by E. L. Giles
My mouth nearly hits the floor. I’ve been sent a unificator? Now nothing makes any sense at all. Am I suspected as of some kind of threat to the safety of the Party? Do they think I’m an insurgent? The more I think of it all, the less I understand, my thoughts becoming a mess of conspiracies and assumptions. I’m literally trapped in a nightmare, and the first thing that crosses my mind is to get out of the car. But I know it’s useless to try since the doors are locked, and even if I could escape, how long would it take before he finds me?
We turn at the intersection of Fourth and Fifth Avenue without stopping and drive past a row of red brick buildings before we stop at the BP Center. A short journey by car, less than five minutes, and made in total silence. I don’t dare ask the man what is going on. I fear the answer more than anything else.
“Get out,” he says.
I get out of the car and step onto the deserted sidewalk. Everyone must still be working. Other than the few patrollers and my driver, who bizarrely stays parked there as if waiting for me, I am horribly and awkwardly alone. A quick glance up shows someone else, staring at me through the window—Marcus, a curious grin drawing up his mouth. But his attention is on my driver as if he is communicating with him. Surely it’s some trick of my imagination or a weird reflection on the window that deforms Marcus’s features.
Black clouds amass over us, and heavy rain starts to pummel the top of my head. The storm has started and is soon followed by a flash of blue and violet lightning before the rumbling of thunder shakes the ground beneath my feet. I pull my shirt over my head and hurry to the entrance of the BP Center before I risk being struck by lightning. I hate thunder.
The waiting room is empty. The lights are dimmed, and I notice a new, older girl standing behind the counter in the lobby. Black hair is braided down her back, but she wears the customary gray dress and a hard expression as she looks at me.
“Marcus is waiting for you,” she says plainly. There aren’t any welcoming words that the redheaded girl used to greet me with every time I entered the BP Center.
I don’t respond but head through the hallway up the stairs and finally to Marcus’s office. I’ve seen these white plastered walls way too often over the last few weeks that I could walk blindfolded and I’d still be able to make my way to his office.
I stop by the door, breathing heavily before I knock three times.
“Come in,” calls a rough voice that barely resembles that of Marcus.
A lump forms in my throat. What should I expect from this appointment? What should I expect from this day? What should I expect from my life from now on?
I walk in. The first thing I notice is Marcus, who is still standing by the windows, a shoulder leaning against the frame while staring outside—though there isn’t much to be seen through the wall of rain that pelts the window.
“I warned you, citizen,” says Marcus in a tone that sounds like someone who cares. It’s weird coming from him.
“What?” I ask.
“Be careful. Be extremely cautious. Not everybody is as tolerant as I am. Keep it cool,” Marcus says. “That doesn’t ring a bell to you? You’ve put me in a precarious situation today.”
“The call, it was you?”
He turns around. His face is more emaciated than ever. The bags under his eyes are even blacker than I remember from our last appointment. His skin is paler, almost transparent; his complexion is a sickly green under the cold white spotlight over his head. It’s unnerving to witness such a drastic change in such a short time. As benign as it seemed to me last time I saw him—the terrible cough aside—it is apparent now that he has some terrible disease. I observe him as he walks toward me, his gait is heavy and slow. I see something in his eyes that puzzles me. Is it fear, pity, or maybe a sparkle that means he cares?
“Let’s see if it worked this time,” he says encouragingly, gesturing me to follow him into the examination room.
“The car and the call, it was you, wasn’t it?” I repeat as he hands me the little plastic stick on which I have to pee.
“Does it matter?”
I think about those three words before I shake my head. In fact, it does matter to me, as it probably saved me from the whip, or even worse. I also don’t understand why he would do that for me, but Marcus seems to be having a hard time—at least that’s how it appears to me—and since he has put himself in a precarious situation at the hospital already to help me, I decide not to linger uselessly on the subject and worsen his torment.
Waiting the required five minutes for the tool to reveal the result is nerve-racking. The nightmare that has been my day plays on a loop in my head: Callum speaking at a nose distance from me, the threat of his words…Peter. Even if I thought I cleared him and his absurd ranting out of my head, the fact is that part of it has stayed in the back of my thoughts, harassing me with doubt and apprehension. I feel the need to pull myself together and concentrate on what’s to come.
“I’m sorry about your friend,” says Marcus after a while, breaking the heavy silence that lingers between us.
His kind words shake me more than anything else today. I never expected he knew anything about Anna or our friendship, and even less that he cared about it. How should I react? What should I say? I don’t know. It’s too sudden, too unusual a behavior for him. The “thanks” I’d like to express dangles at the edge of my lips before vanishing soundlessly. I only nod, trying to show him the gratitude my words can’t express toward such compassion. It’s the first time I’ve felt something that resembles kindness from him. The feeling that someone cares for me and my fate, other than Anna is peculiar.
Marcus raises his head from looking at the stick and stares at me. “Negative,” he says.
The single word is painful to hear. Marcus and I lock eyes. For a few seconds, he stares at me the way he did when I entered his office minutes ago—the same troubled pain and terror and caring that puzzles me. I could be wrong. It could simply be due to his illness, but the doubt is there and locked in my head.
“So?” I ask, my voice unsteady.
He breathes a sigh. “So, from now on, everything is in the hands of the supreme court of Kamcala, who will decide your fate,” he says. “though given the turmoil of today, you’re more than likely to be retired.”
He invites me out of the examination room and pulls back a chair for me to take, and then he turns back to take his own seat behind his desk. He leans forward, opens a drawer, and takes out a pack of cigarettes. He offers me one, but I refuse. The thought of smoke entering my lungs nauseates me. He takes one, squeezes it between his lips, and lights it.
“Lung cancer,” he says between two puffs. “I should have stopped years ago. I’m glad you don’t smoke.”
“Sorry.” is all I can think to say.
I’d like to do my best to apologize for the dreary fate that he faces, but I’m too shaken and too shocked to do so. My worries are driven elsewhere, toward this word that still echoes in my head: “Negative.” It’s not like I wasn’t expecting this, but still, nothing could have prepared me for this feeling of such immense loss. I think of Anna, who believed in me, and I feel shame. She may not be here anymore, but I feel like I haven’t honored her memory properly.
I bring my attention back to Marcus as he stubs his cigarette straight on the surface of his wooden desk, burning through the varnish and creating a charred black spot. I frown at his strange behavior. He used to place everything on his desk with perfect symmetry, never letting even the faintest particle of dust soil his workspace.
Marcus shrugs, snorting, then adds, “Doesn’t matter now. It’s too late. But still one of the few things I don’t regret…”
“I don’t get what you mean,” I say.
Marcus smirks—almost a smile, which is a first—before his features turn harsh and tense, betraying torment that finds its roots beyond my own knowledge or understanding. Is it due to his cancer or something else?
Marcus fills in the blanks on a form
entitled “Pregnancy Fail Report,” scribbling his signature here and there, scratching the paper in some spots and stopping halfway through as the horn of a car blares outside.
“You must leave,” he says without looking at me. He then bursts into a fierce coughing fit, leaning over his desk like he’s about to black out. I jump off my chair to pat his back, noticing his face turning crimson.
“Are you okay?” I ask, worried, rubbing his back.
“Lisa,” he strains to say through the coughs. He plucks up my hand that rests on the desk and holds it into his sweaty one. “You must hold on and be ready. Understand? Hold on and be ready.”
He calms down, the cough fading like he had faked it all to tell me these words.
“I—I don’t get—”
“Trust me,” he interrupts. “You must leave. Now.”
He heads to the window, taking up his previous position exactly where he had been when I entered his office earlier.
“Good luck, Lisa,” he says, speaking to the window.
“But when is my trial?”
“Tomorrow.”
“And how do you know that?”
He bursts out laughing. It sounds eerie, almost evil. “Regular procedure, as usual. Now get out. The car will take you there.”
“The car? You mean—”
“I mean the car outside. Now go.” He rushes me out, his voice drowned out by the horn of the car that cries outside once again.
I jog from his office, not understanding anything that is going on. I don’t understand why Marcus had to rush our appointment. I don’t get why there’s a car waiting for me outside, honking at us like time is running out.
I step outside the BP center, welcomed by the deluge of water pummeling my head. The car is there—the same black one with tinted windows and the same stiff unificator driver who barely looks at me as I take my place in the backseat. I slam the door closed, and it sounds like a muffled detonation. It couldn’t have been the door, could it? It sounded more like a gunshot. And the timing was too perfect to be a simple coincidence. It happened exactly when I closed the door. Was it Marcus?
I lean my head toward the window and twist my neck so I can see the window of his office, but the rain and the growing fog hinder my view.
“What was that?” I ask before the driver shifts forward.
“Nothing,” he says as he shakes his head.
Our eyes meet in the rear-view mirror, and what I see wrenches my stomach—the exact same stare Marcus had when I entered his office, the same blend of pain and terror and pity.
What does it mean? What is going on?
Chapter Six
A narrow bed with one thin pillow and a set of white sheets, an old television on which several knobs and buttons are missing, a flashing lighting fixture, and a locked door—that’s the room I get until my trial tomorrow. It feels austere with its cement block walls painted beige and military-green that inspire nothing but stress and anguish. The floor is also cement, cracked and rugged under my feet. There is no window. I am alone. I have nothing to do before tomorrow, and still, I must occupy my mind. I must distract myself from the madness of today. I turn on the old television.
It is set on the State Channel, and as the commentator recalls a story I’m not familiar with, I mindlessly replay the appointment I had with Marcus and the strange words he said to me. “You must hold on and be ready.” What does that mean? Does it even mean anything? I don’t know. How I hate not knowing.
I let my thoughts drift back to before today’s appointment, to the moment I met Peter. “They kill us there.” Why did he say that? I mean, it’s nonsense, right? It can’t be true. It’s impossible. No, I stick to my thought that something of that extent, that big of an atrocity, couldn’t remain unknown by all of us. Not after a decade of running the Retirement Center and sending people there. Someone would have discovered it, and they would have warned everyone. I mean, they even take the time to print pamphlets about the Retirement Center. Repercussions for rebellious citizens there may be harsher than here. Maybe that’s what he meant to say and not that they literally “kill us.” Yes, it must be something to that extent. It must be.
I breathe a sigh of desperation. You warned me, Marcus, and I screwed it all up, I think to myself. With this failure comes the soiled memory of Anna, who wrongly believed in me. I’m hopeless though, and she should have known that. Marcus should have known too. Why help me? I don’t belong here. That must be why they’re going to send me elsewhere, to this Retirement Center, surely with other people like me—wrecked and hopeless people. At least I won’t be alone…I hope.
+++
“Hold on,” says a voice in the back of my head. It fills my ears, my thoughts. It fills everything. Eyes surround the black curtain that is my vision. Pitiful eyes. Horrified eyes. Painful eyes.
I stare at them all, moving over each other until a detonation echoes, like a gunshot. A bullet leaves the barrel of a gun, appearing at the lower right corner of my vision and ends its course, perforating Marcus’s skull at the far-left side. Blood and brain chunks splash through my sight, like my eyes are a window.
+++
I wake up startled. My hair sticks to the sweat that pools under my face and my forehead. It takes me a minute to recover. The lighting fixture over me still flashes, and the air is chilling. I notice I fell asleep fully clothed and on top of the covers.
The television is still on, streaming an execution that must have been announced sometime during the past three days when I have been mourning Anna. I should turn it off. It will bring back memories I can’t bear. I should, but I can’t. For some reason, I feel like I must watch.
The camera spans the execution square in slow motion, stopping on President Nightingale’s portrait. It appears that his banner has been burned and only the top corner and the chains still hang on. An entire minute passes as the damage around the square is showcased. The camera then zooms to the stage where two men stand, surely the culprits; their heads are hidden under black bags, and the ropes are set tightly around their necks—like Anna. I knew I shouldn’t have looked at it. I gasp and get up to turn off the television, but not fast enough to spare me from hearing the cracking sounds of their necks as the trapdoors beneath their feet open, letting their bodies fall.
I stand before the television, my hand on the power knob, and find myself contemplating the hangman as he moves toward the hanging bodies. He pulls out a long knife from his belt, raises the blade over their heads, and cuts the ropes, letting their bodies slump like stringless puppets onto the pavement below.
Someone else appears now on the stage and takes the place Justice Todd had occupied behind the microphone. This round, short man walks like a duck and wears an awful black-and-white goatee. This is President Nightingale.
As much as the sight of Justice Todd brings me horrible memories of that fateful day when I lost my only friend, seeing President Nightingale makes me shiver with terror. It brings me back to the forced starvation period during that long winter when I was about five. The feeling of going to sleep with an empty stomach still haunts my nights sometimes when winter arrives. I can still feel the aching and see the people dying in the street, frozen, their faces emaciated and lifeless. I don’t remember the reason behind that punishment, but I do remember his face and his gait; the way he stands straight and lifts his chin nonchalantly behind the microphone as he talks in his high-pitched voice, that I can’t forget.
I stand motionless by the edge of the bed as he speaks. His voice is reproachful, filled with anger and a rage that sends cold slithering over my skin as he spits the words across his clenched teeth.
The warning is clear. “In light of the alarming number of recent uprisings in the city, the curfew is now set back by five hours to seven o’clock. Sanctions heighten. Anyone caught outside after curfew has rung will be shot dead without notice.” He pauses, gazing over the crowd before he closes one hand in a tight fist he draws over his head like he’s ready
to strike something. “For the worshiper of anarchy, death shall be upon you.”
And the anthem starts. I turn off the television. In that same moment, the door of my room slams open, framing a skinny man dressed in a military suit that’s clearly too large for him.
“Get out. It’s your turn,” he barks at me, his voice louder than I’d thought possible for the small chest he has.
Here I am. The turning point of my life is about to happen.
I step across the threshold and follow the guard through the same tall and wide hallway that I did yesterday when they brought me to my room. Today, the plastered walls appear clearly to me, illuminated by the sunlight that creeps in through the tall windows to my right. I can see the dozens of paintings portraying all the ministers and presidents that have ever led the Unification Party since its creation a hundred and forty years ago.
All the way up through the hallway there are reminders of every war that was fought here, in what was known before as North America. Papers and relics that survived the era are carefully placed under glass bells and used to remind us how anarchy and chaos drove the “Ancient World” to extinction.
Pictures scatter the walls, depicting giant, mushroom-like columns of smoke or militaries surrounded by thick, yellow-green fog and wearing what the historians in Kamcala call “gas masks,” which were popular during the chemical wars and attacks that happened throughout the country then. There are also pictures depicting piles of dead bodies on battlefields, left to rot. Beside these few artifacts, very little has been left to remember life back in that era.