The next day when Koksun awoke, he felt like he had drunk a jug of whiskey, slipped and fallen down a nastily long stairway, and used his head repeatedly to soften the fall. A mild groan escaped his lips, and he looked up at the ceiling, in the process feeling like the mere act of opening his eyelids was a heroic act meritorious of an epic poem.
He tried to move his head but couldn’t. It felt like his whole body was pinned to the bed by a thousand nails. He closed his eyes, counted to three, and then lurched forward as if his life depended upon it. At least, he tried to lurch forward. By attempting something more dramatic he accomplished something slightly less ambitious—turning to his side. He put his right hand on the bed and pushed. Slowly, like the wall of a house being put into place by two hundred groaning men pulling on a rope, he heaved his body into a seated position.
There, he told himself. That deserves a reward.
He felt like a suitable reward for this task would be to sit there in utter stillness staring blankly at the wall like a senile old man. So that was precisely what he did.
After what seemed to be about fifteen minutes (but for all he knew it could have been fifteen hours), he decided he was going to do something worthy of a gold medallion. He was going to stand up.
The thought alone tired him so much he regretted it the moment it entered his mind. Like a dog sensing it is about to be removed from its favorite resting spot, his body seemed to lower itself towards the ground ready to resist the tyrannical treatment it was about to be asked to undergo.
But Koksun resolved that he was going to do it, and a deeper part of his mind realized that painful or not, there would be no arguing with Koksun’s will. He counted to three and then . . . HEAVE!
He shot to his feet. He felt and heard his back pop at least sixteen times in the process, and he wasn’t sure whether he had just broken it. He stood there, wobbly-legged like a newborn giraffe on ice skates. If he felt his Herculean act of getting into a sitting position was worthy of a long break, this, he felt, had earned him at least an hour before any more brutal tasks should be attempted.
He closed his eyes and breathed deeply. His head ached. His back ached. His thighs ached. His feet felt as if they were being asked to bear the weight of a small wagon. His head listed slightly from side to side like a ship being tossed to and fro on the high seas.
He continued to breathe in and out deeply.
Suddenly, like a dreary day pierced by a ray of sunlight, he felt an energy sweep over him. Not the kind of energy that had for the last five days sustained him while he ran mile after mile, climbed up several-hundred-foot walls as if they were short flights of stairs, or swam for miles with a forty-pound backpack on. But it was perhaps at least enough energy to feel like he was something more than a statue.
He looked near the doorway.
There it was. Like a key taped right next to the exit door in a room full of rapidly advancing alligators. Valder. One small sniff of that stuff, and the aches, pains, and lethargy holding his body and mind hostage would be left far, far behind.
He took a couple steps towards it. His body ached with each one, but he didn’t feel worthy of a gold medal, as he had after sitting and then after standing. The smell was powerful. Sweet but with a spicy tinge unlike anything he’d ever smelled before.
(or ever will smell)
He bent over to get a closer look. His back began popping like a pile of dry twigs stepped on by a hefty hunter wearing thick boots.
It was a finely ground green powder. And as he drew so near that his nose almost touched it the smell alone almost seemed to intoxicate him. Maybe it did.
He stepped back abruptly, realizing that he had come less than half a second away from taking another dose right then and there. But doses were off limits right now. “Two-week detox” had been his instructions. And who knows if he’d get another dose after those two weeks.
He wasn’t sure, but one thing he was unsure of in spite of the dreary cloud of pain and fatigue occupying his mind was that this was not going to be his stumbling block. He had undergone too many tests, made too many sacrifices, and come just too damn close to becoming a Varco agent for some final mind game like this to bring him failure.
“HA!” he laughed to his own surprise. The mere thought of failure seemed amusing as another tiny, yet not invisible, ray of sunlight pierced the storm clouds, revealing to him a strange irony. All he had to do right now was nothing. Absolutely nothing.
It seemed to make a certain kind of sense to him also. He began to imagine scenarios involving future missions where perhaps doing nothing but sit and wait would be the challenge. Maybe it would be a matter of waiting in a closet for a week for a target to come within striking distance. Maybe it would be a surveillance mission. It didn’t really matter. The point was sometimes inactivity was in and of itself part of the mission. And he supposed that perhaps this was part of what his instructor was trying to instil in his mind. The discipline to wait.
Then, a joyous thought came to him. He ought to lie down and have the most well-deserved, guilt-free nap in the history of mankind. He sauntered back to bed, collapsed as he had done the night before, and was dozing away moments later.