not for the glass rod which would soon, he felt sure, be exploring previously unplumbed depths of his anatomy. It looked like the kind of thermometer a vet might use to take a horse’s temperature.
“Not with what?” He wagged the thermometer back and forth like a majorette’s baton. “Not with this? Sorry, sport, gotta be. Orders from headquarters, you know.”
“Wouldn’t a fever strip be easier?” Luke said. “I bet you could get one at CVS for a buck and a half. Even less with your discount car—”
“Save your wise mouth for your friends. Drop trou and bend over the chair, or I’ll do it for you. And you won’t like it.”
Luke walked slowly to the chair, unbuttoned his pants, slid them down, bent over.
“Oh yay, there’s that full moon!” Zeke stood in front of him. He had the thermometer in one hand and a jar of Vaseline in the other. He dipped the thermometer into the jar and brought it out. A glob of jelly dangled from the end. To Luke it looked like the punchline of a dirty joke. “See? Plenty of lube. Won’t hurt a bit. Just relax your cheeks, and remind yourself that as long as you don’t feel both of my hands on you, your backside virginity remains intact.”
He circled behind Luke, who stood bent over with his forearms on the seat of the chair and his butt pushed out. He could smell his sweat, strong and rank. He tried to remind himself that he wasn’t the first kid to get this treatment in the Institute. It helped a little . . . but really, not all that much. The room was loaded with high-tech equipment, and this man was preparing to take his temperature in the lowest-tech way imaginable. Why?
To break me down, Luke thought. To make sure I understand that I’m a guinea pig, and when you have guinea pigs, you can get the data you want any old way you want. And maybe they don’t even want this particular piece of data. Maybe it’s just a way of saying If we can stick this up your ass, what else can we stick up there? Answer: Anything we feel like.
“Suspense is killing you, isn’t it?” Zeke said from behind him, and the son of a bitch was laughing.
9
After the indignity of the thermometer, which seemed to go on for a long time, Zeke took his blood pressure, put an O2 monitor on his finger, and checked his height and weight. He looked down Luke’s throat and up his nose. He noted down the results, humming as he did it. By then Gladys was back in the room, drinking from a coffee mug with daisies on it and smiling her fake smile.
“Time for a shot, Lukey-boy,” Zeke said. “Not going to give me any trouble, are you?”
Luke shook his head. The only thing he wanted right now was to go back to his room and wipe the Vaseline out of his butt. He had nothing to be ashamed of, but he felt ashamed, anyway. Demeaned.
Zeke gave him an injection. There was no heat this time. This time there was nothing but a little pain, there and gone.
Zeke looked at his watch, lips moving as he counted off seconds. Luke did the same, only without moving his lips. He’d gotten to thirty when Zeke lowered his arm. “Any nausea?”
Luke shook his head.
“Got a metallic taste in your mouth?”
The only thing Luke could taste was the residue of the orange juice. “No.”
“Okay, good. Now look at the wall. See any dots? Or maybe they look bigger, like circles.”
Luke shook his head.
“You’re telling the truth, sport, right?”
“Right. No dots. No circles.”
Zeke looked into his eyes for several seconds (Luke thought of asking him if he saw any dots in there, and restrained himself ). Then he straightened up, made a show of dusting his palms together, and turned to Gladys. “Go on, get him out of here. Dr. Evans will want him this afternoon for the eye thing.” He gestured at the projector gadget. “Four PM.”
Luke thought about asking what the eye thing was, but he didn’t really care. He was hungry, that didn’t seem to change no matter what they did to him (at least so far), but what he wanted more than food was to clean himself up. He felt—only the British word adequately described it—buggered.
“Now, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” Gladys asked him as they rode up in the elevator. “A lot of fuss about