by Hulden Morse
“Did they drown you?” he asked.
The frail black man was distant, possibly distracted by the same terrible thoughts eating through Charles’s brain, though he turned to his roommate and said, “No. They did the same thing as before, whatever the hell that was.”
“So you… so you didn’t do the water thing?”
“No. Shit man, did you almost drown or something?”
“I-I think I did.”
“What do you mean?” Damian asked, confused.
“Dude, I think I… um, died.”
His friend chuckled awkwardly, like he was unsure if Charles was making a sick joke or if he had finally lost his mind. Soon enough, the CEO watched the pained smile disappear from his companion’s face, only to be replaced with a look of inquisitive concern. He knew that the same consideration now ate away at Damian’s thoughts.
“So are we… dead?”
“I don’t think so,” Charles responded, having mulled over the same possibility only moments before. “But the things I saw in that room…”
“What? So ya really did see something? You weren’t lying to them?”
“No. I wasn’t lying. I want to talk to the doctor, and this may be my only chance. I told them everything I saw when they asked their questions, but I didn’t tell them what I heard when it… when I… um…”
“What did ya see?” Damian said, trying to be supportive of his friend.
“I saw… me. I was floating above the room.”
“Holy shit.”
“Yeah. And I could see the people in there. And I heard them. There was a sign with a flower on it. So I told them that. And another one with a picture of a house. It-it didn’t make any sense.”
“What did they say?”
“They seemed interested. But they just asked me the same questions they asked before and wrote everything down. Fuck, dude. Did I die?”
The two men stared at each other. This simply isn’t possible, Charles thought. The facility, these people, the trials, all the pain, it has to be fake. Maybe I inadvertently took a drug. Or I hit my head and now I’m going crazy or I’m in a coma. Is it possible to dream in comas? Can someone feel pain in dreams?
“I don’t know, Charles,” Damian responded.
“Did you see anything?”
“No. I didn’t. I remember passin’ out, and then I opened my eyes and saw the doctor there. Nothin’ else.”
They rested together, thinking the same thing. How was it that they were both sitting there? If what they had been through truly involved the touch of death, then why did they wake up like nothing had ever happened? How were they now alive?
Charles looked around the room, staring at the table and the food upon it, looking at his assigned clothing and used shoes, glancing at the windowless walls and locked door, and he wondered if he was actually dead. Am I trapped in the depths of Hell?
Chapter 28
“This had better be good,” Dr. Raymond said as he rushed into room 42. “Alright, Pearson. Spill it.”
“I want to talk in your office,” Charles said to the impatient man.
“You can tell me right now. Or I will have these guards force it out of you.”
“I’ll tell you willingly,” Charles said, trying to diffuse the situation, “I just want to talk in your office. I have more to offer than information from the water trial.”
Dr. Raymond raised his eyebrows in interest. He looked behind at the guard standing in the doorway, who shrugged his shoulders. The doctor paused and then stared at Charles. His eyes were piercing, fierce, searching for a sign of weakness in the subject, a way to break the man and extract what information he had to give without yielding anything in return. The CEO remained strong. He tensed his muscles to keep himself from shaking and glared at the doctor like he was a disgusting insect that needed to be exterminated.
“Alright, Pearson. You have piqued my interest. Let’s go.”
“Sir, are you sure?” the guard said.
“Yeah. It’s my lunch break anyway. Think of it like dinner and a show. Right, Pearson?” He smiled at Charles, though the subject knew that he had broken through to the doctor, exactly what he was hoping to achieve.
The three of them wound through the hallways until they reached the series of offices that Charles remembered from when he had first arrived at the facility. Dr. Raymond entered his own, large office and ordered the guard to search his lunch guest. The man was thoroughly patted down before being allowed to step through the doorway. Once inside, he set himself in the same chair he had sat in before and then watched as the doctor pulled a salad from a refrigerator behind his desk, dropping it carelessly on the wood surface.
“Start talking,” Dr. Raymond commanded, pulling out a fork wrapped in a cloth napkin from his drawer.
“Not until the guard leaves,” Charles said, pointing to the large man standing behind him.
“You are in no position to make requests like that, Pearson. We have been kind enough to allow you to speak with me in my office. Now you will appreciate what you get.”
“Fine. I heard things while I was floating above my body,” he said as the doctor loudly chewed on a crouton and typed something into his computer. “I heard you talking.”
Dr. Raymond ceased his jamming at the keyboard. He swallowed. “What exactly did you hear?” He resumed typing with a passive, uncommitted focus that caused his fingers to pause every few seconds.
“I heard you talking about the clinic. You miss working there. You miss building a relationship with people and learning their background.”
Dr. Raymond turned away from the keyboard and looked at Charles. He then glanced up at the guard standing in the room and waved him away.
“Doc, you sure?”
“Yes. Leave us.”
The large man exited the office quietly. Charles was finally alone with the one person who could get him out of the facility.
“What do you want, Pearson?” the doctor said, leaning back in his chair and putting his hands behind his head.
“I want answers. I want to know what’s going on around here.”
“And why would I tell you that?”
Charles leaned forward. “Because you want someone to talk to. I’m offering my background to you. I’ll tell you whatever you want to know about me in exchange for information about this place.”
“I could just talk to one of my employees about their history. Why are you so special?”
“I’m your patient. You hired them. You probably know their story. I’m a stranger with a really interesting upbringing. You know what I do, but you don’t know everything about me. I’m offering you a relationship with a patient.”
The air in the room was stale, tense, and unmoving. Dr. Raymond crossed his arms in front of his chest, never looking away from his subject. He sat motionless in his large chair, pensive and attentive.
“You won’t lose anything by telling me about this place,” Charles continued. “I’m still trapped here. Still under your control. All I want is an exchange of information.”
“Alright, Pearson. You have yourself a deal.”
The CEO smiled at the doctor, proud that his plan actually worked. He had been expecting to be thrown out of the office or even beaten for his suggestion. But his instincts were still strong. Dr. Raymond’s intellectual thirst was his vulnerability. That confident, sinister, mustached man’s curiosity proved to be sufficient leverage for the situation.
“Excellent,” Charles said, trying to conceal his glee.
“Right,” the doctor said. “Now talk.”
“Huh?”
“You just said you would give me your life story for information about the facility. So I am waiting to hear your story.”
“Oh. Um, where do you want me to start?”
“With your childhood.
Where did you grow up? Do you have siblings? Stuff like that.”
“Okay. Well, I actually grew up in an orphanage.”
The doctor leaned forward in his chair. “Oh. This may actually be interesting.”
“Um, yeah. Well, I lost my parents when I was young. We lived near Hollywood.”
“What was it like living near Hollywood as a child?”
“It was, um, it was odd. I used to think we were so lucky. I knew of Hollywood as a kid, it was where all the movie stars lived and everything was perfect there.” Charles could feel himself loosening up. The man was surprisingly easy to talk to. It was dangerous. He straightened in his chair to prevent himself from completely falling under the devious man’s charm.
“I thought that if we lived by Hollywood, then we must be doing well. Maybe we could be famous. That perfect world was never far away.”
“But your world was not perfect?” The doctor was becoming more intrigued by Charles’s story. The CEO was not sure if that was a good thing or a concern. How far would such a psychotic man dig into him and exploit the pains of his childhood? Was keeping his interest the best way to obtain answers about the nature of the facility?
“No. We were poor. When I lost my parents, I went to an orphanage. It was full. There were so many kids in it. Boys and girls. Many ages. The caretakers didn’t have time for us. We were fed bad food and left to our own devices.”
Charles tried to stop his memory from taking him all the way back to that horrid house where he was mistreated and abandoned. He blocked out the images of older boys stealing his food and throwing his clothes in the toilet. Despite his effort, those painful events pounded on the protective walls he had constructed to keep the past from breaking him again. They tore at the stone barricade within his head, pulling them to the ground in order to widen the holes that had appeared over the years. The wall could not remain standing much longer, and soon it would crumble beneath the stress of the past and the present, releasing the flood of emotion that would drive a self-made man to insanity.
“Pearson. Please continue,” Dr. Raymond requested.
“I-I was beaten. By the other kids. They made fun of me because I was new there. In order to survive, I had to be tough. I picked on the smaller kids, but there was always someone bigger. It was a free-for-all. The strong ones got stronger because they took food and objects and stuff. Anything that was an asset to them. The weak ones got weaker because they had no food or clothes or toys or anything. Jesus. It was awful.”
“Damn. Sounds like it. Did you ever get adopted?”
“No. I ran away. Decided that I was better off on my own.”
“And what happened then?”
“Well, I started working for people. Under the table.”
“What? That’s disgusting.”
“Huh? No! I was getting paid under the table. I was too young to legally work, so I offered to help out where I could and got cash on the side for it. Once I turned 14, I got a real job. Making sandwiches at a deli. I saved enough to go to a community college and eventually got myself a degree.”
“Not going to lie, Pearson. I am impressed,” Dr. Raymond said.
“Whatever.”
“Where did you sleep?”
“Shelters. Sometimes in the homes of people I would work for. Lot of people willing to help a homeless kid.”
“Damn. That’s interesting.”
“Alright. Now tell me about this facility,” Charles said, assuming he had given up enough information to earn some answers to his questions.
“Sorry, Pearson. My very short lunch break is over.” The doctor stood up and threw his empty salad bowl in the trashcan. He then pointed for Charles to exit the office.
“What? Are you kidding me?”
“Please, Mr. Pearson. I must return to work.”
“What?” he yelled angrily. “I gave you personal information, and you owe me answers!”
“My goodness. You need to calm down,” the man said condescendingly. “You will get your answers. But not today. Right now, I have things I must tend to.”
Dr. Raymond opened the door, and a guard stepped inside to remove Charles from the office. His time with the doctor was over. The subject stood there, flabbergasted, but he walked out of the room submissively. He had no choice but to trust that the doctor would hold up his end of the bargain and reveal some much-needed information about the facility.
As Charles was guided down the hall, the guard looked at him, at the immense disappointment building on his face, and said, “I’m not sure what you were expecting. You’re an object in this place. You lost your rights to being human as soon as you decided to live on a street.”
Chapter 29
The bottom of the bunk was composed of several wood boards parallel to each other, forming a platform on which the upper mattress rested. The wood posts of the structure were glossy and smooth, though the supportive underside pieces were raw and untreated, serving no aesthetic purpose even though the person on the bottom bed would potentially spend minutes or hours staring at the underside of the second bunk, admiring the laziness of some designer who failed to take into consideration the fact that not all people on the bottom bunk were blind.
Damian analyzed the raw wood as he waited for Charles to return. He counted the struts, then he counted the knots, and finally he reverted back to simply staring absentmindedly at the grooves and notches in the boards, creating shapes out of them the way a child sees objects out of clouds in the sky.
There was a sudden buzzing beside his ear, soft, quiet, and the man looked over to see a small fly darting aimlessly around his shoulder. He swatted at it, and the insect flew away, disappearing into the expanse of the room. He looked around for the intruder, waiting for it to return so that he could smash it between his hands, but the fly had learned its lesson and seemed to have escaped from some minuscule, unnoticeable opening in the wall or door.
He suddenly became envious of the insect. It held more natural rights than Damian did as a human. That chemically driven bug could move about the world freely, while he was unable to leave that room or even go to the bathroom without being watched closely. The man had given up his aspirations in life to live without responsibilities on the streets, and now he was trapped in a room, only to interact with the outside world when he was fed through a slot in the door. Or taken somewhere else to die. The irony was clear, as was the depression it brought.
Damian couldn’t help but feel like a lab rat in an experiment. His entire environment was controlled by those around him, and he was barely given enough room to breathe. The air felt recycled, used, purified and pumped in for his consumption in order to remove the foul odors emanating from the countless rat cages housed within that building. He longed for something real, something natural that was not controlled by the omnipotent Dr. Raymond.
He wondered how someone who wasn’t homeless would react to being placed in his situation. Would there be any differences in behavior or emotion between him and someone that possessed a vastly disparate backstory? Would a former prisoner feel like this place was unjust, or would he simply compare it to his time behind bars? What about a rich investor living in New York who was forced to put in twelve hours of work a day at the office? Would he sense any familiarity with being trapped in that room, frightened by an uncertain future, and constantly under surveillance?
The plight of the homeless man was that he was never sure when his next meal would come, where he would sleep that night, or what he would do if he became ill. Yet he was gifted with something few others had: liberation from an overbearing society. The working man was plagued with endless bills, government regulations, demands from work, demands from friends, broken televisions, and dependents in school. He had more to think about than a single human should fairly be allowed to accept. People were constantly analyzing his actions at work, on the road, or at home. B
osses filed reports, the public judged actions and appearance, and spouses ensured that the man they married was pliable enough to be molded into the perfect husband and father. And such a violation of human civility wasn’t limited to the males of society. Females were constantly looked on to be perfect models of how a woman should appear, while also being encouraged to rupture the glass ceiling and be more than the average woman in the workplace, or anywhere else for that matter.
No one was safe from the expectations of others, nor from the oppressive rule of their government. No one except for the homeless. They lived free of tyrannical rule, establishing their own system of order to ensure everyone had a fair chance at receiving food, money, and a spot in which to sleep. And it was those people—those social, welcoming, warming people—who were pitied by society for being losers, misfits, failures, and quitters, when in actuality the majority of those people were appreciative of the gift called life. They were more giving and compassionate than most people with money in their pockets and a roof over their head because they were not bound by the demands of society to flaunt their wealth as the only sign of being successful, of being worthy of life itself.
However, that was why Damian found it ironic that he would be the one imprisoned in the facility. He had been a free man in every sense of the word, and it was a free man that now remained caged within a small room. When he first arrived there, he had tried to appreciate what God had given him, though he now saw that it was Satan who had picked him from the streets and thrown him into that room. The cruelest trick ever played. The prank to end all pranks. Offer a homeless man a warm bed and endless food in exchange for his freedom. How the onlookers must be laughing. How the doctor must think himself a deity. How demons on parade reveled at the comical tragedy they endorsed.
Two doors down from room 42, Mr. Munich was returned to his humble dwelling by two guards. Jake was there to offer a helping hand as his roommate cried softly into his grey shirt, his eyes puffy and his hand clutching his chest. The two of them sat on the lower bunk, and the guards left without a word, happy to be rid of the blubbering Mr. Munich.