Belt
Chained naked to a metal bed frame in a stark white room, I couldn’t help but think about the various Soviet torture techniques I’d heard about over the years.
There would certainly be sleep deprivation. Pained cries from fellow prisoners. Real or otherwise. Beatings with leather gloves. Noise assault — there are even stories about the Grizzlies using a subcontrabass tuba at point-blank range to blow out an eardrum.
But it appeared that I was in for something special. My clothes had been completely removed, which indicated they were going to maul sensitive parts of my body. Maybe even remove some parts of my body that I was never meant to see. Hold it up to the light, insult it, as if I were made of defective parts, then place it inside a steel tray and go in for more exploration. Sorry gentlemen, you’re not going to find it hidden up there.
For now, though, they were content to let me freeze in quiet contemplation. I’d heard the Soviets were fond of using the cold room as a kind of torture icebreaker, as it were. For all I knew, we did the same thing. The removal of clothing was an especially nice touch. You never feel quite as vulnerable and weak and inadequate as you do when your legs are spread and your testicles have retreated to a hiding spot somewhere below your liver.
I didn’t want to wait. Better they torture me with the vodka still running through my veins. It wouldn’t make it hurt less, but perhaps I wouldn’t mind as much.
“I’d like a vodka martini, please,” I said. “One toothpick skewering the following garnishes: one anchovy-stuffed olive, one cherry tomato, one pickled pearl onion. Served as cold as this room.”
Predictably, there was no reply.
Some men in my situation would revert to name, rank, and serial number. I preferred to order a cocktail. In the case of a torture room, I believe a martini is entirely appropriate. Mencken said the martini was “the only American invention as perfect as the sonnet” and I’m inclined to agree. The shape of the glass. The crisp bite and warm afterglow. There is nothing more pure. The very thought of a martini comforted me, even though I knew it would most likely be a long time before my next. If there was to be a next.
I had been tempted to request a vodka Gibson. Typically Gibsons require gin, but I had so much vodka running through my system I thought it ill-advised to change horses now. There are many origin stories of the Gibson, but my favorite is of the alleged American diplomat (no such man has ever been identified) who frequently traveled to Europe during the dark days of Prohibition. While his colleagues indulged, this diplomat named “Gibson” (in this version) felt it was important to stick to the spirit of homeland law. So he would order a martini glass filled with cold water and garnished with a single pickled pearl onion, so that he would be able to distinguish it from the sea of other cocktail glasses at various dinners and receptions. Admirable. Going without, while those around you sipped and gulped and grew increasingly blotto.
I was feeling Gibson’s exquisite pain now. The blood in my alcohol system was waging civil war, attempting to reclaim its native territories. Dreadful clarity began to return. The colors around me seemed suddenly faded and dull. There had been a song playing in my head for the past few years, a song I had barely noticed, but now the record was over and the needle scratched into blank vinyl. As the hours passed, and even more hours passed, I began to understand my captors’ strategy. They knew they had apprehended a souse. Torture would hurt me, but nowhere near as badly as if I were stone sober. They were drying me out.
This was a very, very bad idea.
Fix
If you’re reading this, I’m going to assume you have the proper clearance. So it doesn’t matter if I reveal classified secrets, does it? That, or you are one extremely bewildered barkeep and about to enjoy the story of your life.
Which is to say, the story of my life.
Some years ago I was a student at Stanford University who needed book money. Textbooks for my classes, but also novels for my own entertainment. At that time in my life I didn’t have much of anything else. No women, no booze, no life of intrigue, no expense account. I was a bookworm. A classified advertisement in the campus newspaper brought me to a basement office a few blocks away from campus, and within a few days I was beginning my slow transformation into an unstoppable living weapon.
They didn’t advertise that, of course. They billed the program as “answering psychological quizzes.” Research for graduate studies. Military war games, strategy scenarios, codebreaking, that sort of thing. Once you answer the first multiple-choice question, however, you’re already in way too deep. Months blurred by before I realized that I was being transformed into... well, something other than a mild-mannered college student.
Along with the quizzes and strategy games they enrolled me in martial arts classes and weapons training. They told me it went along with the experiment; one fueled the other. I have to admit, it was fun. I was never particularly athletic, nor had I ever held a gun in my life. But within a few months I knew how to break a man’s wrist and could field-strip a rifle blindfolded. They clapped me on the back, told me I showed great aptitude for this sort of thing. They brought me on as a full-time trainee.
Not long after that they began hypnosis sessions, just to clear my head they told me. It was around this time that I began to suffer from memory loss and the sensation of missing time.
The deeper I tumbled into the experiments, the more lost I felt. I also had the unshakable feeling that the experiment was not turning out the way they were expecting, and sadly, my project was only one of 129 under the same secretive umbrella. I wasn’t abandoned so much as ignored as they followed other more promising ventures — poisons, telekinesis, astral projection, and the like. I was tumbling out of control and there were few people to notice.
Until the rampage.
Now this I truly shouldn’t discuss, even here. God knows I don’t want to discuss it. Suffice to say that my project handlers realized their efforts to turn me into a living weapon had worked all too well. Only the weapon inside me was not activated with a code phrase, as intended. It had bubbled up out of my mind spontaneously, and at an extremely inopportune moment.
Instead of prosecution they gave me a new identity, and someone else went to the electric chair. From what I understand, the poor bastard deserved it anyway. After months of experimentation there were no easy solutions. I was more or less a violent psychopath twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. No solutions, that is, until I broke the collarbone of a PhD then sneaked off for a cocktail. Which was the only thing, it turned out, that would keep the weapon inside me in check.
Tight
Sometime later I regained my senses. I was still naked, but now with a busted left wing and blood all over me, much of it not my own, and with a crippling hangover. Heart racing. Internal organs like jelly. Skull five sizes too large for the skin and scalp that tried to contain it. Extremities cold and trembling. Iron crab firmly locked in place inside my chest.