Pandemonium

Page 44

I take an elevator to the second floor. Here there is more activity: sounds of beeping and murmured conversation, doctors hurrying in and out of examination rooms. I duck quickly into the first door on my right, which turns out to be a bathroom. I take a deep breath, try to focus, try to calm down. There is a tray on the back of the toilet, and a stack of plastic cups meant for urine samples. I grab one and fill it partially with water, then head back into the hall.
Two lab techs, both women, are standing outside one of the examination rooms. They fall silent as I approach, and even though I am deliberately avoiding eye contact, I can feel them staring at me.
“Can I help you?” one of them asks, as I am passing. Both women look identical, and for a moment I think they are twins. But it is just the influence of the scraped-back hair, the spotless uniforms, the identical look of clinical detachment.
I flash the plastic cup at them. “Just need to get my sample to Dr. Hillebrand,” I say.
She withdraws a fraction of an inch. “Dr. Hillebrand’s attendant is on six,” she says. “You can leave it with her.”
“Thanks,” I say. I can feel their eyes trailing me as I continue down the hall. The air is dry, overheated, and my throat hurts every time I try to swallow. At the end of the hall, I pass a doorway paneled in glass. Beyond it, I see several patients sitting in armchairs, watching television in white paper gowns. Their arms and legs are strapped to the furniture.
At the end of the hall, I push through the doors into the stairwell. In all probability, Dr. Hillebrand will be presiding over Julian’s death, and if his attendant is on the sixth floor, there’s a good chance that is where he conducts the majority of his work. My legs are shaking by the time I get to six, and I’m not sure whether it’s nerves, or lack of sleep, or a combination of both. I ditch the plastic cup, then pause for a second to catch my breath. Sweat is tracing its way down my back.
Please, I think, to nobody in particular. I’m not sure what I’m asking for, exactly. A chance to save him. A chance, even, to see him. I need him to know that I came for him.
I need him to know that somehow, at some point in the tunnels, I began to love him.
Please.
The moment I emerge from the stairwell, I know that I have found it: Fifty feet down the hall, Thomas Fineman is standing outside the door to an examination room, arms crossed, with several bodyguards, speaking in low tones to a doctor and three lab techs.
Two, three seconds. I have only a few seconds until they’ll turn, until they’ll spot me and ask me what I’m doing here.
Their conversation is indecipherable from this distance—they are speaking practically in whispers—and for a second my heart bottoms out and I know that it’s too late, and it has already happened, and Julian is dead.
Then the doctor—Dr. Hillebrand?—consults his watch. The next words he speaks are louder—impossibly loud, in the space and the silence, as though he is shouting them.
“It’s time,” he says, and as the group starts to unknot, my three seconds are up. I rocket into the first door I see. It’s a small examination room, thankfully empty.
I don’t know what to do next. Panic is building in my chest. Julian is here, so close, and totally unreachable. There were at least three bodyguards with Thomas Fineman, and I have no doubt there are more inside. I’ll never make it past them.
I lean against the door, willing myself to focus, to think. I’ve ended up in a small antechamber. In one wall is a door that I know must lead to a larger procedural room, where complex surgeries and the procedure to cure deliria take place.
A paper-draped table dominates the small space: On it are folded gowns, and a tray of surgical instruments. The room smells like bleach and looks identical to the room in which I undressed for my evaluation, almost a year ago, on the day that started it all, that rocketed me forward and landed me here, in this new body, in this new future. For a second I feel dizzy and have to close my eyes. When I open them, I have the feeling of looking at two mirrors that have been placed face-to-face, of being pushed from the past to the now and back again. Memories begin budding, welling up—the walk to the labs in the sticky Portland air, the wheeling seagulls, the first time I saw Alex, the dark cavern of his mouth as he looked at me from the observation deck, laughing…
It hits me: the observation deck. Alex was watching me from an observation deck that ran the length of the procedural room. If this lab is laid out like the one in Portland, I might be able to access Julian’s room from the seventh floor.
I move cautiously into the hall again. Thomas Fineman is gone, and only a single bodyguard remains. For a moment I debate whether I should take my chances on him—the knife is there, heavy, waiting, like an urge—but then he turns his eyes in my direction. They are colorless, hard, like two stones; they make me draw back, as though he has reached down the length of the hall and hit me.
Before he can say anything, before he has time to register my face, I slip around the corner and into the stairwell.
The seventh floor is darker and dingier than any of the others. It is perfectly silent: no conversations humming behind closed doors, no steady beep of medical machinery or lab techs squeaking down the halls in white sneakers. Everything is still, as though the air up here is not often disturbed. A series of doorways extends down the hall on my right. My heart leaps when I see the first one is labeled OBSERVATION DECK A.
I ease down the hall on tiptoe. There’s obviously no one up here, but the quiet makes me nervous. There is something ominous about all the closed doors, the air heavy and hot like a blanket; I get the creeping feeling that someone is watching me, that all the doors are mouths, ready to open and scream out my presence.
The last door in the hall is marked OBSERVATION DECK D. My palms are sweating so badly, I can barely twist open the door handle. At the last second I remove my knife from the front pocket of my wind breaker, just in case, and uncoil Mrs. Fineman’s T-shirt from around the blade. Then I drop into a crouch and scuttle through the door onto the observation deck. I’m gripping the knife so tightly, my knuckles ache.
The deck is big, dark, and empty, and shaped like an L, extending along two whole walls of the procedural room below. It is completely enclosed in glass and contains four tiered rows of chairs, all of which look down over the main floor. It smells like a movie theater, like damp upholstery and gum.
I ease down the stairs of the deck, keeping close to the ground, grateful that the lights in the observation deck are off—and grateful, too, that the low plaster wall that encircles the deck, underneath the heavy panels of glass, should conceal me at least partially from the view of anyone below me. I ease off my backpack and place it carefully next to me. My shoulders are aching.
I have no idea what to do next.
The lights in the procedural room are dazzling. There is a metal table in the center of the room, and a couple of lab techs circulating, adjusting equipment, moving things out of the way. Thomas Fineman and a few other men—the men from the hall—have been moved into an adjacent room; it, too, is enclosed in glass, and although chairs have been set up for them, they are all standing. I wonder what Fineman is thinking. I think, briefly, of Julian’s mother. I wonder where she is.
I don’t see Julian anywhere.
A flash of light. I think explosion—I think run—and everything in me knots up, tight and panicked, until I notice that in one corner is a man with a camera and a media badge clipped to his tie. He is taking pictures of the setup, and the glare of the flash bounces off all the polished metal surfaces, zigzagging up the walls.
Of course. I should have known that the media would be invited to take pictures. They must record it, and broadcast it, in order for it to have any meaning.
The hatred surges, and with it, a cresting, swelling wave of fury. All of them can burn.
There is motion from the corner, from the part of the room concealed underneath the deck. I see Thomas Fineman and the other men swivel in that direction. Behind the glass, Thomas wipes his forehead with a handkerchief, the first sign of discomfort he has shown. The cameraman swivels too: flash, flash. Two moments of blinding white light.
Then Julian enters the room. He is flanked by two regulators, although he is walking on his own, without prompting. They are tailed by a man wearing the high white collar of a priest; he holds a gold-bound copy of The Book of Shhh in front of his chest, like a talisman to protect him from everything dirty and terrible in the world.
The hatred is a cord, tightening around my throat.
Julian’s hands have been handcuffed in front of him, and he is wearing a dark blue blazer and neatly pressed jeans. I wonder if that was his choice, or whether they made him dress up for his own execution. He is facing away from me and I will him, silently, to turn around, to look up. I need him to know that I’m here. I need him to know he’s not alone. I reach my hand out unthinkingly, grope along the glass. I want to smash it to pieces, to jump down and swoop Julian away. But it would never work. I could not get more than a few feet, and then it would be a double execution.
Maybe it no longer matters. I have nothing left, nothing to return to.
The regulators have stopped at the table. There is a swelling of conversation—I hear Julian say, “I’d rather not lie down.” His voice is muffled and indistinct—from the glass, from the height—but the sound of it makes me want to scream. Now my whole body is a heartbeat, a throbbing urge to do something. But I’m frozen, heavy as stone.
One of the regulators steps forward and unchains Julian’s hands. Julian pivots so I can see his face. He circles his wrists, forward and back, wincing a bit. Almost immediately, the regulator clips his right wrist to one of the legs of the metal table, pushing down on Julian’s shoulder so he is forced to sit. He has not once looked at his father.
In the corner of the room, the doctor is washing his hands in a large sink. The water drumming against the metal is overloud. It is too quiet. Surely executions can’t happen here, like this, in the bright and the silence. The doctor dries his hands, works his fingers into a pair of latex surgical gloves.
The priest steps forward and begins to read. His voice is a low drone, a monotone, muffled through the glass.
“And so Isaac grew and was the pride of his aged father, and for a time a perfect reflection of Abraham’s will…”
He is reading from the Book of Abraham. Of course. In it, God commands Abraham to kill his only son, Isaac, after Isaac becomes sick with the deliria. And so he does. He takes his son to a mountain and plunges a knife straight through his chest. I wonder whether Mr. Fineman requested that this passage be read. Obedience to God, to safety, to the natural order: That is what the Book of Abraham teaches us.
“But when Abraham saw that Isaac had become unclean, he asked in his heart for guidance…”
I am swallowing back Julian’s name. Look at me.
The doctor and two lab techs step forward. The doctor has a syringe. He is testing it, flicking its barrel with a finger, as a lab tech rolls Julian’s shirt to his elbow.
Just then there is a disturbance from below. It ripples through the room at once. Julian looks up sharply; the doctor steps away from him and replaces the syringe on the metal tray one of the lab techs carries. Thomas Fineman leans over, frowning, and whispers something to a bodyguard, as another lab tech bursts into the room. I can’t make out what she’s saying—I can tell it’s a she, even though she’s wearing a paper mask and a bulky, too-big lab coat, because of the braid swinging down her back—but she is gesturing agitatedly.