Jeffrey Thomas - Subject 11

Having finished their meal, they crumpled the paper bags and — per the instructions they had received upon having been accepted as test subjects — dropped them into a hole that had been cut into the floor not far from the plastic bucket in which their bags of food and pills were deposited. Watching his balled-up bag plummet quickly into darkness, 10 speculated that another PVC pipe must be fitted to this hole, to direct all their trash into a bin or such on a basement level below. But why be so fastidious about trash when this entire place was in such a state of ruin? Perhaps it was a condition imposed on the researchers by the owners of this property.

His eyes shifted to the plastic bucket, positioned under the PVC pipe. He remembered at one of their first breakfasts, one of the team moving the bucket aside and peeking up through the thick tube, calling, “Hallooo!” Which one of them had that been, again? He couldn’t remember that part.

“Well, I’m going to do my laundry, I guess,” 3 sighed.

“I’ll go get mine and join you,” 2 told her.

“Me, too!” 6 said.

2 turned and looked at him with a faint scowl.

“I think I’m just going to go to bed early,” said 5.

“I’ve still got to do my confession,” 10 said. He was about to start across the room toward the confessional when something caught his eye — an object on the floor behind the plastic bucket. As he heard the others dispersing behind him, he squatted down, moved the bucket to one side, and picked up the object he had spied.

It was just another balled-up brown paper lunch bag. But why behind the bucket and not dropped down the trash chute? He vaguely recalled now, maybe at the same breakfast he had just been thinking about, one of their team tossing his bag across the room as if launching a basketball at a hoop, and missing. Who had it been? Again, he couldn’t remember that much of it. Idly, not even truly curious, he opened up the wadded paper to view the number that was certain to be penciled on it.

“Huh,” he said, perplexed.

The number was 8.

“The pills make us forget, don’t they?” 10 said. “But I suspect that’s the least of what they do.

“There was a woman I was attracted to. 5 and 3 are attractive, but it was someone else, I’m sure of it. Maybe it was even you, Dr. Onsay, since conveniently I can’t remember much about you… how to spell your name, what your voice sounded like, or even exactly what you looked like. Huh — one of the others told me they even thought you were a man. I can’t remember who it was, now, who said that…

“Or was it subject 8 I was attracted to? You know who I’m talking about, even if I don’t. I found a lunch bag with the number 8 written on it, so there was at least one other subject… which means, there may have been others, too. Others to fill in the gaps. 1, 4, 7, 8, 9. Another team of five to our team of five? Were they removed? Or are they still here somewhere? Are we supposed to figure this out as part of the test, or are you trying to hide these things from us? I feel like I knew so much more than I do now.

“It bothers me a lot, forgetting things, I’ll tell you straight. You want to know why? Of course you do.

“My wife and I divorced when our son was only two years old. She took him out to California to hook up with some kid she met online playing World of Warcraft . And I do mean kid; he’s fifteen years younger than her. Can you believe that? Just twenty-five, with a forty year old woman. Horny little fucker. Yeah, she looks okay now, but is he going to stick with her through menopause? I think that will give him pause. Oh, he said he’d take care of her and our son. But guess what? They’ve been struggling since day one, and even though our divorce was uncontested and I’m not obligated to pay her child support, I still send her two hundred dollars a month. I don’t mind caring for my child, believe me — it actually makes me feel better to do it — but it’s the point. She believed her pimply Blood Elf would keep her in gold sovereigns.

“But what I’m getting to is, she moved out there two years ago. The baby is four now. When I got my ass downsized at work I was finally free to go out there and visit him, because God knows she can’t afford to come out here. Now, when that baby was two I was the sun to him… I was like his God. That smile he had for me. Always throwing himself on me, climbing all over me, sitting in my lap while I showed him cute videos on YouTube, bringing his toys to me so we could play together, and crying hysterically if I left the house just to run for cigarettes. See, I never had a kid before. I married late, and became a father late. He was the sun to me, too.

“Well, you know where this is going. When I came in their apartment and he saw me, he ran into the other room and hid behind the sofa. When I bent down and tried to pick him up, he cried. Cried hysterically, the same as when he used to think I was leaving him. He didn’t recognize me. No — more than that. He’d forgotten me. Forgotten me totally.

“Can you imagine forgetting the sun? But he did.

“I can’t entirely blame her… the bitch. I should never have agreed to let her take him out of state. I should have found time to go visit him sooner, work be damned.

“Well… I haven’t visited him since. Maybe someday. Someday we can start again from the beginning…”

10’s voice broke, and his words tumbled away into silence. Silence, except for one half-suppressed sob. He leaned back in the office chair with his palms pressed into his eye sockets, struggling for self control. He was feeling queasy. Queasy and oddly, utterly drained.

“I’m tired,” he lamented. “Tired of this life. It’s only disappointment upon disillusion upon disgust. Pointless strife. What do I have to show for it? What?

“It isn’t that I would ever kill myself. But sometimes I just wish a bus or a meteor would hit me. Sometimes I just wish I was never born at all.”

Then, 10 heard a muffled commotion out there, somewhere beyond the shut confession chamber’s door. He didn’t get up to investigate, however. He didn’t even have the strength to remove his hands from his eyes. Sleep was the best thing right now. No… forgetting was even better. Forgetting everything. Forgetting himself…

“I’m sure it wasn’t here before!” 5 exclaimed. “I’m sure of it!”

2 studied the mural of black and white graffiti that plastered one cinderblock wall of the room the women had been using as a dormitory. He had never been in this room before, since the men had their own dormitory in which to tuck themselves in the warm envelopes of their sleeping bags, but 3 confirmed, “She’s right. I don’t remember this being in here, either.”

“So did someone paint all this just in the time we were having our dinner?” 6 asked. “It doesn’t even look wet.” He reached forward to touch it, but 5 cried out. Startled, he looked at her.

“Don’t!” she hissed, wide-eyed.

“They painted this and the other ones, just since the last time we were in these rooms?” 2 said. He was certain the graffiti that now covered one wall of the men’s dormitory, which he had discovered when he’d gone to collect his dirty laundry, had not been there previously either. He was dead certain. And then there was the mural of graffiti that now obscured one wall in the room where the new washer and dryer had been provided for them. And the murals that concealed one wall in the men’s shower room, and one wall in the women’s shower room. “Five new murals? And we didn’t catch them making these? What happened, did we all fall asleep at the dinner table for a couple of days?”