by Simon Fay
Dylan finds himself giving the journalist an automatic smile as he’s ushered away. He questions himself afterward why he did that, like Barry had pushed a button and triggered the gesture, but doesn’t brood on it long. Instead, he becomes distracted by a confused group of firemen that peter through the door. At the head of the group, one man grips an axe, prepared for an emergency that doesn’t yet exist. In a quiet lull, the office takes pause to note the addition to their already surreal day. Dumbfounded, they return to their work, effected only for the seconds it takes them to clock each other’s reactions. Dylan is the lone person compelled to ask why the fire fighters have arrived. Sidling over, he shows them his ID.
‘You guys a little lost?’
‘You tell me,’ the swarthy man, gripping his axe a little tighter, suspects he’s the butt end of a prank. ‘We got a call from your department saying we might be needed.’
‘Needed for what?’ Dylan asks the general gathering, and shakes his head in exasperation when he doesn’t get an answer. He can imagine the panicked messages between his boss and other desk jockeys that ended with a call for the presence of firemen at a series of brain scans. Only in Dublin. The lead fireman, equally irritated, twitches a mouth just barely visible under his greying moustache as he awaits instruction. ‘Make yourselves at home. We’re doing some UPD processing.’
‘Why are there so many of you guys? And what’s with the paramedics outside?’
Preoccupied, the detective mutters, ‘I guess they think there might be more than one person to arrest.’
The banter provides some respite from the tension, but it forms again in a minute as the firemen’s heads all go to the impenetrable door Dylan gestured to, behind which Agent Myers is testing Barry, that sad laughing clown, and where they half expect the shrill screams of a tortured man to sound out. Huddled together, small in their baggy overcoats and bulky helmets, the firemen look like children playing dress-up in daddy’s work clothes. When nothing happens, they return their attention to the detective who sidles over to his seat. With a staff of suspect journalists pretending to work and a couple of bored street cops stood about, Dylan waits, his attention dully focused on the conference room from where fates are doled.
Set on the cubicle in front of him, a Bobblehead Barry peers down.
Joanne and Ava are stood outside her office, their backs against the wall. The editor is chain smoking and blinking at Ava’s words, who in a business suit and minimal make up, is evidently taking things very seriously as they watch the room Barry entered. In there, Joanne sees a nightmare. In there, Ava sees just another box, holding another man.
‘If he isn’t untouched, I can’t be either. What if I am though? That doesn’t mean I did anything bad.’
‘You’re not untouched Joanne,’ Ava assures her. ‘Don’t let the bigger case get to you. At the end of the day you’re going to be walking back into your office to run ChatterFive.’
‘Thanks darling.’
As Joanne rubs a smushed eyelash off her cheek, she locks eyes with Dylan and the detective salutes her, prompting her to jump like she’s been caught with a gun in her hand, and dropping the imaginary weapon, she looks away. Ava gives the detective a good humoured purse of her lips and goes back to talking in her editor’s ear. They’re waiting for the lights to fade, a cry for help from Barry, anything to let them know something is happening in there. Dylan had read over the procedure last night and is only glad that it’s not his job – though it might as well be at this stage. He feels like an obsolete cog in a very ugly machine. The pinch in his back makes it all the harder to bare. Arching in his seat, feeling a shooting pain go up his spine, he’s sadly aware it’s from his current sleeping arrangement. His home life bleeds into this work life like this, and his work life into his home. Today it’s been for naught and, as if to highlight the matter, Barry returns.
Lost in thought, Dylan doesn’t hear the door open. He notices the man’s presence only when the rattled typing of the newsroom abruptly comes to a halt. The screen alerts fill the office with cautious anticipation and the Garda, startled by the Englishman, take wide stances at his appearance.
Barry raises his hands, mute in his surprise at being caught in the spotlight.
‘I didn’t do it.’
Agent Myers arrives behind him and nods to the officers.
‘He’s clear.’
There’s a collective sigh of relief that’s at once replaced by anxious mumbles – If he’s clear what does that mean for us?
‘That didn’t take long,’ Joanne grunts.
‘Our man here is very efficient,’ Barry pats Agent Myers on the shoulder. ‘Gave me an STD test while we were at it.’
‘Not so clear there,’ Agent Myers chuckles.
As Barry wanders away from the door he looks at one of the young cops and lightly touches the fabric on his shirt. ‘Zap!’ he says. ‘Full of beans after that,’ and strolls away, ignoring the look of contempt on the Garda’s face. Stopping at his desk, he notices the firemen and does a double take in the hopes that there’s someone about who will share his amusement.
‘Bloody hell,’ he teases, ‘you set the fire alarm off again, Ava?’
The joke flounders and Ava in particular ignores it.
Dylan though, almost puts his back out.
‘Who wants to go next?’ Agent Myers’ face is plastered with a smarmy grin.
‘I’ll go,’ says Ava.
Dylan’s head swings her direction, penetrating what he once thought was the woman and now suspects is a mask. She gives Joanne a set of hurried goodbye kisses before her legs carry her away, hand smoothing her skirt as she goes. By the prowl in her step you’d think that she was a panther going to meet her prey.
‘It can’t be that bad if Barry’s still laughing.’
‘I’m a survivor,’ Barry jeers. ‘You’ll be coming out of there in handcuffs.’
As she’s being frisked down, Agent Myers, Joanne, Barry, everyone but Dylan in fact, politely look away. The detective is studying her, following every line of the body which the hands move over. She turns her head, sees him looking and displays her white gleaming teeth, pairing them with a wink when he doesn’t smile back. The officer at her ankles stands up for Agent Myers to allow her into the conference room, and then, just as Dylan realises his mouth has been hanging open, the agent locks him out.
CHAPTER 21
Ava, primly sat on a stool across the table from Agent Myers, chastises herself for forgetting the cup of coffee. Still, she says, ‘Déjà vu.’
Agent Myers, prepping the software, does not turn from his screen.
‘Excuse me?’
Two clicks and a rattle of typing. Ava waits for him to look up, using quiet to wrest his attention. The social agent, however, is not to be drawn, so she’s forced to continue without a hold.
‘Oh, just, it doesn’t seem so long ago Agent Mullen was sitting on the other side of the desk. He only got a closet out of Joanne. You’ve got yourself the whole conference room.’
The friendly comment is read by Agent Myers as a respectful warning. Furrowing his brow, he concentrates on his work, clicking about the screen in front of him, making it clear that he can pick and choose the remarks he responds to and that he’s the one in control. Ava accepts this with all the joy of someone sat waiting in a dentist’s office, only it’s worse, because there aren’t any magazines to flick through as she anticipates the examination. To provoke a reaction, she sighs audibly. The agent looks up at her, taking his time to select what he wants to say.
‘This is not like your interview with Agent Mullen. It’s going to be a bit more invasive than that.’
‘So I’ve heard,’ says Ava. ‘One step away from shock therapy?’
‘Not quite,’ he replies, his face shifting into a grin that says, ‘Just you wait and see.’
The laptop is thin and sleek like most others and has a hand sized pad set beside it, linked wirelessly, for all appearances. Beside these
two objects is a cardboard box containing smaller plastic packages. The setup holds no interest for Ava. Instead she allows herself a pass over the social agent’s body, admiring the cut of him, the relaxed but confident way he holds himself, a man accustomed to being in this position of power. Francis, she remembers, always sat in his suit like it was a turtle shell. His pudgy head would poke out of the collar on a pencil-thin neck, the tie loosening throughout the day of its own accord. What a silly man he was, she goes sentimental, he couldn’t even get his tie to do what he wanted. This social agent though has had his clothes tailored. Each piece of dress has been selected and refined to his own taste, knowing exactly his strong and weak points. She wonders how different things might have been if he had been the man investigating their newsroom in the first place. His tapping on the keyboard seems aimless to her. Resigned to the wait, one moment she absently checks for her phone and, remembering that she left it on her desk, the next she folds her arms on her lap and lets her eyes glaze over. Only when her mind has floated out the door does Agent Myers talk again, the hand sized pad in front of her humming now.
‘I think we’re all set.’ Reaching into the box, he removes a plastic wrapper to hand her. ‘Open one of these. They’re sterilised and disposable, we can throw it away when we’re done.’
Ava does as she’s told and finds a dense putty substance small enough to be held in her fist. ‘I’m not much of a sculptor.’
Agent Myers doesn’t respond to the banter. Keeping a wall between them, he explains, ‘It’s for your mouth.’
Ava laughs but stops at his blank expression, though she keeps a distraught smile on her face. ‘My mouth?’
At this the social agent launches into a short explanation of the scan. ‘We’re observing reactions in the brain. UPD have certain impairments in the orbitofrontal and ventrolateral cortex. I’ll be measuring the responses to certain imagery as well as observing theta wave activity. I’m going to get you to place your hand on the pad and put that in your mouth to bite down on. Together they’ll send information to the laptop which will create a detailed map of the brain and its reactions to the pictures that will be displayed on the screen to your right. Not long ago we used to measure reactions based on more disturbing shots. Holocaust photos, gruesome deaths, explicit pornography, that kind of thing. I’d seen so many stupid horror films when I was a kid I don’t know what effect they thought it could have had on me, but anyway, it’s much more refined these days. You shouldn’t be distressed at all. All you have to do is sit and look. It should only take a minute.’
Ava guffaws and squeezes the putty in her hand.
‘Where does the electric shock come in?’
‘The synthetic clay you’re holding will release a slight electrical charge. Unless you have a lot of fillings you’ll barely notice it.’
‘I’m sure,’ she says, doubting him as her tongue runs around her mouth.
‘Shall we begin?’ Agent Myers gestures to the putty. ‘Place it carefully and bite down.’
Reluctant, she follows his instructions. Her lips only just touch as she closes her mouth, after which she feels a slight tingling sensation that numbs her tongue.
‘Beautiful,’ the social agent looks at his screen. ‘Bite down a little harder, please.’
Ava clenches her jaw, annoyed at being put in this position. A round of electric shock treatment would have been preferable. Sitting here, being made a fool of, is more than she can take. Though Agent Myers has soundproofed the room and set the window to frosted, she feels like all her subordinates in the office know what position she’s been put in. It doesn’t help that they’ll be going through the same thing. It’s more humiliating for her because of her rank. This isn’t something somebody with the term editor in their title should have to go through, even if it is preceded by the word assistant. She’s sure she can hear them outside, finding excuses to walk by and steal looks at the door. The only thing stopping them standing with their ears up to it is an embarrassed sense of voyeurism. What’s worse for her though, than the feeling of being humbled in front of these people in her moment of vulnerability, is now that she’s been immobilised, so to speak, unable to comment in a coherent manner, Agent Myers has become chatty. Her face is charged with heat as he talks and she doesn’t know if it’s from her anger or the putty. Either way, the social agent ignores it as he launches into a monologue.
‘It’s ridiculous, I know. Funny how people react to it. I remember one guy I had, oh, years back, when we were only processing civil servants. He was sketchy as soon as he sat down. People get nervous, you know, untouched or not, nobody likes to be picked apart. God knows I didn’t. Social agents get tested too. It’d be crazy if we didn’t, wouldn’t it? The guy who did me was a right nervous plonker, dropped the box of putty all over the place. Had to help him clean it up. Anyway, this civil servant I was processing, a social welfare operator, he hiccuped when I was about to start the process–’ Agent Myers cuts himself off and clicks an alert on the laptop, the story brought to an abrupt halt as some feedback on the screen grabs his attention. Ava is only relieved that she doesn’t have to listen to the rest of it until he speaks up again, chuckling. ‘You don’t need to bite down that hard. What was I saying? The guy hiccuped. Made a real show of it too. Swallowed a chunk of the synthetic clay and got it stuck in his throat. Actually choked on it, almost got himself killed. And once he coughed it up he was panting for a good ten minutes, had people bringing him cups of water, patting his face down with hankies. You should have seen him, hamming it up big time, going for the Oscar he was. And to top it off, what does he do? Starts pretending it set off some fictional heart problem. Sure we have medical histories on file. The man was fit as a fiddle. All of this nonsense to get out of the scan.’ Agent Myers shakes his head in a pantomime reaction to the story. ‘I don’t stand for that. I didn’t stand for it. We gave him a half hour to recover. Had some paramedics give him a clean bill of health. That’s why we’ve got an ambulance here today actually. Types like that trying to waste time. Well, we went ahead with the scan anyway,’ the social agent winks at her, making a show of the fact he’s about to make a bad joke, ‘so don’t even try it.’
Ava waits for him to say if the guy turned out to be untouched or not, but she doesn’t get an answer, and rolls her eyes, irritated at not being able to ask. Agent Myers reads her expression as a request to speed up the process.
‘Yeah, you’re right, let’s get this started. Place your hand on the pad please.’
She does so.
‘You’ll feel a slight humming.’
In a puzzled moment, Ava doesn’t feel anything of the sort and wonders where the sensation is supposed to be coming from. She’s about to ask, but before she can grunt the question, she feels it in her teeth, the faint buzz, like she’s biting down on a radio that’s tuned to static. It starts in her mouth and moves through her skull, loud in her inner ear. Agent Myers appears to up a dial on the screen. She can feel it throughout her body, not an unpleasant sensation, but nothing she’d want to last long.
‘Look at the screen on the right please. A slide show of images will appear. Give it your full attention. If you look away from it we’ll have to start again.’
Ava nods and does as she’s told. As she turns to it she concentrates on the blank screen to wait for an image to appear. A zigzagging line intersecting a circle. It displays for five seconds or so until it switches to another geometric shape, a hexagon. She can feel Agent Myers’ probing curiosity, and is more relaxed when he looks away from her to his laptop. The hexagon changes to a circle and as the humming from the putty becomes slightly more intense, her breathing becomes that much harder. What follows over the course of the rest of the scan feels like a long index finger uncurling in her head, worming about and prodding at her brain tissue. When the hexagon changes, a spinning triangle takes its place, the very same image Francis had shown her that day in his office. At the sight of it, some reflex in her warns that her min
d is being read and she wonders how detailed the scan actually is, if it can read the words that are playing, the images, the memories of everything that has happened. The things she has done. Her heart is racing and her body almost shaking from a charge of adrenaline, but before she can worry about it too much, everything comes into sharp focus. It’s as if the light of day has changed, everything now bathed in a clear white. She isn’t worried about anything at all. Then, the shape is gone – just another form that was placed in front of her and will never be seen again. The slideshow finishes out. A cube and lastly a trio of rectangles overlapping each other disappear. She feels the finger in her head curl in on itself until it vanishes altogether. The screen goes black and as the humming in her body slowly fades away, the only thing she’s thinking is how strange it is that a simple triangle could actually mean something to her, if only for a fleeting second.
‘And that, is that,’ Agent Myers confirms and, handing her a tissue for the putty, tells her she can spit it out. ‘There’s a bin at your feet.’
Ava wraps the substance tightly so it can’t escape and disposes of it as casually as she can. Coughing as she sits up on the stool, she inspects Agent Myers’ face for any hints on how she might have done.
‘Well,’ she says.
‘Well,’ he repeats, hidden behind an expressionless mask.
Ava can see through it. She is, after all, somewhat of an expert on masks. What she sees underneath the man’s neutral stance is that she’s being weighed like a slab of steak. Crossing her leg, she breaths, confident that he’ll find whatever it is he wants to see. Enjoying the tease, she meets the man’s gaze and asks in her own suggestive way, ‘Do I get a report in the post or are you going tell me all about it now?’