The End of Marking Time (36 page)

He gave me a stern look, like sarcasm wasn’t a good idea, and I guessed that you were already watching. I folded my hands and listened.

“When Dr. Blake accosted you in the car, you stood up for yourself without resorting to violence. I applaud you for that also, Michael. That was your most shining moment in the program. Many men attack Dr. Blake at that moment and have to be restrained. You succeeded at both protecting yourself and managing your relationship with Dr. Blake. You also worked incredibly hard to comply with his demands on the gray pads, even though you knew they were unreasonable. That is also to be commended.”

I remembered how sore my arms were from the push-ups.

“From there things turned worse. I assigned you a difficult task. I asked you to enforce the law and you resorted to your old ways, Michael. You poisoned my dogs. You broke into my home. You sold stolen property. You took off your ankle bracelet after being ordered not to. You illegally entered this courtroom. In fact you illegally entered a number of buildings, including two within the last several hours.

“Michael, the end doesn’t always justify the means. To enforce the law you can’t run around breaking it. I understand you were trying to help me, and I appreciate your trust and your commitment, but we must determine whether you are a threat or an asset. There is no in-between.”

I told you how my mother pressed the .22 to my head. I believed she was going to kill me. And right now, I wish I knew what you are planning to do with me. It must be light outside now. I don’t know how I even have the strength to stand anymore. You’ve heard my story. I’m sure that Wendell has played recordings of my voice and videos from cameras around my apartment. I want you to know that since I’ve been here, I’ve been doing my best to do the right thing.

I haven’t hurt anyone since I’ve been in this program, actually I’ve never really hurt anyone in my life. Yes, I took things from people when I was young. I was just doing what I could to survive. I was on my own at fifteen years old. You can’t know what that was like because Wendell didn’t start recording me until we met in the hospital. I want each of you to imagine what you’d do if you were sent out into the street at fifteen. How would you eat? How would you stay warm in the winter? I ran out of choices fast. I didn’t have friends to take me in. I didn’t have money or a job to pay for the things I needed. Even when I lived with my mother I had to take what I needed or I wouldn’t have had enough to eat.

I’m not sure you can understand what that’s like.

I can’t see you in there and I don’t know what your life was like. I can only guess that you are sitting there because your life went a lot smoother than mine. Yes, I did some things wrong while you were watching me. But every time I slipped into someone’s house or someone’s car, my only goal was to help Wendell. Farnsworth is cheating the system and I wanted to help stop him. There isn’t much difference between me and those kids I saw in court last week.

Huh.

I guess that was a message to me, too. I remember thinking they were trying to do the right thing, but they’d just gone too far. I felt for those guys. They didn’t deserve to get reeducation. They should have been released. Maybe I still don’t get it, but given where I came from, I’m doing my best. I hope when you look at me, you feel the way I did for them.

I know I’ve been talking for a long time, but I also know I’ve missed things. It’s been months since I woke up in that hospital and I’ve only had a few hours to tell you my story. I’ve done my best with what I knew and what I’d been told. I wanted to help Wendell and I did the things I did because I thought they were the right thing to do, just like those guys I saw in court a few days ago.

So please remember that I worked hard to help Wendell. That I didn’t hurt anyone. Even listening to me, you can hear what I’ve learned from those books. I talk like a new person. I can’t believe it when I listen to myself. I hope you’ll give me a chance to keep learning.

Please, if you haven’t already, please press that green button.

When I turned toward Wendell, he had removed a remote control from his pocket. He stood just four feet from me. I could have pounced and wrestled it away, but I still didn’t know the outcome of the vote and I didn’t know what the buttons did either. I might press one trying to lower the partition and end up gassing both of us. I stood against the glass partition and watched as he pressed the first button.

The window I had been talking to for the last few hours brightened. Something had been blocking my view and now as if by magic, I could see the room beyond. I’d been in that room not long ago and what I saw this time startled me. I remembered two rows of chairs. When Wendell told me I was talking to twelve people who were going to decide my fate, I believed him, partly because I’d seen thirteen chairs in that room. He knew that. From the beginning he’d been showing me what he wanted me to believe and convincing me it was true. I don’t know how he tricked me into breaking in here so I would see the thirteen chairs, but he did.

Through the window, the room was twice as big as I remember. The walls had been moved back somehow and several rows of chairs had been added. Wendell stood back as I took in the faces arranged to greet me.

My counselors lined much of the front row. Charlotte, Dr. Blake, and Morris Farnsworth sat together. I recognized Joanne Torrance and David Jones even though I’d only seen them once. Next to them sat Nathan Farnsworth, Joel, Tyrone, and Deone. In the row behind them I recognized Stephan, the big guy who’d been shot on the lawn, the hot dog vendor, Mandla, and Marc. The prosecutors and judges I had faced were all aligned in the next row along with Officer Benson. Even the flat-nosed Wiffle ball pitcher was there.

“What are they all doing here?”

It was a stupid question, but the answer was too shocking for me to believe. How had he arranged for all of them to interact with me while I was walking around in public? I approached many of them myself. Several of them worked together to deceive me, but there were hundreds of people on the street I could have turned to. The woman I saw every morning at the donut shop wasn’t there, but the relearner who helped me that one morning was sitting near the back.

“Wondering how we did it?” Wendell asked. “Your program. Those videos you watched when you first arrived. Every one of these people was in those videos. We told you to like them or hate them and for the most part, you followed our programming. We gave you friends and we gave you adversaries.”

I’d never seen these people in my lessons. They’d been cut in, just like the images of Stephan being stabbed had been inserted into his videos. Too bad I hadn’t used Stephan’s camera to check my own. But what would have happened then? Wendell couldn’t have let me go if I figured out the game before he taught me anything.

I noticed the three guys I’d caught peeing against the building and I chuckled without thinking. “Why go through all this trouble?”

“We have to know if you’re a danger or not.”

“I mean tonight. Why did you make me tell my whole story? I’ve been talking so long I can barely stand up.”

“They were hanging on every word. What you say about them tells us how well we did our job. We have to know if you believed what you were supposed to believe. Otherwise, we’d never know how we were affecting people.”

“What about me? What are you going to do with me?”

“This is a difficult decision for me,” Wendell said, almost choking on his words.

Was it really his decision all along?

“From the beginning I was worried you wouldn’t make it. The problem we are trying to combat is recidivism. You, Michael, have been stealing from people since you were a little boy. From the very start I knew you were going to be a hard case. We pulled out every trick we had, but you seemed determined to keep breaking the law. You don’t understand that other people have the right to be safe. You wander into their houses because you know how to jimmy locks. You never stop to think whether it’s right or not. You just surge ahead.”

“You’ve known what you’re going to do for a long time?”

“It wasn’t that easy.”

“It’s been a hell of a lot harder for me.”

Wendell pressed a button and the glass clouded over again. I assumed the actors could still hear us, but I didn’t know for sure.

“Are you sure? Do you remember the test Charlotte ran for you when you first arrived? A DNA test to find your father?”

I remembered it was a failure.

He pulled a sheet of paper from his pocket and handed it to me. My name was printed across the top. My mother’s name, address, and her parents’ names were printed down the left hand column. On the right, the name Wendell Cummings appeared along with his address in Brookline and the names and birthplaces of his parents.

I crumpled it and threw it at his feet. “This is just more of your crap.”

“No,” he said. “I met your mother after I volunteered to help the poor in Boston. Your mother told me she wanted out of her mother’s house. They were poor. She said her mother abused her. I learned later that was a sob story. Her mother and her grandmother had both done the same thing to escape their parents. They were packing in a generation every fifteen years. I was in my twenties at the time and should have known better, but I went right along and got her pregnant.”

He looked like he was going to cry and I didn’t want to watch. I didn’t care if he wanted to be my father or not. He was threatening to kill me and I couldn’t think about anything else. I was sure it was an act, another lie to confuse me. I couldn’t figure out what he was trying to hide. It was a bit late for deception.

“I never thought of myself as a father, just like you never thought of yourself as Jonathan’s father. But when we started working on your case and Charlotte dug up the DNA results, she connected me to you and to Jonathan.”

Jonathan was his grandson.

“I did what I could, Michael. You kept breaking the law. I couldn’t hide it. I had to keep going to my boss and telling him you were going to pan out. I was proud that no matter how Charlotte pressed, you wouldn’t give Jonathan up. He’s my grandson, Michael. I’d never done anything with you, but he was my opportunity to help raise a boy. I kept covering for you, but then last night you gave up your rights. You didn’t know it, but you gave up my rights, too.”

“And that’s why I’m in here now.”

“It’s out of my hands.”

He had the remote out in front of him. He held it loosely a foot beyond my reach. I made a show of looking toward the window and snatched at it. As my arm flew out, I heard the button click. Every muscle in my body refused to function all at once. I teetered and fell to the floor. The only place I had any feeling was the base of my skull where that implant burned me as it short-circuited my nerves. It wasn’t a tracking device. It was an off switch. I was neutralized with the push of a button. Charlotte had that same button when I made her nervous in the car. Maybe all my counselors did.

I watched Wendell, unable to interfere with his plans.

He pulled out a small jar, carefully opened the lid and squeezed a single drop of liquid onto the exposed skin of my neck. My throat tightened, my chest pounded, and then the world faded to black.

Wendell clicked three buttons as he’d done many times before. The window cleared, the glass partitions lowered into the floor, and three gloved men came out of the conference room to haul away his only son. They dragged him to the end of the hallway and through the door where the hall dead ended. He couldn’t stop watching even after the door closed and he knew the body was being dumped into a chemical bath to ensure no one came into contact with the poison.

A dark-suited man opened the only remaining door beyond the glass partitions. He held a thick folder in one hand, but extended the other to congratulate Wendell on a job well done. Michael O’Connor cost the state $765,000, far less than they’d spent executing a felon in the old days. This new system was a boon and it proved to anyone who watched the video that the convict deserved the ultimate punishment.

Wendell’s boss handed him the thick folder that held his next assignment. “Problem?” he asked. “This never bothered you before?”

“I never killed my son before.”

Wendell’s boss grimaced.

“I gave him a chance to tell his story. I could have saved him or at least I could have tried. He told the truth there in front of the window. Why couldn’t he understand it was wrong for him to take things from other people? He needed parents to teach him that. Yeah, he got gypped in the cosmic lottery and I have to take part of the blame for that. He never had a father or a grandfather, but I didn’t know what I was doing back then. I thought I was helping a poor girl fix her life, but my meddling destroyed two lives, maybe more. I tried everything I know to help him see what he was doing wrong, but he was too far gone. Michael had been stealing since elementary school. His problems had been passed from generation to generation. Mother after mother had fewer and fewer parenting skills. Each one thought society owed them more. His mother taught him so little. I think he learned more on the street than he did at home. My son could not see his own criminality. In the end I was forced to do what his mother only threatened.”