Sonny was speaking. “…The beta-carboline series. Less drastic, no damage to tissues, yet more certain than physical methods. Sometimes there’re psychological traumas afterwards, but no scars, no mutilation. Deaths from it are minimal, and it leaves no visible effects anybody can complain about.”
“What… what does it do?” Shapiro looked pale around the gills.
“It’s an anxiety drug, a mood-alterer. You feel terror like you can’t believe. Stark, raw fear, anxiety without cause, panic that almost literally scares you to death.”
The Vizzie swallowed. “Is that all? Is… is that… enough?”
“Usually. When it isn’t we add a dribble of LSD.”
“A hairy ride through the funhouse,” Lessing remarked.
“Or a dose of succinylcholine. That paralyzes every muscle except the heart. The subject can’t twitch an eyelid, can’t swallow, can’t even breathe, although he… or she… is fully conscious. A respirator is needed to keep the person from suffocating. It’s a hell of a sensation, let me tell you. I tried it once to see how it felt.”
It was Lessing ‘s turn to swallow. It was becoming hard to stay cool. He addressed Sonny. “Who… who is that… there, on the table?”
“Your Syrian friend, Muhammad Abu Talib. He’s been telling us all about the network of SS corporations, Herman Mulder, the Athens connection, a certain Dr. Theologides, the structure of the Party in the Third World… everything he knows or ever thought he knew.”
Lessing’s mouth was filled with ashes. “Can he… can he hear us?”
“No.” Sonny shook his tight, golden curls. “He’s listening to a tape of our questions, over and over. Sometimes we interrupt with violent, deafening noise and dissonance, sometimes with soft music, lullabies, and sweet persuasion. The IV gives him a dose of fear drugs at irregular intervals. When they wear off, we take the rubber conformer gag out of his mouth and ask him more questions. He never knows how long the sessions last, what time it is, whether it’s night or day. We can keep him like this indefinitely, totally cut off, completely disoriented, fed intravenously. He can’t even have a heart attack and die on us. Medical science sees to that.” He nodded to the nurse, who stared impassively back.
Shapiro made a gagging noise. Sonny sighed and said, “Come on, Alan. Let’s go next door and get this over with.”
Lessing had always thought of himself as a strong man, one who could put up a good fight with his hands tied behind his back — literally. Sonny’s guards proved otherwise. He got in just one solid kick and had the satisfaction of seeing the little one with the truncheon double over gasping. Then the other guard kneed him and knelt on the small of his back. His blue jumpsuit was ripped away, and he was dragged naked, writhing and cursing, through the door, along the hall, and into a room identical to the first. They heaved him up and dumped him onto a table like Abu Talib’s. Its surface was a sheet of ice against his spine.
He hardly felt the Ty-Do straps being wound around his wrists and ankles. They pried his mouth open and inserted a rubber conformer. It tasted terrible, and he gagged and struggled to spit it out, but to no avail. Then they smeared his eyes with some kind of grease and bandaged them shut. Fingers lifted his penis to insert a catheter. It hurt like fire. A plastic tube slid into his anus. Finally they inserted plugs into his ears and stuck cold, metallic spiders — monitors — to his temples and his chest.
The world became a dark and silent place.
He couldn’t feel his fingers, and the padded girdle kepi him from humping up and banging his buttocks on the table. At first the cramps in his spreadeagled arms and legs were awful, but these subsided. Sensation slowly ebbed away as his body became used to the bonds and the frigid mirror-surface of the table. His breathing slowed, and the thunder of blood in his temples died away.
A voice spoke in his ear. It was loud, much too loud, electronically amplified and altered to a rasping, grating roar. It probably belonged to Sonny, although it no longer sounded like anything human. It said, “Sorry… uh… that’s better. Wiggle your left foot if you can hear me.”
He hardly knew when the IV needle slid into his forearm.
Silence. Peace.
Apprehension. Worry.
A tinge of dread
A solid wall of fear, a great tidal wave, a rolling, surging billow of panic.
It swept toward him, above and over him. It came crashing down, smashing his defenses, shattering his resolve, swirling and splashing, seething into every crevice of his brain. Terror ripped along his muscles, gushed into his bloodstream, roared through his arteries, raced in to choke his heart, his eyes, his mouth. He clamped down upon the gag to keep from shrieking, then realized that he was shrieking anyway.
The stench of sweat, feces, and acrid urine clogged his nostrils; smell was the one sense they couldn’t take away from him.
The wave subsided, gurgled turgidly, and disappeared into the featureless distance. He sagged against his bonds, trembling, limp with relief.
Another, greater, darker, and more fearsome wave loomed on the horizon. Helpless, he watched it come. Screaming didn’t help at all.
The grating voice slapped against his eardrums like a physical blow. “Now, Alan. Tell us about Richmond.” Impersonal fingers pried the rubber gag from between his teeth.
He had to hold out, make it seem that he was trying to keep his secret. Could he stand another assault? God damn it, if Abu Talib could, then so could he.
“No,” he husked. “No way!”
This time it was much, much worse. Perhaps they added a dose of some pain-drug. The fingers exchanged the gag in his mouth for another with a vacuum attachment, preventing him from strangling on his own vomit.
The next time he saw visions. Sonny had mentioned LSD. His mother was there, watching his shame, watching him shudder and twist and bawl and fill the bottle under the table with yellow piss. She sniffed, made a face, and dragged him off, down into the basement. There she made him take off all his clothes, and then she switched him with a branch from the little tree in the front yard. He had played with matches, hadn’t he? Wasn’t he the one who had set the Larsons’ tool shed afire? Didn’t he know his dad had to pay Mr. Larson twenty-three dollars for the damage? No good Christian family had to put up with such shenanigans! Next thing he’d be drinking and smoking pot and… and…! By the Lord, he’d work it off: a month of Saturdays at the pet shop cleaning the dog-runs!
The worst of it was that he glimpsed Mavis, the Larsons’ daughter, two years older than he, watching his torment through the laundry room window — and laughing like the witch-bitch she was! His humiliation would be all over school by tomorrow.
Later came much grimmer memories: dust-faced Angolan corpses, mutilated Syrian children rising up from the stones of their blasted homes, his own dead comrades, sacks of bone, meat, and offal that a second ago had been living, breathing human beings. Once more he saw the mere girl he had loved, too briefly, in Damascus. He watched her die again, watched her blood seep through the thick khaki of her uniform, dribble from her sleeve, well up into her mouth and stain her lips and chin.
He howled. And, honor of horrors, so did she, keening right along in ghastly harmony, even though she was dead.
Jameela appeared as well. He had been expecting her.
He heard the shots, the screams, and he saw the silver-ice-blue bundle on the bedroom floor. The harsh, external voice rasped wicked suggestions into his ear, and his wife’s body jerked back up to half-life, one eye open, the other closed, her tongue protruding, her blood and the filth of dying soiling her silken garments. Jameela danced for him, Indian Kathak-style, arms akimbo, tresses flying, head bobbing, and feet pounding. She would have been beautiful, had it not been for her blood-caked death wounds, clear and dreadful in the pearly moonlight. Lessing danced with her too, unable to help himself. Then, at the voice’s behest, he performed obscenities upon Jameela’s corpse while Richmond, Bauer and Helga, the Israeli nurse, Sonny and Shapiro, Liese and Jennifer Caw, prim Borchardt and sardonic Wrench, and a cast of thousands ogled, cheered, whistled, and egged him on.