Authors: Mark Jeffrey
Elspeth smiled.
“Okay then.
Friends, then.
Having dinner.
Then yes.”
THE NEXT NIGHT, Elspeth was led by one of the other members of the Order through the labyrinth of tunnels to a small cavern that was isolated from the rest of the tunnel complex.
There, David sat a candle-lit table with two chairs and a veritable feast on it.
He rose as she entered.
“Ah!
Elspeth!”
He beamed.
“So glad you could make it to the best restaurant this side of the prison!”
She laughed.
God, the food smelled so good!
She hadn’t realized how famished she was until this moment.
David scampered around the table and pulled out the seat for her.
“I was even able to find a chair that should be just right for your height … here you go!”
She sat and found he was right: it put her at perfect table level.
So many times, she found herself hunching over as she ate a meal in a restaurant.
She found herself grateful — and impressed with this little touch — despite herself.
“I call this place The Cavern,” he said, pouring wine for both of them.
“It’s an exclusive place — not everyone in the Glass Prison or even the Order of the Black Dove gets an invite here.”
“Yeah about that … the Black Dove.
What does that stand for?
Who came up with that goofy name?”
David feigned hurt.
“Ohhhh.
You wound me, Elspeth.”
He grabbed his heart.
“I came up with it.”
She laughed.
“You did?”
“Yeah.
I wanted something that sounded … you know.
Mysterious.
I mean, this prison has lots of gangs with their own bad-sounding names.
I thought we should have one also.”
“But you’re not a gang.
You have children in the Order, for crying out loud.”
David shrugged.
“Still.
This is a prison, even for the children.
It’s a hard life for everyone, even them.
I think they’ve earned the right to a bad-ass name.
It makes them feel protected, like they’re a part of something also.”
“Can’t argue with you there.
Listen.
Can we eat?
I am dying to …”
“Yes!
By all means!
We have steak here, and stuffing there, and pumpkin pie over here and …”
“Oh my God,” she said, her mouth already full of steak.
“I have not had meat in weeks …”
She didn’t say another word for a full fifteen minutes.
David kept the wine flowing, and she didn’t care one bit that a man watched her with amusement as she gorged herself.
FEELING QUITE a bit better in all sorts of ways, Elspeth became a lot more talkative.
“So you have guns,” she said.
“There are enough of you to storm the Panopticon.
I don’t know how many guards there are, but they don’t look like
that
many.
Why don’t you try to escape by force?”
David laughed aloud heartily.
“What?
What’s so funny about that?”
When he finally stopped laughing, he said:
“Those guns you think we have are actually made of soap and painted with shoe polish.
They’re not real guns at all.”
Not …?
“No.
We carved them.
We’ve gotten quite good at making ones that look pretty real.
You could call it practical art.”
“Wow,” Elspeth said.
“You could have fooled me.”
“We
did
fool you.”
They both laughed.
“But no, we’re not attacking the Panopticon armed with soap guns.
Although … we do have plenty of knives: daggers. Shivs, and even makeshift short swords.
Still.
All that wouldn’t be nearly enough against the armory of weapons they’ve got in the Panopticon.”
He pause for a moment and said:
“So.
Out there, in the real world, you’re a rich doctor.
All this must have been quite a shock … taken some getting used to.”
“Not as rich as you think,” Elspeth said, taking another sip of wine, and really feeling it now.
“See, everyone thinks doctors are rich.
We’re not poor … but you’d be surprised at how not-rich we actually are.
Here, I’ll tell you story about that.”
She paused for moment to wolf down some more and then resumed:
“About ten years ago, Oscar — that’s my husband — Oscar and I, we had a daughter.
I was just starting my own practice, and we didn’t have a lot of money yet.
Anyway … these drug companies came calling.
You know, Big Pharma.
They have lots and lots of money.
And they spend it — God, how they spend it!
“They have these salespeople who come and visit you.
Always attractive!
Did you know that pharmaceutical salespeople have the highest percentage of former prom kings and queens of any profession?
It’s true.
All those kids who were the hottest in high school, they go to college and then, bam!
They’re done.
The real world hits them.
“So what do they do?
I’ll tell you what.
They go into sales — usually pharma, because it’s so lucrative.
And just like that, they’re back again, just like high school and college, hanging with the hot crowd, and hotting around with doctors and nurses.
It’s sexy.
“Only — they don’t really know what they’re selling.
And they don’t much care.
All they’re worried about is hitting their quota — and where the next kegger is come Saturday night.
“Anyway, this one smooth talking guy comes along and introduces me to Quaofloxin.
It’s a new injectable for a variety of illnesses.
The studies on it are out of John Hopkins, Harvard, you name it.
They’ve got graphs that all go up, up, up to Mars.
Liquid sunshine, just pop it in a vein twice a week.
“But the real attraction is the gifts and kickbacks that come with it.
The more you prescribe, the more kickbacks you get.
Oh it’s not supposed to work like that, but that’s exactly how it does work.
They structure it in ways that make it so it doesn’t appear to be a kickback, it’s a ‘gift’ or a ‘reward’.
But the result is the same: your bank account starts filling up.
“Well, Quaofloxin made my practice possible.
In the first few years, when my business probably would have folded, those extra reward dollars worked wonders on my account.
Even so, right around the second year, I started to have my doubts about Quaofloxin: too many of my patients were showing side effects.
Some suffered convulsions; others developed severe neck and back pain.
One lost the ability to walk.
One even died, after losing the ability to breathe.
Now, mind you, I wasn’t absolutely
sure
that it was the Quaofloxin was directly responsible — and all the studies indicated the opposite, that the drug was completely safe.
“Even still, I might have gotten off the Quaofloxin crack pipe, if it hadn’t been for our baby.”
Elspeth paused for a moment, a spasm of pain wracking her face.
“Oscar had just lost his job when I got pregnant.
By the time I went on maternity leave, we were basically living off of what I’d managed to sock away from the Quaofloxin ‘rewards’.
And that’s when we got our second shock: our baby daughter was born with a faulty heart valve.
She wasn’t expected to live.
“So the operations began.
There were four of them total.
Four!
Can you imagine that?
On a body that tiny?
And of course we had health insurance, but no insurance covers something like this, not really.
The medical bills started piling up.
I had to go back to work, far sooner than I wanted to, but there was no choice.
“We were desperate.
We badly needed money for our baby to live.
It was that simple.
It was an equation.
If you had the money, you could pay for life.
If not … well, then not.
I mean,
holy shit
, right?
When your child is at stake, you’ll do anything.
So I loaded up on the Quaofloxin.
I doubled down.
I prescribed it like candy.
“And I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong, mind you.
The rational part of my brain, the scientific part, it reasoned that the best science backed this stuff up.
So what
if I made money from it?
And not just money — money I desperately needed?
That was capitalism.
That was the free market.
But I ignored the little voice in my brain, the gut instinct you get as a doctor, the intuition that something was off.
I pushed it down, chalked it up to irrational guilt.
Guilt over what?
Success?
That I was a Doctor?
You’re goddamn right I was Doctor!
I’d worked my ass off in school for years —!
“Well.
This was my reward.
This money.
The ability to protect my baby.
To buy her life.
It was my goddamn
reward
!”
Elspeth was almost in tears.
David could see the story was tearing her apart.
“And it worked.
She lived.
She doesn’t have any complications at all.
You’d never know she was born with anything.
There are miracles in the world.
But they cost money.
They’re expensive.”
For the first time, she saw the look on David’s face as she had been speaking.
He looked sad, strange.
“Yes.
You’re right.
There
are
miracles in the world.
And they’re
very
expensive.”
SIX: THE VIZIER
ELSPETH WAS kept on work detail in the arboretum for several days.
Her routine was mind-numbingly simple.
She now lived the life of a peasant girl in the middle ages, she decided.
Penniless and cold, she rose to harvest the crops at hard labor during the day.
And at night, she slept on a bed that might as well have been a palette — though she did have the Order to keep her mind occupied.
“Hey,” James Card called out to her one night.
“Yeah, I’m here,” Elspeth said over the racket of the night films.
She came to the bars.
“Oh look.
It lives!”
“Stop it.
You don’t know how hard the work is in the arboretum.
Ridiculous
.”
“I guess not.
They have me in the metal shop now.
Pretty easy compared to everywhere else.
I’m making barrels.
I think.”
“Barrels?”
“Yeah.
Big cylinder things.
We’re welding them from metal sheets.
Could be for wine.”
She laughed.
“I doubt it.”
Again, she felt the urge to tell him about the Order and even about the wine she’d recently had … but declined to do so.
She’d given her word to David.
“Hey.
Well anyway I wanted to tell you two things.
Ready for the first?”
“Sure.
Shoot.”
“Okay … one sec.”
He vanished from his bars, and she heard a big band jazz song start up in his cell — she could barely hear it over the din of the movies, but hear it she could.
He returned, his face glowing.
“Eh?
How’s that?”
“What is that?”
“That’s my phonograph!
The one I asked for!
They actually gave me one!”
Elspeth stared stunned.
“They did?”
“Uh-huh!”
“Incredible.
I knew you were a good salesman but …”
“Never underestimate my salesmanship, not even in here!
I’m always an entrepreneur, no matter where I am!”