Cages

by Chris Pasley

  The months that followed marked the only time in Dave's life that he gave anyone a hard time. He had seen through the veil. The things his parents told him weren't true. The things they thought were important weren't. Dave was having difficulty dealing with his newfound freedom from the social mores he had always been taught were important. He was like a ball on a string, having been released from one extreme only to swing violently to the opposite side. He skipped school. He bullied younger kids. He snuck out of the house at church time and spent his Sunday mornings knocking small trees down with a metal pipe in the gully behind his house. He drew on his walls with black marker. Spankings didn't deter him - that was hardly real punishment, was it?

  One night Dave's mother came to tuck him in and broke down crying. He saw her eyes wander to the Little League trophies, the academic awards, the rough and colorful drawings on his walls from before. She pulled the covers up to his chin and asked "What's happened to my boy?"

  The very next Sunday, to his parents' surprise, Dave enthusiastically went along to church. He looked down at his hymnal and sang all the songs. Then, after the service ended he went back into Reverend Chalmers's office.

  The last few months had been terribly stressful on Chalmers. Bearing his soul to the boy had kept him up at night. He had nightmares of the congregation tarring and feathering him for a liar and a heretic. There were torches and pitchforks. Chalmers worried that the boy would tell, that he had told. As much as he resented his own hypocrisy, Chalmers had to admit he knew of no other life besides being nestled in the warm embrace of the church. At least, that's what Dave saw in his face when Chalmer found him sitting once again in the reverend's office.

  "I understand why you're doing it now," Dave said. "It's for them."

  He left Chalmers's office and never returned. Up until Quarantine Dave and Chalmers shared a pact of silence, even though each knew the other was just faking. Chalmers faked belief. Dave faked ignorance.

  It wasn't hard to see how his family would light up when he won a basketball game or made the honor roll. Keeping them happy was easy; he just had to be the perfect son - or at least what they thought the perfect son was. He and I shared a relief that came with entering Quarantine, a paradoxical time of freedom in confinement, but his was soon fleeting. His parents received constant word of his activities. They had sent him a limited edition baseball bat (confiscated) and a new basketball. Dave wasn't done being perfect just yet.

  "I don't care much for baseball," Dave confided in me one night, after Ben went to sleep. "The only thing I want to be less than a baseball player is a lawyer."

  "So what do you want to be?"

  Dave grinned. "I don't know. Ain't that great?"

  Worse still, Dave found that perfection doesn't stand still. Perfection spreads. It wasn't just his parents. It was his sports teammates who were counting on him to score the final point. It was the cheerleaders who chanted his name. It was the faculty and the administration of every school he attended, who made up awards just to give them to him. He was someone they could believe in. Celebrity was always a burden to him - one he planned to shed as soon as he could.

  So who was the real Dave Tinder?

  "Maybe you and me'll find out one day," Dave had quipped, munching on candy from a gift basket his mother had brought him the day before. "Cause I don't have a clue."

  Weeks went by as I focused on betraying everything my brother had ever taught me about Quarantine survival. I stopped listening to the radio bug. I reported to Conyers about my fellow students. (Four boys and one girl were sent to the Bell based on my testimony.) I was an enthusiastic member of the Literary Society, Kate's brazen nemesis. I knew Conyers was lying, absolutely knew it, but perhaps it was another example of what Dave's preacher said. I needed to believe I wouldn't end up like #25, and Conyers held out a very tantalizing carrot for me to chase.

  I got good grades. I made friends. I harassed no one and my bag of tricks was kept safely hidden.

  About a month and a half after I entered Quarantine, I had a visitor.

  Visitors were handled much in the same way prison visits are handled, I imagine. Visitors had the option of meeting in a common room overseen by four guards, or by telephone behind reinforced glass. Most chose the telephone. The other kids say that even through the glass their parents looked at them like they would a boxed cobra, fearful of being even in the same building.

  My only visitor was my mother.

  She wore her nicest dress, though I was certain it wasn't on my behalf, a simple blue number she only trotted out at hospital functions. Her thick glasses sat perched atop her head, ready in an instant to snap down should something need reading. I got to say one thing for my mom; she was fearless. She chose the open room.

  I sat down across the table in the middle of the room. "Hi Mom."

  She frowned. "I've been getting reports on you, you know."

  "And? Haven't I been a good boy?"

  She rolled her eyes. "I'd hardly call tricking a guard into unloading his weapon into a wall being a good boy."

  "I meant, haven't I been a good boy lately?"

  A strand broke free of her tightly bound hair, but she whipped it back before it could touch her eyes. "Sarcasm may suit your brother, Sam, but you're made of better stuff than that."

  I stared. "By the way, Mom, there's something I've been meaning to ask you."

  Her frown deeped. "Go ahead."

  "Why do bad things happen to good people?"

  Her frown dissolved into a grimace. "What are you playing at?"

  I shrugged and stood from the table. Even after only a month away from her I felt bigger, and even though I had been taller than her for a year or so, for the first time I didn't feel intimidated. I could always escape back into my cage. "It's something I wanted to ask you when I was six, but was too afraid to. So I thought, what a great way for me to start a dialog with my mother than to ask her all those burning questions I couldn't ask when I wanted to."

  Her thick glasses slid down onto her face, a mask dripping with authority. "Stupid questions don't deserve answers, Sam."

  "But I do." I leaned against the locked door. If I went Beast in here my mother had no escape. The idea didn't really amuse me as much as it once might have. She didn't answer and for a moment we just stared at each other in a cold silence. I blinked first. "How's Dad and James?"

  "They're fine. Or as fine as they get. I asked James what you were up to. I show him your reports, but he just smirks and shrugs. I keep telling him he should come visit, but he says you don’t need him." She took her glasses off again, perhaps knowing that they didn't work anymore. "Look, I didn't come here to talk about them. I came here to talk about you. I'm onto you. I know you, and if Conyers thinks he's got you under his thumb, he's wrong. Whatever you're planning, I want you to stop it."

  I laughed. "Really? Maybe you don't know me that well, ma. I'm one hundred percent sincere."

  She shook her head. "I don't believe you. I told Conyers he shouldn't either. You've got something going, probably something your stupid brother cooked up for you."

  "I don't know what you're talking about."

  "Damn it, stop playing games!" She stood. "Let me tell you what you need to do. You need to keep your head down. Keep quiet. Learn all you can. Survive. Then...when you get out..." She trailed off and the glasses came back down, an emotional blast shield.

  I was flabbergasted. Never in all my life had my mother ever been so...weak, and I felt a crack in my hatred for her. But only a crack. "You think that's all it takes?" I shouted. The guards on the other side of the room's windows put their hands on their weapons. I stared her in the eye, looking down at her, then knocked on the door. "Let me out of here."

  "You don't have to go yet."

  I scowled. "There's really nothing more to say, unless you brought me a gift basket."

  She looked confused. "Gift basket?"

  The door opened with the clank of padlocks and I pushed through
it, an MP5 trained on me the whole way back to my dorm cell.

  It soon became obvious that the Literary Society's sole purpose was to discuss works that examined transformation as a component of the human condition. The story of Tiresias was next on the docket. I think Jarvis picked that one just to give Kate and I something to fight about. This time it was Kate up in arms.

  "The story of Tiresias isn't about transformation. It's about misogyny." She sat with her arms crossed in front of her chest, challenging me with her glare.

  "Oh?" I shook my head. "I don't think that a man who spends seven years as a woman, even bearing children, would be capable of misogyny."

  "Oh come on. In one version of the story, Tiresias becomes a prostitute. In another when the gods ask Tiresias to declare which gender gained more pleasure from sex, he declared it was the female."

  I held my hands up. "Sorry. Still not seeing it."

  Kate snorted. "Then you're not looking. In this story, when a man becomes a woman, he becomes a prostitute - that is what the man thinks a woman is, the first thing he becomes. Not knowing how to be a woman, he goes with his prejudices and decides that he should be a whore."

  Jarvis clicked his tongue at her. "Language, Kate."

  "Oh please. You're taking it as some sort of intentional condemnation on the female gender because this man chose to become a prostitute when he got an extra chromosome in one version of the story. Truth of the matter is that during the time Tiresias would have had his transformation, there were clearly defined gender roles. Are you saying then that he should have automatically known how to cook, how to sew, how to do whatever women did back in ancient Greece? It seems that would have been worse. No, to me if anything it's pro-female. When a man, with all the cultural superiority of the time his gender bought him, became a female, the best he could do was work for sex. He failed at being a woman and chose the only profession it took no skill to perform." I leaned back in my chair, satisfied.

  Kate shook her head violently. "What about the last part then, about his answer about sex being more pleasurable for the female?"

  "What about it?"

  "It just shows how magnanimous men are in their pursuit of sex. It's a rationalization for all the years of rape and abuse women took in that era. 'Oh, what are you complaining about, this is better for you than it is for me.' It's utterly ridiculous." Kate was standing now, her tirade too passionate for her desk to contain.

  I smirked. "And how do you know it wasn't just the truth?"

  Kate turned red, and her mouth worked like a fish, clearly full of so many things to yell about that none could escape. Jarvis, seeing the debate escalating into uncomfortable waters, shifted the talk to questions of Tiresias as a prophet. The four other students seemed intimidated to be speaking after Kate and I had our little battle, but they tried their best.

  There were no handshakes in the hallway attempted this time. This was intellectual war and clearly she hated losing as much as I did.

  When I was in fourth grade, I needed to take a dump really bad. So I got the key to the boys’ bathroom with its large wooden fob and settled into the first stall I saw without poop floating in it. Everything was going fine until the bell rang. Suddenly the bathroom was filled with hollering young boys, pulling themselves over the stall door to peek at and ridicule me. I crunched as tight as I could into a ball, hiding my face towards the floor until malicious little heads began to appear from under the walls. The worst part was that I couldn’t stop once I’d started, though I tried. They roared with every splash.

  From that day on, I developed an unfailing sense of exactly how many people were in the bathroom when I was in the stall. My ears painted a clear picture of the sneakers walking to the urinals; even if two came in on one door opening, I knew. My talent for counting the numbers of people in a bathroom from one locked stall was matched only by my capacity for stillness when someone else sat down in the stall next to mine. I had perfected my timing and control such that I could do my business in perfect lockstep with toilet flushes, running water from the sink, or a particularly loud conversation.

  This is a pretty odd thing to be proud of, granted, but never before Quarantine had my talents been put to such a severe test. The dorm cells were set in two blocks above the gym, trisected by three hallways. The end hallway was the boys’ bathroom and showers. The middle was the girls’, and the end was mainly for security patrols to canvas the entire dorm.

  After many nights of feeling out the low traffic times, I had found a single time where, more often than not, I was absolutely alone. Two fifteen in the morning.

  “Sam’s going for his poop break,” Dave muttered as the hallway light poured in through the open door. My roomies had been surprisingly tolerant of me, so I in turn decided to ignore whatever I heard them doing in the middle of the night. Fair’s fair.

  The bathrooms were sparse. No mirrors. In place of sinks there was a single long trough with six crooked spigots. A shot air-drying machine no one ever bothered with any more. Six urinals built into the wall like sunken mouths with pouting lips. Six stalls made from particleboard and aluminum hinges. Toilet paper rolls locked into rigid metal dispensers. Tile everywhere that led into the shower room, where there were six shower poles that could accommodate four boys apiece. We had each been assigned shower times; mine was in the afternoon just after lunch, so I often had the pleasure of going to half my classes wet if no one had refilled the towel hamper by then. Some days I just didn’t bother, but I always brushed my teeth and put on deodorant. I wasn’t a barbarian. You’d think the bathrooms would be a more violent, littered place, except for the slowly rotating cameras in every corner. Privacy was an amusing idea in Quarantine. They even had little windshield wipers for the steam.

  The walk from my cell, two doors down from the girls’ showers, was pretty quick. Usually I was seen and appraised by the security guard roaming the halls on night shift, my trip noted in a little notebook, but that night the halls were empty. I took a book with me, as I always did: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I was curious to find out what the story had to do with transformation, because sixty pages in, I hadn’t seen it yet. The bathroom was satisfactorily empty, so I chose a stall by the wall and settled in.

  Seven minutes later, the bathroom door swung open. I barely had time to panic before a quick knock warned of a blonde, gelled head popped up over the door. No, no, no, no! My brain screamed, but I was too shocked to say anything.

  “Oh, hey. It’s you,” Kenny Stoppard said.

  “Get out of here.”

  “Oh, grow a pair. Lucky I caught you, I was just looking for some company.”

  “Company?”

  Kenny grinned. “Thought we could break your Blind Hall cherry.”

  There are only a few things people really needed to know about Kenny Stoppard. He was a Vocational track. He had a grating sense of humor and a violent temper. And, he ran the Blind Hall. Dave had him on his List of People Not to Piss Off. Alan Tallart was also on that list.

  I hunched over more to cover my bare legs. “I’ve been there.”

  Kenny whooped. “Not at night you haven’t. Come on, man, everybody’s starting to talk about how I can’t get the guy who got even for Jeremy Emmet into my Hall. You’re a celebrity! It ain’t a party till you show up!”

  He had me grinning. Maybe this once, I should take something at face value. I was a kind of celebrity, wasn’t I? Besides, I was getting tired of my dorm cell. Dave farted in his sleep. “Ok. But stop looking at me and let me finish up. Don’t want the camera to think you’re a funny-boy, do you?”

  Kenny’s smile slipped a bit, but he nodded and slipped down off the door. “Kenny and Sam, steppin’ out tonight!”

  I cleaned up quickly and pulled my pants up. On the other side of the door Kenny waiting with a broad grin. Squirt of soap, quick lather with water and we were gone, me drying my hands on my shirt, One Hundred Years of Solitude abandoned by the faucet.


  The door beside the shop opened up into a totally different world than it had been when Remi had attack Alan. The red lights had been sterile before, but now the shadows of bodies cast everything in sinister silhouettes. I had imagined it to be like a trendy nightclub, filled with sweaty, nubile young bodies, dancing to techno and getting each other off between snorts of who-knew-what. Instead, the Hall was mostly quiet. A single boom box blared at the end of the hall, but its speakers were busted and couldn’t intelligibly produce any significant volume. No one danced. Few people were even standing, most lying in groups together on the floor, belching smoke like dying dragons. Here and there a couple pawed at each other, but I couldn’t see anyone having sex outright. Franklin Fogerty, the quietest and least engaged member of the Literary Society, was slumped against one dirty brick wall, a needle left forgotten like a lawn dart fallen just shy of the rubber tie around his bicep. His eyelids fluttered and his arms twitched, but other than that he gave no movements. Now I knew why he kept so quiet. He was probably just biding his time in classes until he could get back here for his hit.

  There was nothing exciting here. Nothing erotic, nothing dangerous. It was like visiting an infirmary.

  “Don’t worry,” Kenny said, slapping me on the back. “It hits everyone different the first time. It’s the only break we get from Conyers and his goons. Want a beer?”

  No way was I gonna do any drugs; I had made my mind up about that in the bathroom. But beer was the only vice that came with status. It’s drilled into every young Southern boy’s head from birth. Drink beer and you’re a man. My dad had relished his Sunday afternoon Marietta Light for years, all the while lamenting that Budweiser had been more or less eradicated in the Outbreak. He would have given me some if I’d asked, I’m sure, but he could never evade the eagle eye of my mother long enough to have the chance. Now, just as I was starting to think that I was coming into my own, my dear crazy dad’s equal, why not have a beer? “Sure.”

  Kenny grinned again. “My man.” He walked over to a cooler perched on a pipe midway down the hall. There was an older boy standing beside it, stone cold sober. The cooler guard, I realized. Kenny opened the cooler and threw a tall can at me.