“An appointment? What do you mean?” She looked alarmed. “Get out of it.”
“Civilians get out of things,” I said. “We don’t.”
“James,” she said, “find a way.”
“He’s a Zero,” I said.
“He’s a scientist,” she said. “It’s so much worse.”
“This isn’t a joke,” I said. “I saw him at the La Pine attack. He was there. He killed people.”
Bethany shook her head. “Think about what you’re saying,” she said. “You might think you saw him—”
“Don’t.” I cut her off. “Don’t disbelieve me.”
“Look,” she said. “I read his email. I read his diary. I’m practically his biographer. I would know.”
“You have access to everything?” I asked.
“It’s a point of pride,” she said.
“Then find out what’s going on,” I said. We were running out of time, and there was something else I needed to know, something I was almost afraid to ask. “Bethany,” I said, “what’s my name?”
“I didn’t see your last name. I don’t think they even keep that information.”
“I want the name my parents gave me,” I said. “Please.”
She fiddled with the metal zipper on her jacket, meshing the teeth together and then pulling them apart. “It’s James,” she said finally. “The school didn’t change it.”
“No,” I said. “They did. They named me for some deathbed conversion.”
“Maybe,” she said. “But your name was James at intake. It’s definitely rare, but it happens.”
I paused, absorbing the information. “It’s my real name?” I asked.
I’d been hoping for some revelation, some secret other person—something to hold on to; something bestowed by my family. Instead, I felt cheated, as if the school had taken even this, even my name. I thought of the thousands of Goodhouse boys who had passed through the system over the past fifty years—all of them possessed of a second identity, a true and original self that was beyond the boundaries of what the school could control. And I didn’t even have that.
“What else did you read?” I asked.
“You were born in Idaho,” she said, “near Porthill, at the northern tip of the state.” I waited, hoping for recognition, for some pang of memory, but there was none.
“My race?”
“Your mother was white and your father was mixed.”
“Mixed what?” I said. This was an adjective that would apply to almost anyone at Goodhouse. We were, most of us, an assortment of races and ethnicities. Even so, the word had a certain power. “What else did the file say?”
“That’s everything,” she said. She checked her watch. “We’re out of time. When do you want to meet again?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I kept thinking the words mixed, all mixed, very mixed. I looked at my arm. I was a toasty brown color wherever the sun touched me, but under my shirt I was pale.
“James,” she whispered, “did I do the right thing?”
* * *
I tried to return the way I came, but there was a proctor standing in the shadow of Schoolhouse 2. He was talking into his handheld and saying, “Sure, sure.” I waited a minute or so for him to finish, and then I couldn’t wait any longer. I took the fastest route back, dashing along the fence that bordered the Exclusion Zone. The floodlights trained on Mule Creek left plenty of light to spill over onto me. I felt overexposed, and my drugged complacency of only a few minutes earlier was gone.
I rounded the corner to the dormitories and saw a T-4 parked a few buildings away, almost directly in front of my own. One of the proctors was asleep in the passenger seat, and the driver was reading a magazine. I stepped back into the shadows, pressing against the nearest wall. I was being careless. It was only luck that had the proctors looking the other way. I didn’t know how much time was left on my clock—maybe four minutes, maybe none.
To make things worse, an overnight work detail was returning home. I heard their shuffling march. They were about to pass within a few feet of where I was hiding. I squatted low in the shadows, trying to will myself invisible. I am a wall, I thought. I am nothing.
The work detail walked single file. Most of the boys were looking at their feet, already nodding into a half-sleep, hands at their sides, still curled slightly in the memory of whatever tool they’d just returned. I knew they were peeling off one by one to their various dormitories. No one looked my way, and I willed them to hurry, feeling increasingly desperate as the line stretched on.
I joined the end of the line, walking behind the last boy. I passed the proctors in the T-4. They were both awake now, supervising the return. And then I was alongside Dormitory 35. I had to squint at the yellow number painted on the door to make sure I had the right one. I walked up the stairs, trying not to sprint.
“Keep the line,” a proctor called, and I froze momentarily, thinking he was referring to me. But he was looking at a different boy. I crossed the threshold and quickly removed my shoes. I crept to my room. The clock on the wall showed 4:13:03. I had less than two minutes left. I made sure to change clothes, to give every appearance of routine. Owen was still asleep, making a light wheezing noise with every breath. When I lay on my bed, I was so tired I felt as though I were falling through it, into blackness. Something was happening to me. As I broke the rules I felt less certain that I believed in them. And there was a recklessness in that, a momentum that frightened me. If the school had taken my name, had made it their own, then I could take it back. There was no rule to stop me—no reason not to.
I was James from Idaho. This knowledge reverberated through me. I was James from Porthill. I was James.
TWELVE
I could smell Bethany on my skin at breakfast. It was a faint lemony odor and I kept turning my head to pick up the scent. The cafeteria was serving oatmeal with some kind of protein-substitute sausage. I watched the boys around me shoveling food into their mouths, chewing and swallowing. I thought of the way Bethany had felt underneath me, the way the heat of our bodies had left vanishing shapes on the stainless steel. My brain was disordered from lack of sleep, and Owen was in a particularly bad mood. He’d received a message on his personal page that morning. It had been sent on some sort of letterhead. When I asked him what it was, he’d immediately closed the screen.
When a fight broke out at a nearby table, Owen didn’t bother to look up from his tray. Even when one student shoved another to the floor and jammed his fingers into his opponent’s eye sockets, Owen was oblivious. Proctors arrived with their Lewistons out, but it was Creighton and Davis who pulled the boys apart. One boy clutched his face, screaming, and the other was struggling, still fighting, so Davis slammed his head into the table to quiet him. Afterward, there was a red puddle on the concrete floor and—in the middle—a white, gleaming fragment of bone, probably part of a tooth. A student arrived to mop up the blood. Two minutes later, all trace of the disturbance had disappeared.
As my appointment with Dr. Cleveland drew closer, I found myself watching the wallscreen clock. In less than a half hour, I would walk to the infirmary. I would have an AJT to compel me. There was no question that I would go. The rest of breakfast passed as if it were some outsize hallucination. Proctors overhead circulated like clouds in front of the sun, filtering and altering the light. The insect thrum of the cafeteria sounds permeated everything. I felt as if I were watching myself from a great distance, watching myself perform all the usual tasks—carrying my plate to the sand tray, waiting for clearance at the exit. And then I walked down the familiar path to the infirmary. I began to take smaller and smaller steps, slowing my pace, but never stopping. James, I thought. I am James. And the name calmed me. It could not be unlearned. It could not be confiscated.
When I arrived at the infirmary’s waiting room, proctors choked the entrance. “James,” the computer said, “please report to the basement level. Room 101.” I tried to cross to the main hallway, but a pr
octor stopped me. “You’ll have to go around,” he said. “This area is closed.” Beyond him I glimpsed a man in a military uniform. He looked like one of the men from the magazines I’d read on Community Day. I didn’t know what sort of officer he was, but I recognized rank when I saw it—the colorful bars on his jacket, a gold band on his hat. As I watched, another officer in a similar uniform stepped out of a side room. The two men fell into a conversation, each nodding at what the other was saying.
“North hallway to the east staircase,” the proctor told me. “Do you understand?”
The system that usually lighted a path in the floor was off-line, so he gave me directions.
“Yes, sir,” I said. But I was soon lost. The east staircase was locked, and I found myself moving more deeply into the building, where there were fewer students and even fewer staff. I tried to double back, to return to the lobby, but everything was taking too long, and when I found an open staircase, I just descended. My feet scraped lightly on the treads, the sound amplified by silence. James, I thought. I am James. And then, at the bottom of the stairwell, something caught my attention.
There were two doors. One was obviously an entrance into the basement, but the other was tucked in the far corner under the stairs. The door itself was recessed and narrow, and its access light was blinking yellow. I stopped to examine it. For all students an entrance was either red or green. There was no yellow light. My first thought was that this was a test. I should find the intake nurse and report the malfunction. I walked closer. It looked like some sliding panel was meant to cover the door, but the panel was partially retracted. On impulse I reached for the handle. It opened.
I stepped over a threshold and stood in a small antechamber. It was noticeably hotter in there, and the ceiling was very low. I could touch it with my hand. A heavy, clear plastic curtain blocked my view, but it had been cut into overlapping strips, and these parted and then resealed themselves as I passed. On the other side of the curtain was a long corridor. Numbered doors were set into the wall every ten feet. Each door had an observation window. I stopped at the first one and peered through the glass.
A young boy squatted on the floor, wearing only a pair of underwear. His right wrist was secured by a wall restraint, and he was hunched over as if dozing in a squat. He looked reptilian, his bony spine pressing against his skin. His eyes were closed, but his lips were pulled back, showing clenched teeth. I touched the glass in the window and it went momentarily opaque as the boy’s chart was displayed—a series of notes about dosage and duration. His heart rate ticked in the upper right corner, the way it did on our personal pages. As soon as I removed my hand from the glass, it cleared, and I saw the boy was awake and looking at me. His nostrils were flexing as if he were scenting the air. Then his eyes fluttered closed and he curled tight around himself.
Of course, we all knew the Intensives could be dangerous. In the shower I’d seen boys with deep scars on their arms and backs. The idea that I needed to be modified was central to every conception I had of myself. I expected to be altered, medicated—but this was so much more. The banality of my life here, the relentless routine, I realized that it had acted like a camouflage. The closer you stand to a picture, the harder it is to see it with any clarity, and when you are deep inside the pattern, you are truly blind.
A booming noise startled me. Farther down the hall one of the doors vibrated as if it had been hit. I walked closer and peered into the observation window. At first I saw just an empty wall restraint and a smear of blood beneath it. But then I saw someone I recognized. It was Harold, the only other transfer from La Pine. He was backing up to rush the door. He charged forward and hit the slab with stunning force. It boomed like a drum. He was shouting something, too, but I couldn’t understand him. His hair was stiff with dried blood, and his too-close-together eyes looked especially feral. He seemed animated by some terrible energy, some hungry rage. On impulse, I reached for the door handle. Inside, the room was very hot, and it stank like a latrine. Harold immediately ran toward me, and I yanked the door closed, so that he collided with it, making a sickening thump.
I found the intercom button and depressed it. “Harold,” I said, “it’s me, James. Are you okay?” It was a stupid question, and when I looked through the glass, I saw that he had collapsed onto his side. I thought maybe he was unconscious. I called his name a few times, and then I said, “I’m going to open the door now. Just stay where you are.” But as soon as I stepped into the room, he was awake and on his feet. He made a high-pitched howling noise like a balloon deflating and then charged past me. The overhead alarm began to clang and shriek as he ran the length of the dim hallway. He kicked his way through the plastic curtain and disappeared.
I didn’t know what to do. “Shit,” I said. “Shit.”
I ran after him. I sped through the door and out into the stairwell, almost colliding with a proctor. We startled each other, and the man scrambled to get away from me, his body in a crouch, as if he were expecting a confrontation.
“Get on the ground,” he said. “On the ground, now.” But I didn’t comply. Somewhere overhead Harold was keening.
“What’s wrong with him?” I asked.
The proctor unholstered his Lewiston. “I’ve got a Code 34.” He spoke into the mic at his collar. “Repeat, Code 34.”
The alarm cut and a faint voice chattered from the proctor’s earphone.
“You think I’m from the Intensive,” I said. I took a single step toward him and he jumped back, his Lewiston slashing in front of him, warding me off. “Why are you so afraid?”
“Get on the ground,” the man shouted.
“Or what?” I said. His fear empowered me. We were alone—for a few moments, anyway—a man with a name tag and a student with a name. “When the Zeros come they will burn you, too,” I said. “They like to kill proctors. Do you know why?”
He backed toward the staircase. The staccato of descending footsteps grew louder. Many footsteps.
“We might belong to the Devil, but you,” I said, “are our servants.”
The basement door banged open and Dr. Cleveland stood on the threshold. He wore casual civilian clothes, gray pants and a white shirt. He was holding a handful of pistachio nuts, cracking a shell between his fingers. “James,” he said, “you seem to have gotten lost.”
“Sir.” The proctor moved to stand between the doctor and myself, his Lewiston crackling. Between its two contact points, the arc of electricity was a bright, wavering line. “This is a Code 34,” the proctor said. “Return to your office.”
Dr. Cleveland popped a pistachio into his mouth. “I’ll take it from here,” he said. “You’re dismissed.”
“Sir,” the man stammered. “Sir, I have to ask you to reconsider.”
“You can ask,” the doctor said. He motioned for me to follow. Four other proctors came thundering down the stairs, their Lewistons drawn. “Gentlemen.” The doctor nodded. They all stopped at the sight of him.
“We’ve got a code,” one man said. He was out of breath. He pointed to me. “This one?”
“This one’s not for you,” Dr. Cleveland said.
As I turned to follow the doctor, I noticed that the door to the Intensive was gone. Whatever panel concealed it had slid back into place, and now the wall looked like any other—gray and smooth, like polished concrete, like something that it clearly was not.
* * *
Dr. Cleveland escorted me into his office, and I recognized the room, the bulbous cactus in a terra-cotta pot, the single shelf that held leather-bound books. Bethany had sat at this desk when we’d spoken on the factory wallscreen, and now her father sat in the same creaking wooden chair.
“What is a Code 34?” I asked. My voice sounded thin and choked.
Dr. Cleveland made a little pile of empty pistachio shells on the desktop. “Have a seat,” he said. He motioned to an upholstered chair across from him. There was a large photograph of Bethany on his desk. She looked younger, perhaps t
welve, and she stood in some kind of park with oversize lollipops jutting from a snowbank. She was buck-toothed and wearing a red-and-white-striped headband and matching party dress. I quickly checked the corners of the room for cameras, but I didn’t see any.
“Pistachio?” Dr. Cleveland asked. I shook my head no. “They were a gift, but they’re stale, so maybe a regift.” He accidentally knocked a few of the shells onto the floor. “Messy, too,” he said, and then bent to pick them up.
In the few seconds he ducked out of sight, I reached forward and grabbed a pen off his desk. I disguised the motion by leaning forward as if shifting my weight. I rolled the pen between my thigh and the chair. It was a thick plastic. High quality.
“What’s wrong with those boys?” I asked.
“You’ve created an awkward situation for me, James,” he said, straightening up and shelling another pistachio. “Let’s start there.”
“You’re a Zero,” I said.
“That didn’t use to be a dirty word,” he said. “What is it they say? Youth is curiosity minus understanding. It’s a cruel trick. To be young.”
“You’re a killer,” I said. “That’s all I need to know.”
The doctor made a chuffing noise, a dismissive sort of sound. He stood and walked toward a small gray metal cabinet. The handle must have been keyed, because I heard the lock disengage as he touched it. I wedged my hand under my thigh. He returned with an ornate green glass bottle. He unscrewed the top, then picked a glass off his desk and blew into it to dislodge any dust. “I’d pour you one,” he said, “but without a taste of cheap cognac first, you won’t be able to appreciate the flavor.” He sat back, holding the glass in his hands. “So,” he said, “what shall I do with you?”
For a tense moment we just looked at each other.
“Well,” he said, “before you stab me with that pen—which is more likely to annoy than incapacitate me—you should hear what I have to say. Surely you can delay the pleasure a little longer?”
Goodhouse Page 15
