The Academy: Book 2 (23 page)

             
Asa landed with a crunch of snow in front of the door. The windows were drawn with thin yellow curtains. From within, a soft glow emanated with the shadow of a Christmas tree projected upon the window.

             
Asa felt a pang of longing in his chest at the sight. The symbol reminded him of gone times when his mother would make cinnamon rolls on Christmas morning. She would sit in a bathrobe on the couch with her coffee, her hair a mess, and watch Asa unwrap gifts. The time was just a memory now. After she died, Asa had learned that no amount of wishing or crying into his pillow or begging into the dark night could bring her back. No amount of desire could let him return to those Christmases, those mornings before school, or those birthdays. Even if he begged for only ten seconds of his mother’s embrace, sadly, it just couldn’t happen.

             
Not wanting to be alone with his thoughts anymore, he approached the door and was about to knock when a sound began to hum out from inside the cabin. It was rich, deep, fast and mathematical; someone was playing a piano inside.

             
Asa was very surprised. He had no idea that Conway could play piano, and from the sound of it, he was very good. He had always imagined Conway as a bit cold, and practical to a fault. This kind of hobby was not consistent with the schema of Conway that Asa had built in his mind.

             
Not wanting to interrupt, he simply turned the knob and stepped inside.

The cabin smelled of cinnamon and burning dust. The front door led to an initial, sprawling living room and kitchen combination that took up most of the home’s square footage. A hall penetrated the back wall, with three doors lining the hallway; all of these doors were shut.

              Asa’s first thought upon opening the door was of his previous guesses at how Conway’s cabin would be kept; he had thought that the place would be sterile, neat, and purely functional. Asa did not conceptualize Conway as a person to be attracted to the idea of having many things inside his home. Instead, he had imagined that every item inside of the man’s cabin would have a purpose, or it would be thrown in the trash. Conway’s pragmatic nature made Asa even question whether or not the man would tolerate wall art. Asa immediately saw that he had been wrong.

             
This place is eccentric.

T
he Christmas tree was so packed full of ornaments that the branches bent with the weight. There were the usual ornaments, such as silver and gold balls, a fat Santa Clause sitting in a sleigh, religious ornaments, Snoopy sleeping on his red doghouse, plastic icicles, ceramic birds with flapping wings, Homer Simpson, and many elves. Then, there were unconventional tree decorations, including rusty forks hanging from twine, a bathtub plug, wine glasses, keys of all sizes, and, the biggest ornament of all, an industrial sized metal trashcan lid.  It looked like the Christmas tree of an insane person. The tree was wrapped in enough lights to decorate a small house. A miniature train was rolling along on a circular track surrounding the tree.

The
Christmas tree was not the exception to a clean and tidy living room. Rather, it was very congruent with the rest of Conway’s cabin.

Asa could only guess as to what kind of material the floor was made of, because it was covered from wall to wall in various carpets, a dirty mattress, rugs, bits of unmatched tile, and one corner was actually covered with a scattered pile of red marbles. Decorations on the walls weren’t any less scarce. There were hanging tapestries, wooden cuckoo-clocks (dozens of them; each individual clock was painted using just one color), Native American dream-catchers, crosses, pentagrams,
taxidermied animal heads, fluorescent advertisements for beer, movie posters, and there was a baseball glove that was nailed to the wall with a metal stake. The room was lit with dozens of lamps, many of which were covered with different colored shawls so that they gave off red, yellow, green, blue, purple, and pink light. The lamps were not situated in any logical order. They were of all shapes and sizes, with some of the smallest ones on the ground, and one that stood five-feet tall was put atop a table so that it almost touched the ceiling.

The piano music was still ongoing when Asa entered. A vertical piano was situated against the right wall. It appeared old, and the wooden sides were removed so that when the keys were hit you could watch as the hammer
struck the different strings. Conway wasn’t playing the piano, as Asa had originally thought; Conway wasn’t in the room and Asa couldn’t see the face of the pianist. The pianist was an older appearing female. She wore a sheer, long-sleeve red shirt, and a blue skirt. The back of her neck showed that she was black, with many wrinkles, moles, and areas of hypopigmentation. Her hair was thin and as white as cotton. It was wild, and curled loosely at the top of her head in different lengths.

The music stopped suddenly, and then a new noise filled the air—growling.

Asa still hadn’t grown accustomed to the odd pets that people sometimes kept in the Academy. A full-grown male polar bear stood on its four legs in the middle of the room. It would have hit its head on the ceiling if it had stood erect on its hind legs, and still, in the crawling position its eyes weren’t too far below Asa’s. The animal’s head was the size of an eighteen-wheeler’s steering wheel, and its feet were each the circumference of a basketball hoop. The hair on the back of its neck stood up to make the animal look bigger and more intimidating. In Asa’s opinion, this was an unnecessary thing for the animal to do at this point.

“Ozzie, hush!” the woman at the piano said, and the music stopped. The bear immediately went silent, but kept its hair raised. Asa still hadn’t seen the pianist’s face. “That’s Asa Palmer. Am I right? Is that you, Mr. Palmer?” She pressed three keys down on the piano, and then said, “Yes! It is Mr. Palmer! Come in!” She pronounced the word ‘in,’ as ‘
een,’and Asa thought her accent sounded from somewhere around the African continent.

Asa hesitated, staring at the polar bear. He was still unsure whom the woman playing piano was, or how she knew who he was—she hadn’t turned around to look at him, and there wasn’t a mirror on the side wall that she could have used to see Asa’s reflection.

The woman pressed the same three keys, and then said, “Ozzie, go to your mattress.”

The polar bear regarded Asa for a moment, yawned deeply, and then pawed backwards before dropping heavily on the dirty mattress.
A cloud of dust puffed into the air around the bedding.

The old woman stood from the piano bench and grabbed a nearby cane. She slowly turned and made her way over the carpeted ground. The cane was a sort of a precaution, and she held it just above the floor as she moved towards Asa. Her eyes were a milky blue color. Her black pupils were entirely hidden behind bluish clouds of discoloration, and her eyes seemed to not be concentrating
on anything in particular—they rolled around in her head when she walked.

Blind.

Asa had seen her face before, but couldn’t remember where. Her eyebrows were distally black, and white at the roots. She smiled with cracked lips to show gapped, tiny, yellow teeth. She held her left hand at her side, which had a continuous tremor to it; Asa wondered how she had been able to play piano while shaking so much.

“I am very sorry if I did not ‘ear you knock,” she pronounced ‘knock’ as ‘
noke.’ “I like to play piano, because my eyes aren’t very good. It is strange, but when I play I can see the textures surrounding me. I could
see
you when you came in. Does that make sense, Mister Palmer? The sound helps me to
see
things, like my eyes work again.”

Asa thought about his echolocation and about how he had experienced something similar. “I can understand that,” Asa said. He was still not sure who this person was.

“That’s why I have all the decorations up. When I play, the sound bounces off of them, and I can see them.”

Did I land at the wrong cabin?
“Is Conway here? Jul Conway?”

“He is in the basement. Let me get a good look at you, Asa Palmer, then you can go and see him.” She touched Asa’s arms with her outstretched hands, and then worked her fingertips up to his face. She ran the tactile pads of her leathery digits over his brow, his cheek, his nose,
and his lips.

That was when Asa remembered who she was, and he recalled meeting her in The Shop last semester when he was buying a strength boost. She had had the same polar bear. The last couple of times Asa had visited, another clerk had been working.

This is Mama.

She felt his face for twenty seconds. Asa was made uncomfortable by the experience, but knew that this was the only way that Mama could see faces. When she was done, she put her hands on Asa’s shoulders and sighed.

“You look just like your father,” she said.

It felt odd for Asa to hear her say that. He often times thought of his father in terms of his consequences on the world, but not as a person.
My father is the genius who made this gene-altering technology, and he also made the contract that makes the Multipliers want to kill me.
Thinking of his father as a man always hurt Asa, and confused him. He couldn’t understand why such a brilliant man would leave Asa and his mother, and then kill himself. He didn’t want to look like his father, whom he resented.

Not knowing how to respond, Asa said, “Conway’s in the basement?”

“Yes, my son is in the basement,” she responded.

The old woman was smiling slyly.

“Umm. Conway?”

“You didn’t know that Conway was my son? Oh, honey! What else is he hiding from you?” Mama patted Asa on the back. “It’s the far door down the hall. Don’t pet Ozzie on your way through the room. He’s usually nice to people that I seem to trust, but he’s still a bear.”

Asa smiled, nodded, and moved across the room to the door.

“I’ll get some white cake ready for you,” Mama said. “I’ll put some tea on too. Go fetch my son for me.”

The bear wasn’t able to fit its entire body on the mattress, and its four legs hung off onto the floor. The animal didn’t move as Asa passed, but it did follow him with its black eyes.

The basement door creaked when Asa opened it, and he moved down a steep set of homemade wooden stairs. When he reached the bottom, he saw Conway. Conway didn’t hear Asa enter, and classic rock was blaring from white earphones he was wearing.

The basement was one large concrete square and had two components; half of the room was a gym, and the other portion appeared to be a jail cell.

The jail cell was enclosed in a remarkable amount of security measures. Three-inch thick metal bars went all the way from the concrete ceiling to the floor, separating the gym from the cell. The bars were clean and black. Horizontal bars intersected the vertical ones in five separate places. A thick metal door hung on huge bolts in the front of the jail cell. The door had three strong latches on the outside portion that could only be manipulated with keys. In addition to this, there were hinges that completely surrounded the door that could be secured to the rest of the cell with padlocks, to make the opening even more difficult to pass through. A thick chain was bolted to the back wall that ended in four heavy, empty shackles. There was one porcelain toilet, one overhead faucet that came right out of the wall, and a drain in the floor, beneath the faucet.
This kind of cell seems like it would be overkill for even the most dangerous of criminals. I don’t think that even Alcatraz cells were this secure.

The gym portion of the room was dominated by free-weights. There was a bench press that could be adjusted to create a decline or incline press, a squat rack, two one-hundred pound bars with multiple tractor tires on either end, and stacks containing dozens of forty-five pound weight plates. Conway was on the treadmill in the center of the room. It was no ordinary treadmill, and appeared to be a multi-thousand dollar piece of machinery. The floor and support railings were much thicker than on a normal treadmill, giving the machine the appearance that it was made to support bears, not humans. Conway was running at a forty-five degree incline, and the high-pitched hum and the rate that Conway’s feet were moving suggested that the track speed was maxed out. The man was breathing hard, wearing nothing but running shorts and he glistened with sweat from his brow to his bare feet. The digital clock on the machine said that Conway had been running now for
nearly forty minutes. While running, Conway was supporting a weight bar loaded with six forty-five pound weight plates atop his shoulder blades. The bar bent as the weights bounced, and the man’s feet boomed when they hit the floor.

Asa was impressed.

Conway’s eyes shifted and he saw Asa in one of the large mirrors that covered the walls of the basement’s gym side. He ran for half a minute more, and when the clock hit forty minutes, Conway leapt off the machine onto the concrete. He hoisted the bar off of his back and placed it atop the squat rack. He was forcefully breathing between his teeth. Asa couldn’t believe how tightly the man’s skin clung to his muscles, and he had a hard time not staring. Conway pulled out his earphones, clicked off his MP3 player, and supported his exhausted body on the squat rack. He looked at Asa expectantly as he continued to breath.

“What’s the cell for?” Asa asked.

“Holding things,” said Conway.

“Big things,” Asa observed.

Conway nodded, closed his eyes, and breathed. It was clear to Asa that Conway didn’t want to talk about the jail cell, or what it was for. “Why are you here?” Conway asked. He stood at his full height and looked down at Asa; he was possibly the tallest person at the Academy.
Stridor might be taller, but not by much.

“I need to talk to you.
The Multipliers bit a student today; one in my semester. And there are some other things.”

Conway’s rib cage expanded and contracted with deep breaths beneath heavily striated cords of muscle. “Go upstairs,” he said. “I’ll be with you in a moment. I need to clean up first.”

A few moments later, Asa was seated atop one of the dusty couches in the living room, waiting for Conway. Dozens of clocks ticked on the surrounding walls, and Mama was scurrying about the kitchen, preparing white cake on small plates and pouring hot tea into coffee mugs with the proficiency of someone who had not lost their sense of vision. It was clear that she had spent a lot of time in the cabin and knew exactly where everything was by memory.

The polar bear eyed Asa wearily from the mattress. A bathtub full of dog food was against the wall, causing Asa to wonder how much the animal must eat.
Surely the dog food is supplemented with hunting. Perhaps he hunts in the Moat, or catches an occasional deer.

“Here you are Mr. Palmer. Some white cake and black tea. Do you like white cake?” she sat the plate with cake on it on the coffee table along with a mug of tea.

“Yes ma’am,” Asa said. He picked up the plate and looked at the des
sert. It smelled wonderful. The icing was packed into four different layers that ran through the slice.

“Oh, don’t call me ‘Ma’am,’” Mama said. “Are you from Texas, like your father? You sound like it.”

“Yeah, I’m from Texas. I grew up in a town called Dritt.” Asa himself couldn’t detect any sort of accent in his own voice, and most people that he talked to didn’t mention an accent if they heard one. It was possible that Mama’s hearing functioned better than most people’s because of her visual deficiencies. This would allow her to hear subtleties in voices that other people were not able to detect.

Asa took a bite of the cake. Upon hearing him take a bite, Mama smiled. “It’s good, isn’t it?”

“Amazing!” It was the best dessert that Asa had ever eaten. There were small pieces of nuts intermixed in the soft, sugary, icing-filled cake, and it gave the otherwise soft food a satisfying texture. “This is very good.” He took another bite.

“I made it myself,” she said. “It’s a pastime of mine. Before my son and I got mixed up with your father, and were brought here, I was a baker in Africa. My des
serts were highly regarded.”

“I can see why!” Asa said, taking another large bite.

“You saw the basement,” Mama said. “Did you see the cage? Interesting, yes? It’s unusual to have such a secure enclosure in a home, but your father thought it was necessary. He used to live here; this used to be his home. He kept the apes that he mutated in there, before he started to trust them.”

“Apes?”

“Not the normal kind, Asa, but yes, apes. Gorillas. Chimps. Orangutans. Your father mutated all sorts of animals, but only two that he mutated ever gave him fright. Both of the altered creatures that resulted from his experiments were alarmingly smart, your father felt. He thought that if they had malicious intent that they could cause great harm to the world. So, after altering each, he monitored them for some time to see their nature. The gorillas were one of the mutated animals that he was wary of. Do you know what the other was?”

“No.”

“Yes you do. Think, Asa.”

He took a break from his de
ssert for a moment, but couldn’t come up with an answer.

Finally, Mama said, “Humans. The altered humans, or
‘Multipliers,’ also alarmed your father. Of course, he didn’t make them smarter, like he did this group of apes. Humans are already smart enough to cause a lot of damage.”

Asa considered the picture in his suit that he planned on showing Conway today, which the female gorilla had given him in the
arctic jungle. He thought of how she had been wearing a skirt, and he thought of the youth on her back. “How smart were the apes?” Asa asked.

A sly smile stole over Mama’s lips. “How smart
are
the apes
,”
she corrected. “The answer depends on who you ask.” She shrugged. “Robert King didn’t think that they were very smart. He said so. Your father, on the other hand, thought that some of them surpassed human intelligence. His feelings weren’t shared by many on the subject.”

“He thought they were as smart as humans,” Asa repeated, thinking it over. “What do you think?”

Mama made a clucking sound with her tongue and rocked in the rocking chair that she sat in. She slurped on her tea. “I think that the mutated gorillas, your father called them Davids, were misunderstood. Conway disagrees with me on this. I think that often times when you don’t know about another social group, or understand their customs, you think that they are less valuable than they are. Or, when someone else is different, people often perceive him or her as invaluable.

“Your father called them Davids after the biblical story of David and Goliath in which David was the underdog, but he killed the giant Goliath. Your father thought that the Davids were strong in ways that couldn’t be
easily perceived by humans, and that they were more powerful than the Goliaths, or humans of the world, knew. I tend to agree with your father. The monkeys that he made seem strange to humans. They don’t have the same kind of desire to conquer as humans do; your father made them that way. They don’t act selfishly, often times, and want to take only what is needed to survive. They have odd peculiarities (odd to us, anyways, and they can become debilitating obsessed with seemingly trivial things. Of course, there are exceptions. Major exceptions. But, they are different, and thus looked at by many as inferior.”

Conway walked into the living room from the basement. He had showered and was wear
ing his graduate suit. He petted Ozzie as he walked by.

“So, could these gorillas
talk
?” Asa asked.

“Wait.” Conway said. “What’s going on?”

“We are talking about the Davids,” Mama said.

Conway looked horrified, and then angry. “No. Let’s talk about something else,” he said.

“I’d like to hear,” Asa said.

“Let’s tell the boy,” said Mama. “He needs to know about Fran and…”

“NO!” Conway shouted. “This conversation is OVER.”

Asa was surprised at how quick to anger this topic made Conway.
What is the harm in telling me?

“Jul Conway, don’t yell in my house!” Mama said

“Well, I’m his mentor, his father asked me to watch over the boy, so I get to decide what he is and isn’t exposed to! We’re not talking about the Davids. Not yet.”

Asa was hurt, and let it show on his face. “I thought you told me on King Mountain that there would be no more secrets,” Asa said.

Conway looked ashamed, but still, he had the courage to meet Asa’s eyes. “I just don’t think that this is something that you need to know. It’s a liability to tell you.”

In other words, you don’t trust me with this information.

Mama sat with her cake in her lap, rocking back and forth. She did not seem pleased, but also didn’t voice her concern.

“What brought you here today, Asa?” Conway asked.

Asa didn’t know where to start. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to talk anymore. He felt wounded, and wanted to get away. His mind went to the picture in his suit that he had gotten from the gorilla (
David
) in the jungle,
and he considered how Conway didn’t want to have to talk about the Davids.

Asa stood abruptly. “I thought we could talk, but I don’t think that we can.” He was surprised to find himself emotional. Mama stopped rocking and sat still. Conway regarded Asa with his brown eyes, but his face didn’t show what he was thinking. “Thank you for the white cake and the tea, Mama. And thank you for talking to me.”

She smiled and said, “So polite… You are welcome.”

Asa didn’t say goodbye to Conway, but instead he stormed out of the cabin. He was thankful to make it out into the snow before the tears came to him. Angry, upset, distraught, he leapt into the air, ripped his wings from his back, and thrashed them through the atmosphere so that he shot upward into the sky, towards his dwelling.