by Warren Ellis
“He’s new here too?” Adam had the sudden aching feeling of no friends, an endless emptiness of childhood loneliness, and that perhaps someone else who was new to Normal Head might be a friend for him. It made him want to cry again, but just for himself and the ache and his childhood.
“Arrived a few days back, I think?” Lela said. “God knows what’s wrong with him. Maybe he’s checking out the trees for cameras. It happens.”
“Checking out the trees happens, or cameras happen?” Adam felt the fuse light in the top of his spine. He blinked hard, a few times.
“Oh, there are cameras here. I mean, many of your fellow inmates are humans with significant dollar value attached to them. But not in the rooms. And the ones out here are pretty discreet. The video files they generate are on a forty-eight-hour deletion cycle. Their wireless is disabled, they don’t have a hard line off-site, airgaps and high security and all that. They kind of have to. Working in and around surveillance culture for too long put a lot of these people in here, after all.”
Nothing but true, Adam knew, especially for urbanists like Lela Charron. He’d seen them counting off every single networked object on city street corners, like botanists identifying every single obscure poisonous plant in sight. Staring into the abyss of the future while being acutely aware of being watched by every device, every piece of street furniture and every strand of modern infrastructure.
The trees sighed under a cold breeze, and the man in the heavy coat dissolved into the forest.
“Well,” Lela said. “My work here is done. Finish your drink, it’ll help you feel better. An orderly will come by in a little bit to take you to your doctor for your induction interview. Word of advice: don’t try to be a big strong man. Or,” and she cast him over with that raptor look again, “a little big man. Just be whoever you are right now. Don’t be afraid to show them where you’re broken. You’ll get fixed quicker if they can see the breaks up front.”
“That’s it?”
“Yes, that’s it. What did you want? A hug?”
A voice came from over Adam’s shoulder, a deep and sooty sound choked up from the base of a tired throat. “She doesn’t touch people because she ate one once.”
Adam twisted in his seat. The speaker was a man from the north of England, by his accent, with a face like a mallet and skin like a map of Yorkshire scratched out in gin-broken veins. He wore a gray suit that might even have been gray when he first put it on, which Adam judged to have been a couple of years ago. The man’s great head, inflicted with a bootneck haircut that Adam thought had been made illegal for reasons of cruelty by 1958, had the permanent inclination of a man too used to explaining to colliery housewives that their husbands and children had been eaten by a mine shaft. But a grin split it like a spade through clay.
“How do,” the man said, sticking a sweaty hand out to be shaken. “My name’s Clough and I’m fucking mental. So’s she. Don’t trust a word out of her cakehole.”
Lela started hiccupping.
“Oh, here we bloody go,” said Clough. “Did she start dribbling at the mention of food yet?”
She outright murdered Clough with her eyes.
“Don’t listen to her, lad. She went straight-up batshit in Mongolia and they’re never going to let her out of here because she’s fucking mental and she’s got a taste for human flesh.”
Lela snatched the plastic tumbler out of Adam’s hand, threw the juice out of it, and smacked it down on the edge of the table, all in one smooth and terrible motion. If the tumbler had been glass and the table had been wood, it would have instantly produced a fine makeshift weapon. But instead the tumbler made a dull thud on the side of the table, which tipped and rocked a little.
“Fu-UCK,” Lela hiccupped, and threw the tumbler at Clough. She missed and hit Adam in the center of his forehead.
“That’s quite enough of that, Ms. Charron,” said a soft young man in a 4XL short-sleeved white shirt. His small hand rubbed agitatedly at the arrangement that covered his early-onset male pattern baldness. “You were specifically asked to leave the new patient in peace to drink his green juice and calm down.”
Lela swallowed hard and looked away. “I was just practicing, she said. “Practicing for when I go to Staging.”
“I’m sure you were. You walk away too, Mr. Clough. It’s cartoon time in screen room two soon.”
“Ooh,” said Clough, bouncing on the balls of his feet. “Is Danger Mouse on? We haven’t watched all of that DVD set yet. Will it be Danger Mouse again?”
“Only,” the younger man said, “if you promise not to launch another critique on the realism of the treatment of the British Security Service in Danger Mouse. Off you go now.”
Clough gave Adam’s shoulder a quick squeeze. “Chin up, lad. The food’s fair, they’ve got a shitload of DVDs, and no bastard can fucking phone you here. It’s not so bad.”
It was a bizarre thing to see Clough scamper off into the main building singing the theme tune to Danger Mouse.
“My name’s Dickson,” the young orderly said. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Dearden. Your doctor’s ready to see you now. Do you feel up to talking to a doctor for a little while? We prefer to do it on intake day, but if you’d rather sleep and do it tomorrow, we can do that too. What do you say?”
Adam thought the back of his head was going to explode. “I’m not even sure I can stand up,” he said.
Dickson put his hand, too small for its owner but very clean and dry, under Adam’s arm. “Let me help,” he said quietly. “It’s what I’m here for.”
* * *
The room was very yellow. In a northern country, the color would have been called “sunshine yellow,” because they weren’t very sure what color sunshine really was. Adam supposed it could in fact have said “happy pus” on the tin. The walls had been painted within the year, the armchairs and sofas were relatively new, and the thick carpet had been both vacuumed and shampooed recently enough that he could still detect the scent of the soap.
Dr. Murgu was in substantially worse repair. A cut was delicately taped closed over her bushy right eyebrow, and a bruise on her left cheek was blooming like mandragora. She’d changed her white coat, but hadn’t had time to change the blouse underneath. The loop of blood spatter had been smeared and reduced by wet paper towel, but not erased. She looked at her clipboard—Adam had yet to see a networked object here—and then up at him, straightening her back as she perched on the edge of the sofa and pulling up a smile from somewhere under whatever had happened to her earlier in the day.
“Adam,” she said. “Can I call you Adam?”
He just nodded. This is how the cycle went. Emotional incontinence, and then hyperfocused on the environment but drained of words. No sensory input/output. Human-shaped camera. Two facets of terminal panic, he supposed.
“I imagine the whole process of getting here has been both exhausting and confusing. So I’m going to start by telling you what’s been happening. You got very ill in Rotterdam, and your institute got in touch with us. We had you transported to Schiphol, which has a direct flight to Portland. We drove you straight here from PDX. Do you remember anything about Rotterdam?”
Adam shook his head. It was a bit of a lie. He knew he’d been at a conference about coveillance. Some happy solutionist idiot with banana-yellow glasses and hair like a startled badger talking about how watching the watchers makes for a balanced and benign social substrate. Yellow glasses like this yellow room. Yellow is supposed to make people feel good. He wanted to make people feel good about a surveillance arms race between the state and the populace. Adam remembered losing his temper. He didn’t remember much about what he said, except that it seemed to upset a lot of people.
He remembered beginning to cry afterward. He wasn’t sure where he was when it happened, but he figured it must have been a public space. He remembered hands, arms, being lifted.
“Okay,” she said, making a note with a propelling pencil. “Do you know how it starte
d? Your illness. The thing that upset you?”
“Windhoek,” he said, almost choking on the word. “Namibia.”
“Were you there during the riot?”
He nodded. Her pencil scratched across the paper. Without looking up from what seemed to be a very detailed note, she asked, “How are you sleeping?”
“I don’t even know,” he said. Her eyes snapped up. “I’m being honest,” he said. “I was given a lot of medication yesterday. I think it was yesterday.”
Dr. Murgu flicked the top sheet of paper on her clipboard up, skimmed the sheet below. “Yes. It looks like you had three separate episodes.”
Adam took a deep breath, pushing the bases of his thumbs into his eyes. “I am trying to be honest because I know that the more information you have, the better you’ll be able to help me, and I must need help because I’ve been shipped to Normal. That means I have to tell you that I’ve been seeing things that aren’t there and sometimes I’m not completely sure what’s real. Hell, I saw a man earlier by the trees here and I’m not sure he was there. Lela may have just been humoring me during a hallucination.”
“What man?”
“Dark hair, big heavy coat? I think he saw me looking at him and he walked into the forest.”
The doctor smiled. “It’s all right, Adam. I think you saw Mr. Mansfield. He never takes that coat off.”
“He was really there?”
“He certainly was. As much as he ever is. He’s been here a few days, but we haven’t even been able to do his intake interview yet. He hates to be looked at, hides in that coat, won’t communicate, and spends most of his time wandering the grounds. I’m not sure anyone’s even seen him eat. So what I want you to understand from this, Adam, is that you are far from the most wounded person ever to enter Normal. And I note that you met Lela. Lela has issues with things like permission, and time. She’ll be a good friend, but I need you to carry with you the knowledge that everyone is here for the same reason, Adam.”
Adam shook his head. “Doctor, are you telling me not to trust anyone here because they’re crazy?”
“Absolutely,” she said. “You’re all batshit.”
Adam looked at her with total focus. She smiled. He gave a sudden burst of laughter.
“There you are,” Dr. Murgu said.
It was like all the air rushed back into him. His chest filled and his heart started beating again. His skin stung.
She leaned forward, keeping the eye contact. “Adam, you’ve had a nervous breakdown. I know it’s been a tough couple of days. But you’re here now, and things start getting better for you right this minute. You’re going to have some bad moments, because your mind is wounded. But they are going to get less and less frequent. This is a safe place. No prying eyes, no pressure, no eavesdropping, no agenda. You can start looking away from the abyss now.”
Even he was tired of crying again. It didn’t feel better. It was just exhausting and boring.
* * *
Dickson led him to his room. It had a window with a strong mesh over it, a single bed, and an armchair. There was a partition, with a toilet, sink, and shower packed into it. No desk. No expectation of work. The armchair suggested peaceful hours of quiet reading. There was a television and a soundbar mounted on the wall, and a heavy-looking remote control on the bedside cabinet.
Dickson saw him see it. “Music,” Dickson said. “You can’t get actual television. The remote has a slide-out keyboard, and the television shows the selection menu. Just music. No movies, no shows. No web access, of course. We got a ton of music, though. Lot of relaxing stuff.”
“Any books?” Adam asked, eyeing the chair.
“Dr. Murgu will evaluate you for library access at your next interview. Over here.”
Dickson directed Adam’s attention to the door. On the back of it, a key hung by a yellow loop from a hook.
“That’s your room key. You can lock yourself in. Please don’t leave the key in the lock.”
“Okay,” Adam said. He was tired now. His eyesight was juddering.
Dickson produced a small plastic bottle from his chest pocket. It contained three capsules. “You need water?”
He did, and was made to stand in the doorway to the mini-bathroom while Dickson drew a plastic cup of water from the sink. The capsules were red, yellow, and green. Adam studied them on his upturned palm, where Dickson had laid them, and looked askance at Dickson.
“I know, man,” Dickson said. “Stop, wait, go. Don’t read anything into it. It’s just the colors they come in.”
Dickson observed Adam take the capsules, so closely that Adam felt he needed to swallow as ostentatiously as possible to satisfy the orderly’s invigilation.
“Okay,” Dickson said. “You need to eat?”
“I think I just want to sleep. Is that okay?”
“That’s fine, Mr. Dearden. How are you with phones?”
“Um. I know how to use them…?”
Dickson stepped to the bedside cabinet. “It’s a real question. Some of our guests come in with a serious aversion to phones. They can be like a huge symbol of everything that’s weighing on them? Someone told me once that it’s hard to talk when you don’t know how many people are listening. Like phones are half-trained demons always ready to betray you.”
He opened the front of the bedside cabinet, where a cordless phone sat on a cradle. “It’s a closed system, you can’t dial out. And no one can dial in, obviously. Just hit ‘0’ to get the front desk if you need anything. If you can’t face that, press the green button on the TV remote. No audio recording.”
“That’s it?”
“Well, there’s a whole menu, but you look dead on your feet and the front desk will take care of anything you need tonight. I can walk you through the other stuff tomorrow. Get some rest. I hear you had a long journey.”
Adam’s entire life felt like lead in his bones right now. He couldn’t manage more than a nod. Dickson smiled, with genuine and gentle kindness, and let himself out of the room.
Adam sat down and surveyed the room in silence. He supposed it was as close to a hermit’s cell as you got these days, without disappearing into the frozen wastes with a spoon for digging yourself a cave with. Except that you had to pick your frozen wastes carefully these days, as you could probably get 3G service in chunks of Antarctica and the Arctic was full of drunken Scandinavians in headbands and television hosts in SUVs.
He took it in for a moment. No internet. No phone service beyond the front desk. No television. No news. No information flow at all. Just a music collection and, somewhere, a library he evidently had to be medically fit to browse. It was quiet. It was actually quiet. He couldn’t even hear other people. This little room was as close to sensory deprivation as he’d experienced since … when? Childhood?
He sat there for a little while, feeling like he was waiting for his ears to pop from the change in pressure. It came to him that he didn’t even know where his cell phone was. He wasn’t able to tend the eight different messaging apps on it. He couldn’t clear the email from either of his accounts (one open to anyone, one that was nominally private but which suffered significant bleed-through from the other). No Twitter, no Instagram, none of the public-facing services he farmed hourly. No podcasts! He was subscribed to a hundred podcasts. He winced at the gigabyte load that would be waiting for him when he retrieved his phone and reached some signal. The news apps would spin and churn away, kicking out notifications until the phone’s battery was sucked dry. His quant band was gone, he noticed: he wouldn’t be tracking his steps, his blood oxygen, heart rate, local EF field activity, or the five other things it automagically quantified and uploaded and shared. Digitally, he would actually appear dead. A few of his services would send updates to social media daily. The weather report in his last recorded location would post to his Tumblr every day on an automatic basis. After a while, it’d look like an arrow pointed at the spot where he’d vanished or been murdered.
He didn�
�t know where his laptop was. He didn’t know when it’d last been backed up to his three off-site storage services. Christ. He was cut off, really cut off. It was an amputation. He realized he had no idea what to do with that. He was a cauterized stump of a human, dropped in a small room and left to rot.
A small room that bore the weathering of human presence as a slow tide lapping a beach of stones, rather than the marks of occupation. It was the sort of experience he had in low-budget hotels outside airports. He wondered if, in times past, there were caves in nowhere places that travelers used for only one night, on the way to somewhere of consequence. On their way home.
He sat there and thought about what home meant. “Home,” in his life, was the word given to the house his parents had lived in. Adam didn’t get to have one of those. Where they were was “home,” and where he was was always somehow somewhere else.
Adam remembered the first time he’d been in a room like this. The first time he’d ever stayed in a hotel. Remembered lying there on the weary bed, atop a tired brown counterpane, thinking he’d made it. Finally staying in a real hotel. No more hostels and sofas and floors. A real hotel room, bought without pain with his own money. He remembered feeling like he was a big man now, on his way up. Things were just going to get better.
The capsules woke up in his gut and told the stump of Adam Dearden to go to bed, and so he did. They even took care of the shaking, though he would have sworn that his bones were vibrating inside the dead meat of him, desperately trying to generate enough electricity to capture a radio broadcast from somewhere.
* * *
It was the banging that woke him up screaming. It sounded like the percussion of explosives in the street. Something was going on outside. Adam leapt to the window. Pale daylight. Early morning, maybe. Nothing else. The banging was coming from the corridor. Adam had nothing that might constitute a weapon, except possibly the soundbar on the wall. His instinct was to yank it off the wall and use it as a club. He swallowed the instinct down. Adam pulled on his pants, as quickly as he could. His hands were shaking. He stepped to the door, quickly and silently, and took the key off the hook. He unlocked his door as quietly as he could, and wrapped the key loop around his wrist.
