by Alexa Day
He wasn’t supposed to know when the committee was getting to him. They’d certainly tried hard to maintain the illusion of secrecy, but he’d figured them out easily enough. Knowing when the bell was scheduled to toll for him should have made him feel better. His colleagues had spent the week either worrying about facing them or trying to sort out their documentation.
And they didn’t have anything to worry about. He had to explain how Subject 3258 had gone from hesitant wallflower to vibrant playgirl overnight. He couldn’t produce Grace’s tapes without revealing what they’d been up to, but not producing the tapes meant explaining what had happened to them.
Reluctantly he opened his eyes and looked at his pencils and notepad on the coffee table, next to his glass. He’d come so far from the days when he thought everything was under control. He could still account for all the pills, but that seemed like a hollow victory too.
He slowly rubbed his eyes before reaching for the legal pad and a pencil. Enough stalling. What had he learned?
He tapped the page with the pencil. First things first. He wrote, Ongoing experimentation demonstrates intended results.
It looked like a lie. He drew a neat line through it.
Ongoing experimentation seems to have produced the desired results.
Better. He made two columns, wrote the word Benefits over the left one. Beneath that, he wrote, freedom and increased appetite.
That stuff really makes you crazy, John.
The memory of her voice, describing just how well the pills worked, only reminded him of her tears. She wouldn’t let him comfort her and maybe that was a testament to what a world without oxytocin looked like.
And maybe it’s because you’re the asshole who’s turned her life upside down.
He sighed and looked away from the order of his notes to the ceiling. He’d started this. He’d put them in this position, on a long spiral to God-knew-where.
Her tears had burned hot on his fingers. He’d done that.
He faced the stark lines of his handwriting. Everything made sense there on the page, and that knowledge felt like a kick to his chest.
He drew a single line across the page. Blank space waited beneath the newly created border and he began to fill it quickly.
He could still make this right.
Chapter Eight
John stared at the door to his office. Right now it stood open just enough to admit the occasional sounds of the elevator down the hall and people headed toward it in pursuit of their weekend plans. He’d have to shut it if he meant to follow through with his plan to close his eyes for five minutes. He wouldn’t even have to stand. He could just roll his desk chair over to the door, push it closed and then roll back to his desk and let the five minutes begin.
No, he knew better. That five minutes would turn into the full night’s sleep he’d denied himself last night. He’d gotten through most of the day on about four hours of sleep, and fatigue wrapped the day in a surreal hyper-reality. Too-bright colors, right out of a kids’ TV show, assaulted his weary eyes. The building’s climate control made a loud, steady rumble like the moving of a distant herd. All day the weightless click of his computer keyboard had been strangely loud. He yawned and when his eyes watered and burned, he reached under his glasses to rub them.
By midmorning, the audit committee had fallen behind schedule, and now at six thirty he was still waiting for his turn with them. No doubt the committee thought he was a good way to round out the week. At first glance, nothing in his documentation would even slow them down on the way to the weekend. They couldn’t know how wrong they were. He just hoped he could keep his defenses up long enough to get through whatever they had to dish out. In his condition, he was hardly capable of guile.
He couldn’t stop glancing over at the woven texture of the envelope beneath his desk lamp. Something about the surface of the paper made John want to touch it, to reassure himself that it was real and that he really meant to go through with the plans he’d committed to last night.
He’d finally distilled those plans to a handful of easy steps. Finish the memo. Sleep on it. Reread the memo. Send Neil the need-to-talk email. It was almost too easy. Like falling off a log.
Or jumping from a building.
All this waiting complicated things. Waiting to be called by the committee. Waiting for his boss to respond to his email. Waiting was sleepy work. At least he’d gotten through most of the day without actually dozing off at his desk.
A narrow window appeared in the bottom corner of his computer screen, signaling the arrival of an email from the executive assistant upstairs. He probably had forty emails from her, all scheduling and rescheduling his appointment with the auditors. This one had no subject line, but he could read the two sentences in the little window before it disappeared. Ready for you. Come on up.
Alertness gradually returned as he rose from the chair and gathered up his legal pad, some of his notes and the envelope. He went to the doorway and turned to face his office. Would he still be here next week? John hadn’t quite managed to shake off the worry before his boss appeared at his shoulder. Turning to face him was a herculean effort. “Hey, Neil. I was just headed up there.”
Neil glanced down at his watch. “Damn, it’s late. Why does stuff like this always run so late?” He leaned against the doorway opposite John and, heedless of the committee for a moment, they both gazed into the office as if it were a zoo enclosure. Was the tiger asleep? Hiding? Was he even there?
“I’m sorry I didn’t get back to you when you emailed me,” Neil said. “What did you want to talk about?”
“Just this.” John gave him the envelope. “I didn’t want to email it to you.”
“Hold on,” said Neil, holding it as if it were full of those spring-loaded toy snakes people used to cram into fake cans of snacks. “What is it?”
“It’s not a resignation.” John chuckled, but it was a dry, gallows sound, empty and lifeless. “You might want me to write you one, though, after you read that.”
Neil sighed and John almost felt bad for him. He’d probably had a few unwanted surprises this week too. “Can’t you just tell me what it is?”
John looked at his watch again and shook his head. “I should go. It’s late already and they’re waiting for me upstairs.”
As he moved off toward the elevator, John could hear his boss opening the envelope. So much for waiting. “We are going to talk about this though,” Neil said.
“Yeah, we are.” John glanced back one last time to see his boss pulling out the memo. “I promise.”
* * * * *
The audit committee was almost exactly what he’d expected. Almost.
He knew the auditors had taken up residence upstairs in the corporate conference rooms on the pretext of keeping the cinderblock interview rooms downstairs reserved for interviews. Over the course of the audit, they’d ensconced themselves here in the comfortable chairs, with their expensive lunches and panoramic views of the parking lot. According to the office grapevine, the auditors pored over all the files at their leisure, adhering to no discernible schedule, rubberstamping and returning to storage the files that didn’t generate suspicion or curiosity. The most troublesome of the files ended up in a set of Bankers Boxes along the far wall of the room, the side opposite the credenza where the auditors kept their carafes of water and the real ceramic coffee cups.
Of course the gossip left out the important specifics, such as just how many files had ended up in those boxes. So when John made his way past the executive assistant’s unattended desk and pushed open the heavy door, his gaze shot to the left side of the conference room. For all their trouble, the committee had only deemed two boxes of files worthy of additional scrutiny. The idea warmed John in a way he recognized as irrational.
The bigger surprise waited on the other side of the table, where a man and a woman rose to greet him. He’d expected a firing squad. His colleagues had reported facing a panel of six. He wasn’t sure what to ma
ke of the fact that his career lay in the hands of two people.
The man, St. Cloud, greeted him with a stentorian voice and a handshake that was as warm and humid as a garment steamer. The woman introduced herself as Davenport and offered him a prim, restrained smile and a limp handshake. John grinned through his confusion and took a seat, not waiting to be invited. All they needed to know was that he was happy to meet them and to move through this process. The sooner they began, the sooner this would be over.
The table was just wide enough for him to make out the identification numbers on the files. 2463 and 1541—the worst of his problem children. The third one was no surprise.
Subject 3258.
Davenport started up with an obviously canned routine about how this was not supposed to be an adversarial process. “I’m sure you know about what we’ve been working on up here. We’ve been meeting with your teammates to gather some data about…well, your data. We’re all on the same side here. We just need you to answer a few questions for us.” Her soft voice only further convinced John that they’d choreographed this whole setup. Sure. We were all on a quest together to find the truth, and when it came time to fire someone, we’d be all smiles about it.
“Now, these are just a…a sample of your files.” St. Cloud used a dramatic pause for emphasis where another man might have used a shift in volume. “These are just places we’re finding…irregularities. Not the sort of thing we’ve been seeing across the board—people in existing relationships, consistently inadequate reporting, those sorts of things. What we’re finding here are more unusual problems.”
John smiled. He could play this collegial game too. “Sure. Anything I can do to help.”
“Great,” said Davenport. Her precise pronunciation made everything she said sound more formal. “Let’s start with this one.” She opened the file for 2463 and spread its contents out, removing John’s interview notes from their clip on the right side of the folder. “This one here. The notes for her eventually cut off, but before that, they become very sporadic.” She flipped through the notes until she came to a red tape flag. “And see—here, the interview is so short.”
“Can I see it?” Davenport slid John the file and he took his time, trying to ignore the auditors’ stares as he flipped through the pages. John remembered how frustrated he’d been, the aggravation of being stood up and the endless rescheduling. He remembered the growing suspicion that she just didn’t care, the quiet fears that maybe no one would ever care about this as he did. But he remembered that irritation without reliving it, as if he were watching himself in a movie.
Was the fatigue causing this? Or was it the knowledge that his boss was reading and reacting to the memo? Whatever the cause was, John welcomed the detachment in the wake of all the turbulence.
“Right. This one dropped out—out of school—but before that, there were a lot of missed appointments. I don’t know what was behind that exactly, since I don’t know why she dropped out.” John slid the file back into the center of the table. “We were fortunate to have gotten the sample back.”
The two of them busied themselves with notes for what felt like several minutes before Davenport asked, “And does this happen often?”
John maintained his poker face, but the urge to be a wiseass was too much to resist. “Subjects dropping out of school?”
“No,” answered Davenport, looking up from the paperwork. “Just disappearing with the sample.”
John looked upward at the ceiling and pretended that he had to try to remember. “No, I don’t think anyone’s ever just left with the sample. None of mine, anyway.”
St. Cloud gave him a skeptical look before putting the file back together and stamping the jacket. One down, two to go. He pulled the second one, the file for 1541, off the short stack. “This subject had…three interviews.” He unclipped John’s notes and thumbed carefully through them. “Your notes show she had a total of twenty-four pills.”
John sighed and bit his lip. He’d known this one would be trouble too. “We did have problems with her. You’ll also see from the file that those three appointments are each about eight weeks apart.”
St. Cloud frowned at the pages. “Did she…account for each of the pills when you did see her?”
“That was part of the trouble.” John’s frustration with 1541 rose to mind again. She’d disappeared shortly before Grace came to bail him out. “By the time she actually made it to an interview, she couldn’t recall a lot of what had taken place. Her memory of each individual encounter wasn’t reliable.”
“Did you coach her on the importance of keeping the interview appointments?” asked Davenport. “Or keeping accurate records?”
“Repeatedly,” said John. “I think things got worse whenever I raised the subject.”
“Why didn’t you drop her?” St. Cloud asked.
John swallowed his annoyance. “The project has historically had difficulties retaining subjects,” he explained. “We needed as much data as we could get.”
“Even unreliable data?” Davenport glared at him. Not so easygoing after all. But then the prospect of unreliable data would probably get his dander up too.
“I had no reason to believe all the data was so unreliable as to warrant discarding it altogether. Earlier data might not be as specific as the later accounts, but the later material, if you look at it, is more usable.” They couldn’t be hearing this for the first time. By now someone had to have mentioned that when the subjects disappeared for a long time, their accounts of their most recent encounters were usually the most usable. “We’re asking for very subjective material. The subject’s memory of what happened—how she felt, what she experienced—is often as important as what actually happened. Sometimes it’s more important.”
“But you have no way of knowing what happened to all the pills.” St. Cloud put his elbows on the table.
“I never have any way of knowing that. So far as I was told, she was using each of the pills but couldn’t remember with much clarity what happened with all of them.”
St. Cloud shook his head in apparent dismay as he put the file back together, his choppy movements betraying his annoyance. Welcome to my world, my fastidious friends.
Then Davenport slid over the file John most dreaded dealing with, and the strange, detached calm that had settled over him began to burn away.
“With 3258,” she said, unfastening the interview notes, “it seems you have the opposite problem.”
Careful not to betray any additional interest, John waited to see what direction the questions took. Last night, as he’d been making plans for the day’s events, he’d considered all the possible avenues the auditors would take, all the worst-case scenarios. Would the interviews somehow look different when Grace entered the picture? How different would they be?
The memo in Neil’s hands downstairs wouldn’t completely free him from responsibility for this if things went as badly as he knew they could. Even with all his efforts in planning and prevention, he couldn’t fight off the apprehension that made his skin tingle with a sudden chill.
“It seems this subject is one of your most regularly scheduled,” said Davenport, “but your notes are less complete than with the others. Here the time stamps you’ve put in your notes reflect a lengthy interview, but you’ve only got a couple of paragraphs of observations.” She pointed at one of the tape flags before sliding over a slightly thicker stack of notes than either of the ones they’d reviewed so far.
She was looking at an interview from before Grace had started participating, an interview with the original 3258. He hadn’t taken much down because there hadn’t been much to record. That lengthy interview had been more like interrogating an enemy agent.
“But then later, the amount of documentation is much higher. Several pages from one interview, for instance,” St. Cloud chimed in. John wondered if they’d both always been especially interested in this file, or if his frustration with the last file was eroding his patience.
“Didn’t you do that before?” asked Davenport. “You know, when you first started out together.”
“Yes, it’s part of the protocol when the subject first signs on. This was more of a reeducation about the process.” John took one last look at his handwriting in the file, let the memory of that first interview with Grace pass smoothly through his mind. “In this case, the effort really paid off. That interview includes a lot more material, like the one after that.” He sighed. “We might have gotten this sort of information from everyone, if only we’d educated all the subjects like this, repeating what we needed as necessary.”
That seemed to strike a chord with St. Cloud. John waited while he and Davenport finished their notes. He’d gone over Grace’s file after each of the interviews, carefully laying out everything that might have drawn the auditors’ attention. Nothing had escaped his scrutiny. He’d even checked out differences in handwriting so subtle that no one else would have seen them. If things like this were all they noticed, he was home free. It meant a lot of worrying for nothing, but he didn’t mind that so much.
“This is still a very conservative part of the country,” John went on, trying to fill the cumbersome silence. He pushed his notes back across the table. “Any sampling we do here is going to reflect that. A lot of women don’t want to talk about this with anyone, especially if they’re enjoying their experiences. We were very fortunate with 3258.”
St. Cloud sighed and began to reassemble the file. “This is a conservative place, you’re right.” He’d lowered his voice a bit. Someone standing outside probably wouldn’t be able to hear every word. “Maybe in another place, we wouldn’t be having the same trouble.”
Regret settled in John’s chest. He’d wished for the same thing in the past, more than once, but at the same time, he loved being involved with Impulse. The thought that its development might be moved away from him wounded him, even if it did serve the project best.
