Big Cat held court in the makeshift cafeteria. He’d rolled his white cuffs over his bulging forearms to reveal the tattoo of a pig’s head skewered atop a traffic cone. He’d left his sport coat in the other room; everyone else, including the Instrument, wore uniform.
“We were dispatched to Teraa Valley to figure out why our regional allies kept losing their goats,” said Big Cat. “‘Goats have gone missing on an unprecedented scale.’ That’s language from the brief. An Afghan can live off a goat until the goat meets God, so this was something of a deal.”
Big Cat ate his taquito like he was smoking a cigar. The Instrument, despite his size, used a knife and fork. They were two of fifteen. Seven were special forces guys on deck for security. The other six were intelligence.
“So, we arrive and put locals to the Q. Incorporate ourselves. Waste time and funds to learn nada, but, hey, the view of the mountains from the valley is unreal. Truly spectacular—made you wonder all kinds of big questions. Well, one morning I go outside to take in the dawn, and wouldn’t you know it, the river is red. I mean, red as red. Crimson.”
Big Cat slugged his OJ. “Runoff. Rumor says it’s from the wars, right? All the blood having collected in the soil.”
Everyone hung on Big Cat’s tale. Everyone except the Instrument, partly because he’d heard this one before and partly because his hands were sore. He pushed his plate away and hefted the ice bucket onto the table.
“There’s this guy next to the river and he’s just red as a tomato. I figured he’d been swimming, at first, until I see him jump into the water and wash the red off. I ask an MP and it turns out these Teraa Valley Afghans practice voodoo, or some such. They believe you become invisible if you cover yourself in the blood of whatever you’ve slain.”
Big Cat overturned his empty OJ glass to capture a spent napkin.
“Well, I could sure see him,” said Big Cat.
Hoots and guffaws. Hard to blame them for brown-nosing—Big Cat had three stars, and everyone figured him for a Joint Chief in six years or less.
Big Cat finished the taquito. He stood and walked toward the door. The door guards jumped to attention.
“On and on,” said Big Cat. The guards plugged in dual codes and turned twin keys. The Instrument removed his hands from the ice bath. He dried them with a sheaf of brown napkins. Then he joined Big Cat. The baker’s dozen fell in behind.
“How you doing, warrior?” Big Cat had donned his sunglasses. Glare from the overhead halogens made the man into an inscrutable spotlight.
The Instrument shrugged. “Serviceable.”
“This is important work, son. Work? More like craft, am I right? We are creatures of will as much or more than it is…” The tunnel was nearly a quarter mile long, and the Instrument zoned out as Big Cat repeated his usual themes: will plus anonymity equals mastery over any mind, even one so foreign.
“…if it has a brain, such as any human conceives of the organ,” finished Big Cat.
Anonymity was fine for the Instrument. He practiced self-anonymity beyond their cryptonyms: while he did this work, he did not think of himself by his birth name. Because he was not himself. He was only the hands of a larger, crueler creature.
But he did have one question before they went back in. Ahead, the vault doors and the two guards outside. “Did you ever figure out about the goats?”
“Why do you think the river was red? Sure wasn’t Oklahoma red dirt. The goats got sacrificed.”
“What for?”
Big Cat flashed his black badge. The Instrument did the same. One guard traced them with silver wands. He didn’t have the courage to ask what they were being frisked for and he probably wouldn’t understand if they told him. The other guard pressed a button and the vault handle spun at dangerous speed.
“Curses,” said Big Cat. “Lots and lots of curses.”
“On who?” His brow moistened and he realized that he’d left his sweat band in the lunchroom. Without it he’d get an eyelid rash. Not like him, to forget. Chalk it up to heavy hours.
“On us, son. The curses were to make us leave.”
The doors opened.
“Pin it,” said Big Cat. They walked backwards into the room. Even with all the modifications you couldn’t mistake it for anything but a recording studio. Rumor had it Donovan had recorded a lost album here. A companion piece to Barabajagal titled Lemuria. Only ever released in the US.
The baker’s dozen couldn’t be allowed inside—too many variables—and the Instrument watched the vault door close upon their eager, after-shaved faces. One winked at him.
He did not turn, yet, but began his mental buttressing. First, he completed several complex equations which mathematically proved his attachment to a shared reality—this had taken six weeks and three different mathematics professors. Next, he recited the lyrics to Don McLean’s “American Pie” while making sure to fully consider the cultural and thematic implications of every line. Finally, he took a slow sniff of the clump of grass he kept in a leather pouch around his neck. The leather smelled like home and nested in the grass were the corpses of a grasshopper and two pill bugs, as well as a flat river-stone and a quartz crystal. The psychologist had insisted he gather objects which made him feel nostalgic.
Big Cat said, “Shall we?”
By now the baker’s dozen would have filed into the control room. It was strange to think of their perspective of the proceedings. The Instrument did not allow himself to wish he were in the booth. Hands did not wish, they only worked.
And with those hands he fitted the elastic strap of welding goggles behind his head, settled the eyecups against his brow.
A sign blinked on:
RECORDING.
He turned around.
Beneath a hanging microphone that Donovan may very well have sung into, Watergirl sat with the prisoner.
“You should really go eat,” said Big Cat.
“I’m not hungry,” said Watergirl.
She got up and dragged the stool away. With help of a gaff, she unhooked three of the prisoner’s restraints, these stretching taut from its body to hooks in the ceiling. Watergirl did this efficiently even if her lip curled. Disgusted with the prisoner, or the treatment? She was the first Watergirl he’d worked with these last weeks. Previous had been two Waterboys. The first had been moved to a softer posting and the other had gone catatonic on the floor not a foot away from where he stood right now.
Watergirl’s stomach rumbled. The prisoner blinkered its lights. An odd sensation came from behind the Instrument’s eyebrow.
Big Cat itched his forehead. “Is it talking to us? What’s it saying?”
“We think so. And we don’t know,” said Watergirl.
Big Cat nodded at the Instrument. The Instrument slapped the prisoner upside its flank: a sensation like hitting pizza dough if the dough was made of vinyl siding.
The prisoner righted itself before it hit the ground. The Instrument’s hand sizzled. He’d forgotten the gloves, which he’d purchased at Ace Hardware since the company gloves gave him a rash around his wrists. He withdrew them from his back pocket; must be properly frazzled not to have slipped them on.
Watergirl beckoned both he and Big Cat closer. She spoke quietly, as if that mattered.
“She’s been still since you left, yesterday,” said Watergirl. “I’ve never seen her so sedentary.”
“It,” corrected Big Cat.
“Ok.” She looked straight at Big Cat. “Sir.”
“Let’s get a move on,” said Big Cat.
“Remember to have that hand looked at,” she told the Instrument.
“Yes ma’am,” he said. That she was concerned and Big Cat wasn’t came as no surprise.
“Ok,” she said. She looked at her watch. “Let’s call it 1302. Interrogation reconvenes at 1302. Room temperature is 86 degrees Fahrenheit. Interrogators have made requisite preparations.”
Big Cat slumped into the director’s chair and pointed at the prisoner. The Instrument, now gloved, put the hurt on for half a minute. From the prisoner’s upper orifice—the big one, the one you could see easiest—ran a thick stream of what he supposed was blood. Maybe bile or phlegm. There was no name for it.
Watergirl made a note on her notepad. “We will proceed again on Query 12.”
“Did you or your colleagues come to Earth in an attempt to restore the eyesight of one William Rash?” Big Cat asked.
Nothing. No pressure behind the eyebrows, no crawling sensation up the lower back. Not even a spurt of its side-orifice.
Watergirl made another note. The Instrument slammed his knee into what he thought the prisoner’s front—it had no obvious orientation. It didn’t react to the blow. However, gray shadows exuded where the hooks pierced its body, as if breaking its flesh had released exotic and befouling indicators of sensation that he could simply not understand.
“Let’s move on,” said Big Cat. “Sometimes when you aren’t getting what you want, it’s best to start somewhere else. Keep that in mind.”
“Sound pedagogy, sir,” said Watergirl.
Big Cat crossed to the table. From beneath it he removed a suitcase.
“Are you, or do you scheme to be, ‘the music in a house of whispers?” he asked.
A sensation licked down the Instrument’s face, as if beneath the skin.
“We’ve come to think of that response as a negation, sir,” said Watergirl.
Big Cat unzipped his suitcase. “Are you, or do you scheme to be, ‘the music in a house of whispers’?”
The same sensation.
Powers above supposed that the prisoner’s body had evolved past physical sensation into metaphysical “touch.” Big Cat often expounded a theory that the prisoner’s body was not a product of natural evolution, at all, but of genetic modification for space flight. The Instrument could not imagine the cockpit which would take such a frame, but then again, nobody was asking him. Frankly, he wondered if the prisoner had even come from outer space. Technically, they still weren’t sure it was “alive.”
“No?” Big Cat removed a tattoo gun from the suitcase. “You sure?” He gestured vaguely at the Instrument.
The Instrument worked.
After, another of the hooks had come out of the prisoner’s body. Grey shadows unfurled from the heart of the wounded silhouette, swirling to a lilting whistle that he smelled more than heard, felt more than saw.
“We’re gonna need a decontamination in here, after,” said Big Cat.
“Noted at 1330.”
The prisoner had flipped half over. It still levitated, though. Its inner lights made an amber storm.
Big Cat’s sunglasses glowed in the reflection. He took them off. They dangled from his neck by a golden chain. “We are going off-book. Note it.”
Watergirl licked the end of her pen. “Decision made to abandon pre-selected questions. Extemporaneous interrogation beginning at 1332.”
“Y’all’s people get piercings? If you were us, you would. You’re all folds and swoops and ridges. And what about tattoos? I tattoo. As a hobby. Started after I went to this this party at an art gallery. Miley Cyrus was giving tattoos in the back. It sparked me, you know?”
Big Cat ran a wet wipe all over the tattoo gun. He set out several cartridges: yellow, red, green.
“Shit, I’m sorry. You probably don’t know Miley Cyrus. She’s a popstar. You all have that on Planet X, or whatever? You must have music.”
The prisoner wasn’t answering.
“This is the one I got from Miley.” Big Cat rolled up his pant leg to reveal a Foghorn Leghorn tattoo on his thigh. “The other option was a tugboat.”
“Get the hooks set,” Big Cat told the Instrument.
Watergirl helped. Smoke crawled from the fresh holes. They drew the lines until the prisoner was suspended as surely as a talisman in a dreamcatcher. Sensation came, then, crawling down his brain stem.
“Ah, you don’t like this, do you? Well, growth comes from stress.” Big Cat plugged the tattoo gun into an orange extension cord.
“I see tattoos as a spiritual healing. They’re a part of my purpose. They can answer questions that nobody knows to ask.”
Watergirl made a note.
Big Cat pumped the floor pedal. His tattoo gun buzzed to life. He set the needle into the open top of the green cartridge.
“You know how tattooing works? Magnetism, basically, and superfast needles. I’m going to be entering your body at about 33 pokes per second.” He set the jumping tattoo gun against the swirling expanse.
And down the Instrument’s brainstem poured cold oil. Pain? He did not know. But he detested it, and he knew that he only felt the penumbra of what the prisoner was feeling in full eclipse.
Big Cat’s gun beat the devil’s tattoo. He sang under his breath. Donovan, thought the Instrument, something about what green and yellow and red were the color of. Those gray billows cascaded from the prisoner’s body until the fog engulfed the RECORDING sign, until it was as loud in the studio as it was dark and potent.
Big Cat barked: “Goggles down.”
The Instrument complied. Not before he caught a glimpse, though, of what came from inside. An alien light refracting a black shape. A moon? Some celestial body? Was it smoke or a corridor, a pathway? A feeling or a location? He was terrified, suddenly, that there was no difference, and then terrified because he did not know why this so unmoored him.
Then it was over. The prisoner slumped; only the hooks kept it aloft. Facing them, half-hidden in folds, the fresh tattoo of a mushroom. Or maybe a big tree with both canopy and root system.
“I’m still learning,” said Big Cat. “Let’s take five.”
“Union rules dictate an hour-long break, if we break,” said Watergirl. “We’ll reconvene at 1447.”
“You know what, screw this. I’m done for the day. Let’s pick it up on Monday.”
“Yes sir,” said Watergirl. She checked her watch. “Session completed at 1348.”
They filed out, Big Cat first, and at the threshold the Instrument turned because a strange sensation went up his calf.
The prisoner had stopped smoking. It levitated, as before, several of the hooks hanging loose. Its tattoo swirled along its skin. Green ink slithered like water droplets caught between glass and wood. No ink, it seemed, could hold shape on a canvas so magnificent.
“Great,” said Big Cat. “Another day of progress.”
The vault doors clanged shut. The Instrument watched Watergirl drop the notepad into the dead slot. A constant fire burned back there.
“What a day,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. He peeled off his gloves. Dead slot for them too.
They walked together down the tunnel. Far ahead, he could hear Big Cat explaining something animatedly to the baker’s dozen. He couldn’t make out the details.
“Do something fun tonight,” Watergirl told him. “Treat yourself.”
“Sure,” said the Instrument.
