One Way Glass

Tabitha had, as I had suggested, wisely eschewed the heavy makeup she had been wearing when I met her. I was glad to see that that left her face tanned and rather bland, but still pretty. This was a good thing, because with her usual heavy and artsy face paint, the shock of purple hair atop the art student's head might otherwise have made her look like an asylum inmate when she wore those scrubs. Regardless, she looked as good as someone can in shapeless garments, her good-sized rack and curvy but tight bubble butt still managing to signal their presence through the loose polyester.

As previously decided, I brought Tabitha to the experiment room first, chatting about other bland, boring studies from other parts of the Psych department as if I had run them myself. I showed her the food, the beds, and the tiny cloth-walled cubicle, equipped with a high-tech chemical toilet, dry shampoos, deodorants, and other waterless body cleansing products, that provided the only, highly uncomfortable, privacy in the space.

As I left, I pointed out the fire alarm on the wall that they should pull if there was a problem and needed to get out of the locked space.

"Won't you guys see if we need help?" Tabitha asked a little drily, indicating the mirrored window.

Ready for that question, I shrugged. "Someone is supposed to be there at all times, 'observing'," I replied, making finger quote marks in the air around 'observing'. I went on to lie, "I don't know about everybody else, but I have a lot of homework, not to mention a girlfriend. Your questionnaires at the end will provide most of our hard data for the experiment."

If the questionnaires actually provided most of our data, then the experiment would be a disastrous failure...

I let myself out and hustled around the corner to the observation room. (We had disabled the door that directly connected the spaces.) Anna was waiting in the hall outside. She saw that I had Tabitha settled, and scuttled off to give Chelsea the heads up. Anna slipped back into our space just as Chelsea entered the experiment room with our male specimen, Carlos.

And specimen he was. At six feet, he was as tall as me, and his thick shock of black hair, mahogany-tinged skin, and dark eyes made for a striking look. And the girls had issued him clothes that fit like TV doctor scrubs, not real doctor scrubs, making his status as a gym rat clear to see...

Chelsea introduced the two, gave Carlos the rundown, and slipped hurriedly out. As Chelsea reappeared in the observation room with us, Anna toggled the big digital timer, and the seventy-two hour countdown began.

The three of us settled down in the high director's chairs and got ready to be bored for a while.

"All right, time for the pool," announced Anna, flipping her notebook to a page with a table of blank spaces on it. "Everybody give me your projected time for when we all agree that irritation manifests itself regarding the boredom, and then your projected time where we first see some 'experimental results'."

"How much?" I asked, thinking.

"Ten bucks each, split the winnings between the two winners," Anna said. Chelsea pulled out a ten, and I a twenty. I gave Anna the twenty, and Chelsea handed me the ten. Anna added her own Hamilton and pocketed the pool. I chose boredom to appear in less than an hour, and jiggery-pokery to commence by 10:30 the next morning. Anna thought boredom would come much later, and she didn't expect any experimental results until tomorrow night. Chelsea was in the middle on both.

Tabitha and Carlos shook hands tentatively but politely. The two traded sheepish comments about being lab rats. That conversation rapidly segued into the $1,100 each would be paid, and what they would do with the money, which got both excited. As they chatted, they explored their fairly confined space. Tabitha looked up at the mirror and decided to wave at us.

"Hi guys!" she called with a smile. When she of course got no response of any kind from us, she asked Carlos, "Think they are all in there, staring at us?"

We looked at each other, then went back to staring at them.

He considered the question briefly. "Maybe right now, at the start. But they all have lives, right?" He flopped into one of the mis-matched armchairs to test its comfort level. The chairs were wide and soft, and the arms were very low. "And it isn't like we are going to be performing any tasks, or taking tests, or, well, pretty much anything specific while we are in here for them to evaluate. What's there for them to watch, right? I'll bet most of the time, there will be at most one poor bastard in there to make sure we don't die, just doing their homework... or surfing porn!"

They both laughed, as did we, to be honest.

The two resumed exploring. They spent a lot of time going through the food and junk food that we had supplied. We had already determined that neither had any real dietary restrictions. That had been part of our selection process. They decided to catalog what was there, and what each liked. "This way we can make sure we each get a fair share of the things we both like," Carlos suggested.

Chelsea mused, "I think it is encouraging that they are working together already, don't you?"

"It bodes well," I agreed.

The two moved over to the modest stack of printed magazines we had left them for 'entertainment'. They leafed through the small pile, at first idly, them with more intensity.

"You have got to be fucking kidding me!" exclaimed Tabitha. Then she blanched and said, "Excuse me!"

Carlos just laughed at her embarrassment over the profanity and replied supportively, "No skin off my fucking nose!" He leafed through a bit more of the pile, and went on, "And I agree with your sentiment as well as your vocabulary. Did they raid some doctor's office waiting room for this time capsule?"

We had selected the magazines and catalogs for several characteristics. All were woefully out of date, with no connecting subject matter in the articles, but most had attractive men and women on the covers and/or inside. Many were beat up, others were missing key pages.

"I think we did well with our subject selections, guys," I said. "They both seem cooperative and pretty level-headed. Let's hope they keep hitting it off."

"Yeah," said Chelsea hesitantly. "Maybe. But I'm concerned that they both seem a little too ready for the boredom. What if they both have sufficient inner monologue to handle the monotony?"

Anna looked at the clock. "It's been twenty-five minutes, Chelsea."

*

The boredom got to the three of us quickly enough, that is for sure. By 2:30, I had thrown myself on a futon and took a nap. Anna banged away quietly on her laptop, and Chelsea passed the time sketching Anna in charcoal on a drawing pad.

Just when I finally drifted off to actual slumber, Anna shook me. "Wake up. Chelsea and I think it is time to call the moment where they stopped having fun with the boredom."

I struggled up and took a look. Tabitha had just tossed her stack of reading material in the air. She flipped a bird at the mirrored wall and growled, "I swear, Carlos, they went out of their way to make this boring. These magazines... I thought this was a serious scientific study, but maybe they are just playing a practical joke!"

Carlos looked daggers in turn at the mirror, guessing wrongly where we were actually located behind it. This lessened the effect of his glare, focused as it was on the empty part of the room to our left. "Maybe you people are actually studying boredom, not isolation," he almost spat at the mirror. He paused and looked at Tabitha with a shrug, "In which case, I have to congratulate them on some excellent design on their experiment." She chuckled in reply, both of their natural good humors reasserting themselves... a little.

"I don't like how much they keep trying to talk to us through the mirror," worried Chelsea.

"I'm not," I replied. "Actually, I like it. The more they talk to it and get no reply, the more it just reflects themselves back at them, the more they will start to internalize it as a mirror, instead of a window."

"Ooh, aren't you the psychology major?" cooed Anna sarcastically, but in cautious agreement.

"Call me Sigmund," I replied, in a thick German accent. We all laughed loudly, louder than my joke deserved. The noise was no problem, however. We had already determined that they could hear nothing we did in here, no matter how loud, short of our actually physically banging on the window.

We handed Chelsea the first fifteen bucks of the pool money, and realized that the boredom was getting to us at least as fast as it was to them.

*

"I think it is working," I mused later that evening. Our subjects had tried and exhausted Twenty Questions, Alphabet, and all the other word games you play in the car that either of them knew, and were just sitting or moving around idly, making desultory conversation.

"Really?" doubted Chelsea.

"I don't see it," added Anna.

"I do," I said, leaning forward in my chair. "Tabitha just got out of her chair and started wandering again. Did you see Carlos' eyes?" They both shook their heads. They had been looking at Tabitha's movements. "He has started focusing his gaze a lot more intently on her in the last half hour." Tabitha turned just then, and Carlos swiftly swung his gaze to the fridge so she would not catch him staring.

"I saw that," Anna said excitedly. "He is scoping her out for sure now. More than when they first met, even."

"A lot more," I agreed.

As if to cover for his staring, in case Tabitha had caught him anyway, Carlos popped up and went to grab a Sprite from the fridge.

"Look at that," exclaimed Chelsea with something like excitement (an emotion the three of us by this point had thought lost to the shadows of history). "Now she has her eyes glued to his ass when he walked away!"

"Why not?" Anna almost giggled. "It's a nice ass."

The scientist in me had begun to study my partners too, in a clinical way of course. At first, focused as I had been on the experiment, I had lumped Anna and Chelsea into a sort of single entity labeled, 'The Girls'. But moments like this helped to crystalize their differences.

Chelsea was the more introverted of the two. She had chosen to wear khaki slacks and an IZOD shirt under her lab coat, the kind of comfortable clothes that let you see that she was fit, with some nice lean curves, but didn't give an observer a good grasp on any specifics. She also tended to hold her coat tight against her more and more as the experiment went on, which I thought was weird, given that it was, as we had all predicted, warm in there. Her body language was usually indifferent but relaxed. It made her appear a little shorter than she was. On those occasions where she got animated and stood up straight, she was nearly as tall as I was. Chelsea was damned smart, and a contributor, but she also was the doubtful, the cautious one.

Anna was much shorter, and more assertive. The clothes she wore produced a odd mix of impressions between practical don't-give-a-shit, and really, pretty hot. Under the lab coat that she clearly only wore at sufferance to the protocol, she sported a tight, cut-off pair of jeans and a form-fitting zip-front denim vest, with the zipper pulled all the way up. Her short, carelessly styled, dirty blonde hair might have been drab, and her lack of makeup almost defiantly revealed the faint traces of teenage years spent battling acne, but there was no doubt about the quality and placement of her curves. That vest might have been zipped too high to display any cleavage at all, but it was tight enough to let you know that while her bust was not equal to Tabitha's, it was nearly in the same league.

Honestly, I had only started noticing where Tabitha and especially Carlos's eyes were going after I caught the way my own had started following my colleagues.

Suck it Carlos, I thought. You have one pretty girl to ogle to relieve the boredom. I have two. Three, if I included Tabitha, which, hell yes I did. Even in those shapeless scrubs, she was stacked.

Of course, the purpose of this exercise was not about boredom-relieving curves, especially not for me, but to determine whether the circumstances we had created would result in Carlos and Tabitha moving well beyond those sidelong glances...

*

"I don't fucking know how I'm going to do this Carlos," Tabitha said suddenly, swinging from the line on the floor that she had been pacing in front of the window between us.

"I know, I'm frustrated too..." Carlos began to reply.

"I'm not frustrated," Tabitha contradicted him. She turned and leaned her back against the window absently. "I think I'm at the end of my rope. It hasn't been half a day yet. We are supposed to take three days of this?"

"This is good," Chelsea whispered, as if Tabitha could hear us. "It's like she's forgotten we are back here."

Anna and I shushed her so we could hear, but nodded our agreement.

"I know. It sucks," grumbled Carlos, in a mix of sympathy and impatience.

"Why are doing this again?" bitched Tabitha. "It ain't like this is going to cure cancer."

"We are doing it for eleven hundred bucks apiece," Carlos snarled, but trying to keep his eyes on the prize. Tabitha nodded begrudgingly.

Twenty minutes later, Tabitha was leafing through some more of the reading material we had left for them, exploring the crap she had dismissed the first time through. Carlos was prowling around the room like a caged puma. As he passed Tabitha, he looked over her shoulder and exclaimed, "Really? A men's underwear catalog?"

"Back off. I'm a grownup," grumped Tabitha. "Besides, this is about all there is left I haven't read twice."

"I'm not blaming you," Carlos said, waving a hand irritably. "I just look at that and think, with as old as this pile of crap they left us is, there really ought to have been a Victoria's Secret catalog in there for me!"

That actually got them both to laugh a little.

"Let's eat dinner," suggested Carlos. Tabitha agreed, and the two of them perused the fridge. They each selected one of the numerous chicken Caesar salads that we had bought pre-made at the grocery store, and a soda.

"A little booze would have been considerate," grumbled Carlos.

"I'm not 21 for three months, are you?" laughed Tabitha.

"No," Carlos replied. "But still... a little booze would have been considerate."

They ate peaceably.

After dinner, they tried playing some more word games, but their hearts were definitely not in it. Eventually, they just sort of drifted into unhappy silence.

Later, Tabitha began to pace around the room irritably. Sometimes she stretched, sometimes, she jogged in place.

Carlos eyes followed her, a cloudy expression on is face.

"Is he staring at her, or glaring at her?" Chelsea mused.

"I'm going to go with a stare," Anna replied.

Chelsea stopped and stretched again, arms over her head as she bent her knees into a half squat and turned her shoulders side to side.

"I don't know about Carlos," I joked, "but I for one am staring." That stretch nicely showcased, even under those baggy scrubs, two of the, ahem, biggest reasons that I had decided to recruit Tabitha. I found her jogging in place to be similarly interesting.

Unfortunately, before Carlos could get too interested, Tabitha tired of her desultory exercise and flopped back into the chair she had claimed as hers. They both leafed through the magazines some more.

The brief respite from their boredom, and, more importantly from my perspective, our own was over. We all just sort of sat there, on our respective sides of the glass, for a mind-blisteringly long time.

We were all saved, I guess, by a flicker of the lights. The protocol called for the lights to dim at 10:45, then go out at 11:00. They were set up to do this automatically, because we could not risk the subjects turning their lights off while ours were still on. They could then have seen through the one-way glass.

When the lights dimmed, all five of us rushed to brush our teeth, and by eleven we had all gotten into our beds. I never go to bed that early, but that night, my brain just wanted to shut down. I fell asleep quickly, but I still was awake long enough to hear an indistinct snore coming through the intercom, and a clearer one coming from Chelsea's direction. A motion alarm would wake us if either of the subjects got out of their beds in the night. It never went off the whole night.

*

My dreams were a nice break from the monotony. Even upon waking, I could not remember any details, but I was certain I had dreamt about Tabitha, and yes, in that way. I also had the distinct impression that I'd enjoyed a similar dream about Anna... or maybe Chelsea? I enjoy a good sex dream, but even if I didn't, I would have still truly just been glad for a good eight hours free from boredom.

Our lights came up ten minutes before theirs, but just enough for us to see, not bright enough to be seen through the glass. It was enough to make it easier for us to respond to our alarm clock and get up before them.

When their lights came up, they came up slowly, taking ten minutes to reach full brightness.

We watched as the subjects shielded their eyes, and groused to each other about the rude awakening.

"Is there at least coffee?" queried Tabitha.

Carlos got out of bed first, and checked in the food box. "Instant only," he sighed.

"Piss," observed Tabitha. "At least I got a good sleep. How about you?"

Carlos looked furtive. "Uh, yeah. Pretty dreamless, actually," he added almost defensively, avoiding her eyes.

Tabitha started at the mention of dreams, as if remembering something herself. "Yeah," she agreed quickly. "Me too."

Carlos microwaved water for the coffee while Tabitha slipped into the toilet area to change into fresh scrubs. When she came out, Carlos handed her a cup of Folger's and went to change his scrubs too.

They shared Frosted Flakes, actually having an almost lively conversation about sugar cereals. But soon after breakfast, the talk died away again. They flopped back into their chairs and sat listlessly.

For two hours, they just sat around. Each would shoot occasional glances at the other. Once or twice, one would take a shot a conversation, but nothing took hold.

Tabitha was finally reduced to reading one of the old hunting magazines in the stack of periodicals. She tossed it aside after paging through half. "I don't know what I was expecting from this 'experiment' but this is certainly not it!"

Carlos shared a wry smile with her. "Damned straight. I was certain that they'd give us something to do..."

"This is good," said Chelsea, who had become our de facto lead on studying their attitudes toward us and the mirror. "They aren't even glaring our way any more, much less gesturing or looking at us."

Fifteen minutes after her last outburst, Tabitha burst out of her chair and started to walk in a circle near the exit. "Screw this! I am not going to put up with seventy-two hours of this shit." She idly rattled the doorknob. It was, of course, locked to prevent spontaneous excursions ruining the whole experiment. Worse, she then stalked off around the room, but her gaze started repeatedly going to the fire alarm.

"This is not good," I said tensely. "If she starts banging on the exit, or the window, demanding to be let out, we will have to do it, and the experiment fails completely."

"Do we really have to let them out?" asked Anna wistfully.

"Yes," I grumped, answering her calmly to remind us all why. "The fucking protocol demands it. Besides, no good grade is worth a sentence for kidnapping."

None of us talked out loud about those looks at the fire alarm, but we all tensed whenever Tabitha's gaze returned to it. If she pulled that alarm, not only would the experiment be over, but the other groups' experiments after ours would almost certainly never happen in the first place. The music department would be pissed at the disruption, and the ethics board would have an enquiry. The whole semester would be fucked, and it would have been our hand-selected subjects who did the fucking. The wrong kind of fucking.