by Z. Rider
Fucking Insylum—the most badass funhouse in existence.
Two years we’d been waiting for it to come our way.
I tugged the sheet of paper down, my jaw hanging open at the dates. Its last night in town would be the night before A.J. was shipping out—so when we’d go was a no-brainer. What a last hurrah, right?
I watch the toe of my sneaker tip the pebble over again. Oo-fucking-rah.
“On the other hand,” A.J. says, “they might just rush us through. They probably want to pack the place up and get on the road.”
“In the middle of the night?”
He shrugs.
Two days ago, this was going to be the best night ever.
If it weren’t for Delia—and I have no idea why my sister decided to tell me, why she thought I needed or wanted to know, especially given how she and A.J. had already decided they were going to sweep the whole thing under a rug—I would be blissfully ignorant right now. A muscle in my jaw jumps. That would have been nice.
“I’ve gotta work tomorrow anyway,” I say.
Time stalls while we wait.
Yesterday, when I was still trying to process the whole situation, I asked Delia if she wanted me to go with her to the clinic, since A.J.’d be in Afghanistan by the time her appointment came up, but she said she had Grace to keep her company, whoever Grace was. Someone from school. I might have met her once, or not.
I’m still trying to get my head around how it happened. I wasn’t there when it started. That’s the thing I keep coming up on—I wasn’t there, but both A.J. and Delia were. A party I didn’t even know about, wasn’t invited to. Like it was for grown-ups, and A.J., with his newly bristled hair and his newly muscled arms, he’s one of them now, while here I am, still the kid who lives and breathes card games and works in a game store and thinks somehow he can make a future out of that. And I like girls, but I’m not knocking them up and taking off to the other side of the world. And if A.J. had a sister, the last fucking person in the world I’d knock up…
Fuck.
Who’s the grown-up here, really?
Behind the admitting desk, the nurse reads a true-crime magazine from what looks like the sixties. The wall of clipboards spans behind her back, like rows of pinned moths. If I tilt my head, Kate and her boyfriend’s knees jut into the edge of my view. They’re filling out paperwork. I wonder what the releases they’re signing say. I’d read some of what people described on Reddit—and then A.J. and I had stopped following the sub so we wouldn’t have the fun taken out of it when we finally got our chance.
“Are you nervous?” I ask.
“Didn’t we just have this conversation?”
“I mean about Afghanistan.”
“Not really, I guess. What’s the point? I’m going either way.”
I pull my hands into my coat sleeves. The knife-blade chill is back. Voices float from around the corner, excited chatter heading toward the cars. I push my fingers into my armpits, rocking a little.
After a long five minutes, their car pulls out of the field, tires crunching on frozen ground.
A light rain starts to fall.
I swipe my nose with my sleeve. A.J. stands with his hands in his back pockets, his jacket hanging open, his cheeks ruddy from the cold. He’s looking up the face of the building, up to where INSYLUM is graffitied in yellow chemical-waste letters.
Inside, the nurse takes Kate and her boyfriend to another room. The door shuts, leaving the admissions area empty.
As rain patters my coat, I hope they haven’t forgotten we’re out here. I sniff and wipe my nose with my sleeve. The warm light inside is inviting from where I stand. I wish she’d have let us in before going off with the others.
“Did she say anything to you?” A.J. asks.
“Who?”
“D.”
I sniff again. “Like what?” But the nurse is coming back. She hangs two clipboards on a peg, takes another two down. Her hair, the color of dead coals, is combed into a bun so tight it pulls the outside of her eyes up, making her look Asian, except the middle of her face is all doughy Irish. She shoves open the door.
“Janowski. Wexel.”
We duck our heads as we cross the threshold. While she turns the lock on the door, we wait awkwardly in the space between her heavy desk and a couple of paint-chipped metal chairs kicked against a wall.
She puts clipboards in our hands. “Complete the intake forms and return them to the desk.”
Our names are written across the top. She’s gotten them backward. I hand Andrew Wexel, Jr., over to A.J. and he hands me Nate Janowski.
The room isn’t toasty, but it’s dry, and the wind isn’t getting in. Trailing A.J. to the chairs, I draw the pen from under the board’s clip. The form has an awful lot of boxes—as bad as going to a real doctor.
All the while, the nurse hums tunelessly behind her desk.
As we rise from our chairs a few minutes later, she lifts a clunky phone receiver. “Two incoming.” By the time we’re at her desk, she’s on her feet, thrusting her squared-off hand out. It makes me think of a meat cleaver.
When A.J. passes her his clipboard, he says, “Your name doesn’t happen to be Ratched, does it?”
Frown lines hunker around her mouth. “Give me your right wrists.”
“They’re not exactly detachable,” A.J. says.
My molars grind.
When I hold my arm out, dragging my sleeve off my wrist, she snaps the band with fingers like jerky dried tough around knobby bones. The ID band has a patient number on it, matching the top sheet of the form I just filled out. The Insylum logo is fuzzy from a cheap print job. They didn’t even spring for toxic yellow ink; it’s just black.
While A.J. twists the strip on his wrist, the nurse says, “This way.”
And he says, “032996AW—it’s like my lucky number.”
It’s his birth date, and mine’s my birth date. And I’m sick of him acting clever. The more he speaks up, the more I feel myself shutting down.
There’s only one door aside from the main entrance, gray-painted steel with INTAKE stenciled on it. It falls soundly shut behind us.
“Your belongings go in a tub,” the nurse says. “This includes your shoes and clothes, except your underwear. You will not take any cell phones, electronic devices, wallets, coins, or other belongings with you into the hospital. Each person gets his own tub.”
Shelving units line two walls. Powder-blue bundles fill the shelves on one side, racks of diarrhea-tan tubs on the other. Down the middle runs a steel table, empty. In a corner, a privacy screen looks like it’s been rolled in from the 1950s, its curtain a yellowed pleat stretched over a frame. The whole thing hunches on chunky rubber-treaded wheels. I wonder if Kate slipped behind the screen to change or if she’s undressed often enough in front of Mr. Basketball that she didn’t bother.
There’s also a chair in the room, folding metal like the ones outside. The seat’s dented.
“You’ll choose a shirt and bottoms each from the shelves,” the nurse is saying. In the sharp lighting, the creases in her face turn out to have creases hiding inside them, except at her temples where her bun pulls everything smooth, all the way down to her up-slanted eyes. “Sizes are marked, starting with small. Slippers are in the bin at the end. After you’ve changed, secure your tub with the lid that matches the number on your band, make sure it is locked, and leave it on the counter. When you’re finished, you’ll go through that door.”
“That” door is a scarred wooden slab that looks like it was ripped out of the old building at Gilchrest Elementary—the building, with its rusting pipes and thick layers of interior paint, that I heard they’re going to tear down to make room for a new eco-friendly one. A.J. and I first ran into each other in the basement boys’ bathroom there. I hate to admit it, but at the time I’d been struggling to choose between stanching my bloody nose or picking up the Pokémon cards Tug Wilson and his assholes had scattered over the chipped green tiles.
“Do not,” the nurse says before she leaves us to ourselves, “under any circumstances come back through these doors.”
2
No One Fucking Disappeared
Shrugging, A.J. slips off his jacket.
While I sit on the metal chair, A.J. leans his shoulder on a wall to pull his boots off. By the time I’m unbuckling my belt, he’s already dragging a flimsy pair of blue cotton bottoms over his knees.
His paper slippers whisper as he goes after a lid. He checks its number before popping the lid onto his box. The latches snap as he flips them shut.
As I drag my sweater over my head, I’m worrying about what happens if I get to the end of this and they’ve somehow lost my tub. You know—car keys, smartphone, wallet, my entire life. My hair clings to the inside of the sweater.
When I can see again, A.J.’s opening the door we’re supposed to go through.
“Hey.”
“Just looking.” He cranes his head into the flickering darkness.
I pull a thin top over my head, the cheap blue fabric worn dull from who knows how many washings.
At least they were washed.
A.J. waits, leaning on the door to keep it open.
I tug a pair of crinkly slippers over my feet.
“Ready?” he says.
I feel ridiculous. “Yeah. Let’s get it over with.”
“After you.”
The hallway, like I’d already guessed, is dark, but it’s also short, ending in an L that joins a flickering corridor. Insylum’s interior walls are cheap metal, burnished so they suck up the ceiling’s jittery light instead of reflecting it.
This is where all the light goes to die.
The seams where sections fit together show. Under our feet, the floor is textured with raised hashes—for safety, I guess. We’re walking around with glorified tissue paper on our feet, after all.
Doors shadow the hall, each with a small window set at face height. Like it’s a prison, there are shutters that slide shut over the windows, some of them drawn, some open. As I approach the first door—one with a closed shutter—I toss a look back at A.J.
He gives a little nod.
I close my fingers around the handle, the metal gravely, like no one could be bothered to file it smooth. The shutter sticks in its tracks, juddering open by fits as I tug it. The window behind it is diamonded with wire-mesh reinforcement, and beyond that, moonlight falls through a barred window.
I cut my eyes back to A.J., who’s beside me now, waiting to get a look.
The moonlight highlights a narrow bed shoved to the side of the cell. It’s just a metal frame and springs, no mattress, but bedsheets lay twisted at its foot.
A.J. bumps me, his chin crowding my shoulder. The place looks chilly. Empty. I’m ready to move on—whatever attraction had been in here must have called it a night already.
That’s the trouble with going last.
A.J.’s breathing in my ear. He’s also blocking me from moving on. I’m about to say something when a slam on the other side of the door rocks me back into him.
He starts to laugh against my back, but the laugh’s lost under an eardrum-rattling shriek from the moonlit room.
A mess of grayish teeth framed in a sneer appears in the window. Above the curled lip, a sharp nose wrinkles. Eyes narrow. The shaved head tilts, its scalp pocked with scabs. The mouth opens again, a dark maw. A rush of fog hits the glass as a shriek blasts against the window.
The small hairs on the back of my neck stiffen.
“Bet you’d like to get out, wouldn’t you?” A.J. says to it.
I shrug out from in front of him, my cheeks prickly. I feel out of breath.
She hits the door again. I glance back—she closes her eyes, tilts her chin up, and screams. It’s like she’s singing an ear-splitting song to us. The window clouds from her breath again, and she smashes her face to the glass to get another look out.
Her thin lips glisten. Half her crooked teeth are broken jags. Her gums are like dark rot, and the tip of her nose flattens, pale gray against the glass like a fat slug.
A.J. hooks me by the elbow. “Let’s see what else they got. Gotcha though, didn’t it?”
Adrenaline pumps brittle through my nerves. “You jumped too.”
He grins. “I hope they can do better than that.”
“You see what’s in this one. I’ll stand in the back this time.”
This one has its window already uncovered. While A.J. steps up to it, the freak up the hall shrieks like a pterodactyl. I clutch the back of my neck, squeezing, trying not to feel stupid for letting the first jump scare get me.
“Rats,” A.J. says.
“What?” I’m thinking he’s complaining instead of stating a fact, but when I peek in the window, there are hundreds of furry bodies climbing tipsily over each other in a slant of moonlight.
“Sweet,” I say. “Think the door opens?” The handle doesn’t budge.
A.J. ducks away. “I doubt anyone wants to run around catching rats before they dismantle the place.”
I rest my chin on the shutter’s track. The crazy patient screeches. The noise jerks the skin behind my ears tight. I wish she’d knock it off already. “I like rats. Hey, what do you think that is?”
A.J. wanders back. “What?”
“Over by the wall. Under the rats.” I press my finger to the glass, shifting out of the way to let A.J. see but not so far that I lose sight of the small pile of rodents behaving less aimlessly than the general crowd. “It looks like a body. Or what’s left of one.”
“It’s a prop. Not even that great of one. I hope we didn’t pay fifty bucks apiece for three hours of shit locked behind doors.”
The rats nearest the prop are digging in, shoving others out of their way with their heads to get at whatever it is. One tugs something with its teeth. Its whiskers twitch in the moonlight. Its claws scrabble over the head of another rat. The claws are always what I liked the best about rats, so delicate and agile under those bumble-backed bodies.
The springiness of what it has in its teeth puts my own teeth a little on edge. It’s flexing and giving in the same way I imagine a bit of torn flesh would respond. That it’s glossy and streaked red doesn’t help.
“They probably slathered the thing with bacon grease so the rats’d pay attention,” A.J. says.
“Yeah.” I pull away. “I hope they can do better than this.” I’m ready to move to the next door, but A.J. has turned back toward the shrieker.
He looks ridiculous in the short-sleeve pajamas and paper footies. Which means I look even worse.
I don’t know what he’s thinking as he looks back at that door, but the shrieker’s got her cheek smashed against the window, a grin on her face, and a gleam in her eye, which can’t be good. “Don’t encourage her.”
“Was it like that before?” he asks.
I follow his gaze down the shrieker’s door. It’s lumpier than I remember, but how much attention had I paid earlier? I’d wanted to know what was inside.
With a bang that makes me flinch, another lump appears. So that answers that question.
“They must go through a lot of doors.” I turn. Near the end of the corridor, a half-open door spills jaundiced light like it’s trying to call attention to itself. Whatever’s in there is probably something worth seeing. “Let’s check this one out.”
“We’ll get there.” He’s at another door, another with its shutter closed. He drags it open and peers inside, nose to glass. “Empty.”
“That’s what we thought before.”
“Nah, I think this one really is.”
I look in. The barred window on this side of the hall looks out onto a wall instead of the sky, but thin artificial light filters in, revealing a m
etal bed frame with a rolled-up mattress at the end of it.
“Looks like they have a place reserved for you,” I say.
He pushes away from the cell. “I’ll keep it in mind next time I get some R&R.”
The military jargon is like grit under my fingernails. It’s bad enough he doesn’t look like the A.J. I know anymore, but the lingo on top of it: I need to hit the head. I was up at O-dark thirty. Next time I get some R&R.
I get it. I get it. You joined the fucking military.
“Ready?” His back’s against the hallway wall, an arm stretched toward the half-open door, ready to nudge it even farther—like this is some kind of maneuver we’re on.
The screamer’s still banging, and I wonder if her hands are getting sore. I wonder what it’s like, working at a funhouse, how it compares to working at a game store, which I’d thought was going to be the best job ever because I’d be surrounded by games and game players all day. But I also have to run the register and sweep the floor, and then there’s Kenny Dobbins, with his striped shirt floating like a tent over his belly. He smells—a sharp, high-pitched sourness. And normally I would not give a fuck: how you want to look and how you want to smell is your business, but he comes in every fucking Thursday evening, fingers through all the new stuff, leaving oily prints on the cellophane wrappers, and leans against the counter, booming nasal opinions about games he probably hasn’t even fucking played—as if I don’t have other shit to do.
Funhouse actors probably have trade-offs too. Like banging a metal door for ten fucking minutes while the customers dawdle.
A.J.’s cheek is pressed to the wall, his eyes looking toward the opening, his fingers slowly moving the door. Right now, I’m as irritated with him as I am whenever I hear the bell at the store’s entrance tinkle on Thursday evenings. Can we not just act normal tonight?
