Room 101

I thought it would be fun, and possibly cathartic, to write a personal version of 1984's Room 101. I've had a severe revulsion and fear of invertebrates for nearly all my life, which has led to a fair few embarrassing incidents and turned otherwise pleasant and productive summers of landscaping at the martial arts school into waking nightmares. The first time I was able to control myself through such an encounter was at my grandfather's burial, where I stood staring at a struggling earthworm, doing my best to keep still and focus on my breath. I have a handle on it now, but am still occasionally overcome with disgust when I see the things. I have since given this as a prompt to several of my classes, and I've seen some very inventive tortures. What would be in your Room 101? Let me know in the comments.

Aaron has been in the care of the Ministry of Love for some four months. The why of it has long since lost significance. Reasons and exceptions only matter in the subjunctive; when time has passed, truth is much more linear. Aaron’s new life began when, armed with tear gas and truncheons, they dragged him, hands and ankles bound, into the night.

Since then, life has been cruel to Aaron Rockwell. He knows that he is beaten; he knows that everyone he tried to save is dead. He wishes the Thought Police would kill him too, but for some reason, they won’t.

They have bruised him, prodded him, suffocated and drowned him, electrocuted him and starved him, cut him and burned him and drugged him and screamed at him, and whispered threats to him as he slept, but they haven't let him die.

They do not torture him for information. He has no information that they don't already know. They do not torture him for revenge. None of them care enough about his feeble crimes to take any pleasure in his suffering. They torture him because they want to win. The Party wants to conquer. Not just to conquer land or ideals, but to conquer people. Every battle the Party wins, it wins inside the minds of its enemies. It will not be satisfied until Aaron has come to believe that the Party was right all along. It will not be satisfied until Aaron loves the Party with all his heart.

The sound of footsteps in the hall outside his cell sends shivers up Aaron Rockwell's spine. The last time he was tortured, he was told that he was ready for the final treatment, the Party's greatest tool. As two burly guards lift his gaunt, weak frame from the ground, he begins, not for the first time in this place, to sob openly. What can possibly be worse than what they have done? Why do they need him to comply? Why won't they let him die?

As they carry him into the elevator at the end of the hall, Aaron knows that what they are doing is insane. They can't get inside his mind. They can't change who he is. They want him to love the Party. They aren't satisfied with his pretending to love it. They know he doesn't, not really, and so they torture him so that he will. But no matter what they do, he won't be able to change who he is. What can they hope to achieve? Why won’t they let him die?

The elevator stops at the first floor of the basement of the compound. The guards do not strike him as they have done every day. They carry him gently, almost pityingly. There is no sign of the cruelty they showed him before. This, more than anything he has been told, terrifies him, and he struggles limply in their grasp, knowing that he can't escape and wishing one of them would put him out of his misery. This floor of the building is one long, empty hall. There are no windows, just as there were no windows on any other level of this torture chamber. But here, there are also no doors lining the hallway. The only exits are the elevator behind him, and before him, at the distant end of the hall, a slate-gray office door with three brass digits screwed into the wood at eye level: 101.

Reading these numbers, Aaron gasps for breath, tries to cry out and finds he is too frightened. He chokes on his blind terror and begins to cough, racking his battered bones with powerful seizing gasps. If only he could keep on coughing, he wouldn't be able to breathe and he would die, but he doesn't have the energy, and soon his fit subsides and he is left gasping for air and sobbing insensibly. The taller of the guards opens the door and the shorter carries him inside. Aaron is placed on a hard-backed wheeled wooden chair in a dark room. The guard ties his hands behind the back of the chair and leaves the room, closing the door behind him. In the corner of the room is a glass tank. It is too dim for Aaron to tell what is inside. Slowly, shakily, he gets his breath back. The door behind him opens, and closes.

"Welcome, Mr. Rockwell," says a voice behind him. Aaron flinches at the sound. He does not recognize the voice. "Congratulations on your progress through the reorientation program. I was personally skeptical that you would make it this far so quickly, but you have shown remarkable progress. Soon, you will be a fully rehabilitated Party member. What do you think of that?"

Aaron tries, and fails, to keep a tremor from his voice. His answer comes from deep inside him, and is as genuine as a lie can be. "I'm very pleased. Thank you. I am ready to rejoin the Party. Thank you." Even to himself, he sounds half-crazed.

The voice sighs. "You must be honest, Mr. Rockwell. Your honesty with me and with yourself will make this process much smoother.” He pauses a moment to allow Aaron the time his fevered mind needs to process the words. “What do you think of what I said before?"

Dejected and frightened out of his wits, Aaron tells the man behind him what he really thinks. "You're wrong. You’re all wrong, and you always were. Anyone who you’ve done this to before has tricked you. It just doesn’t work. I can do whatever you want me to. I want to do what you want me to do. But I can’t be someone else; I can only act like I am. I can’t be a Party member. I wish you would kill me."

The voice is satisfied, even warm. "Much better, Mr. Rockwell. Much better. But do you really want to die? The Party doesn't think so, Mr. Rockwell. The Party thinks you want to live. Why don't we find out? This will be the ultimate test, Mr. Rockwell. We will find out, finally, who knows you better, who knows you deep inside, who knows your soul; is it you, Mr. Rockwell, or is it the Party? We will find out."

Aaron feels pressure on the back of the chair. Slowly, it is pushed forward into the room, toward the tank. Behind the thick glass of the tank, something pulses. Aaron's eyes widen and he tries simultaneously to scream and to gag. He wants to vomit. He wants to hide. He wants to run far away and die elsewhere, but he can't move at all. His body is gone and his mind is going, and all that is left is his vision.

He sees worms. Millions of earthworms slide one over the other in the thick, open-topped glass casket. Millions of worms, suffocating one another, eating one another, reproducing with one another in their blind, deaf, dumb frenzy of tortured existence. When Aaron was young and he thought of Hell, he thought of this, and now the Party has brought Hell to Earth. How can he think? How could anyone think when such a thing exists? There has to be a way to escape. There has to be a way not to look, but someone is holding his face forward, holding his eyes open, and now he can't even breathe, and his body is cold throughout, and his bowels are knotted, and the worms are still before him, and Hell is still before him, and he can't move.

“‘It writhes, it writhes, with mortal pangs; the mimes become it's food / and seraphs sob at serpent fang in human gore imbued.’ Poe's ‘The Conqueror Worm,’ Mr. Rockwell. This is death. This is the fate you are looking for. This is your escape. I will administer an anaesthetic. You will be unable to move. You will be unable to feel the creatures, at least for several hours. And when it wears off, you may already be dead. Suffocated, perhaps, or some vital organ eaten away by the worms.”

Now, Aaron finds his voice at last. He screams. It comes shrill and insane, the cry of an infant in pain, the cry of a schizophrenic. He can hardly hear it. He can't control it at all. The worms are there. They are there. There is nothing worse. There is nothing. The worms are there. He screams, but they are there, and he is there, and nothing can protect him. Nothing can free him. It is a fact. They are there. He is there. He screams.

“This is the death you asked for, Mr. Rockwell. This is what you want, isn't it? Accept your release. You will be free of the Party at last. You will win.” The man who owns the voice steps around Aaron's side and into view. He wears no uniform. He stands calm, in shirtsleeves and spectacles, watching. He is ugly and short for an officer, but powerfully built. He holds a syringe in his hand.

Aaron's scream resolves itself into gibbering words. "Help! Help me! Don't-- I can't-- I can't-- Help! Give me-- I-- Let me go! Help me, God!”

"God won't help you, Mr. Rockwell. These are his creatures, just like you. When you have died, then he will help." The officer rolls up Aaron's shirt sleeve.

"Help me-- Help! Don't do this to me! How can you do this to me? I'm a man! I'm a man, just like you! Help! Please, let me go!"

"I cannot help you, Mr. Rockwell. No one can help you. You chose this fate, and this is the best I can do for you. I am a Party member. I can only do the Party's will."

"In the name of the Party, let me go!"

The needle stops just above the skin of Aaron's arm. The officer steps in front of him, leans down to look him in the eye. The man's face is close enough that the worms are hidden from his view, and it is the most beautiful thing Aaron has ever seen. His stomach lurches, and he feels deep gratitude and respect for the man before him. The officer looks Aaron in the eye for several seconds, then says, almost in a whisper, "Yes, Mr. Rockwell. I will. In the name of the Party, I will."

The hands of the guard release Aaron's head and he lurches forward, clamping his eyes closed and whispering fevered thanks to the officer, the Thought Police, and the Party. They protected him. They saved him. They helped him when no one else would, or could. They knew him better than he ever knew himself. For the second time in half a year, he is reborn. And as the chair is turned around, his hands are unbound, and he is carried out of the room, he feels a deep surge of love welling up inside of him.

"Welcome back to the Party, Mr. Rockwell," the officer says. "Congratulations. We are victorious."