Iphigenia in Aulis
MIKE CAREY
Mike Carey is the author of the Felix Castor novels and (along with Linda and Louise Carey) The Steel Seraglio. He has also written extensively for comics publishers DC and Marvel, including long runs on X-Men, Hellblazer and Ultimate Fantastic Four. He wrote the comic book Lucifer for its entire run and is the co-creator and writer of the ongoing Vertigo series The Unwritten.
Her name is Melanie. It means “the black girl,” from an ancient Greek word, but her skin is mostly very fair so she thinks maybe it’s not such a good name for her. Miss Justineau assigns names from a big list: new children get the top name on the boys’ list or the top name on the girls’ list, and that, Miss Justineau says, is that.
Melanie is ten years old, and she has skin like a princess in a fairy tale: skin as white as snow. So she knows that when she grows up she’ll be beautiful, with princes falling over themselves to climb her tower and rescue her.
Assuming, of course, that she has a tower.
In the meantime, she has the cell, the corridor, the classroom and the shower room.
The cell is small and square. It has a bed, a chair and a table in it. On the walls there are pictures: in Melanie’s cell, a picture of a field of flowers and a picture of a woman dancing. Sometimes they move the children around, so Melanie knows that there are different pictures in each cell. She used to have a horse in a meadow and a big mountain with snow on the top, which she liked better.
The corridor has twenty doors on the left-hand side and eighteen doors on the right-hand side (because the cupboards don’t really count); also it has a door at either end. The door at the classroom end is red. It leads to the classroom (duh!). The door at the other end is bare gray steel on this side but once when Melanie was being taken back to her cell she peeped through the door, which had accidentally been left open, and saw that on the other side it’s got lots of bolts and locks and a box with numbers on it. She wasn’t supposed to see, and Sergeant said “Little bitch has got way too many eyes on her,” but she saw, and she remembers.
She listens, too, and from overheard conversations she has a sense of this place in relation to other places she hasn’t ever seen. This place is the block. Outside the block is the base. Outside the base is the Eastern Stretch, or the Dispute Stretch. It’s all good as far as Kansas, and then it gets real bad, real quick. East of Kansas, there’s monsters everywhere and they’ll follow you for a hundred miles if they smell you, and then they’ll eat you. Melanie is glad that she lives in the block, where she’s safe.
Through the gray steel door, each morning, the teachers come. They walk down the corridor together, past Melanie’s door, bringing with them the strong, bitter chemical smell that they always have on them: it’s not a nice smell, but it’s exciting because it means the start of another day’s lessons.
At the sound of the bolts sliding and the teachers’ footsteps, Melanie runs to the door of her cell and stands on tiptoe to peep through the little mesh-screen window in the door and see the teachers when they go by. She calls out good morning to them, but they’re not supposed to answer and usually they don’t. Sometimes, though, Miss Justineau will look around and smile at her—a tense, quick smile that’s gone almost before she can see it—or Miss Mailer will give her a tiny wave with just the fingers of her hand.
All but one of the teachers go through the thirteenth door on the left, where there’s a stairway leading down to another corridor and (Melanie guesses) lots more doors and rooms. The one who doesn’t go through the thirteenth door unlocks the classroom and opens up, and that one will be Melanie’s teacher and Melanie’s friends’ teacher for the day.
Then Sergeant comes, and the men and women who do what Sergeant says. They’ve got the chemical smell, too, and it’s even stronger on them than it is on the teachers. Their job is to take the children to the classroom, and after that they go away again. There’s a procedure that they follow, which takes a long time. Melanie thinks it must be the same for all the children, but of course she doesn’t know that for sure because it always happens inside the cells and the only cell that Melanie sees the inside of is her own.
To start with, Sergeant bangs on all the doors, and shouts at the children to get ready. Melanie sits down in the wheelchair at the foot of her bed, like she’s been taught to do. She puts her hands on the arms of the chair and her feet on the footrests. She closes her eyes and waits. She counts while she waits. The highest she’s ever had to count is 4,526; the lowest is 4,301.
When the key turns in the door, she stops counting and opens her eyes. Sergeant comes in with his gun and points it at her. Then two of Sergeant’s people come in and tighten and buckle the straps of the chair around Melanie’s wrists and ankles. There’s also a strap for her neck: they tighten that one last of all, when her hands and feet are fastened up all the way, and they always do it from behind. The strap is designed so they never have to put their hands in front of Melanie’s face. Melanie sometimes says, “I won’t bite.” She says it as a joke, but Sergeant’s people never laugh. Sergeant did once, the first time she said it, but it was a nasty laugh. And then he said, “Like we’d ever give you the fucking chance, sugarplum.”
When Melanie is all strapped into the chair, and she can’t move her hands or her feet or her head, they wheel her into the classroom and put her at her desk. The teacher might be talking to some of the other children, or writing something on the blackboard, but she (unless it’s Mr. Galloway, who’s the only he) will usually stop and say, “Good morning, Melanie.” That way the children who sit way up at the front of the class will know that Melanie has come into the room and they can say good morning, too. They can’t see her, of course, because they’re all in their own chairs with their neck-straps fastened up, so they can’t turn their heads around that far.
This procedure—the wheeling in, and the teacher saying good morning, and then the chorus of greetings from the other kids—happens seven more times, because there are seven children who come into the classroom after Melanie. One of them is Anne, who used to be Melanie’s best friend in the class and maybe still is except that the last time they moved the kids around (Sergeant calls it “shuffling the deck”) they ended up sitting a long way apart and it’s hard to be best friends with someone you can’t talk to. Another is Steven, whom Melanie doesn’t like because he calls her Melon-Brain or M-M-M-Melanie to remind her that she used to stammer sometimes in class.
When all the children are in the classroom, the lessons start. Every day has sums and spelling, but there doesn’t seem to be a plan for the rest of the lessons. Some teachers like to read aloud from books. Others make the children learn facts and dates, which is something that Melanie is very good at. She knows the names of all the states in the United States, and all their capitals, and their state birds and flowers, and the total population of each state and what they mostly manufacture or grow there. She also knows the presidents in order and the years that they were in office, and she’s working on European capitals. She doesn’t find it hard to remember this stuff; she does it to keep from being bored, because being bored is worse than almost anything.
Melanie learned the stuff about the states from Mr. Galloway’s lessons, but she’s not sure if she’s got all the details right because one day, when he was acting kind of funny and his voice was all slippery and fuzzy, Mr. Galloway said something that worried Melanie. She was asking him whether it was the whole state of New York that used to be called New Amsterdam, or just the city, and he said, who cares? “None of this stuff matters anymore, Melanie. I just gave it to you because all the textbooks we’ve got are twenty years old.”
Melanie persists, because New Amsterdam was way back in the eighteenth century, so she doesn’t think twenty years should matter all that much. “But when the Dutch colonists—” she says.
Mr. Galloway cuts her off. “Jesus, it’s irrelevant. It’s ancient history! The Hungries tore up the map. There’s nothing east of Kansas anymore. Not a damn thing.”
So it’s possible, even quite likely, that some of Melanie’s lists need to be updated in some respects.
The children have classes on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. On Saturday, the children stay locked in their rooms all day and music plays over the PA system. Nobody comes, not even Sergeant, and the music is too loud to talk over. Melanie had the idea long ago of making up a language that used signs instead of words, so the children could talk to each other through their little mesh windows, and she went ahead and made the language up, or some of it anyway, but when she asked Miss Mailer if she could teach it to the class, Miss Mailer told her no really loud and sharp. She made Melanie promise not to mention her sign language to any of the other teachers, and especially not to Sergeant. “He’s paranoid enough already,” she said. “If he thinks you’re talking behind his back, he’ll lose what’s left of his mind.”
So Melanie never got to teach the other children how to talk in sign language.
Saturdays are long and dull, and hard to get through. Melanie tells herself aloud some of the stories that the children have been told in class. It’s okay to say them out loud because the music hides her voice. Otherwise Sergeant would come in and tell her to stop.
Melanie knows that Sergeant is still there on Saturdays, because one Saturday when Ronnie hit her hand against the mesh window of her cell until it bled and got all mashed up, Sergeant came in. He brought two of his people, and all three of them were dressed in the big suits, and they went into Ronnie’s cell and Melanie guessed from the sounds that they were trying to tie Ronnie into her chair. She also guessed from the sounds that Ronnie was struggling and making it hard for them, because she kept shouting and saying, “Let me alone! Let me alone!” Then there was a banging sound that went on and on and Sergeant shouted, “Shut up shut up shut up shut up shut up!” and then other people were shouting, too, and someone said, “Christ Jesus, don’t—” and then it all went quiet again.
Melanie couldn’t tell what happened after that. The people who work for Sergeant went around and locked all the little doors over the mesh windows, so the children couldn’t see out. They stayed locked all day. The next Monday, Ronnie wasn’t in the class anymore, and nobody seemed to know what had happened to her. Melanie likes to think that Ronnie went through the thirteenth door on the left into another class, so she might come back one day when Sergeant shuffles the deck again. But what Melanie really believes, when she can’t stop herself from thinking about it, is that Sergeant took Ronnie away to punish her, and he won’t let her see any of the other children ever again.
Sundays are like Saturdays except for the shower. At the start of the day the children are put in their chairs as though it’s a regular school day, but instead of being taken to the classroom, they’re taken to the shower room, which is the last door on the right, just before the bare steel door.
In the shower room, which is white-tiled and empty, the children sit and wait until everybody has been wheeled in. Then the doors are closed and sealed, which means the room is completely dark because there aren’t any lights in there. Pipes behind the walls start to make a sound like someone trying not to laugh, and a chemical spray falls from the ceiling.
It’s the same chemical that’s on the teachers and Sergeant and Sergeant’s people, or at least it smells the same, but it’s a lot stronger. It stings a little, at first. Then it stings a lot. It leaves Melanie’s eyes puffy, reddened and half-blind. But it evaporates quickly from clothes and skin, so after half an hour more of sitting in the still, dark room, there’s nothing left of it but the smell, and then finally the smell fades, too, or at least they get used to it so it’s not so bad anymore, and they just wait in silence for the door to be unlocked and Sergeant’s people to come and get them. This is how the children are washed, and for that reason, if for no other, Sunday is probably the worst day of the week.
The best day of the week is whichever day Miss Mailer teaches. It isn’t always the same day, and some weeks she doesn’t come at all. Melanie guesses that there are more than five classes of children, and that the teachers’ time is divided arbitrarily among them. Certainly there’s no pattern that she can discern, and she’s really good at that stuff.
When Miss Mailer teaches, the day is full of amazing things. Sometimes she’ll read poems aloud, or bring her flute and play it, or show the children pictures out of a book and tell them stories about the people in the pictures. That was how Melanie got to find out about Agamemnon and the Trojan War, because one of the paintings showed Agamemnon’s wife, Clytemnestra, looking really mad and scary. “Why is she so mad?” Anne asked Miss Mailer.
“Because Agamemnon killed their daughter,” Miss Mailer said. “The Greek fleet was stuck in harbor on the island of Aulis. So Agamemnon put his daughter on an altar, and he killed her so that the goddess Artemis would give the Greek fleet fair winds and help them to get to the war on time.”
The kids in the class were mostly both scared and delighted with this, like it was a ghost story or something, but Melanie was troubled by it. How could killing a little girl change the way the winds blew? “You’re right, Melanie, it couldn’t,” Miss Mailer said. “But the Ancient Greeks had a lot of gods, and all kinds of weird ideas about what would make the gods happy. So Agamemnon gave Iphigenia’s death to the goddess as a present, and his wife decided he had to pay for that.”
Melanie, who already knew by this time that her own name was Greek, decided she was on Clytemnestra’s side. Maybe it was important to get to the war on time, but you shouldn’t kill kids to do it. You should just row harder, or put more sails up. Or maybe you should go in a boat that had an outboard motor.
The only problem with the days when Miss Mailer teaches is that the time goes by too quickly. Every second is so precious to Melanie that she doesn’t even blink: she just sits there wide-eyed, drinking in everything that Miss Mailer says, and memorizing it so that she can play it back to herself later, in her cell. And whenever she can manage it, she asks Miss Mailer questions, because what she likes most to hear, and to remember, is Miss Mailer’s voice saying her name, Melanie, in that way that makes her feel like the most important person in the world.
One day, Sergeant comes into the classroom on a Miss Mailer day. Melanie doesn’t know he’s there until he speaks, because he’s standing right at the back of the class. When Miss Mailer says, “. . . and this time, Pooh and Piglet counted three sets of footprints in the snow,” Sergeant’s voice breaks in with, “What the fuck is this?”
Miss Mailer stops, and looks round. “I’m reading the children a story, Sergeant Robertson,” she says.
“I can see that,” Sergeant’s voice says. “I thought the idea was to educate them, not give them a cabaret.”
“Stories can educate just as much as facts,” Miss Mailer says.
“Like how, exactly?” Sergeant asks, nastily.
“They teach us how to live, and how to think.”
“Oh yeah, plenty of world-class ideas in Winnie-the-Pooh.” Sergeant is using sarcasm. Melanie knows how sarcasm works: you say the opposite of what you really mean. “Seriously, Gwen, you’re wasting your time. You want to tell them stories, tell them about Jack the Ripper and John Wayne Gacy.”
“They’re children,” Miss Mailer points out.
“No, they’re not,” Sergeant says, very loudly. “And that, that right there, that’s why you don’t want to read them Winnie-the-Pooh. You do that, you start thinking of them as real kids. And then you slip up. And maybe you untie one of them because she needs a cuddle or something. And I don’t need to tell you what happens after that.”