Free The Poison Sky by John Shannon Page A

heavily.
    “Let’s get you some coffee. You look thwacked.” He held his cup overhead, and a different waitress brought a pot for Faye.
    “Give us a couple minutes,” he said.
    “Sure thing.”
    “Oh, Jack,” she tried again after the waitress left. “I couldn’t just mark time in there. I had to pretend to take it all seriously so they’d take me seriously. They really know how to work on you and your disappointments.” One tear made its way down her cheek and she flicked it free with the tip of a finger. “Man, they know how.”
    “It’s their stock-in-trade.”
    He handed her his napkin and she dabbed at her eye. “Whew. Wasn’t there something in 1984 about authoritarians using your one real terror against you?”
    “They called it Room 101, I think. Whatever it was you really hated and feared, they kept it waiting for you in Room 101.”
    “Well, these creeps took me to 101. But not my fears. My big disappointments in myself. When I came in reception, I could see a girl with long blond braids weeping. They led her out of one of the cubicles, where they took me. I should have left right then.”
    She sipped at the coffee pensively.
    “Did you find out anything useful?”
    “In due course,” she snapped. She looked at him, as if seeing him for the first time. “You’re an impatient man by nature, aren’t you?”
    “Sure.”
    “Well, keep your shirt on. Are my eyes red?”
    “Nothing that would get you thrown out of an AA meeting.”
    An old couple nearby had fallen silent and were trying to listen in. The woman tapped her husband on the arm and nodded in their direction, her chin fixed in a kind of righteous indignation. He wondered what they thought they were overhearing.
    “They set you down and a guy asks you a lot of questions about your life and doesn’t respond at all when you answer. He just takes notes. Then about forty-five minutes into it, he says he has to enter the information into their supercomputer, and he leaves for all of about a minute and a half. Then he comes back with a new clipboard and says there’s a good chance your soul’s a worthy one, ready for the climb, and it’s worth doing a few more tests.” The waitress was heading back and he waved her off.
    “Then two of them, a new man and a woman, come and take you into another room, where they strap you into a kind of lie detector. There’s this accordion hose around your chest and blood pressure cuffs on your arms. They say it’s a way of focusing on the soul’s truth, not just the mind’s truth. Before they start in, they have you breathe deeply for a minute or two, and I got a bit woozy. Then the questions. They start slow but before long they’re going at you good. ‘Tell us your greatest moment of shame.’ ‘Was there a time you thought you betrayed someone you loved?’ ”
    The old woman nearby swiveled a full head of gray whipped-cream curls to meet his eyes. She seemed disapproving, and he wondered if she was a Theodelphian acolyte, but that was just too paranoid.
    “Then they start tearing you down. Just a few suggestions, some reminders of little things you’ve revealed to them. All the friendliness is gone from their voices and it really hurts. This goes on for a while until you’re a bit weepy and then they skedaddle. They just leave you alone to think about it. That was the strangest thing, Jack. I knew what they were doing to me, or at least I knew they were messing with my head, but when they left me alone …” She shook her head, as if to clear it. “It was the worst sense of abandonment I’ve ever felt. I would have done almost anything to get those two creeps back in there to talk to me and be friendly again.”
    “The heavy breathing is probably the key,” Jack Liffey said. “About half the religions in the world use hyperventilation to change your mental state. They make you dance, or whirl around, or chant, or belt out psalms. That gets you suggestible and then they offer you a