Subject 11

7

“The pills make us forget, don’t they?” 10 said. “But I suspect that’s the least of what they do.

“There was a woman I was attracted to. 5 and 3 are attractive, but it was someone else, I’m sure of it. Maybe it was even you, Dr. Onsay, since conveniently I can’t remember much about you… how to spell your name, what your voice sounded like, or even exactly what you looked like. Huh — one of the others told me they even thought you were a man. I can’t remember who it was, now, who said that…

“Or was it subject 8 I was attracted to? You know who I’m talking about, even if I don’t. I found a lunch bag with the number 8 written on it, so there was at least one other subject… which means, there may have been others, too. Others to fill in the gaps. 1, 4, 7, 8, 9. Another team of five to our team of five? Were they removed? Or are they still here somewhere? Are we supposed to figure this out as part of the test, or are you trying to hide these things from us? I feel like I knew so much more than I do now.

“It bothers me a lot, forgetting things, I’ll tell you straight. You want to know why? Of course you do.

“My wife and I divorced when our son was only two years old. She took him out to California to hook up with some kid she met online playing World of Warcraft. And I do mean kid; he’s fifteen years younger than her. Can you believe that? Just twenty-five, with a forty year old woman. Horny little fucker. Yeah, she looks okay now, but is he going to stick with her through menopause? I think that will give him pause. Oh, he said he’d take care of her and our son. But guess what? They’ve been struggling since day one, and even though our divorce was uncontested and I’m not obligated to pay her child support, I still send her two hundred dollars a month. I don’t mind caring for my child, believe me — it actually makes me feel better to do it — but it’s the point. She believed her pimply Blood Elf would keep her in gold sovereigns.

“But what I’m getting to is, she moved out there two years ago. The baby is four now. When I got my ass downsized at work I was finally free to go out there and visit him, because God knows she can’t afford to come out here. Now, when that baby was two I was the sun to him… I was like his God. That smile he had for me. Always throwing himself on me, climbing all over me, sitting in my lap while I showed him cute videos on YouTube, bringing his toys to me so we could play together, and crying hysterically if I left the house just to run for cigarettes. See, I never had a kid before. I married late, and became a father late. He was the sun to me, too.

“Well, you know where this is going. When I came in their apartment and he saw me, he ran into the other room and hid behind the sofa. When I bent down and tried to pick him up, he cried. Cried hysterically, the same as when he used to think I was leaving him. He didn’t recognize me. No — more than that. He’d forgotten me. Forgotten me totally.

“Can you imagine forgetting the sun? But he did.

“I can’t entirely blame her… the bitch. I should never have agreed to let her take him out of state. I should have found time to go visit him sooner, work be damned.

“Well… I haven’t visited him since. Maybe someday. Someday we can start again from the beginning…”

10’s voice broke, and his words tumbled away into silence. Silence, except for one half-suppressed sob. He leaned back in the office chair with his palms pressed into his eye sockets, struggling for self control. He was feeling queasy. Queasy and oddly, utterly drained.

“I’m tired,” he lamented. “Tired of this life. It’s only disappointment upon disillusion upon disgust. Pointless strife. What do I have to show for it? What?

“It isn’t that I would ever kill myself. But sometimes I just wish a bus or a meteor would hit me. Sometimes I just wish I was never born at all.”

Then, 10 heard a muffled commotion out there, somewhere beyond the shut confession chamber’s door. He didn’t get up to investigate, however. He didn’t even have the strength to remove his hands from his eyes. Sleep was the best thing right now. No… forgetting was even better. Forgetting everything. Forgetting himself…

“I’m sure it wasn’t here before!” 5 exclaimed. “I’m sure of it!”

2 studied the mural of black and white graffiti that plastered one cinderblock wall of the room the women had been using as a dormitory. He had never been in this room before, since the men had their own dormitory in which to tuck themselves in the warm envelopes of their sleeping bags, but 3 confirmed, “She’s right. I don’t remember this being in here, either.”

“So did someone paint all this just in the time we were having our dinner?” 6 asked. “It doesn’t even look wet.” He reached forward to touch it, but 5 cried out. Startled, he looked at her.

“Don’t!” she hissed, wide-eyed.

“They painted this and the other ones, just since the last time we were in these rooms?” 2 said. He was certain the graffiti that now covered one wall of the men’s dormitory, which he had discovered when he’d gone to collect his dirty laundry, had not been there previously either. He was dead certain. And then there was the mural of graffiti that now obscured one wall in the room where the new washer and dryer had been provided for them. And the murals that concealed one wall in the men’s shower room, and one wall in the women’s shower room. “Five new murals? And we didn’t catch them making these? What happened, did we all fall asleep at the dinner table for a couple of days?”

“How many murals does that make now?” 6 asked.

They tallied them up together, and came to the number nine. The one in the confessional — the only mural that extended beyond a single wall, encompassing as it did all four. The new murals in the male and female sleeping rooms, the male and female showers, and the laundry room. A mural 2 and 3 had stumbled on in a brick hallway. Another 5 had encountered in the basement of the mildewed old building across the way. The mural 2 and 3 had come across on the third story, that had dribbled paint onto the floor and through the ceiling of the level below. And who could say whether there might be more? They all felt that they had only touched the tip of the iceberg in exploring this complex, had only done so idly, without a clear purpose or determined effort to map it all out. For why should they? Still, because of this, the place seemed like an enormous, even infinite maze to them.

“They’re part of the test,” 2 murmured. “But why? What are they for? What do they do?”

He scrutinized the mural before them more closely. As closely as he could, but its boiling turmoil of shapes seemed to pull his eyes, pull his mind, in all directions at once. He recognized certain designs by now, including the symbol for infinity, but there seemed to be layers or depths that his eyes had not formerly plumbed… patterns that only now made their presence partly known. Background areas of black or white — over which the tagging had been layered — that had previously appeared random to him now looked to be made of interlocking forms, like those of an artwork by Escher: white shapes morphing into white birds, interacting with black shapes morphing into black birds. And the more he stared at this half-hidden map of black continents in oceans of milk (or white continents in oceans of ink?), the more complex the hinted patterns became. Were there even interlocking tesseracts like a multidimensional scaffolding upon which all the rest hung? And then, the tesseracts themselves composed, of course, of all those innumerable 0s and 1s.

5 pivoted around to look through the open doorway of the women’s sleep chamber. “Hey, where’s Te—” she began.

“Who?” said 6.

She peered through the threshold with a slack mouth for several beats, then shook her head as if to clear it and said, “Nothing.”