by Chris Vola
“They told me to drive. I was OK, except it was dark, couldn’t see shit. Navigated blind until a Canadian pulls out these night vision goggles, same model we had in Iraq.” Harry rolls onto his bad shoulder, moans in his sleep. “I took us all the way past Long Spear Reef, maybe a mile and a half out. I thought the plan was just drop-splash-and-go, but Davis said no. Made me hook back around to where I keep the old man’s lobster pots, a little past Shotgun Inlet, you know where. We pulled up all of the pots, filled them with chunks of Keyon, dropped them back down. We got back to the marina and Davis drove us to his apartment in Fairport. They had all this equipment set up everywhere…we packed it up and Davis and I had breakfast at a diner, bought some weed and came over to your place.”
I don’t say anything for a long time. “And that’s it? Why didn’t you tell me? At least warn me?”
“Fuck Josh, do you think I enjoyed it, or any of this shit?” I hear him scratch at his elbow. “My d…” he mumbles into his pillow.
“What?” I hiss.
“My dad has cancer,” he mumbles again, waits for a reaction, doesn’t get any. “Well, not really cancer but it basically works the same way. Chemicals he was exposed to, something from Vietnam, dormant in his system for years. He started getting headaches a few months ago. I took him to the VA up in Providence and at first they didn’t know what the hell it was, then when they figured it out they said he’d have to go to this special treatment center out in Wyoming or Idaho or some shit, but that he didn’t qualify or his insurance wouldn’t cover it. Either way, I couldn’t afford it.”
“You could have asked me,” I say, even though I know he never would have.
“Davis said if I helped him he’d pay for everything,” he says, “travel expenses, the treatment. Now I don’t know why I believed him, but you know…knew Davis, why did I have any reason not to?”
I don’t say anything.
“And after Keyon,” he continues, “well fuck, what was I going to do?”
“You could have told me.”
I hear him sit up. “No, no way. Don’t think that I didn’t want to. Davis told me what would happen if I did. You know those cocksucking Canadians were riding a few cars back the entire trip, all the way down from Connecticut in an Explorer? They were that close. For all I knew they had a scope aimed at the back of my head whenever we stopped to take a piss. For all I know Davis had a gun the whole time. Then we got here and…” he trails off.
The aviator sunglasses. The ride home from the bar in Manhattan. They didn’t miss anything.
“Was it meth?” I ask. “Is that what they gave you, why you were so –”
“That was part of it. I wish that’d been it.”
Both of us stay quiet for a while. “What do you know about this place?”
“Probably not much more than you,” he says. “Except that it’s a lot bigger than fake terrorist movies. As soon as they brought us in I…I think they had me in anti-drug commercials or something. It’s like I remember and I don’t remember. It was like I was in a different body, as stupid as that sounds.”
“No,” I say. “I get it.”
Another long silence. “So what do you think is coming?”
“BOHICA,” he says.
“BOHICA?”
“Bend over, here it comes again. They used to tell us that almost every morning in the desert, even if most of the time we had no fucking clue what ‘it’ was. ‘What’ve those camel jockeys got for us today?’ ‘BOHICA, private, BOHICA.’ Figure it’s probably the same here.”
THE FOLDER WITH the picture of the eagle across the top rests on the off-white pillow. I’ve skimmed through the instructions, where I need to go, who I need to meet. The prospect isn’t appetizing. I haven’t touched anything on my plate. Billy’s in the shower. Harry rustles in his sheets, motions for me to come over.
“They’re going to give you a proper introduction to the company?” he whispers. “That’s what it says in the folder, yes?”
“I guess so,” I say. He’s probably right. The packet looks almost identical to the one I got the first day at an Ernst & Young internship a few years ago, table of contents and thick paragraphs of jargon. “I have to meet with Davis,” I say, “for an introductory pre-orientation, whatever that is, and I don’t know if I can take sitting there while he–”
He pulls my tee shirt down towards his still-bruised face. “Listen,” he says, “trust is how they survive, by making the easily swayed trust their eyes and not what’s behind them. They don’t trust me and they never will, I think that’s fairly obvious. But for whatever reason, someone’s decided to bring you here, and not just to document another execution.”
“That’s reassuring.”
“I’m still not sure why, but they’re going to let you get close, at least for a while. You’ll be able to learn things. Information from which we all may be able to benefit.”
I hear Billy turn the shower off. “So I forget myself?” I ask. “Back to chimp-mode?”
“Something like that.” He lets go of my shirt, closes his eyes. He’s somewhere else.
“SIT DOWN, JOSH.” Davis smiles. He’s wearing riot gear, black Kevlar vest and matching fatigues, fingering the holes of his ski mask, a stack of folders on the table in front of him. The walls and floor are bare. Off-white. No rugs or tapestries. A sterile office smell and a twin-size mattress in the far corner. Is this where he sleeps?
“I want to apologize,” Davis says, business casual, like he forgot to send an email. “I shouldn’t have come on so strong,” he says. “It’s just that this group is something I really believe in and I want you to feel it, too. I’m going to try to answer the questions that I’m sure you have. All right?”
Nothing sounds all right. Nothing you can say. A tremor gushes through the stress-compacted sinews of my lower back. I nod.
“Good,” Davis smiles. His Adam’s apple bobs smugly, the contours of his neck where I should be squeezing, his crushed windpipe.
“One of the million popular YouTube theories,” he says, “is that there’s one or two covert organizations – the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg Group – whose members are constantly shaping domestic and foreign policy, altering and creating wars, economic crises and famines all in the name of a one-world shadow government. Illusions? Maybe. We don’t pretend to be any of those things. Instead of shaping culture, we spin it, make it look slightly more palatable to our clients.”
“Why?”
Davis grins, checks his iPhone. “Shit, I don’t know. Money. The power to influence opinion, to revert past wrongs, to save lives. Boredom. The great amenities. Why does someone join Goldman Sachs, or the Peace Corps?”
Amenities? Free meals and climate control, I guess. But sadistic PR men as global saviors? Not buying it. “Revert past wrongs,” I repeat. “The power to save lives. Question. How are you saving lives by making videos like the one I was in? I’m having trouble with that, among a lot of other things.”
Davis puts down his phone, picks up the mask again. “Makes sense,” he says, “from what you’ve seen. You think we’re some twisted apocalyptic motherfuckers, latter-day Timothy McVeighs, when that couldn’t be farther from the truth.”
The truth? Oh, what is this great truth?
“Do you remember Andranik Sargsyan, the former prime minister of Armenia?” he asks.
“He was beheaded by al-Qaeda in like what, 2007? I saw the video on the Drudge Report.”
“Sargsyan contacted our group about seven years ago,” he says. “He knew that his re-election had been questioned, not just by opposing party members, but people in his own cabinet. There were riots, extreme police brutality was an almost daily ugliness. Sargsyan felt that his assassination (and his family’s) was inevitable, that his country was headed for a partisan bloodbath unless he did something.”
“You killed him. Here.”
“No!” he says. “No, we don’t do that. We made it look like he was killed
. Right now he and his children run a charter fishing boat company on St. Lucia. Different names, different language. By releasing one video, we were able to prevent a possible genocide and quietly hide one of the world’s most reviled politicians, like that.” He snaps his fingers douchily.
“Sargsyan only did it to save his own ass,” I say. “Not like his human rights track record was that great. I remember reading about the Karabekir Initiative for school. How many thousands of Muslims mysteriously disappeared overnight? Did you help out then, too?”
Davis shakes his head. “Regardless of Sargsyan's motives, our results speak for themselves. We saved lives.”
He goes on for the next several minutes detailing at length the hundreds, the thousands of earth’s citizens positively affected by his group’s dabbling in current events, or “shadow-events.” How the video showing Harry being brutalized fits into this bizarre business model hasn’t been answered, and I don’t ask. Outside, the dull clatter of the stainless steel meal tray as it travels along the hallway to what I assume is the meth head room. Someone’s humming Alanis Morisette’s “You Oughta Know.”
“So Titus is in charge of everything?” I ask when he stops talking to take a sip from a bottle of Evian.
“In here, pretty much,” he says. “There’s also a board of directors. I don’t know,” he chuckles. “Some real Jack Bauer shit. Titus gets the work orders, assigns them. If there’s anything about an assignment you don’t like, all you have to do is tell one of us and he’ll assign somebody else. We’re pretty democratic that way.” That raises some serious doubts.
“And you’re really OK with this. With this group.”
“Listen,” he says, “I’ve been working for them for four years now and it’s been great the entire time. They’ve never given me any reason not to trust them. I’m completely cut off from my family. This is how I survive.”
Four years. The last year I was at Richmond, Davis was fifty miles away, a short drive from a highway I’d traveled up and down ad nauseam. I wonder how long he’d thought about getting me here, how he’d do it. He grunts, shuffles through the stack of folders and pulls out a yellow slip of paper. He pushes the slip across the table. “This is yours,” he says. A photocopy of a bank statement and a transaction number for an account in Luxembourg. €200.000.
“What is this?”
“It’s for helping test a new drug,” he says, “one that will have immediate implications in prisoner interrogations. You’re going to be more than compensated for your time here. Titus didn’t explain that?”
I stare at the number, try to make sense of it. “When did I help you?”
“Remember the first room, the pills on the food tray?” Davis asks. Twist my neck and lock knees, automatic reflex. “They weren’t OxyContin, or any other pain reliever you’ve used. They were actually prototypes of a hallucinogenic compound, what the Army’s been calling Project DreamScare. The drug relies on chemical signals that latch onto fear receptors, creating a very realistic and very unpleasant environment in the short-term with no long-term psychological effects. Most of what you imagined, virtually all the torture, was a product of the pills and the environment we created for you.” Most of what I imagined? What about my teeth? “Because of the tests we’ve done here, places like Abu Ghraib will only have to exist in prisoners’ minds.”
“You said Army.”
“Biggest client,” he grins. “You didn’t think we’d be able to set up shop two hundred miles from D.C., unchecked and unregulated with a minimal electric bill? Shit, cops don’t come within earshot of here because they think we are the government. Area 52 or something.”
“What is Joshua XXXXXX?” I ask, holding up the yellow slip, trying to change the subject, trying to fight back the rage that’s splitting my spine, surging into my fists.
“I know it’s not very original,” Davis says, “or even pronounceable, but we had to give you a new identity for when you leave here, so you can collect your, ah, retirement fund. We can call you X, if you like.”
“What was wrong with my name?”
Davis shuffles through the folders again, pulls out a handful of black-and-white photographs, drops them in front of me. One of Billy’s boat in pieces, splattered across what looks like the concrete sea wall the Coast Guard built near the marina in Madison. Another of police officers in scuba gear pulling out the mangled remains of two bodies, both of which look like they were dragged through the propellers of Billy’s dual two-hundred horsepower motors. The final photograph is a scan of the front page of the Fairport Eagle. My headshot next to Billy’s. The headline – TWO DEAD IN GRUESOME NIGHT FISHING ACCIDENT.
“You see,” Davis says, “you don’t exist out there anymore, only here. And here, you have a chance to start over, to remake yourself, to make sense to yourself. None of that would have happened if you’d stayed. You would have wasted away, a half-dead Connecticut casualty, rotting from the inside out. We’d be reading a much different kind of obituary, one I could never let happen. I love you, man. I always have. I only want the best.”
“And Lauren?”
Davis reaches into the folder again, slaps a few more pictures onto the pile, his new watch clinking against the stainless steel. One of Lauren and a man holding hands on one of the Hudson River piers near 66th Street in Manhattan, the drab, smog-charred Jersey City skyline reflected in the sludgy water. Right around sunset. The man is John. Smaller than I imagined, crowlike but still fleshy. Oversized nose and otherwise soft, indeterminate features. White button-down and boring monochromatic tie. Her pale knight in his accountant’s armor.
In the next photo he’s kneeling in front of her, pressing a velvet box into her upturned palm. Her eyes wide. The last photo – hugging, a close-up of her face – smiling, happy tears, glowing. The finger with the diamond stroking through his black curly head.
“She’s gone,” Davis says. “Was hiking in Vancouver with her fiancé when you died. It was a surprise trip to celebrate the engagement. She didn’t come back for the funeral.”
Even if the funeral part isn’t true, the pictures speak for themselves. No way they’re Photoshopped. Under the table, fists tighten.
“Well?” Davis asks. I can’t stop looking at the ring. Chest heaves against the display of calmness. “I always thought you could do better than her. She was so needy in this weird, trashy way, and crazy sneaky, too. I mean, she did manage to fuck like half of your –”
“Davis.”
The Cheshire Cat grin. “Hm?”
I motion towards the contract spread out in front of me. “Do you have a pen?”
“WHAT DID HE say?” Billy whispers as he slides into bed next to me. He’s waited until the lights have been out for at least an hour.
“We’re dead.”
“Dead.”
“They crashed your boat and the police pulled out bodies they identified as us. I saw pictures, an article in the Eagle. Buried us.”
Billy’s quiet for a while. “My fucking boat!” he hisses. “Couldn’t they have just let the bodies float ashore or something…” I wait until he’s done huffing, tell him everything Davis said. He stops me when I get to the part about the drugs. “Wait! Hold up, that’s…that’s the same as…” he trails off. I wait. “When I was in Afghanistan, the first time,” he says, shifting a little, “this sergeant on the base I was at went ape-shit one night, stabbed a couple towelheads at a lamb shack in Kabul. He knew he’d be discharged, so the last night before the court-martial he gets wasted, I mean tanked, with a few of us and starts babbling about all this classified shit he’d been a part of. We thought he was full of it, trying to pull our leg one last time, but now…” He stops when he hears something, but it’s just Harry’s labored snores.
“This sergeant had been around,” he says, quieter, “First Gulf War, Somalia, Bosnia. I can’t recall everything he said because I was hammered, duh, but I specifically remember him telling us that he’d volunteered to be a part of this progr
am where they’d been developing new drugs for decades. Everything from hallucinogens – like the fake pills you were talking about – that’d make you see things, feel things that weren’t there, to emotion suppressors, what they’d give guys who were too aggressive, freaked out, you name it, one for every kind of out-of-whack psyche.
“The main idea was that they wanted to put the drugs in food. Makes it a lot easier to feed somebody something if they’ve got no idea they’re taking it. Sounds simple, right?
“But apparently there was a problem with the preservatives, the pesticides large-scale farmers use or something. Whatever chemicals go into the processing knock out – counteract, he said – most of the drugs’ effects. The pills they gave you must have been the same stuff, a newer version of it.”
“There were always different pills on the tray they slid under the door,” I say. “I only ate what I thought were the OxyContins.”
“What kind of food did they give you?” he asks. “Anything weird?”
“Mostly all organic stuff, a lot of yogurt.”
“It makes sense, makes perfect…” I feel him roll over, scratch.
“Organic food doesn’t have any preservatives,” he says. “Not artificial ones at least. I just remembered the sergeant saying how yogurt was one of the program’s first successes, how for some reason the bacteria, the whatisit, the cultures, actually amplified the drugs.” He stops, scratches harder. “What did we eat at Rob and Andrew’s?” he asks.