by Chris Pasley
Dave laughed. "Not gonna happen. Remember, I'm still in the Banner Society. They never stop talking about you."
Biff led me out, latching the big metal door behind us. As we were walking he knocked into me roughly, sending my bag tumbling to the floor. "Watch where you're going," he snarled, snatching up the bag and shoving it back at me.
I tried not to smile. Biff had just given me my radio back. I knew he was a good guy.
Chapter Seven
"Curse words are a good example," Remi lectured. "They're meaningless. What makes a swear word? What makes a word 'bad'? I can say sex, but that's not bad. But say the really good word for it, and it’s like I killed a kitten. I'm describing the exact same act. What makes it okay to say 'poop' but not the better four-letter-word for it?"
I sighed. Remi was on his fourth ageism lecture of the day, his voice echoing through the metal so that each word phased badly. "I don't care, Remi."
"It's because the word isn't about the act. It's about emphasis. Adults keep these words to themselves because they're powerful. Nothing is as emphatic as the F-word. Nothing. They use it to make their sentences more powerful, more meaningful. 'Hand me the crowbar' lacks the urgency and threat that 'hand me the fucking crowbar' has."
I sat up. "So adults refuse to let kids swear because they don't want them emphasizing things too much? I don't buy it."
"You should. Words are powerful, Sam. Polite speech gets stuck in the filters. Adults know how to ignore it, how to parse it, how to tune it out. But when you use a word that powerful it breaks all their filters down. There's too much 'emotional content,' as Bruce Lee used to say."
"What?"
"Pre-Outbreak movie star. Read an article about him in a magazine once. The point is that when kids are restricted to polite speech, they're giving up their power to emphasize. Only adults can mean something so urgently and meaningful. They want to keep us quiet and powerless."
I laid back down. I hated it when Remi started to make sense.
Prisoners have chronicled time's ability to lose coherency in lockup for centuries. A prisoner knows that time is a mutable thing, speeding up or slowing arbitrarily on some quantum tide.
Lying there in that tiny cell I knew that time was not a fixed constant. Some days passed by in an instant, the lights flicking on and off in what seemed like only hours. But most days seemed to want to take their time, sloughing through a morass of rants from Remi, who seemed to take sustenance from railing at authority, the bored drone of the Bell Teacher who came in and gave us abbreviated lectures and homework assignments, and the piercing shrieks of Susan at all hours.
She was consistent and persistent in the way only the insane seem to have the energy for. One hour she would needle me about being a lying son of a bitch who broke her friend's heart, the next she'd be thundering down prophecies of demons, fire and brimstone. Most of the time she said the exact same things over and over, so that my only course of action was to jam my pillow in my ears in the farthest corner of my cell, by the toilet. Conyers couldn't have crafted a better torture.
Mostly, though, I spent my time thinking about my family.
James had been a mysterious figure in my life until I was five. That's when James graduated Quarantine and came back to live with us. I don't remember that time well - I was too young - but James later told me that he had been facing an existential crisis after leaving Quarantine, that he felt lost and unprotected. For the first time in his life he welcomed the smothering cruelty of our mother, the rough, drunken wisdom of our father. But I was a bit of a conundrum to him. It was common those days for there to be thirteen year gaps between siblings - parents see their children sent off to the horrors of Quarantine and get the feeling they're never going to see them again, so they try to fill that potential hole with another child. It was difficult for James to see me as anything but Plan B.
James was a boon to my parents, especially to my father, who had been forced to stay home with me too much because my mother had the higher paying job. Now he was able to dump me on James, who from time to time found himself unable to leave the house anyway. I imagine to James I must have seemed a horrible burden, but he assured me otherwise. He said having to take care of me helped him overcome his anxiety about being out in the world, because he now had other things to worry about, like whether or not I was going to start licking all the electrical sockets or shove my hand in the trash compactor.
To me, James was a hero. I saw him stand up to my parents, something that I, at five years old, never would have dreamed of doing. He called my mom on her analytical bullshit, browbeat my dad endlessly about being a fuckup and never being there for me. I grew up watching as James tore long furrows into my parents' field of control, taking them down as I was powerless to do. I hung on his every word. And no doubt, this caused some of the tension between me and my parents; I would obey James much more quickly than them, and I would help him do chores without being asked. There was clear favoritism here, but they weren't disturbed enough about it to give up all the free time having James around gave them.
I remember the day James moved out. It had started calmly enough. James had a girlfriend and my parents thought that was wonderful. When could they meet her? Of course, he told them never. Furthermore, he had accepted a part-time job at an electronics retailer one town over and would be moving into an apartment with her near his work.
"Are you embarrassed of us?" My mother demanded, her glasses sliding down menacingly.
"Do we not deserve to meet this girl?"
James's lips had tightened. "I absolutely am embarassed of you. And no, you're not going to meet her."
My father had stood then; he was many things and belligerent was certainly one of them.
"You think we aren't embarassed of you, boy? Twenty-one years old and living off his parents like a damn child?"
James had cocked his head at my dad, and I saw a change in him then. It was the sudden realization that he was better than them, a better human being. Later he told me at that moment, he claimed all the lessons he had learned from his years in Quarantine and had never been able to accept. He had learned that he was alone, and that there was no one to protect him. He was a survivor. "That's exactly why I'm leaving, Dad. And don't ask me to bring Verona over again. I'm not going to have her think less of me because my dad's a pranking drunk and my mom's Dr. Frankenstein. But I will still come by to watch Sam. You hear that, Sam? I'm not gonna leave you alone with these idiots!"
I had smiled and waved back. That's when the shouting began.
"Your demons ride on your shoulders, Sam," Susan sang to me. "Not mine though. I saw one in the cafeteria, and one in a hallway."
I glared at her through the glass. "Why are you doing this? You're not crazy. I went to middle school with you. You're no nutcase."
She was quiet a moment and then in a smaller voice said "No, Sam. I'm not."
I pressed further against the glass. "Then why? Why are you saying all this?"
"Because it's what happened."
"God damn it!" I punched the metal door and howled in pain, throwing myself on my futon, clutching my fist.
"Leave it alone, Sam," Remi cautioned. "I've been yelling at her for a week before you got here and in the two weeks since, and she won't let up. She's the real deal."
"I know," I said, miserable. "It's not just that."
"Then what is it?"
"In another week you're getting out of here. And I'll be all alone with her."
Remi sighed. "Don't worry. You've got more patience than me. You'll tune her out."
"I'm not worried about that. I'm starting to believe her."
James's girlfriend didn't last, and his job didn't pay enough to keep the apartment on his own, so he was forced to move back home. I remember watching him unload his two-door hatchback, his body sluggish with defeat, and being happy that he had failed. Life for me had descended into a hell of my mother's lessons and my father's rough disappointment. I wanted J
ames back, but he wasn't quite the same as he had been. He began putting on weight, watching TV for hours, barely responding when I would show him a new toy or ask him a question.
"There's really not much point to anything, Sam," he said wearily. "Especially when you find out the worst days of your life were really the best, and they're already over."
I started getting really angry with him then. He wasn't the cautious, hopeful James who had taken care of me for more than three years. He was melancholy and morose. Sometimes he would write long journal entries in an old composition book, only to throw the whole book in the fireplace once he was done. He even snapped at me once when I was trying to tell him about how whale sonar worked, and never apologized. Over time he became indistinguishable from my parents, irritated at the world and bitter over its past injustices. He watched me dutifully as my parents lived their lives outside of the house, but he never seemed to engage me in any real way. We were both miserable, sitting there, watching the news every night.
That all changed with a phone call about six months after James returned. I was on my feet in an instant after the phone rang as I ran to answer it first. James used to play the game with me and try to beat me there (and always stumble or slow down at the last minute to let me win) but now he didn't move from the couch.
I picked up the phone and said hello.
"Hello? Is James Crafty there?" The voice belonged to a man. He sounded hesitant, as if he suspected he might have a wrong number.
"James!" I shouted and left the phone on the kitchen counter.
James lumbered to his feet with an irritated grunt and walked to the kitchen. He scooped up the phone and began to talk.
I watched his back as he spoke. He stiffened at first, but then he straightened up, his posture relaxing. His movements were more animated than before, more like the James of old. He was even laughing into the receiver. He talked for more than an hour, and when he hung up he turned back to me and it was like seeing someone completely different.
"There's somebody coming over I want you to meet, Sam," James said, smiling. "An old friend of mine I haven't seen in a long, long time."
Remi had been released four weeks before, and it was just me and Susan, like I knew it would be. She didn't preach anymore. Instead she just sat in her cell, weeping, for hours on end. Sometimes at night I heard her imitating the low, hushed voices of men, talking to herself, which would always culminated in more screams while I jammed my fingers in my ears. I watched the Bell door through my porthole, deliriously thinking that Remi would get thrown back in any day now, just to keep me company. He didn't. The highlight of my day was at around three-thirty in the afternoon, when someone would bang on the big metal slab outside. I thought it must be Remi or Dave, and I took comfort in that they hadn't forgotten abut me.
By then I had moved past repentence. Not a week after Remi's release I had shouted that I was sorry, to please let me out, because I was so very sorry. I kicked at the hatch door over and over and over until Susan started screaming at the noise, sure that her demons had come for her again. Remi must have been a stronger kid than me, not to break under the lonliness. But now the hysteria that had brought on my frantic apology was gone and what replaced it was cold anger. I began to plan, to plot, to think of a million ways to fuck over that son of a bitch and his pussy guards.
Lucky for me, I had a window into the mind of my enemy.
I had used the radio a few times since my incarceration, but the battery wasn't infinite and there were no wall sockets in the Bell, so I kept my eavesdropping to twice a week, for no more than ten minutes at a time. I slipped the earbuds in and dialed into Conyers's office. Largo and Conyers were talking again.
"I think we made a mistake shutting down the Blind Hall," Largo said.
"We had no choice. We did what we had to do."
"But it's not working," Largo cried. "I caught two of my students engaging in....well, you can imagine, in the back of my classroom! Betsy Clarkson and Ryan Fogle. Take away their safe area and they just do whatever they want anywhere they can find, any chance they get!"
Conyers sighed. "What do you want me to do? Say 'okay, we're gonna stop watching the Blind Hall again, you can go fuck there now'? Did you forget about Sharon Norse?"
"No." Largo growled in frustration. "I just can't believe how brazen they are. John Rollins told me the other day that he had two kids hiding in his broom clost with the industrial tools in wood shop. They didn't even stop when he opened the door in front of the entire class."
"We're giving them too much leeway," Conyers said. "Maybe Mr. Crafty needs some more company in the Bell."
Largo was quiet a moment. "Two more Beast attacks in the last two months, Dan. Something is wrong here. We can't keep pretending there isn't."
"There's nothing wrong. It's just a busy year. We just have to do what we can to keep the situation under control."
"I can't keep doing this. I have to take a horse's dose of pills as it is just to sleep at night. How are you sleeping?"
"Are you joking, Largo? I sleep just fine."
"I'm sorry, Dan. I'm quitting. I can't just sit here and watch it happen again."
There was a loud bang, like Conyers had slammed his hand into the desk. "Well, go then, you coward. But if I catch you trying to scaremonger to my other teachers I'll have you led out in chains."
"I've got to tell people what's happening! Washington has to know - "
"You think telling Washington is the right thing to do? Jesus, Largo! They'll tear the Quarantine apart, come in here and just take the whole mess away from me. They'll screw everything up, everything we worked all these years to achieve!"
Largo opened Conyers's door. "I'm sorry. I can't let you bully me into silence any more. We used to be friends, you remember, in the early days? After the Outbreak? Don't you remember what it was like? How could you ever chance going through that again?"
"Just go. I don't want to see you in my Quarantine again."
"It's their Quarantine, Dan. We just run it for them." Largo paused. "It was after you lost your arm, wasn't it, when this stopped being about them. I swear to God, after all these years...maybe you didn't cut it off fast enough. Maybe you're just another one of the walking dead and nobody noticed it til now."
"Get the fuck out. And I swear, if I see a single BPI agent sniffing around this place after you leave, I'm going to come to your house and take a baseball bat to your skull."
A long sigh. "Goodbye, Dan."
I turned the radio off. My ten minutes were up.
James's friend was named Matt Takahashi. He was tall and thin, with a mop of stringly black hair that fell over his eyes. He wore baggy jeans and a camoflague jacket. He moved like James did; small steps, eyes constantly flicking back and forth. He arrived on a black bicycle and from the sweat that dripped from his forhead, he had biked a long way.
"Matt was my roommate in Quarantine," James said, pounding Matt on the back. "He's only in town a little while, so I wanted him to come by and meet my little brother."
Matt shook my hand solemnly. "Hello, Sam."
I shook his hand, but only warily. I had rarely seen James so enthused to be with someone other than me. I didn't trust him. Still, it was clear that having Matt there was good for James. He laughed more and would sometime leap off the couch as they recalled old stories, more animated than I had seen him in a year.
"I was hiding from John Greene in the cafeteria - you remember this, Matt? I don't even remember what John as so pissed off about..."
Matt wagged his finger. "You popped all the footballs Friday afternoon. John was second string, and it was gonna be his big chance to quarterback now that Arnold Gallup was in Solitary, but the game had to be called due to lack of equipment."
James chortled. "That's it, right. Well, I thought it was only fair, seeing as I was the one who got Arnold Gallup thrown in Solitary in the first place. I giveth and I taketh away."
"Your brother was fearless!" Mat
t said, pointing to James. "Absolutely fearless. Screw Beasts, James was in more danger from the jocks than anything."
"Yeah, yeah," James waved the compliment away with obvious pride. "Anyway, I'm hiding behind the lunch counter and John comes into the cafeteria. And I'm thinking that there's no way I'm getting out of this - he's gonna murder me - and how tragic that would have been, right? A promising young athlete's hopes derailed by a tragic case of murder."
Matt grinned. "You always did think of others first."
"Then this guy right here –” James grabbed Matt by the shoulder, "this guy comes running into the cafeteria yelling 'Hey John, your girlfriend's making out with Nelson Stewart behind the gym!'"
Matt clapped his hands. "Jeez, that's right, I did. Did he really buy that?"
"I dunno. All I know is he took off out of there like a bat out of hell and you saved my life." James shook his head, smiling at the memory. "God! I can't believe that was, what? Six years ago now?"
I just watched them, enthralled. This was a side of James I hadn't seen. I saw then where the old James had come from, how he had bucked our parents' authority, how he had managed to inspire me in spite of his inability to leave the house. I was listening to old soldiers tell battle stories.
"I have to tell you, Sam, there was another reason I asked Matt over," James said, looking hard into my eyes. "In no time at all, you're gonna be the one in Quarantine. I want to make sure you don't make the same mistakes we did. I want to make sure you can own that place, not spend five years in a box scared of your own shadow like everyone else in there. We're gonna teach you how to make it. Are you with me, Sam?"
The door to the Bell creaked open exactly three months after my incarceration. I had taken to ignoring the Solitary Teacher when he or she came to lecture - what further punishment could they level at me? - but this time, the door was opening off-schedule. Life in the Bell was even more about routine than the open Quarantine, and this had broken it. I leaped to my feet, ignoring the stiffness in my joints that had grown from being able to move only a few feet for the last quarter of a year, and looked out my porthole. Was there a new student being locked up?