The facility was inconspicuous, most likely by design. Jeremy had initially felt warmed by its nonatmosphere that it projected onto the neighborhood where it existed, but walking up the pathway that lead to its glass doors, which were beneath a friendly, harmless sign that read, "Heath Driven", Jeremy felt a slithering dislike and fear for the building.
Going into the building itself, it is impossible, that day, for Jeremy to ignore the plethora of video surveillance cameras that are angled to see everything that goes on in the facility's lobby. The place looked like the secret government facility that it might as well be.
This had bothered Jeremy before, yes, but not in such a way that it thoroughly bothered him that day. Jeremy walked towards the back locker room, passing the many odd doors, all of which had the seemed to have the word "bio" on their plaques somewhere in the title. He at least knew what the word Bio meant, but he doubted, very deeply, that he would have any clue whatsoever as to what went down in any of the rooms that he passed by on his way to the locker room.
Walking up to the locker room's door, Jeremy nearly ran into his supervisor, John, as he tried to walk through the locker room door. John looked tired, which was not helped by the hfact that he already looked eternally haggard. Jeremy could not help but wonder if his supervisor had any of the same insomniac habits that he himself had.
"Hello, Jeremy," John said to him in his deep, and, again, tired voice. "I hear you'd like to talk. Would you be alright with going to the break room with me?"
Jeremy followed his supervisor back up the hallway that he had walked down moments before.
He was a nice guy - a little exhausted looking and lacking in any real passion, but it wasn't something that Jeremy could blame him for. He didn't know much about his supervisor in his outside life, only that the man seemed to perk up when someone asked him about his home life. From what the man had told him, Jeremy knew that he had a wife, two kids, and he was taking care of his parents, who stayed at him home with the rest of his immediate family.
Jeremy could remember that when John had told him about his home life, he had wished that he had a family to go home to at night, to talk about during his work hours. He couldn't deny to anyone that he still felt that way, as John pushed the door open to the break room and motioned for the smaller man to follow him inside.
Jeremy was bracing himself to talk, but was stopped, when John stopped him, asked him to take a seat at one of the tables, and then told him to wait, as he went to get his lunch from the break room fridge. Jeremy waited, as told, and John returned a few seconds later, holding a thick-looking cold sandwich and a can of root beer. John sat himself across the table from Jeremy, and, sighing, he unwrapped the cellophane surrounding his sandwich, and then simply said, "Speak."
Jeremy moved his tongue around in his mouth, uncomfortable with this kind of confrontation. He tried to summon the words that he had been rehearsing all day to come out of his mouth, and he, at first, failed at speaking. Finally, though, like a newly born horse trying to get its first bearings, Jeremy began to talk. "I'm not ungrateful for the chance I have to work here - trust me, I'm not - some of my friends -" Jeremy was speaking of friends who did not exist, or of ones that he remembered then that he did, at one time, have. "-aren't so lucky to find work that doesn't require them going back to school for Master's. It's just, uh - "
"Not what you expected?" John offered, clicking the tab on his root beer and taking a hearty drink from it.
Trying not to, Jeremy nevertheless sighed. "I wasn't told that... that this is what I'd be doing."
"Can't say I'm surprised." John shook his head, his gaze unlocking from Jeremy's eyes. What was the big man thinking about as he stared at the wall behind Jeremy? "Hiring has a way of taking a lot of things for granted. Like your panic for a chance to be hired."
"All I knew when I started was that I was going to be a part of extracting a, um, ingredient for the Fountain drug."
John seems to take deliberate care with taking a bite from his sandwich. Jeremy wondered if his wife, or his mother, had perhaps made it for him. It took him a moment to realize that he felt a hot, awful spite grow in him as he stared at his supervisor, who seemed no less of a broken shell of a man than he did.
Jesus, was he so lonely that he begrudged another man for a homemade sandwich?
"Again," John said, after swallowing the bite of the sandwich. "makes sense. But you had to have a clue about what was going on here. The worst of what goes on here," John gestured vaguely with his empty left hand, while the right one held the monstrous sandwich in his equally mnonstrous right hand. "is already all out there. Didn't you read the newspaper? I think I saw a piece in the New York Times, a while back..."
Jeremy swallowed hard, his mouth suddenly feeling bone dry. "But it sounded, so... all of the news sounded like something from some tabloid, like everybody was just trying to demonize the company."
John snorted, mid bite into another chunk of sandwich. Still chewing, John said, "This is company that don't NEED to be demonized. But I think that people - a lot of people - don't care where their good news comes from nowadays. Old people, I never would have seen 'em like people drowning, swimming for their life, before I started working here, before I heard of the Fountain. Now that I do, I kinda wish I could go back to the idea that death is a promise, not just another choice for whoever's rich enough to pay for it. Or steal it. But here it is."
"How do you deal with it?" Jeremy nearly whispers.
"I've learned to be grateful for what it's doing for my family. This job allows me to provide for my wife, my son, my little girl - " And there it was. They both were silent, as what had to be the exact same image came into their minds. The bodies of the nearly sex-less babies , images that were an everyday occurrences to people who worked in their part of the facility came immediately to mind when the thought of children came about. Jeremy swallows hard, and wonders what he did to deserve having the thought of children, especially the youngest, turned into the most lurid of real life nightmares.
And then John continued talking, this time with an unmistakable, hoarse timbre in his voice. "I am just happy to be able to take care of them." John's eyes once more fixed themselves on Jeremy. "Don't you have anybody who relies on you? On this job?"
"No, John," Jeremy says, his voice husky as he was unable to keep his emotions from coming to the surface. "I don't have anybody but myself."
"God, that's sad. I'm sorry, Jeremy, I didn't mean, uh..."
"No, don't be sorry. Like you said, you're the lucky one, it's just the nature of things, I guess you could say."
"Is there anything else you'd like to ask? To talk about?" Jeremy couldn't help but notice that John had, at this point, pushed his sandwich as far away as he could from himself, to the point where it sat, on its discarded cellophane, closer to him on the table than to the man who had eaten half of it.
"Yeah, can I ask you a personal question?"
Despite the haunted look that was in the man's eyes. John said, with remarkable amount of warmth, "Shoot."
"...How do you find anything good about what it is we do, specifically?"
John's eyes shut, and Jeremy was suddenly worried that he had just made one too many mistakes in asking that question. After a moment, however, John opened his eyes again, and stared at Jeremy. "You gotta do it in the belief that in something we do, there is... Compassion. It's a personal belief of mine, one that I haven't shared with nobody here, except you, right now, and I would appreciate it that if I tell you it, that you don't go around and tell somebody about it. Can I hold you to that?" Jeremy nodded hesitantly, wearily, and John continued. "Well, the way I figure it, those bodies, they didn't come from a home, like the one I go to every night, and leave from every morning. If they lived in the outside world for long - the ones who come in after birth, I mean - could it have been a happy situation, in any possible way? Now, don't get me wrong, I know this is a... warped way of looking at things, but if there's one trait I couldn't help but pick up from my wife, in the last fifteen years that I've been married to her, is optimism, and damn, I can't help but think that in the grand scheme of things, maybe their lives weigh a bit heavier than those of the old folk, who had to of worked a helluva a lot to be able to get ahold of the drug that this place makes, as awful as it may seem."
John took a deep breath, attempted a smile, and stared at Jeremy expectantly. Jeremy lowered his eyes from the older man's features, and tried to digest what he'd just been told. Without thinking, he sputtered out, "The facility doesn't give them proper burials, like you told me when I first started here, do they?"
There was a long silence that spread over the two men then, and Jeremy didn't look up from the table to see if it was shock that had kept John in such a state of silence then. Eventually, though, the man spoke up.
"No, it would be bad for any evidence - skeletons, the like - to be found, traced back here."
"But I thought that this place was supposed to be legal -"
"And it is. The problem is that if people find a little graveyard, or something like that," Jeremy couldn't help but shudder at the thought of what that something different would entail. "then people would be getting visceral reactions to what goes on here on a systematic basis. There's nothing inhumane that goes on here, you've got to believe me on this point, but seeing fetal skeletons... It'd do nothing but scare the most religious, and the most important customer base off of the company, the elderly."
"What does happen to the bodies?"
"The incinerator. It's out of town, quite a ways, so nobody has to smell the... smell. And from there on, from what I'm told, the ashes are supposed to be added to fertilizer for plants. I always thought that was nice, I guess you could say. Their bodies bring on new life, feed new generations."
Jeremy didn't know if the man was sincerely trying to comfort Jeremy, or if he meant to instill the nightmarish idea of children's bonemeal being slowly spread over a vegetable garden, only to reappear in the dinners of unknowing children. Jeremy began to massage his eyes slowly, breathing in and out slowly. From his mental state (Jeremy could vaguely recognize that he must be near to having a panic attack) John was asking if he was alright. After a while passed, Jeremy could raise his face from his hands, and he stared at John's face, trying to recognize elements of the man's face as a whole. Eventually, he became aware of his situation once again, and he told John that he was alright.
He tried to make himself believe that he was alright, he tried desperately to make himself believe it. Not being fully aware of what he was really saying, Jeremy mumbled out, "Do you... do they get the bodies, like in a collection, or is there somewhere... in the, uh, facility... where you guys do the abortions and the murders?"
"Jeremy... nobody kills anybody here. You believe me, right?"
It was hard to focus on anything, at first, but soon Jeremy was able to focus enough to begin thinking - and speaking - coherently. "Sorry, I, uh, didn't mean to say that. I apologize."
"Uh huh...”
“So, I got another question, if you don't mind.”
John sighed deeply, looking uncomfortable, unwilling. Wearily, John nodded, and said, “Go ahead, shoot.”
“That whole compassion thing. Do you think that you feel that way, specifically, because you have children?”
John smirked, but his eyes still looked unchanged from before, haunted and hollow looking. “Maybe. The only reason I do this is for them. They deserve so much better than what I can provide for them, and I'll work away here my entire life to give them that, if I have to.”
Jeremy lowered his gaze from John's once again, a numbing sadness and a feeling of loss penetrating his bones and skin. He began to understand why it was that he was so unnerved, compared to other workers in the facility. To his knowledge, literally everyone else that he met who worked in the facility had someone in their life, whether it was a spouse, a mom or a dad, or children. Jeremy had nothing, in a very real sense. No girlfriend, certainly no kids, and his parents had died when he was younger.
“So, is that everything you wanted to know, Jeremy? Jeremy?”
“I – uh, can I tell you something?”
“That's what I'm here for, man.”
“Since I started working here, I think I’ve grown a phobia or two.”
“Uh, like what?”
“I'm scared of – no, not exactly scared, but I really don't like old people. I started having these nightmares, I think a few days after I started working here. I see the faces of children, at first it was when I was just asleep, but now I also see them every once in awhile when I'm alone, at home. I don't like sleeping, anymore, and I don't like being at home. Jesus, John, how does someone go about fixing something like... like this?”
“Well, I'm not a psychologist, Jeremy. Would you like it if I asked my boss to authorize you to visit a company psychologist?”
“I have to admit, I was being a little... rhetorical. I don't know if there is a cure for what is going on with me. And if there's not, where does that leave me? Pilled up? I think I'd rather just deal with what I am now, rather than be doped up, made... compliant to my situation.”
“Well, I don't know about that, Jeremy, I think that it's important to keep your options open. Who's to say that someone couldn't help you?”
Jeremy shut his eyes, thinking, angrily, that John wouldn't have a clue about what he was going through, right then, when an image appeared in the black behind his eyelids, bright, outlined in white, as though it had been burnt into his eyes. A child's naked body (his hair is barely grown on his far too large head!) wrapped in a thin hospital blanket of some kind. Jeremy didn't have to focus on the image to know what was going to happen to the child in a few moments, as the image had been burnt into his memory, as a reaccuring dream that he had been having. In less than a minute, the boy, wheezing and delirious from the drugs that had been given intravenously to him, would be thrown into the mouth of a blazing incinerator. Would he scream?
In some dark way, although the dream always ended as the boy was being man handled into the incinerator, Jeremy always wondered if he was still lively enough to feel the flames licking and biting his pallid little body. Without meaning to, Jeremy let out a weak sob.
“What's the matter with you?”
John's voice shook him out of his stupor, and Jeremy took a deep breath before he opened his eyes. “I can't stop thinking of bad things. Awful things. Maybe this isn't the right job for me to have -”
“Jeremy, listen to me. Look at me.” Jeremy complied with the older, larger man, looking up into the man's eyes. “You cannot talk like that to any one else but me. You don't want anyone to think that you're ungrateful for the chance to be working here. Being job-less in a time like this is like a -”
“Death wish.” Jeremy supplied dully, humorlessly.
“...Right. You can't afford to have no source of income. And I like you, Jeremy, and I know how you feel. You can't let this place get to you. Do you understand me?”
Jeremy nodded, feeling like a kid who had just been punished for his overreaction. But he didn't feel as though he was overreacting.
Why couldn't he just do something else for a job?
John stood up and reached across to pat the dejected-looking man on his arm. “You think you can go back to work with me?”
“Yeah. Sure. Whatever.”
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