“Operator,” a voice said.
“Outside line, please,” he said.
“Right away, sir,” the operator said. “What number?”
He gave the number. The dial tone changed to a thrumming, punctured by intervals of silence.
Nobody was answering.
After a time the thrumming stopped and a recorded voice came on, the tape so distorted he could barely make the words out. It was a man’s voice. Not the right number, he thought, and started to hang up, and then thought, no, he might not have a chance to dial out again. Hapler, the distorted voice identified itself as, or perhaps Handler or Hapner. Nobody he knew. But Handler or Hapler would have to do.
“Hello?” he said. “Mr. Hapner? Is that in fact the correct name? My name is Arnaud. I’m afraid I’ve been given your number in error.”
He swallowed, then began choosing his words carefully.
“There’s been a misunderstanding,” he said. “I have every hope it will be quickly resolved, everyone’s heart is in the right place. But, Mr. Hapner, could I trouble you to contact my wife? Would you ask her, assuming that I am not safe and sound by the time you reach her, to do what she can to find out what has become of me? It would mean a great deal to both of us.” He stopped, thought. “She might,” he finally added, “begin with Bentham.”
Immediately after he hung up the phone it began to ring. Almost reflexively, he picked it up.
“Hello?” he said.
“Who is this?” a voice asked.
Arnaud hesitated. “Why,” he asked slowly, “do you want to know?”
“Mr. Arnaud,” said the voice. “Why are you answering the telephone?”
He didn’t know what to say. He held the receiver, looked out the window.
“You made a call a few moments ago,” the voice said. “What was the purpose of this call?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Arnaud.
“How are you acquainted with”—he heard a rustling through the receiver—“this Mr. Hapner?”
“I—” said Arnaud.
“—and what, in your opinion, is the nature of the so-called . . . misunderstanding?”
Not knowing what else to say, Arnaud hung up the telephone.
By the time he was sitting down again, a guard had come into the room. A new guard, not the same one. He stood just inside one of the doors, watching Arnaud nervously.
“Hello,” said Arnaud, just as nervously.
The guard nodded.
“What’s this all about?” asked Arnaud.
“I’m not allowed to converse with you,” the guard said.
“Why not?” asked Arnaud.
The guard did not answer.
Arnaud thumbed through his notebook again. His eyes for some reason were having a hard time focusing on his handwriting, making it out to be furry, blurred. No, he thought, he had followed procedure. He was not to blame. Unless they blamed him for the phone call. But couldn’t he explain that away? Nobody had told him he wasn’t allowed to telephone. There was really nothing to worry about, he told himself. Bentham’s death could not be attributed to his negligence.
The original guard came back in. The two guards stood together just inside the door, whispering, looking at him, one of them frequently scratching the skin behind his ear. Eventually the original guard went to the telephone and disconnected it from the wall. Telephone under his arm, he came over to Arnaud and took his notebook away. Then he went out again.
Arnaud swiveled his chair around to face the remaining guard. He spread his arms wide.
“What harm could it possibly do to talk to me?”
The guard pointed a finger at him, shook it. “You’ve been warned,” he said.
He stood up and went to the window. Outside, past the doubled fence, dim shapes wandered about beneath a mottled sky.
He heard the door open. When he turned, both guards, edges blurring, were present again, conversing, watching him. They seemed to be speaking to each other very rapidly, in a steady drone. He had to concentrate to understand them.
“He’s been standing there,” one of them was saying, “just like that, hours now.”
But no, he had only been there for a few moments, hadn’t he? Something was wrong with them.
One of them suddenly darted over and stood next to him.
“Come with us,” the guard said.
“No use resisting,” the same guard said.
Arnaud nodded and stepped forward, and then felt himself suddenly propelled. Each guard, he realized, had taken hold of one of his arms and was dragging him.
The conference room was replaced by a stretch of hall.
“Malingerer, eh?” said one of the guards, only the words didn’t seem to correspond with the quivering movement of his lips, seemed instead to be coming at a distance, from the hall behind him.
No, Arnaud suddenly realized, amazed, something isn’t wrong with them. Something is wrong with me.
They rushed him through the hall and into an observation booth. His observation booth, he realized, the one he had used to interview Bentham. Perhaps he was being allowed to return to work. Who would his next subject be? Bentham, he saw on the other side of the glass, was gone, though pinkish streaks of diluted blood were still visible on the glass.
He started toward his chair, but the guards were still holding him. Gently, he tried to free himself, but they wouldn’t let go. Then he realized that he was being dragged toward the adjoining door, toward the subject chamber.
“No,” he said, “but I, I’m not a subject.”
“Of course not,” a guard soothed, his face more a splotch of color than a face. “Who claimed you were?”
“But—” he said.
He grabbed hold of the doorframe on the way through. He held on. Something hard was pushing into his back, just below the blade of his shoulder. Something ground his fingers against the metal of the doorframe, his hand growing numb. Then his grip gave and he was through the door, being strapped to Bentham’s bed. A fourth person in the room, a technician, was snapping on latex gloves.
“I’m not a subject,” Arnaud claimed again.
The technician just smiled. Arnaud watched the smile smear across her face, consume it. Something was wrong with his vision. He could no longer see the technician clearly, she was just a blur, but from having watched subjects through the glass he could derive what she surely must be doing: an ampoule, a hypodermic, the body of the first emptying, the chamber of the second filling.
The blur shifted, was shot through with light.
“This may sting just a little,” the technician said. But Arnaud felt nothing. What’s wrong? he wondered. “Not so bad, is it?” the technician asked, coming briefly into focus again. And then she stepped away and was swallowed up by the wall.
“Hello?” Arnaud said.
Nobody answered.
“Is anybody there?” he asked.
Where had they gone? How much time had passed? He looked about him but couldn’t make sense of what he saw. Everything seemed reduced to two dimensions, shadow and light becoming replacements for objects rather than something in which they bathed. He lifted his head and looked down at his body but could not recognize it, could not even perceive it as a body, despite being almost certain it was there.
Fugue state, he thought idly. And then thought, Oh, God. I’ve caught it too.
“Hello?” said a voice. It was smooth, quiet. It struck him as familiar. “Arnaud?” it said.
He turned, saw no-one, just a flat black square. Speaker, he thought. Then he remembered the observation booth, turned instead to where, though he couldn’t quite make it out, he thought it must be.
“Yes?” he said. “Hello?”
“How do you feel?”
“I feel fine,” he claimed.
He heard a vague rustling, was not certain if it was coming from somewhere in his room or from the observation booth.
“Hello?” he said.
> “Yes?” said the voice. “What’s wrong, please?”
Arnaud waited, listened. There it was again, a rustling. He swiveled his ear toward it.
“I apologize for these precautions,” said the voice, “but we had to assure ourselves that you were not a . . . liability, didn’t we? For your own . . . safety as well as our own.”
Arnaud did not answer.
“Arnaud, did you understand what I said?”
“Yes,” said Arnaud. He tried to get up and thought he had but then realized he was still lying down. What was happening, exactly?
“Good,” said the voice. “Shall we move straight to the point? Did you murder Bentham?”
Bentham? he wondered. Who was Bentham again? He blinked, tried to focus. “No,” he said.
“What happened to Bentham?”
“I don’t know,” said Arnaud.
“Arnaud, seven days ago, you interviewed Bentham. During that session he died.”
“Yes,” said Arnaud, remembering. “He died. But it wasn’t seven days ago. It was just a few hours ago.”
“Are you sure, Arnaud? Are you certain?”
“Yes,” said Arnaud. “I’m certain.”
The rustling seemed gone now. He found if he tilted his head and squinted he could make rise from the flat surface of the wall, hovering like a ghost just above it, the plane of glass between his room and the observation booth. The glass was flat as well, depthless. Bentham’s blood, the dull, nearly faded swathes of it, drifted like another flattened ghost on its surface. But somehow he could not see through blood or glass to the other side.
“Who is Mr. Hapner?” the voice asked.
Arnaud hesitated. “I don’t know,” he said, perplexed.
“You don’t know,” the voice said. “And yet after Bentham’s death you placed a telephone call to a Mr. Hapner. How do you explain this?”
“I’m afraid I have no explanation,” said Arnaud. “I don’t even remember doing it.”
He closed his eyes. When he opened them again, the room seemed to have shifted, flattening out like a piece of paper. It was still a room, he tried to convince himself, only less so. For an instant, the room grew clearer.
“—case,” the voice was saying. “How did he die?”
He tried to remember. “He began to bleed,” he said. “From the eyes,” he said.
“Yes,” said the voice. “So you wrote. What made this happen, do you think?”
“I don’t know,” said Arnaud. “How should I know?”
“Think carefully. Did it have anything to do with you?”
He kept looking at the plane of glass, trying to worm his vision through. The voice kept at him, asking him the same questions in slightly different ways, repeating, following procedure. Arnaud kept answering as best he could.
“About this record of your interview,” said the voice. “Is it, to the best of your knowledge, accurate?”
“Of course,” claimed Arnaud. And then, “What record?”
The voice started to speak, fell silent. Arnaud waited, listened. There it was again, a rustling.
“What does ‘fugue state’ mean to you?” asked the voice. But now it sounded harsher, less encouraging, almost like a different voice.
“It doesn’t mean anything,” said Arnaud.
“And yet you wrote it. What exactly did you mean?”
“I don’t know,” said Arnaud. “I just wrote it.”
“Do you see, Arnaud? Right here? Fugue state?”
He turned his face toward the black square and then, remembering, toward the glass, saw nothing.
“Well?” said the voice.
“Well what?” asked Arnaud.
“And yet,” said the voice.
But then it interrupted itself, argued with itself in two different tones and cadences about what question should be asked next.
But how could a single voice do this? Arnaud wondered.
“How many of the one of you are there?” he asked. “Two?”
He waited. The voice did not answer. Perhaps he had said it wrong. Perhaps he had not said what he meant. He was preparing to repeat the question when the voice answered, in its harsher tone.
“How many of us do there appear to you to be?”
He opened his mouth to respond, closed it. He must have said something wrong, he realized, but he was no longer sure what.
“Do you remember your name?” said a voice slowly.
“Yes,” said Arnaud. “Of course I do.” But then realized no, he did not.
“Will you please tell it to me?” the voice said.
Arnaud hesitated. What was it? It was there, almost on the tip of his tongue. “Why?” he said. “Why exactly do you need to know?”
A voice said, changing, “Arnaud, what do you see?”
A voice said, changing, “Arnaud, what is happening to you?”
A voice said, changing, “Arnaud, how do you feel?”
“Fine,” said Arnaud. “I feel fine.”
He waited. “Why do you ask?” he finally said.
His face felt wet. Was he in the rain? No, he was indoors. There couldn’t be rain. He could no longer see through his eyes.
He knew, from the tone of the voice, or voices, that someone thought something was wrong with him. But he couldn’t, for the life of him, figure out what that could possibly be.
III.
There were a series of days he could not remember, how many days he was never certain, days in which, he temporarily deduced, he must have lain comatose and bleeding from the eyes on the floor of a kitchen, next to a woman he assumed, but was no longer certain, must be his wife. And all the days before that which he could not remember either. By the time he managed to open his eyes and felt like the world around him was moving at a rate his senses could comfortably apprehend, the woman, whoever she was, was dead. Thus his first memory, quickly coming apart, was of lying next to her, staring at her gaunt face, at the lips constricted back to show the tips of her canines.
Who is she? he wondered.
And myself, he wondered, who exactly am I?
Near his face was a puddle of water. He did not recognize the reflection that quivered along its surface. He rolled his head down into it, lapped some up with his tongue.
After a while he worked up enough strength to crawl across the kitchen floor, following the water’s source, and to duck his head under a skirt below the sink. There, an overflowing metal bowl rested beneath a pipe’s leaking elbow.
The water in the bowl was filthy, covered with a thin layer of scum. He brushed this gently apart with his stubbled chin then tried to lap up the cleaner water below.
It was musty, but helped. He lay still for a while, his cheek against the damp, rotting wood of the cabinet floor, one temple applied to the cold metal of the bowl.
Later he managed to pull himself up and stagger to a cabinet. Inside, he found some stale crackers and sucked on these, then sat in a kitchen chair, his mouth dry. His eyes hurt. So did his ears and the lining of his mouth.
He got up and ate some more crackers then stared into the refrigerator. The food inside was rotting. He scavenged the heel of a loaf of bread, scraped the mold off it, ate it.
After the better part of the day had waned, he began to feel more human. He searched the pockets of the woman on the floor. They contained a few coins and a wallet stuffed with cards. Something, he discovered, was wrong with his eyes. He knew what the cards were by their shape and appearance—credit card, identification card, cash card, library pass—but was puzzled to find he could not read them. The characters on them, what he assumed were characters, meant nothing. He stared at them for some time and then slid them into his own pocket, then covered the woman’s body with a sheet.
In the bathroom mirror, he did not recognize himself. The face staring back at him had blood crusted about its eyes, above its lips and to either side of the chin, the center of the chin now covered with a diluted slurry of blood and water. His eyes were blood
shot, oddly scored and pitted. His vision, he realized, was dim, as if he were slowly going blind. Perhaps his pupils had always been that way.
He washed the face, scrubbing the blood from the wrinkles around the eyes with soap and with a toothbrush he found in the cabinet above the sink. When he was done, he shaved carefully.
He regarded himself in the mirror. Who am I? he wondered. But that was not what he meant exactly. Only that he had no name to put with what he knew himself to be.
When he tried to open the door, he found it locked. He unlocked the deadbolt, tried to open it again, but the door still didn’t come. He wandered from room to room. The windows were barred from the outside, the street lying far below. The sheet was still in the kitchen, the woman still dead under it. Yes, he thought, that’s right, he remembered. It was in a way reassuring to know she had not been imagined, though in another way not reassuring at all.
What was her name? He didn’t know. Nothing leaped to mind. Nothing sounded quite right. And what about him? Nothing sounded quite right, but nothing quite wrong either.
In the back of one of the closets he found a small pry bar and a hammer. He used them to knock the pins from the door hinges, then tried to pry the door open from its hinged side. It creaked, but still didn’t come.
Using the pry bar as a chisel, he slowly splintered a hole through the center of the door at eye-level. There was, he discovered, something just beyond the door, made of plywood. He slowly broke a hole through this as well until, at last, he had a fist-sized opening that debouched onto an ordinary hall.
“Hello?” he called out. “Anyone there?”
When there was no answer, he went into the kitchen, stepping over the sheet. He started opening up drawers. There was a drawer containing a series of utensils, stacked very carefully into slots, a drawer containing stray keys and books of stamps and a rubber band ball, a drawer containing nested measuring cups and spatulas and turkey basters and pie shields, a shelf holding a jumble of pots and pans, a cabinet scattered with ascending stacks of dishes and nested hard plastic drinking cups. He worked two of the rubber bands off the ball then slid the rest of the drawers closed.
Invaders: 22 Tales From the Outer Limits of Literature Page 18
