“I just want to work,” I said. I was hoping that this was the right answer, the proper amount of submission.
“Work is a privilege,” he said. “You forget that. Year after year we have the same boys forgetting the same things. Can you imagine how frustrating that is?”
I nodded, and Tim put the bottle on the windowsill, setting it down a little more heavily than was necessary. The sound made me jump. “No, I don’t think so,” he said. “I really don’t think you can imagine.”
* * *
I reported to the suiting-up room and was disappointed to find it crowded with a different shift—dozens of boys peeling off their coveralls and hairnets. I passed the wallscreen where I’d talked with Bethany and wondered if she could see me now, some electronic pulse on a screen.
I grabbed a set of coveralls from the CLEAN bin. I had just pulled them on when a lanky kid with brown hair swatted me on the back, right across my wound. I spun to confront him, but he gave me a big grin and said, “That’s cojones, man.” It took me a moment to realize he was referring to the fight.
“Or stupid,” his friend mumbled.
“That’s cojones,” the kid repeated. “But I wouldn’t want to be you.”
I trudged over to Quality Control. Once I was on the factory floor, the intensity of sound dulled thought. I tapped the previous boy on the shoulder, replacing him, sitting on the tall metal stool and watching the chocolate carpet creep past. White ribbons of frosting spooled out so that the whole thing looked vaguely like a divided roadway, white lines on dark asphalt.
I positioned myself so that I could see more of the room, specifically the ladder in the corner. At one point, I felt a prickling at the back of my neck and the hair on my arms stood up as if there were lightning in the air. I whipped around, searching for movement. Nobody was there. I told myself I was overreacting, but still, I removed my earplugs. Several hours into my shift, after a batch had run and the conveyor belt was empty, I got up to pace. It was only luck that I happened to glance at the exit door. A long iron pipe was wedged through the loop of the handle and jammed behind a similar pipe that ran close to the wall.
I pulled on the pipe, but it didn’t move. I swiveled to face the room. It was empty. I stared into the shadows around the grain silos. A loud horn signaled that the line was about to resume. And that’s when I saw Montero. He was standing beside the tray where I’d put the rejected cupcakes, eating one, chewing thoughtfully as he watched me.
“You missed your deadline,” he said.
“What do you mean?” I asked. I noticed that the main camera—the one that monitored and recorded the Quality Control environment—had been disabled. Montero had stuck something to the lens. It looked like a metal cone. I pointed toward it. “That’s a mistake,” I said. “They’ll send a proctor.”
“Let them,” he said. “This won’t take long.”
“They’ll lock down the factory,” I said.
“Not before we send you a message,” he said. He reached over and I thought he was going to pick up another cupcake, but he lifted a knife instead—a compact, improvised-looking blade that fit easily in his hand. “Or should we give you one more day?”
“Who’s we?” I said.
Montero nodded over my shoulder. A man stood just a few feet behind me. He was gigantic—easily six and a half feet tall—the right size and shape to force that pipe into place. I began to edge away. He didn’t look like anyone I’d ever seen. Black tattoos covered his cheeks and forehead—some kind of swirling pattern that sprawled onto his neck, disappearing into the collar of his too-small Mule Creek jumpsuit.
“I have your reader,” I said, “but not on me. It’s in my room, in the mattress. I didn’t know I’d be working here today.”
“He’s lying,” the giant said.
“Look,” I said, glancing between the two of them. “It’s not that easy to move stuff around campus.” I was just stalling, saying anything. This was my own fault, and I was furious with myself. I should have reported Montero, but I’d been too eager to possess something, to have contraband in my pocket. I’d been greedy, and now it would cost me.
“I think we need to do some clarification,” the giant said. He started toward me. “We need to talk to James in a way that he can understand.”
“Great,” I said. I nearly tripped over the stool where I’d sat these past few hours. It was old—the paint was scratched and one of the legs had a serious dent—but it was made of a thick, sturdy metal. I reached down and picked it up, holding it in front of me like a shield.
“Stay back,” I said. “I’m warning you.”
But they were both converging now. I turned and threw the stool into the works of the cooling tube.
Montero lunged, but he wasn’t fast enough to grab it. The legs were sucked in, and then suddenly the stool wrenched upward as if it had caught in an internal gear. There was a massive booming sound and I heard the ping of metal striking the wall behind me. The giant screamed, staggered to one side, his hand on his shoulder, a piece of metal lodged in the meat of his arm. The line stopped. Smoke puffed from the machinery. Cupcakes continued to churn out of the hot-icer, cascading onto the floor, until the belt shuddered and snapped and flung them everywhere. There was an eerie groaning noise somewhere deep along the line. We all were momentarily stunned by the extent of the damage.
“You stupid fuck,” Montero said.
“You better run,” I said. Someone was already banging on the jammed exit door, trying to open it. “Cupcake?” I offered.
The camera swiveled overhead, or it tried to. It had been damaged by a projectile when the cooling tube ruptured. Whoever was at the door shouted, “Open this right now.”
“Get me out of here,” I shouted back. “It’s jammed.”
The giant grabbed the front of my shirt. He threw me onto the ground. The wound on my back reopened. “Don’t touch me,” I said. I tried to scramble away from him, but I slipped on the greasy floor. His touch had infected me with a kind of toxic animosity. It lit me up inside, made me stupid with fury.
I was braced for a fight, but it didn’t come. The pounding on the door was replaced by a sawing sound, and—at this—the two prisoners scrambled up the side of the grain silo. I ran to the door. The pipe had loosened, but by the time I yanked it out, I was alone in the room. The doors surged open. A half-dozen proctors streamed in. “They’re up there,” I said. “I know their names. Well, I know one of them. They’re ten seconds ahead of you.”
But the proctors were more interested in getting me on my knees. Tim stormed into the room. “No, no, no,” he said, looking at the mess on the floor. “Oh, hell no. I want this one boxed. I want him cooked. I want a big fat bow on him.”
“Tattoos on his face,” I said. “Real recognizable.”
“Someone’s been this way,” a proctor called from the grain silo ladder. “Hatch is open.”
“I told you,” I said. “They’re just ahead of you.”
Tim pointed to me. “Why is he still here?”
“They’re Mule Creek inmates,” I said. “You have to find them.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Tim said with exaggerated solicitude. “Did I cut you off? Were you giving an order?”
Three proctors dragged me out of the factory and put me in the boxer, securing and locking the lid into place. They congregated a few feet away, speaking in quiet, serious voices that I couldn’t quite hear. I ran my hand over the interior of the box and felt where the wood had been gouged. These marks were left by the people who’d sat there before me, and I thought of them as chaotic hieroglyphs—some relic of a long-vanished tribe.
One of the proctors drove me to Box Hill and parked. There was a little guardhouse with a canvas awning and a refrigerator. It was just like I’d heard. There was a single chair and the proctor sat in it, eating out of the fridge, watching a wallscreen just inside the door. An old, bulbous air conditioner had been mounted on one wall. It whirred and spit. Water dripped
from the condenser coils and left dark, rusty streaks on the surface below.
When the man leaned forward and adjusted the volume on the wallscreen, I heard voices—men and women talking together—then a rumble, like an audience laughing. My knees were jammed into my armpits, and when I tried to shift my weight, I couldn’t. There wasn’t any room. Very soon the afternoon heat was unbearable. The reeking, ovenlike box exhaled baking air through the hole around my neck. There was a thin lip of aluminum around the edge of the opening, and now I understood why. As I grew dizzy and my head got heavier, I struggled to keep away from the burning metal. I began pushing at the walls of the box, digging at the wood, trying to straighten my legs, to get just another inch. My shoulders strained against the lid, which seemed to press back. It felt bad to struggle and then worse to be still. Sweat ran down my face. It stung my eyes and I couldn’t wipe it away. I wondered why tears didn’t burn like this. I wondered what made them so different.
* * *
After sundown, the proctor drove me to Protective Confinement. It was far from the main campus. I’d never actually seen the building, just the narrow road that was the turnoff. There was a guard station there, and a man nodded as he waved us through. My lips were cracked and chapped. The uneven motion of the boxer made my head snap back and forth. Whenever my throat struck the edge of the box, I coughed and gagged.
We traversed what must have been, at one point, a civilian neighborhood. The houses had been removed and the land repurposed, but there were still sidewalks and concrete stairs—remnants of a different time. In one of the fields there was a partial chimney and firebox still intact, the brick blackened as if the house around it had burned.
And then I saw the Confinement Block. It had been built over several of these cleared lots, and even though it was two stories tall, it looked squat—somehow compressed—as if the building had been pushed into itself. An enormous pile of dirt sat nearby. I’d heard that boys had to move it from one side of the yard to the next and, depending on the punishment—they were given shovels or spoons.
The T-4 lurched to a stop, and the proctor said, “Okay, kid. Try not to fall out.” He stood and unlatched the side of the box. I slid to the ground. My tongue was swollen, and I had a hard time getting my legs to do anything but twitch. I couldn’t tell if I’d pissed myself or just absorbed the smell of the box, but either way, it was enough to make the man choke.
“Did they catch them?” I said.
“Catch who?” the proctor asked. “Can you get to your feet?”
“The Mule Creek inmates,” I said. “Did you stop them?”
“Not me,” he said. He looked worried, as if I wasn’t making sense. A Confinement proctor stepped out of the doorway and walked toward us. This proctor had a neck that seemed on the verge of being swallowed by two deltoid muscles. It appeared compressed, like the building itself. He didn’t wear a formal uniform, just a pair of khaki shorts and a navy-colored T-shirt—but he moved with authority. His black, thick-soled boots were recently polished. From where I was crouched, I could smell the inky tang of the leather.
The proctor typed something on his handheld. “Factory kid,” he mumbled. “Jammed a stool into the gears.”
The Confinement proctor frowned as if I were mud on his boot. “Hope it was worth it,” he said, and yanked me to my feet. I staggered after him, weaving—trying to keep pace. As we neared the thick metal doors, I took a last deep breath of summer air, a last look at the shadowy sky.
The doors opened automatically at our approach, and I followed the proctor into a hallway with a guard station at one end. Lowell, the boy with the dent in his forehead, was sweeping the floor. I watched as he shuffled toward us, dragging the broom behind him. One of his eyelids drooped as if it were melting off. He opened his mouth as I passed and made a sudden groaning sound—a sound that made me flinch. “Easy,” the proctor said. “Watch it.”
The air inside the Confinement Block was humid but chilly, like a cave. The walls were poured concrete, and the grain of the wooden molds used in their construction had etched the surface so that the whole building appeared to be built from petrified wood—some dead gray forest. The guard station had a single proctor watching a number of monitor screens that lit the wall behind him, displaying a maze of passageways. Somewhere overhead I heard a noise—a booming, insistent thrum.
“This way,” the proctor in front of me said.
He marched me down a hallway punctuated with narrow doors, many of which were open, revealing rows of identical cells. The rooms were small, like the ones I’d glimpsed in the basement of the infirmary, only here the concrete walls visibly retained the damp. Dim greenish light flickered overhead. A large metal drain cover was embedded in the floor. A tuft of fur undulated under the perforated brass. It was a rat, disappearing down the pipe.
I realized that I was about to be trapped behind one of these doors, forgotten, left to rot from the inside out. I’d heard rumors that men visited your cell here at night—not every night, but some. It was too dark to see their faces, to know if they were proctors or students. They were just devils reaching for you, reaching and finding. I imagined my parents far away somewhere, in Idaho. I liked to believe that if they knew I was in trouble, they’d come for me—if they were out of jail, if they were still alive.
The proctor stopped at the end of the corridor and told me to strip down. “You’re home,” he said, and nodded toward an open door. The room inside was three feet wide and six feet long. A coffin. It had a shit-smeared hole in the center of the floor and no windows. “Take everything off,” he said. But I just stood there staring, and then I began to back away.
“No,” I said.
The proctor seemed more weary than angry. “Come on, kid,” he said. “This is it. Strip down.” Footsteps sounded in the hall. More proctors.
“Wait,” I said. “What is this supposed to teach me?”
This made the proctor laugh. But I was sincere. All the calming exercises, all the reaching for compassion—it seemed distant now—but it had been a pillar of my education.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “There isn’t going to be a test afterward.”
“How long are you going to leave me in there?” The proctor nodded to a man behind me. “I need some water first,” I said. Someone grabbed my collar and yanked at my shirt. The wound on my back had bled and scabbed, drying to the fabric like a second skin. The pain of its removal was so intense, so unexpected, that I lunged at the proctors, just kicking and swinging, ineffectual against so many.
They stuffed me in the little room and the door rammed closed. The darkness was total. I’d lost a shoe in the fight, but I still had my pants. I stood on one foot. I leaned against the wall, but the surface was powdery and wet. I took off the shoe and stood on it with both feet. Maybe an hour passed. I heard rats in the sewage hole. I breathed through my mouth, wondering when I would get used to the smell. The temperature dropped. Night was here. I felt time opening before me, a yawning rictus of misery.
For the first few hours it seemed impossible that anyone could survive in this room. But then I began to understand how it might happen. A person would change, adapt. The room would alter them. It was already happening. I already knew which corner was the driest. I stood beside the door where the air was better and a small beam of greenish light made it possible for me to see my hand. The process was so simple, so natural—and more than anything I’d felt at Ione, it terrified me. It filled me with an angry resolve, a determination not to change—no matter what circumstance, no matter what room.
FIFTEEN
I’m not sure how much time passed, but I was conscious of the temperature falling and then rising again. When someone slid a bowl of watery broth through a tiny panel in the door, I knew I’d survived my first night. I’d slept in fits, ten minutes at a time, and I felt the pain of this in my muscles. After I’d licked the bowl dry, I placed it neatly beside the door. No one came to collect it.
I must
have dozed, because I awoke to the sound of footsteps. Someone stopped outside my cell and waited there. I grabbed my shoe and used the toe to scoop out a clump of shit from the hole in the floor. I wasn’t going quietly.
But then I recognized Dr. Cleveland’s voice.
“What the hell is going on?” he said. “Open this door immediately.”
“Sir,” a proctor said, “our directive says to keep him here.”
I pounded on the wall. “I’m inside,” I shouted. “Get me out.”
“This is my patient,” the doctor said. “He is in my care. I gave explicit instructions for this boy to be remanded to the infirmary in case of any trouble. Whose idea was this?”
“What instructions?” the proctor said. He sounded a little frantic. “Sir, nothing was posted.”
The lock retracted and the door opened. I dropped the shoe and blinked at the light, momentarily blinded. My pupils contracted and my eyes watered. Dr. Cleveland wore a windbreaker and civilian pants, but he held one of his white lab coats in his hand. He pointed to me. “Explain this,” he said.
One of the proctors held aloft the glowing square of his handheld, showing the proctor beside him the screen. “I swear there was nothing posted when he arrived,” the man said.
“What you saw or failed to see is not my problem,” Dr. Cleveland said. “And if my patient suffers any residual trauma, I will hold you personally responsible.”
The doctor tossed me the white lab coat. It flew through the air like a ghost, the sleeves lifting from the body of the jacket—empty, handless, grasping arms. I caught it and slipped it on, hugging the sides shut. I followed him out, walking barefoot through the gritty hallways. We passed the guard station, where two Confinement proctors stood muttering to each other. The front doors opened automatically into the yard. It was early evening and the fresh air, the slight breeze, felt incredible on the sunburned skin of my face. I realized I’d been in there for nearly a full day.
A T-4 idled out front, waiting. The doctor and I sat side by side on the front bench seat. He handed me an aluminum bottle full of mineral-enriched water. I consumed it in a single gulp.
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