The Voss Interrogation
A man without fear is either very innocent or very certain of something you don’t understand.
Voss || Interrogation || Confrontation || Mystery
She was present at one session of Voss’s formal interview — not as an investigator but as a consulting physician, advising on the psychological aspects of the case. He sat in the interview room at the Coldmoor Institute — the investigators had, with some logic, decided to conduct his interview in the building where the events had occurred — in his white coat and dark suit, with his hands folded and his posture as precise as it had always been. He looked, when she entered the room, at her with the complete steadiness of someone who has processed the changed situation and arrived at a position from which he intends to operate. He did not look defeated. He did not look frightened. He looked, she thought, like someone who was managing a situation that had developed differently than expected and was adapting without distress, because his relationship to distress was not what a standard psychological profile would predict. “Dr. Ashby,” he said. His voice was unchanged. “Dr. Voss,” she said. She sat against the wall, away from the interview table, in the observer’s position. He was asked, first, about the patient population and the third-floor methodology. He answered in the language of research psychiatry — controlled, technical, the language of a man describing something he believes to be legitimate science. He used words like modified attentional states and perceptual recalibration and therapeutic reorientation. The investigator asked him about Carey. He said that Carey had experienced a breakdown and required isolation for his own safety, which was the same story he had told from the beginning and which he delivered with the same evenness, as though the eight months and the locked room and the restraint marks on Carey’s wrists were details he genuinely did not find inconsistent with the description. She watched him and thought about what Carey had told her in Room Seven and what Bruck had described across eleven years and what she had seen in the room beyond — the cold room, the figure at its end. She thought about what it meant that Voss had been maintaining this for twenty years without visible distress or doubt. What kind of certainty produced that. What the certainty was rooted in.
When the investigator asked about Room Seven — about what was in the room beyond, about Kehl — Voss looked briefly, for the first time in the interview, at something other than the investigator or the table. He looked at the window. The mountain was visible through it, the winter valley below. He looked at it for three seconds with an expression she could not read and then looked back. “The individual in the inner room,” he said, choosing the phrase carefully, “has been in my care for fourteen years. The nature of the condition requires a management protocol that is outside standard clinical practice. I have maintained the protocol in accordance with the individual’s own wishes, expressed at the time of the original arrangement.” “What was the arrangement?” the investigator asked. Voss’s expression did not change. “The continuation of his consciousness,” Voss said, “beyond the point at which ordinary means would have permitted it. In exchange for — certain considerations.” The investigator asked about the considerations. Voss looked at the window again. “The research,” he said. “The work of the Institute.” He paused. “Kehl believed the work was worth the cost. He still believes it. He told me so as recently as last week.” The room was quiet. The investigator made a note. Nora sat against the wall and thought about the figure at the end of the cold room, its head turning toward her, and about what it might mean for something to tell you that the cost was worth it after twenty years of being that cost. She thought about whether, in any meaningful sense, you could believe a thing that had been subjected to that for that long. She thought that this was a question that was going to require a long time and a great deal of careful work to even begin to properly ask.