But when he came to a halt near the large metal sink, she stopped beside him, and like him regarded the broad trail of blood on the floor. Protruding from the sink was a length of corroding copper pipe, and with recognition 3 picked it up, noting the blood speckled on its end.
Both of them turned to follow the still wet smears with their eyes. Like one long, continuous brushstroke, the blood formed a pathway to the closed confession room door.
Still carrying the metal pipe, 2 bolted forward again, and 3 again followed, but this time she didn’t voice a protest.
“It isn’t just 5 and 6,” the math teacher panted to himself as he ran, as if desperately working out a mysterious equation. “I know that… I know it. There were more of us… had to be. Missing numbers… there are missing numbers…”
Without hesitation, when he reached the door 2 flung it open wide and stepped inside the confessional.
Looking past his body, 3 cried out in shock.
A web of strands like extruded black slime filled the room, each strand originating from one of the graffiti-covered walls, with their other ends converging on a human body lying facedown on the floor, where it had been pulled out of the office chair. But they only saw this individual from the waist down. The upper potion of the body had been pulled through one of the painted walls… and as 2 and 3 gawked in horror, the body inched forward a little bit more. Then a little bit more, in another jerk of movement, as if someone on the other side of the wall were pulling the body through. The victim’s legs were unmoving, and they couldn’t tell if this person were still alive.
2 started forward, and 3 immediately latched onto him, fighting to hold him back despite his much greater size. “What are you doing?” she exclaimed.
“I’ve got to try to pull her out!”
“Don’t touch her! She has that goop all over her… you can’t let it touch you!”
“You saved me, remember? We’ve got to try to save her, too! It’s 5 — you see? You know her!”
“It’s too late… look!”
Another tugging jerk, and the motionless body was drawn through the solid material of the wall to the point of its knees. Another jerk, to the point of its calves. Then only the feet from the ankles down protruded from the wall. A final pull forward, and the sneakers passed through the wall as if it were only a holograph.
Now severed, all the cords that had been affixed to the body dropped limply like the lines of a landed parachute, only squirming weakly. Even as they fluttered downward, they began to evaporate.
“That was 5,” 2 panted heavily, close to tears. “Say it!” He whirled at 3 with eyes blazing in a florid face. “Say it! That was 5! Say that you know her! Say it!”
She only stared back him mutely, as if she had suffered a traumatic head wound. Suffered amnesia. She switched her gaze past him, toward the empty office chair positioned under the room’s single bare light bulb. Lying on the blood-stained linoleum floor beside the chair were a pair of eyeglasses with white frames.
In a flat voice, 3 said, “I ought to do my confession while I’m here.”
“What?” 2 blurted. “Are you crazy?” He pointed toward the spot where the legs had been sucked into the wall. “Didn’t you see what happened to her? We have to get out of this room! Out of this fucking building!”
“We have to complete the test.”
“Complete the test?”
She looked at him again, eyes flat as her voice. “That’s why we’re here, isn’t it? You agreed to the test. You signed a contract. This is important work being done.”
“Honey… honey, you don’t know what you’re saying! Please… don’t talk like this…”
“I’m going to do my confession now.”
“There’s no one listening in here! They were just having us come in here to… to soften us up, until we were psychologically ready, and maybe ready from the drugs, so we could be… assimilated! You saved me, remember? You were afraid for me when you saw them trying to take me!”
“I’m going to do my confession now,” 3 repeatedly blandly. “Then you need to do your confession, too.”
2 shook his head slowly, no longer able to hold back his tears. “No. I’m not doing any more confessions… and neither are you.” And with that, he spun toward the closest of the four painted walls and swung the bloodied copper pipe.
The elbow at the end of the pipe rang off the glazed bricks. 2 felt the vibration sing up his arms. He struck the wall again, again, crying out as he did so, heedless of 3 behind him. She stepped away to avoid his backswing, but stretched her arms as if to catch hold of him. “Stop it!” she shouted. “Don’t do that!”
Slowly he was chipping pieces from the wall, chunks that clattered at his feet, exposing the red meat of the bricks beneath. When he felt he had marred this wall enough for the time being, he moved on to the next. He had gone from yelling to grinning with sadistic delight, as if he were beating a living enemy. As if he were erasing figures from a mathematical equation of inhuman complexity. Each and every tiny 0 and 1 in these compositions had to be vital. Even these small wounds he was inflicting would disrupt the formulae. Just one gear removed from the machine and it would stop… it had to…
“Don’t!” 3 shrieked. “You can’t do this! God damn it, stop!”
He ignored her, moved on to the third wall. His bones were jarred, the muscles in his arms aching, but he battered gouges from the third wall and moved on to the fourth, which contained the doorway. He struck at the mural to one side of it, then the other. Every wall in the confessional was wounded now. “This room is where we go in,” he ranted between blows. “It’s where they absorb us. And then, those things… those black things come out, from one of the other murals.” Another metallic, clanging blow. A tiny shard of brick ticked off his eyelid. “They’re all that’s left of us… like waste product… and then even that’s gone!”
“You’re talking insane, like someone’s trying to kill us!”
“Not kill us — make us not exist!”
“You’re wrong! Stop it… you’re wrong!”
Heaving with heavier pants than even before, 2 halted his attack and turned to her. “What do you mean? What do you know?”
Her gaze was level and calm. “Change us, yes, I’m sure. Not destroy us… only make us better.” She proffered a hand. “Let me have that thing.”
Tears began flowing down 2’s sweat-filmed face again, and he clutched the pipe close to his chest. “No.”
She didn’t lower her arm. “Okay… okay, then, if it makes you feel safer. But let’s go rest now, okay? Let’s go lie down. I’ll lie down with you.” That flat smile — was it meant to be seductive? “You’re too stressed out; you’re getting hysterical. Come lie down with me, and after you rest we’ll talk about all this more rationally.”
2 studied her, through tears so heavy that her form blurred. “Rest where?” he wheezed. “You think I’m going to lie down in those rooms with the artwork? No way. If you want to rest with me, we’ll go back upstairs — where we slept last night.”
“All right, honey, that’s fine.” Still the extended hand. “Let’s go upstairs, then.”
2 hesitated, his thoughts a kaleidoscope — a dizzying, scintillating kaleidoscope of only black and white — but then he stepped toward her and said, “Okay… okay.”
11
A fluttering of living shadow behind 2’s eyelids, and he woke with a start, fearing that the world was in flux — but it was only the fluorescent tubes in the ceiling. One had gone out totally, the other dying, its light fluctuating as if a glowing white liquid sloshed around inside. How long had he been asleep? So long that fluorescent light tubes, previously steady, might expire?