But that night he wasn’t let out of the room at all. From his perch near the flap, he could see the living room lights turning on, he could smell food cooking. “Dr. Traylor?” he called. “Hello?” But there was silence except for the sound of meat frying in a pan, the evening’s news on the television. “Dr. Traylor!” he called. “Please, please!” But nothing happened, and after calling and calling, he was spent, and slumped back down the stairs.
That night he had a dream that on the upper floor of the house was a series of other bedrooms, all with low beds and round tufted rugs beneath them, and that each bed held a boy: some of the boys were older, because they had been in the house for a long time, and some were younger. None of them knew that the others existed; none of them could hear one another. He realized that he didn’t know the physical dimensions of the house, and in the dream the house became a skyscraper, filled with hundreds of rooms, of cells, each containing a different boy, each waiting for Dr. Traylor to let him out. He woke, then, gasping, and ran to the top of the stairs, but when he pushed against the flap, it didn’t move. He lifted it up and saw that the hole had been closed with a piece of gray plastic, and as hard as he pushed against it, it wouldn’t budge.
He didn’t know what to do. He tried to stay up the rest of the night, but he fell asleep, and when he woke, there was the tray with his breakfast and his lunch and two pills: one for the morning, one for evening. He pinched the pills between his fingers and considered them—if he didn’t take them, he wouldn’t get better, and Dr. Traylor wouldn’t touch him unless he was well. But if he didn’t take them, then he wouldn’t get better, and he knew from prior experience how awful he would feel, how almost unimaginably filthy he would be, as if his entire self, inside and out, had been sprayed with excrement. He began to rock himself, then. What do I do, he asked, what do I do? He thought of the fat truck driver, the one who had been kind to him. Help me, he begged him, help me.
Brother Luke, he pled, help me, help me.
Once again, he thought: I have made the wrong decision. I have left somewhere where I at least had the outdoors, and school, and where I knew what was going to happen to me. And now I have none of those things.
You’re so stupid, the voice inside him said, you’re so stupid.
For six more days it went on like this: his food would appear sometime when he was sleeping. He took the pills; he couldn’t not.
On the tenth day, the door opened, and Dr. Traylor was standing there. He was so alarmed, so surprised, that he hadn’t been prepared, but before he could stand, Dr. Traylor had closed the door and was coming toward him. Over one shoulder he held an iron fire poker, loosely, as one would a baseball bat, and as he came toward him, he was terrified by it: What did it mean? What would be done to him with it?
“Take off your clothes,” Dr. Traylor said, still in his same bland voice, and he did, and Dr. Traylor swung the poker off his shoulder and he ducked, reflexively, lifting his arms over his head. He heard the doctor make his small wet noise. And then Dr. Traylor unbelted his pants and stood before him. “Take them down,” he said, and he did, but before he was able to begin, Dr. Traylor nudged him in the neck with the poker. “You try anything,” he said, “biting, anything, and I will beat you in the head with this until you become a vegetable, do you understand me?”
He nodded, too petrified to say anything. “Speak,” Dr. Traylor yelled, and he startled.
“Yes,” he gulped. “Yes, I understand.”
He was scared of Dr. Traylor, of course; he was scared of all of them. But it had never occurred to him to fight with the clients, had never occurred to him to challenge them. They were powerful and he was not. And Brother Luke had trained him too well. He was too obedient. He was, as Dr. Traylor had made him admit, a good prostitute.
Every day was like this, and although the sex was no worse than what he’d had before, he remained convinced that it was a prelude, that it would eventually get very bad, very strange. He had heard stories from Brother Luke—he had seen videos—about things people did to one another: objects they used, props and weapons. A few times he had experienced these things himself. But he knew that in many ways he was lucky: he had been spared. The terror of what might be ahead of him was, in many ways, worse than the terror of the sex itself. At night he would imagine what he didn’t know to imagine and begin gasping with panic, his clothes—a different set of clothes now, but still not his clothes—becoming clammy with perspiration.
At the end of one session, he asked Dr. Traylor if he could leave. “Please,” he said. “Please.” But Dr. Traylor said that he had given him ten days of hospitality, and that he needed to repay those ten days. “And then can I go?” he asked, but the doctor was already walking out the door.
On the sixth day of his repayment he thought of a plan. There was a second or two—just that—in which Dr. Traylor tucked the fire poker under his left arm and unbelted his pants with his right hand. If he could time it correctly, he could hit the doctor in the face with a book, and try to run out. He would have to be very quick; he would have to be very agile.