“So what do you wanna do today?”
Patrick seemed almost confused by the question. After Michael reassured him—yep, anything—Patrick took him to the cots in the marble halls, where they played with a couple of Nintendo 3DSes. Michael was delighted to play a game with a screen; he told Patrick about the time that he’d beaten the original Super Mario Bros. in eight minutes. “I gotta try it again one day,” he said. “With my eyes open this time.”
Patrick didn’t find that funny, though. And when Michael tried to show him the secret warps on the Mario 2 cartridge, Bub replied, seeming oddly restless and grumpy, “Michael, I know ’em all already.”
He asked if they could go explore.
And Michael said sure, partially hoping to bump into Holly. Patrick led them through most of the Capitol, but they didn’t run into her. The “exploration” of the building was dampened also by another fact: Nearly all of the Capitol’s corridors and chambers were identical, and the novelty of the whole mayhem-meets-marble decorating scheme had already kinda worn off. Michael traveled through these Safe Zone halls with his brother, the mesh-filtered winter light streaming around them, but he had a vaguely depressed “stuck” feeling, as if he were repeating the same screen over and over on a scratched game disc. Patrick began doing things that he usually only did when he was uncomfortable or bored: he counted the cots, up into the hundreds, as well as all the left and right turns of the halls. Even when Michael and Bub discovered a two-lane bowling alley in the east wing of the Capitol, they wound up quitting after only one round: resetting the pins themselves turned out to be brain numbing . . . and when Michael told Patrick that he couldn’t remember how to keep score, Patrick seemed—uncharacteristically—almost angry.
He remembered how Bub’s doctors had once mentioned that “children like Patrick” could get upset if their diet was not monitored. Maybe Bub just had too much sugar this morning?
So after a tuna-fish-sandwich, sugar-free lunch—after an unsuccessful attempt to get Bub to take a nap—Michael suggested they play a game of Sorry! in the Governor’s Dining Room. Bobbie, who had found the board game, played as well. Even though it was one of his favorites, though, Patrick was uneasy, fidgeting and saying, midway through, “Can’t we do somethin’ else? Michael, can’t we?”
And Michael began to realize what was the matter with Patrick today.
That realization made Michael’s stomach drop a little, for it implied a dimension to Patrick’s anxiety he’d not previously considered. Michael always knew, of course, that Bub needed to understand the world around him in order to feel safe.
Now, though, the world around Patrick finally was safe . . . but because hanging out aimlessly at the Capitol wasn’t what The Game said they should do, Bub could not understand that he did not have to feel his horrible anxiety anymore. It struck Michael that the respites Patrick had received from that anxiety—the way he’d been so happy around Bobbie, for example—were only temporary. Patrick can’t really get better, can’t really feel comfortable—can’t really change—until I get him to the real Safe Zone.
Michael’s watch read 2:30 and the sun outside the windows of the Governor’s Dining Room had begun its sure descent toward the skyline. Okay, he thought. So, just give Bub a “Game task” to do.
And so, at the tail end of that afternoon, just as Patrick was putting away the board game pieces and Michael was still trying to come up with a new task, Captain Jopek elbowed open the door to the cafeteria and announced: “Headin’ downtown for a quick trip, troops. Load up at the Hummer in three minutes.” The captain saw Michael check his watch, said:
“Got a problem with that idea, Faris?”
Michael shook his head, both because he felt that unaccountable Jopek-seems-strange shame and also because, for the first time that afternoon, Patrick seemed excited.
So Michael dressed his brother in his coat and wool hat and mittens. He loaded Bub into a rear-compartment harness in the Hummer, Hank and Holly and Bobbie following him. He comforted himself with the knowledge that it was 2:47; sunset was almost an hour away. He caught Holly’s eye, nodded, both nervous and happy when she took the harness right across from him, with only the white emergency gurney to separate them.
The captain revved the engine, beginning their “mission.”
And very soon after that, everything began to go wrong.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Aren’t there, like, land mines here?
Michael