by M. E. Roufa
And that’s when he noticed the window.
For the first time all day, Abe had a window.
He looked out, but all he could see was the black of night, and what looked like trees. He had no idea if it was a real window, leading to the real outdoors, or a simulation to make it feel like the real outdoors. He couldn’t believe that they would give him an actual window when they wouldn’t give him an actual door. It had curtains—cornflower blue with a red and yellow gingham pattern which also looked like they had just been ordered directly out of any number of Maine country catalogs, except that they were clearly handmade, somehow more substantial, and tied back with more burlap ropes. They had thought of everything. He put his hand to the window glass (real glass, he thought), and it was cool to the touch. Just like a real window on a cold night. But it was thick, wavy glass, and if the exterior of his chamber were air-conditioned, the cool temperature would be meaningless. He would have a better idea of what lay outside by morning when the sun rose.
The idea of spending the night there raised other associations for Abe. He was hungry. But Ed had said they would get him the next morning. What about dinner? Were they really not going to feed him? Or was he supposed to wait for someone else to come and escort him to yet another meal? Suddenly he felt more like a prisoner than ever. All day he had been walked from place to place, had been poked in places only he should have the right to poke, and had been asked questions he couldn’t stand the sound of, they had been repeated so often, but nothing seemed quite so dehumanizing as knowing that he was dependent on unknown forces to supply his food. And didn’t know when, or whether, or in what shape they would come. He might have to go without food for the night, all because he was completely at their mercy. Nothing could be worse than that.
Almost nothing could be worse than that.
One thing could be worse than that.
There, peeking out from under the bed, he saw the chamber pot.
40
After spending several minutes staring in dismay at the little china bowl painted, disturbingly enough, with flowers that he was pretty sure were supposed to be (oh the irony) forget-me-nots, Abe tried to return to his earlier joy at this field trip into the past. He opened drawers and poked at things that stood out. He found a loaf of bread, some blackberry preserves, and a jug of whole milk, plus a large pitcher and basin of water that he knew was for washing but he thought contained enough surplus that he could drink from it too, should the need arise. This, then, was to be his dinner.
It was incredibly delicious, every bit as much as he had hoped after his lunch hours and hours before. But the events of the day, coupled with the adrenaline rush of his fears, made him far hungrier than a simple meal of bread could satiate. On the other hand, he realized—thinking again of his new little porcelain friend—less in, less out. And he was all in favor of less out, at least until he could go back to modern conveniences. Whenever that would be.
He sat at the desk, played with the pen and ink and the intriguing wooden spool that served as both inkwell and penholder, then looked at the books on the shelves. They were all law books, dated in the 1800s but with new leather bindings in what he was certain were historically (and probably genetically) accurate leather. But while they were interesting as historical artifacts, they were as boring to him as dry toast. As dry twenty-first century toast. He sat in the chair, finding it even more uncomfortable than it looked. He wondered whether the lack of sufficient food and material comforts (and even the heat from the wood stove was feeble) was some sort of psychological tactic. Possibly a brainwashing technique to break him down and get him to divulge the information that he kept telling them—that he knew—he didn’t have. And if that were the case, he was almost afraid to test out his theory on the mattress. Parasite-free or not.
As it turned out, his suspicions were correct. Instead of a box spring, the mattress rested on a web of more of those all-purpose burlap ropes. It was stiff and lumpy, not like a board was stiff or a sack of oatmeal was lumpy, but more like a mugging victim’s body was stiff and lumpy. And it had an odd smell to it, not the way things you’re not used to always have an odd smell to them, but the way that makes you wonder if you stepped in something earlier and accidentally rubbed it off there and now you’ll never be clean again. And so began a very unpleasant last few hours. After much internal debate, he decided to change into the nightshirt they had left him, carefully hung upon a peg set into the wall next to the bed. There was a nightcap too, but he couldn’t bring himself to put it on. As the night grew colder, and his counterpane not quite long enough to pull over his tall frame, he began to see the logic behind wearing it, but his vanity still won out. Like that insidious stovepipe hat—which incidentally they had left for him and was sitting mocking him on another peg by the fake front door—he would not ever stoop to putting it on. No hats. Not if his life depended on it. Well, maybe then. But not until then.
But right now, all that was at stake was sleep, and the longer he tried, the harder it was to get there. He tried counting things, and recounting things that had happened, and trying to come up with escape plans, and nothing had helped him. And tepid, room-temperature milk, he found, by no means worked the same soporific magic that warm milk was rumored to do. The lamps had burned down hours before, and they had left him no means to refill them, so reading was out of the question. In the darkness, stretched out on the hard bed, he let his eyes try scanning around the room, seeing if he could actually do what they had hoped for him here: try to feel as if he had traveled back in time.
There was a soft smell of wood coming from the stove. From the faint glow of moonlight (real moonlight?) coming in through the window, he could vaguely make out the shapes of the desk, the torture-chair, the shelves. The pitcher and basin. And up high in a corner, tucked behind one of the eaves in a chink between two of the logs that must have been improperly joined with whatever it was they used to join them, he saw a red dot.
But there was no reason he should see anything red in the dark.
Unless it was glowing.
Like an LED bulb.
Abe nearly flew out of bed with the realization of what that meant. Of course they had a camera. Of course they were watching him. Maybe they wanted to know whether the real Abraham Lincoln slept on his right side or his left. Or whether he snored (did he snore?). Or how much he drooled on his pillow. More realistically, they wanted to know if the fake Abraham Lincoln had any intentions of making a break for it. For all he knew, the cloudy silver looking glass on the wall was a two-way mirror as well. How could he have been so stupid? He had to get out of here. He tried not to stare at the dot, not certain whether a person was monitoring him even then, or whether it was all being fed into some digital recorder to be studied later. Whether they had a zoom function, and could see him staring. Whether it was better for them to know that he knew they were watching. In which case, should he wave? Write them a sign with their pen and ink? Put on the damn hat so he could tip it? He remembered their repeated hints that they were unhappy with his refusal to cooperate with their testing. Their veiled and not-so-veiled threats. And he was relatively certain at this point that whoever they were not, they most certainly were not Not From the Government. Too much money had gone into this setup. And at the same time, too little planning. No one seemed to know exactly what to do with him. Ed seemed to be at cross-purposes with Dr. Lamb about the immersion element, which Dr. Lamb clearly thought was unnecessary. Dr. Lamb seemed to be a slave to his device, which as far as Abe could tell did nothing at all. And Nita? What was her role, other than to intimidate the crap out of him?
Okay. Even if that was it, she was very, very good at it.
He wondered whether there was any way that he could exploit their differences of opinion for his own benefit. It would buy him some time, at any rate. The room was growing colder and colder, to the point where it was becoming almost unbearable. Abe wondered what time it was, but they had left him no timepieces in the room
of any sort. He decided to risk the greater chill outside the blankets to see if anything could be done. He resisted the urge to look up at the little red light as he got up, and tried to walk normally as he crossed to the stove. He hadn’t remembered there being any kindling underneath or next to it, but maybe there had been a pile or a bin of some sort that he had overlooked.
Sure enough, on closer scrutiny there was a small woven twig basket filled with logs and strips of paper tucked into a nook beside the stove. He opened the door of the stove carefully, using the corner of his flannel nightgown wrapped twice around his hand so as not to burn his skin, and peered inside. Maybe there was something he could poke deeper toward what was left of the flames. Not that there was a poker, but he would worry about that once he discovered what there was in the way of pokee.
But the point was moot, he discovered as he looked in. Deep inside the stove, a fire was still glowing merrily, the flames dancing brightly behind a black mesh screen. They were red, orange and yellow silk, flickering upwards on the breeze of some hidden fan, and lit from below by a red 20-watt bulb. Some sort of aluminum foil streamers gave it a hint of extra dazzle. A small air-freshener pumped the now-familiar wood smoke aroma out through a vented fan. The rest of the interior protected a glorified space heater, which was now apparently set to low.
Furious, Abe cursed and kicked the stove, then yowled in pain as his bare foot made connection with the extremely real cast iron. He slammed the door of the stove shut and hobbled back to bed. He yelled again, another primal yowl, and punched his pillow hard. A mix of feathers started to burst out of one side, clinging to his face and hair. Exhausted, Abe curled up into a tight ball, lay down onto his now much flatter pillow, and finally fell into a deep sleep.
41
Abe woke up in shock the next morning to the sound of a rooster crowing. Lost in the tangle of his unaccustomed surroundings, his back aching from the slablike mattress and his head still spinning from the trials of the night before, it took Abe some time to recognize the noise or what to do with it. A child of the suburbs his entire life, Abe had never heard a real rooster crowing before. The word “rooster” sprung into his mind, and he knew instinctively that it was right, having heard the sound often enough in movies and on TV, but he couldn’t ever remember having come in contact with the real thing. And was he hearing one now? Or was it a recording—another fake, like the fire in the stove?
He could feel his toes throb faintly in sympathy with the memory. The stove still gave off its heat, much warmer now, as if in mockery. Maybe they hadn’t been watching him last night. Maybe he wasn’t supposed to have noticed the thermostat going down, the classic symptom of Florida’s overdependence on climate control. He got out of bed gingerly and walked toward the window. Would he see the chicken outside? If it was even outside, he corrected himself. If the entire scene outside his window wasn’t artificial. Already, from his vantage point across the room he could see trees. Where was the bird? He felt as if his entire day were going to rest on whether there was a chicken outside or not.
Standing with his face practically pressed against the glass, Abe gaped. It must have been just after dawn; there was some reddish sunlight to be seen on the horizon, but much of the sky was still dark. In the early morning light, though, he could still make out that his “cabin”—for he already felt it to be more than simply a room, the longer he spent in it—was surrounded by a thicket of trees. And not just any trees, but oak trees, maple trees, buckeyes… trees that had no business in Florida. And birds flying between them that were nothing like the fanciful wetland birds that high-stepped through Orlando. He thought he saw the red flash of a cardinal, or possibly a woodpecker’s head, but it was gone as soon as it came. The whole scene was impossible. Which of course made it unreal.
But it seemed real. The sun looked and behaved just like the sun. The birds were absolutely real birds. And only God can make a tree, Abe said to himself, hopefully. He couldn’t remember the last time he had wanted anything as much as he wanted those trees to be real. It was like believing in magic. He would cooperate with the project; he would try to find the ghost of Abraham Lincoln buried inside of him even though he knew he wasn’t there, he would write long florid love letters to Joshua Speed if it only meant that he could go outside his windows and try to climb those trees, if they were real.
Ed was so proud of his achievements in “reality”—everything was original, or grafted from the original hosts, or genetically spliced. So those could be Lincoln’s own trees, somehow made to grow in Florida soil. And if those trees were really Abraham Lincoln’s oak trees and ash trees and maple trees, then this really could be Abraham Lincoln’s log cabin if he wanted it to be, and who cared what lay beyond the wood if he could just wander into it and feel it—feel what it was really like.
He realized he was suddenly thinking like them. Was their project working, or was he losing his mind? He realized that he didn’t care.
He remembered the rooster. Where was it? The rooster was the sign. If a rooster appeared, then the forest was real. No rooster, no forest. They wouldn’t have gone to all that trouble to plant a real forest, stock it with real birds, and then microchip a chicken. It wasn’t possible. He looked down at the cleared ground outside of the cabin. The outside was made of logs, and from their thickness he was convinced they were the same logs that comprised the interior walls. There was a pile of firewood and an axe (Abe groaned at the sight of them), and a water pump, but no sign of any livestock. He couldn’t hear any clucking or other animal sounds either. And the cock’s crowing was never repeated. He watched and watched, burning the negative image of the dirt ground into his retinas, but no rooster appeared. Finally, he gave up and returned to face his still dark room, and began to dress.
As he pulled on his single pair of undergarments, he sighed. The idea of wearing them for a second day in a row was not a pleasant one. But he had no choice. He smelled them before putting them on, then blushed, remembering the camera. It could have been worse, he supposed. But he couldn’t help lamenting that fabric softener would not be invented for another hundred years. He pulled on his trousers and shirt, fastening on the collar while looking in the cloudy mirror. He wondered if anyone was looking back at him. His suspicions weren’t allayed any by the fact that the second his last button was fastened, Ed arrived.
It was a strange moment, worthy of a science fiction movie. First, there was the distant sound of a pure electronic chime. Then, where there once had been a solid log wall, a tall rectangle of white light suddenly appeared. The white light spread, until it opened into a doorway, revealing a completely white corridor behind it, with Ed silhouetted in its center. Abe hadn’t realized how completely he had been immersed in the world of the nineteenth century over the past several hours. But when he saw Ed before him, his modern clothes looked jarring. Ed came in, holding a large basket.
“Good morning, Abe. Hope you slept well.”
“It was okay,” Abe answered. Despite his moment of revelation just minutes before, all his hostility had returned. “The bathroom left a lot to be desired.”
“Ah,” Ed said. “Well, we won’t hold you to that. Not if you help us get what we need in return.”
“Ed, look. I don’t know how to help you. I don’t have any memories.”
“Didn’t the room spark anything?”
“Not yet.”
Ed lit up at this. “Ah—not yet! Well, just think if there’s anything that can help with that, and if it’s within reason, maybe I can pull some strings. Maybe a little more food?”
Ed opened up the basket to reveal more bread and preserves, with butter this time, more milk, some cheese, and more than that—
“Eggs.” Abe exclaimed.
“Yep. Fresh eggs. Laid this morning.”
“From an 1860s chicken?”
Ed beamed. “You guessed it! 1840s, actually. Wait till you taste them! You know, once you’ve had fresh-laid eggs, you can’t go back to store-bough
t. You just can’t. And these…”
“Show it to me.” Abe’s tone was flat, almost harsh.
Ed held up an egg, quickly. “It’s hard-boiled.”
“No.” Abe said. “Show it to me. The chicken.”
“I don’t under—”
“Show. Me. The. Chicken!”
“What?”
“Show me the chicken! Show me the chicken! Show me the chicken!!!” Yelling now, Abe lunged for Ed’s throat. Immediately a klaxon sounded and out of nowhere a team of people he had never seen before came rushing in and pulled him off of Ed, restraining him. He felt a needle entering his arm and everything went spinny, then calm. The room went black.
Abe awoke alone in the room again with an awful headache. The uncomfortable chair had been removed from the room, as had the wooden bedstead. His mattress was now on the floor. From the sunlight streaming in through the window, he guessed that it was hours later.
The breakfast basket was gone. In its place was a grilled chicken.
42
Not long afterwards the wall’s innards chimed and the hidden door opened again. This time the two heavyset guards accompanied Ed, who looked nervous. Clearly he was taking no chances. His eyes went warily over to the table, where there was little left of the chicken carcass. He smiled wanly. Abe, gnawing on a last drumstick, managed a half-smile back. He was starving. Any symbolism the bird represented could take a flying leap out the phony window.