Prodigy

by Dave Kalstein

  “Sunlight shift. Please rotate ninety degrees east. Thank you.”

  Goldsmith rotated with the crowd and came face to face with Cooley, who had not budged an inch and stood there, out of sync with the rest of the rows of specimens, sending him the eerie, lonely stare of a condemned man.

  15

  The cafeteria was one of Stansbury’s crowning achievements of industrial design: 25,000 square feet of polished, bone-colored marble tile fused into rising swaths of titanium that curled into booths and nooks for the specimens to sit and dine in. These metallic waves were crafted to look as if they were in a state of perpetual forward motion (like the surging waves of specimens, of course) and were intertwined with long sheets of crystal-clear glass walls. The architect had made it a point to ensure that every part of the dining area would be visible to all, so that meals would be an open, democratic experience. But grandiose design statements notwithstanding, specimens were still young adults as prone to congregate with their own cliques as much as students at any other school outside the tower. In fact, one quick glance at the dining area would have revealed a great deal of social anthropology at once.

  The specimens filed in for breakfast hour, grabbed serving trays at the entrance, and waited in line for access to Stansbury’s world-renowned nutrient diet. Against a wall were several large, floor-to-ceiling glass vats of liquid in a variety of aesthetically pleasing colors like beige, gray, and a tasteful shade of orange. The vats were labeled with the type of intravenous food they contained. Today, the menu included liquefied pancakes, croissants, and oatmeal, as well as mineral water and orange juice. Specimens brought their small glass jars for personal use to the vats and opened up the taps, letting the foodstuff aerate for a few minutes before consumption.

  Mr. Hurley bounced around from table to table with his notebook, performing last-minute senior class interviews for the yearbook. He sat down at a table of three males and three females, looking at them eagerly.

  “So today’s yearbook question is, What Are You Going to Be When You Grow Up?”

  “Stansbury’s fifth Nobel Prize winner,” said a boy.

  “A pediatrician who works in third world countries,” said a girl.

  “Ambassador to the Middle East. For a Republican administration, of course.”

  “The first woman to throw a pitch in the World Series.”

  “I love you guys,” said Hurley, scribbling everything down.

  Cooley wasn’t hungry at all, but went through the motions of picking up some pancake fluid anyway and walked over to Sadie and Bunson, who were sitting in their regular corner booth. Upon seeing him, Sadie jumped up and planted a kiss on his cheek.

  “I was a wreck yesterday,” she said, whispering over the din of hundreds of separate conversations. “No one knew where you were and then I heard that everyone else was getting—”

  “It’s cool. Everything’s gonna be fine.” He sat down with them. Sadie pulled a laser syringe from its sterility wrapper and filled its chamber with some gray liquid from her glass jar, the built-in centrifuge transferring nutrients. She rolled up her sleeve and tapped a vein before aiming the glowing beam and injecting herself with breakfast. Bunson followed the same routine, tapping the vein, but injected himself twice as fast as she did. Big guy must be hungry, Cooley thought.

  “Man,” Bunson said, grimacing, “they always put way too much starch in these pancakes.” Cooley watched the gray liquid disappear through the laser and into Sadie’s arm. With the exception of Stansbury’s patented NutriTein bars (bland, dense blocks of solid nutrients that prevented the specimens’ digestive systems from atrophying), the cafeteria served syringe food exclusively. The nutrient-rich formulas were actually vitamins and engineered chemicals designed to feed the bloodstream with essential materials with a minimum of excess fat, preservatives, or artificial additives. The pancakes weren’t actually pancakes liquefied in a giant blender. They just tasted like pancakes because the laser-needles transmitted signals to the brain and taste buds that tricked them into thinking the body was feeding on the real thing. Another ancillary benefit was that these foodstuffs were specifically geared to maintain a certain blood sugar level, meaning there was no such thing as a specimen who overate into obesity. The cafeteria’s menu had been adopted by several upscale health club chains and better spas around the world, providing yet another source of income for Stansbury. Cooley peeled open a NutriTein bar, bit into it, and choked back his usual gag reflex: it tasted like chewy clay sprinkled with a crunchy, powdered sugar substitute.

  “Mmmm … The oatmeal’s good,” said Sadie. “Blueberry.”

  Bunson shot some up, tasting it for himself. “After graduation it’s back to the outside world and all those working stiffs with their greasy hand-and-mouth junk food…”

  “Tell me about it. I can’t even remember the last time I used silverware. Might as well just dump the E. coli down our throats and get it over with quick, right?”

  Cooley nodded, smiling halfheartedly. On the opposite side of the cafeteria, he watched Camilla set her tray down next to Goldsmith.

  * * *

  “Can I ask you something?” said Goldsmith. Camilla took a seat across from him and unwrapped a syringe.

  “Sure.”

  “What did Captain Gibson say when he simulcasted you with the headmaster and President Lang this morning?” Now watch her face, Goldsmith thought. She looked at him, her features calm. Not even a furrowing of the brow.

  “They put me on notice. They said you retired, I acted appropriately shocked, and they told me if there are any incidents between now and the end of the school year they might request my services.” She filled up her syringe with oatmeal. “Not that it’s any of your business.”

  Goldsmith studied her, wondering if she was trustworthy. Technically, he was bound by the honor code, which meant that all of the incidents between the valedictorian and specimens on the disciplinary level were to remain confidential. He was not supposed to divulge any information about what happened this morning. On the other hand, the penalty of violating this rule was stripping the valedictorian of his title, and Goldsmith had willingly given it up. He looked at Camilla, reading her for clues. She returned his gaze, reading him for the same. He remembered the promise he made her the night before Selmer-Dubonnet. Maybe they met during her once-in-a-lifetime moment of weakness. Perhaps it was just a coincidence that he ran into her that evening in the atrium and she would’ve opened up to anyone. But the fact was, he kept that promise ever since. She owed him one. Didn’t she?

  “I need your advice,” he said.

  “Are you asking Miss Moore or are you asking Camilla?”

  “Camilla. Definitely Camilla.” He leaned over the table and lowered his voice to a whisper. “Analyze the following scenario. The valedictorian is called in to interrogate a specimen. The specimen exhibits no signs of guilt regarding the charge and offers to submit to a polygraph test, with sodium Pentothal on hand. Yet the school refuses.”

  “For what reason?”

  “Get this,” Goldsmith said. “They don’t want to inject the specimen with chemicals—even though they’ve done it to us every day for the past twelve years.” Camilla glanced around at the glass walls surrounding them, wondering if any specimen out there was an expert lipreader.

  “Graduation is imminent,” she whispered, cupping her hand over her mouth. “You are three days away from completing one of the most remarkable twelve-year runs in the history of Stansbury, a career unprecedented for a full-ride orphan. I’d advise the valedictorian in question to obey orders and mind the honor code’s confidentiality clause. And not to say anything that might incriminate himself in the presence of his replacement.”

  “That sounded a lot like Miss Moore to me. And don’t hide behind the rule book. Each day since we’ve been here, you and I swore the oath, didn’t we? The whole philosophy of this place is using our gifts to help other people, not suppress ugly questions about ourselves.”
<
br />   “Stability comes first. If Stansbury isn’t secure, then the oath means nothing.”

  “I always thought it was the other way around.” He paused, realizing they were speaking different languages, were living in different worlds. “Please, Camilla, I need your help. Tell me your theory on this.”

  “Fine.” She leaned in close, lowering her voice to a barely audible murmur. “They won’t inject the specimen because the truth is not what they want to hear. And it’s none of your business why that—”

  Someone set down a tray of intravenous food at the table. They both pulled back instantly and looked up. Pete smiled down at them.

  “Mind if I join you?” he asked.

  “By all means,” said Goldsmith. Pete sat down at the table and held up a laser syringe.

  “Can’t I just use a straw?”

  * * *

  Cooley watched them from across the cafeteria, wondering who the outsider with the suit and the notepad might have been. The guy busted into a pretty interesting moment: whatever Goldsmith told Camilla 2.0 jacked up her blood pressure by about thirty points. He bet they weren’t discussing cancer cures or progression work. He cut odds that Goldsmith was figuring things out like he was, rather than plotting his next peer review stratagem: fifty-fifty. Cooley decided to stick it out till the polygraph test he thought was waiting for him. Once he cleared himself of Riley’s death he would sort out the contradictory mess of the dopazone bust and what connection there might have been, if any. But that was a tall order for one delinquent kid who was running on more than twenty-four hours with no sleep. He looked up at Sadie and Bunson and hoped he wasn’t putting them at too much of a risk.

  “Hey, guys,” he began. They looked up from their meals. “Uh … what I’m about to tell you is gonna sound … insane, but I might be in a lot of trouble for…”

  Sadie gave Bunson a glance. “Cooley,” she said reaching across the table and taking his hand in hers, “I don’t mean this in a bad way or anything but … I’d rather not know. I’ve got to focus on finals, and if I don’t pass Wilton’s progression I’m going to end up at…” She looked down in shame. “State college.”

  “Same boat,” said Bunson. “I mean, we’ve had a blast all these years, but yesterday was a really close call. Freaked me out. Bad. Oates and Mancuso were my buddies and all, but I … I can’t end up like them. You know?”

  Cooley looked at him. Bunson stared off into the distance, avoiding eye contact. He pulled his hand away from Sadie, more hurt than pissed off. All he wanted to do was grab them both and shout that he was fucked and needed their help, or at least their advice. He felt like Sadie and Bunson were cheating on him, only it was not sex that they were having behind his back—it was the certainty of comfortable futures and college and nice apartments and jobs and white picket fences and glass doors that weren’t shattered by chairs hurled from the fists of angry, violent men. But it was not where Cooley came from that held him back from sharing in the prospects of a future. After all, Goldsmith got with the program from the start and now he was in the driver’s seat. Cooley had plenty of second, third, and fourth chances over the years. His more sympathetic professors always told him that he ended up in the tower for a reason, that the chances of him coming here were so statistically microscopic that it couldn’t have been anything other than his destiny to be one of them, that God meant for it to happen.

  Problem was, Cooley never believed in God in the first place. This he regretted now, too. Rumor had it that He was a pretty generous guy, that He loved everyone unconditionally and that faith in Him solved any number of life’s fucked-up mysteries. Too bad he forgot to send up some stray prayers every now and then, Cooley thought. Was it too late to start? Because at the moment, he’d take any help he could get.

  * * *

  Goldsmith watched his fellow specimens flow along the atrium’s paths toward their morning progressions. He was able to pawn Pete off on Camilla for a couple of hours. He told her he needed to study, but knew that she knew he was lying. The crowds that passed through the holographic fields and meadows started to clear, and after a few moments Goldsmith saw him: Cooley sitting alone on a digitized rock overlooking a field of daisies. Goldsmith headed over.

  “Nice view, isn’t it Mr. Cooley?”

  “Funny thing is, I never saw any of it,” he said, not looking over. “All the hills and the flowers or whatever everyone always raves about. I just see a big white hall with a tall ceiling where the sun’s supposed to be and black image projectors in the place of maple trees.” Goldsmith nodded. He beckoned Cooley to follow him to a flowing stream a few feet away. “Where are we going?” asked Cooley.

  “The water here is loud enough to cover up our voices. The security detail still operates the tower’s surveillance system in public areas on an intermittent basis.”

  “I fucking knew it,” Cooley laughed morbidly. “That’s how you busted my guys.”

  “And given the trouble you’re in, you need all the tips you can get.”

  “When’s the polygraph and Pentothal session?”

  “There’s not going to be one,” said Goldsmith.

  “What? It’ll clear everything—”

  “I told them to put you under, but President Lang said she was hesitant to shoot a specimen full of drugs.”

  “Lang said that? Then what—”

  “I want to help you.”

  “I’m honored.”

  “You’re welcome,” said Goldsmith.

  “No, you’re welcome. You think helping me is gonna get rid of the guilt from all that dirty work you’ve done for them, right?” Cooley stared Goldsmith down, inwardly relieved that someone gave a shit, but also feeling his anger bubbling up because he couldn’t shake the feeling he was being used by this slick careerist punk. “It’s not gonna make you a single friend, but if it means getting me cleared in time for graduation, by all means go ahead.”

  “I’m not using you.”

  “Yeah? Well, I’m using you.”

  “Is there anything you didn’t tell me in the examination room this morning?”

  “No, I told you everything I—”

  “Think,” interjected Goldsmith, sounding like he was training an animal not to piss inside the house. “Contradictions. You told me Mr. Riley was sober but he ended up with a laser in his arm. Were there any other details that didn’t fit?”

  “No.”

  “Think. Mr. Jonathan Clark Riley. A burnout Stansbury graduate…” He watched Cooley, who closed his eyes for a moment, searching, and then they snapped open.

  “He had a gun,” Cooley said. “A brand-new Glock 12. He was acting paranoid and kept waving it around, like he thought someone was coming to get him.”

  “But he never fired it while he was in the bathroom?”

  “No. And when I found him there lying on the floor, I specifically looked around for it and didn’t see it anywhere.”

  “Good. What else?” He watched Cooley glance downward, mulling something over.

  “That’s it.” Cooley felt Goldsmith’s eyes scan his face.

  “You either don’t know how good I am at what I do, or you think you can play me by holding something back.”

  “His coffee table … It was covered with stacks of yearbooks with pages ripped out. Photos of old specimens. I asked Riley about them and he freaked out. There was a hiding spot in the floor, a dummy wood plank underneath a rug, and he stuck the pages in there.” Goldsmith watched his eyes carefully: they were glancing upward and to the left. Good. His brain was retrieving information, not making it up.

  “That’s a start,” he said.

  Without warning, the sun projected up in the atrium sky went gray and the clouds began to skip as the Nature & Co. system got caught in a glitch. Goldsmith glanced up, avoiding Cooley’s eyes. For some reason he felt embarrassed by the technology’s error, as if one of his houseguests had stumbled across a filthy bathroom during a dinner party.

  “You ever wonde
r about your parents?” Cooley asked.

  “At times.”

  “My dad beat my mom up. The orphanage said she ran away with me.”

  “And of course you think she’s still out there somewhere.”

  “Maybe.” Cooley looked at Goldsmith and smirked. “If only she could see me now, right?”

  “What does your mother have to do with any of this?”

  “Because I need your help. And I need you to see me as an eighteen-year-old kid who knows that shit happens just like you do. Not a specimen.”

  “There was this priest who helped run my orphanage, and he told me some things. My dad died of brain cancer,” Goldsmith said. “My mother was too young, too broke to raise a son. The state took me away from her. That’s how his story goes, anyway.”

  “Sorry, Thomas.” He watched Goldsmith flinch at the sound of his own name without a “Mister” prefacing it. Casual talk made him squirm.

  “How have you been getting from the tower to San Angeles?” Goldsmith asked, changing the subject.

  “Universal Taxi service. But they charge an arm and a leg to—”

  “Unlike you, Mr. Cooley, I’ve saved my allowance over the years, instead of blowing it on drugs to rot my brain.” He pulled out his Tabula and ran a search, logging Universal’s phone number. Cooley was surprised. He didn’t think this priss had the balls to follow up on the new leads.

  “Hey,” he said. “Do you think I did it?”

  “Things are … murky at the moment, Mr. Cooley. And sunlight is the best disinfectant. So said Justice Louis Brandeis.”

  Cooley looked up at the atrium’s domed ceiling and saw the static lining the clouds, the strange, hollow-seeming light stretched far and wide over miles of open space that didn’t really exist. “But the sun doesn’t shine in this place,” he mumbled, half to himself.

  He watched that tall head of carefully groomed blond hair float off into the distance. A helping hand from Thomas Oliver Goldsmith was just about the last thing he expected. The guy had a calm serenity about him that rubbed off a little bit, like you just knew the ship was in good hands if he was the one steering. Cooley made Goldsmith for a smart guy with more of a conscience than he probably preferred. Probably had a good heart and wouldn’t have minded making a friend or two before heading off to Harvard, or wherever it was specimens like him ended up. And he was probably lonely like nothing else, Cooley realized.