by Jesse Karp
Having begun this unbelievably shitty odyssey so early, she had made it here during the second-to-last period. Rachel would be in Advanced Bio, Cheryl in gym, and Ari, ex-boyfriend and all-around scumbag, whom she would barely even consider speaking to in this dire situation, would be either in Statistics, or out at the track field cutting Statistics. Surely if there was ever a situation that called for disrupting a class, this was it. But whatever was happening, Laura was still a product of her upbringing, her social structures, and so rather than cause a stir in a class, she walked directly to the administrative office.
The woman behind the desk looked up and fixed her eyes on Laura. Laura knew she was a mess from a sleepless night and spewing every imaginable fluid out of her face back at the hotel. But if that elicited an extra measure of sympathy, then so be it. She wouldn't turn it down just now.
"Mrs. Greene," Laura said, smiling shakily at the woman behind the desk.
Mrs. Greene nodded in response as Laura came up to the counter.
"I'm sorry, Mrs. Greene," she said. "I'm having kind of an emergency at home, and I really, really need to speak to Rachel Parker. She's in Advanced Bio right now. Could you possibly call her down to the office?"
But a sick feeling had already settled in Laura's stomach. She had not shown up for classes this morning, and no excuse had been phoned in by her parents. The first words out of Mrs. Greene's mouth when Laura entered the office should have been a demand for an explanation.
"I'm sorry for your trouble at home, sweetie," Mrs. Greene said in a measured display of both concern and suspicion. "But who are you, exactly?"
"Mrs. Greene," Laura repeated, still trying to smile, though her voice was beginning to fray at the edges, "it's Laura." Mrs. Greene remained blank. "Laura Westlake. We just strung up all the balloons for the PTA potluck in the gymnasium two weeks ago."
"I'm sorry. I don't recognize you," Mrs. Greene said, "and I can't call a student out of class without a request from a parent or faculty."
Laura yanked her cell out, but before she keyed the screen to call up her license, she remembered it was dead. She slapped it on the desk hard enough to arouse the attention of two people seated at desks nearby.
"I'm Laura Westlake," Laura said, and she spelled her last name out slowly. There was no smile left now. "I've been attending this school for four years. You may not remember me, but if you look at the school records, you'll find my name there."
Mrs. Greene accepted the information evenly and bowed toward a screen and moved her fingers about it for a moment.
"I'm sorry," she said after a moment. "I don't see you listed here. If there's some—"
But Laura was already backing away, absolute rage tearing her features apart.
"God!" she screamed, surely loud enough to be heard through the hallways. "This is so fucking unfair!"
She ran out of Linus P. Talbot High and ran and ran until she had no breath left to drive her any farther.
Exhausted, her brain aching from endlessly cycling ideas about what to do next, she arrived home. Would her parents be back soon, or did they think they lived somewhere else now? Or, her heart skipping a beat as she realized it, wouldn't they think that she lived somewhere else now?
Wouldn't they arrive home to find a teenage trespasser waiting for them? But there she would have them, of course, because her room was still there, filled with a lifetime's worth of proof.
She forced her aching legs to churn faster. She ran up her yard and through her door to make sure that her room was actually still where she had left it, only to stop short at the sight of two strangers sitting in her living room.
They sat at the edges of the sofa, in the poise of experienced visitors, never in one place for more than a few minutes before having to move on. They both wore unremarkable suits and bland expressions that characterized their professional detachment.
"Ma'am," the lead man said, standing, as he pulled out his wallet and flipped it open for her, "I'm Agent Grey with Homeland Security." His ID card had a gold seal beside his photograph and the name "Grey, Rodney." A holographic American flag leaped an inch off the card, beneath the words "Department of Homeland Security." "This is Agent Deel." The other man stood and held his ID out. "We've received a complaint from a Mr. and Mrs. Ronald Westlake, whose home this is, regarding harassment by an unidentified teenage female. Would you please accompany us to answer some questions?"
She shook her head. Despite what had happened to her in the last eighteen hours, it turned out she could still be shocked. Homeland Security? Responding to a complaint of harassment? Arresting a teenager? What the hell?
She looked from their badges to their faces. They were as nondescript as the suits, as if they were for formal presentation and nothing else. Both pairs of eyes looked identically dull.
"I live here." She looked Grey right in his flat gaze. "And I can prove it."
Slipping his badge away, Grey looked over at Deel and then back at her.
"Ma'am, if you'd just come with us."
"Come with you?" This was insane. "Let me see your badge again." She held her hand out. When Grey hesitated, she pushed her hand forward. He slipped it out and handed it to her. She pulled out her cell by instinct, before remembering that it was the most recent casualty of this cosmic breakdown that had been plaguing her. She tossed the useless thing onto the nearby table. "Give me your cell, please," she said without embarrassment.
With no shift in his disinterested expression, he pressed several keys and then put his cell in her hand.
"Department of Homeland Security, how may I direct your call?" came a clean, clipped female voice from a screen that framed a Homeland Security shield. Advertisements for surveillance products—binoculars with thermographic enhance, digital cameras in the form of fake fingernails—began to scroll down the side.
"I want to confirm an agent's name and badge number."
"Hold, please."
She looked up at Grey while she waited for some sign of discomfort. He watched her placidly.
"Special Agent Kingston, may I help you?" said a male voice, the Homeland Security shield still holding the screen.
"I'd like to verify that you have an Agent Rodney Grey working out of your office and that his badge number is..." She flipped open the badge and read the number off. There was a pause on the other end.
"Please put the agent on the phone."
She handed the cell to Grey. He lifted it to his ear.
"Grey. Check. Check." Everything was a bore, it seemed from his monotone drone. He held the cell up so that the screen faced him, and a red light from the lens flickered a hazy laser across one vacant eyeball. He handed the cell back.
"Yes?" Laura said.
"Retina scan confirms an Agent Grey, Rodney, badge number as follows." He read it off, and she followed it on the badge.
"And what address has he been sent to?"
"I'm sorry, ma'am, that's confidential."
"But it's my home."
"I'm sorry, ma'am."
"Please describe Agent Grey."
"Height: five feet ten inches, weight: one hundred seventy-five, eyes: brown, hair: brown. Hold for image." Instantly, the picture of Agent Grey that adorned his ID replaced the Homeland Security shield.
"Thank you," she said absently, and keyed off. Grey took his cell and badge back.
"Ma'am, please come along quietly."
"My room is right through that door," she said, taking a step in that direction. "Just walk over and I'll show you."
Agent Deel pulled out a sleek gun of hard black plastic and pointed it right at her.
Her eyes went wide, the muzzle of a gun something inconceivable to her, utterly disassociated from her life. Neither of the agents' eyes changed. They were as lifeless and dull as they had been when she first saw them sitting and waiting. Deel looked as if he was fully prepared to snuff her out simply to spare his partner and himself the trouble of further argument.
"Ma'am." Grey's h
and lashed out and had her by the arm as swiftly as his other hand had produced a hypodermic.
"What?" Laura cried, incredulous. None too gently, Grey thrust the needle through her sweater and into her arm.
"Mookie," she tried to yell, but it came out choked and quiet. She wasn't expecting him to come charging around the corner, to leap up and bite the agent's hand until the gun fell and she could run for her life. No, she just wanted him to appear so she could see one thing she loved.
But he didn't appear, and in the fleeting moments before darkness saturated her vision, she wondered if it was because Mookie was confused by the call of a stranger's voice.
MIKE
MIKE BOOTHE WAS a tall man who slumped a little in the shoulders. With the exception of small and suspicious eyes, he had a big-featured face, from his forehead to his nose to his teeth, and dark hair that had been bright blond when he was a child. He carried around fifteen more pounds than he wanted, and rather self-consciously at that. Most of his shirts were from before he'd put the weight on and so tended to accentuate his bulges.
He came down the basement stairs, his heavy footfalls echoing off the metal steps and announcing his arrival through the dark, humid concrete halls that held the boiler and the circuit breakers and the maintenance equipment.
And the English textbooks. Which was why he was down here. As head of the English department, all five faculty members of it, he had, lo, those many months ago, been charged to find a place to stow the new textbooks. These days, cells were loaded with the material and students did their schoolwork, as they did everything else, on their cells. Problem was, no one had overhauled the budget, so now, in addition to purchasing one current textbook program to be loaded into all the cells, the school continued to purchase hundreds of useless textbooks. Textbooks that needed to be stored so that they could molder and gather dust pointlessly.
Modern public education.
And of the infinite array of reasons Mike resented storing the books, the primary one was that he was responsible for doing a useless job that required more time than he could spare and most assuredly more strength than his back could comfortably accommodate.
He had argued against keeping the books at all—it was his way—starting with the principal, who said that textbooks on view were bad when Board of Education inspection time came around. But they couldn't be trashed, because if anyone questioned the budget, the money that had gone to buy them would have to be justified. Mike then argued with the English department about exactly where to store the books. They said the basement was the obvious place: it was out of the way, so the kids couldn't get to them and burn them as they had the history textbooks in the upstairs storage room the year before, in what some faculty were still calling "the Book Burning of Storage Room Twelve."
Finally, Mike argued with Manuel, the maintenance chief, who said that storage space in the basement was only for maintenance supplies, and if he let the English department store books there, he was going to have to let everybody do it. For that one, at least, Mike called in the principal and got his basement storage closet.
He lugged the books down, the first spine-wrenching box of twelve boxes, because apparently it was the head of the department's duty to transport them. Ironically, he had accepted the head position in the first place because he was under the impression that such a move would exempt him from many of the more menial responsibilities. Manuel, still smoldering over his loss of precious closet space, informed him that the maintenance staff was not responsible for lugging the English department's textbooks around. Manuel's glare challenged him to go to the principal again, assaulting the very notion of how a "man" acted. For the sake of what was left of peace, Mike sacrificed his spine and lugged the books.
Down the steps, along the hall, around the boiler room, back near the rows of pails and mops and detergents that had been hauled out and lined up in the hallway to clear space for the books was the closet door.
Except that the closet door wasn't alone. There was the closet door, the one he and Manuel had stood in front of, arms flailing and gums flapping at each other. It was wood, heavy and old, seams running through it from the humidity and banged and cracked badly from years of collisions with rolling buckets and janitor feet. On every visit Mike had ever made down here, there had been that door and only that door. That was part of the problem, really: not enough doors leading into not enough closet space for his damn textbooks.
Yet now there appeared this second door, as sometimes happened in life, when a thing could not possibly be so but was so nevertheless. Like keys that are not where they're supposed to be one instant and then are, as soon as you turn back around. This second door was only three or four steps away from the closet, though it could not have been further away from it in type. It was matte gray metal, stark and impenetrable, with a metal handle so clean and bereft of age and wear that it managed to collect and reflect even the dim twinkles of light in this dirty, smelly basement. It was slightly ajar, pushed in just a few inches, and there was a pale white light burning just beyond.
Mike looked over his shoulder, knowing he would find no one here, thanks to Manuel, and not sure what he would say to them anyway. Hey, did you know there's a door here?
He plunked the box of textbooks down where he was, groaning with relief and damning his body for getting older and fatter, as he did many times each day. He stood in place, looking at the second door and finally stepping toward it.
The closer he came to the door, the more it didn't go away, or prove to be a trick of the light, or explain itself at all. Once at it, he stood, waiting for it to do something other than be. It was cracked open just enough that a white line burned down its side, but not enough that he could see anything of what was on the other side of it.
So he pushed it open.
There was a room there, lit by a cold, fluorescent light. There was an elevator off to one side, its surface as reflective and unblemished as the door handle, showing him the room again and his own face peeping out of the door. One of many doors. There must have been about thirty or forty of them, maybe ten or fifteen on each of the other three walls, all matte gray with their shiny handles, all closed except this one.
This was really, really not possible; not possible in the most extreme way, which was actually not possible instead of merely undesirable or unthinkable. The room with the doors was big, far too big to be encompassed within the school basement. Indeed, it extended off to the left with gray door after gray door into the space where the controversial maintenance closet should be. Should be? Was. It was right there. He could pull his head out and see it there. He went the four steps over to it and opened it up and, sure enough, there had not been any major construction on the foundation of the building that no one had heard of or seen or known about. The maintenance closet was right there, containing only cleaning supplies, dirt, and a bad smell.
He went back to the other door, and the huge room of doors was just as much there. In the same space.
"I don't..." Mike said. "What's ... to..."
Something dinged. It was the elevator on the fourth wall, which meant, he realized only now, that there was an elevator extending either up or down—or both; yes, why the hell not both?—into solid ground below or a school with no elevator in it above.
A man in a suit stepped off the elevator.
"Excuse me," Mike said, his mouth feeling sort of numb and his voice far away in his ears, as it had been once when he had broken his ankle playing basketball in high school and again when a mugger stuck a gun in his face. "Could you tell me...?" He couldn't come up with an end to that sentence. He just couldn't conjure any words that seemed to do the situation justice or encompass exactly how much there was to explain.
The man was looking at him. He might have been looking at him when he'd gotten off the elevator, or he might have just noticed him. It was impossible to tell, because the man's face was dead, empty, not like a face at all but more like a computer approximation of
a thing called "face." Even his eyes, which should have widened or blinked in surprise, were flat, lifeless. Dull.
"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to scare you," Mike said, not handling any of this to his own satisfaction. "I just don't—"
The man had barely missed a step. He stepped off the elevator, Mike had spoken, and now he was walking toward Mike. He was coming quickly, not running, but moving in a way that was instinctively clear to Mike how malign it was. It was the way a high school principal walked with intent upon seeing a student breaking into a locker or tearing pages out of a textbook—i f that high school principal intended to murder the student.
Mike flung the door closed. He heard it slam, though he didn't see it. He was careening back around the corner through the basement, nearly tumbling over the box of books but catching his awkward weight, running madly past the boiler, back through the hall, and back up the basement stairs.
He came out into the lobby and smacked right into a student. The student stumbled backwards, and Mike bounced off of him and into a wall. Four other kids and one teacher who happened to be walking by stopped and stared.
"Hey, mistah," the student said, a foul look on his face, "where da fire?" He looked resentfully at Mike, and if Mike had been another student this would have been only the start of it.
"Sorry, sorry," Mike said, the buzz of madness still alight in his head. "Get going." The student stayed and looked sullen. "Get going!"
The student hissed in disgust and went on his way.
"You okay, Mike?" The other teacher came up to him. Mike stared at him, a shorter, grayer man who took a tie and jacket very seriously, even in this environment. "Mike? What's wrong?" He took Mike's shoulder.
"There's a door in the basement," Mike said, ready to be quiet and reasonable now.
"Yeah?" The other teacher was waiting for the answer to his question, unaware that it had just been given to him.