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When he dreamed, which wasn’t often, he dreamed about the balloon. Sleep was vulnerability, and he slept mostly in shallow snatches, constrained by instinct and the sounds outside the door: muffled laconic conversation, housekeeping noises, the blaring of that damned alarm. It took him less than a day to become a connoisseur of the animosity between Shephard and Locke, as read in volume level of dishwashing clinks and slams, and by musical selection. Both of them, amusingly, resorted to Geronimo Jackson when pissed off. Locke preferred the Drifters when secretly triumphant, and Shephard liked the Rolling Stones.
He imagined they were sleeping just as poorly: all that responsibility. If he hadn’t needed to stay sharp enough to think, he would have just laughed and embraced insomnia—he could afford dark shadows under his eyes, even if they were a mite redundant—but when his captors napped, or meditated, or read quietly, or for all he knew knitted sweaters, he lulled himself into a stupor as best he could, and sometimes achieved unconsciousness.
And then, if he slept long enough, he’d be looking up into glowing redness, the sky pale above, the ocean a deep, pure blue. It was always morning; the air was thin and cold, and he felt breathtakingly alive. He’d never been in a balloon in waking life, but he knew exactly what it was like; he’d learned it from the light in Henry Gale’s eyes, before they were darkened forever. When he told them about it, about her—and he made sure that each in turn, Jarrah and Shephard and Locke and Cortez, was treated to every detail, smiley-face and all—he could feel authenticity showing in his face and see it sowing confusion in theirs. His false love for the balloon was far more true than his false love for Jennifer, and it was only fair when Jarrah caught him out because the shovelfuls of soil cascading down upon the body weren’t real in his mind. He should have buried Gale personally. There were things you couldn’t delegate, but he hadn’t remembered that at the time, hadn’t known yet that he’d have to become the man from Wayzata: heart and soul if not skin and bone; every tear he’d shed, every twitch and terror, every shadowed night and cool clear dawn.
Jennifer, presumably, was mourning in Minnesota; he’d expect Widmore to fake proof of her husband’s death, help with the probate of his will, urge her to move on. But if she was still searching, she’d never find him, or any evidence of his murder. It was nice to recognize one dead end among all the branching paths ahead. Otherwise, this infiltration was a scramble through the jungle, full of tripwires and nets.
Maybe that’s why he dreamed about the balloon: when you were that high up, everything was simple. The water was blue and the island was green and happiness was bright yellow, and he just had to keep flying.
*
He picked Locke as his mark early on, and worked away like a sculptor, chisel and hammer shaping stone. He wasn’t trying to be subtle. Locke wanted to be chosen.
It wasn’t what he’d planned, but it turned out for the best. His intelligence had gone spotty after Ethan’s death, and although collapsing into the camp and provoking further battle between Shephard and Ford might have worked—and he’d looked forward to playing with Ford, conning the conman—he’d had to quickly revise his scheme when he fell into Rousseau’s trap. He’d been briefly terrified that she’d know him, but she’d only caught a glimpse of him the night he’d rescued Alex, and it had been long ago. She understood, with the fixated clarity of the insane, that he was an Other, but by now, all the Others blended together had stolen her baby. His was just another strange face, another generic threat.
He hadn’t planned on being skewered with an arrow, either, but despite the pain and the inconvenience, it had the benefit of placing him immediately under Shephard’s protection—there was something to be said for suffering, bravely or pathetically as he pleased—and although he could hardly point out the joke to a man whose background he wasn’t supposed to know, it amused him to emulate St. Sebastian. And he meant to end up under Shephard’s scalpel anyway, or rather under a scalpel he owned, wielded by a hand he controlled. They were just starting their relationship a little early: minor surgery on the first date.
It was chilly in the room they called the armory, and the bed was hard. At certain particularly uncomfortable moments he was tempted to announce his cancer. He’d meant to use Jennifer's “illness” as a scare tactic, but stopped insisting on it when he provoked no reaction; besides, it felt disturbingly close to what Juliet guessed would be his own sudden decline and death. Of course, she wasn't an oncologist or a spinal surgeon, and she had reasons to taunt him with his doom. He would have asked for Shephard’s expert opinion if it had fit his story, and if there’d been anything Shephard could have done to help him under these primitive circumstances. But he could read the longing for a moment of assured diagnosis, a lifeline to a drowning healer. Like Juliet, crying over the dead women: frustration and a sense of uselessness.
But this thwarted doctor wouldn’t cry; he’d lash out. The first time Shephard delivered his ration of mango and fish and changed his bandage, he tried saying “Thank you” with heartfelt urgency—almost did feel it in his heart, in fact—and got back only a pointed glance at Jarrah’s handiwork and a sneer that took him a moment to realize was a manifestation of betrayal. As if he’d failed at being a proper patient by having been beaten silly.
Shephard did bring him a damp cloth, though, to wipe off the worst of the blood.
*
It had hurt quite a lot, being punched and kicked; he hadn’t really had to act the desperation to make it stop. He just had to let long-held inhibitions slip, release himself from the stoicism he’d cultivated. His father had slapped him regularly, a few times gotten out the belt, but the less reaction he got the less he bothered to keep hitting. Jarrah was a professional; he wouldn’t be fooled by resignation or impassive silence. He knew that truth didn’t flow out in rehearsed paragraphs, but was gasped out a word at a time through split lips and broken teeth. He also knew that “I’ll say anything you want me to” was the torturer’s dead end, the sign that he’d pushed too hard and too fast and let his own emotions take precedence over fact-finding.
Well, I could have told you that five minutes ago, said a little cold-blooded serpent curled up in the corner of his brain, basking in the furious heat of his own hysterical pleading and Jarrah’s blows and demands. It examined him, critically, and presented him with his own no-longer-suppressed terror, with the heart rate that had risen the second Jarrah had shut the door. He’d never been this scared of his father; and yes, Jarrah’s grief had been eloquently familiar, if far more poetic than Roger’s. But the terror prompted by the intense brown eyes was more familiar still, and it bothered him—bothered the curled-up serpent, at least—that he couldn’t put a finger on why.
He was less frightened of Cortez, even though she clearly had the physical means to hurt him. She was just as angry as Jarrah, but her training held where Jarrah’s broke down, and Goodwin’s stubborn commendations began to make sense: somewhere in there, under the chaos and fury, lurked the mind of a detective. He marked her psychological queries, her desire to know why that mirrored her self-doubt, and plotted how to turn them to his advantage. She wasn’t very likable, and yet he liked her nonetheless, perhaps because he recognized his own loneliness in her. But he didn’t make the same mistake twice either: he let the liking show just enough that she wanted to trust him, and then handed her the map, reasonably certain that she wouldn’t share it with Shephard and Locke. It was yet another category of mistake to assume she wouldn’t share it with Jarrah out of guilt and an urge toward conciliation.
He wondered, considering his own lock-picked storeroom of guilt, if in the end there wasn’t much difference between calculated risk and impetuous gesture, or between reasoned stratagem and petty one-upmanship. He’d taken on this job because Ethan and Goodwin had failed at theirs; because he was sure he could succeed and show Juliet the folly of her choices in the process. And, just as truly, he was here because Ethan and Goodwin had died and that was his responsibility. Painstaking incursion; valuable espionage; personal life-saving quest: yet still, as much as he pretended otherwise to himself, the arrow wound, the split lip, the terrorized pounding heart, the long hours alone in the cold and dark, might all be some kind of atonement. Or retribution.
Only a few things took him utterly by surprise during the days he was Henry Gale, but the oddest of those was Eko’s confession and symbolic barbering. As the door closed on the departing penitent, he burst into uncontrollable if silent laughter, not at Eko but at himself, at that second when baffled incomprehension had flipped like a switch into absolute understanding. If only it were that simple, he thought, and then imagined himself sporting a fright wig of tufted culpability, and laughed all the harder.
He knew the names of the men Eko had killed; if he cared to, he could look up where they’d been born and who they were sleeping with and what they liked for breakfast. But there was something to be said for the knowledge gained by bashing someone’s head in with a rock.
*
Little stabs of artisanal cruelty amused him; so did the artifice of innocence; so did private jokes about cheeseburgers and Stephen King. Not that he was any more in the mood for The Brothers Karamazov than he’d been for Carrie, but it was a fascinating choice on Locke’s part, and he noted it as a possible symptom of vulnerability to exploit later. For now, he needled Locke about competition and inferiority. He hated Hemingway, but he figured that a man who’d nearly crossed the Pacific in a balloon might admire that particular brand of prose and courage. Gale had been different from him in obvious ways—tall, physically strong, black, brought up in America—and he had to twist his brain around to fit into the mindset of the businessman, the servant of Mammon, the Minnesotan; but the yearning for adventure was less foreign than he expected. You took every precaution you could, weighted the balloon just right with the very best in equipment and supplies, and then let the wind steer you. His wind had been Jacob. Mostly.
He decided that Gale had been fond of his father, had inherited the mining company from him, had admired and wanted to be worthy of him; he wondered out loud in Locke’s presence why any father could act like Fyodor Karamazov, and yet why any son would want to commit patricide. And then he changed the subject quickly, before the startled look on Locke’s face could blossom into supposition. This wasn’t a fencing match, not yet; this was pinpricks and barbs, the crafting with bloody fingers of a crown of thorns.
It became clear early on that Locke regarded the hatch as his personal property. Quite an intriguing piece of real estate: they’d known it existed, of course, and what it did, but it had been left alone, one of the last remnants of the Dharma Initiative, and had regressed in their minds into a secret cave overgrown with vines on the borders of the realm of mythology. It was a shock to realize that it was real, that he was there. The more gradual, more personal tremor in his universe came with recognition of objects: the seventies green and orange bowls; the Apollo bar Shephard handed him with no explanation once at feeding time, and never again; the damned white and black cereal box the day they let him out for breakfast. He’d always had to fetch milk from the commissary, mornings they ran out; Roger was usually too drunk to remember the night before.
Crawling through the air vent during the lockdown, he felt absurdly like a bacterium slithering along the gut of some fantastic beast. The island was so much bigger than any of them: bigger than Dharma, or his people, or this motley band of losers who’d mysteriously survived a crash that should have killed them all. It was a long, long story, longer than anything Dostoevsky could have penned, and he couldn’t ask for more than a chapter within it, one that had been written before his birth. He hadn’t arranged for or expected the blast doors slamming down; something larger than him had made that happen. It unnerved him, so for once he did exactly what he’d been told: entered the numbers, watched the counter flip from frightening red hieroglyphics to a benign “108,” and then prowled around, conducting reconnaissance on exit points, no longer certain whether Jacob would want him to leave or stay. Whether he wanted to leave or stay. It was the human need in Locke’s voice, calling out his false name, that decided him. That, and the realization of how much Locke owed him, and how easily he could exploit the debt.
That was another mistake—he’d neglected to account for Jarrah’s zealous persistence—but from then on, the compounding of all his mistakes didn’t matter. For a while, he lost hope that he would survive. But this was a long con; he could sow seeds of faith or doubt as he chose, and they’d bear fruit along the way, even if he wasn’t there to taste it. Though he did very much want to take that satisfying bite. He remembered that as Jarrah punched him and tied him up; he remembered as he refused to eat or speak, soliciting crumbs of sympathy from Shephard the reflexive healer and Cortez the brusque psychologist. He forgot once, when he saw an open door and couldn’t resist a chance at escape. Strangling wasn’t tactful, or tactical; neither was loosening his clever tongue. He shut up again, no words and no facial expression, when Cortez aimed a revolver at his forehead and tried to pull the trigger. Staying silent was one of the hardest things he’d ever done, against all instinct, but he was too tired to inveigle and persuade. And it worked.
It occurred to him later, during what turned out to be the last hour he spent as a prisoner, that she’d been unable to kill him for much the same reason he hadn’t abandoned Locke: the humanity in his battered body; its echo and reflection in hers; the physical memory of taking the same stance before and choosing wrongly. Whether she had a long con in mind herself, he’d never know (he doubted it), but he felt a twinge of sorrow as he scurried out the door past Michael, and saw her body.
And then he was forcing open the wheel on the hatch doors and bursting out into the jungle, running, running. It was like the dream balloon: as long as he kept moving, all would be well. There’d be another chapter written about him in the long tale of the island; he had his old name back, but it felt like a new one. To the people he’d just left, it would be a new one.
Names were stories too; like truth, like lies. You couldn’t tell one from the other while scrambling desperately through the underbrush, searching for home; and when you were up in the blue sky on a cold clear morning with the world laid out in front of you, you didn’t care.
My name is Henry Gale. I’m from Minnesota.
My name is Benjamin Linus, and I’ve lived on this island all my life.