Suddenly I remembered the hologram device in my jacket pocket. I retrieved it from the closet and hurried back to my study, where I carefully placed it on the floor, as fled had done earlier. To my surprise I found a three-dimensional representation of a four- or five-year-old girl at a dinner table with, I presumed, her parents. She was sitting on her hands, and appeared to be terrified. Tears had run down her dirty face.
“It’s all right, Phyllis,” her mother cajoled her. “Eat your chicken.”
The child didn’t move.
“Eat that goddamn chicken, you little slut,” her father snarled.
“I don’t want it. I’m afraid to.”
“Daddy won’t hurt you,” her mother promised. “Go ahead.”
Little Phyllis timidly picked up a piece of fried chicken. Before she got it to her plate the father whacked her hand with his fork. The chicken fell onto the floor, and the girl began crying again.
“GET DOWN THERE AND EAT THAT FOOD!” her father screamed.
Phyllis, her arms thrust upward to ward off blows, screamed, too. But she quickly got down on the floor and tried to pick up the wing.
“NOT WITH YOUR HANDS, YOU LITTLE BITCH—WITH YOUR MOUTH! YOU THROW YOUR FOOD ON THE FLOOR, YOU EAT IT THERE. YOU DON’T DESERVE TO EAT LIKE A HUMAN BEING!”
Phyllis did as she was told.
“And for being such a clumsy girl, you’re going to get the bathtub treatment tonight,” her mother added sweetly.
Phyllis cried even louder. “Please, Mommy, please no! I won’t throw any more chicken on the floor! Please don’t put me in the bathtub! Oh, please, not tonight!”
“And after that, you little shit, I’ve got a cigarette for you!” her father promised.
The girl wailed again before leaning over and throwing up on the floor.
“You lick that up, you little bitch! LICK IT UP!”
“Be more careful with that cigarette this time,” the woman admonished her husband. “We don’t want it to show.”
Phyllis suddenly dissolved and reappeared in another scene. She was sitting in a corner of a bare room, perhaps her bedroom, rocking back and forth, back and forth. She looked to be a little older, and was no longer crying. Her face was blank, her eyes staring, as if she were a porcelain doll. Instinctively I reached out to pick her up, to give her a hug. She didn’t recoil, as I had expected her to, nor did she react in any way. It was as if she were dead….
I didn’t want to know what else they had done to Phyllis, and quickly turned the device a few degrees. The room turned dark, and I found myself in a dirt-floor basement. I could smell the mold, feel the cold dampness. There was an emaciated boy of six or seven in dirty rags crawling on his hands and knees—perhaps there wasn’t enough room to stand up—next to a grimy window. He reached for a spider, pushed it into his mouth, and then went for a dead fly attached to a piece of the web. A mouse ran by and little Rick quickly grabbed it. Just as he was about to bite off its head it squirmed out of his grasp and disappeared through a crack in the wall. He began to cry.
I turned the damn thing again.
This time it was a boy playing Monopoly with, I suspect, an older brother. The boy landed on Park Place. Without warning, the brother slapped him hard in the face with his bare hand. Rocky didn’t seem surprised. He didn’t even cry. He just went on blankly playing the game….
I kept turning the device, but no matter how I set it down I found only misery and anguish. I caught a glimpse of someone who resembled Claire being laughed at, presumably by her parents and other relatives, when she said she wanted to be a doctor. And there were others. Probably all our patients were represented, but I made no effort to distinguish one from the other. There were also two staff members, whose horrible childhood explained a lot about their adult behavior, but whom I can’t identify in these pages.
One last turn, hoping to find an iota of happiness, or at least a little less abuse than befell the others. A chimpanzee was holding her baby in a peaceful jungle setting. There was hardly a sound, except for leaves rustling in the trees, and perhaps the tinkling of a nearby stream. The sun came through the foliage, dappling the soft ground and the young ape. For a second I allowed myself a smile. Without warning, however, the pair were surrounded by three large mongrel dogs. Cradling her child, the mother jumped up, ran for a tree, and almost made it before their canine pursuers caught up with them. It was over in a few seconds, the adult chimpanzee’s throat torn out, the little one screaming, the men with their rifles yelling at the dogs to leave the baby alone….
The scene shifted without interference from me. In a brightly-lit laboratory another ape (perhaps the grownup baby) was sitting in a tiny cage, his head clamped into a vise-like tool. Electrodes connected to heavy black cables protruded from his head. A couple of women in white coats turned a dial and watched for the ape’s reaction, one of the scientists or technicians jotting down the results in a thick black notebook. But the chimpanzee was long past reacting. His vacant eyes stared sightlessly ahead. I saw that he had, sometime in the past, chewed off half his fingers….
I spun the thing and ended up on an icy outcropping near the ocean. Several men with grappling hooks were beating baby seals to death or kicking them senseless with their heavy boots, hundreds and hundreds of them. The bodies, already stripped of their fur (many were still alive, writhing on the ice), dotted the landscape, red with warm blood….
Another turn and a huge bull was being murdered in a ring. Thousands and thousands of de-beaked chickens were crammed into tiny cages, their eggs collected on a conveyer belt, the air saturated with fecal ammonia fumes. A live pig whose throat had just been cut was thrashing and screaming on a red-stained cement floor. I suddenly realized that there was little difference between child and animal abuse….
That was all I could take. Leaving Flower inside so she wouldn’t dig it up later, I grabbed the terrible device and headed for the tool shed, where I picked up a shovel and, forgetting, or maybe not caring, about government agents everywhere, hiked deep into the woods behind the house to bury the fucking thing. For the first time in years I found myself weeping. “Let the goddamn Bullocks come!” I shouted to the rabbits and squirrels. “Let them take us out of existence and put a stop to this endless goddamn cruelty!”
Later, when Karen came home, I explained what had happened. Without a word she put her arms around me until, finally, after what seemed like hours, I began to feel better.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The next morning I was just getting into the car when a disembodied voice whispered, “Dr. Brewer!”
“Huh? Where are you?”
“Up here.” In the oak tree nearest the garage was Wang, proffering his badge. Dartmouth was at the end of the driveway guarding the house from terrorists with his huge, ugly weapon.
“Dammit, Wang, I haven’t had time to—”
“We’ve learned from one of our most reliable sources that your visitor is planning to send some violent aliens to wipe out the human race. Is that true or false?”
I saw no point in withholding this information, which was already on record. “Fled told us in a television interview that if we humans don’t shape up and learn to share the Earth with one another and with all the other species living on the planet, some alien beings might come and—uh—terminate us. But she’s not ‘sending’ them. She’s just passing on their warning.”
“What country are they working for?”
“They’re not working for any country, Wang. They’re aliens.”
“I know they’re aliens. Are they Russian or Chinese? What kind of weapons do they have?”