Blackbird

by Michael Fiegel

  “And if I don’t help …” It wasn’t really a question. He let the ellipsis hang there for a few seconds as he reached for my coffee mug, now abandoned, swirled the dregs around and watched the coffee whirlpool. Poison, damn it. Why did I always get the good ideas when it was too late?

  “We can let you live, because you don’t know as much as you think you know. You think you’re special, important, but you’re not, except for this one thing. For what you can do, right now. You can’t hurt us. But Christian …”

  And there it was at last: the safety was off. Finger on the trigger. Squeezing.

  “We can hurt you,” he said.

  Bang.

  It was the eyes, I think, that hammered it home. They say when someone dies the light goes out of their eyes, and the light had been gone from his for a while. They were cold, burnt-out, dead deer eyes. Nick’s eyes. Black holes. And they sucked up the last of my hope.

  My cell vibrated. A text.

  “Is it him?” he asked. Of course it was.

  “What’s it say?”

  “He wants to meet for dinner.”

  I felt sick as I said the words. Could hardly believe they’d come so easily. But maybe that was how to do this. Quick and easy, gulp it down. Throw up later. Fall off the ledge and pray for a haystack without needles.

  “Well that’s convenient.” Words wet, like a hot tongue in my ear. “When?”

  I hesitated, but not long enough to ever feel good about it. Ever.

  “Thirty minutes,” I said.

  He smiled. “Tell him yes.”

  Second thoughts chased each other around my skull, stirring up memories of what Edison had done. Pain. Fear. Danger. Attempted murder. It was a solid argument. It seemed so easy. But then, why couldn’t it be? Why hadn’t I done it before?

  Was it fear, before that moment? Or was it only fear now?

  “Are you going to kill him?” I asked.

  Dark, cold eyes, black-in-white-in-black, like a hungry bird of prey.

  “No,” he said.

  I pretended it was true.

  Back

  01/22/2017

  Darkness. Smell of alcohol. My ears are ringing, like after a gunshot, but this is not that. This is drugs. I have been drugged, and I am coming out of it, or going into it, or—if they know what they’re doing—I am right in the middle of it. It takes a while to focus my thoughts, but as the fuzziness fades, I start to hear other sounds. Mouth noises. What are they called. Words.

  “Hello, Thomas.”

  I look around, see dark. Blindfold? No, my eyes are bruised shut. Try to move. To speak.

  “Ask your question—” I manage with a foggy tongue. Saliva runs down my chin. At least I think that is what it is. I cannot tell.

  “I just did,” the voice replies.

  I try to get a sense of time and space, but everything loops back in a dizzy circle. Who knows me as Thomas? I feel like I am falling forever, sideways.

  “Did I answer?” I manage.

  “No. Not yet.”

  I force a smile and …

  • • •

  … I am sixteen again. Even though I was ignorant of the world I knew better than to be surprised about them picking me up so quickly. I had not covered my tracks, did not know what I was doing, had not developed the instincts. My father’s money was easy to follow, and I was even easier to tail. So when they got me, threw me in a van, and drove me off to who knew where, I was not at all shocked. Scared, but not shocked. I think part of me wanted them to find me. Dared them to. After all, what was the worst they could do to me? Kill me?

  Yeah, I was naïve back then, too.

  “Where is your father?”

  “I have nothing to say to you,” I said. “I have rights.”

  He smiled. And then he showed me that I was wrong about rights. I guess I expected it, having been hit by my father for much the same attitude, but I did not expect it to hurt quite so bad. This man was remarkably good at causing a large amount of pain very rapidly and with very little obvious effort. Better than my father, even.

  That first day, they tortured me for an hour or so. I thought that was bad enough, but then they gave me a break to think about it, and came back a few hours later. It went on like that for three entire days, alternate waves of pain and isolation, tied to a chair the entire time without food or water, until I started hallucinating. And that was when the real torture began …

  • • •

  … or ended. I cannot be sure. Am I here or there? Then or now? My arms tingle, from where they either started or stopped pumping drugs into me. My mouth is dry, my eyes even more so. I force them open, painfully, and look around. Most of what was inside of me is now apparently soaked into the towels beneath my bare feet, although the lack of a strong odor means either I have not wet myself or they have been cleaning up. I am naked, but that tells me nothing. If I could feel my chin for stubble … but I cannot, since I am handcuffed to the chair. Savages.

  There is no blood anywhere I can see. I suppose that much is good. I try to lift parts of myself up to check for damage and pain, and I feel a lot of the latter, signifying a lot of the former. Hands hurt, knuckles raw. Both arms are likely broken. Humerus in each, is my guess. Likely a shoulder dislocation, too, possibly an elbow. There is an IV in my left arm, and I wonder if they have been dripping me painkillers. I hope not, because if I am on something now and it hurts this bad, I cannot fathom what this is going to feel like when it wears off.

  I try to remember a time when it was this bad, but I have never let it get to this point, especially not that first time. I told them everything I knew so they would stop hurting me. I assumed, back then, they wanted something my father had known, like maybe where he had gotten so much money. I had no idea, so I just told them everything I could think of. At the time, I thought it was stupid and weak of me to spill my guts about everything just because they had withheld food and water for a few days. But what was stupid—in retrospect—was holding out that long. Nothing I had to say was of any consequence any longer. My father would have been useful, but he was dead. You could not get information out of a dead man.

  This is why I am certain I have not given up any information now. I am alive because I still have value. I still know something they do not. That gives me some time to work with.

  I take a few deep breaths, try to focus as the drugs distill out of my bloodstream. I am not in a basement, not at a black site, but in a motel room, a fifty-dollar-a-night sort of operation in the sort of place that does not really mind a few screams from next door, or an extra stain on the carpet afterward. Probably not government, then. At least not openly. Government-trained, though? That much is possible. The lack of torture tells me that they are at least current on technique. Sometime between Abu Ghraib and Gitmo someone figured out that when you torture people all they really tell you is what you want to hear. Waste of time.

  The arms: that was probably not torture. Possibly accidental, perhaps a spiral fracture as they were dragging me around, after they’d clubbed me in the back of the head and choked me out in the diner. Everything looks clean, but of course it could be a lot worse than it looks: spiral could take months to heal. Nowadays, they barely even cast you for these sorts of breaks, just sling it and send you home with drugs. Lots and lots of drugs.

  Unlike torture, drugs do work, especially with hypnosis, which has been all the rage these past few years despite the stigma. You cannot hypnotize an unwilling subject, make him do or say things he normally would not, but add some drugs, some abuse, and now you can. They know what parts of the brain do what, now, can slip in behind and get inside, make you trust them, and then before you know it you are saying things you did not intend to say.

  Yes, you can lie on drugs, under any interrogation, which is why they did not call it truth serum, not even back in my youth, except in movies. It is only partly truth serum. It is up to the interrogator to sift fact from fiction, and here I am guessing they have more t
han an outline; they have a first draft, and now it is not really about finding out the story, but editing out the fiction with their big red pens, removing extra commas, fixing run-on sentences. Occasionally, editing the edits, unsure. Stet.

  I wonder what I might have told them so far. I wonder if it was true. Memory is faulty, and I have been half-conscious through most of this. I wonder if the lies I have been telling myself have become so ingrained that it is what I spat back at them under the influence. Mostly though, I wonder if I can get something to eat. The drugs are really wearing off now, and with a better sense of time and place, my stomach has decided to remind me it exists.

  Through the window curtain, I can just make out what looks like a man and woman, dressed like tourists, jeans and T-shirts from SeaTac, goofy hats. Second floor, looks like. I can hear planes. I yell in a mostly not angry sort of way, and someone arrives after a few seconds, not from outside, but rather stepping in through the door that joins this room to the next one over.

  “Problem?” asks the man. A professional, I can tell immediately.

  “I need food,” I say. “You want me to talk, feed me.” Like some sort of trained bird.

  The man walks over and removes my handcuffs before helping me stumble over to the bed. I am still dizzy, and the pain is excruciating. Knee, ankle. Sprains, tears. Bruises. While this happens, I tell him what I want, and he checks his phone to see what might be in walking distance. Once he tells me, I give him my order, from memory. For a moment he looks at me, as if to question how I know the menu so well, but he does not, just writes the order down on the back of a receipt, then takes a twenty out of his wallet and slides both of them under the outside door, knocking twice. Through the curtain I see the woman walk over, then disappear again. The door never opens. Definitely professionals. Or at least professional enough.

  The guy walks back over and seats himself facing me.

  “How do you feel, Thomas?” he asks, removing the IV needle from my arm. I barely notice, too busy immediately parsing that name, trying to figure out who uses it. But at this point it is completely moot. Everything I knew blew up many months ago.

  “Jesus had a better time on the cross,” I say. The closest I will let myself get to mentioning Xtian here: quoting something she said to me once. I will not drag her into this. If they know about her, if they have her, I will find out eventually anyway.

  “Sorry about the arms,” he says. “I can get you some morphine.”

  “Fentanyl?” I ask. I consider saying no outright, but I am not a sadist. Nor do I want the needle stuck back in me if I can help it.

  “We have Oxy,” he says. I consider, then nod, and he goes rifling around in the room. “I’ve only got tens. How many you want?”

  “A few. What do you want from me?”

  “Everything you know,” he says, filling a plastic cup with tepid water.

  “Like how to cook rice?”

  “Sure. Why not? We have a lot of time.”

  After he feeds me a few Oxycodone, he helps me into a button-down shirt, loose shorts and sandals—are we going somewhere, or is this an effort to help me keep my modesty?—then helps get my arms slung. This confirms my shoulder theory. Tears run down my face. Humiliating, far more than the nudity was, but not as much as trying to choke it back would be.

  We talk a bit, but it is casual, pointless. I am in too much pain, too hungry and dizzy and everything to cooperate. By the time he is finished, and I am somewhat recovered, there is a knock on the door. For a moment I wonder if they plan to feed me fries under the door, but he just walks over, unlocks it, and swings it halfway open.

  “There was a line,” says a female voice. He does not reply, just snatches the bag, shuts the door, and locks it again. I get the feeling that door is not opening again unless someone dies.

  He walks over to the bed, drops the bag, and stares at me. I shrug to make my point, though it sends pain burning up both arms. He sighs, but since he is playing good cop today, he sits down and dumps out the bag to feed me my burger and fries …

  • • •

  … which is what I remember most about that first week with them, as they dragged a much younger me around between low-end hotels and high-end motels, chasing every lead my stream of information led them to. Most of it dead ends, but certainly some of it got them something. I knew little about what my father had been involved with, but from what I was seeing now, I had a pretty good idea. Through it all, they spared every expense. Every place we slept was a dive, and every meal was fast food. I swear the stuff set up home in my taste buds, crowding out everything else.

  Then one morning, just like nothing, I woke up in an Ashland motel and they were gone. I had told them everything they wanted to know, we had finally come full circle back to where my family had once lived, and my utility to them had been expended.

  Or so I thought at the time. Something about me must have intrigued them. Maybe my willingness to cooperate, or my eagerness to learn, or the fact that I really did not seem to care what was going to happen to anyone my information led them to. Whatever the case, when I got out of bed there was a twenty-dollar bill next to the phone, folded into a rectangle so the serial number was just about the only thing visible. Thinking this relevant, I memorized it, then broke the twenty on breakfast at the place across the street: a muffin sandwich with egg and cheese, and a black coffee, after which I became violently ill. At the time I blamed the coffee …

  • • •

  … although now, I am well aware of my limitations and always order appropriately. I look around at what is spilled on the bed and grow concerned. Is it what I ordered? I do not eat at this particular place that often, but the wrapper looks different. I was still under the influence when I ordered, and this place likes to slather mayo on everything. But what can I say? Nothing. They do not know about this limitation of mine. I have made sure of that. Everyone who does is dead, save one. I cannot give that away, cannot afford to give them that leverage, now.

  I try to taste it as he crams the burger in my mouth but I can never tell. Mayo does not taste like anything to me, just bland sticky sandwich glue. Was there any on there? I start to sweat. Is this how I go? Now that would be ironic. Or would it? I forget the definition.

  “Okay,” he says. “Let’s start with everything you know about cells.”

  For the next few minutes, I rattle it all off. About Nick, about everybody. I start with DC and the subway, and then jump ahead to Buffalo and the job on the lake, where Joe came into the picture. I talk about San Francisco, and what I have assumed about Nick’s plot. This is where he gets particularly interested in what I have to say, which does not surprise me.

  Whoever this guy is, he does not write anything down; no doubt this is being recorded. Next room over, probably. Shotgun mic, cameras. This place was prepared ahead of time. This was planned, months before.

  “You know what Nick was up to?” he asks. I do not, not for sure, but I tell him what I pieced together. That Nick’s first job for us was a hit on someone else within the organization. That a new cell moved into the dead guy’s house within a few weeks, and Nick sent a patsy in there and then betrayed them. That he captured and then tortured that person for information they did not have. Then I showed up and spoiled the party.

  “Who was it?” he asks. “Who did Nick betray?”

  “I knew him as Josh,” I say. “He was dead when I got there.”

  There’s a moment of silence, then, and I wonder what he already knows. Certainly he knows that Xtian exists—they were at the diner. But it is possible all they knew is that I often went there for dinner. For all I know, she got away. For all I know, she is dead. But it matters not, either way. They can torture me all they like, but I will not drag her into this mess. And I certainly will not tell them about how I found her, broken and—

  My throat begins to itch.

  “What was Nick up to?” he asks. And this is a question that I, too, would like answered. I tell hi
m the truth: I have no idea. And I find myself parroting Joe’s last words to me, which sickens me. But the guy had a point.

  “It was just business,” I say. “Just a job.”

  “Any guesses?” he asks.

  My guts churn, but I swallow hard and keep talking. I give him my theory, which is unsatisfying but is probably true: that whatever Nick was trying to do, it wouldn’t make a difference. This organization (if it can be called that) is set up so everyone operates within distinct cells, with big thick walls, independent operators, plausible deniability. Everything is autonomous and separate. You can be in two cells, or three, or more, consecutively, just never simultaneously. No overlap. And you never try to move up the food chain, never touch other cells. You do that, you get cell death. Suicide or murder, depending on your point of view. A problem that solves itself. Damage control.

  Nick broke the rules I tell him, and Nick paid for it. With his life.

  What I do not say is that I think this guy interrogating me wants me to help him do the same thing. To build upon the fallen foundation of Nick’s would-be empire. If they were just another ordinary cell, they would know better than to be asking these questions. But that just tells me what they are not, not what they are. They might be some new cell that does not yet know any better, or they could be that theoretical brain behind everything trying to regain control of an experiment gone wrong. The they behind the them. Could be Hezbollah for all I know. FBI. CIA. Sinn Fein. Al-Qaeda. Doctors Without Borders.

  But even as I try to puzzle it out, I realize that it is all pointless. I have never cared, and caring now will not make one shred of difference. Regardless of who they are or what they are about, I already know what is going to happen. I can feel it in my guts, in my throat, in my buzzing head. The room spins, my ears ringing, my vision dimming, and not from drugs.

  At least, I think, I will not be dying on a toilet …

  • • •