by Glenn Cooper
“Easy, Chuck,” Holland said. “If Jamie writes down the drugs she needs, could you leave camp and look for them?”
Streeter jumped at the excuse to get out of camp. Jamie jotted down a list and he was off.
When they were alone, Holland asked if he was sure the drugs would help.
“The seizures, not the cancer.”
“Will she have pain? Later, I mean.”
“Not from the seizures, but if the cancer spreads to her bones, she will. I’m sure Streeter’s got a nice supply of narcotics if that happens. At night, he nods off like a junkie.”
“I’m getting tired of the two of you going at each other,” Holland said. “Would you please get off of his back?”
“The day you let us leave,” Jamie said. “Until then, everyone—and not just us—is living in fear of that man.”
“How do you mean?”
“For Christ’s sake, Jack. Open your eyes. Haven’t you seen the way some of the young women act when he’s around?”
“Your girls?”
“Not mine. I don’t leave them alone with him for a second.”
“Then what are you saying?”
“I’m saying that you don’t patrol the camp at night. He does. If you don’t think he’s got favorites that he’s having his way with, then you’re blind. We’ve seen the women on our rounds. Connie, Gloria, and I all think your new, moral society is already rotten to the core.”
“That can’t be true. I would know.”
“Fine, Jack. Whatever you say. I’ll come back in a couple of hours to check on Melissa.”
*
Camp life was becoming repetitive.
Jamie and Connie awoke every morning from their platonic bed, let Arthur out, and got the fires going. They had complained that the stone fireplace was inadequate and demanded that a potbellied stove be installed on the opposite wall. Rocky had a spare and banged out the job in a day. He wouldn’t get up on the roof to seal the hole he cut for the vent pipe, complaining that his roofing days were over, and Jamie, armed with instructions, laddered up to do the job. Once the fires were roaring, they started breakfast, cooking frontier-style on a grate over the log fire and making coffee on the stove. Then it was time for the first conflict of the day.
Jamie had insisted on locking Dylan’s bedroom door from the outside every night. He had seen enough of Emma and Dylan’s infatuation to convince him that the two of them would dive into sex at the first opportunity.
“We’re going to have to put a padlock on his door,” Jamie had said.
“I’m not locking my son in his room.”
“We don’t have a choice, Connie. There’s no contraception. A pregnancy and delivery is unthinkable under these conditions.”
“Put the lock on the girls’ door if that’s what you want.”
“He’ll figure out how to unscrew it. He’s got a knack with tools.”
“He fixed his own car,” she said with a vague pride.
“That kind of memory is intact.”
“Thank you, Dr. Memory.”
“Look, I know you’re pissed at me, but if locking his door doesn’t work for you, then you can bunk with him.”
“It’s not right for a mother to sleep in the same bed as her almost-an-adult son.”
“See? You don’t trust him either.”
“Fuck you, Jamie. Just fuck you.”
In the end, she relented and they got a lock from Rocky and kept the key under a coffee mug. And every morning, when Jamie went for the key, Connie would come up with a new dig, like, “Hey, zookeeper, would you unlock my son’s cage?”
The kids would get up, taking their turns in the bathroom, and seated at their small table, the dog begging for scraps, Emma and Dylan would start their flirting.
“I missed you,” Emma would say.
“I missed you too.”
“Do you want to hold my hand?” he said.
“Yes.”
She reached under the table. “All right.”
They had found a tube of camp tennis balls in a cupboard and Dylan went to get them. “Do you want to play outside?”
“Yes.”
“Not now, Dylan,” Connie said.
“Can we play after breakfast?” Emma asked.
Jamie said they could.
Kyra was no longer jealous of them. She had her mind elsewhere.
“Can we find Jeremy, Daddy?”
Jamie would usually take her with him on his morning rounds while Connie looked after Dylan and Emma. His cast off, he was fully mobile. Kyra’s cast was gone too and she was happy again. While Jamie checked on the health of Holland’s recruits, she and Jeremy would come along and do their flirting under Jamie’s watchful eye. Later in the day, Connie would examine the recruits Jamie wanted her to see, those with problems more up a surgeon’s alley—injuries, abdominal pains, gynecological issues.
Jamie’s rounds would end at Holland’s house where he saw his last two patients. Melissa Holland was getting worse. Streeter had found a supply of Dilantin for her seizures, but she was still convulsing several days a week. One arm was useless and a leg was weak enough that she could no longer walk without assistance. She lived a bed-to-chair existence and confusion was creeping in.
“She asked me about a lesson plan for her colonial history course last night,” Holland told Jamie one day. “She thinks she needs to give a lecture at college.”
“Prepare yourself for more of that,” Jamie said coldly.
Holland was his captor, and Jamie refused him the compassion he would ordinarily give the husband of a sick patient. He told him the truth about her prognosis, kept laying out his complaints about Streeter’s addiction and misdeeds, and spent as little time in Holland’s presence as possible.
After seeing Melissa, he would move on to his other patient, Gloria Morningside.
Her listlessness had progressed to a full-blown depression, and Jamie spent time with her every day, encouraging her and trying to give her some kind of hope. It was an uphill battle.
She would say, “My husband is dead, my family in Iowa—well, I can’t bear thinking what may have become of them. We’re prisoners. We’re cut off. What’s the point?”
“You’re the president, Gloria. You’re the hope. You told Oliver Perkins that his job wasn’t meaningless. Remember?”
“Oliver is dead. The government doesn’t exist. He was right. The job is meaningless.”
Over a meal or lying in bed, their backs to one another, Jamie and Connie often argued about their other bone of contention—escape. Jamie wanted to try; Connie was against it.
“I’ve got to get to Maryland,” he said.
“These men are killers. If we’re caught, someone’s going to get shot. I can’t risk that.”
“I don’t think Rocky would hurt us,” Jamie said. “Maybe not Roger, either.”
“They’re as scared of Streeter as we are. Push comes to shove, they’ll probably shoot us. The other guys definitely will. And Streeter’s just itching for the excuse.”
“We can steal a car,” Jamie said. “I know where Holland keeps his keys. We wait till the middle of the night. I’m pretty sure the night guards don’t stay awake. We crash the gate and we take off.”
“What about Gloria?”
“I don’t think we can get her out of the house. She’d have to stay.”
“Very nice.”
“There are larger issues, Connie. The epidemic.”
“Forget it. I’m not going to risk my son getting hurt or having him left without a mother. The answer is no.”
“Then stay. I’ll take Emma and Kyra,” he said.
“And leave Dylan and me behind? You know what? You’ve become a real ass, Jamie.”
Through his anger and frustration, he wondered if maybe she was right.
55
“Do you know what he’s forcing me do?” Morningside told Jamie one morning. “He’s making me come to one of his talks.”
It
was a sunny day, calmer and milder than it had been for a couple of weeks. These were the kind of winter days that Holland gathered all his recruits around the flagpole for a large-group lesson. When the temperature plummeted and the wind blew, he crammed half the recruits into one bunkhouse for a morning lecture, then repeated it for the other half in the afternoon.
Jamie agreed to go with her. He had been to some of Holland’s lessons and found them to be unpleasant propaganda exercises, but Morningside was becoming increasingly fragile and he thought she could use the support. Underneath a drooping American flag, Holland stood on a wooden box so everyone could see him. He had Morningside seated on a folding chair, wrapped in a blanket. The recruits stood in a semi-circular gaggle on trampled snow, and Streeter’s men formed a loose perimeter, their rifles casually slung. Streeter had scored a display rack of mirrored aviator sunglasses from a drugstore raid and he had given each man a pair. This had become their uniform. Streeter lounged in an Adirondack chair, nodding off, his head on a swivel. Jamie could usually recognize his drug-du-jour, and today, it was definitely opioids. Opioid days were preferable by a mile to amphetamine days. Sleepiness was safer than aggression.
Jamie stood off to one side studying the faces of the recruits. He had come to know all of them on his medical rounds when he treated their diseases of close quarters—sore throats, respiratory infections, diarrheas. Holland kept the sexes strictly separated, and so far, there hadn’t been any sexual assaults although he maintained his suspicions about Streeter. Males being males, there were occasional fistfights and wrestling matches around bunkhouse territorial disputes, but a broken collarbone was the most serious injury Connie had dealt with.
Holland had given Streeter strict orders regarding the types of people he wanted for the camp. They had to be young, but not too young. Most were between the ages of sixteen and forty. They had to be healthy—he didn’t want to deal with injured or sickly recruits. For all his faults, Holland didn’t seem overtly racist, and the proportion of whites to people of color reflected the diversity of this area of North Carolina.
Holland may have been fair-minded, but Streeter wasn’t. It was obvious that he treated the blacks and Hispanics worse than the others, but when Jamie called him to task for singling out and verbally abusing a black kid to tears, Streeter claimed that he didn’t see color. “I just see a bunch of retards.”
Holland may have been color-blind, but he was dismissive of non-Christian theologies. According to something Roger told Jamie one day, they came across a young man in one of their raids, and when they brought him back to the camp, Streeter told Holland they thought he was probably Jewish based on paraphernalia they saw in the house. Holland had supposedly said, “Well, that doesn’t matter, does it? He won’t remember any of that. He’s a Christian now.”
During the month in camp, Jamie witnessed the recruits’ language skills grow by leaps and bounds. Emma, Kyra, and Dylan were also making progress not only with their acquisition of language, but also with an advancing fund of knowledge. Communication was getting easier. For Jamie and Connie, that meant it was becoming possible to be doctors instead of veterinarians. For Holland, it meant that his lessons could become more sophisticated. “When we started with them,” Mrs. Holland told Jamie from her sick bed, “it was like teaching Sunday School for kindergarteners. We drew pictures and used very simple words. Now, Jack tells me it’s like teaching sixth-graders. I’m hoping to live long enough to see them at high-school level. Jack will have to take them to college on his own, I suppose.”
Jamie and Connie generally enjoyed the recruits. They had something in common with their own kids—an inherently sweet naiveté. They had forgotten all the accumulated memories that made people defensive or fearful, arrogant or rude. The flipside of losing one’s identity was losing one’s baggage. What remained was a kind of childlike openness and wonder. Blair Edison had filled the minds of his minions with hatred of “bad men” and had whipped them into murderous inclinations. The Hollands’ teachings and preachings were of a more congenial nature, reflective of their vision of their Christian utopia. At least their recruits were becoming lambs, not lions.
Jamie’s favorite was Valerie, the Hollands’ neighbor and first recruit. She was a big, bouncy woman with a perpetual smile and an infectious enthusiasm. By the Hollands’ accounts, she had been an angry, bitter person, with a roster of arrests for shoplifting and passing bad checks to support a habit. Now, she was a delight.
“It’s my friend!” she would exclaim, when he came into her bunkhouse. “It’s Dr. Jamie!”
“Good morning,” Jamie would gasp, in the clutches of a bear hug.
“I love you.”
“I love you too.”
Releasing him, she would say, “I love Jesus, and I love Dr. Connie, and I love Jeremy, and I love Mr. H and I love Mrs. H and I love—”
He would stop her before she listed all her bunkmates.
For Holland’s group lesson that day, he used a bullhorn as usual so, as he said, his wife could hear him from her bed. Jamie suspected that amplifying his voice made him feel like a bigger man. The recruits huddled together for warmth around the flagpole and looked to him with eager faces.
“My friends,” Holland began, his words echoing off his house and back toward the lake, “let us give thanks to the Lord for this beautiful day. Say, thank you, Lord!”
“Thank you, Lord!”
“Mrs. Holland is still feeling sick. Mrs. Holland is in her bed. Please shout, as loud as you can, we love you, Mrs. Holland!”
“We love you, Mrs. Holland!”
“Now, I am sure that makes her feel better. What is our camp called?” he asked.
“Camp Clean Minds!”
“That’s right. You came here with clean minds because you couldn’t remember anything about your lives. Mrs. Holland and I are your teachers. The things we are teaching you are filling your minds with new facts and new ideas. But you will still have clean minds. You will not have dirty minds, because the things we teach you are about goodness. We do not teach you dirty things. The Bible says, let us do good to everyone, especially to those who are in the house of faith. We all live in the same house of faith, and that faith is based on our love for Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. So, who do we love?”
All said, “Jesus Christ!”
“Very good. Today, I want to talk about America again. You remember America, right?”
“Right!”
“Camp Clean Minds is in America. We are called Americans. America is very special. There are many countries in the world. The world is a very big place, much bigger than America. But do you want to know something? America is the best country in the world. Raise your hands if you want to know why it is the best country in the world?”
Hands went up.
“It is the best country because it has the best values. What are values? Values are the things we believe in, the things we hold to be true and important. I am going to teach you three American values. The first value is individual freedom. Say individual freedom.”
Some said it more fluently than others.
“Individual freedom is the power to do what we want, say what we want, and think what we want.”
Jamie thought, based on what Holland plants in your brain.
Holland said, “We cannot have freedom unless we can take care of ourselves. That is self-reliance.”
His second value was equal opportunity for all, and he said that since everyone had an equal chance for success in America, we have to learn how to compete for success. The third value was, what he called, the American dream, the opportunity for a better life.
“But understand this,” he said, “you cannot get your American dream without hard work. Each of you will have to work very hard. Will you work hard?”
“Yes, Mr. H!” they cried.
“Now America is a great country because we have the best values. We also have the best government. We have talked about government. Who rememb
ers what that is?”
Valerie raised her hand and waved it at him.
“Yes, Valerie.”
“The government is our leaders!”
“Good. Am I your government?”
“Yes!” Valerie exclaimed.
“That was not a fair question. I am your leader at Camp Clean Minds, but I am not your government. The government is chosen by the people. You did not choose me. The leader of the American government is called the President of the United States. We are so blessed and honored to have the President of the United States here at our camp.” He stood behind her and said, “President Morningside, please say a few words to everyone.”
Morningside made a face and covered the ear closest to his bullhorn.
“I don’t want to,” she whispered.
“Please, Madam President,” he insisted. “This is so special for them.”
He handed her the bullhorn and showed her what button to squeeze.
The bullhorn squawked to life again.
Jamie thought she looked strange. Her mouth was off-kilter, her eyes seemed to be focused, not on the assembly, but on a circling hawk.
Her voice boomed out, “Yes, I am the President of the United States, the leader of America, as Mr. Holland said. I want to tell you this: do not listen to Mr. Holland. He has taken away my freedom and your freedom. We are all his prisoners. We—”
Holland grabbed the bullhorn from her and the assembly came to a messy and abrupt end.
*
Emma had been taught what it was called, and when she announced one evening she was having her period, Jamie gave her a tampon. That’s when it occurred to him that Kyra hadn’t had hers in a while.
“How long has it been?” Connie asked him.
“I’ve lost track,” he said.
Connie offered to examine her and took the girl into her bedroom, where she put on gloves and told her to strip off her jeans and underwear.
She smeared some lubricant onto her fingers and said, “I’m just going to touch you down here to check out your lady parts.”
“What are lady parts?” Kyra asked.
“These, right here, and inside you. Pull up your knees.”
