Cages (16 page)

I tried not to smile. 
Biff had just given me my radio back.  I knew he was a good guy.

"Curse words are a good
example," Remi lectured.  "They're meaningless.  What makes
a swear word?  What makes a word 'bad'?  I can say sex, but that's
not bad. 
But say the really good word for it, and it’s like I
killed a kitten. 
I'm
describing the exact same act.  What makes it okay to say 'poop' bu
t
not the better four-letter-word for it
?"

I sighed.  Remi was on
his fourth ageism lecture of the day, his voice echoing through the metal so
that each word
phased badly
. 
"I don't care, Remi."

"It's because the word
isn't about the act.  It's about
emphasis
.  Adults keep these
words to themselves because they're powerful.  Nothing is as emphatic as
the
F-word
. 
Nothing.  They use it to make their sentences more powerful, more
meaningful.  'Hand me the crowbar' lacks the urgency and threat that 'hand
me the
fucking
crowbar'
has."

I sat up.  "So
adults refuse to let kids swear because they don't want them emphasizing things
too much?  I don't buy it."

"You should.  Words
are powerful, Sam.  Polite speech gets stuck in the filters.  Adults
know how to ignore it, how to parse it, how to tune it out.  But when you
use a word
that powerful
it
breaks all their filters down.  There's too much 'emotional content,' as
Bruce Lee used to say."

"
What
?"

"Pre-
O
utbreak movie star.  Read an article
about him in a magazine once.  The point is that when kids are restricted
to polite speech, they're giving up their power to emphasize.  Only adults
can mean something so urgently and meaningful.  They want to keep us quiet
and powerless."

I laid back down.  I
hated it when Remi started to make sense.

Prisoners have chronicled
time's ability to lose coherency in lockup for centuries.  A prisoner
knows that time is a mutable thing, speeding up or slowing arbitrarily on some
quantum tide.

Lying there in that tiny cell
I knew that time was not a fixed constant.  Some days passed by in an
instant, the lights flicking on and off in what seemed like only hours.  But
most days seemed to want to take their time, sloughing through a morass of
rants from Remi, who seemed to take sustenance from railing at authority, the
bored drone of the Bell Teacher who came in and gave us abbreviated lectures
and homework assignments, and the piercing shrieks of Susan at all hours. 

She was consistent and
persistent in the way only the insane seem to have the energy for.  One
hour she would needle me about being a lying son of a bitch who broke her
friend's heart, the next she'd be thundering down prophecies of demons, fire
and brimstone.  Most of the time she said the exact same things over and
over, so that my only course of action was to jam my pillow in my ears in the
farthest corner of my cell, by the toilet.  Conyers couldn't have crafted
a better torture.

Mostly, though, I spent my
time thinking about my family. 

James had been a mysterious
figure in my life until I was five.  That's when James graduated
Quarantine and came back to live with us.  I don't remember that time well
- I was too young - but James later told me that he had been facing an
existential crisis after leaving Quarantine, that he felt lost and
unprotected.  For the first time in his life he welcomed the smothering
cruelty of our mother, the rough, drunken wisdom of our father.  But I was
a bit of a conundrum to him.  It was common those days for there to be
thirteen year gaps between siblings - parents see their children sent off to
the horrors of Quarantine and get the feeling they're never going to see them again,
so they try to fill that potential hole with another child. 
I
t was difficult for James to see me as
anything but Plan B. 

James was a boon to my
parents, especially to my father, who had been forced to stay home with me too
much because my mother had the higher paying job.  Now he was able to dump
me on James, who from time to time found himself unable to leave the house
anyway.  I imagine to James I must have seemed a horrible burden, but he
assured me otherwise.  He said having to take care of me helped him
overcome his anxiety about being out in the world, because he now had other
things to worry about, like whether or not I was going to start licking all the
electrical sockets or shove my hand in the trash compactor. 

To me, James was a hero. 
I saw him stand up to my parents, something that I, at five years old, never
would have dreamed of doing.  He called my mom on her analytical bullshit,
browbeat my dad endlessly about being a fuckup and never being there for
me.  I grew up watching as James tore long furrows into my parents' field
of control, taking them
down
as I was powerless to do.  I hung on his every word.  And no doubt,
this caused some of the tension between me and my parents; I would obey James
much more quickly than them, and I would help him do chores without being
asked.  There was clear favoritism here, but they weren't disturbed enough
about it to give up all the free time having James around gave them. 

I remember the day James moved
out.  It had started calmly enough.  James had a girlfriend and my
parents thought that was wonderful.  When could they meet her?  Of
course, he told them never.  Furthermore, he had accepted a part-time job
at an electronics retailer one town over and would be moving into an apartment
with her near his work. 

"Are you embarrassed of
us?"  My mother demanded
, her glasses sliding down menacingly
. 

"Do we not deserve to
meet this girl?"

James's lips had
tightened.  "I absolutely am embarassed of you.  And no, you're
not going to meet her." 

My father had stood then; he
was many things and belligerent was certainly one of them.

"You think we aren't
embarassed of you, boy?  Twenty-one years old and living off his parents
like a damn child?"

James had cocked his head at
my dad, and I saw a change in him then.  It was the sudden realization
that he was better than them, a better human being.  Later he told me at
that moment, he claimed all the lessons he had learned from his years in
Quarantine and had never been able to accept.  He had learned that he was
alone, and that there was no one to protect him.  He was a survivor. 
"That's exactly why I'm leaving, Dad.  And don't ask me to bring
Verona over again.  I'm not going to have her think less of me because my
dad's a pranking drunk and my mom's Dr. Frankenstein.  But I will still
come by to watch Sam.  You hear that, Sam?  I'm not gonna leave you
alone with these idiots!"

I had smiled and waved
back.  That's when the shouting began.

"Your demons ride on your
shoulders, Sam," Susan sang to me.  "Not mine though.  I
saw one in the cafeteria, and one in a hallway."

I glared at her through the
glass.  "Why are you doing this?  You're not crazy.  I went
to middle school with you.  You're no nutcase."

She was quiet a moment and
then in a smaller voice said "No, Sam.  I'm not."

I pressed further against the
glass.  "Then why?  Why are you saying all this?"

"Because it's what
happened."

"God damn it!" 
I punched the metal door and howled in pain, throwing myself on my futon,
clutching my fist. 

"Leave it alone,
Sam," Remi cautioned.  "I've been yelling at her for a week
before you got here and in the two weeks since, and she won't let up. 
She's the real deal."

"I know," I said,
miserable.  "It's not just that."

"Then what is it?"

"In another week you're
getting out of here.  And I'll be all alone with her."

Remi sighed.  "Don't
worry.  You've got more patience than me.  You'll tune her out."

"I'm not worried about
that.  I'm starting to believe her."

James's girlfriend didn't last,
and his job didn't pay enough to keep the apartment on his own, so he was
forced to move back home.  I remember watching him unload his two-door
hatchback, his body sluggish with defeat, and being happy that he had
failed.  Life for me had descended into a hell of my mother's lessons and
my father's rough disappointment.  I wanted James back, but he wasn't
quite the same as he had been.  He began putting on weight, watching TV
for hours, barely responding when I would show him a new toy or ask him a question. 

"There's really not much
point to anything, Sam," he said wearily.  "Especially when you
find out the worst days of your life were really the best, and they're already
over."

I started getting really angry
with him then.  He wasn't the cautious, hopeful James who had taken care
of me for more than three years.  He was melancholy and morose. 
Sometimes he would write long journal entries in an old composition book, only
to throw the whole book in the fireplace once he was done.  He even
snapped at me once when I was trying to tell him about how whale sonar worked,
and never apologized.  Over time he became indistinguishable from my
parents, irritated at the world and bitter over its past injustices.  He
watched me dutifully as my parents lived their lives outside of the house, but
he never seemed to engage me in any real way.  We were both miserable,
sitting there, watching the news every night.

That all changed with a phone
call about six months after James returned.  I was on my feet in an
instant after the phone rang as I ran to answer it first.  James used to
play the game with me and try to beat me there (and always stumble or slow down
at the last minute to let me win) but now he didn't move from the couch. 

I picked up the phone and said
hello.

"Hello?  Is James
Crafty there?"  The voice belonged to a man. He sounded hesitant, as
if he suspected he might have a wrong number. 

"James!" I shouted
and left the phone on the kitchen counter.

James lumbered to his feet
with an irritated grunt and walked to the kitchen.  He scooped up the
phone and began to talk.

I watched his back as he
spoke.  He stiffened at first, but then he straightened up, his posture
relaxing.  His movements were more animated than before, more like the
James of old.  He was even laughing into the receiver.  He talked for
more than an hour, and when he hung up he turned back to me and it was like
seeing someone completely different.

"There's somebody coming
over I want you to meet, Sam," James said, smiling.  "An old
friend of mine I haven't seen in a long, long time."

Remi had been released four
weeks before, and it was just me and Susan, like I knew it would be.  She
didn't preach anymore.  Instead she just sat in her cell, weeping, for
hours on end. 
Sometimes at night I heard her imitating the low,
hushed voices of men, talking to herself, which would always culminated in more
screams while I jammed my fingers in my ears. 
I watched the Bell door through my porthole,
deliriously thinking that Remi would get thrown back in any day now, just to
keep me company.  He didn't.  The highlight of my day was at around
three-thirty in the afternoon, when someone would bang on the big metal sla
b
outside.  I thought it must be Remi
or Dave, and I took comfort in that they hadn't forgotten abut me.
 

By then I had moved past
repentence.  Not a week after Remi's release I had shouted that I was
sorry, to please let me out, because I was so very sorry.  I kicked at the
hatch door over and over and over until Susan started screaming at the noise,
sure that her demons had come for her again.  Remi must have been a
stronger kid than me, not to break under the lonliness.  But now the
hysteria that had brought on my frantic apology was gone and what replaced it
was cold anger.  I began to plan, to plot, to think of a million ways to
fuck over that son of a bitch and his pussy guards. 

Lucky for me, I had a window
into the mind of my enemy. 

I had used the radio a few
times since my incarceration, but the battery wasn't infinite and there were no
wall sockets in the Bell, so I kept my eavesdropping to twice a week, for no
more than ten minutes at a time.  I slipped the earbuds in and dialed into
Conyers's office. Largo an
d
Conyers
were talking again. 

"I think we made a
mistake shutting down the Blind Hall," Largo said.

"We had no choice. 
We did what we had to do."

"But it's not
working," Largo cried.  "I caught two of my students engaging
in....well, you can imagine, in the back of my classroom!  Betsy Clarkson
and Ryan Fogle.  Take away their safe area and they just do whatever they
want anywhere they can find, any chance they get!"

Conyers sighed. 
"What do you want me to do?  Say 'okay, we're gonna stop watching the
Blind Hall again, you can go fuck there now'?  Did you forget about Sharon
Norse?"

"No."  Largo
growled in frustration.  "I just can't believe how brazen they
are.  John Rollins told me the other day that he had two kids hiding in
his broom clost with the industrial tools in wood shop.  They didn't even
stop when he opened the door in front of the entire class."