I am suddenly distressed by the turn in the conversation. “Then why did you move in with me?” I ask. “Why did you live with me as long as you did?”
“If I knew the answer to that question,” she says, “I wouldn’t have bribed my way in here to see you.”
“You stayed with me,” I say, having what seems like a moment of clarity, which I immediately distrust, “to collect information. You were teaching yourself to know what to avoid the next time around.”
“You goose,” she says almost affectionately. “You never understand me because you’re too busy reading other people as if they were less subtle versions of yourself. Given the same opportunities, I most likely would play out our time together all over again. Some things can’t be usefully avoided. Isn’t that so?”
“If I knew anything useful,” I say, “I wouldn’t be in this awful room with my hands tethered behind me… So why did you dump me after what was it, eight years together, nine, seven, eleven?”
“For the usual reason,” Molly says, slightly abashed. “There was someone else.”
Now we’re getting somewhere, or nowhere. I hesitate before asking the inevitable next question. “And why was there someone else?”
“I’m figuring it out,” Molly says, hunkering down on the narrow cot. “There was someone else because I needed to dump you.”
“Isn’t that a circular argument?” I can feel the heat of her body next to me, though we are not actually touching.
“What if it is,” she says. “I’m feeling like I’m getting what I came for.”
“And?” I ask, unable to remember the reasons offered for the visit.
“It no longer matters,” she says. “Close your eyes, sweetheart, and let the past forget us.”
I don’t close my eyes and then I do — what else is there to do in this place — and then nagged by a discovery that refuses to stay in focus — I open my eyes one at a time, an extended interval between right and left, aware of her absence before registering that she is actually gone.
There is someone else in the room, the number three interrogator, watching me from a dark corner.
94th Night
It’s been so long since my last visitor, I can no longer remember having ever been visited. The tray with my inedible food is slipped under the door whenever they remember I’m still here. Not even an interrogator has come by in a while to ask the idle probing question. I suspect the word on the street is that I’ve already sung all the songs I have in me to sing. What do they know? Really?
The texts of confessions I haven’t yet made, haven’t even thought of before this moment, keep running through my mind. I’ve been to the north pole of violation and back and the worst of it is, the most unforgivable, is that there’s no one to tell about it. You reach a point in this place where you would gladly put up with some official nastiness just for the company.
“If you’ve lost your interest,” I shout at the recording system in the wall, “send me home.”
Toward evening, two attendants deliver another cot to what had been for some time now a private room.
When they first brought me here, there was a second bed in the room occupied by an almost skeletal figure. He never spoke, though tended to let out heart-rending moans during the night. A day or so after the moaning stopped — changes tend to happen in the dark here — I woke one morning to find bed and occupant disappeared. When I asked the interrogators about my roommate’s absence, they insisted no one else was ever in the room with me.
The new guy is a lot younger, a teenager maybe, but it’s hard to tell his age. He’s painfully thin, virtually emaciated, has an IV in his arm. At first, jealous of my space, I don’t acknowledge him. When the silence becomes intolerable I hear myself say, “How’s it hanging, bro?” I mean what else is there to say to someone you don’t know who’s moved into your room uninvited.
“Do I know you?” he asks, his yards of unearned self-assurance intolerable.
The question attacks a nerve, makes me immediately suspicious though I couldn’t say what of. “You don’t know me,” I say. “Do I look like someone you know?”
“Everyone looks like someone I know,” he says.
“You know what I think, kid. I think they put you in here to spy on me.”
He laughs, which breaks into a wracking cough. “If I have,” he says, “no ass-wipe bothered to tell me about it. You know, Pops, you’ve always been fucking paranoid.”
“What do you mean always, kid?” What does he mean always? I take another look at him (watch him out of the side of my eye) to see if I know him. He looks like any other emaciated nineteen-year-old. “Look, you can’t say always to someone you’ve just met.”
“Who says I can’t?” he says. “Fuck anyone who says I can’t.”
After that we stop talking, each pretend we’re alone in the room. Later in the day, though it could be the next day, the number three interrogator makes an unscheduled appearance. I salute her as she enters, but she ignores me and sashays over to the interloper’s bed.
“I like the way you’ve done your hair,” I call to her.
She gives me one of her characteristic inscrutable smiles. “Put a sock in it,” she whispers, returning her attention to the boy. “Has everyone here treated you well?” she asks. “You’d tell me, wouldn’t you if anyone here abused you.”
He shields his mouth with his hand, presumably to keep me from hearing him. “The guy with the beard on the other side of the room,” he says.
“It won’t happen again,” she says. “You have my promise, Tick. Tick — you like to be called Tick, isn’t that right?4">I have a few questions for you. Your answers are very important to us so be careful to tell us the whole truth as you know it.”
“Tick’s got nothing to hide,” he says.
The interrogation goes on for a while and I do my best to tune it out — a pillow over my head doesn’t quite do it — and it drives me bananas hearing her ask the kid the same questions more or less they asked me when I was their favored suspect.
At the close of the interrogation, she puts her hand between his legs and kisses him on the forehead, which is unacceptable in my view. This is only his first on site interrogation. It wasn’t until my third that I got the forehead kiss and the hand on prick caress, which in my case turned out to be a false promise.
After she leaves, he has this shit-eating smile on his face, which further intensifies my displeasure with him. “Kid, she touched my prick too,” I tell him. “It’s no big deal. From what I can tell, she probably does the same thing with everyone she questions.”
“Hey Pops,” he says, “I know it’s no fun to be left out. Look, I want to say I’m sorry, you know, your day is over. When it’s over, it’s over, Pops. Lights out.”
I don’t want to get into a pissing contest with the kid so I turn on my side away from him while a slew of witty retorts crowd the inside of my head. “And don’t you ever call me Pops again,” I say under my breath.
“Anything you say, Pops,” he says, snorting air.
I wake up from a brief nap, sniffing smoke. “Who’s smoking? There’s no smoking allowed in this room.”
The kid brushes the smoke away with one hand while holding what looks like a cigarette behind his back. “You’ve been dreaming, old man,” he says. “Whatever smoke you think you see in this room is a natural part of the atmosphere.”
I see what’s going on. They’ve put the little bastard in here to aggravate me, to break me down and my only revenge is to not let that happen. I sit up and I wonder if my legs will hold me if I climb off the bed. At the same time, he is also working his way off his bed with the intent (the same as mine) of reaching the floor in an upright position.