The Nobody People Bob Proehl (pocket ebook reader .txt) 📖

the whole thing to rest.” He’s pudgy and sweaty, squeezed into a secondhand military uniform decorated with a spatter pattern of buttons and pins you’d expect from a chain restaurant waiter. He likes to give the impression that he’s where the buck stops. Carrie’s figured out enough about Topaz Lake to know Pitt’s a regional manager in general’s clothing. He signs paychecks and requisition forms. He moves someone else’s money around. She’s surprised he’s involved in the investigation of the power outage the night of the Christmas pageant. Usually something like this is handed off to men with more stomach for cruelty. The fact that he’s questioning her means she’s safe. The real investigators moved through anyone they thought was involved in the days immediately afterward. What he’s said is true: this is a formality.

“I’m taking this incident as an opportunity to speak to some of our residents about what it is we’re doing here,” he says. “To clear up any ambiguity of mission.”

“You call yourself ‘warden,’ ” Carrie says. “That’s pretty unambiguous.”

Pitt shakes his head the way a teacher might at an ignorant child. “The word actually means something closer to ‘guardian,’ ” he says. “I’m here to watch over you all. I see to it you’re fed and clothed. Like a father, really.”

Carrie imagines jumping across the table, sinking her fingers into the roll of fat above his collar, and squeezing until his eyes bug out.

“Of course,” she says.

“What we’re doing here is an experiment,” he says, clicking into the practiced part of his speech. “An intentional community, if you’re familiar with that phrase. The people I work for believe that you people will ultimately be happier separate from the rest of us. The general public is happier with you separated from them. They feel safer. I think in time, you’ll come to feel safer as well, among your own kind. At some point, we were sold the idea that integration is an inherently American ideal. But what is that based on? Where’s the evidence? If you think about any group of people, they will naturally tend toward their own. That’s how you get your Chinatowns and your Koreatowns. Your Harlems and your Comptons. I think of Topaz Lake as a prototype. Resonant Town, version one point oh. Do you follow me, Miss Norris?”

“Chinatown doesn’t have armed guards at the gate,” she says.

His jaw tenses. “No, but there were structures that pushed people together.” He forces his palms against each other like he’s compressing a cartoonishly large sandwich. “Laws, economic conditions. Now, because of the idea that we should all be one big melting pot, such things no longer exist. The people I work for have been forced to be more proactive. Thinking outside the box.”

“You have literally boxed us in,” Carrie says.

“But have we hurt you?” he says, cloyingly sweet. “Haven’t you found here a wholeness that eluded you on the outside? A sense of true community?”

Carrie glares at him. She thinks about Public Day, before the shooting. The sense she had that everyone was in it together for a second, before it was shattered. She thinks of the night on the beach at Coney Island and the feeling of unity. She could never separate that night from that first kiss, but it seemed as if the kiss could have happened only that night, she and Miquel part of something bigger than themselves. Something large enough to draw them together. There were more people like them at Topaz Lake, but it didn’t feel bigger than that night on the beach.

“The thing you fail to understand is that these incidents make it harder for us to keep you safe,” he says, seeming truly hurt. “This morning, I got a report that a young man named—” He rifles through papers on his desk. “—Siu Zhang was repairing the inhibitor tower on the northwest fence when his harness broke and he fell to his death.” Warden Pitt overpronounces the name, saying it as See You. He looks at Carrie with mild inquisitiveness as her friend’s death registers. Siu, who sent the signal. Siu who volunteered, even though, like Miquel, he’d made his peace with life in the camp, found a girl he wouldn’t have met on the outside, a grad student from Wisconsin. Siu, who preferred Robert Fripp to Mick Ronson but played guitar like Ronson because he didn’t want to embarrass himself, who convinced Carrie that Easter was a better Patti Smith album than Horses, who put honey in his coffee and hot sauce on everything else.

“An accident, of course,” says Warden Pitt. If he has a gift, it’s his convincing belief in obvious lies. In the months Carrie’s been at Topaz Lake, Warden Pitt’s announced a dozen tragic accidents, always tagged with of course. “Think how unnecessary that is. Obviously my thoughts and prayers are with his friends and loved ones. There’s also the fact that death is off brand for what we’re doing here. It makes us look bad. Makes our experiment look like a failure.”

All Carrie can think is that this won’t be over until she kills Warden Pitt. Nothing else matters, not freedom, not Miquel. She will dream of his death the way she dreamed of meeting rock stars when she was a kid.

“I brought you in to offer you something,” he continues. “A show of good faith. You have a boyfriend, yes? Miquel Gray?” Carrie gives the faintest nod. “We generally don’t approve of premarital cohabitation. We’re not prudes by any means. But many people in our organization come from religious backgrounds, and they get a bit squeamish when it comes to this kind of thing. I’ve been looking at your work record and at Mister Gray’s work with the children. I’ve issued a special dispensation for the two of you. Mister Gray will be allowed to move into Hall H with you. One of the other residents has agreed to move into Mister Gray’s spot in Hall D, so everything is neat and tidy. He