Prodigy

by Dave Kalstein

  “What?” asked the young man. “I’m not familiar with that idiom.”

  “Just a saying. Late twentieth century. Guess I just dated myself, didn’t I?”

  Goldsmith walked to the front of the line. The tech bowed his head.

  “Good morning, Mr. Goldsmith,” he said.

  “Good morning, Dr. Wilson.”

  “Some of the specimens don’t like staying up all night. Say it drives them nuts.”

  “I don’t mind it.”

  “Oh? Why’s that?”

  Because of the bad dreams I get, thought Goldsmith. I’m nailing other specimens to wooden crosses in the atrium, their blood leaves spatters on my pressed white shirt. The mother I never met is every person in the crowd, and she’s cheering me on. “Because I’m here to get the job done,” he said out loud.

  Dr. Wilson nodded. Goldsmith walked off, rolling his sleeve back over his arm. In the corner of his eye, he saw Camilla step up for her injection. She extended her bare arm. Her skin was the precious white of a frozen pond in winter, subtle blue veins extending beneath. She didn’t wear perfume but still smelled fresh.

  “Miss Camilla Moore II,” drawled Dr. Wilson. “Why wasn’t it Camilla Moore Junior?” She glanced up from the sight of the laser pumping the serum into her bloodstream and looked past him. “Right…,” he smirked. “Bet you were a real hit with the boys at prom time.”

  “Two minutes until assembly. Please gather in the coliseum on Level 125 for announcements from Headmaster Latimer and President Lang,” said Mrs. InterAct.

  Cooley saw the flow of specimens merge and gather, heading toward the coliseum in a single-file line. From where he stood, they looked just like critters in an ant farm he saw back in a third grade Earth Science progression. Now was his chance. He looked over at the elevator bank: Jamison and Jackson were standing guard, making sure no one ditched assembly. Cooley headed for the usual stairwell off a side corridor, away from the light of the atrium. He opened the door and smelled the thick scent of damp concrete and ammonia, normal for the innards of the school where no specimens dared to tread. He looked over the railing and saw hundreds of steps spiraling down into darkness. As he began the long descent, it occurred to him that the smell of fire and brimstone would have been more appropriate.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, the coliseum was packed with specimens numbering four thousand strong. It was a vast, elliptical space, based on the design of the ancient Coliseum in Rome: long stretches of white levels rose up and up, but with row upon row of beige Eames chairs in the place of the hard marble benches of old. All eyes were on the circular stage placed front and center, waiting for their cue. Two figures—President Judith Lang and Headmaster Lloyd Latimer—rose from their seats simultaneously. The entire specimen body followed their lead, rising in perfectly timed unison. Right hands were solemnly placed over hearts. Eyes went to the huge white marble slab that appeared to be suspended several hundred feet in midair, high above their heads near the coliseum’s ceiling. Everyone had memorized the slab’s large, black Roman-font lettering, thanks to this daily invocation each morning since their arrival in the tower, so the collective gaze upward was really for effect, as if Doc Stansbury’s soul were perched somewhere in the rafters, wistfully watching over the children he left behind.

  “By virtue of the Gifts bestowed upon me,” recited this grand chorus of prodigies, “I swear my Eternal Duty to all those without such Gifts. For Power may point the way, but only Honor can lead it.” Goldsmith finished and let the standard ceremonial moment of silence pass through the space and evaporate. With the Stansbury Oath affirmed, everyone sat back down, except for President Lang, who took the podium and began to speak. The stage began its slow rotation, so that she could address the entire specimen body without any section of the audience feeling left out.

  Goldsmith studied her. Lang always looked as if she were being broadcast on television even when she stood before you in the flesh; a soft glow seemed to surround her at all times, lending her an ethereal quality that would be mesmerizing if it weren’t for her hair. It was a dyed shade of brown concealing what was clearly a natural blonde hue. He wasn’t the only one to notice this strange mishap in her appearance: Stansbury rumor had it that President Lang grew up a sunny, bright-eyed knockout of a girl, but she toned down the look during her early tour of duty in Washington, D.C., so the men that ran the town would accord her a respect that, even in this day and age, most ambitious women did not receive. Capitol Hill did good things for her: the microphone projected her voice up into the rumbling tenor of authority and unimpeachable moral righteousness. As she spoke, her finger jabbed the air like she was the second coming of Hillary Rodham Clinton.

  “… And I’m sure you’ve all heard the good news about Prof. Alan Partridge’s crowning achievement,” echoed her voice. Her dark, somber eyes took in the crowd, drawing out the moment for maximum effect. “Specimens, it is also your achievement. Tomorrow the United States Senate Select Committee on Education is voting on the Stansbury grant proposal, and it will pass. It will then move quickly from Congress to the office of the president himself. Stansbury School is on the verge of a glorious victory.”

  Four thousand faces nodded silently back at her, the shine in the stitched emblems on their uniforms glinting against the bright lights. Lang sat down. Headmaster Latimer rose and stood at the microphone, his gray hair adding to a personal history that each specimen was well aware of: he was the first administrator Dr. Stansbury asked to join him in the founding of this school. He grabbed the sides of the wooden podium like a grizzled captain guiding a weathered seaborne vessel in a storm, and he smiled at his loyal crew.

  “Specimens, the eyes of the world are upon us,” he said. Goldsmith knew what was coming next: a meaningfully inspirational aphorism to send them on their way. “I leave you now with the words of George Bernard Shaw. ‘The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.’ I ask each and every one of you to be as unreasonable as humanly possible. Forever. And do so with the honor of our oath, the honor that Dr. Stansbury held so dear.” The specimens burst into applause. Goldsmith’s ears pounded from the reverberations as he stood up and began to file out of the coliseum with the rest of them.

  A hand grabbed him by the arm. He whirled around and saw an outsider slouching, the way all outsiders do, inside of a brown linen suit. He smoothed out the guest pass stuck to his lapel. It read VISITOR in large red letters underneath a tag bearing the school’s emblem.

  “Mr. Goldsmith?” he asked.

  “Can I help you?”

  “I doubt it, but you’ve got potential. What am I gonna do with the head Boy Scout?” The visitor felt the valedictorian’s cold gaze on his face and felt his guts twitter. “John Pietropaolo. I’m with the San Angeles Times. But everyone calls me Pete.” He handed a business card to Goldsmith. Goldsmith glanced down and handed it back like there was a fungus festering on the paper stock. Pete voyeuristically looked around at the specimens passing them and caught a glimpse of Mr. Frederick Grady Jr. himself. The seasoned reporter was surprised to feel a twinge of starstruck adrenaline flow through him. Grady Jr. in the flesh—no shit! The kid didn’t look so big the last time Pete saw him on TV, in a football stadium surrounded by grown men twice his size. Just that past autumn, Grady, the eighteen-year-old son of NFL Hall of Fame running back Freddie Grady Sr., became the youngest person ever to play in a professional football game. And boy did he make the most of it, Pete remembered, seeing the replay in his mind all over again.

  It was the last game of the 2035 season for the cellar-dwelling San Angeles Raiders. After riding the bench for the entire season, through fifteen games (and fifteen straight losses) the coaching staff called Grady’s number with one minute and four seconds left in the fourth quarter against Cleveland. Sixty-four seconds of game time for what Pete and every other skeptic out the
re deemed a cheap marketing ploy by a dead-end franchise.

  The landmark Bright v. National Football League case was overturned by the United States Supreme Court back in 2014, deeming it unconstitutional for any professional sports league practicing age discrimination to deprive a citizen of the opportunity to make a living. (Even back then, Pete, at the time just a cub reporter, considered the dynamics of the ruling interesting: the case was the only one to date in which the two famously opposed former specimens sitting on the Court—the loose/strict constructionist duo—were in agreement, like they knew something about young prospects that no one else did.) The ruling was a ho-hum deal for most leagues. They had already been drafting kids out of high school for years, but the case did, however, deal a mortal blow to the traditions of the last holdout: the National Football League. Current and former NFL types always maintained that what happened on the gridiron was strictly a grown man’s game, that even the most talented high school All-American could suffer permanent injury or worse against the biggest, fastest, most brutal athletes on the planet. Not to mention the players’ union didn’t want any veterans getting cut from their teams to make room for the new kids. However, for twenty-one years after the ruling came down, not one franchise drafted a single prep phenom. It was the free market speaking: no general managers or coaches were willing to waste even a late-round pick on a kid, when they could get a more developed prospect with potential from the college ranks. Then, in 2035, the Raiders selected Stansbury eleventh grader Frederick Grady Jr. with the final pick of the final round of the draft. It was a choice that shook up the sports world. A freshly graduated high school senior making the jump to the NFL was radical in itself, but an eleventh grader? Freddie Jr. was Stansbury’s starting quarterback, a six-foot-six, 240-pound stud with 4.3 speed and a howitzer of an arm, the kid who had led the school to three of its last seven consecutive state and national championships. The California High School Athletics Association regularly tested all players for banned substances such as steroids, always paying the closest attention to members of Stansbury teams, but (much to opposing coaches’ chagrin) no specimen ever came up positive. The med cycle incorporated no illicit ingredients, and the patented formulas were readily available to anyone who could pay the lab’s prices, but very few high school jocks or schools could afford a six-figure supplement budget or the additional cost of a trained med tech to administer dosages on a regular basis. The CHSAA determined that the cycle was no different than a regular trainer’s “secret” herbal ointment to cure an ailment: a bit hard to pin down, but wholly legal. Needless to say, there were many championship banners hanging from the rafters of the tower’s gymnasium.

  Which brings us back to Freddie Grady Jr., Class of ’36, the most heralded jock in the school. The Raiders said he’d been drafted as a pure athlete rather than a quarterback, that they’d move him around when he got to training camp, and he might end up a wide receiver. The pundits all called it a PR stunt that stunk of desperation. The kid wasn’t going to see playing time, even if he did defy the odds by making the regular season roster. He’d ride the bench and be a circus freak show, good for a few weeks of media hype if he didn’t get his head blasted off his shoulders by the opposition in practice. He was sure to end up a cautionary tale for young athletes everywhere. Nobody could get an interview with Freddie on the day he was drafted, because he was busy studying for his final exams at Stansbury. The Times tracked down his Hall of Famer dad. Freddie Sr. said he was giving his consent and allowing his son to train, play, and travel with the team while maintaining his senior year course load. Another reporter got a hold of President Lang and asked her if the school didn’t think the distraction of an NFL season would be too much for even a specimen, and wasn’t Stansbury concerned?

  “The only concern we have,” she responded, “is finding a new quarterback before summer practice sessions begin.”

  The 2035 NFL season followed. Freddie Jr. made the roster but didn’t see a moment of playing time in any of the team’s fifteen consecutive losses, losses that just about broke the hearts of Pete and the millions of other die-hard Raider fans in San Angeles. Then, during the last game of the season, at the tail end of a 14–0 beating at the hands of a mediocre visiting Browns squad, it happened. Pete witnessed it while standing on 89th Street in B Sector, watching the game clock wind down on a plasma screen in the display window of an electronics store. A few dozen others were huddled around, angling for a view, any view to take their minds off the surging unemployment and sidewalks packed to bursting. They caught some audio as it echoed out from the bar next door: the blare of a color commentator mixed in with a cacophony of anguished laments from disconsolate Raider fans inside. There was one minute and four seconds left in the fourth quarter and San Angeles had possession of the ball. On the sideline, Coach Hudler barked something into his headset. A hush fell over the stadium. Grady Jr. got up from the bench, nodded at his coach, and started fastening his helmet straps. The kid wore number 80 and jogged toward the huddle on the field.

  “Finally!” mused a grizzled, tired old man standing to Pete’s right. “But I reckon if they had sent that boy in to get himself killed earlier in the season, we all probably would’ve given up on watching right then and there.”

  “It’s a conspiracy,” said someone else. “The TV network knows everyone’s giving up on those overpaid bums, and they ordered the league to stick Junior in now to keep the advertisers happy. And I’m bettin’ the network is sliding a fat cash kickback to Stansbury for helping them boost ratings.” Pete rolled his eyes and watched Grady Jr. line up as the flanker. The Raiders’ over-the-hill quarterback barked out audibles. The offense was on its own thirty-yard line. Second and ten, but everyone—despite everything they knew about this pitiful team, its shattered season, the mediocrity, its proverbial snowball’s chance in hell—was hoping for something special. The clock started ticking.

  Pete caught some commentary from the TV inside the bar: “Grady Jr. looks simply out of his league. Are we witnessing a coming out party or an execution?” The crowd—in the stadium, in the bar, in the street around Pete (more and more San Angelenos had surrounded the store window, all wanting to catch a glimpse)—held their breaths, doing what they knew best in that day and age: faintly hoping for a pleasant surprise, but publicly expecting yet another letdown, the latest in a long line that started when all of America descended upon this city in the aftermath of the EMP, looking for an escape from a nuclear apocalypse that never came when they expected it, but could always be right around the corner.

  The play started. Junior sprinted ten yards downfield. Pete saw a Cleveland cornerback level the kid, knocking him to the turf. The QB watched it happen and got dropped for an eight-yard loss. The crowd gasped, but Junior bounced back up. Forty-four seconds left on the clock. He retook his flanker position. The ball was snapped. This time that wily cornerback jammed him, locking his hugely muscled, long arms around Junior’s, pinning his hands down and preventing him from even turning around in time to see the pass sail over his head. The guys standing around Pete started to boo the overhyped Stansbury specimen. So did the 150,000 fans in the stadium. As the jeers rained down, Junior lined up again, seemingly unaffected by the wave of taunts being hurled in his direction.

  Ball on the San Angeles twenty-two-yard line. Fourth down and forever to go. Last play of the game. Last play of the season. Down 14–0. Touchdown or no, the Raiders were still losing this one. But everyone kept watching anyway. They booed, threw down empty beer cups, and watched. They still had one last play before going back to their lives. The ball was snapped. The QB dropped back, helpless in the face of a furious pass rush. And then the damnedest thing happened. Junior drove his shoulder into his defender and swung his inside arm up, freeing himself for a split second with a textbook rip move. It created a flash of space, just long enough for him to use his med cycle–enhanced physique to create a sliver of separation between him and everyone else. He flew down the field. T
he QB heaved a prayer in Junior’s general direction. And then Pete felt it: that sudden hush that descends in slow motion when a stadium, a street—hell, even a city packed full of people—shuts up to gaze at a spiraling football soar through the air, up into the heavens, and arc back down to earth. Instinctively, people watching from chairs rose to their feet and those standing rolled up to the tips of their toes for a better view, their mouths all unconsciously formed into dumbstruck O’s, each of them rendered silent by the electricity of the moment.

  Two defenders who dropped back into prevent-scheme coverage converged on the ball. One of them leaped for it. Junior leaped higher. They collided in midair. Junior came down with it, kept his balance, hurdled Cleveland’s lunging free safety, and ran for the end zone forty yards downfield. The weak-side cornerback sprinted after him, closing the gap. Junior glanced over his shoulder, saw him coming, and then hit his sixth gear. Off to the races. The crowd was suddenly rabid now, screaming an unintelligible roar, jumping up and down like this game still meant something. Pete stood there on the street and just plain watched as guys around him bounced around, complete strangers grabbing him by the jacket, yanking that fanatic are-you-fucking-watching-this Morse code into his body. Pete watched. That weak-side corner caught up to Grady Jr. ten yards from the end zone, grabbing him from behind. Junior’s knees buckled for just a moment, and then the kid threw himself forward with his opponent hanging on his back. Just as his body crashed to the turf, he reached that football across the goal line. Touchdown.

  The game clock expired. The Raiders never kicked the extra point. Final score: 14–6, Cleveland over San Angeles. But you wouldn’t have known it from the ecstasy in the stadium and beyond. The sad, wet, packed streets were filled with whoops of joy. Pete was as skeptical as the next guy, but he felt it, too. A game starts. It’s called life. You get knocked down. You get held up by some dirty trick. No one’s there to help you. Everyone’s waiting for you to stay down. But you don’t give up. You adapt and you run fast, fast enough to get a moment of breathing room and reach down past your heart and into your gut to do something no one’s ever seen before, something that nobody ever thought possible. Something that makes a tough-luck city, filled with millions of miserable people, rise up in awe. Something that makes a touchdown worth a great deal more than six points. Call it six points and good helping of hope. Hope that next season (and, really, next season started the moment the last game ended, so next season was right at that moment) would be a brighter one, a time not too far off that could herald a return to greatness or not, but for now, everything was filled with this ripe, pregnant possibility.