Goodhouse

by Peyton Marshall

  “Thank you,” I whispered. My hands shook. “Thank you.”

  “Stop talking,” he said.

  Dr. Cleveland drove me back to his office. When we got there, he said, “You’ve bled through the back of my coat. I’ll have to patch you up.” He took a package of sterilized instruments from the gray cabinet to the right of his desk, but as he approached me, he set the package aside.

  “Actually,” he said, “you smell like a biohazard.” He walked me to a staff shower located off the main hall. I watched as he reached down and authorized my entry with his thumbprint. I kept asking him about the incident at the factory, and finally he told me that no intruders had been found. There was no one named Montero in the facility.

  I shrugged. “A nickname,” I said. “That’s not important. I know his face.” But the doctor didn’t seem particularly interested in this possibility or in anything that had transpired in the factory.

  “Use a lot of soap,” he said. “I’ll get you some clothes. Towel’s over the sink.”

  The shower was newer than the one in my dorm, and there was no water timer here. When the doctor was gone, I stood openmouthed under the spray, drinking as much as I could. Afterward, I made the temperature as hot as possible. I leaned against the wall, watching steam thicken the air, feeling cocooned in the thrum and echo of water on tile. The heat seemed to be reaching into me, relaxing some inner knot that I was only just aware of. I scrubbed the black dirt from under my nails, scrubbed until my skin was raw. I stayed as long as I dared, and then I shut off the tap. I grabbed a towel and stood in front of the mirror. There was a handprint in the steamed glass. The fingers were small and tapered, the shape of the palm was almost square, and I wondered if it was Bethany’s. I lifted my hand to touch it, but when I drew my hand away, I realized my mistake. I’d replaced the mark with my own.

  Underneath the light switch, a print reader gave off a faint glow, its green color diffused by the vapor in the air. I remembered what Bethany had said—she had fifty duplicate readers scattered throughout the infirmary. Out of curiosity, I dug my thumbnail under the back edge of the plastic rectangle. It didn’t move at first, but when I applied a little more pressure, the front casing popped off, tumbling out and toward me. I caught it just as a knock sounded on the door.

  “Are you decent?” Dr. Cleveland said. He didn’t wait for my answer, and I barely had time to cover myself, to turn my back toward him, before he stepped into the room. He put a stack of clothes on the sink: a gray button-down shirt and jeans, a pair of plain canvas shoes.

  “Put these on,” he said. “They’re all I could get on short notice.” When I didn’t immediately follow his orders, he said, “What are you waiting for?”

  As Dr. Cleveland stood by, I managed to slip the reader into the pocket of the pants. The clothes were a little loose, but the material was incredibly soft and whispery against my skin—civilian clothes.

  “The inmates—the men I saw—they’re planning something,” I said. “I think they want to escape through the factory.”

  But Dr. Cleveland only shrugged. “They’re criminals,” he said. “They lie.” He walked me back to his office, where he gave me a cream for my sunburned face. I took off the shirt and he sat me on a little stool, then rubbed anesthetic into the wound on my back.

  “I’m going to have to stitch this,” he said.

  “Did Owen get reassigned?” I asked.

  “Who?” he asked. He pulled over a little lamp on wheels, something with an adjustable neck. He turned the beam on.

  “My roommate,” I said. “It’s not his fault. He can’t share in this. He can’t have this on his record.”

  “James,” Dr. Cleveland said, his voice quiet and serious, “I think you should worry more about yourself.” This shut me up. I sat, feeling each stitch—not the pain but the pressure and the tug of progress.

  When he was finished, I shrugged into my shirt. The doctor walked over to the gray cabinet and deposited a pair of scissors into what appeared to be a little chrome autoclave. He pulled out the cognac bottle and a single glass, which he filled.

  “Do you know what our biggest challenge is here at Goodhouse?” he asked. He stared into the cup, swirling the contents. “It’s not data collection. We have lots of data. No—it’s an inability to synthesize, to distill.” He walked over to his desk. “The computer looks for patterns—it’s there to anticipate and prevent. Your file, for example, has been recently flagged.”

  “For what?” I asked.

  “Deviation,” he said. “You’ve been operating outside your pattern.”

  Something in his tone made me cautious. I didn’t know if he was referring to my fight with Davis or the incident at the factory. “I did what I had to do,” I said. “That’s the truth.”

  “You promised to stay away from my daughter,” he said. “You were going to tell me if she contacted you. And that,” he said, “was also the truth.” I went very still. He tapped the metal band of a ring against the side of his glass. “You were out with Beth the other night, don’t bother to deny it. You let her walk around campus after dark,” he continued. “By herself. You encouraged her.”

  “I didn’t,” I began.

  “She’s not interested in you,” he said. “She might think she is, but you’re just another way of communicating with me.”

  “Okay,” I said. I was stalling. It wasn’t clear how much he really knew. But the ropy muscles in his forearms told me that he was gripping the glass tightly.

  “My daughter,” he said, “has good intentions. I have to believe that. She’ll think she’s rescuing you. She won’t mean to do damage, but she will. And then you will damage her, and that,” he said, “is something I can’t allow.”

  “Sir,” I said, “I think there’s been some sort of misunderstanding.”

  “Do you know what two points on a graph do?” Dr. Cleveland asked. He set down his glass. “They plot a line, a progression. You are just such a point—a piece of a larger trajectory. She thinks that she can pull you off the line, but she can’t.”

  I looked around the office. The room was full of weapons. On a little table beside the gray cabinet there was some kind of old-fashioned bust. It was a man’s head divided into colorful sections, each one numbered and labeled. It looked like a toy. I reached over and picked it up as if I were examining it. The bust was very heavy, and it fit nicely into the palm of my hand.

  “You won’t survive without my help,” Dr. Cleveland continued. And when I didn’t react, he just shook his head. “You think I exaggerate,” he said. “Okay, James. Tell me, how are you feeling?”

  “I won’t go back to Confinement,” I said. “And you can’t return me to the general population. I need to be transferred.”

  Dr. Cleveland ran his hand over the top of his desk and his computer blinked on. The back of the holographic screen was a shimmering, diaphanous glow. “Have you been having as many nightmares?” he asked. “Incidents of panic? Hypervigilance? Have you noticed any change?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Really?” Dr. Cleveland said, but now that I thought about it, these moments had been less frequent and less intense. “Then I suppose it’s a good thing we have an empirical record.” He spoke to the computer. “Project to wall.”

  It was some kind of graph. My name was at the top, above an array of red, blue, and yellow rectangles. “There,” he said, “you see. You are sleeping better.” He scrolled to another graph and then another, faster than I could track. “Your pupils are normal. Your glucose production is down. It’s true you’re more aggressive, but your years of maintaining a Level 1 are really paying off here. Your control is impressive, and when you decide to forgo that control, your reaction times, your stamina—they are all beyond our expectations.”

  “What are you talking about?” I said.

  “You’re responding well to your new medication,” he said. “Your history, your abilities—even the attack on La Pine and the way it has
altered you on a chemical level—have made you very valuable.”

  “What medication?” I said.

  “Now you have the chance to help thousands of people,” he said. “To transform the world you live in. I’m only asking you to choose it for yourself.”

  “What fucking medication?” I asked. But I thought of the injections I’d received every morning in my arm, just above the elbow. I’d gone in day after day. I’d assumed it was cortisone, but it could have been anything at all. “Answer my question,” I said.

  “I need you,” the doctor said, “to go back to the Exclusion Zone.”

  I thought I’d misunderstood. “How do you know about that place?” I said, and then, when he reached into his desk drawer, I said, “If you bring a needle within a foot of me, I will jam it into your eye.”

  But this only seemed to amuse him. He stood with his head cocked to one side, a very Bethany-like expression. “James,” he said, “you really are the perfect patient.”

  * * *

  I threw the statue at him and missed. Two proctors were through the office door and on top of me in a matter of seconds. “Don’t stun him,” Dr. Cleveland said. I bucked and kicked. I felt the prick of the needle in my neck, and then a hot, numbing wave unstrung my muscles and liquefied my thoughts.

  They carried me to the couch. The cushions seemed unbelievably soft, folding around me like warm air. “The sedative feels like more than it is,” Dr. Cleveland said. “Just give in to it.”

  “No,” I whispered.

  “You need to rest,” he said. He sat on the little coffee table next to the couch, his face a few feet from my own. “It won’t be as easy as last time. No one’s getting a placebo tonight.”

  “I won’t fight,” I said.

  “You will,” he said.

  “I’ll just sit there,” I said. “Watch me.” I tried to stand, but could only lift my arm an inch before it became leaden and uncooperative. Fatigue pulled at me. I could hear my pulse in my ears and I felt like I was falling—through the couch, through the floor, into some long tube like a drain.

  “Will you give us a minute?” Dr. Cleveland said to the proctors. They stood arrayed behind him, their red Lewistons out.

  “Sir,” a proctor said, “we need to move him before it wears off.”

  “Wait outside,” he repeated, his tone more commanding. The men left the room but didn’t shut the door.

  “What does it do?” I asked. “The medication.”

  “It’s remarkable that you’re still awake.” He clicked on a penlight and shot the beam into my eye. A jolt of pain gave me the strength to swat his hand away.

  “Stop that,” he said. He held down my arm and tried again to check my pupils, but I shut my eyes against the glare.

  “You don’t have the right to do this,” I said.

  He clicked off the light and sat back. “You know why the Zeros kill with fire?” he asked.

  “Parable,” I said, “of the weeds.”

  “They think they’re doing you a favor,” he said, “something that you are too weak and too selfish to do on your own.”

  I tried to respond, but my mouth felt like a rubber band.

  “Without the flames,” he said, “you all are condemned to spend eternity with the devils whom you’ve made flesh.”

  “That’s insane,” I whispered.

  “They want to better the world,” he said. “I might not agree with their methods, but I’ve got to ask, are your goals as lofty?” He grasped my face, turning it toward his own, pinching my cheeks against my teeth. And I must have whimpered, some animal noise, something I was ashamed of, because his grip lessened. “Go to sleep,” he said. “It’s a function of your age that you can’t see the needs of the many for what they are. You can’t feel the urgency, the obligation.” His hand slid over my eyes, and the steady warm pressure of his palm consigned me to darkness. “Someday,” he whispered, “when you are dead, the work that you do for me tonight will live on inside the people you help, and then they will feel you, even if they don’t know your name.”

  * * *

  I awoke on the ground, my face pressed to the floor, dirt and grit stuck to my cheek. I sat up, sucking in deep lungfuls of air. My hands were bound, tied in front of me with a plastic wire, and I didn’t immediately know where I was or what was going on. I looked around the room—at the vandalized walls, at a piece of warped plywood that had been nailed over a window well. Black mold coated a section of the floor and crawled up one wall—little interconnected dots, all part of a pattern. Still, I didn’t know what I was seeing. It was always like this—that delay between waking and remembering—a small, bright gap in which I was free of identity and history, and then reality would snap over me like a cage. And this time it felt worse, so much worse, when I realized what was coming.

  I got to my feet, and the effort left me unsteady and light-headed. I had to get my hands free, so I paced the room looking for something I could use. I walked over to the panel of plywood. It was warped but still strong and intact, and when I tried to wedge my fingers between the wood and the wall, it didn’t budge.

  I knelt beside what was left of an old porcelain toilet. Just a fraction of the original pedestal remained, still bolted in place. I ran the plastic wire over the jagged edge, trying not to stare too hard at the hole that descended into the floor. But I already knew that this wasn’t likely to work—that when the door opened tonight, when I was sucked into the darkness, into the chaos of the hallway, justice would be waiting for me. With my hands bound, the other men would dominate me. I would become Tuck, I would be the body on the ground, and that thought made me press the wire harder against the porcelain, file it with all my strength, even though I knew it was hopeless and the wire remained intact even as the friction wore down the ceramic edge. One substance was stronger than the other. It always came down to this.

  As I worked, the music I’d sung for Tuck began to creep back into me. It had been a fragment from Handel’s Messiah, a fragment from our last Christmas performance. I heard the opening bars, then I felt my entrance and tensed as if I were about to sing, about to join that dead chorus. To hear us, to sit in the audience, was to surrender yourself, to be guided and altered. And God, their God, the one I could never quite believe in, he’d felt real when his gospel had been lodged in my throat. His promises, so archaic on the page, had felt, in song, volatile and exciting, a fragment of what was possible.

  I stopped filing. I was exhausting myself. Dr. Cleveland was right—my night in Confinement had sapped my strength. Maybe it was better this way. If he wanted me to fight, then disappointing him was meaningful.

  And then I heard them—all the people who were being led inside, the opening and closing of doors, the hooting calls, and the muffled sound of talking in the room beside my own. I stood and faced the door. It was the only new piece of equipment in the room, metal with a gray enamel finish. A few footprints were stamped onto the bottom—tread from civilian shoes. On my first night here the doors had all unlocked at once. Somehow we’d been driven toward the room with the guards, moving as one, as though we were pushed. I was struggling to remember the details now, to find some piece of useful information, when the door in front of me slid open and a man walked through, unescorted. For a second I thought it was Tuck. Briefly, I hoped it was. The man wore a Mule Creek uniform and he had roughly the same rangy build, but he had no tattoos.

  He stopped at the sight of me and we stared at each other. He was a little taller than I was and his hair was braided into tight rows along his scalp, something I’d never seen before.

  “One of the neighbor boys,” he said, “in my room. What fun.” But his tone was more threatening than friendly.

  “How do you know I’m from next door?” I said. I wasn’t wearing a uniform.

  He didn’t answer. He just walked toward me and stopped about five feet away, leaning against the wall, relaxed and confident. Above his tight braids was a fuzz of loose hair like steam
rising off his scalp. “Nothing personal,” he said, “but I’m going to beat the shit out of you tonight.”

  I instinctively shifted my weight forward. I expected him to lunge, but he just continued standing there. Somewhere nearby, I heard the clang of metal against metal. And the music I’d imagined was still playing, the performance progressing inside me—the baritone telling me that the people who walked in darkness had seen a light, a great light.

  “What are you waiting for?” I asked, even though I knew. And when the lights did cut out, I felt the man launching forward. I felt the churn of air a fraction of a second before impact. My hands closed around the fabric of his shirt, and I used his own momentum to roll him over and past me. I kicked him hard and then ran for the door. A memory of the room was still bright in my mind, still functional, but I struck a cold metal slab. The door was closed.

  I heard commotion on the other side, the collision of bodies. Something had gone wrong. Our room hadn’t opened. I felt for a knob, but there was none. And it was just as the man grabbed me and spun me around that I remembered the print reader. I didn’t know if it was still in my pocket—but I heard something fall to the floor, or I thought I did.

  The man was trying to use his weight to drive me down, so I kept moving, making myself a difficult target. Even with my hands bound, I managed to break his hold on my shirt. Blackness had sucked close and my breath was coming too fast. I no longer knew where I was. I no longer saw the room in my mind. The man clipped me a few times—they weren’t direct blows but enough to show me how unsustainable this was. I was off-balance and slowing down. It was just a matter of time before I was overwhelmed. And then, one of us must have stepped on the print reader, because it activated—a sudden green glow in the dark, a reference point. I resisted the urge to reach for it, and I was rewarded by seeing the light lifted off the ground, held in his hand. That was all the information I needed.

  I lunged at the man and kicked him hard in the groin. It was the kind of shot that he would’ve blocked if he’d been able to see it coming. A warbling shriek told me that he had not. The reader clattered to the ground. I almost kicked him again. I felt the strength inside me, the certainty that I had several long seconds to do what I wanted—freedom and access. But I managed to shut that impulse down.