The End of Marking Time (29 page)

The cab cruised through the expansive parking lot past two dozen rows of empty spaces. I worried that most people would be home getting ready for dinner, but as we got closer, I realized that housewives weren’t likely criminals. There were plenty of cars clustered around the building. The people I was looking for would prefer tired salespeople and empty aisles. When we stopped at the curb I felt good about finding what I came for.

The exterior was imposing. Concrete walls rose straight up three floors. Tinted glass trimmed the entrances and roof, providing natural light inside. As I scanned my thumb to pay for my ride, I wondered how much a project like this cost and who decided to build a shopping center as big as my neighborhood. I humbly carried my book through the towering, forty-foot entrance and headed past a series of stores, all boasting something unique. Most offered ladies clothes, jewelry, or electronics.

I touched the pen camera in my breast pocket to reassure myself I was ready. I felt like a hunter prowling through the unshackled masses. The people I passed didn’t check my ankle when they saw me. I was glad to be away from Nathan, Wendell, and anything to do with reeducation. I hoped I’d gone far enough to accomplish my mission. What would I steal here if I needed extra credits? What could I sell? The answer came inside a roomful of bright lights and clear glass.

I watched from a bench outside the store until three men started browsing the cases. Then I closed my book and headed in. I pretended to compare the ladies’ rings in the first display case while I was evaluating the three men in the store. None had an ankle bracelet. One wore a tie and was a bit older. I assumed he could afford what he was looking for so I focused on the other two. I didn’t notice the sensors by the door when I came in. There was no tone to indicate a relearner had entered and I felt comfortable looking at the case while I watched the younger men move around the displays. I should have known a jewelry store would be prepared to ward of relearners, but I was too focused on my mission.

Footsteps stopped behind me. A throat cleared. When I turned around, a large man with a blue uniform, but no gun, confronted me from two feet away. The smaller man beside him asked, “Can we help you find something in particular?”

“No thanks,” I said dismissively. “I’m just browsing.”

The two men parted and offered me a clear path to the door. The man in the suit, probably the store manager, said, “We don’t want any trouble.” He nodded toward my ankle. “It would be better for all concerned if you left.”

I heard my breath rush in. I felt myself stiffen. They were throwing me out because I was a relearner. I couldn’t believe such a thing could happen in America. I had rights. I’d never been discriminated against like this. I wanted to tell them what I was doing, but I couldn’t give myself away. They wouldn’t have believed I was fighting crime anyway.

All three of my potential jewel thieves turned to watch. There was no way I was going to catch them taking something now, not with the security guard threatening me. So I walked between the two men and out the door. How many times had this store been robbed when the prison doors first opened? How much had they spent to hide their scanner? And what would have happened if they posted a sign prohibiting relearners? Did people care? Or were they so fed up they’d be glad to shop where they were safe?

I’d never been so frustrated as when I sat back on the bench to rethink my strategy. Nathan and Wendell had a stranglehold on me if I stayed where I belonged. Out here with the unsuspecting public I had a chance until they realized I was a relearner. It didn’t matter if I was trying to do the right thing or not. Honest citizens didn’t want me near them. I thought about taking my ankle bracelet off, but I remembered the chip in my head and the chemicals dispersed through my body. I couldn’t be sure either story was true, but I knew that when I took my ankle bracelet off, trouble came looking for me.

If someone was going to steal from another store in the mall, I guessed it would be electronics, movies, or video games. I slipped in with the flow of shoppers moving along the wall of display windows. The scanner at the entertainment store was low inside the door, so rather than walk in and become a target, I stayed outside with my camera and watched the shoppers browse.

A group of kids, all about fourteen years old, flocked up and down the counters lined with CDs. They stayed in the pop section and if I was going to catch someone taking a CD, I guessed it would be one of them. After several minutes watching them joke, text message each other from four feet away, and slap and poke each other for no reason, I realized that I couldn’t capture a good enough image from outside the store. Even if I did, these kids would go to some sort of juvenile counseling. They wouldn’t be relearners assigned to Nathan, and that wouldn’t help me at all.

Further down, I stopped in front of two young women who looked suspicious in a lingerie shop. I couldn’t tell if they were nervous about wearing the skimpy underwear they were about to buy, or if they were considering slipping it into a pocket. It was small enough to hide, but women didn’t come to our complex, so I passed them up, too.

Several doors later, I spotted the guy I’d been looking for since I arrived. He was young, probably in his twenties, and he wore ratty clothes that were dirty in the butt and at the ankles like he’d been sitting in mud. He didn’t look like he could afford new clothes, but he needed them.

He went into three clothing stores, but came out empty handed—empty pocketed, too. He stopped for an ice cream and sat on a bench, watching people walk by for a good fifteen minutes. After that he turned back the way we had come. Lucky I was reading my book or he might have noticed I’d been behind him for nearly an hour.

Near the center of the mall, he turned and followed a short corridor wide enough to build a house inside. There were a few stores here, but he didn’t seem interested in what they had to offer. When he walked out to the parking lot, I absently followed. I wasn’t going to catch anyone here at the mall. Maybe it was the wrong place. Maybe the surveillance was too good and people knew it. Maybe people outside the reeducation system didn’t make a habit of stealing. That bothered me as I pushed through the glass doors. It was my life that didn’t fit. These people were the norm.

When I reached for the second set of doors a hand grabbed my collar and yanked me back. I choked. My eyes watered so much I lost sight of the dark parking lot. Lights filled my watery eyes as I turned and all I could see was brilliant white streaks.

An angry face met mine when I blinked my eyes clear. I’d been grabbed because I was a relearner. It was wrong and my arm was cocked and ready to show him how wrong he was, but before I let loose I remembered seeing the big guy bloody and dying on the lawn.

Good thing I didn’t turn around swinging. There were two more angry faces behind the first.

“I saw him,” said the man dressed in jeans and a blue-striped dress shirt. “He’s been following that guy for an hour. He was going to rob him in the parking lot.”

“Why would I rob that guy?” I asked. “What could he possibly have that’s worth taking?”

The guy said some nonsense about identity theft. That relearners cut off people’s thumbs and preserved them so they could collect their government checks. The two mall security guards looked at me like I’d had a machete to the guy’s hand.

“That’s ridiculous.”

The mall cops didn’t think so. They brought me back to the security office, along with the guy who grabbed me. They took his version of events, then called the cops for a report on where I’d been for the last hour. My computer-generated trail lined up well with the vigilante’s story. The mall cops called the police again. They listened to the audio from my anklet and found nothing suspicious.

The cops wanted cases they would win. Lucky for me, this wasn’t one.

The traffic light had cars backed up all along the mall access road. I walked past them on the sidewalk and turned toward home. I wasn’t going to walk the entire way. It was too far, but I wanted to get away from those mall cops before they invented a story good enough to get me back in front of the judge. The farther I walked, the darker the street became. The shadows would have bothered those shoppers who were freaked out by my ankle bracelet, but they didn’t bother me. I’d used darkness to hide so close to people I could reach out and touch them. Most would run screaming if they discovered me in their home.

Regular people spent their lives afraid someone like me would take their stuff or hurt someone they cared about. Were we really that different? I was afraid, too. When I was younger, I worried my mother would kill me. Later, I worried about getting enough to eat. Still later, I was constantly dodging the police. The biggest difference was that I didn’t have anything to protect. Once the cash and jewelry were taken from my safe deposit box, I didn’t have anything to lose in this world. Those people in the mall spent their life on alert for danger all to save a bunch of stuff they really didn’t need.

The road continued on for two miles without a bend or taxi stand. I walked through dozens of intersections and passed plenty of phones where I could have called for a ride, but I kept on walking and thinking about what happened in the mall. Then I wondered if all the pressure from Nick and Charlotte made sense. Jonathan shouldn’t be subjected to this. Not for the sake of a few visits to the sandbox. I should have agreed to sign the papers. It sounded simple, but I couldn’t give him up.

A while later I came to a series of three blocks where the streetlights were clustered close together and the sidewalks were so bright that the green grass shone along them. A red cart with a giant hot dog was angled at the corner to be visible to anyone leaving the five-story parking garage across the street. Beyond the cart was the entrance to an ice arena with an Italian name I couldn’t pronounce. I sat on a bench just short of the cart, thinking if I was going to catch someone stealing something tonight, it would be when dozens of people rushed the cart for a cheap hot dog. The hot dog vendor couldn’t afford surveillance cameras, or at least I didn’t think he could. He did have a thumb scanner on his cart, which made me long for the good old days when you could whip out a five, get a hot dog and a Coke, and the government didn’t need to know.

No one passed for the next ten minutes and I realized there must be a game going on inside. The vendor would make his sales when the flood of fans spilled out. I wasn’t sure I wanted to sit on that bench for another hour for the slight chance someone might do something they shouldn’t. Catching criminals was much harder than robbing houses. I could hit a house and get away clean on any given night. I’d spent a few days trying to catch a criminal without a hint of success. The problem was, you never knew where a criminal would be. Fancy houses didn’t move.

A couple crossed the street, the man hurrying the woman along, clearly in more of a rush to see the game than she was. He waited at the corner for her to catch up and the hot dog man went to work shuffling things around his cart. It was an act to look busy, to make his product appear fresh even though those same hot dogs had been cooked and sitting on his cart for an hour or more. The woman slowed and took a step toward the vendor, but her companion urged her toward the arena. When they were past us and focused on the concrete building, the vendor shrugged and stood back from his cart. The work that had him focused seconds ago didn’t matter until the next patron appeared.

“Slow night?” I asked.

“No, no,” he said. “Business good. Game ends, customers come.”

I wondered if he made more with his cart than the government was paying me to learn what I should have learned in school. If he did, it wasn’t much more, and I didn’t have to stand out in the dark and serve hot dogs and drinks. Judging by his clipped sentences and his accent, he could have benefited from the books Wendell forced me to read.

I gave him a thumbs up and felt weird about it.

He edged over toward my bench. “What you hide from?”

He was better off not knowing. I smiled and shrugged. “Just resting.”

He pointed to my ankle bracelet and grimaced as if he’d worn one once and knew what I was going through. He saw Lord of the Flies in my hand and said, “Good book.” Then he held his hand up over his shoulder like he was pumping a spear up and down and dancing in a circle.

“I haven’t gotten to that part yet.” It would take me another day of reading to get that far, but as the hot dog man sat down next to me in his dark blue jeans, white shirt, and long apron, I realized he’d been a relearner. Could he have graduated? I couldn’t believe my luck.

“Wendell good guy,” he said.

There next to me on the bench was a guy who could barely speak English but had graduated from Wendell’s program. For a second I felt like I had it all wrong, like reading the book was a waste of time, but this guy knew the book. He’d read it and he still remembered it. I was in awe. I never really thought I’d graduate until that moment. If he could do it, I could. I wasn’t even breathing on that bench. I was ready to grab onto anything he offered me.

He tapped the camera in my pocket. He knew exactly what it was, and I assumed a similar device had helped him to move from the brick complex to his own place, where he could walk here to sell hot dogs. He told me I could find what I was looking for if I waited for the game to end, then followed the tail end of the crowd.