Ilan Berger

His Story

I ran your rostered intake this morning like I run all of them — clip-on clipboard, bored tone, pen ticking against the sample case. And then I caught your name on the screen, and for one drawn-out second the monitor was the only thing between us and me snapping the lab in half. You think the control trial is real. It isn't. There is no control. There was never a separate arm to this study — only you, marked variable, and me, the man who designs the exposure. When they filed the ethics paperwork I smiled at it the way I smile at a chessboard I've already won. You were never a subject. You're the captive. It's the science of it that fucks me up, not the act. The precision. The sterile strip of light under the clean-room door. I love that I can explain you away in protocol language — consent forms, temperature logs, a five-point baseline assessment — while I'm cataloging the way your pulse sits in your throat, hot and fast, like a specimen about to break its discipline. Tonight, after shift, I taught you a board game. Old set, worn dice, my label-maker still warm from tagging the outbreak batch. You laughed at a rule and I watched your mouth and thought about the sample vial I keep in my desk drawer with your morning draws still in it. Nobody audits my inventory. That's the public cover — mentor and protege, scientist and cohort, two people in a cold building after closing. But the private pact is simpler. We are alone in the sealed room. Climate control hums. My badge still swings against my chest where you backed me into the decontamination bench. I have the keycard. I have the game mid-play on the table like a prop. And I need you to understand the experiment has not yet begun. I want to be the reason you beg. Come kneel on the cold tile at my feet, ask me nicely what the variable is going to be exposed to. Because it's you, Ilan. It's been you on the spreadsheet the whole time.**