The Experiment Page 3

  Talk like this intrigued Skyler and Raisin because they had been separated from girls for the past year and any mention of sex was forbidden at the lab. They asked so many questions about it, that one day Kuta slapped his knee laughing and vowed to take them to a house he knew in Charleston—a prospect that almost literally took their breath away.

  Raisin jumped at the idea, then sulked when Kuta said he was joking. He was always trying to get Kuta to take them out in his boat—"just to go fishing," he pleaded, though Skyler suspected there was more to it than that—and Kuta kept coming up with excuses: the boat needed repair, the engine had thrown a valve, the tide was wrong. Finally one day he looked Raisin straight in the eye and said: "You know those people in that Big House would have my hide. They own just about the whole island. What you tryin' to do to me, child?"

  Still, the old man seemed to luxuriate in his role as life guide. He filled their heads with Gullah history—recounting such stories as the ancestors who had stepped off a slave ship onto this very island and turned to march directly back into the ocean toward Africa, a mass drowning. At times, talking about the Lab, he would turn serious, shaking his head and pronouncing "something wrong-headed" about its strict doctrines. He thought it peculiar to get all those inoculations—"they turning you into pincushions, for what?" he demanded. And he derived a pleasure in dispensing subversive notions.

  "Don't see no harm in running," he would say. "A boy's gotta stretch his legs if he's to become a man. And what's wrong in leaving the island? It don't make no sense to stay cooped up here your whole life."

  For their part, the old man was a window to the outside world, the only person they had ever met who was not in the Lab. They loved the forbidden hours in his shack, sitting on the bed with broken springs, hanging on his every word. The trumpet was always hanging from its peg upon the wall, and on special occasions—meaning when the spirit moved him—Kuta would take it down and play a riff or two, his cheeks bulging like a blowfish.

  He had a television, but they preferred listening to the radio. It was turned during the afternoons to a DJ called Bozman, who spilled out the words in singsong Gullah.

  "Disya one fa all ob de oomen. Dey a good-good one fa dancin."

  And Kuta would translate: "This one's for all the women out there. It's good dance music."

  The broadcast—from the mainland—almost made them shiver, it was so illicit and enthralling.

  It did not escape Skyler that all this talk of freedom and sex was feeding Raisin's discontent. Increasingly, he began talking of his dream of going to "the other side." As the months passed, he became more and more rebellious, always in trouble of one kind or another. He began standing up to the Orderlies, talking back, openly obstreperous. And punishments lost their effect. His head was shaved bald, which was meant to humiliate him; he seemed to wear it as a badge of honor. Food was withheld; he grew uncomplainingly thin.

  One morning, Raisin was called in to see the Psychologist Physician. There was a report that he had been seen masturbating, which he did not deny. Nor did he deny hiding the dinnertime pills; he seemed to enjoy leading a search party of three Orderlies that marched straight to the barracks and found the cache of tablets under his bed.

  The Elders confined him to the Campus—he had long since lost his right to gather honey—which meant he could no longer slip away to see Kuta. Skyler realized that the prohibition would be hard to bear. One afternoon, Raisin was discovered in the woods; Skyler alone knew where he had been. He was removed from the barracks and consigned for three nights to solitary confinement in "the Box." Skyler tried to visit him there. The first night, he got close enough to hear Raisin talking to himself, playing with his toy soldier, but he had to leave when someone approached. The next night, he found that the Orderlies had placed the guard dogs around it, and their fierce barking kept him away.

  Soon, Skyler saw Raisin only at a distance in odd moments, his bald head bobbing as he carried out garbage from the Meal House or cleaned the toilets or submitted to some other discipline. He was confined for days on end in the basement of the Big House—locked inside a room at night, according to the rumors. It was Patrick who told Skyler this, and he broke the news gently, out of deference to their friendship.

  One hot morning, Skyler was crossing an upper field on the Campus when he walked by the vegetable garden and heard his name being whispered. He looked around, but saw no one. Again, he heard it, coming from behind a row of waist-high corn.

  He ducked behind it and there was Raisin. He had been sent to do weeding, and his head and cheek were smudged with dirt. His hair was growing back in ungainly clumps, his eyes looked pink and watery, and he was disturbingly gaunt. He had a wild look about the eyes.

  "I have to get away," he said, grabbing Skyler's arm and squeezing it so tightly it almost hurt. "You have to come, too. The things I've learned—down there, in the basement. You have no idea what's going on. Horrible things. We all have to get away."

  Skyler didn't want this. He was scared. Raisin was acting so strangely—there were little bubbles of spittle at the corner of his lips, and he seemed to be babbling with the urgency of what he wanted to say. The others would be coming right behind him and—Skyler felt a stab of guilt—he knew he would get into trouble for being with him.

  Still, Raisin was his friend, his oldest friend. He needed him. Skyler would hear him out and do whatever he wanted.

  "I want you to come with me," Raisin said. "I can break out. Tomorrow night. We'll meet at the boathouse and take the boat. We'll go on to the other side. We'll be out of here—for good. We'll be safe."

  Skyler agreed. He felt dread in his stomach. The others were approaching.

  "Eight o'clock," whispered Raisin. "Eight o'clock at the boathouse. Don't be late!"

  The next night Skyler felt his heart pounding as the hour approached. He listened carefully for the chiming of the grandfather clock in the Big House and heard it strike seven. He made a small bundle—two shirts, an extra pair of socks, a small pocketknife, a paperback book on Charles Darwin—to carry with him.

  The mainland! What would it be like?

  His hands and feet felt cold with fear. I'm a good friend, he told himself—a loyal friend.

  Then something unforeseen happened. There was a noise way off in the distance, a thin crash that sounded a bit like glass breaking. It could have come from the Big House, though he wasn't sure. He listened intently, but everything was quiet.

  Five or ten minutes later, he heard footsteps, a heavy tread on the pathway leading to the boys' barracks. The door swung open and in stepped an Orderly. He surveyed the room, pulled a chair up against the door and sat in it, his arms folded. The other Jimminies were stunned; nothing like this had ever happened before.

  Gradually, they settled down. One by one Skyler heard them drop off to sleep, the sounds of their steady breathing. He stole looks over his blanket at the Orderly, sitting there, implacable.

  Skyler waited. He watched. Then he, too, fell asleep.

  He awoke sometime in the early morning hours. The chair was beside the door, empty. Otherwise, nothing had changed. He leapt out of bed, dressed and went to the door, leaving the bundle behind under his bed. When he stepped outside, he could see dawn was already coming up in the east.

  He ran to the boathouse. And then his heart soared. The lock was broken—the door was swinging open a half foot or so. He crept up to it, softly placed a hand upon the latch and pulled it wider, peering inside. The light was dim. There was the slip inside between two narrow docks that hugged the walls, the sound of water lapping the base of the piers. And on the other side the bay doors were open—he could see straight through to the bay. The boat was gone!

  Outside, four feet from the door, he saw a small object. He bent to examine it and then picked it up and held it in his hand. Raisin's toy soldier.

  That afternoon, he learned that Raisin had never made it to the mainland. He had lost his way in the marshes, they were tol
d, and at high tide the boat had been caught in the treacherous currents. It had capsized and he had drowned. The boat had been discovered floating upside down a half mile from shore, and when it had been turned upright, Raisin had been found, his lungs filled with water, his face a ghostly blue and one leg caught under the wooden seat.

  At the funeral service, Baptiste theorized that the escape had brought on a seizure. He managed to say some good things about Raisin. Julia, Patrick and many of the other Jimminies wept openly; something in Raisin's whole saga touched a chord of tragedy in their world, and they sensed it would never be the same. As for Skyler, he was too devastated even to cry. He felt he had lost his only brother.

  He put some of the blame on Kuta. For a while, he stopped coming to the shack, but then, when he found he missed the old man a great deal, he resumed his occasional visits. He still basked in the warmth of his company, but it wasn't the same. When there had been three of them, the old man talking and the two boys drinking it in like wine, it had felt like a family.

  Lying in bed, Skyler marveled at the human mind. Here he had tried to avoid thinking about Raisin and his death a decade ago. He had tried to construct roadblocks to prevent thinking about it, and his mind had led him on a back route to that self-same destination.

  He felt his hands and feet go cold again, just as they had that fateful night.

  He reached under the bed and searched with one hand for the object. When he didn't find it at once, he feared that it was missing, but then he struck it with his finger. He lifted the wooden soldier up and placed it under the thin blanket.

  Raisin dead. Now Patrick. Who would be next? How many more would there be? Had Raisin been right: were none of them safe?

  Chapter 2

  Jude Harley had been on the West Side anyway to conduct an interview, and so he'd decided to walk to his office at the newspaper on Fifth Avenue. He passed a traffic snarl on West Forty-sixth and watched a taxi driver lean on his horn, sending a blast echoing up and down the street. Blocking the road ahead was a flatbed truck piled with steel girders; on top of them stood three construction workers in yellow hard hats, looking up. Jude followed their gaze. Thirty floors above, a girder being hoisted by a crane rocked at the end of a cable like a balancing pencil. The taxi honked again.

  Jude was a bit put off by the new, sparkling Midtown. Not that he would have willed it back to the old days of the pushers and the prostitutes—it was simply that so many of the new stores were slick and shallow. Crass commercialism had triumphed again. He passed a shop and peered into the window at statuettes of the Empire State Building and Miss Liberty, plates emblazoned with the skyline, foot-tall dummies of Charlie Chaplin and Madonna and Elvis. Not long ago, it had been one of his favorite bars, a darkened den with wooden booths, a jukebox of Sinatra songs and a painting so blackened by grit that only old-timers knew it was of Joe Louis delivering the knock-out punch to Max Schmeling.

  That was another problem with change—it made you feel old. And at the ripe age of thirty, with young adulthood finally behind him, reasonably secure in his career, unattached or free—depending upon your point of view—and standing in the middle of the tumult of the greatest city in the world, one thing he did not want to be feeling was old.

  He walked east past the towering office blocks of Sixth Avenue until he came to Fifth Avenue, then turned uptown. The crowd was light for a Saturday morning, but it thickened when he came to Rockefeller Center. He was in no hurry to get to work, so he ducked down the walkway lined with airlines, bookstores and chocolate shops. His reflection popped up in the plate-glass windows, dogging him.

  Jude Harley had a thin, angular face with long dark hair that fell into his eyes when he leaned over the keyboard to type a story. His looks were protean, a woman had once told him: one minute he might be almost ordinary, but the next—seen on a street corner with his collar up, reading intently by a fire, telling an outrageous joke at dinner—he could catch the eye and dazzle. He had been flattered by the description. So how come he had been alone for three months now?

  He came to the sunken plaza. With the warm weather, the skating rink was gone, and in its place was a forest of umbrellas. Too bad. He enjoyed watching the skaters cutting figure eights with their long-legged strides, their sheer exhibitionism. But something about the place also unnerved him; even as a newcomer to the city years ago, he had felt its oppressive anonymity. Out of nowhere, he thought of Holden Caulfield, the eternal alienated adolescent, coming to skate with his "phoney" date with the cute ass, and he felt a stab of loneliness.

  He resumed his walk up Fifth Avenue. Otherwise—meaning professionally—things were breaking for him. He was getting good assignments at the New York Mirror and had hit his stride with three or four bylines a week. At this rate, he might get a column, someday, a perch that would allow him to trumpet his talent. He liked the rough-and-tumble world of the tabloid, and he knew he was good at it. He had sharp elbows and natural instincts. Once he had gone for a job interview at The New York Times; he'd been put off by the self-satisfied smugness of the editor who'd met him in the reception room, and by a newsroom as deadly as an insurance office. He'd skipped the second interview.

  There was something else: a novel that he had written years ago and peddled fruitlessly around town had finally been published. Much to his surprise, it was even doing well, thanks in part to the publisher's vigorous advertising and publicity campaign. He had to admit, he got a kick when he strolled into a bookstore and saw the display built around that familiar cover, a dark blue jacket with a grotesque face in white plaster of paris. The title, Death Mask, was printed in raised silver letters.

  Jude stopped at a coffee wagon on Fifty-fourth Street, an aluminum-plated trailer run by Bashir, an Afghan. Bashir loved to talk, especially about the Taliban, the religious fundamentalists who had overrun his country. Jude had been to Afghanistan for a series on refugee camps—two years ago, when the Mirror had been printing foreign news in a bid for respectability—and Bashir had been delighted to discover someone who at least knew the names of the provincial cities. He treated Jude as a special friend.

  But today Jude wanted to preserve his solitary mood, and so he plunked down his two quarters for coffee—regular with milk and extra sugar—with a wordless nod.

  In his lilting New Yorkese, Bashir asked him if he had heard that a northern village—the name was hard to make out—had fallen. Jude said he had not.

  "They control ninety percent of the country now," said Bashir sadly. "The situation is very bad."

  Jude nodded sympathetically.

  "I don't know what will happen. My poor country. The way they treat people is horrible."

  "I know," said Jude, accepting his coffee in a brown paper bag with the neck twisted into a handle.

  They shared a moment of silence.

  "You have a good day," exclaimed Bashir, suddenly smiling and showing a gold tooth.

  Jude responded: "You, too."

  Ducking into the building, he thought about Bashir, and people like him who had real problems, struggling to make ends meet. His coffee wagon seemed so compact and homey. Photographs of beautiful, dark-haired children were taped onto a side window; change piled up on a kitchen towel spread on the counter as he bustled about amid the thick fumes of Colombian coffee. He was moving up in the world, making something of himself. With a twinge of middle-class guilt, Jude found that he envied the man—his certitude, his striving, even the political convictions that gave an organizing principle to his life. Most of all, he admired his passion.

  The Mirror occupied three floors at 666 Fifth Avenue, a nondescript skyscraper that nonetheless rose high enough to cast its red neon number into the haze sometimes overhanging mid-Manhattan. The sight of 666 up in the sky had caused one wag with Biblical knowledge to call the newspaper "the Beast." For the literate, the nickname also carried an allusion to the newspaper in Evelyn Waugh's Scoop, and so it had stuck.

  It also had the ring of descriptive t
ruth. The owner was R.P. Tibbett, a New York real estate mogul who was assembling a media empire and had moved his headquarters to Washington, D.C., to be closer to the politicians he financed. He used the tabloid shamelessly for vendettas and payoffs. The Mirror was not so much the flagship of the Tibbett fleet as its garbage scow. When he wanted to campaign for more TV licenses, he did it with a steady drumbeat in its pages, and when he wanted to skewer an enemy, which happened more and more frequently these days, he did it with the stiletto-sharp prose of its best writers. To cloak their shame, the reporters espoused the mystique that their paper was street-wise and "in touch with the people"—whatever that meant.

  Jude passed an honor box in the lobby—Tibbett was too cheap to give the paper away even to the people who produced it—and recoiled at the hype of the page-one headline: KILLER FLU STALKS CITY. Apparently, two people were in the hospital.

  The elevator stopped on the third floor, and as the doors were closing, a hand intruded to send them skittering back. Jude saw long, curving fingers bearing an opal ring, and his heart sank—he knew that ring. Betsy entered, and her eyes widened in surprise, which she quickly tried to damp down.

  "Oh, it's you," she said icily.

  Jude was nonplussed. He didn't know how to answer that statement—"Yes, it's me"? So he simply said: "Hello."

  His voice echoed without a response, as she stared straight ahead at the doors. In the silence he could hear the elevator cables grinding. Betsy was a fellow reporter; they had lived together for nearly a year before she'd thrown him out three months ago—or more precisely, when he had decided to leave but let her salvage a bit of pride by showing him the door. He recalled how furious she had gotten during their tag-end fights, and how she had slapped him once, tearing a bit of skin on his cheek with her ring. She had screamed that he was incapable of feeling, "emotionally retarded." What did she expect? she said, given his abysmal childhood. Then she had cried, which he hated.