The Greed

by Scott Bergstrom

  * * *

  Give-and-take is how the world works, and even the kind Dr. Simon is determined to remind me of it. Quid pro quo. Tit for tat. Daughter for Father.

  That’s why the guards have brought me to someplace new, a kind of bunker within the bunker, instead of the usual stage set of a shrink’s office with soft lamplight and comfy armchairs. The new room has unpainted concrete walls, damp with decades of neglect, that are cast in sickly green fluorescent light. There are two long folding tables, each lined with monitors and hooked up to a pair of laptops, the same rubberized, ruggedized kind Dr. Simon uses. On each monitor is a different room. I recognize mine, and Dr. Simon’s office, and the room with the hospital bed. But there are others, too: live motion video of corridors and stairwells, all empty of people, and an enormous steel door, big enough for a truck to pass through.

  Dr. Simon pushes back from one of the tables, the wheels of her old office chair squeaking. She tells me to sit and kicks another rolling chair toward me. “I won’t ask you to trust me, Gwendolyn,” Dr. Simon says. “Trust is earned, and I haven’t done that yet.”

  I sit, then look over my shoulder at Rossi.

  “What do we do when we want someone to believe us but haven’t yet earned their trust?”

  “Offer proof.”

  “Exactly,” she says, and lifts something from the table beside her. It’s an old telephone, red plastic, the dial removed and replaced by a metal plate. “So here’s proof. Of my intentions.”

  She places the phone on the floor in front of me, tugging out a little slack in the cord that connects it to an outlet in the wall. “Sorry it’s a bit grungy, but it’s what we have. Problem with being off the grid is, well, getting on it again is such a pain in the ass.”

  I look at the phone. “Who do you want me to call?”

  “There’s someone already waiting on the other end,” she says. “All you have to do is pick it up.”

  My hand reaches for the phone, but just as I’m about to touch it, I stop. “And in return?”

  “If, after your phone call, you believe me, that everything I’ve told you is true”—she slides forward, gives that earnest look again—“then you tell us one thing. That’s all. One thing.”

  “Which is?”

  Hands out, palms up. “Where it is. The information your father plans to release.”

  I look away, first at the monitors on the tables, then at the phone cord, tracing it from the wall to the handset in front of me, red plastic, no more dial, a single path forward, one way out. I study the cracked floor, the wetness seeping across it. How had Dr. Simon put it? The water wants its tunnel back. I turn my head to the coffeemaker in the corner, tan plastic, the glass pot hissing. I do all this so that I give Dr. Simon and the guard the impression of being lost in thought. Of thinking the unthinkable, which is to say, betraying the unbetrayable. But the truth is, I’ve already made up my mind.

  Child hero. Example to all.

  So I reach for the phone.

  And I pull it into my lap.

  The red plastic is just a shell, but I can tell from the weight the inside is all metal. I lift the handset and press it to my ear.

  “Hello?” I say.

  * * *

  The static of old wires—hissing and crackling, the occasional pop—is all I hear for a few seconds, my voice maybe connecting to a cell phone tower on the surface above us, or maybe continuing by cable and wire all the way to the other end, over mountains and under oceans.

  Then, a breath and another voice. “Hello?” it says. “Hello? Hello?”

  “Hello, hi,” I say.

  “Hello, hi. Gwen?”

  “Hi, it’s Gwen—hello.”

  “My God…”

  Far away, the voice, but even through the static I hear Terrance’s sincerity. I gasp.

  “I can hear you,” he says. “I can hear you, don’t worry.”

  Dr. Simon rises and shoos the guard out. The door closes behind me.

  “Terrance?”

  “Yeah, yes—Gwen, it’s me…”

  “Terrance.”

  “Yes. Gwen, I’m—Jesus, Gwen, how are you? I’m sorry, Gwen. I’m sorry. How are you?”

  My hands are shaking, and it takes both of them to keep the handset stable against my ear. “I’m, I don’t know. I’m shitty, Terrance. But better. You know? It’s … God, Terrance, it was awful, but…”

  “Where are you?” he says.

  “Where are you?” I say.

  “New Orleans. I got a place here. It’s little, but—Gwen, I’m so sorry. I’m sorry about what I—did to you. It’s okay if you hate me, please know that. If you hate me—I just was, I did it to help you.”

  I think I can hear the ocean as it courses over the ancient, fraying cable. It could be I hear whale songs, or maybe it’s birds resting on the line as it rises out of the water and travels over land, strung pole to pole to pole to pole across farm fields all the way to a damp old building on a humid night in New Orleans.

  “Let me hear it, Terrance,” I say. “Let me hear the city.”

  “What?”

  “Let me hear the city. Go to the window.”

  “Okay. In a sec. I’ve gotta—Gwen, where are you? Are you coming back?”

  “Let me hear the city, Terrance.”

  “The window, the latch is—okay, it’s open.”

  Filtered through thousands of miles, I hear car horns, a crowd passing by. Drunk people laughing, high-pitched and loud. And even—is that music?—yes, music. The strum of an electric guitar, a snare and cymbal, a band setting up.

  “Gwen, can you hear it?”

  My fingertips touch my mouth, and my breath pulses hot against the skin.

  “Gwen?”

  “Yes. Yes, I hear it.”

  Wood grating against wood, the window shutting.

  “How fucked-up is this, Gwen? They called me like twenty minutes ago. Asked if I wanted to talk to you.”

  “And you’re safe, Terrance? You’re—they didn’t hurt you?”

  More static. “No. No, in fact—did they tell you about Tulane? I got in, Gwen. I got in.”

  I wander in the direction of the coffeemaker, just three steps, then the cord catches on the wheel of the chair. “That’s amazing, Terrance. College.”

  “I’m sorry, Gwen. For what I did.”

  “I’m sorry too,” I say. “For what I did.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I—I fucked up your life, Terrance. I did. I’m sorry about, you know, dragging you into this.”

  Dr. Simon snaps her finger and I look at her. One minute, she mouths.

  “It’s okay, Gwen. Really. Look, it was an adventure, right? A fucked-up adventure.”

  “I’m sorry about—the mess we made in the hotel room. You know?”

  “Yeah. That was—intense. But it’s okay. It’s okay now.”

  “And when I got drunk at that club. You were so good to me.”

  “It was nothing, Gwen,” he says, and I hear him breathe, in and out, his voice catching like mine did. “Gwen? I want you to know something. I love you. I do. I love you.”

  “I love you back, Terrance. Really. As much as ever,” I say. Then I laugh, just a little. “And your camera. Your poor Leica. I’m sorry about that, too.”

  “Forget it. Really. I mean, it’s just a camera.”

  I look at the coffeemaker, where the pot meets the burner, the glass sizzling with anger. “I’m sorry I sold it. At the pawnshop. We needed the money, though.”

  “Oh, Gwen. It’s—you know. Material things. They’re not important.”

  “No,” I say. “They’re not important at all.”

  “What’s important, Gwen. What’s important is that you get better.”

  I pinch my eyes shut, curl the phone cord in my hand. “Yeah. I know.”

  * * *

  With the receiver back in its cradle, I weigh the phone in my hands, a solid object, a forever object. You could pound nails wit
h it if you had to.

  The guard reenters the room and stands with her arms folded as Dr. Simon arches her eyebrows, well?

  I nod, telling her I’m satisfied. That the phone call has met the requirements of our deal.

  “Emotions. They can be confusing,” Dr. Simon says. “It’s okay if they don’t make sense right away. Takes a while to sort things out.”

  “Sometimes not, though,” I say. “Sometimes, they make sense right away.”

  I close my eyes and inhale as deeply as the breath will go, filling my belly with it. Then I swing the phone—red plastic over metal, heavy as a stone—into the side of her head.

  Twenty-Eight

  But it doesn’t work.

  The swing at Dr. Simon, it doesn’t land clean. I hadn’t accounted for her reflexes—which are good, it turns out—and my weakened ones, so atrophied after however long my imprisonment has been. In the end, the phone hits her shoulder and just glances off her ear. Rossi has an arm around my neck within a second. Within two, I’m on the ground with her knee in my back. She cranks my wrists behind me, nearly pulling my shoulders out of their sockets in the process.

  Darkness after that. Whether it’s the guard choking me out or Dr. Simon with a syringe full of horse tranquilizer, I don’t know, because I never see it. That’s what I get for acting in haste.

  I wake up back where I started, in a hospital bed and strapped down with leather restraints. There are sensors taped to my chest and temples again, and a machine off to one side bleating out my vitals to Dr. Simon, who sits in the chair eating a sandwich wrapped in wax paper.

  There’s a bandage on her left ear. That’s all. Just a bandage. Not even a black eye. A coin-sized drop of mayonnaise lands on her knee and she says shit, shit as she attacks it with a napkin and water.

  She catches my eye as she wipes and actually gives me a thin smile, almost apologetic.

  “Where is Terrance?” I say.

  She goes back to her sandwich, chews thoughtfully. “Whatever I say you won’t believe,” she says, covering her mouth to be polite. “So what’s the difference, really?”

  The pain in my shoulders and neck is incredible, and I feel a throbbing on my forehead, just at the hairline, where I must have hit the floor. “I give up,” I say, voice slow and flat. “Tell me the truth about where Terrance is, I’ll give you whatever you want.”

  Dr. Simon nods, sucks grease from the sandwich off her middle finger. “Yes, you will,” she says. “Give me whatever I want.”

  This said flatly, too, but with a difference. Games are over, it means. No more bullshit. She folds the wax paper and slides it carefully into the outside pocket of her briefcase.

  “Want to know how to contact my father?” I say.

  “Sure. But we’ll get there soon enough in the next part,” she says.

  “The next part,” I say. “Torture.”

  Dr. Simon cants her head to the side, and a smile ticks across her mouth. “The American government doesn’t torture people, Gwendolyn. You know that.”

  “But you’re not the government,” I say. “You’re a contractor.”

  “Well, that’s true. A small distinction, but an important one.” She scratches a pink fingernail at the dark spot on the knee of her pants. “Tell me, when you say ‘torture,’ do you mean pain?”

  I manage a small shrug, what else?

  “There are some people who get off on pain, you know—resisting it,” she says. “Athletes, for example. A pride thing for them. Ego. But there are more extreme cases. You, I think. You like to defy pain. Say ‘fuck you’ to pain.”

  My eyes squeeze shut. “Just tell me. What comes next?”

  I hear the feet of Dr. Simon’s chair squeak against the concrete as she rises. I hear the soft click of her shoes as she approaches slowly.

  “What comes next,” Dr. Simon says, “is the fun part.”

  * * *

  The terror, starting in my stomach and rising all the way up to my tongue, is something I can actually taste: salt and copper. I feel my pulse in my eyes and hear it, too, like a bass drum in my head.

  “Do you know where morphine comes from, Gwendolyn?” Dr. Simon asks.

  I rack my brain; maybe a right answer will please her. “Poppies,” I say. “Morphine comes from poppies.”

  “That’s right,” she says. “And how about aspirin, where does that come from?”

  Again, I work my memory but this time come up with nothing. I shake my head.

  “From a process that turned coal tar into fabric dye. Imagine that—aspirin from coal tar and dye.” She sighs, marveling at science and its wonders. “But we’re beyond that now. That psychiatrist I mentioned, the East German, Stanislaw Richter—he did it, Gwendolyn, actually cracked the code. But me, I took it to the next level.”

  The whisper comes out hoarse and feeble. “Congratulations.”

  “What we’ve discovered—oh, Gwendolyn, it’s wonderful. Can you guess what it is?”

  I look up at her. “No.”

  Her eyes widen and appear wet, as if she’s about to cry. She pinches her lips between her teeth and shakes her head, still not able to believe it. “We found—what love is made from.”

  I blink, twice, three times, her words making no sense. I pull tight at the restraints.

  “That’s right, Gwendolyn. The chemistry of it. Of love.” She walks slowly to a steel counter at the back of the room and picks up a leather case. “Know what the key ingredient of love is, Gwendolyn?”

  “I—don’t.”

  “Come on,” she says. “Guess.”

  A raspy sound comes from my throat. “Kittens,” I manage. “Rainbows.”

  She turns her head to me, lips pursed like an elementary school teacher’s to a wiseass. “Turns out, it’s venom.” Blue rubber gloves snap over her hands. “Venom of the bullet ant. A special neurotoxic peptide unique to a single species in Brazil. Took forever to isolate. Weird, huh?”

  My stomach clenches and I strain at the leather cuffs. “I can give you whatever you need. Information. Money. Whatever. I’ll tell you…”

  The needle of a syringe pokes through the red cover on a little vial. She pulls back the plunger. “Most ferocious stuff in the world. Had to recalibrate the whole way we measured pain. Unbearable, it’s said. But, Gwendolyn”—a flick to the needle with her finger—“turns out, it is bearable.”

  A bead of sweat tickles its way from the top of my wrist, over my palm, to the bottom of my hand. I look and see it’s blood from where I’ve pulled and twisted at the leather cuffs around my wrists until they’ve reopened my skin. “What do you want?” The words are raw, coming from someplace far deeper than my throat. “Please. Whatever it is.”

  “That’s the trouble. What I want, so hard to put into words,” she says, approaching calmly, like the doctor she is, gentle and wise in her movements. “Far easier to show you.”

  My teeth clench and my body bucks against the restraints. I lunge at her with a bark.

  But there’s no fear in her—the restraints have made fear unnecessary—and, curiously, there’s no malice, either. Just pale lips feigning a clinician’s smile.

  The needle puckers the skin over a blue vein on the inside of my elbow, then slides through.

  Her thumb depresses the plunger slowly, and the drug creeps like warm water through my arm to my heart and to my head. She tells me to shush, then caresses my bicep. The warmth of her fingers shines through the rubber.

  The pain, the toxic nausea—I clench my face in anticipation of the first wave from this unbearable-bearable venom. But it doesn’t come.

  Instead, delirium and pleasure. It does not wait. Does not build to something better. It just takes hold, all at once.

  A cartoon sun. A child’s yellow marker, soaking through the paper. Hypersaturated. The salt-and-copper taste of the terror is replaced by sugar and cherries.

  It is not the sensation of flying; it’s stillness, of the world coming to me. I hear a gasp, then a
laugh—mine from my O-shaped mouth. I close my eyes. See springtime.

  She’s there, next to me. I can feel her breath roll over my ear to the skin of my neck and cheek. Like? she asks. I don’t answer. I hear the white film on her lips crackle as it pulls apart. She’s smiling.

  She’s smiling because I’ve made her happy.

  * * *

  Sometimes she’s there, next to me. Sometimes no one is. Sometimes someone else is. A handsome, unshaven man, fit and lovely, curly hair, in scrubs the color of a perfect day’s sky. He asks me questions and I answer and he takes notes on a clipboard. Are they even words, the sounds coming out of my mouth? He leans over, to check the leather cuffs on my wrists, and I strain at the strap over my chest to smell him.

  There’s music playing—a Tibetan singing bowl the size of the Earth—a single-note tremolo containing all notes. It’s the sound the planets make. Musica universalis. The harmony of the spheres.

  Do you know what sunshine feels like on your bare shoulders and your ass and your tummy and the soles of your feet all at the same time? I do. I know what it’s like and wish I had the words to say.

  Three thousand people who love me kiss me with three thousand mouths and stroke my flesh with six thousand hands.

  My blood is champagne.

  These are not metaphors.

  This Dr. Simon—she is a caring doctor indeed. Such a gift she’s given me. And how cruel I was to her. How awfully I had misread her intentions. She loves me. The handsome man is writing more notes, so concerned is he with my welfare. Checking my heart rate, my blood pressure—notice the concern on his face? That’s compassion, right there. Squinting gorgeously as he makes careful numbers. He loves me, too. I know it.

  * * *

  And maybe there’s sleep, but who knows the way these things work, with Dr. Simon’s magical elixir love potion, made of peptides from the bullet ant, native of Brazil. Time passes, not enough of it, and it all ends just like that. It doesn’t scale down gradually, ebb away the way wisdom-teeth-Percocet does. It’s like a drop from a high place, very sudden. A drop from a high place that ends on pavement. Every muscle pulses with the exhaustion of effort, and my wrists and ankles sting with fresh bite marks. When my eyes flutter open, I’m alone in the room. The countertop where Dr. Simon had laid her leather case is bare. The sensors hooked to my chest and temples are gone. As is the machine that flashed out my vitals in green and, later, red lights.