In a way it’s like using the I Ching. It’s a means of concentrating attention on reality. Above all, it provides an outlet for all the frustration you’ve struggled to digest for fear that, learning of it, your friends would brand you failure.
It must help some of the unhappy ones. The suicide rate is holding steady.
FLESHBACK SEQUENCE
Today, said the impersonal instruments, it would be advisable to waken the subject fully; too long spent in the trance-like state of recall that he had endured for the past forty-two days might endanger his conscious personality. The recommendation was not unwelcome to Paul Freeman. He was growing more and more intrigued by this man whose past had been mapped along so improbable a course.
On the other hand there was a diktat in force, straight from the Federal Bureau of Data Processing, which instructed him to produce a full report in the shortest possible time. Hence Hartz’s flying visit. And that had lasted a whole working day, moreover, when one might have expected the typical “hello-how-interesting-goodbye” pattern. Someone in Washington must have a hunch … or at any rate have gone out so far on a limb as to need results regardless of what they were.
He compromised. For a single day he would talk person-to-person instead of merely replaying facts from store in a living memory.
He quite looked forward to the change.
“You know where you are?”
The totally shaven man licked his lips. His gaze flickered around the stark white walls.
“No, but I figure it must be Tarnover. I always pictured rooms like this in that faceless secret block on the east side of the campus.”
“How do you feel about Tarnover?”
“It makes me want to be scared stiff. But I guess you dose me with something so I can’t.”
“But that wasn’t how you felt when you first came here.”
“Hell, no. In the beginning it seemed wonderful. Should it not to a kid with my background?”
That was documented: father disappeared when he was five, mother stood the strain for a year and vanished into an alcoholic haze. But the boy was resilient. They decided he would make an ideal rent-a-child: obviously bright, rather quiet, tolerably well mannered and cleanly in his habits. So, from six to twelve, he lived in a succession of modern, smart, sometimes luxurious company homes occupied by childless married couples posted in on temporary assignment from other cities. He was generally well liked by these “parents” and one couple seriously considered adopting him but decided against landing themselves permanently with a boy of another color. Anyhow, they consoled themselves, he was getting a terrific introduction to the plug-in life-style.
He appeared to accept the decision with good grace. But several times after that, when left alone in the house for an evening (which was in fact often, for he was a good boy and to be trusted), he went to the phone—with a sense of dreadful guilt—and punched the ten nines as he dimly recalled seeing his mother do, his real mother, during the last terrible few months before something went wrong inside her head. To the blank screen he would pour out a nonstop volley of filth and curses. And wait, shaking, for the calm anonymous voice to say, “Only I heard that. I hope it helped.”
Paradoxically: yes, it did.
“What about school, Haflinger?”
“Was it really my name …? Don’t bother to answer; that was rhetorical. I just didn’t like it. Overtones of ‘half,’ as though I was condemned never to become a finished person. And I didn’t care for Nick, either.”
“Do you know why not?”
“Sure I do. In spite of anything it may say to the contrary on my record, I have excellent juvenile recall. Infantile too, in fact. I found out early about Auld Nick, the Scottish term for the devil. Also ‘to nick,’ meaning to arrest or sometimes to steal. And above all Saint Nick. I never did manage to find out how the same figment could give rise to both Santa Claus and Saint Nicholas, the patron saint of thieves.”
“Maybe it was a matter of giving with one hand and taking away with the other. Did you know that in Holland Sinter Klaas brought gifts to children in the company of a black man who whipped the ones who hadn’t behaved well enough to deserve a present?”
“That’s news to me, and very interesting, Mr.—Mr. Freeman, isn’t it?”
“You were going to tell me how you remember school.”
“Should have known better than to try and strike up a brotherly chat. Yes, school. Much the same—the teachers turned over even faster than my temporary parents, and every new arrival seemed to have a new theory of education, so we never did learn very much. But of course in most respects it was a hell of a lot worse than—uh—home.”
The high walls. The guarded gates. The classrooms where the walls were lined with broken teaching machines, waiting for the engineers who never seemed to come, inevitably vandalized after a couple of days and rendered unrepairable. The stark corridors where so often sand greeted the soles with a gritty kiss, marking a spot where blood had been shed. The blood on the floor was his only once; he was clever, to the point of being considered odd because he kept trying to learn when everybody else knew the right thing to do was sit tight and wait to be eighteen. He contrived to avoid all the shivs, clubs and guns bar one, and his wound was shallow and left no scar.
The one thing he was not clever enough to do was escape. Authoritatively the State Board of Education had laid it down that there must be one major element of stability in the life of a rent-a-child; therefore he must continue at this same school regardless of where he currently happened to reside, and none of his temporary parents remained in the vicinity long enough to fight that ruling to the bitter end.
When he was twelve a teacher arrived named Adele Brixham, who kept on trying same as he did. She noticed him. Before she was ambushed and gang-raped and overloaded, she must have filed some sort of report. At any rate, a week or so later the classroom and the approach corridor were invaded by a government platoon, men and women in uniform carrying guns, webbers and fetters, and for a change the roll was called complete bar one girl who was in the hospital.
And there were tests which for a change could not be ignored, because someone with hard eyes and a holster stood by you to make sure. Nickie Haflinger sank all his frustrated lust for achievement into the six hours they lasted: three before, three after a supervised lunch eaten in the classroom. Even to visit the can you were escorted. It was a new thing for those of the kids who hadn’t been arrested yet.
After IQ and EQ—empathic quotient—and perceptual and social tests, like the regular kind only more so, came the kickers: laterality tests, double-take tests, open-dilemma tests, value-judgment tests, wisdom tests … and those were fun! For the final thirty minutes of the session he was purely drunk on the notion that when something happened which had never happened before one human being could make a right decision about the outcome, and that person might be Nickie Haflinger!
The government people had brought a portable computer with them. Little by little he grew aware that each time it printed out, more and more of the gray-garbed strangers looked at him rather than the other children. The rest realized what was going on, too, and that expression came to their faces which he had long ago learned to recognize: Today, after class, he’s the one we’ll carve the ass off!
He was shaking as much from terror as excitement when the six hours ended, but he hadn’t been able to stop himself from applying all he knew and all he could guess to the tests.