Refrigerator Heaven

By

David J. Schow

The light is beatific. More than beautiful. Garrett sees the light and allows the awe to flow from him. Garrett can’t not see the light. His eyelids are slammed tightly shut; tears trickle from aching slits at both corners. The light seeks out the corners and penetrates them. It is so hotly white it obliterates Garrett’s view of the thin veinwork on the obverse of his own inadequate eyelids.

He tries to measure time by the beat of his own heart; no good.

The light has always been with him, it seems. It is eternal, omnipotent. Garrett gasps, but not in pain, not true pain—no, for the light is a superior force, and he owes it his wonder. It is so much more than he is, so intense that he can hear it caress his flesh, seeking out his secret places, his organs, his thoughts, illuminating each fissure and furrow in his very brain.

Garrett slams his palms over closed eyes and marvels that the light does not care and offers no quarter. Garrett feels pathetic; the light, he feels, is unequivocal and pure.

Garrett has looked into the light and formulated a new definition of what God must be like. He feels honored that he, among mortals, has been permitted this glimpse of the divine. His mind interprets the light as hot, though he does not feel the anticipated baking of his flesh. So pure, so total…

He has never in his pathetic, mortal life borne witness to a spectacle like it.

Finally, the light is too much. Garrett must avert his gaze, but he cannot. No matter which way he turns his head, the light is there, cleansing away agendas and guilt and human foibles and the mistakes of the past, as well as mistaken notions of the future. The light, forever, there in Garrett’s head.

He reaches to find words to offer up to the light, and he can only find limited human conceits, like love.

A woman is in bed with her husband. They are between bouts of lovemaking, and the woman’s eyes are hooded and blue in the semidarkness, with that unique glow—a radiance that tells the man he is all she sees, or cares to see right now.

She tells him she loves him. Unnecessarily. The words in the dark do him spiritual good anyway.

She touches his nose with her fingertip and draws it slowly down. You. I love.

He knows.

He is about to say something in response, if for no other reason than not to maroon her in their warm, post-coital quiet, stranding her alone with her words of love. He is trying to think of something sexy and witty and genuinely loving, to prove he cares.

He is on his back, and one of her legs, warm and moist on the softest part of the inner thigh, is draped over his. You are mine, the embrace says. You are what I want.

The man is still struggling with words that won’t come. He misses his chance. If you miss the moment, other forces rush in to fill the dead air for you, and rarely does one have control or choice.

Later, the man thinks, if only he had spoken, none of the bad things would have happened.

There are some loud noises. The next thing the man knows, his wife is screaming and he is facedown, cheek bulled roughly against the carpet. His wife is screaming questions that will not be answered in this lifetime.

The man’s hands are cuffed behind his back. He is lifted by the cuffs, naked, as lights click on in the bedroom.

He twists his head, tries to see. He is backhanded, very hard, by one of his captors. The image he snatches is of his wife, also naked, held by her throat against the bedroom wall, by a man in a tight business suit. With his free hand the suit is holding an automatic an inch from her nose and telling her in no uncertain verbiage to shut up if she knows what is good for her.

Like a bad gangster movie, thinks the man.

He sees all this in an eighth of a second. Then, bang. He hits the floor again, feeling the wetness of fresh blood oozing from a split eyebrow.

His ankles are ziplocked together—one of those vinyl slipknot cuffs used by police. Then he is hoisted bodily, penis dangling, and carried out of his own bedroom like a roast on a spit.

He fights to see his wife before his captors have him out the door. In this moment, seeing her one last time becomes the most important imperative ever to burn in his mind.

As he is hauled away, he says he loves her. He has no way of knowing whether she hears. He cannot see her as he speaks the words. In the end, the words come easily.

He never sees his wife again.

Donnelly regarded the box with a funny expression tilting his face to starboard. He took a long draw on his smoke, which made a quarter-inch of ash, then shrugged the way a comedian does when he knows he’s just delivered a knee-slapper… and the audience is too stupid to appreciate it.

“So what did this guy do?“he said with artificial levity.

“That’s classified,” said Cambreaux. “That’s none of your beeswax. That, Chester, is a dumb question, and you oughta know better.”

“Just testing,” said Donnelly. “I’m supposed to jump-quiz smart-asses like you to make sure there are no security leaks. So what did he do?”

“He’s a reporter, from what I gather. He was in the wrong place at the right time with a camera and a tape recorder, neither of which we can find. They sent down orders to scoop him.”

“Very funny.”

“Scoop him up, I mean.” Cambreaux popped four codeine-coated aspirin like M&Ms. “Do you have any more questions?”

“What did he see? What did he hear?”

“Let me ask you a question: Do you want to keep your job? Do you want me to lose my job?”

“That’s two questions.” Donnelly was having fun.

“You asked two questions first.”

“Yeah, but your answers are cooler. You want a cigarette?”

“No.” Cambreaux really wanted the smoke, but thought this was a habit over which he should exert more control. There was a definite lack of things to do with one’s hands down in this little, secure room, and he was grateful for Donnelly’s company, this shift. “They locked this guy in a cell for four days, your basic sweat-out. No phone calls. No go. So then Human Factors beats the crap out of him; still nothing. They used one of those canvas tubes filled with iron filings.”

“Mm.” Donnelly finished his cigarette and looked around for an ashtray. Finally he ground out the butt on the sole of his shoe. “No exterior marks, except for a bruise or two, and your organs get pureed.”

“Yeah. They used a phone book, too.”

“And he read the phone book and said, ‘This has got a lot of great characters, but the plot sucks.’ “

Boy, you got a million of ‘em. And they all stink.”

“Thanks.” Donnelly patted himself down for a fresh smoke. It was a habit he swore he needed to quit. The pat-down, not the smoking. “Then what?”

“Then what. They brought in Medical Assist. They tried sodium pentothal; no dice. Then psychedelics, then electroshock. Still zero. So here we be.”

Donnelly looked twice. Yes, that was a kitchen timer on top of Cambreaux’s console. Donnelly’s wife had one just like it—round clock face, adjustable for sixty minutes. She used it to brew coffee precisely; she was fastidious about things like perfect coffee. Donnelly indicated the timer, then the big box. “You baking him in there?”

“Yeah. He’s not done yet.”

The box was about five feet square and resembled an industrial refrigerator. It was enameled white, steel-reinforced, and featureless except for a big screw-down hatch lock like the ones Donnelly had seen while touring an aircraft carrier. Thick 220-volt cables snaked from the box to Cambreaux’s console.

“You got gypped,” said Donnelly. “No ice maker.”

Cambreaux made the face he always made at Donnelly’s jokes. Donnelly noticed—not for the first time—that Cambreaux’s head seemed perfectly round, a moon head distinguished by a perfect crescent of hair at eyebrow level, punctuated by round mad-scientist specs with flecks of blue and gold in the rims.

“New glasses?”

“Yeah, the old ones were too tight on my head. Torture. Gave me the strokes, right here.” Cambreaux indicated his temples. “Pure fucking torture. Man, you ever need any info out of me, just make me wear my old glasses and I’ll kill my children for you.”

Donnelly strolled around the box, one full circuit. “What do we call this?”

“The refrigerator. What else?”

“A reporter? Funny. Most journalists don’t have the spine or the sperm for this sort of marathon.”

“If he’d talked, he wouldn’t be here.”

“Point. Agreed.”

“What are you staring at, Chester?”

“I love to watch a man who enjoys his work.”

Cambreaux gave him the finger. “You going to stand around admiring me all afternoon, or can I talk you into setting up a fresh pot on the machine?”

Cambreaux’s timer went ding.

“I was waiting to see what happens when our reporter is done basting,” said Donnelly.

“What happens is this.” Cambreaux lifted the timer and cranked it back to sixty minutes.

Donnelly squinted at him. “Jesus. How long have you been here today?”

“Six hours. New regs call for eight hours up.”

“Oh. Cream and sugar?”

“Just a spot of each. Just enough cream to discolor the coffee.”

“You’re starting to sound like my wife.”

“Grope me and I’ll shoot you in the balls.”

“This is probably a stupid question—”

“Guaranteed, from you,” Cambreaux overrode.

“—but can I get anything for our pal the reporter?”

Cambreaux pushed back from the console, the racketing of his chair casters loud and hollow in the room, like the too harsh ticking of the appliance timer. He winnowed his fingers beneath his glasses and rubbed his eyes until they were pink.

“Did I say this guy is a reporter? Scratch that. He was a reporter. When he comes out of the fridge, he won’t need anything except maybe a padded cell. Or a casket.”

Donnelly kept staring at the box. It was just weird enough, the sort of anomaly you can’t take your eye from.

“How about I just bring him a shot of good ole government-issue cyanide?”

“Not just yet,” said Cambreaux, touching his timer as if for inspiration, then jotting a note on a gray legal pad. “Not just yet, my friend.”

Elapsed time has ceased to have meaning, and this is good for Garrett.

A relief. He has been released from what were once boundaries, and the mundane of the day-to-day. There is no day here, no night, no time. He has been liberated. Elemental input, and the limitations of his physical form, have become his sole realities.

He had once read that the next step in human evolution might be to a formless intellect, eternal, almost cosmic, undying, immortal, transcendent.

If the light had been God, then the cold is Sleep. New rules, new deities.

He is curled into a fetal ball like a beaten animal, shuddering uncontrollably while his lit-up mind wrestles with the problems of how to properly pay obeisance to this latest god.

His bones feel cold; his hands and feet, distant and insensate. Respiration is a knife of ice, boring in to pierce his lungs in tandem. He shallows his breath and prays that his rawed esophagus might lend the air a mote of metabolic heat before it plunges mercilessly into his lung tissue.

He is still merely mortal.

He knows the cold will not steal more than a few critical degrees of his core heat. The cold will not murder him; it is testing him, inviting him to discover his own extremes. To kill Garrett would be too easy, and pointless. He would not have survived the light only to perish by the cold. The cold cares about him, as the light had, as an uncaring god is said to care for the flock that is crippled, tormented, and killed… only to profess renewed faith.

The cold is intimate in a way that surpasses his mere flesh.

His fingers and toes are now remote tributaries of forgotten feeling. Garrett curls on his right side, then his left, to spell each of his lungs in turn, to stave off the workload of chilly pain by reducing it to processable fragments.

He allows the sub-zero ambience to flow through, not batter against, the inadequate walls of his skin. He thinks of the felled tree in the forest. He is here so the cold will have a purpose. He is the proof of sound in the silent, snowbound woodland; the freezing air needed him as much as he needed it to verify his own existence.

Huddled, then, and shivering, still naked, his blood retarded to a thick crawl in unthawed veins, Garret permits the cold to have him. He welcomes its forward nature, its brashness.

Garrett closes his eyes. Feels bliss. Smiling, with clenched teeth, he sleeps.

On the dirty coffee table in front of Alvarado there were several items of interest: A bottle of Laphroiag scotch, a big camera, a snubnosed gun, and an unopened letter.

The camera was an autofocusing rig with flashless 1600 ASA color film and a blimped speedwinder, for silent work. Twenty-one exposures had been recorded in scant seconds. The Laphroiag was very mellow and half gone. The gun was a Charter Arms .44 Bulldog, no shots used yet.

Whenever the building made a slight nighttime noise around him, Alvarado tensed, his heart thudding briskly with anticipation. Moment to moment, he was safe… though the next moment might bring last call.

He had driven all the way into the San Fernando Valley to mail his preaddressed packets, copies of his precious tapes and photos. Now his backstop was secure, his evidence was damning, and the only reason he could think of for still hanging around his apartment was because he, too, felt damned. Soiled somehow.

New evidence waited inside his camera. Rawer, more toxic, dangerously good stuff to reinforce his already strong case.

Alvarado lifted the envelope and read the address for the thousandth time. It was a cable TV bill for Garrett, his next-door neighbor. Once upon a time, the gods running computerized mailing lists had hiccuped, fouled their numbers. Rather than rectify the irritant with fruitless phone calls, Alvarado and Garrett had been trading mail for nearly a year now, sliding it beneath each other’s respective doors when they were out. They both traveled a lot. The mail thing had become an after-hours joke between them.

Garrett was an ad agent for a publishing company. He toured his turf with a folio of new releases and pitched store to store. Alvarado had been staff at the Los Angeles Times until he was let go in a seasonal pruning, followed by a hiring freeze blamed on the latest recession. He made do as a freelancer until his time rolled around again; he had made his living professionally long enough to believe in karmic work rhythms. Freelancing had propelled him into some very odd new places. Alternative papers. Tabloids. Pop magazines. Investigative journalism, self-motivated.

Now, if his backstop allies made proper use of the duplicate tapes and photos now safely in postal transit, Alvarado would be back on the map, big time. The waiting was not the worst part, though it had made his life pretty suspenseful during the past few hellish days.

Sometimes reporters got assassinated for their reportage. It happened, though the public rarely heard about it. Thus, Alvarado had emplaced his elaborate backstop network.

Sometimes reporters got worse than killed. Thus the gun, yes, loaded, and this quiet vigil in a dark room.

It had happened four or five days ago. Say a week. Alvarado’s schedule and sleeptime had become totally bollixed, of combat necessity.

A week ago, he had heard a noisy commotion in the night. His damning photos and tapes had not yet been copied or mailed. He was awake from his snooze on the sofa in a silent instant, fully alert. At first he thought the disturbance was a simple domestic— Garrett and his wife or girlfriend having some temporary and loud disagreement in the middle of the night, as lovers sometimes do.

Alvarado’s mind decoded the noises he heard. This was no argument.

He remembered grabbing his camera and moving to the balcony. After a second of hesitation he had stepped around to Garrett’s adjoining balcony, and recognized immediately that very bad shit was going on inside.

He witnessed most of it through his viewfinder, focusing on the slit of light permitted by the curtains on Garrett’s sliding door. He saw Garrett naked, trussed and manhandled by an efficiently fast goon squad in the very best JCPenney’s Secret Service wash-and-wear. Garrett’s wife or girlfriend, also naked, was being abused and threatened on the far side of the bedroom. The men moved like they had a purpose.

Twenty-one rapid-fire exposures later, Garrett was out, abducted, gone… and Alvarado was off to the mailbox with older, no less scary business. He had his own future to protect.

Now, tonight, Alvarado sat staring at the cable bill addressed to Garrett. He had received it. And Garrett had received a late-night visit intended for his neighbor.

Intended for me, Alvarado knew.

It was a coincidence almost divine, winning Alvarado the time to get his material to safety. Garrett had picked up the check, and perhaps that was why Alvarado was still hanging around.

Just like that, his life had become bad film noir. Here he was, drinking, fondling his gun, and fantasizing about the inevitable confrontation. Blam, blam, and in a blaze of glory everybody gets to be in the papers.

Post-mortem.

Provided the bad guys got the address right this time.

If the light was God, and the cold Sleep, then the sound was Love.

Garrett decides he is being tempered and refined for some very special purpose, duty, or chosen destiny. He feels proud and fulfilled. He cannot be the recipient of so many revelations for some nothing purpose… and so he pays very close attention to the lessons the sound brings him.

He is quite the attentive little godling in training.

The extremes he withstands are the signposts of his own evolution. He began as a normal man. He is becoming more.

It is exhilarating.

He eagerly awaits Heat, and Silence, and Darkness, and whatever he needs beyond them.

“You want to hear a funny?” said Cambreaux. Donnelly felt he was not going to walk away amused. “I do the jokes in this toilet.”

“Not as boffo as this: Our reporter? Janitorial collected him at three o’clock this morning. We’ve had the wrong guy in the refrigerator for a week.”

Donnelly did not laugh. He never laughed when he could feel his stomach dropping away like a clipped elevator, skimming his balls enroute to Hell. “You mean this guy is innocent?”

Cambreaux’s style did not admit of sheepishness, or comeback. “I wouldn’t say that.”

“Everybody’s guilty of something, is that it?”

“No. I wouldn’t say that our friend in the box is innocent. Not anymore.”

They both stared at the refrigerator. Locked inside was a man who had been subjected to stresses and extremes known to fracture the toughest operatives going. His brain had to be string cheese by now. And he hadn’t done anything… except be innocent.

“Fucking Janitorial,” Donnelly snorted. “They’re always screwing up the work orders.”

“Bunch of gung-ho bullet boys,” Cambreaux agreed. Better to fault another department, always.

“So… you going to let him out?”

“Not my call.” Both he and Donnelly knew that the man in the box had to be released, but neither of them would budge until the right documents dropped down the correct chute.

“What’s he on now?”

“High-frequency sound. Metered for—oh, shit!”

Donnelly saw Cambreaux rocket from his chair to grab the kitchen timer and hurl it across the chamber. It disintegrated into frags. Then Cambreaux was frantically snapping off switches, cranking dials down.

“Goddamn timer froze! It stopped!”

Donnelly immediately looked at the fridge.

“It was on too high for too long, Chet! Goddamn timer!”

Both of them wondered what they would see when the lid was finally opened.

Garrett feels at last that he is being pushed too far, that he must extract too high a price from himself.

He endures, because he must. He hovers on the brink of a human millennium. He is the first. He must experience the change with his eyes open.

The sound removed everything from Garrett’s world.

Not too late at last, Garrett says I love you.

He has to scream it. Not too late.

Then his eardrums burst.

Cambreaux was drinking coffee in the lounge, shoulders sagging, elbows planted on knees, penitent.

“Ever hear the one about the self-protecting fuse?” said Donnelly. “The one that protects itself by blowing up your whole stereo?” No reaction. “I saw the fridge open. When did they take our boy?”

“This morning. I was on the console when the orders finally came down.”

“Hey—your hands are shaking.”

“Chet, I feel like I have to cry, almost. I saw that guy come out of the fridge. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Donnelly sat down beside Cambreaux. “Bad?”

“Bad.” A poisonous laugh escaped him. It was more like a cough, or a bark. “We opened the box. And that guy looked at us like we’d just stolen his soul. He had blood all over him, mostly from his ears. He started hollering. Chet, he didn’t want us to take him out.”

This didn’t sound good, spilling from a professional like Cambreaux. Donnelly let out a measured breath, leavening his own racing metabolism.

“But you took him out.”

“Yes sir, we did. Orders. And when we got him out, he broke, and clawed his own eyes out, and choked to death on his tongue.”

“Jesus Christ…”

“Janitorial took him.”

“Disposal’s the one thing those bozos are good at.”

“You got a cigarette?”

Donnelly handed it over and lit it for him. He lit himself one.

“Chet, did you ever read ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’?”

“I saw the movie.”

“The story is basically about a guy who gets tortured for days by the Inquisition. Right before he makes his final fall into the pit, he gets rescued by the French army.”

“Fiction.”

“Yeah, happy endings and all. We did the same thing. Except the guy didn’t want to leave. He found something in there, Chet. Something you or I don’t ever have a chance at. And we took him out, away from the thing he discovered…”

“And he died.”

“Yeah.”

They were silent together for a few minutes. Neither of them was very spiritual; they were men who were paid for their ability to do their jobs. Yet neither could resist the idea of what Garrett might have seen in the box.

Neither of them would ever climb into the box to find out. Too many reasons not to. Thousands.

“I got you a present,” Donnelly said.

He handed over a factory-fresh appliance timer. This one came with a warranty and guarantee. That made Cambreaux smile. A bit.

“Take it slow, old buddy. Duty calls. We’ll have a drink later.”

Cambreaux nodded and accepted Donnelly’s fraternal pat on the shoulder. He had just done his job. No sin in that.

Donnelly walked along the fluorescent-lit corridor, very consciously avoiding the route that would take him past the room where the refrigerator was. He did not want to see it hanging open just now.

He made a mental note to look up the Poe story. He loved a good read.

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