Chapter 44
“You won’t get away with this,” Nathan said again.
“What’s your plan, Sherriff?” The doctor grinned. “Handcuff me and drag me behind your horse to the county jail? That would be difficult while you continue to be at my mercy.”
“I didn’t come… on my own. If… I don’t show… in a half hour,” He took a longer pause to emphasize how much he was struggling to speak. “A friend… will call… the police.” Nathan’s words were regaining their normal speed, but the drug’s impacts on his body kept most of his muscles maddeningly lifeless.
The doctor paused and squinted ever so slightly at Nathan, then a smirk broke out on one side of his mouth, the asymmetry of it out of place on such symmetrical features. “I’d love to meet your friend. Or friends? But tell me, what exactly will they tell the police? That you didn’t come home tonight? You’re a single young man, perhaps you went out this evening and accompanied a girl back to her place.”
“I have… a… girlfriend.”
“Yes. But she’s not in town, is she? Perhaps you went to a French discoteque—they do things differently on that side of the border.” The smile spread to both sides of his mouth. “You know, this is perfect. It saves me a bit of work, actually. I have an idea. We’ll save us both some time. Send your friend directly here!” He sprang up from his chair and went around the desk. Then froze, and looked at his watch. “No, You have plenty of time left on that dose,” he said, then took the last step to the chair where Nathan sat paralyzed and swiveled the white leather seat around. “Give me your phone.” He smiled, “Of course,” the synthetic smile widened, “I ask out of politeness. Naturally I’ll have to help myself.” He reached over to Nathan’s jacket and scrunched up the pockets of his coat until he found the device.
“You can’t make me unlock it.”
“Can’t I?” The doctor asked.
Nathan didn’t respond.
“Unless I have something you need. Something you’d feel obligated to retrieve. Rescue even—“
Nathan realized what he was implying.
“You… haven’t.”
“There is one other young adolescent who hasn’t been responding well to the treatment. I’m sure you appreciate that even if a drug works, some genetics just don’t lend themselves to every treatment. If you don’t cooperate, he’ll disappear permanently.”
Nathan’s heart began to race as adrenaline started loading into his system. The combination of muscle paralysis and racing heart made him feel like he were trapped in a glass jar too small for his body.
“I think of him as an insurance policy.”
“You’re… a… monster.”
The doctor only smirked again. “Your passcode?”
Nathan stared at the man towering above him. “Where… is he?” Nathan asked. The doctor said nothing, but raised an eyebrow. “If… I give… you… the number, you’ll tell me… where he is—you’ll… release him?”
“Of course! When I’m done with you, I’ll have no further need of him. I’m not a brute. The more you cooperate with my plan, the less I need anyone else.” His smile turned somehow grotesquely sweeter, “Give me the code, and when we’re through, I give my word, he’ll be returned to polite society. He’s quite safe right now.”
Nathan hesitated another moment but, seeing no alternative, he gave the doctor the four-digit pin to unlock the screen.
“Merci,” he smiled, still saccharine. The doctor was thumbing around the screen, looking for the right contact. “One moment,” he said quietly, as if not wanting to keep Nathan waiting. He was typing a message now, his two thumbs tapping away at the phone, holding it in landscape mode to make the keyboard larger. He stopped tapping at the screen shortly to pull the lab coat around his wrist back and look at his watch, then stroked his chin. “Très bien,” he said, finishing off the text and closing the phone. “Whether he is indeed scheduled to meet you here or not, in a moment I will send this text which will ensure he will appear.”
“How do you know who to contact?” Nathan asked defiantly.
“Your call and chat history says it all. It was either him or her. It is no secret, given the right data, who a person’s closest contacts are. And you, being new in the city, have not so many contacts to start with. He will come. I do not worry.” He set the phone on the glass table top in front of Nathan. “Very well. I must prepare now. You’ll have to excuse me.” Nathan thought he might be moving to leave the office, but instead, the doctor slid open a drawer of the desk and pulled out another syringe, obviously set in case he had need of another dose. “It won’t hurt any more than the other two,” he smiled. “I think you might be—”
Nathan’s head drooped forward, unconscious, as the drugs near instantaneously made their short journey from his neck to his brain.
*
When he came to, the room was black. At first Nathan assumed the doctor had turned off the lights and locked the door behind him, but then he realized he was no longer sitting in the executive chair in Wollstonecraft’s office. He was in a crouch, his legs folded up in front of him, his glutes on the ground, chin on his knees, head resting slightly against a solid wall. He tried to flex his arms and straighten up, but the drug was too strong and prevented him shifting even in the slightest.
He was held in position on three sides by cement walls. He felt like one of those premade biscuit doughs in the tube from the grocery store, so tightly packed that it popped open when you tore the package. He had the uncontrollable urge to push all the walls out, Sampson style, but even the tips of his fingers weren’t reacting to his will. He could feel the cool cement around and under him, and smelled the slightly woody scent of the wall his head rested on. Even if he weren’t paralyzed, these were no plywood-paneling dummy walls.
An acid worm of fear was swimming in his stomach like a parasite, sucking away his necessary resources. He forced himself to think critically, to keep his mind from succumbing to paralysis as well. The fear was there, had to be there, but he wouldn’t let it climb up his nerves to his brain. If he had an actual paralyzing attack like he’d had in the park, he knew he’d die. It was a certainty.
But he wasn’t dead. Not yet. Hell was more crowded. And no way was it this small.
And if he wasn’t dead, then he hadn’t yet played all his cards.
He was also conscious, and lucid. Unless the cubicle was fitted with carbon monoxide gas lines and this was just the final act, whatever came next, he would face it head-on, and with whatever part of his mind he was able to segregate from that acrid fear-worm in his gut.
He had to hold himself together.
Nathan sensed that if he tried to summon his body into conscious response to press out at the walls, they would only push in harder on him, like an inception-reality, controlled by someone else’s mind.
So he closed his eyes. Sitting in pitch-black with eyes wide open was much more terrifying than the darkness of eyes slammed shut.
He imagined relaxing the muscles around his eyes and actively forcing the tension in his forehead to soften. Of course he had no physical feedback on whether these things were relaxing—the paralytic was stopping that. But it was part of the process.
He needed to send his mind somewhere. He had no choice but to wait, and until whatever came next, he had to retain control of himself. He had to escape for a moment. To someplace open and peaceful. Reverent. He didn’t want unbounded space. He wanted structure and order. A balance of limits. He sent a signal to his shoulders to relax.
Eyes closed, he saw a bright circle of light, glowing so strongly in the darkness, it almost blinded him. Then the intensity lessened and he saw the details of a round roof, where the light was coming from—an open skylight in the ceiling, the sun outside positioned overhead. No windows competed with the light from above, no other source lit the building. Nathan saw himself standing near the wall. He took a step back and put an arm behind him, feeling the cool stone of the cement. He recognized the building.
He was in Rome, in the Pantheon, the temple of the gods.
He wasn’t sure why he’d gone there. Why, of all the places he’d been in his life, was this the escape his mind chose? But it was right. He knew it in the soles of his feet and the tips of his fingers.
He’d been to the Pantheon only once, as a high schooler. A trip with his parents. His first time in Europe. The visit to the cylindrical building had been short, only half an hour before they had to hustle on to a lunch reservation. But it had been enough. Something about the round building, the empty space, and the blinding skylight had stayed with him. His parents had organized walking tours and paid for the audio guides through all the museums, but not for the Pantheon. For some reason, that was the one site they visited raw, without a guide holding their hand and explaining everything they saw. The immediate experience had been strangely anticlimactic for Nathan, but as the moment distanced itself in his memory, it began to hold a sort of reverse anticipation, growing in meaning after the event itself.
Now, trapped in this tiny space, alone with no option of escape, he found himself there in his mind. The sunlight tunneled straight down in a pillar of light to the dusty stone ground. The single wall of the round building expanding out from either side of him and meeting itself across the room. The single room was entirely empty, except for the designs of the marble floor and a few smaller statues set into the wall.
Nathan noticed that the back of his head was throbbing where he’d hit it in his first attempt to gain the upper hand, falling to the floor from his captor’s chair. He had no idea how long he’d been in this closet or when the doctor would retrieve him. He opened his eyes. Fear was pulling him back from his vision. He forced himself to focus on the cavernous room in his thoughts, snapping his eyes shut again.
He pictured the great hall filled with statues–huge creatures, two or three times the size of any human man, each with rippling muscles and the broad shoulders of warrior gods, arranged in concentric circles, all facing that central pillar of cold light.
Nathan moved among the marble statues, he realized not one of them was finished. All were still tangled in the rock from which they had been carved, one still encased so deeply, only an arm and sliver of thigh could be seen forcing its way from the stone. Another was nearly finished, both arms pushing against the rock as if breaking free of his own will, twisting his back away from Nathan. He was nearly free and yet still in the writhing motion of a fight with the matter from which he was made.
These weren’t the statues that had been housed here in antiquity. His mind floated among the marble forms, seeing one face contorted in anger, another rumpled in frustration. They were the ancient gods, he recognized some of their iconic emblems of their identity – a helmet was pushed back on Mars’ forehead, Neptune was using his triad as a lever to break from the stone at his feet, a bottle of wine was falling from Bacchus’ hand as he used both palms to push up on the marble casing around his head and neck. Each figure strained with any tool at hand, to break out of the stonehold. Some figures held only the basic tools of a sculptor–hammer and chisel–trying to escape the marble that cracked around their waist and feet, breaking out of the very material which gave them life, the stone holding them like an umbilical cord that would not be severed.
Despite his paralysis, the pain of Nathan’s frozen position was branching out to each muscle in his body. He closed his eyes again and returned to the Pantheon. In his mind, he took another step forward, toward the center. The figures, contorted and struggling as they were, all faced the only source of light. Nathan moved closer until he was right at the light’s boundary on the marble floor, but didn’t dare step into it, as if afraid it would burn him.
Then he heard a woman’s voice. A song being hummed. The soft melody filled the huge space as only music can.
Helene.
Helene was always too embarrassed when she knew he was listening, but sometimes she’d sing when she thought she was alone, wiping down the kitchen counter in the evening or getting dressed in the morning. And although she knew many songs, there was one in particular that seemed to come to her more often than the others; a child’s nursery rhyme. Her voice carried off the walls of the hall, whispering in a distant echo in his head like a ghost floating through an old mansion. He knew the only living soul in this great stone temple was him, but she was there nonetheless. Her voice soothed him.
As the song faded, he felt an overwhelming wave of peace descend on him. There, locked up in a cement tomb, paralyzed and never less the master of himself than ever before, his heart rate calmed. His mind relaxed.
He let his head slump forward on his knees.
Authors note:
When I wrote this chapter I was reading Karl Jung. I’ve never been one to put much in dreams and mysticism. But As I get older the more I think we have lost some of the social wisdom that used to be better understood. Jung thought the division between our subconscious and consciousness was bridged through dream, and that we are always dreaming, but only when we sleep are we able to see or experience those dreams, because during the day the conscious world is so much ‘brighter’ than the subconscious experience.
The study of dreams and the subconscious is less than obvious, and quite subjective, but there is something about where our mind goes when we actually quiet it, or are asleep that ideas or thoughts can get to us. The subconscious is the place where we start to solve creative problems, where we form ideas about identity and work through the mental aspect of our experiences.
I feel like I’m taking a lit bit of liberty with this vision that Nathan enters when he’s in the closet — but I allowed myself to indulge a little with the images that represent some of his current struggle.
This book for Nathan is a transition story. His first story in Beijing was the entry into adventure. But he was thrown into that story by outside forces and not voluntarily. This story he’s dealing with PTSD from that experience, but also deciding to enter into this adventure voluntarily. Choosing to wrestle with the forces of evil rather than just having the battle thrust upon him.
Jung also thought that the transition of cultures from Polytheism to Monotheism represented a unifying of and organizing of a cultures psyche. If those gods represent all the different forces and competing desires and needs of a person and society— the gods of love, war, drink, beauty, wisdom, etc — then organizing them into one unifying God organizes these competing forces into a hierarchy.
It’s a mythical sort of way to look at things, but these forces sort of are gods in our lives — gods that sometimes get out of control, and have to be managed and organized.
When I wrote this chapter, I was thinking about this, about how we organize and learn to master the desires that run through us. Learning to control our impulses, and wants and organize that energy into appropriate pathways really is like wrestling with the gods.
And so this is where we leave Nathan—in the pantheon of his head, surrounded by manifestations of his internal demons, as he fights to organize himself and control his fears and needs.
I know. Maybe a bit on the nose. But whatever. I get to indulge myself too, sometimes.