“I’m not allowed to converse with you,” the guard said.
“Why not?” asked Arnaud.
The guard did not answer.
Arnaud thumbed through his notebook again. His eyes for some reason were having a hard time focusing on his handwriting, which appeared furry, blurred. No, he thought, he had followed procedure. He was not to blame. Unless they blamed him for the phone call. But couldn’t he explain that away? Nobody had told him he wasn’t allowed to telephone. There was really nothing to worry about, he told himself. Bentham’s death could not be attributed to his negligence.
The original guard came back in. The two guards stood together just inside the door, whispering, looking at him, one of them frequently scratching the skin behind his ear. Eventually the original guard went to the telephone and disconnected it from the wall. Telephone under his arm, he came over to Arnaud and took his notebook away. Then he went out again.
Arnaud swiveled his chair around to face the remaining guard. He spread his arms wide.
“What harm could it possibly do to talk to me?”
The guard pointed a finger at him, shook it. “You’ve been warned,” he said.
He stood up and went to the window. Outside, past the doubled fence, dim shapes wandered about beneath a mottled sky.
He heard the door open. When he turned, both guards, edges blurring, were present again, conversing, watching him. They seemed to be speaking to each other very rapidly, in a steady drone. He had to concentrate to understand them.
“He’s been standing there,” one of them was saying, “just like that, hours now.”
But no, he had been there for only a few moments, hadn’t he? Something was wrong with them.
One of them suddenly darted over and stood next to him.
“Come with us,” the guard said.
“No use resisting,” the same guard said.
Arnaud nodded and stepped forward, and then felt himself suddenly swept forward. Each guard, he realized, had taken hold of one of his arms and was dragging him.
The conference room was replaced by a stretch of hall.
“Malingerer, eh?” said one of the guards, only the words didn’t seem to correspond with the quivering movement of his lips, seemed instead to be coming at a distance, from the hall behind him.
No, Arnaud suddenly realized, amazed, something isn’t wrong with them. Something is wrong with me.
They rushed him through the hall and into an observation booth. His observation booth, he realized, the one he had used to interview Bentham. Perhaps he was being allowed to return to work. Who would his next subject be? Bentham, he saw on the other side of the glass, was gone, though pinkish streaks of diluted blood were still visible on the glass.
He started toward his chair, but the guards were still holding him. Gently he tried to free himself, but they wouldn’t let go. Then he realized that he was being dragged toward the adjoining door, toward the subject chamber.
“No,” he said, “but I, I’m not a subject.”
“Of course not,” a guard soothed, his face more a splotch of color than a face. “Who claimed you were?”
“But—” he said.
He grabbed hold of the doorframe on the way through. He held on. Something hard was pushing into his back, just below the blade of his shoulder. Something ground his fingers against the metal of the doorframe, his hand growing numb. Then his grip gave and he was through the door, being strapped to Bentham’s bed. A fourth person in the room, a technician, was snapping on latex gloves.
“I’m not a subject,” Arnaud claimed again.
The technician just smiled. Arnaud watched the smile smear across her face, consume it. Something was wrong with his vision. He could no longer see the technician clearly, she was just a blur, but from having watched subjects through the glass he could derive what she surely must be doing: an ampoule, a hypodermic, the body of the first emptying, the chamber of the second filling.
The blur shifted, was shot through with light.
“This may sting just a little,” the technician said. But Arnaud felt nothing. What’s wrong? he wondered. “Not so bad, is it?” the technician asked, coming briefly into focus again. And then she stepped away and was swallowed up by the wall.
“Hello?” Arnaud said.
Nobody answered.
“Is anybody there?” he asked.
Where had they gone? How much time had passed? He looked about him but couldn’t make sense of what he saw. Everything seemed reduced to two dimensions, shadow and light becoming replacements for objects rather than something in which they bathed. He lifted his head and looked down at his body but could not recognize it, could not even perceive it as a body, despite being almost certain it was there.
Fugue state, he thought, idly. And then thought, Oh, God. I’ve caught it, too.
“Hello?” said a voice. It was smooth, quiet. It struck him as familiar. “Arnaud?” it said.
He turned, saw no one, just a flat, black square. Speaker, he thought. Then he remembered the observation booth, turned instead to where, though he couldn’t quite make it out, he thought it must be.
“Yes?” he said. “Hello?”
“How do you feel?”
“I feel fine,” he claimed.
He heard a vague rustling, was not certain if it was coming from somewhere in his room or from the observation booth.
“Hello?” he said.
“Yes?” said the voice. “What’s wrong, please?”
Arnaud waited, listened. There it was again, a rustling. He swiveled his ear toward it.
“I apologize for these precautions,” said the voice, “but we had to assure ourselves that you were not a … liability, didn’t we? For your own … safety as well as ours.”
Arnaud did not answer.
“Arnaud, did you understand what I said?”
“Yes,” said Arnaud. He tried to get up, and thought he had, but then realized he was still lying down. What was happening, exactly?
“Good,” said the voice. “Shall we move straight to the point? Did you murder Bentham?”
Bentham? he wondered. Who was Bentham again? He blinked, tried to focus. “No,” he said.
“What happened to Bentham?”
“I don’t know,” said Arnaud.
“Arnaud, seven days ago, you interviewed Bentham. During that session he died.”
“Yes,” said Arnaud, remembering. “He died. But it wasn’t seven days ago. It was just a few hours ago.”
“Are you sure, Arnaud? Are you certain?”
“Yes,” said Arnaud. “I’m certain.”
The rustling seemed gone now. He found that if he tilted his head and squinted he could make the plane of glass between his room and the observation booth rise from the flat surface of the wall, hovering like a ghost just above it. The glass was flat as well, depthless. Bentham’s blood, the dull, nearly faded swathes of it, drifted like another flattened ghost on its surface. But somehow he could not see through blood or glass to the other side.
“Who is Mr. Hapner?” the voice asked.
Arnaud hesitated. “I don’t know,” he said, perplexed.
“You don’t know,” the voice said. “And yet after Bentham’s death you placed a telephone call to a Mr. Hapner. How do you explain this?”
“I’m afraid I have no explanation,” said Arnaud. “I don’t even remember doing it.”
He closed his eyes. When he opened them again, the room seemed to have shifted, flattening out like a piece of paper. It was still a room, he tried to convince himself, only less so.
For an instant, the room grew clearer.
“—case,” the voice was saying. “How did he die?”
He tried to remember. “He began to bleed,” he said. “From the eyes,” he said.