...and how hard would this be, collating the paranoid suspicions of the clinical split-minds, and what volumes would emerge from that collating? How many years of compiling neutrally the tinfoil and grime of meaningless references and misheard nuance, the record player's secret voice, the neighbors whispering instructions to the car in the middle of the night? And how much of that could be sifted through in idle times, the apprentice tasks of the Black Lab, a pile of case histories, and another waiting after that, and out of how many? How many are there in one year, say 1965? 40,000? 12,000? And maybe ten or fifteen have a useful template, no? Yes? And it's already in the book right? So it's radiation-proof, it's bombproof, can't be broken into or out of. What will you say, They're doing ...this? And right next to you is someone saying exactly that, exactly that, exactly that, the mirror has this extra contrast, lines too sharp, shade exaggerated, the pores in your nose gape, and you sound so nervous. What percentage of random hearers will believe you? How sane will you have to pretend to be to get them to listen? Or could you take it to an office, an official place, with paperwork and your painstaking notation, the clarity and insight through the formula, discarding what may or may not be real for what has to be, the hinge of it all, that one afternoon, or was it late morning, answering the doorbell, not salivating but opening it, same thing, trained response, suburban behavioral modification, and that hard-won safety one more programmable device, because your reluctance to surrender it, even to the truth, becomes another low-ampere trip bar, 60,000 volts of ohmygod, and don't do that again, just answer the door, and here's Company, like the Bremen-town musicians a little quartet of relatively same-as-them profiles, it's your friends, from a distance, from across the street, where the little girl lived, the one that used to come over to see if you could play, three years old and cute and deeply quiet, looking nothing like either of the two overly-watchful adults that lived there with her, and now these folksy-shrugging figures meet the silhouette, your coming and going brothers in fog and adolescent kicks, rough clothes and hair and shuffling to the door, but urgent to get in, your friends sort of, only, wait, shoving past you, that dominance filling the living room, the masks shifting, it's your friends, only it isn't, it's not going that way this time, a cheap toupee over an amphetamine-clenched face that was at least a decade too old for who it pretended to be, and something brighter than the television. The operative measure, that you want it not to be, want it not to have been, want it not to be happening, so the slightest excuse to believe them brings you in, and then the closer you get the less you want to turn, back away something, and there's nothing there if you do turn, no one to catch your last denying No, and what else would you be saying at a moment like that?
Like later, They uhmm, they...and the knee-jerk refusal always, to say who? Who are they? Who are you talking about? And that's that because of course you don't know, that's the other part of the disguise, deeper, the trail smudged out by raked branches of dead-end pointless clips of narrative and random nonsense and bits of meaningless fake clue, there isn't any way for someone where you are to know anything other than that there is a place there you don't ever want to go back to no matter what.
And after that, where would you go to complain anyway? Right back on your knees to the hand that locked the door on the way in...
