The Tape Between Us

The Tape Between Us

She came off me fast. Her eyes went wide when she found mine open and on her, awake and level and holding all of it.

She stopped where she was and didn't move.

I didn't shout. I didn't swear at her. I didn't break anything.

I sat up slowly and reached under the vanity table at the head of the bed. The tape came away — rip.

I set my father's old recorder on the wood tabletop. I put my finger down on the black PLAY/STOP button.

Clack.

The reel came up with its hiss in the quiet room and played all of it back, every flat command and the sound of Emily saying she was sorry from a few seconds before.

Emily moved back. She went down onto the floor and her back hit the closet door. There was no color left in her face.

"Talk, Emily,"

I said. My voice came out low and flat enough that it sounded strange to me.

"Tell me the part you kept back about the clinic."

Emily pulled both knees up and held them. She was shaking on the cold floor. She watched the reel turning on the table the way you watch an animal.

"I didn't have a choice, James," she said, and it came apart between the sobs.

"Second year of college... experimental psychology, at Albany. I didn't get to pick my own project. They... they picked me."

She brought her eyes up to mine.

"They handed me your file. They told me it was a long-term behavioral study.

"I got the scholarship, I got an apartment, I got a promise of a place at the institute. All of it on one condition. Marry you and keep the suggestion band running every night."

I sat on the edge of the bed with my hands together on my knees and let her talk.

The reel had run off the take-up spool while she was talking. The loose end went around and slapped the housing, once every turn, about twice a second, and I let it run. The wall clock over the dresser said 11:20, and she had been on the floor close to an hour.

"That bottle..." Emily pointed at the bathroom door.

"It's the maintenance. There's a compound in it that cuts your neural resistance down. Without it to open the band on schedule, the suggestion in your head shuts itself off inside 40 to 60 nights. In all those years I never missed one night. I had to work it into your temples every evening."

She stopped and had to get the next part out. "Except... since April."

"Since April?" I said.

"The stop order."

Emily put her head down on her knees.

"The stop order came right after the last time I met him. You remember the day you saw me at the end of the hallway at the fertility clinic, talking to a man you took for my doctor?"

"That night... he told me to stop," Emily said, low.

"I was glad. I swear to you, James, I was so glad I cried in the bathroom that night. I thought... I thought they were finished with the project. I thought they had decided to let you go, to let both of us go and live like a family."

One corner of my mouth came up.

"They didn't stop because they felt something for us, did they."

"No..." Emily looked up. Her eyes were red the whole way through.

"They stopped because Kessler knew Ethan had gotten out from under them, down in the basement. Ethan had started sending you his own manuscripts."

"Kessler worked out that a Subject B still running suggestion was a hole big enough to pull his whole organization into the light. They wanted the line to you cut and the marks wiped off it."

"Kessler." I said the name out loud. "How many times have you met him?"

"Never!" Emily put both hands up fast, and the fear in her face was the real thing.

"I have never seen his face! The man in the clinic hallway never treated you or me. He carried mail for them. For 11 years all I ever got of Kessler was his voice, on one-way encrypted calls. I don't know where he is and I don't know what he's holding!"

Emily dragged herself closer to the bed and put both hands up to take hold of my pants cuff. I moved my foot back.

"James, please..." she said, and the crying took the rest of it.

"If you take this into the open, if you hand that recorder to the police, they will kill both of us! You don't understand! You don't understand how big they are! They're in the hospitals, in the research institutes, inside the government! We can't fight them!"

I looked at the woman on the floor at my feet. The woman who had shared a bed with me for 11 years. Who made my breakfast, sewed my buttons back on, and worked my temples every night to keep me a slave in my own head.

I didn't argue about how big Kessler was. What his organization could do to me didn't interest me.

I looked into her wet eyes and asked her something.

One question. The one that would settle what the last 11 years of marriage had been:

"In those 11 years... was there ever a night you did it because you wanted to?"

The silence came down.

It ran long enough for me to hear the wall clock move a notch at a time. The wind off the Hudson on the window glass. Emily's breathing, coming in pieces.

She didn't answer right away. She looked at me, and her eyes pulled in on something.

Five seconds. Ten seconds. A minute.

Then Emily put her head down on the floorboards. A long breath came out of her.

"Yes."

It came out at almost nothing. I got every letter of it.

"There were nights... I did it because I wanted to."

She answered, and it made all of it worse.

If she had said no, there would have been something left to forgive.

She hadn't said no.

I stood up.

I didn't look at her again. I took the recorder off the table, put it in my coat pocket, and walked out of the bedroom.

In the hall I set the bedroom door back against the frame without letting the latch catch. I went into the main bathroom, took the bottle off the shelf, emptied it into the sink, and ran the water. I rinsed the glass twice and stood it upside down on the same hand towel. Then I turned off the bathroom light and pulled the door shut behind me.

I went down to the first floor.

The Milton house was dark. The moon came through the window glass and put long strips of light across the wood floor.

The thermostat in the hall read 61. I had set it to 68 at six o'clock and hadn't touched it since. The kitchen faucet had a drip going, about one every four seconds. I shut it off at the handle and it kept going.

I went into my father's old study. Old paper and India ink were still in the air.

I came up to the wood desk with the paint coming off it. I pulled the bottom drawer open.

In among the rotted files and the yellowed sheets of psychological index scores, I reached into the back corner. My fingers came onto a small piece of paper, stiff and creased.

It had been in that drawer 31 years. I found it the week I came back to clear the house out.

I held the paper up in the moonlight.

A 10-digit phone number on it, in blue ink gone pale. The detective from that year.

The man who questioned me for 29 days. He never raised his voice and he never hit the table; he sat across from me with a can of soda and all the time in the world and worked at getting a 15-year-old to say he had killed his adoptive parents, and the calm was the worst part of it.

I took my cell phone out of my pocket.

I pressed the digits one at a time off the paper.

One. Seven. Four. Six...

I put the phone to my ear.

The line started ringing in the quiet.

Ring... Ring... Ring...

Once.

Twice.

Three times.

Four.

Five.

Six.

Seven.

I held my breath. Right when I thought it would go to voicemail, there was a dry click.

The sound on the line changed. Heavy breathing came through the speaker, the wet rasp of an old man with a lung disease he's had for years.

Then a voice, old, scraped down to gravel:

"Deakins."