by M. E. Roufa
But Billy has married a boy.
The girls he had tried on every side,
But none he could get to agree;
All was in vain, he went home again,
And since that he’s married to Natty.”
A longer pause, and then the Emancipation Proclamation was read. This continued for some time. He couldn’t always follow the words, and wasn’t sure whether he was supposed to focus on them or try to tune them out. The readings seemed to be alternating between passages closely associated with Abraham Lincoln and expressions with no association to him whatsoever. Another pause, and she was reading something that sounded more like a letter, something about growing a beard. There was another pause, followed by a litany of words he didn’t understand. It didn’t have the cadence of prose, or the rhythm of poetry. Was it even English?
It was names, he realized, hearing the familiar syllables that made up “Mary Todd.”
“David Derickson,”
“William Seward,”
“Sarah Bush,”
“Ann Rutledge,”
“Joshua Speed,”
“Joshua Fry Speed,”
“Mr. Joshua Speed.”
Abe laughed out loud as he heard the familiar name repeated in several more variations and intonations. So that was their game? Really? He wondered what his brain imagery was showing. If they had been hoping to trigger another reaction, they failed, unless the reaction they wanted was amusement.
More names followed, then place names. There were some paragraphs that Abe didn’t quite place, but was fairly certain came from the debates against Stephan Douglass. And finally, the stirring Springfield speech that included the stirring passage “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” At these words, Abe felt his heart beat more strongly. It had always been one of his favorite quotes—possibly because it so perfectly summed out how he felt about the dichotomy of his own house—his body, his self—which the circumstances of his birth split open.
The clanking stopped, and he was left with the music as the table slowly rolled out from inside the scanner. He felt tired, drained. He wondered what they had seen. The technician helped him up and took back the headphones.
“See anything interesting?” Abe asked.
“Not my place to say,” he responded. He opened the door, revealing Doctor Butcher waiting as if she had been there the entire time.
“Hi again.” Abe said cheerily. “Miss me?”
35
You did great,” the doctor said, after another forty minutes during which Abe had run on a treadmill, blown into a tube, ridden a stationary bike and recited tongue twisters while she looked on. “You’re really in excellent shape for your age. I still have to run these samples to the lab, but between you and me, they’re not really necessary for what they’re doing. It’s more to cover our asses. Pardon my French.” She smiled, revealing a beautiful set of teeth.
Hopping off the table, Abe reached for his clothes so he could begin covering his own ass. Doctor Butcher, who had up till this time been gathering together his charts and throwing out the detritus of the various testing kits, turned at the sound of rustling fabric. “Don’t change yet, Abe. The important tests are coming after this. In fact…” she went back and pulled out the sheet of notebook paper that Abe had seen sticking out of chart, reading it through. “Yes. I’m supposed to take these.” She reached out and took Abe’s clothes. “See?”
She held up the sheet of notebook paper. Instead of revealing the long list of notes in Ed’s handwriting that Abe had been hoping to somehow abscond with, all there were were ten discouraging words: “Remove test subject’s civilian clothing from examining room after physical.” Under those nine words were two more even more disheartening: “Including underclothes.”
“Sorry about that.” She scooped the pile from out of his arms. “I’m sure they’re just taking them for cleaning or something. You can keep this if you’d like.” She offered him the piece of notebook paper. He considered taking it, then changed his mind. He had no pockets, no pen, no need for a reminder of this final humiliation.
“Will I see you again?” he asked.
She shot him her most sympathetic look yet. “I don’t know, Abe. But I’m a medical doctor. You might want to hope not.”
36
They had forgotten him. Abe was alone in the examining room, with no clothes, and they had all forgotten him. There was no clock on the wall, so he had no true way to gauge how much time had passed, but he was certain it was at least twenty minutes, probably longer. The room was starting to get colder, and he could feel goose bumps beginning to form beneath the thin gown. He hugged himself, trying unsuccessfully to squeeze himself back to warmth. They could at least have left him his socks. Or a magazine. Or some of that turkey, even. His mind wandered back to the incredible turkey, and he felt his stomach growl. Had enough time passed that it was already time for dinner? And would they feed him dinner? He wondered again what constituted the “real” tests. When another ten minutes had passed with no sign of anyone coming, he decided to try the door.
Slowly, quietly, on tiptoes even though there was no one in the room, Abe crept over to the doorway, turning the knob by infinitesimal degrees until he heard the bolt slide open. He pulled the door open a crack, peeking out around the corner. Maybe if it had been an outward-opening door, he would have been able to see a bit more, but as it was, he didn’t have a chance. By the time the door was open wide enough for him to see out, he could already see Big Man #2 looking in at him, making full-contact eye contact. He slowly pushed the door back shut and sat back down on the examining table with a papery crunch. He was just going to have to wait.
As it turns out, it wasn’t a wait at all. Ed came right into the door, holding a stopwatch, which he happily showed to Abe—though too quickly for him to get a good look. “Forty-eight minutes!” He announced triumphantly. “You’re a very patient man, Abe. Very trusting. I thought you’d cave before thirty, but Nita had you pegged—she said you were good for at least forty-five. She’s a great judge of character. Always knows who’s going to run and when. You’d think I’d learn not to bet her.” Ed chuckled and shook his head at his own defeat.
Abe felt distinctly uncomfortable sitting here with nothing between himself and Ed but his hospital gown. Noticing his discomfort, Ed opened up a bag he had brought with him into the room, which Abe hadn’t noticed before. The waving stopwatch had distracted his eyes away from the vinyl garment bag, which Ed had meanwhile draped over the head of the examining table behind him. “These should all fit you just fine. I’m sure you already know what they are.” Ed grinned conspiratorially, and Abe realized that he did indeed know. “You may have some trouble with the fastenings. Zippers weren’t invented until 1914, you probably know. Anyhow, give a holler if you’re stuck and someone’ll come in and help you out. Or help you in.” Ed laughed that laugh again, along with the expectant look which encouraged Abe to join in, but he just didn’t have the heart to do more than smile weakly. Yesterday he might have appreciated the pun a tiny bit, today there was nothing about the word “stuck” that he could find even remotely risible.
Ed left him alone with the bag of clothes. Knowing full well he was being given another visceral history lesson, Abe expected to smell the odor of mothballs, but there was nothing of the sort. As he took out the gabardine pants, plain cotton shirt and string tie, he said a silent prayer of thanks that he hadn’t been born from the cloned embryo of Molière, or Sir Walter Raleigh, or anyone else who regularly wore ridiculous tight-fitting leggings or ruffled collars.
Having done this once already for Harold in a far lower quality wardrobe, Abe was able to master the indignity of being dressed like Abraham Lincoln more quickly than he would have several weeks ago. Still, it was humiliating. He had never before appreciated the importance of elastic, or of Lycra fabric in general. Or of fabric softeners.
But he had one good thing to say about this suit. It had a pocket. Befo
re anyone could come back into the room, Abe slipped the perfume card out from under the table protector and into his new jacket, next to his heart. The absence of a two-way mirror in the room had once again joined the ranks of solid positives.
A double knock on the door, and before Abe could get to the “in” of “Come in,” Ed was already in the room. “You look great!” he said, genuinely admiring the effect. “Very Presidential. How does it feel?”
“Itchy,” Abe responded.
“Well, it’s old wool. And the thread is original too. Everything was made exactly the way old Abe would have worn it. So you should feel right at home. Lincoln must have thought his suits were itchy too. That’s a good bit of research you’re already yielding us.”
“How long do I have to wear this?” Abe asked.
“Oh, I’m not sure I have the answer to that yet. Though of course we have a whole set of homespun pajamas waiting for you for after hours—wouldn’t want you to sleep in your daytime clothes, of course.”
“Of course,” Abe sighed, dejected at this new proof that they had no intention of letting him go home anytime soon.
“We did make a hat for you too, if you want it, but we felt it wasn’t necessary, since you won’t be going outside. And there was no way we could do the wooden teeth, obviously.”
“That was George Washington.”
“What?”
“The wooden teeth. And Washington didn’t really have them either.”
“Huh. Well, we couldn’t do them. Not without pulling your teeth out. We decided it wasn’t worth it.”
“Good to know.”
Ed shepherded him out of the room and back into the hallway, where Nita and the two unshakeable chaperones were again waiting for him. Even with his “forty-eight minutes of lead time” (what did that make him—a sheep? Abe could kill himself for his mindless complaisance), they still didn’t trust him to take three steps without attendant goonery. Where was he going to go?
Though truth be told, if he knew he could get away, he still thought he might just make a run for it. So maybe they were justified. The lights in the corridor seemed dimmer somehow, and Abe realized that it was because the few rooms that had windows were now unlit by any natural light. Evening had set in. His stomach growled again. But they passed by the cafeteria without stopping.
“Where are you taking me now?” Abe asked. “Don’t worry, I’m not expecting an answer.”
“You ever hear of a Mnemonic Device?” Ed asked, winking at Abe.
“Sure,” he responded.
“Well, we’re hooking you up to one.”
37
They passed through what seemed like an endless number of connecting corridors before they reached a pair of double doors that were unlike any of those they had passed before. For one thing, they stretched from floor to ceiling and took up the entire breadth of the hallway. For another thing, these doors had a sign. The sign said “KEEP OUT—AUTHORIZED PERSONELLL ONLY” carefully hand-lettered in multiple colors of magic marker. Even more unusually, underneath the words, the sign was decorated with a magic marker illustration of a chase scene of a stick figure trying to run through a pair of giant floor-to-ceiling double doors, while being pursued by a number of scary-looking stick figure guards with guns. The fleeing stick figure was bleeding out of many, many bullet holes. A speech bubble coming out of his mouth said, “I should of read the sign!” Sure enough, in a touch worthy of the finest postmodernist minds, on one of the hand-drawn doors was a tiny rendering of the same “KEEP OUT” sign, stick figures and all. What was this place?
Ed paused while punching in the combination into the keypad next to the door to open the lock, and nodded toward the sign. “Every month we have a contest,” he explained, answering Abe’s silent question.
Abe noticed that the burlier of his silent guards was beaming like a proud parent. “Your kid did this?” Abe asked, thrilled at the opportunity to gain some points. He then watched in horror as the grin disappeared from the man’s face and the grip on his shoulder tightened. Abe couldn’t imagine what he had said wrong. And then he imagined it. A smarter man than Abe would have stayed quiet at that realization. Unfortunately, Abe was not a smarter man than Abe.
“Of course a kid couldn’t have done this. I don’t know what I was thinking. They could never have captured all the nuances this sign conveys. It’s a great picture. Really telegraphs ‘Keep Out.’ Really really communicates ‘Obey the sign that says ‘Keep out.’ And the consequences for not. Keeping out.”
The hand that was slowly relocating his shoulder to somewhere south of his ribcage began to relax. Abe decided to continue. “And it’s very creative. Particularly the orthography. It really does stand out.”
At that Abe distinctly heard Nita cough in what he could have sworn was not laughter.
The electronic lock chirped and the right-hand door swung open, letting them through. It closed with a whoosh of air as soon as they were all on the other side. For a big door, it moved quickly. Had any of them taken a second longer, their clothes might have been caught. Ideally their clothes. In a best-case scenario, their clothes. But pretty much anything that stood out or otherwise dangled. Having two much larger people behind him suddenly seemed like not such a bad thing after all, Abe thought.
In constructing a building, architects create hallways as a way to pass from one room to the next without having to pass between subsequent rooms. When asked to describe or draw a hallway, most people would draw or describe a long space with doors spaced along it, which the hallway connects. After all, that’s its job. Connecting rooms. This was not that sort of hallway. This was more of a runway. A long narrowing corridor that led to nowhere. Like a gallery, but with no artwork on the walls. In fact the walls were starkly, painfully white. So white he kept looking down at his feet, fully expecting to see that his bare feet had somehow left scuff marks. It was a space that said there is only one destination, and that is directly ahead of you. It was essentially shaped like an arrow, with a far broader tip. And Abe was being walked down the shaft.
Only when they reached the far wall did Abe notice the doors recessed into its white surface. They had no handles, no hinges, no visible hardware of any sort. And it was hard to say how many of them there were, now that he was only just noticing them from a one-foot distance. Perhaps he had been passing them all along. Ed stepped up to the large rectangular space where a door was delineated, and placed his hand on it, pushed, touching it with his fingertips first, followed by his palm. From somewhere within the wall a mechanism chimed electronically, then the door sprung open like a kitchen cabinet. Abe became aware that he hadn’t exhaled in almost half a minute. He could hear his heart pounding in his chest.
“That’s all we need,” Ed said, and the two bodyguards who had been Abe’s constant companions turned and headed back down the long hallway. Having them perpetually there behind him had been alarming, Abe now realized. But not needing them had to be worse.
Abe followed him into the room, only to be shocked at what he saw. It was the same room they had been in originally. Same irritating green walls. Same large not-purely-reflective mirror. Same frolicsome kitten couch. They had only approached through a separate entrance he hadn’t seen before, hidden in a side wall.
“It’s not the same room,” Ed said. “It only looks the same.”
Abe couldn’t believe it. Why would they have two identical rooms like that, and in such horrible taste?
“We find it gives test subjects a calming sense of familiarity that helps inspire a positive intellectual frame of mind. Revealing that it isn’t in fact the same room then creates an unsettling psychological effect, which provides an even more effective mental enhancement. Then again,” he added, after a pause, “it could be the same room.”
Three people entered the room to join them. Nita, soon followed by an older man with a large briefcase, and a nervous-looking young man, probably in his early twenties. The older man sat in one of the comfyish c
hairs, indicating to Abe that he should sit in the one facing it. Nita and Ed sat on the lumpy kitten couch. Abe felt this was progress.
The older man introduced himself as Dr. Lamb, following it up in a practiced way with, “But you can call me Steve.” The other, younger man he introduced as “Brian, my intern.” Brian reached out to shake Abe’s hand, then stopped at a look from everyone who wasn’t Abe. Seeing that all the chairs were now taken, Brian sheepishly sat down on the floor. “For God’s sake, Brian,” the doctor sniffed, “Get off the floor. Get yourself a chair. Harvard,” he said to Abe, rolling his eyes, as if this was sufficient explanation. Brian left the room humiliated.
Dr. Lamb began opening the suitcase. “So, Abe, I suppose you know what we’re here for by now.”
Abe shrugged. Why should he make this easy for them?
The doctor continued, “I’m a therapist. A psychotherapist.”
Abe countered with a dead-on impersonation of himself at the press conference. “You think I’m some crazy person who thinks he’s an important dead president, and you’re here to cure me?”
“Well, not crazy, just recalcitrant. Or maybe blocked. So I’m just here helping you jog your own brain a little bit. You don’t have to participate if you don’t wish to. So far, from what I understand you haven’t wished to. So I brought a brain jogger to do it for you.” Abe forced himself not to allow himself think what that meant. Instead he imagined a group of brains in track suits, jogging around a mall. There, that was better.
Dr. Lamb opened the suitcase fully to reveal a set of steel odds and ends that were every bit as disturbing as the instruments in Dr. Butcher’s examining room had been unsurprising. It was like going from a doctor’s office to a… well, like going from a doctor’s office to a freaky room with a mad scientist doctor where you didn’t know what they were going to do with you and you wanted to run screaming away. Exactly like that analogy, in fact.