Stacey Levine - Dra-

Then in sleep, Dra— heard the sonorous, sweet tones of hollow telephones and saw the faces of employees she had seen so often through the years, all of them surging past her through the halls, their faces so familiar they seemed artificial, even that of the bald chorus teacher from school whom she had hated and who, maybe from ubiquitous fear, sweated so profusely at all times that a slippery puddle was perpetually at his feet. He had died on the indoor bridge that led to the auditorium, after imploring a group of students to follow all commandments and rules, even in the face of despair — for despair was false, he said, a trick that prevented one from being competitive and successful in life.

And in sleep, she heard shuffling footfalls that made her raise her head, half-awake, and see the Administrator, who had returned to the room and was saying so warmly and solicitously, “Hello!” bringing with her a scent of lotion.

“You came back?” Dra— asked hoarsely, inexplicably filled with a gladness so uncomfortable that she threw her face back down to her hands on the lab counter, hiding her eyes.

“Naturally!” the woman said, chewing gum with gusto. “Don’t you want to be close?”

“What do you mean?” she answered, nearly sick with apprehension.

“Oh, just that we’ll hem and haw and whatnot. Who knows what we will do?” The Administrator smiled and tugged at her skirt, adding cheerfully, “Don’t you want to need other people?” as she pulled the gum from her mouth and rolled it into a wad, tossing it across the room.

With her eyes, Dra— followed the gum’s long, arched course, while a cool sensation of blustering air seemed to lift her, and she rode it helplessly while hearing the strange sound of friends’ voices surrounding her and cooing with compassion; she had never heard anything like this before, she realized, scanning her memory, and so the voices, it seemed, must have come from the future.

But there was no place to hide, she thought, rubbing her head, lowering it; not here, not in any office, nor in her old school that was built directly into the walls quite close to this very spot, the steam-laden school where her thoughts still often wandered, with its famished students, molding elevator shafts, floors the color of spilled bucket-water — and its blankish character, too, which she knew she somehow shared.

No one in the school had spoken to her, though, so she was hidden, in effect, without having to hide. During her time there she made frequent, frustrating solitary visits to the school’s bathrooms via echoing, sopping wet hallways, stopping along the way to moan and dig her fingernails deeply into the soft wall-grout, an old habit whose origin she simply did not know.

And against the fixity of her rock-hard stomach, she also recalled a classmate, now dead, who once from in between empty library shelves had poked forth her gullish eyes and shouted to the silent, gaping library class: “I’m married!” then shoved a small metal chest to the floor, scattering wigs and electrical switches everywhere.

She remembered the school’s vice-principal, who, after killing a mouse on the lunchroom carpet, had taken her into his office where they sat and stared shyly at one another for many minutes in silence. What was left of his parched-looking hair, badly thinned by disease and medicine, was mostly hidden by a small cotton cap; nevertheless, he was rather vibrant, and not too weak. “I like you,” she had said to him in a kind of fomenting exhaustion, puzzled with herself, her eyes fairly burrowing into his jacket front, and they both turned away.

“It is desire that you now feel. By all accounts, the name we give this emotion is desire,” he answered softly to the wall, perhaps just as exhausted as she; “You give me evidence enough — look at your hands — but my training tells me that this feeling may actually be the product of rage. Do you understand how rage can mimic other emotions?”

Uncharacteristically, she rose from her chair then and in a scream accused him of unfairness, but he only shook his head and waited with her until she grew quiet again, looking down to regard his own shaking hands and limbs, perhaps the result of decades of working with students. Eventually, all the lights in the school went off, and the cook came to escort them each to midnight meetings.

But now, brushing away these memories, she looked to the Administrator, who waited, eyes shimmering with sympathy, and who, after some time, dusted off her stockings with a palm, saying, “Which do you feel is worse? Tethers, or the boundless opportunity to run free?”

Not answering this, Dra— went on to remark, “But what if it becomes a worse fate to know a person, rather than not to know them — what is there to do then?”

The Administrator stared. “Holler?”

“Oh—!” she cried.

“It’s not so unusual to need other people, is it, or even to fear losing them?” the woman said tenderly. “Why, most employees are afraid to lose anything at all, even a nail. And we all know how sad little children feel when they watch their feces flushed down the toilet.”

With a vague nod indicating both assent and confusion, Dra— continued, “But what if we find ourselves lying next to another person at night? Shouldn’t we keep as still as possible, so as not to annoy them? What if that person tries to hold our hand and discourages us from having private thoughts of our own? Should we comply, just for the sake of lying next to another human being? In those moments, is there really anything left of oneself at all?”

The Administrator sighed as silent tears slid from her eyes and she helped Dra— from the laboratory stool, leading her by the hand across the hallway and into a small auditorium where, at its far end, a white drape stirred. They heard scraping, shearing sounds, perhaps distant electrical saws, as they crossed the floor and the Administrator drew back the drape. There, in another dim room, Dra— saw with surprise the man, the one she had seen so many times before, the one with no hair with whom she so often had wanted to speak — he was lying above them in a hammock-like net suspended from the ceiling by two long black cords. The net rocked slightly with the man’s weight, and positioned on his stomach, he lifted his head toward them, smiling tightly with obvious anger.

Wiggling his torso, the man began to swing the net back and forth; and incredulously Dra— turned to the Administrator, who stood behind her, a look of deep concentration in her eyes.

Dra— surveyed the walls of the small room, bare except for a long plastic sack sagging with weight, perhaps feces, hanging upon the wall. The man rose nearer to the ceiling with each swing, growing agitated, squealing, whinnying through a clenched jaw. He arched his neck and head, attempting to buck his legs, though they were tied into the net, it seemed, by a light twine; and rising nearly to the ceiling with each swing, he stretched and contracted his body with great distress, shuddering in sudden anger, face and neck scarlet. Growling, he sailed toward the ceiling as if to catapult himself against it with a force that would smash the crown of his head. Then, he dropped his head back down into the woven surface of the net.

Dra— seized her face in her hands, unable to look; yet as he sailed past once more she caught his sour scent and cautiously, curiously raised her head, uncovering her eyes to stare with disturbed disbelief.

“I suppose it really is rather hard on the neck, in general, to hold up the head,” the Administrator was saying.

“It’s difficult to believe, but he loves being up there,” she went on. “He tied himself in — he won’t come down! I’ve tried lures, I’ve tried plain talk. But that was a mistake — it only whetted his stubbornness! It keeps me awake at night sometimes, wondering why he won’t relent. Well, he craves motion, for one thing.”