The fluid from the injection activated, shooting through me like a rope of electricity. Immediately I felt that this dose of child fluid was different, laced with something harsh, a ballast of amphetamine, a numbing agent. They’d been tampering with it, pushing it through betas.
My speech resources were back. In my face a buzzing commenced, to be relieved only by talking. This medicine didn’t seem to just allow for language, it demanded it.
I looked through the window to the cold, vaulted space where the hole was.
Something pink was tied off to a pole, floating out of sight. It looked like a person hovering in the air.
LeBov asked, “Are you in?”
“You must have others,” I said.
LeBov said, “We do. Nine of them. Foresters. You’ll meet them. They’re a lovely crowd, and your participation, as they say, would round things out nicely.”
Nine of them. And I would make ten. Someone had been doing his reading, a little elementary Jewish procedure, put abroad into the world by our clever elders only to mislead the curious. It astonished me that people expected us to share our holy text, our rules and rituals, with just anyone, or even with each other. Sharing. What a tragic mistake. While the other religions begged for joiners, humping against the resisters until they yielded and swore themselves forever to their principles, we set about repelling them, erecting barriers to belief. It was how I preferred it. And LeBov had taken the bait. The so-called quorum of ten Jews required to ignite proper worship. This rule was one of our better decoys. I marveled at how off track he was. Whoever was running Forsythe thought a Jewish tradition, invented in the first place, was going to assist their decipherment of the transmission, a rigorously difficult act not tied to mystical belief whatsoever.
“You think a minyan is going to help you here?”
LeBov coughed with wretched force, while the technicians kept him from falling. His shirt was soaked through with sweat.
“Well, you tell me,” he said, heaving. “Enlighten me, please. Tell me what will help. I’m at your mercy.”
I looked away from him and said, “I wish you were.”
LeBov waved aside his technicians, but they didn’t leave, only took a step back while continuing to hold him up.
“How about this?” he said to me. “Let’s go take a look at something.”
I paused. LeBov’s show-and-tell had its downside. The last time he’d offered to show me something, it was a room full of children having their essence sucked free into a cup, to be boiled down somewhere into a speech-releasing agent. An essence now forced into my body twice. I didn’t get to see what happened to those children after the fluid was withdrawn, and I didn’t want to. I wasn’t so sure I wanted to see anything new that this man might have to share, but, despite myself, I was already following him.
We went up one level to a low, ankle-height window. You had to crouch to see out, pressing your face sideways against the cold floor, but this required too much strain for LeBov, so he reclined on the floor with his face at the window and invited me to join him. It was like we were testing a bed together in a department store and the headboard was a window we could see through.
Together we looked into a wet, stone room that held a crowd of people who seemed to be test subjects, potential ones. An endless supply of test subjects seemed to appear at Forsythe, and here was yet another holding tank. This group was no different from those I’d seen, and I was relieved; at least I’d not be shown some gruesome sight today. I knew I should feel pity for these people, but their endless numbers, their compliance, made sympathy difficult. These people today who we saw from the low window apparently had made it through most of the admissions process and were here waiting for their final decontaminating showers.
A jet of water shuddered through the room every so often, and someone stepped up to take his turn, twisting in the spume.
Among this group, huddled against the back wall waiting her turn, was my wife, Claire.
She looked calm, even pleased, as if she was waiting on a bench for the doors to open on a movie she wanted to see.
I tried to animate the months she’d spent since I’d left town, but could not will a picture of the extraordinary narrative that must have unfolded. I could only see her gasping on her back in the woods, trampled by a feral child, or scratching at the door of our house while Esther and her friends barked debilitating language sounds inside. I could not will her image into any functional mode, modes of escape, flight, competence—she had been so ill—such as what might have been required for her to first survive, and then to get all the way to Forsythe.
“So,” said LeBov. “The plot thickens.”
“The plot sucks.”
“Well,” he replied, as if there were some debate.
“Go on,” I said. “This is the part where you spell out the blackmail.”
LeBov took that in, said, “That seems tiring, though. Must we really get into that?”
In the stone room Claire had found a friend to huddle against. He seemed nice, a man with no hair. Not fat now, but probably once fat, because he had too much skin everywhere, skin hanging off him. I guess that meant he’d had trouble finding food. He wore large, women’s glasses and I wondered if he walked around expecting to be killed. He had accepted Claire into his arms as if she were a pet, stroking her hair. Maybe he was protecting her.
“What’d you tell her?” I asked LeBov.
“Well, it didn’t take much. Actually it took no telling. No wonder she married you. She thinks we have Esther in here. I waved a photo at her. Those family photos again. I’m not even sure it was actually a photo of your daughter. Maybe it’s a soft spot for children in general that your wife has?”
I asked, quietly, “And do you have Esther here?”
LeBov smiled. “It’s amazing what people will believe.”
“Would you have us believe nothing?” I said, so softly I hardly heard it myself. I knew I was taking the bait. I couldn’t help it.
He paused, gave it some thought. “Well, I do have that also. I have that right now, with some of my workforce, and I quite enjoy it. I have them believe nothing. And then with people like your wife, I have them believe what I require, which is slightly more than nothing. It’s not even that impressive. Is there anything more basic than having people believe things? It’s an elementary strategy of control, to get people to believe things. There’s not even that much artistry required. You should try it.”
If someone was operating the faucet in the holding tank where Claire waited, I couldn’t see him. One by one the potential test subjects rendered themselves nude before the cold jet of water, brought their speechless bodies into collision with the liquid blast. But it wasn’t strictly water, because what collected in the drain had a soapy, black foam in it, a dark brew of bubbles bearding up on the floor.
Soon it was Claire’s turn. She shed her coat, stepped from her nightgown, and with self-conscious charm flipped her hair back before submitting to the fierce spray.
She was really quite lovely, my wife.
LeBov seemed transfixed by the shower spectacle. His mouth had gone slack on the window, mist flaring over his face.
So he’d indicated to Claire that they had Esther in here, and now Claire thought she might just come in and get her? It was hard to think that Claire’s stubbornness had persisted over these last few months, had not yielded even slightly to the crush of reality. Esther would be too old for their purposes by now. At Forsythe teenagers were on the brink of illness themselves, but there was no way Claire could know that.