by CJ West
“No thanks,” I said dismissively. “I’m just browsing.”
The two men parted and offered me a clear path to the door. The man in the suit, probably the store manager, said, “We don’t want any trouble.” He nodded toward my ankle. “It would be better for all concerned if you left.”
I heard my breath rush in. I felt myself stiffen. They were throwing me out because I was a relearner. I couldn’t believe such a thing could happen in America. I had rights. I’d never been discriminated against like this. I wanted to tell them what I was doing, but I couldn’t give myself away. They wouldn’t have believed I was fighting crime anyway.
All three of my potential jewel thieves turned to watch. There was no way I was going to catch them taking something now, not with the security guard threatening me. So I walked between the two men and out the door. How many times had this store been robbed when the prison doors first opened? How much had they spent to hide their scanner? And what would have happened if they posted a sign prohibiting relearners? Did people care? Or were they so fed up they’d be glad to shop where they were safe?
I’d never been so frustrated as when I sat back on the bench to rethink my strategy. Nathan and Wendell had a stranglehold on me if I stayed where I belonged. Out here with the unsuspecting public I had a chance until they realized I was a relearner. It didn’t matter if I was trying to do the right thing or not. Honest citizens didn’t want me near them. I thought about taking my ankle bracelet off, but I remembered the chip in my head and the chemicals dispersed through my body. I couldn’t be sure either story was true, but I knew that when I took my ankle bracelet off, trouble came looking for me.
If someone was going to steal from another store in the mall, I guessed it would be electronics, movies, or video games. I slipped in with the flow of shoppers moving along the wall of display windows. The scanner at the entertainment store was low inside the door, so rather than walk in and become a target, I stayed outside with my camera and watched the shoppers browse.
A group of kids, all about fourteen years old, flocked up and down the counters lined with CDs. They stayed in the pop section and if I was going to catch someone taking a CD, I guessed it would be one of them. After several minutes watching them joke, text message each other from four feet away, and slap and poke each other for no reason, I realized that I couldn’t capture a good enough image from outside the store. Even if I did, these kids would go to some sort of juvenile counseling. They wouldn’t be relearners assigned to Nathan, and that wouldn’t help me at all.
Further down, I stopped in front of two young women who looked suspicious in a lingerie shop. I couldn’t tell if they were nervous about wearing the skimpy underwear they were about to buy, or if they were considering slipping it into a pocket. It was small enough to hide, but women didn’t come to our complex, so I passed them up, too.
Several doors later, I spotted the guy I’d been looking for since I arrived. He was young, probably in his twenties, and he wore ratty clothes that were dirty in the butt and at the ankles like he’d been sitting in mud. He didn’t look like he could afford new clothes, but he needed them.
He went into three clothing stores, but came out empty handed—empty pocketed, too. He stopped for an ice cream and sat on a bench, watching people walk by for a good fifteen minutes. After that he turned back the way we had come. Lucky I was reading my book or he might have noticed I’d been behind him for nearly an hour.
Near the center of the mall, he turned and followed a short corridor wide enough to build a house inside. There were a few stores here, but he didn’t seem interested in what they had to offer. When he walked out to the parking lot, I absently followed. I wasn’t going to catch anyone here at the mall. Maybe it was the wrong place. Maybe the surveillance was too good and people knew it. Maybe people outside the reeducation system didn’t make a habit of stealing. That bothered me as I pushed through the glass doors. It was my life that didn’t fit. These people were the norm.
When I reached for the second set of doors a hand grabbed my collar and yanked me back. I choked. My eyes watered so much I lost sight of the dark parking lot. Lights filled my watery eyes as I turned and all I could see was brilliant white streaks.
An angry face met mine when I blinked my eyes clear. I’d been grabbed because I was a relearner. It was wrong and my arm was cocked and ready to show him how wrong he was, but before I let loose I remembered seeing the big guy bloody and dying on the lawn.
Good thing I didn’t turn around swinging. There were two more angry faces behind the first.
“I saw him,” said the man dressed in jeans and a blue-striped dress shirt. “He’s been following that guy for an hour. He was going to rob him in the parking lot.”
“Why would I rob that guy?” I asked. “What could he possibly have that’s worth taking?”
The guy said some nonsense about identity theft. That relearners cut off people’s thumbs and preserved them so they could collect their government checks. The two mall security guards looked at me like I’d had a machete to the guy’s hand.
“That’s ridiculous.”
The mall cops didn’t think so. They brought me back to the security office, along with the guy who grabbed me. They took his version of events, then called the cops for a report on where I’d been for the last hour. My computer-generated trail lined up well with the vigilante’s story. The mall cops called the police again. They listened to the audio from my anklet and found nothing suspicious.
The cops wanted cases they would win. Lucky for me, this wasn’t one.
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
The traffic light had cars backed up all along the mall access road. I walked past them on the sidewalk and turned toward home. I wasn’t going to walk the entire way. It was too far, but I wanted to get away from those mall cops before they invented a story good enough to get me back in front of the judge. The farther I walked, the darker the street became. The shadows would have bothered those shoppers who were freaked out by my ankle bracelet, but they didn’t bother me. I’d used darkness to hide so close to people I could reach out and touch them. Most would run screaming if they discovered me in their home.
Regular people spent their lives afraid someone like me would take their stuff or hurt someone they cared about. Were we really that different? I was afraid, too. When I was younger, I worried my mother would kill me. Later, I worried about getting enough to eat. Still later, I was constantly dodging the police. The biggest difference was that I didn’t have anything to protect. Once the cash and jewelry were taken from my safe deposit box, I didn’t have anything to lose in this world. Those people in the mall spent their life on alert for danger all to save a bunch of stuff they really didn’t need.
The road continued on for two miles without a bend or taxi stand. I walked through dozens of intersections and passed plenty of phones where I could have called for a ride, but I kept on walking and thinking about what happened in the mall. Then I wondered if all the pressure from Nick and Charlotte made sense. Jonathan shouldn’t be subjected to this. Not for the sake of a few visits to the sandbox. I should have agreed to sign the papers. It sounded simple, but I couldn’t give him up.
A while later I came to a series of three blocks where the streetlights were clustered close together and the sidewalks were so bright that the green grass shone along them. A red cart with a giant hot dog was angled at the corner to be visible to anyone leaving the five-story parking garage across the street. Beyond the cart was the entrance to an ice arena with an Italian name I couldn’t pronounce. I sat on a bench just short of the cart, thinking if I was going to catch someone stealing something tonight, it would be when dozens of people rushed the cart for a cheap hot dog. The hot dog vendor couldn’t afford surveillance cameras, or at least I didn’t think he could. He did have a thumb scanner on his cart, which made me long for the good old days when you could whip out a five, get a hot dog and a Coke, and the government didn’t need to know.
No one passed for the next ten minutes and I realized there must be a game going on inside. The vendor would make his sales when the flood of fans spilled out. I wasn’t sure I wanted to sit on that bench for another hour for the slight chance someone might do something they shouldn’t. Catching criminals was much harder than robbing houses. I could hit a house and get away clean on any given night. I’d spent a few days trying to catch a criminal without a hint of success. The problem was, you never knew where a criminal would be. Fancy houses didn’t move.
A couple crossed the street, the man hurrying the woman along, clearly in more of a rush to see the game than she was. He waited at the corner for her to catch up and the hot dog man went to work shuffling things around his cart. It was an act to look busy, to make his product appear fresh even though those same hot dogs had been cooked and sitting on his cart for an hour or more. The woman slowed and took a step toward the vendor, but her companion urged her toward the arena. When they were past us and focused on the concrete building, the vendor shrugged and stood back from his cart. The work that had him focused seconds ago didn’t matter until the next patron appeared.
“Slow night?” I asked.
“No, no,” he said. “Business good. Game ends, customers come.”
I wondered if he made more with his cart than the government was paying me to learn what I should have learned in school. If he did, it wasn’t much more, and I didn’t have to stand out in the dark and serve hot dogs and drinks. Judging by his clipped sentences and his accent, he could have benefited from the books Wendell forced me to read.
I gave him a thumbs up and felt weird about it.
He edged over toward my bench. “What you hide from?”
He was better off not knowing. I smiled and shrugged. “Just resting.”
He pointed to my ankle bracelet and grimaced as if he’d worn one once and knew what I was going through. He saw Lord of the Flies in my hand and said, “Good book.” Then he held his hand up over his shoulder like he was pumping a spear up and down and dancing in a circle.
“I haven’t gotten to that part yet.” It would take me another day of reading to get that far, but as the hot dog man sat down next to me in his dark blue jeans, white shirt, and long apron, I realized he’d been a relearner. Could he have graduated? I couldn’t believe my luck.
“Wendell good guy,” he said.
There next to me on the bench was a guy who could barely speak English but had graduated from Wendell’s program. For a second I felt like I had it all wrong, like reading the book was a waste of time, but this guy knew the book. He’d read it and he still remembered it. I was in awe. I never really thought I’d graduate until that moment. If he could do it, I could. I wasn’t even breathing on that bench. I was ready to grab onto anything he offered me.
He tapped the camera in my pocket. He knew exactly what it was, and I assumed a similar device had helped him to move from the brick complex to his own place, where he could walk here to sell hot dogs. He told me I could find what I was looking for if I waited for the game to end, then followed the tail end of the crowd.
I couldn’t thank him enough.
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
The game lasted another hour. The night grew darker, the traffic lighter. I hadn’t intended to stay that long, but I couldn’t leave that bench after the hot dog vendor told me how to get what I came for. We sat together for a while. I asked him what it was like working the cart and he told me he’d always done it. He liked seeing the same fans at each game. He liked working for himself and he made a good living with the cart.
What would I do if I made it out? Would I end up behind the counter of some store? Would they trust me with the merchandise? Probably not. It was too early to know. David Jones, my employment counselor, hadn’t even called me yet. He probably didn’t want to waste his time with relearners who weren’t going to make it. I was annoyed he hadn’t spent two minutes to give me some hope. If I could follow the hot dog man’s advice and get the video I needed, I’d call David Jones and give myself something to shoot for.
Doors clanked open. Heels clicked. Voices shouted.
The home team had won and the crowd jostled and cheered, rousing everyone for blocks. The hot dog man stepped up to attention and even though the first wave of fans rushed right by him, he soon had a line of hungry customers ready for a late snack. I shifted the camera to my palm even though I didn’t expect to catch anything so easily. The line was well behaved and I realized that even if I had seen something, I wouldn’t be able to catch the person in the act. To do that I would have to be recording the whole time. I didn’t have, or at least I didn’t believe the tiny camera had, that much capacity. So I sat and watched, waiting for the rush to slow.
When the crowd leaving the arena slowed to a trickle, I got up from the bench with my eyes locked on a group of older men in suits. The hot dog vendor waved me back to my seat with a flick of his wrist. I obeyed. I tried not to stare at him while I waited and wondered what he had in mind. Is this how he got himself out of Wendell’s program? His success was enough for me to follow his every command, but my excitement dimmed as he kept me waiting another fifteen minutes. Maybe lots of relearners ended up here and this was his way of taunting us.
I was sure no one was left in the arena when I saw the fingers motion me to my feet. They came slowly, which accounted for the delay. They stumbled up the sidewalk, blathering and laughing. They came even and turned away from us. I followed with a wide smile of thanks to the hot dog man.
The pen was deep in the book, marking my page and recording the wobbly men as they stumbled along. I kept the camera running and aimed as well as I could with the book by my side. This moment was what I’d spent days looking for. The three drunk men were younger than the group I had intended to follow. I trusted the hot dog man’s advice enough to use every bit of camera time so I didn’t miss anything they did. Their ties and dress pants suggested they were here on business, but weren’t senior enough to require suits to mingle. It was hard walking slow enough to stay behind, but they were so wasted they didn’t notice me following them.
They stopped at an opening in a long brick building. I caught up to them quickly and had nowhere to turn. The three faced the building, where an office entrance allowed them to step into the shadows. Zippers lowered. Liquid splashed on concrete.
One man said, “I was dying.”
“Oh, that feels better.”
One of the men asked me to step up and block them in case anyone came along. I stepped closer, my arms crossed, the book carefully aimed from the crook of my elbow. Urine sprayed the sidewalk, pooled, and ran down. The men adjusted their stances to keep their shoes out of the streams that ran across the sidewalk for the storm drain. I kept the book aimed squarely at their midsections and the splashing urine now hitting the sidewalk and door equally. The people who worked inside were in for a nasty surprise in the morning. Maybe this was a regular occurrence.
Was this what the hot dog vendor had meant for me to capture? I didn’t know the law. If I was going to catch criminals, knowing the law would have been helpful. I’d seen people arrested for being drunk in public. These guys certainly were. Was this public nudity or something like that? I didn’t know if either offense would get someone sent into the programs, but I hoped it would.
The men finished and walked up the block. I thought about following them, but I was pretty sure this was the scene I was supposed to capture. I wondered if I’d caught anything I shouldn’t have. If I’d filmed a penis, would that be viewed as pornography? Would I get myself locked up for turning in this video?
I turned and ran back to the corner, but the cart was gone.
I listened for wheels rolling in the distance. One minute was all I needed from him. In one minute he could tell me what I needed to have on that tape and what might get me in trouble, but he was gone. Like the guy in the donut shop he’d been very helpful and then he’d vanished. I wished there was a way to know
when someone had graduated from reeducation. The ankle bracelets were helpful, but the people who could really help me blended in with everyone else.
CHAPTER SIXTY
The brick building stood alone with a wide drive on each side and six cruisers parked out front. The white sign with bold blue lettering told me I was in the right place. The camera hadn’t left my hand since I stopped recording. The three clean-cut guys I filmed were the kind of relearners Nathan Farnsworth would surely gobble up. One of them could have priors and end up with Wendell, but I was betting that once the judge saw this recording, they’d all be carted off to Farnsworth’s. A twinge of doubt flickered in my mind and kept me from climbing the stairs and going in. Was I missing something? Could I be incriminating myself?
I’d thought it over backward and forward a dozen times. If I went home to check the video I was just giving Farnsworth an opportunity to steal it. I shouldn’t have hesitated so long to grab onto that handle and walk in. When I did the reaction was swift and surprising. The detector inside the door beeped and every visible officer lowered a hand to a holster. There were probably men in other rooms grabbing shotguns. I remembered the motto to protect and to serve from a cop show on television. Unfortunately, I was the one people needed protection from.
I froze with the pen camera clutched in my right hand and the book in my left. They didn’t draw down and shoot me, and when I didn’t come rushing in the mood in the lobby relaxed. Two suspects sat cuffed to heavy chairs at my left. Both were clean-cut kids in their twenties, not who I expected to see. Two officers leaned against a high counter in front of me. I eased up to the nearest officer, careful to keep my hands in sight.
