Livy didn’t interrupt, so Atryx pressed on.
"Focused pain is the key to open the door. But until this point, I couldn’t find anyone who could withstand the sheer amount of pain necessary to turn the tumblers. Then I understood. I wasn’t looking for a single person to internalize all that pain. I mean, it’s too much. It would—and did—kill the average person fairly quickly, before we got so much as a peek.
"What I needed was a choir of pain, a whole host of people. And a choir director to unify and harmonize the entire thing. As I said, that might be you. I hope it is. But remember…pain. It’s all about pain."
He took a deep breath, and Livy could feel him positively vibrate next to her.
"Even with a choir and a director, the music has to be correct. Just the right pitch, the proper intensity. What could we do to produce the absolute apex of human pain and suffering without killing the singers prematurely?"
Livy now shifted in her seat. As keen as he was to share his secret, she was eager too. To get this soliloquizing out of the way so that they could get onto whatever the fuck they were getting on to.
"I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that you’re as much a student of Native American studies as you were sleep or cognitive physics."
"I’d say that’s a safe bet," Livy said.
"Fine. Back in the heyday of this country, the Lakota had a charming ritual known as the Sun Dance. Variations of it were shared across various plains tribes, but it was generally a ritualized way for young men to offer sacrifice for the wellbeing of the family or community. Most of the rituals centered on a trial of physical endurance. Some of them, the ones we’re most concerned with, took it further.
"These involved scarification, blood-letting, or other methods—in addition to good, old-fashioned hallucinogenics—in order to produce enough pain to invoke a trance state. Some of those methods generated sustained levels of pain most people in Euro-indigenous cultures can’t even begin to contemplate. Where we’re going tonight, I'll share with you exactly what I mean."
The car, as if to punctuate Atryx’s words, began bouncing on its springs, crazily rocking the passengers inside. Livy suspected that they had left whatever main road they’d been on and were now on some backroad far from campus.
Evidently, the basement of the Cognitive Physics building wasn’t even enough to shield what he was doing out here.
For that, he needed the kind of buffer zone that only wilderness could offer.
#
The car crunched to a stop, and Livy heard doors open. Hands took her left shoulder gently, guided her out. When she stood by the side of the car, those same hands removed her blindfold.
It was probably around 11 p.m. They were somewhere far enough from the campus that the dull haze of the city lights was muted. The stars shone overhead crisp and clear, and the crazy cicadas filled the air with their perpetual buzzing.
Livy blinked a few times, not really from bright lights, more from the tightness of the blindfold being removed from her head. But there were lights there in the darkness, large security fixtures perched on the top of a huge warehouse-like building whose corrugated steel walls reached at least two stories into the night.
Turning, she looked past the top of the car she’d just climbed from. A narrow gravel road, like a grey string in all that black, twisted the way she’d assume they’d come. All around was a dark, midnight green ocean of cornstalks, rustling in the gentle breeze. The light from the building fell onto the first row or so of the field, illuminating it like a Bierstadt painting.
The building itself was entirely reminiscent of the long, bland hallways she’d walked with Atryx. No windows and only one plain, unmarked door. No signs, no bright colors, no logos or indication of any kind as to who owned this building or what transpired inside.
That, as Livy was about to learn, was entirely by design.
#
The single door opened onto an antechamber small enough to surprise Livy. Only Atryx and Livy went inside, the driver stayed inside the car, and the man who’d sat next to her remained just outside the door.
Inside, a concrete pad and a flight of metal stairs that climbed just one level. The interior of the stairwell was lit by few fixtures and, in another detail that seemed surreal, an illuminated Exit sign above the door they’d just come through.
"No elevators here. After you," said Atryx, ever the gentleman.
He followed her, and Livy felt that same aura of barely repressed excitement bleeding off him. He was evidently anxious to show off something housed in this farmer’s field warehouse, but with all his talk, she had no idea what it could be.
Their footfalls clacked on the metal steps, reverberating in the narrow chamber. At the top, another plain door, this one with a card reader attached, though Atryx never bothered with a card. Maybe with his seniority he didn’t need to. As he approached, the mechanism simply clacked, and the lock turned green.
Through the door was another of the repetitious, long hallways, this one sheathed in the same corrugated steel the building was constructed. Several doors broke the monotony, but Atryx walked to the very end, probably a football field’s length. There another door, which clacked welcomingly as they neared.
He drew it open onto a good-size room, larger than the operating theater where they’d run the tests on Livy. It was crowded with computer gear and monitors and other electronic paraphernalia. The room itself was dark, the ambient light coming from all the technology. Two techs seated at consoles turned in annoyance as the door closed, immediately stiffened.
"At ease, lady and gentleman," Atryx said, ushering Livy in. The two returned to what they were doing, studiously avoiding any attention to the visitors.
Livy took two steps in, her brow furrowing.
The wall opposite was almost entirely glass, a great window that showed the darkened interior of the structure, which stretched into the darkness. The steel ribs of its walls and ceiling visible, what Jonah might have been witness to after his ingestion.
But that wasn’t what stopped Livy.
She wasn’t entirely sure of what she was seeing, so she stepped farther into the room, went right to the glass.
At first, it looked almost religious. Row after row, aisle after aisle of what appeared to be crucifixes hanging suspended a foot or two off the floor. These, like the structure of the building itself, stretched as far as she could see.
As Livy stared, something clicked into focus.
These weren’t crucifixes, these were people.
Dozens and dozens—hundreds!—of people, suspended above the warehouse floor, arms splayed out, arranged in neat little rows like an army of crucified Christs.
"What. The. Fuck," Livy muttered.
"Pardon the religious overtones," Atryx said, with his remarkable capacity to seemingly guess what she was thinking. "It’s purely unintentional, I promise."
"I don’t…"
"Behold, the choir, almost—but not quite—invisible," he said.
Livy felt her mouth go dry, unable to make sense of what she saw. Nothing in her experience, nothing in reality prepared her for such a sight.
"Would you like to go down and see your flock?"
#
When does the addictive substance transcend the addict’s ability to process it?
I’m not talking about death here, we already covered that.
I mean when does the thing you crave become too much for the puny vessel that is your body to process?
I'm talking about a high so profound that your body can’t even cope with it. Something so outside of human perception that it pretty much just overloads your ability to experience it?
Some people I know have tried psilocybins, mushrooms to you noobs. Hippy addicts, sure, but that’s not a high that can be carefully titrated. Difficult to know exactly how much is in each one. Some of them have said that they’ve had at least one trip where the psilocybin content of the particular 'shroom was so off the charts
that it knocked them onto their asses, almost literally just left them drooling onto their hemp carpets.
No happy trips over rainbows, no distorted landscapes, no intense realizations.
Instead something so immense, so profound that their little human brains couldn’t even hallucinate big enough to comprehend.
What happens then?
What happens when the trip doesn’t kill you, it consumes you?
What happens when the trip eradicates the you of you?
We’re all just meat, really, in the end.
What exactly is the melting point of meat anyway?
This thing that Atryx was doing. It was pushing ahead exponentially. He might just find whatever that was.
And for the first time, I found myself capable of pushing that limit…my limit.
That snake of my addiction stirred somewhere deep within, coiled, made itself felt.
Made damn sure I knew it was hungry and needed to be fed.
#
There was an elevator in this part of the building. Evidently if you could make it into the sanctum sanctorum of this place, you could access the elevator, too. Dr. Atryx took Livy down, just one floor. This elevator featured digital controls, its ride far smoother than the secret elevator back at the campus.
When the door parted on the ground floor, Livy saw that the aisles were designated with little illuminated markers at their feet, reminding her of the indicators on airport runways. Each featured a combination of letter and numbers that meant nothing to Livy.
Atryx led them down what she supposed was the main drag, speaking all the way, as was his wont.
"Remember what I told you about the Lakota? The Sun Dance?"
She hadn’t really been paying close attention, but she nodded.
He smirked a little, as if knowing she didn't.
"Some tribes, to induce that all-important trance state, pierced the flesh of their braves, inserted wooden dowels to which leather thongs were attached. These warriors were hung by these from the ceiling of a sweat lodge, sometimes after ingesting sacred medicines. They dangled there, high and in excruciating pain, until they had visions. Sometimes they hung there until the dowels ripped their way through the flesh, and they fell to the ground."
Livy looked up in the dim blue light and saw there were men and women, each mostly nude, sheer briefs protecting at least some of their modesty. Closest to her was a man suspended about eighteen inches off the ground. A series of tubes snaked around his head, a breathing apparatus affixed over his mouth.
His arms were stretched cross fashion, kept flexed by the steel rod that entered his skin just under one shoulder blade, re-emerging under the adjoining. Thin cables attached to the rod, vanishing into the unseen expanse of the ceiling. Blood leaked from most of his wounds, trickled down his buttocks and legs, plipped to the ground.
"What I got from the stories of the Lakota was the idea for a form of pain that seemed intense enough to do what we needed, yet not so much as to kill the patient," Atryx said.
Livy stared at the hanged man. She silently prayed that, as her gaze drifted up, his eyes would be closed. If they were open, if they bulged from their sockets with suffering and terror, she thought she might just bolt and run.
But they were closed. She could barely make out the young man’s respiration, rising and falling. His mouth, though, distorted by the clear plastic respirator mask, was twisted, contorted in unutterable agony.
"They’re drugged, of course. Barely. Just enough to keep them comatose, not enough to dull the pain. Can you imagine the racket if they were all awake and screaming? With these steel walls?"
Livy found it difficult to breathe. She flinched, nearly putting out a hand to steady herself against the man’s thigh.
"Here’s where we come full circle to the first analogy I made, the one involving sleep research and consciousness. We found that we could induce the level of pain we required, but we couldn’t coordinate it, couldn’t focus it. Then I realized that what we were missing was that conductor I mentioned. Just as the brain itself requires those cells in the frontal lobe to lull the rest of the brain to sleep, so, too, did our study. But more than that."
Livy turned to him. "You needed someone who saw. Someone who already had begun to see whatever it is you so desperately want to see."
"Precisely."
"Well, I want to see it too. Desperately."
"That’s my girl," Atryx smiled.
#
They didn’t just hang her up right then and there. No, there were preparations to be made. They drove her back to her apartment in the same black Tahoe, blindfolded, seated between the security guy and Atryx.
Livy found that she was trembling now, in dread or anticipation or both, just as Atryx had on the drive before.
The car deposited her at the door of her building. It was after midnight, quiet on her tree-lined, residential road. The streetlights cast everything in an orange glow. A cat screamed in anger somewhere close, and the muted sounds of music pulsed from some apartment on one of the upper floors, only the bass making it down to the street.
The security man helped Livy out, removed the blindfold. Once she stood on the curb, Atryx’s window whirred down.
"A messenger will deliver a packet of papers for you to sign and return. He’ll wait as you read through it and make your mark," Atryx said. "Don’t eat or drink anything all day tomorrow. Between the pain and the drugs, you’ll definitely be queasy. Don’t want to vomit all over yourself, do you?
"We’ll pick you up here at midnight tomorrow. And, though I shouldn't have to say this, don’t tell anyone."
The window whirred back up, and the last thing Livy saw was the doctor’s smile, like some psychotic Cheshire cat. The car sped away, disappeared into the evening, the light from the dusk-to-dawns sliding over it greasily.
Livy went upstairs, collapsed in bed without removing her clothes or even bothering to turn off the bedside lamp. She fished out her phone, toyed with calling Daphne, to tell her what had happened, thank her. She stared at the cartoon image of Velma, then swiped the phone off, set it onto her nightstand.
She supposed that Daphne already knew.
Besides, that snake she’d felt earlier, the very embodiment of her addiction that had begun to uncoil within her, was now hissing and rattling, making its presence very known.
Tomorrow, she thought as she closed her eyes and tried to sleep. Tomorrow you’ll likely get more than you know what to do with.
And me?
Well, I’ll see, won’t I?
I’ll finally, definitely see.
#
Though it was warm outside, even after midnight, it was cold in the warehouse. Livy hadn’t noticed it before, probably because she was fully clothed then. Now here she stood, tits out, a thin brief covering her ass and privates. She couldn’t see her breath in the air, but it seemed to her that she should.
She trembled, too, but she knew that wasn’t because of the cold.
That had to do with watching the technician with the thick steel bar, the other with the tray of scalpels and forceps. The gleam on all that metal made Livy’s flesh crawl deliciously with goosebumps.
Dr. Atryx stood to the side, far enough back that he wasn’t overwhelming, but still a presence, with his wire rim glasses, tailored suit, and all-purpose grin.
The techs helped her onto a gurney that had been wheeled in place. She climbed onto it, eyes fluttering at this additional layer of coldness as she laid back on her stomach, let her arms fall loosely over the sides.
She kept her eyes closed as they slid down the waistband of her skimpy briefs, gave her a shot in the ass. She hadn’t been expecting this and flinched as the needle dimpled the skin.
"That’s just the narcotic," Atryx said. "Our version of Lakota medicine."
Livy felt nothing from the injection other than the deep sting in her cheek.
"We’re going to make the first incision through the skin and fascia. We need t
o access the space between your trapezius and latissimus dorsi," said the tech with the scalpel. "Needless to say, this will hurt."
He sounded like he was the same tech who’d been there for her original tests, who’d also warned her of the impending pain.
He didn’t understand that, to Livy, it wasn’t a warning, it was a promise.
She felt the scalpel touch her skin, slide through, cut, cut deeper.
An icy tendril of pain fanned out in a skein across her back, and still the scalpel sliced, deeper than Livy had ever attempted. She felt someone press a pad against her back, to catch the blood, she guessed, but that pressure was swept away by the stinging heat of the incision.
Her feet jerked involuntarily, and she felt the old familiar warmth suffuse her body, the flood of dopamine over her brain. As the tech made the second incision, Livy cried out and tried to bury her face in the metal of the table.
She felt like she’d been butterflied. The feeling of her shoulders being cut open, fanned out like angel’s wings was unsettling, but the storm of pleasure that washed over her effaced all that.
Livy scarcely felt the steel bar as it was threaded through the slits the tech had made, the tug of the cables being attached.
The techs lifted her from the table, set her feet onto the ground.
Atryx stepped near, put his mouth to her ear, whispered. "Time to sing, little angel. Time to open that door and see what’s behind."
Distantly, she heard a whirring.
The cables attached to the bar lost their slack, the bar itself tightening against her back, forcing her arms out. The techs guided them gently, until they extended straight from her body.
And then the cables went taut, and Livy lifted from the ground.
As she rose, the injection's medicine asserted itself.
But as Atryx had warned (or was it promised?) it didn’t mask the exquisite pain.
As she ascended, as her toes grazed the ground, a supernova detonated in her skull, expanding, eradicating everything before it.
Lullabies for Suffering Page 17
