“So why did you stay? Why are you playing along with them if this wasn’t what you signed up for?”
“Do you think I wouldn’t leave if I could?” Alex gave him a look of sincerity. “Frank, they said they would kill my mother if I walked. They showed me pictures of her. They knew her address. If I don’t play along . . .” He chuckled darkly. “There’s no doubt in my mind they’ll do what they say.”
“So you’re just another one of their puppets.” Frank shook his head in disgust. “Who’s the puppet master, really? Who is Dr. Kaspar?”
Alex peered down the hall and took a single step into the room. He pressed a hand over his right ear and glanced up at the camera above his head, making sure he was out of sight.
“There is no Dr. Kaspar,” he said in a hushed tone. “Sarge, Gary Hill, Dr. Kaspar—he’s an actor too. I saw him at an audition once maybe five years ago, back in L.A. He doesn’t remember me, I don’t think . . .” Alex shrugged. “Maybe he does, I don’t know. We haven’t talked about it. I don’t know if I can trust him.”
Frank sank back against the wall. He wasn’t sure he could trust Alex either. The man could be feeding him more bullshit, for all he knew. But keeping the man talking postponed whatever pain lay in store for him.
“How far down does this go?” he asked. “Do you have any idea who’s in charge of this place?”
“It could be anyone. Harriet. Jamal. For all I know, it could be you or Linda.” He seemed startled by his own thought. “This could be some Undercover Boss thing, keeping tabs on your employees.”
“Don’t be stupid. Would I step in a bear trap if I was in charge?”
Alex shrugged. “People get committed to their roles. When I first started working here, Billy—the guy who plays Colby—he swore he was a pacifist. Said being in the war had changed him. He lost his arm over there. Iraq, I think. I don't doubt something like that would mess a guy up. But violence is contagious. You experience it enough, you deal it out day after day, it just becomes a part of who you are. Now he’s one of the worst of us. But that’s what being here does: it changes you. This place . . . it screws you up and twists you around until you don’t know up from down.”
“Then how do we stop this?”
Alex blinked. “You can’t,” he said, as if it was obvious. “The Method never ends, Frank. It just changes shape. One day you’re a prisoner, the next you’re one of us. I don’t even think anyone knows what this experiment is about anymore. The only thing we know for sure is that we're never getting out of here. Freedom is just a carrot on a stick. We all know that. And when you lose hope, Frank, you lose your connection to people. You lose your humanity. That's what happened to Billy, to Michael. It'll happen to me, and it'll happen to you too, once you've been here long enough.”
“No,” Frank said. “I won’t give in. I won't ever be like you.”
He gave Frank an ominous look. “That’s what I thought too. But that was before the electroshock.” Alex looked at his watch. “We’d better go before they send Michael.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“If you don’t go, they’ll just send Linda in your place. That’s how it works, in case you haven’t figured that out yet.”
Given no other choice, Frank pushed himself off the bed.
Alex smiled thinly and ushered him into the hall. “The only advice I can give you is don’t resist. The more you fight it, the worse it is.”
Frank followed him down the hall to where Michael stood taking up an open doorway. He stepped inside, revealing the man playing Dr. Kaspar, who stood beside an exam table, fiddling with the dials and switches on several gray machines set up on a rolling cart beside the table.
“Bring him in please, Alex.”
Frank shrugged Alex’s hand from his shoulder and stepped in ahead of him. He noticed the restraints on the table and a mirror taking up much of the wall to his left.
“Strap him to the table.”
Frank hobbled a step toward it before the men grabbed either arm and helped him along. They sat him on the table, and he lay back. The machines beeped with each of Kaspar’s manipulations.
Michael strapped his right leg tightly to the table. Delicately, Alex dealt with his left, giving him a sympathetic smile that Kaspar seemed to notice and favor with a disapproving scowl.
They strapped down his hands and stepped away from the table.
Kaspar approached with a tube of lubricant and several electrodes connected by thin, gray wires to the topmost machine on the cart. He placed a liberal amount of lube on an electrode and made to attach it to Frank’s head.
Frank turned away, facing the mirror.
“When will you learn your lesson, Mr. Moffat? The more you play along, the easier it will be for all of us. Your wife included.”
Frank turned back, staring knife blades. “Is that what you said to Julia?”
Kaspar jerked, his eyes flashing with conflicted emotions. Then his expression hardened. “I don't know who you're talking about,” he said with his jaw clenched, and placed the first cold, wet electrode on Frank’s right temple. As Kaspar squirted jelly onto a second and placed it onto Frank’s left temple, Frank wondered if he’d really gotten to the man or if the notebook was another manipulation.
Kaspar stepped back to admire his work. “Did you know electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT, is still used today to treat depression? Chronic pain and many other neurological ailments as well. It’s quite effective, according to some data.” Kaspar smiled. “Of course, during the treatment, patients are sedated, and the voltage I’ll be using today far surpasses the recommended amount. But we’ll start slow. Who knows? Maybe it will help you with your pain.” He nodded toward Frank’s legs and smiled pleasantly. “Before the treatment itself becomes intolerable.”
He turned to the machine.
With his head against the dense pillow, Frank looked down his nose at Michael and Alex, who stood barring the door, muscular arms crossed over their chests.
He thought, My body is my temple. The random thought led to how old temples and churches once offered asylum from persecution, and he hoped the same shelter could be found inside his own head.
Kaspar twisted a dial.
Frank hadn’t prepared for the jolt. He couldn’t have prepared, even if he’d tried. White fire exploded at the center of his head, far more focused and a hundred times more painful than the cattle prod Michael and Colby had used on them at the cabin and worse than the electroshock obstacle that had caused them to drop out of the endurance event. His limbs seized, jerking against the restraints. His frantic mind conjured up a faint image of himself swallowing his own tongue, which obliterated in a violent, chaotic LSD trip of random memories and images and jumbled words that spilled over each other, competing for space inside his thundering head and winking out suddenly like an imploding star, when Kaspar moved the dial back, leaving him empty.
Kaspar turned to him. “Well? How was that, Mr. Moffat?”
Frank’s limbs settled jerkily, and he tried to answer Kaspar’s question with a sharp retort. His mouth simply opened, and a cracked breath escaped.
He turned to the mirror, thankful to at least recognize the face looking back at him as his own. But his words still wouldn’t return.
The man in charge grinned. “And that was at a low voltage.”
Frank managed to recover his thoughts. The tendons in his neck creaked as he turned to face the man playing Kaspar. “You. Can’t. Break me,” he groaned.
“Oh no? Honestly, Mr. Moffat, you should be thanking me. You got exactly what you came here for. Your wife loves you again.”
Frank looked up at the ceiling, where a florescent track light flickered and buzzed like his frantic mind. “She always loved me,” he said. “She loved me so much the only choice she had was to push me away.”
“Then submit yourself to us,” Kaspar said through gritted teeth, “and Linda can go home.”
His head felt like it was full of br
oken light bulbs when he shook it. “I don’t believe you.”
Linda watched as the woman Jamal had called Harriet stepped out from behind the observation window. Harriet’s hard soles clacked as she crossed the room and approached Linda, who turned to look at the blank TV screen.
“Come with me please, Mrs. Moffat.”
“Go fuck yourself, bitch.”
“Do you want to see your husband or not?”
Linda looked up. The woman’s black hair was pulled back in a tight bun. She held a clipboard snugly to her chest.
“Where is he?” Linda demanded.
“In the electroshock room. You can see him if you come with me.”
Linda stood obediently and followed the woman to the doorway Alex had led Frank through an hour or so earlier. She briefly considered driving her fists into the back of Harriet’s head like it was a volleyball, but Colby met them in the hall with a sadistic grin.
“Hey there, princess!”
Linda ignored him as they passed. He fell into step behind them.
“Have you heard of the Milgram experiment, Linda?” Harriet said over her shoulder.
“No.”
The woman led Linda to a door, which she then unlocked. She stepped aside, gesturing for Linda to enter. “It was a fascinating social experiment conducted in the early ‘60s to test the effect authority figures had on conscience. Stanley Milgram wondered if the accomplices to the Holocaust could be held accountable for their actions, or if they were simply preconditioned by existing societal structures to follow orders regardless of consequences.”
Linda moved past her into the dark room. Harriet and Colby stepped in behind her. One of them switched on a dim light.
Colby closed the door and locked it.
To Linda’s immediate right, a window took up most of the wall, under which stood a low table with a gray switchbox that had a single toggle. Beyond the window, Dr. Kaspar fiddled with dials on a machine. Alex and Gitmo stood sentry by the door.
Frank lay strapped to a hospital bed looking toward the window, electrodes on both temples. He looked beaten. Broken. His forehead and hair were sweat dampened.
Linda made a move toward the window, calling out his name.
“He won’t hear you,” Harriet said. “The glass is soundproofed. He can’t even see you in here.”
Linda stepped back and watched the scene play out in the other room. Kaspar spoke, and fiddled with a dial on the gray machine. Frank turned to him, and said something that made Kaspar flinch.
Linda allowed herself a smile.
Frank wasn’t broken yet. There was still a chance.
“In Milgram’s experiment, participants were told to ask an unseen participant in the next room a series of questions. If he got them wrong, he would receive a shock administered by the participant. The participant was told to increase the voltage after each wrong answer. At a certain point, the man receiving the shocks would cry out in pain, warning the doctors—and the participant—about his heart condition. Most participants would hesitate at this point, but the doctor in charge would instruct them to continue. Very few refused to administer the highest voltage, despite knowing it was possible the man behind the wall would suffer a heart attack and possibly die.”
The woman set her clipboard on the table. “Sixty-five percent of participants administered four hundred and fifty volts to a man with a heart condition simply because a man with a clipboard posing as a doctor told them to.”
“That was a long time ago,” Linda said. “And I know you’re not a doctor.”
Harriet gave her a patient smile. “They recreated the experiment in 2009 under the same belief you’ve expressed, that people would be more skeptical today. More apt to question authority. Sixty-three percent continued to the highest voltage. Just two percent less than fifty years ago.” She chuckled drily. “We do what we’re told, Linda.”
“I’m not going to shock my husband because you told me to.”
“Of course not. We have no perceived authority to you aside from the fact that we hold the keys to the cage.”
Linda looked at the switchbox on the table, the black cable snaking from it into the other room. “What are you saying? You’ll let us go if I flick the switch?”
“Not you. Just Frank.” The woman paused, letting it sink in. “Before you make your decision, I should tell you he’ll receive the maximum voltage when you flick that switch. He may not survive. But if he does, he’ll walk away a free man, believing you died to spare him.”
Linda looked through the window at Frank. He spoke with Kaspar, but she couldn’t hear what either of them was saying. They appeared to be arguing, but Frank didn’t look like he had much fight left in him at all.
“What about me?” she asked.
“You?” Harriet’s eyes twinkled with malevolent glee. “You’ll become one of us, absorbed into The Method.”
A light came on behind the mirror, and Frank saw Linda looking at the glass. Teri Lumley stood at her side, dressed in a lab coat. Colby barred the door. Frank tried to wave, forgetting his hands were strapped to the bed. He cried out her name with what little strength he had left. She was studying something on the table and didn’t seem to hear.
“There’s no use, Frank,” Kaspar said. “She can’t hear you or see you.”
Frank relaxed into the springy pillow. “What do you want me to do?”
Kaspar approached the bed with a thin smile. “Submit yourself. Fully. Everything we ask of you, you’ll do without question. Do what we say, and Linda walks away from here believing you died during the electroshock. Say no, and we’ll make it so the two of you no longer exist. Believe me, Frank. We can do that.”
Frank believed him. It was the only thing the man had ever said that Frank truly believed. He wasn’t sure if they would let Linda go as promised. But he knew that if he refused, the two of them would disappear.
He turned to Linda, and for a moment, it seemed like she caught his eye. He supposed she must have been looking at something in the mirror as her gaze fell away, back to the small gray box on the table.
“Fine,” he said. “I’ll do whatever you want, just let Linda go.”
“That’s good, Frank. That’s very good.” His cold, blue eyes twinkled. “Here’s what we want you to do.”
“Will you do it, Linda? Would you risk his life to save it?”
Linda hesitated only a moment.
Then she reached for the switchbox.
“All you have to do is say you no longer love her.” Kaspar’s voice reached the point of ecstasy. “Say it while looking into her eyes . . . and she’ll go free.”
Frank turned to the one-way glass.
Their eyes met through the window.
Almost like he can see me, she thought.
Frank thought the same.
So much pain and suffering. So much terror and exhaustion. All of it solved with one simple yet frightening act.
“I don’t love her anymore,” Frank said.
“Do it now, Linda,” Harriet hissed at her side.
“To her, Frank,” Kaspar demanded. “Not to me.”
Frank’s voice boomed over the intercom in the same moment Linda flicked the switch: “I don’t love you anymore!”
Then his entire body began seizing on the bed, held in place by the straps at his wrists and ankles. His head rose from the pillow, tendons stretched, eyes squeezed shut in agony.
Frank saw her surprise and knew they’d let her hear him, that his last words to her before she left him behind were I don’t love you. He had little more than a moment to process this before the electrical storm erupted in his head, and all of his guilt, fear, anger, everything vanished, replaced by a single sustained image of pure white agony.
Frank’s torture chamber darkened. The glass between them became a mirror, and Linda stood looking at herself, immobilized by guilt, confusion, and fear. In what could have been the last seconds of Frank’s life, he had seen her throw the switch on
the machine that killed him. If he survived, he would leave her behind believing she’d tried to kill him because of what he’d said.
After everything they’d done to break them, she’d ended up breaking them both herself.
Linda dropped to her knees, laid her head in her hands, and wept.
20 — Closure
They let her shower. The hot running water felt good on her skin, but she couldn’t enjoy it knowing Frank was gone. She was glad they’d told her though, glad they hadn’t hidden his death from her, leaving her to wonder if he was still alive, glad they hadn’t told her he was out there in the world without her, only for her to find out later it had been a lie.
Hot water washed away layers of dirt, blood, and piss, but her tears kept flowing long after she’d gingerly toweled herself off, careful to avoid the angry burn above her breast, the slash on her arm, and the large lump over her eye. Her thigh muscles felt like she’d run a marathon without stretching. Her arms were so sore she could barely hold the towel above her head long enough to get her hair halfway dry.
They made him say that, she told herself. Tricked him somehow. I know he loves me—loved me.
Thinking about him in the past tense made her heart feel hollowed out. It would take time to heal. Physical injuries were the least of her worries. The psychic ones hurt far worse.
Once she’d changed back into the fresh shirt and loose-fitting pants they’d retrieved from her luggage, she sat on the uncomfortable bed in her sterile, otherwise empty room and stared at the camera above the door.
The lock unlatched. The door swung inward.
Alex stood in the hall with a tight smile. “I’m sorry for your loss, Linda. You might be glad to know that Control decided the least they could do was let you go, after what happened.”
Linda barked a bitter laugh. “How magnanimous of them.”
“I really am sorry.”
“Sorry’s not going to bring my husband back, is it?”
The Method Page 20
