Chapter 4

The dinner was delicious, and probably far better than anything Driskoll Sadler might have whipped up on his own. The steaks were cooked in a batter heavy in onions and spices that made my mouth water almost painfully—but it was a wonderful pain. The buttered rolls almost dissolved on the tongue, and the salad had a dressing that I couldn’t quite identify, but I wanted to find out what it was. Maya hovered around the table ready to bring anything that was needed.

The conversation in the dining room was less comfortable than the food. Early on, Kathleen grumbled, “Why do we need to sit through a long dinner together?” I suspected she was more accustomed to fending for herself in the kitchen; I had often done the same while growing up. I had to admit though, Kathleen must be eating a sensible balance of foods somehow, given her perfect proportions and complexion.

Mr. Sadler sighed. “Your brother hasn’t been here for three years, Kathleen.”

Kathleen muttered, “Don’t see why that has to turn everything upside down.”

Grant contributed a sigh of his own to the collection. Evidently deciding there would never be an ideal time, he plunged in at last. “Kathleen, I’m going to be hanged in a few months!” I could see him trying to maintain a breezy tone. He looked as nervous as I had ever seen him.

Kathleen shrugged and reached for her cola, looking only briefly at Grant. “That’s kind of the point of being at the Academy, isn’t it?”

Grant winced, and his jaw took on that set again. “I hope you can be there. I want you to be there.”

Kathleen gave him a skeptical look. “You want me to be there?”

Grant bit back his first irritated response, and said calmly, “Every student wants his family to see him hang. It’s a special time.”

Kathleen gave a look that said everything had been clarified. “Ah. Every student does.” I realized Grant had picked the wrong thing to say, turning the invitation into pure form-following. Kathleen had now decided that Grant didn’t literally want Kathleen specifically. He was just doing what the other boys do. It all made sense now.

Grant hadn’t heard anything to satisfy him yet. “So will you come?”

Kathleen shrugged. “I’ve seen you hang before.” She took another bite of steak.

Grant was working harder to force calmness on himself, to keep it light. “In practice, not for real. You haven’t seen me die before. I only do that once.”

“We all do.” Before Grant could summon up a response, Kathleen turned to her father. “Dad, Zaria wants me to sleep over. She said to come by after dinner. Can I?”

Mr. Sadler looked hesitant, as if trying to keep score of what was happening between his two children. At last he asked, “Is your room cleaned up?”

Kathleen nodded eagerly. When Mr. Sadler nodded in return, she grinned and said, “Great!” She looked down at her half-filled plate. “May I be excused?”

Mr. Sadler looked exasperated. “Kathleen, Maya worked hard on this.”

Kathleen looked chastened, for the first time. “I’m sorry, Maya.” She cut off another forkful of steak.

Grant looked helplessly at me. I mouthed back, “Patience,” and Grant sighed and resumed eating, mechanically, probably more to avoid insulting Maya than from a need to put anything in his stomach.

Later in the Evening

My eyes grew wide, my heart pounding. This is the room! It should be a shrine, with red velvet rope across the doorway, people paying admission to look in while listening to a tour guide. Whatever awe those people might feel, it couldn’t top the awe I felt right now, in this den off the living room.

A noose, the rope looking new—Grant said he had changed it fairly often—hung from the ceiling. There was an exercise machine in the corner, a chinning apparatus, a low wooden box for step aerobics, a stationary bike as well as a normal bicycle, a treadmill for those days when the weather prevented outdoor running. On a shelf sat a device that looked like a posture collar, the one Grant had used to hang and continue breathing while he worked out those amazing sexual hanging moves that all of the boys at the Academy now learned as standard techniques.

And, in another corner, two platforms for hanging practice. One was non-mechanical, simply a box for Grant to stand on, step carefully off of and then kick away, trusting his coach to put it back under his feet at the appropriate time. This was the one that Grant had used in the early years of his training. The other was a rising/falling platform with a lever, modeled after the ones used by the Hanging Academy.

In a hushed voice, I asked, “How much time did you spend in here?”

Grant answered, “Hours, most days. I’d work on my school lessons in my room in the mornings and meet with my tutor at the kitchen table. Then I’d spend most of the afternoon in here, usually exercising, and then go out jogging, or biking. My coach would come over late in the afternoon, several times a week, and we’d spend about an hour, sometimes ninety minutes, practicing hanging and working out different moves.”

“Did Kathleen ever watch you hanging?”

“She’d look in sometimes, but she never seemed that curious. When I’d start a session she was still at school, and when she came home I’d usually still be at it, but she’d be with her playmates in the yard, or at their houses down the street. She’d usually watch TV in the evenings, here or at a friend’s house. I’d come out and watch sometimes, but usually I’d be in my room reading.”

“You ... well, I guess you didn’t play with her, right? She seemed pretty stunned when you asked to play cards with her today.”

Grant gave me a sheepish smile. “You could tell, huh? I should have, I know that. But I was...”

I put my arms around him from behind, rubbing my chin on his shoulder. “You were you. You were the Grant I met when we first got to the Academy.”

Grant gave a short laugh and rubbed my head with the back of his own. “That about says it all, I guess.”

I heard another laugh from the living room. Maya was on the sofa with Grant’s father, watching television, while in the kitchen the dishwasher rumbled, and a load of laundry went round in the dryer. Maya was sitting with her legs curled up on the seat cushion, her body turned toward her Master, her left arm pinned against the back cushion, her right hand idly rubbing Driskoll’s chest, her head on his shoulder as they both watched the screen. Occasionally one of them would point at some event on the screen and they would share a laugh. Even now, each time Driskoll spoke to Maya, the slave responded with “Yes, sir,” along with any other sign of respect that seemed called for.

I had seen a variety of Master/slave relationships, but I hadn’t seen one exactly like this before.

I suddenly noticed the single non-utilitarian decoration in Grant’s training room, a framed color photograph on the back wall. I walked over to it; it showed a young man and small child, the man seated in an overstuffed chair, the child curled up in his lap, staring at the pages of the book he was holding. The man was handsome, even beautiful, with reddish brown hair. He was smiling as he read from the book. The child was light blonde, adorable, completely enthralled, wide-eyed.

Grant had come up behind me. I asked quietly, “Is this Kathleen with your dad?” But I frowned as I said it. The man looked way too young. When Kathleen was this age, her dad would have been in his thirties.

I could hear the smile in Grant’s voice. “That’s not Kathleen, doofus, it’s me. And it’s not my dad either. Take another guess.”

I paused, puzzled, then suddenly gasped. “It’s your Uncle Seymour??”

Grant, his voice suddenly husky, said, “Yeah. This is the only picture, as far as I know, of him and me together. My mom took it. She thought it looked really cute. I was about ... four years old, I think. Seymour was still in high school, and he lived really close. He’d come over after school, several times a week, and have dinner here, and after dinner, before I’d go to bed, he’d read to me. It was really hard for me when he went off to the Academy, and I didn’t see him for ... probably a couple of years, I guess. Eventually he started being able to come by again, and he was here a few times, up until his hanging. But my life went on without him, I started school, I got interested in other stuff. It’s funny, I never had much of a feeling for what the Hanging Academy was, or what he was doing when he was there. I just knew nothing about it. Until that day, that day. The day they hanged him. And everything changed. Everything came in focus. I knew what my life was going to be all about.”

I turned to look at Grant, and saw the passion flame in his eyes to a degree I’d hardly seen before. “Amy, I want that so badly for Kathleen! I’m never going to say to her, Kathleen, I want you to think about being a Noosemeister. You can’t make somebody decide to do that. It’s something you discover inside yourself, not from somebody telling you to do it.

“I want her to be what she wants to be, I want her to do what makes her happy. But if it’s anything other than hanging, I get worried that she’ll never know the ... completion, the pure buoyancy and joy I feel when I’m up in the air. I know you feel it too, you know exactly what I’m talking about.” I nodded, and Grant went on, “Nobody else in the world but a Noosemeister knows that feeling. Seymour knew the feeling, and he brought the feeling out of me, he let me find it inside myself. I want, so much, to be able to do that for Kathleen.”