They brought him to the bedframe and made him lie on his stomach. The springs in the frame creaked and jangled. No one said anything, and Karel had the surreal sense that he was watching the reenactment of a horrible crime.
The two men manacled the young man and shook the manacles to test them, and left. Kehr was still in his chair. He rubbed his eye with a fingertip and blinked. The young man lay spread-eagled where he was, gazing at a spot on the wall. The weight of his head was all on his chin, and he ground his molars. His jaw was still swollen. His toes curled and uncurled against the frame.
Two other men came in. One was short with heavy glasses and wore a white apron. The apron had OP printed on its upper left corner.
“This is someone we call Mr. Birthday,” Kehr said. The man in the apron smiled in acknowledgment. The other man was filthy and unshaven and looked like a prisoner himself and apparently didn’t rate an introduction.
“This is Karel Roeder,” Kehr said.
“I don’t want to be here,” Karel said. He was still against the wall. The man in the apron smiled sympathetically and crouched near the bedframe to examine wires that ran to the field telephone. The unshaven man crossed the room stiffly to the lattice screen and sat behind it at one of the desks. The shadows made patterns across his face and clothes. The desk was too small for him and it looked as if he were being made the object of a joke.
“Mr. Birthday is one of our up-and-coming experts in public safety training and civic action,” Kehr said. The man in the apron gave the wires an expert tug and nodded modestly.
The unshaven man behind the latticework had taken out a small writing pad and a pencil.
“What you’re interested in is over here,” Kehr said, inclining his head toward the bedframe. “Not behind the screen.”
The unshaven man hadn’t looked up and was concentrating fiercely on his writing pad. Kehr remarked that the prisoners here did their part to run the system; that way the customers served themselves, as they liked to say.
“It teaches them responsibility,” he added.
“I think we’re about ready here,” the man in the apron said. He was bending over the toy box with his hands on his thighs. He reached in and extracted a silver rod a foot long and a narrow length of cheesecloth. The cheesecloth he folded and refolded and then wrapped around the tip of the rod and lashed it with string from his pocket. Karel recognized the knot from camp. The bedframe made a creaking and shifting sound.
“Sit down,” Kehr said to Karel. Karel was looking at the rod. “I would suggest it,” he warned. The man in the apron indicated the chair with the rod, as if offering an open seat on a bus. Karel sat down.
“What happens is this,” Kehr said, and he took hold of the crank handle on the field telephone. “The field telephone is battery-operated and generates a current when the handle is turned. The voltage produced depends on the speed at which it’s turned.”
He turned the crank at an easy pace, the way he might grind coffee. The man in the apron reached over and flipped the switch beside the crank and the young man howled and shot from the metal frame all at once, a rigid board, a magic act. He came back down and bounced and screamed and then twisted and thrashed. Kehr stopped.
Karel pressed against the back of his chair as if he wanted to push through it. Kehr reached over and took his hand and put it on the crank over his, and Karel tore it away, trembling. Kehr turned the crank and flipped the switch as if introducing Karel to an uncomplicated but soothing craft. The young man shrieked and tore upward at his manacles, and the bedframe jumped an inch across the floor.
Kehr relinquished the crank to the man in the apron.
The man in the apron cranked at various speeds and thumbed the switch intermittently. The young man shrieked and cried and jabbered in between the shrieks. The manacles were making raw red lines on his wrists and ankles and he’d bitten his tongue.
“What’re you doing?” Karel asked. “Why aren’t you asking him questions?” He was trying to turn his head away, but he was too close and Kehr was restraining him from getting out of his chair. “Why aren’t you asking him questions?” He looked wildly at Kehr, and Kehr put his finger to his lips.
The man in the apron unhooked the wires from the bedframe and wound them through an eye at the base of the rod. He cranked the field telephone again and touched the cheesecloth tip of the rod lightly to various parts of the young man’s back. The young man screamed even louder than before. The rod made coin-sized burn marks. Karel could smell it. The man in the apron shut off the switch and adjusted the cheesecloth.
Karel had his hands over his ears and was trying to keep his eyes shut. “Why aren’t you asking him questions?” he asked. His voice rebounded around the cement walls.
Kehr gave his arm a pat and then pulled it down, freeing an ear. He said, “Is it so hard to figure this out? What we do is administer fear in small doses, which we then gradually increase. Education. We’re teaching him a story with two themes: ultimate brutality and absolute caprice.”
“I can’t watch this,” Karel said. He was starting to sob.
“In fact you can,” Kehr said. “You’re not up pounding on the door. You’re not retching. You’re not doing anything to stop us.”
“No no no no,” Karel shouted. The man in the apron walked the rod tip down the bumps of the young man’s vertebrae and the young man started screaming the same thing. He drowned them all out.
Kehr said it was like Karel’s herpetology and that Karel should’ve recognized that already. The man in the apron described a grid pattern with his prod across the young man’s back and legs. The young man screamed as if someone were pulling his throat out. That sort of study created an identity for the object being studied, provided an essence. He was talking about a kind of power over the natural world. This was about power, the power to see clearly what one was designed for. What he was talking about, he said, was the audacity he had, the audacity Karel had — he shook Karel, hard, to focus his attention, and the man in the apron poured a small bottle of mineral water onto the young man’s back and touched the rod to it — the audacity they had, to circle, as it were, like birds of prey over inarticulate suffering.
Karel was crying. Kehr was unbothered by it. After waiting for Karel to stop he got up and led him to the door and opened it for him. He said something in a low voice to the man in the apron. Out in the hall he shut the door with a clang on the young man’s shrieks and smoothed his hair and reminded Karel that he had gotten up to leave, not Karel. This was nothing, he said. This was not torture. This was a long way from what it could be. This was exercise.
Karel,
Mother says the light here will ruin my eyes and here I am writing to you anyway. I’m in bed already, and I’ve even been to sleep and had a dream. Now I can’t sleep, so I’m writing you, though I’m not sure you’ll ever write back or that you got my other letter or that you’ll even get this.
In my dream we were hiking. (I almost always dream I’m going somewhere.) We came to a big lake. It was night and there was a moon. You wanted me to swim the lake and I told you I wanted to eat first. That’s all I remember, though later you kissed me. They say dreams depend on the noises you hear in your sleep. Maybe it’s true. I always feel the same in dreams: like I live in this peculiar world where I’ll never be entirely happy, but still … It’s strange. It always makes me melancholy. Am I getting really sentimental?
I’ve been thinking of you more often than usual. Maybe because I’m always tired with work and everything. I tell myself: you’re looking for a crutch. You know you can depend on him, how he feels about you. (Leda being presumptuous.) But then I find myself thinking about you anyway. I think, What do you know about him? And I find myself going over all the good things and remembering things like our walks. Karel! If I ever get completely sappy, promise to shoot me, like a horse.