Night Man.
A legend had wrapped itself around me, just another dark fairy tale of the Floating City. People told me about it, the ones who could speak English or whatever passed for it. I never asked, but they’d tell me anyway. They said that my body turned brown like a rotten fruit when I died, digesting itself, and that I didn’t know I was dead. Others said that I was once a brilliant white—my hair, my skin, my eyes, my heart—but I’d spent too much time on the Other Side, was dipped too long into the abyss, and now I was black inside and out.
Night Man, they call me. The transformed freak who can see their dreams, read their future, find the lost souls.
“You go…” The girl pushes on the old woman, who doesn’t move. “Insi.”
The old woman, who doesn’t know any English, who won’t lower herself to speak what French she does know, gets her toothless mouth around the word in her ancestor’s tongue. “Người đêm.”
I close the door on them both.
6. The Weight of Paper
I sit in the soft chair, sinking half a foot. The doctor is positioned behind her desk, hands folded under her chin, and looks down at me waiting below her like a scolded child.
“I’m Dr. Massaquoi,” she says, making it a point to mention her name so that I pick up on the Creole vibration that maybe wasn’t expressed in the caramel color of her skin, the freckles that ease back from her cheek into the particular curl of her dark brown hair. Cutting that skin are the lenses of her glasses that reflect the light from the desk lamp, hiding her eyes. I need to see her eyes so I know what I’m dealing with, but that glass won’t let me. An air-conditioning unit hums in the corner, cooling the room to the temperature of a morgue. Framed photos cover the walls, showing another doctor also wearing glasses standing next to other men in full military uniform. All of their faces look the same. I can’t find the face of Dr. Massaquoi anywhere.
At the front edge of the mostly deserted desk is an egg-shaped paperweight, veined with a stringy blob of pink matter encased by heavy, bubbled glass.
“What do you see?” the doctor asks.
“A jellyfish,” I answer.
Dr. Massaquoi waits for me to continue, but I don’t, because there isn’t anything else to say. She waits for a few seconds more, then a full minute. This is the game. I want the whole thing to be over with, so I pick up the paperweight and look at it closely.
“A jellyfish trapped in a bubble of air. Suffocating because it can’t breathe like we do.”
I look up at her and it’s not her—now a different doctor from a different time. It’s the man in the photos who looked just like everybody else.
“Just what happened out there, Specialist?”
I remember where I am, where the River has dropped me this time. This is my debrief after Signal Hill, when my eval report took a mortal wound from which it never recovered.
The doctor chuckles, leans forward and holds out his hand, palm up. It’s not shaking. Why would it? The man hasn’t seen or done anything his entire life aside from sitting behind desks and staring at people, making them feel small in tiny soft chairs. I put the heavy glass into his hand, dropping it a few inches. Can’t take the weight. He carefully replaces the paperweight on the edge of the desk, settles back into his chair and regards me again, but I know he can’t see me. No eyes behind those glasses.
“What happened out there, Specialist Broussard?” The voices of the two doctors have combined into one, musical and deep.
I look up, and it’s Dr. Massaquoi.
“Why are you here, Specialist Broussard?” she asks.
“You don’t know?” I ask in return. I know that she knows. I also know that this is just another part of the game, regardless of who’s asking the question.
“Yes, I do know, but I’m asking you. That’s how this works. You do want this to work, don’t you?”
“They sent me here, just like they sent you.”
“Who’s they?”
I don’t answer.
“Why did they send you here?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you believe your superiors have a vested interest in your health, your well-being?”
“I don’t know.”
The doctor stares at me. The silence lasts so long that I feel like I’m going to scream if I don’t say something, so I do. “I’m not sleeping.”
“Insomnia. They flew you here, at great expense to taxpayers, because you’re not getting your beauty rest?”
“I guess.”
“And what is keeping you from sleeping?”
“I don’t like it.”
“The question stands.”
“I don’t feel like it’s safe to sleep.” I won’t tell her anything more, because if I dig down into the truth, the God’s honest, they’ll lock me up and pump electricity into my brain.
“That’s a conveniently vague response, don’t you think?”
I shrug.
The eyebrows above the glasses are now bushy and belong to the other doctor, the man, who never told me his name because it didn’t matter to either of us. These brows crowd low over his glasses. If he had eyes, they’d be squinting at me. “You wouldn’t be trying to malinger, would you?”
“Excuse me?”
“You purposely didn’t engage the enemy when given an explicit order,” he says.
“I didn’t see an enemy to engage with at the time.”
“I see. So you’re in command, I take it?” Both of the doctors sound alike. Not their voices, or their accents, which sound totally different. But what’s underneath both reads like the same script.
“No, sir.”
The chair creaks under the thin frame of Dr. Massaquoi as she sits back, looking up at the ceiling, where no mosquitoes collect in silent conference, as if this place is a thousand miles from the jungle. It just might be. The River moves quickly, and nothing can stop the current. “It’s impossible to test,” she begins, as if launching into an internal monologue translated with her mouth, “or even to adequately and quickly treat, what happens inside a person’s mind, which is what I assume you’re implying. That there’s a problem inside your mind. What most military medicine classifies as ‘psychosomatic.’ Do you follow what I’m saying?”
Oh, yes. Me speakie English real well. “I’m just saying that I can’t sleep.”
“Yes, that’s what you’re saying,” the other doctor says, turning in his chair. “But let’s be honest, soldier, that’s not what you mean when you say that, is it?”
“You’re trying to twist my words.”
“No, I’m not. I’m trying to get at the true meaning of your words, because you seem unable to provide that for me.
I try to stand, but the chair won’t let me up. It’s so low I can’t find my feet. The carpet feels stick, wet with river water. I miss the tile of those hallways. “This was a mistake. I shouldn’t have come here.”
“No, it’s not a mistake, and you had no choice but to come here. This isn’t the army of Specialist Broussard. This is the Army of the United States of America. You serve. They command. They snap. You dance. That was the deal, and you knew the deal before they shipped your ass eastward.”
I grit my teeth so hard I know he can hear my enamel pop. If he does, he doesn’t let on. He steeples his fingers in front of his face like all the scientists do in the movies.
“So here you are, sent to me in hopes of proving something that isn’t provable, not in any quantifiable way, in order to shirk your responsibilities, and abandon the soldiers in your squad. That presents quite the conundrum for the U.S. Army, doesn’t it?”