Project X

Flicking The Switch

Axl said he would not be accompanying me to McKagan's session, and the smoky richness in my mouth immediately went sour as bad milk.

We were smoking cigarettes in the canteen, having just finished eating lunch, or in my case pushing that lunch from one side of the plate to the other. The food reminded me of the meals they served at back Stanford - it looked good, smelled good, but once you actually got to eating the stuff, you'd find yourself swallowing disappointment along with globules of chewed-up whatever that they happened to be serving, because it never, ever tasted as good as you thought it would. It never tasted bad, though, not really. Especially to someone like me, a child who'd attended segregated schools where they served us gristle, skin and fat and called it meatloaf. The advantage of growing up poor was that you never developed a taste for luxury.

"Why?" I asked, frowning at Axl across the table, swallowing to get rid of the sour mustiness on my tongue.

He flicked the end of his cigarette with his thumb and it twitched between his fingers, tiny particles of ash falling from the end and disappearing before they reached the ground.

"Reasons," he said, looking at me squarely. "You'll have to go in with Isbell."

Slowly, I nodded, looking away and pressing my lips together tightly. There was something in the way he'd said that word, reasons, like he'd erected a wrought-iron gate with spikes at the top for good measure to signal the end of that particular road of repartee. I had no choice but to leave it alone, but I couldn't help the twinge of resentment vibrating through my gut. I tried to squash it down. After all, people don't bare their secrets to a man they just met yesterday. Unless the man is their psychologist. Or unless the man had just administered a healthy dose of sodium thiopental.

Shaking my thoughts away, I stuck my cigarette between my lips and stared over Axl's shoulder at the others milling about in the canteen, some in suits, some in jeans and shirts. Lab coats were strictly forbidden in here. I watched them, the CIA employees, as they carried their trays around, pushed food around their plates with their forks, chatted to one another in low voices. I was struck by how ordinary they looked, how ordinary the entire canteen looked. It could have been part and parcel of any old office building in America, buzzing with the low hum of its lunching staff, and I found that thought to be both unnerving and disappointing.

"Just me, Isbell and McKagan," I murmured, trying to muster some enthusiasm and failing miserably. "And the ECT machine."

Axl didn't say anything for a few seconds, moving only his thumb as it continued flicking the end of his cigarette, ash trailing freely from the tip, some of it sparking red for a split second before fading into grey, and then nothing. "Cheer up," he finally said, stubbing it out in the remains of his mashed potatoes. "You could always be on the other end of the electrodes."

********

The ECT machine was sitting in Isbell's lap, and Isbell himself was sitting on my desk, legs dangling off the edge as he fiddled absently with the knobs. I watched his fingers anxiously, nibbling my lip, feeling like a child who'd lent his favourite toy to a notoriously clumsy playmate.

"Dissociation is important in mind control because the human mind is more susceptible to hypnotic command when it's in a trance state." Isbell recited a section of my paper almost verbatim.

Cautiously, I looked up, his fiddling fingers still in my periphery. "Yes...?"

He gave me that smile again, the one that stretched his mouth and did nothing to the rest of his face. "In other words, we'll be torturing McKagan into insanity."

Immediately, my hackles went up. "Physical trauma isn't the only way to achieve dissociation."

Isbell shrugged, playing with the machine in his lap as if it were a pet cat. "Sure as hell the best way." He gave me a sly look, eyes hooded. "In my experience, I mean."