by Rohan Wilson
Hot sparks spill from the lock. Howland slides back the gate. I can’t see his face but I know he’s smiling. Surely, he’s smiling. The admin building now belongs to him.
Even in my deadened state, I see the problem. Rin is inside that building.
The Hon. Sophia Rose Kwong MP
Prime Minister
Minister for Truth and Justice
MEDIA RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE DISTRIBUTION
30 JANUARY 2075
Today I’m announcing that I’ve recommended to the Governor-General the establishment of a royal commission into possible systemic failures that led to rioting in the Eaglehawk Migrant Training Centre.
Allegations of mismanagement in the facility have for a long time been widely aired.
The previous government saw fit to ignore these allegations.
During the election, we promised to recommend a royal commission to investigate any mismanagement and we’re proud to deliver on that promise to the people of Australia.
We remember the images of violence and destruction that accompanied the riots.
We remember the death of Archer Van Hooj, the officer killed trying to subdue the rioters.
We remember the images of Rin Sakurai inciting protesters to bloodshed inside the centre. We remember the manhunt for Daniel Howland.
Lives were lost.
The community of the Eaglehawk peninsula suffered a tragedy.
We need to understand everything that went wrong in order to prevent it from happening again.
I’ve submitted the terms of reference and the name of the proposed commissioner to the Governor-General, pursuant to the Royal Commissions Act 1902.
I will speak with the Premier of Tasmania, James Abetz, in the coming days to finalise how the royal commission will conduct its inquiries and how it will relate to the ongoing police investigation.
Rest assured that this inquiry will find the answers the community needs.
Rin
To be honest, I’ve always floated in weak acid. I don’t talk about it because no one has sympathy for the rich. I’d be that pathetic rich girl whining about how tough her life is. So, I don’t tell Alessandra. I don’t tell anyone. Not even Yamaan.
But anyway, I’ve been eaten full of holes.
Mostly it was nothing. Mostly it was small and I could pretend it didn’t matter. Like when people said ‘ni hao’ to me. Whatever. Fuck you. Or when they congratulated me for speaking English without an accent. I mean, it was nothing. I lived with it. Or when my Japanese conversation tutor at Yale—a white guy, if you can believe that—confused me with the other Asian girls. We all looked the same, you see. Sure, he acted embarrassed about it and he’d apologise and we knew he wasn’t a bad dude. Like I’m telling you, weak acid.
It worked the other way too. I took my first trip to Japan when I was seventeen. Right, I know, it wasn’t my first visit. I realise that. It felt that way though. Coming through the airport, everyone spoke Japanese to me—the customs guys, the shop staff, the cops. Alessandra just laughed. Folks spoke to her in English. She’d been coming to Japan her entire life and she was fluent in the language and they still spoke to her in English. She told me I’d always have two homes but, in my mind, I only had one—New York. I wasn’t home unless I could pass along Madison Avenue and see myself in the store plate glass. One night I went out in Harajuku, loitering with the salarymen and the cosplayers and the people there. No one stared at me. Why would they? I looked exactly like everyone else. On the inside though I was an impostor. I felt more lost than ever.
Alessandra saw what I went through day after day. We’d be at functions and dinners and meetings in rooms full of smart people, good people, and she’d introduce me to someone as her daughter and I’d see that twitch in their eye. They’d look at her and look at me, trying to puzzle it out. Smart people, good people. Some would say, ‘Oh, you’re adopted.’ Others would fake a smile to hide their confusion. Once, a guy told Alessandra that she should have picked a kid from the Philippines because the darker Filipino complexion would have matched her Latina colouring. I mean, I was standing right there for godsakes. She turned steely then. Her back straightened. She gave this guy a badass look and told him that she didn’t choose me any more than Romeo chose Juliet. Love happened. That’s why we’re together.
Was it true? I’ve thought about it a lot. The two of us, you know, how else could she make it work? There was no blood. No natural bond. So, she built this story about us and built a relationship out of the fiction. Romeo and Juliet. I knew you were the one, she used to tell me. Soon as I saw you. My true daughter, it’s her. She told me this so much I never questioned it. In the end, I suppose love is a story we tell ourselves. This person and no other. This person will fill the hole inside me. When my senses started to nag, I sort of ignored it. I believed the story. I didn’t know what was wrong but I knew something was missing. That’s the thing about adoption—you always feel like something’s missing. Well, something is missing. The first chapters of your life story are missing.
The nagging really started after I met Yamaan. He’d walk around the house on Feydhoo Finolhu in these tight blue shorts, bending to dust a side table or sweep a corner, and I’d watch from behind my sunglasses with a growing heat in my belly. I’d never seen anyone so ignorant of their own beauty. He’d lean and bend and stretch and I’d grow hotter and hotter. His skin reminded me of licked chocolate. Alessandra would nudge me when he walked by or scrunch up her face in pleasure when he leaned or stretched and it made me angry at her, like, angry on his behalf. He’s not a piece of meat, I’d say to her. Then she’d catch me staring and lift her eyebrows in my direction—that’s the effect he had on me.
Lying together in bed, naked, holding each other, Yamaan would ask me these funny questions. What do you sing to yourself when you’re alone? Who do you think of when you masturbate? Where do you want to be buried? What item do you treasure the most? Is there a poet that touches your heart? Some I could answer, some I couldn’t. Yamaan gazed at me as I thought each one over. I’d give an obvious answer. A safe answer. I mean, I hardly knew the guy. I felt comfortable with him though, like I could answer if I wanted to. Then he asked me, ‘What do you fear the most?’
Without thinking, I said, ‘Being alone.’
A tingle spread along my nerves. I smiled and looked away but before I could hide it my eyes started to well. He was still watching. I pinched my lips tightly shut. What the hell was wrong with me? As he smoothed my hair, I started to cry. It was stupid. Crying about what? I didn’t even know. He must have thought I was a lunatic. He pulled me against his chest and said, ‘Dear girl, you’re not alone. You’re not alone.’
And that was the start of it.
It wasn’t until Houston that I understood.
The thing about Houston, right, is this: Houston brought back an old memory. It was like I’d found one of the first chapters of my life and the rest of the story started to make sense. After Houston, I couldn’t think about anything else.
While all this was going on, I’d started senior year at Yale. I was supposed to be a good kid. Alessandra had instilled in me a work ethic, mostly through brute force. Extra classes at Chapin, my high school in Manhattan. Language study. Leadership courses. Aikido. I had a work ethic all right. But I hadn’t ever had freedom like the freedom I found at Yale. I’d turn up for class with a hangover and eat breakfast at 3 p.m. in that shitty pizza place on College Street, the one with signed photos of twentieth-century movie stars on the wall, and trek back to my apartment to sleep. I wasn’t a good kid anymore. I was full of holes.
There are orders of horror. Waking in the morning face down on a sofa with a boiling hangover? I’d call it second order. Waking in the morning, hungover, and with your pants soaking wet with urine? First order. Let me emphasise that. First fucking order horror. It happened to me so often I started wearing undergarments to bed. To be honest, it was the undergarments that got me thinking I
was sick. The first time I stepped into a pair a sort of calmness came over me and I stood watching myself in the mirror. The fact that I looked like a baby felt comforting. I stayed curled on the bathroom floor a long time wishing there was someone to hold me, coddle me, breastfeed me.
I’d often find myself lying in bed, holding my pillow, and staring at the light on the ceiling fan while thinking about Yamaan. I thought about him a lot. I thought about his ass in those tight shorts especially. We’d stream to each other every day. We’d masturbate together. Somehow, we became a couple, even though we only physically saw each other once or twice a year. I would lay in bed, thinking of Yamaan, until Daisy and Luciana showed up with a sixpack of EnergyBliss and dragged me out to a bar in the early evening.
Late in my senior year I woke on the sofa in my apartment to see Alessandra standing over me. That grey streak in her hair. Those nails painted red. She had a key because she’d paid for the place. She sat her bag down and folded her arms. I was still buzzing and it took me a second to understand she wasn’t an hallucination.
‘God,’ I said. ‘Let me sleep.’
‘It’s eight thirty. Get up.’
‘I got home at five. Sleep. Please.’
‘The board fired Axelrod,’ she said. ‘He’s blown Yokosuka. He’s out.’
My mind churned in slo-mo. ‘What?’
‘Things have changed. I’m bringing you up.’
Axelrod. I tried to picture him. All I saw were the strobe lights of the club.
‘I have to bring you on board,’ she said. ‘It has to be soon.’
This was not good news. I’d been planning on finishing my MBA as slowly as I could to stave off the inevitable. I stood and made for the bathroom, thinking I might throw up.
‘Is that a diaper?’
‘Yes, it’s a fucking diaper.’
‘Rin.’
I closed the bathroom door. Outside I heard her heels on the marble tiles.
‘Is something wrong?’
‘I’m fine.’
‘Are you wetting the bed again?’
‘You should call before you come, you know. You can’t just walk in here. This is my apartment.’
‘I called you ten times. You didn’t answer.’
‘What am I supposed to do about my MBA?’ I said. ‘And my Japanese? It still isn’t good enough for business.’
‘A grown woman wearing diapers is not fine, Rin. What’s going on?’
‘Axelrod’s out and you want me on Yokosuka. That’s what’s going on.’
I heard her lean on the door. ‘Yes, I want you on Yokosuka. But not until you know the company. You need to know how it works. All of it.’
‘I think I’m going to throw up.’
‘Like it or not, it’s time to start learning.’
The company had been waiting on the road ahead of me like a troll under a bridge my whole life. Now it was real. I lowered my head against the cold copper sink.
‘Your Japanese is fine,’ she said. ‘It’s great. You can do this. Stop worrying.’
‘What happened to Axelrod?’ I said.
‘Short answer: Hoshino-san didn’t like him.’
‘Hoshino-san?’
‘Don’t worry. He’s going to like you. You can keep up with Hoshino—unfortunately Axelrod couldn’t.’
I wiped my mouth and looked at myself in the mirror. You’ve got to understand: Alessandra rescued me from a kid’s home that I hated and this basic truth was obvious to me every time I saw my reflection. She rescued me from a life of God knows what. Can you imagine the misery of the institutionalised in a failing state like Japan? Sooner or later, I’d have ended up on my own, maybe even homeless, or poor, or drug addicted. She saved me from that. There I was at Yale and my credit card had a $500,000 limit and there was a Range Rover parked in the garage that I didn’t even use. The only thing she ever asked was that I help her run CYC when the time came. Guess what? The alarm just rang on that clock.
I had to do it.
So that’s where Houston came into the picture. Federal Detention Centre Houston. The first morning downtown, standing outside the centre, all I wanted to do was run away. No windows or lights or signage. Just a tall, sheer cliff of sandstone. I stood staring up, in the full and certain knowledge it would be the worst six months of my life. FDC Houston had been a holdover facility for pre-trial detainees of both genders under government operation. These days, under Cabey-Yasuda, it had been bastardised into a sort of warehouse where we stored clients of every security level before transferring them to more appropriate facilities. In other words, stacking them ten deep to save money.
Alessandra wanted me to understand how the company operated from top to bottom. Houston was bottom. If I wanted to work on Yokosuka, if I wanted a vice presidency, I had to start at the bottom. After all, that’s the way she’d done it. Her father, Francisco (a badass who’d worked his way up from warden to take a board position in 2035), made her earn every promotion she got. She’d done time on the floor, time in admin, even time in cleaning. So it followed that I’d do time on the floor, time in admin, and time in cleaning too. That last one proved to be an impasse. No fucking way was I cleaning toilets. Turned out Alessandra hadn’t been too fond of the cleaning either and she let me take a dip on that one. Victory? You betcha.
So I was onboarded, given ten hours of basic training, and put to work as Corrections Officer Braden. A regular day ran like this: 3 a.m. prisoner count, 5 a.m. prisoner count, breakfast in the cafeteria, escorting prisoners to commissary, escorting prisoners to medical, lunch in the cafeteria, 3 p.m. count, then back to the hotel. Day in, day out. I’d pass through these weird dizzy moments where I’d be walking a prisoner somewhere and for a second I’d forget everything. Was I the guard or was I the inmate? Seriously. Twelve-hour shifts meant I did half their time with them.
Worse was the boredom. You walked the same route around the same unit maybe ten times a day. To keep from going stir crazy, I made chitchat with the inmates about life outside FDC Houston. One guy, Bones, said he was from New York like me. The feds packed him off to Texas after he caught a beating from two guards, who he then threatened to sue for brutality. I fostered these relationships—having the 240 lb hardass treat me with courtesy made younger inmates more amenable when I needed cooperation. I learned that bending rules won you friends. One time, I let a wife beater call his kids outside of hours. He later slipped me a note warning me to stay away from the white guy on level four because the asshole wanted to hurt me. Bit by bit, I came to respect the men in my unit. They taught me how to keep myself safe.
I really came to understand the treachery of the prison business during my time at Houston. Ranking officers, the men in charge of the unit, routinely faked the records for security checks. Instead of walking patrol, they sat in the break room with their boots propped up while eating food stolen out of commissary. I’ve seen the contracts for Houston—we’re required to log security checks every 15 minutes. The only time these checks took place was if a Department of Corrections auditor came through. ‘We leave it to the software,’ one guy told me. ‘Those damn cameras know more than we do anyway.’ We broke every rule there was. I made a plan for a use-of-force incident, to move a risky client safely to another cell and, by law, I knew we had to use mechanical restraints, you know, handcuffs or leg shackles. Nope. The ranking officer showed me an ‘enhanced escort position’, basically a neck lock, that I would use to de-escalate and control the non-compliant inmate. That was enough for me. I told him I wasn’t doing it.
Then one morning Captain Abernathy called four of us into the interrogation room and lined us up. He said that a client on level four had a weapon hidden in his cell. I knew this client—the wife beater had warned me about him. He’d been threatening to kill me since I’d arrived. He was part of the Order of the Blood, a white supremacist gang, and he told anyone who’d listen that the Japanese race didn’t exist until a Chinaman fucked a pig. That’s why I’d volunteer
ed for the cell incursion. The captain seemed to approve of this attitude.
‘He’s wound up,’ the captain said. ‘He’s dangerous.’
We leaned on our shields. The guy on my right popped his gum.
‘He’s going to try to get under your visors. Protect yourself from that. Okay? Go slow. We take our time on this.’
I unlocked the safety on my pepper shooter.
‘Officer Reyes, you’re the number one. Do you understand your responsibilities?’
Reyes pulled on his gloves. ‘Yes, sir.’
‘Officer Miller, you’re the number two. Do you understand your responsibilities?’
‘Reed, sir.’
‘What?’
‘My name’s Reed.’
The captain looked around like one of us might be Miller. I knew Miller. He’d quit last week and Reed had replaced him. Corrections officers turned over at a rate of about two per week. Shitty job, shitty pay. It figured.
‘Jesus Christ. Reed, I hope you understand your responsibilities.’
‘I do, sir.’
‘Officer Braden, you’re the number three. Do you understand your responsibilities?’
‘I understand.’
‘Officer Hameed, you’re the—’
‘Captain?’
‘What is it, Braden?’
‘We’re supposed to be issued with an AC-331 body protection system when undertaking a cell extraction.’
‘Thank you, Braden. I’m aware of that.’
We all looked at each other. None of us had AC-331 body protection systems. I wasn’t even sure we kept AC-331 body protection systems in the facility.
‘Officer Hameed, you’re the number four. Do you understand your responsibilities?’