by Kit Reed
“I do, I do!”
“You do?”
“Don’t I?” Gavin is sobbing for breath. Is this the wrong thing to say?
“You either do or don’t.”
When you can’t eat what you want, you gorge on power and Gavin knows that when you are this close to power, you tread extremely carefully. Taking his cue from his leader’s glare he shouts, “I do!”
The Reverend’s laugh is surprising. “Then the more fool you.”
“I mean I don’t.”
“You don’t?”
“I want to do this right!”
“Trust me, you will.” The Reverend Earl reaches into his pants pocket underneath the white linen cassock he wears for these occasions.
Keys jingle and Gavin lifts his head like a dog at suppertime. This is after all what he’s been working and waiting for, the reward and the incentive. “Will what?”
The Reverend Earl says as if he has explained everything, “Do it.”
“Do what?”
“You know.”
“Believe or not believe?”
“You will.” The Reverend is the master of the significant pause. . “Understand?”
Is this a trick question? The qualifying test that he must complete properly? The archangel-in-waiting is crazy with the ambiguity. Until now it’s been all about losing the weight and the discipline, everything done by the clock, and once Gavin reached the clubhouse, the show: endless rehearsals and tapings, mandated workouts to buff the abs and pecs, hours spent tanning and doing facial scrubs and maintaining the hair, which must be perfect, but now … “Which?” he shouts angrily. “Which!”
The Reverend Earl smiles and smiles. Finally he drops both shoes. “You will trust me and you will believe it.”
It’s no answer and Gavin knows it but he also knows what the Reverend Earl expects—he’s always expected it: unqualified assent, never mind what you are assenting to. Saying yes to him may be the whole point. Gavin says with his hands spread to indicate complete submission, “I will.”
It is a kind of ceremony. This is not your ordinary Nigel Peters flying up to the Afterfat and taking his promised place in the clubhouse, which he and Jerry Devlin perceive as the inner circle.
This is the real inner circle. Like fools, the Reverend Earl’s early converts think all you have to do is fly up to the clubhouse and you’ve made it, but they are wrong. Inside the clubhouse, there are degrees. Angels-in-training. Angels. Archangels. Only the officers of the corporation are allowed into this room and Gavin here is about to become an archangel. In another minute he will have what Nigel Peters and Jeremy Devlin want.
“And you will follow me.”
“I will.”
The Reverend Earl keeps his voice low, but it cuts to the bone. “To the death,” he says.
“To the death,” Gavin says.
“You will take the keys.”
Gavin suppresses a greedy swallow. “I will take the keys.”
“You will accept all that this implies.”
“I will.”
“No matter what it implies.”
“Whatever it implies.”
“And you will do the work.”
“I will do the work.”
“Whatever it is.” The Reverend Earl’s eyes are boring right into him.
“Whatever it is.” Deep inside Gavin, something squirms.
For the first time since they came into the inner office, the Reverend Earl’s eyes shift. He is glancing at his watch. “And you will do it well.”
It marks the birth of his misgivings. “I will do it well.”
“Until …” The leader holds up the keyring. “Say it.”
“Until what?”
“I need to hear you say it.”
Gavin’s voice is small and tight. “Until what?”
“You know what.” The Reverend Earl repeats, “To …”
Like a seal jumping for a fish he leaps to the conclusion. “You mean, to the death.”
“No.”
Mistake? Oh no, not now. Don’t let me make a mistake this late in the initiation. “No?”
“No. To the end.”
“To the end.” Oh yes he is frightened.
“Whatever that is.” The Reverend Earl holds the keyring up so Gavin can study the keys on it. They aren’t exactly the keys to the kingdom, but they are clearly marked: Clubhouse. Spa. Pool house. Barn, which remains a puzzle and a mystery even to the initiates. There is another key, conspicuously unmarked. Big, square with an octagonal head, designed to fit a lock he hasn’t seen.
“This square key isn’t …” There is no rough lock matching this key in the clubhouse. In the clubhouse, all the locks are gold plated.
“No, it isn’t.”
“What does it mean?” Gavin asks, because in the Reverend Earl’s cosmos even the stupidest things are invested with meaning.
“I have a job for you.”
“What kind of job?”
The Reverend shakes his head: no explanations here, and none coming. “Do you accept?”
“I do.”
“And you’ll do it.”
“I will.” Gavin has no idea what he is accepting. He grasps the keys.
“No matter what it is.”
“I will.”
“And you’ll do it every day.”
“I will.”
“No matter how hard it is.”
“I will.”
“Or how disgusting.”
“I will.” The keys bite into his palm. Shaken, he relaxes his fingers.
“And you will tell no one.”
“No one,” Gavin says.
20
“She’s around here somewhere.” Marg Abercrombie is in a diner outside So Low, Arizona, with a clutch of transients and wary locals, flashing Annie’s picture on her PDA. Nobody much wants to look. “She has to be.”
The Flowering Cactus is a pleasant enough place, fixed-up railroad car on an adobe foundation with booths and a counter in the front and an adobe addition where the tourists sit. The waitresses zigzag adroitly, lifting their trays to keep from nicking Marg, who is patently in their way.
“I’ve looked everyplace else. Has anybody seen this girl?” Marg moves from counter to booths to the tables, flashing the PDA like a snapshot, but she can’t seem to get anybody to give the image—her beautiful Annie’s picture!—the time of day.
“She’s my daughter. If you’ve seen her, tell me. Please!”
Either the glare makes the tiny screen too hard to read or there aren’t enough pixels in the world to capture Annie, not the way she really is. Either way, Marg can’t seem to get their attention. Everyone just keeps on eating. When she tugs their arms and thrusts the image on the PDA in front of them the ranch hands glance at it and shrug; the Navajos sitting at the counter shrug and shake their heads without looking at it at all. It is as if for them, at least, in this territory everything is a foregone conclusion, nothing unusual happens and there are no missing girls. The tourists in the place cast walleyed looks at Marg—is it bad hair or do I have something on my face?—pay their bills and leave.
“She’s sort of blonde,” she says anyway. “About my height, but pretty, with long straight hair. Her name is Annie, are you sure you haven’t seen her?” Lame, Marg! That sounds like a bad line out of a twentieth-century play but she can’t help herself. “If anybody’s seen her tell me, please!” Equally lame? Her delivery. Her voice comes out all quavery and uncertain, like a loser’s voice. She can assert herself in the classroom, but she can’t seem to do it here.
OK, she barged in here like a mother from another planet, no credentials, no missing persons reports to back up her case and no three-color quality-printed fliers, not even Annie’s face on a milk carton to make her point. She didn’t even write an opening speech to gain their confidence. She came in—face it—unprepared. Her bad encounter at the gate to—what was that the gate to? The guard didn’t let her get close enough to see. Marg fol
lowed intricately forking tribal roads right straight to the X that Sister Dolores Farina put on her map with Magic Marker last night in Oklahoma. Anxious and furtive, the Dedicated thrust it into her hands with a tentative smile and at the last minute she panicked and shoved her out the door. X marked the spot but when Marg got to the place the guard wouldn’t let her inside the gate. He threatened her and like the wuss she is, she backed off. The encounter has left her shaken, that she knows. Shaken, but OK. She is definitely OK. She has by, God, crossed the country alone looking for her oldest child, she drove all this way all by herself and when she got a flat outside Dubuque, Iowa, she definitely coped. Since then she’s talked her way into Dedicated installations in a half dozen states and won over hostile strangers in eateries a lot seedier than this, and not once … Not once has she wished she had Ralph along to help.
Good. Things are bad but this, at least, is very, very good.
See, an interesting thing happens when you let yourself become dependent. When somebody else is in charge, you let things slide. Let things slide for long enough and he makes terrible decisions in your stead. In what might be construed as your absence from life he does terrible things, and he does them in your name.
Marg was preoccupied with her work and the kids for so long that Ralph became the default decision-maker in their house. He picked out everything from the wrong refrigerator to a couple of high-end, unaffordable cars. Face it, he’s made some bad decisions, of which sending Annie to the Dedicateds is definitely the worst. She is coping with the fallout here. See, you have to notice what’s happening before you can take hold. Stupid bastard, what was I thinking? How could I let you sign Annie’s life away?
She is forty-two years old and after she got married she let go of herself. She totally lost it. Whatever she thought she was. She’s only now beginning to get it back.
Whatever it takes she will find Annie and wherever she is she’ll get her out and God help her when she does. What will she have to do to help her daughter get over the trauma and the indignity? What will she have to do to regain Annie’s trust? What can she do or say to help her get well? And what, God. What is she going to do with Ralph? Too soon to tell, but she is going to have to make some decisions here. Meanwhile, adversity has sharpened her: For the first time in a long time, she remembers who she is. If you want something done right, she thinks resentfully, give the job to a woman. Beauty is in the details, and you high-minded assholes are much too busy for details. You’ve left the details to us for so long that believe me, women are the masters of detail.
Better. She is feeling better.
Awful as this is, the search for Annie has toughened her. Things are just as bad as they ever were but she is definitely improved. She scopes the crowd in the restaurant, takes a deep breath and starts over.
“OK,” she says in a loud, clear voice.
Heads turn.
“OK!” She is using the voice that even in an auditorium wakes sleepers in the back row. “There is this gazillion-acre ring of razor wire out there in the desert, you’ve all seen it, no way you haven’t, right? There are security lights around the whole perimeter and for all I know, they have gun towers to keep people in, unless they’re to keep you out. So who are they?”
They are all looking now, but nobody really wants to meet her eyes.
“Who the fuck are they? And what.” She raises her voice and several people jump. “What! What is it about?”
There is a moment of hesitation in which they regard her. As one they turn away. Like a batch of synchronized swimmers, they dive back into their plates.
The silence is worse than the buzz and clatter of eaters pretending to ignore her when she first came in.
Never mind. Now that she’s hit her tone, Marg persists. “A place that big, there has to be some outgoing traffic. You can’t sit there and tell me nobody comes and nobody goes.”
All around her, diners are signaling for their checks. In this busy place Marg is an island around which other people flow.
“If you can’t tell me where my daughter is, at least tell me what’s going on.”
There is the rush of a collective sigh. Then everybody in the place goes back to what they were doing. Too much time passes. She’s giving it everything she has, but nothing changes.
“Excuse me.” Doing neat switches of the hip and angling their trays to avoid her, the waitresses paddle by.
Marg stands firm. She pulls herself together yet again and raises her voice to the level she used when she used to give lectures. “Is this about the Dedicated Sisters or what?”
The silence is intense. Every face in this place is closed to her. Sighing, she turns to go. She thinks she’s drawn a blank when in the far corner of the adobe dining room, there is a stir. As Marg turns to see what’s happened, someone huge billows to her feet. In a voice richer than fudge sauce over ice cream, the big woman says, “Wait.”
21
On the wall of the windowless room where they are keeping her, Annie Abercrombie has scratched words to live by.
MY BODY IS ALL I HAVE
FOOD IS EVIL
YOU CANT TEMPT ME
YOU CANT TRICK ME
YOU WONT CHANGE ME
I DON’T GIVE UP
It’s this kind of grim activity that keeps a prisoner sane, and that’s what she is here, a prisoner. One failed breakout and the Dedicated Sisters have moved her from patient category to inmate, like she is a criminal and this is the state pen. Before they locked her in they shook her down like a Death Row convict, looking for anything she could use to hurt herself or somebody else. They stripped her hospital gown and put her into a canvas shift so rugged that her butt is sore and the skin on her hip bones is rubbed raw. She’d be in restraints if Sister Darva hadn’t waved them off, which was big of her, considering. Like, this attempted jailbreak (you heard me, she thinks, jail) happened on her watch, which, for an entry-level Dedicated like Darva, is a definite black eye. As the door swung shut Darva shot her a loving, resentful look and blew her a kiss good-bye. Now Annie is wondering, Am I in solitary or what?
She has no idea how long she’s been here—long enough to scratch her credo into the wall with her fingers and go over and over each letter until it was end-of-the-world headlines size, coloring in the words with her own blood. When you’re miserable, time gets huge, it’s exponential. She doesn’t know what time it is right now, or whether it’s dark or light outside. Sometimes she jolts awake and sits up, listening to a mysterious rumble, a bigger version of the cart rolling from here to there, but she has no idea where those locations are. She doesn’t know where she is in the building. In fact, she doesn’t know where this particular building is; she was out cold on that terrible night when they threw her in the van and brought her here, so she doesn’t know if the Dedicateds’ clinic is on a mountain or in a valley or what. She has no idea how far from home she is. Why, she and Kelly and the others could be stashed in the high-rise right behind her neighborhood strip mall. When she and Kelly found the window in the clinic basement, she thought they were home free. All she had to do was break the glass. She could hardly wait to run free in the fresh night air. Instead she hit solid dirt. They were underground. The basement level was completely underground.
Solitary can turn your thinking from frantic to crazy, like, what if the whole building is underground?
Solitary can make you want to die.
MY BODY IS ALL I HAVE.
Then what the fuck is she doing here? When you look at photos of the ideal Dedicated Sisters clinic in the brochure and on the Web page, you never see this. They make it look all fluffy and wonderful. This barren cube is nothing like the flowery rooms in the pictures, the ones that convinced her folks it was worth a hundred K to send her here. It’s nothing like her old room on the ANO ward, either, with its pale lavender walls and indirect lighting, with the scenic landscape painted on the window shade, in case you missed the great out-of-doors. There are no niceties here, no letter
paper with the gold logo and nothing to write with, no furniture except for this rickety steel cot. The cement floor is bare. The room is white, with no clock and no bedside lamp. There is nothing here but a ceiling light too high to reach, with a little cage around the bulb in case you thought you were going to smash it and cut yourself, a steel toilet-basin unit in the corner and that’s it. Think insane asylum. No. Think jail.
So is this Solitary, or what? Is Annie in the hole? In fact, Annie Abercrombie has fallen into the best-kept secret of the entire Dedicated Sisters scam. The dungeon level, where they hide their failures. Stubborn cases that they can’t “cure.”
But Annie is forever optimistic. She thinks she can hang in here and scope the place and find a way out.
She wants to believe this jail thing is only temporary. Like, it’s something Darva thought up, a last-ditch scare tactic laid on to stampede her into eating enough to gain a little weight. Like if she can fool the Dedicated keeper into thinking she’s eating, maybe they’ll let her go? She doesn’t know.
But fears chase each other around inside her head like dungeon rats. What if she’s been filed in the Dedicated Sisters’ dead-letter office like an old thing that’s outlived its function but is still around? Like, she could be sitting in here stamped Canceled, with nothing in her future but the incinerator or the Dumpster where they dispose of all their trash. She can just imagine the phone call home, where they break the news: Dedicated Domnita or maybe the famous Mother Imelda, whom she’s never seen, will make the call, smarming into the phone while Dad grins triumphantly and her mother sobs. Imelda will break it gently: “Just when she was doing so well.” The news will come down in practiced, sympathetic fluting, like a bad solo in the high school band. “Poor Annie, she was gaining, you would have been thrilled! We were going to give her back to you with a Certificate of Merit, but she died.”
Sobered, she does the Ophelia thing, lying on her back with her hands matched up, pretending to be dead. In a way, it is alluring, she would in her own way get exactly what she wanted, Annie Abercrombie thin at last—thin beyond her wildest hopes, reduced to a sweep of blonde hair and the pure, clean, uncluttered lines of her beautiful bones.
