Goodhouse (30 page)

“We need to look the part,” she said. “Social norms allow for men to be a little slovenly, but never women. It's really irritating. You know, I had a toy as a little girl, a big vacuous blond head whose sole purpose was to be made up. I hated that thing.” She was dusting her face with different powders, dropping the containers onto the ground when she was finished. “It sat on my dresser,” she said. “Usually I was too weak to get out of bed and cover it, and when I finally did make the head into something I could bear to look at, Dad took me to get a psychiatric evaluation.”

She straightened to face me. She looked much older now, and her features appeared sharp and unfriendly.

“Okay,” she said. “You just got out of the military. I have your papers linked to your ID. I'm sorry, but you have that high and tight haircut. It's the only believable story. And you have to wear a hat.” She passed me a baseball cap. It had a large
N
and
Y
intertwined on the front—orange lettering on a blue field. “Lots of guys wear these at night,” she said, “so don't think it's weird.”

The guard began to bang on the inside of the trunk. I could hear him screaming something, but it was muffled and unintelligible. A taillight shook. He was trying to kick it out.

“What's going to happen to him?” I asked.

She knocked on the side of the trunk. “It won't be long now,” she called. “Hang in there.” And to me she said, “Come on.” She grabbed my hand and led me up the hill, hiking through the thin, dry grass. The stopwatch dangled and spun at the end of the black cord around her neck. Her palm was moist but her fingers were cold.

“Javier will let him go,” she said. “After a while.”

“Who's Javier?” I asked.

“He's our ticket to Canada,” she said. “And I, for one, cannot wait to corrupt my American vowel sounds with a little Français. Did they teach you any other languages?”

“Why would they?”

She kept checking the stopwatch, glancing at it and walking a little faster. The muscles in my calves burned with the effort of our climb. I tugged on her hand, willing her to slow down. She was breathing too hard. “Stop for a minute,” I said. But she kept climbing.

“I'm so sorry, James,” she said. “For all of it. I wanted to use a delivery truck from the factory. That was my first choice, to get you out, put you in a crate of cupcakes. That would've been memorable, right?”

“We're in the middle of nowhere,” I said. I gestured to the stars that dotted the sky overhead. They were bright, the way they had been in La Pine, up in the mountains. “We just ditched our car. How are we going to get my chip out? Have you thought about that? How are we going to eat? In a few hours it will be over a hundred degrees. Do we have water?”

“Just a little farther,” she said.

“Because if we don't have a plan”—I reached to stop her, to make sure I had her full attention—“then maybe we should just stay here and you can take your clothes off again.”

She smiled at me. “Boys,” she said, “always have such thoughtful commentary.” And then I looked over her shoulder and saw—stretched out in the valley below us—a tent city, a sprawling light-speckled grid that was so vast I couldn't clearly delineate its boundaries. Two giant nuclear cooling towers stood in the distance, blacker than the nighttime sky.

“Holy shit,” I said.

“It's one of the more notorious ones, so we're in luck,” she said. “If it were a weekend, we definitely wouldn't be able to get in.”

We started down the side of the hill. At the entrance to the city there was a large metal gate surrounded by a crowd of people. A short guard tower—or at least that's what it looked like to me—aimed a large spotlight at the crowd below. The gate was wide enough to admit everybody at once, but it was closed and the people outside were being funneled through a building that was some kind of checkpoint. A large sign read
EAST ENTRANCE.
Inside the walls of the city I saw thousands of lights demarcating streets. The streets themselves were so populated—so densely packed—that they appeared, from a distance, to be a shifting kaleidoscope of movement.

We were on a path now, winding down a rocky slope, practically tripping over our feet as we hurried. It was easier than hiking up, but more precarious.

“I thought tent cities were for homeless people,” I said.

“Who told you that?” she asked. In the distance a ribbon of highway curved across the countryside. A silent stream of cars filled the road—red taillights and pearlescent headlights, a beautiful artery. As I watched, a single car exited. It was headed in our direction, pulling into the enormous parking lot below us.

“If it was the police I think they would have their lights going,” Bethany said. “So that's reassuring.” And then we had to stop talking, because we were approaching the edge of the lot and there were civilians nearby. Trash littered the ground, debris mixed in with the dirt—bottles and bits of paper and the thin, rattling skin of plastic bags. As we got closer to the crowd at the gate, we passed a few people squatting in the road, holding cardboard signs asking for assistance. Their clothes were ragged and uniformly dirty. One woman had a baby on her lap. Bethany tugged my arm.

“Stop staring,” she whispered. We merged with the crowd outside the gate, joined the line that was waiting to pass through the checkpoint. I felt the heat of the spotlight as we stepped into it. A metal fence encircled the city. It had barbed wire at the top, looping curls of rusted spikes. In contrast, a pristine white tent with a red cross over the door had been erected between the city and the parking lot. It had a large sign that read
DOCTORS AVAILABLE
; another, smaller sign said, simply,
POTABLE WATER.

I looked at the people in line with us. Some of them appeared to be regular civilians—the sorts I'd seen from afar—or like proctors out of uniform. But others seemed unusual to me—they had arms and necks covered with tattooed images and words. One woman had a series of metal bars inserted through her eyebrow. I saw one child, a boy of maybe ten or eleven, reach into a woman's purse without her noticing. I pulled Bethany's backpack in front of me. Music played somewhere inside the city, the percussive thump of a dance track. Every so often there was a large whooping noise as a crowd of people cheered some invisible feat. “How long have we been gone?” I asked.

She pulled the black cord over her head and passed the device to me. “You keep it,” she said. “It's making me crazy.” I glanced down. Thirty-seven minutes had elapsed.

“And how long do we have left?” I asked.

She just shook her head. “I don't know. But once we're inside, we'll have an advantage.”

I divided the crowd in front of us into likely groupings of people. “We'll be here for seven minutes,” I said. “Optimistically.”

I felt as if the chip inside me were a pulsating beacon, some terrible thread tying me to the school, still pulling my heartbeat into the servers there, still holding me captive. I wrapped an arm around Bethany, bringing her closer. A man ahead of us had his arm around a woman, so I knew it was okay, that it wouldn't make us conspicuous, but still it felt bold, a secret in plain sight.

“Thanks,” Bethany said. She was almost shivering. I tightened my grip. I had a fleeting moment of compassion for her father. He was right to worry. “Did I ever tell you about the Superman costume I made when I was a kid?” I said. I wanted to distract her. She smiled up at me, expectant. “My first headmaster was a huge comic-book fan, and sometimes he let us read the really ancient first editions on our wallscreens—you know, the versions where they don't swear and even the bad guys are wholesome. Anyhow, one day we got this idea.”

“Who's we?” she asked.

“My friends,” I said. It was an innocuous question, but still it conjured the past. “Anyway, we stole some linens from the school Dumpster. I think they were old bedsheets. We tried to dye them with berries and eggs. I'd read something about how antique paints were made out of egg. We actually sewed a shirt and cape, but they started to rot. The proctors thought we'd stashed a dead animal somewhere as a joke.”

“James,” she said seriously, “that is a very sad story.”

“No, it's not,” I said.

“But it makes me sad to think of you as a child,” she said.

I ignored this. “We took turns wearing the costume,” I said. “It did stink, though. I guess that could be its superpower.”

I checked the watch. We were almost at the front of the line. Bearded men in black T-shirts with the word
SECURITY
printed on the front were motioning people forward, telling them which screening station to report to, how much the entry fees were.

“I don't have any money,” I said.

“The military,” she said, “pays pretty well.” And then she pressed something into my hand. It was a slim white plastic card. On one side was the seal of California, a woman in Roman dress, sitting before a harbor. A bear ambled at her feet. The other side bore the name James Mitchell Madison. I looked at Bethany, surprised. “It had gravitas,” she said.

A guard directed us toward Screening Station 4. We walked down a hallway and stopped in front of a metal desk. A man sat behind it, and a small fan was clipped to the edge of the desktop. A silver ribbon was tied to the fan's metal face. It waved like a streamer in the breeze.

“ID,” the man said. I gave him the white card. He had the same detached and efficient demeanor as a proctor. He scanned my card with a handheld, glanced at the screen and then at me. Then he did the same for Bethany. I felt so obviously wrong. I didn't know how to stand, how to be normal.

“Is this woman with you?” he asked. I nodded. “Say yes to confirm the voiceprint,” the man intoned.

“Yes,” I said.

“And what is your business here tonight?” he asked. He was clearly looking at me.

“I'm on leave for a few days,” I said. And when that wasn't enough. “Don't want to waste them.”

“Make sure you stay together at all times. Do not leave the visitors' areas for any reason. To do so means immediate expulsion without a refund. You will report to the East Exit at or before 10 a.m. Do you agree to a one-time fee of fifty dollars?”

“Yes,” I said.

“All transactions inside city limits will be conducted in cash. Anyone who asks you to pay by another means is not authorized to make that request. Do you understand?”

I nodded, and Bethany nudged me. I was supposed to sign a small screen on the man's desk. I looked for a stylus and then used my fingertip, which left a green contrail on the black screen. I only just remembered to sign Madison instead of Goodhouse—in fact, my capital
M
started with a curved line. The man approved the signature, then printed two yellow badges, each of which had a barcode and a time stamp. I stuck the badge to the front of my shirt. “Next,” the guard called. His attention had already shifted to the people behind us.

We took a few steps, moved through a metal turnstile—and then we stood on the hard-packed dirt of the city itself. We were inside.

*   *   *

I was unprepared for the noise, for the press of the crowds, for everything, really. All around me people were touching—couples walked with their arms draped across each other's shoulders or clasped around each other's waists. Many of the women wore very little clothing, short pants and shirts that ended just below their breasts. Some women had metal rings in their belly buttons, and one had actual jewels glued to her skin, a stripe up each leg. I saw no uniforms, no obvious displays of rank and status, at least not the kind I was used to seeing. Music threaded through the crowd. It spilled out of doorways. Everyone seemed to be talking at once, and for a moment I forgot myself, forgot the stopwatch, the pressure of time. The crowd was effervescent, shifting and tumbling like a turbulent river.

I realized that we were in some kind of open-air market. Vendors lined both sides of the walkway, standing in front of little stalls that displayed watches, sunglasses, kerosene stoves, jewelry, plastic shoes, musical instruments, packaged food. One vendor had hundreds of scarves hanging on a wooden rack. Each scarf had gold disks sewn along its edges. When a breeze lifted the fabric, the disks sparkled—they made a glittering wall. I must have stopped to stare, because Bethany pulled at my arm.

“Keep moving,” she said. “If you stop too long, they'll try to sell you something.”

I nodded, but I was disoriented. I kept bumping into people. Bright orange bicycle taxis sped through the crowd, pinging their bells. The sound was supposed to alert pedestrians, but the din was constant. Quickpaper banners hung on the sides of tents. They advertised everything imaginable—a female dancer whose skin was painted blue and silver, some kind of hot-pepper vodka, something called a Quaker Friends meeting. One giant-size banner hung across the street itself, with the words
East Market
spelled out in what appeared to be flowers and stems. Everyone and everything seemed to be moving and colliding.

The only point of stillness was a knot of conservatively dressed men and women. They were silent, holding up a series of printed paper signs.
MODIFICATION IS A CRIME
, they read. And:
BLESSED AS YOU ARE BORN.

I tightened my grip on Bethany. These people had the disapproving look of a proctor on a bad day. “What's their problem?” I said.

“They go where the sinners are,” she said. “They bus them in from Yreka and the valley. Just ignore them.” But it was spooky how quiet they were, how calm and focused. It made me remember the day of the bus attack, the way the crowd had surrounded us, all united in one purpose. As we walked past, one of the citizens lifted his sign. “God bless,” he called, and the other sign holders echoed this sentiment. “God bless,” they said. “God bless.”