Ch. 4 Getting Food To-Go

I have a confession to make. I skipped making an entry here yesterday. You're probably reading this in its completed form, so you'd never know I skipped a day, but I'm telling you because I want you, whoever you are, to know how much I appreciate you reading this. Writing this record is really helping me process what's happened to my life since I became an Agent of Control (if I even still have that status. It's not exactly clear at this point what's to become of me once I'm all healed up as much as I'm going to get healed up, especially after yesterday.)

I have faith that Rachelle’s pet AI will get this file in front of a lot of eyeballs, but I have no idea whether you're taking me seriously or just thinking that you're reading a piece of fiction. Either way, it helps me a lot to know that you're reading this. It's a much nicer way to work things out than what happened yesterday after breakfast.

My first debriefing session since I came to be here at the facility was intense. Although everyone else in this facility has consistently been friendly, kind, cheerful, and supportive, my interviewer for the debriefing is a Grade A asshole. The session was three antagonistic and adversarial hours that at times involved some yelling from both sides of the interview.

I was so out of sorts afterwards that’s why I didn't get anything written to you yesterday. I have another debriefing session with that same person scheduled for tomorrow. Oh, joy!

It's a lot nicer to share these things here with you at my own pace, starting from the beginning, and taking things day by day as they happened. My interviewer jumped right into the worst parts, the death, the shock…I guess you could use the word “trauma”.

Anyway, I've rambled enough. You and I, dear reader, left off last time just as Rachelle and I were trekking down Interstate 70 in a Ford Expedition looking for grub and a place to switch drivers.

We soon found a Denny's. That was good enough. As we pulled in and parked, Rachelle said that since she was short enough and the Ford Expedition was large enough, she planned to sleep in the back after our break while I drove to Kansas City’s Union Station to pick up the next two members of our team. I thought at the time that she was rather trusting of a strange man she had just met, co-worker for a secret organization or not. I would later learn that Rachelle is never unguarded while she sleeps.

Once we were inside, seated at a booth, and waiting for our food to come, Rachelle asked me why I accepted Mr. X’s offer and joined Control. I didn't tell her the part about me joining on a trial basis. That felt like sharing individual salary information at a corporation that could cause jealousy. What if not everyone got such offers as mine? I shared everything else, though.

“I've never really fit in anywhere. I think I know why. I'm haunted by something an old college roommate of mine said once, about 25 years ago”

“What’s that?” Rachelle evinced a real curiosity.

“We had both just graduated with our Bachelor’s degrees, mine in biochemistry with a minor in Spanish and his in philosophy with a minor in finance. He was working at a bank. I was working in a lab. One day, he came home in a really grumpy mood. He’d been having problems with jerks at work in management. He was fuming about people ‘stuck in their left brains’, people too rigid in their logic patterns and thinking of answers only in terms of math to see the big picture of things.

“I was in my twenties and hadn’t developed the people skills and cue reading abilities that I like to think I have today. These days, I would have left him alone to calm down and wind down on his own. But, back in my twenties, I thought my college buddy just needed some humor and fun and cheerfulness, and I thought I’d be the one to supply it.”

“Uh oh.” Rachelle winced in sympathy for the predictable outcome.

“Yeah. When we’re young, we’re often pretty dumb. I sarcastically joked that dissing math/logic people might not be cool since his roommate that he was venting to had just graduated the previous week with a degree in biochemistry. He had been setting up some music on his stereo and suddenly whipped around, turning on me. He used the harshest tone I’ve ever heard him use. He said, ‘Carl, you’re not a scientist’ with real venom.

“I think he saw the hurt on my face which snapped him back to himself and he explained what he meant, which was still harsh, but it made sense. He said that I spoke three languages, that I played a musical instrument, that I could sing well enough to win awards, that I could quickly become brilliant in anything that interested me. He said that I was a Renaissance Man and that unfortunately for me, the Renaissance is long over. Our modern society puts labels on everyone’s foreheads and sticks them in boxes and then labels the boxes. He said that I resist labeling and that I don’t fit in one of society’s boxes. He said that life would be very hard for me since I would never truly fit in anywhere, that I was a Renaissance Man out of my time. It was a dark prophecy, a pronouncement of doom that has come true.”

Rachelle tried to counter my negativity. “You’ve got a good career going as an anthropology professor.”

“I’m an eccentric who found a niche in which to blend in with other eccentrics in a college anthropology department. And I found it too late. I don’t have enough years in to have any savings, nothing built up, no investments. Too many years were just bouncing from one thing that didn’t work out to the next thing that didn’t work out to the next thing that didn’t work out.”

“But when you met Mr. X, you thought you might just have found a place for a Renaissance Man?”

“Yes,” I acknowledged as our waitress arrived with our food.

“Before we eat, I’m going to freshen up,” Rachelle said. “Feel free to start without me. You gotta get your strength up. You’re driving next.”

“Alright,” I said, a little disappointed that since she was going to nap when we got back to the vehicle, that me learning about what got her to join Control would have to wait.

I was unwrapping my silverware from my napkin when I noticed that a cord was trailing out of one of the pockets of Rachelle’s cargo pants, a very thick cord, not a little cord as would charge up a portable electronic device, but a thick household appliance cord. It was white in color, leaving a trail on the ground as Rachelle headed for the restrooms. She seemed oblivious to it, as if it exerted no pressure or sensation that she could feel. I leaned down and looked under the table to see that our table was a “lucky” table that had an electrical outlet on the wall underneath, probably for the staff to plug in a vacuum cleaner at closing time. The mysterious white cord was plugged into this outlet.

This reminded me of a magic trick in which a magician pulls an endless supply of colored scarves from his hand, all tied into a multicolored rope that just keeps going and going. The cargo pants pocket, from which the cord continued to emerge in ever increasing length, looked like a normal pocket, yet twenty feet of cord had already emerged between the pocket and the wall socket under our table. How was this possible?

There didn’t turn out to be any time to wonder about it, since a waiter about ten or twelve feet away with a tray of at least four plates full of food on it, tripped over the white cord with a crash. Matters were made worse when he fell right into a table of other guests who were trying to enjoy their food. The cord became very taught when the waiter tripped and even slipped out of the wall socket under our table. I saw the cord suddenly retract, all twenty-something feet of it, into Rachelle’s cargo pants as quickly as if the heavy cord were thin, light tape measure. There was instantly no evidence that the cord had ever been there. I think I was the only one who had seen it. Rachelle knew about it, though. Her eyes met mine and her face displayed a terrified expression.

No one else seemed to know about the cord that had been there but suddenly wasn’t anymore. The waiter even said, “I don’t know what I could have tripped on.”

Rachelle changed her plan. Instead of going to the restroom, she found a restaurant worker who wasn’t part of cleaning up the mess. I could faintly hear her apologize for the inconvenience since our food had just arrived for in-house dining and she asked if we could change that and get the food to go instead. She whipped out a card to pay for our meals and then finally went to the restroom. I sat there in the booth while a worker came and boxed up our meals to-go, wondering what had just happened.