Ring of Knives

CHAPTER TWO

Twenty minutes later, as instructed, Matt stepped out of the fog to meet Maloria at the Admin Building's back loading dock. She gave him a mop, a bucket, and a maroon knit golf shirt with "Carthage Janitorial" embroidered on the chest, below a gold plastic name tag that said "Sid."

"So if I've got this, what's Sid wearing?" Matt asked, unbuttoning his flannel shirt and tying it around his waist.

"Orange fuckin' jumpsuit is what that cracker got on, after the shit he played with that retarded girl we got sent on accident last month." She shook her gold streak ruefully. "This place gone to hell is what, and that's no joke. First they cut the fundin' to nothin', then they lay off, then they start usin' part-timers. But with shit pay, shit hours, no benefits, an' no supervision, who you gonna get? Buncha kiddie-porn-watchin', methamphetamine-cookin', probation-dodgin', dead-beat, crackhead, stripper-for-a-girlfriend, no-count ma'fuckahs, is what."

"And you can work with that?"

"Fuck no. Three weeks from now? I'll be onna South Side of Chicago, with my moms and sister. That's where I'm from. When I make forty in April, I'm 'a be with my moms for sure. 'Til then, I collect my pay, and any one of them fuckheads tries somethin'?" She patted her huge purse.

"You'll Tase their ass."

"Damn straight. Paid three hundred twenty-five dollars for this shit. Now, come on, follow me."

He had the shirt on now. Together they took the mops and buckets and began walking across a quad towards the four modules out back.

"Arright, listen up. Way it's gonna work is, you keep your mouth shut and stay with me. We got to clean Module One. People ask, just say you fillin' in as a swing. Dr. Dindren's in Module Two. Hirotachi in charge of that module, but she always take a meal break around five o'clock. That's when I'll take you over there, an' you can talk to your friend."

"Sounds good."

"Yeah, but hear this: I'm only workin' a half shift today, so at seven I got to leave. You stay longer than that, you on your own."

"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."

# # # # # #

To get into Admin, Maloria led him through a back door that led to the facility's kitchen.

"All kinda nasty get cooked up in here," Maloria said as Matt looked around.

The kitchen had clearly seen better days. In his brief transit, Matt counted at least four thumb-sized roaches exploring the stove and cabinets. He also noticed that while there was no smoke alarm in sight, the kitchen was well equipped with cutlery: four large wooden grids held dozens of serrated steak knives and cleavers, as well as two huge butcher's knives that were at least twelve inches long.

What the hell? Matt didn't know much about mental health, but he doubted that the residents were getting sirloin every night. So why was the kitchen outfitted like an Outback Steakhouse?

Even weirder, from a ceiling rack hung a row of headless spatulas and meat forks with missing tines, as well as an unconnected extension cord and an odd set of cuffs.

Curious, Matt reached out and touched the cuffs as he walked by. They seemed to be wooden wrist braces, five inches thick, covered in leather buckles. Each one had a deep groove cut into the wood, but their purpose wasn't clear.

"What're these?" he asked Maloria.

"Unless you the Board of Health," she said, not looking back, "keep ya damn hands to yourself."

With that, she shoved through two swinging double doors, leading Matt out of the kitchen and into a large hallway. "Hold on." Maloria stopped suddenly, peering ahead at a half-open door marked "Control." "Gotta see if someone's in there, first. Shouldn't be, since it's my post tonight, but you never know where them skanks is hookin' up." She took him by the elbow. "So here: you go clean the FA's office while I find out what up." And she hurriedly pushed Matt through a door marked "Facility Administrator."

It was an office that probably counted as fancy in this place: a window looking out onto the quad, a heavy oak desk (with a blotter, no less), a leather chair, a brass lamp, some cherry bookshelves full of books on mental health and team leadership techniques.

That is, it would have looked fancy if the chair hadn't been knocked over and papers strewn all over the floor. Behind the chair, a large cork bulletin board covered in lists and photographs had been knocked off its left screw and hung diagonally from the right.

Apparently, the only things that hadn't been trashed were three tribal masks hung on the wall opposite the door. They looked Ojibwe to Matt. Two were deer masks and had long, tapering snouts and antlers. The third was a triangle of tanned leather, with a single eye slit in the center, and at the bottom tip, a serrated cluster of shark's teeth. The mask gave Matt a queasy feeling. He forced himself to look away from it, to focus on the surrounding mess.

Matt gathered up a handful of papers and laid them on the desk. Under the papers were pieces of shattered glass and a broken picture frame. He picked that up, too. In it was a photo of a smiling, bookish man with bifocals and a silver beard, flanked on either side by two girls of about ten and thirteen, giving bracey smiles.

Matt dropped the broken glass into a garbage bag and set the picture on the stacked papers he'd put on the desk-then took it off again. The top sheet had caught his eye. He picked it up, held it under the light.

It was a form marked Incident Report. It had been dated five days earlier in bright blue ink, and under Reporter a hand had written in hasty, scrawled cursive, Thomas Sterns, FA. Under Incident, it said

At approximately 12:15 AM on March 1, 2011, this writer was working late in preparation for the annual audit when he became aware of a loud commotion outside. Looking through the window in his office, he saw what seemed to be three therapy aides roughly escorting an unidentified, protesting individual past the quad towards the meditation path. This writer immediately proceeded to the back entrance, only to find it blocked by Therapy Aides Holtz and Pfister, who-in this writer's view-intentionally delayed his exit by pretending to be "fixing" the door, and repeatedly demonstrated insubordination by refusing to let him pass. After several minutes of argument, this writer was finally allowed to go outside, whereupon he proceeded to the meditation path but found no trace of the individuals previously sighted.

No clarification was gained from talking to the lead workers, one of whom (Aide II Mendez) this writer found sleeping. It should be mentioned that Module One was in complete disarray, and the common room of Module Two was filled with the stench of decomposing meat, although Aide II Hirotashi insisted that there was no spoiled food in the refrigerator.

This writer believes that poor morale, lack of supervision, total absence of accountability, along with the unexplained departure of Dr. Kingsley and Head Nurse Reich, have had a deleterious effect upon the operations of this facility to the point where the residents are actually becoming endangered. This writer is requesting that the instant matter be fully investigated, and further recommends that Aides Holtz and Pfister be disciplined for insubo

The report left off there, halfway down the page. A four-inch line of blue ink extended from the o in insubordination to the edge of the page.

Matt reread it from the beginning, and then set it carefully down on the desk, beneath the broken picture frame.

Moving behind the desk, Matt righted the tipped-over leather chair. He got ahold of the fallen end of the cork bulletin board and slid it up the wall to reattach the left-hand hook to its screw.

Again, he stopped.

Stared.

Revealed on the drywall behind the hanging board was a black smear. It was roughly the shape of the Nike swoosh, and the thin end tapered off into a long spatter. The thick end had several thin silver strands embedded in it. Matt leaned closer, pinched one, pulled it free of the black crust. Held it up to the light.

A silver hair.

Matt looked back to the photo on the desk. The smiling, bookish graybeard with his two bracey daughters.

What the hell is going on here?