Robert hold a photo up to the light. “This is my wife.”
“Of course it’s your wife.”
“Why do you have pictures of my wife?”
“I have other pictures of your wife,” the man says. “I have video of your wife. I have audio recordings of your wife, what her breath sounds like when she’s coming, not with you, with another man. Would you like to hear that? Would you like to hear what your wife sounds like, when she’s coming with another man?”
“Why do you have pictures of my wife?”
“Do you imagine that she sounds different, when she’s with another man? So much of who we are depends on who we are with.” The room fills suddenly with the sound of Viola breathing.
“Why are you doing this?” Robert begs. The breathing that surrounds him grows louder.
“We are doing this out of love,” the man says, and places a baggie of pills on the table.
Robert stares at the pills, with a sort of horror. “I don’t believe you,” he says, finally.
“There were moments when she loved me,” the man says. “Even if she did not love me all the time, there were moments when she did. I have photographic evidence of this. Video stills of her eyes, magnified to hundreds of times their original dimensions, in which one can see — scientifically, objectively — that she loved me, at least during that moment.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“What? What don’t you believe? That your wife’s had an affair? You believed it enough to question her. Here: photographs! Of her eyes! Of her legs! Of her inner and outer thighs! Of the freckles underneath her navel! Of the soft skin on the underside of her arm! Of her left eyebrow, arched! Every part of her, photographically segmented and recombined right here on the table in front of you.”
“I don’t believe any of it. You’re an FBI agent? You spend your time having affairs with people involved in your cases? You kidnap their husbands to ask about love?”
“Here’s my badge — there!” the man says, pulling it from his neck and throwing it at Robert. “You want more photographs of your wife? You want video? You want transcripts of the call she placed to a women’s health clinic? You want to hear the audio?”
“It’s fake!” Robert yells, shaking the badge in the air. “All of it could be fake!”
The FBI agent throws photographs at Robert by the handful. Robert throws himself across the table and punches the FBI agent in the face. The FBI agent falls to the ground.
“Those photographs could be fake,” Robert says, shaking. “You said so yourself, just a minute ago.”
The FBI agent’s nose appears to be broken. He pushes it one way and then the other on his face, trying to find the position it originally corresponded to. “Ow, fuck,” he says. “Could you grab me that roll of paper towels over there? Ow.”
“There is something in me,” says the FBI agent, holding a wad of paper towel to his nose, “that rejoices even in this, suffering for your wife.”
“She hasn’t left me,” Robert says, possibly to himself.
“Like this one time? We went grocery shopping? And every item she took from the shelves had its own, tragic charm. I’ve kept everything, everything. Except the milk and the apples. Those went bad.”
“What is it about me that has stopped her from leaving?”
“She says that the two of you fell into marriage as if part of the set-up to a joke. The morning of your wedding day, she said, her dress somehow managed to rip from neck to ass. She had to borrow one of the bridesmaid’s dresses for the ceremony. When she met you at the alter, she said, ‘Well, Robert, which of us did you want?’”
“I’ve felt, since she lost the last child, like my life was closing in around me,” Robert says. “I haven’t been able to breathe, sometimes. I mean really. I try to take in a breath, and it stops halfway. I’ve lain awake at night, worried that I have emphysema. I don’t know any of the warning signs for emphysema. I mean, does it just happen? Just like that? One day you have it, and from that point on, life is a steady narrowing of the amount of air you can breathe in?”
The FBI agent sits on the floor, holding his head back to try to stop the bleeding. He takes out a pack of cigarettes and matches from his front pocket, manages one-handed to shimmy a cigarette out of his pack and into his mouth, and fumbles, trying to get a match lighted. “Do you mind?” he says. Robert kneels and lights the FBI agent’s cigarette. “Fuck,” the agent says. “I think I’m going to have to see a doctor about this.”
~ ~ ~
That night, Robert lolls in his hospital bed, cuffed to the bed’s siderails. Suddenly, from all sides, comes a terrible rumbling. He has felt one earthquake in his life, and it wasn’t nearly as jarring as this. He fights against the cuffs, trying to sit up straight. It feels for a moment as though the floor might give way. A stranger stands in his hospital room, a man in a fake fur coat and black goggles. Wordlessly, he uncuffs Robert’s arms and motions for him to follow. Robert follows. Everything around him seems to be happening at a great distance. Scenes of horrifying violence, explosions, gunshots — the floor under Robert’s feet shakes, it feels at moments as if the building itself might collapse. A nurse screams. An orderly stumbles blindly, collapses at Robert’s feet. There are bodies everywhere. Yet it somehow never occurs to Robert to feel afraid, or even to wonder what is happening. Instead he simply follows — the fake fur coat makes its way through the violence, and Robert stays close behind.
The keypad that unlocks the elevator doors has been pulled free of the wall, and hangs by its jumble of wires — Robert stands beside the man in the fake fur coat and they ride the elevator down, past the first floor, the explosions he felt earlier rocking the entire elevator car, but neither Robert nor the man beside him showing any signs of distress; into the basement, where dust and flecks of paint rain down from the ceiling in time with the concussions that shake the floors above. Robert steps around bodies and follows the man into a tunnel, burrowed into the far wall, next to a row of vending machines.
They go down, down, down, into the darkness. It is impossible to say how far they travel. Finally their tunnel connects up with a series of others. This, Robert understands, is the guinea-pig underground: the ancient Indianapolis sewers that have expanded over the years, that have come to match the city itself in its sprawl… in the darkness there is the sound of movement, shuffling feet, indistinct orders barked out by men Robert can only just now make out, his eyes adjusting to the darkness: “Operation was a success, sir,” in front of Robert is no longer the man he followed, but a guinea-pigger militiaman, dressed in camo with a black scarf obscuring the bottom half of his face. “We’ve taken the hospital. The Savvy Cavy requested that this one—” evidently Robert, “be spared.”
The commanding officer sizes Robert up. “What’s your name, comrade? Robert, huh? You look fancy, Robert, you used to be somebody? We’re used to your kind… Fact of the matter is, plenty of our recruits have had some sort of substance abuse problem, even former lawyers. Were you a lawyer in your previous life, Robert? Were you on the other side? We’ve seen plenty of guys like you, has-beens who take up guinea-pigging to support a habit. Probably fucks the phase I tests up a teensy bit, having guys like you in the population… For the best, I say! Let them be fucked up! But once you’re on our side, we need you clean. A requirement of the guinea-pigger militia, three months clean, minimum, we offer our own counseling programs if you need them, based on the RR rather than the AA model, given how hard it is to maintain a belief in any sort of benevolent higher power when you’ve got so much experience with earthly powers feeding you shit that makes your hands swell up to twice their size, your fingernails and teeth come loose, etcetera, etcetera… But sobriety is an absolute requirement! We’re trying to fight a war, after all! And anyhow most of us come out of our latest phase I plenty out of our minds enough already, thanks!”