John Domini - Bedlam and Other Stories

The woman herself, well. When he had seen her alone in that hotel bar, the young Grissom had felt only the old and simple deepdown tug. He didn’t try to fight it. The woman fit his imaginings. When she lifted the veil they wore in those days, by the flame of his lighter Grissom saw icy, dark features, the fineboned quality he’d always pictured on European women. And that bar where they met was of course nowhere near his brown home in Lake Forest, nor even near Chicago. This had all happened on his very first extended executive-level trek. Even when he and the woman were discussing money, him showing off his pre-credit-card wallet as hefty as the wrought-iron elevator they rode in, even that came out sounding to Grissom like avant-garde poetry fresh in from the Continent — or wherever, in the suddenly very wide world, they got avant-garde poetry from.

Grissom of course drank. A good Scotch firmly in hand could practically launch a career by itself, in those days, and the place he worked for was a world-class ballbuster. Afterwards (no surprise, considering) Grissom went on the wagon.

And she next did something strange. Yes, something as strange by its own lights as anything that followed. The woman actually let him have what he’d gone up there for. Together they got the juices going and took turns leering at each other from top or bottom. She let young Grissom have his satisfaction even though it was she who’d mixed the drinks — even though, in other words, she must have slipped him the stuff right away. She must have slipped him the stuff before he’d so much as got his shoes off. And naturally Grissom had belted down as many shots of courage as an empty stomach would allow. Moreover he did remember, odd detail, that the drink had left a coating of silt on the ice He remembered, because after the last swallow he’d held the glass up to one eye in order to watch her undress. He’d felt very lightheaded already. That nightelubby suit she wore, like Peter Gunn’s girlfriend’s, had seemed to blur with the fineness of her skin, which was sometimes indistinguishable from the ghostly ice. Yet the woman did strip, in silence. Soon enough she stood unusually naked, a glistening silt-creature he’d tuned in from a world of icebergs and runny, elongated stars. And then, still silent, she held out her hands to him.

He’d been looking for an adventure, sure. That much Syl could have understood. She could have appreciated her husband’s yen for a night’s adventure maybe twenty-five minutes after the fact, let alone twenty-five years. Sure. But also young Grissom had wanted…so many times, especially during this month just past, he’d tried to put this idea into words…he’d wanted to come by means of this experience to a more complete, more substantial idea of himself as an individual. Grissom alone , he’d wanted to see. Grissom as a separately defined person, as an intensely , separately defined person, something as unique and identifiable as a planet in a pale sky. That too was what he’d wanted from this woman. And given all the facts about what had happened, certainly in time he could have put the idea into words. He could have gentled the lonesome wanderer he was trying to define, and so in time he could have shared the whole experience with Syl.

Unfortunately however young Grissom had not merely been led into a whore’s hotel room. The room and the lady had been a trap. Worse luck, it had taken all these two and a half decades to get at the truth of the matter.

Finally, now when he was pushing sixty, the story broke. Grissom had first seen the news on TV. It seemed that a couple of those hush-hush, top-level intelligence agencies in this country occasionally used to slip unsuspecting victims a drug, an hallucinogen. CIA, Army, whatever. They would drive somebody clear out of his mind for a few hours, as an experiment.

While “the project was in operation,” Grissom had learned, these agencies had sometimes hired prostitutes to “administer the substance.” Thereafter, an agency man would sit behind a two-way mirror and “monitor the session.” Oh, Grissom had come to know their bald lingo well, this past month. The agency records had been subpoenaed, and he’d seen his own name in them. He’d seen the faraway date and verified it against his old business records. He’d seen, he’d seen.

And so Grissom and his lawyer arrived at the troublesome business of the whore’s actually going through with her original job. Why had she let Grissom have her? The two men had discussed the question one afternoon a couple weeks ago, in the lawyer’s office. The woman’s motives might prove important if the suit came to court. The office was bright, with buttons flashing red and yellow on the enormous desk phone. The lawyer raised the question in a friendly way, but Grissom at first kept quiet. Since he still couldn’t find the words to explain it to his wife, Grissom figured, no way he could talk it out with a lawyer. In silence he watched the phone buttons flash. Eventually, calmly, the lawyer tried out an idea of his own. He hypothesized that the agency had wanted a subject who would truly feel guilty, in order for the experiment to be more, more — the lawyer frowned, searching for the expression — more emotionally impactive.

Now Grissom frowned. Emotionally what ?

So, the lawyer finished with a grin, the girl had let Grissom zap her as part of their research.

Grissom found he couldn’t sit still. That kind of talk , he’d said loudly, shaking his head and striding round the office, that kind of talk— . His lawyer was looking at the wrong side of the picture entirely. The drug’s effects, Grissom said, were way more complex than that. Instead his lawyer should look at the other end of the picture, the human element. One way or the other, Grissom suddenly started shouting, you have to join the human race . One way or the other!

Bad idea, getting so fired up. The next day the Sun-Times carried a photograph of him throwing a fit in the public corridor outside his lawyer’s office. As he’d jumped round screaming about the human race, a camera-flash had caught him. The picture showed a heavy-bodied man in late middle age, with one knee raised in mid-stomp. The other foot, in its elegant European boot, was actually off the ground. This leaping person had an intelligent forehead, broad and pronounced, but at that moment it was cracked into so many wrinkles it looked like intestines caught in a vise. That morning (only a couple of weeks ago, now), Grissom had come into work and found the paper on his desk, folded open to the page with the picture.

He’d jumped back into his car, that morning, and driven the thirty miles to his home at well past the speed limit. He thought somehow he could pick up the house copy before Syl saw it. No dice. He found his wife at the kitchen table, with the paper open to his photograph in front of her, murmuring wearily over the phone to someone in her family. Her body sagged in its chair. After the first startled glance, she wouldn’t look at Grissom.

Revenge, Grissom thought. The whore had let him have her as a means of revenge. The drug after all was too freaky, too mysterious for anyone to go predicting its effects. Therefore you had to look at the person, not the apparatus around the person. So this woman, Grissom explained later to his lawyer, had wanted a hooker’s revenge: her own special way of showing her ass to the men who gave her their grubby orders and then sat, smug and above-it-all, behind the mirror.

The lawyer had looked sincerely surprised to hear Grissom come up with such a subtle theory. The lawyer took off his glasses and touched a stem to his lower lip. Grissom, in turn, could only give a disgusted half-smile. He would never get used to these narrow preconceptions people outside of business had about those on the inside. A man could work as an executive and nonetheless perceive the soul. Grissom had imagination enough to appreciate what must happen to a whore’s spirit while her body rang up trick after trick. For a moment he felt like jumping up and shouting again.