by Jeff Soloway
His eyes were dark and wide. The multicolored lights of the surrounding slot machines reflected off his forehead like a puddle in Times Square. He wiped his skinny arm across his brow, and the puddle dulled marginally. I recognized him: Carlos, from the protest. His limbs looked thinner than they had outside, twigs that these bullies could snap. His eyes drooped down toward whatever they had slapped away from him.
“You’re not one of us,” the leader said. I could see him too. He wore a gray blazer and a black T-shirt, the old Miami Vice ensemble, perhaps in honor of our port of departure. Here was a cop who broke rules, got results, and scoffed at misconduct cases and civil lawsuits. “You’re a spy. Or a reporter. Go ahead. Tell us how funny we are.”
A new disturbance rose behind me. I turned, hoping another security troop was marching by, but it was only a new gaggle of cruisers. They were laughing and pointing. The Witch had come to the casino. She laid a basket of merch on an unused blackjack table and sang out:
Buy my hat or buy my chains!
Just don’t leave me in the rain!
I turned back to the huddle.
“It’s cool,” Carlos was saying. “I’ve got lots of pictures. Here, just look at one. Look at the face. That’s my sister.” He held out a photo.
I caught just a glimpse. I could see the girl better in my memory, penned in behind the bike-rack barricade, her face confused and anxious, her arms shielding her chest. She had watched the cops tackle her brother. At least she wouldn’t have to see this.
Behind me, the Witch cackled.
If redcaps ask you, please don’t tell!
They want to ship me back to hell.
I turned to see a little boy hide his face in his mother’s skirt. Then I heard a liquid smack and a gasp and turned back to Carlos.
His face was dripping. His eyes blinked from the sting. “I bet you paid like twelve bucks for that beer.”
“Now tell me why you love Chomp,” the leader said.
His posse waited. The slot machines near us chirped and pinged; the Witch and her admirers shrieked and squealed. Carlos remained silent.
“I’ll find someone else to dialogue with,” he said finally. He took a tiny, tentative step and dipped his shoulder slightly, to gently nudge the nearest Chompian aside.
The nearest Chompian shoved him hard against the machines. They were all computerized now, so there was no jingling on impact, just the smack of flesh against plastic and chrome, and a little squawk of fear from Carlos. One of the Chompians feinted a punch at him to make him flinch. He cracked his head against the slot machine and they all laughed.
“Security’s coming!” I shouted.
The man in front of me, whose ears I had assaulted, half turned in annoyance. He was short but elaborately muscled. On his bicep was a tattoo of a bicep. “Fuck security. We got this.”
The leader turned around completely. He frowned. His eyes, from their high-altitude perch, sought me out. “We are security,” he said. “We’re citizen-soldiers. We don’t leave work for other people. We’re not liberals. Who are you?”
The rest of the posse, including Mr. Bicep, backed away so the leader could glare unimpeded. A few stepped behind me. Now I was surrounded too. Carlos, momentarily reprieved, craned his neck as he looked around for help.
“I thought I saw a security guard,” I said.
“Hey, look!” Mr. Bicep stomped on a fallen photo. “I’m stepping on the little dyke’s face.”
Carlos ducked his head and tried to burrow between the two nearest Chompians. He didn’t have a chance. He was slammed against a slot machine, pulled back, and slammed again, twice as hard. A dozen copies of his sister’s face looked on in silence from the floor. Still no security, no one even glancing our way. Everyone else in the casino was fully entertained by the Witch.
Carlos groaned. No one but us seemed to hear.
“Now make it hurt,” said the leader.
I turned around, waved my hands high over the heads of the nearest men, and shouted, “I’ll buy a hat!”
Those magical words zinged straight to the Witch’s ears. She cackled in triumph. “A sale! I’m saved!” She grabbed her basket and trotted across the casino with an exuberance that belied the weight of her chains. The confused men behind me stepped away.
“That’ll be ten million dollars, please!” she said. “Make it out to my foundation.”
Her fans laughed and cheered.
I took my time pulling out my wallet and fishing for cash. Everybody was watching me now, not just the Chompian bullies and the Witch’s fan club, but also the roulette players, boulevard flâneurs, and even the slot-machine zombies. Many of them stepped closer to watch what wackiness she’d do next, now that she’d been paid. I requested a picture with her; she announced that I was entitled to a freebie.
I pressed my phone on Mr. Bicep. “Take the picture?”
“What?”
“Come on, a little help,” I pushed the phone on him, wishing I hadn’t said little.
“What’s the deal with that guy?” The Witch pointed her crooked finger at Carlos. His thin forearms were crossed defensively over his chest, just as his sister’s had been.
The men all looked to the leader.
His lips pressed together, then his forehead bunched, as if his face had to convene for a discussion. The onlookers sensed the posse’s suspense. They all stared at him too.
He would surely back down. It’s hard to maintain righteous fury in the face of so much curiosity. On the other hand, the public—especially this public—tended to stand with authority, and this man’s authority was still supreme. If he accused Carlos of espionage, no one would object to a beatdown. And then the moral dilemma would be mine. Do I attempt to defend Carlos, and suffer my own beating, or do I melt away under cover of my new Chompian hat? In Chomp’s America, there are many ways to be a moral failure.
“Whoa.” The Devil’s Due player had ripped himself from the game. His gait was wobbly, his eyes wobblier, and the hand that held his Rolling Rock wobblier still. He tossed his non-drinking hand over the Witch’s shoulders. “Get me in the shot!” He giggled—he was drunk and merry instead of drunk and ornery.
I took up the camera. “Kiss her on the cheek,” I suggested, and he obliged, to much hooting, groaning, and cheering from the Witch’s crowd and even some laughs from the posse. I took a few more shots, squeezing in some of the posse, further diluting their anger. Then the drunk decided he wanted to take his own personal selfie, which necessitated much hilarious negotiation with the Witch. One of the posse wanted in on the fun. He started stuffing dollars in the links of her chain as if she were a stripper.
The leader looked at me once, then decided to forget about me forever. “Hey!” When he had everyone’s attention, he lifted his fist and, not to be outdone in any cause, whether for justice or for comedy, presented to her a twenty-dollar bill. The whole posse had transformed into good-hearted buddies teasing and flattering a middle-aged woman.
Carlos, now given space, edged away along the bank of machines. A few of the men glanced at him, then almost guiltily away. The soldiers for Chomp had been routed by their own humanity. Carlos escaped to the boulevard. So did I.
Pedestrian traffic was flowing aft, toward the stairs to the buffet, but Carlos was trying to plow his way forward. He Froggered to the exterior windows on the edge of the boulevard to try to make better progress.
I called to him: “Carlos! Stop.”
The very name seemed dangerous to say aloud. At least it wasn’t José or Paco. He froze for an instant, just long enough for me to catch up.
“I remember you,” he said. “You sprayed me.”
His hands were still trembling, even his forearms. When he saw I was alone, he wiped his forehead again and leaned against a window. There was no safe place for him on this
ship, but at least we were sheltered by the massive Chompian feed migration along the boulevard.
“How did you get on this ship?” I asked.
“I paid for my ticket. I have a constitutional right to cruise.” He rubbed at his eye. “What you squirt me with? It still itches.”
“Just water.”
“Didn’t feel like water. Felt like pee.”
“It wasn’t.”
“It stung.” He looked more worried than aggrieved.
“It mixed with your sweat and dripped into your eyes,” I said. “Pee and sweat are chemically very similar.”
He pondered my biochemistry for a moment. “Okay, I can see that.” I’d never met such an open-minded activist.
A kid knocked me in the hip as he dashed by. Carlos grabbed my elbow until I steadied myself. He even gave it a little pat after he let go.
“I’m not a Chompian,” I said. “I’m a writer. I’m covering the cruise.”
He stared into my eyes, searching for the lie. “Really?” He wouldn’t know what to do with a lie if he caught one.
“Really. I’d like to talk to you.”
“I can’t handle a writer. I’m not trained. It should’ve been her, not me.” He lowered his voice still further. “I’m wired. Can I trust you?”
“Absolutely.”
“Good. We’ll need exposure. We can’t talk here.”
“Follow me.” I led him back along the boulevard, past the casino, where the Witch was still doing business, all the way to the library. Nobody, of course, was in the library. The mock-oak tables in the room’s center were littered with empty ice cream bowls, cocktail glasses, beer bottles, and plastic plates, plus a copy of The Corrections. I hoped the reader had given up before the cruise part.
Carlos brushed some crumbs off a chair, sat down, and clasped his hands on the table surface. He was ready for his interview.
“What did you do to Clark Wolfson?” I hardly expected a full confession, but there was a chance he’d be crazy enough, or unsettled enough by the recent threat, to blurt either something true or something so obviously false as to implicate him.
Carlos rubbed at the corner of his eye. “Who?”
Did that rub mean anything, or was his eye just still itchy? I usually try to ignore what some writers, and most poker players, consider telltale gestures. People’s physical responses are odd at the best of times; it’s impossible to judge when their oddness is actually consequential. I prefer to judge them by their words.
“Clark Wolfson,” I explained, “was the passenger you manhandled outside the cruise terminal.”
“Oh. Is he okay? Those fucking cops. Look, apologize to him from me. I lost my cool. I’m not here to battle. I’m here to dialogue and engage.”
“How did you get a ticket?”
“My mom bought it. Well, really it was the Ola.”
“Hola?”
“Wish she was here. She knows how to handle writers. And fascist meth heads. She comes from a family of warriors. Her dad was a history professor in Guatemala City. A socialist. She left when she was eighteen. You can’t live down there. You get knifed for your bus fare. Ever been to Guatemala?”
“No.” Actually, I had, and I’d even glimpsed the country’s dangers. The armed convoy that had escorted me and my fellow junketeers to the ruins in Tikal could have starred in a Mad Max movie. But I was here to interview Carlos, not dialogue with him.
“Me neither. My mom came on a student visa and got a job in a daycare center. Never got papers. My dad’s a citizen but he hit the road, Jack, ten years ago. Didn’t slow her down, nothing does.”
I had met people like Carlos’s mom—people of relative privilege in their home countries, but not privileged enough to be safe from their national disaster. So they emigrate, legally or not, and trade their high-status lifestyles in a high-danger setting for a run-down one-bedroom apartment in New York or Miami. They take on menial work, maybe as a waiter, or a cab driver, or a nanny. Their education and cultured accents mean nothing; to the mass of Americans, they’re simply Latin, like their neighbors. Their only compensation is reasonable physical safety and the hope that their children will someday regain, in a richer country, the social status the family used to hold. Only the most dedicated rejoin the political struggle in their new country. Admirable, and honorable, but not easy on their children.
Carlos smiled down at the coffee-ringed table as he thought about his mother. “Now she’s the president of Ola de Mujeres, which, if you know anything about multicultural domestic worker alliances in Florida…” He cocked an eyebrow.
I had the urge to tell him exactly what I knew or cared about these alliances, but I remembered how he had persisted before the menacing Chompians. Everyone should be so childlike. “Sounds familiar.”
He grinned with pride. “We’ve had nannies coming over for meetings since I was old enough to pour my own Cheerios. You should’ve seen them screaming at the TV the night of the election. My mom’s friend Meches drove home to tell her kids to sleep in the basement, like the raids would start that night. My mom just turned on the computer and said, ‘Let’s get to work.’ The other alliances wouldn’t show at marches, because the members are scared of ICE undercovers. Not my mom. She could always see them coming. Dopey white guys in stupid blue do-rags like they’re Crips. She’d give out masks or wigs to the scaredy-cats, or let them stay home and paint signs. So they could give them to a friend who’s got papers, or their kids, if they were born here. Like I was. I carried signs for lots of people.”
“So you’re a fighter too.”
“What else could I be? What would you do, in my place?”
I wondered the same thing. What I admired about my mother was her success. What if she, like Carlos’s mom, had been fighting all her life for a cause that always failed? “So why did your mom put you on this cruise?”
“Oh, Jesus, I wish she was here! She always says we need to get the media on our side. We’re not antifa. We reject violence. Violence only works if you’re white anyway. But we’re realists. When Chomp quit, we skipped all the victory parties. We knew we had to be ready for worse. Right after the first comeback rallies, my mom brought a plan to the Ola leadership. That’s her and her two best friends. The boardroom’s our kitchen. It passed. I’m gonna tell you what it is. But you can’t blow our cover. It’s secret. What I’m about to say, it’s— What do you call it when you promise not to write something?”
“Off the record.”
“Exactly! See, my mom would’ve known that. So here it is: The plan was to go to Chomp’s comeback rallies. Not hang around the free-speech cages outside, like normal protesters, but get tickets like any ordinary fascist and walk right in. Once you’re there, you don’t argue, or scream, or boo, or cut the microphone, or lay down dead on the stage with a big fake knife sticking out of your back until they drag you out. No. You stay low, hang out in the rear by the hot dog stand, find some reasonable-looking people—you know, unarmed, not bikers—and you introduce yourself. You’re an independent, you’re curious, you want to learn more about Chomp’s plans now that he’s not president. You talk. You listen. You dialogue. Also you bring along a friend with a little GoPro camera strapped to her belt so you can live-stream the encounter.”
“In case they beat you up.”
“No! So you can document the human connection! That’s what you upload to YouTube. Because when you start talking, you stop hating. You buy that? Me neither, but the funding committees did. My mom gives A-plus presentations. Now at first, I’m just tech support. I’m setting up fake Facebook profiles so we can pass the lame-ass security check to get rally tickets. But one of the ladies turns to my mom and says, ‘Cristi’—that’s my mom—‘Cristi, take Carlos, not me, he’s so blanquito.’ Which I am. Not to mention I can handle a GoPro better than any of them. And she says, ‘Carlo
s, forget the rally in Pennsylvania. Let’s go on the Chomp cruise.’ Imagine taking a cruise with your mom!”
“Crazy.”
“No, it’s brilliant. This is way better than a normal rally. This gives us a chance to embed for days in a normal setting and to dialogue with the big donors, not just the average cracker. Maybe even meet Chomp himself at the buffet or something. It stretches the budget, so we can’t do the ten rallies we planned. We can just do this one. But it’s all worth it if we can dialogue on camera with Chomp himself. We got my aunt to babysit my sister. I’ve got break at school.” He sighed. “The plan was perfect. My mom would do the talking, I’d do the taping. No one ever wants to punch her.”
“That’s why you were on our side of the barricades at the protest.”
“I was one of you. I had a ticket. My sister and my aunt were on the other side. I was coming over to say goodbye before I boarded. Then your friend showed up. And Chomp.”
“So where’s your mom now?”
“In detention.”
“They arrested her at the protest?”
“ICE got her. Not at the port, days before.”
“They heard about your plan?”
“Probably not. They raid daycares all the time. You hear the stories at Ola meetings. They like to bust down the door during snack time, when all the staff’s in the same room. That’s what happened where my mom works. The one American woman there, the supervisor, had to herd the kids into the finger-painting room while they cuffed my mom and two other teachers. That’s progress. Under Chomp, the redcaps would make the kids watch. So my mom’s in a detention center now. I wanted to cancel the trip, but there’s no refunds, and I knew my mom would want me to go. So I did.”
“Your dialoguing needs work.”
“Tell me about it. My mom’s so much better.”
“Last question. Remember the evacuation drill we had today?”