that used to be called New Amsterdam, or just the city, and he said, who cares? “None of this stuff matters anymore, Melanie. I just gave it to you because all the textbooks we’ve got are twenty years old.”
Melanie persists, because New Amsterdam was way back in the eighteenth century, so she doesn’t think twenty years should matter all that much. “But when the Dutch colonists—” she says.
Mr. Galloway cuts her off. “Jesus, it’s irrelevant. It’s ancient history! The Hungries tore up the map. There’s nothing east of Kansas anymore. Not a damn thing.”
So it’s possible, even quite likely, that some of Melanie’s lists need to be updated in some respects.
The children have classes on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. On Saturday, the children stay locked in their rooms all day and music plays over the PA system. Nobody comes, not even Sergeant, and the music is too loud to talk over. Melanie had the idea long ago of making up a language that used signs instead of words, so the children could talk to each other through their little mesh windows, and she went ahead and made the language up, or some of it anyway, but when she asked Miss Mailer if she could teach it to the class, Miss Mailer told her no really loud and sharp. She made Melanie promise not to mention her sign language to any of the other teachers, and especially not to Sergeant. “He’s paranoid enough already,” she said. “If he thinks you’re talking behind his back, he’ll lose what’s left of his mind.”
So Melanie never got to teach the other children how to talk in sign language.
Saturdays are long and dull, and hard to get through. Melanie tells herself aloud some of the stories that the children have been told in class. It’s okay to say them out loud because the music hides her voice. Otherwise Sergeant would come in and tell her to stop.
Melanie knows that Sergeant is still there on Saturdays, because one Saturday when Ronnie hit her hand against the mesh window of her cell until it bled and got all mashed up, Sergeant came in. He brought two of his people, and all three of them were dressed in the big suits, and they went into Ronnie’s cell and Melanie guessed from the sounds that they were trying to tie Ronnie into her chair. She also guessed from the sounds that Ronnie was struggling and making it hard for them, because she kept shouting and saying, “Let me alone! Let me alone!” Then there was a banging sound that went on and on and Sergeant shouted, “Shut up shut up shut up shut up shut up!” and then other people were shouting, too, and someone said, “Christ Jesus, don’t—” and then it all went quiet again.
Melanie couldn’t tell what happened after that. The people who work for Sergeant went around and locked all the little doors over the mesh windows, so the children couldn’t see out. They stayed locked all day. The next Monday, Ronnie wasn’t in the class anymore, and nobody seemed to know what had happened to her. Melanie likes to think that Ronnie went through the thirteenth door on the left into another class, so she might come back one day when Sergeant shuffles the deck again. But what Melanie really believes, when she can’t stop herself from thinking about it, is that Sergeant took Ronnie away to punish her, and he won’t let her see any of the other children ever again.
Sundays are like Saturdays except for the shower. At the start of the day the children are put in their chairs as though it’s a regular school day, but instead of being taken to the classroom, they’re taken to the shower room, which is the last door on the right, just before the bare steel door.
In the shower room, which is white-tiled and empty, the children sit and wait until everybody has been wheeled in. Then the doors are closed and sealed, which means the room is completely dark because there aren’t any lights in there. Pipes behind the walls start to make a sound like someone trying not to laugh, and a chemical spray falls from the ceiling.
It’s the same chemical that’s on the teachers and Sergeant and Sergeant’s people, or at least it smells the same, but it’s a lot stronger. It stings a little, at first. Then it stings a lot. It leaves Melanie’s eyes puffy, reddened and half-blind. But it evaporates quickly from clothes and skin, so after half an hour more of sitting in the still, dark room, there’s nothing left of it but the smell, and then finally the smell fades, too, or at least they get used to it so it’s not so bad anymore, and they just wait in silence for the door to be unlocked and Sergeant’s people to come and get them. This is how the children are washed, and for that reason, if for no other, Sunday is probably the worst day of the week.
The best day of the week is whichever day Miss Mailer teaches. It isn’t always the same day, and some weeks she doesn’t come at all. Melanie guesses that there are more than five classes of children, and that the teachers’ time is divided arbitrarily among them. Certainly there’s no pattern that she can discern, and she’s really good at that stuff.
When Miss Mailer teaches, the day is full of amazing things. Sometimes she’ll read poems aloud, or bring her flute and play it, or show the children pictures out of a book and tell them stories about the people in the pictures. That was how Melanie got to find out about Agamemnon and the Trojan War, because one of the paintings showed Agamemnon’s wife, Clytemnestra, looking really mad and scary. “Why is she so mad?” Anne asked Miss Mailer.
“Because Agamemnon killed their daughter,” Miss Mailer said. “The Greek fleet was stuck in harbor on the island of Aulis. So Agamemnon put his daughter on an altar, and he killed her so that the goddess Artemis would give the Greek fleet fair winds and help them to get to the war on time.”
The kids in the class were mostly both scared and delighted with this, like it was a ghost story or something, but Melanie was troubled by it. How could killing a little girl change the way the winds blew? “You’re right, Melanie, it couldn’t,” Miss Mailer said. “But the Ancient Greeks had a lot of gods, and all kinds of weird ideas about what would make the gods happy. So Agamemnon gave Iphigenia’s death to the goddess as a present, and his wife decided he had to pay for that.”
Melanie, who already knew by this time that her own name was Greek, decided she was on Clytemnestra’s side. Maybe it was important to get to the war on time, but you shouldn’t kill kids to do it. You should just row harder, or put more sails up. Or maybe you should go in a boat that had an outboard motor.
The only problem with the days when Miss Mailer teaches is that the time goes by too quickly. Every second is so precious to Melanie that she doesn’t even blink: she just sits there wide-eyed, drinking in everything that Miss Mailer says, and memorizing it so that she can play it back to herself later, in her cell. And whenever she can manage it, she asks Miss Mailer questions, because what she likes most to hear, and to remember, is Miss Mailer’s voice saying her name, Melanie, in that way that makes her feel like the most important person in the world.
One day, Sergeant comes into the classroom on a Miss Mailer day. Melanie doesn’t know he’s there until he speaks, because he’s standing right at the back of the class. When Miss Mailer says, “. . . and this time, Pooh and Piglet counted three sets of footprints in the snow,” Sergeant’s voice breaks in with, “What the fuck is this?”
Miss Mailer stops, and looks round. “I’m reading the children a story, Sergeant Robertson,” she says.
“I can see that,” Sergeant’s voice says. “I thought the idea was to educate them, not give them a cabaret.”
“Stories can educate just as much as facts,” Miss Mailer says.
“Like how, exactly?” Sergeant asks, nastily.
“They teach us how to live, and how to think.”
“Oh yeah, plenty of world-class ideas in
“They’re children,” Miss Mailer points out.
“No, they’re not,” Sergeant says, very loudly. “And that, that right there, that’s why you don’t want to read them
Sergeant comes out to the front of the class then, and he does something really horrible. He rolls up his sleeve, all the way to the elbow, and he holds his bare forearm in front of Kenny’s face: right in front of Kenny, just an inch or so away from him. Nothing happens at first, but then Sergeant spits on his hand and rubs at his forearm, like he’s wiping something away.
“Don’t,” says Miss Mailer. “Don’t do that to him.” But Sergeant doesn’t answer her or look at her.
Melanie sits two rows behind Kenny, and two rows over, so she can see the whole thing. Kenny goes real stiff, and he whimpers, and then his mouth gapes wide and he starts to snap at Sergeant’s arm, which of course he can’t reach. And drool starts to drip down from the corner of his mouth, but not much of it because nobody ever
