INCORRIGIBLES

“Right,” she said, giving a nod that was more polite acknowledgement than agreement.

Virgil’s excitement didn’t spark a similar feeling in her, but rather, made her almost wistful. By now, the idea of ever reaching an anywhere but here seemed like a distant, unobtainable dream.

There was no point in saying that, though. It was no secret that he was the optimistic one in their partnership, and he truly was good at selling the dream sometimes – like a lotto ticket salesman, convincing her that she had a shot at winning, at least enough to take the chance and open herself up to the possibility.

She almost rolled her eyes at his question, but still racked her brain for anything substantial. After a moment, she shook her head.

“Nothing relevant,” she said, thumbing the edge of her journal page again. She felt strangely restless, craving something to occupy herself with. Another cup of coffee, maybe, or a cigarette. “Elswood social media is basically just an info dump.” In this context, dump meant garbage. “Who started a fight with who, what teacher gave whoever too much homework, who’s craving whatever type of food, et cetera…”

“I did find a few books in the library with stuff about tunnels, though,” she offered. “Nothing technical, but worth reading for background information. Mainly history stuff, prison escapes, that sort of thing. Surprisingly kind of cool.”

“They have that?” Virgil recoiled with a look of bemusement. “I mean—fuck that is cool… but they’d like, actually let folks have access to that kind of shit?”

“That seems like the kinda… the kinda stuff that would get caught in their propaganda filters…” he mused aloud in a much softer voice. Contemplating something in the beats of silence that followed, but he shrugged, accepting what Lynn had told him. “But hey—if it’s not censored then that’s great, actually.”

“’Cause—believe it or not—I’ve never broken out of prison before,” he admitted with a joking smile. “I mean, I guess maybe I can say I’ve tried—but that was like, not a prison—more like a jail—and it was a good attempt but nowhere near the kind of complexity that we’re dealing with here.”

With his laugh, it seemed like maybe he was maybe joking about the entire notion of being incarcerated. Addressing it with such lightness, and mentioning it so offhandedly—the idea that Lynn was now Virgil’s accomplice had summoned up connotations of criminality and the imposition of the law. Elswood was a prison and this was a prison break, after all.

Lynn almost felt bad as she watched the man opposite her practically deflate like a balloon as he talked again, her ( albeit realistic ) negativity clearly poking a hole in his usually unyielding positivity. 

Dejectedness wasn’t a good look on him. 

Still, she did appreciate the rare agreement. She didn’t need him to tell her that she was right–she knew she was right–but she hoped that he at least recognized that her pointing out flaws was meant to be constructive. It wasn’t because she was a negative asshole; she just thought it was practical to push aside the plans with a low probability of success and higher risk factor to make room to focus on the more realistic ones.

“It’s possible. Those fuckers would,” she said. “But I almost hope there’s nothing too important down there. It’d make it harder to access, to stay under the radar.”

There he was! The positive, pseudo-motivational Virgil she knew and didn’t understand.

Her response was a shrug and an expression that said something like ‘sure, I guess, whatever’. “We’ll just have to see how this plays out.” Then there was a short pause, where she seemed to consider this, then finally nodded almost reluctantly, putting on a half-smile. “But yeah, we’re, uh – we’re getting somewhere.”

“Getting somewhere being… closer to getting anywhere but here,” he mused. The notion infected him with giddiness, as it always did. Virgil couldn’t help but exhale as his eyes rolled up to the ceiling—a dreamy gesture, as he was surely imagining what he was going to do once the two of them escaped.

If the two of them escaped. It seemed preemptive to actually discuss the logistics of what they were to do with themselves once they crossed the threshold (if there even was a threshold to cross), as Lynn had already made it abundantly clear she wasn’t hopeful that they’d even ever reach that point. Don’t get your hopes up and all of that pessimistic garbage Virgil had to deal with on top of the real debris he was shoveling every day.

“God—I am excited,” he admitted with a laugh. “I was trying to keep a straight face when they were talking to me about it… I mean even though the administrators give me the fuckin’ creeps and I hate even being in the same room as ‘em.”

Virgil could probably continue to talk to Lynn about his auspicious assignment for the rest of the night. He was that eager about it, as it energized him as a tangible thing he could point to as a step towards their salvation, but he was also cognizant enough to know that if there were other matters at hand, the two of them should promptly address those.

(So that, maybe, they’d have time at the end of the meeting for him to enthuse more).

“But uh—you’re saying it’s a no on fogging up the cameras—but neither of us know that for sure,” he reiterated, indicating he was ready to come back from their tangent. “And I don’t know if they’re gonna be scrambling my brain every time I get done cleaning… umm—besides those two things… is there anything else you found? Besides marking down where the last cameras were…”

“Any new gossip on the internet?” he asked, in jest. But she was the IT wizard, after all. She was privy to many things that transpired over the all-encompassing network that tethered them all to Elswood.  

As she reluctantly listened to him speak, she picked up her now lukewarm cup of coffee and tipped it back, downing the dark liquid in the same casual, unblinking way an alcoholic might down a glass of whisky after an especially long day before setting the empty cup back down and exhaling a long, disgruntled sigh – to the soundtrack of him still talking.

By now, the source of her irritation was nothing more than the situation they were in; one which, it seemed more and more likely, was going to call for her spending time in a trash can. If she couldn’t come up with a better solution or a big enough problem with the suggestion, that was to be her fate. Stuffed in a bin meant for garbage, breathing in garbage air, surrounded by garbage, like a bag of garbage.

“Never tried, but we have no way of knowing if it would work – I don’t have access to the camera feed,” Lynn said. “But with how advanced Elswood’s tech is in literally every other aspect, chances are they’ve installed measures to protect against superpowered interference anyway. Maybe even alert them to attempts at it. Too risky.”

It wouldn’t be entirely fair to call Lynn’s lack of faith in their plans pessimism. With her entire adult life of experience in the academy, familiarizing herself with its ways, attempting to fight back against Elswood seemed about as hopeful as punching waves.

A few beats of silence. Her fingers tapping against her thigh. God, she needed a cigarette.

“Alright, listen, I’m not gonna need to get down there for a while,” she said. “Maybe once you familiarize yourself with the area something better will come up. Or I’ll think of something. Either way, no point in committing ourselves to one plan yet.”

For her logic and articulation, Lynn got incredulous eyebrows pointing upward in dissatisfaction. Virgil could lie about many things, but he couldn’t delude himself into believing it was easy working with someone as pessimistic as Lynn. In earnest he reasoned that if either of them were to escape they’d need his zeal to inspire a call to action—indolence and complacency could easily condemn both of them to Elswood for as long as their captors saw fit.

He could bite back (or rather, antagonistically bark) when students were so blasé in respecting his assertions of authority, but there was something spiritually grating about suffering through Lynn’s apparent dissatisfaction as he spoke. A slight taken by a hypocrite, to be sure, and Virgil could certainly understand how he had provoked her with his trash-can talk.

But the solemnness still set in.

”You’re right… about the cameras and the sneaking you in,” he conceded without protest. His gaze fell away from Lynn as his head rolled to the side—he stared at his immaculate bed and the notion of fatigue took hold. Rubbing his eyes, he took a deep breath ”For all we know they’re gonna wipe my memory every time I get done cleanin’, or some other sort of uh—security bullshit.”

”But it’s still exciting,” he perked up with a smile. Forced, but still affable as he innately was. ”I think we’re making real progress here.”

“Jackass,” Lynn repeated, calmly, frankly this time, looking directly at Virgil with a straight face as though she were merely pointing out a fact. Two plus two is four, blue and yellow make green, Virgil is a jackass.

Her initial irritation had reduced to that casual, inevitable sort of irritation that was one of the many constants of her everyday life at Elswood – partially because she wasn’t as genuinely angry at him as she was incredibly uncomfortable with the idea of being stuffed in a trash can. And partially because his facetious response to the paper toss was almost funny, objectively.

“I –” Lynn started, clearly fumbling to articulate a reasonable, logical response more convincing than ‘it’s gross!’, or the like. It was irritating that she could neither put a finger on the exact reason for her discomfort nor provide a better solution to the issue at hand. She pressed her lips together for a second, tapping her fingers against her thigh before beginning to speak.

“Listen, we go in the basement, you still need to do what you’re supposed to do before they realize and start to wonder what the fuck you’ve actually been doing. Which means collecting trash, which goes in the trash can.” She was bullshitting her way through this, but she figured she might have actually been on to something here. “Even if I managed to fit in an empty bin, there’s no way I would fit on the way out with all that shit in there with me, and I don’t know ‘bout you, but I think it might raise some red flags if Elswood catches you on camera carrying a trash can with a head sticking out of it.”

Virgil shook his head. “Unbelievable,” he muttered, slumping back into his seat. His posture settled into something more attentive than when he first sat down, as if he could anticipate Lynn throwing more paper projectiles at him as this meeting degenerated progressed.

“Have you seen the big trashcans? The big ones? You and a two bags of garbage could fit in there with no one the wiser—and you wanna know how I know this?  Because not once—but twice—I have wheeled around a big bin wondering why it was so heavy before looking down and realizing there was a student just fucking—sleeping in my trash can! And he was bigger than you!”

There was a goading in his dramatization of the incident. Something to get back at Lynn—maybe. As the charm of humor wore off, he genuinely tried to consider how they could sneak her into the lower levels with him for cleaning duty. There was a plethora of unknowns, as Virgil hadn’t even been down to the site yet to determine if it was feasible for Lynn to accompany him—but all they did was spitball abstracts at these get-togethers, anyway. So long as there was something to talk about, he’d give it some honest consideration.

His eyes rolled up towards the ceiling with a sigh. “But, okay, I’ll humor you—in the event that ‘Plan A: Sneaking You in with the Trash’ can’t work—what’s gonna be plan B? Or C? You think there’s any way to disrupt the surveillance camera long enough for me to let you in?”

A pause, as Virgil squinted at something. He was thinking.

Then his gaze steadily returned back down to Lynn. He was biting his lip. “You ever tried fogging up the cameras? Or frosting them? You think they’d work if you used some of your magic on them?”

At the clarification, Lynn jotted down ‘- Friday nights’ after the previously written note. Then she closed the journal with the pen inside, leaned back in the chair and picked up her coffee again, taking small sips this time as she listened to him speak, nodding occasionally.

Now, there were endless possibilities for cutting remarks to be made about the fact that Virgil was practically bragging about being mediocre, just sitting at the tip of her tongue like ammo. The enormous amount of self control it took her to tune out the little devil on her shoulder jumping up and down and begging her to say them was worthy of the highest commendation.

Still, she couldn’t hold back a chuckle, proceeded by a shake of the head and, in the driest voice she could muster, a muttered, “Silver linings really do exist.”

The trash can suggestion was almost funny to her, and it elicited a good natured eye-roll… until Lynn realized why Virgil was looking at her like that, at which point her half-smile turned into a full on glare that would have set him on fire if it were a degree more scalding.

“Oh my god.” She grabbed a stray piece of paper from his desk, crumpled it up and tossed it at him. “Anyone ever tell you you’re a jackass? There’s no fucking way. Get that idea out of your head immediately.”

“Hey!” Virgil jerked upright from his languid slump, hands reaching out to protect himself from the paper projectile. It bounced off of his arm and on to the ground despite his best attempt to catch it. So much for all those years playing baseball.

“Hey! Lynn!” he really tried to act offended, but he couldn’t help but grin through the severe face he put on. Lips pressing together as he stifled laughter—hand reaching out to point at Lynn, as if he was shaming her. “Just because I’m the trash guy here doesn’t mean you get to throw trash at me! In my own room—even! I can’t believe you!”

Now he was sitting up straight—leaning forwards towards Lynn—clutching his little notebook in his hand. “How else do you think we’re gonna be able to get down there together, huh? They’re gonna see two people on the security cameras when only one is supposed to have clearance!”

“Have you ever spent time in a trash can?” he asked, as if there was something socially amiss with Lynn outright rejecting the idea. As if being in a trash can was somehow culturally normal in Virgil’s mind. “Or did I just bring up some repressed memories or something? What do you have against trash cans, huh?”

A brief glance at Virgil’s almost laughably terrible posture elicited a snort from Lynn, which she managed to half-hide behind her cup of coffee. She took a sip – more like a gulp, really – before gingery resting it back on the desk, far enough from the edge where it was safe from a wandering elbow.

Her response to him beginning to talk again before she could answer his question was a roll of her eyes, but truth was, she was more interested in hearing new information than presenting what she already knew. Adding new factors to the puzzle, which was what it was to her, really. Her faith in the merit of forging this plan was still up in the air, but she was bored, and she always liked a good problem to solve

“That’s good news,” she said with a nod. She pressed her lips together, tapping her pen against the journal page. “That’s really good. Gives you an excuse to go down there, scope it out.”

She skipped a line under the date and wrote, ‘Virgil lower level basement duty once a week‘. There was silence for a few moments, interrupted only by more pen tapping, as she considered this. Tap, tap, tap.

“Is there a specific day?” she asked finally, looking up, but then continued talking, appearing to be thinking out loud more than anything. “There are security cameras near all entrances to go down there, so when we need to get shit down, that’s a good cover. Makes it… almost possible at least. Not that we’ll need to for a while, but.”

“It’s better than good—it’s great,” Virgil corrected. Of course, there was more to it than he had led on with, but he waited until Lynn had finished speaking before divulging further. Still reeling from the rush of being handed such a serendipitous job assignment, Virgil was complacent with himself. Had he expected Lynn to be a little bit more enthused? Yes, he had, actually.

“Fridays at night—it’s a night shift,” he elaborated. “They’re gonna be giving me a tour later on this week to show me all the nooks and crannies I gotta take care of—you know it really sucks that I don’t have some kind of photographic memory for this, huh? But I think that’s why they put me on the shift in the first place—they don’t think I’m capable of really doing anything down there—which is the great part of all of this.”

He threw his hands outward, as if he was expecting some kind of praise for something he had no part in actually contributing to. As if he wanted praise for having his mundaneness be relevant and useful to the matter at hand.

Virgil snapped his fingers. “Exactly! They won’t care if I’m carrying down a drill or something in a trashcan! They’ll never know! Hell—we could see if I could fit you in a trashcan and wheel you in secretly.”

Virgil laughed imagining Lynn in a trashcan, but in the lull of his giggling it became apparent by the look on his face that he wasn’t being entirely facetious. He looked over Lynn, surmising if she would be able to fit in one of the bigger trash cans that he worked with on a daily basis. 

The resulting silence from her host was a response in itself, and one Lynn was satisfied with. She chose to interpret his lack of a comeback as some sort of reluctant acceptance on his part.

When he finally talked, she smiled a little; that same amused smile. “Nah, I think I’ve said all I need to for now,” was her response, and just like that, the conversation was over – on her side, at least. Unlike Virgil, she hadn’t forgotten her reason for being there for one second, and was happy to move on. They had a lot to talk about.

Resting her coffee on his desk ( next to the archaic CDs ), she took a seat on his chair and leaned back, opening her notebook to the spot bookmarked by a pen. The pages were well-worn. With the scribbles and scratched out words and lines of code it had accumulated over the past few years, it was maybe the most personal thing she owned. It may have seemed old-fashioned, especially for someone who worked on computers most of the time, but physical writing had always been the best way for her to flesh out her thoughts and ideas. 

 – Plus, given the nature of these thoughts and ideas, it seemed wise to not leave a digital trail. Everything was risky, but at least paper could be burned or ripped up and flushed down the toilet. Electronic data was there forever.

“Where were we last time?” she asked, writing the date at the top of the page in shorthand. “I did some looking around this week, think I’ve found all the security camera blind spots we didn’t already know about.”

“Great,” he sneered—the insolence leaking in the curls of his expression. This retort, he decided, would be the furthest he’d push in their usual banter: a fleeting pinch sarcasm. Just as soon as he’d thrown it out at Lynn he had returned to his pouting frown and incredulous stare. Another bitter mouthful of the coffee—the peacekeeping gift.

Virgil ambled over to the armchair opposite of the desk area that Lynn had decided to occupy. With a huff he fell into the sunken chair, casual and languid in how low he let his posture slump into a pose that looked almost uncomfortable. The only thing he really seemed to care about was if he could still sip on his coffee sitting like that—and he could—so he remained there. His own little notebook was in arm’s reach on the floor, and his wayward limb managed to snatch it up without his eyes leaving Lynn as she officiated the start of this distinguished assembly. Where were we last time?

“Uh…” Virgil breathed out, flipping absentmindedly to the last used page. “Yeah, the cameras…”

“Were any of them useful? That you found—like around those service stairs?”

There was a silence. As if it seemed like he was going to let her answer, but it was obvious in his inhale that there was something he needed to say now that the conversation had settled into their escape plans.

“I, actually, have some big news,” he perked up with a genuine smirk. “That doesn’t have to do with cameras—not really.”

“Guess who… got assigned to start cleaning up the lower level basement once a week?” he asked. A wagging finger led back to him “This guy.”

A stillness after a storm. Virgil was leaning nonchalantly on the door as he stared blankly at the state of his room. He never imagined he’d ever have to have the displeasure of having someone over in his private space—the only space that he could personally define as his in this fucked up prison. In fact, he could remember making some meaningless promise to himself that he’d never ever let anybody see his room. Which was why whenever he and Lynn engaged in their favorite game who’s room this time? he would fight tooth and nail for her to stay the hell out of his room. Having Lynn feel the same way about her space made the argument especially frustrating. A circular and self-fulfilling series of points that would go round and round between them until someone got frustrated enough to break the cycle. Usually, it was Lynn who conceded to end the pointless shenanigans, but this time around Virgil had lost fair and square.

After first proving to him that she had no possession of psychic powers through a guessing game with a deck of cards Virgil had bought a few weeks ago, Lynn had beaten Virgil five-to-four in rock paper scissors. There was really nothing else he could pull out of his ass to convince her they couldn’t use his room besides his own convoluted feelings on the matter—most of which Lynn had invalidated by letting them use her room when she felt the same way. All’s fair, right?

“Fuck me,” he muttered, pushing himself off the door to collect some wayward papers on the floor and tidy up further. Not that Lynn’s room was all that clean either, but Virgil hated it when people saw how much of a slob he was. Might as well be seeing him naked. Hell, he’d be fine stripping down in front of Lynn instead of letting her see his room at this point.

“Fair enough, I guess,” Lynn said. “I would’ve at least looked for another job, though. If you have the choice to not work in an environment like that, you take it.”

It was a fucked up world they lived in where the obligation to pay bills was stronger than the fear of death. Elswood’s point system was more of an incentive system than anything, where the necessities were provided free of charge, more or less. Real money was a concept relatively detached from the academy. 

The importance of it, the hold it had on the outside world was getting easier to forget in passing: a feeling only accessible through memories now – an eight year old trying to figure out where her next meal was coming from; a seventeen year old struggling to find money to pay for her college textbooks.

( These disconnects from the world that used to be hers but wasn’t anymore weren’t something that Lynn thought about often, but were, admittedly, a source of great discontent every now and then )

“I don’t think there’s a moral obligation. Only people in danger are the idiots deciding to fight and the idiots deciding to stick around and watch.” She took the last sip of her coffee, then tossed it into the dustbin a few feet away. “No guilt in walking away.”

A grin had grown on to Virgil’s lips. It was always nice to have your amoral views reaffirmed by a coworker you fancied. “Nice,” Virgil muttered under his breath in praise of Lynn’s basket shot. Good vibes all around.

“Save your own skin, yeah. It’s a good practice,” he yawned, stretching out his arms and placing them behind his head. “You have to walk away.”

“Speaking of walking away,” he pulled out his Elstech. Two notifications had alerted him to a mess that required his immediate attention, with a follow-up message containing some sort of stern reprimand for not being presently where he was needed. Reading the content of that particular message, he let out an annoyed sigh. He was still too tired for this, but whatever. Another day another… arbitrary monetary system?

“I gotta go, but it was fun chatting,” he said, giving Lynn a smile. “We should do this again sometime.”

As Virgil knew (and as Lynn could probably extrapolate from Virgil’s persistence and personality), they were going to do this again sometime because as far as Virgil was concerned things were going great. He was going to crack that icy exterior and get… something out of it. He could only imagine what Lynn was like when she wasn’t being a deadpan snarker, but something told him the cynicism was well worn with the whole, being at Elswood for almost a decade.

If he could do anything about it, he’d get them both out. It was the least he could do after she shared her weed.