Subject 11

4

“What I wouldn’t give for some music,” 7 told the close walls of the confessional. “Or a TV. Or just to check my email. God — you couldn’t let us have one laptop we could share? When I signed up, I didn’t really stop to think about the stuff I’d miss. The things I rely on.

“I miss weed, too, but I guess that’s too much to ask.” She snorted. “At least I’m thankful you give us soap, toothpaste and toilet paper, so I don’t feel like a total savage.

“Another thing I really miss about not having a computer is being able to work on my art. I’m a pretty damn good artist, I’ll have you know; I’ll be going back to school in the fall. Most of my stuff is done on the computer, but I wish I at least had a sketchbook with me. The boredom here will kill me. By the way, that’s some pretty wild graffiti we’re seeing around — was that stuff already here before you rented the place? And those doll heads we found; it reminds me of an art project I did in high school, where I made a baby’s crib mobile out of doll heads.”

7 paused to release a great sigh, then resumed, “Well, frankly I’ve been masturbating like crazy to take the edge off my stress. I lie down between 5 and 9 every night. I don’t mean snuggled between them — though that would ne nice — but it still makes me feel kind of… you know. I feel closest to 5, but 9 is more attractive. She must be almost forty, but she’s still hot. The guys seem most attracted to 3 — I can feel these things — but I don’t see it myself. She just seems dirty to me. I don’t mean because she’s an Asian or whatever she is, I just mean… I don’t know. I just don’t like her vibe, like she’s really this sleazy conniving little bitch who comes across as all cute and shit. She acts as though she doesn’t like the guys checking her out, but you know she really thrives on it. She must bring out their inner pedophile, because she’s so teeny. Maybe she brings out their inner bisexual, too, because she’s built like a little boy, and she has this pretty little boy face. Not my kind of woman.

“And none of the guys appeal to me. As usual with guys, they’re either assholes — like 8 and 10 — or boring, like 2 and 4. I haven’t figured out which type the black guy, 6, is… but he is the youngest, so if I had to choose I’d go with him. But I choose not to choose. Anyway, today I saw 6 talking with 3 at the mess hall table, when they were the only ones in the room until I came in, and 6 was holding her hand while they talked, but he let go and they looked all embarrassed when they saw me. Christ. She’s gotta be ten years older than him, but he must have Asianitis, too. Then later, I saw 2 looking for 3… he was asking people if they knew where she was. He asked me, too, and I said I didn’t know. It was a pitiful sight indeed. He was like a big stupid dog whose master has left him home alone. I didn’t mention to 2, so I don’t know if he realized it himself, that 6 wasn’t around either.

“So… unless you people want to bring in some much cooler guys than these, I’ll maintain my secret crushes on 5 and 9. 5’s waiting for me outside right now; after I’m done in here we’ll be doing some more exploring. We’re going to see if there’s anything interesting on the upper floors of that moldy old brick building. Heh… maybe she’ll get spooked over there and hug me, and I can comfort her.”

“So where did you disappear to?” 2 asked 3 as they set out walking together, on what had become their daily stroll. They were later than usual, today.

“I just needed to be alone for a little while, to think about some things.”

“Was I one of the things you were thinking about?” He made it sound like a joke.

She smiled mysteriously and shrugged, without looking up at him. “Maybe.”

After a short while they stepped into a stairwell that echoed hollowly with their movement and voices. 2 and 3 leaned over its blistered metal rail to peek below. A basement level? There were no lights on down there, so they might as well have been gazing into an infinite abyss. Standing very close to 3, 2 made an exaggerated show of sniffing at the air and said, “We’re all using the same bars of soap and the same laundry detergent… so how is it that you smell better than everyone else?”

3 shrugged again. “Some people just have a natural good odor.”

“I’ve read that odor plays a big part in people’s attraction to each other, on a subliminal level.”

“But some people just have a bad odor, too. Like 4. Have you ever smelled him up close?”

“No. Have you ever smelled him up close?”

3 smiled at him, and bumped him with her elbow. “Are you jealous?”

“Maybe.”

“No, I don’t have to get close to him… his odor is strong enough. But I think it’s because he’s always jogging through the buildings.”

2 took her arm and pulled her back away from the railing. “Come on, let’s not lean on that too much; you never know if it’ll give way and you and me will take a nosedive.” He didn’t let go of her arm, however, and she turned to face him, raising her full dark eyebrows inquisitively. 2’s words stumbled over each other’s feet. “Hey look… I know you don’t want to tell me your name or where you live or anything because of the test, but after this I really want to see you again. I mean, see you seriously. You said you’re divorced, and I told you I’m divorced, and I don’t care at all that you have a child already, so long as you don’t care that I have one. I know you don’t want to hear my particulars either, but I’ll tell you this much: I have a good job. I can take care of you and your kid.”

3 smiled. “The mafia pays well, huh?”

“Sure does.”

“If you have a good job, why are you free to do this experiment? You must need the money.”

“Okay, I’ll tell you. I’m a school teacher. And it’s summer.”

“School teacher? Wow. I was wrong about you. And that’s a good job?”

“Well…”

“It’s so early to talk like this, don’t you think? It hasn’t even been a week.”

“I don’t want to wait for somebody else to scoop you up.” Again, he made it sound like a joke, but his words were actually very straightforward.

“Who’s going to scoop me up? Someone in here?”

“Here, there, or anywhere.”

“But you don’t really know me.”

“I know in my guts that I know enough.”

“Maybe I don’t know enough.”

“Okay. So after this is over, give me a chance and you can get to know me.”

She slipped out of his hand, but was still smiling. “We’ll see.” She gestured toward another flight of cement stairs that proceeded through the ceiling to a second floor. “Come on… let’s go see what’s up there.”

2 agreed. For now he had to be content with the fact that she still desired his company, and was willing to continue in their directionless journey together.

“You okay?” 4 asked 5, outside the closed door of the confession room.

5 turned to face him. Her eyes had been shut, and she still held a hand pressed to her brow. “What?” she asked in a slurred, disoriented voice.

“Do you have a headache?”

“Um… I feel kind of nauseous, actually. I almost passed out for a second there, I think.”

“You all right now? Maybe you’d better sit down.”

“Yeah. I was going to do some more exploring today, but think I’d better go lie down a little more. I didn’t really sleep well last night. Crazy dreams, or whatever.”

“I think you should.” 4 motioned toward the closed door. “You waiting for someone?”

5 regarded the door, blinking in bewilderment. “Um. I, ah… I don’t think so. No.”

“Do you need to make your confession?”

“No, I already did.” 5 stepped to one side. “Be my guest.”

“Go lie down, will ya?”

“I will.”

4 rapped on the door, waited a few ticks, then rapped again. “Hello?” He turned the knob, opened the door. The confessional was empty. He slipped inside and shut the door after him.

5 lingered for a few moments, staring at the door, then turned away to seek out her sleeping bag in the women’s makeshift dormitory.

“There they are.” 10 moved forward to the scarred old wooden work table, where a varied mix of doll heads in two rows had been assembled to confront each other. 9 hung back a bit, as if the sight of them were too disturbing. 10 examined them more closely, and reported, “Yep — eight of them, just like 5 said.”

“Eight?” 9’s tone was puzzled.

10 looked over his shoulder at her. “Yeah. Why?”

9 shook her head. “Nothing. So… okay, eight doll heads. Must have been kids messing around in here, like 8 said.”

“Perhaps.” 10 lifted each doll head in turn, peering into its hollow skull through its open neck stump. “Nothing hidden inside. Rats… I thought there might be a clue or something. A key to open a locked section of the complex, or a key to get outside. I thought maybe they were challenging our puzzle-solving abilities. That would be more fun, wouldn’t it?”

“We’re not inside a video game.”

10 peeked into the final doll head, its scalp just a pink hemisphere perforated with holes, and one blue eye missing. “Lobotomy complete,” he remarked as he set it back down. “Come on, let’s go find that graffiti they were talking about.”

“Why?”

“It’s just funny, that’s all. You have something better to do? You can always go back to camp on your own, if you want.” He smirked.

“On my own? Thanks a lot. I’ll come with you.”

“I’m nothing too out of the ordinary,” 4 said, in between biting his nails and spitting little shreds of them onto the floor of the closet-like room that served as the confessional. “I don’t know if that’s good or bad for your study. I guess if there was one unusual thing to define me, it would be…” He stopped short. Spit out a crescent sliver of nail, slick with his saliva. It looked to him like it got stuck on the glossy, graffiti-coated wall. “It would be that I was molested by a priest when I was eleven. Good old Father Ryan. He’s dead now — may he burn in Hell. Yeah… that’s sad, huh, if that’s the most outstanding thing that’s ever happened in my life?

“Well, I guess I’m not even really out of the ordinary in that sense, either. It’s not like a lot of boys haven’t been molested that way. I was reading about one fucker in Wisconsin who molested two hundred deaf boys. Nice, huh? Who knows what issues they might have had to deal with, since. Not bad enough being deaf, right? But I guess we’re all scarred in some way. Fractured and incomplete.

“Can I truly blame that for the failings of my life? The failings of all my relationships? The disappointments in my career? Or am I just making excuses, and not taking enough responsibility for my own actions — or inactions?

“My ex-girlfriend Hanna told me something once. It struck me as being a lot of facile psychological bullshit at the time, but who knows? It might be true. When we were fighting a short time before we broke up, she said, ‘You know why you like to jog? Because you only understand running. That’s all you do. Run away. But you don’t know what from… and you don’t know where to.’”

3 had begun climbing the stairs ahead of 2. Ascending behind her, he had taken advantage of this arrangement to watch the movements of her bottom in her white scrub pants. She reached the second floor landing ahead of him, took several steps, and cried out.

“What? What is it?” 2 said, quickening his pace up the remaining cement steps. Was she swatting at a hornet?

3 was batting at the air around her head as she turned in jerky circles, quickly switched to tousling her black hair. “Oh God… check me for a spider! Look at my back, quick!”

“Okay, okay, hold still a second.” He took hold of her shoulders.

“Look in my hair! I felt it in my hair!” She rubbed her hands across her face vigorously. “As soon as I came up here I walked right through a spider web. God — I hate spiders!”

He ran his hands through her hair, then brushed off her shoulders, back, and the outside of her arms. He felt guilty for enjoying this excuse to touch her, in the face of her distress. “I’m not seeing anything… not even webs. Are you sure one of your own hairs didn’t blow across your face?”

“I know the difference.” 3 tilted her head back, and pointed at the ceiling near the area where the staircase continued on up to a third level. “Hey, you see that?”

2 followed her finger. An inky stain had spread across the ceiling. From it, a few attenuated strands dangled like dripping glue. Simultaneously, the two of them dropped their gaze to the floor at their feet. A few similar black splatters. 2 scuffed at one of these with the toe of his sneaker, but the stain here had dried. “Yeah, maybe a few strings of this gummy stuff were hanging down. Roof tar, or something?”

3 felt at her hair again. “Maybe. Let’s go see.”

This time, 2 took the lead up the stairs, toward the third floor.

“And here we are,” 10 said. “5 was right — it does look like something out of a dungeon.”

Ahead of him and 9 was the mouth of a narrow, brick-lined basement hallway, with a curved ceiling that made it appear more like an antiquated sewer tunnel. Even outside the corridor’s entrance, they could see the graffiti that covered the whole of the right-hand wall.

10 observed, “I wonder if this building goes back to the nineteenth cent—”

But his words were sliced away. From beyond the far end of the hallway, they’d heard a single shrill cry. It echoed toward them down the length of the corridor. To that point in his life, 10 had never experienced the sensation that authors so readily described, of the hairs rising on the back of one’s neck. At that moment, he learned that it was an actual phenomenon.

“Oh my God,” 9 moaned, and even as the utterance left her lips, she and 10 saw a figure dart past the end of the brick corridor, from right to left. Just an indistinct silhouette, like a moving smudge, gone in a flicker.

“Fuck,” 10 hissed, angry for being startled again so soon. “Who is that?” he bellowed, his voice also amplified by the tunnel. “Who’s there? Are you okay? You’d better not be playing fucking games!”

“Let’s go,” 9 pleaded, pulling at his arm. “Let’s get out of here!”

“I can’t,” he told her, not taking his eyes off the hallway lest the figure reappear. “It might just be some kids fucking around, but it could be somebody in trouble. A homeless person… or one of our own. Come on.”

“No, please! Don’t you understand?” She tugged at him more insistently. “It isn’t one of us, and it isn’t a homeless person! It was a ghost!”

Just off the third floor landing was a hallway. While sunlight beamed in through one large barred window near the stairwell, the hallway itself was in such darkness that it might go on for miles for all that 2 and 3 could tell. Still, enough sunlight touched the start of the hallway for them to see that its entire right-hand wall was plastered with more of the now familiar black and white graffiti.

“Look,” 3 said, pointing at the floor beyond the threshold. A glossy black puddle had spread from the base of the graffiti-obscured wall. “That’s what it is. The paint was running, and it must have leaked through a crack in the floor.”

2 approached the entrance to the corridor, knelt down and poked at the puddle with a finger. Dry, but tacky. He pulled nearly invisible strands of the material between fingertip and thumb. Turning his gaze to the graffiti itself, he saw a design at eye level, white on a field of black: a sideways figure 8 that appeared like the symbol for infinity.

Up close like this, there was a strange quality to the paint that he couldn’t quite process, and the murkiness of the hallway wasn’t helping. He drew in closer, then closer, until his nose almost touched the wall. The paint had an odd odor, unless that was the wall itself in its state of decay. And then, the paint’s unusual quality became clear to him.

At first he had thought the rough texture of the cinderblocks was what lent the paint a kind of grainy appearance. Now he realized the minutely broken aspect to the painted surfaces had another explanation. What at a distance appeared as solid white areas of paint were actually thousands upon thousands of tiny white numbers. And what appeared as solid areas of black paint were comprised of thousands and thousands of nearly microscopic black numbers. Even the background fields of black and white consisted of the same. But whether in black or white paint, there were only two numbers in varying, indecipherable patterns, and those numbers were 0 and 1.

“Binary numbers,” 2 mumbled to himself. “Like a code.”

As he had indicated to 3, he was a school teacher. He was in fact a math teacher. And so he thought of logic gates and Boolian functions. He thought of ancient binary systems used in Africa for divination, and in Europe for geomancy. He thought, of course, of the use of binary numerals in computers. But he couldn’t understand what the artist was trying to express by utilizing them here.

He sat back on his haunches to view the graffiti mural more as a whole again; as much of it as he could make out in the gloom, at least. Fat, blocky balloon words. Spiky, squiggly gang-like tagging. These symbols, names, initials appeared like spontaneous, quickly-rendered blasts from a spay can. Instead, they were intricately composed of numbers the way a painting by Seurat was composed of dots of color. Pixel-like particles, like the cells of an organic body. Not truly graffiti, then, but an artwork of such obsessive detail that it seemed an impossibility to him. His mind spun its wheels in attempting to assimilate it. He wasn’t an artist; was there a means of creating such an effect more easily than what he was envisioning? Some kind of stencil, or overlay, or…

“What is it?” 3 asked him. “What do you see?”

He didn’t know how to digest it himself, let alone put it into words for another person. And did it really matter, anyway? Why should it seem of such importance? Why should he feel a frost collecting in the core of his bones?

2 rose, and turned to face her. “It’s nothing. I’m sure that’s what you walked through — a couple goopy strands of this paint, that seeped through the floor.” He took her arm. “Come on… let’s get back to camp.”