The interrogation room is made of paper. The walls are paper, the table is paper, the coffee cup is paper. The coffee is coffee, it can melt your skin, leave it sloughing off in gluey folds, hands over your face like a celebrity, afraid of sticky cotton gauze. The chair you’re sitting on is paper, too, a special kind reinforced for its special purpose. And it’s all a stage, of course, because a stage is just a place where everything might be true except what’s really happening, and you’re always an actor under contract, it doesn’t matter if you remember, they can show you all the paperwork, there’s your signature on the curling parchment, there’s the drop of the virgin’s blood, and the long and short of all of it is just to say that you can’t leave. Not even the old-fashioned way, where you send your tongue in search of the thing that makes it speak, they’ve worked out a protocol for that, a flow chart they can follow that accounts for every avenue, the measure and the countermeasure noted down in black and white (or, occasionally, that livid, grainy, corporate gray). Because they want the mystery preserved, you should try to understand, they don’t want you gone away, not yet, at least, just at a distance from yourself, a special distance, the doll’s head unscrewed and rolled off under the sofa, the doctor with his probing flashlight (and this is their most important trick, their greatest slight of hand) appearing as pure inevitability, just another functionary like your teacher at the temple and the boy falling off the skateboard, because otherwise you’ll discover that you’re not wounded in that way, the hemorrhage is elsewhere, you can stop it up with rainy weather. It’s not even that it would help you to discover this, really, not directly, because there’s no rain in here, nothing that could make the ink run where it matters, they’ve fixed it so the blur only ever goes one way, but remembering that there could be other circumstances at all, that you’re an actor, that this is all performance, all contingent, just figures on a stage – it doesn’t stop the cuts from bleeding and the skin from turning black, but it can make the thing that speaks into a thing that’s only breathing, and that’s no good to them, it makes the drama complicated when they want to keep it simple, a basic three-act structure that’s so easy to explain.
The interrogation room sometimes is also breathing, breathing just like you still have to, or more often like a dead thing, iron-rich and calcium-deficient, juiced back into false vitality by the insistence of an alternating current. The way it goes depends mostly on the color of the day, the way the whorls are twisting in the oil puddles on the asphalt, which you can’t see from here, of course, that’s all definitively backstage, and which no one is going to tell you anything about. The way the breathing happens it can almost seem like anything is possible when it’s only you inside, that maybe there’s a rhythm to this that you can understand, but then the door clicks open and everything breaks down and they all come inside. They come carrying a pair of pliers, or a practiced smile, or, most often, a plain manila folder full of papers, a dossier that they’ll tell you has everything you thought was yours alone done up in plain and black, all your secrets marbled with some coffee stains, always coffee stains, to show that they’ve already read them, that they already know. It’s just like we’ve been telling you, they’ll say, flipping through the pages, making fingerprints that never count, so just open up your ribcage and let us come inside. All these things are all the same, of course, the pliers and the practiced smiles are just other kinds of paper, other kinds of scars on the same liver-spotted brow. It’s a room, you need to understand, with no real differences except the one that it all comes from, a room where everything becomes the one thing or the other once it goes inside. The door opens for a moment and there’s the sound of ringing telephones, footsteps in the hall, maybe a bubble in the water cooler somewhere just outside. One thing to remember about paper is it only breathes until it gets wet. Then it asphyxiates you.
There’s a window somewhere. It’s not in the interrogation room, that’s not something they’d put in there. They’ll put a mirror, a false face, they usually do, because a mirror is a place for you to look and imagine you see everything you don’t want to see staring right back at you. But not a window, a real window, that would confuse everything impossibly. It’s there, though, not far away at all, really, despite the distance underground. They’ve got it in some other kind of place where no light really gets in, where there’s nothing that they’d want to see. They try, though, because they have their little secrets of their own. They stand there and try for thirty-five years, their entire careers, stand there and try until they finally forget what it is they’re doing, and then are allowed to retire. They might give you a window, too, if they had that sort of time to work on you, but they don’t, they want it to all happen now, to have already happened just a moment ago, yesterday, last year, before the first star fell down out of the sky. Ignore it when they tell you they have all the time in the world, that it’s always been this way and that it always will be, the truth is the walls have to come in all at once for them, that’s the point, it can’t happen slowly, it can’t just occur like water filling up a stone, they have to make the idea happen for you. But for them, the window’s there, right there, and there, the idea happens naturally. This is what they think they see: some trees, strangely flat, dry leaves and dry dirt and sand. Beyond that, a fence, very high, very simple, chainlink and razor wire. And beyond that, well, that’s the question, isn’t it? It’s hard for anyone else to say. It looks like there’s nothing, just the sky and the ground and no water out there, just a long walk to nowhere, a wide open plain. In the daytime they’re sure that that’s the only thing there is to see, but at night it gets a little harder, the way the little shrubs become just shadows somehow complicates things. They could swear that sometimes they see the ground moving around out there in some constant state of change. They could swear they see whole forests and wide rivers out there, glaciers, volcanos, clipper ships and steam locomotives, huge cites full of buildings they’ve never seen before, languages they don’t understand. Then they look away or they blink or shake themselves and it’s all gone, it’s just nothing again, nothing to see, nothing out there, no light getting in, but the idea is still there. It sits and it stays and it doesn’t go away. And of course the truth is there’s nothing really there, it’s also all just a stage, a kind of performance, kayfabe, but the point is that every time they come in to see you, and bring you a new hot steaming coffee wearing their thick, waxy emanation of a face, it gets a little harder for them, until one day there’s a new stain in the sheets somewhere in the suburbs, and the hand holding the coffee changes into someone new. But it’s the same coffee, and the same hand, really, just with different skin, but skin is so cheap, always has been, has been for so long they hope you’ve forgotten, they hope you won’t even notice. They hope that you won’t guess there’s even a window somewhere, that there might any stage other than this one, that you’re not alone, that there are other actors out there, ones not at all like them, and that they might be trying to talk to you.