Door 5:  The interrogation, during which things become less clear

“Let’s go over this again, shall we?” His tone is of the sort you’d hear in idle chit-chat, small-talk on a train between two strangers, perhaps, but with an undertone of savage, uncontrollable violence lying just beneath the surface.

Xie listens as if trying to identify a bird in the woods that’s fallen silent. She’s restrained to the chair she’s sitting in, a simple wooden affair of the sort you’d find in old schoolrooms, and there’s a kind of electrical apparatus hovering about her head like an elaborate coiffure with multi-colored leads attached to her nipples and fingerpads running off somewhere she can’t follow with her eyes, her head, as it were, immobilized by a high, stiff leather collar; she’s naked, too, of course. The entire effect is hieratical, Egyptian. The general mood in the room, otherwise, is relatively normal.

Sitting across from her, in plaid shirtsleeves and loosened tie, the man cocks his head at a friendly angle, as if this were a blind date at Starbucks and he were trying to be genial, feigning interest in her thoughts, when all he really wanted to do is get laid. He’s an ordinary-looking man, mid-aged, balding, as is customary in these situations, long sideburns, and a five-o-clock shadow despite recent shaving. Xie finds herself puzzling over what must be the resemblance of this man, on some level, to herself, for otherwise, she knows all to well, she wouldn’t be subjected to this unwelcome interview.

Meanwhile, he is waiting, with mock patience, for an answer, but Xie hasn’t properly heard the question. She has instead fallen inexplicably asleep and been dreaming of mass graves, a dozen hills in the green summertime, crowded with angels, crosses, and obelisks carved from stone, each bearing a word of a tongue no longer spoken.

“So many are the dead, so many the places to which they will never return, and the world we pass through nothing but their absence”

This line, or one very similar, speaks itself inside Xie’s mind and at first she thinks it’s the man speaking, but it’s not, he’s saying something else entirely, and in the act of confirming this, she finds herself re-focusing her attention on him, but only briefly.

He repeats his question and although the words are not spoken in a language unfamiliar to Xie, she fails to understand all the same, as if the syntax has been chosen with a deliberate disregard of the normative rules of grammar, intentionally garbled, in other words, to release some other forbidden shadow meaning that our ordinary everyday language keeps carefully concealed.

He has, Xie can’t help but notice, tufts of black hair growing on the tops of each thick finger.

The hum of bees.

 Xie, wonders: Are the wires attached to her nipples, her fingerpads, and now, she realizes, to probes inside her vagina and anus, as well as needled at strategic points along her vertebrae, and god only knew where else, and, of course, let’s not forget the multilayered contraption on her head—are these the source of the bee-hum. Are they devices recording or transmitting?

If neither, what then?

They brought her to this room for observation after she was found wandering in a restricted zone, dazed and incoherent, unable to produce her papers, or even to recall her name. She offered no reason for her presence in the forbidden sector, nor any resistance upon detainment, but remained, for the most part, mute, when questioned by the soldiers on the scene, giving rise to speculation that she might be an escaped patient from a nearby ward for the experimental treatment of sexual autistics that had been destroyed in a recent terrorist bombing.

This, anyway, is what they tell her. According to the records, of the forty-three patients originally assigned to the ward, nineteen had been killed or wounded in the attack, eleven had already been recaptured, and the rest were still unaccounted for.

Xie was one of the rest. One of the unaccounted for. As per always.

She was placed under provisional arrest, held without charges, pending interrogation, this being the law of the land for undocumented refugees as per Executive Emergency Order No. 7717 instituted immediately after the heinous, unforgettable, needless to say, unforgiveable incidents of fifteen April. She was taken back to headquarters where she’d been held in a 3x5 cell in utter isolation for an indeterminate period of time under twenty-four hour observation. But who was observing and what they were looking for remains unknown. What seems clear from the subsequent questioning, which Xie realizes is happening even now as she recounts these fragmented false memories, is that whatever whomever has been looking for…it has not been found.

They must be looking for someone else, she thinks; it must be a case of mistaken identity. It makes no sense otherwise what this balding, mid-aged man with the glistening black hairs on the backs of his knobby knuckles is asking, asking repeatedly, in a tone that reminds one of casual chit-chat but with an undertone of savage, uncontrollable violence.

Perhaps it really is the humming of the bees in her head, or, on second-thought, they might be flies, that is distorting his words.

She only catches sketchy fragments of his question, like a poor radio transmission from somewhere that’s been largely destroyed. Piecing it together as best she can, filling in the blanks, the question seems to go something like this, “Why is it that you don’t love me?”

The room is shaken by distant tremors, like seismic shocks, as if miles above ground and far away, the bombs are falling again, but that might be wholly imaginary, some effect they are producing within her own physiognomy to induce the deep psychological terror that she is under attack from an enemy common to us all.

This kind of thing is common: the border between inside and outside in these Final Days has grown so porous, anything can get through.

Us? Who’s that? There is no “us.” From the start, “US” was nothing but a fantasy. Do they think she still believes in “us?”

She knows enough not to disabuse them of their misperception. Let them think she still believes. It’s safer for her that way.

Meantime Xie says nothing, what can she say? Fact is, she’s lost interest once again. The man, the inspector, or whatever he is leans forward and whispers in her ear, perhaps trying to make himself heard above the humming or buzzing he must know fills her head, but what he says makes almost as little sense as what he said previously, which Xie has already lost in a blizzard of static and meaningless signals; in fact, what he says now might even be identical, or at least, indistinguishable, to what he said before.

In either or any eventuality, the words act as a hypnotic trigger or prompt the start of a session of guided imagery and Xie sees a colonnade of statues where she is replicated ad infinitum in stone all the way to the vanishing point and yet she cannot locate the seat of her consciousness anywhere in this scene. It is thus from some theoretically omniscient vantage point that she sees the men wandering down the endless central gallery, like dreamers in an x-rated museum, touching, as lepers might, her stone tits, her stone ass, her stone cunt.

She feels nothing, nothing she feels, and there is no rain, but an intermittent and concussive thunder beyond the horizon like the bombing of a distant city and a dull red flutter of soundless light.

And there, illuminated along the perfect and insensate thigh, only a millimeter in length, almost invisible, is a tiny crack, like the trace of a long dried tear.

Or love stain.