Robert calls again, crestfallen. Crestfallen, Robert listens to Viola’s voicemail message. Robert calls again, and listens to the voicemail message again. If no one came to stop him, he could do this all day.
~ ~ ~
Does it mean something that he’s here, Robert thinks. Is it a kind of penance?
His roommate at the psych ward steals his shoes whenever Robert takes them off and goes shuffling down the hallway with them in his hands. Robert stops taking off his shoes when he sleeps. One night he wakes up to find his roommate carefully working his left shoe free from its foot. “Fine,” Robert says. “You want the shoes?” He pulls off his loafers and throws one and then the other at his roommate. “Have them! By all means! Enjoy!” His roommate crouches in a corner of the room and cries. Robert lies down, waiting for the orderlies to come, thinking, Shut up, just shut up.
~ ~ ~
It is not a penance. There is only one event happening after another, until Robert arrived here.
~ ~ ~
Robert is in a small room. In front of him is a bright white light. A man is sitting somewhere in front of the bright white light, facing Robert. Between them is a table. “Why does my head hurt?” Robert asks.
“Because I hit you over the head with the butt of my pistol. You were being uncooperative.”
“I was asleep.”
“You were being uncooperative in your sleep.”
“Why do my ribs and arm and abdomen and chest hurt?”
“Because once I started hitting you it was difficult to stop.”
“Are you a doctor?”
“I am an agent of the secret law.”
“Could you turn off that light, for Christssakes?”
“No.”
“Could you turn it down, at least?”
“No. The bright white light has important symbolic connotations: Truth, Justice, Righteousness, Grace, Purity. All of these things are important in our work, the work of the FBI, which is the preservation of National Stability. Is there anything I could get you that would make you more comfortable? A coffee, perhaps? A drink of water? No?”
Robert shakes his head. Robert’s head feels like it’s stuffed overfull with steel wool.
“I understand that at first the white light can be disorienting, uncomfortable perhaps, perhaps painful — but in time subjects get used to it. Often, they come to love it. We’ve recorded cases of subjects weeping when we take the light away. May I read you a testimony?”
“I suppose so.”
“I came to understand, after several weeks, that the white light was the all-encompassing mercy of God Himself, and I, poor sinner, can imagine nothing more joyous than the expectation, as I near the end of my life, of that white light’s return… This from a subject we interrogated in Algeria. I thought he was particularly eloquent, as regards the white light.”
“What is that high-pitched squeal?”
“That’s a high-pitched squeal. It has nothing to do with the white light. Here, Robert, let me show you some pictures.”
“I can’t see anything with that light in my eyes.”
“You have to hold them at the right angle. There. See? Yes? Clearer, in the white light, than they could ever be by the light of day?”
“These are pictures of me.”
“Of course they’re pictures of you.”
“At the guinea-pigger camp.”
“Do you know that we have been investigating a series of shootings? Researchers, shot dead in Indianapolis, all of whom worked for the pharmaceutical industry? Who are you giving that file folder to, Robert?”
Robert sits for a moment in the glare of the white light. “You can’t possibly think I was involved in the shootings.”
“Of course we could think you were involved. It would take almost no effort on our part to think you were involved. You were present at the self-storage facility. You have demonstrated guinea-pigger sympathies, as evidenced by these photos of you acting sympathetic towards several guinea-piggers. You had access to records indicating which researchers were engaged in the most harmful and negligent drug trials.”
“But I didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“I know you didn’t have anything to do with it, Robert. Did I say you had anything to do with it?”
“Thank God,” says Robert.
“I was only pointing out a certain fact. That fact being, if one were to choose to do so, one could easily make it appear that you had something to do with it. And as far as hard evidence is concerned? Photographs can be modified, film edited, fingerprints, DNA, ballistics, all can be tweaked.”
“I feel like you’re threatening me.”
“Would you like something to drink? We have whiskey and vodka and gin and spiced rum and baijiu. For mixers we have orange juice and cranberry juice and several kinds of soda.”
“I don’t want a drink.”
“I was only trying to be polite. You keep holding your head.”
“My head hurts. Could you turn off that damn light?”
“There are people in the world who believe in such things as conspiracies, Robert.” The man leans forward, arms crossed and resting his elbows on the table. “I don’t. I don’t imagine that you do, either. You are a practical man. But let us consider, for a moment, why someone less practical might believe in conspiracies. We tend to think of such people as paranoid, of living in fear of something that doesn’t exist. And this might well be true, as far as it goes. But have you considered how comforting a conspiracy is? Instead of fearing the entire world and its capriciousness, such a man has a focus — which, moreover, serves to explain all of the otherwise inexplicable things happening around him. Are you religious at all, Robert? Never mind. I only bring it up because… Imagine, please, a roomful of believers. They are silent, waiting for the Holy Spirit to come and fill one of them, to cause that person to rise and begin speaking. Now let’s say you’re in that room, and I rise, and I begin to speak. You might ask yourself, how do I know that this person has actually been filled with the Holy Spirit, and isn’t, instead, just some attention-seeker? You might say to yourself, I’ve been sitting here, quiet, not speaking, because I have been honestly and steadfastly waiting to be filled with the Holy Spirit, and here’s this guy, standing up and talking about the same shit he’d be talking about anyway, Holy Spirit or no. You might, in other words, question my motives, question the purity of my intent.
“This would be the wrong question, Robert.” The man places a new stack of photographs on the table in front of Robert. “It is entirely possible that I have base motives. But my motives are my concern, not yours. You are sitting in relation to something much larger than yourself.”