Goodhouse

by Peyton Marshall

  “What is this place?” I asked.

  “There’s a lot of different people here,” she said. “Think of it as a watering hole in the desert.”

  “Animals eat one another at the watering hole,” I said.

  “Good point,” she said. “Maybe don’t think of it that way.” She waved for another pedicab.

  This driver was older. He looked somewhat dehydrated, all sinew and ropy muscle, but he had no tattoos. We climbed into the passenger compartment. It took a few minutes to get out of the thick of things, to break free of the crowd. We turned onto a quieter street lined with shops and restaurants. I was keeping track of every turn, picking out landmarks, looking over my shoulder so that the way back would be recognizable.

  We passed a residential section, mostly canvas structures treated with some kind of solar paint. And then we neared an area marked QUARANTINE, a few blocks of tents cordoned off by yellow plastic tape. “Hold your breath,” Bethany whispered. Several security guards stood at intervals, enforcing the boundary. She reached into her bag and pulled out one of the white powder-filled capsules and slipped it into her mouth. All our talk about her father and it hadn’t occurred to me that the drug could actually work—that it was, on some level, a success.

  * * *

  West Market turned out to be an old warehouse that had been repurposed as some kind of club. Tables were set up outside, and they had flames in the middle, fire flickering within a brazier. There was an eerie red light inside the building itself. Through the windows I could see dark, shadowy outlines of backlit people. The pedicab dropped us off in front of another group of sign holders. THE WAGES OF SIN IS DEATH, one of the signs read. OBEY HIS LAW, read another. The men holding these signs were still and quiet until I made eye contact with one of them. “God bless,” he said.

  West Market looked a little shabbier, a little rougher. It was almost as crowded as East Market, but the clientele was less celebratory, more watchful. Bethany led me to an alley behind the club. A large rat sprinted along the passage ahead of us.

  “Do you know where you’re going?” I asked.

  “Stop worrying,” she said, her voice tense and a little breathless.

  “Right,” I said.

  She stopped at an unmarked door. The surface was dented and pockmarked. “Okay,” she said. “Let me do the talking. Just until we know for sure—” But she didn’t get a chance to finish her sentence. The door opened, flying outward with a percussive boom, as if it had been kicked. We jumped back. A man in a crisp white shirt stepped through the opening. He was maybe fifty, his brown skin taut along his cheekbones. He had a cigarette clenched between his lips.

  “This way,” he growled. And as soon as we were inside, his face split into a wide smile. “Welcome,” he said. “And my apologies,” he added. “I should have sent an escort.”

  We stood in a reception area with a fireplace, a white velvet sofa, and a chandelier that was made out of tubes of light. It was the most beautiful room I’d ever seen, an intense contrast to the filth of the alley. There was a mural on the ceiling—painted faces and lush, tropical-looking foliage.

  Bethany opened her mouth to speak, but the man cut her off. “Not yet,” he said.

  We followed him down a long hallway, past a secretary at a large desk, past a fish tank with darting neon-colored fish. The air smelled strongly of ginger and cinnamon. The hallway had motion sensors embedded in the walls, little red blinking eyes. I didn’t see any cameras, but I recognized some of the architecture, the way the secretary’s desk was elevated and projected slightly into the corridor, the way the reception room was sunken by a single step. It was the sort of layout I was familiar with—the preservation of a sight line, the maintenance of security. I felt the building closing around me like a trap. I began to sweat.

  The man took us into a room that had one of the plastic therapy tables that I recognized from the infirmary. A large sign on the wall read YOU WILL HAVE THREE WEEKS TO REPORT TO A DMV OR A POLICE STATION TO REGISTER ANY FACIAL MODIFICATIONS. BY AGREEING TO OUR SERVICES YOU WAIVE YOUR RIGHT TO CLAIM ANY AND ALL DAMAGES. Someone had drawn a smiley face on the edge of the paper.

  “I’m not modifying my face,” I said.

  Javier pressed his hand to a small wallscreen. A keypad appeared, and he typed in a numeric code. “Okay.” He smiled. “Now we can talk.”

  “Did you find the payment?” Bethany asked.

  “The Maybach,” he said. “It’s exquisite.” He stepped toward me and held out his hand. In the other one he cradled the lit cigarette. “I am Javier,” he said. “A pleasure.” I shook his hand and said my name. “Yes, I know,” he said. “We will be sorry to lose our littlest mastermind, but she says you’re worth it.”

  I looked at Bethany, and she shrugged. “I did some work for these guys,” she said.

  “When?” I asked.

  “Recently,” she said. And for some reason this answer irritated me—it brought to mind just how much I didn’t know, about her life, who she was, what she did.

  “So, let’s start by getting that chip out,” Javier said. “And then we’ll move on to the fun stuff.” He walked over to the sink to wash his hands.

  “What fun stuff?” I asked.

  He began tugging on a pair of latex gloves and arranging a scalpel, scissors, and several other sharp-looking instruments on a lined tray. “In the interest of full disclosure, Bethany, now would be a good time,” he said.

  “James,” she said, “I don’t want you to freak out, but we have to do a small operation.”

  “That freaks me out,” I said.

  Bethany nodded. “I didn’t tell you everything,” she said, “because I didn’t want to scare you.” But she was the one who seemed frightened.

  “Just take out my chip,” I said.

  Javier looked at Bethany. “Perhaps a little sedation is a good idea?” he asked.

  “Don’t touch me,” I said to him. “If you touch me, I will literally kick your face in.”

  I backed toward the door, but the handle was locked. I eyed the keypad that was still visible on the little wallscreen. I remembered the code he’d entered, but I couldn’t be sure what it would do.

  “We can’t just take out your chip,” Bethany said. “I mean, we can, but the real problem is your eyes. The iris is very distinctive and they’ll scan yours at the border.”

  I looked at the metal instruments on the tray—a hooked retractor, several wickedly sharp lancets, and a small pair of forceps. “So what happens?” I asked. “How do you alter an iris?”

  They were both quiet for a moment. Maybe it was the word modification—because it implied retention of the original—but I’d just imagined an implant or an injection. I hadn’t made the necessary leap.

  Bethany crept forward. I leaned away from her, my weight shifting toward the exit. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but we’ve got to take the old ones out.”

  NINETEEN

  I pulled at the locked door handle—a fruitless gesture that I felt compelled to do nonetheless. “I need time to think about this,” I said.

  “You can have one minute,” Javier said.

  “I already sort of committed you,” Bethany said. “I may have signed some paperwork on your behalf.”

  “No.” I shook my head. “Things are different now. You can’t just force me. You can’t cut my eyes out.”

  “We don’t need the whole eye,” Javier said. “You keep the sclera.”

  “I’m keeping the whole thing,” I said.

  “If it helps,” Javier said, “I had the procedure done myself. It doesn’t hurt. Much. And our doctor is very good.” He paused. “I mean, I’m the doctor, but I’m really good.”

  Bethany stepped closer, as if she were approaching a fractious animal. “You have to trust me,” she said. “This is our best option. We’ll get you to recovery, get going as quick as possible.”

  “Not if I’m blind,” I said. I thought of the crowds outside, the thousands of s
trangers. “And what if you drop dead? What happens to me then?” I edged away from her, creeping closer to the keypad on the wall.

  “I don’t blame you for being mad,” she said. Her expression was hopeful and apologetic.

  “You think I don’t recognize this setup?” I asked. “The locked door, the sterile room. I feel right-fucking-at-home.” My surroundings began to take on a dreamlike quality; they seemed to be shrinking, warping, diminishing. The muscles in the back of my legs twitched. I felt like I was going to throw up. But Javier and Bethany took my sudden quiet for acquiescence. They saw a fire banked, resistance countered.

  “It’s going to be okay,” she said. “I won’t let anything bad happen to you.”

  “You can’t promise that,” I said.

  “Let’s start with the good news,” Javier interjected. He pressed his hand to the wall. A large screen lit up. On it was a picture of myself, or rather, the person I’d been a year ago. The picture had been taken in Oregon. My cheeks were rosy, as if I’d just stepped in from the cold. I realized that this was my official ID photo, the one visible only to the proctors. I’d never actually seen it. “You can have any eye color you like,” Javier said. “Brown or blue or gray.” He flicked his hand over the screen and my eye color changed. “Anything but what you have.”

  Even as I’d aged—even as my bones had lengthened, as my musculature had built and broadened—my eyes had not changed. They were all I’d retained from my childhood. Their bright green color was unusual and I’d hoped that perhaps, in some possible future, my mother would see me and know me from my eyes alone.

  “And now for the bad news,” Javier was saying. “These implants are synthetic. The most common defects are an inability to focus, night blindness, light sensitivity. There is a one percent chance that the graft will be weak and you will see objects and colors, but they’ll seem distorted and create a lot of noise your brain can’t process. There is also an even smaller chance that one eye will graft well and the other will not. In that case, you may choose to have the damaged eye removed, but we recommend wearing a patch.” He paused. “Cheaper,” he said. “Much cheaper.”

  “Just take out my chip,” I said.

  “You leave as you are or as we make you,” Javier said. “Those are your choices. We don’t do partial work.”

  There was a knock on the door. It opened, and a man with a wide, bulbous nose stepped partway into the room. “Sir,” he said. He nodded toward the hallway. Javier followed, sucking hard on his cigarette. They left the door slightly ajar, and the indistinct murmur of their voices hummed in the room.

  “We can’t go back,” Bethany said. “I sold Tanner’s car. You have to do this or we’ll both be caught.”

  “I don’t want anything grafted onto me,” I said. “I don’t want to be augmented, tinkered with, cut up, or fucked-up. I won’t do it.”

  “You’re not thinking straight,” she said. “Take a moment to think. This is the only way.”

  “One percent,” I said. “How do we know that’s even the right statistic? Who is this guy?”

  “He’s famous.”

  “For what?” I asked. “He works out of an alley in a tent city.”

  “Trust me,” she said.

  But I couldn’t feel her, not in the way I was accustomed to. She was just a face—her words were just sounds. I saw this clinic not as a passport to another life but as the resurgence of an old one. “My body is the only thing I own,” I said. “There is nothing else. And even that’s fifty-fifty at this point—I eat their food, I do their work, I take their drugs.”

  “James,” she said, “you’re with me now.”

  I shook my head. If something went wrong, all the blackness would pour in like smoke. I’d be trapped in memory, unable to wake. Her father would be there, waiting for me, with the building on fire. He would find me, after all. I ducked past her. I grabbed a scalpel off the tray.

  She sucked in her breath. “No,” she said. “You’re making a mistake.” Her face was crumpled slightly, a distressed, pinched-mouth expression that took me a moment to identify as grief. “Don’t do this,” she said. “Just talk to me.”

  “We’re leaving,” I said. “Come on.”

  “Don’t,” she said. “Just wait.” She began to inch toward the door, and I felt her intention—she wanted to lock me in.

  We both moved at the same time, but I was faster. I made it into the hallway and yanked the door closed before she could follow. I felt the slight reverberations of her pounding against it.

  Javier stood alone, leaning against the wall. He gave me a cold look of appraisal. There were a number of thin white scars on the back of his hands, and the initials GHS were tattooed into the web between his thumb and forefinger. “If you leave,” he said, “you can’t come back.”

  And so I left.

  The secretary stood up as I shot past her desk and crossed the lobby. I burst through the door into the alley, then rounded the corner and hurried into the open city, weaving in and out of the streets, unsure where I was going, quickly becoming lost in the crowd. It was dawn and the sky was just starting to pale in the east. A light rain had begun to fall, water drumming on the canvas tents. The air had filled with the mineral smell of dirt.

  “Hey,” somebody called. A man was following me. I picked up my pace. “Hey!” The man started to jog. “You there,” he called. “Stop him!” People turned to stare. I gripped the warm metal handle of the scalpel. I had only a few seconds before it would be obvious that I was in flight—that something was wrong. I took a deep breath and made myself stop. I turned to let the man approach and tucked my hand, the one with the weapon, behind me. I resolved to kick him in the gut as soon as he was in range, but then I saw that he was smiling.

  “You dropped your hat,” he said. He jogged up to me, holding out my baseball cap. I touched my head as if to confirm that it was gone. “Like a bat out of hell,” he said. “Boom! You took us by surprise. Where you coming from?”

  I took the hat and tugged it on, pulling the brim low. I slipped the scalpel gingerly into my pocket. “Thanks,” I said, and turned to leave.

  “I don’t know your story,” he said, “but cities like this fly in the face of God.” The man came up beside me. He had a sign tucked under his arm. I recognized the bold black print on the white field, but I couldn’t read the words. He wore brown slacks and a white shirt that was styled like a proctor’s—button breast pockets and a loop on the shoulder, almost like an epaulet. “They attract the worst kinds,” he added.

  “Yeah,” I mumbled. He followed me through a cluster of food carts. Trash cans overflowed with wax paper and bits of food. There was vomit on the ground. People stood at little tables, eating and drinking.

  “You look pristine,” the man said. “No tattoos, no nothing.”

  “I was in the army,” I said. “Is there a bathroom around here?”

  The man nodded. “Right there.” The bathroom was only a few feet from us, but it required a $2 cash payment. I had only the card.

  “I guess I don’t need to go,” I said. “Anyway, thanks.” I’d have to find somewhere else to remove my chip. I thought of the stopwatch and I walked faster, but my desire to get away from the man only intensified his curiosity. He continued walking beside me.

  “What branch were you in?” he asked. “You don’t look like army.”

  “Matter of opinion,” I said.

  “You don’t talk like army, either,” he said.

  “Fuck off,” I said. “How’s that?”

  “Is it drugs, brother?” he asked. “I know about that trouble.”

  I kept being jostled and elbowed, the sort of contact that was never unintentional at Goodhouse, that was always a harbinger of something worse. It set me on edge. And on top of that, the little bells that the pedicabs rang to announce themselves seemed to be chiming everywhere. I kept scanning the crowd for Bethany, hoping to see her familiar shape. I’d made a mistake. That was rapidly becoming
clear. I’d been impulsive and irrational, and now that the crisis had passed, I was seeing my situation with more clarity. Javier’s clinic was not the Exclusion Zone. It was not more of what I didn’t want. If I’d stayed, it would have been my own choice. And now I was alone in a crowd, the thing I’d wanted to avoid. I felt ashamed, as if I’d fulfilled some genetic destiny, as if I’d succumbed to my own true nature even as I’d fought against it.

  A pedicab almost collided with me, and I jumped out of the way.

  “Somebody’s trying to tell you something,” the man said.

  “What?” I said. I thought I’d glimpsed Bethany, or maybe it wasn’t her, just another girl in a black dress.

  “Not me,” the man said, and he pointed to the heavens—at the pink, spreading dawn. “Him.”

  * * *

  The man’s name was Bob Hawkins, and he wanted to sit in a café and talk about God—about how the Devil was fighting to claim the planet, using his henchmen to destroy the righteous. He offered to buy me breakfast from a cart, but I was distracted. All I could think about was finding a quiet bathroom where I could be alone with the scalpel in my pocket. I remembered the cluster of sign holders, and I asked him if his companions had a building nearby, a gathering place. “It’s been too long since I’ve stood in a house of worship,” I said. And he must have thought I was going through some kind of withdrawal; he kept staring at my hands, which trembled even though I clasped them together

  “You’re a good kid,” Bob Hawkins said. “I can see you’re from nice people.” He clapped his hand against the stitches on my back, sending a bolt of pain all the way to my knees. “All you have to do is put your foot on the path,” he said. “God will do the rest.”

  “Amen,” I said.

  The church was a large white canvas tent at the edge of the market. It had one big central room, and it was connected to another, smaller tent by an open-air passageway. Two hefty men with rosebuds tucked into the lapels of their jackets stood at the entrance. They waved us through and nodded to my companion.