Black Horizon

by Robert Masello

  God, what a night that had been: Jack nearly in shock on the cab ride uptown, then, once they got to his apartment, positively manic, throwing the clippings at her, waving a rolled-up theater program -- saying something about its having belonged to his mother -- insisting she believe him. It had been the scariest night of her life.

  And now, here she was, in bed with him... and not scared in the least.

  His fingers traced a larger circle, grazing the top of her buttocks.

  “I knew I could tell you anything,” he said, “and no matter what, you wouldn't run away from me, or laugh, or hate me for it. I knew I could chance it again, with you.”

  She wanted to reply, to say something tender and reassuring, but words were the last thing on her mind at that moment. His hand had gradually eased itself down, until he was brushing, back and forth, across the cheeks of her ass. She felt as though her skin were catching fire. When he trailed his fingertips even lower, into the crevice between her legs, touching the insides of her thighs, she dropped her head, her hair hanging down onto the rumpled sheets.

  “I gather you trust me, too,” he whispered.

  She laid herself flat against the sheet, her eyes closed, her head turned toward the door.

  She felt him stir on the bed beside her, then place both of his hands on her buttocks. He was straddling her, as she had once done him, that night she had massaged his shoulders. He was kneading her flesh between his fingers, and gradually opening her, more and more. He gently urged her legs farmer apart.

  “I wish there was more light,” he said, “to see you by.”

  He slipped his hands around and under her, lifting her ass in the air.

  “I wish there was more light,” he repeated, pulling her back against him now. “I wish... mere was... more light...”

  Nancy had no need for light; at that moment, she felt in need of nothing.

  At the front desk, Tulley seemed to pay no attention to the fact that they had come in together.

  In the elevator, holding hands, Nancy said, “With Sprague, we'd better be more circumspect.”

  “We're not there yet,” Jack said, glancing at the lighted panel above the door, then pulling her toward him. “We've got three more floors.” He put one arm around her waist, almost lifting her off her feet, and kissed her. The elevator bumped to a halt, one floor below Sprague's, and Jack had just let go of her when the doors slid open.

  Sprague was standing there, his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his lab coat, his feet tapping with impatience. His eyes flicked from one to the other; Nancy blushed and looked down at her feet. Jack wanted to tell her to look up and brazen it out. But it was already too late.

  “Morning,” Jack said. “I thought you always took -- “

  “The stairs? I saw the elevator was coming up.”

  The doors started to close automatically. Jack pressed the OPEN button. But Sprague stayed where he was.

  “I was coming upstairs to wait for you both,” he said. “I had no idea I'd be so fortunate as to catch you together.”

  Jack didn't like the sound of that “catch you together.”

  “Come out -- I have something to show you.”

  They stepped out of the elevator and followed Sprague down the hall. As they passed the steel doors behind which the lab animals were kept, Jack caught a faint whiff of that terrible stench he remembered from the week before. To his relief, they stopped at another door, on the opposite side of the hall, and Sprague pulled a large key from his pocket.

  “I've been working on this all night, for the past two nights,” he said, jiggling the key in the lock, then pushing the door open. “It's lucky I remembered it was here.”

  He flicked on the lights and ushered them into the room. There was a battery of machines -- to Jack, it looked sort of like the control panel in a recording studio -- set up on one side of a floor-to-ceiling glass wall. On the other side of the wall, where the lights had not yet been turned on, there was a large cylinder, no less than eight feet long, and painted a pale robin's egg blue.

  “It's a holdover from the hippie-dippy days,” Sprague said, with some disdain, “but I should be grateful it was never dismantled.”

  “What is it?” Nancy asked.

  “Before your time, perhaps.” He turned on the lights on the other side of the partition. “It's a sensory-deprivation tank.”

  Jack went to the glass and looked through. The cylinder was resting on two or three wrestling mats, and bolstered on all sides by cinder blocks. At the near end, two black hoses and several orange wires protruded from the shell, snaked their way across the linoleum-covered floor, and disappeared under the base of the room divider. Clearly, they hooked up, somehow, to the array of instruments in the control room.

  “As soon as you showed me those newspaper articles about your birth,” Sprague said to Jack, “I knew I would have to put you into the trance state again, to see what, if anything, we could dredge up. I wanted to regress you as far back as possible.” He came and stood just behind Jack, his reflection appearing, ghostlike, in the glass. “But I was never satisfied with the results we achieved upstairs. I always felt we had only scratched the surface of your potential.” He smiled and lifted his chin toward the cylinder. “Then I thought of this.”

  “Why will this be any better?’

  “For one thing, we'll deprive your senses, just as the name of the thing implies, of all external stimuli; you'll be able to concentrate entirely on your inner vision. Second” -- and here he sounded particularly triumphant -- “I have taken some pains to create, in terms of water temperature, salinity level, et cetera, a close facsimile of the fetal environment.”

  Jack turned to face him directly. Sprague's eyes were bloodshot, no doubt from his round-the-clock labors, but he seemed terrifically pleased with himself.

  “It'll be close as we can get to a womb,” Sprague explained. “Possibly that will help you to recall, or even recreate, what may have transpired during those formative months of your embryonic life.”

  “If I was just an embryo,” Jack said, “how could I be thinking, or noticing, anything -- much less remember it now?”

  Sprague's good humor abruptly vanished from his face; he hated to be challenged. “Don't question what you do not understand,” he said. “At only seven weeks after conception, you had hands that moved, and clearly defined fingers. The bones of your skull were already growing together to protect your incipient brain. At fifteen weeks, your sensory organs were almost completely formed. At sixteen, you were moving actively inside the womb; you had a mouth, lips, and eyes that could see. No one knows -- least of all you -- precisely what a human being is capable of, at any stage of its development. Let us not close our minds to any possibilities.”

  Jack glanced over at Nancy, who shook her head as if to say “What did you expect?”

  “Sorry,” he said, to placate Sprague, “I'll keep my mind open.”

  “Good. Then we can go forward with this right now.”

  “You mean, you want me in the tank now?”

  “I already told you, I've been up for two nights just getting it prepared. I didn't do all that just for the hell of it. Nancy,” he said, turning to her, “take off your coat, for God's sake. I'll want you to help me monitor the various readings. We're going to be recording all the usual things, and several others in addition. Jack, you can come with me.”

  He opened a door, also made of glass, at the far right side of the wall, and strode into the tank room. The air was warm and humid. “I want you to take a look at this first,” Sprague said, “so you can see what we're doing.”

  Jack stepped up after him, onto the wrestling mats. Sprague slipped his fingers into a small indentation on the top of the cylinder, then slid back a hatchway about three feet long. The inside of the tank smelled to Jack like the seashore.

  “The water in there is about twenty inches deep,” Sprague said, “and the salinity is enough to keep you afloat without touching the bo
ttom. You see that black disc in the side wall, near the top?” He pointed to something that resembled the mouthpiece on a telephone receiver. “That's a two-way microphone. You can hear us; we can hear you. The sockets you see around it” -- there were three -- “are for the heart and brainwave readings. The electrodes I attach to you will have jacks at the other end; you simply stick the red jack in the red socket, the blue jack in the blue, the black in the black. Get it”

  “Sounds simple enough.”

  “Good. Get undressed.”

  “What?”

  “Get undressed. Let's get started.”

  Jack glanced at the glass control booth, to see if Nancy could hear what Sprague had just said. She appeared to be trying not to laugh, so he assumed she had. Sprague caught his glance, and said, “Please -- let's not be ridiculous. Do you want me to tell Nancy to turn around?”

  She did, without Sprague's asking.

  Jack took off his clothes, laid them on the wrestling mat. “Everything?” he said, stopping at his underpants.

  “I think you'd be very uncomfortable in there with those on.”

  Jack stepped out of them, and Sprague removed from the voluminous pockets of his lab coat a roll of surgical adhesive tape and several of the electrode wires, which he attached, like leeches, to Jack's chest and temples. Finally, he added a thin pair of rubber ear muffs, which he fitted securely over Jack's entire ear.

  “Now,” Sprague said, “if you will step into the tank, gently -- I don’t want you to disturb the water any more than necessary -- we can get things underway.”

  Jack was almost glad to get into the tank; it had felt awfully strange to be standing there stark naked, with Sprague taping wires to him and Nancy keeping her back turned. (At one point, she had peeked over her shoulder and smiled.) The water was quite warm, and the bottom of the tank slippery smooth. Jack held onto the edge of the hatchway as he lowered himself in.

  “Before you lie back,” Sprague said, “stick the jacks in the sockets.”

  He watched as Jack did so, then, satisfied, said, “Lie down now.”

  Hesitantly, Jack lay back in the tank, allowing his legs to come up off the bottom, his head to rest in the cushion of salty water. As soon as he was lying flat, buoyed up in the center of the tank, Sprague said, “Fine -- are you comfortable?”

  “Yes,” Jack said, the water sloshing gently up onto his chest and under his chin. It drummed softly against the rubber sheaths covering his ears.

  “And you can hear me fine?”

  “No problem.”

  “Then I'll close this now.”

  Sprague slowly rolled the hatchway closed, shutting out the light. Jack found himself plunged, suddenly, into an absolute and total blackness. His first thought was that this was what it must be like to be buried alive, to see the lid of the coffin closing. But far from feeling “sensorily deprived,” he felt himself instead keenly aware -- of the warm, salty water bathing his limbs, of the gentle drumming sound in his ears, of the rich, deep blackness surrounding him. All his senses seemed to have been put on alert, alive to every nuance in his sealed environment, anxiously striving, in one way or another, to perceive.

  He had only been in the tank a minute or two -- or at least that was all it seemed -- when he heard Sprague's disembodied voice, speaking to him in the darkness. “If you can hear me,” the voice said, clear but with a tinny electric edge to it, “say yes.”

  “Yes... I can hear you,” Jack replied. He licked a speck of salt from his lips.

  “Good,” he heard Sprague saying, as if to himself, “the sound quality's fine.” There were a couple of taps, and clicking noises, and then Sprague said, “Jack, I want you to do the standard entry to the trance state. I'll count off the numbers for you; then, once you're under, we'll take it from there. Are you ready?”

  “Ready.”

  “One.”

  Jack rolled his eyes up, toward the top of his head.

  ‘Two.”

  He closed the lids.

  Three.”

  He exhaled slowly, and let his eyes, beneath the closed lids, relax and drop to the normal level. As he did so, he felt his whole body also relax, trained to it now by frequent repetition. He let his limbs float free, and languidly, in the water, and his mind, in its own way, do the same... float away, free of his body...

  In the control booth, Sprague flicked off the outgoing microphone; he would still be able to hear any sound from inside the tank, but Jack would not be disturbed by any noises he or Nancy made. Quickly, he pointed out to Nancy where the various controls and meters were, and told her what to keep track of. She seemed to have already figured out most of it; grudgingly, he admitted to himself that, as lab assistants went, she was smarter than most. In fact, if he came right down to it, she was the smartest he'd ever had.

  And judging from what he now knew was going on with Logan -- his initial suspicions, that day he'd seen them huddled over the light box, had been correct -- she was also the most alluring. So they had a love affair going? That was something he'd have to think over, at a less critical time. One way or another, there would be ramifications to it, for good or ill, and he would have to keep as well apprised of it as he could. He might even be able to work it to his own advantage, somehow.

  “The readings,” Nancy said, “are just beginning to slow down.”

  “How much?”

  “Still within normal range.” The heartbeat was approaching what would, under most circumstances, be the sleep state. But it was, as usual, the electroencephalograph readings that worried her. His brain activity had, for a brief time, soared; then, as she had now seen on these tests several times, it had begun its inexorable dip, toward the region where it had no business being. She had, from the very first, been alarmed by this precipitous decline But now -- especially with last night behind her -- she felt terrified. Sprague glanced over at the meters, drummed his fingers on the top of the console; then, apparently, he decided it was time to begin guiding Jack wherever he wanted him to go. He put a finger to his lips, to indicate Nancy should no longer speak to him, then flicked his microphone back on. Whether it was intentional or not, his voice dropped a register, and took on some of that mellifluous quality Nancy associated with FM disc jockeys.

  “Jack... I want you to remain utterly relaxed, totally at ease, and attend only to the sound of my voice.” For the next few minutes, he recited all the standard instructions and questions, and received from Jack the expected, monosyllabic replies. For Nancy, it was eerie to hear Jack's voice issuing from the microphone speaker; because of the tank, it had a hollow, almost sepulchral tone to it.

  “Jack... I want you now to think back, to when you were six years old, and in the first grade... I want you to think about something you liked about that, anything at all, and tell me what it was.”

  Sprague was just fishing, Nancy knew, asking any old question at all, on his way to the stuff he really wanted to know. Jack was saying something about a tetherball game, played in the schoolyard, and Sprague was just waiting for him to finish. The second he had, Sprague asked him to think back even further, to when he was three or four, and to tell him now something he remembered from those years, good or bad, it didn't matter, just something from the time before he had even gone to school. There was a longer pause, during which Nancy could swear she heard the gentle sloshing of the water in the tank -- looking out at it, it was hard to believe that Jack was floating, naked and in a trance, inside it -- and then Jack said something about Mam and a Ferris wheel, and swaying in the air, high above the beach at Asbury Park. This seemed to interest Sprague a little bit more, and he asked Jack to tell him why he thought this had made such a strong impression. “What is it,” he said, “you remember most about that ride on the Ferris wheel?”

  “I remember most...the dusk,’” Jack said. “It was the end of the day. I was looking out, over the ocean, at the horizon... It was the first time I'd seen something like that.”

  “Like the ho
rizon?”

  “Yes... you could actually see the way the earth curved ... the way the light was fading away at the edges... the way...”

  Sprague waited, then asked, “The way what?”

  “The way it... reminded me of something...”

  “Reminded you? Of something from even earlier in your life?”

  Nancy knew, though she was afraid to look, that Jack's EEC line would be rapidly flattening out... if it hadn't already. She looked -- and confirmed her worst fears. She tapped Sprague on the shoulder and pointed to the printout; Sprague seemed totally unsurprised.

  Returning to the microphone, he asked again, “What did the sight of the horizon, at dusk, remind you of, Jack?”

  “Of... I don't know... somewhere I'd been already...”

  “But you said you'd never seen anything like it before.”

  “Not, you know, in real life... not since I'd been born...”

  The blackness in the tank had yielded, gradually, almost imperceptibly, to a somber gray. At first, Jack had thought his eyes were simply becoming accustomed to the dark, but then he had realized that even with them closed, the same gray light, cloudy and roiling, filled his vision. It was like wandering through an immense steam bath, without walls, without boundaries of any sort, seeing no one, but aware, nonetheless, of not being alone.

  Aware, in fact, of multitudes.

  But wherever he looked, the shapes -- faces? -- which had almost coalesced, seemed instantly to evaporate again, into the same gray, misty vapor The vapor seemed composed of those evanescent forms, of their strange and unspoken longings. He felt, as he passed through it, that the mist fairly clung to him, with invisible fingers, and parted only reluctantly. He knew what he was looking for, and knew, as well, that it would be looking for him.

  When, he wondered, would they meet?

  Sprague's voice came to him, over the tank speaker, sounding as it would on a transatlantic call -- muted, submerged, oddly delayed. “Jack,” he was saying, “where are you now? Tell me what you're seeing, where you are.”