Cages (9 page)

No one sniggered, no one
snorted.  They were entranced by his sincerity. 

"I want us to do some
writing, all of us.  I want us to write what it was that we saw
yesterday.  I want to write down how it made me feel, and what it made me
feel
like
."  Jarvis held his head in his hands.  "So
this is what I want all of us to do.  You can start now if you want, and
turn it in tomorrow.  Remember...be honest.  That is what the most
powerful writing is, you know, honest.  True."  He pulled out
his desk chair and sat down.  He uncapped a pen and turned a page on his
notebook.  "Tomorrow I will share what I wrote and I hope some of you
will share yours."

All I could hear after that
was the sound of pencils scratching over notebook paper as the students took to
their work.  I saw some simply put their paper away and stare off into
space.  I saw one girl doodling in the margins, but ignoring the writing
space altogether.  Still, most of the class seemed to relish the chance to
vent their feelings, something Quarantine rarely encouraged outside of
indulgences like the Blind Hall.  I looked down at my paper and felt what
I assume Jarvis must have felt.  Just a longing to get it all down, so the
thing I had experienced wouldn't slip away from me.  I began to
write. 

I still had joined no real
after-school club or intramural, so I was alone when I knocked on Conyers's
door.  The locks to the outer lobby of his office scraped open laboriously
and I was greeted by the MP5 muzzle of one of his pet guards, who curtly asked
"What?"

I explained that I wanted to
talk to the Principal.

The guard's eyes narrowed, but
he said "Wait," and shut the door again.  Three minutes later it
reopened.  "Okay.  You can come in."

The graffiti Remi had drawn in
the lobby was gone without a trace.  Just as Wilson's office had been, the
lobby was freshly painted with no signs of anything amiss.  The guard
gestured to the main office door and I knocked gently.

"Come in." 
Conyers's voice.

I turned the handle and
stepped inside.  The last time I had been in this office I had been too
focused on getting the bug in place to notice much about my surroundings, but
now I drank it in. 
Unlike Wilson’s, this
desk was
sturdy
oak
,
big and stately.  The walls were the same shade of pale white. 
Bookcases lined the walls and I strained to see the titles on the
bindings.  I could make out a few:
Catcher in the Rye
,
Brave New World
,
On the Road
.  There were a few academic awards for
excellence tacked up behind Conyers, but they were crooked, seemingly put up
with little care.  The desk was piled high with paper, which he was
scribbling on even as I closed the door shut behind me.  No photos, no
calender, nothing to indicate much in the way of personality.  I respected
a man who kept his inner feelings private, didn't throw them up on his walls.

"What do you want,
Sam?  I'm busy."

I sat down in the chair. 
"I'm sorry to bother you, Mr. Conyers.  I just wanted to ask
something...I mean, after what happened yesterday...can you....can you
really..."

Conyers looked up, one eyebrow
raised.  "Can I really smell the Beast on people?"

I nodded.  "I always
heard that was impossible, but...."
But maybe I could believe in you,
if you say I should.

Conyers put his pen down and
stripped the glasses off his face.  "Yes, given enough time."

"H - how much time?"

He shook his head. 
"You want to know if I think you'll go Beast, don't you?"

I nodded again.

Conyers smirked. 
"Not such a tough ass now, are you? Saw your first taste of the real thing
- that satisfy your appetite for hanging posters?"

I could only swallow and take
the recrimination as deserved.

He glared at me, squinting
slightly, as if to read a word inked in tiny print on my forehead. 
"I don't know about you yet.  Maybe."

I licked my lips. 
Memories of James warned me off this path, but I ignored them.  "What
can I do?"

"What do you mean, what
can you do?"

What I was saying was stupid
and childish, and I knew it, but I couldn't get #25's face out of my mind,
perched like a mask on that monstrous body.  "I mean...if you can see
it coming...you must have a way to prevent it right?  I mean, if you catch
it early."

Thinking back on the moment, I
should have seen the glimmer of satisfaction in his eye as he nodded
slowly.  "Maybe.  It's not easy though, which is why most
Quarantines don't bother.  And it doesn't always work."

"What is it?" I
asked, leaning forward. 

He exhaled for a long time,
looking at me, sizing me up, as if asking himself if I were ready. 
"Let's take it slow, Sam.  Here's what you do.  I want you to
join an after school activity.  Not the Banner Society."

"No, they've banned
me."

"Did they?  Anyway,
join a club or a sport, okay?  Make some friends, talk to people. 
And come back here every day, just before dinner and we'll talk about it some
more.  You're really lucky, you know," Conyers said, sliding his
glasses back on.  "You're a borderline case.  Some people, like
your friend Remi –”

"Remi's not my
friend."

Conyers continued as if he had
not been interrupted.  "...like your friend Remi are doomed to the
Beast.  No stopping it.  At least you've got a shot.  Now go on,
get out of here.  I'll see you here again before dinner tomorrow.  Do
what I told you."

I promised I would, and left
Conyers's office with my heart a little lighter.

Go ahead, you can laugh. 
I deserve it.

I joined Mr. Jarvis's Literary
Society. He'd been bugging me to join for the week or so that I had been there,
but until then I just shrugged it off.  They read books and talked about
them.  Jesus, I had come into Quarantine feeling like a badass, and now I
was a member of the book club.  They were already halfway through the
current book, but I had already read it.
The Metamorphosis,
by Kafka.

"Seriously? 
Metamorphosis
?"
I blurted.

Hey, Conyers said I had to
join.  He didn't say I had to be nice.

Mr. Jarvis closed the thin
volume he was holding, using his finger as a bookmark.  "And what's
wrong with it, Sam?"

"I mean, how blatantly
obvious can you get? A guy turns into a giant cockroach and his family hates
him for it.  Oooh, how prescient.  Oooh, how like our present
situation!  Jeez."
 Mr. Jarvis was smiling now, humoring me.  "Don't you think we
should use literature to examine our own lives?"

I had a dozen replies Remi
would have loved, but none Conyers would have approved of.  I chose a
middle route.  "I think that Kafka's metaphor for transfiguring
change gives us nothing we don't already know.  And I think literature
should be used to cast light on our lives from new angles, not reinforce old
ones."

"Mr. Jarvis?" A bl
ack-haired
girl in a green sweater
and thick
black glasses
raised her hand.

"Yes, Kate?"

She looked right at me. 
"I think Sam's full of crap."

Jarvis was beaming now as he tried
to scoot himself out of the debate.  "How so?"

Kate chewed on her lip for a
moment, looking at me.  Just when I thought she wasn't going to answer she
spoke up.  "Literature isn't about how we can put a happy filter on
bad situations.  It's not finding ways to look at things that are
fundamentally different from how we understand them.  It's about finding
different ways to express fundamental truths as the author understands them,
and in the post-Outbreak era,
The Metamorphosis
is as exact a metaphor as
we're going to find to describe our situation.  So it's hopeless.  So
it's grim.  So what?  It's our life and we need to learn to deal with
it."

Clapping from around the
group, and I had to admit, she was a firecracker.  I tried not to smile; I
enjoyed a worthy opponent, but so far only the teachers themselves ever had
been.  This was a new sort of challenge.  "But,
Kate
, at
what time does a metaphor stop being a metaphor?  At what point does it
become not a literary tool of comparison but a undisputed fact?  When
Kafka's metamorphosis became real, the power the words had to evoke disgust and
revulsion disappeared in a new wave of sentimentalism and empathy.  It's
no longer a metaphor.  Our monster metamorphosis is real, and as such,
doesn't benefit from a fictional event about the same thing."

No claps for me - clearly this
was Kate's home team - but they could tell a good jab when they saw one. 

Kate rolled her eyes
,
blown large by her glasses
. 
"Please.  The metamorphosis may have closer ties to modern life than
it did in Kafka's time, but there's still a message there for anyone holding
out hope that things will go back to the way they used to be before they got to
Quarantine.  You are a burden.  They hate you.  And in the end
they will kill you and leave you to die.  That's what we should take away
from Kafka and the sooner we all learn that, the better."

 Crap
.  I really
didn't like to lose.

After club-time was over I
stuck my hand out to Kate in the hall.  "You got the better of
me.  Don't expect it to happen too often."

She brushed past me, ignoring
my hand.  "Screw you."

I grinned.  "I think
you're taking Kafka a little too much to heart, Kate."
 After club time I went to see Conyers.  He asked me about my day,
and I told him.  He asked about Kate, and I told him about our
encounter.  Then he told me to stay away from her.

"But...why?" I
asked, disappointed. 

Conyers just tapped the side
of his nose.

Dave Tinder looked like an
All-American boy.  He was the ideal, the good-natured athelete, the
straight-A student, the grinning volunteer.  He was a basketball star, and
a baseball star, and a solid soccer player.  He could do basic
calculus.  Before Quarantine he went to
secret
parties and got casually drunk and gave everyone
around him thumbs-ups.  He wanted to be a lawyer when he grew up, maybe a
District Attorney like on TV.  Or a baseball player, but let's not get
ahead of ourselves - he was good, but was he
that
good? 
Maybe.  Dave Tinder played by the rules and the world patted him on the
back for it.

Dave Tinder was a lie.

He first realized there was
something wrong with the world, he said, when he was six years old, sitting in
the pews at his family's church.  His father was a minister but not the
head preacher, so Dave was spared hearing his father pontificate on the evil of
sin every week after seeing the things he did on the other six days, but church
attendance was clearly mandatory.  This was a church that had grown
uncomfortable with the Resurrection, and when Jesus appeared on the third day
it was as the Holy Ghost, not the flesh-and-blood rebirth of the Son. Dave was
listening to the sermon, a moral that even at six he had heard before, when it
suddenly struck him to look at Reverend Chalmers's face.  No one ever did;
they all looked obediently down at their books and their hymnals when he spoke,
but Dave took a good hard look.

He was lying.  Dave
didn't understand why, but he could tell the reverend didn't believe a word he
said.  His eyes would flutter back and forth off he page.  He would
lose his place and sometimes babble contradictory statements before he found
his place in the scriptures once more.  And sometimes, only sometimes,
Dave could see him grimace in pain.  He didn't mention this observation to
his parents, of course.  He kept quiet for two more years, but every
Sunday, when everyone else was reading the Bible, Dave read Reverend Chalmer's
face.  Finally Dave decided to get an answer.

He stayed behind one day,
after the congregation let out, as his parents hobnobbed with the other
churchgoers in a hierarchical dance every bit as complex as any found in
Quarantine.  The reverend usually shook a few hands, blessed a few
unfortunates and retired to his office even before the church was empty. 
That day he found Dave sitting in his seat.

Dave asked why Chalmers was
lying.  At first Chalmers was all bluster and Authority but Dave kept
simply asking the same question.  Why are you lying? 

Perhaps he saw something
divine in the driving questions of an innocent eight-year old.  Maybe he
was just finally glad to have someone to talk to.  For whatever reason,
Chalmers decided to spill his guts out to this insistent kid who had stared
accusingly at him every Sunday for two years.

Because, the reverend
said. 
I don’t believe there
is
a
God. 

Dave considered this. 
But you always said
you did
.

That's because I was lying.

Dave had a minor worldview
paradox as two separate realities - the one everyone he'd ever trusted told him
existed and the one deep down he was afraid actually did - fought for the same
belief-space in his head.  In spite of a short lifetime of forced piety,
he found the idea ridiculously easy to accept.  It explained so many
things.  Still, there were a few things Dave didn't understand.  Why
continue to lie?