11

But it was months, or what felt like months anyway, before he saw the gray man again. First they left him alone in his cell for a while without food or water, and then, once he was very weak, finally gave him water. Then they beat the bottoms of his feet with a steel rod until he couldn’t walk or even stand. They they put a bag over his head and poured water over it, so that it felt like he was drowning. They stripped him and left him shivering in a cold bare room and then yelled at him and insisted that he talk until he felt he had no choice but to retreat deeper and deeper into his body and watch it all from a distance.

Most of it he watched with horror, but their growing frustration at being unable to crack him he watched with a certain delight. How many days that went on, he couldn’t say for certain. But then abruptly it came to an end: they again put a sack over his head and bound his hands and hustled him careening down a corridor, laughing at him when he fell before yanking him back to his feet. Is it the same sack? he couldn’t help wondering. They put him in a vehicle again, but he didn’t think it was the same vehicle they had put him in before—it felt different somehow. The tone of the space, even through the sack, was different. There was someone next to him holding him firmly by one arm and someone on the other side of him holding him firmly by the other arm. They drove somewhere for a long time—maybe not all that long, suggested a voice somewhere inside of him and when he heard it he grunted with satisfaction into the hood. Welcome, voice, he thought. He felt one of the hands tighten on one of his arms. However long it was, eventually the vehicle stopped and he was rushed out of it and brought quickly into another place. At first he thought he was going into a building, but when they finally had him inside and seated and had removed the sack from around his head, he saw that he wasn’t in a building at all, but in some kind of aircraft. He was alone except for two guards.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

But the guards with him would not answer the question. They would not even look at him. There was a grating sound above them and he saw light begin to flood in and realized they were in the spaceport, and then the ship’s engines began to rise and they were lifting straight up and into the air. That, of everything he had experienced so far, turned out to be the thing most akin to a carnival ride. He could feel his stomach pushing down, threatening to leave his body, and his whole body felt heavy and he had a hard time breathing, and the voices in him drifted tingling down from his head before getting tangled within his legs. And then they were through the upper lock of the dome and the pressure began to diminish, to become less and less until it was almost nonexistent. Soon they were circling a space station, synchronizing speed with it and slowly coming closer until with a gentle thunk they had docked.

“Is this where we’re going?” he asked. But neither of the guards answered. It felt strange to be weightless, to feel like you hardly even had a body. It was like how sometimes the inside voices didn’t have a body, he thought, and then thought, Maybe I am becoming an inside voice. Or maybe the inside voices weren’t inside at all, he told himself, but in space, where they could exist without a body. He was webbed into his chair, but floating now, jostling gently back and forth against the webbing. But the two guards seemed to be sticking to the floor, something about their boots holding them in place. He didn’t have boots. Why not?

They unwebbed him and, grabbing him by his elbows, propelled him gently through the air, but as they got closer to the hatch, he started to feel his body come back to him and by the time they had gone through and into the station, he weighed nearly as much as he always had. Having a body again was something of a disappointment.

They dragged him down around the wheel of the space station and to a bigger bay where a larger ship was waiting, not a planet hopper but an interstellar vessel. Near it was the gray man, holding a rubberized sack.

“Ah, Istvan,” he said. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

“Why?” asked Istvan, astonished.

“Now that these fine gentlemen have tried their best,” he said, gesturing to the two guards, “it’s my turn.” He gestured to the guards. “Take him in.”

The guards dragged him up the ramp and into the ship. They passed a series of crew members, many of whom regarded him nervously.

“No need to be alarmed,” said the gray man to one of them. “You never saw this.”

The gray man directed them down a flight of stairs and through a thick metal door marked RESTRICTED AREA on the outside. Inside was a chamber lined with metal cabinets, a grate cut into the floor. The room was freshly washed, water still puddled on the floor, but there was nevertheless an odd smell to it, something that Istvan couldn’t quite place. In the room’s center were three reclining rubber and metal chairs, all of them bolted securely to the floor, each equipped with a series of restraints.

“Strap him in, boys,” said the gray man.

Eventually they did. First, though, they removed his restraints, and then removed his clothing, making a neat pile of it to one side. For a moment Istvan thought of trying to break free but he was too weak to do much of anything. They led him to the chair and strapped down his arms and his legs, and then affixed a head strap as well, something to keep him from turning either left or right. Then they saluted the small gray man and left the room.

“They can see you. You’re real,” said Istvan.

“I thought we’d already agreed that I was real,” said the gray man. “Can’t you accept anything as meaning something once and for all?”

No, thought Istvan. No, I can’t. He had been hurt too many times, burnt too often by a world that seemed to be constantly changing, constantly shifting out of his grasp.

The small gray man came forward and stroked Istvan’s hair. “Now we’re alone,” he said, and then he reached into his sack and took out a razor and began to shave the hair roughly away, sometimes nicking and gouging Istvan’s scalp.

“We have lots of things to play with,” said the man, gesturing to the cabinets. “We’ve got a lot of time before we arrive where we’re going and where the fun will really start.” He reached into the rubberized sack, bringing out a hypodermic and a needle in a plastic casing. He affixed the second to the first and broke the casing away. “No reason we should wait until we arrive to get things started,” he said, and smiled.

He primed the needle, and then brought it slowly down until it was no longer within Istvan’s field of vision. Istvan felt a sharp prick in his arm, followed by a burning sensation, and he winced. The burning pushed its way down toward his fingertips and began to climb up his arm.

“How does that feel?” asked the small gray man, almost in a whisper. He was holding the hypodermic up again and Istvan could see that it was empty, the needle slick with blood.

Istvan felt the burning push its way past his shoulder and then insinuate itself into his chest and neck, and then suddenly it felt like the top of his skull had been torn off and the skull filled with liquid fire. He gasped, could see in his wavering vision the smiling face of the gray man.

And the worst part was that—even as he struggled to catch his breath, even as he tried and failed to stay focused and keep a grip on his mind, even as pain rapidly transformed into the worst thing he had ever felt—he experienced a brief moment of lucidity, and couldn’t help but realize that this was only the beginning, and that before it was over it was sure to get much, much worse.