Obedience (32 page)

“I couldn’t,” Brian said to this man, this stranger. “I just couldn’t let him continue hurting us.”

“I know, I know,” the man said. “But put the gun down and we’ll figure it all out.” His voice was soothing, familiar.

Suddenly, Brian knew who he was.

Brian reached up and unzipped the man’s jacket and revealed Dennis Flaherty.

Dennis took the gun away from Brian and put it on the table. Mary was so close to Dennis that he could hear her voice. “Why?” she said.

“Let’s talk about this later, Mary,” he said. He was holding Brian by the shoulders. Both boys looked vulnerable, weak, as if they had stepped into a nightmare that they couldn’t wake up from.

Dennis took a few steps toward where Williams lay, but he couldn’t get through to the man. Mary went around to the other side and found her way to him. They had him on the floor, and she could see by his pallor that he was dead. He was gray and still. She knelt and touched his hand, and he was unresponsive to her touch. “Professor,” she whispered. Nothing. The man who had played Marco was performing CPR, and all the actors and actresses were watching passively now. The air had been taken out of the room. They had finally reached the end.

Some time later, after Marco had stopped trying to save Williams, after some of the actors and actresses had left the room to retch in the hallway, Mary looked at Dennis. She didn’t have to say anything: he knew what she needed him to say.

He took a deep breath. “I was intrigued. When I figured it out, I thought it was so brilliant. A real-life behavior experiment, you know. So I joined them. They sent me to Cale and Bell City. I was their emissary. I made all the phone calls so they could track us. I called the Collinses beforehand; I called the diner from the store where we stopped to get directions. I went in to speak to Bethany Cavendish this morning and we sent out Paul. They needed someone to help them, and so I did. And there was also…” Dennis trailed off.

“Her,” Mary said.

“Excuse me?”

“You wanted to be near Elizabeth.” It was Brian. His head was leaned back against the wall, and Dennis still held him by the shoulders. Mary knew that if Brian wanted to break free he could, but he was resigned to this now. He had conceded defeat.

“That’s absurd,” Dennis said, his voice nearly a whisper. “I was going to say that there was also my father. How I wanted to be like him, more ‘serious-minded,’ as he liked to say. More academic. More worthwhile.” But Mary could see that was also a lie. The truth was that Dennis’s part in the study had, in fact, everything to do with Elizabeth Orman and little to do with his interest in the science or with his father.

“How pathetic,” she said to him. Dennis didn’t respond, and in that silence she saw that in some twisted way he agreed with her.

“No,” Dennis said. “It had nothing to do with her. Not after I got involved with it. Not after I started talking to Leonard and Troy Hardings. It became a-a purely academic thing. I began to see what my father saw. The proof opening up, the answer revealing itself. The study was so perfect, so mathematical.”

“Except you forgot one thing,” Mary said.

“What’s that?” Dennis asked.

“The human element. It’s what you always forget, Dennis. That your actions mean something to other people. That what you do has consequences.”

She looked down and caught Brian’s gaze, and he simply shook his head. His face revealed the gravity of his mistake. Tears streamed down his face, and Mary noticed that his hand, the hand that had held the gun, was trembling slightly.

Then Mary was being led away from them, into the crowd of people. Soon she was in the back of the room with Edna Collins beside her, and through the mass of people she saw the events of Seminary East unfold: Elizabeth Orman sat on the rolling chair and buried her head in her hands; Troy Hardings came to Elizabeth and stroked her hair, and Mary saw what he was saying to her by reading his lips: “It will be okay” the ambulance arrived, the stretcher was rolled in, and they took Leonard Williams away; the word “dead” began to ripple through the room. Then, much later, when only ten or twelve of them remained, a detective came in to talk to her. He was wearing a flannel jacket and had a mustache. He could have been an actor for all Mary knew, but she was too exhausted to care.

“What’s going on here?” he asked, and Mary told him what she knew.

Mary Butler had begun to pick up the pieces of her life.

She was back in Kentucky and planning to enroll at another university next fall. She had answered question upon question about her role in Elizabeth Orman’s study. It was decided, finally, that she didn’t know what Brian House had been planning. It was also decided, by a faceless ethics committee put together by Winchester University, that the mistakes that had occurred in Elizabeth Orman’s Polly Experiment were completely happenstance. There was no breach of ethics, the committee found, and Elizabeth was allowed to continue her studies at Winchester.

None of this mattered now to Mary except for Brian’s fate. She had moved on. It had taken her a while, of course. She had spent three or four dark weeks in her parents’ home, sleeping between those bouts of questions. She thought of Brian often. He was awaiting trial in DeLane, and the district attorney was planning to charge him with first-degree manslaughter. Mary had been subpoenaed, and would testify at the pretrial in two weeks. It would take no preparation. She had memorized the story by now; she knew it so well that she could recite it with her eyes closed.

She took walks with her mother. She cooked dinner for her parents. She tried to regain some normalcy. But it wasn’t easy. She had, once again, trusted too much and had been hurt because of that trust.

Dennis had been dismissed from school. He had been Elizabeth’s and Troy Hardings’ patsy after all. The school had uncovered his relationship with Elizabeth, and they had ruled that he had an “unhealthy obsession with the doctoral candidate and her work.” Mary knew that this was not the case; Dennis had told her the truth in Seminary East that night. He took the fall for Elizabeth, and Mary saw something in that: he still loved Elizabeth. Perhaps she had seduced him into the study, perhaps she had stuck the knife in his back and twisted it, but he could not give her up. Poor Dennis. He called Mary one night and simply sat on the other end of the line, weeping.

Williams, of course, was dead by the time he reached the DeLane Baptist Hospital. One shot to the gut opened him up, destroyed his insides. They found cancer there, Mary heard, and it had been terminal. Eating him away in there, destroying him. She didn’t know if that was true or not. She wanted it to be.

Only one question remained: Who had sent the videotape of the Milgram experiments?

Mary had a feeling that she knew, and one day in the middle of winter she e-mailed him to test her theory.

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Subject: Milgram

Thank you for trying to warn us, Dean Orman.

It took him only ten minutes to respond.

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Subject: Re: Milgram

I am so sorry. I told Elizabeth that it was going too far, that things were breaking down. I sent the videotape as an object lesson. They, as you know, got ahold of it. Thus the audio at the end, the voices of Hardings and a boy named Net. All that chicanery. You know now: never trust those who seem to have extramural motives. Elizabeth and I have finally drifted apart. I suppose you heard that, though. After Leonard died we just couldn’t look at each other any longer. She wants to pursue her studies; I want to settle down, retire, live my life. My good friend Pig Stephens is recovering from the broken hand you gave him. He sends his best wishes. We go out fishing from time to time on the Thatch. We ponder life and how it winds and unwinds. It’s all masculine and pathetic and, yes, disingenuous. But it is what it is. I miss her some nights. But she had a drive unlike mine; it was the same drive Stanley had. I probably married her because of that, because I became-what?-subservient to her ambition. I noticed it from my dealings with Stanley, and I’m drawn to that kind of rigor. I admit it: I’m a sucker for a strong mind.

Don’t be ashamed, Mary. You are not alone. I was thirty years old when it happened to me, so I had some years on you. I too have spent my life trying to figure out how it was that I was…deceived. I know how it feels, you see. I know how
you feel.

I’ll see you in DeLane soon for the legal mess.

All the best,

Edward Orman

Milgram.

They were ready inside the laboratory at Linsly-Chittenden Hall at Yale University. There was a strong scent in there-like burning flesh. Milgram could smell it through the closed door. Why had they done that? He wondered if it was on purpose, to create some sort of deeper effect on his subjects. It certainly wasn’t his idea. He thought, Will I ever be the same after this is through?

“Stanley?” asked James McDonough, the man who would be acting as Milgram’s learner. “Are you all right, Stanley?” He assured the man that he was.

Milgram was looking at the shock machine, at this creation that would make him famous. Slight shock. Moderate shock. Strong shock. Very strong shock. Intense shock. Extreme intensity shock. Danger-severe shock. Milgram touched it, ran his palm across the cool surface. The machine seemed to pulse with some hidden life. It had become like some kind of a weapon. He had dreamed about the goddamned box for weeks. He had gone back to mescaline so that his mind might dodge the machine in his defenseless sleep.

“Stanley,” said McDonough. The man was not nervous. It seemed that nobody was nervous except Milgram himself. “We’re ready now.”

Milgram went into a back room, where he could watch the proceedings through a two-way mirror. He saw his experimenter, the man who would play the “scientist,” appear in the open room. The experimenter was wearing a gray coat.
Not white,
Milgram had demanded. Definitely not white. White presented the idea of medicine. Of sterility. People automatically distrusted white for that reason. So Milgram’s experimenter would wear gray, and upon seeing him in the coat for the first time Milgram thought he looked like a slab of granite. This was exactly what Milgram had intended.

He then saw his subject enter the room, a middle-aged man with red hair wearing a light smoker’s jacket and a wet hat, for it was raining outside. The man took a seat, and the experiment began.

“I’d like to explain to both of you now about our Memory Project,” the gray-coated experimenter said to the man and also to McDonough, who was already in his act, nervously twitching in the chair next to the subject. The plan was to place McDonough in a separate room and have the subject shock him. There wouldn’t really be shocks, of course. No electricity, either. The box was a grand hoax. The point was that the subject should be obedient to the experimenter. The subject should respect the experimenter’s authority, only because the experimenter wore a coat and spoke with a deep voice and held a clipboard.

“Psychologists,” the gray-coated man went on, “have developed several theories to explain how people learn various types of material.”

Milgram stopped listening. He had fallen away somewhere, to that other plane.

“Okay, now we are going to set the learner up so he can get some punishment,” the experimenter said. “Learner, let me explain what’s going to happen, what you’re supposed to do. The teacher will read a list of word pairs to you.”

Milgram shut his eyes.

“So he later reads to you,” the experimenter was saying, “‘strong: back, arm, branch, push.’ You would press this one-”

McDonough hesitated. “Well,” he said, as he had been instructed, “I think I should say this. When I was in West Haven VA Hospital a few years ago, they detected a slight heart condition. Nothing serious. But as long as I’m getting these shocks-how strong are they? How dangerous are they?”