James Adcox - Does Not Love

“I suppose so.”

“ I came to understand, after several weeks, that the white light was the all-encompassing mercy of God Himself, and I, poor sinner, can imagine nothing more joyous than the expectation, as I near the end of my life, of that white light’s return… This from a subject we interrogated in Algeria. I thought he was particularly eloquent, as regards the white light.”

“What is that high-pitched squeal?”

“That’s a high-pitched squeal. It has nothing to do with the white light. Here, Robert, let me show you some pictures.”

“I can’t see anything with that light in my eyes.”

“You have to hold them at the right angle. There. See? Yes? Clearer, in the white light, than they could ever be by the light of day?”

“These are pictures of me.”

“Of course they’re pictures of you.”

“At the guinea-pigger camp.”

“Do you know that we have been investigating a series of shootings? Researchers, shot dead in Indianapolis, all of whom worked for the pharmaceutical industry? Who are you giving that file folder to, Robert?”

Robert sits for a moment in the glare of the white light. “You can’t possibly think I was involved in the shootings.”

“Of course we could think you were involved. It would take almost no effort on our part to think you were involved. You were present at the self-storage facility. You have demonstrated guinea-pigger sympathies, as evidenced by these photos of you acting sympathetic towards several guinea-piggers. You had access to records indicating which researchers were engaged in the most harmful and negligent drug trials.”

“But I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“I know you didn’t have anything to do with it, Robert. Did I say you had anything to do with it?”

“Thank God,” says Robert.

“I was only pointing out a certain fact. That fact being, if one were to choose to do so, one could easily make it appear that you had something to do with it. And as far as hard evidence is concerned? Photographs can be modified, film edited, fingerprints, DNA, ballistics, all can be tweaked.”

“I feel like you’re threatening me.”

“Would you like something to drink? We have whiskey and vodka and gin and spiced rum and baijiu. For mixers we have orange juice and cranberry juice and several kinds of soda.”

“I don’t want a drink.”

“I was only trying to be polite. You keep holding your head.”

“My head hurts. Could you turn off that damn light?”

“There are people in the world who believe in such things as conspiracies, Robert.” The man leans forward, arms crossed and resting his elbows on the table. “I don’t. I don’t imagine that you do, either. You are a practical man. But let us consider, for a moment, why someone less practical might believe in conspiracies. We tend to think of such people as paranoid, of living in fear of something that doesn’t exist. And this might well be true, as far as it goes. But have you considered how comforting a conspiracy is? Instead of fearing the entire world and its capriciousness, such a man has a focus — which, moreover, serves to explain all of the otherwise inexplicable things happening around him. Are you religious at all, Robert? Never mind. I only bring it up because… Imagine, please, a roomful of believers. They are silent, waiting for the Holy Spirit to come and fill one of them, to cause that person to rise and begin speaking. Now let’s say you’re in that room, and I rise, and I begin to speak. You might ask yourself, how do I know that this person has actually been filled with the Holy Spirit, and isn’t, instead, just some attention-seeker? You might say to yourself, I’ve been sitting here, quiet, not speaking, because I have been honestly and steadfastly waiting to be filled with the Holy Spirit, and here’s this guy, standing up and talking about the same shit he’d be talking about anyway, Holy Spirit or no. You might, in other words, question my motives, question the purity of my intent.

“This would be the wrong question, Robert.” The man places a new stack of photographs on the table in front of Robert. “It is entirely possible that I have base motives. But my motives are my concern, not yours. You are sitting in relation to something much larger than yourself.”

Robert hold a photo up to the light. “This is my wife.”

“Of course it’s your wife.”

“Why do you have pictures of my wife?”

“I have other pictures of your wife,” the man says. “I have video of your wife. I have audio recordings of your wife, what her breath sounds like when she’s coming, not with you, with another man. Would you like to hear that? Would you like to hear what your wife sounds like, when she’s coming with another man?”

“Why do you have pictures of my wife?”

“Do you imagine that she sounds different, when she’s with another man? So much of who we are depends on who we are with.” The room fills suddenly with the sound of Viola breathing.

“Why are you doing this?” Robert begs. The breathing that surrounds him grows louder.

“We are doing this out of love,” the man says, and places a baggie of pills on the table.

Robert stares at the pills, with a sort of horror. “I don’t believe you,” he says, finally.

“There were moments when she loved me,” the man says. “Even if she did not love me all the time, there were moments when she did. I have photographic evidence of this. Video stills of her eyes, magnified to hundreds of times their original dimensions, in which one can see — scientifically, objectively — that she loved me, at least during that moment.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“What? What don’t you believe? That your wife’s had an affair? You believed it enough to question her. Here: photographs! Of her eyes! Of her legs! Of her inner and outer thighs! Of the freckles underneath her navel! Of the soft skin on the underside of her arm! Of her left eyebrow, arched! Every part of her, photographically segmented and recombined right here on the table in front of you.”

“I don’t believe any of it. You’re an FBI agent? You spend your time having affairs with people involved in your cases? You kidnap their husbands to ask about love?”

“Here’s my badge — there!” the man says, pulling it from his neck and throwing it at Robert. “You want more photographs of your wife? You want video? You want transcripts of the call she placed to a women’s health clinic? You want to hear the audio?”

“It’s fake!” Robert yells, shaking the badge in the air. “All of it could be fake!”

The FBI agent throws photographs at Robert by the handful. Robert throws himself across the table and punches the FBI agent in the face. The FBI agent falls to the ground.

“Those photographs could be fake,” Robert says, shaking. “You said so yourself, just a minute ago.”

The FBI agent’s nose appears to be broken. He pushes it one way and then the other on his face, trying to find the position it originally corresponded to. “Ow, fuck,” he says. “Could you grab me that roll of paper towels over there? Ow.”

“There is something in me,” says the FBI agent, holding a wad of paper towel to his nose, “that rejoices even in this, suffering for your wife.”

“She hasn’t left me,” Robert says, possibly to himself.

“Like this one time? We went grocery shopping? And every item she took from the shelves had its own, tragic charm. I’ve kept everything, everything. Except the milk and the apples. Those went bad.”

“What is it about me that has stopped her from leaving?”

“She says that the two of you fell into marriage as if part of the set-up to a joke. The morning of your wedding day, she said, her dress somehow managed to rip from neck to ass. She had to borrow one of the bridesmaid’s dresses for the ceremony. When she met you at the alter, she said, ‘Well, Robert, which of us did you want?’”