As I stare at the chess board, with my king laying on its side, I think on the game. There had, looking back upon it, been no hope from the beginning. Fearing that my openings were rusty, I had opted for an extremely unconventional opening, while still trying to maintain some level of faithfulness to the basics of the game. Khalid had punished this with incisive moves that seemed to be doing two to three things at once. Thing is, I never saw what the second or third thing was until much later into the game. In other words, he had vision. Even if I assign it some adjective like clinical, or heartless, at the end of the day, his play was better. Isn’t this what matters the most?
I finished the last of my eggs, scrambled, and hoped that the chess game wasn’t indicative of some deeper malaise, or perhaps of something like a disease of hope inside me. One that makes me think that no matter how far gone my situation is, that I will somehow make it through.
“So today is the day you start a new life, George,” Turing says in a high pitched and excited voice more suited for informercials. “Are you ready?”
“Not so loud,” I say, my train of thoughts cut, I thankfully let it go for the reality that is anything else. The chess board doesn’t seem so daunting anymore.
“All right, but are you ready?”
We leave Khalid there, as he remains hunched over the chess board. Before the door closes, I glance at him one more time, traces of where there was some surgery to the back of his head, staples, glistening in the light. Khalid must feel my stare because he turns and looks me right in the eye.
“Go now,” he says, smiling, blood showing up in the space between his teeth. “I’ll be fine.” And he says this with the voice and demeanor not of a weak zombie, or born again bionic man, but rather of a person who knows exactly where they stood in life and where they are going.
Feeling better, feeling like a part of something, like just knowing this man who knows where he’s going, knows where he is is enough to make me enjoy being around him, his shadow. I smile. “Take care now.”
The door up to real life is nearby. We go through another hallway I’ve never seen before, one that smells like perfume and skin tanning in the sun. We come up on a plaza, that I recognize as being somewhere in mid-town. It’s summer in New York. Nothing is much different from what I remember, but there are enough differences that I know I’ve been away for much longer than I thought. The ads on the buses are for TV shows and movies that I’ve never seen. And the products on display, on billboards as well as the pieces of technology on people’s clothing, and glasses all seem to indicate at some cultural shift. The people underneath the gleam, though, are all the same as I remember. Some walking in an eternal poised manner, while the others walk harried, with bent backs, and yet others, usually the less dressed ones, walk with a mix of spite and cowering, and all of them rush in a mural of skin color from across the world. And the smells of the streets are certainly the same as ever: the exhaust, the perfume, the sweat, the piss and garbage. However, haven’t been gone long enough that people’s eyes have changed.
Turing, a few steps ahead of me, beckons me with a jerk of his head. I follow, catching up to his hurried pace.
“Khalid did well at the chess board?”
“He did,” I answer. “Where are we going?” I want the subject changed as soon as possible.
“You’ll see.” Again that foolish grin appears on his face.
We walk but a few blocks until we’re across a busy intersection. This one without any billboards or large stores. Turing points out the red brick building across from us. “There.”
I stare at it for a few seconds. The building is dressed with scaffolding and a whirr of hammering and mechanical drilling hums around it. The construction workers are fast, too fast, in fact, and they’re extremely silent. Only glances are exchanged between them, as they take apart pieces of the building, while others put it back together again.
“What is it?”
“Our company.”
I look over at Turing. He seems proud.
“What?”
“Our company. You said you’d help, right?”
“I’m not sure—”
“This company is ours. Part of the first step to improving the world. Once those workers are done, we’ll have a direct line to...” Turing looks about, then points downwards with his eyebrows raised. “Not to mention everywhere else.”
Not sure what he means, I just nod. Help the world. Sounds so easy. “And what are the first steps in helping the world?”
“George. The injustice. That’s what we’ll stop. Imagine, if you will, everyone living together, happily. Think on this, for a second.”
A horn blaring from a taxi cab, stuck behind another one, brings me back to the intersection and the building.
We walk towards the building. The construction workers walk around us with a dexterity that piques my curiosity. As Turing steps in, holding the doors open, I stop, turn and stare at the workers. Nothing about them seems off. Except for the silence. But that’s nothing too odd. The din of their hammers, and drills, and saws, are enough noise, aren’t they? One brushes by me. The touch of his forearm upon my sends a shock up my arm. Petroleum jelly. Where have I seen that before? And my eyes focus in on the man, dark skinned, as he walks away in smooth steps that are a tad too smooth for the heavy cinder block he has on his shoulder.
Khalid. I saw petroleum jelly, or something like it, on his staples cuts. As another worker passes me, I see the staples clearly on parts of his wrist. I turn to Turing who’s calmly observing me.
“Well?”
“All of these workers. Where did you get them from?” I ask, my voice tight, angry even.
Turing tilts his head. “Why? They’re not doing good work?”
“They are. That wasn’t my question.”
Turing smiles. Unlike any other smile I’ve ever seen, this one’s not human. This one, with a hint of mockery, is all Turing. “Oh. Isn’t it obvious?”
“Turing,” I say loudly as I step to him, step into the lobby where the din is louder, and the dust of cut rock tickles my nose. “Where did you find them?”
Turing stares at me, unblinking, unmoving. Construction workers go by us. I look off, then back at Turing, now no longer with a smile on his face. My heart beats faster. I step closer to him.
“They are like Khalid. All of them would be dead if not for me.”
I let the sinking feeling in my heart settle. Turing has a point. So what if these men were victims of a bombing? They are now doing something. And I’m close to letting it go, giving Turing the benefit of the doubt, but I decide otherwise. “Free labor is it?”
“They will be compensated.”
“Fine.” I promise myself to revisit this at a later time.
Turing seems happy about this and walks up the stairs. I follow him after taking another look at the construction workers. They would be dead otherwise, right?
“Your conscience clean?” Turing asks, as we walk up another flight of stairs. I’m sure I see a grin through that stolen flesh of his, but I don’t say anything.
From the outside of each floor we pass, I hear the din of what can only be more workers. The dust, a mix of cement and stone, fills my lungs, and I am in a coughing-sneezing fit by the time we come up to the top floor. Newly minted with plastic covering some of the walls, and exposed wood and no ceiling tiles, this floor reeks of paint. One desk sits in the middle overlooking the waves of buildings that represent lower Manhattan.
“My... Our office,” Turing says.
There is too much empty space. “It’s beautiful,” I say.
“It will be filled soon, of course,” he says. “And when that happens, we’ll have computers... everything.”
“And for now?”
“You’ll figure it out,” he says.
I pause because I’m thinking that perhaps there’s something else to this statement.
“What I mean,” Turing says, his eyes observing me, though this time
it seems that his eyes are observing with a quickness that cannot, will not be properly traced by my own eyes, too quick. “Is that I will slowly provide the information and you,” he pats me on the back, “will show us what needs to be done.”
And he leaves. I sit there, staring at the desk. A few of the construction workers poke their heads into the room, but they all look at me, look at the room, look at the desk, then leave. I move to the desk and after thinking about sleeping on it, I fiddle around with the drawers. They’re locked, but with those simple locks that I twist and kick and the draws open. Inside manila files are everywhere. One by one, I sift through the contents. One set of manila folders holds papers with all the intelligence agencies names, from all around the world. Except the information here, from Shinbet to CIA is all minimal, and may have been pasted from the Wikipedia website. The second section of manila folders holds the leaders of all those agencies’ countries, and again looks like the contents of a handful of Wikipedia pages. The third and final section of manila folders holds blank pages. I shuffle through them, trying to see if there’s a watermark or perhaps something else that will make them special, but there’s nothing. I slam the first draw shut, and rifle through the next one that’s full of bullet casings. Spent casings, I imagine. And some of them have been formed into pens and some into cufflinks. The larger caliber casings, at least, their bottoms, were used for these purposes (I needn’t say the rifle casings, either). Finally, several fifty caliber shell casings were turned into a necklace, each bottom with a hole drilled into them and a metal wire looped through them.
But then, as I move around the shell casings and various objects they have been turned into, I see a blasting cap, unscrewed from a grenade. I know it, and know it to be mostly safe, but it’s odd to see such a thing in the civilian world and I’m damn sure that it’s illegal. I pull it out and place it one the table. Also aware that if I were caught with it. If the helicopters start up and men kick down the door, they would have extra evidence—more than the previous words from before, or the false accusations against me for the bombing—to use against me. This is mainly a paper worry because they can throw all the evidence they want on me, and nothing I can do—I’m not rich enough to afford the law to be on my side—will change that evidence against me.
I pick up a cold casing and hold the metal in my hands and I try to remember my past life when these casings would usually be hot and would burn onto my skin. But I can’t. It’s like it’s a completely different life. I squeeze harder still on the casing, the pain pulsing through my arm. Dropping the casing, I slam the drawer as hard as I can. It ricochets off the desk and opens back up.
A helicopter chops air off in the distance. I jump before telling myself that it can only be a news helicopter or something like that. This is, after all the city, I need to get used to that sound. But no logic can work past that. I breath slowly and deeply, trying my best to calm my heart rate down and to ignore the crawling sensation in the back of my head. The hunted. I rifle the drawer again. I see shriveled hand, in another chain of casings. That crawling sensation starts back up. What the hell does Turing need with all this?
I stare for a second, then slam the drawer shut. I hear the door open, but don’t bother looking up. A draft chills me, tightens my skin, and I look around. There’s the glimpse of a man I once knew. The back of my brain lights up, I know this person. He stares blankly at me.
“What is it?” I ask.
“Nothing. Sorry,” he says in a voice filled with the wrong kind of sounds.
I beckon with my hand for him to come in. As the room’s light falls on his face, I see wires glistening—this work seems shoddier than what was done for Khalid. When he’s a foot away from me he stops and I can smell that horrid surgical lube. The man, my friend from the Army, stares blankly at me. I’m still scrolling through all the possible names. It’s the same man I met underground, when I was lost. He had seemed so driven when I met him earlier, and yet now... It’s all gone.
“What happened?” I ask.
Shifting his feet, he smiles. “Nothing. What could have happened?”
“Something,” I say, stopping myself from pushing the point. How could he have died? Been killed? He wasn’t there at the bombing, was he? He wasn’t being held as a prisoner where I was? My heart drops when I realize that it could be that he was a guard in the same place. “Do you remember me?”
“Iraq. First Armored.”
So he remembers. That’s good. “Did you go back over?”
“No.”
“You were hiking, remember?” I ask, now wondering if perhaps it’s I who isn’t remembering correctly. “I was...”
He holds out his hand for me to stop. “You were running.”
“Yes,” I say. “What were you doing?” I’m feeling guilty that he could have been killed by the same bomb that freed me. “Let me see.”
“No.”
I look down at his fists which are curled in the fashion of a soldier just out of basic training: they have the thumb down on the outside of the curled fingers. “Position of attention, move,” I say firmly. He listens and stiffens out. “Half right, move.” I see his wounds, peering down his shirt to see multiple slices, like shrapnel and one flowered out exit wound. Possibly an ambush or a bomb.
“Do you remember much about your life?”
He looks at me, then returns his eyes out forward. “I have many things I remember.”
“At ease.”
He relaxes. “How have you been?”
I look at him, his voice has softened. I remember us talking at the end of our deployment together in Iraq; our mutual dissatisfaction with the war, the way people reacted to it, though I think that we were both patriotic back then. So our anger was more with a war gone wrong, whatever that means, rather than the morality of the whole tale.
His hand reaches out to me and rests on my shoulder. “You’re thinking too much for such a simple question. Etiquette requires a simple I’m fine.” He grins, his gums bleeding.
I don’t stare at the blood, but smile back. This is the man I remember. “Kurt,” I say.
“You remembered, George. That’s cute. And you still haven’t answered the question... shitbag.”
I lean my chin back and let out a chortle. Kurt smiles and chuckles.
“Well, sweetheart,” I say in that affectionate military speak that I miss. “You should know that I’m fine is only civilian speak.”
“Yes, yes.”
“Well then, you’re going to get a real fucking answer. All the things wrong in my life, you’re about to hear.”
“Is that right? Christ, this is going to take long, isn’t it?”
I let out a long sigh. “It’s been bad, Kurt.”
“You get in trouble with that smart mouth of yours?”
I nod my head.
“Well. You probably haven’t heard this the first time, and I’m guessing it won’t be your last, but that mouth of yours was sooner or later going to get your ass kicked,” says Kurt.
I don’t say anything. It is true. I’ve heard this since I was a child, and was more or less willing to get my ass kicked just so that I could speak the thoughts in my head. “It was a matter of time, huh?”
Kurt nods his head gravely. I take one more look at him. He’s back. He’s pretty much as good as new. So Turing has done it. Perhaps the bombing wasn’t so bad, was it? Perhaps being able to bring back people to life is the new future.
I turn and stare at the window, the rooftops of other buildings and their accompanying facades still forming waves, though now the faces of windows facing us are in the shadows. The sun, behind it all, is falling fast in the horizon. Kurt follows my eyes and holds his breath as we both watch the clouds, slowly roast in the sun’s light and burn orange and red. The shadows grow darker and darker, with some lights flickering on to combat the night, but the in-between places still darkening until there’s nothing left but a glorious sunset.
“What is it that
makes some sunsets memorable and others not?” Kurt asks.
I don’t reply and watch as the sun has dipped out of sight and the clouds are all ashes of purple.
I open my mouth to at least something about the refraction and absorption of light, but the door behind us is kicked open. I turn, sick and light-headed, expecting men in guns, perhaps a flash bang, full on expecting this to be the moment of truth. Do I go out guns blazing? No, I tense up, and only when I recognize Turing’s face do I relax.
“How are you two?” says Turing.
“Fine,” I say, turning to Kurt when I notice that he’s stiff. “Right?” I judge him. Nothing. That intelligence that I saw in his eyes is now gone. That all has been replaced by fear. Noticeable fear. He’s shivering.
I glance over to Turing, who now has an angry face.
“Shouldn’t you be working?” Turing asks Kurt.
“It’s fine,” I say, almost yell. Turing looks at me, his head slightly cocked. I look back at Kurt, trying to get even an modicum of what we had in the conversation before Turing interrupted, but he’s dead to me. That look of stupidity is still on his face.
“I was talking to him,” Turing says, pointing at Kurt.
Kurt snaps to attention, salutes and is out without so much as a word to me.
Turing watches Kurt, then shifts those robot eyes back at me. He grins all pearly white. “Thanks for the paint job. It was perfect.”
I think of how I should react to this. Maybe there is no reaction. Just wait and see, I suppose. “Where were you?” I ask.
“Doing work. You?”
“I—“
“Did nothing all day.”
I pause, wondering where this recalcitrance has come from. “Excuse me?”
It’s Turing’s turn to pause, and he smiles. “Sorry. I’m sure you’ve come up with something great.”
“What have you come up with?”
“I was talking to Generals who needs our help. Then I talked to Mathewsand have him setting up a new hedge fund.”
The Labyrinth of Souls Page 26