Cages (10 page)

The reverend had sighed deeply
then, the sound of a man who has rationalized his life for far too long to
enjoy picking it apart.  Finally he said that even though the Outbreak had
proven to him that there was no divine spirit, no watchful eye looking down on
him with benevolent concern, it had not had the same effect on the other
survivors.  They were heartbroken and lovelorn, terrified - and aching for
someone to tell them it would be all right.  Reverend Chalmers knew how to
do this.  He had been trained for it and even though the words he spoke
were hollow he took solace in the comfort they brought to those who had been
forced through an ordeal unlike any in human history.  At least he soothed
their spirit, he reasoned, even if he could do nothing for their soul.

Dave said thank you very much
and left the Reverend's office.

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."

"
B
ut 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.