Prologue

He had six of them once. Now there were four.

This displeased him.

As a collector of fine things, there was a commonly accepted amount of subject matter required to be considered a "collection," though these terms involved semantics, which the man cared nothing about. He was more stimulated, or to be perfectly accurate, tantalized, by motivations. The kind of involuntary, primal urges that typically drove ninety percent of human behavior. Of primary interest to him was the process the mind went through when the walls closed in, when there was no longer enough breathing room or visual space to feel like a free person with free will and freedom of choice.

In particular, incarceration.

Myriad effects could be studied in response to this stimulus, to creating a false, artificial environment of incarceration. Thought processes, behavior patterns and changes, sensory perception, emotional responses, problem solving, group interaction and decision-making. It had been a curious epiphany to discover that according to his own research freeing oneself from the predicament of incarceration came higher on the needs hierarchy than any Maslowe had previously established. It was an epiphany worth writing about and sharing with the scientific community. If the manner in which he had constructed his control group were not, in fact, a felony, perhaps a book might have been written on the subject.

Of the six, one had died of natural causes, though he often laughed when he thought of that phrase. Death of any kind was anything but natural. Of course, in the most abstract sense of the word, death was a process, a story not unlike birth and life, full of details and drama with a clear beginning and end. In between birth and death, well, that was unimportant. But the procedure of taking another’s life with your own hand or, in the alternative, setting in motion a turn of events that led to the same conclusion, was the most unnatural of all activities. And, for him, this procedure satisfied a need more vital than oxygen to the lungs. One died, one escaped, leaving now only four. Four prisoners-of-war, prisoners of the war he declared on the rest of civilization, and even they were only half-living by now. The fifth link, the MIA, the escapee, was all he thought about. Besides the daily observations and experiments he had to contend with, one had sniffed out a path of egress and found a way, calculated the right time, amassed all of the needed accouterments to carry out this elaborate scam and left him. The thought of it made the lingering shadows of prior stomach ulcers pool with acid. Made his hands wring with rage, his head flood with a molten heat. He would find her. One day he would find her and make her suffer worse than any prisoner of war ever had. Every physiological function in his body and every neurological impulse in his brain depended on this one execution. For execution was the correct word for it, after all.

Some men are capable of just one crime. One crime that evolves out of a crack in the glue of sanity and righteousness that binds together the healthy balance between the human heart and mind. And this crack happens as the result of one incident, one betrayal, a proverbial straw on the camel’s back. After the crime is committed and fully absorbed, the mind returns to its normal patterns of processing as if none of it had ever happened. But then other men, of stronger mental constitution, can spend a lifetime perfecting a single crime, painstakingly trying time after time to finally get it right.

Returning his gaze to the monitor on the desktop, he picked up a pen and started the usual observations. Left to right. "Subject Number One," he began writing, "lay like a shivering fetus, curled up and facing the wall looking blankly at the wash of white, chalky cinderblock. Subject Number Two grinding teeth and scratching long red lines into the skin on her left forearm. In a few moments, the skin will bleed and subject will scream bloody murder. Same as every time before. Subject Number Three stands in the upper right corner of the cell with her hand on Subject ..."

*

"Yes, that too."

The girl mechanically obliged.

"And the socks and shoes. Hurry up, get them off."

The man wrote the girl’s number on the top of a blank page. He gazed upon her body with sinister eyes, planning with thoughtful precision what would happen next. The game was redundant. And though his mental stability required this type of regularity, a part of him craved something new and exciting, a new wrinkle or different response. Something to keep him up nights pacing the concrete floors, something to spin his intellect into frenzied circles. He loved a good puzzle, and the game was becoming too routine to mean much anymore.

"Now, tell me how you’re feeling."

For a long time the girl said nothing. The once vibrant hue of her blue eyes had faded from medication and fatigue and grown cloudy from malnutrition; her skin had a sallow jaundiced cast, her lips barely distinguishable from the color of her skin. Life was gently fading from her just as he had expected, or hoped. There were vertical stains on her cheeks where tears had fallen. She was sitting on the edge of a cot with her bare feet touching the cold concrete floor. Now, with the man facing her, waiting anxiously for her anticipated response, her face scrunched up and trembled, lips contracted into a wrinkled mound of dehydrated flesh and eyes squinted almost shut. But no tears fell. Were there none left? Was she saving them for when she could release them in private? He doubted she had this kind of control or cognitive ability left. After all, that was the point, wasn’t it? Because there was no privacy. He watched them, all of them, constantly on expensive, sophisticated monitors. Impatience showed on his face and demeanor now as he waited for the response that would not come. In his chart for this subject, he checked the behavior profile and asked again. And again. How are you feeling? How–are you feeling? The questions were tailor-made, the tone and volume of his voice, duration, according to a precise set of self-composed clinical procedures based on years of research on similar control groups. There was information in his extensive database on what was too loud, too fast, empty, cold or hot, according to nearly every conceivable scenario.

"How--do--you--feel?"

It was the type of question that usually elicited one of three possible responses native to the emotional effects of incarceration. Response One: Bored resignation, a variation on one of the many dissociative disorders, to the stimuli resulting in no verbal response whatsoever and a litany of movements including shrugged shoulders, vacuous staring, body limp and hunched over due to a severely weakened skeletal system.

Response Two: Mechanical, quick, one or two-word verbal response, such as ‘hot’ or ‘too cold’ or ‘I don’t know.’ This one was typically accompanied by body language based on fear or vulnerability—knees bent with arms wrapped tightly around them with the head angled down and resting on the knee caps, sometimes laying fetus-like on the floor or the bench.

The third response was by far the most exciting and elusive, but well worth waiting for when it actually manifested. He referred to it as the rage-response, incorporating a variety of words articulated in a loud, often frantic and uncontrolled verbal tone and behaviors ranging from flailing arms, leaping up, banging on the walls or floor or self abuse. In this scenario, the verbal stimuli of ‘how do you feel’ served as the proverbial last straw. Once, some years ago, a subject had actually physically attacked him, rising from the floor and coming at him with clenched fists, wild eyes and a high-pitched freakish wail. It had taken him months to come down from the rush. How a single phrase, an innocent question could cause such a violent release of not only inhibition but deep emotion was of eternal fascination and, after all, precisely what he had studied all his adult life.

A thin stream of tears fell down the subject’s white, flaccid cheeks. And oddly, the eyes did not so much as blink, nor did the facial muscles exhibit any typical signs of crying. She was not weeping out of sadness or grief; this was obvious. It more fit the profile of the soul crying out for help, begging to be rescued from desperation. The man recorded this unusual response in his notebook and again stuck to the accepted curriculum that he had created.

"Now, please, how do you feel?" he asked, less able to control his impatience than before.

"I’m not afraid to die," came an unexpected clear, stony voice. Her body remained motionless, almost frozen.

"You’re not going to. I have something much more delicious in mind." The man could barely restrain the smile that crept across his lips. "You’re going to live."

*