Project X

A Chat With Susan

I hadn't shaved since I'd arrived at Basalt. In fact, even before arriving here, it had been a good two weeks before I'd picked up a razor, and my facial hair was starting to toe the line between a bristly growth of stubble and a full-out beard. Standing in front of the mirror, my first Sunday at this place, I raked my fingernails through the growth of coarse scruff around my face and neck, thinking wryly that I looked less like a CIA employee and more like a bindle stiff without the bindle, who had wandered onto government property thinking it was a particularly formidable liquor store. Thank God for my lab coat, otherwise I may have been tackled on my merry way to the lab and dragged off to what Axl called Corridor 101.

"When Room 101 just won't do," he said cheerfully.

I suddenly yearned, with an empty, forlorn resignation, for the familiar comfort of home.

Usually on Sundays, I woke up pretty early. By eight at the latest, I was in the kitchen brewing a pot of strong coffee and poring over the crossword in the paper, never managing to complete the full thing but always hopeful that this would be the morning. After conceding inevitable defeat, I'd savour my coffee and light a cigarette, rolling my eyes at the funny-pages that never quite lived up to their name. I'd go hiking, or for a run around the local park if I was feeling sprightly, and pick up some groceries on the way back. Grocery stores were always quietest on Sundays, and I liked being able to cruise the aisles without the background cacophony of screaming toddlers and gossiping mothers and irritated barks of coming through, do you mind and I'm 21, lady, I swear on my mother's good china.

I called my mother on Sundays. Sometimes, I visited, if it had been more than a month since I'd last dropped by. I'd make the long drive from LA to Fresno - the armpit of California, how I despised that place - humming along to the blues station on the radio, either making a stop at her local bakery to satisfy her sweet tooth, or at a greenhouse to buy something for her green fingers. She loved plants, often spending more time tending to the nursery in her back garden than she did indoors, back pain be damned. Last time, I'd bought along a bag of aloe seeds, and she'd practically lost her mind with glee, planting them that very same day, and even when we'd gone back inside, every so often she'd glance out the kitchen window and smile, with the suppressed excitement of a well-behaved child at a candy store.

I wondered how big those plants had grown by now.

My nostrils twitched as I covered my face with Old Spice soap lather, inhaling that confusing but somehow soothing scent of floral spiciness and baby powder. The razor bladed scraped and rasped through my facial hair, and I didn't stop to yawn, not once, because for the first time since I'd arrived at Basalt, I slept like a baby. No nightmares to speak of, either. Those pills Axl had gave me worked wonders; within twenty minutes of washing a single one down with a glass of water, I was dead to the world, and had slept right through until morning. My headache had faded to almost nothing, too. I made a mental note to thank him.

I never did get round to it, though. The events of that day moved far too quickly. There was simply not enough time. There never is, when you think about it.

**********

I finished explaining my idea, and was met with utter silence. Axl, his hands gripping the back of the chair he was straddling, beamed at me with such intensity that I almost wanted to shade my eyes. Isbell, on the other hand, appeared even less impressed than usual, a feat that until then I didn't think was physically possible.

"In case you hadn't noticed," he drawled, "McKagan's cell isn't exactly a sensory wonderland to begin with. What're you going to do, turn the lights off?"

"Actually, I was thinking we could move him. Blindfold him and take him to a different cell, preferably a smaller one in a further corner of the building. That'll be good for disorientation."