Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(83)
His thoughts are like clouds. He cannot sharpen them, cannot concentrate. Sometimes he talks to himself. Images float around him. His daughter throwing rocks in a river that sparkles with sunlight, plucking a dandelion and handing it to him, smearing her face with a red beard of spaghetti sauce. His wife, naked in the shower, smiling and looking over her shoulder when he pulled back the curtain. His wife with fireflies woven into her hair. His wife brushing back a strand of hair with a hand gloved in dirt from gardening. His wife curled in a ball in bed with a stone-cold expression on her face.
He vaguely remembers his capture. He was at the safe house in Sandy—a farm set back from a county road, ten acres of oaks and firs and blackberry brambles and barbed-wire fences and rotten outbuildings and alfalfa fields gone to weed. Two days had passed since the Pioneer Courthouse Square bombing, and since then, he and his fifteen men had done very little except surf online and watch the coverage on TV and drink whiskey out of paper cups and toast to the memory of Thomas, who had so courageously sacrificed himself at the wheel of the van. That night, the giant Magog was supposed to be on sentry, but he offered no warning when the agents whispered through the tall grass and encircled the farmhouse and simultaneously rammed open the back and front doors and stormed through the rooms and slammed Jeremy to the floor and flex-cuffed him and tranquilized him before he could shake off his dreams, before he could transform.
Then he woke in this cell. Whether a gun was fired that night, whether the others were killed or arrested, he does not know. He does not know a lot of things. Like where he is being jailed. And by whom. And why they haven’t questioned him. And whether the media know of his capture, and if so, how he is being portrayed.
None of this matters to him now. He has made his mind purposefully blank. For the past few hours, Britney Spears has played on repeat over the loudspeakers, and he has developed several techniques for escaping the noise and brightness of his cell, for avoiding the trapdoor of madness he senses underfoot. One trick is to recite the alphabet forward and backward. Another is to create designs and patterns in the air bubbles hardened into the concrete walls. Another still is to imagine himself on a path in the woods and approaching a gnarled pine tree and pulling down on its branch like a lever so that a door swings open and then stepping into its shadowy interior and descending a coiled staircase to a muddy root-tangled room with a pond full of glowing fish and peeling off his clothes and going for a swim.
That is where he is now, swimming in that underground pond, while at the same time sitting on his bunk, his body bent in half, his hands smashed against his ears. The fantasy dissolves when he realizes the music has stopped. He isn’t sure when this happened, maybe five minutes ago, maybe five seconds. His palms peel away from his ears.
He startles when he realizes that someone is standing in his cell. Not one of the dead-faced buzz-cut guards, who bring him his food and who escort him to his shower and who will not respond to his pleas or questions and who wear uniforms that match the tons of concrete that surround him. This man is different.
He is so tall that he must have ducked his head to enter the cell. His face is glossy with burns and his nose slightly upturned so that its tip appears to have been snipped away. He has no eyebrows, but the places where they ought to be hook upward like question marks.
Behind him the cell door opens and two guards enter carrying aluminum folding chairs. With a clatter, they set the chairs up facing each other as if across an invisible card table. The man extends a hand, indicating that Jeremy should sit, and after a moment he slowly walks from his bunk and takes his seat and feels little surprise when his arms are seized and wrestled behind him and cuffed to the chair. Then one of the guards departs the cell and the other stations himself against the wall with his eyes trained on Jeremy.
The Tall Man sets down his briefcase and then he does not so much sit as fold himself into the chair. He sighs and crosses his legs and knits together his hands over his topmost knee, and Jeremy notices that only a few of his chalky fingernails remain. “I’m sorry I haven’t come to visit you sooner,” he says. “I’ve been busy hunting, you see.”
Jeremy feels an itch on his cheek and goes to scratch it and forgets about the cuffs and the chain rattles when his arm stops short.
The Tall Man offers him a sympathetic smile. “Now that you’ve had some time alone to think, I believe we’re due for a little talk.” He uncrosses his legs and leans over and sets the briefcase on its side. It yawns open to reveal a padded interior filled with gleaming instruments. His hand floats over them and then decides upon a pair of pliers.
For the next hour they talk. The Tall Man tells him that he never wrote a book, that The Revolution was in fact a bound copy of blank pages. That he never led a faction of the Resistance, never had a wife or a child. The planes never went down. The bomb in the square never detonated. It was all in his head. The person he thought he was and the life he thought he built and the followers he thought awaited him did not exist. “You have been in this room your entire life and you will remain in this room the rest of your life. This room, this fourteen-square-foot room, is your universe. And I am your god. And as your god, I dictate that your purpose is pain. That is your existence. That is the only word of your vocabulary and the only sensation you are capable of experiencing. Pain.”
Five of his fingernails are now gone, peeled away by the pliers. Jeremy thinks that after his fingers the pliers will go to his toes. He thinks that after his toes he may lose his teeth. He thinks that after his teeth there are so many places, so many pink and vulnerable places to slide a blade, rub salt, apply a jolt from a live wire. He thinks, maybe, the pain will never end.