“Why shouldn’t you?” the man responded, and Istvan, having no ready response to this, considered for a moment and then pulled his chair to the table.
“Do you know what you’ve done?” asked the small gray man.
“Why are you gray?” asked Istvan.
“Excuse me?”
“Why are you gray? That’s not a normal color. Are you real? Are you the shadow man?”
“Do I look gray to you?”
Istvan nodded.
“Interesting,” said the man. “I don’t know if it’s a normal color or not. I don’t know how you typically see things. I’ve always thought of myself as having a normal color. And yes, I am real.”
Istvan nodded again, then stared at the table.
“What about you?” asked the gray man. “Do you think of yourself as real?”
“Me?” said Istvan, surprised. “Of course I’m real. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“That’s good,” said the man, and smiled. “Then, both of us being real, we can speak seriously.”
“About what?”
“About what you did.”
Istvan folded his arms. “I don’t think it went right,” he said. “It wasn’t supposed to happen that way.”
“No? How was it supposed to happen?”
“He wasn’t supposed to get hurt.”
“Are you sure?”
No, Istvan realized. He wasn’t sure. That was what was troubling him. Maybe the man Fischer was supposed to get hurt. Maybe he had been tricked. Or maybe he had simply misunderstood. Not knowing what to answer, he simply didn’t answer. He looked up and the gray man was still there, across the table, watching him with unblinking eyes.
“You’ll be with us for a long time,” said the gray man.
“Why?” asked Istvan.
“Because of what you did,” said the gray man. “You killed someone. Not only that, you ended up killing someone political. You assassinated him. He was only a councilman, but he was important in other ways, important to us. That means you belong to us now. To me.”
Istvan felt anger rising in him. “I don’t belong to anybody,” he said.
“It’s just a figure of speech,” said the gray man affably. “What I mean is that you are now an enemy of the state. We have to understand what you did and who convinced you to do it. We know you didn’t plan this yourself. We’re eager enough to understand that we’ll use any means necessary to have our answers.”
“I won’t tell you anything,” said Istvan. “Why should I?”
The gray man smiled. “We’re patient,” he said. “We don’t need the answers right away. But eventually you will tell us everything we want to know.”
Istvan shook his head and waited for the gray man to disappear. But he didn’t disappear.
“You’re not real,” Istvan claimed.
“We already agreed I was real,” said the man.
“Did we?” asked Istvan. “Or was that someone else?”
The gray man smiled. “I like you, Istvan,” he said. And then a moment later, everything around Istvan started to go strange, the light changing, going bloody. The gray man started to fold himself up. First he folded one arm up and then the other arm, and then he bent in the middle of the back and folded backward. When he was done, he was nothing but a strange gray square lying flat in the chair. Istvan reached across the table and picked it up.
Open it, open it, a voice inside him was saying.
And so he did, slowly unfolding it until it had become a man again. He set it up in the chair and then took a step back to look at it. When he did, the light went back to normal. It was a man all right. Only it wasn’t the gray man. It was a man in a uniform and with a red face, and from the face was coming a voice that was yelling.
When it stopped for a moment so that the man could draw his breath, Istvan stuck his hand out. “I’m Istvan,” he said. “Put it there.” He closed his hand around the man’s hand and shook it, only it wasn’t a hand at all, but a neck. As it turned out, the man’s neck. Abruptly he was lying on the ground with other people’s hands on him, holding him down. What have I done? he wondered. What’s wrong with me?
He was like that for a while and then they hauled him up and set him in the chair again. This time they tied his hands to the arms of the chair. There were more men in the room, one to either side of him in fact. The red-faced man was still there, sitting on the other side of the table now and rubbing his neck, looking a little frightened.
“What about you?” asked Istvan. “Are you real?”
“What’s wrong with you?” the red-faced man said, which was enough to make Istvan think that yes, this man was real, since he had heard that very question posed to him so many times before by people who actually were real.
* * *
He and the red-faced man talked for a long time. The red-faced man had a lot of interest in the politician and what had happened to him, in why Istvan had shot him. He seemed to want to ask the same questions again and again in slightly different ways. Each time a question was asked, Istvan did his best to answer, but the man never seemed satisfied. “Who told you to do what you did?” the red-faced man might ask. And Istvan would answer, “They did.” “Who are they?” the man would riposte. “The ones who told me,” Istvan answered, quite truthfully. It went on and on like that, sometimes very much like a merry-go-round, sometimes like other rides at the carnival, rides Istvan had never ridden but which he had seen vids of. He wished he could ride them. They might be fun. As long as he could think about carnival rides it did not bother Istvan to have this conversation, but it seemed to bother the red-faced man, and he would get very angry and lean over the table and sometimes shout into Istvan’s face. This shouting, too, he could think of as a carnival ride in a way, as long as he thought hard enough.
After a while, the red-faced man got so irritated with him that he threw up his hands and left. Istvan was on his own, sitting in the chair, waiting. He did not mind being on his own, even preferred it in a way. So he just sat there. There was, somewhere deep in his head, a slow staticky sound that he could listen to, and so he listened to it, wondering if he would begin to hear the inside voices hiding in the static. That sometimes happened to him. But no, he did not hear voices, just the static. It was soothing, relaxing, and for a while he forgot where he was.
* * *
When he remembered where he was again, the red-faced man was back, shaking him this time, yelling again. Then he picked Istvan up by his shirt and lifted him off the chair and let him go so that he fell sprawling on the ground. Istvan lay there, confused, looking up at him, wondering why the man had done that to him when all he had been doing was just sitting minding his own business.
“Get up,” the man said.
Why? wondered Istvan. I’m fine where I am.
He lay there a while longer, just staring at the man.
“Get up,” the man repeated, and gave him a kick in the ribs.
This man is not your friend, a voice told him. It was an inside voice, he knew, because he could tell that the red-faced man did not hear it, too. It was a voice just for him. Voices like that, voices just for him, made him feel special.
Not your friend, the voice repeated.
“He’s not?” he said.
The man standing above him creased his brow in confusion.
No, he’s not. In fact, he’s your enemy. You need to get rid of him.
“Rid of him how?”
The red-face man had taken a step back. “Who are you talking to?”
Start by getting up. Sit back in the chair. I’ll tell you what to do.
It was good to have a voice with him. It was good especially when the world around him was confusing and he didn’t know what to do. The voices seemed to know more about the world than he did, even if sometimes they told him to do things that later he wasn’t certain he should have done. But yes, he would listen to it. Slowly he pulled himself around and stood up, then went to the chair.
> “There, that’s better,” said the red-faced man.
No, said the voice, it isn’t. But we will make it better.
“Yes,” said Istvan. He was talking to the voice, but the red-faced man thought he was talking to him and so he nodded.
“Good,” the man said. “Now are you ready to tell me what happened?”
Tell him ‘yes,’ said the voice. And now the voice was no longer feeling like it was inside him exactly, it was more than that somehow. He was beginning to see now a shadowy shape forming there right next to the red-faced man. Not a body exactly, it would never be a body. But, he knew from past experience, eventually it would be like a body. It was like his vision was slowly adjusting so that it could begin to see what was really there. He smiled.
“Yes,” he said.
“Good,” said the red-faced man. “Let’s start at the beginning. Who were you working for?”
The shadowy shape was now more or less human, though still a little blurred around the edges. He watched as the shadow man put its hands around the red-faced man’s throat and pretend to choke him. The red-faced man didn’t seem to notice. Then the shape turned to Istvan and nodded encouragingly.
Now you, it said.
In an instant he had sprung out of his chair and thrown himself across the table, knocking both the red-faced man and his chair backward. The man gave a startled cry and then his head struck the cement floor and his body was suddenly loose. Istvan clamped his fingers around the man’s throat and squeezed.
Yes, said the shadow man, now kneeling beside him, an awful smile on its blurry lips. Do it. Harder!
And then the door burst open and other hands were on him tearing him off, dragging him away.
10
They bound his hands again. After a while, they brought him back into the interrogation room, unless it was a different room. Curious, he tried to look to see if there was blood on the floor that had leaked out of the man’s head but either this was a different room or they had cleaned the blood up. Then more questions, from several people this time, back and forth, none of them giving him a chance to do much. Where was the voice? Now that it had a shadow body, had it simply walked off? In any case, he couldn’t hear it. He kept listening for it but couldn’t hear it, but it was so hard sometimes to hear the inside voices when there were so many outside voices talking.
Whatever he was saying to answer the questions didn’t seem to be satisfying them; they kept on asking him the same questions again and again as if he had another answer to give to them. So, he stopped answering. This didn’t seem to help any, though: they still kept on asking, and now they started acting like his body might have the answers as well. They kept yanking on his hair or pushing his head down or pushing his head up or edging him out of the chair. When he hit the ground he lay there, wondering if the inside voice would come back. But nothing happened. They were right there, all around them, but it felt to him like they were moving farther and farther away, like he was burrowing deeper and deeper into his own body where they couldn’t get at him.
After a while, they took him away, down a hall and to a cell, and locked him in. Once he was alone, he felt himself slowly beginning to fill up his body again, until the things around him felt like they were real and there again. His body, he realized, hurt a lot, ached all over. There were bruises on his arms and legs where they had hit him, and probably bruises on his face, too, though there was no mirror or anything reflective he could use to examine it. There was the taste of blood in his mouth and he seemed to be missing a tooth.
He groaned a little, pulled himself onto the narrow cot and lay there. How had this happened to him? Why were things always happening to him in ways that he had a hard time understanding? Was it the same thing for everybody or just for him? He thought back to Jensi—Jensi always seemed to understand the world around him more clearly. Why would that be the case? What’s wrong with me? wondered Istvan again.
After a while he fell asleep.
* * *
He awoke to the sound of someone groaning. It took him a while to realize that it was him. His body hurt all over, and was stiff now. He sat up slowly holding his head. When he looked up, it was to see the gray man.
“You,” said Istvan.
“Me,” said the gray man.
“Are you real?” asked Istvan.
A flicker of amusement passed over the man’s face. “We decided earlier I was,” he said. “Don’t you remember?”
Istvan thought for a moment, then nodded. “But maybe I was wrong,” he said.
“Does it really matter if you were right or wrong?” asked the man. “Who else is there to talk to?”
“What do you want to talk about?” asked Istvan.
“You know what I want to talk about,” said the gray man. “Who told you to do what you did?”
Istvan just stared at him, then shook his head. “I’ve tried to explain it,” he said. “I can’t.”
“You won’t, you mean,” said the man.
“No,” said Istvan. “Can’t. I don’t know why.”
The man stared at him thoughtfully. “You really believe that, don’t you?” he said. Once Istvan nodded, he continued: “I’m afraid it doesn’t matter what you believe,” he said patiently. “The information is there. We’re going to get to it. Even if we have to break your skull open and filter it out bit by bit. And in the process, we’ll make sure that you never are able to do anything like what you did again.” He smiled. “We have a reputation for being very thorough. It is not an undeserved reputation.”
Istvan had an impulse to stand up and fall on the gray man, but he suppressed it. He was afraid that the same thing would happen that happened before, that the gray man would fold up again, into a gray box, and then unfold into someone or something else. He did not want to see that happen again. So he stayed there, waiting, part of him hoping the gray man would go away, part of him hoping he would say something else that would help him to understand better the situation he was in.
But when the gray man did not speak, Istvan finally cleared his throat. “What will happen to me next?” he asked.
“Normally you would go back into an interrogation room a few more times,” said the gray man. “Maybe a dozen times, maybe two. But what you did to my colleague has sped the process up a bit.”
“Your colleague?”
“The man you strangled,” he said. “Or rather, started to strangle and then cracked his skull.” He shook his finger at Istvan. “That wasn’t very nice of you.”
“But he told me to do it,” said Istvan, and then noticed the gray man was staring at him with delicately poised attention.
“Who told you?” he asked.
Istvan raised a hand and let it fall helplessly. Who had told him? At the time it seemed so clear, but now it seemed so confused. A man that was not a man, a figure made of smoke, a voice that perhaps was there, perhaps not. How was he to explain that? Particularly to a man whose skin looked wrong?
“I didn’t mean to,” he finally said.
“You didn’t answer my question,” said the gray man.
“I didn’t?”
The gray man smiled, shook his head. “No,” he said. “You didn’t.” He sighed and rose from his chair, pushing up with his hands on his knees. “No matter,” he said. “We’ll have you for a long time. I don’t need the answer today.”
The gray man started to move toward the door, then turned back. “You asked what would happen to you,” he said. “Next step, since you sped things up by murdering a man who was just trying to do his job, is for you to be taken off planet to a secure location, a place not subject to the laws in place here. That’ll make it easier to work on you.” He smiled. “Work on you is obviously a euphemism,” he said. “By the time we’re done with you, I don’t know how much of your mind will be left.”
He struck the door twice with the flat of his hand. “Then again,” he said, “it’s an open question how much of your mind is there now.” The
door groaned and slid open. “Be seeing you,” the gray man said, and slipped out.
11
But it was months, or what felt like months anyway, before he saw the gray man again. First they left him alone in his cell for a while without food or water, and then, once he was very weak, finally gave him water. Then they beat the bottoms of his feet with a steel rod until he couldn’t walk or even stand. They they put a bag over his head and poured water over it, so that it felt like he was drowning. They stripped him and left him shivering in a cold bare room and then yelled at him and insisted that he talk until he felt he had no choice but to retreat deeper and deeper into his body and watch it all from a distance.
Most of it he watched with horror, but their growing frustration at being unable to crack him he watched with a certain delight. How many days that went on, he couldn’t say for certain. But then abruptly it came to an end: they again put a sack over his head and bound his hands and hustled him careening down a corridor, laughing at him when he fell before yanking him back to his feet. Is it the same sack? he couldn’t help wondering. They put him in a vehicle again, but he didn’t think it was the same vehicle they had put him in before—it felt different somehow. The tone of the space, even through the sack, was different. There was someone next to him holding him firmly by one arm and someone on the other side of him holding him firmly by the other arm. They drove somewhere for a long time—maybe not all that long, suggested a voice somewhere inside of him and when he heard it he grunted with satisfaction into the hood. Welcome, voice, he thought. He felt one of the hands tighten on one of his arms. However long it was, eventually the vehicle stopped and he was rushed out of it and brought quickly into another place. At first he thought he was going into a building, but when they finally had him inside and seated and had removed the sack from around his head, he saw that he wasn’t in a building at all, but in some kind of aircraft. He was alone except for two guards.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
But the guards with him would not answer the question. They would not even look at him. There was a grating sound above them and he saw light begin to flood in and realized they were in the spaceport, and then the ship’s engines began to rise and they were lifting straight up and into the air. That, of everything he had experienced so far, turned out to be the thing most akin to a carnival ride. He could feel his stomach pushing down, threatening to leave his body, and his whole body felt heavy and he had a hard time breathing, and the voices in him drifted tingling down from his head before getting tangled within his legs. And then they were through the upper lock of the dome and the pressure began to diminish, to become less and less until it was almost nonexistent. Soon they were circling a space station, synchronizing speed with it and slowly coming closer until with a gentle thunk they had docked.
Dead Space: Catalyst Page 8
