I finished my coffee and threw the styrofoam cup across the room. It spiraled in a perfect arc from my hand to the trash can, but hit the rim. The lid popped off and the milk foam I hadn’t been able to suck out of the cup sprayed across the wall like a spurt of beige arterial blood in a detective show.

I wiped it off and went downstairs to my first evaluation of the day.
Veronica was already in the evaluation room prepping our client. They turned to face me when I entered the room.

“This is Greg,” Veronica said. “He’ll be handling your evaluation. Greg, this is Peter.”

“Pete,” the young man said. He attempted a smile, but his face was already constricted by his suit and the goggles riding high on his forehead. He was thin with grayish-looking blonde hair. An air of sadness swarmed around him like gnats. He held out his hand and I shook it, in the thick neoprene glove.

“Hi, Pete,” I said. For the first time, I had to wonder why anyone would want to do this. Maybe his sadness was contagious. Who screens these guys, I wondered. Are they screened? Pete sat uncomfortably on the edge of the examination bed. Who wouldn’t, with a six inch plug up their rectum? Veronica laid him down and strapped him in and I explained the procedure to him.

“Before we start in earnest, we have to calibrate everything,” I said. I looked over towards the mirror. “Are you guys ready?” I asked the technicians inside.
“They’re not here yet,” Veronica said. “Mike called, there’s some protest blocking traffic on the freeway. They’ll be fifteen minutes late.”

“Okay,” I said. I looked at the clock. I looked down at Pete. “Make yourself comfortable,” I said. “We’ll start at a quarter-after.”

He nodded and said something around his rubber gag. It sounded calm so I assumed it was just some affirmative grunt. I was not used to having real conversations with clients. Now I knew how dentists must feel. I picked up his clipboard and leafed through his application information. The top sheet was the most recent, his vital information taken that morning, jotted down just now by Veronica. Height and weight and sex. Resting heart rate. Blood pressure. Respiration. Beneath that were his personal information. Address and telephone number. Next of kin. Then came the psychological stuff. Psych evaluation results. Application letter. Nowhere were the applicants required to give the precise reason they wanted an evaluation, strangely, although it often came up in their letter. Here were the references he’d given the institute. I wondered if they were ever checked out. A list of hobbies.

“I see you’re into sports,” I said. He’d listed the usual outdoorsy Seattle stuff, hiking, kayaking, soccer.

He nodded and swiveled his head over to look at me through his fogged-up goggles and said something that sounded like, “Wa-wa,” which I assumed meant “uh-huh.”

“Music, too. What kind of music you like?” I asked.

He sort of shrugged and made a non-committal up-and-down grunt, which sounded like, “I dunno, different kinds.”

“Like rock or classical? Grunge?”

The noncommittal grunt again. I briefly thought about our dead rock star Klaus. “Not metal right?”

He shook his head and said “wa-wa” which sounded like “uh-uh.”

“Classical?”

Nod.

“Grunge?”

Shrug.

I wondered if this could be interpreted as a form of torture, and stopped asking him stuff. Why does a 26-year-old outdoorsy classical music fan submit himself to extreme pain? He should be at a picnic on the grounds of some scenic winery, with someone he likes and some brie and a baguette. I went over to the other side of the room and pretended to examine his papers. Then I got a can of air – we used these aerosol cans of clean air to clean stuff, wiring and meters and so on – and sprayed it on some of the machinery, pretending to dust it until I heard a door slam next door and Mike’s voice came onto the intercom. “Sorry, dude,” he said. “It was those chicks from Shut Up again, walking right down the freeway this time.”

“Okay,” I said, tapping my watch. “Let me know when you’re ready. Everything okay with you, Pete?”

“Wa-wa.”

“Okay.” The green light came on. “First, we need to calibrate the machines,” I said. “You’ll feel slight pain all over your body. It starts at your feet and moves upward. Tell me on a scale of one to ten how it feels, and where it fits in on the scale I explained to you. Punishing, crushing, all that.”

“Wa!” The operation lights came on, and Pete began to squirm as a thin, shallow band of pain slid up his body.

As the evaluation continued, I realized my chat with Pete had been a big mistake. Normally the way it is done is, you walk into the room, they’re already strapped down. You run through the script with them and leave again. They don’t have time to acquire any identity for you. They are simply keening black suits strapped to a bed. They don’t go kayaking or have hobbies. Lacking identity their pain response never registers much with you beyond are they shriekers or groaners or screamers or yellers? Do they articulate words or not? Are they pushers or pullers – do they push on the bed or pull on the straps? Do they arch their backs or not? We had one woman who did a sine-wave thing with her body. You never ask why these stupid fucks would ever want to do this, and you never, ever sympathize with them.

Pete exhausted himself around four. Somewhere between splitting and burning at level four, the thrashing stopped. The screaming stopped, and from then on, up to crushing seven when he finally hit the panic button, he just mewled and puled and quivered. He would have sore muscles tomorrow, I thought. That would have been explained to him already so I didn’t need to say it out loud. All the lactic acid he’d pumped into his system fighting the straps; he’d totally spent all the energy stored in his muscles and the lactic acid would have him limping for several days, a pain hangover from his evaluation.

“Seven and a half out of ten,” I said, as we were unstrapping him. “That’s ninetieth percentile pain-wise. Not many make it that far.” The orderly came in to wheel him out. He removed the gag from Pete’s mouth. I prayed that he’d leave the goggles on until he was out side, but Pete reached up with one shaky hand and slid them up onto his forehead. I tried to look away but was too slow and Pete made eye-contact. He had a beatific look on his face. He had black rings under his bloodshot eyes and was covered with snot and sweat and tears, but he looked at me as if I were god or something, or he was.

“Thank you,” he whispered, as the orderly wheeled him out.

I nodded at him. I didn’t know what to say. Then I wondered what my nod meant.