The War Game (15 page)

             
I screamed in my head. John had his head out the window, screaming something out loud. I could only watch. I felt frozen.

             
He was going to a different place.

             
And I said it out loud for real for this time.

             
God damn it
.

             
People turned their greasy heads around to stare at me but I didn’t care. God can damn them, too.

             
“Heading south on 77. Looks like they could be headed in Camp Z’s direction. Splitting the deck.”

             
I turned around. Behind me was a fat, burly man looking aimlessly out the window, oblivious to my trauma. Next to him was a slim guy wearing the biggest pair of eyeglasses I had ever seen. With his pointed nose and long, thin hair, he looked like a greasy mosquito.

             
“What exactly is Camp Z? Do they really hunt people?”

             
“Yes, they hunt people as if they were animals. In fact, Camp Z is an abandoned zoo. I knew a guy who somehow transferred from out of there. Or maybe he escaped, he didn’t quite say. Men with hunting rifles drive around the park and shoot people. An electrical engineer in the lynx’s lair. 10 points. A fitness trainer in the lions’ den. 15 points.

             
“How do they choose who goes?”

             
“Sometimes they send people who have committed a crime. And leave them there to die. The guy who I knew killed a soldier with nothing but a pen. But the way that they choose people to go to Camp Z is mostly random. Just like the cards.”

             
“What are cards? People mention ‘cards’ every once in a while but I have no idea what they’re talking about.”

             
“You’re better off not knowing.”

             
“But I want to know. Please,” I begged him.

             
He looked at me with stoic eyes. He leaned in to whisper, “All I will say for now is...the higher the better.”

             
He moved back and added, “Nothing but luck can win the game. The cards may be shuffled again.”

             
“Are we the cards?” I asked him.

             
He shook his head no. He moved his fingers to his lips and leaned towards me. I drew closer to him in anticipation for another nugget of secret information, “But that’s not all,” he whispered. “The zoo may have been abandoned by people but the animals are still there.”

             
“What was the name of the guy you said who went there once?” I asked.

             
“John,” he replied. “Murderer in the aquarium. 50 points.”

             
When you’re at your lowest and you think you’ve fallen through the earth, and when you find yourself at the end of the earth, you will see that there is a staircase so you may as well throw yourself down it, lock the door, and turn out the lights.

             
The sadder I get, the longer my sentences become.

SOCIETY X

             
After what seemed like hours and hours on the bus we pulled up to a hotel. One of those hotels that look crummy even when they were brand-new. I checked my wristwatch twice but the battery apparently went dead, frozen.

             
Before they shuffled us into a dusty ballroom and we were each were given a yellow laminated card. It said, “Temporary Citizenship.”

             
They asked me for my name and I said Pearl. They asked for my last name and I said the quickest thing that came to mind. “Johnson.” There’s so many Johnsons in the world, I don’t think they’d notice a fake one among them.

             
I looked for him even though I knew he wouldn’t be here. There were a few guys around my age but none with long hair like John. I don’t think most of the guys here would be interested in someone like me anyway. You know, as in someone female.

             
We went through an orientation and the speakers droned on and on. The key parts I remembered were that we would be placed into families in a day or so. We would actually be living in a real neighborhood (on a trial basis) that even had security guards. But were the security guards there to protect us or scare us?

             
We were assigned room numbers but they didn’t give me a key. I found out why.

             
Not only were we assigned rooms, we were assigned roommates. I got me some grandparents.  Some old man who wasn’t much bother and an old woman who could barely stand without using someone (namely me) to lean against, and a much older sister.

             
Within the first day, certain things were excruciatingly clear. Three meals a day, you are required to be present at the table.  Lights off at nine o’clock. We had to share beds with each other but luckily, (or unluckily) there were two beds.

             
I was the last one to arrive in the hotel room. It had no doors. None of the rooms had doors. Like I really cared to see people doing what should only be done behind closed doors. And please shave your backs next time guys, thanks.

             
Eventually, I tried to take a shower. But it did not work. Then I tried the sink. Also, did not work.

             
I noticed the older sister had wet hair. I asked her what was the trick to getting the shower to start. She told me that she didn’t take a shower. Hadn’t in too many days to count. That’s why her hair looked like that.

             
Nasty. Not that she could necessarily help it but I’ve never seen hair do that.

             
The first night, I guessed I was kicking in my sleep and I was demoted to sleeping in an arm chair. I must have had some terrible dreams and blocked them out as soon as she shook me to wake me and tell me to stop it.

             
I happily offered to move to the chair, since sleeping there was in my mind well before the lights were scheduled to go off. I just didn’t know how to say I would be sleeping there without hurting her feelings.

             
The second morning, my neck was stiff from the chair and I was afraid to move because it felt like my head would fall off and spin around on the floor like a toy. I heard that when people are beheaded, they still retain some awareness for awhile. So I kept rubbing my neck (not that it was helping much) but mostly to keep my head intact.

             
The old lady was getting on my nerves already. Less than twenty-four hours and she’d already made me visualize slicing up her body with a knife. But that plan would never work successfully, because of all the garbage collectors.

             
My family (the real one) used to be garbage collectors when it was looked down upon and before it became the norm and then illegal.

             
It’s amazing what people will pay for trash.

             
My mom and I used to dumpster dive. We’d get really cool things such as food, clothes, books without their covers. But then stores started to close up really fast and for a very short time the dumpsters were taking over the parking lots. But then we saw a bunch of people diving on our route and the dumpsters eventually emptied forever.

             
Someone said the garbage collectors used to take cans of trash from people’s houses once every week but it’ll be collected once a month for us. They spent an insane amount of time on how to dispose of everything. Organic in the green bin, paper in the blue, and so on. We are probably just being trained to save them time on spying on us, sorting out the good incriminating stuff from the actual trash.

             
My mom made me a coin purse out of a bag of Cheetos when I was little. I loved that thing. I carried it around everywhere, not that I had anything of value to put in it except for some pretty rocks I’d find outside.

             
For breakfast, there was burnt bread. Some of the people that were new couldn’t be bothered to eat it. I could always tell who the newbies were. Some of the signs were painfully obvious. Their clothes were clean, their nails still looked nice. They still cared about their appearance. Maybe I’d brush my hair with a fork when it was convenient but I just kept it all in a pony tail. Low maintenance.

             
I scraped the burnt crud off of the bread and ate it. I had some watered-down orange juice.

             
A family of four were waiting to be served. I only figured that out because the dad kept looking around, all impatient. So eventually, he got up and got two plates of burnt bread for his family.

             
He started looking around, like he wanted to ask a question and deciding who looked the least unfriendly. An old skinny guy whose stringy beard kept getting caught with whatever he was eating or a fat woman who had a stack of bread she was working through. He lingered on me the longest. I won the least unfriendly contest. That’s usually because my age and gender act as a default. “Are they serving anything besides toast?”

             
“What’s toast?” I scraped more black crumbs off my burnt bread.

             
I could hear the dad mumbling to his wife, “That can’t be all there is. Let me know when you see someone who works here, I’m going to call them over to our table.”

             
Could you believe that?

             
Miriam came through the door, almost didn’t recognize her until I saw how she walked. She has a very distinctive walk. She kind of saunters along, like she was posing for a fashion magazine and that at any second someone might take her picture. I hadn’t seen her since the buses left Camp M. She had short hair, a face clear of makeup, and was wearing pants.

             
She came bustling into the room and sat at an open spot at their table. The father said to her, “Excuse me, but this is my family’s table.”

             
“Your family’s table? You don’t have a table. You don’t have a soul. It’s been traded for a pair of pants. You don’t have anything here.” Miriam eyed the man up and down, “They’re going to take your shoes and dignity away. You may as well unlace them both and hand them over. And they’ll take and they’ll take and they’ll take. And just when you thought you had nothing left, or at least, nothing left that they could possibly want, they’ll lock the doors to that one spot in your mind where you used to go when they’re beating you, when they’re raping your friends and there’s nothing you can do and you can no longer...”

             
Then she broke down and sobbed. Completely sobbed with snot and everything. Arms covering head on the table, the family looked around for an escape route. The father moved his chair to an empty table. I went over to their now vacant spot.

             
“Hey, Miriam, it’s me. Pearl.”

             
It’s a very, somewhat frightening experience to have someone as big and as intimidating as Miriam to just break down like that, crying on my shoulder. If someone like that can’t get through this, how would I be able to?

             
I didn’t like feeling heavy and empty at the same time. My throat did a funny thing at night sometimes. It’ll feel like I’m choking on an apple or something. I tried to calm myself down by inventing a breathing exercise but that only made my heart race and that apple in my throat grow larger.

             
I didn’t quite like thinking sometimes. And I tended to do most of my thinking at night and that kept me up. So I played this game. I didn’t have a name for it yet but I could call it “Machine.” The one who thought the least and fell asleep the quickest won. Once a memory pops into my head, I press the “stop” button in my mind. I played this game by myself. It helped me to get to sleep.

             
I was getting better and better at it. But that might be because my memory was getting worse and worse as I aged so I didn’t have all my memories with me. Plus, I was getting all dead inside. I thought a big, thick callous had grown over my heart and my mind. But I preferred it that way, at least for now. It was a good defense mechanism when someone tried to verbally tear you apart.

             
Sometimes I played the opposite game. It also didn’t have a name but I could name it something like “Memory,” like the card game where you match pairs of cards up but this one has different rules. The whole purpose of the game was to let your mind wander and stop and wander some more. You thought of any tiny memory, even a pinhole opening of a memory, and the more you remembered, the more you won. But I planned on getting myself a journal and writing down all my memories so I don’t have to play that one ever again. And I could misspell all the words I want because no one will ever read it.