Prodigy

by Dave Kalstein

  Goldsmith stood there, his face blank. Cooley watched his face for a change, looking for the telltale signs in his eyes, on his skin. He saw a small, subtle vein on Goldsmith’s temple start to throb gently. Cooley felt a smirk coming on but hid it. Goldsmith stiffened, like he knew what Cooley was thinking, and grabbed the manila folder before walking out of the examination room—fast. The click of the door closing behind him was the only good-bye that the great valedictorian offered.

  * * *

  “You heard him, sir,” Goldsmith said to the headmaster as he entered the observation room on the other side of the mirrored wall. Something about that peer review session felt off kilter, he thought. He saw every color of Cooley’s spectrum of emotions. Cooley was angry, scared, defiant, sad, defeated, guilty, innocent, thoughtful, and finally passionate, all within the course of fifteen minutes. Maybe it was because, having been used to the slow-building, controlled reactions of med cycle specimens all these years, Goldsmith wasn’t accustomed to seeing such an unbridled display of feelings. Still, there was this nagging sensation in his gut—a close cousin of his inner bullshit detector, no doubt—that was telling him to get out of that room as soon as possible. Thank God he got the job done quickly. “Mr. Cooley consented to the polygraph and to Pentothal injection,” he continued. “I suggest we—”

  “No,” said the headmaster. He was making eye contact with President Lang.

  “Sir?”

  “I say we shoot him up, strap him to the lie detector, and mix in some electroshock treatments just in case he starts getting mouthy again,” said Captain Gibson.

  “Categorically, no,” said the headmaster.

  Lang stood up from her chair and fixed Goldsmith with a look. “Stansbury is entering a new era, Mr. Goldsmith. Pentothal-based confessions aren’t 100 percent reliable. We’re capable of enforcing discipline without shooting specimens full of drugs.” She beckoned him to the side, out of earshot of the others. “What does your instinct tell you?” she asked, lowering her voice.

  “That there’s more to the story than he’s telling us. There’s … there’s a chance he might be innocent.”

  “And?”

  “And if you lock him up and turn him over to the police, we may or may not discover the truth, but we will have a public relations catastrophe on our hands.”

  “An astute analysis.” She beamed, delighted he was thinking on her level. “Go on, Mr. Goldsmith. Tell me what bold measure you propose.”

  “What was the name of the boy who led the specimens’ bid for wider civil liberties all those years ago? The one who went to Dr. Stansbury and the trustees and made the case that the specimens had earned their trust, that the tower’s security network should be reined in?”

  “Peter Salazar, Class of 2019. He’s now the president of the ACLU.”

  Goldsmith nodded and walked over to the headmaster, ignoring Captain Gibson’s glare. Against his better judgment, Goldsmith just wanted another chance to talk to Cooley—but not in a peer review chamber. “Sir, I think the case against Cooley is incomplete. Since you are not opting for the Pentothal and polygraph test, I propose you release him back into the specimen pool and let me shadow him. If he’s guilty, there’s a good chance he’ll run to someone and incriminate them as well. If he’s innocent, he just might run to me.”

  “You got a death wish?” asked Gibson, jumping up to his feet. “The kid’s got guilty written all over him! Shadow him? You’re not gonna need to shadow anything because he’ll be right in your face with a hand around your neck. You want to end up like Riley?”

  “The tower is a controlled environment. I trust your men on the security detail—and my own training—to keep me safe.” Goldsmith watched Lang shoot Gibson a look. Gibson sat back down and studied the floor.

  “No,” said the headmaster. “You’re talking about letting a likely murderer into the tower.”

  “Reactivate the tower’s security system. There’s nowhere for him to run. If he did it, his actions will betray him. And I might be able to get him to confide in me. We’re both scholarship orphans, sir. He knows I’m the one specimen who could help him. There’s no adult in this school he trusts. And if you send him to the San Angeles Police Department, the media will grab this just in time to ruin the Senate committee vote.” The headmaster looked at Goldsmith for a long moment. Goldsmith glanced at Lang and she nodded, giving him the silent signal to close the deal. “Sir, back in 2019, Peter Salazar convinced you and Dr. Stansbury that specimens were worthy of your trust. Think about what I could do for you—and Stansbury—if you extend this trust to me.”

  “What do you think, Madam President?”

  “I think Mr. Goldsmith grasps the complexity of the issues at hand. I agree with his strategy.” Silence filled the room as the old man considered his options. He looked at Goldsmith and smiled.

  “Peter Salazar wasn’t half the specimen you are, Mr. Goldsmith. I’m giving you until five o’clock today to secure proof of his innocence or guilt,” he said. “Then we detain Mr. Cooley again and, if necessary, hold him until after the Senate committee vote before turning him over to the police.”

  “Thank you for performing your duty this final time,” said President Lang. “That will be all.”

  Through the one-way mirror, Goldsmith watched a detail officer release the cables binding Cooley to the chair in the examination room. Out of his peripheral vision, he saw Lang and Gibson exchange eye contact across the room behind the headmaster’s back. Goldsmith gently set down his manila Cooley file on the desk and headed for the exit. On the way out, Gibson gave him a warm smile as he wheeled his chair over to a computer terminal facing the door. Gibson’s knee started to do this funny little bounce.

  Goldsmith stood outside in the corridor and counted to ten. Then he opened the observation room door unannounced, striding in toward that manila Cooley file.

  “Forgot my folder,” he said, feigning annoyance at a mistake, the kind that he had never once made in his life, because he was not capable of such errors. The headmaster smiled, picked it up, and handed it to him. On his way out, Goldsmith caught a glimpse of the computer monitor behind the just-a-tad-too-casual Captain Gibson and saw a simulcast of a face so familiar that it didn’t occur to him just who it was until he was outside of the room and headed for the elevator bank.

  The image was digital and slightly static-ridden from the tower’s heavy network server workload, but there she was, that stray strand of autumn hair and tortoiseshell eyeglass frames perched high upon delicate cheekbones: Camilla 2.0.

  14

  As Cooley made his way down the long hallway on Level 9, fatigue started to take hold; his feet went clumsy, his neck became a stiff, dead weight. It first kicked in when the security detail officers escorted him out of the disciplinary level and he saw the date and time on the elevator pod’s display monitor. March 30, 2036. 6:15 A.M. The knowledge that he would not be able to sleep, that he had to figure out some way to beat Goldsmith, that he could not just call in sick and lie around all day only enhanced his exhaustion. One of the detail guys saw his eyelids getting heavy and offered to bring him to the med tech bay before it opened to get a Stimulum injection. As much as it sounded like a good idea, drinking the Kool-Aid at this point in the game seemed like a betrayal of Bunson and the guys.

  Cooley swiped his key card and pushed open the door to his room, preparing himself for the depressing sight of the emptiness his friend had left behind. He was expecting a stripped bed, several discarded uniforms hanging in the solitude of a barren closet, perhaps Bunson’s rusty brown stubble still clinging to the white basin of their sink as the only evidence of a past life. Did the school even give him enough time to leave a note before they sent him away? But Cooley walked in, looked around and … Everything was normal. Two unmade beds, two humming computer terminals, two messy closets occupied with dirty laundry just like he left them yesterday after his dopazone trip. But how …

  “Hey!” called out Buns
on in his baritone cadence. Cooley flinched and then felt his tired body lifted off the ground in a bear hug, his roommate’s long, thick arms wrapping him up from behind. He looked at his grinning buddy as he towered over him in his triple-extra-large white robe.

  “I thought—,” Cooley started.

  “Where the hell have you been? You got no idea what kind of shit went down while you were gone!” Bunson set him down and his face brimmed with nervous excitement, bearing the look of a giddy, shell-shocked soldier who had lost the rest of his platoon in battle. “The school searched the guys’ dorm rooms, rounded everyone up—Mancuso, Oates, Sugiyama, the whole gang—and sprung a piss test on them. And then—”

  “I know.”

  “You do? Maybe you should lie down, man. You look awful. I bet you spent the night in San Angeles, didn’t you? At Riley’s place?”

  “Sort of.”

  “When the other guys didn’t show up at lunch I knew something was up. Sadie was freaking out. She thought maybe you were down in the disciplinary level with them, but I told her where you really were. I was thinking I’d—”

  “Why didn’t you get busted along with the rest of them?” asked Cooley, blinking several times as if to make sure it really was Bunson and not some digitized replica.

  Bunson’s face went blank. “Well … I don’t know. I figured we got lucky. Figured maybe you still had some good karma left over from Guernica and…”

  Cooley closed his eyes and started shaking his head, trying to focus. The gears in his brain felt like jelly. Things weren’t cohering the way they normally did. “No … no…,” he said. He opened his eyes and saw his buddy, this big, six-foot-nine oaf all confused about why he was not similarly ecstatic about their good fortune. “Think, Bunson. Thirteen specimens tripped on dopazone two nights ago. Eleven of them had their rooms searched and got expelled. Our room wasn’t searched, even though the evidence was out in the open for anyone to see. I didn’t even lock down my computer terminal, I didn’t think to delete the site history.”

  “So? Maybe they just took a quick look and didn’t see anything that—”

  “My goddamned dopazone cuff was sitting on the desk!”

  Bunson shrugged his meaty shoulders. “So we got lucky,” he said. “Why mess with that?” He reached into Cooley’s closet and tossed him a white robe of his own. Cooley started peeling off his soiled uniform, changed into a clean pair of underwear, and pulled the robe on.

  “There’s no such thing as luck in this place,” said Cooley as he splashed cold water on his face at the sink. “They let us off the hook for a reason.”

  “I love you to death, man, but you’re being paranoid.” Bunson headed for the door. “You coming to the solarium?”

  Cooley followed him. “Yeah … I guess.”

  “Relax,” Bunson said. “Just three more days. We dodged the silver bullet. Leave it at that.” Cooley walked into the corridor outside. Bunson looked over his shoulder and smiled. “How’s old man Riley holding up these days?”

  Cooley thought of that tremor-ridden body, the severed tongue, and the red film of blood soaking Riley’s white teeth. “Good,” he said. “He’s doing real good.”

  * * *

  The corridor was packed with the flow of specimens all wearing identical white terry cloth robes and headed in the same direction. Cooley looked around at their distant gazes and noticed that their feet were unintentionally hitting the ground in unison, like they were solemn, monastic disciples marching in formation on their way to worship at an altar.

  Cooley knew the administration was letting him back into the specimen population for a reason. The initial guess was that they assumed he’d freak out and drag someone else like Bunson down with him for some transgression or another. The headmaster probably wanted to reel in another fish before they had the polygraph session ready to go. Stansbury always liked making examples. They’d parade their captive in chains through the atrium and stick them in some gallows in the coliseum if they could get away with it. Cooley wanted desperately to tell his best friend about everything that happened last night—about Riley, about what Stansbury was trying to do to him—but he understood that Bunson was better off not knowing anything. Plausible deniability. He felt guilty enough about the other guys and wasn’t going to risk the diploma of the last person he could count on.

  Still, the fact that their room was conspicuously left out of the dopazone search gnawed at him. Why? He marched in time with the rest of the specimens and saw the entrance to the solarium appear in the distance. The answer to “why?” had to be a significant piece of this messed-up puzzle, he thought. Cooley tried analyzing the mystery the way a smart guy like Goldsmith would, logically, precisely.

  The scenario: the security detail passed over the quarters of two of Stansbury School’s most notorious unbalanced specimens during a search, the purpose of which was to locate and expel drug users.

  Known fact: for the twelve years that Cooley had been schooled in the tower, he judged the detail’s procedures to be nothing less than thorough and ruthlessly efficient.

  Another known fact: Cooley admitted to dopazone use and possession less than an hour ago during his peer review in the disciplinary level and, despite the fact that this admission would normally warrant both immediate expulsion and a mandatory search of both his belongings and those of his roommate, no actions had been taken.

  Postulation #1: contrary to his initial prognostications, the administration was not waiting for Cooley to incriminate his remaining associates. If that was their aim, they could have terminated Bunson’s tenure yesterday or this morning.

  Postulation #2: the fact that he and Bunson were not expelled with the rest of the specimens could lead one to believe that the two of them collaborated with the administration in order to save themselves.

  Postulation #3: since Cooley did not collaborate, this left Bunson as a possible traitor.

  Postulation #4: if Bunson was not a traitor, this indicated a strong likelihood that the school consciously spared them for a reason that had not yet been revealed.

  Addendum: the concurrence of these events with the accusation of Riley’s sudden death either meant it was: A) a strange coincidence; or B) a link somehow connected to a larger web of actions of which Cooley had no knowledge.

  Final Conclusion: Bunson would never rat on his boys. Which meant the shit in which Cooley was swimming only got deeper.

  * * *

  Three hundred male specimens stood in the boys’ solarium clad only in underwear. They were lined up in five perfectly straight, symmetrical rows of sixty specimens apiece, barefoot on the cold white marble floor and wearing darkened ergonomic lenses sealed tightly over their eyes. Hanging from the ceiling roughly one hundred feet above them were a series of ultraviolet Celestial Class spotlights positioned at varying angles. Each specimen was individually illuminated with his own halo of warm light that rendered his skin a healthy golden brown within fifteen minutes.

  “Sunlight shift,” announced Mrs. InterAct over the loudspeaker. “Please rotate ninety degrees east. Thank you.”

  The spotlights rattled and cranked as the machinery switched angles and, like a sternly choreographed dance company, the specimens made their turn in unison. Cooley saw Goldsmith standing in a neighboring row, five places down. He wondered if Goldsmith was helping the administration with whatever it was that was happening to him. If he was not, there was no doubt that the valedictorian had seen the same contradictions he had and started to put some theory together. He was too smart to overlook the clues. But then again, Goldsmith was the administration’s personal attack dog. Which meant, if anything, he was in on it too.

  Goldsmith knew exactly where Cooley stood, could feel him looking daggers into the bare skin of his back, shooting his glare through those smoke-colored ultraviolet lenses. The valedictorian preferred it this way, actually. He couldn’t bear to look the kid in the eye. Goldsmith had always been more of a prosecutor than a defender, henc
e the pure animus that hung between him and just about everyone; and yet he couldn’t help but feel as if he were letting Cooley down. Not because it was his job to protect him—it was not by any means, nor did he want such a hopeless task—but because he knew the bizarre manner in which events were transpiring. He had always done business the proper way, lived by the same absolute standards that he enforced. But now, after they had finally trapped Cooley after all these years, the administration went back on their standard procedure and, well … took a shortcut. It was almost no better than cheating. Here Goldsmith stood, officially retired from his duties, and full of the knowledge that he witnessed something that was, quite simply, wrong. He heard the cadence of specimens reciting the Stansbury Oath in his mind: By virtue of the Gifts bestowed upon me, I swear my Eternal Duty to all those without such Gifts. For Power may point the way, but only Honor can lead it. This is how they use their “power”? This is their version of “honor”?

  Why didn’t they just give Cooley the polygraph, he wondered. Did he know something that the headmaster and President Lang did not want coming out? They might have been protecting the school, a value with which Mr. Goldsmith could certainly empathize. Because without order there was no Stansbury, and with no Stansbury there was no AIDS vaccine, cancer cure, gyroengine or rescued orphans.

  It also didn’t help that the administration had gone behind his back by somehow bringing Camilla into it. Granted, they found themselves in an unusual situation—without a valedictorian with three days left in the semester—and it was only natural that they should seek the number-two specimen in the class as his replacement. But Goldsmith remembered what she’d said last night, how the very integrity of the school would crumble without a valedictorian, and it occurred to him that Camilla would probably not have the same issues with Cooley’s treatment than he did. Perhaps it was all a bit too convenient.