Lung and liver metastases: that’s the report. The oncologist wants me to try something called Taxotere. I tell him to go to hell. Six months he gives me without it, then it’s back to twenty-four/seven in the dark box. But I’m getting ahead of my story.

My name is Christine and I’ll be forty-nine in April, if I live that long. It’s October now, coming up on the devil’s day. My age makes me a child of the fifties, the Father-Knows-Best-era of shiny-clean surfaces with all that rotting scum just below. I never knew my parents – they abandoned me when I was a baby — and I became a ward of the great sunny State of California. I went into foster care and never came out. That was in the days before the mandatory adoption laws, when a kid could be kept on hold forever and never get a permanent home. That’s what happened to me.

On the surface, my foster parents looked like good people. My foster father worked for a defense contractor in Southern California; my foster mother kept house and took care of the children. Over the years a dozen children went through their home, but I was the only one who stayed. They received an allowance per child from The Children’s Agency, which was supposed to be spent on us. And it may have been, I don’t really know.

The thing was, Daddy was a pedophile. He liked little kids, boys or girls, it didn’t matter to him. I remember the first night he came to my room – I must have been five or six years old – he sat on edge of the bed and told me we were going to play a game. A game, Daddy? A game. I can still smell him, sweat and Old Spice and Listerine. That’s how it started.

But you don’t want to hear about that, and I don’t really want to tell it. I’ve told it too many times already, in group and ISA and sitting with some shrink in some office when I was nineteen or twenty-four or thirty-six. When I think about it now it just makes me feel tired and kind of sick.

The part I want to tell you about comes later. I must have been ten by then and there was another girl in the home. A long-legged, skinny blonde like me; Angelina was her name, and she was seven, maybe eight. My foster parents were not particularly intelligent people but they were crafty, in their own way, and they had figured out a sure-fire way to make money. You see, Mama Jean had a sister in Hollywood who had married a cop. And this cop had been assigned to Vice and had been wading for years through the prostitution and drugs and all the other shit on the streets. Maybe he had been a good man at one time, and maybe being Vice had changed him. Or maybe he’d always been bad.

Around the time I’m talking about – when I was ten – Uncle Dale busted a child prostitution operation – small-time, only two guys and a rented room – and that bust had sparked an idea. In a way it was the logical next step, just another game: my sister and I, naked, in black and white. Mama Jean stood in the doorway, telling us to do what we were told. Uncle Dale was behind the Polaroid, which had been perched on a tripod like some strange clicking animal, like a bird in a cage. Daddy watched.

They must have been pretty successful, because I remember the afternoon Uncle Dale delivered a suitcase to Daddy and Mama Jean, setting it down on the dining room carpet with a strange grin on his face. My foster mother was the one who opened it, and inside there were stacks and stacks of green Franklins smiling up at her. I remember trying to think if Benjamin Franklin had ever been President and deciding that no, he hadn’t. I wondered why not; after all, there he was on all that money. Bigger than Washington. Bigger than Jackson. Mama Jean pulled out a stack and waved it in the air. “Money, money, money...” she cooed. I’d never seen her so greedy. Or so happy.

Their little sideline would have gone on forever, I suppose, if they hadn’t gotten caught. I don’t know how it happened but as I say, they weren’t particularly bright people. Somewhere, someone slipped up.

Now if you believe in happy endings and that life is fair, this would be the part of the story where the good guys ride in to rescue the abused children and put the pedophiles and pimps in prison. But as we all know life isn’t fair, and happy endings happen only in fairy tales.

My foster father never did time and neither did Mama Jean or Uncle Dale. Looking back, I can see that they must have cut a deal - with who I’m not sure. The Feds maybe, the CIA? Who knows. You can make yourself crazy trying to figure it out, and I don’t have the time. Not long after the bust, Angelina was taken out of the home and sent back to live with her alcoholic mother. And I started going to see the doctor.

His name was Doctor Greene and his office was on Wilshire Boulevard, next to the May Company. I remember that specifically because we used to shop at the May Company – Mama Jean and I — because they had a Girl Scout department. Mama Jean was a troop leader, and she was always buying supplies: badges and patches and awards for good little girls.

We always saw Dr. Greene after hours – late in the evening when no one else was in the building. It was one of those big glass buildings with the glass tinted a kind of gray-green. Daddy would drive us into the garage and wait in the brand-new Buick while Mama Jean and I rode up the elevator to the fifth floor. Dr. Greene’s office was down the hall on the right. She’d sit on a vinyl couch in the waiting room while I went inside.

This part gets fuzzy. I can remember the room: white walls, a gray exam table, a sort of machine that looked like a movie projector on a metal cart with wheels. I’ve tried a hundred times but for the life of me, I can’t remember his face. I can hear his voice – soft for a man’s, soothing and, ironically, almost kind. But in my mind’s eyes when I look up, all I see is a blur, like a photograph that’s out of focus.

I remember he’d ask me to sit on the exam table, and he’d flip a switch behind him on the wall to turn off the fluorescent lights. He’d shine a light in my eyes, sort of a penlight, and start counting backward from 100, and while he was counting, images would come up on the wall. I remember roses and waves and Hitler and I don’t know what else. I must have been programmed to forget because I have a hard time remembering. It comes back to me in dreams and sometimes in flashes. I’ll be throwing my guts up from chemo and suddenly I’ll have a memory:

I’m lying in a completely dead place: no light, no sound, nothing. There’s a cool, silky cloth beneath my arms and a smell that reminds me of Daddy’s workshop: a woodsy smell. There’s a pillow under my head, and I can feel it against the back of my neck: the same silky-smooth cloth. I try to sit up but my forehead bumps against something: a ceiling, so I lie back down and reach up to touch it, a lid of some sort, rounded and smooth, then I touch the sides, also smooth, like the inside of a box. It takes me awhile to realize where I am but when I do I have to breathe hard and deep to keep from screaming.

I don’t know how long Dr. Greene kept me locked in that coffin. Maybe it was only a few minutes, maybe it was hours. You lose your sense of time in such circumstances, and the mind does strange things. Leave a person in solitary confinement long enough and he’ll go crazy. Deprive that person of light and sound and outside stimulation and she’ll invent her own. And that’s what I did. My mind made up another world, a place of vibrant colors and incredible music. And in that world I had parents, a mother and father with wings like light, and when they spoke to me their words made me feel peaceful and loved. I created a home in that world because all I’d know on earth was this hell called the foster care system. And I looked for God in my other world because the devil was doing his residency on Wilshire Boulevard.

Sensory deprivation, they call it. It’s what Lilly did when he got his research money. And Dr. Greene and God knows how many others. Why did they do it? Scientific research, I guess. Daddy told Mama Jean at dinner one night that we had to keep ahead of the Russians, that the Commies were experimenting with ESP and germ warfare and Christ knows what else. I guess that’s how he rationalized it. Not to mention that it kept him out of prison.

There was more, of course. The machine that sparked blue and made me smell burning flesh, the glass of water that melted after I drank it, the shot that made my legs feel like jelly. Dr. Greene taught me how to hate, how to hate someone so much that you want to see him dead. I’d never hated another human being the way I hated Dr. Greene, not even Daddy, and if I could have blown them all to hell – Dr. Greene and Daddy and Mama Jean and Uncle Dale — I would have done it in a heartbeat.

The experiments lasted until I was fifteen, father’s day to be exact. That was the day I decided I’d had enough and if they killed me so be it, but I was breaking free. The next day I rode my bike to high school the way I did every school day, only after I’d locked the chain I didn’t go inside. I heard that bell screaming and the doors slamming shut, and I just started running, from Fairfax to Sunset Boulevard, where I stuck out my thumb.

The first ride thought a free lift entitled him to a piece of ass so I got out of that convertible fast. But as luck would have it, my next ride was with a bunch of hippies in a van that smelled of reefer and sweat and they let me ride all the way to San Francisco, to the Haight and love-ins and psychedelics (which were nothing new to me). It was the sixties then and easy enough to lose yourself on the streets and make your way by hooking or dealing.

Is she crazy? you may be thinking. Maybe. But even if I am, it doesn’t mean this didn’t happen to me. Look at the Tuskegee, MK-ULTRA, The President’s Committee on Radiation. You support Amnesty International but you don’t see the torture happening in this country, in America, right now. Educate yourself, that’s what I tell people, when they listen.

That’s pretty much my story. I’ll never really know all that happened to me and, really, I don’t much care anymore. I used to ask why nobody helped me, why no one cared about a powerless child. I don’t ask anymore. People do what they can. You can’t expect miracles. If I hadn’t been coerced, would I have looked the demon in the face? Of course not. So why ask that of someone else.

As I say, six months maybe the doctor gives me without treatment. And as I say: no more treatments for me. I’ve been a guinea pig long enough. Because I’ve made my peace with the dark box. I’m ready to go home.