Keepers (5 page)

I knew there was a basement but had no idea there were floors beneath even that. We went all the way down to sub-basement #3. Just seeing that light up above the elevator door gave me the creeps; this was deeper than they
buried
you after you died.

Yeech.

The doors opened to reveal a long hallway with concrete walls and bare bulbs cradled in bell-shaped wire cages dangling from the ceiling. It was damp and cold, and I was suddenly grateful that Beth had insisted that I wear the bathrobe and pajama bottoms.

I remember the walls clearly. It was easy to see the boards that had been used as forms for the concrete because several of them had warped before the concrete had set properly; they looked like ghosts trapped in the walls, stuck forever between this world and the one they’d come from and now wished they had never tried to leave.

Double yeech.

Beth leaned over and whispered in my ear, “This is where they bring the dead bodies.”

“Huh-
uh!
”

“Uh-
huh!
I heard the nurses say so.”

The “yeech” factor was tripled with the notion that at any moment we could see a dead body being rolled down the hallway. I wondered if any of the bodies from Kent State had been brought here, if they’d been covered up and rolled over the very spot where I was standing. The thought frightened me so much that my fingers went numb. I shook them, confused by the effect. Usually when I got scared, my stomach got all tight and hurt; this was the first time I’d had anything happen with my fingers. Maybe fingers had something to do with real fear, and the stomach stuff was just with pretend fear, like with Godzilla or
The Fly
or
The Incredible Shrinking Man
. I’d have to think on that. Later.

The orderly took hold of one of Beth’s hands and guided us out of there in a hurry. The feeling began to return to my fingers as I heard Beth breathe a sigh of relief. I looked at her and she smiled and took hold of my hand with her free one, the three of us forming an unbreakable chain.

I felt as if someone really liked me. I wondered what the kids at school would say if they could see me now, on an adventure with a girl, a
16-year-old
girl who wore love beads and bell-bottomed hip-huggers and had friends who thought I was cute and actually
wanted
to hold my hand. Wow. (My interest in members of the opposite sex had begun in earnest during my ninth year, which only served to make me even more of a weirdo among my schoolmates; after all, everyone knew girls were
gross
, they had
cooties,
and the last thing you wanted was for one to touch you. I’d thought about asking one of the nurses or doctors where the Cootie Ward was located, just to see if they could kill you like all the other kids said.)

There were things about Beth I didn’t really understand, like how she could get so serious sometimes. Once I’d awakened in my hospital bed a few days after my surgery to find her standing over me with two of her girlfriends. I tried to speak but my throat was still sore; she put a finger to my lips, bent down, and kissed me, just like that. Her girlfriends had kissed me, as well. I don’t know what kind of a reaction they were expecting, but the look on my face made all three of them go “
Awww
,” and touch me: my cheek, my hand, my shoulder. I never asked Beth why she did that, or why her friends acted the way they did, because I was afraid that she’d tell me the look on my face had been goofy. Beth was the only person I didn’t feel goofy around, and if I’d looked that way I didn’t want to know. I would pretend. Like she did about her mother, the famous stage actress. That would be okay.

“This way,” the orderly said, pointing toward where this tunnel split off into another.

He led us through the tunnel that connected with the building across the street. It was a long, boring tunnel, not a creepy one like we’d just come through, and I was happy about that. Boring was good.

Once we made it through the tunnel, we got into another elevator and took it all the way up. I was secretly hoping that we’d skip both tunnels on the way back and just walk outside and cross the street; if the tunnels were part of a great adventure, I’d just as soon go back to being a goofy zero with iffy eyesight in his mismatched plaid and paisley.

The elevator stopped and the doors opened onto a large foyer. Open windows with a breathtaking view of Cedar Hill took up most of the walls. A cool, gentle wind came in through the windows, fluffing the curtains outward. Up here the ghosts weren’t trapped in the walls; they fluttered free, saying hello. Even the concrete floors seemed less threatening. On either side of the foyer were sets of swinging metal doors. We went through the set on the right, and as we stepped through it hit us full-force: the stink of ammonia mixed with the chemical cleaners. It burned the inside of my nose and made my eyes tear up. This probably should have been an omen but we continued on down the hall, anyway, fun-fun-fun, following the smells until we came to the doors marked:

Sanctioned Personnel Only

“You okay?” Beth whispered to me.

“I guess. Do you think this is okay?”

She leaned her head to one side and sucked once on her lower lip. “Hard to say, kiddo, but we’ve come this far, might as well finish it, huh?”

I didn’t like her calling me “kiddo” but didn’t say anything about it. Maybe she was just nervous. I was.

We pushed open the doors and entered a cavernous room. Equipment of all sorts stolen from every science-fiction movie I’d ever seen lined the walls, and in the center stood interlocking pens with metal poles for sides. In two of the pens were pigs; in the other two, sheep. They had no straw for bedding, and the concrete floor, dribbled with urine and liquid feces, sloped downward toward a system of drains. My first thought was:
How can they sleep on this floor? It’s so cold and hard and...messy
.

The animals had been sleeping but stirred when we entered. The sheep bleated and the pigs snorted, both sounding almost human, and circled their small pens. I’d never been close to sheep or pigs before, and they seemed enormous, like creatures that the scientist experimented on before accidentally creating a giant spider that broke loose and did all sorts of yeechy things.

Pigs have human eyes, blue, with round pupils. After staring at you, they’ll look away and you can see the whites of their eyes. Something about the pigs and the sheep seemed
wrong
to me, and I didn’t want to get any closer to them.

The three of us stood there in the doorway. I remember that things were said, but exactly what and to whom I can’t remember. We’d come this far, we’d survived the Decent into Darkness and the Hallway of Frozen Ghosts and wouldn’t turn back until we had something to show for it.

A tough bunch, us.

As the sheep paced around I saw that sections of fleece had been shaved away in squares for recently sutured incisions. One of them had what looked like a plastic bag sewn to its side. It was filled with something thick and dark and swirling with small chunks. I turned away.

We moved to the next room, where dogs had started barking. Half a dozen of them in large cages greeted us joyously as we entered. One of them looked sad and sick and ignored us, but the rest pushed their weight against the bars as we approached.

As I neared the first one’s cage, however, he stopped barking and growled. Beth heard this and warned me not to get any closer to the dogs, most of whom looked desperate for attention—just a rub, a touch, a sniff of your hand so I can lick it, please, oh, please-please-please.

At that moment I both loved and despised them, with their shrill yelps and wag-wagging tails and bright eyes. Sorrow and discouragement soaked the room in those loud cries, pacing back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. I was overwhelmed. On each cage door was a chart with handwritten details about the dog, filled with alien words and baffling mathematical and chemical symbols. Instead of water dishes they had bottles attached to the cages, with tubes they could lick, giant versions of the ones used by the gerbils at school. Despite the warnings and my own confused feelings, I decided to let one of the dogs lick my fingers through the bars. I knew it wouldn’t bite me; it seemed far too lonely.

It was friendly and warm, and I wanted to open the door and take it back to my room. I took a chance and pushed my hand a little farther into the cage so I could scratch its neck. There was a light-blue plastic tag attached to the back of its ear. I bent its ear down, gently, and saw the tag had only three words on it:
Property of Keepers.
Below that was a series of numbers. I pulled my hand out and looked back at the silent dog. It was staring at me, unblinking, as if it either recognized me or was waiting for me to figure something out. I smiled at it, feeling sorry for the poor thing, and took a step toward it.

It shook its head back and forth, once, quickly: an emphatic
no
.

Beth and the orderly didn’t seem to have noticed, so maybe I’d imagined it. Shaking your head
no
like that was something people did, mostly parents and teachers when they didn’t want you to accidentally have fun: cold stare, tight lips, head back and forth once and once only:
No, absolutely not
.

I took another step toward the silent dog. This time I watched carefully. This time I did not imagine it. It definitely looked at me and shook its head
No!

I remained still, then mouthed the word
Why?

The dog looked away from me for a moment, making certain that no one else was watching, then with its front left paw reached up and bent forward its left ear, holding it like that so I could see the plastic tag:
Property of Keepers.

A sense of adventure almost emerged for a few seconds.
I
knew what was really going on here. They were making the animals smarter, smarter maybe than people, and this dog was trying to let me in on the secret. Maybe because the animals were planning a revolt and would need human friends once they were outside and free? Could that be it? I started to mouth the question but then my silent conspirator blinked, suddenly just a dog again, twisted around, lifted its legs, and began licking itself
down there
.

Beth’s hand on my shoulder nearly caused me to shriek. “Hey, don’t wander off on me, okay? I’d be pretty lonely if I lost you.” Even as a child of ten—okay, okay,
nine
—I could’ve swum a hundred raging rivers on the memory of those words.

The next room was lined with cages.

The wall directly across from the door was filled with cages containing white mice, and to the right was an entire wall of cats, cage after cage stacked on top of each other. I’d never seen so many cats in one place, yet it was eerily quiet. The cats crouched in their cages and stared at us. As we got closer, some of them came to the bars and rubbed against them, opening their mouths soundlessly.

“Why are they so quiet?” I asked Beth.

“I don’t know.”

“Well, shit—I do!” said the orderly, proud of himself.

He went to one of the cages and worked the door open with a paper clip he took from his pocket, then pulled out a cat—a brown Tom—and brought it to us.

“Look here,” he said, grabbing its head none too gently and pulling it back.

The fur underneath its neck had been shaved all the way across, and running through the middle of the pink skin was a long scar.

“What
happened
to it?” said Beth, sounding as if she were going to cry.

“You think the folks who work here want to listen to bunch of goddamn cats yowling all day long?” said the orderly, throwing the cat back into its cage and closing the door. “You get this many cats, you cut their vocal cords so they don’t make any noise.”

“That’s
terrible
,” said Beth, and I could tell she was trying to hold off the tears.

The cats had the same type of water bottles and charts as the dogs, but their cages were much, much smaller. A lot of them had matchbox-sized rectangles with electrical wires implanted in their skulls. The skin of their exposed scalps was crusty and red where it joined the metal. There were plastic blue tags attached to the backs of their ears, as well, only these were much smaller than those worn by the dogs. It didn’t matter; I already knew what they said.

I gripped my IV pole with all my strength. I looked at the tubes and wires running into the silent cats, then at the thin clear tube running from the IV bottle into my arm. I think that was the first time in my life when I realized that, eventually, all of us will be put in a situation where we will be treated as something less than human.

Welcome to puberty, you dumb dork.

One of the cats gently swatted at my hand through a space between the bars, working its mouth as if begging to be petted. I remember how wide its open mouth was, how dark, how if you looked into it long enough you might fall in and be swallowed and then both of you would be quiet forever, never able to ask anyone for a hug or food or to refill the water bottle. I squeezed its paw and quickly let go.

There was the sound of monkeys in the next room, but I wanted to leave. I was scared and sad, and my stitches hurt.

“You
bet
we’re leaving,” said Beth, putting her hand on my shoulder and looking at the orderly. “Well?”

“Well,
nothing
,” he said. “You two pussies can leave if you want, but I’m gonna go look at the monkeys. I hear they’re doing some
really
weird shit with them.”

Beth glared at him. “How are we supposed to find our way back?”

The orderly shrugged. “Getting you
back
wasn’t part of the deal. You put out; I bring you and the squirt over here. You want me to take you back the same way? You know what it costs.”

“You are such a fuck-stick,” said Beth.

“Yeah, well…you didn’t seem to mind it the other day in the linen room.”