The End of Marking Time (13 page)

I got tired of standing and walked around to sit next to Deone. A chalkboard lay flat on the table in front of him. I saw Wendell’s name, Charlotte’s, Dr. Blake’s. All my counselors were there along with other names I didn’t recognize. Obviously, they were using the chalkboard to signal each other, but why? These guys could teach me what I was up against and I didn’t let the occasion escape.

“What can you guys tell me about getting along? I keep stumbling into trouble.”

Deone said, “Don’t do anything stupid.”

At the same time Joel wrote, Careful what you say on the chalkboard and then pointed to his ankle bracelet.

I started to ask a question, but Deone shook his head gravely. It was important to him that I keep quiet, so I did. Deone then drew three rows of squares on the chalkboard and pointed to one in the middle of the top row. He drew an arrow to the wall at my right and when I looked over, there was a dark figure standing in the center window on the third floor.

“A crowd attracts attention,” Tyrone said, meaning a crowd of relearners. Did they think we were planning a heist? Or a jailbreak?

“Not everyone is glad we’re out,” Deone said.

“No one’s glad we’re out,” Joel corrected. “Except Wendell.”

Everyone laughed except me.

“He thinks he can fix us,” Deone said. “Thinks teaching us equations gives us control. We control ourselves, but he’ll never understand that.”

“That’s a laugh,” Joel said. “If you could control yourself you wouldn’t be here. And you know you’re never getting out for good.”

All three seemed resigned to return over and over.

“Bad luck getting here on your first try,” Deone said to me.

“What do you mean?”

Deone explained there were three types of programs. If you were lucky you got one of the easy ones. There wasn’t much to them and you’d be out in a week or two. According to Deone, you never got one of those twice. Wendell’s program was the hardest. He was nuts about helping people. He really believed that a relearner could walk out of his program and go straight for good. He worked day and night and made millions in the process.

“It could be worse, one of the cat baggers could have gotten you.”

A cat bagger was a sadist who created his own program and had it sanctioned by the government. They tortured relearners to entertain themselves and made a living in the process. Most of the convicts in those programs went nuts and jumped out a window. Once you went to one of the cat baggers, you never came back. In the old days prisoners would sue if they didn’t get the right kind of toast, but now the pendulum had swung the other way. People wanted protection from relearners and citizens were willing to close their eyes to get it.

For the second night in a row I went out to dinner alone, then spent the night staring at the ceiling unable to sleep. On this night I would have gladly replayed my nightmares about confronting my mother. The stories about the cat baggers wiped away any confidence I’d gained from my victory over the black box. The guys in the courtyard made me feel like an idiot for going so slow and that bothered me, but thinking about the cat baggers and how sinister they could be with Wendell’s technology, that had me thinking about going straight. Wendell was trying to teach me something and that was frustrating enough. If the cat baggers were bent on tormenting me, they could create something infinitely complex or completely random where no matter what I chose or no matter how hard I tried, I’d be sure to fail. Strange as it sounds, I felt fortunate to be in Wendell’s program and I didn’t want him to kick me out. That was my first hint about how the system worked.

I had a sliver of hope Wendell would give up and send me to one of the easy programs. The stakes seemed trivial until I heard about the cat baggers. My new friends didn’t know how the cat baggers worked, only that relearners who went to one of those programs were never seen again. The stories were probably dramatized, but I knew there were people in the world sick enough to do what Deone and Joel described.

If the threat of electrically induced psychosis wasn’t enough to keep me awake, I could imagine Charlotte leading me onto the set of a talk show to confront my mother. She hadn’t told me where we were going or what she hoped to accomplish. My only clue was that she told me to dress nicely. If our trip involved my family I wasn’t sure why I needed to dress nicely, but I knew it wouldn’t be pretty.

At nine I visited the donut shop in my newest jeans and the only long sleeve dress shirt I owned. I hoped I’d have enough time to finish my lesson when Charlotte was done with me because I was too tired to look at the screen before I left.

She arrived in a new Chevy hybrid, the car exhaling air and water as it reached me at the curb. She looked me up and down, unimpressed with my sneakers and jeans and, unable to see the ankle bracelet, she nodded toward my feet and made me show it to her. She wore heels and a black dress with a high neckline. She’d look at home wherever we were going. I looked like her needy cousin. Unfortunately, this was the top step in my wardrobe. The public defender’s office had taken back the suit they loaned me for trial.

“Are you going to tell me where we’re going?”

She pulled away and casually said, “To see Kathleen and Jonathan.”

The words rolled out like she was taking me to the corner store for milk and bread. I reminded myself that Jonathan was my son. Using his name so casually, she made him what he was—a person. Until that day, he’d only been a vague recollection of frenzied nights a long time ago. I’d prepared for an argument with my mother where she was the bad guy and I was the wrongly injured, riding in to claim justice for my pain and suffering. The conversation with Kathleen would be exactly the reverse. If the people who administered the DNA tests could be trusted, I’d gotten her pregnant and disappeared. The ugly conversation I’d prepared for got a lot uglier in the car.

If I had been driving, the car would have slowed to a crawl, but Charlotte sped silently past block after block. She had nothing to fear except arriving late. I remembered how much I resented my own father as a kid. Jonathan wasn’t old enough to be picked on by the other kids, but kids were smart. He’d have questions. I wondered if my accident would make any difference to Kathleen. I thought about Double and Cortez and the hassle they went through to build a family. Maybe I should have been doing the same. Maybe this was my chance. Maybe Kathleen would understand. Certainly she’d need help raising our boy.

Charlotte stopped in front of a house that was just a bit bigger than my apartment. There was a tiny lawn out front, big enough to need a push mower, but barely big enough to turn it around. The roofs were so close I could jump from one to the other if I wanted to slip in through an open window. Charlotte turned off the car and motioned toward the front door.

“You’re not coming in?” I asked.

“You’re a big boy.”

“What exactly am I supposed to do?”

“Don’t you want to meet your son?” She overplayed the dismissive tone. I knew she was warmer than that. Some days I thought I might even have a chance with her if I graduated, but on that morning she was the lead actress in the production taking place all around me. A play designed to teach me life lessons. The problem in this new world was that I never knew where the players ended and the citizens began.

The cement walk that split the lawn led me directly to the front door of the American dream. Hope surged through my spine to every muscle. Kathleen and I had been close if only for a short time. Maybe the black box had changed me. I’d lived alone for a long time, but there on the steps I imagined myself living inside, cutting the grass, playing ball, even kissing Kathleen before I went to work.

The broad-shouldered guy in dress pants and shiny shoes ripped that image from me when he yanked open the door and blocked my way in. He didn’t even ask my name before he pushed me back onto the tiny concrete landing and faced me toe to toe.

“I don’t care what those whack jobs over at reeducation say. I don’t want you anywhere near my son. Understand?”

I was stunned. If Kathleen had come out and greeted me warmly I would have fumbled for words. I didn’t know what I was doing there, and I couldn’t have anticipated the confrontation at the door. I stood slack-jawed for a second, then shot a look at Charlotte for direction. Every lesson with Wendell was the same. My expectations didn’t align with reality, and until I figured out what they wanted from me I couldn’t proceed.

What was he trying to teach me? I could think on my feet. I could read people. You had to where I grew up. But I felt as lost here as I did on the black box. I still don’t know why he kept manipulating me. Maybe Wendell wanted to keep me confused so I couldn’t see the truth. Or maybe he was trying to break me down and reshape the way I saw the world.

Charlotte waved weakly toward the door.

When I turned, a stern face topped with slicked, jet black hair met me. “I took the morning off so I could be here. You say one thing about relearning to my boy and I’ll have you back in court so fast.” His face was bright red, his voice loud enough to be heard in eight neighboring houses.

I’d had enough of this clown. “Is he my boy or yours?”

He cocked his arm and clenched his fist, but thought better of it.

“Careful,” I said. “Hit me in front of my counselor and you’ll be the one sitting in front of a black box.”

He stepped close and lowered his voice. “I make one call and you’ll be back in court this afternoon. I know every time you step into my yard, and I know what happens when they get tired of someone like you swinging in and out of that courtroom. Cross me and you’ll end up in—”

“Nick?” Kathleen appeared at the door and her voice froze him instantly.

I wished she’d let him finish. He knew more about the system than I did, and if he had told me about this Plexiglass cage and what happens here, I would have applied myself ten times harder. I still don’t know how such a thing can possibly exist. How it’s been hidden from the government reformers and dogooders I’ll never know. But knowing about this place would have completely changed my attitude. I would have been more scared of this room than Deone and Joel were scared of the cat baggers. That’s the problem with these things. To be effective the punishment has to be so severe as to be frightening, ten times more frightening than whatever else is driving your actions. Citizens can’t abide that level of punishment, and I

understand now why the secret has been so well guarded.

When we walked into the house Kathleen pointed Nick to a chair in the kitchen and he obeyed. My mother had ruled the house and demanded strict obedience, but we were just kids. To see a strong man bow to a delicate woman like Kathleen was a surprise. The curly red hair bounced at her shoulders just like I remembered. Before I met her I’d always liked blondes and girls with tans. The freckles hadn’t done anything for me at first, but now they were a welcome sight as I followed her to the back of the house. It had been four years since I’d seen her. She’d given birth to my son and yet I couldn’t see anything different about her.

When she reached for the door, a diamond sparkled on her left hand with a plain gold band snug against it. The rings redefined my trip as surely as if she’d punched me in the chest. I’d never be part of her life. Charlotte must have known Kathleen was married. Why hadn’t she said something on the way over? Charlotte, Wendell, the program, they all sent me racing toward invisible roadblocks so they could see me stumble. I told myself it was a lesson, but I couldn’t help feeling something special had been taken away from me.

Kathleen’s backyard was closed in with white vinyl fencing that kept Jonathan in and the neighbors out of sight. He sat in a wooden sandbox. His tiny white sneakers were half buried and his jeans were dusted with sand in every crevice. As we came over he growled engine noises and pushed a yellow road grader back and forth. Several cars idled on the steep banks of his construction project. His dark hair matched mine. The fair skin he got from his mother.

When I saw the perfect little miracle there in the sand I understood why Charlotte brought me here. Cortez’s struggles made sense. Part of me was in the little boy who played with trucks in a safe little yard where no one would come and poison him with drugs or throw a brick at him. Seeing him there so innocent left me without words. Love for something so unspoiled could make a man rush off to work every morning and sit in a corner when he’s told. Charlotte taught me something I hadn’t learned at home, something I couldn’t learn anywhere but in that sandbox. I learned it in a single instant.

The lesson came with a price. I couldn’t abandon the little guy, but staying connected with him would be difficult now that his mother was married to someone else.

Kathleen introduced me as Michael, not his father, simply Michael. I didn’t argue. Rather, I squatted to his level and held out my hand. He slapped me five, his soft little hand not quite covering my palm. My heart erupted with pride and relief at being accepted.

The encounter wasn’t as meaningful for him. He turned back to his grader and continued working his road toward the far corner of the sandbox where the even surface dipped into unruly dunes. I couldn’t leave without offering to help. He thought about it a second, then looked right into my eyes as if he was about to entrust me with a very important mission and needed to make sure I was up to the task. He nodded ok, handed me a front-end loader, and put me to work taming the dunes. I raised and leveled them and he came along with the grader and smoothed out a racetrack for the cars.