Our Contract of Distrust

-- 42 --

Another door has opened.

I wonder what jolted it this time. A passing scent on the street? The gentle plop of a tea bag? Hair in a slicked back ponytail? Surely something mediocre and commonplace. Something you would never actively seek after. Something so trivial, so ordinary, that it couldn't be contrived.

Much the same as the triggers, the doors themselves often appear mundane at first.
This one opened upon the second time I met Feodor. Which, like the first time, was rather unremarkable. 

We coincidentally met in the lab's waiting room once again. I think there had been a couple of times before that when it was empty. Cold and silent apart from the hum of the filtration system.

"Oh, you're here again," Feodor had said.

"Hi."

"How- how's the work?"

I shrugged. They never really explained it.

Sully said it was just some simple tests to help a friend of hers. I could just think of it like donating blood. Sacrificing a little for the greater good. Just a little lost time. And I might feel a little lightheaded sometimes, but that was normal, nothing to worry about.

Sully opened the door then, a smile plastered on her face.

"Sweetie, you're here. How's your week been?"

"Fine."

"Glad to hear it. Well come along, we've got everything ready for you."

She nodded at Feodor, smile set on her face as if moulded in clay and fired in the furnace.

But her purple hyacinth eyes were never smiling.

Feodor returned the nod, his expression unreadable. Did he even know then who she was? Does he even know now?

At first everything was like a theatre production.

Sully would lead me into Set A from the waiting room, where I'd be sat down on a couch and offered something to nibble on, sometimes a cup of tea. Then she'd nod to somewhere behind me and the door would open, in would come Actor B, dressed up like a nurse. They'd put the drip in my arm, flick it so the liquid would snake down the tube, while Sully rattled off rehearsed lines void of relevance. Then the anaesthetic would kick in, and all the while, even as everything faded, she had that same smile plastered on her face.

At first, I would wake again in Set A, with all props perfectly aligned.

I was tired and my arm might sting, but there was nothing I could pinpoint as being wrong. They had long since perfected their charade.

But then I suppose she started getting desperate.

Perhaps progress was too slow. Or money was being withheld. And the results she wanted required greater sacrifice.

At first, they were like dreams.

The blackness wasn't as complete and instantaneous anymore. The time elapsed no longer felt like mere seconds.

I could feel things. Hear things.

Like dreams I had no control over.

I don't know what they used on me, but everything was warped.

Sounds came from everywhere and nowhere.

My mind was unhinged, disoriented.

A fan would be much too loud, would sound like the wind itself. Things would echo too much. So, I felt as if I was in a cavern by the sea. As if the tide would rise at any moment and drown me.

I would panic. Want to jump up, out of the darkness, clamber for sunlight. But I couldn't move.

Not even my breathing would change.

My mind was alive and active in an immobile prison.

Sometimes it would last only a moment. Just a fleeting prick at my skin, or a murmur from behind the wall.

But other times it was living hell.

I would hear whole conversations. Secrets which could harm me as much as the speaker.

I would feel them roughly haul my limp body onto the surgical trolley. Feel the fabric tugged past my ankles. Feel a needle in my wrist, my arm, my neck, my thigh.

Feel their eyes, critical and unconcerned, travelling wherever they pleased.

Everything was beyond my control. Nothing consensual.

I felt contaminated, but I could never pinpoint why.

Sometimes I would stand beneath scalding shower water for an hour, as if to purify me of that which I couldn't remember, and that which I could but didn't understand.

The lingering sense was very much like that of waking from a dream. Of feeling and knowing so acutely, but being unable to pinpoint anything tangibly. Like a word on the tip of your tongue, I could feel the memories but never recall them. It was a sensation absent of any detail. More ephemeral than merely vague. But gradually it became more suffocating. As if dreams had compiled together into a single sensation. An overwhelming sense that something was more than just amiss.

It was like an insect was inside my brain, slowly eating away at my faculties and yet no outward symptoms were showing.

I think I started going insane then.

And I don't know if I ever really recovered.