“I feel so bad, so much of the time,” the FBI agent says. She rubs her hand through his hair.
“It’s okay,” she says, shushing him. “It’s okay.”
Somewhere, I am being watched, she thinks. On other screens. Images of me, scattered throughout the nation. She considers the FBI agent. This is not his fault, she thinks. Or not entirely. I was in the process of becoming a certain type of image — fitting a certain role — long before. Can I say that it is Robert’s fault? No, not entirely — I had as much to do with it as anyone—
Robert, who was once her husband, which is to say, who was once married to an image of her, calls, over and over again, on her cell phone. She can never quite convince herself to answer it.
~ ~ ~
Hugo takes Robert to the guinea-pigger camp, which lies on the far western edge of the city. They take the bus from downtown, because Hugo is concerned that Robert’s newish, expensive-looking car might attract suspicion. “What kind of suspicion?” Robert wants to know.
“They might think that we are with the mafia.”
Beyond the complex’s gates, rows of bright orange roll-up doors stretch off into the distance. Small fires are everywhere. Guinea-piggers look up at Robert, sweating, shaking, their eyes glazed over, many of them not seeing him as he walks past, or, if they do see him, not knowing whether he is an hallucination. Others don’t even bother to look up, but continue feeding their fires with pieces of junk mail or gathered sticks. Huge flakes of ash float through the air like terrifying moths.
“This is horrible,” Robert says.
“This is the underside of the world,” Hugo proclaims, voice suddenly taking on dramatic-movie tones. “This is — oh, hi kids.”
A group of a half-dozen kids runs by, throwing pieces of rubble at each other. One of them throws a piece of rubble at Robert, which hits him, hard, in the shoulder.
“Hey!” Hugo says. “Don’t throw rubble at Robert. Robert doesn’t even know how to play the rubble game.”
Robert rubs his shoulder. “Did those kids have horns?”
“Horns?” Hugo asks. “Oh. The bony protrusions. Yes, certain of the younger children here have bony protrusions. It was a statistically insignificant birth defect resulting from a previous phase I drug trial that their parents participated in.”
“That seemed like a lot of kids with horns that just ran by.”
Hugo shrugs. “Statistics,” he says.
Hugo brings Robert to Jeremy, the leader of the guinea-piggers. Jeremy is a thin, haunted-looking man, with dark circles under his eyes and a sharp face. He’s the only other person in the storage facility that Robert has seen wearing a suit, though Jeremy’s is in bad shape, shabby and worn through in places, with a noticeable stain near the left breast. His office is in a double-wide storage unit filled with stacks and stacks of papers. “I’m sure that Hugo has told you what I expect in return,” Jeremy says.
Robert hands over the organizational chart for Obadiah Birch Pharmaceuticals. “I’m risking my neck on this,” Robert says. “If it came out that I did something that went against a client’s interests—”
Jeremy makes calming shushing noises. “This?” he says. “It’s like I’ve never seen you. Oh,” he says, looking with surprise at the document in his hands. “Where did this come from?”
Jeremy hands him in return a file containing information on the drug that Robert has been secretly giving his wife. “Now that we’re done here,” Jeremy says, “I just wanted to let you know that I despise you. As far as I’m concerned, you stand for the worst of humanity. Hugo, show this man the door.”
Hugo shrugs and gestures towards the door. “Do you think you can find your way back alright?” Hugo asks.
“I think so,” Robert says.
At the bus stop, Robert runs into the same gang of children. He would guess, from looking at them, that most of them are around seven or eight years old. “Are you from the mafia?” they ask.
Robert laughs. “No,” he says.
“Are you from the government?”
“Nope,” he says, smiling.
One of the children shoves him while two others go for his legs. Robert hits the ground, hard, and the children swarm him. “Hey!” Robert yells. One grabs his wallet. Another gets his phone. A third kid kicks him repeatedly in the kidneys. Then, just as suddenly, it’s over. The bus pulls up and the kids run off before he’s even had the chance to get back to his feet. Robert grabs up, as best he can, the papers that have come loose from the file folder Jeremy gave him.
“You getting on?” the bus driver calls from the open bus door.
“Did you see that?” Robert asks.
“Last bus of the day,” the bus driver says.
Robert gets on but doesn’t have any money for the fare. “They just took my wallet,” he tries to explain. The bus driver looks at him, blankly. “Look, if you just take me to a bank,” he starts.
“This ain’t a taxi,” the driver says.
Robert turns to the other passengers. They stare at him flatly, refusing to help.
~ ~ ~
The self-storage facility is a kind of labyrinth, with hundreds of possible centers. There is no way to orient oneself, once one is out of sight of the metal gates — the rows of doors stretch on seemingly forever — above the doors are numbers, but it is impossible, at a glance, to understand their organization. Behind any one of these, perhaps, might wait the minotaur, in black goggles and fake fur coat, two shining pistols — Is it better to keep wandering through the labyrinth, or try to walk home? It is almost dusk — the sky is the color of sunburnt skin — both options raise, in Robert’s mind, the face of the dead man, fat and red and expiring, running out of breath…
They didn’t take my car keys, Robert thinks. If worse comes to worse, I can walk back to town — it’s what, five or six miles — that’s entirely possible — Still, he doesn’t like the thought of walking so far through the west side at night. He keeps thinking about the dead man’s red face… He is aware of people all around him, human bodies — for the most part, they do not pay attention to him — he is just another body — From time to time, a pair of glassy eyes takes in his suit, Robert can tell that there is an act of appraisal going on — He thinks, It is vital to look like I know where I am going. But of course he doesn’t.
Robert finds a place to settle down for a moment, his back against one of the buildings’ cinderblock walls, ass on cold concrete. He looks through the folder that Jeremy gave him. The pills he has been feeding to Viola and himself are being marketed under the commercial name Milamor, but they have previously appeared under different names—Ligatal, Amebgyn, Keratexx, Sartrex, Cryptogest. The true name, the pill’s chemical formulation, is longer and more complex than Robert can pronounce, but its letters seem to hold a power over him, nonetheless. Previous versions, in some cases with formulation and dosage slightly tweaked, have been marketed for military purposes, for the questioning of unwilling sources, a means of instilling trust between interrogator and interrogated…
Glancing up, he sees a woman who looks very much like Viola. He almost calls out to her, then stops himself. Idiot, he thinks. Of course it’s not her. But her face, her build is so similar — it could be her sister, or Viola in five years’ time. With her is a boy maybe six years old, wearing a knit cap that doesn’t entirely cover his sandy blond hair. Possibly one of the children who attacked me, Robert thinks. As if in response to this, the kid starts to turn. Robert scrambles around a corner, then peers back out.