The Smaller Evil (11 page)

There were no Band-Aids.

Of course there weren't.

Arman slouched back. He placed the pills he'd been handed into his mouth and swallowed them.

“Are you okay?” Dr. Gary asked.

“I don't know what I am.”

“Then it's no wonder you're struggling with the program.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Just what I said. Now why don't you tilt your head to the right for me.” Dr. Gary pulled on a pair of rubber gloves, then switched on a portable light that nearly blinded Arman. “Go ahead and close your eyes. I'm going to rinse and clean the wound. Then I'll give you a small shot of anesthetic before I stitch it up. The whole thing should be real easy. Okay?”

Arman nodded. He hated needles, but didn't want to say that. He was long past his childhood days of cowering and hiding under tables from nurses, but that didn't mean he wasn't scared. Although, at the moment, he realized, with his sanity in doubt, he was more scared of
himself
than anything else. That was a terrible feeling. The worst.

So Arman did what he was told.

He leaned back in the chair.

He closed his eyes.

“JESUS. YOU LOOK LIKE SHIT.”
At the sight of Arman appearing in the cabin doorway, Dale leapt off his cot like he'd sat in a nest of spiders. A gray haze of pot smoke swirled around his head.

Arman didn't move from where he stood. His brain felt empty. Scraped clean. He didn't think he wanted to know what Dale had been doing before he'd interrupted him. He didn't think he wanted to know anything. He just wanted to sleep. “Huh?”

Dale, who was simultaneously grinding a joint out on the dusty floorboards with one of Kira's high-heeled sandals, waved Arman inside. “Well, sit down or something. Christ. You look like the walking dead. And is that
blood
? Gross, man.”

Arman stepped inside the cabin. Then he stopped. Stared down at his T-shirt. Sure enough, there was blood streaked across the front of it.

“Oh yeah,” he said. “I hit my head.”

Dale came toward him then, removing his sunglasses and inspecting him closely, red-rimmed eyes running from head to toe. “Fuck. Are those
stitches
? What happened? Who did that?”

“A doctor did it. The stitches, I mean.”

“
A doctor did it?
That's all you're gonna say?”

“His name's Gary.” Arman took a breath. “Sorry if I'm being spacey. He gave me some kind of painkiller. I can't think too straight right now.”

“A painkiller, huh? Well, I hope he gave you something good. Like morphine. Or Percocet.” Dale paused. “Did he?”

“I don't know.”

“Did you get any more?”

“No.”

Dale sighed. “Well, tell me what you've been doing all day then. Kira's been worried. She thought you'd been Jonestowned or something.”

“And you weren't worried?”

“Nah. I don't worry about a lot of things. It's nothing personal.”

“Where is Kira?” Arman looked around. She definitely wasn't anywhere in the cabin.

“She's still down at that stupid meeting. She's really into it, this whole thing, the whole program, all the denouncing your family—excuse me, your
vectors—
and finding wellness within. Figures. She's the one who wanted to come in the first place. Not me. My family's not worth denouncing. I mean, it's not like they would care, so what's the point?”

“But you're not at Inoculation,” Arman said, which wasn't a question, but an observation about something that seemed wrong.
Everybody
was supposed to be at Inoculation.

Right?

“Well, you're not there either.” Dale lowered his voice. “And just between us, I think it's all a bunch of bullshit. That Beau guy wasn't even there today, but it didn't matter. Those so-called trainers jumped in all eager, leading the speeches, telling us we need to
commit to the program
or else. Like they were glad he was gone. They bring people here, too, you know. I bet we could if we wanted to. Get paid for our effort. They're just a bunch of con artists, man. All of them.”

Arman's head snapped up. “What did you say?”

“I'm saying it's a total scam. Everything here. This morning we stayed in that room for
hours
while they yelled at us. They wouldn't let us eat. Wouldn't even let me take a piss.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously. Apparently bodily functions are against the rules. Deodorant, too. I snuck out during one of the group confessional things when no one was looking. They were making people stand up in front of everybody and talk about all the ways people in their lives were toxic. It sucked. People were crying and shit. Some lady
fainted
.”

Arman put a hand to his heart.

“What's wrong?” Dale asked.

“I need to sit down.”

“Didn't I tell you that already?” Dale gestured for Arman to sit on the cot, which he did. He let the heavy messenger bag drop from his shoulder to the floor with a thud.

“You all right?” Dale asked after a moment. “You must've hit your head pretty hard.”

“Yeah.”

“You know, you still haven't told me how you did it. Or what you've been doing all day.”

“I don't know what I've been doing all day,” Arman said. “That's just it. I thought I knew. But I don't anymore. I don't think I know anything.”

“I think I know you're really stoned right now. You sound like a goddamn robot.”

“Sorry.”

“Don't be.”

“Hey, Dale?”

“Hey, what?”

“Have you ever had something happen only to realize later that none of it was real? That it couldn't be real?”

“You talking about acid? Don't get into that shit.”

“No, not acid.”

“What then?”

Arman sighed. “Forget it. I need to sleep.”

“Hey, were you
going
somewhere?” Dale was staring at his bag.

Arman nodded, collapsing onto his side with a yawn. He didn't have the energy to stay upright any longer. “This morning. I tried to leave this morning.”

“Why? You already paid to be here. You got room and board, man. The people are weird, but people are always weird. There's a good view. The air's fresh.”

“Because I'm a fuck-up,” Arman said. “Because Beau wanted me to do something last night and I didn't do it. Because I don't want to
keep
fucking up.”

Dale snorted. “Pretty ironic then, huh?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, seeing as you tried to leave and you ended up back here anyway, it kinda looks like you fucked that up, too.”

HOPE YOU CAN.

They show up right on time and right in the order you told them to. The two guys arrive first, followed by the dark-haired girl. You can't help but admire her confidence as she walks in. She's serious, ready to do battle, even though this is far from a war. You can read her determination because she's got her hair pulled back and doesn't once look at her phone. She's smarter than the boys, and she's going to make sure they know it.

You wonder again why she doesn't smoke and what it could mean. Not that it matters much in the long run.

But it might.

When it comes time for you to start, you don't play favorites. Your audience is rapt and your job is to keep it that way. You talk and you talk, and soon the expressions on their faces become the ones you anticipate. There's awe. Affirmation. Followed by the desire for approval.

Yours, of course.

You talk more and they keep listening. But all the while, you're listening, too. Group dynamics are your specialty. You glean information from every silence and passing glance until you know just what drives each one of them. Until you know how to play them to your advantage.

Young people are the easiest to read, you've found, still pliable, still eager. And these three have been taught well, at least for your purposes. They're products of their time, willing to take on debt and more debt with no job in sight because they don't know any other way to try. Individualism is their birthright, their false ideal. This means they've learned to question the truth, but never their dreams, and that above all else, they believe deeply in what they want to see, not the image that's right in front of them.

What they want, of course, isn't what you can give them.

What you're selling is the hope you can.

ARMAN'S DREAMS WERE ALL NIGHTMARES.

In them, he was sliding open the van door. He was seeing the blood. It was everywhere, great quantities of it, spilling from Beau's arms, dripping, pooling like a lake, reminding Arman of a video he'd seen in which a hockey player's throat was sliced by a skate on the ice, severing his carotid artery and flooding the crease with his blood. The player's life had been saved by a quick-acting doctor, but Arman wasn't a doctor.

He wasn't
anything.

It doesn't matter what you are, damnit. Help him already!

Get a tourniquet.

Stop the bleeding.

Do something!

Only Arman didn't help or get or stop. Instead a gleam of light jolted him from his state of shock. A flash. A glint. The gleaming object lay on the van's floor, right at Beau's feet. Arman's vision swam to see what it was—a knife. A knife he
knew,
its polished layers of steel having been hammered into the most delicate of designs. The whole thing now splashed with red.

That's not possible. It's not. That knife can't be here.

I threw it away.

Then the dream shuttled forward. One minute Arman was staring down at the floor, at a knife that didn't belong, the next he was leaping out of the van in a feral burst of panic and sunlight, sprinting for the market's back door. There was pain in his head, a sickening ache, and blood was in his eyes and streaming down his face, only he didn't know why it was there. He didn't know how he'd been hurt.

The barn door was locked. Arman bolted around to the front of the store, only to find that that door was locked, too. And all the lights were off. Despite his growing pain and growing weakness, he pounded on the glass and shouted for the boy he knew was inside to open up. Only he didn't. Asshole.

I need to get help. An ambulance.

A medic.

Someone!

But the longer Arman stood banging on the door and pleading for compassion that wasn't forthcoming, the more certain he became that at any moment the cops were going to show up. They were going to pull into the parking lot, and they were going to find Beau and the blood and Arman's bleeding head and his bag that was filled with thousands of stolen dollars. The boy with the blue apron would probably have something to say about it all, too. The cops would start asking questions, lots of questions, and Arman didn't think he'd like the conclusions they'd come to.

At all.

So of all the choices Arman could make in that moment, it was by far the easiest and most cowardly to turn and jog back to the white van that sat in the shade with the engine still running; to avoid looking at Beau or the knife, much less touch either of them; to hastily shut
the side passenger doors and crawl into the driver's seat; to back the vehicle out of the parking lot onto the main road and to head right back up to the compound.

• • •

Arman woke with a gasp.

He sat straight up. Looked around. Recognition took its sweet time, but he soon figured out that he was on his cot, alone in the cabin, with his heart racing. Hummingbird fast. And he was soaked with sweat.

You're awake now
.
It was just a dream.

But his despair failed to dissipate. Dreaming had done nothing to change reality. It hadn't made him less of a coward or lightened the weight of his guilt.

Oh Beau.

A strange scent wafted across the cabin then. Fragrant and earthy, it caught Arman's attention. Paused his guilt spiral. It was a good smell, too, with just a hint of richness. Like the most comforting of food. The scent floated across the cabin, filling his nostrils, teasing his mind like magic, and conjuring up the distant dance of memories he'd kept long buried: warm meals around the dinner table in the time before his parents' divorce, back when his father was still around and still doing his best to stay honest. Or at least give the
impression
of honesty.

Giving impressions, after all, was sort of his thing.

With bleary eyes, Arman searched for the source of the smell. It came from a wicker picnic basket that had been set on the table in the center of the room. That was strange, he thought. The basket hadn't been there earlier, when he was talking to Dale. He would've noticed it. And he
had
talked to Dale earlier, hadn't he?

It was hard to remember.

Arman got up, wincing as he stood. Not only were his feet sore, but
moving brought back the ache in his head, deep enough to hitch his breath. He fingered his stitches gratefully. Despite the pain, the presence of his blisters and the head wound offered an earthly sort of reassurance; both were a testament to the past that was getting harder and harder to hold on to.

He walked to the table. Opened the basket. Nested atop a bed of timothy grass and lavender sat a smooth ceramic bowl filled with broth and covered with plastic wrap. Two vent holes let the soup's steam and scent escape into the ether. Beside the bowl was a plate with a corn biscuit and a pat of butter, also covered in plastic wrap. Next to that sat a mug and a pot of hot tea that smelled of mint and honey.

Arman's stomach felt too jumpy to eat, but he knew who'd brought the food for him and it was knowledge that made him feel good. Cared for. He glanced out the cabin's window. The day's shadows had grown long. Everyone must still be down in the meeting hall. Dr. Gary had said they'd be there until dinner, which, if yesterday was anything to go by, wouldn't happen until well after dark.

That meant now might be a good time to visit the cook. For him to try to talk to her. Arman's body quivered at the thought, unable to resist indulging in the memory of her perfect touch, her open mouth, the sweet-soft way her breasts rubbed beneath that flimsy dress she wore, just barely a secret. It all had power to fill him with the most dizzying sort of agony. There could be nothing more earthly than that. Besides, she would listen to what he had to say. She would believe him. And she would know what to do.

Wouldn't she?