Goodhouse

by Peyton Marshall

  Later, I would try to remember everything about the scene. The symbols on the felt banners that hung like colorful pennants along the walls, the faces of the faithful, and the woman who stood at the lectern speaking in a singsong voice. But, at the time, I was too consumed with my own purpose. I felt as if I were drawing the school toward me. The chip was a hot, glowing coal in my belly.

  A spray of roses stood on the altar, a thick mat of crimson petals—blooms that seemed almost waxy in their perfection. My companion nudged me. Everyone around us got to their feet to sing. Wind tugged at the taut canvas sides of the tent, causing them to snap and vibrate. The air smelled of a woodsy incense—pine pitch and myrrh. In Oregon I’d visited the logging camps, and I remembered that the whole forest had smelled like this—like the hearts of the trees had split open.

  I excused myself to use the bathroom. I told Bob Hawkins I’d be right back, then I walked to the rear of the church and inched down the far aisle, feeling conspicuous, heading toward a little blue curtained door that had the word RESTROOM stenciled above it. The scalpel tapped my leg with each step, and I covered the blade with my hand so no one bumped it. “I know you are frustrated,” the woman at the pulpit was saying. “I know you are hurting. But you are not alone. Not anymore. You need God, but he also needs you. There is a fight coming. You will be asked to commit everything. He will test you. He will have you feel his mercy, even as you are the instrument of his wrath.”

  I ducked behind the blue curtain and followed a passageway that opened into a larger room. Two portable toilets stood in the middle like green plastic towers. One was occupied. I stepped into the empty stall, and the stench reminded me of a boxer. I breathed through my mouth. The person in the toilet beside mine coughed, and the sound was depressingly loud. I would have to be totally silent.

  I lifted the front of my shirt and tucked the hem in so it would stay up and away. I unwrapped the gauze that the doctor had used to cover the stitches on my back. I wound it around my arm, saving it, trying to keep it clean. The light in the restroom was very dim. I couldn’t see the black dot on my skin, but I’d marked the site so many times that it had left a small raised scar on my stomach. I knew I had to cut deep to be sure I got the chip. I thought an inch should do it, roughly the depth of a finger joint.

  I stuffed the whole roll of toilet tissue into my waistband below the chip site, then leaned forward, my head pressed against the green plastic wall, my legs as far behind me as I could get them. I needed to keep blood off my pants, if I could. I withdrew the scalpel and tensed. I kept almost pressing the blade into my skin, thinking I was going to do it, but pain stilled my hand every time. I took a blob of sanitizer gel from the little canister affixed to the side of the toilet and smeared it over my belly and hands. I tried to imagine that it wasn’t a body, that my stomach was just a piece of cardboard, but this made it even more difficult. Someone knocked on the stall door.

  “Just a minute,” I called back.

  I was angry with myself for being squeamish. I tried calling myself a coward, but this only made it harder to cut. It wasn’t until I thought of my belly as something beloved that I was able to press the knife in. When I imagined this work as delicate and gentle, then I was able to part the skin and the fat. I imagined my hand was like the soft fabric of the shirt, caressing, caretaking.

  I was terrified of going too deep, of cutting into my intestines. I tried to stop when I felt the resistance of muscle and then angle the knife in a wide circle about an inch across. Blood soaked the toilet paper almost instantly. I imagined that the hole was already there, that I was simply finding the strength to empty it, but the pain was disorienting. It flowed through my back and into my arms. I removed a bloody mass of something and it was done, or I hoped it was. I tossed everything into the toilet. I stuffed the wound with gauze and wrapped it tight. Someone knocked again on the door. “A minute,” I said.

  I didn’t have any place to wipe my hands, and the tissue at my waist was useless. I tried to use the sanitizer to wash away the rest of the blood, but it turned everything into a pink goo. There was a filter at the top of the toilet, some kind of air-purifying screen, and I reached up and used this to wipe off whatever I could. I was dizzy. I adjusted my shirt, stepped out of the stall, and almost lost my footing.

  A long line of people waited for the restroom. One man pushed past me and slammed the door. The sound was like a gunshot. Another man in line had his eyes closed, head bowed in what appeared to be prayer. Two others were deep in murmured conversation. A black fog hovered at the edge of my vision. I stepped into the hallway. I had to get out of here. My body was liquid with pain. One of the heavy canvas walls of the tent undulated slightly. I pulled on the edge, to see how far it would lift. Only about an inch. I was going to have to walk out the front door.

  I returned to the church and was dimly aware of two things. First, it was much more crowded. All the seats were taken and dozens of people were packed into the aisles. The early-morning service, it seemed, was standing room only. Second, a new voice was preaching. A man stood at the pulpit, his cadence rhythmic and hypnotic and somehow familiar.

  “If you understand nothing else,” the man said, “it’s this one thing: Just as the dawn arrives, each morning, here on earth, so does God’s call. It arrives each day. God calls you, each day, to battle.” And here his voice deepened and slowed. “This is not a human war but a God-given one. And I should know.” The crowd called out their encouragement. Some people were waving, palms outstretched. Most of my attention was on the act of walking—on the simulation of normal, uncomplicated movement.

  “Excuse me,” I said. I had to push past several church members. And then, perhaps because every face was riveted, I glanced at the pulpit. I saw a man in a tan sport coat with a red rosebud affixed to the lapel. It took me a moment to see beyond the clothes, beyond the context—to see the face that I recognized. I stopped and stared. It was Tim—Timothy Goodhouse, my supervisor at the factory. He stood at the lectern, transformed into a civilian, but the slight flattening of his vowel sounds, the way he leaned his head forward and looked up through his lashes, was immediately recognizable.

  “Who is that?” I said to the woman next to me. She was tall, plump, and middle-aged. She had a metal stud in the side of her nose. Her long, graying hair cascaded down to the middle of her back.

  “Quiet, brother,” she said. She remained transfixed, staring over the crowd. Hanging from her neck was a gold chain with a charm—a Zero bisected by a lightning bolt. I saw the same symbol tattooed on the upturned wrist of the man beside me. Above it the word purity. I was close enough to see the little hairs on his arm and the weave in the fabric of his clothing. I momentarily touched my face to make sure it was blank of expression. The felt banners overhead—the lamb and the lion, the dove and the cross—had been subtly altered. The halo on the dove was slashed through; the lamb stood astride a bolt of lightning. This was a Zero church. There were hundreds of believers here. We were packed shoulder to shoulder.

  “You are good people,” Tim said. “You want to feed the hungry, minister to the sick, protect the weak. Compassion is a virtue. Right?” The crowd murmured, unsettled—some people saying yes. But Tim was shaking his head. He was holding up his hand, the one with the stump for a finger. “You are wrong,” he said. “Compassion is the knife at your throat. And how do I know? Because I was not always guided by the Holy Spirit.” He let his gaze travel slowly across the room. It was unreal to see him, to see him so altered—Tim, one of us. He seemed to be taller, more substantial, the feeling from the crowd buoying him, forming him in some way, infusing him with authority. He opened his arms wide, as if to encompass us all.

  “The waters have turned to acid, the seas have risen, the heavens storm, the earth is fallow. And we know how the Devil operates. We can see the problem. God himself has called us to action. And yet—” Here he paused as if overcome. “And yet, how do we respond?” he asked. “We feed. We clothe. We
educate. And I tell you, good people, that it does you credit. But your compassion is, absolutely, killing you.”

  That pine pitch smell was back—a bitter, musky smell. I’d seen the bodies at La Pine, some of them, anyway. I’d certainly smelled the flesh cooking along with the acrid stench of every burnt mattress and shoe and floorboard. I’d thought about the water inside us. That was the only part of the boys to escape. Spongy insides turned into vapor, a gas pulled out of the little window opening, sucked into a cloud, blown into the forest.

  Someone handed me a white cylinder. I just stared at it. Another cylinder was being passed nearby and people were slipping paper money into an opening at the top. Tim was generating donations with his speech, revenue for the Zeros. I quickly passed the cylinder to my left. That’s when I noticed how badly I was bleeding. The woman in front of me had a large purse slung over her shoulder, a printed cloth bag, and we were packed so tight that the bag was actually wicking blood from my wound. A spreading red circle ate through the pattern on the fabric—blood rich with the doctor’s drug, blood that had once carried oxygen to my organs. Now it was merely a stain.

  “Excuse me,” I said, but the man beside me didn’t move. I was just shifting my weight, preparing to force my way through the crowd when I glimpsed Montero—standing less than twenty feet away.

  He stood near the altar. Thick, wavy hair framed his face. He, too, wore a suit with a rosebud in the lapel, but he looked uncomfortable in it, uneasy. He was part of a line of men that created a sort of human barrier between Tim and the crowd. And a few feet from Montero was the giant, with his thick neck, the black undulating tattoos staining the skin of his cheeks. My first thought was that they must have escaped after all. Tim must have known them, he must have helped them, gotten them a print. But that wasn’t right. If they were fugitives, they wouldn’t be here, out in the open, so bold, so unafraid.

  “Let me,” Tim said, “be a tool in your hand, a hammer brought down. We are fighting for the destiny of a planet. And you can step away. You can abdicate, claim it’s too hard. You’re free to do that.” He paused. “Or you can acknowledge that it is a fight, that it has come to you, and that you didn’t ask for it, but you will stand up with your God. You will link arms on this battlefield.”

  As his voice rose, the people around me began to shout their encouragement. An organ started playing and a hymn broke out, the lyrics projected in the air above Tim, tall white letters, the words verse and chorus blinking like a warning. I was cold with shock, and whenever Montero swept the crowd with his gaze, I bowed my head as if overcome by prayer.

  I had to get out of there. I said, “Excuse me,” again to the man beside me, but he didn’t hear, or didn’t want to. The crowd was packed too tight. Everyone’s mouth was opening and closing, creating a river of noise. And then I realized that I was thinking about it all wrong. That I had been stupid to believe that Mule Creek inmates were wandering around the factory, sneaking over to our side, their absence going unnoticed and unreported.

  Someone opened the door. That was the pattern of the Goodhouse attacks. The Zeros appeared like a virus, multiplying and overwhelming, and always—someone opened the door. And that was when I knew what Montero was not. He was not an inmate, not a convict. He was not breaking out of the Ione campus. He was breaking in.

  TWENTY

  I had just turned and started toward the exit when a dozen civilian police officers poured through the entryway. All of them wore black helmets and body armor. They were faceless human shapes, cutting through the crowd with the confidence of training and the aggression of purpose. I saw them as if they were all connected—some tentacle unfurling, reaching. I was briefly certain that they were headed toward me, that I had been identified, and I felt again the magnitude of my error.

  “Illegal search,” someone yelled. “Illegal search!”

  An officer told everyone to remain calm. “Stay in your seats,” he said. “Stay where you are.” But this had the opposite effect. The crowd surged in all directions as people pushed for the exits. It felt like we’d all taken a step closer together. My arms were actually pinned to my sides now, and I was struggling to free myself, pushing against the woman with the purse. Tim alone seemed composed. He remained at the altar, standing behind a shield of flowers.

  “Welcome, brothers,” he called. “This is a peaceful gathering.”

  “We need everyone to sit down,” one of the officers said. Another one held something that looked like a gun with a large boxy nozzle. He swept it over the crowd, searching.

  “We have nothing to hide,” Tim said. “We are happy to comply.”

  One woman near the back of the church screamed, “Get your hands off me.” She appeared to be struggling. “Don’t touch me!”

  “This is private property,” someone else said. “Come back with a warrant.”

  The crowd was bearing me toward the hallway that led to the restrooms. I felt the hands of those behind me clutching my shirt, and I was actually holding on to other people, trying not to be pulled down. We were all fused in this moment, some unwieldy animal, and I promised myself that if I survived, I would never go back into a crowd—never willingly.

  I had to push hard to get into the hallway. The lady with the purse was still in front of me, and we moved together into the room with the green towers. The far wall had a large panel of canvas that had been drawn to one side, revealing a wide gap. A mass of people shoved their way through it, out into the clear morning light. I could tell there were police nearby. I heard shouting. I felt the crowd resist as if they were one organism absorbing a blow. “Stay where you are,” an officer called, and his voice was very close, alarmingly so. “Stay where you are.”

  Someone grabbed the woman I’d been following and threw her to the ground. I started to run. I glanced behind me and saw a thick line of police moving to cover the back entrance. The white sides of the tent rose above them like a glacier. I passed a narrow alleyway and saw more police advancing at a run. I didn’t feel my wound now. Even my legs were numb. I accelerated, and it seemed to take no effort at all. The landscape of the tents sailed past as if the city itself were moving. I didn’t know where I was, and most of the shops were closed anyway, some kind of metal webbing drawn down over their entrances. Nothing was familiar, and this only added to my disorientation.

  A pedicab shot past, overloaded with people. “This way, kid,” someone called. “This way.” I had no idea who’d spoken. I was running blindly. I felt like I couldn’t get a full breath. At last I stumbled onto a road that I recognized. It was the one that cut through the residential tents, the road I’d taken with Bethany. Suddenly the path that I’d memorized snapped into place. I knew where I was.

  I hid in the quarantine area. There were no sick people there, of course, only solar generators, canned food, and portable water-treatment kits. It made sense—located deep in the residential section and heavily guarded, it was a sham for the public. I embedded myself among the valuables. I crawled between cans of beans and cooking oil. If the contents shifted I’d be crushed, but there was no way I could get to Javier’s tonight, and I was almost too exhausted to care. I located a few jugs of water and broke the seal on one of them. I drank deeply and then poured the rest of the contents over the wound in my belly. I hoped Bethany wasn’t on the streets, wasn’t running, wasn’t risking herself. I willed her to be safe.

  I must have fallen asleep, because I lost track of time. I awoke to find the tent blazingly hot, the metal tins around me burning like coils in some larger oven. I drank more of the water, but it did nothing to ease my thirst. I remember pulling the intake form out of my pocket, unfolding the quickpaper. I tried to read it, but I couldn’t focus my eyes. I was squinting and straining even though the document was right in front of my face. The tent cooled down rapidly after sunset and I began to shiver, to alternate between hot and cold.

  At one point I rolled over and saw Tim lying beside me. He was wearing a student’s unifor
m, a man dressed like a child. “We have to tell somebody,” I said. I started to shake him, to pull at his clothes, but he remained inert and peaceful. “Wake up,” I said. “Tell them you made a mistake. Tell them.” But his clothes started to come apart in my hands. He was melting into the cans, melting into me.

  A few times I awoke and remembered to drink—to pour water over the wound, which was now excruciatingly tender and oozing a thick, blood-tinged pus. I wanted to see Owen again, wanted to tell him that our status was nothing, just a preoccupation, a distraction from this, from some deeper river of life. I felt always on the verge of getting up, always on the verge of finding the strength to crawl out, to walk back to Javier’s. But soon the water jugs were empty and I was unable to replace them. I was entombed, and I realized for the first time that I might die here, that the poison of the infection might thicken my blood, devour my tissues; that it might fight me, and win.

  * * *

  “She didn’t come for you,” a man’s voice said. “I’m a little surprised.”

  Dr. Cleveland, I thought. That’s who it sounded like. I opened my eyes. I was sitting in the passenger seat of a vehicle I didn’t recognize. A blanket had been tucked around me, but it was unusual, brown and coarse, and there were bits of plastic tape stuck to its surface.

  I heard a rasping sound and turned to see Dr. Cleveland kneeling in the back of a cargo van, securing a stack of boxes to the floor, cinching down a strap. I felt nothing at the sight of him, not even surprise. “Well, we tried,” he said. “Didn’t we? That’s all you can really ask of yourself.”

  My fever seemed to be gone, but it had consumed some essential spark of life. I had almost no strength. Through the windshield I saw a row of houses—wood-sided, gray-and-white-painted structures—and a laundry line where clothes shuddered and kicked in the wind.