Slot Machine (19 page)

At the front door Oskar turned the knob briskly, then kicked it open, making enough racket to attract the attention of everyone in the room. All eyes turned to us, and I found myself staring back. It was as if somebody had thrown on a light in some secret experimental geek lab in the middle of the night where the mad scientist was building a separate race out of mismatched and discarded pieces of all the other slots.

“Welcome to the Arts Sector,” Oskar laughed. “In the library,” I said, the smile holding steady.

Mother Superior,

Would that thou mightst have witnessed the greatest yet accomplishment of thy sole progeny.

They kicked me out of Religion Sector.

It was a classic clash of power. I was like Martin Luther, throwing open the floor to new ideas, winning converts left and right, only to be excommunicated for it. Half the class was lining up to join my sect when they ran me out of there.

But they cannot contain it now. Elvinism is coming.

Yours in Christ,

Bishop Elvin

W
HEN I GOT UP
that next morning, I didn’t stumble blindly into my old workout routine. I still woke before everybody else, but this time I just lay there, knowing I didn’t have to get my body in shape for anything. I lay there staring, listening to the breathing of the animals all around me inside and the chirps of the animals outside. I thought about the impossible geekdom of the Arts Sector and laughed, wondering what I was possibly going to do over there. I rustled, adjusted my pillow, closed my eyes, pretending to myself that I wanted to enjoy some more lazy sleep. Then I did what I really wanted to do. I got up, dressed, stretched, feeling my muscles screaming yet alive again. Then I went out and ran. Just because I felt like it.

I started sweating the instant I stepped out the door. It felt good. I jogged, I strode, I ran. I stroked it. Fluid, right arm up, left knee up, left arm up, right leg up. Two breaths up, two down. All my parts were working together, like they knew what they were doing, like they knew each other well. It hurt, of course. It was hard, of course. I was still tortoise slow, of course. But I was in sync, and I was enjoying it. I was better, running down the road, down the path, amid the trees, up the hill, than I had ever been before. Because I took a day off? Why didn’t I think of that before, to just take a day off to recharge?

Because I was an athlete before. An organized athlete. A slottist. And they don’t do that. They don’t take days off, ever.

Now I could enjoy it, and I did. I felt stronger, freer, more efficient. Better. Because I was doing it for nothing and nobody. I ran and ran harder, pushed myself, panted, felt the heartburn and the charley horse burn. I almost wished I
did
have football players to smash into later that day, almost wished I
did
have wrestlers to break.

I laughed as I ran up the hill—no small effort to do those two together. I remembered I’d need all my strength to slay the wild arts horde.

I was very nearly to the top of the hill when I caught myself. I stopped dead before reaching the peak. The campsite. I didn’t want to see that. Whatever it was like now, I didn’t want to see it. I turned around and rumbled back down.

There were a hundred million differences, give or take a mil, between the Arts Sector and all the others. Starting right at the top, the Brothers. While all the sports slots had one or two official Brothers hanging around drinking iced tea and clapping just to make the “non-sports” camp look legit while lay coaches did all the real work, Arts Sector was crawling with Brothers. Busy Brothers. And while the Brothers who did nothing everywhere else went out of their way to look Brotherly—the black suit, shoes, socks, half-white collar even in the blistering sun—you couldn’t tell that the Arts Brothers were Brothers unless they told you. The largest swatch of black in the whole library—other than on the students, who were dripping in it—was Brother Clarke’s cloud of fuzzy black hair. It was about a foot high off his head—like Larry of the Three Stooges if he wasn’t balding.

I met Brother Clarke first, the instant I entered the library. It smelled wonderful, and he was the reason why.

“Drink?” he asked, still hunched over a small hissing black machine on a table.

“What?”

“Drink, I said. Or, rather, Drink? with a question mark. As in, Do you? Would you? Like a drink? Café? Espresso?”

I dumbfounded him with my dumbfounded expression.

Brother Clarke gently put his cup down on the table, then not-so-gently grabbed my shoulders and shook me. “Coffee. Coffee, boy. For god’s sake, don’t you smell it? Are you with us, son?” Even after he stopped talking, he kept shaking me.

“No-o-o,” I burbled. “None-for-me-thanks. And-you-might-think-about-cutting-down-yourself.”

He laughed, gave me one last good shake, and pinched my cheek. “So, what do you do?” he asked, challenged, really, but in a funnish, robust way. He swiped up his mug with one hand and put the other hand in his pocket, waiting for an answer. When I hesitated, he dramatically looked at his watch.

“What do you mean, what do I do? Like, do I have a job?”

Brother Clarke blinked at me fifty times, shifted his weight back and forth and back and forth as if waiting for me to answer was like waiting in a long bathroom line.

“Artistically speaking,” he said finally. “What is your gift?”

“Oh, that,” I said, nodding and pointing my I-get-it finger at him. “None.”

“I see, no gift. What, then, is your strength?”

“Okay,” I said, nodding some more, “now we’re getting somewhere. My strength? None.”

“I see, no strength. How about... er, proclivity? You got a proclivity?”

“Nope.”

“Leaning?”

“Straight up and down.”

“Inclination?”

“Without.”

“Aptitude?”

“Getting colder.”

Brother Clarke let out a great sigh, refilled his coffee, and asked with his back to me, “Have you got any ambition at all?”

“Yes,” I said surely. “I want to go home.”

“
Finally
,” he proclaimed, throwing his coffee-free hand up into the air, “we’re getting somewhere. Tap your ruby slippers together and follow me.”

I followed along as Brother Clarke led me through the library. It was a different place now from the building that had belonged to only me the week before. The lights were all on. Here and there guys were slumped at tables, reading, painting, or doing projects that were unfathomable to me, making god knows what out of god knows what. One guy was making a model out of what looked like mud, building, I think, a Madonna except she kept disintegrating because the mix was too watery.

“What is your name?” Brother Clarke asked over his shoulder.

“Bishop,” I said. “Elvin Bishop.”

“Bishop Elvin Bishop. It’s dramatic. Like Ford Maddox Ford, right? Or William Carlos Williams. Or Flavor Flav. What do you want to be called? Bishop? Elvin? Bishy?”

“Elvin,” I said, stopping to do a double take as a guy stroked a coat of shellac over what I swore were dog droppings. After a few seconds the guy felt my presence.

“Gonna be a napkin holder. For my mom,” he said icily.

“You haven’t been deloused yet, have you, Bishy?”

“Elvin.”

“Come on, you can’t tell me you got through over two weeks of sports camp without being nicknamed.”

“Big Booty,” I sighed.

“Good one,” Brother Clarke said.

“And if you were at the talent show, you may remember me as The Masked Potato.”

“No way. You were The Potato? Hot damn.”

“Ya, I’m kind of a celeb. Free Willy, The White Tornado, Squishy Bishy...”

“Ouch. Free Willy, huh? Is that because you’re heavy, or because you’re boring?”

I stared at him deadly.

“We’ll go with your regular name then. Okay, Elvin, let’s get you deloused.”

“Let’s,” I said, though I had no idea what he was talking about.

He threw open the door to the periodicals room, where a meeting was in progress. Brother Clarke shoved me down into a seat at the back of the room as a student stood to speak. It took the kid a long while to stand all the way up to his full elongated height, but when he did, I brightened.

“My name is Paul Burman,” he said sadly, tentatively, “and I hate the shit out of basketball. I spent the last two weeks taking passes in the pivot from some psychopath who would not let me alone. They were so hot to have my body in the slot that they wouldn’t let me out until I took off all my clothes in the middle of a scrimmage and played naked for five minutes. I blocked three shots with my privates dangling.”

There was polite applause all around.

“My name is Lennox,” the next outcast said. “I was a prisoner of wrestling for two weeks. I want to paint.”

“I want to sculpt.”

“I want to draw.”

“I want to build.”

“My name is Eugene, and I
do
bathe, twice a day. And I don’t have to be here. And when school starts I will be back on the wrestling team, but I want to do other things. I want to sing.”

I knew them. I knew every one of them. I hadn’t been slotted with every single one of them, but I knew each one, somehow. We’d sat at adjoining tables at mealtimes, or crossed paths while being ejected from one slot or another, or logged some time together in sick bay. There wasn’t a guy in here who hadn’t nodded his head or said “hey” or “how ya doin’” to me as we floated by on our paths to very different places. The football players didn’t do that. If I didn’t keep my head up and jump out of the way, they’d trample me rather than say “hi” or “excuse me.” My own Cluster mates would go days without acknowledging me or half of their other neighbors. But all these guys...

What was I doing here with all these geeks?

And where did they get all this focus? Half of them couldn’t tell you what month it was out there in the real world, or if they needed a drink of water, but suddenly, here, they had the answer. “I want to be a dancer. I want to be an architect...” Where did all this come from?

“You, sir,” Brother Fox said, pointing to me.

“Me, sir?” I repeated, also pointing to me.

“You, sir.”

Brother Clarke nudged me, and I got up. Nervously, I spit it out. “I started in football. Then I got knocked out and went to sick bay. Then I went to baseball. Then I went to sick bay. Then I spent a long time in wrestling, a little more time in sick bay... then I golfed, which put me
really
in sick bay; then I got Religion Sector.”

That brought the big reaction. When I bottomed out with the Religion Sector, the heartfelt moans that were directed my way—even from the Brothers—even made
me
get all choked up for the poor sap we were discussing, whoever he was. Heads shook, the hands were raised to cover mouths, as if what I’d really said was “and
then
the big one held me while the little one pistol whipped me. And
then
...” We were all on the brink of tears.

“It’s been a long road, hasn’t it, son?” Brother Fox said. “What is your name?”

“Bishop, Brother.”

“Well, Bishy—”

Brother Clarke started waving his arms at Brother Fox. “Ix-nay on the ishy-Bay,” he said, kindly.

“Well, Mr. Bishop,” Brother Fox said, pausing for emphasis and looking all around the room to include all the sad sacks. “That shit’s history. You’re artists now.”

There was a round of laughs and applause as everyone stood.

“Whoever wants to do performance, drama, music, follow Brother Crudelle that way,” he announced, and three guys walked out behind the Brother who looked like Jesus only skinnier. “Those of you who want to try painting, drawing, sculpting, or other visual arts, go with Brother Mattus.” Half the group got up and followed after Mattus, who looked like a cross between Santa Claus and Rasputin. “Those of you interested in exploring print-making, textile art, mixed media, abstract art, experimental art, and the study of art history will be coming with me.” There were six of us left, obviously the six who had no idea what we wanted and were waiting to be struck by something. “And the last group, going with Brother Percy, will be those interested in poetry and prose.”

Well that decided it. The other five fence sitters hurried to line up behind Brother Fox.

Myself, I remained. Like the moment before, and the year before. Undecided. Unclear. Unmoved. Unattracted. Paralyzed with the depth of my own nothingness. I made my decision the way I made all my decisions. By sitting passively.

Brother Percy walked up to me, chuckling. The last of the last were filing out of the room as he sat backward on the chair in front of me. “You don’t know it yet,” he said, “but we are an elite class, you and I. After sifting and sifting, weeding and sorting, picking and cleaning, and sifting again, out of the bottom of the sieve drops only the finest grain of all.”

I looked at him, leaning closer, to try and see if he was for real. I couldn’t tell.

“The dregs, you mean,” I said.

He stood up over me, a medium-built six one, with prematurely silver collarbone-length hair. “Son,” he said with a generous face, extending a hand for me to shake, “I perceive in you a problem of perspective.”

I shook his hand and he tugged me up out of the chair.

“What if I
hate
poetry?” I asked as he led me out with his arm around my shoulders. I figured I’d break it to him in stages that I did, in fact, hate poetry already.

“Then you move on,” he said, shrugging. “You are not tied to any one art while you’re here. Everyone is welcome to float from one area to another if he likes, and every year most of the fellows do. In fact, I insist you do.”

“What if I don’t
want
to?” I snapped, out of reflex. My wick was burning down quickly in the last days of camp.

“Ah, a bona fide contrarian. This is going to be a pleasure. A
pleasure
,” he said.

“But look at them,” I said, making a sweeping gesture with my hand over the main room of the library. It was already abuzz with eager rookie artists making a lunatic formless cheery colorful mess of the place. Santa’s workshop merged with
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
. “They’re all geeks. They’re all mental.”