James Adcox - Does Not Love

“I’ve felt, since she lost the last child, like my life was closing in around me,” Robert says. “I haven’t been able to breathe, sometimes. I mean really. I try to take in a breath, and it stops halfway. I’ve lain awake at night, worried that I have emphysema. I don’t know any of the warning signs for emphysema. I mean, does it just happen? Just like that? One day you have it, and from that point on, life is a steady narrowing of the amount of air you can breathe in?”

The FBI agent sits on the floor, holding his head back to try to stop the bleeding. He takes out a pack of cigarettes and matches from his front pocket, manages one-handed to shimmy a cigarette out of his pack and into his mouth, and fumbles, trying to get a match lighted. “Do you mind?” he says. Robert kneels and lights the FBI agent’s cigarette. “Fuck,” the agent says. “I think I’m going to have to see a doctor about this.”

That night,Robert lolls in his hospital bed, cuffed to the bed’s siderails. Suddenly, from all sides, comes a terrible rumbling. He has felt one earthquake in his life, and it wasn’t nearly as jarring as this. He fights against the cuffs, trying to sit up straight. It feels for a moment as though the floor might give way. A stranger stands in his hospital room, a man in a fake fur coat and black goggles. Wordlessly, he uncuffs Robert’s arms and motions for him to follow. Robert follows. Everything around him seems to be happening at a great distance. Scenes of horrifying violence, explosions, gunshots — the floor under Robert’s feet shakes, it feels at moments as if the building itself might collapse. A nurse screams. An orderly stumbles blindly, collapses at Robert’s feet. There are bodies everywhere. Yet it somehow never occurs to Robert to feel afraid, or even to wonder what is happening. Instead he simply follows — the fake fur coat makes its way through the violence, and Robert stays close behind.

The keypad that unlocks the elevator doors has been pulled free of the wall, and hangs by its jumble of wires — Robert stands beside the man in the fake fur coat and they ride the elevator down, past the first floor, the explosions he felt earlier rocking the entire elevator car, but neither Robert nor the man beside him showing any signs of distress; into the basement, where dust and flecks of paint rain down from the ceiling in time with the concussions that shake the floors above. Robert steps around bodies and follows the man into a tunnel, burrowed into the far wall, next to a row of vending machines.

They go down, down, down, into the darkness. It is impossible to say how far they travel. Finally their tunnel connects up with a series of others. This, Robert understands, is the guinea-pig underground: the ancient Indianapolis sewers that have expanded over the years, that have come to match the city itself in its sprawl… in the darkness there is the sound of movement, shuffling feet, indistinct orders barked out by men Robert can only just now make out, his eyes adjusting to the darkness: “Operation was a success, sir,” in front of Robert is no longer the man he followed, but a guinea-pigger militiaman, dressed in camo with a black scarf obscuring the bottom half of his face. “We’ve taken the hospital. The Savvy Cavy requested that this one—” evidently Robert, “be spared.”

The commanding officer sizes Robert up. “What’s your name, comrade? Robert, huh? You look fancy, Robert, you used to be somebody? We’re used to your kind… Fact of the matter is, plenty of our recruits have had some sort of substance abuse problem, even former lawyers. Were you a lawyer in your previous life, Robert? Were you on the other side? We’ve seen plenty of guys like you, has-beens who take up guinea-pigging to support a habit. Probably fucks the phase I tests up a teensy bit, having guys like you in the population… For the best, I say! Let them be fucked up! But once you’re on our side, we need you clean. A requirement of the guinea-pigger militia, three months clean, minimum, we offer our own counseling programs if you need them, based on the RR rather than the AA model, given how hard it is to maintain a belief in any sort of benevolent higher power when you’ve got so much experience with earthly powers feeding you shit that makes your hands swell up to twice their size, your fingernails and teeth come loose, etcetera, etcetera… But sobriety is an absolute requirement! We’re trying to fight a war, after all! And anyhow most of us come out of our latest phase I plenty out of our minds enough already, thanks!”

“Do you work with Jeremy?” Robert manages.

“Jeremy, that fuck,” the commander says, already walking away. “Doesn’t know his own ass from a prolapsed hole in the ground, pussyfooting between the courts and the mafia, trying to play one off against the other, and meanwhile Indianapolis growing darker for us each day… ”

“Here, take this,” a hand placing a pill in his.

“What is it?”

“It’ll help with the fever.”

Robert is laid out on a cot, shaking, muscles jerking, face contorted. A militiaman is assigned to his bedside. They’ve seen this before: discontinuation — he was on something other than just the tranquilizers they shot him up with at the hospital, and whatever it was, his body has grown dependent. Impossible to tell, without knowing the drug, whether the situation is life-threatening, but the symptoms look familiar to anyone who’s come off certain long-term psychotropics: sweating, nausea, tremor, confusion, nightmares, “brain zaps.” The only thing to be done, with the war going on aboveground, is to let him ride it out.

Beside his bed, a woman that could be Viola, or could be the woman he saw at the storage facility, the almost-Viola. She comes closer, until he can’t quite make out her expression for the shadows across her face. She takes his hand, urges him wordlessly to his feet. They make their way out through the cell and further into the tunnels, past the ranks of training militiamen, who begin to grow larger and stranger the further into the tunnels they go, men clinging onto the walls and ceilings at impossible angles, men with the fur and general facial structures of rodents. Goggles turn into strange eyes, black and unreflective, set deep into the skull. Heads turn to peer at them as they pass, necks rotating a full 180 degrees, the intentions of the dull black eyes impossible to discern. Finally they are alone again in the blackness, and she is leading him to a light, set so far off in the distance that Robert is sure they will never reach it. “That flame has been burning here since these caverns were first explored, by the great-great ancestors of the guinea-piggers. It rises from the depths of the earth itself.” Robert has no idea how long that is, but from the way she says it, he imagines that it’s long indeed. He thinks of who or what was here before the guinea-piggers. He hears an unearthly sound from deeper in the tunnel, somewhere far beyond the fire. It is the sound of voices keening, the combined pitches alternating almost painfully between harmony and disharmony. And then somehow they are upon it, the fire, a snake tongue flicking through the mouth of the earth.

“This is a picture of our child,” Viola or pseudo-Viola says. “And these are pictures of what might have been. Throw them in the fire.”

The flame rises up to meet them. Viola grows more shadowy with each picture they throw in.

“And these are pictures of us,” she says. “Do not look at them. Throw them in the fire.”

“Oh God,” Robert says. He is shaking now. “Everything?”

“We have hurt each other too badly, Robert. We have been judged by the secret courts. We have to go into the fire as well.”