The End of Marking Time (21 page)

“Of my son.” I said it more forcefully than I’d expected. Was something really being taken away from me? If Charlotte hadn’t told me about the DNA test, I never would have known Jonathan was mine. Would I have been just like my father and the other men my mother knew? I didn’t want to be, but here was Nick, offering, no insisting, to take on my responsibility. The pregnancy didn’t change anything between Kathleen and me. She was married to him. Did I want to be the third leg of this parenting trio?

“They’ll make him a good home,” Charlotte said, as if I couldn’t.

I knew it was true. I didn’t even know why I was protesting, but I felt like something was being stolen from me and I wanted to fight.

“You won’t have child support deducted from your pay anymore.”

The more she pressed the more determined I became.

“Nick has a good job. It’ll be very difficult for Jonathan growing up the son of a relearner. After the adoption he won’t have to know. He’ll never be teased on the playground.”

Any thoughts I had about sleeping with Charlotte vanished. She thought my son would be better off if he didn’t know I existed. She looked at me sincerely, but I was below her. She came here and she seemed unafraid, but to her I was an animal in obedience school. If I needed proof all I had to do was look down at my ankle. I told her I’d think about the papers.

She left in a hurry.

That was the first time I felt out of balance with the world. Would I always be repulsive to Charlotte? I would have worked hard to impress her. I was already doing my best to finish Wendell’s program without getting into trouble, but that wasn’t enough. She would always see me as a relearner. Would everyone on the outside see me that way? Could I ever buy my own small place and settle down? Would my neighbors hate me? Would they protest outside my door? Could I get a job? Or would employers refuse to hire me because I couldn’t be trusted?

I might have been a bit emotional after Charlotte thrashed my pride, but I seriously considered staying inside the apartment forever. I wondered how long the government would keep paying. Would they kick me out if I didn’t show the potential to finish? The counselors and all the technology they used to watch me had to be expensive, but I never believed Wendell would throw me to the cat baggers.

There was one thing I needed to do if I wanted to stay. I clicked the button on the remote control. The television lit up and Wendell appeared above the black box and chirped right into a lecture. “If you have any hope of finishing your GED you need to work much harder. You must spend at least five hours a day attending to your studies.”

It was Blake talking through Wendell. After learning about the control room from Stephan, I guessed Blake had been downstairs waiting for me to begin a lesson so he could harass me.

I chose to continue working on math.

A long division problem popped on the screen. That wasn’t surprising in itself, but Blake was asking me to divide 6,809,775 by 735. The last time I used the program I was dividing even numbers by ten or twenty. I knew he was making it as difficult as possible for me, but I also knew I couldn’t afford to quit. I needed to show effort and that’s exactly what I did.

I worked and worked at the problem, constantly multiplying 735 to try and find the right digits for my answer. I was getting close when Wendell popped up and said, “You’re out of time, Michael. You really need to try harder.” Blake was watching and making sure I didn’t finish.

Nine more problems came, each one as difficult as the first. No matter how organized I got, I couldn’t finish the problems in time. I wasn’t sure if Blake was manipulating the clock, but I knew for sure he was watching me. If he could speed up the clock, he would.

After the tenth problem, holographic Wendell returned.

“You missed ten out of ten. You must do ten push-ups for each wrong answer.”

He couldn’t make me do a hundred push-ups.

“Spread the gray pads on the floor. One for each hand at shoulder width and one for your feet.”

I tossed the pads on the floor.

“Michael, you are five feet, eight inches tall. The pads are too close together for push-ups.”

I arranged the pads appropriately and the machine instructed me to get into position. I held myself there and the machine ordered me to begin. I tried doing tiny push-ups and the wrist strap zapped me.

“I can see you, Michael,” holographic Wendell said.

I pressed out fifteen push-ups and my arms ached. Sixteen was a struggle. I managed to get to nineteen before I collapsed. My chest hit the floor and when it did, the strap zapped me again.

It took me nearly an hour to finish the hundred push-ups because I needed to rest so long in between. My arms and shoulders ached. I was covered in sweat. As soon as I finished, another impossible long division problem appeared on the screen. The box didn’t even give me time to get to the couch.

What I needed was a calculator and a way to hide it from the cameras. With that thought, I stood and started checking the walls and ceilings to see if I could find tiny lenses. I spent half an hour walking around the living room shaking my arms as if they hurt. It wasn’t acting because they did, but in all that time I couldn’t find a single camera.

Little Wendell jabbered at me. He didn’t like the delay and like a fool, I put on the wrist strap and had another go at the problems. I did my best work and got two correct out of ten. Wendell ordered eighty push-ups and I spent the next hour completing them. After that there was no way I could do more math. My arms couldn’t hold me anymore and I couldn’t take the shocks when I rested.

Blake had me in an impossible situation and he knew it. I had to keep studying or get thrown out of the program. The only other program that would take me was impossible to survive. At that moment I had a fleeting hope that Wendell would help me if he knew what Blake was doing, but who was Wendell going to believe, a relearner or his teacher?

I decided to go outside and wait for Blake to leave the security room. Then I would try some of the other programs and see what I could learn when he wasn’t there to interfere. I needed to rest my arms and a walk outside was just the thing.

The front of the building emptied onto a busy commercial street. At least it had been busy before the relearners moved in. There were a few shops still in business and plenty of cars parked along both sidewalks. I had no idea how far the cameras extended, so I walked to the donut shop and leaned against the bricks for a while. I wanted to wait long enough for Blake to lose interest and go home. What I forgot was that he could track me anywhere I went. He didn’t have to wonder where I was. He could find me electronically and so could anyone connected to Wendell or the police.

I thought I was being smart walking the long way around two blocks and circling back to the control room from the opposite direction. Blake couldn’t know my intentions, only where I was at any particular moment, but I’d forgotten that. The street-side wall continued well past the rest of the building, forming a leg that jutted out. That leg housed the control room and also hid a fair-sized nook along the back wall where Blake parked his car. The men working for Wendell could bring things, or people, in and out of the building without being seen because the enclosed courtyard concentrated the relearners in the center of the building. Wendell kept us contained where he could monitor us easily without our knowing what he and his counselors were doing.

The parking lot behind the building was home to cars with sagging tires, leaking fluids, and rusty panels. I settled low onto the curb where I could look past a fender and see the control room door while staying hidden.

Sitting there on the granite curb, I felt my biceps and pecs tighten from the push-ups. Pretty soon my butt hurt from the granite and I pushed back onto the tiny strip of grass and stretched my legs out in front of me.

If I was smarter, I would have realized Blake was probably in the control room watching my little dot on a screen somewhere. As I waited and waited for him to finish, he was probably waiting for me to get sick of sitting outside and come back in where he could torment me. Eventually it got dark and Blake waddled to his BMW and drove away.

I laid flat and waited for the car to disappear. I didn’t move even after it was gone in case he could track me from his car. I gave him almost five minutes and then I stood up to go back inside.

I hadn’t heard a single movement around me. I made a living by knowing my surroundings and blending in, but that night in the dark I allowed myself to focus only on the door, the car, and Blake.

Nick sprung up when I reached the hood of the rusty Chevy. He cornered me at the worst possible time. My arms were sore from all the push-ups and Nick outweighed me by fifty pounds. My hiding place among the old cars was good because almost no one came back here. That meant no one was coming to my aid either. Nick, on the other hand, was ready. Tight leather gloves covered his fists. Long sleeves protected his arms as he grimly blocked the path back to my apartment.

I thought about running, but my legs were stiff from sitting on the granite. I had a better chance to talk my way free than to outrun the brute.

“What do you want?”

“What do you think I want, moron?” Nick growled.

He wanted my son. There were so many things I could have said to put him over the edge. I’d gotten to Kathleen first. Jonathan was my son and he couldn’t have him without my permission. But I didn’t feel powerful in the narrow space between the cars. I could have threatened never to give up my rights if he touched me, but I kept quiet. Nick was beyond negotiation. He was ready to force his will, and Kathleen wasn’t here to reign him in. I wondered what would happen if we went to the police. Was my word as valuable as Nick’s?

If I reported this encounter and the last, maybe I’d have some credibility, but after being arrested three times, I was a bit short.

Nick tired of the long silence. He poked me in the chest and said, “Sign the damn papers.”

“You can’t force me to give you my son.” Honestly I hadn’t thought about the papers since Charlotte left. I didn’t know what was holding me back. I didn’t know Jonathan. I hadn’t intended for him to be born, but it felt wrong leaving him and it felt wrong for him to be stripped away like this.

Nick twisted a handful of my T-shirt and lifted hard enough to prove he could hold me in the air with one hand and pummel me with the other. “I’m done waiting,” he snarled.

When I didn’t answer, he said, “I work inside Govbank. I can make things miserable for you in a thousand ways. I can make it look like you’re stealing credits one day, selling them to foreigners the next, and I can bankrupt you the next. No one will ever know what I’ve done.”

The threat took me by surprise. Could Nick really be that powerful? I’d grown up surrounded by angry faces. Reading people saved me hundreds of times. Nick wasn’t bluffing. He worked in the bank and he believed he could ruin me.

“We both know where you’ll end up then,” he said.

“What?”

He couldn’t know about the horrors Blake had shown me. Impossible. But he didn’t mean reeducation. My mouth hung open and he backed away knowing his point was made.

“Sign,” he said.

He rounded the Chevy, stopped, and turned to meow in my direction. I was stunned to be at the mercy of yet another man. I couldn’t look back into my past and ask myself where I’d gone wrong because I’d never really been on the right track.

The ceiling barely faded from sight that long night in my apartment. Wendell, Blake, Charlotte, and now Nick were all pressuring me to be something I wasn’t. Every move I made, they were there. It seemed they were inside my head, reading my thoughts before I had them. How could they know what I’d do, where I’d go, and which tests I’d fail? They had dealt with hundreds of relearners before. They knew everything about me. Maybe from behind a video monitor it was easy to know what my options were and which one I’d choose. It wasn’t emotional for them. The choice to give up Jonathan or build a relationship with the boy and his mother was a checkbox on their list. To me it meant passing judgment on how I was raised and whether I was able to become something more than my father had been.

For a while I felt like they were all, every one of them, herding me toward destruction. Wendell was responsible for everything that happened. Blake wanted blowjobs and who knew what else. If he couldn’t get what he wanted, he’d gladly flunk me and move on to the next relearner. Charlotte seemed too cold for someone so beautiful. I had no idea what she was capable of. Nick wanted his boy and he wanted to cleanse any memory of a relearner sleeping with his wife.

I watched the slow march through the numbers on the clock radio until the morning light prompted me to get up. Showering was painful. I couldn’t reach my back and I knew the next day would be even worse.

Pulling on my jeans and sneakers, I thought about signing the papers to get Nick and Charlotte off my back. She might force me to see my mother, but that was an argument I could handle. Blake was a nightmare. Just thinking about what he did made me sick to my stomach. There was only one person who could help me with him. My biggest problem was finding him.