Frames Of Reference- Chapter 5

~nsequeira119

The sunscreen in my palm is growing complacent. I’ve never liked sunscreen, never liked the way it feels on your skin. Even though it should feel refreshing, it doesn’t. It’s warm and viscous and it creates stains on clothes. I keep thinking I’ll opt for the type that’s a condensed stick, like deodorant, but whenever I’m at Walmart I’m in a rush and I stupidly grab the tube. Well, we need it. We’ve used up around twenty tubes so far, although I’m not keeping an exact tally.

I’m sleep deprived, still feeling the effects of the ribs and the building is locked. I looked in the windows, they’re all dark and the receptionist is nowhere to be found.

Finally, ten minutes late, right when I’m prepared to call the whole thing off and assume the facility is shut down due to unforeseen circumstances, a gas leak or something, Bradford rolls around the corner, smug grin at the helm of his modified Bentley Continental. He lets out a hearty cry and pulls up alongside me.

“Walk around to the back.”

I do as I’m told, follow his tread around both corners and he stops in the middle of the alley. Turns the thing off, the engine groans to a dead stop and he takes off his sunglasses.

“Where’s Carla-Jean?”

“She’s staying home today,” he answers, fidgeting with the lock. “She always stays home when we’re on official business. No time to explain, you’ll understand better when we’re inside.” The deadbolt slides home and he opens the handle. I’m hesitant to enter, but as per usual he deftly slithers his hairy arm and places it on the small of my back, escorting me up the steps. Once we’re in, he looks both ways and shuts it tight.

“This way, Jerry.”

The same hideous alcove. I notice one of those large metal tubes with the horizontal stripes, an aluminum snake sucking air across the ceiling. Bradford ushers me along as I stare up at its dimly lit presence. I’m cold because of course I didn’t dress for this.

We turn into a hallway I didn’t notice earlier, it’s small and only wide enough for us to walk single file. Bradford’s teeth gleam as he turns his head to make sure I’m following him, he’s all smiles today. I can’t make out anything up ahead.

“Do you have a flashlight?”

“Don’t need one, you’ll remember how it goes. Come on.”

I don’t know why it's unlit, there should be lights installed here, in a decade of medical study I’ve operated under the assumption that clinical environments are well-kempt, orderly, conducive to thought. I’d never considered it before, but the realization comes over me that I am a lygophobe. There’s no avoiding that.

“Watch out here for the step.” I stagger forward, reach out, grab the handrail just in time. Bradford puts his arm out to steady me, shows me how to space my feet correctly. We help each other down, and then, at last, he goes over to a wall, feels around, flips a switch. The basement comes into being, barely legible by the cheap, outdated phosphorescent tube screwed into the ceiling socket.

I have to admit, even after all I’ve seen here, this lower level is a step above in terms of possessing a decrepit, hostile atmosphere. The walls are gray concrete, there are no windows or even any ventilation to speak of, long-vacant spiderwebs drip from the corners of the ceiling and everything, up to and including Bradford’s face, is bathed naked in a sickly turquoise glow. I look back up the staircase we descended. Nothing is visible above. If I called out, it would create a cavernous echo. We’re all alone in this abysmal sunken tomb.

“I think I should go back up,” I stammer. “I’m not feeling well.” I grasp at my forehead. I wish this was facetious, but it’s genuine. I can’t stand it down here. The sound...

“Aw, come on, Jerry,” he grunts, pulling me away from the exit with his ape grasp. “You’re doing fine so far. In fact, very few before you have ever made it all the way down here. Some I decided weren’t the right kind of material and stayed upstairs. But you... something different about you. Something necessary.” His words bounce off the cement and into my ears like syrup, I can’t deny there’s something markedly appealing about how his syllables flow together, how they coalesce into a sum greater than its parts.

“Thank you, Sir- uh, Vern.”

“No, thank you,” he says, crossing over to a drab shelf with one lone manila envelope set askew at the bottom. “Because I know I can trust you. I know there are no hard feelings, no secrets between us. Of any kind. So I need to ask, before you open this. Are you faint of heart?” He hands it to me and I freeze up, his expectant tactics are getting to me.

“Of course not. I’ve been a surgeon, a clinician. I’ve opened up people’s skulls, I’ve looked at the raw human brain. Have you?”

“Can’t say I have, no.”

“Well, let me tell you this,” I grab the envelope with resolve and alter my speech pattern to appear more confident. “When you peel away that flesh and bone, drill a hole in the scalp, when you have to shave away the follicles of the hair, hope they grow back- well, it changes you. You don’t come out of that experience the same. And it’s no different here. I’m sure, whatever you have waiting for me, it’ll take a while to adapt. But I can. If studying the mind has taught me anything, it’s that people are resilient and capable of adaptation. That’s one of our key strengths.”

“Good. Rip that open.”

I do as I’m told, quickly tear off the corner, then the top, paying little attention to the adhesive. I forcefully retrieve its contents- a stack of papers roughly half a centimeter thick, stapled once diagonally. They’re old documents, I can tell, compared to what I’ve been processing upstairs. Twenty years, at least, faded and yellow, with standard typewriter text and Polaroid photos Scotch-taped on.

Two photos on the front page of what appear to be some disheveled man, accompanied by a strange device behind him- although the pictures suffer from light leak and overexposure, and one of them is more incomprehensible than the other. They’re taken from two separate angles.

He’s wearing a blindfold, not a traditional cloth blindfold but some kind of modern foil visor, reminds me of the cheap plastic wraparound sunglasses given to patients following an eye exam. And his mouth- his mouth can’t be made out, there’s a ribbed tube extending from it, like something out of an H.R. Giger painting, man and flesh unified as one. In the grainy abyss behind him, something resembling an IV drip looms tall and imposing.

“What do you think?” he asks, not a note of humor in his query.

“I don’t know what to think,” I respond after a long pause, “Because I don’t know what these are supposed to be. Who is this, Vern?”

“It’s Nil.”

He walks towards the back of the room, the coldest, dampest area yet, air conditioning vents blowing incessantly from within the walls. Bends down to inspect a little metallic keypad next to a large, horrible iron door. The door is deadbolted, has five locks and magnetic seals, and here’s Bradford, casual as ever, humming to himself as he taps in the entry code.

Beep.

It opens, it opens and I shut my eyes because I don’t want to see what’s inside, I squint faintly and I cough because there seems to be steam billowing out from whatever lies beyond, a noxious gas that fills the room up, rendering it a completely inhospitable wasteland. He senses the fear in me, and before I can make a run for it, he decisively grabs my wrist, plunges me headlong into the nightmare.

“Meet Nil, Jerry.”

I’m pulling out my hair, my legs are giving out, and it’s so cold. I’m freezing, I realize, I’m not dressed for this temperature. It’s a meat locker, or something, or- some kind of deep freeze environment. This is where all the ducts go to, all the air conditioning, the coldest place for miles around, arctic tundra singing my flesh, needles of frostbite stabbing my vulnerable prostrate form.

Then, little by little, I calm down. The wave of horror passes, the tsunami departs, leaving the citizens of the nondescript city in its wake to rebuild their lives. We’re in another room now- similar, but about half the size, this one isn’t lit at all, it’s dark and cramped, and in front of me I can make out a control panel of some kind. Buttons flash on and off, colorful displays behind glass panels, dials and gauges.

Above this panel are seven CCTV cameras, each displaying a separate angle through distorted gray static. I can hear the Hi-8 tapes rotating in each of them, the gears whirring and clicking like a great unified swarm. Seven angles of the same man in the photographs, albeit more aged and broken.

And the only light in the room besides the sickly hum of the panel comes from the room immediately in front of me, separated from the one I’m in by a half-foot thick panel of glass. Inside, the same man, in the same state as on the cameras, sits motionless in the same cybernetic apparatus, within the confines of a roughly ten-foot by ten-foot blank white rectangular prism.

For a fleeting instant, I almost laugh, because the absurdity of what I’m seeing is so magnanimous, so complete, that my frail faculties don’t know how to react. I wander over to the panel in an absolute stupor, run my fingers over the buttons to make sure they’re real. Yes, and very tactile. Whoever designed them saw to that.

Bradford smiles behind my shoulder.

“What is this?”

“That’s Nil, Jerry,” he clears his throat with some hesitancy. “The man you’re seeing before you, his name is Nil. You’re going to get to know him.” There’s a trace of a shiver in his delivery, as much as he tries to suppress it. He can’t stand the cold down here, either. It must be ten degrees at the most.

“I am?”

“Yes, of course.”

I run the previous weeks over, again and again, searching frantically, because the way he’s revealing this information to me seems too effortless, as if I would have known, yet there was nothing beforehand to indicate this was what I’d be doing- nothing in the listing, nothing in any of the forms I’d processed, which used only vague jargon. Certainly nothing about the facility itself to denote the leering presence of this subterranean madhouse. I rub my temples.

I remember visiting the mental health facility at Swedish once, wasn’t my department but I had to go there once to fill a prescription. I wandered beyond the part out front, the friendly part with the potted flowers and nice Modernist paintings and the medication disposal bin. This is the part with the antique clock, the bright bold text signs talking about the Good Samaritan law in Colorado, how if you bring your friend in during a potential Opioid overdose to save their life you won’t be prosecuted. I had absentmindedly walked past all that, as if asleep.

Down a hallway, some hallway, in hospitals they all tend to blend into one another, bright sterile corridors with lines etched into the ceramic tiles to make navigation easier for visitors. I saw the entrance to the psychiatric ward was unlocked. And I thought I’d take a peek inside.

I remember catching a quick glimpse of only one padded room in there, before the doctors in that wing noticed me and ushered me out, and I made up some flimsy excuse about getting lost, but that one vision was enough to make me reconsider my own state of being.

Someone in that room, the rubber padding, little domes of specially manufactured material. They weren’t frothing at the mouth, they didn’t even have a straitjacket on, none of the stereotypical imagery you think of. They were sitting in an upright position, leaning back against the wall, staring forward as if into the sun, like those old Fakirs who did it until they were blind. This person with matted hair and chapped lips, bruised feet and malnutrition, and a little wristband, in the prison of their own perception, forever unable to get out.

I had blocked that memory, had blocked it until I saw this, because you don’t tend to ever consider such things. Hysteria is infectious.

I snap back to the present and Bradford has his typical reassuring hand on my shoulder, he’s leaning close to my mouth as if to monitor my breathing pattern, which must be a shrill whistle about now. I’m hyperventilating, and I don’t know how that could possibly mean I’m suitable for whatever the Hell this is.

“Who’s Nil?” I reach out to clutch something. The back of an old leather chair. I sit down, rub my nose, which is dripping like a faucet.

“Let’s start with the basics,” he says. “Nil is an experimental test subject here at the facility. Who his parents are- I don’t rightly know. Those records are classified. What we do know is that he was placed into our care at a very young age. Perhaps right from the womb. That would suit the purposes of our company extremely well.”

“Your purposes being-?”

“Well, not my purposes,” he clarifies. “My purpose is only to keep the building operational, maintain what goes on upstairs. What the company wants from all this- what they’ve entrusted me with the care of- is the creation of a universal truth.”

He stands there and expects me to believe it. In the adjacent chamber, behind the two-way mirror, Nil’s right index finger twitches slightly.

“What-?”

“Think of it like this,” he raises his hands. “Nil has never known a life beyond that room. One of his senses has been permanently obscured, rendering him effectively blind. I don’t think his photoreceptors would work even if we took off that blindfold. He receives nutrients and oxygen through the feeding tube. He never has to leave the room- the chair he’s in has an opening beneath which filters out excretions, it moves occasionally to prevent his muscles from decaying. Only enough to prevent that, you understand. No more. We can’t give him too much tactile input, or the experiment would be ruined.”

“What the fuck does any of this have to do with ‘universal truth?’”

“You don’t seem to understand,” he continues. “I figured, as a neurologist, you would have caught on by now.”

“I don’t understand, Vern. I don’t understand at all.”

“There are freak cases, outliers. Seldom reported on heavily. Take children who are prevented from attending school, locked into high chairs until they’re ten. Or take children raised in cults. Whatever you want, take a case where the subject is reared from birth in a prohibitive environment that inhibits thought, that actively stifles growth.”

“That’s inhumane, it’s a war crime.”

“Certainly,” he posits. “Nil, here, is different. I believe he was brought into being solely for this purpose, and no other, by the company. Some hush money exchanged. Or maybe he was raised out of a test tube. I don’t know. Regardless, you’ll need to put ethics aside for now, because what we have on our hands here is a very unique opportunity.”

“Opportunity? This is barbaric!”

“Please, lower your voice,” he shushes me. “Nil can’t hear you, the glass is thick, but I don’t need this kind of stress. Haven’t I been fair to you? Haven’t I been a straight shooter?” I look at him, he doesn’t blink.

“No, Vern,” I reply calmly. “You haven’t. You haven’t been upfront about anything, since I’ve been here. You’re a fucking liar.”

“I assure you, I’m not,” he goes on. “I’m telling you the truth, right now, this very moment. As I was saying- these cases, prohibitive environments, severe isolation, neglect, malnourishment. Not only of the body but of the mind, even to a degree of the soul. Now you would assume, looking at Nil- that his existence is empty, that he’s a nonentity. Accuse me of being unethical all you like, however that’s your prejudicial judgment.”

“It is not,” I remark. “He’s not a nonentity. He’s a living being, a human, like you and I.”

“Now who’s lying?” he pauses and leans against a massive server. “You assume that he can’t think, that there’s nothing going on in there, that his state is somewhat akin to a coma, or to death itself. You, as a person in the outside world, who has heard and seen many things, assume that someone with no sensory input cannot process information, and as a result cannot produce any meaningful output.”

“Of course,” I say. “That follows logically.”

“Yes! See? That’s where you’re wrong!” he claps, as if we’ve made some major breakthrough. “This is what’s been found- that even in cases of extreme sensory deprivation, the mind goes on. It has to, the alternative is self-cannibalization, it would eat itself otherwise. So it has to create new experiences for itself- new places, new states of being. New types of thought. Instead of exploring outward, the subject retreats inward- to the furthest point, to the root of the brain. To a place so deep, so forgotten and unstudied, that it betrays some deeply-wired genetic predisposition, some, as I put it, universal truth. An absolute singularity.”

“You’re insane,” I stammer. “Fucking insane.”

“Not at all, Jerry,” he hands me the folder. “Not even remotely close. I’m just a wheel in an apparatus, Jerry. I don’t know who our employers are, I’ve never seen their faces. But they pay me. And they pay you, now. And you’d better get used to it, because this is important work. What we have here is completely unexplored ground with no precedent.”

“I can’t do it. It goes against everything I stand for.”

“You stand for nothing,” he drones. “You convince yourself of these- these morals and platitudes. I’ll tell you something, Jerry. Much of our understanding of anatomy today comes from those early modern surgery amphitheaters. Public spectacles. Most of your credentials were obtained through patently immoral means. We’re not putting Nil up as a spectacle, only letting his life run its course, as it was meant to.”

“But he’s a person.”

“If it helps, you can think of him that way,” he responds. “Your role down here is to work with him, try to get to the bottom of what goes on in his head. What we’re looking for is some form of creative self-expression. A drawing, a symbol. Something like that.”

“Use this,” he taps a gangly stalk. “This is a microphone which Nil can pick up through a loudspeaker in there. You are to use only the simple voice commands on this list, here. Nothing else. You are not to engage in normal human conversation with him. We hope he understands your commands based solely on tone rather than meaning.”

“I need to leave,” I stand up, walk past him, wrench the deadbolts open and unpressurize the chamber. The difference in temperature is striking.

“That’s what they all said. All the previous people who worked with him. They were apprehensive at first. I’ve seen five of them leave under my watch. But they all helped him, and I have a feeling you will, too. Maybe the best so far. I think you can get Nil to draw something, or to say something. If you can do that- well, that’s all we ask. That’s all you have to do. You’ll have a full retirement package, live like a king wherever you want, forget all about this. All we ask is one result. That’s not so much to ask for, is it, Jerry? One indication of sentience, one meager scribble? Surely the great neuroscientist, Dr. Kessel, with your higher ideals, can coax one word out of someone.” He stands with his thumbs sticking out of his pockets, lotion congealing on his tanned flesh, stomach protruding past his ornate studded leather belt.

I can’t speak right now. I face away from him, rubbing my arms frantically to produce friction, any kind of heat in this frigid prison.

“I have to ask two things of you,” he says. “One, you don’t tell anybody. Not even your wife. That’s very important. Not that what we’re doing here will need to be kept a secret once we make the breakthrough. Once it’s made, everything will change. But for now- well, you know how heated certain activist groups can get. So we ask that you keep this between you and me. For the safety of the project.”

“Second, and this is the most important- if you don’t want to, just let me know. I need to know before the end of the week, Jerry. I understand if you’re feeling a wide range of emotions right now. So go home, think it over. If you quit, if you want to leave here and never look back, and forget what you’ve seen, you can. Severance package of fifty thousand to prove there are no hard feelings between us.” He extends his palm to give me a warm handshake. I don’t move. For a few solid minutes, I’m as inert as Nil. Bradford sighs heavily, grumbles a little.

“Well,” he resigns at last, “I have to get upstairs, file some things away. I trust you can find your way out. Call me once you’ve made your decision.” He glides past me, slips the manila envelope into the crook of my elbow and begins his ascent into the darkened crawlspace above, his hirsute legs poised atop his wrinkled athletic socks.

“Vern?”

“Yes?” He spins around, his voice cascading like a distant waterfall from the heights.

“Who runs this? Who’s your boss?”

“I told you that,” he laughs. “The day you got here. A private firm called Agarico.”