Subject 11

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?

3 lay asleep beside him, covered to her chest in a sleeping bag. He had had trouble becoming aroused, but she had persisted, patient and determined, and eventually he had attained a climax that barely shook him, more of a meager release. Before this he might have caressed her hair or held her head as she pleasured him, but he had only looked on at her as if through someone else’s eyes. He looked at her similarly now. In the unstable light, her skin appeared darker to him. On her exposed upper right arm, a single tattooed word he had somehow only noticed at this moment: ONE.

He hadn’t expected to sleep again so soon after they’d awoken, but maybe she was right: his hysteria had exhausted him. He had thought to merely feign sleep until she herself dozed off, but had nodded off himself soon enough. He slipped out of his own sleeping bag as stealthily as possible so as not to wake her, dressed, then sat on one of the chairs to tie his sneakers. Standing, he retrieved his metal pipe. The blood was dry, and its end was now marked with paint from the murals.

He went to the emerald green door, which he had left open enough for him to steal through without having to move it, the rasping sound of which would surely wake her… and when he entered the hallway outside, he had all he could do to keep from shouting his surprise.

This broad hallway still bore its large composite windows on either side, its ceiling still flaking away and the floor covered in these fallen flakes, like a carpet of autumn leaves. The radiators against the walls here and there were still encrusted with rust. But every available inch of both walls was covered in black and white graffiti.

This had been done while they slept, vulnerable with the door partly open.

Reining in his trembling outrage, his horror, 2 glanced back through the doorway at the lumpen shape of his lover. He considered dragging the door closed, and quickly shoving the copper pipe through the door’s handle so that 3 couldn’t pull it open on her side. That way, she couldn’t try to stop him again. He would come back for her, but first he would find a way out of here, or even find these hidden researchers, this Dr. Onsay, and force them to let him and 3 leave this place. But no… no… he couldn’t lock her in. If something happened to him, then she would be trapped.

So he stalked down the newly painted hallway, leaving the green metal door open behind him.

3 lifted her head a little and cracked her eyes. It was she who had been feigning sleep. She considered going after 2 to stop him, but decided not to oppose him. Though it hurt her that he didn’t trust her, she still had faith that the two of them could find their path to togetherness.

She wriggled out of her sleeping bag like a snake shedding its skin. Without bothering to dress, she selected one of the vinyl-padded chairs corralled in the corner, and dragged it to the very center of the room below the sickening, extinguishing light.

When he had emerged from the other end of the hallway and entered the stairwell, 2 had found the walls here wholly filled with graffiti as well.

He had descended to the ground floor, and here too discovered that every wall had been painted in what appeared like wild collisions of black and white, but he already knew how unthinkably, intentionally elaborate it all was. An architecture within this architecture.

He had broken into a run, graffiti flashing past him as though he were plummeting through space, past constellations and nebulae in swirls and soundless explosions. Words and names he couldn’t decipher for their distortions, if they were truly words and names at all. Infernal order disguised as mindless chaos.

He had burst into the banquet hall, with its walls formerly composed of glazed white brick.

Here, each wall was freshly masked with black and white graffiti all the way to the high ceiling.

That had been hours ago… he didn’t know how many.

More of the fluorescent tubes throughout the complex had died out, and day was on the wane, wintry light glowing blue outside windows large and small. In frustration, he used his metal club to smash one window between its bars, and called outside, “Help! Help us! Help!” His breath steamed in the icy air, which lashed at his face as if to force his words back into him.

He located doors that he felt must lead outside, but when he pulled on them he would find them unmovable, probably padlocked on the other side. Possible fire exits… two garage doors in what had to have been a loading dock… various others: all locked.

He came upon one door in what was apparently a reception area or front vestibule, and here the padlock was on the inside, heavy and brand new.

His explorations took him further and further, into areas he had never visited before. He climbed stairs when he chanced upon them, then descended back to ground level again later. He ventured anywhere there was sufficient light to see, but avoided corridors and chambers that were swallowed in complete darkness. As evening progressed, such areas became more abundant.

Everywhere he explored, it was the same. After hours of seeking a means of escape, seeking enemies he was convinced meant their guinea pigs harm, it was clear that every last wall in the complex — apart from the makeshift storage room where he had left 3 — had been swept by the tide of graffiti. It no longer seemed to him that people were painting these walls, but that the graffiti was generating itself, picking up momentum as it spread like a virus.

This isolated microcosm… this insulated pocket universe… was a drowned world, black water having poured through every crack or chink to fill it utterly. He knew it wanted to drown him, too.

So just as a shark will drown if it stops swimming, he kept on moving, ignoring exhaustion, ignoring thirst and hunger. Once he stopped to relieve his bladder — maliciously, on one of the endless murals that had made this formerly disparate group of connected structures into something much more homogenous.

He was zipping his fly when a peripheral movement across the mid-sized room in which he stood caused him to look in that direction. Close to the floor, two glossy black arms had reached out of a wall, scrabbling blindly at the cement floor. The smooth top of a hairless head emerged, followed soon by the head in its entirety. It lifted as if to regard 2 in turn, but it had no eyes, and only a stretched depression instead of a mouth giving vent to a throat. This creature was not able to scream, but it began shaking its head in a mad blur, from side to side, as it dragged it shoulders from the wall… its torso…

“5?” 2 bellowed, to compensate for his fear. His voice bounced back at him in heavy ripples, distorted by the room’s hollowness. He was backing toward the doorway. “5, is that you?”

In a last lurch forward, the entity pulled its legs out of the wall, loosely tethered by drooling strands, and promptly went into a kind of violent seizure, reminding 2 of a large fish tossed onto a ship’s deck.

Whether or not the tormented being meant him any harm, he turned and fled from the room… hoping it would attain its inevitable disintegration before it came looking for him.

He went as far as the brick building across from that which contained the base camp, evidently the oldest unit of the complex, but after scouring its lighted areas in vain he began to make his way back again, still hoping to find an unlocked door to the outside he’d missed, or a window that had been overlooked by his keepers when the rest had been outfitted with new bars.

In a building somewhere between these opposing structures, he was sure he heard an almost subliminal humming sound. The first time he had passed through here he had thought he’d detected something, and now sure enough here it was again.

He rechecked the rooms he had explored before, even the upper levels, but as he ascended the humming diminished. On the ground floor once more, he did his best to track the sound and stood at last at the mouth of a tight corridor in pitch blackness. He cursed that he had no flashlight, no matches. But that sound… the more he stood listening to it, the more certain he became that it originated from somewhere at the other end of that inky hallway. In the end, he decided to venture down its throat, careful to shuffle along the midline of the corridor. He didn’t want to trip on some debris and come into contact with the walls, which even though he couldn’t see them were no doubt brimming with the ubiquitous graffiti.

At one point he stopped to glance behind him, and the mouth of the tunnel was a small pale rectangle. How much further did this hallway go?

But the more he moved ahead, the louder that humming became. Now it sounded more like a rumbling, such as that of a distant train passing through the night.

When the end of the tunnel came, he stepped into a large room without fluorescent lights, but a subdued blue glow entered through a row of large windows close beside him. He heard the delicate tick of icy snowflakes spitting against the panes, like the gentle scratching of ghostly children. But still, that humming rumble. He crossed the room, following the sound through a doorway in the far wall. Here, he came upon a stairwell — a flight of steps ascending, and another that descended to a basement level. The sound came from the latter.

Leaning over the handrail, he saw a feeble illumination at the foot of the cement stairs. He started down, and with each step the unbroken rumbling grew more pronounced. It was unmistakably the thrumming of machinery. Was this finally some of the machinery that had once been used in this place, if it had been a factory? Or was it a boiler room to provide the heat… a generator to supply the electricity?

At the bottom of the stairs, sure enough he entered a basement with pipes both thick and thin running along the low ceiling, supported by brackets and bound with greasy cobwebs. Spaced here and there, a few bare bulbs glowed. Their light glistened in reflection on the graffiti-painted brick walls, and in scattered puddles where water had dripped from spots where the pipes were bandaged like weeping wounds.

Down yet another tunnel-like hallway he followed the mechanical chugging, now a deep rapid throb like a titanic heartbeat that he felt vibrate up through his soles and disperse throughout his nervous system. Louder… louder… until he arrived at the source.

It was a doorway in the brick, covered with a barred gate. The bars were freshly painted, and he knew the gate had been added at the same time as the bars over the windows. He gave it a useless tug, having already spotted the chain and heavy padlock that secured the metal door in place.

Beyond the bars, the room was in darkness and thus he couldn’t determine its size, couldn’t guess at the appearance and hence the function of the machinery, or how extensive it was. All he could see from here was a constellation of scattered glowing buttons in a variety of colors — green, red, amber, blue, but their light was not enough to illuminate their surroundings. Set further back in the room, he was sure he saw a few pale blue computer monitors. Computers! Might he use one of them to send emails to summon help?

He tried to break the chain with his copper pipe, wedging it between the coils and pulling on it like a lever, but the links were too thick. He couldn’t fit the straight end of the pipe into the U-shaped shackle of the padlock, either. At last, in frustration, he hammered at the padlock using the pipe as a club. He only produced loud clanks and, once, a few spitting sparks. Exhausted as much psychologically as he was physically, he stumbled back from the gate, sucking at air, his throat and mouth feeling coated with sand, licking his parched lips.

He realized he needed to rest, to get his head together. Refreshed, he might gain fresh perspective, devise another plan. He needed water — food if he dared — and most of all, he was anxious to check in on 3. Surely she must have awakened by now. Finding him absent, might she even be looking for him? Despite her changed demeanor, he longed for her companionship. And so, he turned away from the mysterious machines behind the barred door, to find his way back to the storage room. To find his way to 3.

Some hours earlier, sitting nude as a newborn infant on the former banquet hall chair in the center of the room where they had made their new camp, 3 had spoken aloud in a one-sided discourse.

“It doesn’t matter anymore about Seth… if I can’t be sure of his love, then he was never important. It’s time to move on. And there’s no taking back what that priest did to me, our good old Father Ryan. After all, he’s dead now, so it’s all in the past. And my Mom… yes, it’s hard, but she knew how much I love her, and I’ll always have my memories — like watching One Life to Live in the hospital with her.

“We can’t walk around with open bleeding wounds, can we? If we’re ever going to get it together, and realize our full potential, we have to get on with our lives. No… we have to make a new life for ourselves. A better life.

She smiled. “This is a fresh start. I’m a phoenix.”

Then she closed her eyes and tilted her head back, still smiling, waiting for 2 to come join her.

When 2 climbed the stairs out of the basement, he found the ground level’s floor had been covered in graffiti. So had the ceiling.

“No,” he said in disbelief. “Oh my God, no.”

At first he was reluctant to set foot upon it. Might the paint be all there was, with nothing solid behind it? Not coating the floor, but in place of the floor? Might he fall straight through and plunge endlessly through fathomless space? Endlessly through some unknown dimension? But what choice did he have, if he wanted to get back to 3?

And so he started forward warily at first, step by step, as if crossing the melting ice of a frozen lake. But it was solid beneath his feet, solid as ever, and so he quickened his pace until he was running, huffing, running…

His transfigured environment disoriented him with its sameness. It became harder to distinguish ceiling from wall from floor, as if indeed he were moving through the depths of space. But eventually, after a number of wrong turns, he reached the base camp building — or wing, if the complex were all one vast structure — and when he entered the banquet hall saw that even here, the graffiti had spread to the floor. It covered the flat areas of the ceiling but had not affected its exposed metal beams and joists.

The PVC pipe running down the wall from a hole in the ceiling had not been affected, nor the bucket positioned beneath it, and as they were both white they stood out more distinctly than usual against their backgrounds. He rushed to the bucket, thinking he might risk eating one of those cereal bars because they were sealed in factory packaging. He even entertained the mad idea of smearing the cereal bar’s raspberry filling on a wall, for want of paint — using it to write his name. Not the number 2, but his name. In an expression of defiance. In a declaration of identity.

When he looked into the bucket, he saw only one envelope of pills, and one stapled lunch bag, but he never even touched them, for something else caught his attention. He reached in and picked it up, befuddled and marveling and suspicious and elated all at once.

It was a single key linked to an emerald green plastic tag, like a hotel key. A number was printed on the plastic tag in metallic gold: 11.

What was this key for? To open the gated door in the basement, and give access to the machinery and the computers? Or better yet… oh yes, better yet… that padlock on the door it what had seemed to have once served as a front reception area?

Had the test come to an end, then? Dr. Onsay’s needs fulfilled?

Grinning, 2 pocketed the key and straightened, glancing around him as if he expected to see Dr. Onsay emerge from a doorway, clapping his hands and congratulating him on a job well done. There was no one, but 2’s gaze settled on the closed confessional’s door. So far, at least, the graffiti had not spread to the surfaces of doors. He felt a compulsion he could not explain, urging him to go look inside, so he walked toward the door. Maybe he felt he needed to see if the walls in there were still marred from his attack. Maybe he believed, but he couldn’t say why, 3 had come down here to defy him and make a confession. No, please, not that, he thought as he hastened his stride.

Opening the door, he saw the room was empty. Graffiti extended now to the ceiling and floor — obscuring the former blood stains — but the wounds he had gouged in all four walls were still there. Good. His gaze lowered to the pair of eyeglasses with white frames lying on the floor beside the chair. He couldn’t recall to whom they had belonged, but after a moment of hesitation he went to them, retrieved them, folded the glasses and slipped them in his breast pocket. Then he left the room and continued on toward the storage room upstairs. His smile returned. He couldn’t wait to show 3 the key… then take her with him to go test it. He trusted his intuition utterly now, had no doubt whatsoever that this key was the instrument of their freedom.

“Hey,” he gushed, slipping past the still half-open green metal door, “hey—”

He stopped in his tracks on the graffiti-covered floor.

Somehow the graffiti had spread across the floor without affecting the strewn doll heads. The collection of unrolled sleeping bags. The group of chairs in one corner — and the chair that stood alone, and vacant, in the center of the room. The graffiti had crawled up and consumed the walls, the ceiling. The graffiti had created a new confession room.

“No,” 2 choked. “Oh no.” His body sagged. His soul sagged within him. He stepped further into the room, turned in a slow shambling circle. Perhaps she had simply gone out into the complex in search of him… perhaps if he just stayed here and waited for her to return…

His thoughts froze like a startled deer before it bursts into flight, when he heard a distant unearthly scream. It ululated, echoed with a watery resonance, rang in his ears and in the hollow of his chest. But ultimately, after only a few moments, it faded away and was gone.

2 dropped the copper pipe, and it clanged by his feet. He pressed the palms of his hands hard into his eye sockets, and released a single barking sob. He had never learned her name. He hadn’t even known her name.

He backed up blindly, hands still crushing his closed eyes. He would not forget her. He swore he would not allow that to happen.

He backed against the chair at the midpoint of the room, and fell into a sitting position upon it. And still he blocked his eyes.

He sat that way for an indeterminate amount of time. It might not even have been a linear “arrow of time.”

Then, he raised his head and lowered his hands from his eyes. He blinked, but perhaps from the pressure against them his eyes were blurry, so he reached into his breast pocket, withdrew his eyeglasses with their narrow lenses and fashionable white frames by Roberto Cavalli, and slipped them on. Yes, oh yes… much better.

Dr. Once twisted around a little on the chair’s vinyl seat, this way then that, surveying the room. “Yes,” he spoke aloud to the walls, as if making a confession to no one but himself. His voice bore only the barest tease of an accent. “Quite good.” Water damaged, the scabby mottled walls looked diseased, but were at least completely devoid of graffiti.

He was more than satisfied. Like a Mobius strip looping in on itself, the experiment was ended and had just begun.

Dr. Once rose from his chair, and before leaving the room — leaving the building — double checked that he still had the key in his pocket. He withdrew it, and fingered the green plastic tag, the tag which bore in metallic gold the number that was his name.