“They?”
“The Accident People.”
“Is that what you call them? The Accident People?”
“What do you call them?”
“They’re just one group in a field of many. There’s a Secret America, Hardie. Beneath the one you know. Beneath everything. Run by the people who really call the shots. They’re the ones who make things happen. The ones who never sleep. I’ve spent the past few years studying how they conceive and execute their goals. They run secret hospitals. Secret prisons. Secret airports. Secret factories. Anything you can think of in the aboveground world, there’s an equivalent in the shadow world. This is the real America, the shadow structure under the structure we think is real. And here’s the really weird thing, Charlie—the thing that’s going to drive you right out of your mind. The more I dug, the more I learned, the more I started piecing things together, the more the truth became clear: this isn’t a nefarious global plot. They espouse no particular ideology. They have no viewpoints or goals. They’re so massive, so vast, they’re like this big benign thug. They merely work for whoever signs the biggest check. Like Frank Zappa said—they’re only in it for the money.”
Static.
“Are you listening to me, Charlie?”
Yeah, Charlie Hardie was listening.
And thinking about the images they showed him inside the mask.
Hearing the prisoners’ stories made Hardie realize:
This “Secret America” would never, ever leave his family alone.
Unless he forced them to stop.
22
You’re stripped down to the bare essentials of what you are, and who you are as a man.
—Eddie Bunker
HARDIE STARTED WITH something smalclass="underline" push-ups.
One-armed, one-half push-ups, to be exact.
His old man’s favorite exercise. The only exercise a man needed, he always said. And the old man’s favorite punishment was a half push-up. That’s when you started a traditional push-up, then stopped halfway through, with your arms nearly fully extended, back straight, knees locked, muscles working. And you stay that way for as long as you can take, or until the old man tells you to drop. Mouth off? Half push-up time. Forget to take out the trash? Half push-up time.
Get your dumb ass thrown in a secret prison, causing you to have a complete mental breakdown and a resultant moment of clarity?
Half push-up time.
His body hated it at first. Absolutely hated it, because it had been softened by years of watching rich people’s homes and eating whatever and drinking whatever and reclining on whatever, confident that his years of strength training would still be there when he needed them. His body, of course, was full of shit. His body was weak and lazy and broken. But his head was in charge, and it ordered the body to do the half push-up. And there was nothing the body could do about it, because the head was safely ensconced in its cozy metal mask.
You can’t make me do this.
Watch me.
You can’t.
You will.
I won’t.
You have no choice.
And the body, in fact, had no choice.
(Hardie was aware that bifurcating himself like this would probably lead to mental problems down the road, but that didn’t matter, because this was the road now, and hey, you have to deal with the road as it comes.)
The guards didn’t like the half push-ups, either. They would yell at him and tell him this wasn’t exercise time and give him an electric jolt through the metal floor of his cell. Which was fine, because at first, Hardie couldn’t do a half push-up for more than thirty, forty seconds. But he kept at it, got right back up after being thrown off by a shock. He knew there were limits. They couldn’t just keep shocking the snot out of him. So they had to try something else. They had to open the cell to get to him.
Which they did, kicking him and punching him and spraying him with their wristbands full of mace and telling him to knock it off. Hardie ignored them, ignored the burning fury in his eyes, and went back to the half push-ups a few hours later anyway. After a while it became too much of a pain in the ass to open the cell. They ignored him, and only beat him every once in a while. By then, Hardie was up to three minutes. Then five.
Soon Hardie was doing full push-ups and leg squats—which killed. He did them when no one was looking. When he was caught he was shocked and beaten. Which Hardie considered to be a workout on its own, toughening his skin, his muscles. He grew to welcome the intrusions, actually.
Hardie knew that he was doing a slow-motion version of all of those insane get-back-in-shape, get-armed, build-weapons, plant-traps, don-the-body-armor, smear-war-paint-on-your-face montages from countless movies, the most egregious of which were, of course, from the Rocky movies, in which you could go from flabby palooka to mean lean hurting machine in as long as it took for the 1980s pop song to play itself out. What ordinarily took years could play out in a matter of verse-chorus, verse-chorus, bridge, chorus, chorus. Hardie started to imagine Rocky Balboa in the cell with him. Not to goad him on, but to be there when the monotony set in so that Hardie could turn around and call Rocky Balboa a pussy. You’re a pussy, Rock.
Hey, whaddya mean?
A pussy, Rock.
Hey, I wouldn’t be talking like that if I were—
A PUSSY, BALBOA, A BIG FAT PUSSY.
Don’t get Hardie wrong; jail still sucked.
But with the same self-awareness, he understood that he’d merely adapted to his surroundings. This was nothing special. This what people did; he’d seen Shawshank Redemption.
And, like Tim Robbins, he had a plan.
The next shower.
Hardie knew one had to be coming at some point.
The waiting was the worst part. No watch to check, no calendar pages to rip off the wall. Just the vague notion that at some point the guards would have to release him from his cell and place him in the shower room for a few minutes.
But when?
Or had they decided to revoke his shower privileges forever?
Finally, at long last, during a long dull fuzzy moment when Hardie’s brain truly tuned out of reality, Victor appeared at Hardie’s cell door, with Whiskey in the backup position.
Hardie had to pull it together. Reload the plan. He’d had a plan at some point. It had been a good one, too. Both guards had their batons ready, in case Hardie decided to try anything funny. Which he totally was going to! Only he couldn’t remember exactly what the hell it was…
Snap out of it. Wake up. Come on, WAKE THE FUCK UP.
“Back against the bars.”
Hardie complied. Victor slid the key in hard, forcing Hardie’s head to bob forward. Something beeped. The binds loosened. Hardie reached up and slipped off his mask as Victor slipped another electronic key into the cell door.
“Up.”
Hardie crawled to his feet and they nudged him forward, around the block of cells and to the right, toward the shower room.
“Take your smock off,” Victor said once they’d reached the door, which had a thick opaque glass panel.
“Could you turn around? I’m shy.”
Whiskey poked him in the ribs with her baton.
“Lèves-toi!”
As Hardie stripped and dropped the smock to the ground, he said, “Okay, okay. Want to join me, Whiskey? Wash my back, maybe? Squeeze my testicles again?”
Whiskey’s reply was to shove him inside the shower room with both hands, causing Hardie to clumsily tumble forward and slide across the tile floor.