last edit 12-15-2000
One: Apprehension
He sat, hunched forward, across from her at a table near the back of the café. Between mouthfuls of condiment laden lettuce and carrot she explained her latest observed flaw in the status quo, gesturing wildly as she did and wielding a three-pronged metal fork.
“And another thing, couldn’t the millions of dollars in campaign money these pigs use to insure their positions of oppressive power be used in more constructive ways? Here’s an idea. A politician gives what would’ve been used for a few expensive television commercials to a charitable cause instead. That way, not only is the money being used for good, but he is famed for being a generous man as well,” she said.
“Or woman,” he added.
“What?”
“I doubt that you want to say that only men can be politicians.”
“That doesn’t matter,” gesturing more vigorously now, “The point is that the political process in this country is seriously fucked up, Greg, and what are we supposed to do about it? What can we do about it?”
Greg really didn’t care much about doing anything about it. Due to his lack of attention over the last seven minutes, he couldn’t tell you for sure what “it” was. His mind, and eyes, wandered to her moving lips, which were the color, he thought, of bubble gum and appeared just as soft. He would’ve liked to kiss her right then and see if they tasted as such, if only the frequent shoveling of vegetable matter would cease for a few seconds.
Her name was Judith. This name he danced around in his head unendingly after learning it a few weeks ago. This was the third time they had met for conversation, and Greg was quick to learn how long-winded a person can be when faced with a weak counter position to everything she says. Besides her conversation skills and vast knowledge of worldly affairs, she was approximately five feet seven inches tall with straight blonde hair and dense pools of dark brown for eyes. She immediately caught Greg’s interest but in the end she made the first move.
Greg noticed that her eyes were reflecting light of a red blinking neon sign in the adjacent window, which made them seem to flash from brown to crimson rhythmically.
Judith noticed Greg’s blank stare, “Am I getting through to you? Do you want a bite of this salad? It’s really good.”
“No thanks, I’m dieting,” he joked, wondering if she would understand it.
“Well you look fine.”
He guessed not.
“I said dieting, not dying.”
There was a long pause of mastication after which Judith burst into laughter. Greg wasn’t sure if she was laughing at the joke, herself, or some grand realization. It was an anonymous kind of laughter that Greg noticed commonly came from females.
“Tell you what, my salad is getting limp and it’s about…”
As she extended her arm to check her watch in a violent movement, the fork she’d been wielding flew out of her hand and clanged as it skittered across the tile floor of the café. Her face turned red, and chuckled a little.
“I’ll get the bill,” said Greg quickly.
“Thanks.”
Greg drove her home to the outer suburbs and eventually discovered her lips tasted like nothing at all. He figured this was better than a lot of things they could’ve tasted like. She shut the car door and skipped up to her house. Greg sped onto the highway to his parents’ home in another nearby suburb.
~
The house was unlit when Greg drove up to the garage. When creeping through the empty house, being careful not to wake his parents, he noticed a pile of unopened mail on the kitchen table. Leafing through, Greg found bills, bills, more bills, and a small envelope with a handwritten address bearing his name. There was no return address. He hastily opened it. Receiving any mail at all was a rare occurrence for Greg, and he felt a rush of adrenaline tearing through the paper wrapper. The tearing and ripping soon revealed a sheet of creamy bond paper. In an elegant typeface it shouted:
Dear Selected,
Congratulations. The governing body has selected you to be tested for extreme ability and aptitude. This testing could lead to your involvment in government projects as an administrative figure. You are summoned to meet with officials on the date printed on the bottom of this page. This is not an invitation. It is a summons. Your presence is required, and it is your duty to attend. Failure to do so will result in apprehension and criminal charges. The address of the governing hub you must visit is printed below the date. Thank you for your compliance. We will be looking forward to seeing you in our offices.
Your loving comrades and friends at:
Local Governing Chapter 3
“Good Tim,” he thought.
The date was for Thursday, tomorrow at four o’clock. Greg knew the street of the address the letter referred to, but hadn’t recalled ever seeing a government building on it.
He picked the mangled envelope off the floor and scanned it for a hidden return address. There was none. Taken none seriously, the letter was soon disposed of in the kitchen trash bin. Limbs shaking and nerves wracked, Greg took up a spot on the sofa and tried to get some sleep before school. He checked his red-display digital alarm clock. It was 1:34.
~
“So what happened?” asked Mike in the zombie-like stir of morning hallway time at Killian High School. Mike was a year younger than Greg, and Greg longed for the day when the age ratio would even out a little so that Mike wouldn’t seem so, well, green at everything. Nonetheless, Greg enjoyed best-friends status with the skinny, blue-eyed teenager. Until Greg’s recent dating escapades, they spent most of their time with each other.
“Nothing. She ate lettuce and talked about the government while I watched and listened,” informed Greg.
“Did you kiss her?”
“Yes.”
“What did it taste like?”
“Forget that for a minute. Look at this.”
Greg dug in his pocket for a moment and produced the crumpled ball of bond paper he fished out of the trash in the morning in a change of heart. For reasons unknown even to him, he told his mom he was digging in the trash for a science project. He passed off this reflexive lying to the fact that he could not stomach his parents’ probable ecstatic pride so early in the day.
“I got this in the mail yesterday,” said Greg.
“What is it?” asked Mike with bulging eyes.
“Some kind of…”
Greg flipped the wrinkled paper, now blank, over and over in amazement. The fancy printing had disappeared overnight, or maybe something in the trash chemically erased it. No, probably not.
“This is insane,” said Greg in disbelief.
“What’s insane?” came a female voice out of nowhere.
They both looked up, and straightened.
Judith, in all her post morning ritual immaculateness, stood before them now, glancing sideways at Mike.
“Did I leave my Math book in my locker again?” said Mike, and trotted off, giggling.
“Hi,” said Judith.
“Hey,” replied Greg, half-heartedly.
“I was thinking about what you said, and I think you’re right. I think women do belong in politics, that is, if politics belongs anywhere. I was reading up on the coming election and you wouldn’t believe what these guys are talking about. For instance…”
Just then, the school bell rang for a full fifteen seconds muting or garbling anything that might have come from Judith’s mouth.
“… And that is why we’re dropping bombs on them. Can you believe that?”
Greg shook his head.
“Anyway,” she sighed, “Call me sometime. I’ve got to get to class.”
In a typical to everyday way, Greg went on his way to Economics, and Judith to History.
~
A day and a half passed in the suburbs and with the passing grew Greg’s anxiety that he would make have the requested appearance to the government officials voluntarily or against his will.
On his sofa Greg thought, “Perhaps there is little to be wary of. It was only for testing. But why the disappearing ink on the letter? It was like they needed to cover their tracks before getting me to come in, but make it mysterious enough so I am spooked into it. Maybe I’m over-thinking this. Judith always talked about grandiose cover-up schemes by the government. Maybe that’s why I can’t dismiss it… Judith!”
They spoke on the phone briefly, and it was agreed that Greg come over. It was now a full three hours since he had been expected at the Governing Hub.
Walking out the door to his car, Greg couldn’t help but observe an obtrusive, to his paranoid state, dark van parked on the opposite side of the street and a half of a block down. His heart pumped hard beneath his ribs all the way to the driver’s seat, and as his sweat soaked palm turned the key in the ignition.
~
He skidded to a stop outside of Judith’s in his boxy Honda. Glancing at his watch and knocking at the screen door, out of his left eye Greg noticed a dark vehicle slowly advancing. Flinching, he spun around. To his amused relief it was only a navy blue Ford Taurus quietly occupied by what he liked to call “serial numbered suburbanites” and their “little plastic procreations”. Since he also lived in a suburban home, he would justify the name calling by remembering that he, and of course, Judith and Mike, were teenagers. To him teenagers, due to their youth, belonged to few social classifications. Still in the womb of society, he found himself inside a self with no name or brand but Greg Thompson.
“Hi!” exclaimed Judith, opening the door.
“Hi, can I come in please?” Greg asked.
“Yes, of course.” she said in a cheerful tone and added, “But take off your shoes.”
It made him feel vulnerable to remove his foot ware, but on second thought highly doubted an upcoming need for fleeing.
“What was all this mind chatter about being safe,” he asked himself. Of course he was safe, he assured himself. “I was expected only three hours ago.” He couldn’t shake the memories of the invisible message in his pocket and the dark van parked outside his house, though.
“I’m making herbal smoothies,” said Judith and asked Greg, “Do you want one?”
Greg hadn’t a clue what an herbal smoothie consisted of, but his mouth was parched from stress so he nodded and thanked her. The sounds of pouring liquid and of appliances whipping the concoction into form drifted from the kitchen. Between bursts of this blending, Judith spoke to Greg.
“It’s strange, you know. I was half expecting you to call and ask to come over. I don’t usually have premonitions of any sort, or any that can’t be explained by basic intuition, but I even vacuumed the curtains in preparation. So what brings you from the lovely suburb of Woodsmith and to my door?”
“I don’t actually know for sure. You’d probably laugh at me if I told you what I thought,” said Greg and added a weak chuckle.
“What do you think?” she asked with a serious expression while creeping back into the living room. She had two glasses in her hands. They were shaped like the curvature of a woman’s body and were tall as glasses go. A strikingly blue opaque liquid was frothing over the brims.
“To be honest, I almost felt like I was chased here, half by my own mind and half by something real,” explained Greg the best he could.
While shaking her head in mock disbelief, she set the glasses on the coffee table in front of them, one nearer to Greg than the other, and said, “These are supposed to clear the head. Give it a try,” and then nudged the glass closest to Greg closer to him with the claw-like nails of her right hand.
He grabbed a glass, though not the one nearest to him, and took a mighty gulp through the bent straw poking out of the mixture. It tasted like carrots and rosemary, but believed the main ingredient to be a blue food dye. Judith’s eyes bulged nervously and eyed the full glass, sitting now not quite as near to Greg as the one he picked up.
“I have to use the bathroom, I’ll be right back,” said Greg and walked down a nearby hallway where he hung a left into the home’s only facility.
Judith put her hand to her forehead and rolled her eyes. She looked at the full glass in front of her, and had an idea. A lot counted on what she did next, and she knew this. She took an equal gulp as Greg took from his glass from the untouched glass, switched the exact positions of the glasses now equal in containment, and waited.
Greg returned, zipping his fly, saying, “It was probably nothing, but outside my house was…”
Judith stopped him and said, “Hold that, I’ll be right back,” and bolted for the bathroom door. When inside she bowed her head to the toilet and pushed her index and middle fingers deep into her throat. At first only for the noisy sound of retching, but after a few hard heaves she worked the azure beverage to the surface and into the toilet water where it swam and dissolved like some kind of foaming pipe snake chemical reaction. She sigh-moaned a few deep breaths and went at it another time, coughing and spitting into the bowl.
There was a knock at the bathroom door.
“Huh, huh, huh, yeah? Huh,” said Judith, panting for breath.
“Are you alright?” came Greg’s muffled voice though the hardwood door.
“Yeah, just some bad curried tofu or something I ate earlier. I’ll be all right. Drink your smoothie and I will be out in a second.”
She stood up and saw bright points of blinking light swimming from the back of her eyeballs into her peripheral vision.
“Oh shit,” she said out loud.
Judith looked at her self in the mirror, examining her eyes. The pupils were dilated, but she figured she was in good shape considering what she had recently ingested. Cold tap water splashed on her face felt good evaporating from her skin on her way back to the living room.
Sprawled out on the couch with limbs in all directions when she arrived was Greg, unconscious. His eyes were a quarter open, which made Judith worry a bit, so she stepped over one of the feminine glasses, now empty and horizontal on the carpeted floor, to check his vital signs. He was breathing shallowly.
Judith sighed, walked to the kitchen, and picked up the telephone. Her long nails, attached to shaking hands, skidded on the plastic buttons, causing her to have to abort dialing a couple of times. When she got the number right, there was a pause in which Judith took the time to roll her eyes around a bit.
“Hello?”
“Yes, is this the Project Coordinator?”
“Fine. Hi Phil.”
“Yes, he’s here.
“Yes, the serum worked… wonderfully,” she said into the receiver while observing the pool of saliva filling in the corner of Greg’s mouth.
“Yes, quite incapacitated.”
“I do realize this is a tremendous break.”
“I’ll be waiting for them.”
“What, what else?”
“Oh okay, north side Emilio’s in Metro-Cap.
“Eight tomorrow.”
“You dress pretty too.”
“We should have him up there in about five hours.”
“Okay,” she said with a lot of breath and hung up the phone.
Judith took out a red packet and produced a cigarette from it. She lit the cigarette and inhaled deeply. She eyed Greg’s limp body and wiped the sweat from her forehead.
~
The doorbell rang, but Greg did not hear it. Two men came from a black van idling outside to the door of Judith’s house. The three of them disappeared inward, the lights in the house blinked off, and four came out a minute later. With some difficulty that comes with moving an unconscious and therefore uncooperative human body, Greg was taken to the waiting van by the two men and shoved hastily into the rear cargo door. Had he been alert to the situation he may have fled from his captors, but given that he was busy negotiating a path through a near out of body experience as a side effect to the precaution taken against his fleeing, he was not at all alert to the real scenario that was unfolding.
Another man came from the van and retrieved a jingling set of objects from Judith’s grasp before entering Greg’s car and driving it away.
The two men entered the front seats, and Judith the back door with Greg. The apprehenders swung shut the doors of the van as it pulled away from the curb and gutter of South Fork Drive in the expansive suburban city of Fairville and eventually onto the dark and sinuous connecting highway passes to other cities.
~
“I am a plant,” thought Greg.
“No, no, a flower,” he clarified his thought to himself, though he didn’t so much think it more than just become falsely aware of it. His thought process was wrecked far beyond the point where he could form even simple concepts into words and sentences.
“A rainbow flower, with petals of red, green, and white.”
Greg felt himself taking root and spreading his petals.
“What’s that bright mass of energy? Oh, it must be the Sun. I shall grow towards it, for it is my destiny as a plant to do so.”
Greg twisted his stem-like torso around to look at his surroundings. He saw a pulsating yellow sky, and a brown cloud in the distance. The cloud was shifting and getting larger, though gradually. He looked back into the Sun.
“If I grow too high I will get burned,” he thought.
The earth he was planted in shook violently as the van went over a rough part of the road.
“Damn earthquakes.”
The brown cloud was much larger now, and Greg noticed that it wasn’t really a cloud, but a swarm of brown particles flying in loop patterns around each other very quickly.
“Huh.” thought Greg, and “squinted” into the swarm, believing that he was furrowing two of his petals like eyebrows at it.
“Yes, definitely something strange. Maybe it’s a rain cloud that will help me grow more.”
Greg shook is petals back, extended his leaves, and prepared for the drink. He was admiring the Sun with his flower head leaned back when the bites started. First one, then another, then more bites came. Greg swung forward to be greeted by a swarm of angry locusts hungry for plant matter. He screamed and thrashed at the bugs with his leaf-arms, which came across to the people in the van as weak croak and a slight writhing of his body, but no one paid much attention to it. The locusts dined on Greg, but as they did Greg’s panic and fear turned to calming resurrection in the bodies of the creatures that sought to destroy him. He felt his being transferred from the vegetable state to the animal state. He could feel his body being digested in the bellies of the maddened insects and used to fuel them to continue their destructive path to ingest him. His life was now their life.
When they were through, the swarm dispersed, and the yellow sky turned to black. Members of the swarm took up random positions in the sky and burned a white glow. The Sun still shone, but was a rectangular shape now. While this happened, Greg slowly opened his eyes to see the interior of the vehicle he was lying in the back of.
To his immediate front, and up, he saw a black foam insulation pad with white speckles of paint scattered randomly. The pad was punctuated in the center by a four-sided dome light that hurt his eyes to look at. He attempted to raise his head to further examine his surroundings, but a surge of stiffening pain shot through his neck.
“Ugh,” was the sound that escaped his mouth. He fell back into a full reclining position on the floor of the van, and relaxed his eyelids.
~
The van carried the four further into the night, but towards a sick blue glow, like an H-bomb halo, over the eastern horizon. Two hours had passed from when they had left the suburbs, and they had another three until their destination arrived.
Judith sat on a bench immediately behind the front seats and facing back towards the foam mattress on which Greg was passed out. She lit a cigarette and yawned the first drag into her lungs.
“How much further, Chuck?” she shouted over the din of the van’s five liter engine.
“Two hours maybe, Honey,” came a high-pitched, though male, voice from the driver’s seat.
“I don’t know if this guy is going to be up for the induction by then. He looks like shit. You know, it isn’t policy to bring them in while they’re still too tripping to walk.” said Judith and added, “Honey? Okay, whatever darling,” with more than a hint of sarcasm. The driver was silent.
Judith ran her vision along Greg, sprawled out on the mattress. She smoked the rest of her cigarette and waited.
Bubbles formed on Greg’s lips.
~
Light outside the van streamed through tinted glass windows on either side. Two and a half hours later it was still night, but the streets of the outer regions of Metro-Cap illuminated the interior of the van with each passing light post. Greg’s awareness was also brightening, though slowly. He was paralyzed in all bodily regions except his head and neck. Speech was possible, but not easy. Though the vivid dream-state had subsided, he wasn’t at all coherent.
Greg strained his neck to look up at Judith. It was a familiar face, and not an unpleasant one either, but he could not connect a name. He looked around and surmised that he must be on the inside of an ambulance. There was no siren, so it must not be an emergency. That was a relief.
Judith looked at Greg. Greg looked at Judith. “Judith!” he thought.
“You?” croaked Greg with most of his strength.
“Hello Gregory,” said Judith.
Where were the paramedics? Had he fallen? No simple bump on the head as a child had yielded such halitosis as he had just experienced. Lights were unbearably bright and sounds piercing. Still under false impression of the situation, he queried Judith further.
“How far to the hospital, Judith?”
“We’re not going to the hospital. You can call me Judy now. We’ll be to where we are going soon.”
“But I’m in rough shape,” said Greg, lifting an arm a few inches and experiencing pangs of stiff pain in it as he did. He glanced at his arm and then at Judy several times as he did this hoping she’d make the connection.
“You’re getting better. The doctors will have a look at you when we get there.”
“So we are going to the hospital.”
“No,” Judy said shortly.
“Where are we going?”
“I can’t tell you.”
The conversation paused, and Greg tried to assess things.
“Well, can you at least tell me how I got here?”
“Morphine, mescaline, and muscle relaxants mostly,” alliterated Judy.
Greg remembered the last time he recalled dabbling in illegal drugs. Mike and he had smoked weed before school on one occasion, but they both swore at the end of the day never to repeat the experience. After Mike stuttered through an hour of Spanish class and Greg all-too-vividly viewed the formaldehyde scented inner workings of a stray cat in Biology, neither of them had willingly taken anything of the sort again.
“Damn, I can’t remember doing all of that shit,” said Greg with a stronger voice now.
“You shouldn’t. You didn’t know.”
“I see… it was in the blue smoothie things.”
“Good intuition,” said Judy, and smiled. The smile looked nice on her, and it almost gave him some comfort.
Greg collected all he could remember about Judith, or Judy. He didn’t realize at the time that her stability, assuredness, and adamant political fervor were becoming glowing points of navigation in the dark directionless social and otherwise life of his. This was so even when Greg felt he could neither measure up to nor keep up with her. Seeing her crouched near him in the back of what he thought was an ambulance gave him comfort. But now that she gave only bits of information when he needed more, that she admitted to drugging him against his knowledge, and that she even changed her name, a growing frustration gave way to fear.
Greg laid back and sighed, “Why?”
“It didn’t look like you were going to turn yourself in.”
“Turn myself into what?” asked Greg. Could they mean the flower he was turned into earlier? He asked. He was able to speak, though his mind was still a little tweaked from the pharmaceutical cocktail he had drunk a few hours earlier.
Judy dismissed ladder question and answered, “Local Governing Chapter Three,”
“Local Governing Chapter Three, Local Governing Chapter Three…” he ran over and over in his head. The combination of syllables sounded awfully familiar.
Greg pondered this and the van crept to a halt behind a massive midtown traffic jam spanning four city blocks.
“Just eight blocks away, and this. Phil is going to be pissed,” the high-pitched voice of the driver cut in.
“Idiot! The Selected is awake. Why are you throwing names around?” shouted Judith.
“Bill? Who is Bill?” came Greg’ voice.
“You’re lucky, Chuck,” said Judith, warningly.
“Like Judith is a good cover name for Judy. It’s the same damn name,” Chuck spat.
“Ph – Bill has a life outside the Project, while I am an embedded cog. I devote my life to this shit, and I will have ultimate protection when I get out. That’s the life of a scout in the Project.”
“Or so you hope,” said Chuck.
Judy was silent. She lit a cigarette.
“You know, the amount of people who die in this nation because of that pungent nastiness is the same as two jumbo jets colliding in mid-air every day,” Chuck informed Judy.
Judy blew her drag at him in spite.
The thought of two airplanes colliding in midair excited Greg and, for a minute, replaced the nagging uncertainty of his predicament.
The traffic thinned, and the van trudged onward into Metro-Cap. It made a left turn into what fronted as a small parking garage. This garage was always “full”. A man in mirrored sunglasses sat in a booth by the entrance, reading a newspaper. The man continued to read the newspaper as the van attempted entrance. The van’s horn sounded rudely, jerking the attendant’s attention from his reading. He jumped, pushed a button that opened the gate, and saluted the van as it spiraled down the ramp. Brakes squealing, it stopped at the bottom where three people in blue suits were standing in a half circle.
~
The muscled man who had made the trip in complete silence stepped out of the passenger door of the van, made his way to the rear cargo doors, and opened them. He slung Greg’s limp right arm over his shoulder. Without a word he drug-carried Greg to the feet of the three men and dropped him in a heap.
“Name?” the middle one said. His voice was a hollow echo in the concrete expanse of the parking garage. He was not much taller than Greg, but Greg couldn’t perceive this from his vantage point on the ground. What he could tell was that his face bore the expressions of dire seriousness and his garb of a well-dressed businessman.
“Gregory Thompson,” spoke Judy for Greg.
The middle man scrawled this name on the clipboard he was holding. The muscled man reentered the van and Chuck slowly drove it to another part of the garage. Greg followed with his eyes it as it maneuvered out of sight. A sharp pain in his side swung his attention back to the blue suited men and Judy. The man on the left had kicked Greg’s immobile body with a black wing tip and grunted. The man on the right scowled at the man on the left.
“I took every precaution unlike some loose-lipped van drivers I know,” said Judy to explain Greg’s lack of movement and conversational skills.
“I want to talk to Bill,” said Greg.
“Who is this Bill?” the man in the middle asked.
Judy whispered in his ear for a few seconds as his facial expressions morphed from indiscernible to more indiscernible. The other men’s faces stayed stationary. There was a familiarity in the man on the left. Greg could have sworn he’d seen his face before. Then he realized it. He’d seen the man in the middle when he’d seen the man in the left, and he’d seen the man in the left when he’d seen the man on the right. The three men had identical faces. Greg weakly swung a finger at the three men.
“Uh,” was all he could manage.
“You’ll be talking to a lot of people, young man,” said the man in the middle and added, “The three of us are just here to welcome you to the beginning of your stay here.”
“Let me be the first to apologize whole-heartedly for the way in which you were brought to us. We decided to take no chances with you, and that meant you had to suffer through a few hours of unknowing in the hands of our employees,” said the man flanking the right of the group. Greg noticed that Judy had disappeared from the little get together.
The man in the middle continued by saying, “You are now a valuable asset to the Project. Some in the Project may say the most valuable to the world, but you don’t need to know all about that now. You need to get cleaned up and presentable to the Project Coordinator. Everyone thinks, from what they know about you, that you are our winner. Although you were not brought to us on your own accord, we believe you will eventually see the reason we chose you for the role you will be playing. If this is all confusing to you, it was to us too when we were being brought in to the Project. Soon your questions will be answered… uh.”
The man in the middle took a look at his clipboard and said, “Oh right, Gregory.”
The man on the left who had previously kicked Greg said, “Though first to the showers,” and grinned.
Judy reappeared pushing a wheelchair. The four of them hoisted Greg on to it with no help from Greg himself. Though it was nothing, it was the best he could do to resist. He wasn’t sold on the middle man’s welcoming speech, and was a little wary of the man who had kicked him. This same man was now pretending the trek to the showers was a car race and Greg’s wheelchair was a racecar. He put the chair up on two wheels around a right-angle corner in the linoleum hallway making squealing noises with his mouth the whole time. The man who was previously on the right ran after them shouting at the man maneuvering the chair, “Slow down, you’ll hurt him!”
Judy and the man who was in the middle trailed the maniacal wheelchair pusher, the sympathetic suit, and the terrified Greg by enough so that they could talk freely.
“Do you think he’s salable?” asked Judy.
“He’s not much more than a lump of shit now, Judy, but that’s kind of what we are looking for. A real malleable sort, you know? The ones we’ve had up to now have been either morally opposed, control hungry, or, Tim forbid, religiously objecting.”
“I have a good feeling about this one. Maybe I’m just hopeful I can leave this mess behind eventually. The prospect of a door out has made me try hard to find the right teenager for the job.”
The man said nothing.
“I’m sorry Egon,” said Judy and explained, “Sometimes I forget that the Project isn’t temporary nor peripheral to the bulk of its members.”
“We should catch up to Sid and Angelo before someone gets killed,” said the man, changing the subject.
~
“Rum, rum, rum, rum…”
Sid, the man pushing Greg, made the noise of an engine idling with his mouth as he wheeled to a stop in the showers. Judy and Egon, the man whom she was talking to, soon caught up with the rest of the group.
A low-privacy shower was administered on Greg. His wallet and loose change were taken into custody. When he protested it they explained to him that he wouldn’t need any of it anyway. He thought he had his car and house keys on a ring in his pocket when he went to Judy’s house. In fact, he was sure he did. When he asked where they were they again explained that he would not need them either. Greg found this hard to believe.
A white robe was issued, as well as “flip-flop” sandals. Greg was able to walk, though barely now. By popular vote, the peaceful Angelo was allowed to wheel a worn-out Greg to a room that was to become his chambers for some time to come.
~
Three: The Physical
Greg paced in his cramped quarters; quite steady on his feet now that he had rested. He wasn’t sure which time of day it was. Due to his disorientation he knew not which cardinal direction his small window looked out upon. Which ever it was displayed a rising, or setting, orb of sunlight depending on how long he had slept since the four-some had locked him in the room. Sunrise meant he had been out for at most six hours. Sunset meant the doping effects of the drugs slipped in his drink had really kicked his lights out hard. He doubted this. Though he felt refreshed, his brain was still popping and fizzing a bit. He wasn’t an expert, but he surmised that an eighteen-hour nap would certainly have sufficed to metabolize the chemicals completely.
He had awoken with a start and had been pacing since, wearing down the treads on his brand new “flip-flops”, for what he was sure was an hour. Had they forgotten about him? Remembering the middle man’s speech about him being a huge asset to something-or-other, he thought not.
He checked his watch. He found he didn’t have a watch.
In the twin bed he was supplied with in the corner of the room he laid down. Looking at the ceiling he noted the color. It was the palest shade of orange, as were the rest of the walls and floor. There was no television, which didn’t bother him much since it seemed they’d be drugging him to sleep. The window would have to suffice for entertainment. He stood up, paced over to it, and looked out. Metal wires crisscrossed inside the glass, making a diamond matrix of reinforcement against attempts to flee through it; though it seemed the confines of the window’s dimensions (which were less than that of the average breadth of human shoulders) were reinforcement enough. On the other side of the window he saw the roof of another building and the sun that was now a few inches high in the morning heavens.
Sounds of a key jamming for position in the outside lock of the door to his room wheeled Greg’s attention away from the sub-scenic viewfinder. First appearing was half of a cart that jammed in the door. It backed up a little, and then barged forward, throwing the door violently to a fully open position. A man with a dirty white apron tied around his waist appeared, pushing the cart. He smiled at Greg.
“Hello young man. I bet you’re hungry” came a rich voice of a man in his mid twenties, but his face was a near match to those of the three men he encountered the night before. Had he not spoken immediately upon entering the room, Greg would have assumed it was one of them.
“Tim yes. What are the fixings?” asked Greg.
“Eggs, toast, bacon, and coffee,” said the man as he raised the tray cover. A wisp of steam rose from the perfectly arranged meal.
“Beautiful.”
“I’m the cook around here. You ate it, I made it.”
“What’s your name?”
“Derrick. I know that you must be Greg because that’s the name that’s been floating around the compound for weeks.”
“What am I doing here?”
“You’re asking the cook, son. They don’t let me in on much, ahem. They let me come and meet new arrivals, so you won’t be seeing much of me around after this, probably.”
Greg wondered for a second about why Derrick might have enunciated the word “seeing,” the way he did, but came up blank.
“Anyway,” said Derrick, “I have to ask you a question. What do you want on your tray for supper? I have Seafood, Spicy Southern, Far Eastern...” He winked enthusiastically at Greg after he said “Far Eastern” then paused to accentuate the wink and continued with the list.
Greg thought oh no, I’m going to be here that long?
“Well, which will it be?” asked the cook
“The Far Eastern will be good I guess,” Greg said, taking the man’s hint for whatever it would be worth.
“Yes it will, and that’s an excellent choice,” said Derrick while scribbling on a green notepad.
Derrick turned to leave and Greg asked, “What’s the deal with everyone’s face? Does everyone here look like you?”
“I can’t talk about it, Greg. My apologies,” said Derrick over his shoulder and departed from the room with the empty cart. He closed the door and locked it. Greg tried the handle but, sure enough, it was once again locked. Greg had been too taken aback by the Derrick’s relative kindness to think of an attempt to escape his pinkish prison while he was in it.
Seated on the bed, Greg dined hungrily on his breakfast. When he was through he set the tray on the floor and buried his face in his hands. He didn’t cry, nor did he chant anything in his head about not crying. He’d been subjected to enough unbearable confinement so that he only consciously saw himself in the third person, and he hated to see people shed tears and carry on a lot, so he didn’t.
More than wanting to get out of the room and ultimately away from the people who put him there, he was curious about a reason for the abuse. No one yet had told him outright what his peril or fortune was to be or even which of the two his fate would resemble. The magically inked letter had spoken of “administrative careers” or something, and everyone here talked about a “Project” which they pronounced in conversation with an air of all-importance. It reminded him of the elite hallway clots at school where was discussed happenings of a cult television show no one else cared about or was too distracted by worthwhile viewing to follow. His present circumstance pissed him off a bit more, especially since it seemed to center around him.
Being a sucker for pretty faces, he found it hard to accuse Judy, or Judith, for all of this. He had no blame laid on her directly. If his fate was fortune he would have her to thank, and, despite it all, this was the optimistic view of things he currently held. He’d heard that government jobs pay well, but he hadn’t even been able to keep a job at a car wash for more than a month. A desk job might be just as easy, if not easier, though.
He laid back and day-dreamt of kicking his feet up on a walnut desk in a vibrating leather swivel-chair for six hours a day, firing delinquent government lackeys, and stamping official documents he hadn’t read with a signature stamp and ink pad. The fantasy entertained him for nearly a minute, after which it dawned on Greg that a career like this didn’t really fit him, or his weight class anyway. He did not guess either that jobs like that were given freely to teenagers not even out of school and especially considering his current lack-luster grade point average.
He would just have to wait. He was getting good at waiting. He waited for his friend Mike every day to grow up. He had been waiting with unbearable anticipation between dates with Judith, or Judy. He secretly waited for something profound to happen in his life, never fully expecting it.
His favorite way to wait was to sleep, which he did to excess.
The hot breakfast soon put him in a headlock of lethargy. Greg reclined on the bed with one arm stretched underneath his head and he whirled into a fit of rapid eye movement. His nap produced visions of recollection complete with sound and color.
~
During a dream on the outskirts of recollection, and more than crossing the boundary into fantasy, involving several girls from his school, his stomach turned over three times in succession. Judy’s voice pierced the subconscious episode of perversion. The virtual orgy had temporarily erased Greg’s memories of recent events, as it should have, and he assumed the girl he was dating had walked in on him doing dirty, dirty things without her.
“Greg, you’re needed,” said Judy, shaking him.
“Oh, hi,” he said, and reality spun back around him. “Interesting time to be thinking about such things,” he thought.
Five men and women in white lab coats and, most of them, in thick glasses stood around, peering down at him.
“Who are these geeks?” he asked flippantly.
“They’re the doctors I promised you.”
“How are you feeling?” asked one of them.
Greg felt a mutually canceling form of relief, but assumed they were asking about his body.
“A little stiff,” said Greg, and giggled silently, “but alright.”
“Good,” Judy said, and then addressed the doctors; “I want a full physical examination as well as CT scan and electroencephalograph.”
The doctors nodded, sniffed, and scribbled.
Greg asked Judy in a passive-aggressive way, “How are you this morning?”
“It’s afternoon, Greg, and I’m very, very busy. We can talk later.”
Judy stormed out of the room flipping through pages of an organizer.
The doctors kind of mulled for a minute with Greg staring at them. Finally what must have been the head doctor took a step forward, opened his mouth to talk, paused, and looked around.
“Well let’s get to it,” said Greg.
~
“None of you look like you’re from around here,” said Greg through his teeth, bent over an examination table.
“What do people from around here look like?” asked a female doctor.
“As far as I know, the females look like Judith, I uh mean Judy, which would be fine with me. But then, she’s the only uh one I’ve seen,” said Greg now panting with anticipation of the end of this particularly intrusive examination. Only one of the doctors was needed for the process and was too absorbed in his work to listen to what was being said between Greg and the observing doctors.
“What about the men, then, Greg?”
“They all, with the exception of you fine medical professionals,” said Greg hoping that appealing to their good side would lessen any unnecessary pain of the many examinations to come, “have this sad, strung out look. But it isn’t only that. Their facial features are perfectly matched to each other. Maybe I don’t know. They had me on some hard drugs and a haven’t quite rebounded yet.”
The doctors looked at each other curiously.
Greg asked, “What do all of you know about me?”
“We can’t tell you what we don’t know,” said two of the doctors in unison. One petered out, letting the other finish in a very non-robotic way, but still in a way that made them sound as if they were reciting from a script.
“Is that what they told you to say if I asked?”
The men and women said nothing and looked at each other shamefully.
“You don’t know shit, do you!” accused Greg, but there was a peculiar feeling of an instrument being yanked from within him and his voice flew out of control on the word “you” making his accusation sound not very much like a question, and quite a bit like a yelp.
One doctor ventured to answer him anyway, “We are signed on to do nothing but examine your body and brain, Greg. We are under agreement that we are told nothing of your, or anyone else’s, purpose here, or even what purpose ‘here’ has to anyone or anything. You are quite literally barking up the wrong tree to ask us questions. Now, we have about nineteen more tests to complete before the brain examinations, so if you’ll please cooperate I’ll give you a sucker when it’s all through.”
The man sounded sincere, and also quite stern, so Greg did what he was told. He looked around at all the misshapen instruments in the cabinets on the walls of the room and wondered what regions of the human body each of them called home. A rainbow of possible sucker flavors danced in his head.
The examining doctor appeared from behind Greg. He smiled and asked, “What’s next?”
Twenty-seven times Greg heard, “This won’t hurt… much.” Four times he heard, “Just a little pinch…” Twice he heard, “Cough.” Nine times he heard, “Good, now relax.” He was poked, jabbed, and touched in many trials of small and large muscle group dexterity. Seven vials of blood were taken, then taken again, and then taken to a centrifuge. Five x-ray bombardments, fourteen hypodermic needle insertions, a spinal tap, and sixteen semi-lewd poses later he was naked on a gurney to another division of the hospital sub-floor sucking on a green apple lollipop and clinging to his dignity by a shred of floss.
~
Down several hallways Greg was pushed with doctors flanking him on both sides. They jabbered in a foreign language of medical terminology about the state of affairs in Greg’s physical manifestation. This would have ordinarily annoyed Greg to where he would have demanded of the doctors to repeat everything they were saying in a more familiar tongue, but he was getting accustomed to being left in the dark on issues he correctly assumed centered on him.
“Idth dith nexdth thig going thoo hurst?” asked Greg?
The doctors looked puzzled. Apparently Greg’s garbled speech was as incomprehensible to the doctors as the doctors’ jargon-filled speech was to Greg. This gave him some satisfaction.
A female doctor tried pulling the sucker from Greg’s mouth, but Greg protested by biting down hard and shattering the crystalline sugar disk between his teeth. He chewed merrily on the shards of green goodness, and grinned mischievously at the doctor. She threw the paper stick with the remainder of the sucker stuck to it into a passing waste receptacle, and asked him kindly to repeat himself.
“Is this going to hurt much?”
Taking into account what Greg had just undergone, the doctors assured him that no, it wouldn’t… relatively.
The rolling of the gurney paused at the dead end of the hallway while a door to a room on the right side was opened. Gently Greg was rolled into it and nearly blinded by its obscenely monochrome interior. Everything in the room was a color that lied somewhere in the middle of the subtle spectrum between off-white and beige. Florescent lights that rang a high frequency oscillating glow from ceiling tiles bathed the walls, floor, and equipment this room housed. They smoothed any variance in the hue of the room and eradicated shadows making it hard for Greg to tell exactly what the room was for.
When his eyes adjusted to the lighting scheme some, his inquisitiveness was still eased very little so he asked, “What does all of this junk do?”
“We are going to take pictures of your brain… ”
Greg shuddered. He saw himself with half of his skull sheared off and his pulsing cerebral cortex sticking out of the lower half with the explosions of flash bulbs all around.
“… in layman’s terms.”
“Oh,” said Greg, still horrified by whatever method they planned to take. One of the doctors saw the lingering fright and took it upon him to explain the procedure in detail, even though he was not supposed to make any unnecessary conversation with the subject.
Now relaxed with the knowledge that no scalpels or saws would be needed in the photography of his most prized possession, he was fed into a large cylinder headfirst on his back.
His average sized body stuck out of the large contraption making him look a little silly, as if the contraption was an over-grown mechanical head. Inside the machine Greg felt a little short of breathing room, but had gotten over his fear of enclosed spaces within the first few weeks of owning his Honda.
The cylinder swung around a few times, made some electronic-sounding noises as one might expect it to make, and repeated the process nine times while the group of doctors stood in a room adjoined by a wall of windows. Grey-blue readouts reflected on their faces and especially on their glasses, and they all looked professionally solemn through the duration of the exam. None of them spoke; they just humphed, and hmm-mmmed a lot.
Greg’s head was mechanically removed from the machine. He sat up on the gurney, then stood up, looked around, and waved cheerily at the doctors behind the glass who soon disappeared. They reappeared at the door of the room Greg was in.
“Is it a boy or a girl?” Greg asked, laughing.
“We can’t tell you anything about the results, Greg,” one said, ignoring the question and the small amount of humor it contained. Greg looked disappointed.
To get on a brighter topic another said, “Just one more test, and you can go back to your cell.”
Greg thought, “Cell? Are they under the impression that I am a convicted criminal? I could have some fun with these people if only I knew how to be a insanely frightening.” He supposed he was a prisoner of some sort, but he couldn’t recall actively breaking the law. “Then, there are a lot of things you can not do to become a prisoner. Tax evasion for example. But that sort of thing has to be nurtured for a long time before steps to incarcerate are taken.” Greg ran things through his head like vehicle registration, vending licenses, and loitering, but couldn’t remember doing anything unlawful by simply not doing it. Anyway, he wasn’t here for any of that, for he was an “asset.” He was supposed to turn himself in to avoid this mess, but what alternate mess would have he had to undergo had he turned himself in? Greg looked up and was done brooding, for now.
“Show me the way, fine professionals,” he said, still wanting to appeal to them because Greg knew not what lay ahead on the agenda.
~
Greg found himself in a chair with many wires streaming away from points on his head. The wires made their way across the floor, then dangled upwards into many colored ports on a computer interface.
Four-fifths of the medics stood behind the computer and intently watched what resembled an array of seismographic readouts. One-fifth was in charge of flashing cards in front of Greg, which he did with the flair of a professional cue-card holder in a major television studio, looking away dramatically while Greg studied each image.
He was shown a variety of black and white images on twelve by twelve inch cards at fifteen-second intervals. On the cards were birds, trees, faces, and geometrical figures. One card that Greg particularly enjoyed for no reason that he could explain was of a simple vertical line intersected at about one third its height by another, shorter line.
The testing session concluded with Greg reading a representative selection from a very smutty romance novel printed in large blocky letters on one of the cards. Greg had been able to gather what the motivation was behind most of the testing up to this point but this; this had him at a complete, though comfortable, loss.
The electrodes were swiftly removed from his skull, and he was asked if he had any washroom business to attend to. He answered no.
~
Greg was escorted to a windowless room no bigger than an elevator where he was told to wait. Seeing no furniture suitable for sleeping on, he accepted that he would have to wait lucidly until someone came and saved him from his confines. He fruitlessly checked under the hard chair he was seated on for magazines.
Easily, an hour passed. He tapped his foot to the ticking of the second hand on the analog wall clock placed high on one of the walls for several minutes, then delved into cleaning his fingernails.
Another hour passed and Greg was well on his way out of his mind. The paint on the blank walls buzzed with the sound of the lights, and the two became indiscernible from each other. Soon the joints of the walls began to give way making a horrible sound of cracking stone. One wall at a time, in a counter-clockwise order, starting with the one immediately to his right, came crashing down away from the center of the room revealing an abstract plain stretching infinitely in every direction. Only the door remained standing.
“Knock, knock, knock…”
He walked, or rather floated, over to the door and opened it. Judy stood before him, looking nice. More quickly than they had fallen, the walls stood upright again, the buzzing of the lights and the paint on the walls returned to being perceivably separate things, and Greg regained feeling in his legs. He passed off the episode as a mescaline flashback. He would have to have a word with Judy about it, though.
“Follow me,” commanded Judy.
“You wouldn’t believe what just happened in there,” said Greg following Judy down a familiar hallway.
“Wouldn’t I?” asked Judy uninterestedly.
“No, you probably wouldn’t. It was incredible. How long was I in there?” he asked.
“About two hours and fifteen minutes they tell me,” said Judy in a disinterested tone.
“Was I supposed to be in there that long, or did everyone forget about me?”
“Yes and no. It’s called the Cupboard, and it’s part of your training,” explained Judy only to the extent she was allowed.
So he was getting a government job. He thought how much nicer it would be if the room he was trained in had a padded chair, some more square footage, and perhaps a rubber stamp. Perhaps he had to climb up to that. He started right away.
“You look very nice today Judy,” complimented Greg in the least sarcastic tone he could muster. It wasn’t that Judy didn’t actually look very, very nice indeed that day. Greg would have gone so far as to say lovely despite her conservative attire. It was just that Greg had problems letting people know such things without sounding like he was making a mockery of it.
Judy didn’t respond, or at least not in a way that reflected any interest in what he had to say. She may have moved her head slightly, but Greg wasn’t sure.
They stopped at Greg’s door and Judy opened it with a key, she gestured for him to enter without her. Greg asked when they would be able to clarify some things that were nagging him slightly, like who exactly she was and what on Tim’s good earth he was doing here. She replied that tomorrow she would have some time to answer a few things, but most of the answering would have to wait until the Project Coordinator saw him. The results from the health tests would also have to wait, she informed him. She closed the door and locked the Project’s treasure inside for the night.
~
Greg was pleased to find waiting for him in his room a tray of lukewarm rice and chicken with lovely red pepper sections poking out a smothering red curry sauce. In a corner division of the tray sat a fortune cookie. He eyed it with delight.
Unwrapping the napkin from his cutlery, he discovered the usual fork, spoon, knife, and also, oddly, a black ballpoint pen. He set it aside.
Before inhaling his second, and last, meal of the day, he looked out of the tiny window in his room to see nothing but black; as if someone had taped a sheet of black construction paper over the outside of it. He realized this was the only window he had observed in his whole day around the compound. He looked forward to seeing any color of sky through it in the morning.
Greg fumbled with the last dregs of food on his plate until coming to the parable conclusion that you just have to let some rice go. Not thinking, he began munching on the fortune cookie, which turned out to be a little chewier than he’d expected. This was, of course, because Greg hadn’t removed the fortune first. He pulled a saliva soaked piece of paper from his mouth in amusement and unfolded it.
In Greg’s limited experience with cuisine of the Far East, all the fortunes he had encountered inside a cookie had been printed neatly on a small, narrow slip of paper. This fortune, on the other hand, had been scrawled on a corner of notebook paper with a blue ballpoint pen and folded neatly to fit inside the cookie. The shoddy handwriting on the partially chewed paper read:
G—There’s alot you need to know about this place A pen is in your plastic silverware Write back to me inside your napkin (I’m also the dishwasher) And keep ordering Far Eastern –D
Greg wadded up the scrap of paper and disposed of it orally. This was to avoid its discovery by members of the Project who would not approve of him having a pen pal relationship with one of their employees.
Greg wrote clearly on the inside of his somewhat used paper napkin to his new ally:
D—You must tell me of these things. In the mean time, the rice was real good. Keep it coming –G
Greg capped then pen, folded the napkin to hide the message, and put the tray on the floor. He curled up and prepared for sleep but remembered to stash the pen in his pillowcase first.
He relived the day’s events in a restless slumber, but without visions. Greg slept in a blackness made colorful only by the adjectives he said out loud, and loudly, to describe the people, or things, he believed were causing him sharp needle-like pains and to bend in various contorting directions. The restlessness was soon slept off and his room lay silent and dark for a long time before the dim morning light narrowly beamed its way in a number of hours later.
~
Four: A
The morning was one of the lighter shades of gray. That’s what Greg found looking at a very small portion of it through his tiny window. He had an understanding with this type of weather. It was the kind he liked to be outside during, breathing the damp air while walking to the corner station in a well-insulated garment for a well-insulated cup of partially evaporated coffee. He wondered if he’d see more of the outdoors today.
Judy delivered Greg’s breakfast and agreed, after some amount of pathetic pleading on Greg’s part, to stay and talk while he ate. He ate at an extremely retarded rate in order to keep her as long as he could.
“Am I healthy?” Greg asked and took a miniscule bite out of a strip of crispy bacon, first turning it around a few times between his fingers to buy time.
Judy quickly replied, “All the tests came back negative, including the blood protein typing test. Type O negative, that is. It’s rare, you know.”
Greg knew. When he was a child his mother protectively made him wear a medical identification bracelet proclaiming that he had owned this type of blood in case of a need for an emergency blood transfusion. Even then Greg thought she was nuts.
“Did the brain scan also come back negative?” asked Greg, chewing his bite of bacon a full twenty times before swallowing and speaking.
“Yes.”
“So I have no brain?”
“Not an abnormal one… in its physical aspects anyway.”
Greg cleared his throat, took a few cautious sips from his steaming plastic-molded coffee mug, and changed the subject.
He asked Judy, “How old are you?”
“Twenty-six,” replied Judy.
“Really?” asked Greg in a calm tone while buttering a piece of toast with the utmost care anyone has ever cared to use on such a task. He spread the margarine out evenly, being careful to get enough on the corners. “Why then do you hang out at high schools?”
“To find you. Now it’s up to us to help you find you,” said Judy in a way reminiscent of an overbearing guidance counselor.
“Where did I go?” asked Greg, dipping a corner of his toast into an undercooked egg yolk several times to achieve optimum saturation.
“It’s where you are going that you should care about,” said Judy.
“And where’s that?”
“You’ll find out when you –“
“…Talk to the Project Coordinator,” finished Greg.
“Right,” said Judy.
Judy seemed very preoccupied this morning and, in fact, most of the times that Greg had encountered her since his abduction. She was not Judith. Judith would be convincing him at this juncture that a government cover-up was at the root of, or at least directly related to, his imprisonment. She would be happy to see him and glad to spend a few moments watching him scarf down his morning cholesterol. And then, Judith would lead him out of here.
Greg backtracked a bit, “Twenty-six? You look about the seventeen I assumed when I knew you in high school,” to try win her enthusiasm. Greg found that talking about a girl’s appearance usually grabbed her attention in one way or another.
“There are reasons for that,” said Judy, uninterested in Greg’s observation as a compliment.
“It makes you, in a teenager’s eye, that much more attainable. I’ll have to warn people about you, or at least tell them to get their business done in three outings or less,” Greg kidded.
“It also makes me believable. A much as you liked Judith, she’s just one of my personas I use to bait new recruits. You’ll understand soon. There isn’t an ounce of giddy teenager in me, Greg. It was just a net of deception.”
“Now I’m convinced you’re evil,” said Greg, slicing off a conservative chunk of egg white with the side of his fork. Greg was glad Judy finally snapped open and was prepared to talk about herself.
“I plan to hang it up in a closet one of these days,” said Judy as a weak defense. She looked at him, expecting retribution for his last statement. She got none.
“What do your parents think of your career choice? Kidnapping and the like,” said Greg between sips of coffee.
“I tell them I’m an exotic dancer.”
“You’re kidding?”
“No. They’re very liberal, and they approve more than they would if I told them what I really do.” She added ironically, “Besides, I have to stay covered on all fronts.”
“Exotic dancer isn’t far from the truth,” said Greg.
“How so?” asked Judy, immediately taken by the comment.
“Strippers get paid for short sessions of sexual teasing. They aren’t actually interested in the men they entertain, and are probably quite different people outside their jobs. The men who patronize them leave the seedy venues with a bit of disappointment upon realizing this fact. Do you follow me?”
“No, elaborate,” said Judy shortly.
“Don’t you think I’m a little disappointed?”
“Who’s to say we would have ‘rounded any bases’ together anyway?” She made the shape of quotation marks with her index and middle fingers in a way annoying to Greg.
“I wasn’t concerned about that,” explained Greg. “I was liking having a friend of female proportions who would bore me to death about government issues while I sat there loving it,” He nibbled a tiny morsel from a piece of toast and then washed it down with a proportionate amount of slightly cooled coffee. He continued, “Now it seems you’ve taken that and the daily life I’d gotten so used to away which makes you a lot worse than a stripper, or maybe a stripper of a different definition.”
Something human stirred inside Judy, and it was visible to Greg.
“No stripper can give you what I have given you.”
Greg had a feeling she was going to refer to the elusive Project Coordinator again and frustrate him further.
“And that is?” asked Greg, advancing a forkful of egg toward his mouth.
“A chance… at what it is you are here for,” she said, substituting ambiguity for an explanation.
Greg ate the egg on his fork, and asked, “When do I get to see the Project Coordinator everyone promises?”
“We have a few things to work out. Before you can know your role, we have to be sure you’re up to it.”
“Oh,” said Greg, sounding the opposite of what he was, which was under satisfied.
“I know you’ll like him. I should know. I’ve been out with him. He’s really nice.”
Greg had heard that one before though never in this context of situation. “Oh, nice,” said Greg, still locked into the same superficial tone of voice.
“
-