by Gwenda Bond
6.
The first part of Alice’s trip stretched out in a calm blur and she relaxed. Maybe today there’d be no electricity. She wanted that tray of tools, to take something apart instead of lying on the cot being lazy. But she kept that inside, kept everything inside and quiet, in the hope that they’d forget she was here until it was time to leave.
Dr. Parks had removed a tube of blood, which they did every few weeks, and labeled it with a date and Alice’s name on a thin strip of tape. They’d listened to her heart, checked her vision, then handed her a dose of bad medicine. Sometimes Alice fantasized about the printing press that had brought the ad to her uncle’s garage and to her attention. As with the elevator before, she imagined a slow dismantling, each piece laid out in a row until no message could be delivered at all.
That made her wonder about Ken’s experience here. He seemed just the same as when they’d started. If he was a psychic, then she’d like to punch him in the nose for telling them to get in the van that first day.
Alice, said her mom’s voice in her head, we don’t punch young men.
“Not even if they deserve it?” she asked.
“What’s that?” Dr. Parks asked, coming through the door. At least Alice thought she’d just come through. And then she knew it, because behind her was Dr. Brenner and that bearded orderly who always came at his side. That bearded orderly who brought the machine she most wanted to take apart and wreck. The one they used to shock her.
“Nothing,” she said, swinging her feet to the floor and sitting up. “Wait, I thought you were going to take my temperature. I don’t feel right today.”
Dr. Parks frowned. “What are your symptoms?”
Besides the fact my eyes see like pinwheels on this junk?
Dr. Brenner stepped forward. “It’s psychosomatic. The treatment will help.”
Alice snorted before she could stop it.
Dr. Brenner’s eyebrows raised so high, they seemed to levitate above his head. “Oh? Because as a medical professional I can tell you that you probably feel poorly because it’s been a week since your last treatment.”
I feel better the minute I’m out of this place.
“You haven’t spoken about this to anyone, correct?” Dr. Brenner moved forward, waving for the machine to be brought, too, and began to fix the electrodes to Alice’s temples.
“I know we’re not supposed to.” She hadn’t. She’d thought she might on the day she went to the diner, and then Terry’s boyfriend said that thing about weapons and she had realized maybe she was beginning to feel more like a weapon than a person with her desire to disassemble everything…
It was silly. She knew it was silly.
“Good.”
Brenner placed a hand on her shoulder and gently shoved her down. “Let’s increase the voltage this week.”
Dr. Parks’ hand went to her throat. “Are you certain that’s a good idea? If she’s not feeling well…”
“It’ll perk her right up,” he said. Then, to Alice, “Won’t it?”
What was there to do but nod? It was the opposite of what he’d told Terry he would do.
Alice closed her eyes and waited. She decided she definitely would not scream or cry out or make any noise, but then the lightning passed through her and she gasped and sparks floated behind her eyelids.
No, not sparks.
Those spores she could never close her fingers around.
She went to the quiet place inside, beneath the reality she longed to escape. Alice felt out of joint here, in the Beneath as she’d begun to think of it, like she didn’t fit. A daydream of decay, filled with shadows.
Today the shadows were motionless, walls and windows cracked, tendrils dead where they lay. Alice moved through the wheel of images in her mind to prove there was life here, that she was still alive.
This week’s drugs were something.
She turned in a circle, closing and opening her eyes. The shadows grew now with each blink. Sunflowers rose up, leached of color. She felt dizzy.
Alice whirled toward new movement.
A monster, glistening and sharp. A dream. A nightmare.
The kind of thing in those comic books her cousins read. The kind of creature that might result if you disassembled a life-form and put it back together wrong. Arms too long. A head like a dark flower.
She wondered if it longed to take apart things the way she did.
“Alice, can you hear me?” Dr. Parks voice. “You can open your eyes, if you like.”
The black-and-white sunflowers swayed, the monster fading into them. Had it been one of them all along? Maybe so….Butterflies burst out of the swaying stalks as the flowers returned to yellow-gold.
When she opened her eyes to the real world, the little room in the lab, Brenner was the first thing she saw.
“Monsters,” she said, “of course my brain has them.”
As long as they stayed in there, everything would be all right. Wouldn’t it?
7.
Terry had gotten lost in the moment, then the next, and the one after that, studying the floor, the walls, the ceiling. The ceiling! As she watched, it moved like a sky. Everything ordinary was made extraordinarily strange through the lens of her acid-soaked brain. By the time she remembered she’d wanted to ask Dr. Brenner about the calls to the university and Alice’s uncle, he’d left the room.
Wherever he’d stepped out to, the orderly had gone with him. This week was in the small exam room, no one else around, talking through times when Terry wished she’d done something different, revisiting regrets.
If she didn’t ask Brenner while this was on her mind, she might forget again. The acid test is remembering anything…
He wouldn’t mind if she went to look for him, would he? She didn’t think so. He’d never told her she had to stay put.
Terry got up, and went to the door where the knob spun. They’d left it unlocked. It was a sign: Go on.
When she stepped into the hallway, she was alone. She started walking.
She took the first hallway she’d never been down before. Maybe Brenner’s office was this way? The tiles on the wall danced around her.
There was the sound of a door opening and footsteps, and she cowered alongside the wall. A man in a lab coat breezed around the corner in front of her and went up the hall, away from Terry. She darted forward, feeling like she was in a game.
The door he’d come through went to a different wing. It had one of those fancy keypads beside it and…it was still partway open. Could she make it?
She rushed forward and slipped through just before it closed.
Yes!
Another hall forked off almost immediately, but she went forward instead.
The rooms she passed were empty, filled with a variety of machines and cots. Until one wasn’t.
In this room, there was a child. Was she hallucinating this?
No, the child was still there. The little girl sat at a low table, coloring so hard she almost ripped the paper apart.
What in the world?
Terry knocked gently and opened the door to let herself in.
“Hi there,” Terry said, doing her best to make her voice kind, soothing. Why would a child be here in the middle of a place where experiments with LSD were taking place? She wore a gown like Terry’s.
“Who are you?” the girl asked and blinked up at her.
Terry moved to the seat across from the girl. She was too big and her knees jutted up comically. The girl didn’t seem to mind.
“I’m a patient. Who are you?”
“Kali.” She paused. “What’s a patient?”
“Ah, someone who’s sick.”
The little girl’s black eyebrows drew together. Terry noticed that her draw
ing was of a man with slicked-back hair. Brenner? She thought so.
“Are you sick?” the girl asked.
“No,” Terry said. “I’m fine.”
“Then why are you here?”
“Oh, I’m part of an experiment. Do you know what that is?”
“You’re a sub-ject.” The girl dragged the word out. “Me too. Does Papa know you’re here? I’m not s’posed to talk to most people.”
Papa. Was this Brenner’s child?
A shape passed by the door outside in the hall. Terry had a sudden suspicion that no one would be pleased to discover her in here.
She moved off the chair, crouching to stay at Kali’s level. “Why don’t we keep my visit our secret? I have to go now, but I’ll come see you again.”
“Okay.” The girl shrugged. “I like secrets.”
Terry needed to go, but she stayed for one last question. “Are you a secret?”
Kali hesitated, then bobbed her head in a nod. “I think so.”
“I’ll come see you as soon as I can.”
Kali nodded again and lifted her right index finger to her lips, the universal sign for quiet. Could a child this young keep a secret? Terry supposed a child who thought of herself as a secret probably had lots of practice.
And so, she realized, must Dr. Brenner.
1.
Andrew had gone to visit his folks for the weekend, and so Terry was forced to wait to unpack her discovery. He’d told her what time he expected to be home and she’d gone over to his apartment to wait. She pounced as soon as he walked through the door and deposited his backpack on the floor.
“He has a kid there, Andrew. A child. A little girl.”
“Babe? Hi,” he said, obviously happy to see her. But also lost. “Catch me up. Who has a kid, where?”
“Oh.” She ran a hand through her hair. “Sorry. The lab—Dr. Brenner—” She searched for the right place to start.
“I think we both need a beer.” He touched her cheek and kissed her forehead, then headed for the kitchen.
“Good call,” Terry said. “I’m sorry. I’ve just been waiting to talk this through.”
“You didn’t bring it up to your lab friends? I liked them.” Andrew opened the door, found two cans toward the back of the top shelf, and passed one to Terry.
“I don’t know what it means…So I thought I’d better keep it to myself for now. But it doesn’t feel right.”
“Okay, lay it on me.” He popped the top on his can and they went back to the living room. Andrew sat on the couch, but Terry was too filled with electricity to relax.
As she paced, she described her acid-fueled wandering and how it had brought her to Kali and the conversation they’d had. When she’d finished up with the promise to return to visit the girl, she paused to take a sip of her beer.
“It’s weird, for sure,” Andrew said from the couch. “Do you think anyone knows you saw her? You didn’t tell the doctor guy, did you?”
Terry shook her head. “No way. I…I was afraid to say a word. I’m just glad I didn’t get busted in the hall.”
He reached out a hand to pat her arm. “Do you think you’d have gotten in trouble?”
“I don’t know.” Terry finally swung down to sit beside him. “I know you probably think this is my own fault. For volunteering.”
“No way.” He put his hand on her knee. “So far, you’ve just seen a little girl. Assuming she is his daughter, maybe she is sick?”
“She didn’t look sick. But who knows? If she’s Brenner’s kid maybe he’s doing all this to try and find some kind of cure.” Terry tilted her head back. “But that doesn’t feel right. There was something…off about it. Her little room—it had bunk beds.”
“That could be to make her more comfortable during whatever treatment…Maybe you should just ask him about her?”
“Maybe.” Terry imagined it. A week ago, she would’ve. But she remembered Gloria’s discomfort with how tied into the experiment their grades were. She needed more information first.
“How’s everyone else doing there?” Andrew pulled Terry down to the floor in front of him so he could knead her shoulders. She hadn’t realized how tight and tense they were.
“They seem fine. Alice wasn’t feeling well, but I think she was just under the weather.”
“You could ask them what they think.”
He was right.
“I will…But I want to try to find out more about what this experiment is for, too. Why is it classified? Does it have something to do with this kid?”
“Babe, could it just be because they’re giving LSD to young, healthy adults?”
Terry sighed. “Yeah, obviously, at a minimum.” A chilling thought occurred to her. “What if they’re giving that little girl drugs?”
“Surely not,” Andrew said. “Did she seem out of it?”
“No, she seemed fine.”
But in his assurance she heard the echo of her mom all those years ago, telling her dad the things he’d seen in the war couldn’t happen here. Terry knew they could. But she also believed that people could and would work to stop them.
“I just have to see what I can find out,” she said. “About all of it. I want to know what she was doing there. It’ll make me feel better.”
“You know I believe in you.” He gave her shoulders another knead. “If you need to do this, you need to.”
“I know.”
Who was Brenner and where had he come from? What had he been doing before this? Terry had more questions by the second, which meant she needed to go somewhere good at providing answers.
2.
The library was hopping with action the next day. They were close enough to the beginning of the semester that everyone’s best intentions of getting ahead, keeping up, and making the dean’s list were still in play. Terry waited for a librarian in a line four deep beside a tall bookshelf filled with leather-spined reference volumes.
She took the tattered paperback of The Fellowship of the Ring out from her bag and returned to chapter three. Might as well make some headway on Tolkien until she could make headway on digging into Brenner’s background.
“Miss?”
Terry blinked up from a scene involving the hobbits. Andrew wasn’t wrong. She’d gotten sucked in.
The librarian had a weary face and a bun bobby-pinned within an inch of its life.
“Hi,” Terry said. “I was hoping you could help me with something.” She explained that she wanted to find information about a doctor who’d recently moved to the area—presumably a Ph.D. but maybe an M.D. or possibly both—and his past research.
“And you don’t know where he last worked or what university he attended? Nothing about his area of expertise?” The librarian made it clear that only an idiot wouldn’t bother to find out at least one of these things.
“I’m afraid not. But it might have something to do with psychology.”
“Hmm.” The librarian gazed past Terry, at the growing line behind her.
“Anything you can point me to that might help,” she said, a plea. “I don’t mind spending time on it.”
That earned her an approving nod. The librarian took out a notepad and wrote a list in tidy handwriting. “Check these places for his name. If we have anything, it’ll probably show up in one or the other. Good luck.”
First up was a shelf of thick books called Books in Print that turned out to catalog titles, authors, and publishers. After trial and error at picking the right volume, she finally checked the BR’s and found three Brenners but no Martin. Strike one.
Next. She consulted the list.
That led to Who’s Who in America, a list of biographical sketches that seemed to include every person who had ever been important and then a bunch
of other people. Lots of researchers showed up as she flipped through, and hope rose in her chest as she finally got to the B’s…
She recognized some of the names there, but again, no Martin Brenner.
The librarian had scribbled a note by the last item on the list: a long shot but worth a try. She had to go back to the desk to ask where the vertical files were. Once on the second floor, she went through a row of tall file cabinets with a mishmash of pamphlets and republished scientific articles. The collection sprawled, and so she gamely went through each file. This might be the one…Whenever she started to skip one, she stopped and went through it.
Her fingertips were numb from shuffling through paper by the time she neared the end. The lights in the library swooned once, and then a crackling announcement over the PA informed students they had ten minutes until the library closed.
Terry had to face it. She’d come up with nothing. A big fat zero. It was as if Martin Brenner hadn’t existed before he moved to Indiana and took over a prestigious government lab. Obviously that wasn’t the case, but what did she do now?
The librarian who’d helped her earlier caught her eye as she trudged back to the first floor toward the exit, and Terry gave her a sad head-shake. The librarian nodded as if to say, Oh well.
But this wasn’t an “oh well” kind of topic. She walked to Andrew’s, fighting how tired she felt.
“It would’ve been a lot easier for the hobbits to stay in the Shire,” she told him when he opened the door. “But they don’t, do they? Frodo ends up with the ring and they leave with it.”
“I knew you’d like it,” he said, beaming at her and dropping a kiss on her cheek. “Let me know when you’re ready for the next one. Where are you?”
“Still early. The hobbits may be the ones without magic, but I can feel how it’s going.”
“You can skip the Tom Bombadil/Goldberry section if you want. It’s a little much.”
“Now there’s no way I’m skipping it.” She paused. “But did you just admit this book isn’t perfect in every way?”
“Ha-ha, she’s so funny!” And he tackled her, tickling her until she laughed, as effective as any Prince Charming waking an enchanted princess with a kiss.
