More time passes. The boredom is its own kind of torture. I think of Alice back in San Francisco. What is she doing? Is she at work? At home? Is she alone?
The door swings open. “Hi, Maurie,” I say. He doesn’t respond. He unlocks the handcuffs and I lift my hands from the table. They feel heavy, not my own. I move my fingers, rub my hands, shake them out. Maurie grabs my arms, roughly pulls them behind my back, and handcuffs me again.
He leads me down the hallway and into an elevator.
“Where are you taking me?”
No response. He seems nervous all of a sudden, even more nervous than me. I remember the Düsseldorf study: When frightened or panicked, humans release a chemical through their sweat that sets off certain receptors in the human brain. I can smell Maurie’s anxiety coming off of his skin.
The elevator door closes. “You got a wife, Maurie? Kids?”
Reluctantly, his eyes meet mine. A slight shake of the head.
“No wife?” I repeat. “No kids?”
Another subtle shake of the head. And I realize he’s not responding to my question. He’s warning me.
The elevator takes us down five floors—ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. My empty stomach turns; my resolve weakens. I am forty feet below the desert floor, a hundred miles from anywhere. If there were an earthquake, if this place collapsed, I would be buried, forgotten forever.
We leave the elevator. Maurie too seems to have lost some of his resolve, because he doesn’t bother to grab my arms. He walks and I follow. He punches a code into a keypad and we enter a room where another guard is standing—a woman, about forty-five, bleached-blond hair in an old-fashioned style. She doesn’t look like she’s a member of The Pact. Employment in the desert must be difficult to find. Maybe she’s a former prison employee, from before this place shut down.
The door slams shut behind us. Maurie unlocks my handcuffs, and then the three of us just stand there. Maurie looks at the woman. “Go on,” he says.
“No, you,” she says.
I get the feeling this is the first time they have done this, whatever it is, and neither of them wants to take charge. Finally, the woman tells me, “I need you to take all of your clothes off.”
“Again?”
“Yes.”
“Everything?”
She nods.
I slowly remove my slippers, thinking. Maurie gave me that nod of warning in the elevator—not an unfriendly nod, I’m sure of it, more like a conspiratorial one. These two both seem jittery. Could I convince them to let me go—while it’s just the three of us? No Gordon. How much do they get paid? Could I offer them money?
“Are you from Nevada?” I ask. I pretend to have difficulty with the top button on my jumpsuit, stalling for time.
The woman glances at Maurie. “No. I’m originally from Utah,” she says. Maurie gives her a scolding look.
“Hurry it up,” he says.
I unbutton the jumpsuit and let it fall to the floor. The woman looks away. “Where are you from?” she asks, clearly uncomfortable with my state of undress.
“California.” I stand here in the prison-issued boxers. “Would you be willing to help me?” I whisper.
“Enough,” Maurie hisses. I know I’m crossing a line. I sense he could erupt into fury at any moment. Still, I’m running out of options. “I have money,” I say. “A lot,” I lie.
I can hear the beep of numbers being punched into the keypad on the other side of the door. The blond woman shoots Maurie a glance. Shit, she’s as nervous as he is. The door swings open and a tall, stout woman enters. She looks like an old-time prison warden, the real deal, like she could gleefully crack my skull open with her fist. “Guards,” she says, her voice unexpectedly soft, studying her clipboard, “we need to pick it up.” She looks at me. “Buck naked. Right now.”
I shrug off my underpants and cover my groin with my hands. What an awful feeling, to be naked among the clothed.
The warden glances up from her clipboard. My nudity neither surprises nor interests her. “Take him to twenty-two hundred,” she tells Maurie and the blond woman. “Quick. Get him into the apparatus. Everyone’s waiting.”
Shit. That can’t be good.
The blonde, clearly terrified of the warden, pushes me forward. We walk down the hallway and enter another room. In the center is a table made entirely of plexiglass. An attractive woman stands beside the table. Although she too holds a clipboard, she wears a crisp white shirt and white linen pants, nice leather sandals—not the usual uniform. Her hair is a strawberry-blond bob. She must be special somehow. Maybe she’s one of the Friends.
Her eyes roam over my body. “Get on the table,” she says.
“Are you kidding me?”
“No.” Her eyes are cold. “Maurie can show you an alternative, but I assure you it’s much worse.”
I look over my shoulder at Maurie. Shit. Even he looks scared.
“Look,” I say. “I don’t know what kind of medieval—”
The woman’s hand comes up so fast, I don’t even have time to avoid it. She smashes the clipboard into my face. My gaze goes blurry. “On the table, please,” she says evenly. “You need to understand that there are many of us, one of you. You can give in to our requests, or you can resist, but either way it’s going to happen. Your level of resistance merely equals the level of your pain; the outcome is the same otherwise. It’s a simple equation: Resistance equals pain.”
I shudder and climb onto the table, feeling profoundly vulnerable. There’s a foam neck rest at one end, and beside it a leather strap. There are other straps on the table too, wooden blocks at the bottom. The blond woman is looking at the ceiling. Maurie is watching the woman in white, apparently awaiting orders.
The plexiglass is cold against my bare skin. My head aches, and I feel a trickle of blood on my face. Where yesterday I longed to be free of the straitjacket, now I long for anything to cover my nakedness and humiliation.
The blond woman arranges my head on the foam, then tugs the leather strap across my throat and disappears from view. I feel my arms being strapped into place—Maurie. His grip is powerful, but he is surprisingly gentle. Then I feel the straps across my ankles. It must be the blonde. After strapping me in, she pats my foot. Such a maternal gesture. I fight back tears. Why are the two of them acting this way? What do they know? Is this the kindness before the slaughter?
I’m staring up at the ceiling, immobile, chilled. All I can see are ugly fluorescent lights. The room is hushed. I feel like a frog strapped down in a high school biology class, waiting to be dissected.
There are footsteps—it sounds as though a couple more people have entered the room. The woman in white is standing over me now. “Close it in,” she says.
A large plate of plexiglass moves over me. My heart is beating so hard, I can hear it. I wonder if they can. I try to move, to resist, but it’s no use. The sheet of plexiglass looks heavy. “No!” I shout, panicked.