XXXVIII: Even a Dog Can Shake Hands

Lying around wounded gives you a lot of time to think, and that's not always a good thing, Sawyer has come to realize. He has run over dozens of possible scenarios in his head, from thrilling escapes to gory tragedies, and it always comes down to one thing: He is being watched. He is well aware he is being watched, and in case he forgets, people come in from time to time to remind him of the fact, to give him some medication for his shoulder, to talk and ask him about the plane crash. He tells them as fairly as he can: Not enough to arouse suspicion, but not too much that he feels like he's giving something away he shouldn't give away. They already know all about it anyway, so they're just asking me to see how I react. He does his level best to give them no reaction at all.

He doesn't see Colonel Klink again for a while, and that's fine with him. The nameless people that see to him don't concern him. He wonders how often they have visitors in here and suspects not very often. Their bedside manner could use some work. When they unwrap his bandage to check on his injury, they treat his arm less gingerly than he would have liked. He's not in a position to demand better treatment, though, and they've given him even more cigarettes and beer, so who's he to judge?

Instead, in between sips of Rolling Rock, he moves past harebrained escape plans and onto further, less idle speculation. They know Frank Sawyer. They know he's been dead. They know there's a connection there. That connection is apparently important, and he tries to isolate on it. It's not like he has anything else to think about, books to read, anything like that.

"That letter of yours, Jimmy. Can I read it?" What could he say? He couldn't tell the newspaper reporter no. There were no secrets to the letter, really. There was nothing to hide yet. All he had scrawled on it was, 'Dear Mr. Sawyer,' and he had always thought it was funny how Dana's face changed, shifted, turned different somehow when he read those three words. James hadn't known what to think.

Sawyer had gotten the letter back, though, and he had kept it. He has it still – doesn't he? A sudden panic attack seizes him, and he moves his free hand to his pockets, the burn on it still stinging, sending shooting pains into his fingers and wrist and across his palm with each minute movement of the hand. The dog-tag is there. That much is real. The letter… the letter… is somewhere. Somewhere here. He has to have it. They can't have taken it from him. They've already taken away Frank Sawyer's death from him, and if he loses the letter, that's it, lights out, curtain down, goodnight nurse, so long and no thanks for the memories.

It's there. The paper is still there. They haven't taken it. They haven't taken it because they want him to know that they've seen it. He seizes it despite himself, yanks it from his pocket, the notebook paper familiar. He knows every crease of it.

He unfolds the paper in a hurry, almost spills beer on it, manages to avoid that only through some sleight-of-hand that would have amazed Houdini, he thinks. The scrawls are still striking in their childish fervor, and he reads the note again, recites its words like a mantra. It's calming, somehow. To know what he went through at home helps him focus. That's what matters. Not this damn island that put a bullet in his shoulder, that's now holding him hostage. Screw all that.

"Dear Mr. Sawyer," someone says, and for a moment, he's not sure if it's his voice or someone else's. He glances up and sees Colonel Klink. He knows him from somewhere. The guy's figure is familiar, although the nondescript face could be placed on any of several dozen marks that he's conned over the years, maybe more. "Oh, we saw the letter; don't you worry about that. Still haven't figured it out?" The redheaded man smiles, raising a hand to scratch at the bridge of his nose.

The gesture is familiar, too, and it sends a shock down Sawyer's veins, but he can't quite figure it. Maybe someone, somewhere. Maybe if he weren't so doped up, he could figure it out. As it is, he just stares uselessly, stabs a finger at Colonel Klink before letting his hand fall back onto the bed again.

Colonel Klink shakes his head, clearly quite disappointed. "You have drunk four bottles of Rolling Rock and smoked eight cigarettes since you have been here. We have wasted fifteen hours of our time dealing with you. We will not spend sixteen without you becoming less of a disappointment to us. You were supposed to be smart, a good candidate, but it seems we have been misinformed, like we were with the brother and sister."

"A candidate for what? Whatever you're sellin', I'm not buyin'."

"Becoming part of the island." It's spoken as if it's an offer for a walk to the store, just that simple and congenial. Colonel Klink leans against the wall, folding his arms. "You all will. You're just the first we've picked. You're the most volatile, so you're the worst threat."

"Damn straight I'm a threat," Sawyer replies. He can't make it sound as forceful as he'd like. The drink is getting to him a bit, taking off some of his edges.

Colonel Klink continues as if he hasn't even heard that. "You'll become less so, though, given time and education. In fact, you already are becoming less so. For example, you have made no move to leave. You're content here, whether or not you admit it to yourself. You can acclimate yourself to more and more, given a proper opportunity, and when the time comes for you to be part of the plan, you will do so gladly, because you'll be used to being pleased with us."

He shouldn't laugh. He knows he shouldn't. Every single cell in his brain screams at him not to laugh, because, Jesus, these guys are serious, but he does it anyway. He lets a sharp burst of laughter escape his lips, rocket over to Colonel Klink like it's a full-bore assault against what the guy's saying. "Listen, you delusional freak." Even though the other man doesn't react, Sawyer mulls over the words, decides to be a bit more polite from then out: "Thanks for puttin' my arm right, but I ain't interested. Go find yourself another mark."

"We already have. Several dozen of you, in fact, currently camped out on the beaches. Or beach, I should say, now. That's good, though. It's good that you're doing that, because that'll make it easier. Less places to monitor. We had initially planned to keep the two of you separate, the select group and the substitutes, but since you've joined," Colonel Klink shrugs, "Well, I'm no scientist, but I would imagine it's fine."

Sawyer shoves the paper away. He'd forgotten about it in the past few minutes, but now it's right there again. "So you're going to take 'em one-by-one like that Agatha what's-her-face novel? With the Indians? Ten Little Indians? And you don't think that that's gonna come back to bite you?"

"We have measures to prevent that, and reasons to believe that your friends won't attack."

Sawyer shakes his head in sharp disagreement. "Yeah, well, screw that. I know them. I know them, and they will. Maybe not for me, but they will when they start losin' two, three, four more."

"You won't be lost, though. We'll have found you." Colonel Klink's eyes are glassy. "And you do want to be found. Your whole life, right? You wanted your family to find you when you were seven, and they didn't. You wanted Mr. Sawyer to find you, so you could kill him, and he didn't. You wanted your family to find you again, when you were an adult, and they didn't. And then when you found someone else, that was taken away from you in Tampa. That's a hell of a sob story. Don't you deserve better?"

He can't argue with that logic. He stares, stunned. The rightness of it hits him. He deserves more than that, and he has never gotten it. They can't offer it, though; he knows that, but there's something about this that sounds convincing. Maybe, maybe they do offer him something fair and square that's worth having. Maybe they're right. He glances away from Colonel Klink, his eyes scanning the wall beyond.

"So you folks killed Shannon and Boone."

"Wrong. Miss Cortez killed Miss Rutherford and the plane killed Mr. Carlyle. We only made it possible for those things to happen, gave them each a chance of occurring. We provided the resources."

He ignores that. The hell with semantics. "And you folks took Walt. Where is he?"

"Oh, yes. The young Mr. Lloyd. He is quite well. He is better than he was before."

"You kill him?"

"Not exactly."

"What the hell does that mean?"

"In some sense, he's still alive. Just like you will be." The redheaded man motions Sawyer to the beer again. "You look thirsty. And you are asking too many questions. You really have no sense of how to hold a conversation with people, do you? That's not optimal. We'll have to work on that."

Sawyer reaches out for the beer – what the hell; may as well – and opens it deliberately, taking a long, long sip. He watches the redheaded man, everything about his drinking quite deliberate. See, you bastard. I can outsmart you. You think that I'm not going to drink the beer; you've got another think coming. He sets the Rolling Rock down on the sidetable, runs a hand over his mouth, and laughs again, suddenly. He's doing exactly what they want him to do anyway. They want him to disobey, because that's predictable and they want him to obey, because that's predictable. He'd been so careful before when he was talking to them, done his best not to play into their hands either way, and here he has been outsmarted on the account of beer. There's a moral there, somewhere.

Colonel Klink laughs too, as if he knows exactly what Sawyer's just figured out. Sawyer suspects that he might well know. The man steps away from the wall, and for all of the guy's talk about fitting in, about how he, Sawyer, needs to straighten himself out and learn how to work together, Sawyer would have thought that the guy could have found a suit that fits him well, because although the suit looks fine from afar, he's just not quite up to par in it.

"Listen, James," Colonel Klink says, and his voice is the voice of a friend now, that same tone that came when he burned Sawyer's hand. Sawyer can feel himself tense at it, but Colonel Klink shakes his head at him as if telling him not to worry. "We had to get you healed. We want you well. If you are not well, then you are of no use to us, and if you are of no use to us, then you cannot be a good candidate. It was save you or kill you, and we decided on the former. Don't disappoint us, all right? We want what's best for you."

There's something soothing in those words, something that reassures him. At least they're going to make him healthy. Then, when he is healthy, he can go to town on them, kick some ass, get out of the place. The possibility makes his adrenaline rush, makes angels sing in his head, although that could be all the alcohol as well.

"Don't you want to be better?" The question encourages him to say yes, and he nods slowly. Colonel Klink smiles, continuing, his voice deliberate. "We will make you better. We will remove all that guilt that we know you're feeling, and we will replace it with better things. We will make you function. You want to function, don't you? You want to live the life you were supposed to lead."

Once again, Sawyer nods. He's always wanted to live that way. There's no point in denying it to himself. He always thought he could be more than just some con man, always knew he had that potential. Nobody ever saw it in him, though, not even the woman whose name is on a strip of metal - a misspelled strip of metal, he suddenly remembers – in his pocket. They're seeing it, though. They can see him for who he is. They accept it, and they offer improvement, and it's so easy to just say yes. Whatever they will do thereafter doesn't matter, because he has that acceptance, and that's enough to last him through anything. Someone understands him, even if they're a collection of freakshows in some military plant.

"Of course you want to be better. Unlike us, you stand the chance." The redheaded man takes another step closer, and then his voice turns less confiding, more brusque and businesslike. "I tell you this now because we want no resistance. You are being taken to have an MRI. Do you know what that is?" Sawyer nods. "Good. Then you know it won't hurt. It's just magnets." Colonel Klink tosses a set of earplugs to Sawyer, and despite the burn on his hand, Sawyer instinctively moves to catch them. This earns him an approving nod. "Put those on. And take that damn dog-tag out of your pocket."

He feigns surprise. "What dog-tag?"

"The one you have taken. It was on the table, and you lifted it, just like you lifted it from the corpse. Why are you so curious about those things?"

He can't tell them, Because I see them in hallucinations, and because the name on the one I have changes. They would never take him seriously. He does, though, despite himself. He's too drunk to think of a good lie, and he figures the other guy probably is too sharp to believe him. This earns him another signal of approval, and he relaxes some at that. He's gotten on their good side now.

He needs to protect himself, though. He needs to make sure he won't get entirely taken in by these guys. He quickly chooses some information to hold back – Jeannie, mainly, since they've decided to remind her of him, and the way his parents' bodies looked, and the look on Debbie's face, the shock, the disgust, when he'd asked her to put him up for a while, the distaste on Mark's face when he, Sawyer, had asked for the money back. They're not pretty images, but his life isn't pretty. They'll have to do. He won't let them take those thoughts; if he starts to feel like he's losing himself, at least he's got something to cling to, even if it's a rather bitter past.

"You see, James, you're learning to listen to what we say. Take that army tag out of your pocket, now." The redhead's voice is that of a bootcamp drill sergeant. Sawyer fishes the tag from his pocket, slaps it down on the table with more vehemence than he needs. This brings laughter from Colonel Klink, who moves for the door.

The man's words are hushed, but perhaps louder than he expects. "Ford's ready. Be prepared, though. You might have a bit of a struggle getting him to the room. I think he's compliant, but you never know with him, we're told."

A bass voice answers. Another Yankee. "Right, Kelvin. Whatever you say."

The name is instantly familiar, but Sawyer is more distracted by the apparent escorts to the MRI. They're boxers. Weightlifters. Something. And they mean business. At least he manages to hit the floor before they have to grab him and drag him out of the bed. And, surprising even himself, he offers them no fight as they start walking him from the room.