To Panthea, Bridget said, “There’s a long slope to get down there, and no vegetation for cover until we reach the bottom.”
“They won’t see us. He sleeps by day and lives by night.”
I didn’t like what that might signify. I mean, Dracula slept by day and lived by night. I’m not saying that I believed in vampires. Or disbelieved in them. After the events of the last few days, I was willing to consider the existence of everything from werewolves to fairy godmothers.
“But the others,” Sparky said. “How many others are in the Oasis?”
“I don’t know. But they all live according to his rhythms. When he sleeps, they sleep. I believe . . . somehow they have no choice.”
“Guards?”
“My sense is that guards are thought unnecessary. They believe they’re safe behind their steel doors and electronic locks.”
“Aren’t they?” I asked.
“No,” said Panthea Ching, and she started up the slope toward the rim of the crater and the Oasis beyond.
BACK IN THE DAY
THE INNOCENT BOY, THE EVIL FATHER, THE ANTS, THE FISH, THE BIRDS
A hard, steady, windless drizzle fell on Phoenix that morning. In the wing of the orphanage dedicated to schooling, in a classroom where I was expected to be learning English grammar, I heard the teacher only as a flat and distant droning, as though I must be in a parallel universe alone with my thoughts, her voice leaking through a rift in the barrier between worlds. The rain seemed not to be pure but as gray as the sky that dispensed it. Beyond the windows, the courtyard playground was now a cheerless realm, the swings and the other simple amusements transformed by the distorting skeins into a grim geometry that suggested devices designed to torment and restrain.
My mood was neither as solemn as the rain-drenched morning nor as light as in the days before the murder of Litton Ormond. In fact it was in flux between the pleasures of anticipation and a disquiet that arose from a better understanding of—and adjustment to—the world as it was shapen. My depression had in part lifted to the extent that I’d gotten out of bed without being coaxed to do so. I had eaten breakfast with an appetite that I’d recently lacked. I’d made my way to class not in a shuffling slouch, but rather as an eleven-year-old boy with a renewed, though tentative, sense that something was worth looking forward to in the day ahead.
At noon, I went not to the cafeteria but to Sister Theresa’s office. Her door stood open, and she sat at her desk. Although she didn’t look toward me, she must have seen me from the corner of her eye because she said, “Come in, Quinn.”
Her habit looked whiter than usual on this gray day when she invited me to have a seat in the visitor’s chair opposite her. “You’re just in time for lunch.”
On her desk were two plates with flatware, two napkins, and two glasses of cold milk. Lunch consisted of a large scoop of chicken salad on a bed of lettuce, sliced tomatoes, two hard-boiled eggs.
As I sat before my plate, on a pillow that lifted me to dining height, I said, “Our next lesson on fish isn’t till three o’clock. How’d you know I’d come sooner?”
“You got out of bed without being wheedled and prodded. You ate a reassuringly hearty breakfast. You didn’t shuffle to class like a zombie. I’ve got my spies, you know. And in spite of rumors to the contrary, I can put two and two together.”
We ate in silence for a few minutes, and then I said, “If I was an ant or a bird or a fish in an orphanage, I’d expect to be there forever. I wouldn’t know things could ever change.”
“If there were orphanages for ants, birds, and fish,” she said, “and if you were one of those things, what you just said would be true. You’d lack the imagination to envision new circumstances.”
“Yeah, but it’s more than that,” I said. “I couldn’t imagine a different place or life, and I couldn’t, like, do anything to change anything.”
“You are talking such good sense, Quinn, especially for someone who has put his poor teacher through ants, birds, and fish when ants should have made the case. How’s the chicken salad?”
“Very good.”
“There’s a special dessert. But I don’t mean to interrupt. I suspect that, as a repentant stubborn student, you have more to tell your patient teacher.”
“If we were like ants or any other bug or animal, we’d be kind of like machines, programmed to do what we do and nothing else.”
“And what would that be like, do you think?”