“Does anybody ever clean out here?” she asks.
He looks behind him, sees where she’s looking and at what.
“Does that bother you?”
“Everything bothers me,” she says. “People don’t do what they’re supposed to do, and no one tells the truth about anything.”
Click-click.
“What are they supposed to do?”
She looks up at him from under her brows.
“The real question,” she says, “is what aren’t they supposed to do, and who’s doing it?”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning, you know, figure it out.”
“I’m gonna need a little more—”
“I’m saying sometimes the city is full of rats, and you call the Pied Piper, but instead of killing the rats, he steals your kids. I’m saying what does the Bible say about a trusted man who will rise one day, tricking people with signs and wonders?”
Click-click.
“You consider yourself religious?”
“I’ve been to church, but that’s not the point. The point is people say they love something, but really what they love is using it.”
“You feel used?”
She smiles again, this time bright with a kind of giddy rage. “It’s not a feeling.”
“What is it?”
Louise takes a Tootsie Pop from her pocket, peels off the wrapper. She slips it into her mouth. “It’s the facts of fucking life, kitty-cat.”
*
She sees Simon at dinner, sitting alone on a bench outside. He is sitting alone in front of an empty plate. It’s been three weeks since the Prophet told Simon that God has a plan for him. Three weeks of questions, of paper bag interludes and restless leg syndrome. In that time Simon has asked a thousand questions of the what where why how variety. The Prophet doesn’t answer them all. He tells Simon, I know only what God tells me. Each time, Simon’s anxiety spikes, and the doctors up his dosage of Klonopin, which makes him tired all the time and muddies his mind.
Then the dreams begin.
At first all he sees is a house with a red door sitting on a quiet street. An empty street. No people. No animals. No birds. No life of any kind. For many nights this is all there is. The street. The house. The door. And a sound, like scratching fingernails. He wakes sweating, dread in his gut. The next night he finds himself in a fluorescent kitchen. The walls are sweating. There is a bubbling pot on the stove. The room has no doors, no windows, the air so cold he can see his breath. And there is a smell, like a sour cabbage abattoir.
What’s in the pot?
At night, while he slumbers, the ambulances arrive, sirens off, flashing lights strobing the walls of the children’s rooms. The outside world is stalking them. Its sickness. But in their bucolic retreat, all they know is whatever happened to Kevin is going around—shoelace nooses, broken-glass wrists, or pills stored, hidden and gorged upon. Some nights it feels like the whole fire department arrives, trying to smother the problem with overwhelming force. But every morning, group therapy gets a little emptier, until afternoon check-in arrives, new clients flocking to the center each day, their parents hoping against hope that institutionalizing their offspring will ward off the suicidal ideation of the outside world, never realizing that a psychiatric treatment facility is a prison for experts—experts in self-sabotage, experts in starvation, experts in knot tying and pill taking, in sharp object management and plastic bag suffocation.
And experts talk. They share techniques, until your child too is an expert in falling apart.
Inside the cafeteria, all the other kids are lined up with their trays, trying to decide between chicken and salmon. But Simon seems to be here by accident, as if he had been wandering, lost in thought, and simply felt the pull of collective destination. Louise sits down next to him.
“Are the choices that grim?”
He looks over, his eyes focusing.
“What?”
“The meal. There’s only so much organic faro a growing boy can eat and all that.”
“No,” says Simon. “It’s not—”
He sighs, trying to find the right words in his drug-induced haze, then settles on the simple truth.
“My sister killed herself.”
Louise flushes. The intimacy she’s used to is physical, not emotional.
“Shit. When?”
“Last year.”
He leans closer, glances around to make sure no one can hear.
“She was the first,” he tells her. “But now it’s everywhere. The Prophet told me.”