5
“Guess I’m the token black guy in the mix, huh?” 6 said as he swiveled the office chair from side to side, tapping his hands on the armrests. “And I’m Dominican, so I’m Hispanic, too.” He laughed and shook his head. “You couldn’t even get two people for that; you covered them both with one guy. And you got your one token Asian, too, I see.
“Speaking of 3, she’s a cutie and a half, man. Something very hot about a sexy woman in a pint-sized teenager’s body. It’s hard to catch her away from that fucking big guy, 2, though. He’s guarding her like a pit bull with a bone. When I do get her alone she says she likes me, but I don’t know if she’s just fucking with my head or not. I asked for her number, but… shit, what am I telling you for?” He laughed again. “Sorry about that — don’t cut off my money! She didn’t give it to me, anyway. After we’re done with this, she said. That isn’t against the rules, right? After we’re out of here and in the real world again, we get our lives back.
“Speaking of which, I wonder how my old man is doing right now. My cousin promised he’d look in on him, but that Ace is such a fuck up. He better check in on him, or when I get out of here he’ll be sorry. I know I shouldn’t really have left my Dad alone to do this, but shit, I’m not working… I need the money. And to be honest? I needed some time away from my Dad, too. I hate to say it, but I feel like I’m in a jail cell in that apartment. I’m only twenty-five years old… I should be out there living a little more, you know? Not taking care of a grouchy old man like a fucking nurse…”
A babble of excited voices came to 6 from the other side of the confessional’s door, and he took this as his cue to bring his daily monologue to an end. And so, curious, he rose from the chair and threw the door open to see what the hullabaloo was about. Across the spacious banquet hall, he noted three people gathered at one of the large windows. He strode toward them, calling ahead in a voice that reverberated off the high ceiling, “What’s up?”
Bearded and balding 8 looked over his shoulder and said, “We heard breaking glass outside. I don’t know if one of the windows above us just fell out of its frame on its own, or if somebody up there broke it.”
Hunched at one of the less foggy panes that made up the composite window, not taking his eyes off the scene outside, 10 said, “I told you guys how 9 and I saw someone running around screaming in that brick building. We’ve either got a loony homeless person, a teenager fucking with us, or Dr. Onsay trying to freak us out.”
Peering through the cloudy glass beside him, 9 protested, “And I told you what I think that was. This place is haunted, and I bet Dr. Onsay knows it, and this is all about how we’ll react to it.”
“Maybe it was one of our lovesick lovebirds doing a suicidal swan dive,” 8 said.
“Who?” 9 asked.
“2 and 3.”
“Wait — what’s that, in the grass?” 10 exclaimed.
6 drew close to another of the panes, tried cleaning it with the heel of his hand but the view remained blurry. All he could discern was a dark, uncertain shape moving erratically in the tall yellowed grass and drifts of brown fallen leaves. “Is that a dog?”
“Shit… it’s a person, and they’re hurt,” 8 said. “That glass we heard — I think somebody did jump right through a window up there!”
“Oh my God,” 9 gasped.
“How’d they get through the bars that are on the windows?” 10 asked.
“They obviously did somehow.”
“I’m not so sure that’s a person,” 6 said.
8 watched the black, flopping form sink down out of sight within the overgrown weeds. He waited for it to resurface. It did not. The stirring grass had gone still. “If it was a badly injured person,” he said, “they either just passed out, or died.”
“Well, we can’t get outside, apparently,” 10 said, “but we’d better go upstairs and see if we can figure out what happened.”
9 said, “One of us should stay here and keep an eye on the window.”
“Okay, you do that. You others with me?”
“Let’s do it,” said 6.
“They should really let us have a cell phone for emergencies,” 9 said, “they really should.”
“I’ve got an idea,” 8 said. “I’ll go in the confession room and tell them what we saw. Maybe they’ll be listening, and come around to check things out.”
“Good idea, man,” 10 agreed. “Go for it.”
“Okay,” 8 said, then turned to jog across the room toward the confessional’s door.
10 nodded to 6. “Let’s go, then.”
“Someone was saying that the freaky graffiti in here was making them dizzy,” said 8. He was sitting in the padded office chair, talking to the wall in between biting his nails and spitting little shreds of them onto the floor. “I can’t remember who. But I think it’s the drugs we take every morning. What are those things doing to us, huh? I mean, why are we even taking them?”
He felt a light tickling sensation on his upper right arm, and thinking it might be a spider, quickly pushed up the short sleeve of his scrub top. There was no spider, only his tattoo which spelled out ONE LIFE. He studied these words oddly, like the proverbial buffoon who is mystified at a tattoo they received while drunk. But as if he finally recognized it, he let his sleeve drop back into place to resume talking. Only, he forgot what it was he had wanted to say.
“Definitely your drugs messing me up,” he said accusingly. “I hope I’m not fucking up my health for the rest of my life for a measly four thousand dollars.” In truth, since he had been laid off from his job as a mechanical engineer, these days four thousand dollars was far from measly to him. It wasn’t bad at all, considering the test’s time span. But as 8 considered all this, he realized he couldn’t remember how long they had already been there. In fact, he could no longer remember how many days, or weeks, the test was to encompass in total.
Thinking of his former job now, he recalled how his coworkers had dubbed him Scotty, after the character in the TV program Star Trek. He chuckled as he related this fact aloud. “Well, you have my name, so you know why they called me that. Sometimes when the floor managers called me to come look at one of the machines in the plant, I’d answer the phone in a Scottish brogue. I’d tell them I’d need two hours to fix something, and they’d play along and say, ‘You’ve got fifteen minutes, Mr. Scott.’” He chuckled some more. “Hey, you know what my favorite Scotty moment was? It was in one of the movies, the one where they went back in time to Earth. They needed some repairs done to the ship, so Scotty gave some technology to the guy who was destined to invent that technology. But since Scotty is the one who gave the guy the technology, the guy never had to invent it. So… it’s like the technology never got invented, it just — became! That’s a weird loop, huh? Trippy.
“Ohh… God. Speaking of trippy,” he groused, his good humor fading, “I’m feeling sooo… I don’t know, right now. You’re making me have seconds thoughts about all this, you fuckers.” To his own ears his words sounded increasingly groggy, or drunken. He felt like he could fall asleep right here and now… take a nap right in this chair. “You think I haven’t been through enough stress already, getting laid off — and my Mom dying of uterine cancer last year? And what I went through as a kid? Did you know my father left us when I was only eight? And that business with good old Father Ryan. He’s dead now — may he burn in Hell.”
2 and 3 were exploring again, like restless zoo animals pacing in their cage. What else was there for them to do, when they weren’t eating or sleeping or washing their clothes or bodies?