Goodhouse

by Peyton Marshall

  I tried to hold still, but the flame burned my wrists and the room filled with the awful reek of smoking hair. I jerked away.

  “No,” Tuck said. “You really do want this.”

  “Why? What happens?”

  “It’s always different,” he said. “Usually they turn off the lights and try and flush us out into the main area. Just stick close.”

  I wanted to press him for answers, but I was having a hard time holding still. We worked on the cuff for several minutes, until I was sweating with pain. The insides of my wrists were starting to bubble. I pulled hard. Then I squatted down and used my knees to push my arms apart, and that seemed to do it. The cuff stretched enough to wiggle one hand out and then the other. I sat on one of the pallets, which was a mistake. It smelled like a dead animal and released a cloud of fleas. Somewhere in another room a boy started yelling. The words were indistinct. I licked the blisters on my wrists and then blew on them. It helped.

  “So, what’d you learn,” Tuck asked, “about civilian life?”

  I shrugged. “I worked. I chopped up this tree, but they acted like I was there to rob them.” I thought of the money with a pang. It brought me up short. I had robbed them. “What’s it really like out there?” I asked. “What’s a day like?” But Tuck seemed both amused and mystified by my curiosity. “We just don’t get to talk much,” I said. “And you have to be careful. People try to get you to say wrong-thinking stuff so they can report you. Not your friends, but, you know.”

  “You snitch in here,” he said, “we kill you.”

  I tried to explain. “At my old school we had a group. Four of us. We never reported each other—or actually, we had to a few times a month or else they’d have split us up. But it was always arranged ahead of time—who would get tagged for what—and it was always small stuff. We actually worked out profiles like personal problems. I was supposed to have a problem with swearing.” I paused. I hadn’t said any of my friends’ names out loud since the fire. And I found I didn’t really want to conjure them. “Another one of us was supposed to be prone to taking the cafeteria spoons back to his room. Just stupid stuff. Not real wrong-thinking, nothing that got you too many days in the field.”

  “You have no idea how crazy that sounds,” he said. “I hope my brother isn’t as screwed up as that.” Tuck kicked at some trash on the floor. He seemed to be lost in a memory. “You ever see a little kid who looks like me on campus, you say hello.”

  “I’ll keep an eye out for him,” I said, lifting my chin slightly. But the gesture wasn’t truly my own. I was imitating Tuck—stealing his mannerisms, adopting the cadence of his speech. I’d felt this before, the ability to impersonate, to become like the people near me—and I wondered if this was what I’d really learned at Goodhouse, the art of appearing to be something I wasn’t.

  “What time was it when you came in?” Tuck asked.

  “Don’t know,” I said. “After lights-out.”

  “Which is?”

  “Ten.”

  He stood up and ran his fingers over a piece of molding around the ceiling of the room. He pulled a piece of lathe out from the hole around the toilet. But the wood was brittle and snapped in half, and he threw the pieces away. “Shit,” he said. “It’s getting to be that time and we’ve got nothing.” He tore several strips of cloth from the mattress covering, revealing the stained cotton pad underneath. “Here.” He handed me two pieces of fabric. I watched the way he wrapped the cloth around his wrist and knuckles and I tried to do the same. I stared at the birds on his arms. Some of them had their mouths open as if they were calling to each other. Some of them looked startled. “Just fight hard,” he said. “If you get into the lighted area, you’ll see the guards. Don’t pay any attention, even if they say they’ll let you out. They won’t. Just swing until you can’t. You know, they place bets. If you do well, somebody will probably lose a lot of money,” he said. “There’s always that.”

  I persisted in asking questions, but he cut me off. “I don’t know any more,” he said. “I’ll help you if I can, but I won’t go out of my way. That’s not how it works. What did they train you for, anyway?” he asked. “They do that, right? Give you a job skill.”

  I gave up trying to wrap the cloth around my wrist and just covered my knuckles. I wasn’t a good fighter, and the strips of rag seemed almost laughable. “I sing,” I said.

  Tuck stared at me. “Everybody sings,” he said.

  “Yeah, but that was my skill,” I said. “What they chose for me.” Tuck told me I was useless. “But that was the best part,” I said. I blew on my wrists. “Learning to do something useless felt like they let me out,” I said. “For a while, anyway.”

  “That’s just how they keep you busy,” Tuck said. “Give you a little taste of something you want.”

  “Maybe,” I said. I felt heavy with fatigue. After my initial reaction to the drug, I’d had no other side effects. Still, I knew it must be inside me, metabolizing.

  “Sing me something,” Tuck said.

  “I only know church songs,” I said. But Tuck was waiting.

  “Go on,” he said.

  I stood up straight. I closed my eyes, and strangely, the little chapel where we practiced was there, waiting for me on the inside of my eyelids. I could smell sage and cedar and the heavy perfume of lilies on the church altar. At the last Christmas concert I’d sung the opening of Handel’s Messiah. And now I heard the violins beginning the overture, and our little organ followed and then the harpsichord—an old, worn-out box that had been donated to us, one of its legs broken and propped up by a two-by-four. My throat muscles felt too tight. For a moment the notes were elusive, but then, all at once, the air pushed through me and I relaxed. My voice grew richer and deeper and it felt natural to sing, like I was exhaling a cloud of melody.

  Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people, saith your God.

  Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem,

  and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished,

  that her iniquity is pardoned.

  I opened my eyes, forgetting they were closed, and I was shocked to see the room anew, in fact to see it at all, to smell the mold and see Tuck’s astonished expression.

  I went silent then, feeling as if I had invoked some sort of forbidden magic in this place, crossed some line. The entire building was quiet, and I realized I’d sung as if my body itself were a pipe joining the surge of the church organ, pushing to surpass the little orchestra, to reach the back row, where our headmaster sat. I was shaking. I had been there. In the chapel, that dead life was still going on inside me, playing and replaying.

  “Jesus,” Tuck said. “You’re like some kind of fucked-up bird.” And then the lights went out and I heard a clicking noise. The locks on our doors had automatically retracted. Deep silence suddenly gave way to a collective roar. Footsteps pounded through the hallway. Tuck pulled me over to the door. He opened it wider and we stood behind the slab. It was so dark I couldn’t see, but Tuck seemed to have a grasp of where everything was. He made a low shushing noise, just barely audible, and then I heard someone enter the room with shuffling steps. I tried to breathe quietly, but my heart was hammering. The blackness was like a thick, suffocating soup. I stifled the urge to lash out. Tuck’s hand gripped my arm, sensing some change, though I hadn’t moved.

  “It’s clear,” a voice said. “Check next door.”

  There were sounds in the hallway, and the brief illumination of a flashlight beam cut through the crack between the door and the wall. Then we were alone. Tuck pulled me after him. “I got to find my people,” he whispered.

  It’s hard to remember exactly what happened. Down the hall somewhere a boy was howling like a wolf. Someone grabbed me from behind and tore at my shirt. I struggled and fought. The blisters on my wrists burst. I was having little effect on my opponent, or perhaps there was more than one, and then suddenly I fell into another room, just fell through an unseen opening and lay on the floor.

 
I crawled a little way and stood with my back to a wall. All the ambient noise was conjuring memories of the fire. It was peeling away time, and I felt certain that the hallway was filled with the angry remains of my friends. It felt like I was in two places at once. I was seeing little bursts of orange light out of the corner of my eye. They were phantoms, just like the smell of smoke, just like the repeating chorus of the school choir, chanting:

  But he is like a refiner’s fire, like a refiner’s fire.

  And the violins were sawing away and we were all sweating in the little church and then we were on fire, choking, clawing at each other. And there was that breath on the back of my neck: the white-haired man had found me and was going to open the back of my head. He was checking his gun. What was taking him so long?

  I was swinging into full panic, my hands digging into the wall, kicking and thrashing. When I felt the touch of a human hand, I turned toward it in fury.

  * * *

  This is what happened. On my last night at La Pine, I awoke to the sound of the fire alarm. Our room was already filling with smoke. I shouted at my roommates to follow me, but the hallway was chaotic. All of our training—the orderly fire drills with the marching lines of boys who stood on the green line and counted off—hadn’t prepared us for the darkness, for the chaos. We had been hunched over. Walking on all fours, bellowing and pushing—terrifying each other. The flashing red light of the alarm pulsated as it shrieked. There were no adults. Smoke filled the halls, a black, undulating ceiling that sank lower and lower. I was knocked to the ground, crushed for a few panicky seconds, kicked and stepped on. The air felt acidic in my lungs. I thought of that picture of Hell in the chaplain’s illustrated Bible: men with dog bodies and donkey tails and fire consuming their hair, maggots erupting from their mouths, a chaotic tangle of maimed and damaged limbs.

  Then, somehow, I was up and running, staying close to the wall as I sprinted to the back staircase. I saw Ian. My friend Ian, the one who stole cafeteria spoons. Ian. That was his name.

  I grabbed his arm and pulled him after me as we raced for the stairs, pushing against a tangle of boys headed in the opposite direction. I had a secret. I’d been sneaking out. The dormitory was old, and all the wooden windows had been replaced with metal sliders of impact-resistant glass. They opened only four inches to circulate the air. But the janitor’s utility closet on the fourth floor was an exception. It had its original double-hung sashes, and I knew the access code—I’d seen a class leader punch it in.

  The upper hallways were worse, filled with a more acrid, stinging smoke, with an almost unbearable heat. We crawled to the utility closet and I punched in the numbers. Stumbling over buckets and bottles of cleaning fluid, we managed to raise the window and suck in great gulps of cold January air. I was already regretting my decision to race for the closet. Surely most everyone had made it out the main door. Surely it was not as bad as it seemed moments ago. “I’ll take responsibility,” I said. “You should turn me in.”

  “I’ll say the closet was already open,” Ian said. “Nobody will check.”

  We expected to see boys flooding the yard below. I expected to see my friends lined up in rows, but instead, the yard was dotted with men in black jackets and red balaclavas. Bodies—proctors, mostly, but some students—lay unmoving on the lawn. It took us a moment to process it all. The snow at the base of the building had melted. Ash floated in the air, little black flecks like crows against a stormy sky.

  “I’m not going down there,” Ian said.

  “We have to,” I said. The smoke was getting heavier. It was hard to breathe even with the window open. “Follow me.” I told him to put his feet where I did, and then I was on the ledge, trying to dig my fingers into the rotten molding, usually soft enough to find a grip, but tonight, frozen and slippery. Ian kept grabbing for me, and I moved away from him, afraid he’d knock me loose.

  “Wait,” he said. “You’re going too fast.”

  “Just do what I do,” I said.

  We crept toward the corner of the building where the decorative edging had been cut to look like stone—and the pattern created a series of handholds and footholds. As we descended, we passed several open windows, one of which was broken, the safety glass bulging in its frame. A single limp and disembodied arm had been wedged through the four-inch opening.

  Purifying fire. This is what the Zeros preached. We’d all read Matthew 13—the parable of the weeds. We all knew that the Zeros used this—this single biblical chapter—as the foundation of their doctrine, their justification for the use of fire. In the parable, an enemy has sown weeds among a farmer’s wheat, but Jesus tells the farmer to wait. He tells him not to remove the weeds, not to risk damaging the crop. It’s only when everything has grown—when everything has been safely harvested—that the weeds must be bundled together and burned. This was, the Zeros said, the word of God. This was his truth.

  As I climbed to the ground that night in La Pine, as I struggled to grip the side of the building with my shaking fingers, I felt the blaze intensify. Paint bubbled off the siding and smeared onto my pajamas. My palms burned. I jumped the last ten feet and lay still beside a fallen proctor. Whatever was happening, I knew it was better to blend in and disappear. A dead boy had the best chance, and I assumed that Ian would follow me, do what I did, like he had for the duration of our climb. But as soon as his feet touched the ground, he ran for the woods. I could have shouted for him to stop, but I didn’t. I lay there on the grass watching his pajamas flapping, breath issuing from his mouth in clouds of condensation.

  Someone shot him from a distance. He fell, and then a man with a red scarf around his neck, a man dressed in the garb of a citizen, stood over him and shot him in the head. Even in the flickering chaos of the flaming building, even through my partially closed eyes, I could see the man’s composed, almost bored expression. His thick white hair was slicked back like a helmet. And then this man was walking toward me, feet crunching in the frosty grass. He was humming to himself, a little tune I didn’t recognize. He stood there for what felt like a very long time. There were little metallic clicks as if he were checking his gun. It was probably no more than fifteen seconds, but it seemed interminable. I imagined I was dead. I am grass. I am air, I thought. But I was glowing with life, waiting for some treacherous limb to twitch, half wanting to stand up and fight. If it had to happen, if I had to be shot, then I wanted it to be done already. I wanted to be on the other side of the experience—away from the dying. I am empty, I thought, I am empty, and when the proctor beside me groaned, the man fired into him. I was the frost on the lawn. I was the night itself. I was nothing at all.

  And so I was simultaneously lying in the grass and fighting my way through the hallways in the Exclusion Zone. There was a breath on the back of my neck, and even when I spilled out into a lighted room, I was blind. I was everywhere and nowhere, dimly aware of guards cheering behind some sort of wire cage. But I was fighting the men in red masks. I was fighting my way back into the burning building, racing up the corner of the dormitory and into the janitor’s closet. My friends were all still alive and I could get to them. I was stronger than time, stronger than fact. I would open the walls, splinter the windows. This was a rescue mission, and my terror gave me the strength of two, and any person in my way was just a door to blow open. It was not until several guards pinned my arms and pushed me flat that I saw where I was. I saw the body I was fighting, the one that now lay very still. I saw the blue-inked tattoos, the shaggy hair, and then I saw my mistake.

  PART TWO

  THE SAFEST PLACE TO BE

  SIX

  I don’t clearly remember leaving the Exclusion Zone. Several guards subdued me even though I’d stopped fighting; one of them hit me hard on the side of the head. I do remember being carried outside through the night—I remember hearing Davis shout at someone, his voice tense and angry. At one point I opened my eyes and saw Tuck beside me, lying on a stretcher in some kind of triage facility. It was
tiled like a shower. Machines loomed above me; a plastic bag dripped saline into my arm.

  “They’re both stable,” a voice said. But when I opened my eyes again, Tuck was gone. A pile of blood-soaked bandages and cut-open clothes had been heaped onto the stretcher. A female nurse—a woman with short red hair and a bright blue stethoscope around her neck—leaned over me.

  Time passed in fragmentary images. I faded in and out. Water stains like rust-colored flowers bloomed on the ceiling tiles overhead. The clock above the door had a broken hour hand that twitched as it pointed to the number 6. At one point, Ian sat on the end of my bed. He was still in his pajamas, telling me some story about how he’d covered the doorknobs with Vaseline. He left muddy footprints on the floor, and I worried I wouldn’t be able to clean them before they were noticed.

  When I finally came to, it was evening. I could smell the faintly salty, meaty stench of cafeteria food. My door was open, and Bethany stood beside me. At first I thought she was another hallucination, but her hand felt warm on my arm. “Wow,” she said. “You look like a cobbler. I mean, your face does. Have you had cobbler? I think peach is best, but not made from canned fruit.”

  “What are you doing here?” I said. “Where am I?” But my mouth felt thick and the words ran together. She was wearing a white lab coat that was much too big for her. The sleeves were rolled and the name Dr. A. J. Cleveland was embroidered on the pocket in blue thread. Underneath the name was the image of a swan. She followed my gaze.

  “This belongs to my dad,” she said. “You know, they used to paint everything white in hospitals so patients thought the surfaces were clean, which, of course, was a fallacy. Lots of people died of infections.” Her hair was loose and curly at the ends. She smelled vaguely of coconut. “Did you know,” she continued, “neckties are the most dangerous part of a doctor’s outfit? Nobody washes them. They’re Petri dishes.”

  “How is it that you’re here?” I said. “How long have I been out?”