“No.”
“Okay, you’re doing good. Now I want you to count to twenty, then open your eyes.”
Luke counted and opened.
“What do you see?”
“The wall.”
“Nothing else?”
Luke thought Tony almost had to be talking about the dots. When you see em, say so, George had told him. When you don’t, say that. Don’t lie. They know.
“Nothing else.”
“Sure?”
“Yes.”
Tony slapped him on the back, making Luke jump. “Okay, champ, we’re done here. I’ll give you some ice for that ear. You have yourself a great day.”
8
Gladys was waiting for him when Tony showed him out of Room B-31. She was smiling her cheerful professional hostess smile. “How did you do, Luke?”
Tony answered for him. “He did fine. Good kid.”
“It’s what we specialize in,” Gladys almost sang. “Have a good day, Tony.”
“You too, Glad.”
She led Luke back to the elevator, chattering away merrily. He had no idea what she was talking about. His arm only hurt a little, but he was holding the cold-pack to his ear, which throbbed. The slap had been worse than either. For all kinds of reasons.
Gladys escorted him to his room along the industrial green corridor, past the poster Kalisha had been sitting under, past the one reading JUST ANOTHER DAY IN PARADISE, and finally to the room that looked like his room but wasn’t.
“Free time!” she cried, as if conferring a prize of great worth. Right now the prospect of being alone did feel like sort of a prize. “He gave you a shot, right?”
“Yes.”
“If your arm starts to hurt, or if you feel faint, tell me or one of the other caretakers, okay?”
“Okay.”
He opened the door, but before he could go in, Gladys grabbed him by the shoulder and turned him around. She was still smiling the hostess smile, but her fingers were steely, pressing into his flesh. Not quite hard enough to hurt, but hard enough to let him know they could hurt.
“No tokens, I’m afraid,” she said. “I didn’t need to discuss it with Tony. That mark on your cheek tells me all I need to know.”
Luke wanted to say I don’t want any of your shitty tokens, but kept silent. It wasn’t a slap he was afraid of; he was afraid that the sound of his own voice—weak, unsteady, bewildered, the voice of a six-year-old—would cause him to break down in front of her.
“Let me give you some advice,” she said. Not smiling now. “You need to realize that you are here to serve, Luke. That means you have to grow up fast. It means being realistic. Things will happen to you here. Some of them will not be so nice. You can be a good sport about them and get tokens, or you can be a bad sport and get none. Those things will happen either way, so which should you choose? It shouldn’t be hard to figure out.”
Luke made no reply. Her smile came back nevertheless, the hostess smile that said oh yes, sir, I’ll show you to your table right away.
“You’ll be back home before the summer is over, and it will be like none of this happened. If you remember it at all, it will be like a dream. But while it’s not a dream, why not make your stay a happy one?” She relaxed her grip and gave him a gentle push. “You should rest a bit, I think. Lie down. Did you see the dots?”
“No.”
“You will.”
She closed the door, very gently. Luke sleepwalked across the room to the bed that wasn’t his bed. He lay down, put his head on the pillow that wasn’t his pillow, and stared at the blank wall where there was no window. No dots, either—whatever they were. He thought: I want my mom. Oh God, I want my mom so bad.
That broke him. He dropped the cold-pack, cupped his hands over his eyes, and began crying. Were they watching him? Or listening to his sobs? It didn’t matter. He was past caring. He was still crying when he fell asleep.
9
He woke up feeling better—cleaned out, somehow. He saw two things had been added to his room while he was at lunch, and then meeting his wonderful new friends Gladys and Tony. There was a laptop on the desk. It was a Mac, like his, but an older model. The other addition was a small TV on a stand in the corner.
He went to the computer first and powered it up, feeling another deep pang of homesickness at the familiar Macintosh chime. Instead of a password prompt, he got a blue screen with this message: SHOW CAMERA ONE TOKEN TO OPEN. Luke banged the return key a couple of times, knowing it would do no good.
“You fucking thing.”
Then, in spite of how horrible and surreal all this was, he had to laugh. It was harsh and brief, but genuine. Had he felt a certain sense of superiority—maybe even contempt—at the idea of kids scrounging for tokens so they could buy wine coolers or cigarettes? Sure he had. Had he thought I’d never do that? Sure he had. When Luke thought of kids who drank and smoked (which was rarely; he had more important things to consider), what came to mind were Goth losers who listened to Pantera and drew lopsided devil horns on their denim jackets, losers so dumb that they mistook wrapping themselves in the chains of addiction as an act of rebellion. He couldn’t imagine doing either, but here he was, staring at a blank blue laptop screen and hitting the return key like a rat in a Skinner box banging the lever for a piece of kibble or a few grains of cocaine.
He closed the laptop and grabbed the remote off the top of the television. He fully expected another blue screen and another message telling him he needed a token or tokens to operate it, but instead he got Steve Harvey interviewing David Hasselhoff about the Hoff’s bucket list. The audience was laughing it up at the Hoff’s funny answers.
Pushing the guide button on the remote produced a DirecTV menu similar to the one at home, but as with the room and the laptop, not quite the same. Although there was a wide selection of movies and sports programs, there were no network or news channels. Luke turned the set off, replaced the remote on top, and looked around.
Other than the one leading to the corridor, there were two doors. One opened on a closet. There were jeans, tee-shirts (no effort had been made to exactly copy the ones he had at home, which was sort of a relief ), a couple of button-up shirts, two pairs of sneakers, and one pair of slippers. There were no hard shoes.
The other door opened on a small, spandy-clean bathroom. There were a couple of toothbrushes, still in their cases, on the washbasin, next to a fresh tube of Crest. In the well-stocked medicine cabinet he found mouthwash, a bottle of children’s Tylenol, with just four pills inside, deodorant, roll-on Deet bugspray, Band-Aids, and several other items, some more useful than others. The only thing that might be considered even remotely dangerous was a pair of nail clippers.
He swung the medicine cabinet closed and looked at himself. His hair was crazied up, and there were dark circles (beat-off circles, Rolf would have called them) under his eyes. He looked both older and younger, which was weird. He peered at his tender right earlobe and saw one of those tiny metal circles embedded in the slightly reddened skin. He had no doubt that somewhere on B-Level—or C, or D—there was a computer tech who could now track his every movement. Was perhaps tracking him now. Lucas David Ellis, who had been planning to matriculate at MIT and Emerson, had been reduced to a blinking dot on a computer screen.
Luke returned to his room (the room, he told himself, it’s the room, not my room), looked around, and realized a dismaying thing. No books. Not a single one. That was as bad as no computer. Maybe worse. He went to the dresser and opened the drawers one by one, thinking he might at least find a Bible or a Book of Mormon, like they sometimes had in hotel rooms. He discovered only neat stacks of underwear and socks.