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It’s a searing bright light that engulfs her vision, a blinding shine that has her eyes frantically flutter until the world around her reassembles; the glow melts into texture once the cigarette burns in her eyes have dissipated, now able to make out the atmosphere around her. What was once a violent glow has been reduced back to the void of color, a dim room with a flaring bulb above her head as the source of the incandescence, swinging ever so gently like a pendulum. Her eyes wander, moving onto the dark plated walls and the tiled ground beneath her, her eyes catching onto the dull iron frame of the bed she was laying on. She shudders, rolling her shoulders into the stiff mattress; kneading the back of her crown into the plush pillow, fisting the sheets. A bed, in a dimly lit room, with just her in it — but when she looks to the side she can see a small tinted window in the heavy red door anchored to the wall, intimidating in color and size, appearing as if it were actually rooted into the ground and could not be opened.
It was haunting — almost breathing, squirming — emanating a low hum that tore through her eardrums. It ripped through her entire being, tremors returning to her finger tips. She turns her back to the door, but the feeling only grows, her stomach twisting and lurching as the back of her neck burns uncomfortably, as if a hand was hovering mere inches from her scruff but never daring to move a muscle (a quiet, foreboding threat: a promise never kept). She holds herself, clawing at her white scrubs and sheets, pulling them to her chin where they pooled at her feet. Like a child trying to shield itself from the boogeyman with their armored blanket, she burrows herself into a cocoon and hopes to drift back asleep, forgetting to question where and how she had managed to get back here in the first place.
She doesn't know where she was before, what other bed she was resting in or maybe just another place in time, but she does know that where she is now is wrong. She shouldn't be here.
The harder she tries to think about it, the louder the ringing in her ears becomes, and it grows so unbearable that she forces herself to sleep from the exertion. Even her chest begins to ache, her heart pounding against the healed wound on her sternum. What feel’s like sleep is actually a single moment passing, a rush of time moving around her in the irrelevant blanketed space she pocketed herself in.
She can’t feel the ringing, or hear the door’s heavy breathing, not even the burning sensation from the intimately swaying fixture above her.
She breathes in — chokes — the air around her is heavily sterile, bleach closing her throat; a heavy gulp of ammonia scorching her nostrils. Undoing the blankets again, hand clawing at her throat, eyes squeezing so tight she feels that the chemical mix will singe her eyelashes off. The poison travels throughout her body in rivulets; heart racing, chest swelling, the more she struggles the worse it becomes. She can’t scream for help, all she can do is seize, all she can do is die. I’m dying , the words fall lame on deaf ears, and with one jerk of her head she can feel her entire body throttle.
The fall from the bed feels like an eternity; a dream where you’re not really falling, but you awake like you’ve just missed the ground by a few inches.
The door opens, a flood of milk swarming her again, but this time the mass has multiple limbs and she can just faintly make out the distant resounds of words.
“Looks like another episode.”
“When will they end?”
“Don’t think they ever will…”
A glint of a needle catches her peripheral vision from beneath her closed lids, yet she’s able to make out the mass around her through thin eyelids. They open suddenly, she’s on the ground, and there are three great pillars above her.
“You should probably inject her soon.”
“Hold her then, I need to access the vein.”
The world triggers something inside of her, another gyrate from her as she tries to crawl away. Her limbs feel stiff, paralyzed, detached from the rest of her body as she panics to hide away from them under the steel frame. Calloused hands take hold of her arms, dragging her forward, another hand balling her hair to the side to turn her away from the incoming needle. The needle is diving and she can’t do anything to stop it, so all she can do is latch her eyes shut and try to regain control of her senses. It’s a prick in her arm, but it might as well be like they slit her wrist open, burying a freshly sharpened blade into her forearm to her shoulder, bleeding her out like livestock. She’s finally able to scream, but it’s swallowed by the darkness she's forced to succumb to as the dosage takes hold.
“It’s okay Bell, don’t fight it anymore.”
Bell: the name feels numb on her lips, though overwhelming like a distant memory — a smell that you can’t get a grasp on, a taste you can’t fix.
Her eyelids become heavy, she can’t strain to keep them open anymore. Her head bobs once, twice, then she’s out like a light.
The feeling of suffocation remains as she succumbs to sedation, her eyeballs squeezing against her eyelids in protest with stars forming in the darkness. Her throat is still closed up, and it doesn’t help that the feeling of choking has been replaced with drowning. She feels like she’s filling up with water, inflating her lungs until her body is twitching with every gulp of water. She thrashes, and then the hand tangled in her scruff pulls her from the water.
“You can tell us what Perseus has planned and it all ends here.”
She only has a second to breathe before the words come out, as if automatic. Trained.
“I don’t know.”
The man tsks, and she can catch the glint from his face in her peripheral vision.
Then her head is pushed back into the sink, her nose barely scraping the bottom as she thrashes around. Her wrists are bound but her feet are free, yet they feel swollen and worn. She can’t even curl them without the sharp static feeling shooting up her ankles.
The water tastes dirty, but it is unbearably cold; it stings her nostrils, numbing the rest of her features, her lips going purple from the extended amount of time under. It’s psychotic how the man holding her down timed when she was going to pass out, as her eyes started to spot once again before her head rears back from the sink. She wolfs meager pockets of air while simultaneously spitting out water from her lungs and nose, chest heaving as her head is pushed further back until her neck is cramping with discomfort. With bleary vision she makes eye contact with the reflection within his aviators.
“It ends when you want it to.”
She sputters, the position her neck was in made it hard to speak without all the water going back down. She tries to shake her head, and he grimaces, pushing her head forward and nearly smashing it into the industrial metal sink. He grunts, leans down to pat her wet, numb cheek patronizingly, pinching it to get something out of her before smoothing over the damp curls stuck to her face.
“Why are you protecting him? Protecting someone who doesn’t give a damn about your life?”
“He does give a damn… I-I’m special.”
You’re special, Bell…
Perseus thinks too highly of you.
He chuckles, placing his hand on her crown to lift her head up.
“Oh. You are, aren’t you? Really?”
She nods weakly – automatically.
“Well… how about some time in the dog box then? Sounds like you need a nap to reconsider how special you are.”
Her eyes widen, a wallow leaving her throat as she tries to squirm away, squeezing her eyes shut in hopes to reawaken in her room. Her head rears forward as she’s dragged by the scruff, unable to kick her legs without feeling the stunned pain course through her lower half. (She didn’t figure it out then, but later she realized they used a medicine to paralyze her lower half. To make her more… compliant).
No more kicking, no more scurrying around into different corners like a terrorized animal.
“Please! No! NO! Not the dog box, please! PLEASE!!”
Her voice was hoarse as the pleas came out shattered, laced with whimpers and choked sobs. But she knew that when he’d tried to compromise she’d only reply with what she’d been trained to. ‘I don’t know’, or ‘I won’t tell you’ — everything he’d taught her to say, even if it were at the cost of a limb. Or her life.
“Then tell me where Perseus is! I won’t ask again, or maybe you’d prefer the steam bath instead?”
His threats are indignant, aggravated by her lack of compliance; by her completely selfish protests. She didn’t want the steam bath, but would it be worse than the dog box? Could she stand her skin being scorched by water rather than forced confinement? She never knew how long she’d be in there for, but with the bath it was like being boiled alive with needles. It stopped when she wanted it to, all she had to do was spill.
She was trained to never break, but the dog box had brought her on the edge of domestication.
Her mouth continues to spew gargled invocations, hot tears defrosting her plum tinted cheeks. But to no avail, the stinging reverberates throughout her scalp as he tugs even harder, and somewhere within her damp curls she can feel blood begin to spill from the seams of her roots. Her wrists ache from how the tightly fitted cuffs chaff against them, bruising the etiolated skin with deep reds and purple all while overlapping the healing yellow bruises from before. Her body is already aching, and she knows that when she gets in the dog box it will be ten times more insufferable to deal with. She doesn’t know what’s worse: having to balance on her chin with her arms forced behind her back in little to no space, or having to hold herself up for hours with muscle spasms.
“It ends when you want it to.”
He tells her lastly, something he’d been accustomed to saying during their ‘sessions’. It was faux sympathy, a slice of his sociopathic methods. Even if the torture ended, she knew her life would end as well once he got the information he needed. She’s put in the box, screaming now as the pinkish water sluices down her forehead. Placed on her chin and knees to her chest, propped up in the box before its latch shut, succumbing to the sensory deprivation. Darkness, silence, the lack of air already settling along with the burn in her muscles and jaw. Her teeth ache from when she tries to open her mouth, to scream and wail into the void where the sound bounces off the walls and right back into her mouth. The space is so tight she can’t shift or even breathe enough air as her back rises and falls against the ceiling, crushing her bound hands and pushing against her elbows. Her shoulders cramp in the way they do when stretching them for too long, feeling the muscle tighten instantly and locking into place. The same as waking up and stretching your legs, unable to stop the feeling of it cramping and binding tightly in a pain so debilitating it leaves you paralyzed for several minutes. It was those charlie horses but ten times more painful and all over her body. Her chin was increasingly swelling, pushing against her lower teeth and grinding them against the tops, her mouth tasting of iron from her abused gums. To keep her mouth open only felt worse as it made her jaw ache and her chin press harder into the ground, and the first time around she had kept her mouth open for so long that she nearly bit her tongue off when she collapsed from the exertion. Her toes are pressed against the wall, arched excruciatingly as the weight pressed down and crushed them, and she could feel her lower half begin to reawaken. The burdening ache in her knees began, her thighs trembling, ankles cramping; it’s too much, and the tenebrosity doesn’t help. The quiet is gut-wrenching: she can hear the droplets of sweat as they land, the tear of skin as her teeth break through the seams of her lip.
Her body becomes deadened, her ears begin to ring again. The chimes mixed with gunfire and cries and the flashing red and yellow images engulf her, the smell of gunpowder-blood mist violating her tongue as she finally screams out in agony.
She screams and doesn’t stop, even though her belly is filling up on her own wretched howling and it feels like she’ll throw up any moment. Her eyelashes knit together to keep her eyes shut, eyebrows scrunched so hard visible lines are left indented in her forehead.
“Bell, you need to relax now, your mind is going to violently vacillate the more you resist.”
Her screams stop immediately, the sudden realization that she was no longer inside the cramped container anymore hitting her. Instead, she was in the interrogation room: a dark and heady area with plated walls, smelling of bleach, cigarette smoke, and perfumed ichor. The room was strewn with tray tables, on them medical trinkets stained with her dried blood, as well as multiple TVs playing the same war footage at once and a window in front of her revealing a haphazard office. There was a camcorder pointed in her direction beside one of the TV’s and a giant studio light glaring down at her harshly on the other side, straining her eyes. Right beside her was an IV, currently disconnected from her veins. Her eyes caught onto the farthest point of the room, the clock hanging there frozen in time with unmoving hands, and the sanguine door adjacent to it sitting there menacingly with a sardonic sign above it reading ‘EXIT.’
But she wasn’t wet anymore, in fact she was back in her white scrubs and socks, not the tank and underwear from inside the box. It was worse when she had more skin exposed inside of there, because it’d become hot and her skin would stick and peel from the metal, making her uncontrollably itchy. But her hands were always bound, and even if they weren’t there’d be no space to move if not squirming and risking snapping her neck.
“Just breathe, remember where you are. You’re in the lab, we were just having a conversation. Can you tell me what we were talking about? Can you remember?”
She licks her lips, feeling at the scabs before catching a piece between her teeth and pulling, ripping it off with a satisfying sting. She spits it somewhere toward the floor, catching his frown. She takes a few moments to reassess, avoiding any nonexistent eye contact from behind his aviators.
“Box.” She murmurs, looking down at her blooming wrists. They were bound, raw, retaining a yellowish-purple hue, her nails were equally tattered. The only evidence to suggest that the torture wasn’t just a part of her mind. Bloodied cuticles, nails clipped down to the root where they pulsed with pain. It was a ‘safety precaution.’ That’s where all the blood on the instruments came from, and he even threatened to take all her nails off entirely.
“Box? No, no… don’t worry, I won’t put you back in there. Not tonight, at least.”
She swallows down hard, trying to neglect the implications of his words. She can’t go in there again, not for a third time, not ever. She couldn’t go inside three times — the chimes of the death knell would be calling for her. She shakes her head, seething as her brain burns in a ring around her skull, squeezing like a thousand rubber bands overlapping each other. She wants to bring her hand to her face, wrists shaking with the urge to smack herself. Adler stalks from his place behind the studio light to her place in the chair, leaning above her with his hands on the leather binds.
“What’d we talk about hitting yourself?” He wanes, his voice taut as he squeezes he binds, making her wince.
“Let’s start from the beginning. What’s the last thing you remember, Bell?”
She presses her lips tight together, frowning as the name echoes in her brain and threatens to spill from her tongue.
“The box… the, uhm, torture.”
He hums, glancing at his watch for a moment.
“You don’t remember how you got here? What you wanted to talk about?”
She shakes her head, hanging her head. She remembers the torture: that suffocating feeling, her skin perspiring, limbs burning, eyes squeezing, head spinning, throat closing, hands—
“N-no…” She sounds so small, but it’s the first time she can actually hear herself speak. Weak, frail, she can see herself now. Blotchy eyed and pathetic. Looking down on her like the rest do.
“I don’t know, I don’t know .” She tries to tighten her cadence, but it only comes out warbled. It’s sadistic how he bares his teeth at her, breeding a patronizing grin across his face. Soon it fades as immediately as it came, as if he caught himself smiling from outside his mind.
“Let’s work it out together.” He starts, patting her wrist as he regains his train of thought. He moves back, retrieving a vanilla folder thick with documents and a marker from one of the tray tables, each page front and back filled and drawn over. The folder is days — weeks — of paperwork filled and revised by him and the others. It's nothing but chalk full of psyche evals, status updates, and other very troubling legal requirements he's had to digest thoroughly. On the top of each page he was forced to read, “RE : Introducing Project MKULTRA : The time for The Agency of the Future is NOW!” It’s a heavy burden, one that leaves a waxy sour taste in his mouth and makes his teeth ache. His only solace is knowing that this is all a means to an end, and that if it truly does work then his efforts wouldn’t be in vain. His eyes flicker to hers, lip twitching as he gets a look at her blown out eyes and flushed cheeks, a light layer of sweat forming on her neck and forehead.
Eerily, he thinks she looks the most beautiful like this.
She’s not relaxed enough, he realizes.
“Hey… why don’t I get us some water from the bubbler?”
He taps two fingers under her chin to grab her attention from the dazed expression she had set on her lap, nodding weakly as he wanders over to the bubbler in the corner of the room, folder tucked under his arm. The bubbler was never there before, he’d only have it installed recently to maintain the immersion between the two. There would be no one else to interrupt them, everything they needed was right here for them.
He takes two of the paper cups and fills them, the way the jug bubbles as the water siphons into the cups mesmerizes her, but it is only a sore reminder to the torture she’d undergone. The bubbling is akin to the water being forced down her throat, trying to push out as she scrapes scarce pockets of air. He can feel heavy eyes on him and a thick on-edge atmosphere, so he turns from the jug to walk over to her again, extending his free hand to her with the water. He urges the cup towards her mouth, and out of her own will, takes the edge between her lips and drinks, finishing it within seconds.
She wasn’t thirsty.
He doesn’t drink his, however, leaves it on the table beside him. The action alone makes her stomach drop uneasily.
“Okay Bell, you ready?”
A weak hum, but her eyes are set sternly on his hands.
“I promise it’ll be quick, and after that you can sleep. How's that sound?”
She wasn’t tired either, just full of drugs; he takes a long drag from his cigarette.
“Yesterday, you were placed in a special room, just like this one. Do you remember this?”
The room was blindingly red and small, but not cramped like her normal room was. It was similar to a narrow classroom, the one that harbors only a select handful of students. She knows that she woke up with groping hands on her, urging her to get up.
‘You don’t have to wake up, you just have to open your eyes.’ Is what they told her, dragging her from under the arms and onto her feet, encouraging her to walk. She doesn’t remember if she did or not, but somehow she had gotten into that room and on the other side was a woman. On the wall, a giant mirror stretching across the entire way, and a small table in front of it with a radio humming very lowly but piercing straight into her brain. In the middle of the room, a small steel box. A speaker ripples through the echoey space.
‘Bell, move to the center of the room.’
She moves, almost crawling on all fours until she's up on her feet, dragging with each step until she stands above the box, turning to look at the mirror. There’s a stranger standing there, standing exactly where she is; she doesn’t recognize the reflection in the mirror anymore, it had been months since she’d been able to look at herself. But herself isn’t there anymore, just a husk of what used to be. It’s surreal how, when her finger twitches, so do the reflection’s, or when she blinks, it blinks back. It’s not her, it’s never been. She’s trapped inside her mind, and the body moving isn’t her will. It’s an entirely different being that's taken her place.
“Yes.” She responds, Adler flattens his lips.
“Do you remember what happened in the room? Who, or what, was in there with you?”
Her eyes go elsewhere, his head moving with her gaze.
“They… told me to go to the middle of the room. There was another person in there… a, uh, a woman.”
“Remember what she looked like?”
Older than her, healthy, taken care of, calm, but looking out of place.
“No.”
Surprisingly, he seems pleased, taking a moment to highlight something on one of the pages.
“And what was in the middle of the room?”
‘Go ahead and open the box.’
She sits on her knees, placing her thumbs on the cool metal latches, lifting the lid.
“A box.”
“And inside?”
‘Take the pistol out of the box.’
There isn’t a second thought, not even a moment of time between seeing the pistol before it's already in her hands, somehow teleporting straight into her palm within a blink of an eye. It’s the gasp that makes her look up, watching the other woman's eyes widen. The gasp was the cracked twig which alerted the predator to her hiding spot, and all she can do is back into the corner. Around the woman’s ankle is a lock and a short chain, leaving her with nowhere to go but to huddle against the door. The door, that pulsates and hums lowly, chanting some kind of spell in throaty incantations.
“Who told you to shoot?”
“Mirror.”
“The people behind it?”
‘And on the count of three, I want you to shoot that woman. Understand? We’ve got a job to do.’
“The one inside.” Her throat burns, her eyes shutting tight.
‘Now's the time! Do it!’
“And did you? Did you shoot that woman?”
The gunshot rings so clearly through her head that she wants to say yes, it hangs on her lips, but she doesn’t say anything. She shakes her head, beginning to welt with tears.
“I don’t know…” She balls her fists, she doesn’t remember a body, or blood, she doesn’t even remember anything before looking in the mirror. Seeing its eyes dark and hair matted and pushed from its face, pale and sylphlike.
“Do you think you shot her?”
“No.”
He takes a moment to jot down some notes, causing her brows to furrow as suspicion and anger rears its ugly head.
“Why are you writing that down?” She croaks, garnering his attention, “you think I did it? Why, why would I shoot an innocent woman?”
Adler stares at her, hidden irises darting across her features, curling his lip as he looks back down at his notes.
“I don’t think you shot that ‘innocent woman’, I know you did.”
The firmness in his response startles her, the stone etched visage crumbling to pieces as she turns her head away. Her whole body is perspiring now, her shirt feeling sticky and her hands clamming up, her neck laden with chilled frost on standing hairs. She feels hot and cold, riddled with sickness all over. She looks at him again but he bears no grin to suggest he was joking, he himself holding a hard visage.
“You tried to shoot her. But you didn’t kill her, if that’s some comfort,” it’s anything but comfort, “we told you to shoot and you did. It was a pneumatic pistol, operated on air. You pulled the trigger, not once, not even twice, but repeatedly until we told you to stop.”
‘The Primate Trial was successful. Well done, Bell.’
“Why?” It falls out of her like lead, followed by dewdrops of hot tears.
“Because we told you to. You did exactly as we told you to.”
“That wasn’t me… it wasn’t, I never—”
“You might not understand it now, and you’ll probably never get the chance to, but you’ll realize that everything we’re doing for you will matter.”
“You’re hollowing me out.”
“And we’re making you better by doing so.”
His own admission of guilt, consoled by the fact that she may make a difference after all. Her progress had been the most substantial by far, a rare case among the other MKULTRA subjects. They’ve only ever reached the depatterned state, done in by psychic diving while pumped with barbiturates and amphetamines all at once. They’ve done everything to her, interrogation and the brainwashing: electroshock therapy, waterboarding, sleep deprivation, forced confinement, steam baths, hypnosis, the drugs, sensory stimuli. And now, it was all being proven worth it. Her advancement was one in a million, and he could feel that they were in the homestretch of it all.
He’d remember very viscerally when she first underwent electroshock therapy; she’d been thrashing and fully conscious of her surroundings, unlike her narcosis state now, pleading for them to stop. It was the first step to their entire plan: breaking her down with electroshock therapy and LSD to work from a clean slate. She wasn’t giving up any information however, refusing to crack despite the torture waiting for her, and he had to admit he admired her resilience. They told her there was no use in begging if she wasn’t going to talk, thus sticking the rubber probe in her mouth while sticking the electrodes to her temples. They started at 50 volts, and she wouldn’t stop convulsing until 90. They cooked her until one of her eyes filled red with blood, then she passed out, and there was a deep dread that perfumed the atmosphere when the silence settled.
Normal forms of interrogation weren’t working; they were realizing what they would have to do next.
“If it means something to you, you probably won’t remember this conversation anyway. You’ll wake up in your bed, or maybe somewhere else. Or… maybe nowhere at all. You won’t wake up, but that means what we did worked.”
Her head spins, she feels tired all over again, the exertion of having to speak and think taking its toll. His water is still untouched.
“Can I have some of your water…?”
“I think you’ve had enough. Why don’t we start some exercises now?”
She can’t think too much about the untouched water until her bones start to puddle, her eyes filling with red as the room splits into two. She wants to clutch her chest, leaning over from the pain blooming through her.
“C’mon, Bell, stay with me. This shouldn’t take long if you cooperate. We have a job to do.”
She squirms.
His arm moves beside him, throwing the folder down before picking up a remote to click the projector on.
“Can you tell me what you see here? The first thing that comes to your mind, try not to think too hard about it.”
On the screen are symmetrical ink drawings — a Rorschach test — that interweave and augment from each other to create warped designs to penetrate the human psyche. They hurt to look at, so much so she winces when setting her eyes on it, seeing the picture burst behind her clasped eyes. ‘ The first thing that comes to mind.’ The image was structured like an upside down egg, with white holes at the top and a matching, smaller set below: eyes and nostrils. She breathes in, looking back at the image.
“Mask.”
He doesn’t acknowledge her answer other than switching to the next slide, taking notes. This time it’s curvaceous, melting in and out into a bulbous shape. Around the bulb are random splotches, but to her they are like deep dark eyes, just like her own. Just like the mirror’s. She shakes her head, feeling her stomach lurch.
“Dark room.”
The flashes of the swinging light bulb fill her mind, the image clear from having memorized the mystifying movements of the pendulum going back and forth without halt. She can hear the low hum from the fiery core within the glass, the irking sound singing in her ears. The Dark Room is where they ‘talked’ to her, not like how she is with Adler now, but more like they were telling her stories. Events she experienced, places and names, faces too. After each sentence or description they would sound off a chime, only to continue on with the script. They’d even show her pictures: of her, her comrades, of forestry scenery. A time lost to her.
She doesn’t know what it was for, why they kept telling her stories she already knew of, feeding her information she’d lived through already. She’d already lived through war, but she didn’t want to remember it — she figures it’s just another way to torture her psyche.
Another slide is presented to her, this time it fills up the page more, expanding to the edges of the paper like roots and veins. The bottom starts out thick and dark, thin lines shooting up before becoming fat again and intertwining together. They looked like trees, or dandelions.
“Vietnam.”
Da Nang, Vietnam, is a fickle memory she wishes she could bury into herself again. She’d done so good to forget about it, convince herself of never even being involved; she’d done so well in fact that she was able to recreate an entire new life for herself to forget and it worked. All until now — the torture is being forced to remember. She doesn’t want to remember the friends she lost, the bodies she had to recover, the blood shed, the smell of forest fire, the threat of having your throat slit in your sleep. How she almost died from a single wrong step.
The fear for her was that she’d wake up one day and her entire crew would be dead, but the greater fear was that someone remained to finish the job. The only one who really comforted her about it was—
“Very good.” It's a sickly sweet resonance; she wants to throw up from it alone.
“Just one more, Bell. You can do it, you’re doing an excellent job. Maybe if you get this one right you can have a reward.”
Get this one right? She slurs, feeling too hopped up and adulterated to utter anything longer than two words.
The last picture displays a flowery smudge directly in the middle, surrounded by the remaining white of the page but only a diamond shaped space in the middle of the blooming void. Her first instinct is to say flower, but she catches her tongue, nearly biting down on it painfully to stop the word from pouring out. Right before her eyes the shape takes a different form, now the diamond shape has split and flipped itself, turning into eyes. The streaks move out from the top and the sides, forming an elongated rhombus. A tiger. She begins to feel her heartbeat quicken, her lungs deflating as an imaginary force bludgeons her chest.
“What do you see? Say it.”
She continues to yearn to grip the space between her collar bones, feeling the stinging sensation of her breast plate tenfold. She looks down, scrutinizing the freshly welting cleft in her chest.
“Shot. S-shot.”
She thrashes in her place suddenly, the chair creaking from the sudden assault. Adler subtly leans backward to grab a vial and syringe, not saying anything as he watches her experience another ‘episode’.
Adler doesn’t look like himself to her now, everything is quickly changing like a motion picture, blurring in and out to different shapes and colors; and instead of what is his glass barriers is replaced with sharp blue eyes penetrating her soul through the gateway of her wound, and a river bound scar bleeding down his unhinged jaw.
“You shot me. You shot me. You shot me! YOU SHOT ME! YOU SHOT ME!!”
Her eyes catch on to the needle in his hand, making her thrash vociferously against the sudden unyielding grip on her jaw. He forces her head to one side, gripping so hard she's sure it will leave rufous bruises behind, all before she can feel the sedative running through her neck, slitting her neck open from carotid to jugular. The world goes dark again, leaving her alone in the vacuous black as her limbs grow weary and limp.
But her mind tries to not to give in, but one look in the reflection of Adler’s aviators sends her away into the lull of unconsciousness.
Her body feels raw; singed and sensitive, inflamed from the steam bath. It was days ago (she thinks) when it happened, and she hadn’t been out of her room since. She’d been drugged up, stuck in limbo on the border between rest and consciousness, only roused for food and bathroom breaks. It hurt to stand, her legs feeling stretched from having hung from the ceiling by her arms, which were as equally sore and numb as her bottom half. They had to prop her up in the bath, as if she didn’t feel violated enough, but thankfully they were female nurses, however it doesn’t satiate the humiliation. An ice, cold shower to counteract her boiling body; scrubbing as gently as they could. The only merciful act from them, and anyone, has shown her since her time here at the mental facility. Or, at least that's what she thought.
When they lifted her onto the scale, she had noted to herself how much she weighed: 135 pounds. She’d lost at least 20 pounds since she arrived. She’s lost track of the days, she has lost track of almost everything. Her family, the outside, who she was, and why she came here in the first place. She forgot the taste of good food and fresh water, the smell of nature, how to properly articulate her fingers without them spasming; she forgot what great sleep felt like and the refreshing wake up in the morning, she forgot about the things she loved. But, whenever she started to think about her fatal memory, everything would come back to her in a flood of white. Her life consisted of a normal childhood, a mother and a father and maybe a sibling somewhere, and then the military. She’d fake her age, cut her hair off, work her skinny body like a boy to join the Marines, and soon be assigned to the Vietnam War in South Indonesia. She remembers waking up in a tent with others, patched up, but her chest revealed in its bound state. She thought it was over for her, and then he came into the picture.
Russell Adler, of MACV-SOG, the man who had supposedly saved her life from a minefield. The man she was supposed to be assigned to. She’d almost trekked through mine and trap laden territory near the rice paddies if not for him. She remembers her search, something that caught her eye and had subsequently got her split up from her team. She recalls the sound of chimes, echoing wildlife, birds trilling and fluttering through the forestry. Then, as she continued down the path, through the cave — or what she remembers being a cave, or perhaps some burned down village, an underground mine — and past the Russians, a door. A… bunker . Once she wraps her fingers around the handle and pushes, her mind blanks, and she's left with what seems like the only memory she has of Vietnam.
Fractured Jaw.
After that, she was discharged, not without Adler promising to find her when everything was over. She knows there was something there, but the glint of his wedding band suggested otherwise. Adler was always smiling at her then, in his iconic, flat lipped fashion she likes to believe was genuine. She wonders if their relationship would’ve been different if she were a man, and adds on to the thought of why he’d bother to save her in the first place and not have her booted home. He was always there though, by her side, in their “little oasis in this godforsaken shit storm.” Their Hell away from Home. He’s a misty memory, but he did find her when it was over (more or so leave her an ominous letter). However, she felt too far gone, and that's how she ended up here, having admitted herself for psychiatric viewing before being able to join the CIA on their big mission. A mission she knows too little about, too risky to write in a letter.
That’s how her story goes, and for some reason, they remind her everyday.
The same stories went on and on, repeated to her while those familiar chimes rang into her mind. The shutter of a lens flickering through slides of the war she lived through. She likes to assume its exposure therapy, to help her confront her PTSD from the war by making peace with what happened.
Was it working?
The red door breathing heavily behind her thought differently.
That damn door had been haunting her throughout her entire stay at the clinic, no matter what drugs they gave her or how loud her headphones would play, the door would combat everything she did to ignore it. Violently rufescent and heady like some animal in heat, acting as a celestial body about to take form and suck her into the ether within itself. Behind the door for which the contents were unknown to her and had plagued her for decades. Perhaps something she’d forgotten or had never known at all, the thing that has kept her from sleep, amongst other things.
When she reaches for her headphones to isolate herself from the door, the nauseating aura exerting from the door intensifies. She huddles under the blankets in routine fashion, shutting her eyes and crumpling up into herself as the music blares. They only let her listen to one song during her stay, and despite how sickening it was it was her only outlet from reality.
A candy-colored clown they call the sandman
Tiptoes to my room every night
Just to sprinkle stardust and to whisper
Go to sleep, everything is alright
“I close my eyes and drift away…” She mumbles softly, hushing a constant ‘go to sleep, go to sleep, go to sleep’. But the air within the blankets becomes hot and stuffy, and with her aggravation she rips the sheet off along with her headphones, holding herself as she howls. But no one comes, no nurses to sedate her and toy with her against their oath, to tell her it was just another unending episode. As time passed and no one came to sedate her, she stopped, taking a couple moments to realize the sudden dread filling her belly.
Was there anybody there?
She turns weakly, wincing at the way her bare arms drag against the sheets. She sits up on the edge of her bed, staring at the hypnotizing door. It was glowing, beating red, pulsing waves of energy that made her want to keel over. It was uneasy, alive , trapped within its vessel but resonating with a yearning sensation to cause pain. Her eyes caught on, realizing the small window had disappeared. Now, it was just a giant monolith hanging on industrial hinges and a large latch. It never looked like it before, but now it eerily resembles the bunker door she had found in Da Nang, sitting before her. Exposure therapy, confronting your deepest fears.
She can refer to him as calling it ‘projecting.’
But she can’t confront it now. She was never ready to — whenever she had to reminisce on the past, whenever they asked her about what was behind the door, the memory was lost on her almost instantaneously. She’d grab the latch, pull it, and as she pushed it open she would return to the present and forget what she was talking about. She’ll never be able to find out what was behind that door, and maybe she could’ve saved countless lives if she did. Recover hidden plans to counteract the Soviets, to guarantee the safety of the United States. Her home. She failed, and whatever compelled her to join the military in the first place vanished. She’s weak, if she were strong she wouldn’t have come here in the first place. She was too weak for the war, and now she’s too weak to fix what's going on inside her head, too weak to fight against the torture.
'You have to know that your mind is weak, understand?'
'Yes.'
She doesn’t realize she’s crying until she catches the reflection on the shiny metal frame, watching the distorted visage mimic her falling tears and anguished expression. She can’t even trust herself now, let alone confront her own depravity. Her eyes travel over the railing and onto the edge, noticing the corner was wrapped and layered with tape. She blinks, letting the tears drop from her eyelashes while she lowers onto her knees on the ground, picking at the tape. Her nails were dulled down completely, a consequence for having left her mark on multiple nurses' faces and arms. A tedious task, as well as a little excruciating given with every pick her fingers tips racked with throbbing pangs, but she had managed to pick off a piece that could easily be peeled with her fingers. She tears it off, taking away enough layers until the metal cracks and splits, revealing the broken frame. She stares at it, looking at the sharp curve the broken piece made, sticking out as if waiting for someone to prick their finger to fall into a deep, permanent sleep. And as she contemplated the idea, she subconsciously began to shuffle closer until her chin was hovering mere inches above the shard. Now was her chance to escape everything with no one to stop her. She could make it swift, but some part of her lusted for that suffocating feeling again — to choke on her blood as she dies, just to know that she was alive all along and not stuck in some perpetual Hell. It would be reassuring, a small comfort in her last moments as the taste of her own blood settled on her teeth. This mental facility had done nothing but make her go through the Hell she was trying to get away from, and perhaps it was the ultimate sign that she was a lost cause. She was damaged goods, and only a grave could cure a hunchback. She frowns, letting her heavy lids fall over her eyes as she makes contact with the sharp edge underneath her chin, guiding it to her throat as she prepares to impale herself. She breathes one final time, wraps her fingers on her wrist to feel her pulse, and as she begins to press her throat to the whetted pipe she stops.
Fluttering her eyes open she tilts her head down slowly, letting the tip graze ever so gently against the skin of her jugular as she looks at her wrist. Her thumb kneads into the skin, but the texture feels wrong. It… was scarred. The skin wasn't smooth or taut, it didn't feel sensitive either like the rest of her. Her eyes catch onto the vertical cicatrix embedded in her forearm. She scrutinizes it in awe, feeling her eyes welt heavier than before.
She had already tried before, and she couldn't remember it. She tried, and failed, and now she knows she is undeniably stuck in Hell. She sobs, holding her arm to her equally scarred chest as she moves away from the bedframe. Then, before she can pass out, another opportunity presents itself. She opens her eyes, turning to look over her shoulder at the abrupt disturbance. She figures it's one of the negligent nurses coming to her rescue, but there's no one there. The hulking door creaks open agonizingly slow, the light from the outside pouring into the dimly lit room. She shudders, feeling the cold from the outside glide over her limbs. The chill had felt familiar, not like the one she’d been accustomed to in her room or the lab, but the natural cold of a winter's day. Something she hadn’t felt in a long time, something she never knew she needed before. Feebly, she rises from her knees, letting out a muted groan as she trudges towards the door, the cold working itself into her lungs and icing over her tears. Though whatever deep melancholy she felt is now replaced by faux relief, hopelessly desperate that behind the door was an escape. Either from this asylum, or to Heaven, just anywhere but here.
It takes some strength to get the hefty door open, having to push her body weight with the door back to get it open enough for her to slip out. When she does, it doesn’t hesitate to slam shut again, locking loudly. She can’t see anything at first as she walks into the unknown, once more having to accustom to the surprisingly blinding lambency before her until it renders back to normal. The cold has become even more intense, having her clasp at her arms as she saunters aimlessly through the white.
“Arctic air. Clears the head, doesn't it?”
The voice rips through reality, with one blink she can make out her surroundings fully. She was standing some feet away from the cliff side by the sea, the ocean air perfuming her nostrils alongside the faint scent of gunpowder and ash. Then, cigarette smoke. Adler stands there, looking off into the far distance, nursing his cigarette between sentences. This feels familiar, but she can’t recall a moment like this before. She doesn’t remember Vietnam being this cold, or the thunder-fit scar etched across his face. He looks more somber, the years haven’t been kind to him.
Maybe he’s her guardian angel, and her Heaven is all the memories she's had with him. But tragically, he wears the same face of the man who tortures her.
“Bell, you made two extraordinary sacrifices to stop Perseus. One was without your knowledge. The other, you made that decision of your own accord.”
Her stomach drops.
“I just want you to know that this little thing that's happened with you and me… it was always for the greater good.”
Her chest begins to ache.
“You're a goddamn hero, y’know that, kid?”
This was becoming increasingly nostalgic; the type that makes your heart swell with missed opportunity and dread knowing you’ll never get moments like these back. Except, she didn’t want this moment back. The realization of what was going to happen filled her up unwillingly, spreading through her blood stream like a disease until her body began to deteriorate. But hearing him call her a hero? There was nothing heroic about what she did, even if it seemed that way through his cedar colored lenses. What she did was the right thing, what she did was try to delay the inevitable. Either choice she had made would’ve resulted in the same end. What she did was try to save herself. She betrayed her country, betrayed herself, and believed hopelessly that Adler would spare her because of it.
“...and heroes have to make sacrifices.”
Her feet are rooted in the ground beneath her. She can’t run, try and pry the door open behind her, this was her fate.
“That's why when I ask you for one more, I hope you understand.”
And her fate was staring down the barrel of a gun.
“It was never personal.”
She feels the bullet rip right into her center, in the same place she had constantly ached for years. The bullet found home again inside her chest, and when she squeezed her eyes shut she could see herself in another reality. Another gun pointed at her with the intent to kill.
She knows now that she’s always in that car, or in the lab, or Vietnam and even on the mountain side. She’s always been there, walking on the tight wire between life and death, with a man gripping the rope and tugging it hoping she’d fall to her doom. And now, she remembers. It might be the most clarity she's felt in years, or should she say, months. And suddenly, the man who had tortured her and the man who had saved her life became one.
Her name was never Bell, she was never in the war, she had never been assigned to a man named Russell Adler, she’d never admitted herself into any mental facility. She was the enemy to those she believed were her friends, to the people she helped let destroy her. To hollow her out and fill her back up with a false narrative, an overdose delusion. She died in that car, and that's when she had met him. Where she had been ‘saved.’ All that torture was after the fact, because she wouldn’t spit. The physical, psychological torment they — he — put her through was her Hell. A forced resurrection.
Their names are fresh in her mind: Park, Sims, Lazar, Mason, Woods, Hudson. And, the other side: Arash, Quasim, Volkov, Rudnik, Kuzmin, Perseus.
Perseus.
PERSEUS.
She had betrayed him willingly, acting on her own to help Adler. But even so, if she had chosen differently, would he have still accepted her back with open arms. Would he forgive her? Would he kill her?
Is true love dying for your country, or dying because of it? Is love a bullet that leaves a mark to be remembered, or the one who put it there?
She is standing above her own dead body now, outside herself like she had in the mirror room. Soul separated from vessel. A gaping cleft frothing with blood and staining her ivory pelt. She was dead this entire time, going through the same cycle over and over again until her mind was able to accept reality.
She was in Hell.
"No! It's not real! IT'S NOT REAL! I'M ALIVE! IT'S NOT REAL! I'M ALIVE, I'M REAL, I'M ALIVE! GET OUT OF MY HEAAAD!!! GET. OUT. OF. MY. HEADAAAHHHHHH!!!!"
"Your mind is weak, that's why it was so easy to make you succumb to us."
"No, I'm strong. I won’t give you what you want no matter how many times you torture me. You had to resort to mind control just to get your way. You're the weak one."
He purses his lips, raising his hand to pet her hair. She bares her teeth at him, growling, but it garners no threatened reaction.
He only leans forward, mouth riskily pressed against her earlobe.
“I’m going to enjoy breaking you.”