“GOOD MORNING, JOUNG people,” the bald, bespectacled man called out in a Swiss accent, biting down on the stem of his pipe as the Sylla-Bus clattered around the corner. “Did any of jou have any interesting dreams last night?”
The girls, restrained by their steel harnesses, all craned their necks slyly toward the handsome new boy, Angelo Fallon, each with the same vague sloppy grin smeared across her face.
The Korean boy raised his hand. “My dream is that I become the president of a Fortune five hundred company before college,” he said, scrunching up his nose to push his thick black-rimmed glasses back into place.
“Before college?”
“Yes, sir. I thought it would look good on my college applications.”
The man’s lips twitched into a smirk beneath his patchy white mustache. “I meant dreams as in ‘nocturnal reveries’ … the gateway to the subconscious …” The man uncapped a marker from his easel and wrote on the dry-erase board in tight, squeaky cursive: “Dream Overanalysis: Dr. Jung.”
“So, joung people,” he continued in a voice as crisp as a freshly starched shirt, “today we will be learning—”
The Korean boy again raised his hand.
“Yes, Mr.…?” the doctor asked, his face tightening with irritation.
“Myung-Dae Euclid Finkelstein,” the boy replied. “The Third. What will we be learning today, Dr. Jung?”
“I was just getting to that before jou interrupted me!” the teacher replied. “And it’s Jung—like Yoong.”
“Are you sure?” Myung-Dae asked.
“Jes, I am sure!” Dr. Jung barked as he wiped the dry-erase board angrily with a rag. “Now, then, dream overanalysis accomplishes two important tasks. One, it allows jou to make productive use of time normally wasted with sleep and pointless fantasy. And two, it helps protect adults against one of the most tiresome questions that can be posed: Would jou like to hear my dream?”
Virgil, harnessed next to the new kid on the Sylla-Bus, raised his hefty arm. “But you can’t control what you dream about,” he said. “I mean, if you eat anchovy pizza with hot fudge and Fresca right before bed, you get some really weird dreams, like the one I had about the giant squirrel dressed as a Canadian Mountie, only it wasn’t really a squirrel; it was more like my uncle Augie with a fuzzy tail—”
Dr. Jung waved away the question. “See what I mean?” the teacher replied. “There’s a minute we’ll never get back! But jou cannot only control dreams, jou can also eradicate them,” Dr. Jung continued as he drew a sleeping stick figure, dreaming little bubbles, then crossed out each bubble with a big X. “Then none of us will have to waste our time with boring squirrels and fuzzy Uncle Arties …”
Virgil slunk back in his seat. “It’s Augie,” he mumbled as the Sylla-Bus rounded the corner. Virgil glanced over at Marlo, as he seemed to do every few minutes. She was stifling a laugh—not quite laughing at him, but not really with him either, as he wasn’t laughing. Still, her amusement made him feel somehow better.
“That’s what you get for interacting with teachers,” Angelo said to Virgil, crossing his brawny arms. He looked down into his palm at a small picture of Milton. His disturbingly blue eyes examined the other boys who—while all sharing Milton’s geeky attributes—weren’t quite the boy he was hired to “deal with.”
“Yeah,” Virgil muttered back, filled with an odd, sudden unease. Whereas the other kids pressed next to him were physically warm, Angelo seemed to exude a frosty, electric chill: like he was literally too cool for school.
A man with a high forehead, tortoiseshell glasses, and slicked-back hair appeared up ahead.
“Good day, Junior Executives!” the man shouted while buttoning his white lab coat. “My name is Dr. B. F. Skinner and you are here to learn behavior modification!”
On the man’s desk were three wire cages, one covered with a white sheet. Inside the cages were an assortment of fuzzy white animals and a few of those long creepy worms Marlo had seen down in the grotto. She strained against her restraining bar for a better look.
“Hey!” Marlo yelped. “That ferret is Lucky!”
“I hardly think so,” the teacher answered with a shake of his head. “Unless you think it’s ‘lucky’ to be experimented on.”
“No, his name is Lucky,” Marlo replied. “And he belongs to my brother!”
“No, the ferret’s name is Bueller. At least it is now after an intense session of negative reinforcement.”
“W-wait,” Marlo sputtered, filled with sharp pangs of worry. “What do you mean, experimented on?”
“I hope you’re not some crazy animal activist,” Dr. Skinner said suspiciously. “I can tell you from firsthand observation that animals feel very little. They simply haven’t the capacity for complex psychophysiological and biochemical functionality.”
“You mean emotions?” Marlo countered.
“That’s what I just said. Laymen have this irritating knack for transferring human emotions onto animals, characteristics that are beyond an animal’s cognitive capabilities.”
“Well … you’d better not hurt him,” Marlo seethed, her arms crossed defiantly.
“Hurt who?”
“Lucky.”
“Lucky?”
“Bueller!”
“I hurt these tools … creatures … far less than the violent chaos of the natural world would.”
Myung-Dae raised his hand. “Can you tell us what behavioralism—the methods and principles of the science of animal and human behavior—is?” he both asked and explained.
Dr. Skinner smoothed back his greasy silver hair. “Behavioralism is, yes … that … but, as I see it, it’s the acceptance that the external world cannot be fundamentally changed, so we must change our behavior. There’s no sense beating your head against how things are. It’s far more beneficial for society if you just surrender to the facts and become someone you’re not. That’s what life is. And death even more so. A series of conditioning events.”
“So life is like shampoo and death is the conditioner?” Marlo whispered to the girl next to her.
The Sylla-Bus scooted away, leaving Dr. Skinner behind, grumbling to himself. Suddenly, Dr. Curie came running across the room with lunatic glee.
“He asked me!” she squeaked, her voice as high as a rubber ducky filled with helium. She waved her luminous green hand, now adorned with a diamond ring.
Marlo leaned into Kali, moving aside one of the severed heads on her necklace so that it wasn’t staring back at her. “Asked her what?”
“Asked her to install a dimmer switch on her forehead?” the fuchsia-haired girl next to Marlo joked.
“Asked her to marry him,” Kali interjected. “Solomon Grundy, married on Wednesday …”
“Wasn’t he just a baby yesterday?” Marlo asked.
“Children grow up very fast here in Precocia!” Kali replied as a heavyset man with an unruly snow-white beard set a large bundle down on the ground ahead. He was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot, and his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot.
“Hey, that guy looks familiar,” a boy with big ears and a buzz cut said.
“He gives me the creeps,” Angelo said with his smooth, dark rumble.
Lyon turned and gave Angelo her most practiced smile from her arsenal of supermodel expressions. “I know!” she gushed. “Like, totally gross, right?”
“I know I’m Jewish and everything,” Virgil said, staring at the man’s twinkling eyes, merry dimples, rosy cheeks, and cherrylike nose, “but, really, there’s only one guy who can be …”
Kali’s dark eyes widened in terror. She heaved the scooter bus forward and sped past the man, her long tongue lolling out of her mouth like a slimy red scarf.
“Ho-ho-hold on!” the man yelled as he ran after the Sylla-Bus.
Marlo folded her pale white arms together and stared at the man suspiciously. “Santa Claus?” she said with amazement. “I don’t believe it … or in him.”
The fuchsia-haired girl looked back at the puffing old man. “And I can’t believe the fat old guy can run like that!” she said as the man tried vainly to keep up with the Sylla-Bus.
Marlo turned to the giant blue Hindu driver. “What’s the dealio?”
Kali straightened her grisly girdle of severed arms and sped past a three-copier pileup.
“My job is to protect you children from childhood!”
“From childhood?” Marlo asked as Kali slowed the Sylla-Bus down now that they were out of Father Christmas range. “Why?”
“Childhood is an incredibly dangerous time, when you young people are at your most vulnerable! I help rush you through it so that you arrive at the sanctuary of adulthood as soon as possible!”
“But what does Santa Claus have to do with anything?” Marlo asked.
Kali waved two of her hefty blue arms up in the air in frustration. “If there is one person who has perpetuated the myth of childhood as some enchanted, merry fortress against reality, it is he!” she bellowed.
“Okay, okay,” Marlo said, her hands on her ears. “Let’s use our inside voices, please.”
“Ksama karem,” she apologized as she turned the corner. “Not only does he deepen childhood with muddling magic, but why would any sensible person stuff candy and toys in their socks, then hang them above the fireplace? That is just an accident waiting to happen!”
The Sylla-Bus clattered and creaked back to Dr. Jung.
“In waking life, too, we continue to dream beneath the threshold of consciousness, especially when under the influence of repressed complexes!” the doctor shouted as the scooter bus drew near. “Dream overanalysis can help us strip away this befuddling gauze, to make us more productive.”
“What is a dream?” the little boy with the buzz cut asked. “I mean … exactly?”
“Though decorated with silly details,” Dr. Jung replied, twirling his marker in the air, “a dream is often symbolic of an actual situation nagging the unconscious. An issue—”
“Gesundheit,” the pale little boy replied.
“Thank you … something troubling the mind that has been stuffed into jour brain’s laundry hamper, only to be aired out at night in hopes of being solved. Through the practice of overanalysis, we can free our consciences of useless feelings such as guilt and resume our selfish undertakings.”
“That sounds great!” Lyon beamed.
The Sylla-Bus crept past Dr. Jung.
“There are a variety of ways of doing this—keeping a dream journal, for one. Dream catchers are another. But I find lucid dreaming to be the best technique.”
“Lucid dreaming?” Virgil asked.
“Jes, taking the reins of jour unconscious mind, Mr. Giant Squirrel!” Dr. Jung replied. “Simply command jourself to become consciously aware of dreaming so that, instead of dreaming of silly things, jou dream of homework, studying, or even taking tests that will very much count on jour school record!”
“But then we’re, like, always at school!” Lyon whined. “With no breaks!”
“Exactly! Then jou have successfully turned a good night’s sleep into a hard day’s work!”
The children sulked as the Sylla-Bus scooted away.
“Behold the operant-conditioning chamber!” Dr. Skinner shouted. He tugged a white sheet off a large cage. In it was a white rat standing upright atop a metal grid, sniffing at a pair of levers.
“This is rat number twelve, who will show us how reinforcement shapes behavior. See what happens when another rat is displayed on the screen.”
The rat sniffed a picture of another rat. Suddenly, the floor of the cage sparked. The rat jumped back, electrified.
“After several sessions of negative reinforcement, I will have conditioned rat number twelve to be terrified of his own kind.”
“That’s awful!” Marlo yelped with outrage.
“Awful—wait for it!—ly interesting!” the doctor replied, his eyes bulging behind his glasses. “Now see what happens when I replace a usually negative stimulus with a reward.”
A picture of a cobra flashed on the screen. A food pellet tumbled down a chute into the rat’s dish.
“With consistent positive reinforcement, I will have conditioned rat number twelve to overcome its instinctual fear of snakes and in fact become drawn to them.”
“How does that help the rat at all?” Marlo asked.
“Well, I suppose a fear of snakes—ophidiophobia—must be quite stressful for rats when in their native habitat, twitching at the slightest slither. Rat number twelve, however, will be free of this debilitating fear … for the few hours until it is consumed by a real snake.”
The Sylla-Bus clattered slowly past Dr. Skinner and his cages.
“You young adults are like rat number twelve: you can all be conditioned to respond more favorably to environments beyond your ability to control,” the teacher said, smoothing out his lab coat.
Myung-Dae raised his hand. “How?”
“Let me explain,” Dr. Skinner said, pacing before the cages full of miserable animals. “A student’s actions, both positive and negative, must be reinforced and punished, until the correct response is consistently achieved. In the weeks to come, we’ll rely less on education and more on ‘shaping children with electrical shocks.’ ”
“Shocks?” Marlo exclaimed. “But that’s torture!”
“It will be!” Dr. Skinner replied with a creepy excitement. “But only when your behavior has been controlled to society’s liking are you truly civilized.”
The Sylla-Bus scooted around the corner.
Mind-numbing boredom is one thing, Marlo brooded, but being electrocuted and turned into somebody you aren’t is another. She shifted uncomfortably on the cramped bench. Marlo was, again, filled with a twinge of worry at the mysterious fate of her missing brother. And now Lucky, his beloved pet, was the plaything of some mad doctor.
Up ahead were Dr. Curie and Solomon Grundy—now a gawky young man with sandy brown hair and big teeth—standing before the same preacher who had baptized Grundy only yesterday.
“We are all gathered here today, and every Wednesday, to join Mr. Grundy and Miss Curie in holy matrimony … or at least regular matrimony,” the bald preacher said with a nervous flap of his small angel’s wings.
Dr. Curie clutched her bouquet of wilted lilies with trembling joy, her green cheeks glowing like a nuclear reactor gone critical.
“Solomon Grundy,” the preacher said with a dusty boredom, “do you take Miss Curie to be your lawfully wedded wife for the week?”
Mr. Grundy shrugged. “Sure, I guess,” he replied.
“Do you, Miss Curie—”
“Yes!” she squealed like a radioactive pig.
“May I please have the rings …”
One of Napoléon’s stooped demon foot servants hobbled down the aisle, fighting desperately against its chains. It held a red velvet pillow on which rested a pair of gold bands.
Solomon Grundy and Dr. Curie exchanged rings and awkward giggles.
“Mr. Grundy and Miss Curie, you have agreed to be dead together in matrimony. So by the power vested in me—”
Up ahead was a pile of desks, thrown into a great heap at the center of the office throughway. The fat man in worn red velvet waved his arms.
“Stop!” he bellowed, his round belly shaking like a bowlful of furious jellyfish.
Kali leaned back, bringing the Sylla-Bus to a grinding halt.
“Are you Santa?” the baggy-eyed girl squealed with unhinged delight, her face shiny and bright.
The plump man, looking less like his right jolly old self, sighed. “What’s your name, little girl?” he asked.
“Virginia Teasdale—”
“Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus—in a way—but I ain’t him. I’m Saint Nicholas. Santa’s just some commercialized alter ego of mine that took off on its own. Totally co-opted by the Man. The whole spirit of Christmas thing … that was my bag. Nowadays it’s all about getting as much as you can.”
“Duh!” Lyon said with a roll of her blue eyes.
“The whole give/get ratio is off,” Saint Nicholas continued with frustration. “How can everyone get if no one gives? The joy of doing something nice for someone without them expecting anything: that’s Christmas, man! Not this capitalist machine!”
St. Nicholas took off his cap and nodded to Kali. The hulking Hindu goddess sighed and, flicking a switch on the end of her handlebar, popped open the children’s restraints.
“Let me tell you my story,” St. Nicholas said, sitting down on the ground. He patted the carpet beside him. “Back in the three hundreds, I was a bishop and my folks were pretty well off, so when they died, I gave the money away to kids in need.”
Myung-Dae raised his hand. “As a tax write-off?”
“So I could help someone who wasn’t as well off as me!” St. Nicholas said with irritation. “After I died, people began giving presents in my name, which is where that whole ‘Santa’ thing came from.”
“Why are you here?” Marlo asked. “Are we your charity cases?”
St. Nicholas kicked off his Earth shoes and grinned. “I’m down here from up there … as part of the Eternal Quality Unification Adherence Law—or EQUAL—to teach you free time.”
“But how do you teach free time?”
“Exactly!”
The skinny Asian girl raised her hand tentatively. “Excuse me, Mr. Nicholas, but what’s free time? Is that like studying in the car between dance and violin lessons?”
St. Nicholas shook his head sadly. “Oh, you poor little dudes. You’re all like backpacks with legs, rushing off from one thing to another. And for what? So you can serve a future that you didn’t make yourself. The educational system is just a factory, mass-producing wave after wave of Homo economicus on assembly lines, dig?”
The children around him not only didn’t seem to “dig,” but also apparently weren’t even equipped with shovels.
Marlo leaned into the fuchsia-haired girl. “I think Santa’s been hitting the eggnog.”
“Yeah, he’s like one of those guys who stands outside of natural food stores, wanting you to sign his petition.”
Virgil stared at Marlo. Angelo watched the boy with detached amusement.
“You like her, don’t you?” Angelo said in his cool, velvet voice.
“I … well … she’s friends with my brother … I mean, I’m friends with her brother.”
“Here’s a tip for you, Tubby,” the outwardly flawless boy said with a smirk. “The best way to get a girl to like you is to feed her attention, then, without warning, take it away. Your sudden absence is total girl-poison. Then you come back like some kind of antidote.”
“I think I’ll stick to just being nice,” Virgil replied.
Angelo shrugged his broad shoulders. “Suit yourself, Romeo.”
Marlo noticed a large sack slumped next to St. Nicholas. She raised her hand. “Will there be toys, Mr. Kringle?” she asked.
St. Nicholas grinned as he reached back for the bulging sack. He poured a pile of wooden blocks, Slinkys, and felt dolls onto the gray carpet.
“What’s this junk?” Lyon said with slack-jawed disgust.
“Toys—real toys—the kind that depend wholly on your imaginations,” the old man explained. “Playtime is supposed to be like gym time for your imagination, making it big, strong, and unstoppable. But imaginations are all burning out! And society likes it that way because young imaginations are dangerous.”
Marlo’s hand felt drawn to the blocks. They felt solid in her hands as she arranged them on the floor.
“So, how did you get here … um …?” Marlo asked the fuchsia-haired girl as she made a mini Stonehenge with her blocks.
“Frances,” the girl replied. “Well, I was at circus camp—”
“I already know I’m going to like this!”
“And I had been bragging about how I could ride a unicycle on a tightrope while juggling flaming swords. See, I was always one for exaggerating the truth. It just made everything less boring,” Frances explained as she drew a cell phone keypad onto a block with a crayon. “It was great, up until the day I was picked to ride a unicycle on a tightrope while juggling flaming swords. I just hope that my folks got their tuition money back. So, next thing I know, I’m in Heck. I was going to be sent to Fibble, but it was swallowed up by liquid truth or something before I could get there—”
“Yeah … I heard about that,” Marlo whispered as she slyly pocketed a felt gnome that she had developed a liking to.
“—so I ended up here,” Frances said.
Myung-Dae raised his hand. “So what are we supposed to do? To rebel against society and all that stuff?”
St. Nicholas smiled a smile that felt like the toasty, reassuring warmth of a fireplace. “That’s simple: be a kid. Play. Stop rushing through childhood. Daydreaming, actually, is the best way to subvert the system. Because if you’re not spacing out, you’re not paying attention!”
“I’m confused,” Myung-Dae replied.
“Wonderful!” the chubby old man exclaimed, clapping his gloved hands.
Vice Principal Cleopatra stormed around the corner. “Back in the bus!” she shrieked.
Vice Principal Napoléon marched behind her. “As a honeymoon present for zhe young couple,” he said, his aquiline nose held high in the air, “we are all going on a little field trip tomorrow!”
The children cheered. A man—the fancy Spanish guy in tights Marlo had seen a few days ago—walked up to Napoléon.
“An archaeological dig!” Napoléon continued with a smirk. “To find a mythical relic that may not be so mythical after all!”
Dr. Curie rushed around the corner, yelping with excitement, and threw her bridal bouquet into the air. A group of girls instinctively rushed for it. The flowers bounced off Lyon’s head and into Marlo’s arms.
“Vhell, looks like Miss Fauster may not be a ’miss’ for too long!” Napoléon cackled.
“Fauster?” Angelo said under his breath as he peered at Marlo over the glasses he didn’t need. Marlo grimaced at the dead flowers in her arms.
“Nice catch,” he said, giving Marlo his most luminous, prescription-strength smile. “Nice catch indeed!”