Black Balloon

Chapter 8

I was abruptly awoken in the middle of the night and escorted from my cell without explanation, a routine I was getting quite familiar with. The door swung open, the lights were flipped on, and a large man was barking orders. Station 12 was in no short supply of large men barking orders.

"Rise and shine!" he shouted.

In a daze, I blabbered nonsensical questions:

"Who? Where are we-- What?"

"Get dressed," he yelled, tossing me my blue pajamas.

I asked several times where I was going, all the while hopping around with one foot stuck in the wrong pants leg, but the stoic military man remained characteristically mum. When I was dressed, or close enough to it, he ordered me to follow. Good, Miles. Let's go boy. Good dog.

I was led up the stairwell and through a heavy locked door with an armed guard stationed outside. Here, my handler passed me off to another man, one of the suits, who led me into a very small four-foot by-six-foot room. The room lurched, and I felt gravity momentarily increase. It was an elevator. The sliding doors opened into a hallway, which terminated at another set of locked doubled doors. And if you haven't figured it out by now, Station 12 consisted of a lot of fuckin' hallways and a lot of fuckin' doors. Even if every soldier and scientist inexplicably dropped dead, I'd never find my way out of the labyrinthian building. It certainly put the "complex" in complex.

We eventually arrived at a door that was different than all the others, in that it was so ordinary, a wooden six-panel with an ordinary doorknob, distinct from all the industrial steel doors that were elsewhere. He opened it, and for the first time in several days I saw the sunshine. It wasn't the middle of the night at all. My body, with no frame of reference, had completely lost its circadian rhythm. Day was night, and night was day. I slept when I felt like it, which was most of the time.

We were in a long room with four barber chairs, in one of which sat a soldier getting a haircut. An Air Force barber stood behind him snipping away with shiny scissors. Neither man paid us any attention as we entered the shop. He closed the door behind us, and from the outside it resembled nothing more than a broom closet, not the entrance to a huge underground scientific facility. An old-style boxy Coca Cola machine sat in the corner, advertising Cokes for a nickel a piece. Everything was straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting; the red and white striped barber pole, the barber's chairs with teal upholstery, the glass cylinder full of mysterious blue liquid, and combs. But, most shocking to me was a paper calendar hanging on the wall which in large black letters read "November 1955" at the top. It was stunning to see it in writing like that, further cementing the stark reality of my situation.

Waiting for us outside were three Jeeps, old ones, olive green Willys with no tops and narrow tires—shovels bolted to their sides. All three were idling in the middle of the road while patient soldiers waited in their respective driver's seats. In the rearmost vehicle sat Frank Gendelman riding shotgun. Behind him were two suits, typically attired in their uniform of button up white shirts and skinny black ties. Each had thick black spectacles and short flat-top haircuts. Gendelman gave me a slight nod as I was led to the middle Jeep and seated behind its driver.

The little convoy peeled away down an asphalt boulevard and past long rows of non-descript buildings and Quonset huts. We passed all manner of aircraft and huge six-wheeled transport vehicles. Everywhere I looked there were men milling about, performing whatever duties Air Force men perform while on a domestic base in peacetime; mopping the parking lot or scrubbing the toilets with a toothbrush.

We eventually arrived at a guarded gate where the lead vehicle flashed credentials and our convoy was waved through. This happened at two more checkpoints before we were finally free of the base and driving into wide-open desert. The scenery looked exactly as it had three days ago. Or...Wait. I mean...fifty years from now; flat, dry, with barely any flora. I glanced back to see the huge military installation fading into the distance.