Subject 11

10

2 woke with a single blurted sob, and sat up in his sleeping bag. 3 sat up quickly beside him, immediately rubbing his back. “What’s wrong, honey? Honey, calm down.”

6 sat up, too, eyes unnaturally wide. “What? What is it? What?” He looked around frantically at the room’s four walls, as if expecting to see a half dozen faceless figures stepping out of them all at once. From across the room, six scattered doll heads leered at him instead.

2 took several deep breaths, and got out, “I was dreaming about my Mom. God, I wish this test was over with already. How much longer do we have to stay here? When will they let us know?”

Still rubbing his back, 3 asked, “What’s wrong with your Mom, honey?”

“She has cancer. Uterine cancer. I hope she’s been doing okay without me.”

“Ohh… poor honey. Poor Mom. Wow, so many people get cancer, huh?”

“Fuck, man, you gave me a heart attack.” 6 drew himself out of his sleeping bag, paced and stretched at the same time. “Hey, I wonder how 5 made out last night. I can’t believe she really had the guts to sleep alone down there.”

“Well, she did explore that old brick building over there alone the first time,” 2 reminded them. “She’s tougher than we gave her credit for.”

“We should go down and look in on her.”

“Go ahead,” 3 said, “I could care less.”

“Hey,” 2 scolded her, but he was smiling. 3 noticed the tears still in his eyes and wiped them away with her thumbs.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” 6 muttered, watching them.

2 glowered at him. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m going to go look in on 5. You two lovebirds can stay here and do whatever.”

“Maybe we will do whatever,” 3 said defiantly.

“Hey, while you’re down there,” 2 said, “see if our breakfasts have arrived.”

“What, you want room service delivered to you?”

“Okay, so don’t bring us our food if you don’t want to. We’ll be down when we’re ready. I’ll tell you one thing, and I don’t care if they’re listening anymore: I stopped taking those meds. I suggest you two do the same.”

“Good idea,” 3 said. “This is all too much now.”

“Well, wait a second there,” 6 said, “that might be going too far. Not sleeping beside the graffiti is one thing, but I’m sure those meds have a lot to do with this whole test, somehow.”

“I’m sure they do — but I’m not taking them.”

“Whatever, man,” 6 said, leaning his back against a wall as he pulled on and laced first one sneaker, then the other. “But I’m not going to stop. I do still want that four thousand bucks, you know.”

They watched him haul on the metal door and exit the room, leaving it jammed halfway open behind him. As soon as he had left, 3 turned impulsively toward 2, took his face in her hands and kissed him on the mouth lingeringly. Their tongues swished wetly around each other. Immediately 2 felt his penis stiffening, at the same time that a drowning klaxon in his mind tried to blare: I’m kissing a man. Kissing a man…

But when 3 pulled away from him to regard him with shining eyes, 2 grinned back at her, his nightmare having dissipated. “Thanks for rescuing me last night, sweetie,” he said. Then he shrugged. “Apparently, rescuing me.”

“I’m not letting them take you away from me,” 3 told him firmly. “You and me are sticking together, right?”

He pulled her against him again, his arousal returning as he ran his hand up and down her back. He wondered if they could get away with some quick lovemaking before 6 returned. His hand slipped under the top of her white hospital scrubs, to rub the smooth bare plain of her lower back, as if he were trying to gently wipe away the Mobius strip tattooed there.

Looking over her shoulder at her exposed back, and the blue ink punched into the taut brown skin under his palm, 2 frowned and drew back from her, shifted his body behind hers to pull apart the hem of her top and the waistband of her pants. A tattooed caption under the figure 8 Mobius strip, in flowery script, read: LIFE’S NO STORYBOOK. It wasn’t the meaning of the words that confounded him, but he simply couldn’t recall having noticed this part of the tattoo when they had made love in this room. Come to think of it, he couldn’t recall her body bearing any tattoos at all. Had the rest of her body so distracted him? He decided to make a joke of it while calling the tattoo to her attention. “Nothing personal, honey, but aren’t you a little old for this silly tattoo? I mean, you’re still as cute as a button, but you being a mom and all…”

3 twisted around and slapped his arm. “You think I’m so ancient? I’m only twenty-eight years old, you know!”

“Twenty-eight,” he echoed.

“Yes! I told you that.” She cocked her head at him. “Honey, are you okay? You know I don’t have any kids, either.”

“No daughter… no stepson…”

“No! No nothing! Of course not!” 3 gave him an exaggerated pout of feigned hurt and jealousy. “I think you must be thinking of someone else.”

5 had awakened early, opening her eyes to find herself confronting the graffiti wall as if she had been staring at it through her closed lids while she had been sleeping. Viewed sideways like this, some of its designs seemed to take on more meaning for her, if only in a subliminal manner, and yet still remained just a notch away from locking into conscious interpretation. She sat up, stretched, emerged from her warm chrysalis.

While showering she watched the graffiti-covered wall avidly, but with more curiosity than nervousness this time. Nothing out of the ordinary occurred, and she dressed and moved out into the banquet hall. Its commanding windows were apportioned into blank white squares. She found four envelopes containing their pills in the bucket, buried under four paper lunch sacks of breakfast. After filling her plastic tumbler with water, she seated herself alone at the table, swallowed each of her pills, then started on her breakfast of apple, banana, and cereal bar with raspberry filling.

She glared at 6’s empty chair directly facing her, conscious of 2 and 3’s empty chairs to her left. She couldn’t believe they were willing to sacrifice that money. Sacrifice everything. They were putting her own involvement and investment in this research at risk. Their changed attitude only made her all the more resolved to her own commitment.

As she chewed a crisp mouthful of apple, she allowed her gaze to slide aimlessly along the surface of the table toward its far end. There, someone had set down a length of old copper pipe, blotched green with verdigris, about three feet long and with a ninety degree elbow at one end.

And folded on the table about halfway between the pipe and herself, 5 noted a pair of eyeglasses that someone had also left behind. Curious, she rose from her chair and picked them up, unfolded them. They had narrow lenses set in modern-looking white frames with the name of the designer, Roberto Cavalli, printed on the inside of one arm.

5 contemplated the eyeglasses for several protracted seconds in which she did not move, nor even blink. At length, she said aloud, “I was wondering where these went to.” And then she raised the eyeglasses to her face and slipped them on.

When her meal was finished, 5 drifted back to the female dormitory, standing framed in the threshold and gazing upon the black and white graffiti. Right away she grinned, and her heart tripped into a faster rhythm. Right away everything seemed to come together for her at last, like a film of a jigsaw puzzle exploding into thousands of pieces, but played in reverse. It was the lenses of her eyeglasses, she was convinced, restoring her sight after it had been compromised up until now.

Rapturously, she crossed the room, raising both arms as she did so. When she was close enough she lay her hands flat upon the glossily-painted surface of the wall.

A subtle but steady vibration — or was that an electrical current? — trembled up both her arms. Coursed through her veins, shepherding her corpuscles along, and humming along her nerves, plucking at them like the strings of a harp.

She was wet between the legs. Her grin was so broad it hurt her bunched cheeks. Tears of joy ran freely from her eyes, and she moved in closer, hugged the wall as if crucified to it, arms spread wide, chest and the side of her face pressed hard against it.

There was a sense of communion. Communion with an otherness, but through that somehow a communion with herself. Like a lover, her quivering lips almost brushing the wall as she spoke, she whispered, “You needed that I worked for a pharmaceutical company. That was one of the things you needed from me. You must have needed things from all of us, to become…” Oh, to be needed, to be essential even in part. Seth had never really needed her… she saw that now.

She felt as if, for the first time in her life, she had truly come home. Truly found herself. She had never known until now how much her life had always been one gaping wound, as if from birth she had been a walking autopsied corpse with its chest spread wide and red and nearly empty. But now, she was only a few steps away from becoming fully healed, at last.

6 had lost interest in 3, no longer felt competitive with 2; the big guy was welcome to her. 6 couldn’t reconcile what 5 had said she’d seen in the shower with what he himself had seen when he and 3 had been alone together that one time, and so it was less of a headache (and his head did ache when he tried to sort it out) to just drop the whole matter. He had a young girlfriend, Ana, a Dominican like himself and just as diminutive and cute as 3, waiting for him on the outside anyway.

Remembering Ana now made him also recall Dr. Onsay, whose dark complexion had caused him to wonder about the researcher’s nationality. Maybe not fully Dominican; a mix perhaps. But there had been the barest tease of accent, and only 6 — when the doctor had introduced himself and given his name — had guessed correctly that name’s proper spelling. Spanish being his native language, 6 had known immediately that the doctor’s name should be spelled Once.

6 had now wandered downstairs to the former base camp, and leaned his head into the female dormitory. “Hello? Hey.” No answer, so he stepped all the way inside to find two empty sleeping bags: 5’s, and the one 3 had forsaken last night. After a suspicious glance at the wall mural, he went on to look in the laundry area, then stood outside both the female shower room and the female restroom, again calling out for 5. Still no answer. He continued on to the banquet hall.

No sign of her here, the Formica-topped table and its four chairs empty. In the plastic bucket, though, he did find three envelopes of meds and three packed breakfasts. So 5 had already retrieved hers, then. He contemplated bringing 2 and 3 their breakfasts, but decided not to interrupt their probable pre-breakfast feasting, so he simply transferred his own rations to the table. Filling a tumbler at the sink, he debated whether to skip the drugs as 2 had suggested. No… no… he was sure they were too critical to the research; he couldn’t risk it.

When he turned away from the sink to approach the table, 5 was standing there directly in front of him and swinging the copper pipe, gripped in two fists like a bat. He dropped his tumbler and the rust-tainted water splashed on his sneakers. The ninety degree elbow at the end of the pipe gashed a dent into 6’s forehead above his right eyebrow, blood rising rich and dark in the crater and overflowing it. His eyes had gone wide and he staggered back against the edge of the sink, but he didn’t go down, so 5 cocked the pipe back and swung it again. His hands came up too late to intercept it and the elbow struck his nose with a crunch. He dropped to his knees, more blood running from his nostrils and his eyelids fluttering. But he was still upright on his knees. As big as he was, 5 was afraid he would rise up yet and return the attack, so she stepped around behind him and bashed him a third time, now on the back of his head with its close-cropped curly black hair. This time 6 pitched forward onto his face, and when his already shattered nose impacted with the floor it spurted out a thick gout of blood. The gout quickly became a radiating puddle, in which 5 saw her dark reflection.

“You don’t want to confess, huh?” 5 said, huffing as she stood over him. Like some torturing inquisitor, through gritted teeth she went on, “I’ll make you confess.”

3 had pulled her top off, then taken 2’s head in her hands again and drawn it to her chest. He had sucked one of her nipples, dark as a chocolate kiss, into his mouth. His hands were on her waist, but she took one of them off and pressed it to her crotch. “Don’t be afraid,” she cooed.

From somewhere below came a high-pitched, banshee-like shriek. It reverberated in eerie diminishing waves.

“Jesus!” 2 said, whipping around.

“Was that 5?” 3 said, clutching his arm.

2 jumped to his feet, and waited while 3 hurried her top back on. “Come on!” he said, and they lunged toward the partly open green metal door.

5 had had a devil of a time dragging 6 into the confessional, an even harder time pulling his limp body up into the office chair. Once the chair had rolled out from under him and he’d thudded to the floor with 5 sprawled comically atop him. By the time she had succeeded in hoisting him into the chair, her white scrubs were smeared with his blood, making her look like a wartime surgeon. Thank God 6 was still alive. For a while there he had been making an uncanny, bubbly snoring sound, but now a vestige of consciousness had returned and his eyes opened halfway in the mask of thickening blood he wore. He began mumbling. Good. That was very good. “Keep talking,” 5 encouraged him as she backed out of the little room, grinning that grin that hurt her face. “Keep talking.”

She closed the confessional door, turned and confronted the swath of blood on the floor that led back to the banquet hall. There was no way she could clean that in time; 2 and 3 might come downstairs at any second, and follow the blood here. Disrupt the research more than they already had.

She had retrieved her copper pipe, and held it ready with determination. Maybe she couldn’t face both of them at once, subdue them and force them into the confessional as she had 6, but she had done the best she could. The rest she would have to trust to Dr. Onsay. She hoped the doctor would be appreciative of her contribution to the body of work. Now, all that remained was for her to perform one last confession herself. She only had to wait her turn, and pray that she wasn’t interrupted before she too could be submerged in the baptismal pool — that she might be reborn.

There had been several more unearthly screams, which seemed to penetrate into every room in the entire vast facility. Having thundered down the flights of steps to the ground floor, 2 and 3 followed the last echoing wail to the hallway off which were the entries for the laundry, the restrooms, the shower rooms, and the dormitories. They were advancing down this corridor to begin looking into each room when a figure burst out of the male dormitory.

It charged right at them, letting out an abysmal howl.

5 had heard the piercing cries, too, but would not leave her post in front of the confessional to investigate. Anyway, she intuitively understood the source of the screams. They originated from an ephemeral byproduct. And didn’t that indicate that the process on the other side of the door was complete?

She spun around and swung the door to the confession room open. Yes, it was as she had thought… and she stepped into the room to seat herself in the vacant chair.

2 grabbed 3’s arm and pulled her against the wall with him just as the running figure plunged past them. In the second that it was beside them, they saw that it possessed a mouth stretched wide but no eyes. It was without hair or clothing as well, completely oily black, and it flashed by them as if unaware of their existence or as if it didn’t care about them, so gripped was the entity in the pain or panic that had inspired it to shriek and flee. They turned to watch the figure, that three-dimensional shadow, continue its charge down the hallway — and yet it had only gone a few yards more before it exploded.

Instantaneously, with a soundless detonation that sprayed like liquid fireworks, the anthropomorphic figure had been reduced to gummy strings and garlands of membrane. The now amorphous mass splatted to the hallway’s floor, tendrils of varying thickness flicking madly in the air, in a repeat of what they had witnessed before in the female dormitory.

“God!” 2 choked, crushing 3 against his chest.

Once again, gradually the whipping tendrils broke off, rippled briefly in the air like eels, and dissolved as if they’d lost their transitory hold on corporeality. Once again, the mass was reduced more and more until it utterly vanished, leaving not a trace.

2 released 3, and as they faced each other he said with urgency, “We’d better find 5 and 6.”

“What?” 3 said, still looking stunned.

“The others — 5 and 6 — let’s find them!” He nodded toward the doorways further along the hallway.

Now 3’s expression was one of confusion. “Others?”

2 gaped at her for a second. “The other two… 5 and 6. You do remember them, don’t you?”

“What are you talking about? There’s only you and me in this place.”

He took her by the shoulders. “3… listen to me. There are four of us! There are two others, a man and a woman. 5 and 6!”

“Honey…” she began, wagging her head.

2 dodged around her then, and took off running down the hallway in the opposite direction from that in which the shadow being had bolted. The drugs, he thought — this was the second morning in which he hadn’t taken them, but 3 had only gone without this morning. The drugs were helping her forget… to resort her memories, to readjust, reboot…

“Hey!” she cried, starting after him, “where are you going? Don’t leave me here alone!”

2 darted from doorway to doorway, but he met no one in any of the rooms of their base camp: the two dormitories, the showers, the restrooms, the laundry. He moved on, then, toward the banquet hall with 3 on his heels, shouting, “Why are you acting so crazy? Stop it!”

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.”