Such are Sanjay’s eyes when Carter Jergen says, “In a way, she did this to herself, to you. The two of you were on the Hamlet list to be adjusted, but you weren’t near the top until her novel was published three weeks ago. Alecto Rising. The response of certain critics and too many deeply affected readers led the computer to move you to the top of the list.”
Jergen is not sure that Sanjay can make sense of what he hears, so deeply is he sunk in misery, his mind turning round and round on a descending spiral path of grief and guilt. But Jergen and Dubose have won the day, and there’s no point in achieving a win if you can’t have some fun with it.
“Her novel will inspire the worst ideas among impressionable younger generations. The computer identifies it as potentially a dangerous iconic work. So it’s fitting—don’t you think?—that the two of you will now be tasked with discrediting it and all your other writing, ensuring that every word the two of you have put on paper will go out of print forever.”
Sanjay’s gaze fixed on the nearest of the candles, the faux fire bright in his eyes, which might never again be alive with a true fire.
“It used to take eight to twelve hours after injection for the control mechanism to fully form across the brain. Only in the last few days have we been using a new version of the secret sauce that completes the job in four hours. Millions of brain-tropic molecular machines swimming upstream toward those three pounds of tissue in your skull. Sanjay Shukla is only secondarily the body in this chair before me. The essential you is those three pounds. Can you feel those millions of invaders swimming through you and at the same time toward you? I am fascinated by it all. I wonder…when they pass through the walls of cerebral capillaries and into the very tissue of the brain, when they begin to link up and form a web across the various lobes, in the final hour of your independence, before everything settles down up there, will you feel as if spiders are creeping inside your skull?”
Sanjay’s eyes turn from the candle and meet Jergen’s stare. In a whisper, he declares, “You’re insane.”
“Sticks and stones,” Jergen replies.
“Evil,” Sanjay says. “Not all madmen are evil, but all evil men are mad.”
Jergen smiled. “You shouldn’t speak so disparagingly of someone who will shortly be your absolute master.”
44
Jane returned from the theater to the lobby and released the chocks on the wheels of the office chair. She rolled Petra Quist into the theater and parked her in the shadows behind the back row of seats, where she could see and hear what was to come. Then she fixed the wheels in place once more.
After unwinding the duct tape, Jane waited while the party girl worked the sodden mass of gauze between her teeth and expelled it into her lap.
Considering that Simon Yegg made a habit of hurting her and that she claimed to be over him, Petra seemed unduly worried about his well-being, almost breathless with concern. “My God, what’ve you done to him, did you kill him already, his face was covered, wasn’t his face covered?”
“It’s not covered now,” Jane said, directing Petra’s attention to her nuclear love machine below, bound like Gulliver in Lilliput. She had adjusted the theater lighting so that only the stage and the area immediately in front of it were illuminated. “He’s just asleep, recovering from an encounter with chloroform.”
“What are you going to do to him?”
“Not a fraction of what he deserves.”
“He’s not all bad. I mean, he’s not so nice sometimes, but he’s not a hopeless shit.”
Jane said, “Listen, I’ve brought you into this so you can hear him and maybe learn something. Lying down there, Simon’s not at an angle where he can see you even if he turns his head, even if you weren’t in the dark up here. Among other things, you’ll learn what he really thinks about you. It’ll be worth hearing. But if you can’t keep your mouth shut, I’ll gag and duct-tape you again.”
“No. Don’t. I can’t. I thought I was gonna puke and choke on it, you know.”
“Then be silent.”
“Okay. I will. But please, please, please let me go potty.”
Those blue eyes were so pellucid that they seemed like windows to a soul in all its truth, but artful cunning was required to meet eye to eye for as long as this and seem guileless. Jane put a hand to her captive’s head, and the girl flinched. She wanted only to smooth the disarranged hair back from Petra’s forehead, which she did before saying, “Sorry, but I don’t trust you yet. In spite of all your attitude, you have so little self-esteem that you’ll go on needing Simon until you have even less respect for him than you have for yourself.”
Sudden color pinked the girl’s pale cheeks and her chin thrust forward. She seemed about to pull the trigger on her temper. But she restrained herself, opting for a look of pitiable distress. “I really gotta pee.”
“It’s not my chair,” Jane said, “so have at it.”
45
Sanjay Shukla finds no hope in the candlelight and yet another reason for despair in Carter Jergen’s eyes, and so he turns his attention to the open door through which Radley Dubose led Tanuja.
In a voice breaking with anguish, he says, “Where has he taken my sister?”
“If Pastor Gordon has an office here,” says Jergen, “it’s a cozy space with all the amenities. He didn’t strike me as one of those clergy who believes there’s any point to a vow of poverty. Mainly, my partner will want a nice big sofa.”
The thin sound that escapes the younger twin suggests an intensity of grief that Jergen has never heard before.
“You don’t have to worry that I might have any such intentions, Sanjay. That good old boy was raised in backwoods West Virginia. I wasn’t. Oh, yes, he was accepted at Princeton and earned a degree. But the standards expected of Princeton grads, if any standards are expected at all, are magnitudes below those of Harvard alumni. I’d rather be partnered with one of my own kind, but I must admit he does keep things interesting.”
The girl’s first cry seems to issue from a greater distance than is in fact the case, and it sounds like the forlorn voice of some exotic night bird, though lonelier and eerier than a loon’s call and more miserable than the moaning of an ibis.
Jergen’s buttoned-up old-school father, Carlton, has long been a member of New England’s preeminent bird-watching club, one of his many cultured interests. Inevitably, some of the elder Jergen’s deep knowledge of all things avian has rubbed off on his son, although by his university days, Carter’s interests were quite different from those of his old man.
Tanuja’s protests no longer sound birdlike in any way, nor distant. They are shrill and terrible. She is apparently resisting with all her strength, though considering Dubose’s size and the ferocity of his appetites, resistance is futile.
Kicking violently at the floor, Sanjay rocks the chair backward from the table and attempts to stand, but the taut collar-and-leash tether makes it impossible for him to unbend his body from a sitting position and thrust to his feet. He can neither release the collar nor reach far enough behind and down to the knot at the stretcher bar. The chair topples onto its side, bearing him with it. He yanks on the arms of it as though he will break them off with his bare hands, but the frame of the chair is welded steel. The minimal restraint allows the illusion of easy escape; therefore, the truth of his helplessness is all the more frustrating. He is furious in his anguish, in his excruciating grief, managing to rattle the chair in a half circle to no useful purpose. Throughout this, he never shouts or screams, but grunts and hisses and snarls in this dumb-animal striving, breathing ever more noisily, until at last he is no longer able to deny his impotence. He lies on his side in the cage of his chair, immobilized and weeping miserably.