The Impossible Fortress

by Jason Rekulak

  The Reverend Mother turned to me. “You have one minute,” she said. “But no privacy. Say what you need to say, and then we go to my office and call the police.”

  I turned to Mary. I tried to remember the exact phrasing of my letter. On paper, everything had seemed so clear and concise. But up in my brain, my thoughts were a mess. Mary started shaking. She looked like she was ready to cry. “I’m sorry to come here like this,” I said. “I just need you to know the truth. I never lied to you. Not about anything. Especially the last night. After the movie. All that stuff was real. I liked you. I still like you.”

  I looked at her eyes, so she’d see I was telling the truth; I willed her to believe me. The Impossible Fortress was real. Radical Planet was real. Everything I felt for Mary was real. She was beautiful and kind and funny. She was better than I deserved, and I was a better person for knowing her. I stuttered and stammered and went well over my allotted minute, but in the end no one could accuse me of wussing out. I said everything I came to say, and then some.

  Mary looked like she was ready to throw up. Her forehead was beaded with sweat, and she clung to the handrail to keep her balance.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  The Reverend Mother stepped forward. “That’s enough.”

  “I’m fine,” Mary whispered. “You should go.”

  Water piddled on the concrete steps beneath her feet. A stain spread across the front of her skirt. She was wetting herself.

  “Mary?” I asked.

  Another sister rushed to Mary’s aid, and everyone started talking at once.

  “Get back.”

  “Get the nurse.”

  “Go to class.”

  “He doesn’t know.”

  This last voice was Mary’s. I could hear her speaking to the other sisters. They were swarming around her, steering her toward the cool shade of the classroom building. I went to follow, but the Reverend Mother grabbed my arm, yanking me in the opposite direction, whispering hot words into my ear.

  “Tell the truth,” she said. “Are you her father?”

  I stared back at her, puzzled. “Her father is Sal Zelinsky.”

  It was hard to hear anything with all of the shouting. But the Reverend Mother repeated herself, and this time I understood the question clearly: “Are you the father?”

  3200 REM *** REPEAT SIREN SFX ***

  3210 FOR I=0 TO 22

  3220 POKE L1+I,0:NEXT I

  3230 POKE L1+24,15:POKE L1+5,80

  3240 POKE L1+6,243:POKE L1+3,4

  3250 POKE L1+4,65

  3260 FOR I=20 TO 140 STEP5

  3270 POKEL1+1,I:NEXT I

  3280 POKE L1+4,64:FOR I=1 TO 50

  3290 NEXT I:RETURN

  MY MOTHER INSISTED ON driving me to the hospital. We left our house after dinner, after I’d showered and cleaned myself up. On the drive across town, she tried to manage my expectations.

  “This is probably a bad idea,” she said.

  “I want to see her,” I said.

  “They might not let you see her. If she’s been sedated, or God forbid if anything went wrong—”

  “I’ll just ask.”

  Mom squeezed the steering wheel tighter. “And Mary could say no. She’s probably not ready to see you. Labor is labor, it’s not like the movies. You need to respect that.”

  “I know—”

  “No, you don’t know, Billy. You have no idea. This girl is a mother. At age fourteen.” She shuddered at some long-ago memory. “Everyone said I was young, and I was a senior.”

  At the hospital, Mom waited in the car with a Sidney Sheldon paperback while I went inside and got directions to Mary’s room. The maternity ward at Wetbridge Memorial Hospital was full of balloons and stuffed animals. There were grown-ups laughing and babies crying and grandparents carrying enormous video cameras that required two hands to operate. Every room was packed with visitors. People spilled out of doorways, talking and smoking cigars and eating food off paper plates. I felt like I’d wandered into a surprise party in the Twilight Zone.

  I asked another nurse for Mary, and she pointed down the corridor, to a stretch of dim rooms far from the streamers and celebrations. Zelinsky and the Reverend Mother were seated on folding chairs at the very end of the hallway. Zelinsky saw me coming and stood up, crossing his arms over his chest.

  “You’re not supposed to be here,” he said.

  “I came to see if Mary’s all right.”

  “She’s not all right. Do you think she’d be here if she was all right?”

  “I’m all right,” Mary called from inside the room. I couldn’t see her from the hallway; I could only see the foot of her bed. “Can you let him in, please?”

  Zelinsky didn’t budge. I sensed that part of him wanted to drag me kicking and screaming out of the maternity ward. But another part of him was ready to let Mary have anything she wanted.

  The Reverend Mother spoke to him in a whisper. “He’s the first friend to visit,” she said. “I think Mary could stand to see a friend? Just for a short while?”

  Zelinsky didn’t answer. He sank into his chair, shaking his head, and buried his face in ink-stained hands.

  “Ten minutes, love,” the Reverend Mother told me. She placed a gentle hand on the small of my back, guiding me through the doorway. “Mary’s had a long day, do you understand?”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  I stepped cautiously into the room. I didn’t know anything about babies—I’d never even held a baby—so part of me was scared to go any farther. The room was divided into halves by a curtain: The front half was empty. The back half had a bed and a chair and a window overlooking the parking lot. Mary was sitting up in the bed, chewing on a pencil eraser and reading a large binder full of computer code. Her hair was pulled back in a headband, and some of the color had returned to her face. If she hadn’t been dressed in a hospital gown, you might not have realized that anything was wrong.

  “You’re all right?” I asked.

  “All the gory stuff is over,” she said. “Be glad you weren’t here five hours ago.”

  I looked around the room. There was a dresser and a television, but I didn’t see any cribs or boxes or containers that might be holding a baby.

  “Where is it?” I asked.

  “Where’s what?” she asked. “The baby?”

  “Yeah.”

  “She’s down the hall. With her parents. They just got here from Scranton.”

  I took a moment to process this, to understand what she meant.

  “Are they nice?”

  “Super nice. They’re music teachers. And they already have a daughter, so she’ll have a sister. They have a house with three bedrooms, and they live across the street from a park. My father and I drove out there a month ago so we could see exactly where she’d live. It’s really nice, nicer than Wetbridge.”

  A month ago. And all this time I had no idea. A month ago, I had walked into the store to buy hearing aid batteries, and Mary gave me a flyer advertising a computer programming contest. And I had no idea.

  All this time she’s been fooling you right back, Zelinsky told me. You don’t know her at all.

  “Scranton’s not very far,” I said. “I guess you could visit?”

  Mary shook her head. “It’s not going to work like that,” she said, and her voice cracked. She looked at the open binder in her lap. “But look what they brought me. As a gift.” She closed the binder and showed me the cover. It was the operating guide for the new IBM PS/2 computer. “No more messing around on 64s for me. I’m moving on to the big time. VGA graphics and a twenty-megabyte hard disk.”

  It’s crazy: In spite of everything she’d been through, I felt a pang of envy. With a PS/2, Mary would rocket into the big time. Nothing would hold her back now.

  “Do you want to sit down?” she asked.

  The only seat in the room was a hard-backed metal folding chair, but I took it anyway. “I’m glad you’re okay.”

 
“Me too.”

  “I thought you were dying.”

  “Dying of embarrassment, maybe.”

  “I didn’t know,” I said. “I really had no clue.”

  “God, it was so obvious,” Mary said. “Did you notice how many times I went to the bathroom?”

  I shrugged. “I thought that was normal. In movies, girls are always running to the bathroom.”

  “I guess I did a good job of hiding everything.” She gently patted her hips. “The perks of having a full figure.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that.

  “At the end of this month,” Mary continued, “I was supposed to visit my aunt in Harrisburg. Have the baby out there. You never would have known.”

  “You could have just told me.”

  “No, I couldn’t have,” she said, and I knew Mary was right. I wouldn’t have understood. I didn’t even understand now. There was only one explanation for all of this, and yet it seemed impossible: “Tyler Bell?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Was it— You know— Did he force himself on you?”

  She shook her head. “More like the other way around.”

  “You forced yourself on Tyler Bell?”

  Mary scrambled for the remote control and turned on the television. “Can you keep your voice down?” She raised the volume, concealing our conversation with an ad for Calvin Klein Obsession. “It was stupid, Will. I know it was stupid. He took me out on his motorcycle, and I thought we’d just kiss.”

  “But you liked him? Liked him liked him?”

  She didn’t answer right away. She looked like she was trying to remember something that happened many years ago.

  “My mom had this thing about second chances,” she explained. “ ‘Everybody deserves a second chance,’ she’d say. Even criminals. Especially criminals. Before she got sick, when she worked at the store, she’d hire part-timers who were straight out of prison. She said it was the Christian thing to do, that Jesus commanded us to forgive them. My father hated this idea. He thought she was crazy. Hiring thieves to stock our shelves. It was nuts, right? But Mom didn’t care. She hired ex-cons for years, never had any problems. And then after she died—”

  Mary stopped, reached for a plastic cup, and took a long drink of water. “Maybe a year after she died, our part-timer quit, so now it’s Dad’s turn to hire someone. And he decides he wants to honor Mom’s legacy. He wants to do the Christian thing. So he goes to the cops and says, ‘Bring me a screwup.’ Meaning, bring me some kid who’s always in trouble so Dad can straighten him out. The very next day, a cop comes by with Tyler Bell.”

  “Did you know him?”

  “No, I’d never met him. But I’d seen him riding around Market Street on his Harley. Every girl in Wetbridge knows him by sight. They would come by the store and buy crap they didn’t need, just for the chance to see him. His hair and his eyes and the whole biker thing. To be honest, I’m not sure if I really liked him, or if I just liked him because everybody else liked him.”

  She explained that the first few weeks passed without incident. Tyler did his work and kept to himself. “He was nice to me because he had to be,” Mary said. “I was the boss’s daughter, right? So even though he’s three years older, I felt really safe talking to him. Making little jokes. I guess it was flirting. But always when Dad had his back turned. Tyler didn’t mind, he just laughed. So every day I got a little bolder.”

  Then one night Tyler invited Mary to take a ride on his motorcycle. She described how he drove them into the woods behind the Ford motor plant. They sat on blankets and smoked a cigarette. Then they started kissing and didn’t stop. “I was so mad at myself, Will. As soon as it ended, I knew it was a mistake. Tyler was nervous. He wouldn’t stop talking. He said that out of all the girls he’d been with, I had the nicest hair. Like that was a compliment, you know?”

  I didn’t say anything. I felt like she was talking about a completely different person, some other Mary, like a character you’d read about in a book. I couldn’t believe I knew someone who’d had real sex.

  “The next day was awful. He came to work and he kept touching me. Every time my dad turned his back. He wouldn’t keep his hands off me. And I just wanted to pretend it never happened. I wanted him to go away. But we were stuck in that store together, every day. So I made up an excuse to get rid of him. I said he tried to steal a lighter.”

  “You lied?”

  “He was so angry. Because no one believed him, you know? Not a single person. It was such a selfish, shitty thing for me to do.”

  “Did you know you were—” I couldn’t bring myself to say the word aloud; I still couldn’t believe I was sitting in a maternity ward.

  “No, I wasn’t sure for another six weeks. I kept hoping I was wrong. By the time I knew for sure, Tyler was long gone.”

  Up on the television screen, three gorgeous women in cowboy hats welcomed Spuds MacKenzie to a country-western concert on a dude ranch. The dog hopped up behind the drums, grabbed the sticks, and began to play along.

  “I waited until February to tell my dad. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him. I was too embarrassed. It was such a stupid thing to do.”

  I thought of Tyler’s rampage during the robbery, thought of the blitz of destruction that never totally added up. “Does he know now?”

  “My dad told him last week. At the police station. That’s why he didn’t press charges, by the way. He couldn’t send his granddaughter’s father to jail. He figures she might want to look up Tyler someday, find out who he is. And it wouldn’t be right if he was a criminal. So he told the cops to drop the charges, and they let you all go.”

  Up on the television, the Bud Light commercial ended and a studio audience shouted WHEEL! OF! FORTUNE! It was seven thirty, and America’s favorite game show was starting. I wanted to change the channel, but Mary still held the remote; she seemed grateful to have something to watch, an excuse to stop or at least pause our conversation. Vanna White appeared onstage, resplendent in a designer gown, and the audience applauded as she twirled around, showing off the scooped back and her taut calves.

  The first puzzle was a popular phrase consisting of six words. After several spins, the board looked like this:

  I F   I   _ _ _ L _   T _ _ N   _ A _ _   T I _ E

  I guess I was grateful to have the TV, too. I was happy to just sit there and hang out like nothing had spoiled between us. For some strange reason my mind kept going back to Tyler Bell, the biggest screwup in Wetbridge and the father of a huge mistake. I knew Tyler was already en route to basic training, and a new life, and I guess the baby was better off without him. But I wondered if he would ever look back and have regrets.

  I was still wondering when Zelinsky appeared in the doorway. “Time’s up,” he said. “Get out.” And there was something comforting about his arrival—like we were back in the store and Zelinsky was kicking me out again, just like the good old days.

  “Thanks for coming this morning,” Mary said. “Your timing was terrible, but I was glad to see you.”

  “Maybe we could hang out sometime,” I said. “The Regal has a new movie. Which Is Eastwick?”

  “The Witches of Eastwick,” Mary corrected.

  “Maybe we could meet there,” I said. “If you felt like hanging out again.”

  Mary straightened up in bed, neatening the blankets. Her fingernails were painted with tiny ladybugs, little pops of red and black. “I don’t think so, Will.” She tried clearing her throat, but her voice was still thick. “I got a fresh start today. Things can finally go back to normal. I can pretend this whole awful year never happened.” She hesitated, then said, “If I could turn back time . . .”

  “Yeah?” I asked.

  Mary just nodded at the television screen, and I realized she had solved the puzzle.

  3300 REM *** GAME OVER ***

  3310 POKE 53281,0:POKE 53280,0

  3320 PRINT "{CLR}{RED}"

  3330 PRINT "{9
SPACES}THY GAME IS OVER."

  3340 PRINT "{9 SPACES}YOU ARE TRAPPED"

  3350 PRINT "{6 SPACES}IN THE FORTRESS"

  3360 PRINT "{8 SPACES}FOR ALL OF ETERNITY."

  3370 PRINT "{6 SPACES}YOUR SCORE IS ";SCORE

  3380 PRINT "{6 SPACES}YOUR RANK IS ";RANK$

  3390 RETURN

  SCHOOL ENDED TWO WEEKS later and I started my Cosmex internship at six forty-five the following morning. The factory was hidden among a sea of warehouses off Route 287; I had to wake at five thirty and take two different buses to arrive on time. My boss was a short, squat Haitian man who never told me his name or asked for mine. He simply thumped his chest and said, “Boss Man.”

  “Boss Man?” I repeated.

  “Très bon!” he said.

  The factory floor was the size of several gymnasiums, full of quietly humming machines that united to create a dull roar. Within minutes of my arrival, Boss Man had me outfitted with earplugs and a hairnet, and I was standing over a conveyor belt with a box of mascara brush caps. He flipped a switch, and the line groaned to life; a row of open mascara tubes surged toward me. Boss Man grabbed a brush cap, plunged it into the first open tube, and twisted it closed. “Push, twist, yes?” he said.

  “Push, twist?”

  “Push, twist, push, twist, push, twist,” he said, capping the subsequent tubes with a speed that was dazzling. He gestured for me to join in the work, but the tubes moved faster than my hands; I felt like I was chasing them.

  “Push, twist, push, twist, push, twist,” Boss Man sang, like it was some kind of lullaby he’d learned growing up in Haiti. I hadn’t capped more than a dozen tubes when Boss Man abruptly stepped away. “First break ten thirty.”

  “Hang on,” I called. “Can I just—”

  “Push, twist!”

  He was already gone and the tubes kept coming, hurtling down the line like the march of the wooden soldiers. My heart was racing; my palms were sweating. I needed all of my concentration just to keep up. Some twenty feet to my left, at the end of the conveyor belt, a trio of elderly women collected the finished tubes and placed them in slender cardboard sleeves. They regarded me with suspicion, just waiting for me to screw up.