A Place Called Zamora

by LB Gschwandtner

  He pointed to the sky, and Miriam thought a hint of a smile crossed his face. And then the cloud above them joined with another one and turned dark at the edges. She wondered if they were in for one of those freak storms, where clouds suddenly formed and rumbled and tumbled until the pressure of all that water had to find some release. But so far there were only a few clouds and they helped dispel the heat some, although the air felt heavy with the threat of something ahead.

  “Someone or something pushed her from behind, and she entered the room. The door closed and I thought I heard a bolt. It was then I noticed—I think because another set of lights came up at the end of the room—that there was more than this dining room. In fact, it seemed to be a whole apartment. I got up, thinking I would offer her some food and a glass of the champagne. Which is what I did, walking over to her with my hand extended. Many times El had given me food and drinks and honey from the convent. This seemed perfectly natural and a way to repay her the kindness she’d shown me in the past. But she looked past me to the table, so I said to her, ‘Are you hungry? Come and sit down. They gave me all this food. And have a glass of this.’

  “I reached out my hand with the glass in it, and before I knew what was happening, she raised her arm and smashed my hand, and the glass fell on the floor and shattered. The champagne went all over the place, and all I could do was stand there, stunned.

  “‘Why did you do that?’ I asked, but she brushed past me to stand by the table. She grabbed food with her fingers and stuffed anything she picked up into her mouth. There was a pitcher with water, and she lifted it and drank after every few bites.

  “I was too stunned to say or do anything for a few minutes. I just watched her. When she had crammed a lot of food into her mouth and swallowed it, she turned to face me, and I saw hatred in her beautiful green eyes. And she seemed to be searching for an escape route. She whirled around and tried the door that those girly guys had used, but it was locked. Then she skirted the table and tried the door she’d come through, but it was also locked. She stood there, looking confused and angry and scared. And then she walked carefully down to the other end of the room and disappeared. I thought she’d found a way out, and I sat down to think things through, to try to figure out what was going on.

  “My mind began to wander back to earlier that evening. And then I couldn’t stop the flood of images. It was like a movie playing fast forward in my brain. I thought I should lie down for a while, but I didn’t know where. And then I wondered where El had gone and thought she must be tired, too. So I headed to where she had disappeared. And I wanted to find out why she was acting so strange. I guess I wasn’t thinking too straight. I guess I should have understood what she’d gone through. But, honestly . . .”

  His voice cracked a little, and he made a kind of choking sound, then took a deep breath. Miriam waited. She didn’t want to upset him again. The air felt heavy, and the sun was blocked out now. The tree above them had taken on a dark gray-green tint like mint leaves boiled for tea. Looking out at the sea, she saw patches of gray-blue water where once she could only see a green algae bloom. She guessed it had died off some. Or was it wind blowing the water? She had a fleeting thought that it was an omen, but then she mentally chided herself for such superstitious thinking.

  But Niko went on.

  “Then I went down that hallway and through a door to a dimly lit room. It took a little time for me to understand that this was a large bedroom. The bed was up on a platform and looked very plush. Lots of pillows and stuff. Beside it was a table and what looked like another champagne bottle in a bucket. I saw a lot of what looked like feathers on the floor. I think I was confused by that, and before I could get everything straight in my mind, someone kicked me from behind and I doubled over. Then I saw a foot coming at me again, so I jumped out of the way and spun around and it was El. The dress she’d been wearing was all torn up, and the feathers were gone from it.

  “‘Hey, what are you doing?’ I yelled at her. But she just launched another kick at me and spun around like a top and kicked me from the side. Well, I guess I just went on autopilot because I grabbed her foot and pulled her, and she lost her balance and fell at my feet. I bent over and reached out to get her by the hands and pull her up. I didn’t mean to hurt her. I was confused. I swear I didn’t mean her any harm. I chose her because I loved her. I thought she felt the same. Or would once The Race was over and we were together.

  “And that’s when she pulled out the knife. She’d been holding it in her dress somewhere. I never saw it. Everything happened so fast. It must have been when I bent down because her hand flashed in front of my eyes, and then I felt this stinging pain.”

  He touched the cut again with an expression on his face of anger and sadness, like a bewildered child who doesn’t understand why his pet puppy got hit by a car.

  He was quiet for a while, so they just sat in silence.

  Finally, Miriam said, “Sometimes people react without thinking. El must have been confused and terrified. No one had prepared her for what had happened to her. Her whole life had suddenly been stolen.”

  He stared out at the water and then up at the darkening clouds, but Miriam had the feeling he was really looking inside himself as if searching for some answer to a question not yet asked aloud.

  “That’s not all,” he said softly. “Not nearly.” He turned to her with a puzzled look, his brows knit as he touched the edge of the gash on his face again with his index finger. “I thought she would be happy,” he said. “You know. To be chosen. To be with me. To be taken care of. Not to have to live on the streets anymore.”

  He took a deep breath and exhaled. His shoulders slumped. And then he stood up, agitated again.

  “The next thing I remember is seeing the blood. My blood. But it was like—I don’t know how to tell you—like all the blood, you know, on the street. After . . . after The Race. All those bodies. The others. The ones who didn’t win. A river of their blood. It was like something broke in me. It was the blood that made me crazy, I think.

  “I grabbed her hand and twisted that knife and threw it across the room, and then she tried to bite me, and that’s when I tore her dress. Right down the front. Underwear and all. I didn’t mean to. It just happened so fast. And there was her skin and her breasts. Right in front of my eyes. She tried to shield herself I think. It’s not very clear now exactly what happened next. What I did or what she did. All I remember was blood dripping down on me. My face was burning by then and that’s when I grabbed her by the arms and pulled her over to the bed. I must have pushed her down. It’s a blur now, how it happened, I mean in what sequence. Maybe I saw the blood dripping after I pushed her.

  “She tried to kick me, but she couldn’t do anything anymore, and I ripped the rest of her underthings off. Blood was still dripping. Right onto her stomach. All I could see was red. Like my eyes were filled with it. I was going to do it, you know. I really was. And then I heard something like from far away, as if I was in a tunnel and someone at the other end was calling my name. “Niko.” It was El. She was crying and saying my name. ‘Niko. Niko. Stop.’

  “It was like some storm had gotten inside of me and I wanted to let it out inside her. But when I heard her voice something snapped and I pushed back off her and all I could think was what the blood looked like on that street as we drove past and this one thought kept repeating inside my head: I did that. I created that. I should be there on that street all bloodied and broken.

  “She could have killed me at that moment. She could have gotten up and grabbed for the knife. It was like I was caught in an invisible trap. Unable to move or scream or anything. But when she didn’t get up, I left her there and got my own clothes. These.” He pointed to what he had worn to The Race. “I didn’t even look at her again. It was like someone else was operating me. Like I was a bot or something. Next thing I knew I was outside and there was my bike. I guess they’d delivered it to me after they said it was part of what I’d won. They
must have serviced it. I got on it and rode and rode all over the city and finally got so tired. But I had no place to go, so I slept for a while under a bridge, and when it got light, I scavenged a drink. And then I came over here.”

  As he told Miriam what had happened, he began running his hand absently over his pattern-shaved head. He ran it over and over from his forehead back and then to the front again. Like someone with senility, endlessly repeating the same gesture. When he stopped talking he kept doing it, as if trying to dislodge some foreign object stuck inside his mind.

  When he finally spoke, he said, “I almost became like them. Like all the high-ups. I never had anyone love me or take care of me. El was the only person in this world who cared for me. And look what I did. I don’t want to be like them. Not for any wealth or power or anything.” He looked at Miriam in a way that begged for forgiveness, understanding, relief from his burden.

  “I never should have chosen her, never should have put her in that position. But why did she turn on me like that? I only wanted us to be together.”

  Miriam didn’t know what to say. She couldn’t give him absolution for what he’d done. She understood how guilty he must have felt. Understood the turmoil that must have driven him. And then there was the knife slice down his face. And the tears running down along the cut and dripping onto his knees because his head was bowed now. He was a bird who had smacked into a window, dazed and disoriented.

  Miriam thought he might need stitches for that cut, but she only asked, “Where is El now?”

  He didn’t have a chance to answer. The moment after she asked the question, a splinter of lightning broke through the dark gray clouds that had lowered over them, and almost immediately came the crack of thunder. They saw the bolt strike the edge of the beach not far off. Miriam gathered her few things, and Niko ran to his bike.

  “Come back to my apartment!” she yelled to him, and ran off in that direction.

  Miriam let Niko sleep on the floor of her rabbit-hole apartment that night. After she cleaned his wound and bandaged it the best she could, he washed in the shared shower down the hall and ate the cucumbers and bread she’d bought. He slept for the rest of that day and most of the night. The rumble of his bike as he rode away awakened her before dawn, and she listened until the sound faded.

  That morning, when Miriam went to work, the whole office was in turmoil. It had been ransacked. Everything was strewn around and mixed up. It seemed random, but while trying to restore order, they began to notice a pattern to the apparent chaos. It wasn’t that unusual for the Regime to invade offices in a general search for so-called subversive material, but this seemed different. After they’d put everything back where it belonged, there was nothing missing. That, in itself, was odd.

  Strangely, Miriam’s desk was almost untouched, which made her even more suspicious. Had they been watching her meetings with Niko? She would never know for sure, but this interruption, like all the others, reminded them that at any time they could all be hauled away, and that nothing really belonged to them.

  Just before dawn, El managed to escape from The Compound by hiding herself under a pile of linens on a laundry truck. The Compound was serviced by outside vendors. Laundry was too menial an occupation for anyone actually living within its walls. She saw an opportunity when the truck backed up to the building, so she took it and climbed aboard the back.

  Once outside the walls, she ripped a sheet in half and wrapped it around her body sarong-like. Then she took off the heels they’d put on her feet and tore them apart to make them flat. She waited until the truck stopped to unload, then jumped out before the driver came around to the back, and hid behind the laundry’s wall.

  The laundry happened to be midway between the now-boarded-up convent and where she’d been meeting with Father Ignatius and the others. She had no idea where he lived, so she skirted the alley and slid under a tear in the fencing, where the weeds and vines that covered it were so dense they afforded her cover. She found a dark spot in a corner against the back of the building and crouched there to wait for someone to appear. She fell asleep half sitting with her legs folded under her, her head resting on her shoulder against the old brick building. That’s how Father Ignatius found her.

  Upon hearing his footsteps, she stirred and saw him spin around, as if to confront a foraging rat. She was wide awake now and tried to shrink back even farther in the semi-darkness.

  When he realized who it was, he approached her slowly, extended his hand and leaned down to her. “El,” he said. “Are you all right?”

  She looked up at him with vacant eyes, like someone lost in a foreign land, almost as if she couldn’t understand the language he spoke.

  “El, come,” he tried again, softly, “let me help you.”

  When he tried to take her by the hand, she shrank back against the wall. She began to shake despite the heat.

  “You’re afraid,” he said. “I understand. But you can’t stay here. The others will be here for class. Let me help you. I’ll take you to my place, and you can rest there. It’s just around the corner.”

  She looked up at him as if assessing his motives. Her eyes narrowed. She looked around at the vacant lot where she’d trained with him, and she seemed to get acclimated in some way as if remembering it. Slowly she stood, and when she did, Father Ignatius could see that she had tied a sheet around herself. Fragments of a torn dress hung loosely under it. Her arms were bruised, and he saw dark circles under her eyes that hadn’t been there before. There was now a haunted look about her.

  “Follow me,” he said simply, and did not reach out to touch her again.

  He lived in a sparse room on the ground floor of an undistinguished, three-story gray building that, long before The Collapse, had been erected of heavy granite from a now-defunct quarry outside the city limits. The room was rather longer than it was wide, with one window at the far end. This window looked out at the other side of the yard where Father Ignatius taught his outdoor classes. There was a pallet on the floor with a blanket and pillow. Also in one corner was a battered dresser. On the opposite wall, a wooden bench and one old chair were back to back. Above these, on the wall, were a shelf, two candles, a cross. Next to the shelf, hanging from a plain hook, was a purple stole of the kind priests donned to receive confessions.

  Father Ignatius closed the door with a soft thud and said in a low but steady voice, “You may take the chair.”

  He pointed to it and El followed his finger obediently, taking her seat while he lifted the purple stole from its hook. It was the last remnant of his life as a practicing priest. He kissed it and slipped it around his neck over his T-shirt, making the sign of the cross. He lit the two candles and blew out the match. It left a faint acrid scent in the air followed by the odor of melting wax. He turned to the bench and sat with his back to El.

  “I will hear your confession now,” he said simply, as if this was any normal act of penitence.

  El began with the usual ritual recitation, and Father Ignatius answered as required.

  “Father,” she began, “I know we are all sinners. I know I have sinned. I have stolen, I have used bad language. I have had evil thoughts and have wished evil upon others. I am not worthy of God’s forgiveness for those things. But why did this happen to me? Why was I singled out for such . . .” Here, she stopped abruptly as she fought to control a strangled sob. “Father, tell me why.”

  “I am supposed to give you penance for the things you just told me. But El, to receive absolution you must be honest in your confession. Honest with God and with yourself. I myself have sinned and continue to sin against God. Yes, we are all sinners. But there are degrees of sins, I believe. And these degrees must be recognized and brought into the light where God can grant ultimate absolution. Sometimes, we are burdened with more than we think we can bear, and many of those burdens are not caused by us. They are not our direct sins. There is no way I can explain to you what has apparently happened to you, and I won’t try. All
I can say is you, too, El, must bring your burden to the light. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, Father.”

  She was quiet. Her head drooped down, her chin resting on her chest bone. She closed her eyes and sighed.

  “I don’t know why he chose me,” she began. “He never told me it was his plan. I would have said no, but when it happened, I had no way to refuse. All those people. All that noise. And they led me away. And I thought . . . well, I did think about the feelings I had for him. I can’t deny it, Father. I would have gone with him already, been with him if he had asked me to. If I thought he wanted that. But he never said anything. In all the times we’d met, he never a word about what would happen after The Race. Still, I thought he had feelings for me.”

  She stopped and took a deep breath. “Father, can I turn around? It’s hard for me to tell all that happened not facing you.”

  Father Ignatius answered, “My child, I told you I have sinned. I am as mortal as anyone. I left my priestly garments behind. I stopped going to confession. I went out on the streets, collected children, taught them how to defend themselves and, yes, how to fight. All this isn’t within the responsibilities of the priesthood, although hundreds of years ago, the Pope himself led an army of men. I suppose I harken back to that time because I see the people of Infinius under such an evil spell that to fight it is the only way to restore it to its moral core. All that said, I am still a priest; therefore, when I hear a confession, even under these unusual circumstances with no true confessional available, I must not look upon you, nor you upon me. But be assured, I listen not only with my ears but with my heart without judgment and with a mind open to all the frailties we humans must endure.”