Emptyhands3

It was one of the difficult lessons of the outside world: prisons are more than just physical, and freedom was more than that. It was complicated. Weighty.
   The apartment was small enough that Jarod could lean back and twist his body in an unusual way to grab his cell phone from the table. It was a new one. Smaller, more compact, easier and a little more fun to alter than his old one. He had created a small scrambler chip for this phone; even if someone had had the will and motivation, they couldn’t triangulate his position by monitoring the waves.
He flipped through the numbers recorded in the phone’s memory, found Sydney’s, and hit the green button.
   He listened to it ring. Two times, and then it was picked up so lightly that he didn’t even hear the click. “Hello,” the psychiatrist’s slightly accented voice resounded over the phone. “This is Sydney.”
   Jarod didn’t say anything. He called Sydney regularly, at least in part to ensure that he was all right;    Sydney ran or monitored many projects for the Centre, raised many children, but he was neither poisonous nor political. The psychiatrist simply did his job and tried to stay out of the way. He had effectively run the Pretender Project. Someday, they would come after him.
   That, Jarod had decided long ago, was when he would have to disappear. Because the day when Sydney didn’t answer his telephone was the day they would stop playing cat-and-mouse with Jarod and move in for keeps.
   “Jarod, is that you?” Sydney’s voice was always gentle and controlled. It could even have a thread of tenderness, if you listened carefully. “Are you all right?”
   But why talk with the man who manipulated your life, used you, turned a blind eye to any suggestion that you had been kidnapped? Why ask him for refuge? Continuing those weekly psychiatric sessions, Jarod?
    Why do you care?
   Those were the questions that came from the lips of anyone—limited few—that he had ever told of his time at the Centre. It was what made any call to his psychiatrist, his doctor, slightly disconcerting.    More than just verification; Jarod could do that from a computer. Less than, vastly different from, friendship. Most of the time.
   “Jarod, can you hear me?”
   He waited another moment. “Good morning, Sydney.”
   It was five-fifteen. Jarod had called Sydney’s office. In nearly two years of telephone calls, he had never woken Sydney up. In his mind’s eye, he could see Sydney lean back in his office chair and glance through the doors for people who shouldn’t be listening.
   Contact with the runaway lab rat was a minor faux pas at the Centre.
   “Hello, Jarod.” He sounded relieved. “How are you?”
   Jarod sighed. “It’s difficult.”
   “Do you feel like talking about it?” That question. He had heard it perhaps a hundred times, each time with a slightly different meaning, a slightly different offer.
   He watched the shadows dance on the wall. The sun splashed pale yellow; his dark silhouette seemed to glow. Jarod regretted calling Sydney now. Talking with the psychiatrist often laid his emotions painfully bare, and today he had wanted to swallow his wounds and adjust. His reply was traditional enough. “No.”
   A short silence on Sydney’s end. “All right. Are you comfortable with answering a question?”
   Jarod felt something creep into his shoulders, a familiar guarded feeling. A question from Sydney, even a yes or no question, could yield any one of a number of correct conclusions. He didn’t want to take a journey through his jungle of childhood memories today. “Depends on the question.”
   He flipped up the turkey’s head and drew a small purple candy from its beak with his teeth. He pressed the candy up against the roof of his mouth with his tongue.
“Have you. . .anything to do with what is happening here?”
   Jarod sat bolt upright. Sydney wouldn’t have shared that information with him unless it was important. There was nothing like a crisis to put Jarod’s often overwhelming feelings back into perspective. “What’s happening?”
“Do you know anything about a Directive 410?”
   He leapt to his feet and nearly tripped over himself to get to the table. He found his MUFON pen, from another Pretend, and scribbled Directive 410 on the open page of his journal, right on top of an article which headlined COMPUTER GENIUS MENTALLY HANDICAPPED IN CAR ACCIDENT.
“Jarod, I’m not sure how long I’ll be able to speak with you—”
   The line went dead, the low tone buzzing in his ear.
    Five-twenty. If he was going to work, he would have to start now, and abandon Directive 410 for a moment. Fortunately, at Eureka Technologies, he would have plenty of access to computers.
He flipped the telephone closed and turned on his laptop computer. It was time to print all of his “records.”
   He moved in the direction of the bathroom, and whenever his emotions welled up and threatened to pull them under, he simply buried them in a fountain of other concerns.
Jarod’s hand’s felt hollow and clammy. He shook his head. He would, he decided, apply himself fully to discovering Directive 410.