Giddy? Is that what he was?

Sullivan had never been good with words. He’d spent more time in high school remedial English classes than he had anywhere else, the weight room notwithstanding. He read rarely, but when he did it was at no better than a seventh or eighth-grade level. He didn’t care much for words or their meanings.

That’s why he didn’t quite know how to describe how he felt.

Maybe it was giddy. Maybe it was exuberant -- though that was most certainly not a word in his vocabulary. Maybe it was a mix: a little pumped, a hint of expectant, and a dash of spellbound.

Regardless of what you called it, Sullivan couldn’t hide what he was feeling. His cheeks were bright and ruddy. His eyes glistened like so many halogen lightbulbs. And his heart? Couldn’t be topped by a drumline, it was pounding so fast.

This was it. He was finally being rewarded. For his hard work, his loyalty, his patience, his fealty, his obedience, his composure, his dedication, his resourcefulness, and, perhaps most of all, his survival. Pacheco certainly couldn’t be rewarded, could she? No, not only does it take an exemplary track record and stellar show of character, one also has to have a functioning heart and brain to get invited to meet with the Commanding Officer.

Too bad for Pacheco.

Unless, that is, this meeting was as much to commend Sullivan as it was to memorialize the death of his former partner. That was a distinct possibility, but, while Sullivan could appreciate the sentimental value of such an exercise, and would certainly himself want to be honored were he to be eliminated in the line of duty, if that really were the only reason they had asked him here, then Sullivan thought they were wasting their time.

Pacheco was dead! She wouldn’t even be able to appreciate the nice things the Commanding Officer might say about her. Per protocol, her ashes had already been scattered somewhere or another; it made no difference to her now what niceties might be expanded on her behalf. Sullivan, on the other hand, was very much alive and fully capable of receiving, and cherishing, any praise doled out.

Put another way, it would have really grinded Sullivan’s gears to have all the pomp and circumstance of an official invite to meet the Commanding Officer, just to celebrate the dead. If that’s what it took to get some adulation, Sullivan thought, maybe he ought to have died.

No, there was no way they had called him all the way here, without precedent, just for dead Pacheco’s sake.

Unless….

Of course, there was no one for Sullivan to ask about any of this beforehand. The invitation had come in the usual way. A simple message. Simple, with no words wasted. An address and a time, plus the briefest of reasons for his visit.

CONSULT WITH COMMANDING OFFICER

That’s all they’d left him with: nine syllables spread across four words, like somebody else’s poker hand menacing you from across the table.

ASP headquarters. It was his first time there. ASP had long domiciled in the capital of one of those Midwestern states outlined with bold and rigid right corners on maps ad infinitum. A faceless place somewhere forgettable. It was no mistake that ASP had chosen a place with all the character of unflavored gelatin. Let those other agencies show off with Doric columns and Pennsylvania Avenue addresses. ASP wasn’t out there to be noticed. The sheer remarkability of their building and of its location in that interchangeably rectilinear state was precisely the point. Let it be one of the states, corn-fed and liable to get excised by a greedy tornado. Let it be in one of those arcane cities named for a man who died fighting the natives two and a half centuries ago.

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ASP didn’t need scary gates or rabid security. Mediocrity was their shield. They sat in the same federal squat building as the local Office for Soil Science and an annex of the Bureau of Veterans Graves and Memorials. The key to ASP’s secrecy was to lay in plain sight. No one would notice; but, on the off chance they did, they would surely forget just as quickly.

They’d put him up for the night at the second-tier hotel of one of the big national chains. That meant a free breakfast with more than just a single-serving box of stale raisin bran. This he took as a good sign. ASP wasn’t about to upgrade him to microwave-in-the-room level accommodations just to give him the bad news. Might as well keep him in fourth-tier digs if that were the case, with a rattan quilt for a comforter and only the local channels on TV.

In the parking lot outside the non-descript, mid-century brutalist redoubt that ASP called home, most of the license plates had images of chugging trains or soybean fields. It was a world built on the back of good, honest labor and generous federal subsidy.

He took the elevator alone to the third floor, where the Commanding Officer’s suite sat, just as he had been instructed to. Solitude and quiet hung around the building like the specter of bad news. The carpets in the building were rough and were the color of blueberry yogurt. The walls were a thick, viscous white, as if once or twice a year a new layer of paint was simply smeared on in lieu of any kind of cleaning regimen.

Sullivan could have easily walked past the Commanding Officer’s suite without having noticed it. Nothing adorned the door -- no gilded numbers, no slick nameplate, not even a handy inter-office mail older. Coming out of the elevator, he was told, the suite was the final door on the left. Even under the muted buzz of the flickering fluorescent light above, it was plain to see that no one wound up in that place accidentally or uninvited. To have made it to that door, on that floor, in that building, in that milquetoast outpost of America, one had to have known exactly what they were in for.

Before Sullivan could knock or otherwise announce his presence, the door swung silently open, beckoning him and warning him in one fell swoop.

What had he expected to see inside?

Whatever it had been, whatever fantastic or quotidian; prosaic or absurd ideas he might have had about the place instantly left his mind the moment he stepped over the threshold and actually saw the office for himself.

A simple telephone, dated but unextraordinary, the hard-shelled black-plastic kind found in humdrum workplaces worldwide, sat squarely in the middle of a wide work table, black-topped, perhaps meant for a high school science class. The room, barely larger than a broom closet, was otherwise empty. There were no chairs. There was no clock on the wall. In addition to no windows, there were no doors to other, more sensibly outfitted rooms.

And there were absolutely no other people inside.

Sullivan, with no small amount of trepidation, checked under the table. He considered poking at the tiles of the drop ceiling. He wondered if there might be a false wall, or perhaps a trap door in the floor. But, no, that wouldn’t make any sense, not on the third floor.

He almost doubled back to make sure he had found the right suite, that there wasn’t, somehow, yet another last suite on the left. However, it was this door that had opened to him, and he was sure there were no others that might beckon him in. That was to say nothing of the mystery of how the door had opened to him to begin with. That he would mull over another time.

There was only the desk, the phone, and, now, Sullivan.

He closed the door behind him. Then, he waited. There was nothing else to do.

A lesser man might have cracked, left in that room for hours with no indication as to when that infernal limbo would end or how. Sullivan himself would have been forgiven, albeit not by ASP, for fleeing during that long and uneventful interlude. The room, the phone, the waiting: It wasn’t meant as a test, per se, but it was trying all the same. In that unyielding void, others might have looked heavenwards or, worse yet, inwards for some kind of sign of what to do next.

Not Sullivan.

He did not beg the heavens or undertake any self-reflection. He stood and he waited. The list of things he could have thought about was long, including, though not limited to:

* His partner’s recent shocking death, for which he bore some measure of responsibility

* The subsequent killing of Dat Vinh, for which he bore even more responsibility

* The imprisonment, on mostly trumped-up charges, of three civilians

* His entire career, which consisted mostly of intimidating, injuring, or killing those who sought to expose the fact that the governments of the Earth were in league with extraterrestrials

That is to say, with all that time and no good way to spend it, it would have only been natural for a person in Sullivan’s overstuffed, ill-fitting shoes to contemplate just what had happened to their life that it had wound up so twisted, so malignant and so preposterous.

Not Sullivan.

He did nothing more than stand and wait, his mind no less immobile than a pebble encased in concrete.

It was an awful coping mechanism that spoke to how stunted he was. It was a sign of an inability to achieve normal human emotions.

But it sure did help pass the time.