“There is no duration of time,” Gressil said. “There simply is nowhere else to go. This is the last stop, Sterling. This is the peak of existence. Once you make it here, there’s nowhere to go but down, and you can’t even go there because you’ve made it here. I told you, what’s on the other side of those doors doesn’t matter, anymore. Tell me…do you want to go anywhere else, Mr. McPleasant? Do you want to leave?”
McPleasant shook his head, and the girl traced the tips of her fingers up the inside of his thigh.
“Nor will you ever,” Gressil continued. Those doors, you see, are one-way only. New people come in, but no one ever goes out. There’s simply no reason to go out. Everything you could ever desire is in this building. The things that happen here would befuddle even a perverse mind such as yours. You will learn things here that will alter your state of being in ways unimaginable.”
“I like this,” McPleasant said, putting his arm around the girl’s warm shoulders. “I like this a lot.” His voice sounded deeper, more harmonious and almost a bit melodic. It was the voice of a practiced hypnotist, a centuries-wise magician, a blind and white-bearded seer. It was the voice of a god.
“Bask in it,” the girl whispered into McPleasant’s ear. “Can you feel it? This place does that to you. Close your eyes, reflect upon your newly-acquired knowledge.”
He did as he was told, and he could picture himself sinking into a gurgling puddle of gelatinous golden warmth. He let it wash up over him, seep inside of him, flow into his veins.
“What do you feel?” Gressil asked, sounding miles away and underwater.
“Everything,” said McPleasant, the corners of his mouth twitching into a contented half-smile at the sound of his new voice. He opened his eyes, and the scenery had changed completely. The hotel lobby was gone, and he was now lying on his back on a huge bed. The girl lay next to him, propped up on her elbow, one hand slowly unbuttoning McPleasant’s khaki shirt. Gressil was seated on a white, semicircular couch nearby. There was a number of hallways and rooms in the suite, and six stairs that led from the bedroom area down into the lounge where Gressil was sitting. A gigantic television was built into the wall, its dead black screen staring knowingly at McPleasant. There were no windows.
McPleasant was unbothered by this abrupt change of location. Everything remained blissful. The cigarette still hung from between his lips, and there was a tall glass of scotch on the nightstand. The girl had now opened his shirt and was running her index finger up and down his stomach.
“There should be music,” McPleasant said, and was immediately answered with the sound of an old song by the Pixies, a tune that McPleasant had always liked, but he’d never known its name. He knew it now, but felt no need to speak it, to think it, to retrieve it from his massive collection of newfound knowledge. The tune of the music flowed through his veins, replacing his blood with an abstract sense of rhythm and connectivity to the lyrics. He looked at the tan young girl and said, “Try this trick and spin it. Your head will collapse.”
The girl smiled, shut her dilated eyes, and said, “But there’s nothing in it.”
“I want to hurt you,” McPleasant whispered as the music droned on. “I want to please you. I want to hear you scream in pleasure. I want to hear you shriek in pain.”
Smiling, her eyes still closed, the girl nodded and whispered, “Do it, then.”
McPleasant looked back up at the ceiling and took a drag from the cigarette. “Not yet,” he said, pushing curls of smoke from his nose. “Listen to the song.”
“Take it in,” the girl agreed. “Absorb it like everything else.”
Gray plumes hung over McPleasant’s head, and he watched them sway and twirl to the rhythm of the music. “This feeling,” he called over to Gressil, “this bliss…it’s unbelievable. Fuck, it’s good. I can sense that notion of eternity, now. I can see myself here forever. I can see an endless line of indulgence. Looking at the present, looking forward, never looking back.”
“Now you’re getting it,” Gressil said, and McPleasant saw him light a joint from the corner of his eye.
“What does it take to get into this place?” McPleasant wondered aloud. “Murder? Rape? Blasphemy? I’m guilty as charged on all accounts, but which one was my golden ticket?”
“None of the above,” Gressil said, kicking off his shiny black loafers and sprawling back on the couch. “You represent a very small fraction of a much larger whole. Freedom, Sterling, true freedom…that’s what gets you in here. It’s all about thinking for yourself, eschewing the roles that society tries to force you into playing. Life is one big fucking stage production. You can be a bitch in a costume, reciting meaningless lines from a worthless script, or you can be an asshole in the audience who throws shit at the faggots on stage. The assholes in the audience come here, and the actors fade into fat, wrinkled obscurity. People like you, Sterling, people like everyone here, are the ones who watch with a sad kind of fascination as the world lathers itself in shit and tries to tell itself that it’s all for a good cause.”
“How sad,” McPleasant said. “How sad for the others. Oh, the things they are missing.”
“Fuck the others,” whispered the girl. “This isn’t meant for everyone. The others, the actors in the play, they wouldn’t know what to do with this kind of freedom. They’ve spent their whole lives in chains, and they like the chains. The chains make them feel sane. They make them feel normal. They make them feel like they belong.”
McPleasant lit another cigarette, inhaled, and listened to the music. “Where is my mind?” he said in unison with the band. “Do I even have a mind here, or has my being just melded into one shapeless form of boundless energy?” He thought for a moment, and then said, “I feel…royal.”
“You are,” said the girl. “Royalty is just a state of mind that exists all around us.”
“Trust your instinct,” Gressil said for the second time since they’d met. “Don’t think about it too much.” After he said this, his cell phone rang, and he answered it. He muttered something that McPleasant couldn’t hear, didn’t need to hear, and then he hung up. “I have to get back to the front desk,” he said, crushing out his joint in a crystal heart-shaped ashtray on the glass table in front of the couch. “We have a new guest arriving shortly. I’ll be back up later to see how you’re settling in. Give me a call when your new friend ceases to entertain you.”
The girl giggled at this and pressed her warmth closer to McPleasant.
Gressil didn’t leave in any traditional sort of way, but he didn’t just vanish, either. One moment he was there, and the next time McPleasant looked over, he was gone, and this was perfectly acceptable to him.
“Are you ready?” the girl asked, placing a long knife in McPleasant’s hand.
McPleasant set the knife down beside him, hit his cigarette, and said, “Almost. Not quite. Just listen to the music. Just listen.”
Mechanical Patriots
None of this makes any sense to me.
I remember, vaguely, naïve notions of courage, honor, valor…I remember feeling like I was a part of something that was bigger than myself, that I was a valiant guardian of peace and a beacon of hope for the subjugated individuals on the other side of the looking-glass. I remember believing that, in a society such as my own, the governing higher-ups made their decisions in the interest of their governed.
I remember this, but the meaning of it all is now as foreign to me as this vast, sand-swept country. These aforementioned concepts are far too abstract, too fake, for my drill-instructed mind to process. I’m not a hero; none of us are. We’re not protectors…we’re destroyers. We are ruthless and brainwashed drones, expendable pawns in someone else’s depraved chess game.
Life’s a bitch, though, and orders are orders.
I see myself standing here, now, more or less recognizing what I am, but powerless to do anything about it. This thing I’ve become, this murderous mechanical patriot, is as real as the rifle in my hands and the boots
on my feet. My flesh and my body are no longer my own, but have instead melded with my crisp camouflage uniform.
The others don’t think like this, and soon, neither will I. Once you’re here long enough, you just shrug off your former convictions like an old coat. It hasn’t completely happened to me yet, but I’m getting there. Sooner or later, we all get there.
I used to think that the screams were the worst part, but they’re not. For the first few weeks of doing this shit, you think that the screams are going to drive you insane. You hear them late into the night, long after all the villagers have been lined up and shot and haphazardly tossed onto a burning heap of corpses and trash. Those screams will infect your nightmares, seep into your veins, and tear your soul to bleeding tatters.
But no, the screams aren’t the worst part. It’s when you stop hearing the screams that you know your humanity, whatever may be left of it at that point, is running on empty. This begs the question…is it better to bind yourself to your pain in the interest of keeping your conscience intact, or to allow desensitization to replace that pain with unfeeling emptiness?
Once you come here and do this, however, it doesn’t matter which is the better option, because the latter inevitably becomes the only option. In the end, it all comes down to survival, and you can’t survive out here if you’re burdening yourself with the weight of a troubled conscience. You have gear you need to haul around, and it’s too goddamn hot to try to carry anything extra.
“Quit being so fuckin quiet, kid. Have a cigar, help yourself to a plate of roasted sandnigger. Shit, help yourself to two plates. You’re too fuckin thin.”
I look up quickly, having momentarily forgotten where I am. The others, all five of them, are watching me expectantly. They lounge in their canvas folding chairs, puffing on cigars and picking at the roasted flesh and organs on their paper plates. The fire in the center of our circle spits and crackles angrily, charring the skin of the skewered “sandnigger” that hangs over the flames. It had probably been six or seven years old, judging from its size. Keep in mind that I say “it” not out of racist disrespect (not yet, anyway), but because there’s no way to tell whether it’s male or female. Its face is caved in, and I can see the silver reflection of at least six separate bullets lodged in its head. What’s left of the meat is starting to slide off the blackened bones and into the fire. If there had been male genitalia, someone had already eaten it.
“Don’t be such a bitch,” one of the other guys says, tossing his cigar into the fire and lighting a Winston. “Why the fuck would you eat a goddamn MRE if you’ve got fresh, warm food right in front of you?”
“Yeah,” says another. “It’s a little weird, at first, but after you take a few bites, you forget all about what you’re eating. Plus, it’s not like they’re people, for chrissake. They’re fucking animals.”
I look off in the distance at the dark pre-dawn sky and consider this. Animals don’t get down on their knees and plead in tragically broken English that you spare the lives of their loved ones. Animals don’t hug their children and whisper comforting words to them in their native tongues right before the grenade detonates. Animals don’t break down into hysterical sobs as they watch their family slaughtered right in front of them.
No, the animals are the ones who pull the trigger. They’re the ones who urinate on the bloody carcasses of murdered civilians while chanting “USA! USA! USA!” They’re the ones who pump a child’s face full of lead and then dine on what’s left of the body.
We’re the animals, not them.
One of the guys skewers an eyeball with his fork and sticks it in his mouth. White fluid squirts from between his lips when he bites down. “Seriously, man,” he says, still chewing, “you gotta get on the train, or jump off it.”
This is deep, coming from a man with a sixth-grade education who’s been drinking whiskey and snorting hydrocodone all night. I’m impressed.
The sergeant takes a swig of beer and drunkenly points a finger at me, his hand shaking slightly and his eyes glassed over and bloodshot. “He’s right, you know,” he says to me in a stupidly intoxicated voice. “Remember that shit last week? You remember that? Fuckin bullshit, boy. You think you’re too good to join us when we’re havin a good time? Is that what it is?”
“No, sir,” I say. “Just wasn’t in the mood, sir.” And I hadn’t been. I’d just stood outside the tent, smoking cigarettes, listening with a disgusted kind of fascination as my laughing comrades gang-raped a teenage girl they’d taken from a village we’d razed earlier that day. They’d fondled her and poked at her with their combat knives on the drive back to the camp. When they’d finished with her, one of the guys dragged her out of the tent and shot her. We left her there when we packed up and moved on, her body lying in the sand with the hot sun beating down on her dark skin.
“I’m stuffed,” says the guy next to me, leaning back and rubbing his stomach. He holds his plate out to me, which still has half of a liver on it, drizzled with steak sauce and bourbon.
“Eat up, boy,” the sergeant slurs. “This time, that’s a fuckin order.”
With mixed feelings of hesitation and hunger, I look down at the plate for another moment before taking it.
This is what I am, what they are, what we are.
Life’s a bitch, though, and orders are orders.
Rocket Man
“We’ve tried everything.”
The doctor took off his glasses and looked with kind eyes at the woman sitting before his vast mahogany desk. “Oh, Mrs. Thibault, I seriously doubt that.”
Margaret Thibault raised her eyebrows. “Why?” she asked, shifting in her seat and fiddling with the zipper on the glossy red purse that sat upon her lap. “Aversion therapy, support groups, hypnosis, detox, innumerable medications…none of it has worked. I’ve stood by him for years, but it’s becoming intolerable. Christ, it’s been more than two fucking decades, pardon my language. I love him, and always will, but I cannot continue to play second fiddle to alcohol for the rest of my life.”
The doctor polished the lenses of his glasses with a gray silk cloth and put them back on. “Have you heard of SET, Mrs. Thibault?”
Margaret shook her head.
“This does not surprise me. Space Exposure Therapy is relatively new to the United States, and, thankfully, we of the medical community have been successful in our collaboration with NASA to prevent the mainstream media from finding out about it. It originated in Russia in 2037 and has been shown to have extremely positive results in the treatment of substance abuse patients. Basically, in simple terms, space exposure has an enormously profound effect on the mind and body, essentially rendering the abused substance in question irrelevant to the user. Sixty-four percent of patients have experienced complete recovery, and the remaining thirty-six percent displayed significant progress in the reduction of the use of the addictive substance.”
“It sounds expensive.”
The doctor smiled, and it occurred to Margaret that the old man’s teeth were too white, too perfectly straight and aligned, to be real. “Actually, Mrs. Thibault, since the therapy is still in its experimental stage, the team behind its implementation makes selections based on physician recommendations. Those selected are not required to pay any fee. The patient must simply sign some documents, mainly in the interest of formality.”
Margaret narrowed her eyes, looking at the doctor with a cruel kind of skepticism. “I don’t know how my husband would feel about participating in something that is ‘experimental.’ I don’t know how I feel about it, myself.”
The doctor did not immediately reply. Instead, he unlocked one of his desk drawers with a long silver key and, after rummaging for a few short moments, removed an unmarked blue folder. “Look this over,” he said, handing it across the desk to Margaret. “Discuss it with your husband. If you decide that you two would be open to such a possibility, give me a call and I can make the necessary arrangements for your husband’s application. Based on the i
nformation you’ve provided me, I have little doubt that he would be eligible for selection. Is he sober now?”
Margaret took the folder but did not open it. “Yes, he just got out of detox.” She paused and then asked, “Are there risks involved?”
“There are risks involved with everything, Mrs. Thibault. The risks involved with this particular therapy are described at length in the informational packet. As I said, though, the results thus far have been immensely positive.”
Margaret nodded slowly. “All right,” she said, standing up and shaking the doctor’s hand. “Thank you for agreeing to see me on such short notice. I’ll call you if Tom and I decide to give this a try.”
His nose and palms pressed against the thick, airtight glass window of the shuttle, Tom looked out at the Earth with wide eyes. Despite the cabin’s stabilized gravity and pressure, his equilibrium had been thrown off, and the steadily-shrinking image of his home planet did nothing to help matters. In a panging moment that was both sad and ironic, Tom realized that he had never wanted a drink more badly in his life.
“Fucking crackpot medical schemes,” he muttered, walking unsteadily over to the tiny cot and sitting down. “Fifty-six years old, and they shoot me into fucking space, for Chrissake.” Granted, he had agreed to it, even signed all the papers himself, but he recognized that he had been hasty and foolish. His desperation had driven him to act irrationally, making snap decisions that should have been contemplated for days, perhaps weeks, even. This, though, this had received almost no contemplation at all. He’d looked over the papers, signed some forms, and two days later, here he was.
“Tim? How are you doing, up there?” The voice came from the overhead speaker, belonging to some NASA peon who was probably reading a comic book and sipping a Diet Coke.
“It’s Tom,” Tom corrected, sighing and running his hands through his thinning gray hair. “My name is Tom, and I’m doing fine.”
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