“Well, they’re also the same company that makes the cameras here and programs them, so keep that in mind.”
They know the cameras well. The cameras are the newest, cleanest thing about the place. They’re fuelled wirelessly, no batteries, nothing to short out. The cameras know their faces, their gaits, even their hand gestures. The cameras tell them where to go, at least indirectly. They’re part of the prison scheduling system, which pings their cuffs at certain times of day to go left or right until they arrive at a certain room for a specific job. Javier has done most every kind of job, now: mail, laundry, garbage, kitchen, library. They keep him out of the infirmary because it might trigger him, but sometimes he delivers things there because he moves more quickly than the others.
His favourite job is the library job. He brings the spines of all the books right to the front of each shelf so no dust accumulates there. He alphabetizes, and writes notes to the captains of each unit to tell their people to return things. Sometimes, it even works. Guys who beat the shit out of each other are strangely respectful of books. Some of them have never seen the printed kind, before. One even cried the first time he ripped out a page by accident. Then the whole book fell apart and he just lost it. He howled and sobbed and rocked back and forth on his knees, stubby fingers searching the pages, trying to put them back in order.
“It’s OK,” Javier told him. “It’s OK. It’s OK. It’s just a story. It’s not even real.”
But mostly, his job is to stop fights.
They start in odd places. In the yard, in the library, in the shower. He spots them, goes a bit blind, and jumps in. It’s the surprise that stops the fight, most of the time. How high he can jump. How precisely he can land on someone’s shoulders. Sometimes it’s someone getting raped. Ignacio explained rape the first time someone beat him up for spending too much time with Javier.
“He thought I was a baby-raper,” he said. “I explained that we were just friends.”
“Rape?”
“When you fuck someone without their wanting it,” Ignacio said. “Sex is like a game. It takes two people – or more, I guess, if you want – to play, and both players have to agree to the rules ahead of time. Anything else is cheating.”
When he woke up, the car had stopped. “We’re here.”
“Here” was a house in the middle of the desert. There was nothing else around it, just an expanse of sagebrush and dusty red earth stretching up into mounts flat as molars under a cloudless blue dome. If he looked carefully, he could see white specks that might be houses up in the mountains. But it was mostly nothing. Nothing, with a faint dusting of snow.
“You can see someone coming for miles,” Holberton said. “Which, as you might imagine, is just how I like it.”
Javier helped him with the other luggage. The house was ringed by scrub pine and an iron fence with a burnished copper gate. The gate swung open onto a raked gravel yard, with a flagstone path down the middle. The path led to a glass door set in a jagged glass and concrete wall. From one side of the house, he could see out the other.
“You know, for someone who values his privacy, your house is awfully open.”
“My bedroom walls are solid,” Holberton said, thumbing open the door.
The door opened onto an open space broken only by concrete arches. The floor was grey marble. Everything was grey. The dining table, the wall of pressed earth with a fireplace cut out of it, the marble bench beneath it, the shag rug in front of it. Pearl, graphite, charcoal.
“I find it soothing,” Holberton said. “I spend all day looking at swatches. When I’m done, my eyes need a palate cleanser.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You didn’t have to.”
They carried the luggage into Holberton’s bedroom. It was downstairs. As he’d said, the walls were solid – save for one sliding glass door that opened directly onto a pool. The pool curved around the lower level of the house. From the bedroom, you could swim to the downstairs patio and fountain, and walk into another, grander living room and an impeccably clean kitchen with grey marble countertops.
The bedroom was the only room in the house with any colour. This colour was a deep purple like an overripe eggplant. It was on the bedspread. When Javier ran his hand over it, it pushed up under his palm like a cat.
“What the… ?”
“Oh, that,” Holberton said. “It’s just smartcloth. It moulds to your body. I get very cold, at night.”
Javier snorted. “You could try pyjamas.”
“Now, where would the fun be in that?” Holberton’s silvery brows rose. “Do you want a shower, or anything? You seem like you could use one.”