After a sleepless, angry night, Riley made her way back from the storeroom to learn that, as she’d feared, the missing key card had been noticed and all the others were being recoded, rendering useless the one she had stolen. To cover her tracks, she dropped the stolen card behind the art room couch, where it would be found during the next cleaning.
The other ARC patients could see something was bothering her, but she couldn’t bear to tell them how badly she’d failed. Danny did his best to cheer her up, starting with a detailed recitation of every fart joke he’d ever heard. She nodded and smiled and even laughed from time to time because she didn’t want him to feel unappreciated, but everything behind her eyes was lost to rage and frustration. She wanted to dig a hole, jump in, pull the ground in after her, and never come out again.
Can someone please tell me—just for future reference, so I can understand why the universe keeps fucking with me like this—which god did I offend?
All of them, her brain whispered back at her.
Okay, well . . . that’s fair.
* * *
“During our last session, we talked about how we were going to start over and earn back some of the trust that was lost due to recent events.” Kaminski said. Once again he made it a point to glance at Riley when he said recent events but she didn’t care enough to get annoyed about it. Whatever. Can I go now? I need to throw up for about a day and a half.
“So as a show of good faith, I’m going to make the first move in repairing that trust,” he continued. “Let me start with a question. What’s the difference between all of you, and the people who organized the protests that got you arrested?”
“They ran faster?” Jim said.
Kaminski put on his smiley face. “No, but you’re close. The difference is that they’re still out there, going on dates and dinners, hiking and swimming and making plans for more protests, while you’re stuck in here, paying the price for their actions. And what have they done to help you since being arrested? Nothing. To them, you’re just collateral damage. I don’t see you that way. Yes, we disagree on many things. Yes, you made mistakes. But you’re not ringleaders, you don’t use other people; you’re good, decent people who wanted to make the world better and ended up being exploited and abandoned.”
“If we’re such good people,” Angela said, “then why not just let us go?”
“Good question,” Kaminski said, then turned to Callie. “How much longer is left on your committal here?”
“Three weeks,” Callie said, her voice rising at the end of the sentence like, Is that about to change, in the wrong direction? “I mean, I’ve been doing everything I can to show, like you said, good faith—”
“And you’ve done a very good job, despite a lapse in judgment at the breakfast table a few weeks ago.”
Riley straightened. Was he going to punish her for standing up to him during the hunger strike?
“We know who someone really is by what they do most of the time,” Kaminski said. “When there’s a break in that pattern, you can either define that person by the exception, or weigh it against how they live and who they are the rest of the time. So should we give that incident equal weight to everything you’ve done since coming here?”
“No,” she said, fighting tears.
Where is this going?
“I agree, Callie. You’ve worked very hard to earn your way out. You’ve shown that you understand what you did wrong and why you did it. As a result, I feel you’ve become a better person. The rest of the staff concurs. So after consulting with Mr. McGann and going over the points you’ve earned toward rehabilitation, balanced against the relatively short time remaining on your commitment, we’ve decided that your behavior should be rewarded with an early release.”
Her hand flew to her mouth, hardly believing what she was hearing. “How early?”
“Would today suffice?”
And the tears came in a rush as the other patients began applauding, high-fiving, and hugging her.
“The paperwork’s already been drawn up, and is sitting on my desk awaiting signature. I should mention that it includes a nondisclosure agreement stating that you received the best available care, that you were always treated professionally, that you will not discuss the terms of your treatment, and that you absolve the hospital of any potential legal issues. I’m also required to let you know that violating the NDA will incur significant penalties that will almost certainly put you right back here. So I understand if you’d rather not sign it. You’re welcome to hang on another few weeks until you’re discharged through normal channels, which won’t require signing an NDA.”
Unless you decide to change your mind at the last minute and keep her for another six months, and you know that she knows that’s always an option.
Callie hesitated, weighing her options, then nodded. “No, it’s okay, I’ll sign it.”
“Excellent. Then there’s just one last item, and then we’re done. A gesture of good faith from you to match our own.
“We’re still working out how the protests are organized, who does what, and who’s in charge of which geographical areas. Understanding the situation on the ground will let us be more effective as we try to help others like yourself. One of the gaps in our knowledge concerns the identity of the organizer for the protest that landed you here.”
And the room got very quiet.
“I can’t do that,” Callie said, her voice little more than a whisper, oblivious to the tears that were rolling down. “I can’t give you that name.”
“And I’m not asking you for it. I understand that you might feel a sense of loyalty to these people, despite them having turned their back on you. For what it’s worth, we have a pretty good idea of who this person is because several other people have already confirmed it for us. So I’m not going to ask you to say this person’s name if that would make you comfortable. You don’t have to say anything at all. I’ll simply say a name, and if it’s the right name, all you have to do is nod. That’s it. And you’ll be out of here before dinner.”
Riley thought back to the conversation about the Emergency Detention Act. “Is that why they’re working so hard to get names, so they can prove conspiracy?”
“Don’t do it,” Riley said.
“This conversation doesn’t concern you,” Kaminski snapped. “This is between Callie and myself.”
Callie stared at the ground, fist pressed to her lips, agonizing over her decision.
“What’s the name you have?” she asked at last.
“Derek Winters.”
She looked up, startled. “No,” she said, relieved. “That’s not him.”
“I know. That was just a test of your sincerity. Derek Winters was my principal back in high school. If you’d said yes, it would show that you were still in need of further treatment. Only an honest answer will suffice. Do you understand?”
She nodded. Dreading what came next.
“Is his name Thomas Madigan?”
She closed her eyes tight, and even before she nodded, Riley knew that was the name.
“Then you’re done,” Kaminski said, rising. “There’s an orderly waiting outside to help collect your things. I’ll be along in a bit to see you off.”
“Okay,” she managed, and everyone was crying as they hugged her goodbye. She saved the biggest hug for Danny.
“I never meant any of the mean things I said to you,” she said, holding him tight.
“That’s okay, I meant all of mine.”
She laughed through the tears, then turned to Riley. “Good luck.”
“You too,” Riley said, and hugged her.
“You could at least stay for Barbeque Day,” Jim said.
“Not a chance,” she said, then waved goodbye. “Be safe, everybody, okay?”
When she was gone, Kaminski turned back to the group. “I want you to remember this moment because despite what you might think, despite what you might have been told,” he said, once again looking at Riley, “cooperation is not pointless. Cooperation has its benefits. We didn’t have to release her early, but we did. We. Not your friends, or your organizers, we did this. So as we go forward, I urge you to remember who your friends are and who they are not.”
* * *
An hour later, Riley and the others sat behind plates bearing ribs, fries, and corn on the cob from the outdoor grill—the Beast was on the fritz again—but very few of them were eating. Or talking.
Then Hector glanced outside. “There she goes,” he said.
They crowded the window and watched as Callie put a small bag into the trunk of a taxi and looked back up at the hospital one last time. They couldn’t tell if she could see them through the glare of the glass, but she waved anyway. They returned it. Then she climbed into the back seat, and the taxi drove off.
They watched until it disappeared from view, then returned to the table.
After what felt like a very long time, Hector pushed away his plate and leaned forward, his voice as sad as it was angry. “Does anyone here, and I mean anyone at all, really believe that somebody confirmed this Madigan guy’s name before today?”
No one raised their hands.
“Yeah, same here,” he said resignedly. “They probably suspected it was him, but didn’t know for sure. Until now.”
“Bitch of it is,” Becca said, “I saw Callie’s eyes when she nodded, and I don’t think she believed his line. She just wanted out.”
“Can you blame her?” Angela said. “Raise your hand if you know for sure you wouldn’t do the same in her position, given a chance like this.”
No one did.
He’s wearing us down, and as of right now, everyone at this table knows we can’t take much more.
“So what’s the next move, Jim?” Danny said. “Where do we go from here? How do we push back?”
“I don’t know,” he said, and there was fatigue in his voice. “First Lauren, now this . . . I won’t lie, I’m feeling a little lost right now. From day one I’ve been all about not pushing back. It’s what I know best, what I trained for. ‘Find consensus. Build alliances.’ If there’s another way forward, I can’t see it.”
Then he paused, and when he came out the other side of whatever thought he was chasing, Riley realized he was looking at her. “We need fresh eyes and a fresh approach. I’ve carried this as far as I can. I’m ready to step back if you want to step in.”
Riley took a breath, then nodded, the move so slight it was almost imperceptible. “Okay.”
And just that quickly, it was done.
Now earn it, she thought.
“Hector, you asked where we go from here,” Riley said. “I think what we do is get up on our hind legs and say fuck you, we’re not cooperating anymore. I’m not suggesting anything noisy, or public, where there can be witnesses, we keep this just about him and us.
“The only reason they let Callie go is so we’d start thinking about the cooperation carrot, that maybe it’s not such a bad idea, and it sure as hell beats the stick. There are a hundred ways he could have made that point, but he did it in the most personal way possible to beat us down and get us to give up on ourselves and each other. Making everything personal is how he tries to drill into our brains. So I say we turn that around, and make it personal about him.”
“How?” Angela asked.
“We freeze him out. We play nice with all the other doctors, the nurses and orderlies, even Nakamura, without giving them anything useful. But when we go into a session with Kaminski, we don’t talk. That’s all, just silence, nobody raises their voice or does anything he can use against us. We’re not being violent or threatening, we’re happy to talk to the staff, we’re just not talking to him. If anybody asks, we say we love everybody else, we just have a personal conflict with him as our doctor. It happens.”
“Won’t he just bring in another doctor?”
“Maybe, but I doubt it. This is his Big Thing, and I don’t think he wants to share that, or give us the satisfaction of forcing him to bring on someone else. That would be the worst kind of surrender.”
“He’ll call it another strike,” Hector said.
“He can call it anything he wants as long as we don’t call it that. We’re not fighting, we’re not resisting, we’re just not going to play his game by his rules anymore. We make it personal, about him; we freeze him out, and we do it together.”
“You know what he’s like,” Becca said. “All the things he did to you when you two were slugging it out, he can do just as easily to the rest of us, and then some. What if he comes after us?”
And for a moment, Riley felt her mother’s blood in her veins. Say something that would make her proud.
“If he comes after us, then we’ll face it—and we’ll do that together too,” she said, looking to each of them in turn. “We all know what it feels like to stand at the front of a march when the police line starts to move, that moment when we think, maybe today’s the day I get beaten up or shot with a rubber bullet or lose an eye or get killed when somebody plows his car into the crowd. But we stayed put.
“Kaminski keeps asking, Why are you here? We’re here because we didn’t run. We were scared and outnumbered but we stayed when everybody else took off. We didn’t stay because of a conspiracy or because we had orders from some faceless master on a distant mountaintop; we stayed because that’s what we do, we look out for each other. We put our bodies in the cogs of the latest fucked-up machine the government built to chew up the world. Sometimes we stop it, and sometimes we slow it down long enough for someone else to take the fight to the courts, the boardrooms, to Congress or the White House. We stayed because we believe in something better and more important than ourselves. That’s why we’re here.
“If we were willing to put our bodies on the line out there, then we can do the same thing in here. Because trust me, this isn’t just about us, it’s about everyone else who’s going to be put away after us if we don’t slow down the machine.”
The others shared a look, and for the first time since Lauren’s death, Riley saw determination returning to their eyes.
“Okay,” Danny said. “We’re in.”
Boots on the ground. Bodies in the way.
Bring it, motherfucker.
* * *
Riley slipped into the storeroom, made her way to the hidey-hole, and fumbled through the shirts in the bottom rack, hoping the phone would still be there. When her fingers closed around it, she breathed a sigh of relief and pushed the power button. The phone struggled to life, the power indicator hovering near 1 percent.
A second later the screen filled with text messages.
Then the power died, and the screen went black. She tried turning it on again, in case there was even a smidge of reserve power, but the phone remained dark and dead.
She removed the SIM card and the memory card, then used the butt of the flashlight to smash it all to bits, hiding pieces in different parts of the room to reduce the odds of it being useable. To make sure the flashlight had survived the effort, she turned it on and off a few times, illuminating the magazine ads taped to the wall, each featuring a young boy smiling broadly as he looked out at a world full of promise. The boy Frankenstein could have been if things had been different.
If we are all the product of the soil in which we grow, what kind of tree would you have become if they hadn’t poisoned the ground? If you had been allowed to grow straight and true and loved? Where would you be now? College? Maybe an artist? Someone creative and gentle, rather than the monster they made you into?
She shook her head, correcting herself. No. Like you, Frankenstein’s creation came into the world innocent. The real monster was his creator, the one who twisted him through neglect and hate, the one who should have known better, like your parents should have known better, but they did what they did anyway. And now here you are, trapped in a world you can only survive by forcing yourself to believe that you can’t feel any of it. Maybe we all do that a little. And maybe some of that truth applies to me, a truth that I haven’t been willing to confront. And maybe I should do that one of these days.
But not tonight. Tonight we get ready for war.
* * *
There were no protests outside the center the next morning.
Or the next day.
Or the day after that, when the ARC patients were scheduled for their next session with Kaminski.
They were seated in their usual places as he came with his usual coffee in hand and nudged the door closed with his foot. “Okay,” he said as he sat. “Where were we?”
No one said anything.
“Is something wrong?”
Silence.
He set his coffee down on the floor. “All right, so who wants to tell me what this is all about?”
Silence.
“Becca?”
Becca stared straight ahead.
“Jim? C’mon, tell me you’re not playing the I-can’t-hear-you game. Tell me you’re not that immature.”
Jim didn’t even offer a shrug.
“And here I thought we were doing so much better after our last session. With Callie’s release, I felt that we’d reached an accommodation, made a fresh start. I don’t have to say you’ll lose points for this, because you already know that, just as you know this can’t go on forever. Sooner or later we’ll have to restart our conversation. Better to do that now, don’t you think?”
Not just silence. Arctic silence.
“Fine, then we’ll just sit here for the hour.”
And they did.
* * *
The cone of silence came down again when he approached them at lunch, while they were talking with the orderlies about the coming Superbowl.
And again, when he convened a special counseling session that evening.
And again, the next morning.
They seem fine with the rest of the staff, Riley overheard one of the orderlies telling Kaminski. The knowledge that other doctors weren’t being shut out infuriated him almost as much as the fact that he was. So she wasn’t surprised when a new schedule was delivered to the ARC ward at the 7:00 a.m. knock-knock announcing that all counseling sessions had been canceled, even those with the other doctors, like Nakamura—along with exercise periods.
“He’s pissing off the staff,” Jim told the group at lunch after making sure no one else was close enough to hear. “I heard some of the doctors saying they can’t do their jobs as long as Kaminski keeps up the blockade. They’re worried that their salaries might get docked for lost sessions if this drags on.”
“He went personal to try and split us up,” Hector said. “Well, now it’s our turn.”
The next morning, acting on Kaminski’s instructions, Biedermann informed them that they were not allowed to leave their rooms, citing unspecified “safety reasons.”
The morning after that, they were given a choice: stay in their rooms all day, or come to a session with Kaminski.
They stayed in their rooms.
We’re getting under his skin, Riley decided as she lay in bed that night. How do you like it, motherfucker?
Then she closed her eyes.
And awoke at dawn to the sound of a drum line.
She ran to the window and craned her neck to look past the edge of the hospital to where a hundred protesters had commandeered an empty lot across the street. As a drum line pounded, they chanted, “Shut down ARC!” and waved signs that read “This Isn’t What Noah Had in Mind,” “Let Our People Go,” and “End Medical Establishment Abuse!”
“Yes!” Riley yelled out the window. “Yeah! Welcome to the freaking party!”