrance to—do what he did.”
“After the thing, the incident in Buenos Aires. That—hit man, whoever he was. Terrance was scared.”
“Of course he was scared. He almost got killed.”
“No, Gwendolyn,” says Dr. Simon. “He was scared of you.”
I look up at her.
“Scared of you. And for you. What we did, forcing you to go on the run, it changed you, mentally. He recognized that. Reached out. Said you were—headed to Zurich. To get the money, he said.”
“It’s gone, by the way. The money. I had it for all of about five minutes.”
Dr. Simon nods. “The money doesn’t matter, Gwendolyn.”
Bullshit. It’s all that matters. Money is all that ever matters. I see it now, Dr. Simon’s game. Win my confidence. Wait for my sin to become too heavy to bear alone.
“I mean it, it’s gone. Really.”
“Let’s promise each other something,” she says. “I won’t ask about the money. Ever. And you won’t bring it up. Ever.”
“So what do you want with me?”
“Once you’re better, you’ll go back to the States. You can have a new name, if you like. A new legal name. Social security number. Even a credit score, a good one.” She smiles warmly, leans forward, elbows on knees. “You’re young still. Colleges to consider. We can help you with that, just like we are with Terrance.”
I take my coffee again, swallow some.
That creamer, it’s a lot like real milk.
* * *
Two guards—a man Dr. Simon referred to as Mr. LaBelle and a woman she called Ms. Rossi—follow me down the corridor. Both wear cargo pants, polo shirts, and boots—not combat boots exactly, but they wouldn’t be out of place. They’re of a kind, these two, the strutters I’d see in embassy hallways with my dad, athletic even under a layer of mid-thirties padding, intelligent faces, seen-everything-before eyes. There are no handcuffs on my wrists, but the pair walk a few steps behind me, their confident footfalls echoing off the concrete floors of the tunnel to the concrete walls and concrete ceiling.
The doorways are very few, and each is like the one to my room, with no window and a slot along the bottom for the passing of trays. Next to each is a stenciled letter and number combination in no particular order: A-14, A-15, C-12. Conduits for the fluorescent lights run down the center of the ceiling like a gray stripe.
I look over my shoulder to Ms. Rossi. She’s the one who stood behind my chair in the session with Dr. Simon. Her expression is blank, and it’s the blankness that infuriates me. That amoral American professionalism: I’m not evil; it’s just my job.
“What do the letters mean?” I say. “Next to the doors?”
“Eyes forward,” she says.
“Are there even any windows in this place?”
“Eyes forward, please,” she says.
“Eat my ass.”
It’s a child’s bravado, though, an attempt by the powerless to claim some. Rossi knows this better than I do, and my eyes are forward before she has a chance to repeat herself a third time.
We stop before a door marked C-19, a different room from the one I’d been in last night, C-7. It’s a straight shot to the room where Dr. Simon and I met, B-3, as if this entire facility were a single long corridor.
* * *
In this new room, the hospital bed is gone, replaced by a cot. There’s a pillow on it, and sheets, and
a blanket. All of it is institutional in kind but not punitive in quality. Comfortable enough, as far as government bedding goes. They’ve also given me a clone of the same tan vinyl armchair. And next to it, a small stack of books. A history of NASA. A collection of American poetry. The autobiography of a heroin addict who finds Jesus.
In the corner, I even discover a little luxury: a handheld showerhead mounted to the wall, a drain on the floor, and a thin plastic curtain that goes around it in a quarter-circle, creating a space barely big enough for me to stand.
There’s a towel, a fresh set of scrubs, and a pair of white rubber-soled shoes without laces waiting for me on the chair beside it. There are also toiletries, little bottles of shampoo and toothpaste, a flimsy plastic comb, a toothbrush with a flat round tab as big as my thumbprint for a handle. So I can’t make a knife out of it, I suppose.
My body shivers under the brassy water and I shower as quickly as I can, not really rinsing the shampoo properly and wondering if it would have killed them to give me a little conditioner. When I finish, I reach from behind the curtain, grab the towel and scrubs.
As I work the comb through hair matted as a stray cat’s, I see something has been slipped through the slot in the bottom of the door. It’s a cardboard tray, and on top of it, a bowl of soup, beige and hot; and white toast; and a foam cup of orange liquid. I lower my nose to the bowl and breathe in the smell of chicken broth, salty and metallic. I lift a spoon of it to my mouth and burn my tongue. So I take a sip of the orange liquid. It’s a sugary something that tastes like a chemist’s idea of orange juice, re-created from memory as best he could. I scoop the toast through the broth, then let each bite collapse under its own weight on my tongue.
When I finish, I look up at the camera. It’s high in the corner of the room and hidden behind dark glass. Who’s on the other end? I wonder. Dr. Simon? No, she couldn’t always be there, could she? So a guard, with the unhappy task of recording my sleep, my meals, my bowel movements, my showers.
I give the camera a little wave. “No fair,” I say. “You can see me, but I can’t see you.”
* * *
If I sleep, I don’t remember falling asleep, which is why it feels so strange when I wake up.
The Greed Page 23