“My best friend in college liked to tell stories about how he’d been abducted by aliens. You’d think intelligent people would laugh that off, but he was very convincing, and in several cases he not only got his listeners to believe that he’d been abducted, he made them wonder whether they had, as well.
“One night at the ranch I asked myself whether you couldn’t take it a step further: Build an enclosed stage set, designed to look like the interior of an alien spacecraft. Go out and find people—stranded motorists, or just barflies who’d had too much to drink—knock them out somehow, bring them back and put them in it. And do things to them.
“Of course it was a wicked idea. Evil, if you took it far enough. I tried to think of ways to make it not be wicked…What if, I thought, you only did it to bad people? Murderers, thieves, people who deserved a good scare. But inevitably, my fantasies turned towards other kinds of people as well…A pretty girl, say, whose car blew a tire on a back road, and who saw a strange light in the sky. And when she woke up in the spaceship, she wouldn’t be alone. There’d be a man with her, a fellow abductee, college age, as scared as she was, and together they’d explore the ship, and see what happened…”
“These issues you had,” I said. “Were they sexual, by any chance?”
“Some of them.” Love grinned. “I hear you have a few of those yourself…Anyway, I decided that while of course I couldn’t go through with this prank, there was no harm in at least building the spaceship. I called it my ant farm, because the point was to put living things in it and watch what they’d do, and because, let’s be honest, this was very much a boy’s toy.
“So I built the spaceship, and then, since I still wasn’t ready to admit that I was going to use it, I built some other ant farms: A nuclear fallout shelter. A death-row prison wing. Most elaborate of all, a Victorian-era hotel floor with no exits.
“All of this took time, and for most of it I was completely alone. When you’re removed from human society for that long, especially if you’re intoxicated, ordinary moral inhibitions begin to lose their grip. It’s not that you deny the concept of evil, it’s that you begin to find it acceptable, even attractive. You start to wallow in it: you ignore the consequences and concentrate on the fun parts.
“But it turned out I wasn’t as alone as I thought. My one remaining contact with the outside world was the town of Coleman, where I’d go to pick up supplies. When I bought things, I paid cash, and I put the change in jars on a high shelf in the workshop where I designed my ant farms. In one of the jars, there was a dollar bill that was…special. The pyramid on the back, it saw what I was about. The organization became aware of me. And it might have ended there, with me dying quietly of a heart attack or stroke, except that the young Cost-Benefits operative assigned to my case, Bob True, had some rather…enlightened ideas about the difference between thought and deed. Also, the Panopticon agent who first sussed me out—Bob Wise—well, he wasn’t as hesitant as True when it came to dealing death, but he did think my ant farms might be useful as an intel-gathering tool.
“So they didn’t kill me. They decided to study me. They built an ant farm around my ant farms. The town of Coleman: they bought it. That wasn’t as hard as you might think. It was…What was the name of that town where you spent your teenage years? Little Nap?”
“Siesta Corta,” I said.
“Right,” said Love. “Compared to Coleman, Siesta Corta was a metropolis. Coleman was just a saloon with a gas pump and a mail drop. The organization bought it and brought in their own people. The night I finally came looking for an ant to put in my ant farm, they were waiting for me.
“The setup was perfect—too perfect. They’d doubled all the saloon staff I might recognize, and there was a pretty girl sitting at the bar, slightly drunk, looking exactly like the pretty girl I’d fantasized about…She smiled at me and encouraged me to sit with her, and in that moment, I knew two things: First, that I’d walked into a trap. And second, that since what I’d been planning to do was clearly evil, the people who’d set the trap must be good. So good could be tricky, too. That was a revelation to me.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “So you just saw the light then?”
“It wasn’t exactly Saul on the road to Damascus,” said Love. “But it was a significant epiphany. So I looked at this pretty, helpless girl who wasn’t helpless at all, and said to her, ‘I surrender.’”
“And they recruited you?”
“Well. It wasn’t quite that simple. The road from there to here was a long and twisted one, and along the way I gave True more than a few opportunities to regret his leniency towards me. But in the end, yes, here I am, running the circus.
“And the reason I’m telling you all this,” Love continued, “is that I want you to know I understand evil. I’ve been there; I’ve felt its draw, and almost succumbed.
“I understand it, but I don’t condone it. I know that I was lucky. The organization would have been right to put me down. And if I’d gone ahead and done to that pretty girl what I was thinking of doing…A quick death would have been a mercy to me.
“So maybe you are a good Jane. We’ll proceed on that assumption for now. And if you are a good Jane, then all will be welclass="underline" if the Troop wants to play tricky, we’ll show them what tricky really is.
“But if you’re a bad Jane? If you’re lying to us now, if even a drop of True or Wise’s blood is on your hands?…You’ll weep before we’re through. True was enlightened; Wise was patient. I’m neither. Are we clear?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I think I have the ground rules straight.”
“Good.” He brightened, and held out his hand—like I was really going to touch him after hearing that story. “Let’s go in the next room. We’ll talk strategy…and see what we can’t do about that brother of yours.”
white room (vii)
IN THE WHITE ROOM, ONE LAST PROP has been laid on the table.
“Where did you get this?” she says.
“From Officer Friendly.”
“You found him?”
“It wasn’t difficult,” says the doctor. “He’s retired now, but he draws a pension, so his address is on file. I thought he would be worth contacting. Most of the policemen I know, over the course of their careers, have a handful of cases that continue to haunt them long after they are officially closed. With Officer Friendly, I had an inkling that your case might be one of those.”
Wary, now: “What did he tell you?”
“You know that even after she learned about John Doyle, your mother still blamed you for your brother’s abduction. And she wasn’t just accusing you of being irresponsible: she believed you’d abandoned your brother in the garden deliberately, as you’d abandoned him many times before, hoping that something would happen to him.”
“My mother was out of her mind.”
“She made some outrageous claims. The social worker thought she was paranoid, and Officer Friendly wanted to agree, but his patrolman’s intuition told him not to dismiss her so quickly. So when he volunteered to drive you to your aunt and uncle’s house, he wasn’t just being kind—he wanted to spend more time with you.”
“That son of a bitch…He actually thought I wanted Phil to get kidnapped?”
“He wasn’t sure. It bothered him that he wasn’t sure. Unfortunately, the car ride didn’t settle the matter. He said you seemed like a normal, if very troubled, girl—one who’d done a careless thing and was now putting up a tough front to keep remorse from eating her alive. Ordinarily, he said, he’d have been worried about you hurting yourself, especially if your brother was found dead. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that you were hiding something, and that made him wonder if your remorse was just an act.