Bogdan is intent staring at the big TV on the wall. He flashes through screen after screen, using a keyboard that rests on a rolling hospital bed table carefully arranged in front of him. Having adjusted the height himself, he can sit cross legged with the keyboard just above his lap.
Bog pauses and looks out the window. The scene outside is sunny, bucolic, rolling lawns, over spreading ornamental trees, specifically arranged park benches, and, near the building, a swell of planting beds and flowering annuals. The zinnias and petunias look a little beat, abused by recent cold snaps and blustery winds, but are still standing, defying the onset of winter.
Bog doesn’t really notice any of his surroundings that much. Christopher Gray, with members of his medical team standing at his rear, had discussed Bog’s options clinically with him. One option was to drug him with the purpose of damaging his thought beyond the possibility of repair. If released, he would be addled. No one would believe a word he said.
“Man, that is so twisted,” Bog observed.
Gray chuckled.
“A sense of humor is good. You will need it.”
Bog had inched himself higher against the headboard of the bed, unconsciously trying to better his position against Gray. Bog would rather be standing on his feet, toe to toe with Gray. But he is restrained. Recently brought to, he has no idea how long he’s been out of things or where he is. At least he feels halfway normal.
“What are my other options? I mean, am I going to like any of them?”
“Probably not. But that can’t be helped. You should consider yourself on a kind of extended vacation from your studies. That would be nice, wouldn’t it?”
“Why is it that I want to stick my foot as far up your ass as I possibly can?” Bog asked disingenuously.
“Really, you must learn to control your anger. I think we might just have the thing for that!” Gray replies, trying, and failing, to sound helpful.
“I think you mean to make me compliant,” said Bog.
“Just so.”
At that, Gray gestured for the nurse, who dispassionately applied her skills. Bog soon fell down a rabbit hole, sent there by what would be a string of medications intended to render him without much will of his own.
Bog absently moves his eyes from the flowers outside the window and looks around to survey the cabinets, drawers, a desk that is part of a cadenza. and a divan. Everything is pearly white, suggesting antiseptic cleanliness. On the cadenza, which sits under the triple slider windows that don’t slide, is situated a box stereo with separate speakers, some slender books he has never looked at, bookends, and a framed picture of the countryside that may have been taken from the very grounds of this facility. In the picture you can see beyond the tended lawns to broad, flat never-ending farm fields that surround the facility. The fields seem to go on forever in neat, narrowly planted crop rows. Lost in those rows is an old women dressed in colorful farm clothes, bent, tilling with a simple hoe.
When Bog first saw the picture he thought “so this is where I am”. But where is this? He had no idea. And now, in the mood cast by the meds, he has lost his curiosity about the picture. It just doesn’t interest him.
Instead, as he has been given access, he monitors the girls’ doings in Paris. He examines their searches, their communications, they’re movements about their room, how they come and go, even what they’re saying. In his current state, though, he has no desire to actually communicate with Sophie and the others. He knows where Zak and Kim are, and he can follow the path of the cars and airplanes that they are in. He feeds this information back to Gray, who uses it to keep Washington informed. Of course, they simply watch everything he does.
Bog pauses again and looks about the room some more. His eyes go to the print of an oil painting on the wall behind him. The picture is filled with flowers. It even has a butterfly and he likes it, his gaze returning to view it time and again. On what passes for the bed stand, which is on rollers for goodness sake, there is a small bouquet of artificial flowers, yellow zinnias like the ones in the garden, their edges tinged a fiery red. He likes them too.
Somewhere in Bog’s confused mind is a shred of memory, a spark of his former self. He begins to look for something on the net, hiding his search amid a blizzard of unconnected, virtually random things. His search mimics the struggle going inside himself, its stutter step created as it is by a kind of static of the brain.
Bog looks for a way to send something. He wants to be able to send this something in such a way that nobody will be looking for it. As he does this, as the screens jump and leap across the big TV screen at his command, he reminds himself that he likes the flowers with the monarch butterfly in the painting over his bed and the artificial red and yellow zinnias stuck into the copper pot on his bed stand.
They are pleasant and soothing.
He thinks, how very nice.
Chapter 73
On Fire Page 72