Telling them anything they wanted started to feel like a welcome manner to end this hell.
Every hour, they opened the box. I heard it and saw blurry figures. Muffled men’s voices. I would feel another shot, and the familiar floating sensation of ketamine would come raging back. They would close and lock the box again.
I felt myself suspended, drifting down again. But without the boy. I was locked in the box, my box, and set off to drift in the infinite loneliness of the universe.
At some point I was removed. I couldn’t stand. Weak and disoriented. I screamed again, weeping and gulping breaths as a man carried me to a bed and placed covers over me. I didn’t sleep all night. I think it was night. I remember hearing my constant screams. At one point, I collapsed on the way to the bathroom, dragged myself onto the tile, and then couldn’t stand or see shapes, and I passed out in my spreading pool of urine, only understanding my situation when I was dragged back to bed and tied down, still wet and stinking in all my waste.
I’d remember that boy forever. Maybe there have been only a handful of days that I haven’t thought about him. I still feel him on my skin. He lasted forever.
I don’t feel the torture anymore.
They didn’t break me. They didn’t kill me. But they became my silent enemy, and I knew I would try to destroy them if I could.
1981
It took a year after the interrogations for me to find an opening to leave the agency. That life. To begin my series of new identities and new lives. But every new person I became always looked over his shoulder. Though I don’t think I ever knew fear again after they’d finished with me in that room.
They tried to destroy all of the MK-ULTRA papers in 1973. Helms, the head of the CIA, did it at Gottlieb’s request, and Helms knew this was something that could never become public. However, twenty thousand pages were misfiled and never destroyed, and they were released under the Freedom of Information Act in 1975. Congress held hearings. People were shocked. But nothing happened. More hearings in 1977. The same — brief horror followed by everyone forgetting about it and moving on.
A couple years later, I started sharing the stories with some investigative reporters who I trusted could keep a secret. I knew experiments that were not covered in those twenty thousand pages. But my attempts at anonymity, I realized early, were futile. And the stories have yet to appear.
I’ve sent copies of everything to Hans. I’ve sent copies to a PO Box in Portland, Maine, and one in Lincoln, Nebraska, and mailed the keys to the Times journalist, who’s mailed it to a friend. A friend now at risk. I hope there is no way the agency can know about that. But I also know they are everywhere. Nowhere and everywhere.
1951
I was a graduate school chemist at Northwestern University. I remember snow, which I know I will never see again. I wasn’t this man. With only one different choice somewhere along the way, maybe I would have never been this man. I don’t remember the man I was before the agency. He disappeared when the man from the agency appeared.
1981
A new message from Hans told me to call him and he left the number and time. We hadn’t spoken in decades. When I called, all he said was, “I can’t protect you anymore. They’re on their way.”
When I went to hurry home, I burned my hand on the car handle. And on the steering wheel again. It can be damn near impossible to even drive out here.
Still, this cruel landscape has become my home.
Since I heard from Hans, I haven’t so much as left my cabin in three days. Nor have I slept. Methamphetamines are one of the easiest drugs to make. My brain slips here and there from sleep deprivation, but I have enough control to see this through.
They’ll come soon, and I’ll make sure I’m awake.
And when they open my door — front or back — they will be dosed with one of the early experiments with the VX nerve agent. I’ve carried it and made deadly gasses for years. The hard thing was picking one that would kill them within a minute or less, but have its power dissipate to safe levels so that when we’re all found, no one else will be in danger.
Never leave an institution that seeks to kill you without the means to kill them.
I have a gas mask for the VX. I put it on, and the vision glass fogs. I wear two pairs of latex gloves. Even though this is mainly an airborne weapon, you can kill yourself if you break the skin.
I’ve turned off the swamp cooler. It blows too much air for me to hear them coming. I spread the nerve agent over the middle of the floor and by the doors.
I have a cyanide capsule in my mouth that will end it soon after I watch them take their last breaths. My life is over. Somehow, this brings waves of relief.
Inhaling twenty-five to thirty micrograms of this VX strain is enough to kill a person in minutes. Once they open my door, they’ll be dosed with over two hundred micrograms. It immediately begins to paralyze the muscles. And then freezes the diaphragm, which causes the suffocation and death.
A car pulls up outside. I sit in my corner chair.
I’m covered in sweat. No swamp cooler, and in the confining rubber of the mask. The increasingly sweltering wet mask limits my vision a bit. But I can still make out their faces and thick, cruel bodies. They are the same as the agency killers I knew in the fifties. One replaced by a clone, and so on. A seemingly enormous supply of men with no skills other than to overpower and kill. Any agency with enemies will forever need these limited men.
The sunlight through the window illuminates dust specks in the air. The nerve agent hits them as soon as they fully enter. They shout at me to hold up my hands. Which I do, but the gas is already starting to kill them. They can no longer speak. The coughing has started. I watch to see if they will be able to step forward and try to beat me to death. The shorter one holds a gun on me — the taller man a baseball bat. The gun falls out of the short man’s hand, and he drops to the floor. The man with the bat takes two steps toward me and collapses. They look at each other. At me. They gasp for air that will never again come, terror in their eyes.
Briefly, I wonder whether or not it matters if I witness them die, or if knowing is enough. I close my eyes. I breathe. My face slippery from the sweat. I keep my eyes closed. I have seen enough death, caused enough death, to ever want to see another one. I bite down on the capsule and wait for it all to end.
Part III
Everything Happens To Me
The Stand-In
by J. D. Horn
Deepwell
“I learned about the Kennedy assassination while I was stripping for the prison guard.” Donna waited for the line to land, then sensing a tough room, stepped it up. “Tits out and squatting in front of this Mack truck with a vagina, and she just bursts into tears.”
The kid sitting across from her — couldn’t be more than thirty, corn-silk hair, weak chin, done up like a newly minted missionary in a white short-sleeve button-up — shifted in his seat but said nothing. Donna didn’t make a habit of letting just anyone into her house, but after the kid called two days earlier and asked to meet her, she got help at the senior center looking him up on the Internet. She found his résumé — a fancy school, followed by a meandering mishmash of jobs, pictures of him and his girlfriend drinking beer in Puerto Vallarta, pictures of him and his girlfriend drinking beer in Portland, videos of their tiny muttsy, whateveradoodle dog. The kid seemed rudderless, but harmless. He was interested, and Donna was bored, so she figured why the hell not? She’d talk to him. Besides, Sally was waiting nearby if Donna needed her help.