After that it got really bad.
He didn’t know when they quit. He awoke as they were wrestling him off the metal table and strapping him, face down and still naked, onto a gumey. He had a dizzy view of Sonny above him, shaking his head. Shapiro lurked in the background, too, his face strained and pasty.
“A real Totenkopf,” Sonny whispered. “Not a Nazi but a genocidal maniac who makes all the Nazis who ever lived look like amateurs. How could I have known?”
“You should have interrogated him properly!”
“We didn’t have a clue! God damn Richmond to hell! And if Lessing’s telling the truth, it would’ve been too late even if he’d told us this story the minute he arrived!”
“But is it true? Could he be lying to set us off on the wrong track? Can you give him some sort of truth serum? We have to find out!”
“There’s no such thing as truth serum, except in spy novels,” Sonny sneered. “Interrogation… soft or hard… is the only way. I had no idea, no idea!”
“Oh, Israel!” Shapiro’s voice took on a mourning, keening tone. “Oh, Israel!” His eyes became round. “And us? What about us!”
The guards were rolling the gumey away. Lessing struggled to speak, but his battered, mangled lips wouldn’t work. His throat was so raw he could barely breathe.
“We’ll get him back here as soon as he’s able,” Sonny was saying grimly. “Run him through his story over and over again. You get on the phone to your people in the States… find out what you car about progress on Pacov research…”
He heard no more. The two guards wheeled him into an elevator at the far end of the corridor. There they upended the gumey and proceeded to beat him, very carefully, with their truncheons. They didn’t touch his face but concentrated on his ribs, his belly, his thighs, and his genitals. Then they tipped the gumey up the other way, so that he hung head downward from its straps, and the smaller guard used his rubber club as a dildo while the other hit him in places they might otherwise have missed His tormentors kept calling him “Palestinian pig” and “terrorist.”
Afterward they took him back to his celclass="underline" the neat, bare room he had left so blithely that morning. They sat him down crosslegged on the floor and shackled his wrists and ankles so tightly that he could not straighten his limbs. The bigger guard, whose English was better, then told him precisely what they would do to him in the sessions to come. Finally the smaller man urinated on him. Only then did they leave him alone.
Consciousness flickered in and out. Terror and hallucination blew through the open doors of his mind like windy ghosts. He hurt, terribly, but his physical pain was nothing compared to the miasma of fear that churned and coiled inside and all around him. He was still suffering the after-effects of the drugs. Too, Sonny had mentioned further sessions: Lessing was now a full-fledged customer of Section Six. Aside from beta carboline and other chemicals, he would now be subjected to the unfriendly ministrations of the guards. Sonny pretended not to tolerate sadism, not openly, but he must surely be aware of it. Pain, degradation, and terror were, after all, the specialties of the house.
He couldn’t take it. He had not known before, but he did now: Alan Lessing was no hero. He was not immune.
No one was. Interrogation had become an art-form in the twenty-first century.
He rolled and crawled and struggled across the tiled floor to the washstand. He gasped; his manacles were thin steel circlets, and they cut into his flesh like hot wires. His captors were undoubtedly watching; let them think he was trying to drink from the toilet bowl.
There was a way out. He had one card left to play.
He caught the toilet paper roll in his teeth. He twisted at it, worrying and tugging, until its metal holder came open. The Khalifa’s tiny “zombie pill” rolled out of the hollow tube. He hawked up saliva and doubled over, quickly, so that the guards would not have time to see and stop him.
The pill tasted bitter on his tongue. He strove to swallow, almost lost it, and finally choked it down. He lay still.
The door clanged open. He heard noise and outcry. Hands clawed at his shoulders, jerking his head back. Rough fingers jabbed down into his throat, grabbed at his tongue, pinched his nose. Somebody yelled, “Suicide pill! Doctor…!” Other voices yammered in Hebrew.
The ceiling light dimmed, rocked, brightened again, went dark. Pain, dead and dull, crawled up from his belly. Leaden was a good word for it.
Blackness all around. Jameela. Oh, Jameela
I will wipe Jerusalem as a man wipeth a dish, wiping it, and turning it upside down.
Therefore shall her plagues come in one day, death, and mourning, and famine, and she shall be utterly burned with fire: for strong is the Lord God who judgeth.
The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places: how are the mighty fallen! Tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Ashkelon; lest the daughters of the Philistines rejoice, lest the daughters of the uncircumcised triumph.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Tuesday, March 1, 2044
Cold.
His feet were cold.
He hurt. Bruises. Aches. Limbs locked, stomach cramped, fingers and toes numb, mouth as dry as mummy-dust, a tomb unopened for a thousand, thousand years.
Something constricted him. He struggled weakly and felt the slither of cloth gliding down off his body. A sheet?
Without conscious command his eyes opened. Or tried to. They were crusty and gummed shut. Fingers came up from nowhere to paw at them. Sight returned blurrily to his left eye. The right one didn’t work. It was just as well; the left one showed only fuzzy colors and shifting blobs, with a great, white sun overhead.
Something glittered to his right, another white object to his left, a black oblong before him. Shapes writhed at the limits of his vision, as though he were looking down a tunnel — a tunnel that passed through Hell. He saw things, people, animals, fantastic creatures who danced and jigged and cavorted. Change your partner! Round and round and do-si-do! He heard fiddle music, smelled the mingled stink of heat and candles and beer and sweat, cheap perfume and straw. It wasn’t real; was it a movie?
It must be a movie. He tasted chocolate-mint, smooth and dark upon his tongue, and he heard the crackle of tinfoil. A moist, feminine hand trembled in his, making his lust rise unseen in the popcorn-fragrant dark. He felt shame. Could she tell? Could she see the lump in his pants? Mavis was pretty observant, even while watching Kari Danforth and Robert Wayte emoting on-screen, steamy as a Chinese laundry! He thrust his hand down to hide the pressure between his legs. That only made it worse.
The white sun was bright, a cold, glittering star-fire. It dragged him back to pain and to dust, mummy-wrappings and eyeless skull-faces.
He could not remember. He did not want to remember. He was afraid. He could not remember and remain sane.
His other eye came open, but it was blurrier than the first. Did he have any more eyes, ones that might work better? He willed them to open, but none did. He commanded the rest of his body to respond. Just who and what was he? How many limbs did he have? Was the whole universe just agony and blur? Was he the universe?