And yet they had brought him food, a metal dog bowl of mixed slimy scraps, stringy meat and gristle and mushy rice or tapioca mixed in, all in a gelatinous pap that could be anything from raw egg to the guards’ saliva. He couldn’t see it. He tried not to smell it because it had a foul tang a little too close to the reek of bodies rotting in front-line mud. At one point he wondered if the meat wasn’t the commando himself. He then realized that they didn’t necessarily want him to starve in case they needed him half coherent and strong enough for whatever they were to do with him—even if it was just a vile setup to frame him as the fall guy.

No guards had passed by out in the corridor for what felt like a day or more. What if they just left him here? Packed up and went. He would go mad even without their needles and guinea-pig drugs. Someone else might find him. He would wake up in a VA nutcase ward, if he was lucky—though it might just be the electric chair. He wouldn’t put that past the America of today, let alone in the iron-fisted leviathan that the cabal coveted and was sure to get, those mongers of the insidious plot. The way forward wasn’t what anyone expected. We had forged our past and won the present but we would lose the future.

They will see, he thought, and laughed. But it will be too late by then, the seeds already long sown. No one will see.

He imagined himself as a corpse in here. He wondered if the cold would stave off decomposition and preserve his body for a time, like a pig carcass hanging in a butcher’s cold storage. He figured his soul or whatever a person wanted to call it would exit well before then. But where would it go? Would it hover in here until his body reached a certain state, until his body spasmed and clenched up as he’d seen bodies do from violent death on the line? Or would his body relax, all flaccid, and then only harden up with rigor mortis many hours later? He told himself he would close his eyes and mouth upon dying, and willed himself to do it, chanting it even. “Close eyes, close mouth . . . mouth closed, eyes closed.” More than anything, he hated the thought of something crawling in his mouth, or of his eyeballs decomposing bared to the air.

His stomach clenched up and his head spun and he clambered over to the drain and vomited into it. But only bile came up now, bitterly sour like apple vinegar.