The End of Marking Time (17 page)

I didn’t say a word and I’m glad I didn’t. He might have wanted to argue, but I was beginning to understand how completely Wendell controlled my fate. Eventually the yelling and the lack of sleep tired him out and he sat down.

“What am I going to do with you?” he mumbled.

“You could try explaining things.”

“You didn’t know it was wrong to sell stolen jewelry?”

I should have, but I’d had that stuff a very long time. I believed it was mine, not those ladies I’d taken it from. They’d never have found me, never have realized I had what they’d lost, not without that old lady ratting out Joel. That was the point Wendell had been trying to make all along. Right and wrong mattered even when no one would ever find out. It was the basis of those silly simulations that kept shocking me. But simulations and reality are different. I had been surviving on my own for ten years. Sometimes survival required bending the rules.

“I’m sorry.” I wanted to tell him I was positive no one would ever find out. That I was helping a friend. That I was scared of being hungry for two days, but none of those things mattered to Wendell. He only cared about his program.

“I need you to stay out of trouble. How am I going to get you to do that? Do I need to pay a counselor to babysit you day and night?”

He was desperate. He’d just saved my life and I owed him my best. I felt like crap for causing him so much trouble. I’d never felt that way about any cop or guard before, but when things went bad for me, they went bad for Wendell, too.

“Tell me what to do.”

“Sit in your room and finish the program before you get in trouble again.”

“That helps you?”

I don’t think a relearner had ever asked about his interests before. He looked at me sideways, like I was messing with him, but I wasn’t. He’d saved me and I wanted to help. My problem was that the system I’d taken advantage of my whole life had leapfrogged me while I was sleeping. I couldn’t learn the new rules fast enough. It seemed like the cops were watching me with night vision goggles while I fumbled around in complete darkness. The person I kept stepping on was Wendell Cummings.

He thought a long time before speaking and I knew he only trusted me because his situation was so dire. He had been working on an early reeducation program when the Supreme Court decision came down. He was the foremost authority on prison reform and his relearners were the most successful in the country. He got millions for research and his company boomed. Soon he had a monopoly and others wanted part of the exploding market. He sold his black box company and went back to running a program for relearners. It’s what he loved. It’s what he did best, but in the last several months Wendell’s program had begun unraveling.

The programs were scored, he told me, by how many relearners were judged non-conformant. That was the new word for a conviction. Every time he had to reeducate a former client, his effectiveness rating was lowered. Lately, he’d had a terrible string of non-conformers and his program was close to being shut down. There was more to it, but basically, if I kept getting into trouble, he’d be forced out of business.

“I know what you did for me in there,” I said. And I meant it. I was terrified for Joel. Wendell knew what it would be like. I wondered how he could let it happen. He cared about the people he taught. He’d dedicated his life to reeducation even before there was money in it, but there were things even he couldn’t control.

He shook his head as if I couldn’t know how horrible a death Joel was about to meet.

“How can you let it go on?”

“It’s not up to me.” He told me the best thing he could do was to help the relearners that came to him. Eighty percent of his first timers stayed out of trouble once they were released. Even some of those who came through a second time were helped. It was an amazing improvement over the old way when a third of prisoners wound up back in prison within three years of finishing their sentence. Relearners went on from his program to productive, normal lives. His eyes were full of pride. He was helping people like me who’d been gypped by the genetic lottery. The things my mother failed to teach me were stuffed into Wendell’s program. I could reshape my world if I tried. It was a nice idea, but changing the way I fit into society was a massive undertaking. Even trying my absolute best, I kept falling down.

I couldn’t blame Wendell. He was doing everything to help. But why was he standing aside and letting the court officers deliver Joel to some barbarian? “Can’t you do something? Couldn’t you go public?”

“Are you kidding? The people would applaud.”

I was stunned. Would decent citizens celebrate Joel’s torture?

Two million felons were let out of prison all at the same time. I was in a coma then and I missed what happened on the street. The sheer numbers overwhelmed the police. Society changed. Ordinary people shuttered themselves inside. Then one day it all threatened to come undone. The Supreme Court had voted five-to-four that extended prison sentences were cruel and unusual punishment and must be abolished. Six months after the mass release, the chief justice was gunned down during a robbery. His face was plastered all over the news, but what made a bigger impression was what happened to the non-conformer. He was enrolled back in his program, where he collected a government check that was larger than what many citizens earned.

Every news station and every talk radio show screamed for changes.

The changes started, but something surprising happened first. Over the next week, the remaining four justices who voted for the release were shot to death. The guys who killed them didn’t even run. They were cheered and after they were reeducated, they walked out of the programs free and clear. The government had to go underground then. Unpopular officials risked being murdered by anyone who disagreed with them. By removing real punishment, they had unwittingly made themselves assassination targets.

That’s when the big changes started. Local police forces across the country had already swelled. Their numbers tripled. That helped, but the real control didn’t come until the money disappeared and the welfare system changed. That took away the biggest motivator for most relearners. Once they realized they couldn’t make a living burglarizing homes and stealing cars, they stopped. They got enough money to live comfortably even if they didn’t work. I realized that myself. Only when I spent myself out of money did I resort to selling the jewelry. That was a mistake I’d never make again.

“You think if people knew relearners were being tortured they’d look the other way?”

“Look the other way? No. They’d volunteer to help.”

I couldn’t believe decent people would line up to torture someone like me, but I remembered how Nick treated me and how hard he was trying to keep me from seeing my son. “Really?”

“Imagine how powerless you’d feel if you were attacked and the relearner was simply moved a few blocks away and set free. Decent people want blood.”

“Is that why you take all the tough cases? You trying to save the relearners from jumping out a window?”

“It doesn’t work that way. Each program is assigned new non-conformers in a defined order based on when the non-conformer is arrested. Once someone is in a program, he or she returns to that program until expelled. Every program gets its share of hardened criminals and its share of first timers.”

He told me that there were special cases. Some program managers volunteered to take tough cases because they earned triple credits for convicts like Joel that were expelled from another program. The credit was only good if the relearner didn’t non-conform again. If that happened more than once, the benefit of getting the troubled relearner was erased.

“You don’t take those people?”

“Some people don’t want to be helped, Michael. Some people will never change. They are hardened criminals and there is only one way to deal with them.”

“And?”

“I’m not willing to do what those cases require.”

As smart as Wendell is, he has a bad habit of assuming I understand what he means even when he gives me little more than a hint. He tells me half the story and expects me to figure out the rest. I wonder if he’s done that with you, too. Don’t get me wrong, I’m good at understanding people. I get what people are about just by watching them for a few minutes. But there is a big difference between understanding someone’s motives and understanding complex rules you can’t see or touch. Wendell told me the government went underground, but he didn’t tell me that special measures were taken to protect officials—and that he is one of those officials. That simple message would have saved us both a tremendous hassle.

Then there was the small matter of punishment for hardened criminals. Joel had made mistakes. I was somewhat responsible for his latest problem with the jewelry, but before that it was attempted murder. That wasn’t his first arrest either. Wendell had to decide which of us was more likely to get into trouble and sacrifice that relearner to the cat baggers. Until I learned about the cat baggers, I thought the new laws were gutless. Sure, the program was annoying and the counselors were irritating, but you couldn’t go to prison and you couldn’t get the death penalty. Now that I knew about the effectiveness ratings and how much our mistakes cost Wendell, I understood that he controlled my fate with a few clicks on a computer. Wendell had given Joel his chance. Now he was as good as dead. If I didn’t turn myself around, I’d end up on the concrete next to him.

I spent my adult life perfecting my craft to put myself beyond the law’s reach. I never believed I’d be seriously punished until I met Joel and Stephan. I was terrified that day in court, but still couldn’t comprehend my vulnerability. How could people close their eyes to torture and murder? I was afraid to imagine the sort of man who would torture people he didn’t know. In my heart I knew it wasn’t the money, but I had to bury the knowledge that I could be delivered to men who reveled in their despicable task. You know I’m not like that. You’ve been watching me for weeks, years as far as I know. If you’ve been paying attention, you know I could never take pleasure in hurting anyone.

Wendell believed I could make it. That’s why he took me home.

He may have been watching me then, but I didn’t care. I was glad to be alone at home where I couldn’t be arrested for breaking a law I didn’t know about. I made myself a frozen pizza and sat down on the couch with a six pack of Coke and a box of frozen Devil Dogs. I chained the door closed and from then until Friday afternoon I did nothing but eat, sleep, and battle the evil little discs I fed into the black box. The idea that a lesson would take six hours and I would be free after doing one a day was forgotten. I lined them up one after the other and I struggled, really struggled, to do my best. That I was out of money and couldn’t really do anything on the outside helped somewhat, but the thing really driving me was the short walk from the defense table to the conference room—the moment when I’d abandoned my friend. I’d gotten him arrested and I’d left him to die. For days when I slept I imagined volunteering to take his place, but that was a pipe dream. I couldn’t offer myself to be killed. I was barely beating the box. I was in no shape to deal with the cat baggers and I knew it.

With the strap around my wrist, I saw a man lose his wallet. I maneuvered myself to pick it up, then found a policeman to help me return it. I met a lost little boy wandering the park and helped him find his mother. I turned off leaky faucets, righted spilled garbage cans on the sidewalk, and stopped traffic when a child darted into the street. Disc after disc I did the most righteous deeds I could imagine. And as time went by, the wrongs became harder and harder to identify.

In my final challenge, there was a group of men playing basketball on the playground. I walked by them a dozen times before I realized one of them was selling drugs out of his bag. When I told a police officer, the men scattered. The wrist strap gave me a shock, but it wasn’t particularly painful compared to what Joel was dealing with. Early Friday morning I remembered what I had seen in the donut shop when I set off the alarm. I bought myself a virtual camera and went back to the playground. At four o’clock in the morning, I recorded the man selling drugs from his bag. Minutes later I was at the virtual police station with my camera. When I placed it on the counter, the screen lit up with fireworks like never before. Did they really expect people to walk around with cameras and turn in their neighbors? It was easy in the simulation, but in real life there would be consequences.

In three days I completed forty-nine discs. It was as easy as Deone said it was, but I had forgotten what he said about the other half of the lessons. Deone was stuck on algebra. I didn’t even know what algebra was yet. That morning I fell asleep and dreamed things my old self would have dismissed as ridiculous. In my dreams, I acted like the virtual Saint Michael. Maybe it was because I had done so many lessons all at once. Maybe it was because the painful shocks made the consequences real. Whatever the reason, I was becoming the person Wendell wanted me to be, in my dreams at least.

When my eyes cracked open at ten o’clock, I could still see the faces of the people I’d helped. Wendell would have been proud of what he’d done to me, but honestly, I’d been trying my best all week. I wasn’t ever trying to get in trouble, I’d just been unlucky. Some part of me would always be the boy stealing peaches from the grocery store.