Do you find that strange?
Sad?
Pathetic?
Interesting?
“Where are we going?” I said to Max, once we were far enough away from Arnie.
“To the fucking pub.”
“What happened between you and Arnie?”
“The fucking story of that requires the consumption of beer. Much fucking beer.”
We ended up in the same pub Max took me to before, at a little table in an empty corner, drinking Guinness and looking at framed photographs of the extremely green, rocky, and often misty Irish countryside. Max downed an entire pint with one tilt of his wrist, pushed his big glasses to the top of his nose, belched loudly, and ordered two more Guinness, even though I hadn’t even taken a sip.
“You’ll fucking need another, once you hear this,” Max said. “Trust me!”
I took a creamy sip and then listened to his tale.
According to Max, Arnie had called him on the phone and asked if he’d like to be part of a study. “What’s a fucking study?” Max asked, and Arnie explained that sometimes therapists put patients in a “controlled fucking environment” to study their behavior, advance our “fucking knowledge” of the “human fucking race,” he said, and help the test subjects in the process. “Arnie hit me in my fucking weak spot, because he said there’d be a cat to pet, and there fucking was too!”
Apparently, Max was instructed to meet Arnie in West Philly at a “fancy fucking college,” and when he did, he was taken into a “large fucking building that looked like a hospital but wasn’t a fucking hospital, because Arnie called it a laboratory fucking facility,” which creeped out Max for many reasons, which I will explain a bit further on.
Max was taken to an office and introduced to a man wearing “a white fucking lab coat” who inquired about the possibility of asking Max questions and “digital-fucking-recording” his answers, as the lab coat turned on the camera stationed on a “fucking tripod.”
Max asked when he would be able to see the promised cat, and the doctor said that would be “the fucking dessert.”
They asked Max all sorts of seemingly random questions, most of which he refused to answer because they were “way too fucking personal.” Max said they asked him whether he had had sex with any men or women recently, and Max said, “Fucking whoa! That’s a line crosser! What the fuck, hey?” And they didn’t seem to mind that he hadn’t answered the questions, which was “fucking weird” because they kept telling Max that he was doing fine, even though he was just getting mad and refusing to answer and sweating in his chair. “I don’t fucking like this. Where the fuck is the cat?” Max kept asking, and they kept promising Max that he was very close to the part where he got to pet the cat. Max said they asked him even stranger questions next, like did he ever have “suicidal fucking thoughts,” “extreme fucking reactions to criticism,” “vivid fucking dreams,” and “did he really believe in fucking aliens,” which freaked him out because of what happened to his sister. The doctor said he was particularly interested in Max’s belief that his cat Alice had been telepathic.
Max ordered another two beers, because he had finished his second.
I had only managed to drink half of mine, so I soon had two and a half pints of Guinness lined up on my side of the table.
“What happened to your sister?” I asked.
Just the mention of The Girlbrarian made my mouth dry—it felt like someone had poured hot sand down my throat.
“I’m not at that fucking part of the story yet. Fuck!” Max yelled. He then said they took him to the end of a “long fucking hallway” that had no windows or doors or anything at all—just white walls, ceilings, and lights overhead. At the end of the hall was a “weird fucking box” on the wall. The doctor touched the box with the tip of his right index finger, the box started to glow green, and then a voice said, “Recognized. Door opening. Hello, Dr. Biddington,” as the door automatically unlocked and slid with a hissing noise, as if the inside atmosphere “were pressure fucking controlled, like a fucking airplane or a subma-fucking-rine.” The doctor walked in. Arnie and Max followed. Inside there were no windows and no clocks and “no fucking TV.” Everything was white—the chairs, the rugs, walls, the counters, “every-fucking-thing!” There were black balls in the ceilings of each room, and when Max asked about them, he was told there were cameras inside.
“Meow!” Max heard, and a medium-sized “short-fucking-haired calico” appeared and began to purr and rub up against Max’s leg. The doctor said Max could name the cat “whatever the fuck he wanted” and she looked “a-fucking-lot like Alice—too fucking much like Alice!” She even had a black patch of “fucking fur” around her “fucking eye!” Max began to worry that they’d cloned his “dead fucking cat,” which made him “sweat fucking buckets” because “what type of mind-fuckers go around cloning people’s dead fucking cats? What the fuck, hey?” Then he began to worry that maybe he was on a spaceship, because the insides of spaceships are always “all fucking white.” And the long hallway seemed like a “fucking entrance ramp,” like “getting onto a fucking airplane.” And if he were on a spaceship, he feared that Arnie and Dr. Biddington were not human—but aliens.
Max asked what they wanted, why had they brought him to this place.
The doctor said, “How would you like to live here with the cat for a few weeks—say . . . three weeks?”