Living Proof

by Peter J Thompson

  “Well, I thought…” Ortman was about to apologize.

  “It’s only money. I can’t believe he said that.”

  Green had been thinking about his encounter with Cain from the other day. Cain had seemed so much in control then, like he owned the place. More than his captain’s rank would have called for. And he’d brought the body in for delivery to level five. Green had heard rumors of things like that before, but this was the first time he’d seen it first-hand, and he’d been thinking about it ever since. There were some things that you just didn’t talk about, not if you wanted to get ahead. But tonight he was feeling good and these were friends.

  “Who was that guy? I mean, who is he really? He had me deliver a patient down to the basement.”

  “Captain Cain?” Ortman responded. “He’s like a straight shot to the colonel is what he is.”

  “He’s an asshole is what he is,” Stepman cut in.

  “What’s the deal with that anyway?” Ortman chimed in. “There’s some strange shit going on down there…”

  “Hey. Hey! You’re out of line here, soldier.” Stepman’s attitude had changed.

  “All I'm asking is who are these people they’re carting in? Where do they come from? It’s…”

  “Stop talking now, soldier. That’s an order,”

  Stepman stood up. He was still half drunk, but his anger was mixed with fear and he suddenly seemed sober. “You’re way out of line. This is crazy-assed talk. You’re officers in the US Army. You are paid to follow orders. You are not paid to think. If a superior officer tells you to shit, you dammed well better mess your drawers right then and there.”

  The veins in his neck bulged and his face turned a bright crimson. “If… and I mean if, something is going on down there, it’s going on for a reason. Your superiors have reasons for what they do. We’re in a goddammed forest and you pricks are getting your tits in a wringer cause you see some trees? We are preparing for war! It’s not your decision—or mine—how we fight this goddammed war. If something is being done, it’s being done for a reason. I suggest that you stop this pinko talk and let your superiors do the thinking. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Yes, sir,” Ortman replied, his gaze fixed on the floor.

  “Absolutely, sir.” Green realized that he was standing at attention.

  “And I don’t want to hear any more of this talk. It’s over.”

  The party quickly broke up and everyone left at the same time. As he walked out the door, Green realized that Rev Tanner had remained silent and detached throughout the entire exchange. He hadn’t said a word.

  Lena couldn’t sleep. She lay in her bed, eyes wide open and her mind racing, unable to relax and let go. It seemed her life had changed in some way. Somehow, things were different. The well-ordered categories of her life had been rearranged in some subtle way, leaving her anxious and depressed. It was funny, because new opportunities were opening up. Opportunities she’d been working for and planning for years. She should have been excited—but instead, her thoughts were of dying.

  Her series on the death penalty and the Texas prison system ended with the story of Ramon Willis’s execution. Returning from Huntsville, her story filed and printed, was a triumphant homecoming. Half the day was taken up with congratulatory phone calls. Calls came in from her editors, co-workers, and past associates. It was nice to be the center of attention, but she just felt empty. The story had been her main focus for the past few months. And now it was over. The series went over well, critically acclaimed and well read, but she knew that in the end, it made no difference. The impact of the series would be as fleeting as the paper it was printed on. People were talking about it now, but they’d talk about something else tomorrow. Long range, nothing would change. Texas wasn’t about to change its policy on capital punishment because of anything she wrote.

  Later in the day, Lena got a call that changed her mood for the better. Allan Edwards, the VP for production at Newsworld called. Newsworld was a media giant with a 24-hour cable TV network, a print magazine and a major footprint on the web. She’d sent them a resume ages ago but never got a response. Now Edwards was calling her about a position on the network. She was a rising star, he said, a bold new talent. She made an appointment to fly out to meet him in New York the following week.

  After that, she’d felt better. It lasted until that night when she was alone in her apartment. She was looking at a magazine and an ad for a prescription drug caught her eye. In the ad, a couple was walking contentedly through a field of summer flowers. The sky behind them was a brilliant shade of blue—the same shade as Ramon’s eyes.

  Images of the execution flashed in her head. The needle sliding into the vein in his arm, the liquid flowing through the clear plastic tubes into his body, how he seemed to shudder once before he stopped breathing and was still. She could smell the viewing area of the death chamber, disinfectant, and stale after-shave.

  She closed the magazine, but the images lingered. A man had died in front of her eyes. His death was peaceful, and he didn’t appear to be in pain. But it was still a strong young man dying long before his time. It made her feel vulnerable, and for the first time she could remember, Lena truly considered her own death. If she died now, what would she have to show for her life? Some minor awards, some by-lines in archived newspapers, and that was it. No lasting relationships, few people who would actually mourn her when she was gone.

  Lena always considered herself an independent, self-sufficient woman. Her career was the focus of her life—in order to succeed, it had to be. But at times like this, she longed for the comfort of a man, a partner who shared her goals. Someone who loved her, someone she could make a life with. She’d that before but walked away from it. She wondered if there would be another chance. She didn’t sleep much that night.

  Now it was three days since the execution and she still couldn’t sleep. As she lay in bed, the walls of the room seemed to close in and bear down on her. Sleep wasn’t an option. Lena rolled out of bed and went out to the main room. She looked out her window. The lights of Austin’s skyline were like soft candles in the distance. She sat in the dark and watched. It felt comforting.

  But she still couldn’t sleep. She thought about turning on the TV to one of the late shows, but the idea of trivial jokes and canned laughter left her cold. She wasn’t in the mood for laughing. After a while, she got up, poured a cup of milk from the refrigerator, and switched on her laptop. If she couldn’t sleep, she might as well work.

  For the last several months, she’d been playing around with a story idea about the Internet. How it had opened up and legitimized behavior and ideas that in the past would have been considered eccentric at best. There were now virtual communities clustered around every oddball belief. What kind of people were drawn to these communities? A lot of them were probably normal people. Just average people in real life, who found meaning on the fringes of cyberspace.

  There was one chat room Lena had monitored for some time. She’d found it the first time by accident and returned several times since. Its focus was conspiracy theories and other outlandish ideas.

  Her idea was to approach one of the people in the chat room, develop some trust, and then get an in-depth interview. What are they like in real life? What draws them to the fringe? How does it affect their other relationships? And then the big picture, what does this say about the rest of society? Are we so cynical that we want to believe everything is corrupt? There was a story in there somewhere. Just thinking about it helped make Lena feel better. It was good to be involved with something new.

  She clicked on to the site. Voyeuristically, she monitored the conversations. Mostly it was wacko stuff: the world was controlled by the Trilateralist committee, Richard Nixon was behind the Kennedy assassination, there was a government plot to implant computer chips into people to monitor and control them. It was crazy, but for some reason, she found it intriguing.

  Lena took a sip of her cold milk as she scrolled
through the postings. The glow of her computer screen was the only light in the apartment. Alone in the dark, she felt a real connection with the people conversing on the site. As odd as the ideas were, they were looking for connections, just like she was. They weren’t that different from her.

  The participants of the chat room all went by some sort of code name. Someone would make a statement, others would respond, and conversations would bubble up. Sometimes several different discussions would be running at the same time. If two people wanted to have a confidential conversation, they could move out of the main area and into a private space. Watching the conversations move across her screen, she felt she could get a sense of some of the personalities behind the statements. There was one who would come on strong with one idea and try to bludgeon others into agreement by repeating the idea in a different form, over and over. The only ones responding to him were those new to the site. Another talker came on very wishy-washy, agreeing with everyone, even if their positions were opposed to what he had agreed to previously.

  There was one, though, who seemed to be a likely prospect for her story idea. He went by the name of True Believer. His ideas were just as wild as the rest, but his arguments were logically supported. Lena had noticed him before, and he seemed to be a regular.

  Lena finished her milk and stared at the screen. It was late. She was tired but didn’t want to sleep. It was better to be communicating with someone than lying in bed alone. She paused for a moment then made her decision. She typed out a message and addressed it to True Believer, then hit the enter key and sent it out into cyberspace.

  She signed it Ms Skeptic.

  Ramon was no longer sure what was real and what was a dream. The white room felt real, but it seemed so strange and alien compared to what he’d known of real life, that he began to convince himself that it wasn’t real at all. It was a nightmare and he’d wake up if he remained calm and just gave it enough time. But it kept coming back like a recurring dream. Maybe this really was Hell? An individual Hell created expressly for him. Maybe this torment was how he would spend the rest of eternity, strapped to a hard bed unable to move, with needles sticking into his veins and tubes connected to every orifice.

  Or maybe this wasn’t Hell but purgatory. Limbo. His terror had passed and replaced by a general anxiety. And boredom. As bad as this was, he had the feeling it could be much worse. That this was just a way-station to what was in store for him.

  The Space Men, as Ramon thought of them, came back at regular intervals. They’d draw some of his blood and check the monitors, maybe hang a new IV bag. It seemed that they were waiting for something to happen, waiting for some kind of change. Waiting for the time to move on to the next stage. He tried to talk with them and ask them questions. Who were they? Why was he here? Why were they doing this to him? But they never answered him. Except for the first exchange, they never said a word.

  Still, he thought he had figured out a pattern. They would come in to the room two at a time, always the same people in a pair. Although they didn’t talk, he’d been able to tell them apart by their size and a glimpse at their eyes that he could see through the masks in their space suits. There were three pairs. Each team would come in two times in a row before being replaced by the next team. Ramon had figured there were three teams, working in three shifts. If each team’s shift was eight hours, that would mean that a full day passed when the first team appeared for the third time. Keeping track of their comings and goings was hard. With the monotonous sameness of the room, he would drift in and out of sleep. In order to try and keep track, he’d bitten into his cheek or lips each time someone entered the room. By playing over the sores with his tongue he could, in a way, measure time. By this reckoning, he had now been in the room for three days since he discovered the pattern.

  Another way that Ramon could tell time had passed was by the way his arm felt. Originally, his arm would ache after each injection. It had started out as a low-level irritation but had increased to the point he wished his arm would fall off, the pain was so bad. For a time, the pain was all he could think about. It was like a toothache in his arm that throbbed and pulsated until it took on a life of its own. The pain radiated downward to his fingers and up through his shoulders, eventually resonating in his head. He thought his arm must have gotten infected. He’d become hot and feverish. The Spacemen were very interested in the arm too. They checked the wound on every round, sometimes prodding it to check for tenderness. Still later, Ramon knew time had passed because his arm no longer hurt. He’d gone to sleep retreating from the pain and woke up clear-headed and pain free.

  He tried to gain control of his environment in any way that he could. In his mind, he’d named his captors. Huey and Dewy were one team. Huey was tall and thin, Dewy was a full head shorter. The second team he called Heckle and Jeckle. They were both tall, but Heckle seemed wider and the loose-fitting spacesuit clung to his body. Jeckle had a lumbering gait that Ramon thought was probably from back trouble. The third team was actually the first one he’d seen. In his mind, he thought of them as Tom and Jerry. They were both about the same size and the way they moved, so tentatively, reminded him of cartoon mice.

  To stay sane, Ramon had to believe he had some control over his situation, even if the control was just being able to move his hands and feet. He did his best to exercise his muscles, but under the circumstances, it was anything but a full workout. He’d start with his toes, flexing and unflexing them, just trying to move. Then he would do the same thing with the next muscle, working upward. First his calves, then his thighs, tightening, then relaxing. Upward through his body, his stomach, chest, arms, gripping his fists into tight balls. Clenching and unclenching each muscle until he was done with the muscles in his face. Then he’d rest for a moment and start again.

  This morning—was it morning?— he’d come up with a plan. A small act of defiance. He planned to resist his captors when they came in by tensing his muscles and making it difficult for them to do their tests. Twisting his arm when they went to draw blood, maybe he could be an irritant to them anyway. Maybe he could provoke a reaction. Huey and Dewy were expected. He waited with anticipation for them to enter.

  He didn’t know how long he waited. It seemed like an eternity, but finally, the door opened. He knew immediately that something was wrong. The pattern was broken. Huey and Dewy entered the room like they were supposed to, but Heckle and Jeckle followed them in. They silently surrounded the bed. Ramon flushed with anxiety. There had never been four of them in the room at the same time.

  A moment later, the door slid open again. A short, stocky figure clad in the familiar space suit entered the room. He walked to the head of the bed. His voice was a staticky drone.

  “Time to get dressed, Mr. Willis. It’s graduation day.”

  6

  The smooth mahogany surface of the desk was always clean and clear of papers. Darkly polished to a near mirror finish, the massive desk rose up like an island in the dimly lit room. It, like everything else in the room, was there as much for its symbolic value as for its function. The room was large but sparsely furnished: just the desk, two leather chairs in front of it, one behind, and an American flag in the corner. The chairs, like the desk, were oversized, as if designed for people who were larger than life.

  The figure behind the desk was oversized too. Tall and broadly built, he stood six feet four inches tall and weighed close to three hundred pounds. His skin was dark, a deep mahogany that nearly matched the color of the desk. In the dim light of the room, he seemed to blend in with his surroundings. Only the glint of light reflecting off of his glasses was proof he was really there. Colonel Lucian Pope was an intimidating figure. Most of the people under his command had never seen him in person, but his reputation was mythic.

  Alone in the office now, Pope sat as still as a stone, holding the phone to his ear, silently listening. A yellow legal pad lay within easy reach, but he had no use for it. It was said that he had a photographic memory.
He never put anything down in writing unless he specifically wanted a record of the fact.

  He listened to the speaker on the phone for a long time before he broke his silence. When he spoke, he spoke crisply and precisely, enunciating each word.

  “Yes, I am quite aware that there are budgetary constraints. However, if you want me to accomplish my stated task, there’s no way around it. This project requires more money.” Pope went silent as the party on the other end began to talk.

  Colonel Pope reached into the top drawer of his desk and pulled out a brand new deck of playing cards. Listening, he cradled the phone into his shoulder, pulled the strip on the pack of cards, and began to peel off the cellophane. He opened the package and slid the cards onto the table, cut the deck into two piles, and with a flick of his wrists, shuffled them back into a single deck. The cards were dwarfed by his huge hands.

  “Yes, I clearly understand that,” he said into the phone.

  He placed the cards face down and drew the top two. Without looking at the cards, he placed them on their sides and leaned one into the other at a ninety-degree angle. Then he placed a third card against the ends of the first two. Satisfied, he picked up the next card and placed it on top of the others as a roof. He then performed the same operation with some new cards, interconnecting them to the first structure.

  “Yes, General, I entirely understand your reservations. I know you have political issues to consider… Yes, that is correct…” He glanced at his watch. “Excuse me, General, something has just come up. Could you hold the line a moment, please?” Without waiting for a response, he put the call on hold and pressed down on the intercom button. The call was immediately answered.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Is Captain Cain out there yet?”

  “Yes, sir, he’s been waiting for you.”

  “Send him in.”