Room

  “Oh, Jack,” she says, “we’re never going back.”

  The car starts moving and I’m crying so much I can’t stop.

  After

  Officer Oh is riding in front, she looks different backwards. She turns around and smiles at me, she says, “Here’s the precinct.”

  “Can you climb out?” asks Ma. “I’ll carry you.” She opens the car and cold air jumps in. I go small. She pulls at me, makes me stand up and I bang my ear on the car. She’s walking with me up on her hip, I cling onto her shoulders. It’s dark but then there’s lights quick quick like fireworks.

  “Vultures,” says Officer Oh.

  Where?

  “No pictures,” shouts the man police.

  What pictures? I don’t see any vultures, I only see person faces with machines flashing and black fat sticks. They’re shouting but I can’t understand. Officer Oh tries to put the blanket over my head, I push it off. Ma’s running, I’m shaking all about, we’re inside a building and it’s a thousand percent bright so I put my hand over my eyes.

  The floor’s all shiny hard not like Floor, the walls are blue and more of them, it’s too loud. There’s persons everywhere not friends of mine. A thing like a spaceship all lit up with things inside all in their little squares like bags of chips and chocolate bars, I go look and try and touch but they’re locked up in the glass. Ma pulls my hand.

  “This way,” says Officer Oh. “No, right in here—”

  We’re in a room that’s quieter. A huge wide man says, “I do apologize about the media presence, we’ve upgraded to a trunk system but they’ve got these new tracking scanners . . .” He’s sticking out his hand. Ma puts me down and does his hand up and down like persons in TV.

  “And you, sir, I understand you’ve been a remarkably courageous young man.”

  That’s me he’s looking at. But he doesn’t know me and why he says I’m a man? Ma sits down in a chair that’s not our chairs and lets me in her lap. I try to rock but it’s not Rocker. Everything’s wrong.

  “Now,” says the wide man, “I appreciate it’s late, and your son’s got some abrasions that need looking at, and they’re on standby for you at the Cumberland Clinic, it’s a very nice facility.”

  “What kind of facility?”

  “Ah, psychiatric.”

  “We’re not—”

  He butts in. “They’ll be able to give you all the appropriate care, it’s very private. But as a matter of priority I do need to go over your statement tonight in more detail as you’re able.”

  Ma’s nodding.

  “Now, certain of my lines of questioning may be distressing, would you prefer Officer Oh remain for this interview?”

  “Whatever, no,” says Ma, she yawns.

  “Your son’s been through a lot tonight, perhaps he should wait outside while we cover, ah . . .”

  But we’re in Outside already.

  “That’s OK,” says Ma, wrapping the blue blanket around me. “Don’t shut it,” she says very fast to Officer Oh going out.

  “Sure,” says Officer Oh, she makes the door stay halfway open.

  Ma’s talking to the huge man, he’s calling her by one of her other names. I’m looking on the walls, they’ve turned creamish like no color. There’s frames with lots of words in, one with an eagle, he says The Sky’s No Limit. Somebody goes by the door, I jump. I wish it was shut. I want some so bad.

  Ma pulls her T-shirt down to her pants again. “Not right this minute,” she whispers, “I’m talking to the captain.”

  “And this took place—any recollection of the date?” he asks.

  She shakes her head. “Late January. I’d only been back at school a couple weeks . . .”

  I’m still thirsty, I lift her T-shirt again and this time she puffs her breath and lets me, she curls me against her chest.

  “Would you, ah, prefer . . . ?” asks the Captain.

  “No, let’s just carry on,” says Ma. It’s the right, there’s not much but I don’t want to climb off and switch sides because she might say that’s enough and it’s not enough.

  Ma’s talking for ages about Room and Old Nick and all that, I’m too tired for listening. A she person comes in and tells the Captain something.

  Ma says, “Is there a problem?”

  “No no,” says the Captain.

  “Then why is she staring at us?” Her arm goes around me tight. “I’m nursing my son, is that OK with you, lady?”

  Maybe in Outside they don’t know about having some, it’s a secret.

  Ma and the Captain talk a lot more. I’m nearly asleep but it’s too bright and I can’t get comfy.

  “What is it?” she asks.

  “We really have to go back to Room,” I tell her. “I need Toilet.”

  “That’s OK, they’ve got them here in the precinct.”

  The Captain shows us the way past the amazing machine and I touch the glass nearly at the chocolate bars. I wish I knowed the code to let them out.

  There’s one two three four toilets, each in a little room inside a bigger room with four sinks and all mirrors. It’s true, toilets in Outside have lids on their tanks, I can’t look in. When Ma pees and stands up there’s awful roaring, I cry. “It’s OK,” she says, wiping my face with the flat bits of her hands, “it’s just an automatic flush. Look, the toilet sees with this little eye when we’re all done and it flushes by itself, isn’t that clever?”

  I don’t like a clever toilet looking at our butts.

  Ma gets me to step out of my underwear. “I pooed a bit by accident when Old Nick carried me,” I tell her.

  “Don’t worry about it,” she says and she does something weird, she throws my underwear in a trash.

  “But—”

  “You don’t need them anymore, we’ll get you new ones.”

  “For Sundaytreat?”

  “No, any day we like.”

  That’s weird. I’d rather on a Sunday.

  The faucet’s like the real ones in Room but wrong shaped. Ma turns it on, she wets paper and wipes my legs and my butt. She puts her hands under a machine, then hot air puffs out, like our vents but hotter and noisy again. “It’s a hand dryer, look, do you want to try?” She’s smiling at me but I’m too tired for smiling. “OK, just wipe your hands on your T-shirt.” Then she wraps the blue blanket around me and we go out again. I want to look in the machine where all the cans and bags and chocolate bars are in jail. But Ma pulls me along to the room where the Captain is for more talking.

  After hundreds of hours Ma’s standing me up, I’m all wobbly. Sleep not in Room makes me feel sick.

  We’re going to a kind of hospital, but wasn’t that the old Plan A, Sick, Truck, Hospital? Ma’s got a blue blanket around her now, I think it’s the one that was on me but that one’s still on me so hers must be a different. The patrol car looks like the same car but I don’t know, things in Outside are tricksy. I trip on the street and nearly fall but Ma grabs me.

  We’re driving along. When I see a car coming I squeeze my eyes every time.

  “They’re on the other side, you know,” says Ma.

  “What other side?”

  “See that line down the middle? They always have to stay on that side of it, and we stay on this side, so we don’t crash.”

  Suddenly we’re stopped. The car opens and a person with no face looks in. I’m screaming.

  “Jack, Jack,” says Ma.

  “It’s a zombie.”

  I keep my face on her tummy.

  “I’m Dr. Clay, welcome to the Cumberland,” says the no face with the deepest voice ever booming. “The mask is just to keep you safe. Want to see under?” It pulls the white bit up and a man person smiling, an extra-brown face with the tiniest triangle of black chin. He lets the mask back on, snap. His talk comes through the white. “Here’s one for each of you.”

  Ma takes the masks. “Do we have to?”

  “Think of everything floating around that your son’s probably never come in cont
act with before.”

  “OK.” She puts one mask on her and one on me with loops around my ears. I don’t like the way it presses. “I don’t see anything floating around,” I whisper to Ma.

  “Germs,” she says.

  I thought they were only in Room, I didn’t know the world was all full of them too.

  We’re walking in a big lighted building, I think it’s the Precinct again but then it’s not. There’s a somebody called the Admission Coordinator tapping on a—I know, it’s a computer, just like in TV. They all look like the persons on the medical planet, I have to keep remembering they’re real.

  I see the most coolest thing, it’s a huge glass with corners but instead of cans and chocolate there’s fish alive, swimming and hiding with rocks. I pull Ma’s hand but she won’t come, she’s still talking to the Admission Coordinator that has a name on her label too, it’s Pilar.

  “Listen, Jack,” Dr. Clay says, he bends down his legs so he’s like a giant frog, why is he doing that? His head is nearly beside mine, his hair is just fuzz like a quarter of an inch long. He doesn’t have his mask anymore, it’s only me and Ma. “We need to take a look at your mom in that room across the hall, OK?”

  It’s me he’s saying. But didn’t he look at her already?

  Ma’s shaking her head. “Jack stays with me.”

  “Dr. Kendrick—she’s our general medical resident on duty—she’s going to have to administer the evidence collection kit right away, I’m afraid. Blood, urine, hair, fingernail scrapings, oral swabs, vaginal, anal—”

  Ma stares at him. She lets out her breath. “I’ll be just in there,” she tells me, pointing at a door, “and I’ll be able to hear you if you call, OK?”

  “Not OK.”

  “Please. You’ve been such a brave JackerJack, just a bit longer, OK?”

  I grab onto her.

  “Hmm, maybe he could come in and we could put up a screen?” says Dr. Kendrick. Her hair is all creamy colored and twisted up on her head.

  “A TV?” I whisper to Ma. “There’s one over there.” It’s way bigger than the one in Room, there’s dancing and the colors are much dazzlier.

  “Actually, yeah,” says Ma, “could he maybe sit there at Reception? That would distract him better.”

  The Pilar woman is behind the table talking on the phone, she smiles at me but I pretend I don’t see. There’s lots of chairs, Ma chooses one for me. I watch her going with the doctors. I have to grip onto the chair not to run after her.

  The planet’s changed to a game of football with persons with huge shoulders and helmets. I wonder if it’s really happening for real or just pictures. I look at the fish glass but it’s too far, I can’t see the fish but they must be still there, they can’t walk. The door where Ma went is a bit apart, I think I hear her voice. Why are they taking her blood and pee and fingernails? She’s still there even though I don’t see her, like she was in Room all the time I was doing our Great Escape. Old Nick zoomed off in his truck, now he’s not in Room and he’s not in Outside, I don’t see him in TV. My head’s worn out from wondering.

  I hate the mask pressing, I put it up on my head, it’s got a stiff bit with a wire inside I think. It keeps my hair out of my eyes. Now there’s tanks in a city that’s all smashed into bits, an old person crying. Ma’s a long long time in the other room, are they hurting her? The Pilar woman is still talking on the phone. Another planet with men in a ginormous room talking, all in jackets, I think they’re kind of fighting. They talk for hours and hours.

  Then it changes again and there’s Ma and she’s carrying somebody and it’s me.

  I jump up and go right to the screen. There’s a me like in Mirror only I’m tiny. Words sliding underneath LOCAL NEWS AS IT HAPPENS. A she person is talking but I can’t see: “. . . bachelor loner converted the garden shed into an impregnable twenty-first-century dungeon. The despot’s victims have an eerie pallor and appear to be in a borderline catatonic state after the long nightmare of their incarceration.” There’s when Officer Oh tried to put the blanket on my head and I don’t let her. The invisible voice says, “The malnourished boy, unable to walk, is seen here lashing out convulsively at one of his rescuers.”

  “Ma,” I shout.

  She doesn’t come. I hear her calling, “Just a couple more minutes.”

  “It’s us. It’s us in TV!”

  But it’s gone blank. Pilar is standing up pointing at it with a remote and staring at me. Dr. Clay comes out, he says mad things to Pilar.

  “On again,” I say. “It’s us, I want to see us.”

  “I’m terribly, terribly sorry—,” says Pilar.

  “Jack, would you like to join your mom now?” Dr. Clay holds out his hand, he’s got funny white plastic on it. I don’t touch. “Mask on, remember?” I put it over my nose. I walk behind not too near.

  Ma’s sitting on a little high bed in a dress made out of paper and it’s split at the back. Persons wear funny things in Outside. “They had to take away my real clothes.” It’s her voice though I can’t see where it comes out of the mask.

  I climb up to her lap all crinkly. “I saw us in TV.”

  “So I heard. How did we look?”

  “Small.”

  I’m pulling at her dress but there’s no way in. “Not right this minute.” She kisses me instead on the side of the eye but it’s not a kiss I want. “You were saying . . .”

  I wasn’t saying anything.

  “About your wrist, yes,” says Dr. Kendrick, “it’ll probably need to be broken again at some point.”

  “No!”

  “Shh, it’s OK,” Ma tells me.

  “She’ll be asleep when it happens,” says Dr. Kendrick, looking at me. “The surgeon will put a metal pin in to help the joint work better.”

  “Like a cyborg?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Yeah, a bit like a cyborg,” says Ma, grinning at me.

  “But in the short term I’d say dentistry is the top priority,” says Dr. Kendrick, “so I’m going to put you on a course of antibiotics right away, as well as extra-strength analgesics . . .” I do a huge yawn.

  “I know,” says Ma, “it’s hours past bedtime.”

  Dr. Kendrick says, “If I could just give Jack a quick checkup?”

  “I said no already.”

  What does she want to give me? “Is it a toy?” I whisper to Ma.

  “It’s unnecessary,” she says to Dr. Kendrick. “Take my word for it.”

  “We’re just following the protocol for cases like this,” says Dr. Clay.

  “Oh, you see lots of cases like this here, do you?” Ma’s mad, I can hear it.

  He shakes his head. “Other trauma situations, yes, but I’ll be honest with you, nothing like yours. Which is why we need to get it right and give you both the best possible treatment from the start.”

  “Jack doesn’t need treatment, he needs some sleep.” Ma’s talking through her teeth. “He’s never been out of my sight and nothing happened to him, nothing like what you’re insinuating.”

  The doctors look at each other. Dr. Kendrick says, “I didn’t mean—”

  “All these years, I kept him safe.”

  “Sounds like you did,” says Dr. Clay.

  “Yes, I did.” There’s tears all down Ma’s face, now, there’s one all dark on the edge of her mask. Why are they making her cry? “And tonight, what he’s had to—he’s asleep on his feet—”

  I’m not asleep.

  “I understand completely,” says Dr. Clay. “Height and weight and she’ll deal with his cuts, how about that?”

  After a second Ma nods.

  I don’t want Dr. Kendrick to touch me, but I don’t mind standing on the machine that shows my heavy, when I lean on the wall by accident Ma straightens me up. Then I stand against the numbers, just like we did beside Door but there’s more of them and the lines are straighter. “You’re doing great,” says Dr. Clay.

  Dr. Kendrick writes things down a lot.
She points machines in my eyes and my ears and my mouth, she says, “Everything seems to be sparkling.”

  “We brush all the times we eat.”

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “Slow down and speak up,” Ma tells me.

  “We brush after we eat.”

  Dr. Kendrick says, “I wish all my patients took such care of themselves.”

  Ma helps me pull my T-shirt over my head. It makes the mask fall off and I put it back on. Dr. Kendrick gets me to move all my pieces. She says my hips are excellent but I could do with a bone density scan at some point, that’s a kind of X-ray. There’s scratchy marks on my inside hands and my legs that’s from when I jumped out of the truck. The right knee has all dried blood. I jump when Dr. Kendrick touches it.

  “I’m sorry,” she says.

  I’m against Ma’s tummy, the paper’s in creases. “Germs are going to jump in the hole and I’ll be dead.”

  “Don’t worry,” says Dr. Kendrick, “I’ve got a special wipe that takes them all away.”

  It stings. She does my bitten finger too, on the left hand where the dog drank my blood. Then she puts something on my knee, it’s like a sticky tape but with faces on it, they’re Dora and Boots waving at me. “Oh, oh—”

  “Does that hurt?”

  “You’ve made his day,” Ma says to Dr. Kendrick.

  “You’re a Dora fan?” says Dr. Clay. “My niece and nephew too.” His teeth are smiling like snow.

  Dr. Kendrick puts another Dora and Boots on my finger, it’s tight.

  Tooth is still safe down the side of my right sock. When I have my T-shirt and blanket back on, the doctors are talking all quiet, then Dr. Clay asks, “Do you know what a needle is, Jack?”

  Ma groans. “Oh, come on.”

  “This way the lab can do a full blood count first thing in the morning. Markers of infection, nutritional deficiencies. . . . It’s all admissible evidence, and more importantly, it’ll help us figure out what Jack needs right away.”

  Ma looks at me. “Can you be a superhero for one more minute and let Dr. Kendrick prick your arm?”

  “No.” I hide both under the blanket.

  “Please.”