The Fate of Mice (10 page)

“And we can always go overseas to help people there,” said another.

“Actually,” said a third, “I’ve always wanted to be a painter. I might try that.”

“Placebos,” said the fourth. “That’s all my letters, across two triple-word scores.”

An energetic squabble erupted over whether the plural of “placebo” ended in “es” or only in “s,” and I went back to Dad’s room, relieved that the human race hadn’t changed past all recognition. We could still be competitive, when it was just a game.

Because none of the medical tests had shown anything, the hospital called Dr. Hurley, who examined Dad and listened to our account of what had been happening. When we were done, he sighed and nodded and looked compassionate. “Yes, it sounds like conflict addiction to me. But right now, it’s even more than that. Your father’s gone catatonic. He’s completely shut down because he can’t cope with his environment. We’re going to have to hospitalize him and give him food and water through a tube until he comes out of this.”

“He’ll come out of it, then?” I could have used some Ativan myself. Sam was sitting in a corner, happily coloring with some crayons a nurse had given him; I was jealous of his calm. “You’re sure he’ll come out?”

“I can’t be sure of anything,” Dr. Hurley said gently. “This is an extreme case, one of the worst I’ve seen, although it’s not unprecedented.”

“What happened to the precedents?” Jenny asked. Of the two of us, she’s much better in a crisis. She takes in situations right away, and she gets right to the core of things. “Did the precedents come out of it? How were they treated? And if they came out of the catatonia, what happened then?”

Dr. Hurley scratched his nose. He didn’t look happy. “They, um, they came out of it when they were played old news broadcasts. They came out of it when something like their old environment, where they felt safe and comfortable, was restored.” He coughed. “Actually, there are enough of these cases that the
NIH
has just made a very interesting proposal about how to deal with them. I can give you some articles to read, if you’d like.”

And that’s how we learned about Oldworld Manor.

This place where you’ve been living, Oldworld Manor, isn’t the real world. It’s a prison, a demented funhouse, a very sophisticated insane asylum. And this isn’t the only such place; there are others, ten or twelve around the country, and others in other parts of the world.

Your jailors want you to believe that Oldworld Manor is just business as usual, an unremarkable neighborhood on the same old planet. For them, it’s part psychiatric hospital and part theme park, a little like colonial Williamsburg used to be, except dirtier and scarier looking. It isn’t really scary, and the dirt is sanitized and completely harmless, but a lot of people have gone to a lot of effort to make sure that you and the other full-time residents don’t know that.

This is why your families always come to visit you, not the other way around. This is why your efforts to travel, for the few of you still young and healthy enough to do that, always seem to run into obstacles: rampaging bears in the national forests you want to visit, hotel-hostage crises or salmonella outbreaks in formerly glamorous capital cities, foreign borders closed to Americans for health or military or ideological reasons.

None of that’s true. It’s just pretend, misinformation your jailors feed you to make sure you don’t stray out of the Oldworld Manor universe. The only destinations you’re allowed to reach are other Oldworld Manors.

Oldworld Manors are huge tourist attractions, and not just for you. Kids love to go on school trips there, because it’s creepy and safe at the same time, like a horror movie. They know the place where you live is just pretend.

And there’s a long waiting list of people who want to work at Oldworld Manor: people who want to dress up as cops pretending to catch people who’ve been paid to act like criminals; people to write and produce the fake newspapers and news broadcasts about rampaging bears and salmonella outbreaks and international security alerts; people to maintain the phony conspiracy-theory weblogs; people to staff the hospital, where the
ER’S
always really crowded and there’s lots of screaming, lots of fake bullet wounds and stabbings next to the real medical problems, because you Oldworld residents get the flu and break your legs, like everybody else.

Lots of people want to get into Oldworld Manor, because they want to pretend. But now we’ve gotten in. We aren’t pretending. We think you deserve the right to enjoy the happiness of post-Change life. We think you’re strong and capable enough to make that choice.

Jenny and I are here, finally. Do I even have a stomach anymore, or has it been replaced by a nuclear core in full meltdown?

We pull up to the gates and show our
ID
, and the guard waves us through. “I hope your dad will be okay,” he calls to me through the window, and I thank him. But once we’re on our way to the hospital, I say, “You’d think they’d check the
ID
cards more carefully now, since that’s how—”

“Nate, please relax. I’m sure the guard was alerted that we were coming. They have our pictures on file; I’m sure he looked at those so he’d recognize us. And anyway, the damage is already done, here. You’d better believe they’re tightening security at the other places.”

I look through the window. On the sidewalk, a homeless man’s panhandling for change: he’s an actor, of course. There’s a lot of garbage lying around, and we drive past boarded-up buildings and street signs peppered with bullet holes, all props. “I hope they catch the bastards,” I say, and hatred twists in my gut. I haven’t felt hatred for twenty years. I haven’t felt hatred since before the Change: it shocks me.

“Nate.” Jenny’s voice has gotten quieter. “Look, the Truth Terrorists were—they were just telling the truth. God knows the idea’s always been controversial. We argued about it too, remember? All those conversations about whether we were just enabling your father’s addiction by putting him here, whether this was some sociological equivalent of Methadone.”

“Of course I remember,” I snap at her, and she shoots me an anguished glance. “And we finally decided that what we were doing by putting Dad here was saving his life. Do you remember that?”

“Nate - ”

“And whoever messed with that had no right, no right at all! It was—it was—”

“It was deeply misguided,” Jenny says. Now we’re driving through a neighborhood of brownstones with S
TREET
W
ATCH
signs and cars double-parked along the street. Someone runs up to a Volvo and smashes the window, and the car alarm goes off as the actor yanks out the radio. “I agree with you completely. But we haven’t seen your father yet. He could be all right. They said he’s not catatonic, and that has to be a good thing, doesn’t it?”

“They said he’s raving! They had to put him in a
rubber room
, Jenny! They’d have used Thorazine or something if they weren’t afraid of short-circuiting his adjustment process! Adjustment process: Who are they kidding? He’s eighty years old in a rubber room. Does that sound to you like he’s all right? Does that sound like adjustment?”

Jenny takes a hand off the wheel to reach over and squeeze my thigh. “Nate, they’re doing the very best for him they know how.”

“Yes, of course they are. Of course they are, because that’s what everybody does now. And if they catch the scum who did this, I’m sure they’ll put him or her or it into a wonderful prison with lots of therapy and counseling and job-skills training. Right now, I’d prefer lethal injection.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“Don’t tell me what I mean.”

“Nate, I don’t want to fight with you.”

“Then don’t.”

Usually, Jenny would shut up at this point, but today she doesn’t. She’s upset too, even if she’s not admitting it. “What’s really going on is that you feel guilty about all these years of lying to your father, even if it was for a good reason, and you’re taking your fear and anger out on a convenient target.”

“Jenny, please shut up.”

This time, she does. The drive to the hospital seems to take forever. Oldworld Manor has to be pretty huge, something like fifty miles across, to minimize the chances that residents will be able to wander outside, into the real world. Most of them, most of the conflict-addicted who couldn’t cope with the Change, are really old—my father’s one of the youngest of the bunch—and not really mobile, so it hasn’t been a problem. But none of that matters now, because the problem isn’t that one of them got out: the problem’s that masked crusaders got in.

The hospital parking lot’s much more crowded than usual, and when we walk into the lobby, I see a small mob of people, and hear yelling. “I want to know how this happened!” a woman bellows. “I want to know how you let this happen! My mother’s just had a nervous breakdown because you people weren’t careful enough!”

“I don’t think she’s an actor,” I tell Jenny.

The man at the front of the crowd is wearing a white coat and a stethoscope, and wiping sweat off his face. “I’m so very, very sorry. We’ve done everything we could to prevent an incident like this, but the perpetrators were just too sophisticated for us. Whoever they were, they hacked into our computer system to create a fake family member, and then forged a fake family
ID
, and then used another fake
ID
to get access to our telecommunications center. And then they flooded the Oldworld media with messages saying that this is an artificial environment, that the residents had been lied to, and they got copies of the Truth Terrorist Manifesto on every computer screen and under every door—”

“We know all that!” I yell. “It’s old news! We want to know when you’re going to catch these people! We want to know when they’re going to be punished! What do you know about them? What leads do you have?”

“Nate,” Jenny said, her hand on my arm. I know I’m being irrational.

The guy in the white coat—I’m wondering if he’s even a doctor, although I don’t want to change the subject by asking—couldn’t tell me any of that even if he knew it, because it would compromise the investigation. But I want him to stop telling us old news and give us something else.

It occurs to me that some cops just got their jobs back.

He mops his forehead again. “We don’t know much. We’re doing everything we can to track them down, I promise you. And we’re doing everything we can to restore your loved ones to equilibrium in the meantime.”

“Is it possible that some of your employees were plants?” I force myself not to howl in rage, not to curse. “How closely have you screened the people who work here?”

The supposed doctor mumbles something about excellent morale and loyal employees, about never imagining that Oldworld staff would want to sabotage the place, and Jenny tugs at my sleeve. “Nate. Come on. You already know all this, and it’s not doing your blood pressure any good. We need to go see your father. Come on, now. I know you’re scared, but you’re going to feel much better after you’ve seen him.”

“Later for you,” I mutter under my breath at the white coat. Jenny’s right. I need to see my father, even though I don’t want to. The terrorists don’t have to face my father or the other residents. They don’t have to look at what they’ve done. But I do need to face him. I need to know if he can forgive me.

I’ve never felt as much dread as I feel walking down the long white hall towards the door of my father’s padded cell. My stomach has settled down, finally; instead, my blood vessels are all filled with ice water. A group of beefy orderlies trail behind me and Jenny and Dr. Noruba, Dad’s physician. She’s a slim young woman who’s also wearing a white coat and stethoscope, but whom I believe to be a real doctor, because she’s been treating Dad very capably for about five years now. The orderlies are here so they can quell Dad if he gets violent. I’ve insisted on seeing him, on being able to talk to him in person. I’ve insisted that they open the door to the rubber room.

“He’s very agitated,” Dr. Noruba tells me for the millionth time. “I want you to be prepared. We didn’t want to drug him, especially given his history of aversion to chemicals, but he’s really very agitated.”

“Yes, I know. I understand that.”

When we get to the room, I look through the little window, but don’t see my father. Anxiety cramps my gut; I have visions of Dad having somehow hung himself from his hospital pajamas in some corner of the room I can’t see. “Open the door,” I tell the orderlies. “Now.”

They open it, looking grim. Jenny’s hand is on my shoulder. “Dad!” I call into the room. “Daddy, are you there?”

“Nate!” It’s a hoarse croak. I rush inside, and, just as I suspected, see him sitting in one of the corners I couldn’t see from the window. He’s naked. Dr. Noruba should have warned me about that. I suppose they wanted to prevent any chance that he might hang himself with his hospital pajamas. I glance back at the door and see Jenny’s face framed in the small rectangle of clear plastic. She’s biting her lip. “Nate, did you and Jenny really put me here?”

I feel sick. I go over and sit next to him on the soft rubber floor. When he looks at me, his blue eyes are as piercing as ever, even though they’re surrounded by wrinkles now. “Yes, Dad. We really did. I’m so sorry We thought it was the best thing. You were—you were so sick after the Change, Dad, and we were so scared, and we thought this would help you.”

He reaches out to put a skinny hand on my arm, and squeezes. He’s surprisingly strong. “Well now. So that’s why I never got to go to your house for holidays, for all these years. That’s why you and Jenny and the kids always came here. All those stories about house renovations and floods and fire and how you were passing by here on your way to somewhere else: I thought all that sounded fishy after a while.”

“I guess it did,” I tell him. “I’m sorry. Dad, we only did it because we love you—”

“And the children were in on this? Yes, they must have been. I remember Sam telling me stories about traffic accidents he’d seen, and Julie telling me stories about kids being bullied at school, and it always seemed odd to me that they saved up all of their bad news for their grandpa. They enjoyed it too much, for one thing. I used to wonder how you’d raised such morbid kids, when you were always such an infernal optimist.”