Welcome back to The Listening Room for the next installment of “Hypnotic”. David Fuller, a man being housed in a sleep research facility Dr. Vincent Vogel and his assistant Molly Fitzgerald, has just undergone his most extreme dream test run yet.
In chapter seven, something sinister is in the works.
7.
David stretched out his aching limbs on the bed. The artificial light in his room was still low signaling early morning. He pressed his palms against the sides of his head and let out a long, low groan. What a night. Snippets flashed before his closed eyes. The casino, the target, the van, and then… he couldn’t remember. He pressed his eyes shut tight but the memory would not surface.
He heard shoes scuff against the floor outside. The lock slid open with a muffled clang and the door creeped open. David quickly rose to his elbows. He was stunned almost into silence before managing to croak out a question.
“Sam?”
Sam stood in dark green coveralls with dirty blonde hair tucked under a cloth hat. A devious smile spread across his face. David dug the heels of his palms against his eyes and rubbed. Impossible. Again?
“No time for pleasantries, friend. We have got to get out of here. Leave your things. You won’t need them.”
David leapt from his bed and threw a shirt on. He put on a pair of sweatpants and dipped his feet into slip on shoes. He grabbed Sam’s bicep and stood close.
“I’m really glad to see you,” David said. His body was a mess of oddly firing emotions all at once. He was aflutter with excitement and grief which burned deep while his eyebrows turned down at the corners with concern and bewilderment.
“And you’ll see other friends too,” Sam said, tapping the hand on his bicep.
David paused to take in the last of the space. His table was nearly folded away with a stool underneath it. His bed, where he’d spent countless hours slipping from daydreams to patches of night behind his eyes, was a crumbled mess. He winced.
A visage of himself projected from his mind pacing, reciting poetry, laughing, weeping, and shielding against the stinging loneliness of isolation. The visage faded. He looked over at his friend and shyly tucked away a smile. David would usually look for an inconsistency, some crack in the façade of his dreams, but he didn’t want to risk finding one. He wanted to believe his friend was freeing him and that there’d be some new adventure on the horizon.
Sam pulled the cap low on his forehead and led David down the hall passed the gym on the right all the way to the end where a steel door was at the left. A sign adhered to the door read “This is not an exit,” which made David’s body tense at the sight. He had never considered leaving, only seeing the experiments through so he could come out the other side.
David combed through the experience in his mind. He spent six months in facility being pried open, drugged, manipulated, and wrung out. His memory was a punchcard full of missing pieces that made him shudder. What had he really done here? And why? The questions sat heavy and demanded resolution.
It was unnerving the way time blew away like sand. He’d been convinced over and over that he was doing something worthwhile and in the moment, it seemed justified, but now that reason drifted like a fleeting rain shower. It pattered quickly away leaving a mist of something he didn’t grasp, only felt.
Sam dug into his pocket and pulled out a key to unlock the door. They slipped out. David did not look back.
A camera pointed toward the exit captured a lone man skulking down the hall and pushing open the exit door.
The room in New Directions Treatment Center was threadbare. A twin bed was pushed against the far wall with a night table beside it and a small lamp on it. There was a desk and chair in front of a picture window in the middle of the room, overlooking a busy avenue. A chest of drawers was on the other wall with a small closet to the left.
David had taken down the bargain pastoral scene painting at the end of the bed and put up a poster. His favorite band stared down from a fish eye perspective. Fresh yellow flowers from the corner store sat on the chest of drawers in a clear, curvy plastic cup he’d found abandoned at the laundromat down the street.
He was beginning to settle here. After being clammed up for weeks in a haze of near dissociation from the world, he started inching back to consciousness and other people. He had started making friends with the other residents and even liked his social worker, Molly. She was helpful and had eased his transition in.
Just then, Molly knocked on the door.
“Morning!” she said brightly as she entered.
“Morning Molly,” David said. He gestured for her to take his chair. He sat on the bed.
Molly balanced a small notebook on her leg before hesitantly setting on the desk. She crossed her legs and glanced at the flowers.
“It’s a good sign that you’re decorating. We make a home wherever we are.” She said the affirmation as if it were the first time. It wasn’t.
David smiled weakly. His hands shook and he clasped them in his lap.
“Now, you’ve been clean for 90 days which is huge, but I wanted to think about where we can go from here.” She pulled her pen from the spine of the notebook and she clicked it. She opened the notebook to a blank page.
David moistened his lips and looked up at the poster at the end of the bed. The group members were in the foreground of a bridge, bathed in dark blue with the lead in a white, patterened Kangol hat. The drummer’s usual Afro was laid down in braids and his eyes were closed.
“David?” Molly asked. She flicked her strawberry curls behind her ears and looked at him expectantly.
His mouth pursed to form words that didn’t come. The walls sometimes loomed over him in a foreboding embrace. That’s when he had to get out, sometimes cutting close to curfew, to escape that trapped feeling. Once outside, though, he could feel his pulse quickened with expectation. His senses sharpened and every face volleyed from friend to adversary. He feared a gaze that lingered a little too long or a bump to the shoulder would send him spiraling into a rage.
That’s when he started to sweat and his chest tightened. David would race back to the house and barrel into his room, shutting the door behind him. His breaths would come in gasps before slowing to deep sighs. He told no one about these bouts and could not remember a time it ever happened before. Whatever he had been addicted to did a number on him.
Finally, he spoke.
“I’m just worried about staying clean right now. I did start sketching a bit, though,” he said with a trace of pride.
“May I see?”
He gestured to the top of the desk which had a neat stack of paper. Molly flipped through the sheets past still lifes of the flowers, the desk chair, and lamp. She kept flipping. There were portraits of the mailman and one of the residents, Paula, who so far was his closest acquaintance.
“This is good, David. Very good. Anything else?”
“No, Molly, that’s all I’ve come up with,” he said, managing a weak smile. His hands were still clasped in his lap.
“I think you should do the food shopping this week,” she said without looking up. She was fixated on sketch of a 90s model sedan with a shrouded driver.
“You and Paula seem like pals. Maybe you two can plan a few dinners for the group,” Molly said, laying the sketch back on the desk and turning to look at David.
Her eyes were ocean blue with dark rims. They bore into him and he suppressed a rising discomfort in his chest.
“That’s fine. I think I could do that,” David said nodding.
She smiled cheerily and jotted down a few notes.
“That is good news. I’ll let Paula and Dr. Chambers know. You can meet with her tonight after dinner when you’ve come up with some ideas.”
She stood up and gripped his shoulder reassuringly. Without another word, she left his room and closed the door. David sat still and waited to hear her footsteps depart down the hallway, then the stairs.
He stood up from the bed and moved the chair away from the desk. He opened the desk drawer and under some other sketches was a portrait thick with pencil strokes and charcoal. He held it up to the light streaming through the window. He squinted at the sketch, willing himself to remember. The mental strain yielded nothing.
The woman had braids intricately fashioned into a bun atop her head. Her high forehead sat above jeweled eyes. At the bottom right corner of the page was a single word: mother.
The residents had dinner in the backyard that early evening. He preferred to think of everyone as involuntarily committed patients, though. Picnic tables dotted a well kept lawn reclaimed from an oil-stained parking lot years before. Tall hedges shielded them from noise and neighbors. David usually sat alone, or with Paula. There was something about the others that repelled him, though he didn’t know why.
He’d gone to high school with one man, Gerald, who was heavyset but graceful and almost dignified in his movements. David half expected another face to greet him when he turned around but it was never what he expected. It was wrong somehow. The pouty mouth and thin eyebrows. The round, flat nose. Something about his face was familiar, yet misplaced, and it bothered David.
There was a tall woman named Kareema who had worked with him back when he was a trucker at Carlsbad Logistics a bit farther north. She had broad shoulders, narrow hips, and a singing voice like a siren. With Kareema, it was her teeth. She had a movie star smile that beamed. The guys used to call her Lighthouse. The name was chopped and screwed over time until it became Elly. When David looked at that smile, a memory that wanted to force its way up from the dirt could never break through. It made his skin prickle with goose flesh.
He pressed his fingers against the bridge of nose and steadied his heart through deep breaths. He closed his eyes and tried to remember. Then someone tapped his shoulder. He sprang loose from his thoughts.
“David? I just wanted to go over dinner plans,” Paula ventured louder than necessary. She stood at a distance, timidly waiting for his response, bobbing on the balls of her feet.
He motioned for her to join him. She slipped in close and balled her hands inside the sleeves of her sweatshirt despite the late spring heat. She quivered with nervous energy. Her eyes darted from David to the surroundings. She took a few more moments to reassure herself no one was close enough to hear, then dropped her voice to above a whisper.
“When?” she asked.
“Friday afternoon. I’m going to the city to his office.”
“What about the others?”
“They’ll know where to be. Wont be long now, and we can get this charade over with,” David said, barely masking his disgust.
Paula’s cheek twitched. That happened when she was excited. She rubbed the wooden surface of the picnic table with her fingertips.
“And then what?” she asked eagerly.
“Once he’s dead, I have a contact who will get us transferred out of here,” David said.
Paula knitted her brow. She looked around to see the other residents laughing as they finished up their meals.
“Don’t you think that guy is a bit high profile?”
“That’s the best part. There will be so much attention on that case, no one will pay attention to two addicts going to step up housing in the suburbs. From there, we’ll disappear,” David said. He suddenly felt a chill and wished he had his own sweatshirt to curl into.
“We can’t just do that now?” Paula’s voice was getting higher. The twitches pulsed like a slow metronome.
David’s scanned the backyard. No one had heard Paula. At least they gave no sign they did. One of the counselors, Peter, a mostly serious man in his late twenties, was in an animated conversation with one of the residents. They seemed absorbed in whatever he was saying and didn’t look in their direction.
“Sorry.” Paula put three fingers over her mouth and rested her chin on the table surface.
He shook his head and dashed away her apology with a flick of his hand. They were under pressure and the window to do the deed was rapidly closing.
“Molly and the elusive Dr. Chambers are likely to tell the court we’re not compliant. That means possible jail time. We’d be fucked after that.”
Paula considered it, nodding.
“So what’s for dinner this week?” Paula asked.
“What?” David responded, confused by the topic change.
“Well, we still have to decide on dinners. Can’t chat this long and not come up with something.” She blinked at him with childlike and innocent eyes.
He chuckled. When Paula was sober, she was sharp. She asked all the right questions too. The problem was that her intelligence also came with obsessive and addictive tendencies. She could have gone anywhere in the country to any university studying medicine or physics, but in the end, she got hung up on a boy who was into coke. The rest was history.
As the two discussed menu options in the descending gloom, Molly stood inside the screened back door with Vincent. A “Chambers” tag adorned the breast pocket of his suit jacket. His face was shrouded in shadows.
“How’s he?” Vincent asked, tipping up his chin in David’s direction.
“Good. He doesn’t remember anything. He’s just drawing parked cars and other nonsense,” Molly said with a wave of her hand.
“We’re set for Friday then?”
“Yes. He’s going to plan with Paula over the next few days. The others are already in place,” she said.
The residents sat talking in the light of golden hour and none would know this was a collection of strangers who’d become friends and each other’s support.
“You know, the thing about free will is as long as people believe they’ve made the choice, it doesn’t matter if you make them do it. The choice itself is enough,” Vincent said.
“Mmm. The fight breaks the programming,” Molly said flatly.
“Exactly. And we need to keep him programmed for a little while longer.”
Vincent let out a chortle. He could not have anticipated this going so well.
“The inmates are planning an escape that the warden has designed,” Vincent mused.
“You can’t make this stuff up,” Molly said shaking her head.
They stood in the darkness of the house looking out on the residents of 18th Avenue’s drug rehabilitation center. The six other members of the plan would soon be awakened to orchestrate a single performance. In a matter of days, a state Senator might be dead.
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