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"I don't want to," John says woodenly, staring at the small plastic cup Vogelbaum is holding. It has milliliter gradations and a bright blue screw-on lid, the same color as the caps of a lot of other disposable plasticware in the lab.
"John, we don't have all day, and the people upstairs are waiting for this sample."
John pulls his bare feet off the floor, and scoots back on the mattress until his back hits the wall, hugging his knees. "I don't want to. I don't do that kind of stuff."
Vogelbaum sighs and sits down next to him. John can tell he's not going to have his way. They wouldn't bring Vogelbaum in here unless they really cared about something.
"John, when they were telling you not to do that, they meant we didn't want you doing it all the time. You know, aimlessly. This… we need this sample."
Vogelbaum extends the cup to him and John holds it by the top, but his arms are still wrapped around his legs, head tilted down, mouth pressed to his knees.
"Why are you even here?" he grumbles, barely understandable because he's saying it without lifting his face. "You haven't visited me in years."
Vogelbaum shrugs. "They told me you were refusing to do what they asked."
"That never made you come visit before." It was true. When John threw a tantrum– which didn't happen often, and usually because they'd kept him in the room too long, not because they pushed him too hard in experiments– the best he could hope for was Barbara paying him a visit and giving him a stern talk to about not acting like a child. It was never Vogelbaum. John knew Vogelbaum visited the lab, he'd hear his voice on other floors sometimes, but he never showed his face on the floor John was on– he hadn't dropped by since John had turned ten, probably. So now John is full of resentment and aggravation, but he's also overwhelmed by a feeling that he doesn't want Vogelbaum to leave, that he wants to keep him here as long as possible, that maybe he even wants to hug him despite how angry he is at him, although he knows that's out of the question.
"Why did you stop working with me?" John asks, almost certain he'll get some evasive answer, and not even sure what answer he wants to hear.
Vogelbaum sighs. "I just got busy with other projects. And I did get regular reports about you. I heard you were making really good progress, so it didn't seem necessary to make the trip out here."
"So you just didn't care enough to visit. Didn't care about me at all."
Vogelbaum shakes his head very slowly, as if trying to evaluate his own feelings at the same time. "I do care about you. But you probably wouldn't understand why that would translate into me not coming down to see you here."
"Bullshit," John says, partially because he's angry and partially because he's fishing for a reaction at this point.
"Oh they've expanded your vocabulary I see. Anyway, I don't blame you for not understanding that part. I wish I had come to visit you, in retrospect."
John's anger melts into a sadness that is very imminently threatening to turn into tears. "I told them I wanted to see you! And they kept saying you didn't have time," John says. "So after a while I stopped asking. But were you really too busy to even just drop by?"
"I do have a lot of work, John."
"For years?"
"John–" Vogelbaum presses his lips together as if trying to decide what to say. "It's not about you."
"How is not visiting me not about me? And now suddenly you're here, asking me to do something gross."
"'Gross' is not a word intelligent people use. Now stop being stubborn– they need a sample from you."
"For what," John grumbles.
Vogelbaum sighs. "That's not for you to worry about," he says instead of explaining anything, and somehow John missed this tone, this patronizing, calm way Vogelbaum has of cutting off any questions which takes the responsibility off of John, and it's comforting for some reason. "I'm visiting here because of the important work that's going on upstairs. And that work hinges on you doing your part and helping us. You understand now?"
"I don't want to do it," John reiterates.
"I'm not asking you to want to, I'm telling you you need to do it, otherwise all the scientific work can't move forward."
John chews his bottom lip. "I don't want to do it while everyone watches and laughs."
"No one's going to laugh," Vogelbaum says.
John sighs through his nose. Vogelbaum wasn't around to know about how Marty from the nightshift caught him in the middle of the act about a month ago. He wasn't around when Barbara told him everyone would stop working with him and he'd be left alone in the Bad Room forever if he didn't stop touching himself, even if it was during the short showers they allowed him to have. Vogelbaum isn't around enough to know about anything, or understand anything about John's current life.
"No one's going to laugh," Vogelbaum repeats. "It's a normal thing to do."
"Then why do people tell me not to do it?" John is exasperated, and he can't keep it out of his tone. "Then why do they…" he chokes up, not wanting to finish the phrase. He can't see through the walls of the Bad Room but he can hear people talking on the outside of it quite clearly, all the way through the building. They don't realize he can hear them even when they're not in the room outside his door. They don't think he can hear them when they're up on some higher floor judging by what they're saying, and he doesn't really want to give that fact away, because listening to them is the only way he has of knowing when they lie to his face later.
Vogelbaum nods. "Well, I'm telling you to do it. You have my permission."
John shakes his head, not lifting his face because he can feel tears welling up in his eyes and that's the last thing he wants Vogelbaum to see. He's not even sure why he's crying. Maybe because it feels like they're taking the last thing he used to enjoy away– twisting it into something humiliating and just another task, another test for him to complete.
"John. Look at me."
John shivers. That's a command he gets from very few people in charge of him. Most of the time, the request is the opposite, to keep looking away or staring at a fixed point when there's someone inexperienced coming into his room, nervous about what they've heard or the footage of accidents they've reviewed for training. John knows they keep a record of every person who died in this room and analyze it with new recruits to avoid repetition of the same mistakes. He looks up, blinking away his tears.
"You can do it on your own, or they'll have to come up with ways to help you, but trust me, it'll go much better if you can just do it on your own."
The warning sounds ominous and John looks down, tempted to ask how they'd do it, but he knows Vogelbaum's patience has already worn thin by his tone.
Vogelbaum rises off the bed. "I'm going to leave you, we'll shut the cameras off, and you can do it in privacy. But please just do it."
Privacy isn't a word John has really heard used before. Maybe he's read it but skipped over it without knowing exactly what it means, but he can guess now.
"I'm counting on you," Vogelbaum says as he walks out the room. "Be good and do what we're asking you to do."
That last phrase feels like it locks something in John's mind, like he reverts to an earlier age, and he feels compelled not to let Vogelbaum down. He stares up at the camera in the corner of the room.
"We're turning the camera off, don't worry," Vogelbaum's voice says over the intercom.
John stares up into the lens and waits for the quiet whir to fall silent. He's heard them shut the cameras off before, for maintenance, so he knows what it sounds like. They're just telling him they're shutting them off without doing it. Lying to him– he doesn't understand why people lie to him so often. It doesn't even seem to be about important things most of the time, but they probably think it makes things easier. Maybe it used to work when Vogelbaum was still involved. John didn't use to question what they told him as much as he does nowadays.
He sighs and curls up in bed in the fetal position, still holding the cup, not doing what they're asking him to do. He stopped touching himself after being caught by Marty, feeling nauseous about doing it, and he's certainly not going to do it on command when they're recording him. He lies there and listens to the technicians outside, but no one is talking. When they're not talking, it's usually a sign that they're communicating in writing, so that he can't eavesdrop on them. John lies there patiently. He doesn't hear talking but he hears shuffling of feet around. One of the noises he picks out is different than all the rest. A woman's shoes. So Barbara's there too. Are they going to bring Stan Edgar in just so they have everyone important watch him do this?
Several people take the elevator two floors up and think they're in the clear so they start talking.
"He's not doing it."
"He thinks we're giving him some sort of behavioral test."
"No. He's out of sorts." John can easily pick out Vogelbaum's voice among the others. "You've raised him with some sort of hangup about this. I thought we agreed to let him develop like a normal teenager as much as feasible."
"Oh we try," Barbara responds, and John is surprised to hear her sound defensive, maybe the first time he's heard that tone from her. "But once he discovered the art he started spending all his time alone doing that."
"It was probably just stress relief," Dr. Park's voice says. John likes Dr. Park well enough. He's young, and more responsive than Barbara when John says he can't do something. But John also respects him less, because he can see he's lower down in the hierarchy and chain of command.
"He was doing it incessantly, though," Barbara goes on. "Every free moment he had to himself."
She's exaggerating, John thinks sullenly. But it's true that once he discovered he could soothe himself, he'd do it whenever the testing and ordeals were over. It helped him stay calmer. It even made him feel less lonely, and gave him one reason to look forward to being left alone.
"You keep him in the room too long," Vogelbaum tells her. "You've seen the footage. He talks to himself. Not surprised there's other self-pacifying behaviors that take root."
You're perfectly fine. They don't know what they're talking about, the voice in his head tells him, but John doesn't respond to it out loud. The last thing he wants is to be caught on camera looking like he's talking to himself and reinforcing Vogelbaum's point.
John can hear Barbara sighing and even though he can't see her, he can perfectly picture how she's tilting her head because that's how she looks when she sighs at him. "Whatever it was, we had to put a stop to it, shame him about it. He was still doing it on the sly, like a normal teenager."
John breathes hard, feeling his cheeks start to burn, and he doesn't want them to know he can hear them, so he tries to will the heat away from his face. But it's painful to hear that there's no secrets, nothing he can really hide from them in these closed rooms with the cameras always on.
"And why didn't you start collecting samples then?" Vogelbaum asks.
"I don't see why you want to start so early. I'm sure it's too early for him to be making quality samples at fourteen." Barbara replies, and once again John is surprised to hear her sound like she’s on the back foot, explaining herself and sounding unsure.
"Why would you assume the normal rules apply here?"
John has no idea what a quality sample means, and wonders what will change in the future. He wishes they'd tell him about things they know are coming. He was surprised and even scared when he first discovered the ability to make something new come out of this part of his body. It caught him completely off guard the first time. He had been touching himself idly in bed under the covers, his underwear suddenly flooded with something that felt viscous between his fingers. He got up, heart racing, told the people on the night shift watching him, sure it was some sort of strange new power manifesting. But everyone else was less surprised than him, told him that it was perfectly normal, to change his underwear, wash his hands in the small sink in the room, and go back to bed.
There's lab techs discussing him on another floor.
"Maybe we just wait for his bedtime and he'll do it on his own?"
"The lab needs it by the end of the afternoon, before all the scientists in Repro go home."
"Lazy 9 to 5 assholes."
"He's not going to randomly jizz in a cup for you during the night shift."
"Can you shut the light off?" John asks, realizing that listening to these discussions is worse than just getting it over and done with.
There's a pause in everyone's conversations. There must be speakers from his room on every floor.
"It's not straightforward to shut the light off in that room," Barbara's voice tells Vogelbaum, but John knows it can be shut off. They've cycled the power once or twice, when doing something with the backup generator, and he's been plunged into pitch dark before. He can see in the dark just fine, at least the outlines of everything, just as he sees when he looks into sealed containers that have no light inside, even if he doesn't power his lasers on. But all the people taking care of him don't seem to see anything at all, and that's what he wants right now.
"You don't shut it off when he sleeps?" Vogelbaum asks.
"He only sleeps about three out of twenty four hours. And we'd rather keep the CCTV on. I don't think it matters to someone with his type of eyesight."
"John, it's not really feasible to switch off the lights right now," Vogelbaum tells him over the intercom. "Nobody's watching you."
"Fine," John says under his breath, softly enough that the microphones probably don't pick it up. He climbs under the covers, under the sheets, where their human eyes and cameras can't see, closes his eyes, and focuses on the softness of the bedding, tries to think about something relaxing, thinks about being held, about how it feels to have his hair brushed on the rare occasion when he gets his hair cut, even thinks about the time they kept him in a container of boiling acid and he felt extremely sick afterwards, so sick that one of the nurses was tasked to sit with him and pet his hand when he was lying in bed, and John wonders if that would be the kind of help he would have gotten if he refused to do this on his own. He would have liked that.
What if she didn't just pet your hand, what if she started touching your body, maybe even down–
John cuts off his own thoughts. He gets disturbed by what the voice in his head comes up with sometimes. He doesn't want to think about Nurse Heather that way. He was feeling sick and she was just there to calm him down.
You were feeling so sick and yet you still had the energy to stare at her chest through her clothes–
John shakes his head, pretends not to remember how her body looked under the nurse's uniform and frilly bra. He didn't stare. He snuck a peek, almost accidentally. Most of the people working here know John can see through things. He didn't want her to know how much he wanted to stare at her body.
"He's getting close," someone in the outer room says and John is thrown off, still stroking himself but now acutely aware of his depressing surroundings again. "When his eyes power up…"
John squeezes his eyes shut tight, and wishes he could drown sounds out as well. He finishes, biting his lip not to make a sound that would air across all the CCTV screens, almost forgetting to catch it in the cup, shoving it up close when he remembers himself, jabbing the hard plastic rim against his body. He breathes hard, cracking an eye open, pulls the cup away and screws on the lid before he forgets and spills this sample that's oh-so-important to them for some reason. They can't complain now. He's done what they've asked.
John half expects one of the lowly orderlies to come in and collect, or maybe them asking him to put the sample near the door to be collected later, but it's Vogelbaum who enters the room.
"Thank you," Vogelbaum tells him. "I'll talk to them about shutting off the lights for you next time." John is shocked to feel his hair get tousled, and it brings him back to his early childhood, maybe ten years earlier, when he had no question that Vogelbaum was his father and that he loved him more than anything else in the world.
"Next time?" he asks.
"They'll probably ask you to do this once in a while," Vogelbaum says. "Let's see how this one turns out."
John still has no idea what 'turning out' would mean in this case. Barbara said it has to be a certain quality, but for what he doesn't really know. It just looks like a thin layer of white stuff at the bottom of that plastic cup. But he nods anyway, feeling bereft as he watches Vogelbaum leave his room. If they really plan on asking John to do this stupid thing again, maybe he can demand a visit from Vogelbaum before he complies.
~~~
Vogelbaum doesn't ever end up visiting again of course. John hoped but he didn't expect it.
They ask John for a lot of samples, more and more leading up to his fifteenth birthday. John is idly curious about what they're doing with so many of them– maybe just analyzing them the same way they do stool and urine specimens they collect while running experiments to see how he metabolizes poisons, but they collect them separately, more often, and seem to treat them with much more urgency than they do anything else, rushing them upstairs, as if these samples are much more important.
He overhears bits of conversations that sound like something about what they're trying in the lab isn't working, but it's never clear what that is.
John hasn't completely lost his sense of shame about touching himself, but it's become such a routine, almost daily request that he doesn't bother worrying about privacy so much anymore. They never did bother to switch off the light for him, nor the cameras anyway. Why should he care about it if they don't seem to?
He's thought of a lot of different things to get himself to the brink, but his most trusted go-to are still thoughts about Nurse Heather. Nurse Heather has already left the job, so she seems like a safe person to fix on, but John's fantasizing about her has escalated to imagining her touching him everywhere. Sometimes his fantasies turn to him touching her everywhere, and that's a more disturbing line of thought, because he remembers what usually happens to people he touches. And somehow, those thoughts get in the mix and he's turned on by them too. He touches himself but thinks about touching others, and they don't always survive his touch in his fantasies. He knows it's wrong to think about that over and over again, but it makes it easy to submit a sample quickly.
~~~
The small group of scientists that takes care of John doesn't celebrate many holidays, at least not inside the lab. He overhears them talking about attending a Christmas party for employees in the middle of the city in some big building. He asked once if he could go, not knowing what 'employee' meant exactly, but they told him he'd have to wait until he was older and then they were sure he would be attending that party.
But there's one annual tradition they do always celebrate– they mark John's birthday as a special day. They bring John out of the room and he's allowed to stay in the common area with them. Nobody gets too near him, but they still sit at a table together, sing Happy Birthday to him, and eat cake. They're proud to mark off the time they've raised him, and they act as if they genuinely like him. John is cautious to believe that, but he appreciates their effort.
On one of the cement columns in the room, they mark off how much he's grown each year. This year, he gasps when he steps back to see.
"That's a solid 5'6 and a half!" Dr. Park says after applying a measuring tape and writing the number on the cement surface. "I think you're officially going through a growth spurt."
John smiles. He wonders if he'll grow taller than all of the people here some day. He also wonders if he's allowed to ask for a second piece of ice cream cake as he goes back to his seat at the table— this year's tastes so good— but decides not to push his luck since no one else seems to be going for seconds. Sometimes he has to pick up etiquette by just mimicking other people, and he certainly doesn't want to break the illusion that he's just one of the group.
"And here's your gift, John." Barbara extends a thick paperback book to him. John appreciates that they wrap his annual gift even though all of them know he sees right through something like that.
"Thank you," he says, unfolding the paper carefully and hugging the book to his chest. Ever since John heard about a book that has all the words of the English language and their definitions, he's wanted to have one. So that's what he requested for his fifteenth birthday– a dictionary.
"Well, back to work," Barbara says, and the scientists all follow her lead and start getting up and going back to their workstations, and the magical moment where John feels like he's part of the group is over. It won't happen again until next year.
John is back in the Bad Room, but he's got free time for now and lies in bed on his stomach, kicking his legs idly while flipping through the book. He looks up a lot of words he overhears from this floor and others. Some of them are close to what he thought they meant, but some are quite different.
"Oh and John, please provide a sample for upstairs today," he hears someone's voice over the intercom and a plastic cup is shoved through the door slot.
He looks over at the cup on the floor but then looks away, leafing through the book until he finds the word Sample. It's not helpful. He tries to remember all the other words he's overheard about this.
spunk noun
1 Woody tinder : punk
2 Mettle, pluck
3 Spirit, liveliness
He has to look up some of the words in the definition, but none of it seems to make sense.
seaman noun Sailor, mariner.
No other strange meanings listed. But he sees another word further down the page.
semen noun A viscid whitish fluid of the male reproductive tract consisting of spermatozoa suspended in secretions of accessory glands (as of the prostate and Cowper's glands).
John's heartrate speeds up, because "whitish fluid" sounds like the right thing, but he'll have to look up most of the other words.
spermatozoon noun A motile male gamete of an animal usually with rounded or elongated head and a long posterior flagellum
"... What?" John accidentally says out loud, completely confused at this point, but he forges on.
gamete noun A mature male or female germ cell usually possessing a haploid chromosome set and capable of initiating formation of a new diploid individual by fusion with a gamete of the opposite sex
John feels like he's nearing a dead end, because no matter how many words he looks up, the definitions just get more and more complicated. Not to mention, 'sex' is a bad word, and it's right there in the definition. But his eyes rove over the definition, back and forth, trying to make sense of any of it. Whatever they're doing up in the lab, it's probably complicated.
"Are you enjoying your gift?" Barbara's voice startles him because it's over the intercom and very loud compared to the hum of conversation going on behind the door.
John nods, hoping that it's not obvious through the camera which words he's looking up. There are a lot of words on each page. There's no way she'd know, but he still breaks out in a sweat.
He gets up off the bed, remembering he's supposed to provide a sample today and that they like to have it upstairs before noon.