The Dead Man: Ring of Knives

'Understood. If I'm still here after that, I'll let myself out.'

'Yeah, but night shift come on at eleven. You got to be gone by then.'

'Sure, I'll do my best, so long as I finish up with Dindren by—'

He looked down. She had grabbed his arm. And not gently.

'Listen what I tell you, boy. You got to be gone by shift change. Got to.' Her eyes were wide, dark, and deep. Dead serious. 'Them fucked-up niggahs workin' midnights? They don't play. I'm tellin' you now: you stay after eleven, I can't account for your ass. Arright?'

'Arright.'

They crossed the rest of the quad together in silence. Then she dug out a ring of keys and fit one into the door of the nearest building.

A click.

Together they stepped into Module One.

Matt didn't know what exactly he'd expected, but it wasn't this.

He was in a central living area, set up with a worn sectional couch facing an old TV that was deeper than it was wide. The room had avocado shag carpeting and card tables set up in the corners. The air was thick with cigarette smoke. Butts littered the carpet, along with hundreds of puzzle pieces, soft drink cans, deflated balloons, napkins, craft junk, pieces of popcorn, and scattered pills. A radio in the corner was playing top forty, and the vintage TV was turned to Maury Povich, with the volume cranked. Matt saw three therapy aides, all wearing the same maroon golf shirt. Two were smoking and watching TV, talking back to the screen. The third, deafened with earbuds, was texting.

And then there were the residents: six of them. An older woman was rocking back and forth on her chair, eyes closed, making a loud quacking noise. A laughing bald guy was drawing mazes on a wall in permanent marker. Two flabby men in sweatpants were arguing over a teddy bear at the top of their lungs. A way-too-skinny blond teenage girl was sobbing in a corner. And then, against the far wall, standing on a table, was a man built like an NFL linebacker. He couldn't have weighed less than three hundred pounds. He had a crew cut, deeply crossed eyes, and a protruding lower jaw. He stood on the table ramrod straight, unmoving, unblinking, his huge arms engulfed in yellow and red flame tattoos. Dark-complected, he wore a shirt that said 'Ojibwe Pride'. He stared straight ahead in cross-eyed, jut-jawed silence.

Apart from him, it was utter chaos.

'Jesus Christ,' Matt said, and got an elbow in the ribs from Maloria. Matt's skin crawled as he looked around. He had no problem being around disabled people. But the filth of the room, the deafening wall of noise, the half dozen types of madness on display, and the fact that the residents were going untreated—totally ignored by the therapy aides, who clearly didn't give a shit—gave him a twist in his gut. The place felt wrong. Sick.

Maloria hissed at him to start working, so he pulled a garbage bag off his rolling yellow bucket and began picking at the carpet of trash. He watched as Maloria took the stuffed animal from the fighting men, barked at the texting aide to 'take off those ma'fuckin' earbuds,' turned down the TV, and took the weeping teen by her bony arm and let her through an entryway to the left that led to a corridor marked 'Women's Dorm.' On the right was a corridor leading to the men's.

But as soon as she was gone, the yelled-at aide put the earbuds back in, and another cranked the volume on Maury back up. The two flabby men started to argue over a Rubik's Cube. The quacking woman kept quacking. The maze man kept laughing. And the massive, piranha-jawed Ojibwe kept standing on the table in tattooed, cross-eyed silence.

'Jesus Christ,' Matt said again, and reached for more trash.

# # # # # #

His two hours in Module One passed with excruciating slowness, mainly because nothing changed but the TV talk shows. While wiping crusted food off the tables, Matt noticed a weekly calendar pinned to a bulletin board. It stated that in this module, the two hours between three and five o'clock should be spent on cooperative games, adaptive therapy, and cognitive exercises. Instead, it was filled with gangster rap and the televised blare of thrown chairs, insults, and skeezy wife-swapping discussions.

Nice to see our tax dollars at work, Matt thought.

In all that time, the Ojibwe never moved a muscle.

# # # # # #

By five o'clock, Matt had a throbbing headache, and his nerves felt raw and jangly. He was just picking up a final cigarette butt when he noticed movement to his left.

'Excuse me? Sir?'

He turned his head. The too-skinny teen was standing tentatively in the entryway to the women's dorm, her arms crossed tightly over her flat chest. Her hair was a pixieish shock of blond so pale that it was almost white, and her kohled eyes were smudged with tears.

'Sir,' she said in a quavering voice, 'have you seen Maloria?'

'I thought she was back with you,' Matt said.

'She was, but now . . .' The girl looked nervously at the aides behind him, then stepped in closer, whispering. 'Look, you seem like an okay guy, all right? I need . . . I need some help. I don't belong here.'

'Sure,' Matt said, feeling bad for the kid. 'Sure.'

'No, really. These people are all crazy! But I'm not. My folks put me here because they couldn't deal with my wild talents.'

'Your . . .'

'Wild talents. Like, I can move things with thoughts? And disrupt electrical systems.'

'Okay,' Matt said.

'I can.' The girl's eyes hardened stubbornly. She looked past him. 'See that glass of water? On the table? Watch this . . .' She lowered her chin and glared at it.

Matt turned to watch the glass. Having seen an aide slowly sipping from it, he strongly doubted that it held water. But he watched it do nothing for a few seconds before looking back at the girl.

Her chin was trembling, her eyes bright with tears. 'It works better on electrical systems,' she said.

'Sure,' Matt said. 'Look, why don't you find Maloria?'

'That's what I was trying to do, but . . .' The girl's voice dried up, and her eyes got big. Matt turned to see the earbudded aide stand up suddenly, glance around with hooded eyes, then saunter towards the girl, thumbs hooked into the front of his pants.

Immediately the girl spun away—right into Maloria, who'd come up behind her.

Seeing Maloria, the aide did an about-face, scratched the back of his head casually, and flopped back onto the couch.

With a parting glare, Maloria took the girl back to the dorm.

Matt massaged the bridge of his nose. His headache was getting worse.

Maloria returned a minute later, still staring down the aide, who pretended not to notice. She crossed to Matt, tapped him on the shoulder. 'C'mon, now. I take you to Dindren.'

He gathered his bucket and mop and followed her outside and across the quad towards the Admin Building.

'I thought we were going to Module Two.'

'We are, but first we gotta stop in the Control Room, make sure that Hirotachi's on break.'

'Control Room . . . ?'

'You know—like where the monitors at for all the surveillance cameras, right? Control Room.'

'Oh. Right.' Matt hadn't even noticed the cameras. He changed the topic. 'I talked a minute to that girl,' he said, 'the blonde . . .'

'Yeah, Annica. She crazy as the rest. Once I take you to Control, I gotta go back quick, else the aides'll be fuckin' with her.'

'I got that. But what happens to her when you leave and the night shift takes over?'

'That ain't my problem.'