Prodigy

by Dave Kalstein

  “Hey, Mr. Stevenson! Where are we going now?”

  Stevenson looked down at Calley and smiled warmly. “Recess.”

  * * *

  “Stella?” said Senator Bloom over the simulcast system on Level 4. “Are you there?” He did not receive an answer, because the progression room had become a different world. The red sun outside poured in through the windows that Stella’s mind had created inside the thick concrete walls, illuminating birds and trees that seemed to reach up forever. The fragrance of a steaming supper filled every living thing around with a voracious appetite, which was fine, Stella thought to herself, because there was more than enough to go around. She floated about behind the stove, watching fresh food in large ceramic pots simmer as she took in the view through those huge windows that overlooked the world from a perch high up in the sky. She felt two strong hands on her waist, wrapping around her in a soft embrace, and she leaned her head back a bit, just enough to feel the day-old stubble on Wayne’s cheek and the cursive smirk of his lips as he whispered yet another secret that would be heard by her ears only. He reached over and held up a crystal goblet of dark red wine for her and she took a sip from it, feeling a warm tingle spread throughout her whole body. She accepted the goblet from Wayne and he pointed off into the distance where two small figures ran into the tall grass holding hands. Stella could only see their silhouettes, but she knew it was Curious George leading small Evan into a soft meadow, because all of the meadows in their neighborhood were soft. That, after all, was why they moved here in the first place. Evan wanted to keep on going, but George would not allow it. He saw the color and height of the sun and knew the hour drew near. Dinner was approaching, and when mother called out they would go to her as fast as their little legs could carry them.

  “Stella,” came the senator’s voice one final time. “Are you out there?”

  * * *

  “You can’t let them all go!” pleaded Mr. Hurley to President Lang as she stood there leaning against the brick down near the loading entrance, watching the steady stream of specimens flow past them and out of the loading dock into the desert beyond. “Why aren’t you stopping them?”

  Camilla watched as scores of familiar faces passed her by. Lang had not uttered a word since Goldsmith walked out into the light. Camilla had determined that she must stay behind. It was her duty. She had become the captain of this ship by default, and she intended to remain there to gather up the few specimens who were not ready to walk out on their world. But, she thought as they kept walking by her, ignoring her presence, soon there might be none left. Even if one of them stopped and invited her to join them, she would politely decline. Her honor—her family’s honor—would simply not allow it. But that path of light streaming in past the titanium door was almost hypnotic to her medicated eyes, as it slowly morphed from gold to orange to a startling shade of red. Against her better judgment, Camilla 2.0 decided to steal a look. She would most assuredly not walk outside, but would take a quick peek from the safety of the doorway. It occurred to her that it might be courteous to inform the president and Mr. Hurley that she was not going to leave them like all the others, but she did not want to make these adults feel any more foolish or worried than they already were. The flow of specimens had slowed to a trickle, just single exits now, rather than large groups all trying to squeeze through the small opening at once.

  Camilla walked over and stepped into the brightness, the warmth sending a wave of goose bumps up under her knee socks where they popped through her pale skin, running all the way up to her scalp. She carefully leaned her head outside and took in the sight of scores of specimens—boys and girls who looked just like her—filling what seemed to be the entire horizon of the desert. The world had gone silent. The only sound she could hear was the soft dry breeze blowing up dust against the hard steel edges of the tower itself. She scanned far and wide for a glimpse of Goldsmith, but only saw all of the shapes of the other young boys who were following in his footsteps. She stood there as the sun went dark and night fell before her, bidding a silent good-bye to the last specimen to fade into the distance as he slipped from her sight. And then Camilla turned around and closed the sliding door, sealed it tightly, and slowly began her long walk up the stairs to the solitary desk where the meticulous study sheets she had arranged for her final exams awaited.

  EPILOGUE

  “Don’t worry. I’ve got a great memory.”

  Those really were the last words I ever said to Thomas Oliver Goldsmith. And maybe they were more appropriate than I could have known at the time, because it’s this memory of mine that has in many ways kept me locked inside that school even after we all graduated. The last thing I wanted to do was put the story of Stansbury down on paper. From the first moment of my first creative writing seminar at Yale, my new classmates stole looks at me, because the rumors had already started: I was one of them, one of the kids who was at that school when it all happened. And in all of the courses that followed, every teacher and student was waiting for me to finally break down and write that story they all knew I had inside, but I never gave in. It would have been too easy, too cynical for me to re-create all the sordid details and watch as my audience used it to nourish their curiosities, turning my personal recollections into literary pornography.

  But here I am a senior in college, and I’ve spent the past four years telling mediocre stories about everything else in the world but Stansbury. I imagined all of the things a normal girl my age would find inspiring, and handed in short story after short story on eating disorders (literal ones and allegories), forbidden love (both interracial and intergenerational), satires on upper-class manners (some witty, some subversive, some plainly awful homages to Fitzgerald), childhood loss of innocence (boring ones filled with far too much animal imagery), a woman’s right to choose (spare me, I know) and even dabbled in science fiction (my easily injured pride will not allow any more detailed a mention than this). While some of them earned me above-average grades, none won any awards, or even publication in the most pedestrian of campus literary magazines. Submitting them for group critique every other week eventually became unbearable. I would sit there in an old musty room with my peers, these unkempt retro-hippie pot smokers stuffing their faces with rancid vegetarian burritos as they mercilessly tore apart every sentence I’d written in between chomps and swallows. “Insincere,” “stylish, but lacking true feeling,” and “characters too emotionally guarded to resonate” were the most frequent thrusts of their comments. And the whole time, whichever professor presided over the seminar that particular semester would sit in the corner nodding along with the jury, and when they had finished picking the carcass of my latest work dry, he or she would inevitably hand down a nugget of wisdom along the lines of: “I think we’re all still waiting for that one story, Camilla, where you really let go and show us what keeps you up at night, the one that may embarrass you, but will bring a surge of life to your carefully constructed use of language. Now, on the other hand, Teresa’s delightful musings on her summer spent as an intern to the editor of the world’s most powerful fashion magazine…” But every teacher and every class was really saying the same thing: Stop dillydallying with these little yarns about your feminine alienation, and start writing about all of the insanity that happened inside Stansbury Tower, the stuff that didn’t get printed in the newspapers after the Senate committee testimony back in the spring of 2036. Take the gloves off and give us the real, uncensored version, so we can turn your adolescence into juicy dinner conversation.

  Stansbury School’s Class of 2036 ended up graduating on time that spring. The seventy or so of the three hundred and fifty seniors who remained after the tragic revelations that came to light on the day of Stella Saltzman’s testimony to the United States Senate Select Committee on Education went through their final exams. The San Angeles police blocked off the majority of high-trafficked floors inside the tower for their investigation, so the tests were held in makeshift progression rooms on lower l
evels; but we were able to have commencement inside the coliseum as planned. Of course, it felt strange and empty. Without the headmaster or President Lang around to conduct the ceremony, a team of junior level administrators and professors—lead among them was Professor Jeffrey Nelson—stood in with predictably clumsy results. As promised to Mr. Goldsmith, I delivered the valedictorian’s speech to the few who stuck around. I neglected the usual exhortation to, basically, take over the world in time for our fifth-year reunion, in favor of eulogizing the departed headmaster and encouraging my fellow specimens to one day affect someone as much as he had affected us. Not so surprisingly, the usual talk of conquest and domination of years past went over much better than what I had to say. My father and mother seemed to be the only ones in the audience who applauded. There were, however, quite a few TV crews and reporters who were in attendance. The school’s trustees thought it would make for good PR to balance out everything else for which Stansbury was making news. Unfortunately, it didn’t even come close.

  You see, the next time I saw Mr. Goldsmith was the following day on a plasma-screen broadcast in an elevator pod, after his departure from the tower along with 1,875 specimens. He was being introduced to the public at a press conference held at the San Angeles Police Department’s central offices, and was flanked by the noted Stansbury critic Senator Arthur Milford Bloom on one side and the chief of police with his district attorney on the other. The news anchors and writers labeled him a noble whistle-blower, the perfect witness, who was willing to sacrifice all of the benefits the corrupt institution of Stansbury conferred upon him in order to bring justice to those who deserved it. His voice sounded much older when he spoke into the assembled microphones and tape recorders. His shoulders were held high. His beautiful blond crown of hair seemed to have gone several shades darker overnight. He looked, well, like a grown-up. Standing there alone inside that elevator pod, I could imagine all of America swooning over him. I wondered who coached him to radiate that kind of authority, and then remembered: Stansbury did.

  Before a national television audience, Mr. Goldsmith calmly named President Judith Lang as the mastermind of a criminal conspiracy aimed at procuring a $1 trillion annual government grant for the school at any cost. He accused her of premeditating and orchestrating the murders of six Stansbury alumni, the school’s headmaster, and a reporter for the San Angeles Times, as well as devising a complex plot to frame an innocent eighteen-year-old orphan named William Winston Cooley for the crimes. The following week, Goldsmith enumerated the intricacies of this plot in a lengthy testimony to a grand jury.

  President Judith Lang, the ringleader of the Stansbury conspiracy, was charged with eight counts of first-degree murder. Due to California’s progressive stance regarding the death penalty, she is currently serving consecutive life sentences in a maximum security penitentiary. Miss Sadie Sarah Chapman, of the New York City Chapmans, was tried as an adult, but was able—through a top-notch criminal defense lawyer her father hired—to successfully plead guilty by reason of insanity brought on by the large amounts of behavior-altering drugs with which the school supplied its specimens with on a daily basis. She is in the midst of a ten-year sentence at a San Angeles prison known for its exceptional mental health facilities, and is eligible for parole in 2043. During the Stansbury trial—dubbed “The Preppie Massacre” by the San Angeles Times—neither the prosecution nor the defense made mention of the popular tabloid rumor that Judith Lang was actually Thomas Oliver Goldsmith’s biological mother.

  After the criminal phase of the trial the civil charges commenced. Multiple families of past and present specimens brought a multibillion dollar class-action suit against the school’s trustees, charging them with violating dozens of child labor laws in the production of Stansbury’s famed, hugely profitable pharmaceutical advances, as well transgressing multiple child abuse statutes by providing specimens with drugs they falsely claimed were approved by the Food and Drug Administration (such as the ADD vaccine, among others) and forcing delinquents to undergo the sort of incarceration and peer review that qualified as cruel and unusual punishment in the eyes of the law (Mr. Goldsmith was an especially enthusiastic witness during this phase of the trial). The charges were devastating. The board of trustees was ordered to pay out packages of compensation in the hundreds of millions. Coming on the heels of the Preppie Massacre Trial, the once proud name of Stansbury was forever tarnished.

  The school did, however, survive. With strict government oversight, the trustees appointed an interim administration, mixing Stansbury veterans with eager volunteers from outside schools and universities to keep the place going. The med cycle was eliminated. The trustees had windows—real windows—installed in the tower over the summer holiday. Enrollment dropped by some fifty percent, but the administrators and professors who remained—most of them chose to stay, surprisingly enough—have been very vocal about keeping the good things about Dr. Stansbury’s dream alive.

  The fate of Panacetix, Professor Alan Partridge’s heralded cure for cancer, remains unresolved. Despite its obvious allure, production of the medication was frozen during the months of legal and political drama involving the school in which it was created. Although there have been outcries for the government to nationalize his patented formula, the country’s leaders have been averse to doing so. Meanwhile, the Professor has been in long negotiations to enter into a business deal with one of several pharmaceutical giants, but the talks stall on a regular basis due to one rather unconventional demand: Partridge is adamant that portions of what will surely be gargantuan profits go toward the families of each and every specimen over the years that had enrolled in his progressions, as well as the families of the six murdered alumni.

  The Stansbury courtroom drama that gripped much of the nation and provoked passionate public debate over the direction of education and America’s continued obsession with academic excellence ended nearly a year after it began. It made temporary stars of Mr. Goldsmith and Mr. Cooley, but neither took the bait of book offers, made-for-TV movie deals, or prime-time interviews. When their testimony ended, they disappeared completely from the public eye. In this, they were, I suppose, just like the rest of us. After everything that had happened, it was rare to come across a former specimen who would admit they were educated at Stansbury. Nobody wanted to be perceived as if they had benefited from a corrupt, murderous regime, even if there was no way they could have known about it while it existed. Everyone—the ones who left with Cooley and Goldsmith that day, and the few who left with me following commencement—bid each other silent good-byes and tried their best to melt into society unnoticed, to pursue their dreams and goals without the golden emblems on their chests or the once proud declaration of having been raised inside the tower.

  I saw the transformation before my eyes during my freshman year of college, as I watched the television broadcasts from inside the courtroom, quickly switching channels to some ridiculous soap opera if anyone ever came knocking at my door. I’d walk out into the center of campus, into the dining rooms, into local bars and house parties, and see those familiar faces, and they, of course, would see me. There were twenty-eight other specimens in my graduating class who matriculated along with me at Yale, and I am certain that not once have any of us admitted where we were formed. Other students talk about us in hushed tones, knowing that the spaces left empty next to the High School query in our class’s face book were full of meaning. I’ve heard naïve freshmen ask former specimens where they attended high school—sometimes they asked to make routine small talk, and other times on a bet or a dare—and heard the response that, while it sounded strange at first, is now my own standard answer: “Oh, just a little school out West. Nowhere you’d have heard of. What about you?”

  Walk through this country’s cities and sometimes you might catch a glimpse of one of us; those unusually tall, calm-faced men and women on the street pushing strollers, speed walking to catch the monorail to the office, or even putting out the garbage
on Wednesdays and Fridays on tree-lined suburban streets. Shortly after the press revealed that close to two thousand specimens walked out into the desert that day and that many are still unaccounted for, it was speculated in workplaces, on street corners, in restaurants, who might be one of them. I will say this: I know them when I see them. They’re the ones who stand out in the crowds, who always seem to laugh at jokes a moment too late, the ones who—like anyone else, I guess—wonder why the world didn’t end up as perfectly as they were told it would. Sometimes I see them and they see me. We exchange curt nods and walk along, keeping the secrets only for those who understand.

  An encounter like this is how I finally came to write this story, actually. A few months ago, during winter break, I was visiting my family in San Angeles and had stopped inside a department store for some last-minute Christmas shopping. One thing that most assuredly has not changed over the years is the overcrowding. The place was packed full of people dashing around frantically, acting more or less like animals.

  “Camilla?” came the voice of a young man behind me. Somehow I just knew it had to be a specimen. Forgetting all about the rigors of anonymity, silent repentance, and curt, meaning-filled nods, I turned around and came face to face with Mr. Cooley. The last time I saw him was on television during the trials three years ago. His eyes still had that unmistakably defiant energy simmering inside of them. He had a coat of brown stubble covering his face and an inviting smile. I wanted it to be an inviting one, anyway, and made it that, whether he intended it as such or not.

  “Mr. Cooley,” I stammered, cringing at the officious sound of my own voice as soon as it left my lips.

  “Hey,” he said, that grin still on his face, “it’s Will now, okay? Just Will.” The years had done good things for him. His body had filled out from skinny to firm. He might have even grown an inch or two.