Silence. Yellow Tie and Blue Tie both watch me with pained expressions. Absurdly, I find myself glancing at Black Tie for guidance, but he continues to be little more than statuary.
“What do you want with me?” I finally snap, and it’s like pushing a skipping record needle back onto its groove. Their smiles blink on again.
“You’re like them,” Yellow Tie says, and slides her palm across the table again, not quite touching me. “But you’re different. You influence them.”
“No I don’t.”
“It’s widely known that you instigated this deviation,” Blue Tie says. “You caused these unknowns to appear.”
“I didn’t do anything. It just happened.”
Yellow Tie leans toward me, fixing me with a look of intimacy that suggests it’s time to brush aside the posturing and be real with each other. “We need your help,” she says softly. “We want everyone to be secure in their places. We want to eliminate confusion. But we’re finding it difficult to communicate the benefits to these non-standard individuals. They are unnaturally resistant to our help.”
Her face is about two feet from mine, eyes big and imploring. I notice that her makeup goes all the way down her neck and I wonder if it covers her whole body, bronzing her veiny breasts and smoothing her withered holes. A scent like overripe pineapple wafts up from beneath her collar.
“Corpses know what death smells like,” I say, staring her in the face. “Your cheap perfume can’t hide it.”
Her expression holds for a moment. Then it flashes into a smile. Black Tie steps around the table and shoves the wire into my neck.
“Unfortunately,” Blue Tie says as I convulse, “if you are unable to recognise either the rewards of working with us or the risks of refusing, coercion does become necessary at this time.”
“If at any time during this interview you would like to accept our offer,” Yellow Tie says, “simply say ‘yes.’”
Electric shock is a strange pain. At this voltage, very little physical damage is occurring, but my nerves still throw a tantrum. My muscles clench into knots, fire erupts in my joints, my bones tell my brain they’re being shattered, and my brain itself complains of hot coals and daggers. But when Black Tie removes the wire, there’s no harm done. No blood no foul, as they say in sports.
Fascinating.
The pitchmen watch me and wait. I sit in my chair, looking idly around the room. They frown, and Black Tie pokes the wire into my throat.
My neck tendons bulge. Bolts of pain flash up and down my spine and I swear I can feel my brain heating up like meat in a microwave. But I watch all this suffering from my hotel balcony, taking footage from afar with an expensive zoom lens. The pain is real. I’m aware that I’m in agony. But I just don’t care.
Black Tie removes the wire and Blue and Yellow watch me expectantly.
I shrug.
“This display of endurance is unnecessary,” Blue Tie says through his glued-on grin. “You cannot outlast your interview. It will continue until we reach one of two possible outcomes.”
“One outcome is you assisting us,” Yellow Tie says.
“The other is you dying.”
I shrug again. “Been dead before. It’s not so bad.”
Their smiles falter. I enjoy about three seconds of triumph, then the pitchmen cock their heads, listening. I hear a commotion through the wall behind me, a clatter of furniture, a muffled shout. The pitchmen regard me like cheery mannequins, wordless and motionless, as if waiting for something.
Through the wall comes a high shriek of pain mixed with indignant fury. “Fuck you! Fuck you, you dressed-up sacks of shit! You Botoxed babyfuckers!”
Julie.
I lurch against my bonds, trying to turn the chair around. “Julie! I’m here!”
Another scream, less rage this time, more pain. No words.
“What are … doing to her?” I growl at the pitchmen, all my hard-won fluency melting away in the heat of panic.
“We are making her a comparable offer,” Yellow Tie says.
“Does she share your ambivalence toward discomfort?” Blue Tie asks me.
Julie’s scream rises higher and higher and then breaks off, collapses into a sob.
My eyes squeeze shut. I see fireworks. I see fire. I see flames roaring from rooftops, kids running from schools. I see rapturous faces watching the flames, watching me, hands clapping, applauding, eyes glittering in the orange light, and a bottle in my hand, a flaming rag stuffed into it—
I see a cheap plywood casket descending into a hole in the ground, a preacher sprinkling platitudes into it like piss into a toilet while fools watch and pretend to weep—
I see a blond woman in a forest, bruised and bloody, eyes full of loathing as she presses my gun to her forehead—
I open my eyes.
Julie is tied to a chair by my side, our shoulders almost touching. She is looking at me with a kind of bleakly apologetic smile, breathing hard, her eyes red and wet.
“Hi, R,” she says.
Her face is spotted with small bruises. Her lower lip is cracked and puffy. On the side of her neck just above the clavicle, precisely my favourite place to kiss, the skin is mottled with the bluish brown of an electrical burn.
I feel the TV cables cutting into my ankles and forearms. I hear the chair creaking under the strain.
“Stop,” she says gently. “I’m okay. Don’t give them what they want.”
“Unfortunately,” Blue Tie says, “we do need to continue the interview at this time.”