18th January, 6:05 AM
J wakes up in the back of a van with his arms wrenched behind him and his wrists bound with duct tape. His body is a network of dull aches culminating at his neck and shoulders, while the back of his head is pierced by a hot, knife-edge of pain. A gag has been stuffed in his mouth and his tongue is dry and swollen, and after a time his thirst relegates the other pains to a kind of background static, a white noise he is no longer fully conscious of experiencing.
The windows have been blackened, but there is just enough light for J to make out the van's interior, as well as the outline of his own body lying prone on its side. He struggles to sit up, fails, and lies down again, his head pounding from the effort; each new tremor as the van shudders over a pot-hole or gouge in the road sends a fresh jolt of pain through his skull. He closes his eyes, and tries to remember how he got here.
It comes back to him in fragments, the sound of a door banging open and the fall of heavy boots in the hallway. A moment later two thick, vigorous figures in black coats were inside his room, hauling him from the bed. He tried to fight them off, but one of them put a taser to his chest and J crumpled into a ball, retching. He felt the crack of a boot tip connecting with his temple and nothing more until he woke up in the van.
He'd only been wearing boxers when he went to sleep, but now he finds himself dressed in track pants and an old t-shirt. The idea of the agents dressing him while he was unconscious is somehow worse than his current pain or the fear of more to come, and a rage begins to well up in him, an angry humiliation that acts like a drug or anesthetic so that for a while he even forgets his thirst.
Suddenly the van comes to a halt. J can hear the two men exiting the cab, and a moment later the doors at the back are thrown open. The inrushing light floods J's eyes with water, and he feels himself taken by the heels and dumped heavily onto a hard, flat surface. In short order he is hauled upright and sat down in a chair. When he tries to stand, the smaller man hits him in the gut. J falls back, blinking through tears and struggling to breathe.
He is in an empty hockey arena, directly over the red line. Dozens of floodlights are suspended from the rafters, and the agents' shadows fall like smudges of black ink over the milky surface of the ice. J spits a flurry of unintelligible words at his gag.
"Shut up," the smaller agent instructs him, holding the end of his taser an inch from J's face. The taller agent glides across the ice to undo the gag.
"Thought you wanted me ta shut up?" says J thickly.
"No," replies the taller man. "We want you to talk. Just needed you to wait until we were ready to start recording. Regulations."
"You boys have regulations?"
"We've been given a certain amount of operational freedom here," the taller man tells him. "But protocol is protocol."
"Well then, you think I could get some fuckin water? Your operational freedom include that?"
"He wants water," says the taller agent. The smaller man nods as if thinking it over and returns to the van. A moment later he reappears with a bottle of water. Taking his time, he unscrews the cap, and then dumps the contents over J's head. J laughs, craning his neck to gulp down whatever he can, the water running in rivulets over his chin and soaking through his shirt.
"That better?" the taller agent asks.
"Great," J says, still laughing. "Fuckin great."
"Then let's get on with it," says the shorter one, taking a small box from his jacket.
"We're recording now."
"Fuck you," says J, and the taller agent laughs.
"Know I told ya ta fuck off earlier," J goes on. "But just wanted ta make it official you know? No sense wastin it in the ether."
"Oh I agree," the taller man says lightly. "I agree completely."
The arena is cold, only a few degrees above freezing. The ice grips the soles of J's feet, softly at first, and then painfully, and it occurs to him that the agents might have neglected his socks on purpose. He does his best to keep his feet from the ice, holding them up until his thighs are shaking under the strain. The water that was poured on him and which at first was almost pleasant, shocking him alert and clearing his head, soon grows unbearably cold. Within minutes he is shivering, his feet and legs are numb, and the t-shirt clinging to his chest like a second skin has all but robbed him of breath.
The two agents take turns questioning him. Their technique is haphazard, their questions veering wildly from one subject to another, but again and again they return to the events in the mines and the whereabouts of C and Auld. They press him for details, teasing his answers and spinning them, until at last J even begins to doubt himself, questioning his own memory and the sequence of events that led him here. He feels his mind drifting from his body, set loose in a wide, hollow space: hollow, and terribly bright. At times he thinks that he can hear people on the bleachers, noises that might be doors opening or closing somewhere in the distance. He calls out for help, his voice cracking in his throat, and the smaller agent applies the taser; whenever J says or does anything other than answer questions the agent applies the taser. J stares at this man, his chapped, stubbled head and unbending mouth, aware of the bored, almost mechanical way he has of using the device, like a listless factory worker pulling a lever. Despite the pain, J knows that the taser is set to a far lower voltage than it had been at the bar: if it wasn't he would be unconscious by now, or dead. Still, it's high enough, and as time seeps forward and the questioning continues J begins to feel its bite even when it's not being used, the pain residing in him like an echo or after-image, burned into his memory; there is a word for what is happening to him, he realizes. He is being tortured, and this strikes him as so absurd, so perfectly ridiculous – that he should find himself being tortured, that anyone in the world would want to waste their time torturing him –it causes him to laugh, a great, shuddering laugh that echoes through the arena and brings the interrogation to an abrupt halt.
"Something funny?" asks the taller man.
"It's funny," J manages. "It's funny."
"Tell us why," says the shorter agent, as if the fact that J is laughing now is equally pressing, equally pertinent to their investigation.
"You don't see the humour I can't show it ta you," J spits.
"Very astute," remarks the taller man.
"Now I'd like ta ask you a fuckin question, if I may."
"Go ahead," says the taller man, amused.
"You all rent the arena by the hour, or how does it work exactly?"
The shorter agent presses the taser down in a long, contained burst just above J's navel. J laughs, the sound exiting his throat in short, panicked bursts and it is only by an extreme effort of will that he manages to prevent it from becoming a scream.
"Keep laughing," says the smaller man, his face knotted with contempt. "It's all a joke. The powder, the outsiders, all of it."
"But you won't see the truth," adds the taller man.
"The truth," J mutters with a mouth that no longer feels like his own. "You tell me what the fuckin truth is."
"The truth is that none of this is real," says the shorter agent. The taller man looks at him, frowning.
"All of this is shit," continues the shorter man. "Very finely ground shit, and people like you are content to wallow in it."
"What the fuck are you talkin about?" J says.
"You find a way to make a bit of money dealing powder, why wouldn't you take it? No one blames you for that. The stuff's not even illegal. But you don't know where it leads."
"And where's that?" J's voice is voice faltering; his head is heavy on his neck, and he gazes at his knees, and his bare feet on the ice, feet he can no longer strictly feel and that might as well belong to someone else. "Heroin?"
The older man shakes his head.
"People need to think it matters. They need to believe that all of this is real."
"Real?" J forces his head up.
"Maybe we should take a short break," says the taller agent uncertainly, but
the older man stops him with a look.
"You can't see where it leads," he goes on. "But we can. It starts with the outsiders, but that's not where it ends. Once people lose faith in their own reality everything goes to shit."
"So you boys are all that's standin in the way a'social chaos, that it?"
The taller man laughs, but it comes out sounding forced.
"That's it exactly," answers the shorter man.
"Well shit, you should a'told me so before. I'd never stand in the way a'good work like that. Auld's hidin out in the closet back home. You take me back there and I'll hand him over."
All three men laugh now, and for a moment they find themselves bound together, almost like brothers, and then the feeling dies, cut off by a scream as the shorter agent presses the end of his taser to J's neck and holds it there. At last J's voice hits a wall: beyond it there is nothing, darkness, and the end of pain.
Once when he was 14 years old J got into a fight with an older boy. For the life of him J can't remember what he did to make this boy angry, but whatever it was, the boy cornered him with a couple of his friends and beat him so badly that J spent a week recovering from it in the hospital. Now, as his mind reluctantly returns to his body, he feels as if he is there again, alone in a sick bed, idly tracking an odd progression of memory and colour that trails before him like curtains stirred by a breeze. A sudden bump in the road jerks him back, and he vomits blindly onto the floor of the van.
At some point the doors are opened, and he is dragged outside and dumped into a muddy bank of snow. The agents leave him there, getting back into the van and driving off without the least appearance of haste. J rolls onto his side, shivering. From across the street the boy working the coffee stand comes running. He kneels in the slush and shakes J roughly at the shoulders, calling his name.
"Where am I?" J asks him.
"Northside," says the boy, and with a great effort he is able to drag the bigger man to his feet. The two of them stagger up the road, the weight of J's arm nearly crushing the boy. Finally they reach his apartment, where J slumps onto the couch and promptly passes out. When he wakes up again the boy is gone, and the window facing the street is dark.
J takes himself from the couch, peeling off his sodden clothes and almost falling into the shower. He sits with his back to the mould-spotted tiles and allows the water to fall on him. Now and then he blacks out, only to rouse himself again with a shuddered gasp of pain.
Eventually he gets up and takes his robe from the hook on the wall. He is on his way to his bed when a knock on the front door stops him; a sliver of panic appears in his chest, but he reassures himself that if the agents had returned they wouldn't bother to knock. Standing in front of the door is a man he's never seen before.
"Yeah?" J asks him.
"Hello J."
"Who are you?"
"Call me I," the man says, smiling at him as if they've known each other for years.