by Jim Fusilli
“Who was on the phone?” asked Otis. Mickey got up from his seat, came back to Otis’s row, and sat next to him.
“My wife found the watch in Reno,” he said excitedly. “She’d been putting notices up everywhere online and found that some old guy had bought it from a pawn shop. Can you believe it? My wife just wired the old guy four hundred dollars. We’re getting it back. He’s shipping it overnight tomorrow. It’ll be home before I am.”
Otis congratulated him and Mickey got up from the seat and went back to his row. Otis leaned back, closed his eyes, and went to sleep. A half hour later he woke to Lenny vomiting into a plastic sack.
“Bad chicken wings,” Lenny murmured. He puked three times before he went to the toilet. He came back twenty minutes later and sat in the aisle seat across from Otis. His face was drenched in sweat and his skin was gray.
“Bad chicken wings?” Otis said and fell into a fit of laughter.
“I’m serious, man,” Lenny whispered sickly. “It was the chicken wings. I remember the exact wing. I can see it in my mind.”
“I told you this tour is cursed.”
“Maybe, but maybe not. While I was in the can I thought of something.”
“What’s that?” asked Otis.
“You remember that rockabilly gal from Tucson, from the band Lucky Lucy and the Lariats?”
“The blonde?”
Lenny nodded. “Lucy.”
“I always dug her,” said Otis.
“Her husband left her and took their band with him. What made me think of her is that she’s a puker. Sometimes you see her and she’s heavy, sometimes she’s not. She’s bulimic, has fake teeth and everything. Anyway I heard a few days ago she was looking for a band that was edging more toward country. I didn’t think much of it ’cause of Harlan but now . . .”
“She’s big in Europe, right?”
Lenny nodded and smiled.
“We’ll have to get passports,” Otis said and clapped his hands together.
Lenny took the bottle of schnapps from his coat pocket and opened it. He took a quick drink from it, handed it to Otis, but as he did he began gagging and had to run desperately for the toilet.
EARWORMS
BY ZOË SHARP
“Earworm: ɪəwə:m (noun) A song that sticks in your mind, and will not leave no matter how much you try.”
THE URBAN DICTIONARY
SHE WAKES FROM THE MAELSTROM of sleep, from a black hole at the center of darkness. All she hears is the beat of her own blood. All she feels is the urge to flee. For a few seconds she lies absolutely still, letting her senses stabilize, her logic circuits reboot.
Perhaps it is simply the echo of another nightmare.
They come so frequently she is afraid to close her eyes. Often she spends the unlit hours sitting upright in a chair, staring at nothing and hoping, for once, there will be nothing staring back.
But there is always something staring back.
Something she remembers.
Something that remembers her.
She concentrates on her breathing, on drawing her diaphragm slowly down and out to fill her lungs to capacity with each breath, oxygenating her system for primeval response.
It takes another minute before the sound that stretched down through the layers of disturbed sleep comes again. It is close to nothing. No more than a quiet slither.
It is enough.
She slides out from under the covers in one fluid move. Her hand reaches for the Glock hidden beneath a towel on the nightstand, retrieving it without noise or fumble. She knows it will be loaded—thirteen .40 caliber hollow-point rounds in the magazine, plus another in the breech. She checks it every night, part of the ritual. But she checks it again now, sliding her forefinger over the loaded chamber indicator as she ghosts toward the bedroom doorway.
As she steps through she recognizes her mistake. The hairs riffle at the back of her neck a moment before the blade touches her skin and the Glock is plucked from nerveless fingers.
They’re pros. She knows this even before her legs are kicked efficiently from under her, as her hands are zip-tied, as the hood goes over her head. They have to be good to have gotten this far, past the perimeter sensors and the yard dog and the alarm, not to mention the acres of barren isolation.
They’ve come in numbers. Probably two on point and another two to manhandle her down the stairs, across polished hallway, front porch, and gravel. It is only then she hears the roar of an approaching engine. Her shiver has little to do with the still night air.
She wonders what has become of the dog. Not through sentiment but because it is her most effective early warning system, trained ruthlessly not to take bait from anyone’s hand but her own.
As the first vehicle slews onto the driveway she feels the sting of the needle in her arm. The hood contracts as her mind explodes into static and haze.
And then there is nothing.
SHE WAKES DROWNING.
Her gulp for air is a reflex. She finds only water. It binds the cloth to her face, saturating her mouth, her nose, her eyes. She inhales, retches, and drowns a little deeper.
The flow subsides. She feels the excess running down her body in a river of cold. Her arms are suspended out and up, tied so that her feet barely touch the ground.
As she heaves the water up out of her lungs, as the air rattles in, she understands the place they have taken her.
Not where, but what.
And she is terrified.
It doesn’t matter that she knows they will not waterboard her to death. Not yet, anyway. If they had wanted her finished quickly there would have been no point taking her from the house. Or she would never have woken from the needle.
So they want something first.
Information?
Or simply revenge?
From the way sound ref lects she deduces the room is small and overcrowded. There are at least four of them with her—all male. She can smell their sweat even above the stink of her own fear.
Besides, she knows how this goes. Two to haul her up. One to grip her head. One to pour.
The air oozes with a stifling humidity. As her gasping eases she hears the underlying susurrus of distant insects, like whispers of dissent.
Somewhere nearby comes a scream that ceases more abruptly than it began.
No . . . not here. Not back here . . .
The hood is yanked from her head. For a moment she squeezes her eyes shut. Not just against the brightness, but against confirmation.
“Look at me, Clara.”
She opens her eyes and takes in the man standing before her. His arms are folded. His face is hidden behind a ski mask.
Is that good, because they intend ultimately to release her?
Or bad, because someone she has come to know and trust is behind this?
No, in this business she has learned to trust no one.
He steps in close.
“I own you,” he tells her. “Every human right you think you have is a privilege here—one that has to be earned. But you know how this goes, don’t you?”
“What do you want?”
He shakes his head. “That’s not how this works. You know that, too. We’ll talk later. When you’ve had time to realize the . . . reality of your situation.”
He nods to the men holding the ropes at her wrists. They slacken so suddenly she jars to her knees. The hood drops over her head once more. Her hands are short-shackled to her ankles so she cannot stand. The men are deft, without malice. She might as well be an animal they’re hog-tying for the slaughter.
The headphones go on, positioned carefully so her ears are completely covered. Now she knows exactly what’s coming. Not a beating, not rape or more water torture.
This is far worse.
And it won’t leave a mark on her.
THEY START WITH HEAVY METAL, of course, played loud enough that it’s impossible not to hear the words or blank out the music. The reproduction quality is good, and the irony of th
at fact is not lost on her. She can’t even pray to be struck deaf by distortion.
So begins Metallica’s pulsing “Enter Sandman” on constant repeat. After the first half dozen plays the lyrics start to stick inside her head. Lyrics about dreaming of war, of sleeping with one eye open and of never waking up. Who would get her blackened soul, she wonders? With no visual distractions, the monsters that might be lurking at the corners of the room—she doubts there are any closets, and there certainly isn’t a bed for them to hide under—take on shape and mass and venom.
As the single guitar riff cycles endlessly through its series of gradual changes she is overwhelmed by the prominent beat of the drums until she wants to scream. The words fracture into shouting.
Even shaking her head doesn’t work. Someone is monitoring. They reposition the headphones every time she jiggles them loose until eventually they tire of the game and duct-tape them to her ears.
ALL CONCEPT OF TIME VANISHES. There is no respite, hour upon hour. Day upon day, for all she knows.
Until, just as suddenly as it starts, the music stops.
She flinches, the silence more frightening than the noise. Either that, or the prospect of what might come next.
She has a right to fear.
The Sesame Street theme song starts up in her ears. She has listened to it numerous times over the years. There are no children of her own—her career has seen to that. But visits to aunts and cousins mean a TV set in the background acting as a kind of electronic pacifier, allowing the adults to talk unencumbered in another room.
Now she is scared that the next time she hears the jaunty tune, the children’s raucously cheerful singing, she will run amok. The contrast between this and the previous music is well chosen, she knows, for maximum effect. She feels it as a pounding in her chest, the tightness of her jaw, a vibration through her body as it tries to contain the rage.
It is nowhere near over yet.
“WHAT DO YOU BASTARDS WANT from me?”
She can’t tell how long she has been subjected to Eminem’s “The Real Slim Shady,” but the repetition in the chorus has her near to breaking. And Kim is her. She has become the woman from the song desperately trying to placate her crazy ex. The man who’s just slit her second husband’s throat—their son’s throat—right in front of her. Every time around, she thinks she might be able to escape him. Every time, he catches her.
Every time, she dies.
“YOU KNOW WHY YOU’RE HERE, Clara.”
“I don’t!”
“Of course you do. And every time you lie to me, you go back under.”
“No, please! I did nothing!”
“Ah. . . . At last we begin to get somewhere.”
FOR ONCE SHE IS ALLOWED to rest, to lie curled on a blanket. For once the only sounds inside the hood are those of faint weeping, the hot wet night, and her own despair.
“I did nothing.”
It is both truth and lie, because she is back there right now, in the vividness of the moment. The moment she is newly arrived, filled with the aggressive energy of self-righteous indignation. She watches hooded detainees shackle-shuffle between their tiny dirt-floored cells and the interrogation rooms. She sees them forced into stress positions, humiliated, half drowned, surrounded by barking dogs and strobe lights. Over the coming months she feels a little more of her humanity slipping from her grasp. She still cannot abide the color orange.
But in the beginning she has no uncertainties. They are the enemy, or why would they be there? They are intransigent, defiant, and all she can see is the towers falling and the blood on their hands.
When, later—she is ashamed of how much later—she voices those doubts to her boss, back home in his air-conditioned office in the five-sided fortress, word passes down the line that she needs to piss or get off the pot. She of all people cannot be seen to weaken. God is on their side.
She hardens, learns to ask the questions she is told to ask without emotion, without empathy. And if she lets others carry out her commands, it is poor distance.
The policy of “no-touch” interrogation seems a salve to what remains of her conscience. She tries to ignore that Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA”—initially blared out continuously over the camp speakers as part of the softening-up process—has to be quickly abandoned for the sanity of the guards as much as the prisoners. By some tacit agreement, it is never discussed.
So she does nothing—nothing to protest use of the headphones and the music.
The same headphones—and the same music—that is now being used on her.
“THE HUMAN MIND CAN ITSELF prepare, mentally, psychologically, for physical abuse, but music? Music takes us back to a time in our evolutionary history when reacting to noise was the difference between survival and being eaten. It triggers a response on an elemental level—one against which we have no defense.”
Recognizing the truth of his words keeps her silent. That and the guilt which has plagued her ever since she came home. She has left the job behind her but it will not let go.
“Music has been an integral part of war through the ages. The beat of drums and pipes as an army marches into battle. It was designed to strike fear into the heart of the enemy.”
She says, “We were at war.”
“Your so-called ‘War on Terror’? Tell me, how can that war hope to be won by inflicting terror on those who might not even be your enemy? Is this not like attempting to put out flames with gasoline?”
“We were sanctioned to use enhanced interrogation techniques—”
“Semantics.” She can almost hear the shake of his head although by now she is hanging on to reality by her fingernails. “What are your ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ except another name for torture? What is ‘food manipulation’ except another name for starvation?”
“I never starved anybody.”
“But the rest you admit, yes?”
“I . . . we were under pressure to get results.”
“So the end justifies the means, is that it?”
“No. Yes. I don’t know.”
“Which is it, Clara?”
“I don’t know,” she repeats dully. “I don’t know what this is all for. What do you want from me?”
“If you have to ask, then you are not yet ready.”
She hears him shift. She is shaking, her head pulsing to a beat no longer there.
“Wait! Please! Ask me something—anything. What do you want me to say?”
“That you are a liar?”
“I am! I’m a liar. I’ve lied to you. I’m sorry.”
“What have you lied to me about?”
“About everything. But you have to understand, we were under attack. It was vital we obtained intel from detainees.”
“It would have been kinder to beat it out of us the old-fashioned way.”
“Us” not “them” . . .
“I would not have been a party to physical cruelty.”
“But you were under pressure to produce results, Clara. It was ‘vital that intel was obtained,’ yes? Admit it—there was nothing you would not have done.”
“There was nothing I wouldn’t have done,” she mumbles.
“Just as, right now, there is nothing you would not say in order to stop me placing those headphones back over your ears and leaving you in here another twenty-four hours.”
“No, no, please . . .”
“How long will it take you to lose your mind, Clara? Bruises fade. Broken bones knit. How long will it take your mind to heal—if it ever does?”
“You healed.”
“Is that what you believe? We have kidnapped and tortured you. Do you honestly think those are the actions of men who are able to forget what was done to them? Men who are able so easily to let go of the past and move on with their lives?”
Any response will be the wrong one. She says nothing, hears him sigh.
“What you subjected us to was not simply an auditory onslaught, you also denigrated
our culture by playing music that was filled with Western dominance and posturing, which was sexually offensive.”
“I tried to get them to stop! I tried . . .”
“Not hard enough, Clara. You were the one with influence—the one with a friend in the hierarchy. If anyone could get them to change what was going on there it was you, but you didn’t try hard enough, did you?”
“I did try! I was told we had to—”
“Still you cling to this as justification. ‘Had to’ for what? Did you ever get any significant piece of intelligence about any high-value target, by the methods you used?”
“Of course we did!”
“Are you sure about that? Did you yourself hear this confession from the very lips of a prisoner or were you merely told?”
“I . . .”
As the headphones go back on she screams. It is not loud enough to overcome the blast of Britney Spears.
THE NEXT TIME SHE SHAKES her head she realizes this time they are the ones who have made a mistake. The headphones are no longer stuck down to her skull and they slip halfway off her left ear. She tenses, waiting for the door to open, for the footsteps, the rip and tear of the duct tape, and the agonizing increase in volume.
It doesn’t come.
She takes a breath and thrashes more vigorously, like a dog coming out of water. The hated device flies from her head and goes scuttering across the floor. The sound is tinny now with distance, little more than clicks and hisses.
She waits.
Still no one comes.
She flops and rolls, landing on her side, hands still zip-tied to her ankles. By squirming, she is able to get rid of the hood. It takes her eyes half a minute to adjust to the light before she can see her surroundings.
She is in a small room, a metal box with a dirt floor. Light penetrates through the bars on the door. Her heart plummets, but inside her head a voice is yelling at her to get loose, to get up, to escape and evade the way they trained her.
It takes far too long to get the zip-tie off one hand, by which time her wrists are raw. She keeps struggling, gaze fixed on the doorway for the first indication that they are returning and her attempt is over.
