Goodhouse (25 page)

But the proctors were more interested in getting me on my knees. Tim stormed into the room. “No, no, no,” he said, looking at the mess on the floor. “Oh, hell no. I want this one boxed. I want him cooked. I want a big fat bow on him.”

“Tattoos on his face,” I said. “Real recognizable.”

“Someone's been this way,” a proctor called from the grain silo ladder. “Hatch is open.”

“I told you,” I said. “They're just ahead of you.”

Tim pointed to me. “Why is he still here?”

“They're Mule Creek inmates,” I said. “You have to find them.”

“Oh, I'm sorry,” Tim said with exaggerated solicitude. “Did I cut you off? Were you giving an order?”

Three proctors dragged me out of the factory and put me in the boxer, securing and locking the lid into place. They congregated a few feet away, speaking in quiet, serious voices that I couldn't quite hear. I ran my hand over the interior of the box and felt where the wood had been gouged. These marks were left by the people who'd sat there before me, and I thought of them as chaotic hieroglyphs—some relic of a long-vanished tribe.

One of the proctors drove me to Box Hill and parked. There was a little guardhouse with a canvas awning and a refrigerator. It was just like I'd heard. There was a single chair and the proctor sat in it, eating out of the fridge, watching a wallscreen just inside the door. An old, bulbous air conditioner had been mounted on one wall. It whirred and spit. Water dripped from the condenser coils and left dark, rusty streaks on the surface below.

When the man leaned forward and adjusted the volume on the wallscreen, I heard voices—men and women talking together—then a rumble, like an audience laughing. My knees were jammed into my armpits, and when I tried to shift my weight, I couldn't. There wasn't any room. Very soon the afternoon heat was unbearable. The reeking, ovenlike box exhaled baking air through the hole around my neck. There was a thin lip of aluminum around the edge of the opening, and now I understood why. As I grew dizzy and my head got heavier, I struggled to keep away from the burning metal. I began pushing at the walls of the box, digging at the wood, trying to straighten my legs, to get just another inch. My shoulders strained against the lid, which seemed to press back. It felt bad to struggle and then worse to be still. Sweat ran down my face. It stung my eyes and I couldn't wipe it away. I wondered why tears didn't burn like this. I wondered what made them so different.

*   *   *

After sundown, the proctor drove me to Protective Confinement. It was far from the main campus. I'd never actually seen the building, just the narrow road that was the turnoff. There was a guard station there, and a man nodded as he waved us through. My lips were cracked and chapped. The uneven motion of the boxer made my head snap back and forth. Whenever my throat struck the edge of the box, I coughed and gagged.

We traversed what must have been, at one point, a civilian neighborhood. The houses had been removed and the land repurposed, but there were still sidewalks and concrete stairs—remnants of a different time. In one of the fields there was a partial chimney and firebox still intact, the brick blackened as if the house around it had burned.

And then I saw the Confinement Block. It had been built over several of these cleared lots, and even though it was two stories tall, it looked squat—somehow compressed—as if the building had been pushed into itself. An enormous pile of dirt sat nearby. I'd heard that boys had to move it from one side of the yard to the next and, depending on the punishment—they were given shovels or spoons.

The T-4 lurched to a stop, and the proctor said, “Okay, kid. Try not to fall out.” He stood and unlatched the side of the box. I slid to the ground. My tongue was swollen, and I had a hard time getting my legs to do anything but twitch. I couldn't tell if I'd pissed myself or just absorbed the smell of the box, but either way, it was enough to make the man choke.

“Did they catch them?” I said.

“Catch who?” the proctor asked. “Can you get to your feet?”

“The Mule Creek inmates,” I said. “Did you stop them?”

“Not me,” he said. He looked worried, as if I wasn't making sense. A Confinement proctor stepped out of the doorway and walked toward us. This proctor had a neck that seemed on the verge of being swallowed by two deltoid muscles. It appeared compressed, like the building itself. He didn't wear a formal uniform, just a pair of khaki shorts and a navy-colored T-shirt—but he moved with authority. His black, thick-soled boots were recently polished. From where I was crouched, I could smell the inky tang of the leather.

The proctor typed something on his handheld. “Factory kid,” he mumbled. “Jammed a stool into the gears.”

The Confinement proctor frowned as if I were mud on his boot. “Hope it was worth it,” he said, and yanked me to my feet. I staggered after him, weaving—trying to keep pace. As we neared the thick metal doors, I took a last deep breath of summer air, a last look at the shadowy sky.

The doors opened automatically at our approach, and I followed the proctor into a hallway with a guard station at one end. Lowell, the boy with the dent in his forehead, was sweeping the floor. I watched as he shuffled toward us, dragging the broom behind him. One of his eyelids drooped as if it were melting off. He opened his mouth as I passed and made a sudden groaning sound—a sound that made me flinch. “Easy,” the proctor said. “Watch it.”

The air inside the Confinement Block was humid but chilly, like a cave. The walls were poured concrete, and the grain of the wooden molds used in their construction had etched the surface so that the whole building appeared to be built from petrified wood—some dead gray forest. The guard station had a single proctor watching a number of monitor screens that lit the wall behind him, displaying a maze of passageways. Somewhere overhead I heard a noise—a booming, insistent thrum.

“This way,” the proctor in front of me said.

He marched me down a hallway punctuated with narrow doors, many of which were open, revealing rows of identical cells. The rooms were small, like the ones I'd glimpsed in the basement of the infirmary, only here the concrete walls visibly retained the damp. Dim greenish light flickered overhead. A large metal drain cover was embedded in the floor. A tuft of fur undulated under the perforated brass. It was a rat, disappearing down the pipe.

I realized that I was about to be trapped behind one of these doors, forgotten, left to rot from the inside out. I'd heard rumors that men visited your cell here at night—not every night, but some. It was too dark to see their faces, to know if they were proctors or students. They were just devils reaching for you, reaching and finding. I imagined my parents far away somewhere, in Idaho. I liked to believe that if they knew I was in trouble, they'd come for me—if they were out of jail, if they were still alive.

The proctor stopped at the end of the corridor and told me to strip down. “You're home,” he said, and nodded toward an open door. The room inside was three feet wide and six feet long. A coffin. It had a shit-smeared hole in the center of the floor and no windows. “Take everything off,” he said. But I just stood there staring, and then I began to back away.

“No,” I said.

The proctor seemed more weary than angry. “Come on, kid,” he said. “This is it. Strip down.” Footsteps sounded in the hall. More proctors.

“Wait,” I said. “What is this supposed to teach me?”

This made the proctor laugh. But I was sincere. All the calming exercises, all the reaching for compassion—it seemed distant now—but it had been a pillar of my education.

“Don't worry,” he said. “There isn't going to be a test afterward.”

“How long are you going to leave me in there?” The proctor nodded to a man behind me. “I need some water first,” I said. Someone grabbed my collar and yanked at my shirt. The wound on my back had bled and scabbed, drying to the fabric like a second skin. The pain of its removal was so intense, so unexpected, that I lunged at the proctors, just kicking and swinging, ineffectual against so many.

They stuffed me in the little room and the door rammed closed. The darkness was total. I'd lost a shoe in the fight, but I still had my pants. I stood on one foot. I leaned against the wall, but the surface was powdery and wet. I took off the shoe and stood on it with both feet. Maybe an hour passed. I heard rats in the sewage hole. I breathed through my mouth, wondering when I would get used to the smell. The temperature dropped. Night was here. I felt time opening before me, a yawning rictus of misery.

For the first few hours it seemed impossible that anyone could survive in this room. But then I began to understand how it might happen. A person would change, adapt. The room would alter them. It was already happening. I already knew which corner was the driest. I stood beside the door where the air was better and a small beam of greenish light made it possible for me to see my hand. The process was so simple, so natural—and more than anything I'd felt at Ione, it terrified me. It filled me with an angry resolve, a determination not to change—no matter what circumstance, no matter what room.

 

FIFTEEN

I'm not sure how much time passed, but I was conscious of the temperature falling and then rising again. When someone slid a bowl of watery broth through a tiny panel in the door, I knew I'd survived my first night. I'd slept in fits, ten minutes at a time, and I felt the pain of this in my muscles. After I'd licked the bowl dry, I placed it neatly beside the door. No one came to collect it.

I must have dozed, because I awoke to the sound of footsteps. Someone stopped outside my cell and waited there. I grabbed my shoe and used the toe to scoop out a clump of shit from the hole in the floor. I wasn't going quietly.

But then I recognized Dr. Cleveland's voice.

“What the hell is going on?” he said. “Open this door immediately.”

“Sir,” a proctor said, “our directive says to keep him here.”

I pounded on the wall. “I'm inside,” I shouted. “Get me out.”

“This is my patient,” the doctor said. “He is in my care. I gave explicit instructions for this boy to be remanded to the infirmary in case of any trouble. Whose idea was this?”

“What instructions?” the proctor said. He sounded a little frantic. “Sir, nothing was posted.”

The lock retracted and the door opened. I dropped the shoe and blinked at the light, momentarily blinded. My pupils contracted and my eyes watered. Dr. Cleveland wore a windbreaker and civilian pants, but he held one of his white lab coats in his hand. He pointed to me. “Explain this,” he said.

One of the proctors held aloft the glowing square of his handheld, showing the proctor beside him the screen. “I swear there was nothing posted when he arrived,” the man said.

“What you saw or failed to see is not my problem,” Dr. Cleveland said. “And if my patient suffers any residual trauma, I will hold you personally responsible.”

The doctor tossed me the white lab coat. It flew through the air like a ghost, the sleeves lifting from the body of the jacket—empty, handless, grasping arms. I caught it and slipped it on, hugging the sides shut. I followed him out, walking barefoot through the gritty hallways. We passed the guard station, where two Confinement proctors stood muttering to each other. The front doors opened automatically into the yard. It was early evening and the fresh air, the slight breeze, felt incredible on the sunburned skin of my face. I realized I'd been in there for nearly a full day.

A T-4 idled out front, waiting. The doctor and I sat side by side on the front bench seat. He handed me an aluminum bottle full of mineral-enriched water. I consumed it in a single gulp.

“Thank you,” I whispered. My hands shook. “Thank you.”

“Stop talking,” he said.

Dr. Cleveland drove me back to his office. When we got there, he said, “You've bled through the back of my coat. I'll have to patch you up.” He took a package of sterilized instruments from the gray cabinet to the right of his desk, but as he approached me, he set the package aside.

“Actually,” he said, “you smell like a biohazard.” He walked me to a staff shower located off the main hall. I watched as he reached down and authorized my entry with his thumbprint. I kept asking him about the incident at the factory, and finally he told me that no intruders had been found. There was no one named Montero in the facility.

I shrugged. “A nickname,” I said. “That's not important. I know his face.” But the doctor didn't seem particularly interested in this possibility or in anything that had transpired in the factory.

“Use a lot of soap,” he said. “I'll get you some clothes. Towel's over the sink.”

The shower was newer than the one in my dorm, and there was no water timer here. When the doctor was gone, I stood openmouthed under the spray, drinking as much as I could. Afterward, I made the temperature as hot as possible. I leaned against the wall, watching steam thicken the air, feeling cocooned in the thrum and echo of water on tile. The heat seemed to be reaching into me, relaxing some inner knot that I was only just aware of. I scrubbed the black dirt from under my nails, scrubbed until my skin was raw. I stayed as long as I dared, and then I shut off the tap. I grabbed a towel and stood in front of the mirror. There was a handprint in the steamed glass. The fingers were small and tapered, the shape of the palm was almost square, and I wondered if it was Bethany's. I lifted my hand to touch it, but when I drew my hand away, I realized my mistake. I'd replaced the mark with my own.

Underneath the light switch, a print reader gave off a faint glow, its green color diffused by the vapor in the air. I remembered what Bethany had said—she had fifty duplicate readers scattered throughout the infirmary. Out of curiosity, I dug my thumbnail under the back edge of the plastic rectangle. It didn't move at first, but when I applied a little more pressure, the front casing popped off, tumbling out and toward me. I caught it just as a knock sounded on the door.