Stanzi—Thursday Night—Genius Debriefing
IN THE PLACE OF ARRIVALS
Marvin asks me where I think the missing guilt organ is. I show him the spot just at the base of my neck, above my clavicle, but near the shoulder. He presses on his and closes his eyes. I stand, waiting for him to tell me what he thinks, but he just stays that way, pressing my theoretic organ in his neck, and Patricia says, inside my head, Let’s leave him to figure it out.
As we walk up the path I say, “But I wanted to figure it out. I wanted it to be mine.”
“His discoveries are trapped here, like he is,” she says.
“It’s my discovery.”
“And you’ll take it back to the world when you leave.”
“Leave?” I say. “Why do you keep talking about leaving? There are no departures.”
We walk quietly for a moment.
“So no one believes our story about hiking?” I ask.
“There must be other ways to get here than a helicopter.”
She smiles. “It isn’t just a helicopter. You know that.”
“Gustav told me this place would be a hotbed of genius,” I say.
“More like a vacuum of genius,” she says.
I look to see if she’s joking, but she’s dead serious. I say, “Gustav said this is an invisible place. It doesn’t seem invisible to me.”
“I feel more invisible every day I live here,” she says. “So will you.”
I think about the drills. Patricia says in my head: Yes. Just like the drills.
“Is that why the bush man left?”
She laughs. “Why do you call him that?”
“Hard to explain,” I say. “He’s a good guy, but he scares people.”
“Don’t we all?”
I picture the dangerous bush man in my head: naked, trench coat, letters. I wonder if she can see him.
“I can see him.”
I picture the bush, the lemonade stand, and the kisses.
“What’s normal, anyway?” Patricia asks.
“It’s not this place,” I say.
We walk quietly again for a minute. The hill is steep. I wish the trees would help me breathe, like Mama always said they would.
“Tonight you and Gustav will be debriefed,” Patricia says.
“Okay.”
“They’ll ask you things about the real world.”
“Okay.”
“They’ll ask if you know Kenneth,” she says. “You can’t tell them the truth.”
“Okay.”
“I’m going to pretend I have my period and stay home,” she says.
“Why?”
“I don’t like debriefings,” she says.
I wonder if the dangerous bush man was ever debriefed.
“He was. But he lied about us being in love.”
“You’re in love with the bush man?” I ask.
“Very.”
“I thought you were married to Gary,” I say.
She laughs. “Ha!”
I wonder if the bush man was like Gustav when it came to love.
“Exactly the same,” she says. “Never knew what to do with his hands.”
“He’s a very good kisser,” I say.
“Yes,” she answers.
“He has the answers,” I say.
Gustav is sitting high in a tree. I wave to him and he waves back. Patricia has gone to bed early because she has Lansdale Cruise cramps.
As Gustav climbs down, he says, “They told me they never believed our story because of your lab coat. Who goes hiking in a lab coat? they asked.”
He mutters to himself as he descends the final two branches and jumps to the ground in front of me.
“They’re very smart,” I say. “Trying to turn you against me.”
“Do you know where we are?” Gustav asks. “Do you know what this is?” He’s talking like Gary now. He has smug up to his knees.
“I have a guess, but I don’t trust what they’ve told you.”
“We’re in the smartest zip code in America,” he says. “No one here has an IQ under a hundred and seventy.”
“We’re not in a zip code, Gustav. They don’t get mail here,” I say.
“Who needs mail? I never got mail at home. Why would I need it here?”
“You called it a zip code. It’s not a zip code,” I say. “Also, they already knew we weren’t hikers. It had nothing to do with my coat.”
He’s agitated. I wonder what it’s like having a helicopter to build every day for months and then not having anything to do.
“They told me they would have believed us if it wasn’t for you,” he says.
“They lie better than Lansdale Cruise. Marvin told me. Patricia told me. There’s no other way to get here except the helicopter,” I say. “And no way out, either, except the bush man got out.”
“Yes. Kenneth.”
“He got out. He told me how to get out. Except the fuel. He never told me about the fuel,” he says.
“You didn’t tell them this, did you?”
“No.”
“What’s so great about a bunch of people with high IQs, anyway?” I ask. “Look at Gary. He may be smart, but he’s a jerk.”
Gustav says, “Smart people often have social issues. It’s how we’re made.”
“We?”
“You have social issues,” he says. “I have social issues. So what?”
“So neither of us are jerks,” I say.
He says he needs a minute. “It’s hard to catch up. All this new information,” he says.
“We lied from the minute we got here,” I say. “They don’t trust us.”
“Patricia lied.”
“But then we lied, too,” I say.
“I just went along with it,” he says.
“Maybe we’re not as smart as we thought we were,” I say. “Maybe we’re easily swayed. I don’t know. But I don’t like this place. I’ve been here for half a day and I don’t like it.”
Gary whistles to us like we’re dogs. It’s time for the genius debriefing.
“I’m going to tell them about the drills,” I say.
“I’m going to tell them who’s been sending the bomb threats,” Gustav says.
I take a deep breath. “There is no way you can know this, Gustav. Scientifically, you don’t have enough evidence,” I say.
We walk toward the building where the dining hall is. As we walk, Gustav reaches over and touches my hand. I pull my hand away. Today has made me edgy. I wanted to come here. But now I don’t want to be here. Gustav wanted to come here and then leave, but now he wants to stay. We are two very confused arrivals.
“It’s China,” Gustav says. “She’s untrustworthy.”
I’m glad we’re not holding hands. I shout, “Where are you getting your information? Are you eating what insects eat?” Gustav looks shocked. I don’t think I’ve ever yelled at him before. “China is your friend. She deserves more from you!”
Gustav stops on the path outside the building and looks down. “I apologize. You’re right.”
“She’s the smartest zip code you ever met,” I say.
“I wish sometimes that I had her words,” Gustav says.
“No, you don’t,” I argue. “Because then no one would believe you, and people would call you untrustworthy because of bad luck. If you had your own words, it might be different. China can’t win. She can only eat herself.”
“You know what happened, don’t you?”
“I know.”
“Will she ever recover?”
“Do any of us ever recover?”
“I don’t know,” he answers.
“Did she ever tell you about Fuenteovejuna?” I ask.
“No.”
“When we get back, she will.”
“Get back?” he asks.
There are several rooms inside. It’s like a church, but with no god. In the room with Gustav and me are sixteen people. Marvin is here, no longer pressing on his/my theoretical guilt-free gland; Gary is here in his fog of smug. The others are all names I never even hear. They introduce themselves by telling us only what they do and where they learned how to do it. Physics, MIT; biology, UCLA; music, Berklee; neuroscience, Penn; law, Harvard; poetry, NYU; economics, Yale; abstract painting, Royal College of Art, London; architecture, Cornell; master chef, Culinary Institute Lenôtre; mathematics, Stanford; psychology, MIT; philosophy, Harvard; botany, Trinity; astronomy, Cambridge; chemistry, Cornell. After the introductions, we’re supposed to be impressed, I think.
I’m not.
Gustav is probably not, either.
They ask us about our daily lives. We tell them that we don’t watch television but that most people do and that it’s not all bad, though most of it is. We tell them we don’t care about fashion or culture, and I point at my lab coat as an example. We tell them about the wars we’re in and I tell them about the war in Congo and they seem uninterested. They are similarly uninterested in the drug cartels in Mexico and the wars in the Middle East, one of them snorting at Gustav’s mention of Syria, and they are not at all interested in the tsunamis, the hurricanes, or the earthquakes. Not even the one that caused a nuclear reactor to melt down.
They ask us about the Internet.
Gustav says it is informative and a marvel.
I add that it causes pain and is filled with pornography. The room laughs at this. The whole room jiggles its belly.
“Don’t you have the Internet here?” Gustav asks.
“We are the Internet here,” Gary replies. The room jiggles again. The walls laugh. The lighting fixtures make a clinking noise.
“Well.” Gustav stops to choose his words well. “You can’t know everything the Internet knows.”
Gustav and I bounce around like the Ping-Pong balls in a lottery machine. We are in a genius bouncy house. The sixteen residents still sit in their chairs, but we are thrown and sprung from floor to ceiling to wall until they contain themselves.
As I float from surface to surface, I want to dissect all of them. Find their livers. Dehydrate them. I wish I had my Dealing with People You Can’t Stand book that Mama and Pop bought me for Christmas.
Gustav has blood running down his face when we land. He wipes it with his finger and checks to see if it is blood or sweat. It’s both. I take a tissue from my lab coat pocket and press it on the small cut above his right eyebrow after gently wiping his forehead of the layer of frustrating sweat. It’s been an hour.
They ask about school. We tell them about the drills.
One asks, “Every day? The alarm goes off every day?”
“Yes.”
“And you go outside?”
“Yes,” Gustav answers. I think of him under his black walnut tree. I remember that we’re resilient weeds. I look at the sixteen others. I don’t know what they are.
“We have to do our tests there,” I say. “Even if it’s raining.”
“It’s just water,” Marvin says.
Another says, “I’m sure you pass them. You’re both competent.”
“The tests aren’t for us,” Gustav says. “They’re for them.”
I add, “For assessment.”
I hear Gustav’s thoughts in my head. Just like now. We’re being assessed.
“Who makes these assessments?”
“A company,” Gustav says.
The sixteen of them stare at us. We stare back at them. One of them presses a button on his chair and a wall drops down between us.
Gustav says, inside my head, They can probably still see us. Just sit there.
I say, “Okay.”
He says inside my head, You can hear what I’m thinking?
I think yes, but he doesn’t hear me. So I whisper, “Yes.”
He looks concerned, so I say, “Don’t worry. I won’t pry.”
We sit for three minutes. Gustav talks to me in my head as we sit.
He thinks: These people aren’t exceptional. They’re cowards.
I want to ask Gustav about fuel, but they can probably hear me through their secret genius wall, so I keep looking ahead. I fold my hands on my lap as if I was in a photographer’s studio in a shopping mall. We wait.
Gustav says inside my head, Kenneth told me I was going on a mission. I didn’t know what kind of mission, but any mission was better than testing week. I thought this would be different. Maybe it is. Maybe we belong here. Maybe we don’t. I can’t tell yet.
A click sounds and the wall lifts.
Gary is standing up and the other fifteen are still sitting.
Gary says, “Where’s the helicopter?”
Gustav answers before I can say anything. “We crashed.”
“Where?”
“Three days from here. I don’t know what direction,” Gustav says. “Remember when we said we’d been walking for days? When we arrived?”
“You have no wounds to indicate a crash,” Gary says.
“The trees,” I say, thinking of Mama. “The trees saved us. Though I did twist my ankle climbing down, and Gustav got a small bump on his head from the impact.”
Gustav rubs the side of his head.
Gary contemplates. He says, “Our first job is to recover it. We’ll start searching tomorrow.”
I hear Gustav trying to find a way to ask if they’ll destroy it, but before he can say anything, one of the others presses the button and the wall drops down again.
Gustav and I sit there and stare ahead. I whisper, “They’re going to destroy it. I know it. We have to get out of here.” Gustav nods as if he might believe me.
When the wall recedes into the ceiling again, the sixteen geniuses are gone. The room is empty. Gustav looks at me and holds out his hand. I take it and we leave through the front door, which opens as we approach it and closes behind us.
Outside, there is a message meticulously hand-lettered on wood.
It says, in red paint, THERE ARE NO DEPARTURES.