Chapter Four

Simple white words appear on the black screen:

Subject: N. Vale.
Session: 2

The screen resolves to a quite stereotypical psychiatrist’s office. There is a chaise lounge against the wall beneath a wooden-framed window that looks out over an industrial park. Bookshelves line the other wall and are filled with leather-bound books and brass knickknacks. A leather wing-backed chair faces out from the bookshelves, flanked on one side by an old-world globe on one side and a combination floor lamp-side table on the other. A cigarette is smoldering in a ceramic ashtray on the table. The Persian rug underneath the chair has a noticeable faded area where the afternoon sun must hit it every day for who knows how long.

An unremarkable man sits in the leather wing-back chair, slouching a bit and thoughtfully rubbing the stubble on his face with his right hand. The sleeves of his white, button-up shirt are loosely rolled and the top few shirt buttons are undone, revealing a tank-style undershirt. His workman’s pants are blue and end in well-worn combat boots. His legs are crossed and his foot shakes nervously.

He has shaggy, brownish, medium length hair and his hazel eyes stare blankly into space as he speaks

“An animal knows it’s about to be slaughtered,” he begins. “Maybe not the week, or even the day before – but it knows. You take a hog you’ve raised its entire life out of the wallow – the only home it has ever known – and carry it to the slaughterhouse.” he says, wiping the sweat from his forehead with the back of his forearm.

“It starts to panic.”

His gaze wanders to the window, “You see it in its eyes first. They open a bit wider and it stares at you, boring a hole in you, pleading with you. Then it starts to shake and the panic call begins. A goddamned pig crying can break your heart.”

He shifts in the chair and uncrosses his legs.

“Because it knows. It knows that this person, this familiar being, is about to do something terribly wrong. I mean, what does an animal know besides life and death? It doesn’t know the concepts but it knows that it has do do anything it can to get out of that situation. It’ll scream and bite and whimper and sometimes it’ll try so hard to get away that it’ll knock itself out by trying to run through the wall. Anything to get away.”

“Have you ever had to put a dog down?” he asks.

“No,” says a voice from off screen.

“Figures.” He glanced at the cigarette, “If you grow up in the city, you’ve got a nice sterile vet’s office for that. Rover gets a nice nap, everyone cries and the bill comes 30 days later.”

He stands up and walks to the window. How tall is he? 5′8″? Six feet-even? It’s hard to tell, but he seems small and the hard shadows of the midday sun make him seem insignificant.

“Same as your food. You’ve got a supermarket to get your meat… It’s all very clean and impersonal. No fuss, no muss, nobody gets killed so you can have a Big Mac. But I’ve done it. I’ve killed a pig so I could eat. It’s not the same as hunting – you’ve shot that animal already and it’s dying when you cut its throat. It’s panicking, but not that panic that penetrates your soul and makes you hesitate. You finish the job and tell yourself you’re putting it out of its misery. Easier to think of it that way – easier to trick your mind than believe you’re taking life.”

He pulls a silver flask from his front pocket, unscrews the cap and takes a long drink before returning to the wing-backed chair.

“Now imagine instead of a pig, it’s a person. Maybe it’s your neighbor, or Bob from the office. Maybe it’s your daughter, doc. Do you have a daughter?”

“No.”

“Doesn’t matter. Imagine this person gets plucked from their mundane life of school or work or the corner bar and is dragged to some dark, remote place where no one will hear them scream. Imagine the panic. Imagine it. The screaming. The crying, the convulsions. And the waiting. God! The waiting! Can you see it? Can you imagine knowing that you’re about to be slaughtered like a pig? Can you?”

“I can’t,” says the voice.

“It’s got to be the worst feeling in the world,” says the man in the wing-back chair, “Worst. Ha! Is there a better word for that? Nothing worse than worst? Just doesn’t seem adequate. I know you talk to folks who are afraid of spiders or airplanes. Or people who get ‘panic attacks’ before they have to give that important presentation at work. But this is different. Something you can’t really wrap your head around till it happens to you – or till you’ve seen the body again and again. It’s tangible… Ever see a dead body, doc?” he asks.

“Yes, of course. I am a physician. We worked on human cadavers.” says the voice.

“Cadavers,” he laughs, “What an impersonal word, ‘cadaver’. I mean, I get it. You want to learn gross anatomy from cadaver 571 rather than from Joe the dead milkman who is survived by his wife Regina and two lovely daughters.” He laughed again, “Milkmen. There aren’t any milkmen anymore, are there? They’re all just cadavers now, I guess.”

He takes the last puff left from the cigarette and stubs it out in the ashtray. He slowly blows out the smoke and his eyes glaze over as if he’s remembering something far away.

“When you find a body that’s been slaughtered, you can imagine the panic. Or at least, I can. I feel it like a lead blanket pulling me down under the earth. It feels like a heart attack – if I could have one. Things go numb and your heart races a million miles an hour. And the sight of it. If you have a humane bone in your body you’ll puke your guts out. I still get dry heaves sometimes. You think I’d get used to seeing them. They look like those dried up mummies in Tibet – that is if there’s whole body left. A lot of times they’re completely consumed and you won’t find shit. I’m almost thankful when that happens. But when you do find them, their skin is stretched so tight you can’t close their eyes. The skin over the sockets gets peeled back as wide as can be. Might as well be a skull. Just a silent screaming skull that won’t shut up.”

“Yeah, you’d think you’d get used to it. After the 1000th old man or 16 year-old girl or Joe the milkman-cadaver, you think your heart would turn to stone. And some people might. I guess you gotta cope somehow. You get numb to it or maybe you’ll go crazy.”

He ignores the sweat that beads on his forehead this time.

“But not me. Every time I see one of those corpses, I can feel their panic almost as if it was happening to me. And there is nothing worse than that. Panic. Keep your fear and your dread. Panic beats ‘em every time. I can feel it because these people aren’t cadavers to me. I get to know all about them. They tell me who they are, who their families are, where they live and work. As if I need a more urgent reason to try and find ‘em before the slaughter. So it’s not cadaver 571, it’s Rebecca the high school student who got kidnapped on her way to a concert. Rebecca who was raped and roughed up before being killed. Rebecca who was going to be be a teacher or a fucking secretary or who cares, it was Rebecca !”

“So why do you continue?” says the voice.

“Who the hell else is going to do it? You gonna send in some green rookie with 8 weeks of training who’s all red-white-and-blue-god-bless-America? Great idea. Not enough dead kids already, so send in the new recruits – they’re too dumb to know better anyway. Or at least too ignorant. Nah, it has to be me. Who else knows about the panic? Who else can feel that and still wake up every day?”

He leans forward in the chair and puts his head in his hands.

“Those things – those motherfuckers,” he pauses, “They enjoy it when Rebecca or Cadaver Joe panic. It’s almost as delicious as the blood to them. Makes sense, I guess. What else are you going to do with eternity? After 100 years living in a shadow, you want to feel everything at maximum volume. So that’s why it’s hard, doc. It’s hard because I know how they feel too. And I’m just like them in so many damn ways.”

For the first time, the man in the wing-back chair’s voice cracks.

“What if I become them? I hate – hate the panic. It makes me want to crawl out of my own skin, but I need it, too. If I don’t feel it like that then I’m them. I’ll become them.”

“Fear is a big motivator, Mr. Vale.” says the voice.

The man in the wing-back chair – Mr. Vale – looks up towards the disembodied voice. He smiles and laughs bitterly, “What? That’s what you have to say after all of that?” He’s shouting now, “Pat on the back, here’s your paycheck, keep your chin up, don’t lose the fear, by the way here’s another case, good luck?”

“Mr. Vale, I don’t think there’s any need-”

With superhuman speed, Mr Vale leaps out of the chair and grabs the camera, shouting into the lens, “Is that the whole point of this, Camp? ‘Fear is a big motivator?’” he laughs a shuddering, exhausted laugh. “I’d have felt a hell of a lot less violated if you just told me to suck it up and drive on. I hope this camera was expensive…”

The scene tumbles as the camera is hurled across the room and crashes through the window.

The screen returns to black.