He pictured himself poised under an empty black sky, and over an infinite darkness. The air was warm and stale. It dried up the tears that had suddenly sprung to his eyes, leaving them gummy. When he began to shout for help, which he did after the tears had passed, the darkness ate his words easily.
Having yelled himself hoarse, he lay back on the lattice. He couldn’t help but imagine that beyond his frail bed, the darkness went on forever. It was absurd, of course. Nothing goes on forever, he said aloud.
Nothing goes on forever.
And yet, he’d never know. If he fell in the absolute blackness beneath him, he’d fall and fall and fall and not see the bottom of the shaft coming. Though he tried to think of brighter, more positive, images, his mind conjured his body cascading down this horrible shaft, with the bottom a foot from his hurtling body and his eyes not seeing it, his brain not predicting it.
Until he hit.
Would he see light as his head was dashed open on impact? Would he understand, in the moment that his body became offal, why he’d lived and died?
Then he thought: Quaid wouldn’t dare. “Wouldn’t dare!” he screeched. “Wouldn’t dare!”
The dark was a glutton for words. As soon as he’d yelled into it, it was as though he’d never made a sound.
And then another thought: a real baddie. Suppose Quaid had found this circular hell to put him in because it would never be found, never be investigated? Maybe he wanted to take his experiment to the limits.
To the limits. Death was at the limits. And wouldn’t that be the ultimate experiment for Quaid? Watching a man die: watching the fear of death, the mother lode of dread, approach. Sartre had written that no man could ever know his own death. But to know the deaths of others, intimately to watch the acrobatics that the mind would surely perform to avoid the bitter truth — that was a clue to death’s nature, wasn’t it? That might, in some small way, prepare a man for his own death. To live another’s dread vicariously was the safest, cleverest way to touch the beast.
Yes, he thought, Quaid might kill me; out of his own tenor.
Steve took a sour satisfaction in that thought. That Quaid, the impartial experimenter, the would-be educator, was obsessed with terrors because his own dread ran deepest.
That was why he had to watch others deal with their fears. He needed a solution, a way out for himself.
Thinking all this through took hours. In the darkness Steve’s mind was quick-silver, but uncontrollable. He found it difficult to keep one train of argument for very long. His thoughts were like fish, small, fast fish, wriggling out of his grasp as soon as he took a hold of them.
But underlying every twist of thought was the knowledge that he must out-play Quaid. That was certain. He must be calm; prove himself a useless subject for Quaid’s analysis.
The photographs of these hours showed Stephen lying with his eyes closed on the grid, with a slight frown on his face. Occasionally, paradoxically, a smile would flit across his lips. Sometimes it was impossible to know if he was sleeping or waking, thinking or dreaming.
Quaid waited.
Eventually Steve’s eyes began to flicker under his lids, the unmistakable sign of dreaming. It was time, while the subject slept, to turn the wheel of the rack —Steve woke with his hands cuffed together. He could see a bowl of water on a plate beside him; and a second bowl, full of luke-warm unsalted porridge, beside it. He ate and drank thankfully.
As he ate, two things registered. First, that the noise of his eating seemed very loud in his head; and second, that he felt a construction, a tightness, around his temples.
The photographs show Stephen clumsily reaching up to his head. A harness is strapped on to him, and locked in place. It clamps plugs deep into his ears, preventing any sound from getting in.
The photographs show puzzlement. Then anger. Then fear.
Steve was deaf.
All he could hear were the noises in his head. The clicking of his teeth. The slush and swallow of his palate. The sounds boomed between his ears like guns.