“Don’t!” she hissed, wide-eyed.
“They painted this and the other ones, just since the last time we were in these rooms?” 2 said. He was certain the graffiti that now covered one wall of the men’s dormitory, which he had discovered when he’d gone to collect his dirty laundry, had not been there previously either. He was dead certain. And then there was the mural of graffiti that now obscured one wall in the room where the new washer and dryer had been provided for them. And the murals that concealed one wall in the men’s shower room, and one wall in the women’s shower room. “Five new murals? And we didn’t catch them making these? What happened, did we all fall asleep at the dinner table for a couple of days?”
“How many murals does that make now?” 6 asked.
They tallied them up together, and came to the number nine. The one in the confessional — the only mural that extended beyond a single wall, encompassing as it did all four. The new murals in the male and female sleeping rooms, the male and female showers, and the laundry room. A mural 2 and 3 had stumbled on in a brick hallway. Another 5 had encountered in the basement of the mildewed old building across the way. The mural 2 and 3 had come across on the third story, that had dribbled paint onto the floor and through the ceiling of the level below. And who could say whether there might be more? They all felt that they had only touched the tip of the iceberg in exploring this complex, had only done so idly, without a clear purpose or determined effort to map it all out. For why should they? Still, because of this, the place seemed like an enormous, even infinite maze to them.
“They’re part of the test,” 2 murmured. “But why? What are they for? What do they do?”
He scrutinized the mural before them more closely. As closely as he could, but its boiling turmoil of shapes seemed to pull his eyes, pull his mind, in all directions at once. He recognized certain designs by now, including the symbol for infinity, but there seemed to be layers or depths that his eyes had not formerly plumbed… patterns that only now made their presence partly known. Background areas of black or white — over which the tagging had been layered — that had previously appeared random to him now looked to be made of interlocking forms, like those of an artwork by Escher: white shapes morphing into white birds, interacting with black shapes morphing into black birds. And the more he stared at this half-hidden map of black continents in oceans of milk (or white continents in oceans of ink?), the more complex the hinted patterns became. Were there even interlocking tesseracts like a multidimensional scaffolding upon which all the rest hung? And then, the tesseracts themselves composed, of course, of all those innumerable 0s and 1s.
5 pivoted around to look through the open doorway of the women’s sleep chamber. “Hey, where’s Te—” she began.
“Who?” said 6.
She peered through the threshold with a slack mouth for several beats, then shook her head as if to clear it and said, “Nothing.”
8
The next morning, at the breakfast table, 2 found it much easier to avoid swallowing his daily ration of pills than he’d thought. When he brought his hand up to his mouth — atypically, as if to swallow all six of the pills in one go — he simply closed his fingers around the variety of gel capsules and tablets. As a bit of sleight of hand, magician’s misdirection, he raised his left hand with the tumbler of water at the same time he lowered his right hand with the palmed pills. Under the table, he tucked them into his waistband.
His performance was not noted, in any case. By now the ritual had become so second nature that the other three subjects didn’t even glance at him to verify his compliance. He just prayed that no one watching through a hidden camera had detected his trickery.
2 wasn’t even entirely sure why he had done it. He was a math teacher, his realm of expertise one of immutable order and hard rules. He would have expected one of the others, maybe young 6, to be more the rebel. Though who was to say 6 had actually taken his own pills just now?
Surely they couldn’t be seriously harmful, even if this was a trial for a new series of pharmaceuticals. Why then? Why had he felt he must purge his system of these unknown chemicals?
At the same time, there were other drugs which he still craved, though he had been denied them since the test had begun. He said aloud, “Man oh man, would I love some coffee right now. And more than that, a cigarette. I swear I could strangle a puppy for a cigarette.”
To his immediate left, 3 looked up at him and said, “I didn’t know you smoked.”
He blinked at her. “Of course. Of course I smoke. I, ah, I just haven’t been able to, so that’s why you haven’t seen me.”
“Oh.” She shrugged. “Me, too.”
“What? Really? Are you kidding now?”
“No. You just haven’t seen me because I haven’t been able to, either.”
“Oh. Wow. Well, you should quit that.”
“I will if you do.”
“Looks like we’re already working on that.”
3 looked him up and down, and smiled. “I thought people got fat when they quit smoking. I swear you’ve been getting thinner. When I first met you, you had more of a gut.”
“A gut? Thanks.”
“Well, you don’t now. You look sexier.”
2 chuckled, shy in front of the others but pleased. From the corner of his eye he saw 6 look across the table at them, his tumbler paused on its way to his mouth. 2 wanted to tell 3 she looked as sexy as ever, but decided to save the compliment for when they were alone.
Finished with her meal, 5 got up from the table, stretched with an exaggerated yawn, and wandered across the room to one of the towering windows. She called hollowly across the room to the others, “Wow, it’s really snowing out there now. You should see it — everything is white.”
While 3 finished her modest meal, 2 and 6 joined 5 at the window. “Huh, yeah,” said 2, observing the blizzard. “It looks like the whole world’s being erased.”
2 glanced back at the Formica-topped table around which their four chairs were grouped, to see if 3 was finished and ready to have a look outside for herself. He was surprised to see that she was gone from the room instead. The four chairs stood empty.
5 left the banquet hall, proclaiming that she would be taking a shower, leaving 2 and 6 alone. 2 didn’t want to make conversation with the younger man, so he busied himself with exploring the room’s furthest reaches: the far wall opposite that in which the great windows were set. Here, and spaced elsewhere in the enormous room, a cast iron radiator with leafy scroll designs stood against the wall of glazed white bricks. Nearing it, 2 established that it was functioning, giving off heat to keep the wintry weather outside at bay. Not far from the radiator, lying flush with the wall and apparently overlooked by whomever had stripped this complex to the bones, he spotted a few varied lengths of old copper pipe, blotched green with verdigris. He lifted one of these, about three feet long and with a ninety degree elbow at one end. Hefting it in two hands like a baseball bat, he regarded how good it might serve as a weapon.
A weapon? And why was he thinking about that?
Still, he carried it back to the table with him and rested it across the imitation granite surface. He saw that 6 had busied himself with an ersatz game of basketball, repeatedly launching a balled-up paper lunch bag, probably his own, toward the white plastic bucket in which their three daily meals dropped.
Both men looked around as 5 reentered the room, walking briskly and with a fretful expression. When she arrived at the table, 6 drew in closer to hear what she had to report.