Raised in Captivity Read online

  “What can you tell me on-the-record? Anything?”

  “Yes,” said McMullin. “We’ve created an investigative task force for the singular purpose of profiling an unknown person. The person is a white male who wears sunglasses and carries a cat. Citizens should not interact with the cat. The suspect may be exposing victims to an infection, but the infection is traditionally harmless. His reason for doing this is unknown.”

  “Can I explain why the situation is so unusual?”

  “Make it vague,” said McMullin. “Don’t say the virus has been medically mutated. And don’t describe the cat in detail. Don’t marginalize orange cats.”

  Lola said she couldn’t write a story without more information, which wasn’t true. McMullin said he’d already told her more than he should have, which also wasn’t true. Lola begged for one on-the-record detail about how the parasite had been altered. McMullin said, “What parasite?” Lola asked if she could verify any of the off-the-record information through other sources. McMullin told her she could try as long as she didn’t mention his name, even though everyone would immediately know she’d received the information from him. It was the same dance they always did.

  “I have to go,” said Lola. “I have to write this up and then get home to feed my cats.”

  “How many cats do you have?” asked McMullin.

  “Six,” she said.

  “Oh, wonderful. I hear the cafeteria in the sanitarium is underrated.”

  “Go fuck yourself in the throat,” she replied, and they both smiled.

  McMullin left the bar before it got dark. As he walked to the train station, he could see the cherry blossoms in the distance, just starting to bloom. The colors made him wince. Soon the afternoons would be hot. The days would grow humid and miserable. Men would wear khaki shorts. Women would wear tank tops. Exposed skin would be everywhere, and there was nothing he could do about it. The city was a dangerous place.

  Experience Music Project

  How many times do I have to repeat this? I’m only going to tell you the exact same thing I told the other two guys, which is the same thing I told the woman who contacted me originally. I don’t understand what my role in this is supposed to be. I’m cooperating. I’m trying to be cooperative. I will continue to cooperate. But this is the last time I’m explaining what I’ve already explained. You seem pretty chill, and those other two guys were lowkey chill, and that original woman was super chill. I’m trying to be reasonable here. But I still don’t get it. I still don’t understand the nature of the question.

  Like I keep saying: I go to work at noon, every day except Monday and Tuesday. I get off around nine, and I’m usually home by nine-thirty. I do the same thing every night: I get home, I check my email, I change my clothes, and then I take the fire escape up to the roof. I smoke for maybe ten minutes. I take the elevator back down to the lobby and cross the street to the bodega. This is the bodega in question, the one on Smith Street, next to the CVS. I’d never even heard of the word bodega until I moved here. We always called them gas stations, but I suppose these places don’t sell gas. So I get it. I understand. Words matter. Since the incident, I’ve started going to the other bodega, the one with the orange cat, way over on Court Street. But that place isn’t as good. They don’t carry the products I like. No Pepsi products. Only Coke.

  But like I keep saying: Back at the place on Smith, there were three different people. Three employees. Sometimes they worked together, but that was rare. Only on Thanksgiving and maybe Christmas Eve. It was typically just one of the three, on some sort of revolving schedule I could never anticipate. There was the guy whose name I couldn’t pronounce, the guy who told me I could call him “Jon.” There was also the less friendly guy whose name I couldn’t pronounce, who was taller and more handsome. And then there was a kid, a teenager, who was younger and whose name I didn’t know at all. And like I keep telling you: I don’t know what their nationality was, although I assume you people must know, and it’s kind of fucked up you won’t tell me now, instead of constantly asking me what country they’re from and then acting all suspicious when I say I have no idea. I’m bad with accents and I try not to make assumptions. It seems racist to guess who people are. But I don’t see why that matters, anyway. If you call me in here again, I want a lawyer. I’ve seen that episode of Frontline about forced confessions. Don’t talk to me like I’m a person of interest. I’m not a person of interest. I’m not interesting. All I can tell you is that I sort of knew these three guys, in the sense that I recognized their faces and they recognized mine. I knew Jon the most, because he was talkative. But I didn’t know him know him. You know? I don’t know where he lived or anything about his life. We only talked about one thing, which is the same thing you keep asking about. I’m running out of ways to explain this.

  But, okay, fine. Here we go again.

  There was a portable stereo system, above the cigarette rack. It looked like a model from the 1980s, except it was brand-new, like it was just out of the box. Pristine. At first, whenever I came into the store, I assumed one of the speakers was blown, because every song I’d hear sounded slightly different than the way I remembered hearing it before, even if the song itself was familiar. Every time I went in there, I’d have this foreign experience with a song I’d heard a thousand times before, particularly when Jon was working, because he only listened to the classic rock station. I’d hear “Hey Nineteen” and it would seem like a totally new song to me. But like I said, I’d just been smoking on the roof, so I didn’t always trust my ears. You know what I mean? The first woman told me I could be honest about that. Eventually, I ask Jon about the stereo. I ask if the woofer is busted or if the EQ is set up weird. And he was like, “Oh no, this is just a radio from back home.” Here again—I don’t know what home he was referring to or where that home was or is, and I didn’t ask, since he seemed to act like this was supposed to be obvious. I also didn’t care. I don’t care about those kinds of details. I was more interested in the stereo than the person. This went on for—I don’t know, six months? Nine months? Time is different in the city.

  Jon was a dude I liked. A nice, normal dude. Big smile, every time I walked in the door. The fact that I couldn’t pronounce his name didn’t matter to either of us. He was really into Zeppelin and Cactus and ZZ Top, but his obsession was bands named after geographic locations—Boston, Kansas, Asia, Brownsville Station. He was really into the first Missouri album, which surprised me. But the other guy, the taller handsome guy—he was a difficult kind of dude. He was a little more . . . how would you say it . . . aloof. Whenever he was working, he only played the Top 40 station, so it would be, like, Beyoncé and Katy Perry and shit that seemed like dance music. Woman singers. Justin Bieber, probably. The third employee, the youngish kid—he only played rap, and he played it loud. Aggressive rap, like that woman who used to be a stripper and that little nutcase who had all the heart attacks. He played that shit way louder than necessary, this being a place of business. But it sounded kickass in there, even when the music sucked. You’d get some heavy reverb off the Doritos bags.

  Now, I know this next part is what you people are obsessed with, so I’ll try to be as straightforward as possible: Last Friday, I go in there when Jon is working, and the song on the stereo is “25 or 6 to 4” by Chicago, which of course Jon loves. We talk a little about the way the drums were recorded. I know a lot about drums, for a nondrummer. And then, just to sort of kill time and keep the conversation going, I mention how the taller employee, the handsome aloof guy, always reminded me of the singer from Depeche Mode, and that he was always playing techno. This wasn’t exactly true, because techno is never on the radio and I’m not totally sure what the singer from Depeche Mode even looks like anymore. But that was what I said. And Jon laughed real hard at that. Like, maybe too hard, in retrospect. It wasn’t like what I said was particularly funny. But he laughs and he laughs, and I go home. No big whoop. Bu
t then the next night, I’m back in the store, and now the handsome aloof dude is behind the counter, and I notice he’s listening to an Imagine Dragons cover of Third Eye Blind, and I stupidly mention the conversation from the previous evening. I stupidly mention the conversation I’d had with Jon, and how this conversation had made Jon laugh. Which clearly annoys him. Maybe it annoys him too much, in retrospect. I try to mend the fence. I say something like, “Oh, don’t overreact. Jon just values authenticity and auteurship. He sees traditional rock ’n’ roll as the governing state of popular music. His dialectic spectrum does not engage with alternative canons that hope to subvert the white heteronormative view of culture.” Honestly, I was just trying to get out of there. Like I said—I barely know the guy.

  So then on Sunday, I go in the bodega again, and now it’s the third guy working. The teenage rap guy. And it’s loud as hell in there, but—for the first time ever—the kid turns down the volume as I pay for my beverage. This was the first and last time we ever spoke. He says to me, “What the fuck were you telling my brother the other night?” And I was like, “Your brother? Who’s your brother?” We go back and forth a bit, and I realize all three of these dudes are related. They’re all brothers. All three of them. So I say something dismissive, something along the lines of “I was just telling your brother that his sonic aesthetics latently promote inclusion and recognize intersectionality, and that he dexterously sees through the institutionalized facade that dictates musicians must play their own instruments and write their own material in order to galvanize relevancy.” He seemed to dig what I was saying, but he didn’t say much in response. He nodded, gave me my change, and jacked the volume back up. So I went home.

  That’s the whole story.

  That’s the extent of what I know.

  You all seem to act like there’s something obvious here I’m not telling you. If there is, it’s not obvious to me. Sometimes two plus two equals five. The reason I always went in there was to get a can of Mountain Dew. Mountain Dew, to me, is delicious. It’s the single-best beverage there is, and I can’t understand people who don’t love it. But you know what’s wild? You know what I consider to be the single-worst beverage on earth? Diet Mountain Dew. You couldn’t pay me to drink that dog piss. So you tell me: How is this possible? How can the relationship between two things that are supposed to be almost identical be so different? How can two things that are supposed to be interchangeable exist on opposite polarities? There’s no answer, so why ask the question? It’s the same thing with this incident. You’re talking to the wrong guy about the wrong thing.

  I saw the police tape when I tried to get in there Monday afternoon. And like I told the original woman for her original report, I have no clue how anyone could beat somebody to death with a portable stereo. This shit is above my pay grade. I wanted a twelve-ounce can of Mountain Dew. That’s it. This is not my affair. But will you at least tell me who got killed? I think I deserve to know.

  Pain Is a Concept by Which We Measure Our God

  The doctor sits behind a desk, speaking to a man and a woman. The conversation is happening in a world that looks and feels identical to our own, with the same history and the same mechanics. But this world is not our world. This world is better.

  They are discussing the Procedure.

  “The question is not whether or not you should do this,” the doctor says. “The question is mostly about whether or not your insurance covers the implant and how you want it to function. At this point, it’s hard to justify not doing this, at least in some limited capacity, particularly if you have coverage for both the insertion and the removal. In the past, some plans only covered the front end, so the removal was out-of-pocket. But that’s become less and less common, and it’s actually not that expensive, anyway. I would check with your HR department, just to make sure.”

  “We’re covered and we want to do it,” said the woman. “I’ve been reading about this for a long time, way before I was pregnant. We both understand the technology, more or less. What we don’t know is the normal way to do this. Like, how are most other people doing it?”

  “That’s a loaded question. There is no normal,” said the doctor. He slid open the drawer of his desk and pulled out two spiked silver spheres, each one smaller than the head of pin. He held one between his thumb and index finger. “These are the most basic implants,” he said. “We go in through the ear and plug it into the dorsal posterior insula. With adults, the process is easy. Fifteen minutes. Your dentist could probably do it. It’s trickier on a newborn, but not by much. And once both individuals have the implant, it works almost instantly. You can’t jump all the pain, but you can jump most of it. Ninety percent at an absolute minimum. The average transfer is around ninety-seven percent. Ninety-seven percent is a reasonable expectation.”

  “What happens to the other three percent?” the man asked.

  “Pain, as your wife has probably read, isn’t like someone pressing a button inside your brain,” the doctor explained. “It’s not that contained. It’s not that isolated. Pain is a ghost. It bleeds into everything. So the source patient will still feel something. There’s a sensation and some disorientation. The source patient ingests the extraneous three percent. Nothing that hurts, though.”

  The man had a second question he didn’t know how to ask. He tried anyway.

  “You know, I saw this British TV show on Netflix,” he began. But the doctor cut him off.

  “It’s not like that,” the doctor said. “I know what you’re going to ask, and it’s not like that at all. So many people have asked me that question that I finally went back and watched the show you’re referring to, which I enjoyed. But this will be nothing like that. This is not a way to share pain. This is a way to move pain from one host to another. And the recipient won’t feel the same specific pain the source generates. It’s not like your wife will experience pain in her cervix and you’ll experience the same level of pain in your penis. We distribute the pain evenly throughout your whole body, in order to mitigate the impact. For example, let’s say you decide to do this for the birth only, which is what most people—”

  “Yes,” interrupted the woman. “Explain how that works.”

  “Of course,” said the doctor. “Once you’re full-term, we implant the transmitter into your insula. We generally don’t implant the receptor into your partner until the labor starts, since it’s logistically helpful for the woman to feel the onset of her contractions. Like I said, the insertion is a fifteen-minute procedure. We can do it in the ER if necessary. Once the receptor is secure and the connection is locked, the pain flows straight across the bow. Any sensation the source contextualizes as discomfort automatically migrates to the recipient, as long as they’re on the same Wi-Fi network. No need for an epidural. No need for opiates. The mother will feel the fetus sliding through the birth canal, but that transition won’t be remotely excruciating. One woman told me it felt like swallowing gelatin in reverse. The recipient, of course, will feel something quite different. The cliché is that it’s like being tased from the inside out. Most partners choose to be sedated for the process. Some like to sit in a warm bath and drink beer or wine, which we allow. But we do require that the recipient remain conscious, for the safety of all involved parties.”

  “What could go wrong?” asked the man. “Why would it be unsafe for me to be unconscious?”

  “He’s just being cautious,” said the woman. “He’s just telling us what he has to tell us, because he’s a doctor. This is not dangerous. Right? It’s been widely reported that this procedure is not dangerous. Right? Nothing ever goes wrong.”

  “That’s basically true,” said the doctor. “There’s never been a fatality or a successful malpractice lawsuit. There’s always a minuscule possibility of circulatory shock. But even if that were to happen, it would be happening inside a hospital. It couldn’t happen in a better place.”

  “We’re doin
g this,” said the woman. “We’ve made our decision.”

  “Excellent,” said the doctor. “I will get the initial paperwork started and we can talk about the specifics in our next visit. Give me ten minutes to print and collate the copies. In the meantime, read this brochure and see if you have any questions before moving forward. Read the back page first, and pay special attention to the third point and the last point.”

  The doctor handed the couple a five-page pamphlet and left the room. The image on the front was a cartoon of two rabbits—one smiling and pregnant and one screaming and pulling its ears. The man grabbed the document from his wife’s hands and immediately flipped it over.

  NATAL PAIN MIGRATION:

  SIX THINGS TO CONSIDER BEFORE YOU PROCEED

  This is a shared responsibility. Do not agree to this exchange unless both parties are comfortable with the intensity of the experience.

  Not all “pain” is pain. Migration is a technological process, but also an intellectual process. The transfer of sensation only occurs if the source actively perceives that sensation as negative and categorizes it within her own abstract definition of what constitutes “pain.” If, for example, the source needs to urinate, the recipient will (probably) not feel that mild discomfort; if, however, the source chooses not to empty her bladder for four or five hours, the discomfort will (almost certainly) cross over to the recipient.

  Pain is not gender specific. Most studies suggest that males have a higher tolerance for pain than females. This, however, does not apply to all couples. It is unwise to transfer negative feelings from a woman with a high threshold of pain into the body of a partner whose threshold is significantly lower. Some men also feel an obligation to absorb their partner’s discomfort due to social pressure. Keep in mind that this belief is antiquated.