His heart had gone into overdrive, and he was suddenly finding it difficult to get enough air. He sucked on the whiskey.
“The memo broadened the ‘alternative set of procedures,’ allowing us to use ‘extremely harsh techniques’ to extract vital information from ‘high-value detainees.’”
“What does that actually mean?” she asked. “The Bush administration had a talent for euphemism.”
“Electric shocks, heat, fire, bastinado, strappado, extreme humiliation… anything that pushed the limits of human tolerance. You know,” said Schafer, after a long, ruminative drink, “once you’ve decided that torture is okay it’s inevitable that boundaries get pushed.”
“Presumably you were paid extra to do all that?” she said.
“Seventy thousand dollars a month.”
He breathed in heavily, as if he had a weight on his chest. The phone rang. An answering machine cut in after seven rings. No message. The phone rang again. Still no message. It rang once more.
“I’m going to have to take that,” said Leena. “It’s one of my clients.”
She took the call in her office, closed the door. She came back out to explain that she was going to be a while and that he would have to entertain himself. She pointed him to the art gallery, poured him more whiskey
“Client?” he said. “Are you an analyst or something?”
“I told you, I’m an expert on the nature of guilt,” she said from the doorway to her office. “I know how to relieve its symptoms and what the consequences are if it’s ignored.”
He stayed on the sofa for a while, as if pinned by that statement and exhausted by his own revelations. Then his edginess got to him, and he socked down the scotch and went for another. He grabbed a handful of ice and poured a measure to the brim. He walked the length of the window, asking himself whether this had been a big mistake. Had his vulnerability this morning made him read too much into how he’d felt about her? He stared out of the huge panel of glass at a vast dark patch within the heart of the city. What did he feel about her? He wasn’t attracted to her, not sexually. Did he think she had some answers? Could she help him understand?
He drifted away from the window, let himself into the art gallery It was pitch black, with no visible cityscape. He flicked the switch. Only lights illuminating paintings came on. The windows were blacked out. He drifted through the maze of works. He wasn’t much interested in modern art. Too conservative. Didn’t get it. These were bleak landscapes. Large, white, unframed canvases with something gray and indistinct happening, or rather not happening, in various quarters. The only portrait was at the far end of the gallery. An old man in a business suit was sitting in a chair within some kind of cage. He was holding on to the arms and screaming. It made him shiver.
At the end of the gallery was a door, which gave him notions of escape. It opened onto stairs going up to the roof and down to the floor below. He went down, drink in hand, the ice tinkling against the glass. Another door opened onto a wide, wooden-floored corridor with a view of the city visible at the end. The lighting was utilitarian neon. He walked down the corridor, checked around the corner, realized there was a room set within the entire floor of the condo. Maybe, given her superb physical shape, it was her gym.
His palms were sweating again as he reached for the door handle, opened it. The air inside was cold and smelled of damp and something unpleasant like effluent. The surface of the floor was different; it had the grittiness of rough concrete. As he felt for a switch, the door clicked shut.
The strobe of fierce neon thrashed four images onto his retina. Ropes and pulleys over a large puddle. A metal frame in front of a cinder block wall. A bed with straps hanging from it. An uncoiled hose. Even before the neon had settled he fell to the floor unconscious.
Someone was stroking his face with a wet washcloth and running a hand through his hair. It was so lulling it put him in mind of being pushed in a pram under trees. He came to, stripped to the waist, broken glass on the floor. The concrete bit into his back. His vision was blurred, but he could make out a face above him. His vision slowly cleared. Leena rested his head on the floor and took a seat on a stool at his feet. She was wearing an orange boilersuit, of the sort prisoners wore in Gitmo.
“What is this, Leena?” he asked, seeing blood on his chest.
“You fainted, dropped your glass of whiskey, cut your head and hand as you went down, and bled all over your shirt,” she said. “You must be familiar with this sort of room.”
“What is this?” he asked, turning his head to take in his surroundings.
“I call it a return to equilibrium,” said Leena.
“It’s a treatment room for your clients?”
“I help people, mainly men, who feel that they have such a disproportionate amount of power to control the lives of others that they experience overwhelming sensations of guilt. By reducing them to a state of powerlessness, through the infliction of pain and humiliation, I return balance to their minds. This reduces their suicidal tendencies and, in some cases, reinvigorates their sense of belonging within the human race.”
“And who are your clients?”
“Mainly captains of industry, politicians, military men, policemen, and the odd prison governor, but no interrogators,” she said. “Or is that being too euphemistic? The idea is to face up to things, after all. I’ve never had any paid torturers among my clients.”
“I told you I’m atoning for my sins,” said Schafer. “I’m dealing with my guilt in my own way. I’m going to reveal myself to the world for the man that I am, for the work that I’ve done in the name of my government. I’m condemning myself by media. Do you think my wife will have me back? Do you think she’d want me anywhere near our daughter?”
“You’re not coping with it very well,” said Leena. “I don’t think last night was the first time you’d drunk yourself into oblivion. Everybody in the restaurant was concerned for me… not you. They could see that you’d given up on some essential human qualities. Then you walk in here and faint.”
“So what are you proposing?”
“That you have some of the experience of the victim,” said Leena. “I can’t simulate everything. I can’t keep you for days in a locked room with little food and in poor or extreme conditions with no sleep. I can’t reduce your humanity to the level of livestock and have you brought up to the light, immobilized into a state of total helplessness, and then, possibly the worst thing, have another human being do terrible things to you for hours and days, over which you have no control, not even if you tell the truth. I wouldn’t want to. It would reduce me, too.”
“So what do you do?”
“I can make you feel helpless and humiliated and deliver a certain level of pain,” said Leena. “There are psychological benefits.”
“It sounds like I have to trust you.”
“That’s not a common link between torturer and victim, as I’m sure you’ll appreciate, but that’s part of it.”
“And what do you get out of it?”
Silence apart from the drip of water. They looked at each other for some moments.
“There’s not a minute of every day that I don’t think about what happened in the accident,” she said. “I went through a red light. I wasn’t thinking straight. My head was so full of what my father had done, killing himself, that I was in a state of distraction almost all the time. I was a careful woman driver, not a crazy kid, and my brain suddenly didn’t understand the difference between red and green anymore.”
“You’re punishing your father.”
“It’s the only way I can keep going,” she said. “Otherwise I have nothing. All the money, all the comfort, all the male interest in me, all the possibilities that life has to offer are meaningless.”