sure I was doing everything possible to not upset her in some way. Pushing my reactions down so I didn’t add stress to the situation. Maybe that’s why college was such a relief for me. It was the first sustained amount of time I could remember when I could think about me first. When I could know who I was when I had some space.
When the protester, the white man with dreadlocks, yelled the “word” study, my eyes instantly darted with fear. My mouth started to open. I looked at their faces, hoping I would recognize them on second glance. I thought they might be observers trying to see if someone would break. I had never seen these people before in my life. One of the women shoved a flyer into my hand. I kept running. Waited until I was two blocks away to stop and read it.
Written at the top of the flyer was Stop operation lightbox!!! Below it in a much smaller font was: They have been testing on us since the Cold War. This is a human rights violation. They are tricking you into making your body trash. They are rounding up the meek and turning them into murderers. The poor, the sick, the queer, the black, the small, the victims of the great credit scam, the natives, the disabled, and using them for experiments. Wake up, America!!!!!! We are eating ourselves! Go to stoplightbox.net.
Stoplightbox.net was blocked on my phone.
Below that a drawing and a comic strip featuring Uncle Sam. The drawing showed Uncle Sam eating a person, which looked like it was modeled after Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son. I hate that painting, but this version of it made me laugh. The comic strip had Uncle Sam hitting either a husky child or a very short man with the American flag. Progress, he yelled. Next panel, the child burst like it was a piñata. After that, Uncle Sam gathered the organs. Then he labeled them. A heart was $1776. Intestines were only $74. Skeleton, $1.50. I did not understand what was being said here or Uncle Sam’s value system. On the back was an all-caps rant. I skimmed it, but the highlights were the US government is sewing the heads of dogs onto men. Women were being given pills to make them more subservient. New lab meat was being grown only for the rich, and the grocery-store meat was making everyone shorter. Facilities were all over the world.
Three of their flyers were taped to the lamppost next to me. Another flyer taped above that: IF YOU’RE A SUBJECT IN A RESEARCH STUDY, YOU CAN BE RESCUED. Around campus last semester, some kids had done—I guess I would call it an art project? A prank?—where they put up posters claiming squirrels weren’t real. ALL SQUIRRELS YOU SEE ARE ROBOTS! You probably remember seeing one. The website said they were vehicles for tiny aliens from a distant galaxy. I told myself it could be the same style thing. The protesters I ran past were a little too old, though, to be doing fake internet hoaxes.
I threw my flyer on the ground and ran on to the closest donut shop. Sweaty and tired and gross, I sat in a booth, ordered a glass of water and a chocolate donut. How long have you been in research studies? a woman’s voice asked. I shook my head, sure that paranoia and anxiety were making me hear things. A man said that he wasn’t in them, he just was sure they were happening in this town. He had been hearing rumors for years. I know I should’ve left immediately. But I was too curious. I wanted to know what he meant by years.
The average person is most interested in someone who might give them attention. They would notice me if I turned my head or was obviously eavesdropping. I pulled out my phone, opened the notes section. The man said he had heard stories since he was a boy: You don’t ever go to the basement of the old hospital. He said colored people were always coming and going. The woman said Colored? in an I-beg-your-pardon way. It made me like her. I always like anyone who hears something racist and can immediately react, not get caught in the processing loop of what-the-fuck-did-I-just-hear. I wanted to see who they were, so I posed and took a selfie. Took another.
The woman was wearing a black blazer and small red reading glasses. The back