UnWholly (27 page)

“How could you be so . . . so shallow?” she says to him, when she catches him alone later in the day.

“If that’s what you want to call it,” he says, all smiles, like he’s just been given a new puppy. “But if it’s shallow to want a life, then heck, I’m a wading pool!”

Deprogramming! It’s enough to make her sick. She despises Timothy and wonders how anyone’s lifelong faith could be traded for corned beef and cabbage.

Jackie seeks her out later in the day—after Miracolina has determined that her “freedom” ends at a locked door, which keeps all the ex-tithes in a single wing of the mansion. “The rest is still uninhabitable,” Jackie tells her. “That’s why we’re only allowed in the north wing.”

Jackie explains that their days are spent in classes designed to help them to adjust.

“What happens to the kids who fail?” Miracolina asks with a smirk.

Jackie says nothing—just looks at her like it’s a concept she hasn’t considered.

•   •   •

Within a few days, Miracolina has all she can stand of the classes. The mornings begin with a long emotional group therapy where at least one person bursts into tears and is applauded by the others for doing so. Miracolina usually says nothing, because defending tithing is frowned on by the faculty.

“You have a right to your opinion,” they all say if she ever speaks out against their deprogramming. “But we’re hoping you will eventually see otherwise.” Which means she really doesn’t have a right to an opinion.

There’s a class in modern history—something few schools actually teach. It includes the Heartland War, the Unwind Accord, and everything surrounding them, right up to the current day. There are discussions about the splinter groups within many major religions that took upon themselves the act of human tithing, becoming socially sanctioned “tithing cults.”

“These weren’t grassroots movements,” the teacher tells them. “It began with wealthy families—executives and stockholders in major corporations—as a way of setting an example for the masses, because if even the rich approve of unwinding, then everyone should. The tithing cults were part of a calculated plan to root unwinding in the national psyche.”

Miracolina can’t keep herself from raising her hand. “Excuse me,” she tells the instructor, “but I’m Catholic and don’t belong to a tithing cult. So how do you account for me?”

She thought the teacher might say,
You’re the exception that proves the rule,
or something equally insipid, but she doesn’t. Instead she only says, “Hmm, that’s interesting. I bet Lev would love to talk to you about that.”

To Miracolina, that’s the worst threat the teacher could make, and she knows it. It keeps Miracolina quiet. Even so, her resistance to the resistance is well known in the mansion, and she is called in for an unwanted audience with the boy who didn’t detonate.

•   •   •

It happens on Monday morning. She’s pulled out of her intolerable therapy group and taken to a section of the mansion she hasn’t seen before—escorted by not one, but two resistance workers. Although she can’t be sure, she suspects at least one of them is armed. They take her to a plant-filled arboretum, all curved glass and sunshine, kept heated and restored to its former glory. In the center is a mahogany table and two chairs. He’s already there, sitting in one of the chairs, the boy at the
center of this bizarre hero worship. She sits across from him and waits for him to speak first. Even before he speaks, she can tell he’s genuinely interested in her: the only square peg in the whole mansion who can’t be whittled round.

“So what’s up with you?” he says after studying her for a few moments. She’s offended by the informality of the question—as if her whole stance on everything occurring in this place is a matter of “something being up.” Well, today she’ll make it clear to him that her defiance is more than just attitude.

“Are you actually interested in me, clapper, or am I just the bug you can’t squash beneath your iron boot?”

He laughs at that. “Iron boot—that’s a good one.” He lifts his foot to show her the sole of his Nike. “I’ll admit there may be some stomped spiders between the treads, but that’s about it.”

“If you’re going to give me the third degree,” she tells him, “let’s get it over with. Best to withhold food or water; water is probably best. I’ll get thirsty before I get hungry.”

He shakes his head in disbelief. “Do you really think I’m like that? Why would you think that?”

“I was taken by force, and you’re keeping me here against my will,” she says, leaning across the table toward him. She considers spitting in his face, but decides to save that gesture as punctuation for a more appropriate moment. “Imprisonment is still imprisonment, no matter how many layers of cotton you wrap it in.” That makes him lean farther away, and she knows she’s pushed a button. She remembers seeing those pictures of him back when he was all over the news, wrapped in cotton and kept in a bombproof cell.

“I really don’t get you,” he says, a bit of anger in his voice this time. “We saved your life. You could at least be a little grateful.”

“You have robbed me, and everyone here, of their purpose. That’s not salvation, that’s damnation.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way.”

Now it’s her turn to get angry. “Yes, you’re sorry I feel that way, everyone’s sorry I feel that way. Are you going to keep this up until I don’t feel that way anymore?”

He stands up suddenly, pushing his chair back, and paces, fern leaves brushing his clothes. She knows she’s gotten to him. He seems like he’s about to storm out, but instead takes a deep breath and turns back to her.

“I know what you’re going through,” he says. “I was brainwashed by my family to actually want to be unwound—and not just by my family, but by my friends, my church, everyone I looked up to. The only voice who spoke sense was my brother Marcus, but I was too blind to hear him until the day I got kidnapped.”

“You mean
see
,” she says, putting a nice speed bump in his way.

“Huh?”

“Too blind to
see
him, too deaf to
hear
him. Get your senses straight. Or maybe you can’t, because you’re senseless.”

He smiles. “You’re good.”

“And anyway, I don’t need to hear your life story. I already know it. You got caught in a freeway pileup, and the Akron AWOL used you as a human shield—very noble. Then he turned you, like cheese gone bad.”

“He didn’t turn me. It was getting away from my tithing, and seeing unwinding for what it is. That’s what turned me.”

“Because being a murderer is better than being a tithe, isn’t that right, clapper?”

He sits back down again, calmer, and it frustrates her that he is becoming immune to her snipes.

“When you live a life without questions, you’re unprepared for the questions when they come,” he says. “You get angry
and you totally lack the skills to deal with the anger. So yes, I became a clapper, but only because I was too innocent to know how guilty I was becoming.”

There is an intensity about him now, and a moistness to his eyes. Miracolina can tell that he is sincere, and that this is not just a show for her. Maybe he’s even saying more than he meant to say. She begins to wonder if she has misjudged him, and then gets angry at herself for wondering such a thing.

“You think I’m like you, but I’m not,” Miracolina says. “I’m not part of a religious order that tithes. My parents did it in spite of our beliefs, not because of it.”

“But you were still raised to believe it was your purpose, weren’t you?”

“My purpose was to save my brother’s life by being a marrow donor, so my purpose was served before I was six months old.”

“And doesn’t that make you angry that the only reason you’re here was to help someone else?”

“Not at all,” she says a little too quickly. She purses her lips and leans back in her chair, squirming a bit. The chair feels a little too hard beneath her. “All right, so maybe I do feel angry once in a while, but I understand why they did it. If I were them, I would have done the same thing.”

“Agreed,” he says. “But once your purpose was served, shouldn’t your life be your own?”

“Miracles are the property of God,” she answers.

“No,” he says, “miracles are gifts
from
God. To call them his property insults the spirit in which they are given.”

She opens her mouth to reply but finds she has no response, because he’s right. Damn him for being right—nothing about him should be right!

“We’ll talk again when you’re over yourself,” he says, and signals a waiting guard to take her away.

•   •   •

The next day a class is added into her schedule, to keep her from having too idle a mind. It’s called Creative Projection. It takes place in a classroom that was once some kind of parlor, with faded, moth-eaten portraits on peeling walls. Miracolina wonders if the stodgy faces in the paintings look down on the lessons here with approval, disapproval, or absolute indifference.

“I want you to write a story,” says the teacher, a man with annoying little round glasses. Glasses! Objects of antiquity no longer needed by anyone, what with laser procedures and affordable eye-replacement surgery. There is a certain arrogance to their quaintness. As if people who choose to wear glasses feel they are somehow superior.

“I want you to write the story of you—your biography. Not the life you’ve lived but the life you’re
going
to live. This is the biography you might write forty, fifty years from now.” The teacher wanders the room, gesticulating into the air, probably imagining himself to be Plato or someone equally lofty. “Project yourselves forward. Tell me who you think you’ll be. I know that’ll be hard for all of you. You’ve never dared think of the future—but now you can. I want you to enjoy this. Be as wild as you want. Have fun with it!”

Then he sits down and leans back in his chair with his hands behind his head, very satisfied with himself.

Miracolina taps her pen impatiently on the page while the other kids write. He wants her dream future? Fine. She’ll give these people something honest, even if it isn’t what they want to hear.

It is years from now,
she writes,
and my hands belong to a mother who lost her hands in a fire. She has four children. She comforts them, bathes them, brushes their hair, and changes their diapers with those hands. She treasures my hands because
she knows how precious they are. She gets manicures weekly for me, even though she doesn’t know who I was.

My legs belong to a girl who was in a plane crash. She had been a track star, but found that my legs simply weren’t built for that. For a while she mourned the loss of her Olympic dream, but then realized that my legs could dance. She learned to tango, and one day she met a prince while dancing in Monaco, and she danced her way into his heart. They married, and now the royal couple have a grand ball every year. The highlight of the ball is her stunning tango with her prince.

With every word she writes, Miracolina is filled with deeper fury at all the possibilities stolen from her.

My heart went to a scientist on the verge of discovering a way to harness starlight and solve the world’s energy needs. He was so close—but then suffered a major heart attack. Thanks to me, though, he survived and completed his life’s work, making the world a better place for all of us. He even won the Nobel Prize.

Is it so strange to want to give of yourself totally and completely? If that is what’s in Miracolina’s heart, why should it be denied her?

And as for my mind—my memories, which are full of a loving childhood—they all went to troubled souls who had no such memories of their own. But now with that part of me in them, they are healed of the many hurts in their lives.

Miracolina turns in her paper, and the teacher, perhaps more curious about hers than anyone else’s, reads it while the other kids are still writing. She watches his face, full of thoughtful expressions as he reads. She doesn’t know why she should care, but she’s always cared what her teachers think. Even the ones she didn’t like. Then, when he’s done, he comes over to her.

“Very interesting, Miracolina, but you’ve left out one thing.”

“What?”

“Your soul,” he says. “Who gets your soul?”

“My soul,” she tells him with confidence, “goes to God.”

“Hmm . . .” He strokes some graying whisker stubble. “So it goes to God, even if every part of your body is still alive?”

Miracolina stands firm against his questioning. “I have a right to believe that, if I want to.”

“True, true. One problem with that, though. You’re Catholic, isn’t that right?”

“Yes.”

“And you want to be unwound voluntarily.”

“So?”

“Well . . . if your soul leaves this world, then voluntary unwinding is no different from assisted suicide—and in the Catholic religion, suicide is a mortal sin. Which means that by your own beliefs, you’d be going to hell.”

Then he leaves her to stew with an A-minus on her essay. Minus, she assumes, due to the eternal damnation of her soul.

Miracolina has no idea how deeply her obstinance affects him. Most kids here are either terrified of Lev, or worship him, or both—but Miracolina is neither intimidated nor reverent; she just hates him, plain and simple. It shouldn’t bother him. He’s gotten used to being hated—for just as his brother Marcus said, as much as the public mourned for poor, corrupted, little-boy-Lev, they also despise the “monster” that he has become. Well, he was innocent, and he was a monster, but here in the Cavenaugh mansion, none of that matters, because here he is one step short of being a god. There’s a heady, awkward kind of fun to that, but Miracolina is the pin that pops the bubble.

His next encounter with her is the following week, at an
Easter dance. Tithes are notoriously inept when it comes to male/female interaction. Knowing that dating and all that goes with it won’t be a part of their limited future, tithes and their families don’t give boy/girl stuff much attention. In fact, it’s downplayed, since it would create the kind of wistful longing that a tithe should not have.