[FICTION] — Know Your Product, part 2

– Continued from Part 1 –

CONTENT WARNING — language, mental illness, drug abuse

As I said before, the company I work for makes medical equipment, so that means a lot of mechanical and computing parts coming in and going out. Drugs and medication aren’t really part of the equation. And since we’re a small-ish company, receiving and fulfillment both go through the same warehouse. The receiving crew — the guys who bring in all the supply deliveries, log them and send them off to their departments — work alongside mine, and we help each other out a lot although our work is supposed to be separate.

Anyway, this all means that I noticed when pharmaceutical shipments started coming in occasionally, and I noticed when none of that stuff was going back out. It struck me as odd, obviously, but didn’t bother me at first. The R&D side, manufacturing, all that jazz — none of it is my business and I don’t worry about it. At least, I don’t worry about it unless it somehow starts to fuck with me and my crew. Which, yesterday, it did.

I came back onto the floor after my lunch break to find four EEG units just sitting there, already assembled and ready to go on their carts. Lined up next to them were four of the specialized infusion pumps we make. These were also assembled and rigged to their racks, complete with tubing and fluid bags. None of this stuff had any reason to be here, not set up like this, and it was sucking up a lot of space.

I turned and hollered down to the packaging lead. “Gwen! The fuck is this??”

She squinted back at me and shrugged.

“Dunno,” she yelled. “Couple of the research dudes brought it all down and staged it there. They didn’t tell you?”

I shook my head, super pissed to find my space being used for random storage by another department. I got more pissed when Jerry told me to just work around it, and didn’t get un-pissed for the rest of the day. There’s a lot of elitist bullshit that gets pulled on the warehouse crews by other departments, and this felt like one of the worst examples I’d seen in a while. But I couldn’t exactly go over Jerry’s head to raise hell about it, so I just fumed.

That evening though, as I was sitting at home watching old House episodes without really seeing them, I got a dumb idea. I was drunk, first of all, or well on my way. For a long time it’s felt like I can’t come home in the evenings without getting at least a bit sloshed. Being alone with my own thoughts hurts more often than not, and if I don’t have work to do, then drinking feels like the next logical thing.

So anyway I was sitting there on the couch, buzzed and feeling angry for no specific reason, when I got it into my head to go back to the warehouse and just fuck up the stuff that those R&D pricks had left sitting around. Dock #3 happens to have a good-sized blindspot from the safety lights and security cameras, and it also has a latch that likes to stay loose if you don’t really slam it shut. I had left it loose before clocking out that evening. I guess somewhere, in the back of my mind, I had known what I would want to do later.

But when I got back to the warehouse — after I’d snuck around the shadows to Dock #3, jimmied it open and slipped inside — something was immediately wrong. The equipment that had been cluttering up the floor earlier was gone. More importantly, the place wasn’t as quiet as it should have been. Beneath the hum of safety lights and machinery on standby, I heard the random ripple of voices. They were too distant and faint for me to know what they were saying. But I could tell that, wherever they were, they were yelling. A couple were screaming.

And for some reason everything clicked at that moment. The homeless people, and Simon, the weird pharmaceutical shipments and misplaced equipment — I knew it was all somehow tied up in that distant clamor. I knew that if I followed it, I would find out what was going on. And I also knew that if I left instead, the question would keep bothering me. Curiosity and suspicion would creep under my skull, needling away at it from the inside.

That’s why people walk down the dark hallway and investigate the strange sounds in horror movies. It’s not because they’re stupid — it’s because they want to know the truth. Some people can go without knowing. But I guess I’m not one of those people.

In the far corner of the warehouse there’s an alcove with a door leading down to a big basement storage unit. We keep our server bank down there because it stays cool, along with inventory overflow and a bunch of plumbing whatever. I’ve only been down there a few times to stash orders that got cancelled at the last second. And that was where I heard the voices coming from.

I was surprised to find the stairwell fully lit by the fluorescent bulbs running along its ceiling like a spine. Horror movie cliches had made me expect something different, I guess. But light doesn’t necessarily make things less frightening. The voices got louder and clearer when I opened the door to the basement, and that only made things worse. Because although I still couldn’t understand what the voices were saying, I recognized it.

There were several, maybe five or six, some high and shrieking and others low and gravelly. I thought of witches and trolls babbling away in a dark cave, their words piling on top of each other to make a big lump of nonsense that was both familiar and nasty.

“You thinks can out the show shot! Ivy!”

“Meaning this brain folds bitch!”

“AGGADA AGGADA AGGADA AGGADA.”

“Give rrrrreeeeestitin my own same divine!”

The bottom of the stairwell was shadowed and the hollering gibberish bounced upward from it, off the concrete walls and all around my head. I kept going down the stairs, even though I was totally sober and totally terrified now. I had to know.

I reached the bottom of the stairwell, and its bright white light gave way to a dull orange glow like that of heat lamps or sulfur streetlights. It was so much darker that it took me a minute to actually see what I was looking at. Once I could see clearly, it was so strange that the hot dim light on top of everything made it feel like a fever dream.

A half-dozen or so hospital beds were spread out in a semicircle, each with a reddish lamp rigged up on a stand overhead and an EEG and IV unit next to it. Each bed held a person, and in the closest one I could see the homeless guy who had chatted with me about the birds in the park. Next to him was a round wrinkled old woman, I think, who might have been that first person I saw over two weeks ago. Her toothless lips were going a mile a minute with a stream of random words, though the rest of her was completely still.

All the figures in all the beds were completely still except for their chattering mouths. Their eyes were open and looking straight up from where they lay, and none of them seemed to notice me. Two shadows stood in the center of the semicircle, roaming between the beds and scanning charts. I must have made some kind of noise because one of them suddenly looked right at me and tapped the other on the shoulder. He turned and looked my way as well, and I saw that it was Simon.

My heart hammered and my mouth felt like it was full of paper. I didn’t understand what I was seeing, but I knew I wasn’t supposed to be here seeing it. Yet I was also afraid to turn my back to it. For a moment I was sure that if I turned to run, one of those sheeted figures would lurch off its bed and come after me. Maybe it would be fast.

Simon walked toward me in smooth strides, like he was just strolling down the hall on a regular day at the office. Finally I snapped out of it, stepping backward and putting my hands out in an apologetic gesture.

“Hey fuck, I’m so sorry man, I just came down here looking for–”

Simon held up a hand. “Woah, it’s okay, it’s okay.” He drew up to me, looking a little amused. I thought that was a weird choice of expression.

“I knew this wasn’t the ideal site for us to initialize,” he went on. “But space is tight. And if someone walks in on the project, well, that’s just an opportunity to educate. I’m guessing you’d like to know what’s going on here?”

The babbling continued from behind him like some fucked-up cocktail party. I swallowed and nodded slowly.

“Uh… I mean yeah, I guess.”

He gave a half-smile, then gestured to the bedridden group.

“I’m glad you’re here, actually. Wanted to thank you for being an initial point of contact for many of our clients.”

I scanned the figures on the beds again, knowing as I did so that I would recognize all of them. And I did. They were the hairy, tweaked-out, sunburnt people that had been drifting through the back lot. The recognition made me feel kind of sick.

“As you’re probably aware, mental illness and addiction have left millions of people on the streets with little hope of recovery,” Simon explained. “Some of them manage to get out, of course. But many don’t, and they end up spending years out in the elements, alone and full of disease until they finally die. It’s harsh, but… I think anyone who’s honest with himself for a minute can understand how it’s true.”

A rail-thin meth head in the center of the group yelled without any words, then flopped her head to the side and stopped talking. She just breathed deeply and quietly. A line of drool stretched down from her mouth to the pillow. The others kept yammering around her.

“We’ve partnered with a couple other manufacturing and research firms to come up with a humane solution to the problem,” Simon continued. “It’s a combination of medication and neuroelectrical stimulus that keeps the clients alive without any distress or atrophy. And so far, it’s remarkably cost-efficient.”

Now bird-guy at the end of the lineup also yelled and then fell silent, gazing up at the ceiling and pulling in slow, even breaths. I couldn’t keep from staring at him; his body seemed peaceful, but the wide-open eyes bothered me. I wondered what he was seeing.

“You happened to stumble in at the most dramatic part of the procedure, the dissociation phase,” Simon explained. “I know it looks scary, but I promise, the clients aren’t in any pain or physical danger. Their vocalizations are just the result of what I call ‘unhooking,’ where the brain purges itself of the associations and meanings accrued to sensations. Hence all the words.”

I turned my head in his direction without looking at him, still unable to take my eyes off of the “clients” on their beds.

“Uh-huh,” I said.

He gave another funny half-smile. “Stay as long as you like. Observation is education.” Then he went back to join his partner.

I stood there for a few more minutes, watching as the rest of the ragged people on the beds stopped talking one by one and lay motionless with their eyes wide open.

I called in sick this morning. I couldn’t sleep after getting back home. Every time I lay back and closed my eyes, I could feel words bubbling up in my throat, random words that meant nothing together. That idea of “unhooking” had gotten stuck in my brain, and it felt like it was trying to do its work on me.

I had this thought — although I knew it was silly — that I might not wake back up after falling asleep. At one point I got up and went for another beer, but the smell hit me all sour and wrong. I guess it smelled the same as ever, but I couldn’t smell it the same way anymore. I just poured it out.

I think I understand what Simon meant by that term, “unhooking,” although I don’t know if I could explain it myself. It sounds kind of nice when I think about it. But it scares me at the same time. And the fact that part of me finds it appealing scares me even more.

So now I’m sitting here at my computer, turning things over and over in my brain and seeing the same things on both sides. A big part of me wants to leave the job — to just not go back tomorrow or any other day. But I don’t know if they’ll let me leave after what I saw. Again, I guess it might not have been anything illegal or dangerous. But it still feels like a secret; and if it is a secret, the company probably wants to keep it. To keep me.

At the same time, I don’t know if I can stay either. If I stick with the job, if I go back tomorrow and the next day and the next, I have this feeling that one day I’ll go talk to Simon. One day I’ll ask him to set me up on one of those beds, to hook me up to IVs and electrodes so that I babble and babble until I forget my own name.

It sounds nice. It sounds like a relief. And that terrifies me.