Pain Suit

Do you ever wonder how much pain you could stand? Me neither, but some people you ask that question and they get a faraway look in their eyes.

Feeling pain was never a priority of mine. In fact, following the death of my parents, I got good at not feeling it.

A bachelor uncle raised me because I had no other relatives. We lived in an old house he had inherited from my grandparents. He kept the roof in good repair so it never leaked, but the rest of the house already looked scary and run-down when I moved in. I had my pick of several dusty, cluttered rooms upstairs and eventually spread my things evenly between them. Bats swooped through my open windows on summer nights and the upstairs was full of the odor of hazelnuts drying in bushels in the next room, and the musty smell of army-surplus camping equipment. Chickens had free run of the property. There was a junk pile and a wood pile, cows and an old motor bike he used to give me rides on sometimes, when we could get it started.

It was paradise for a small boy but then school started and with it the ostracism. It never stopped all through school, and in fact worsened when the tractor company moved its warehouse and assembly plant back east and my uncle, over 50 and unable to find a decent job, became a self-employed window-washer and recycler.

After school, I would go on his rounds with him, parking at the loading docks and back entrances of the businesses around town, flattening the cardboard boxes piled outside and quickly loading them into his old Ford pickup. The furniture store was the best, we could get half a truckload there alone on a good day. Least favorite, for me, was the Dairy Queen, where the boxes were small and greasy and where, when I was older, I could hear the voices of my classmates having a good time out front, and see their cars.

One rainy Saturday, we drove to the Oregon coast where my uncle cut his hand deeply digging razor clams. We drove to the doctor for stitches. His skin was so tough the doctor broke the first needle trying to sew him up. His hands were like paws. A recycler needs tough skin, otherwise you’ll slash your hands on the edge of a box or gash yourself with copper wire; you can’t wear gloves most of the time because you need the dexterity. Soon my hands were nearly as tough as my uncle’s.

He fell from a tall ladder and died while I was away at college. He was seventy years old and still working because he had no retirement to speak of. It happened in a big home overlooking Lake Vancouver, owned by a successful local attorney. I had the opportunity to meet him while home making arrangements for burial: he barely got his condolences out before he was stressing the absolute lack of any liability on his part. All I wanted to do was get my uncle buried and get back to school.

The banks got the house.

Before my uncle died, most summers, I worked at the local cannery. It was hot, wet, dirty and loud. My job was to walk around in bright yellow rain gear spraying all the machines with a high-pressure hose because algae grew so fast in that environment, and to wash beans into the drain, flunky clean-up stuff. If we ever saw a dead mouse on the conveyor belt we were supposed to tell the supervisor and he would stop the machine and toss out a few pounds of contaminated beans, but the only break we normally got was lunch, so when I saw a mouse I let it continue on unmolested until the old ladies who worked picking out bad beans after they’d gone through the blanching machine found it. When that happened, they had to call in the real clean-up crew who would throw out a ton of beans and scrub down all the machines through which the mouse had passed. That usually took ten or fifteen minutes, which gave guys like me time to step outside for a little fresh air and a smoke or whatever.

The summer after my uncle died, because I needed the science credits and because I was sick of the cannery and had no desire to return "home", I took a psychology class on quantification of psychological indicators. It was an introduction to the various psychological tests by which one could quantify things like empathy and sympathy, as well as more complicated things like degree of autism and general social functioning. Since the statute of limitations has not yet expired, I will call the professor “K.”

We didn't just study the tests, we administered them to ourselves. We sat there in a low, under-ventilated brick building near a fountain down from Suzallo library at the University of Washington, dozy and hungover most days, and checked boxes on sheets of paper, which we then scored and interpreted, discussing the results in class. It was hot and all the windows were open and we could hear voices outside and the fountain splashing and distant traffic and seaplanes buzzing overhead. Even though the boredom didn’t bother me, staying awake was sometimes hard.

Sometimes, though, it was interesting. Once, we took a test on psychological characteristics of stalkers. It was the usual multiple-choice test ranking subjects in terms of empathy, problem-solving, attachment and borderline personality features. The test really worked, it turned out. After class, Prof. K. took a student aside and had a short chat with him. Low on empathy and problem-solving, high on attachment and borderline personality, he told him: typical stalker profile. As you might expect of a professional psychologist, Prof. K handled it well, and the student didn’t freak out. The kid went into therapy shortly after that. He didn't even have a lover, but it's best to nip that thing in the bud.

I was the last to leave the room, because I was moving slow that day, and K. called me over. Great, am I a stalker too, I wondered. I looked out the window over his shoulder in time to see a group of girls jog past, heading towards the lake. I didn't catch the first part of what he was saying.

"... borderline personality high." Oh, fine, I thought. "Projected empathy high, genuine empathy low," he went on.

Some more people ran past, out of sight, but I heard their laughter and their feet on the gravel.

"What does that mean?" I asked.

"You see a turtle on its back in the desert, in the sun."

"That's the Voight-Kampff," I said.

"I’m explaining. It means you turn it over and set it in the shade, if someone else is watching. If it's just you and the turtle, you do not."

"That's bad, right?"

"No, it’s very good. I'd like to offer you a summer job," he said. "At the Discomfort Quantification Institute."

Prof. K. had a nice condo on Lake Washington. He invited me to a barbecue the following Saturday. He told me it was to see how I liked the other people on his staff. We stood around eating salmon and pasta salad and drinking India Pale Ale and enjoying the view. K. introduced me to his other employees. "This is Greg, everyone. He has no human feelings, but he's good at faking it," he said. He had already drunk several beers.

They all shook my hand and made me feel welcome.

A tall, muscular blonde woman brought me another beer. She was wearing a Women's Crew Team tee shirt. I didn’t have an opener so she opened my bottle by striking it on the edge of a table. She cocked her arm up to her head and snapped her fingers, and the bottle cap shot sixty feet down the sloping yard out into the lake. Only then did she hand me the beer.

"K.'s basic idea, right, is to take the McGill Pain Questionnaire to its logical conclusion. To the limit," she said. "I gather you'll be the one asking the questions."

The McGill Pain Questionnaire was one of the first tests we'd covered in class. What it basically does is, it takes a subjective experience -- pain -- and quantifies it. It uses three main kinds of pain descriptors – sensory, affective and evaluative, and can also measure the intensity and other properties of pain, which can then be treated statistically. Normally it is used for Good, like quantifying the sort of pain hospital patients suffer from and measuring differences among different pain-relief methods, but K.’s stroke of brilliance was realizing that people would pay to know exactly how much they could take.

He found venture capitalists to fund the Discomfort Quantification Institute, and he selected his staff very carefully. Veronica, the athletic blonde I’d met, was his assistant. “I’m in charge of bullshit containment,” she explained to me. He had other technicians who would connect the clients to the electrodes, and operate the dials from adjacent rooms. These technicians were also subjected to careful testing prior to hiring, because they needed just the right level of sadism. It was important that they liked their jobs, but not too much.

It turned out K’s big problem had been finding someone to actually administer the questionnaire, because that person had to tolerate being in the room with the client during the evaluation. The technicians operated in soundproofed rooms behind mirrors, but the administrator was right in the thick of it. It wasn’t hard, K said, to find someone totally devoid of human feelings; the hard part was finding one who could pass as sympathetic. This was essential, because the tests had to be completely objective; the client must not sense that someone was enjoying his pain, nor horrified by it. Just a little sympathetic.

“But if the tester really was sympathetic, they would quit after the first day,” K said. “That’s why I was so very happy to find you, Greg.”

For some reason my most vivid memory of the DQI in those days is the panic button. It was a black hemisphere the size of half a tennis ball, attached to a paddle on a sturdy stand placed near the client’s dominant hand. Other safety measures such as “safe words” were not viable since the clients wore heavy rubber mouthpieces to bite down on, and to prevent them from choking on their own tongues (they were also lined with pain-causing electrodes, like the rest of the suit); even without the mouthpiece, it was also hard for clients to speak intelligibly at the levels of pain some of them managed. Testing went on until the client lost consciousness, experienced cardiac arrest, or hit the panic button.

Sometimes when I think about the DQI, all I see is that big button.

My first client was an Army ranger. He was fifteen minutes late and K spent the time telling me about all the work his lawyers had gone through before they could open the institute. “They spent an entire year writing the releases,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe the scenarios they devised.”

When the Ranger finally arrived, he stripped, showered, removed his bodily hair with his choice of razor or depilatory shampoo, got his body oiled, and put on the electrode suit. The technicians checked the monitors (pulse, temperature, respiration and blood pressure) and strapped him securely to the bed. Veronica verified his identity and that he’d properly signed all forms, then she explained the test a final time.

“This is Greg,” she said. “He will be measuring the four dimensions of your pain: intensity, mood, relief and side-effects, all on a scale from zero to ten. Try to answer his questions clearly, with grunts, or body language. These are the defibrillators. If your heart stops, you will be reanimated immediately. You have nothing to worry about. Trained technicians are standing by. This is the panic button. When the pain becomes unbearable, hit the panic button and the pain will stop immediately. Do you understand everything? Good. Then the test can start.”

His respiration, blood pressure and heart rate were elevated before the technicians even started, I noticed. Could just be Veronica, I supposed. Then the green light lit up and he jerked a bit as the suit was fired up.

The suit. Everyone called it the Pain Suit, except when talking to clients, when it was referred to officially as the Discomfort Suit. Prof. K. told me once it cost more to make than the rest of the Institute combined, including the building and all the equipment it contained. It was a tight-fitting black neoprene suit, like a wetsuit only thinner, lined with millions of miniscule electrodes. It also had the necessary inserts for all body orifices, all of which were also covered thickly with tiny electrodes Trained technicians could simulate any kind of pain in any part of the body, and regulate its qualities and intensity.

“The first part of the test requires that you speak, so please spit out the mouthpiece,” I said. The mouthpiece was also covered with electrodes. “We have to make sure you are perceiving the standard sensations. The pain level will be mild, this is just to make sure the suit is transmitting properly.” When the test started up, the technicians could burn him, stab him, crush, freeze or cook him. His hands or feet could be dissolved in acid, stung by jellyfish or wasps. They could give him an earache or hemorrhoids. The sky was the limit, basically. At this juncture, though, I had to run him through the list while the technicians calibrated everything.

“What sort of pain do you feel?” I asked. He told me. I checked it off the list: Throbbing. We took him through the rest: Shooting, Stabbing, Sharp, Cramping, Gnawing, Hot-Burning, Aching, Heavy, Tender and Splitting, as well as the advanced group, with their emotional components: Tiring-Exhausting, Sickening, Fearful and Punishing-Cruel.

The suit was working perfectly.

Then I ran him through the levels of pain from No Pain, which scored him a zero, to Mild, Discomforting, Distressing, Horrible and, finally, for five points: Excruciating.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll help you replace the rubber mouthpiece now.” After it was in, we went on. “Of course, you won’t be doing a lot of unambiguous verbalizing later in the evaluation, so you can also use the pain spectrum. Imagine the spectrum goes from zero, on your left – No Pain – to five on your right, Worst Possible Pain. When I ask you to quantify, just look towards the corresponding spot on your imaginary spectrum, and blink, and I’ll mark it down. Got it?”

He didn’t last long, making it to a DQI score of just under fifty out of one hundred before hitting the panic button. Fifty is average. At the debriefing, of course, they told him he’d done well. Whatever. Marketing, you know.

The summer went well. I got an “A” in the class and had an interesting summer job. Veronica and I would occasionally go out for a beer after work, I think she was trying to be friendly, but basically, she scared me and I gave her the creeps so, you know. Chemistry problems.

That was fine with me. I was not looking for any entanglements back in those days. Now and then, you know, a drunken fuck at some party, or wake up in a strange bed with a woman twice my age and dim memories of a Mexican restaurant, that was all I needed. I was concentrating on my studies, you know? I was a young man with, if not big plans, at least a strong desire not to return home.

Posted by Mig at October 21, 2003 11:20 AM