by Blake Banner
She winked. “Well you can’t be that bad if you’re being a pain in the ass, can you?”
“What, now it’s only me? We’re not both pains in the ass?”
“I’ll let Dr. Banks know you’re awake. Can I get you anything?”
“Yeah, something to stop me feeling sick.”
“I’ll leave that to the doctor.”
She opened the door. I said, “What’s your name?”
“Nurse Rogers.”
“You free after work, Nurse Rogers?”
She raised an eyebrow at me. “In your condition? I do enough nursing while I’m on duty, tough guy. After work, I like to be nursed.”
I smiled and she left. I lay back and closed my eyes. I wondered for a moment if I even knew who I was. I did. I was Lacklan, Lacklan Walker. I was rich because I had inherited a fortune from my father. He had died. I hated him and he had died. Because Marni had killed him. She had killed him because…
The door opened and I opened my eyes. There was a black woman in a white coat. She looked oddly like Oprah. She had her hands in her pockets and her head cocked on one side. “How are we feeling?”
I managed to raise an eyebrow. “You too? What’s with the we? Everyone in this hospital has blue blood or what?”
She smiled on the right side of her face, where it looked both tolerant and ironic. “Oooh kaaay, how are you feeling?”
“Like shit. Can you give me something to stop vomiting?”
She nodded. “Sure. I came prepared.”
She stepped closer, popped a pill from a plastic sheet, and handed it to me with a glass of water. I pushed myself up again and took the pill and the water. As I swallowed both, she started talking again.
“The nausea will pass quickly. It’s the after effect of the drug you took.”
I frowned. “What drug?”
“Yeah, you probably don’t remember much. It will affect your memory for a bit too. That’ll pass.”
“Where am I? What happened? Who are you?”
She crossed her arms and watched me for a moment. “In reverse order, I am Dr. Banks, you took a large dose of Benzoacetalokine. It knocked you out for a good few hours, but it has side effects, like making you feel like shit and wiping out your memory.” She waited a moment while I frowned at her and tried to remember. Then she added, “The pills will reduce the inflammation in your stomach and your intestines fairly quickly. The rest of it will take time.”
I shook my head. “I have never even heard of Benzo…”
“Acetalokine. Probably not. But you took it.”
“Hang on… I was at home. Ben. I was with Ben. Did he call you?”
She nodded, but not in the affirmative, more like she was agreeing with her own thoughts. Then she said, “Try to get some rest. Can you manage some food? It’s the best thing you can do, if you can keep it down.”
I answered absently, telling her yes, but not really listening to what she was saying.
She left and I lay back and tried to search in the amorphous grayness that was my mind for details of where I was and how I had got here. But my thoughts drifted into vague irrational sequences and without realizing, they became dreams in a world of sleep. I don’t know how long I slept, but I awoke feeling better and stronger, though still confused.
Nurse Rogers was there. She had pushed up the overbed table and placed a plate of scrambled eggs, bacon, and pork sausages on it, with a large mug of coffee and a side plate of toast. She smiled and winked in a weird replay of the way she’d left last time I saw her. “Good morning, sleepy head.”
I pushed myself up and she adjusted the cushions behind me. “Do you patronize all your patients, Nurse Rogers, or only the ones who want to sleep with you?”
“Now why would you want to sleep with me, silly?” She asked it with a big, friendly smile. “Surely it would be more fun if we were awake.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“All of them.”
“What day is it?”
“Monday.”
“Date?”
“14th of May. Anything else, Herr Walker?”
I smiled at her. “Yeah, wiseass. Where are my clothes?”
“Somewhere safe, where you can’t get them.”
I cut into a sausage and she made her way to the door. I said, “Nurse, I took a sleeping pill. Why am I in hospital?”
She stopped and turned back. “I’ll let Dr. Banks explain that. She’ll be ’round to see you soon.”
She left and I ate hungrily, then drained the mug of coffee and felt good. As soon as I felt good, I felt impatient. I wanted my clothes and I wanted to be up and out of there. I got up and opened the door to look out. There wasn’t much to see. A corridor that on the left made a right angle and on the right led to a desk with what seemed to be a reception area. Dr. Banks was leaning on the desk reading some papers and looked up when I stepped out. She put down the papers and came toward me.
“You’re looking better.”
“Yeah. I don’t know why I’m here. I need some answers and I need my clothes.”
“Of course you do.” She put her hand on my shoulder. “Let’s step inside and get you sorted. You have a visitor.”
I yielded to her pressure and moved back into the room. “A visitor? Who?”
“Your nephew.”
I shook my head. “That’s a mistake. I haven’t got a nephew.” A small ache in my head and a memory. “I only had one brother. He’s dead. He never had kids.”
She smiled. “Well, that’s what he said. Now you just rest while I get you something to wear, and then we’ll take you down to the garden.”
I felt a stab of anger. “I don’t want something to wear, Dr. Banks. I want my clothes. And you don’t need to take me anywhere. Just tell me where it is and I’ll go. And then I’m out of here.”
She gave a little nod. “That’s not a problem, Mr. Walker. Nurse Rogers will bring you something to wear right away.”
“Something to wear…What happened to my clothes?”
“She’ll be right here. Try not to get upset. Everything is going to be fine.”
I went and stood by the window, looking out. I barely registered the view. I was remembering. Ben. I had been drinking with Ben, discussing something… I had fallen asleep. Ben had said it was a problem. There was a problem, but I couldn’t remember what the problem was. Marni? Had Marni been the problem?
Then there was a face, a sobbing face with a large beard. I shot him in the head, even though he was bound. Bound with coat hangers. And bodies, dead bodies upstairs, with their throats cut. I was aware my heart was pounding. The door opened and I turned to see Nurse Rogers, still smiling. Over one arm she had a toweling dressing gown. “I got you something to put on while we sort out your clothes.”
I growled, “What the hell do you mean, sort out my clothes? What do you need to sort out?”
She didn’t falter. “Well, we had to wash them when you were brought in, didn’t we? Now, do you want some help to change?” She winked.
I snarled. “No, get the hell out of here.”
“Rude! Just call when you’re ready and I’ll take you to see your nephew.”
“I don’t have a nephew!”
She laughed. “Well, you’d better tell him that!”
She left. I stripped off the nightgown and put on the dressing gown. I looked for some slippers or shoes, but there weren’t any. I yanked open the door and shouted, “Nurse Rogers!” She peered around from the desk down the corridor. “What am I supposed to put on my feet?”
She disappeared and reappeared a moment later with a wheelchair and a pair of fluffy slippers. I stared at her. “You have got to be kidding.”
“Sorry, Mr. Walker, it’s hospital policy. Our insurance company insists upon it.”
“You can tell your insurance company that they can shove that chair and the slippers right up their corporate ass. Now where is this guy who claims to be my nephew?”
; She shook her head. “I can’t tell you. I can take you there.”
“Then take me.”
She indicated the chair with her eyes and her head. I sighed and she handed me the slippers. I sat in the chair and threw the slippers on the floor.
She made a tsc! sound and sighed back at me. “How old are you? Four?”
Ten
She wheeled me past the desk to a bank of elevators. A couple of people passed and smiled at me. We boarded one of the elevators and rode it down to the first floor, which consisted of large, open spaces and plate glass walls overlooking lush gardens and sweeping parkland. There were a lot of people. All of them were dressed in normal clothes. Some had white coats. They all seemed busy. She pushed me across the lobby, past a reception desk, and out a set of automatic doors onto a path. That path wound its way through hydrangea bushes to a broad lawn that sloped down to a dense hedgerow running beside a stream. She wheeled me onto the grass and down to a bench where there was a man sitting cross-legged in an expensive suit, watching me. It was Ben.
Nurse Rogers stopped a few feet away from him and said, “Well, I’m sure you two have a lot to catch up on. I’ll leave you to it. If you could just bring him to reception when you’re finished?”
Ben looked up at her and nodded. She walked away.
“How much do you remember, Lacklan?”
“Everything.”
He made a face that said he was almost impressed. “That’s good. That’s a quick recovery.”
“Now I want my clothes back and I want to go back to my apartment.”
He gave a small smile and a small snort to go with it. “Let’s not rush things, Lacklan. Let’s see first if we have come to understand each other yet.” I didn’t answer. I just watched him. “Your mistake, from the start, was to think that we needed you.” He spread his hands. “You were convenient. You were very convenient. And you are very good at what you do. But, let’s be clear, Lacklan, Omega does not need you.”
“OK. Lesson learned.”
“Your other mistake: you kept telling me, ‘I don’t work for you.’” He shook his head. “Wrong. You do, Lacklan. From the day you came to my office at the Pentagon, you have worked for me. You see, just because you don’t want to, doesn’t mean you don’t. I own you, Lacklan.”
“Fuck you.”
He gestured at me with his hand. “Look at you! Half naked, barefoot, in a wheelchair!” He laughed out loud. “A prisoner of your own obstinate stupidity. And look at me. I am wearing a two thousand dollar suit, five hundred dollar leather shoes, my Jaguar is waiting out front, I have the freedom and the power to do whatever I please. And that includes letting you go, forcing you to stay, letting you live, or killing you off. Assimilate it, Lacklan. I own you.”
“What is this place?”
“I’m glad you asked. It’s the Richard John Erickson Institute. It is a research center that studies psycho-social dynamics.”
“Mind control.”
“You sound like a 1950 radio horror show.”
“Do I? Am I wrong?”
He shrugged. “Only in so far as the term is impossibly simplistic. What is ‘mind’, Lacklan? What makes your mind yours and my mind mine? Have you ever asked yourself that question?”
“No.”
“Mind…” He shook his head, biting his lip. “It’s a whole range of processes! Hunger, thirst, libido, anger, joy, excitement, analysis… And somehow you know that your joy is not the same as my joy, your anger is not the same as mine. When you analyze something, somehow you know that I am not making that analysis, it’s you. That sense of ‘I’ is also a part of Mind. But, what if, Lacklan, what if that separation was an illusion?”
I yawned. “Yeah, what about that?”
“What if your mind and my mind, and Nurse Roger’s mind, were all the same mind?”
“You know what, Nephew Ben? People who didn’t have anything better to do have been asking themselves that same question for about ten thousand years. And for all their philosophizing and asking of stupid questions, every baby that is born still knows that it’s an individual, and when it craps it doesn’t crap your crap, it craps its own crap. And when it laughs it laughs its own laugh, not yours. You can get Stanford University to do as many experiments as you like, and you can found as many psycho institutes as you like, the bottom line is, I am me and you are you. So get off your fucking ego-god trip, because you don’t own shit.”
He narrowed his eyes into an unpleasant smile. “And yet here we are. And with every passing decade since 1960, people in the west have felt themselves increasingly connected, due, in no small part, to the television’s power to homogenize culture. And since the late 1980s, due to the explosion in information technology. There is a matrix of thought and information, Lacklan, with a nexus within the World Wide Web, that is steadily exerting an ever stronger influence over the collective thought and the collective emotions of the world. Journalists are murdered in Paris and the people weep in Sao Paulo, New York, and Tokyo. A child is shot in Cape Town and people demand justice in London, Paris, and San Francisco. Trump is elected president in the U.S.A. and people demonstrate in Moscow, Madrid, and Munich. There are great streams of consciousness, information, and emotion flowing around the planet in a way that is not dissimilar to the streams of electrons flowing through your brain. I am here to tell you, Lacklan, that the destiny of humanity is to have a collective consciousness.”
“Ben, there is an Islamic terrorist cell threatening to bomb the United Nations General Assembly hall on Friday. They will not only kill several hundred people present, they will spread a genetically engineered virus, SF2, all across New York. Quit talking shit, and get me out of this damned hospital.”
“Institute.”
“I am going to come over there and break your fucking legs.”
“Move an inch and I will have you shot.”
I flopped back in my chair and closed my eyes. “What do you want, Ben? You want New York wiped out? Why? What for? If you wanted Marni and Gibbons dead you could have done it long ago, without this four ring circus. What do you want?”
He nodded. “That’s a lot better.”
I scowled at him. “You arrogant piece of shit.”
“Arrogant, yes. Piece of shit, not by a long chalk.” He pointed at me. “You, in your ridiculous bathrobe, in your wheelchair. You, you are a piece of shit. I am not.”
I repeated, “What do you want?”
He stared at me for a long while. “I want you to bring me Marni.”
“That’s what I was doing, Ben.”
He shook his head. “No, you were going off half-cock—again—murdering terrorists, uncovering bomb-plots…”
“They were going to kill Marni, goddammit!”
“Not if you had got her to us.”
I stared at him, incredulous. “They were going to kill thousands, possibly millions of people! Doesn’t that mean anything to you, Ben?”
“Lacklan, there are almost eight thousand million people on this planet, and they are all going to die. It’s what people do. They live, and then they die. The vast, vast majority will have insignificant lives. A very, very few will do something useful in their time. Let’s help those few, and let the many die where and when they will.” He stood. “Wake up, Lacklan. Time to wake up.”
“What are you going to do with me?”
He smiled and looked around, like he found my question amusingly stupid. “This is an institute that studies psycho-social dynamics, Lacklan. They are going to help you to adjust, psycho-socially.”
“You can’t do this to me. You have no authority…”
“On the contrary, Uncle, as your only surviving relative, and given your recent attempted suicide, I have the authority. Like I said, I own you.” He laughed and took hold of the back of the chair. “Now, shall I wheel you back, Uncle?”
Dr. Banks was waiting for us at the reception desk. She and Ben barely acknowledged each other. He patted my shoulder and sa
id, “I’ll see you again soon, Uncle,” and walked out to his dark blue Jaguar.
I watched him go. Banks smiled at me and said, “Well, how are we getting on? Did we enjoy our little visit?”
I raised an eyebrow at her and repeated, tediously, “What, both of us?”
She took hold of the handles of the chair and started to push me down a passage. People passed and smiled at me. She chuckled. “You’re going to be an interesting case, Mr. Walker, I can tell.”
“He’s not my nephew. You know that, right?”
“Is that so? Well, you can tell me all about it in just a moment.”
We came to a door and she backed through it into a spacious, modern office with broad windows overlooking a garden with a lily pond. She pulled me in after her, then wheeled me up to the desk. There, she dropped into a large, black leather chair and sat smiling at me. Everybody smiled at the Richard John Erickson Institute for Psycho-Social Studies.
I said, “So, are we going to pretend that you are a regular psychiatrist and I am a potential suicide case? And that Ben is my nephew, even though we are practically the same age?”
“So what do you think is going on, Lacklan?”
“I’m not Mr. Walker anymore, Banks?”
“Are you going to answer all my questions with a question of your own?”
“Are you?” She pulled over a pad and made a note. I jerked my head at it. “Is that supposed to intimidate me?”
She didn’t look up. “Does it?”
“Should it?”
She finished making her note, set the pad on the desk and looked at me. This time she wasn’t smiling. “Do you know why your nephew registered you with us, Mr. Walker?”
“Yeah, do you?”
She obviously didn’t want to play the question game anymore because she said, “Yes, of course I do. Why do you think he registered you with us?”
I smiled on the right side of my face, where it’s most ironic. “So that I would stop killing Islamic terrorists.”
“Is that what you do?”
I nodded. “Yeah, it’s one of the things I do.”
“Would it be accurate to describe you as a lone warrior fighting against a vast conspiracy?”