I shook her hand. “And you are . . .”
“Melinda Gerber, ma’am, and I am so pleased to make your acquaintance.”
“Yes, of course, thank you for arranging the meeting.”
“We want to make sure that you are very comfortable here and that we show you some of our amenities.”
“I’m here to see Mr. Carver,” I said abruptly. “That’s my only order of business.”
“Oh, Carver’s an abiding influence at the Academy, Mrs. Eager,” Melinda said. “You can see him all around you, in a way.”
“Yes, but where is he? I need to go to his office and have a meeting with him now.”
Melinda’s beautiful face crinkled slightly with concern. “George, do you know where Carver is at this moment?”
George turned red and looked confused. “He’s still back in FW,” he said, or something to that effect.
Melinda smiled. “Ah, that’s fine, George. Mrs. Eager, we’ll find him, very soon. He knew you’d come eventually. But for now, I was wondering if you wished to see our Gifteds facilities. We’d love to show you around.”
I looked at the spacious parks and towheads playing in the swing sets that surrounded the red-tiled buildings. The children laughed and gamboled like deer. The clouds parted, and for a moment, the sunlight brightened the black, curling scar of smoke that continued to cut through the sky.
“What’s the land grant?” I asked, admiring the vast facility. “I don’t remember the filings being this big.”
Melinda placed her hands on her hips and looked out at the scene. I noticed suddenly that she looked tired, with a sallow tint to her skin. “We’ve expanded this sector to nine hundred acres.”
“How many units?”
“Here, about twenty-eight thousand.”
“It’s incredible how you’ve been able to scale,” I said. “Your numbers.”
“It’s because we started with a rock-solid plan,” she said, her lips lightly shuddering. “Carver said that we’d achieve escape velocity once we locked down the variables, and he was right. He led us out from the wilderness and into a world filled with harmony, enlightenment, rational color schemes creating security and identity . . .” She yelped a short, high laugh. “Not that it hasn’t been hard going sometimes. Not that we haven’t had to make sacrifices. But it’s all been worth it.”
I studied her. “Is he working you too hard, Melinda?”
She shook her head with great seriousness. “There’s no such thing, Mrs. Eager, not when you’re executing brain training in total, pure love and unwavering faithfulness.”
The poor amanuensis’s tone was certainly fevered, yet I already knew that Carver had a tendency to inspire such flights in his people. I had to admit that I was deeply intrigued by the developments here. I decided I could spare a few minutes to take a peek.
I have spoken already of my son Sheraton’s struggles with reading comprehension. Sheraton was my firstborn, and his was a hard birth. He’d been a breech with a cord problem, and his heart had cratered twice during my labor. The doctors placed him in the pediatric ICU for about six weeks, and some very anxious days passed when we didn’t know if he’d live. It was a tough time.
He fought hard, though, the little critter. My sweet little baby. I knew immediately when I saw his tiny face that I would honor him with the name of his grandfather, as my dad had recently passed away.
What with my father being an English teacher, maybe it was ironic that Sheraton had a problem with reading. I don’t know if he suffered from a mild form of ADHD and related cognitive atypia because he hadn’t had enough oxygen during his delivery. Lots of kids struggle, and for many different reasons. We addressed the problem by placing him in Middlebrook P–12, which has a six-to-one student-to-teacher ratio and offers the age-appropriate Loving Variants of “I Am” and “Listening” Exercises to enhance A/Bs’ Comprehension and Self-Awareness. I’d taken special care to ensure that the curriculum did not feature the more rigorous Pain Management and Self-Assessment protocols. Though studies showed that A/Bs who had endured these programs had often gone on to succeed brilliantly in the fields of business and medicine, neither James nor I could withstand the idea of our son being frightened to the point of loss of bodily governance or threatened in ways that he would later have to integrate into his adult memory processes.
Sheraton was a sensitive child. He suffered from nightmares about invisible vampires and bloody-handed murderers that he couldn’t redirect into healthy cognitive loops despite the “I Am” and “Listenings” trainings. He also had mommy’s-boy tendencies, which I’ll confess that I encouraged. I loved to take him in my arms at night, after James had gone to bed and the girls were ensconced in their bedrooms like duchesses. I’d kiss him all over his dewdrop face and tell him that he was my little angel princeling from a far-off planet sent to Earth to make my life perfect.
“Hey you, hey you,” I’d say, a little song of mine.
“Hey you,” he’d sing back to me. “Hey you.”
Even though I coddled Sheraton, I had nevertheless come to understand that a certain amount of unpleasantness was inevitable in every program that we’d installed. Without mandatory decency there cannot be harmony, as Carver had taught us. There is no discipline without discomfort. There is no pride without shame. A certain amount of cost-benefit had to shape every choice curriculum. We had learned to accept as a common fact of life that all of our sons and daughters must learn about the terrifying love of our Creator, the importance of bowel control, and the difficult if necessary workings of hate if they were to avoid being classified as SubDs, whom the studies deemed as inexorably fated to a 91 percent incarceration rate (what Carver had so audaciously insisted on describing as the school-to-prison pipeline that he would jettison).
When my son would come home weeping and shaking, I clutched at him and felt my heart break. But I believed that our methods were the right ones. My Window didn’t open up far enough for me to understand there could be any other way.
This long-held belief system of mine may explain why I spent almost the rest of that day at Carver’s Consolidated Academy in an attitude of bliss. As George tailed behind us, Melinda led me into a huge network of red-tiled buildings, and I saw assembled there small groups of attentive, mostly blue-eyed boy and girl children who together learned lessons in Geography, English, Love One Another, Calculus, French, Civics, Political Theory, God Thought, and Right History without any assists except for books and benevolent pink-jumpsuited teachers. There was no fear, no violence at all. Only two or three times, I saw students leap up in an excess of enthusiasm, flailing their arms with excitement. But these incidents passed without coming to any crisis. Each time this happened, the educators came over to the pupils and patted them tenderly on their heads, and the children instantly sat back down.
“This can’t be the whole school,” I asked Melinda, while George stood silently three or four feet behind us. “These units are displaying so much emotional control that they can’t be below Bs.”
“Actually, this campus does goes from A all the way to SubB. We just make small variations in the aptitudes,” she said, glancing sideways at me and giving me a small, watchful smile.
We began walking through yet another one of the buildings’ whitewashed corridors. We stopped by a red door, which Melinda cracked open so that I could spy inside. This classroom, like so many of the others, was decorated with soft sofas upholstered in merry primary colors. Twenty students ranging from the ages of eleven to twelve sat at small desks and looked at their open books. A black-haired but fair-faced female teacher wearing spectacles stood before the class, gesticulating with measured gestures.
“And what happened during the Second Emergency?” she asked.
A slim girl with a long brown braid raised her hand. “We had to get rid of all the disease.”
“And how did we do that?”
“By cleansing ourselves of disinformation.”
“Excelle
nt, Lauren,” the teacher said.
I scanned my eyes back and forth across the cheerful room, looking for monitors and the bio aids.
“There haven’t been any breaks—aren’t you running programs on them?” I whispered to Melinda. “Aren’t you hosing them?”
Beaming, Melinda made a sign to me, and I closed the door. “No, they don’t need it. We’ve been able to select them and amend their nutrition so that they don’t require any interventions.” She began quickly walking down the hall, toward the rear of the building, whose doors led back to the parks. “We have them do sports for two hours, reading for three hours, socialization and fraternity during playtime; we have them in science labs, drama workshops . . .”
Excitedly thinking of Sheraton and how as an A/B he would qualify for these classes, I followed her outside. George still peaceably ambled behind us.
“Our children are leading the country in reading acuity, mathematics, devotion, and slow brain-wave production,” she said, speaking rapidly and her eyes shining a tad too brightly. “They’re last in ADHD and sexual perversity.”
“I know all that,” I said. We stood under a jacaranda tree in the lowering light and the rising chill. George lingered behind Melinda and looked off toward the smoky part of the sky. “But I hadn’t realized that you have both genders in the same classroom. There’s so much diversity. It’s a miracle.”
“It’s no miracle,” Melinda said, her pale eyes locking onto mine with an intensity that I remember from Carver himself. “It’s what happens when you truly realize that our society has run itself into perdition. And it’s only then that you make the deep, hard subtractions in the consumer surplus. And that’s when you create a new age.”
“You sound like Carver,” I said.
“He’s been my mentor,” she nodded, as pink flush began to spread up from her neck to her eyes. “He was, and has been, my everything.”
“I see,” I said, after a moment’s recalibration.
“No, you don’t.” A small note of hysteria crept into her voice. “You couldn’t.”
“Melinda,” I said, “I hope you don’t mind me saying so, but I think you, yourself, might need an ‘I Am’ session.”
Melinda looked around desperately at the campus. But the façade she had maintained all day cracked. Dark, masacaraed tears began dripping down her cheeks. “You never supported him.”
“What are you talking about?” I tilted my head. “We’ve given him everything.”
“Why didn’t you come before? Couldn’t you tell that he needed more resources?”
I blinked at her and felt my patience give way. “Okay. This has been great, but I’m done. I’m here to see him, not to get this tour from you.”
“Oh, Mrs. Eager,” she wept, wiping her made-up eyes and making herself look a fright.
“Where is he?”
For a second, anger rippled across her face. “No.”
“If he does not submit to this investigation, there will be consequences,” I nearly shouted. “I swear to you, the Secretary is going to rain down controls on this place if he doesn’t meet with me today!”
Melinda burst into tears afresh. “I know it.”
I turned from her, toward the parkland, where the children had now disappeared. The sky began to darken very quickly—what time was it? And the black, curling haze that continued to waft thickly up into the sky seemed to have spread.
As I turned back to watch her with mounting anxiety, Melinda shuddered with suppressed sobs. She would obviously be of no more help. But just as I resolved to leave the playground and roam the school’s administrative sector in search of Carver, something now occurred to me, something more important than whether I saw him that day.
“Melinda, you said this whole campus was all A/Bs,” I said. “Where are the other students?”
Melinda continued crying.
“Jesus, Melinda, where are the other students?”
“Don’t blaspheme,” George said behind me, suddenly and harshly.
I turned and stared him down. “The Cs, the Ds, the SubDs, where’d you put them?”
George glanced at Melinda, who pawed the tears off her red face.
“George, look at me,” I said. “I am your boss. I am your supervisor.”
He swallowed and nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Tell me where the other kids are.”
His eyes shifted toward Melinda again. He sighed. “I’ll show you, Mrs. Eager.”
George brought me back outside, and we got into his car. He drove us for maybe three miles, past the bucolic campus and deeper into the complex. The trees here grew less lush, and the grassy lands grew barer. Trucks now began to appear on roads that cut through the shabbier landscape. Some of the vehicles had labels that read “C/SubC” or “D/SubD.” Others read “F/W.” I sat stiff in my seat, trying to ignore an unpleasant pressure developing in my chest. George drove calmly forward and looked blankly out the windshield.
I looked ahead too. After perhaps ten minutes, a large, concrete building, built in the boxy Le Corbusier style, appeared before us. White bricks rose in huge blocks and extended into tall silos that were cut through by thin, rectangular windows that could not capture much daylight. Jumpsuited employees of the Academy flowed in and out of its guarded doors.
George stopped the car on an incline, and we got out. Farther up, on a steeper ascent, there stood another similar and larger concrete building. Beyond that, I could only spy a darker and thicker spiral of smoke rising into the sky, which seemed to be the same black pollution that I had first seen in the parking lot and that had followed me all the way here.
“This is the prison,” I said, shaking my head. When George didn’t answer but just gazed at me passively, I pointed at him. “George, this isn’t the school; it’s the jails. I’ve read about these buildings. These are Landingsburgh’s prisons.”
“This is the school, ma’am,” George said, shutting his car door.
“School for whom?”
He tilted his head at me, pausing. “Permission to speak candidly?”
“George!”
For the first time, I saw an unpleasant expression cross his features. He pointed at the structure that stood directly before us. “This one is for the Not Cleans, but don’t tell Melinda I called them that.”
“What are their formal classifications?”
“They’re Cs and SubCs.”
“Show me.”
George and I endured a short hubbub of badge inspection at the entrance. He then brought me through the door, leading me to a spare, pale interior that was staffed with more guards as well as a receptionist who sat behind a thick glass wall. We took an elevator up three levels. Exiting, we walked down a brightly lit corridor, whose glare picked out the shadows under George’s eyes. Finally we reached a tall metal door, which George opened with an electric card that he took out of his pocket. We entered into a long hall filled with halogen lights that filled the room with a dazzling, alarming brightness.
I stared. This massive gallery was filled with both White and Non children who sat at common tables made of white plastic. Individual laptop computers had been placed before each child. The pupils watched images that played on their screens while also listening to instructions on white elongated devices that poked out from their ears. They all wore white jumpsuits. The standard rubberized neurologic caps used in brain-training drills had been placed on their heads. But drips had also been inserted into their arms, so that all the students had plastic tubes extending from the veins in their hands to metal IV stands holding saline bags. Non guards in green jumpsuits had been installed around the room’s perimeter, though that wasn’t standard for a C or even SubC system.
“Charm,” I heard the students saying, all together. “Religion. Dedication. Morbidity. I Am. I Am.”
“George,” I said. “What protocol am I looking at?”
“This is an automated and whisper-lite delivery stratagem for the ‘I Am’ and ‘
Listening’ Exercises, combined with the Pain Management and Self-Love protocols, depending on the academic diagnoses and the flexibilities of the students, which are all the same,” George said.
“I thought we’d eliminated Non and White mixing, except for a few Qualifieds,” I said.
“Carver said at this level it was fine. It gets streamlined again at the lower levels.”
“Shouldn’t they be ending for the day? It’s late.”
“They’ll get a break in a few hours.”
“But what are they watching, and what are they saying?” I moved up toward one of the tables, at which sat approximately thirty students spanning the age ranges of K–12. There seemed an equal distribution of genders, though not races. All of the students had been outfitted with the same ear gear. Their dark and light eyes did not dart toward me as I approached them but fixed onto their computers’ large, vivid screens. Upon these monitors flitted images of rockets, bears, clowns, trees, naked women, wasps’ nests, corpses, muddy soldiers who looked as if they fought in the Somme, a woman getting her hair pulled and slapped, tulips, teeth crunching down on ice cubes, snowy mountain ranges, and firing squads executing bound and blindfolded victims.
“This is a new iteration of ‘I Am’ and Listening?” I asked, wincing.
“Charm,” the students said. I stared at the broad brows of high schoolers and the round, babyish faces of fifth graders, fourth graders—even younger, too. No matter what their age, every single student’s lips trembled violently. “Religion. Dedication. Morbidity. I Am. I Am.”
George nodded. “Carver redesigned it himself.”
“But the last version I saw had more nature scenes and Rewards. And it didn’t require fluids. This is—this is—” I stammered. “This is like the Adversative proto that got killed in Committee.”
“It works very well, Mrs. Eager,” George said, shyly. “I myself was diagnosed as a High Grade Looneytunes and Soft Head Lack of Discipline before I sat through the Advanced Adversative and learned how to behave myself.”
The World Doesn't Work That Way, but It Could Page 19