jd87: Dr. Belvedere's 2,340th Thursday

by Josh Delman

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Dr. Belvedere's 2,340th Thursday FICTION

“There are humans out there who are black boxes. Whose internal psychology is completely impregnable, completely closed off not only to the world but to themselves. These people do not understand their own ability to function; they simply do. And in these men and women we see our roots as animals, as animated flesh and blood and meat and bone, as objects guided by forces beyond our own control. But their lives, most likely, are dearly happy ones. For in their lack of awareness is a kind of self-satisfaction that only the completely absorbed can achieve. It is a bliss born of ignorance, it is a beauty in simplicity.” – Steven Gregory Belvedere, Ph. D, p. 301-302, The Underlying Psychology of Man, 3rd ed., 2008, Oxford University Press.

“Are you ready for this?” said Dr. Belvedere.

He readied a syringe. He removed its light-blue protective cap, drew in about 100 ccs of a clear liquid, and then flicked its side with his index finger to get any air bubbles out as he test-squirted some of the clear liquid out the tip. He felt a pleasant thumping at his temples as if he were wearing a warm helmet. Then he took the needle and watched it penetrate the soft skin of subject #42, who barely squirmed as the plunger sunk down and the clear liquid mixed with subject #42’s blood.

Dr. Belvedere placed the syringe on a shiny silver rack next to subject #42’s bed. He thought to himself, “Oh, baby,” and then imagined himself doing a jig from subject #42’s perspective. He walked over to the sink and washed his hands with pink soap, which he’d ordered from a medical supply company in China because they had the best smelling stuff. He walked out the subject’s room and into a poorly lit hallway. He’d almost slammed the door to the subject’s room in the process, but reached his hand out and grabbed the stainless steel knob right before the latch hit the strikeplate.

This was the worst part of the day for everybody. They would have to go over that week’s subjects, including a full discussion of any issues that had arisen during the day’s work, and it would be long and laborious. Evil took many forms, and it sometimes manifested itself as the End-of-Day Discussion at the lab. So Dr. Belvedere walked down the hallway and opened a wooden door at the end of the hall, whose creaky hinges sounded not unlike the cackle of your garden-variety witch. Plus it was Dr. Belvedere’s birthday, and he wanted to go home to see his wife and kids, who all had brown hair and made Dr. Belvedere feel happy.

Behind the door was a group of highly trained men and women whose time was extremely valuable. They were sitting in something akin to a dungeon, which was what people called it: a dungeon. The walls surrounding them were cobblestone, irregularly shaped rocks of dull color, piled atop one another with a lime mortar. The smell was undoubtedly mold and musk. Upon entering the dungeon, officially the “Sub-Basement of the Schermerhorn Building at Columbia University,” one got the sense that the place did not belong to the human beings who only occasionally inhabited it, but rather to the expansive collection of bacterial molds and fungi that coated its walls and ceilings and lent the air its musky charm. (There was, in fact, a drain grill embedded in the ground at the center of the room, so that every couple months the walls could be power-washed, but the wash would only be temporary, as the molds thrived under the damp and dark conditions.) There were no windows. But, yes, it was hellaciously dungeonesque down there, and so it was decided, by committee, that there ought to be some nice lighting to remind themselves that there was still a world above where people lived and breathed. The original plan was to rip out some of the walls and design an elaborate system of mirrors, beginning with one outside the building, so that sunlight could be piped into the room. They decided it wasn’t worth it when the budget skyrocketed and Dr. Melki, the only woman among them, pointed out that they usually met after dark. So there was recessed lighting installed underneath a makeshift pine ceiling, illuminating the walls with soft cones of incandescence.

“I shall bring to your attention, gentlemen,” Dr. Belvedere said. He had a clear view of the room from his position at the head of the table. He looked around and took note: there were six men and a woman, each wearing a white lab coat, several other men wearing denim jumpsuits, and a man wearing a three-piece suit with a hideous mauve tie at the opposite end of the table. Then, clearing his breath: “And ladies, excuse me. I shall bring to your attention subject #1958.”

“Now hold on a minute,” another doctor spoke. This was Dr. Rexmore, a real fuckwit of an M.D., who had a penchant for interruption, and was usually concerned with all things inane. “There is a small bureaucratic matter which I believe should be addressed before we discuss today’s subjects. Due to the seemingly undesirable nature of this conversation in and of itself, I will do my absolute very best to keep it brief.”

There was a collective releasing of breath and the room warmed up.

“What is it?” Dr. Belvedere said.

“There is the matter of the reports,” Dr. Rexmore said.

“Yes, yes, the reports. What about them?” Dr. Belvedere used his most indignant voice. He didn’t like getting mad at people.

“Well, and I’m sure most of us here would agree,” Dr. Rexmore began to say, letting his eyes make contact with every other person in the room for a brief moment, and then continued, “that, well, they’re simply unreadable!” Dr. Rexmore, too, sounded indignant, although more genuine, less put on.

Dr. Melki’s coarse feminine voice sounded off. “Dr. Rexmore, we can see your jugular.”

This was ignored because Dr. Melki had the sharpest, most caustic wit among them. She also knew the sizes of their penises.

“What do you mean? That’s absurd bullshit,” Dr. Belvedere said. “Stop wasting our time, doctor. I looked at them last night and they read fine.”

“Me too,” another doctor said, maybe Dr. Wallsworth or Dr. Englewood. The two of them couldn’t be trusted to pay attention, and the shorter one was picking at an ingrown hair on his forearm.

“I also have read the reports,” said Dr. Malpani, an Indian doctor with an unstylish mustache. His accent was almost unnoticeable, but it was drawn out by the presence of the Americans in the room.

“These reports, gentlemen, and ladies, I’m sorry, Dr. Melki, are unreadable. Do you see this?” He took out a stack of papers – more like a ream, actually – and slammed it on the Formica surface, a faint cloud of dust rising from the table.

“See what?” said Dr. Belvedere.

“Printed in a sans-serif font.”

“A what?” Dr. Belvedere said. He flashed Dr. Rexmore the strongest look of contempt he could muster.

“A sans-serif font. One without the fine cross-strokes at the top and bottom of a letter.”

“Are you serious?” Dr. Belvedere said, now staring at Dr. Rexmore.

“Quite.”

“And your recommendation?”

“That we re-print the documents using a serifed font, which would be, no doubt, easier on the eyes. Especially in print format.”

Dr. Belvedere pressed his index and middle finger to the side of his neck under his jaw and checked his pulse. He didn’t think about the fact that all the other doctors in the room would know what he was doing. He also forgot about that pesky positive feedback loop, in which checking your pulse in a state of high tension can lead to an increase in blood pressure and thus heart rate, which meant that simply checking your pulse could trigger a panic attack. There was no time for something like that – efficiency was of the utmost importance. The collective agitation level in the room was increasing at a slow but steady rate.

“Your recommendation has been noted, Dr. Rexmore,” Dr. Belvedere said. “Now, if we can proceed, Dr. Rexmore?”

“Go ahead,” Dr. Rexmore said. He smiled.

Dr. Belvedere went on to describe the experiments performed earlier in the day using a PowerPoint presentation and a Levitra-branded laser pen, which he had received in the mail from Bayer, Inc. In the middle of the presentation, he felt a vibration creeping up his leg. He checked his cell phone, but it was off. After the presentation was complete, the doctors walked to another room, which had a view of an experiment room behind a two-way mirror.

On the dark side of the two-way mirror, Dr. Belvedere was nothing more than a shadow. He was elevated about fifty feet above the experiment room, where he could watch everything and take notes. It was his job to oversee the experiments and make sure they were performed according to plan; every detail was planned meticulously, and any deviation from that plan could mean disaster in terms of generating results that were scientifically sound. Then he’d be chewed out by his supervisor who seemed to get off on chewing people out. The room he was in was barely lit. Dr. Belvedere couldn’t make out the freckles on his arms. He stood at the two-way mirror and faced a row of doctors sitting in plush seats, which had pop-out footrests. Only two of the doctors were using the footrests. Dr. Belvedere turned from the window to face his colleagues, who were visibly anxious. Maybe they were frightened, maybe they were excited. Nobody really knew, but if they had, they’d probably adjust their facial expressions accordingly. You didn’t want to express too much emotion down here, but asynchrony in mood and affect could also spell disaster on a deeper level.

Down below, five naked humans, all male, were shuffled into a concrete-walled room about eight feet square by a few of the denim jumpsuit people. Their bodies were covered with brown circular sensors, which resembled human nipples. Around each subject’s left wrist was a blue tag bracelet. The floor they were standing on resembled a checkerboard – an alternating pattern of black and white squares, with a slightly raised silver grid between the squares. There were huge, five-foot-wide fans installed in the ceilings, like the ones you see in the ceilings of movie theaters. They functioned as Sound Conditioners by filling the air with a narcotic whooshing, which had the added benefit of blocking out the sounds of screams. Thin wires ran from the nipple-like sensors on each body to the input of a dedicated research server in the corner of the room. The room was lit by a harsh fluorescent light that gave the subjects’ skin a purple hue.

“Gentlemen,” Dr. Belvedere said, “here are the final subjects of the day.” It was all clinical. On the walls were five lights, each with a button beneath it. “Today’s subjects have not been given any instructions. They are in a room whose floor is electrically charged. The standard voltage is sub-lethal, approximately one hundred and fifty volts. They will be shocked every twenty seconds, unless—”

“This is fucking awesome,” said Dr. Rexmore.

Dr. Belvedere audibly cleared his throat. This was his pet project, and Dr. Rexmore was ruining it.

“Unless subject #1958 presses the correct button,” Dr. Belvedere said. “In which case they won’t be shocked. But we will measure the anticipation of the shock as well as the path the electricity takes through the body using sensors placed in various locations on the body. We will vary the shocking schedule to see how quickly the subjects can adjust.”

“They look like nipples,” Dr. Rexmore said.

“Dr. Rexmore, if you would please be quiet,” said Dr. Belvedere. “Let’s begin.”

Dr. Belvedere pushed a green button on the wall, which lit up a little red light in the experimentation room and signaled a low-frequency tone that sounded like the buzzing of an alarm clock. In the room, the subjects looked at each other’s faces. They had known what they were getting into when they signed up for this, but being there was a totally different thing. The first shock came and the subjects screamed. They scrambled to the wall with the buttons and pushed them repeatedly. Another shock came. A few of them jumped and screamed again. One of them said something that sounded like, “What the fuck are we doing wrong?” They tried pressing other buttons. They looked at each other in anticipation of the shock, but it didn’t come this time.

Dr. Rexmore looked on from his plush seat in the observation room, grinning. Dr. Belvedere noticed this and couldn’t help but feel that Dr. Rexmore’s grin was inappropriate. Dr. Belvedere pictured himself meeting and shaking hands with Barack Obama as he looked down through the two-way mirror. He saw one of the subjects scratching himself violently, peeling off some of the sensors.

“Stop the experiment,” Dr. Belvedere said. He walked over to the panel on the wall and pushed a red button, which made the green button pop out. He ran out of the observation room, jumped down a flight of stairs, and opened up the door to the experimentation room. He had never gone in there before. The room was cold and smelled like burning flesh.
“Subject number one nine five eight,” he said. “You have to stop scratching.” He picked the nipple sensors off the ground. Curly hairs were stuck to the sticky side of the sensors.

“I don’t want to do this anymore,” subject #1958 said.
“You agreed to do this experiment. You’re getting paid handsomely,” Dr. Belvedere said.

“I want to go home.”

“I’m sorry,” Dr. Belvedere said. Subject #1958 tried to open the door, but it was locked from the inside. Dr. Belvedere grabbed his wrist and looked at the tag. It read: Subject #1958, Goldman, A.

“Come on now, Mr. Goldman,” Dr. Belvedere said. Goldman sighed.
Dr. Belvedere had the power to completely dissociate himself from reality, sort of an internal defense mechanism. It wasn’t a skill he’d consciously developed, though he’d become aware of it as he found himself visiting dense forests with towering trees, beaches with pink sand and Barbicide-colored swells, lands he’d never been to. One favorite was to picture himself floating above Manhattan in a glass cube that was invisible to everyone else. He believed that he was escaping the second-by-second tedium of his work by forming mental postcards. He did not care to think about it. There was a certain amount of money he needed to live comfortably, and he believed that the experiments carried out in the lab were of utmost importance to the future of the human race. There was no doubting this.

He took the sensors and re-affixed them to Goldman’s skin, then went back upstairs.

Dr. Belvedere poked his head into the observation room. “I have to go,” he said. Dr. Belvedere felt his leg buzzing. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his cell phone. No new messages, no voicemails, no missed calls.

Dr. Belvedere rode the lift up to the ground level. It was a counterweighted black cage, an old school elevator. He was often afraid that one day it would just break and he’d plummet to his death, right there. He would spend the entire elevator ride imagining the scenario. Sometimes, he found this a thrill. The idea that he could be seconds away from his death was adrenally exciting in ways that even, say, skiing at maximum velocity down a double diamond or skydiving out of a parachute could simply not match. There was something about the slow creep of the cage, the way it resembled an old man rising from a chair. If he went, how would he go? – would it be an explosion, a giant gaseous ball of fire? Or would the cage simply collapse under its own weight, trapping him inside? That would be a much slower death, that of starvation, and that did not seem like a noble way to die. With an explosion, you become one with nature. Your insides become outsides.

He walked out of the building and into the December night. The sudden change from heat to cold shocked his whole body. Usually, you couldn’t see the stars in the city, though it was hard to deny the beauty of the city illuminated, especially when viewed from above, and its grid pattern was not unlike the checkerboard floor of the Schermerhorn basement. But tonight there was a heavy snow falling on the previous week’s blizzard, which had left a few feet of dirty, black, impacted snow piled up at the curb, pushed aside by snowplows. It was more like a crust, actually, as if the city itself was a living thing and had this icy black discharge. Dr. Belvedere hated seeing that dirty snow. But he loved the way the virgin snow looked on the ground, before it was soiled by cars and feet, when the snow molded to the shape of the ground and you could tell which way the wind was blowing by looking at the shape of the white hills it formed, like the dunes of a desert. The snow was falling from low hanging clouds, normally gray, but which tonight trapped in and diffused the light from the city, giving the sky a pink sheen. In this moment the city seemed to calm down for a bit. Maybe it wasn’t sleeping, just taking a nap. Things were quiet. Was it that the falling snow absorbed all the sound – passively transferring the harsh energies of car horns and jackhammers and drunken ramblings to white nothingness? Did everyone decide celebrate its arrival in whispered voices? Maybe it was just that people stayed inside, desired to be warm and comfortable in the face of the harsh blizzard air – which could cut your skin like a frozen knife – and so New York City on this night sounded like an empty room occupied only by an oscillating fan.

Dr. Belvedere walked from the Schermerhorn building to a garage nearby on 118th Street. He’d forgotten where he’d parked his car. He felt another vibration in his leg. This time he actually had a phone call, though it was from a number he didn’t recognize. The area code was 304, which was West Virginia. He picked up the phone and said, “Hello?”

“Hi,” a voice on the other end said.

“Who is this?” Dr. Belvedere said.

From his right pocket he removed the remote for his car, crossing his left hand over the front of his jacket, because he was holding the phone with his right. He pressed the ‘lock’ button to get his car to honk its horn, but he didn’t hear anything. “Is somebody there?” Dr. Belvedere began to suspect that his family was throwing a surprise birthday party for him, and that they were calling his cell phone to somehow distract him or at least figure out where he was so that they could know when to turn out the lights and say “Surprise!”
Dr. Belvedere pressed the remote to the bottom of his chin with his left hand, then tried the button again. This was a trick that his son taught him, actually – it turned out that you could turn your head into a giant antenna. The cushy fluid in between your brain and your skull could conduct electricity and carry the signal. Your head as a point of radiation. The animated logo for RKO Radio Pictures. Dr. Belvedere pictured himself from outside his body and saw his head emitting jagged white bolts whose light seared his mind’s eye, as if he were actually seeing it, actually feeling the searing pain, so that he had to consciously avoid thinking of it. The man on the other end didn’t answer Dr. Belvedere, so he collapsed his phone and put it in his pocket. He pushed the button again, and finally he heard a honk come from his car. He got into his car, a black BMW X5 SUV, and pressed the ‘Engine Start’ button.

He drove his car up a few blocks and then made a right onto 125th Street. He drove over the Triborough Bridge and onto Long Island. He felt relieved when he got there. It was nine and his wife was probably worrying about him. He felt the reciprocal need to worry, as in to worry about her worrying, and even though he found it had no point, he worried anyway, and continued driving east towards his house in Brookville.

There was a lot on his mind, but he felt like he couldn’t really focus on any one particular thing. He kept sniffing at the air as if to reset his sense of smell. He couldn’t tell if the burning flesh smell was stuck in his brain or his nose. He blew his nose with a tissue that he pulled out of the center console. He looked at it afterwards and realized he’d already blown his nose with that very tissue. He was nearly home, on Route 107, where there were no streetlights, and only one lane for travel in either direction. No one was out because the ground was covered in snow, covering the yellow road lines, and hadn’t yet been plowed. Snow was still falling heavily. He felt his phone vibrating in his pocket again, and he went to his pocket to grab it. When he looked up, he saw a deer in the middle of the road. He slammed on the brakes, but the black ice underneath his car had its own intentions. The anti-lock brake system went into action, pumping the brakes for him. It wasn’t enough. The ice was too slippery, and the car was too big. He didn’t know why but he turned the wheel and watched it turn as he spun out, his car pirouetting on the ice, yet remaining in a straight-line path down the road. From above, you’d think the spinning was beautiful, as if planned in advance, the tires of the car fixed and tight, wheel askew, no grip whatsoever, the world beyond the windshield blurring into a swirl of white snow and brown trees. Would he hit a tree? That wouldn’t be a good way to go. And he’d miss out on his surprise party. In that moment he thought of the face of his wife and children, his two little brown-haired boys, wearing party-cones on their heads and noisemakers in their mouths and if he had maybe another moment to really stop and think about everything he might have felt something, but instead he just saw their faces smiling but they were smiling too hard, like forced smiles, too many teeth showing, eyes neutral, and before he had a chance to really think about it everything faded.

When he came to, he saw the front of his car was embedded in a pile of dark snow piled up at the edge of the road. He put his car in reverse, backed out of the spot, and drove home. When he got there, the lights were all dark. He took out his cell phone and dialed his house, expecting his wife to pick up, but there was no answer. The street was lined with cars, and though not a religious man, Dr. Belvedere crossed himself, thanking all major deities that he hadn’t been on the street with all the cars on it when he was spinning around. He wasn’t sure if he was in shock or not. He opened the door and he heard it: “Surprise!” The lights flicked on and there was his family, standing there, waiting for him just as he’d pictured in his head, smiles only slightly less feigned.

♦

February 10, 2010

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