When he was ten Rollo cut school to mess around with some friends only to end up in a hospital after a hit and run. His sister was taking care of things at the time, his mother having gone off on one of her 'dates' two days before and still not returned.
Terez came to the hospital straight from school and sat in the waiting room until the doctors told her that her brother had a broken leg and a concussion but he'd be all right. Then they started asking about their mother, but Terez managed to duck out before the police and social welfare people showed up.
Somehow Terez managed to track down their mother. When Rollo woke up late that night, she was standing over the hospital bed stroking his forehead. She smelled of pot, sweat, and alcohol. She was still in the same clothes she'd left in two days before. And she was crying. Rollo smiled at her and pressed her hand to his face.
"I love you, little boy," she whispered.
Two days later, when he was back home, she'd slap his face and scream at him for the ruined bicycle but that moment in the hospital remained the best of his few good memories of her.
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Rollo woke from feverish dreams in a darkened room. He struggled to sit up but his upper body wasn't cooperating. The effort did succeed in generating a lot of pain. A woman came into the room and put her hand on his forehead.
"Shh. You're safe now."
Rollo looked up at her trying to get his eyes to focus on her face.
"Mom?" he wanted to say but his mouth was so dry it came out as a short rasp.
"Here, let me get you some water." Her face moved into the light as she brought the straw up to his lips. Blonde-haired, blue-eyed. There was a smell of roses in the air. Definately not mom.
"Thank you," he managed to say after a long drink, "Where am I?"
"The Hoffman Institute" she answered.
That didn't mean anything to Rollo. But it seemed safe enough and he fell back to sleep.
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Two days later he still had no better answer than "The Hoffman Institute".
Am I under arrest?
Oh, no. Not at all. Should you be?
How did I get here?
Why don't you tell me.
What happened to the others?
What do you expect happened to them?
Can I make a phone call?
It better right now you don't do that.
Who won the election?
George Bush. How does that make you feel?
At least the last was a partial answer. And he thought he heard a slight disappointment in Dr. Stahler's voice when she said it; she was human after all.
Aside from Dr. Stahler, Rollo only saw the nurses, who came in shifts and never made more conversation than what was needed.
The room he was in looked like a hospital room out of the thirties. If there was modern equipment around, it must have been kept behind the screen the nurses would sometimes go behind. They did tell him that he had three broken ribs and a punctured lung. He thought that the latter would at least mean he'd be hooked up to something, but it didn't seem necessary here. Either he had a poor idea of how serious a punctured lung was, or they knew something he didn't.
The smell of roses came from a bowl of them on the nightstand. There was no television and when he asked for one they just smiled. There was a radio that seemed only to play music - no dj's., no traffic reports, no ads. His bed was situated so that he really could not get a good view of what was outside. All he could tell was it seemed to be raining a lot. They brought him magazines but they all seemed to be a week old, but he wasn't even sure about that. He didn't really know how long he'd been out before waking up to bigfoots and
Dr. Stahler sat with him for three hours the first morning and three more hours in the afternoon. Both times her appearance was preceeded by a nurse giving him "a little something for the pain." At first she worked from a checklist, "What's your full name? Address? Bloodtype?"
Rollo was sure they already knew these things, but answered anyway. And when the painkillers started kicking in, he hardly noticed that the questions turned more personal. What was your first sexual experience? How do you feel when you see an injured dog in the road? Did you cry when your mother died?
As he ate lunch and the fog in his mind cleared a bit, he realized what kind of doctor she was, and probably what kind of institute he was in.
When she arrived for the afternoon session, he asked, "So you think I'm crazy, don't you?"
She gave a tight smile and put aside her clipboard.
"Why do you think that?"
"The Hoffman Institute, I'm in the loony bin, aren't I?"
She repeated the smile, "No, you're actually in one of the few islands of sanity in a world gone mad."
"No, I've gone mad. I've seen bigfoots shooting it out with shadows and nearly been anal-probed by wall. If I didn't have a bullet hole in my chest, I'd think I was dreaming. But I'm pretty sure I'm in a CIA LSD experiment."
She actually laughed at the last remark.
"The CIA is far beyond that, trust me. No, Mr. Tamasi, the inability of the average person to comprehend the universe around him is about the only thing that keeps him from going completely apeshit crazy, if you'll pardon a technical term. At the same time, that willful blindness constitutes a sort of insanity itself. Here at the Hoffman institute we try to look straight at the cosmos without going nuts."
Rollo frowned.
I've been captured by Scientologists.
"Don't worry, Mr. Tamasi, you'll understand in due time. Why don't we just start this all over again. You know what I am and why I'm here. I'm asking you to trust me. Trust that I'm here to help you. Tell me what happened. Pick a place to begin and tell me the story."
It might have been the drugs, or it might have been that things were wierd enough that Rollo was past caring, but he found himself telling about Cho, the package, the murder. He told her about the cell and the bigfoots and the shadows. He talked nonstop for two hours. She listened. She didn't ask questions, she didn't need to. She took no notes. And none of what he said seemed to surprise her at all.
When Rollo was done, Dr. Stahler looked at her watch. "It's late. I'll see you in the morning and I promise you I'll answer your questions as much as I'm allowed."
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It turned out she wasn't allowed to tell him much. He was in Portland, a "guest" of the Hoffman Institute. When she said, "guest" he could hear the quote marks around it. What was the Hoffman Institute? For that she handed him a brochure.
It didn't tell him much.
"You're a bunch of do-gooders then. Alternative energy. Environment . . ."
"You could say that."
"What do I have to do with any of this?"
"See the part about 'Alternative explanations for unusual events'?"
"Yeah."
"Don't you think what happened to you and the others was unusual?"
"Oh."
"How long will you keep me here?"
She shrugged.
"Can I at least call my family?"
"Mr. Campos knows you are okay. He said he'd call your sister."
"You've talked to Fernando?"
"One of our people did. We also got your car out of impound."
"What did you tell him?"
"He knows you're okay. And I've just told you all I can. I want you look at these and tell me what you see."
Inkblots. He thought shrinks only did that on t.v.
-----------------------
The rest of the week went like that. Inkblots, word association, personality tests. He was pretty sure there was an IQ test in there somewhere, too. Other times she just got him to talk. She already knew a lot about him: his school records, his health history, his juvie record. She pulled each the files out of her briefcase and went over them with him.
Other doctors came in an fussed over his wound. "You'll have a nice scar," one of them told Rollo as he took out the stitches, "but you can get out of this room now."
"That's faster than I thought it would be."
"We're good doctors."
It was still painful to move his upper body but it felt well to get outdoors and walk. Not that he could walk far. Go in one direction long enough and he would come to a wall. Stand by the wall for more than a minute and a pair of large men would come by and suggest he be elsewhere.
Dr. Stahler suggested he try the library.
He couldn't decide if he was in a library or a movie set. They seemed to have forgotten the lights when they built the place. The Sao Paulo Library down the street from his apartment was bright and open. This place looked like someone crumpled it up and threw it into a dark corner. The rare window let in enough light to highlight the dust motes. Here and there a shadowy figure hunched over a single desk reading and taking notes.
Rollo looked around. There wasn't a computer terminal in sight. He glanced at the row of books nearest him.
Cultus Malefiarum, Unausprechenlichen Kulten, Livre D'Ivon, Cultes Des Goules. Did they have anything in English?
He heard voices. He turned and saw a man talking to a women at a desk.
"Do you have anything by John Grisham?"
The look the woman gave the man brought the room temperature down by ten degrees.
"Third aisle, halfway down."
When the man turned, Rollo recognized him. He'd been . . . wherever they'd been. Come to think of it, Dr. Stahler never had told him where he and the others had been held.
Rollo went to the third aisle. The man was there looking at row of Grisham thrillers.
"Excuse me," Rollo said.
