Page 40 of Bent Heavens

“All right,” she said.

He nodded like it was no big deal but sipped his wine too fast, too hard.

“I might have to tell a couple other people, too. Just so it, you know, checks out.”

Liv nodded. It made sense. If Mr. Monk, in a spate of parental concern, called Mrs. Fleming to get a read on the situation, Mrs. Fleming would confirm the relationship. Why, yes, our kids are a couple, though they’re shy about it. Isn’t that the sweetest thing? Liv could foresee each development. Aggie would begin mentioning her daughter’s boyfriend to coworkers. Eventually it would reach school, regardless of Doug’s guarantees. And Liv wouldn’t be able to dispute it, not if she wanted to conceal what she and Doug were really doing. Some traps, like those built by Lee Fleming, were inescapable. Her panic was wine-doused and quiet.

Doug ruffled through his bag, eager to move on. He extracted a few pieces of rumpled paper filled with indecipherable notes.

“I’ve been reading all these message boards. To see if anyone else has spotted one of these things. What if we’re not the only ones?”

“Are we?” Liv’s own voice sounded distant to her.

“Well, yeah. So far, anyway. There’s tons of these sites. Thousands of people write their stories in the forums. They think they see UFOs or they upload pictures of things they see in the sky. Some of them do hypnosis and say their abduction memories are exactly like the memories of people they’ve never met. Some of the most popular ones go by aliases. The Washington Construct, TR00TH with two zeroes, some guy called Mr. Brown. I know most of it’s crazy, but who knows? You have one Lee, you can call him crazy. But thousands of Lees? Anyway, I’m watching out for anything from the tristate area.”

He crammed the paper back into his bag. It was overfull; Liv could tell, even by moonlight.

“What’s that other stuff?”

Doug considered the bag. Chewed at his lip. Then, impulsively, hauled out a file folder, unable to stifle a grin. Perhaps, thought Liv, this was the face of a guy with a brand-new girlfriend. This might disturb her if she could feel anything, but tonight, halfway to drunk, she could not. The folder bulged with multicolored paper. She recognized the bottom pages—recent homework he’d repurposed—before he flipped over the stack, and she saw the telltale tray smudge of the school library printer.

“You said before that we should think about telling someone. And I understand that. We haven’t been getting the results we want. I know it, and it’s my fault. But I’m not giving up. I’m never giving up. So I did some research. If we’re going to get results, we need to do this how the pros do it.”

“Pro what?”

Doug paged until he found a stapled sheaf. Entire paragraphs, Liv was surprised to see, had been highlighted. Doug had never highlighted anything in his life.

“This is called the Third Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War. It sort of defines what a prisoner of war is. They’re enemy assets, basically, and you’re not allowed to mess with them. When the war’s over, you send them back.”

Liv repeated the bewildering words: “Prisoner of war.”

“But it was written in 1949. Wars were totally different back then.” Doug selected another packet of printouts. “This is from 2002. It’s by President Bush, and it’s called ‘Humane Treatment of al Qaeda and Taliban Detainees.’ It basically says the Geneva stuff is fine, but if I’m reading this right”—he tapped a line both highlighted and underlined—“it says not everybody is entitled to the Geneva stuff, not if we think they’re bad enough. See what I mean? When we’re in a war, our authority overrides everything else. I don’t know about you, but I don’t remember us ever not being in a war.”

Liv’s head felt fuzzy. Doug’s eyes looked too bright.

“We’re doing everything right so far. The first rule of detention is isolating the prisoner. Even the Geneva convention said you could hold prisoners as long as you wanted if you could prove military necessity.” He brought out a second folder, twice as large as the first. “Look. I printed out this whole thing. Army Field Manual 2-22.3, Human Intelligence Collector Operations. Four hundred pages. Took me like three days. I thought they were going to yank my library privileges. This thing lists nineteen ways to get information from prisoners. This is from our government. It’s a hundred percent legal. Just so you don’t think we’re doing something criminal here.”

Liv’s glass was empty again. She grabbed the bottle and poured. A word formed in her mind. She wanted to ask about it. She hesitated. She swallowed half of the glass at once, gasped, wiped her lips with the back of her hand, and decided to try.

“Torture,” she said. “You’re talking about torture.”

Doug looked injured.

“We’re just following orders,” he explained.

“Whose orders?” The question came out as a whisper.

Doug shrugged. “Lee’s? The country’s? Ways to deal with prisoners already exist. We shouldn’t have tried to reinvent the wheel, you know?”

Liv licked her teeth, filmed with wine, and sucked on her tongue, soaked in it. Nothing being said tonight should be a surprise. Doug’s dad missed another birthday. Liv’s mom, and soon Doug’s dad, would think Doug and Liv were having sex. They were torturing an alien. Tonight, it all made sense. Any other way she’d chosen to look at their backyard activities had been a joke.

Doug adjusted his voice to the quiet night. “Nineteen methods. Proven methods. Legal methods. They have names. Incentive Approach. Ego-Up. Ego-Down. Emotional-Futility. We Know All. And those are just the listed ones. The guards were authorized to augment them. Augment was the official word. Did they cross the line or whatever? Some people think so. I don’t. Because what else do you do? If you have a prisoner unlike other prisoners, how do you know the nineteen approved methods are going to work at getting the info you need? You don’t. But it’s your job to keep trying if anyone is ever going to be safe. You can call it torture if you want, but torture’s just what happens in war. You cannot, under any circumstances, pity the enemy.”

Liv let herself be lulled. Doug’s soft voice seemed to have rocked the trees awake. They swayed and shushed, and she was tossed along with the first leaves beginning to fall. Doug had never sounded so confident, so prepared. Like one of Lee’s skinners, he’d shed a skin and stepped from it as something stronger, with a new voice that made hers even more useless. How many times now had she pressed him to get others involved? He’d deflected the idea at every turn, and now they were too far down the path to turn back, even while they knew, better than anyone, how some paths held vicious traps.

“Tomorrow’s Sunday,” Doug said. “Good day to get started. Really started.”

The words made her feel like the wine might come back up. She had no rage left, except for herself. Instead of trying to climb out of her personal Abyss for the past weeks, she’d only dug herself deeper into it, as if searching for an appropriate depth of grave. She saw no way out that didn’t ruin both her and Doug and betray everything, no matter how regrettable, she’d entered into with him with eyes wide open. Her mother cooked with wine sometimes; Liv imagined herself sizzling inside it, disappearing.