by Max Barry
Yeats continued to hit balls and she fought to move but couldn’t. She felt violated and angry but also ashamed that she couldn’t control her own body. It was humiliating. It was making her reevaluate her relationship with herself. Breathe fast, she told herself, because that would be like being still but not exactly. She had to find a place to drive in a wedge and work from there. Breathe.
Yeats’s head turned to her. What he was thinking, she had no idea. But she had the feeling that the golfing part was over. He returned his club to the bag and lowered himself into a wrought-iron chair and began to untie his shoelaces. He did this with great care, as if his shoes contained secrets. When this was done, he entered a black glossy pair. Business shoes. Shoes for business. He laced them firmly, and stood, and headed toward her.
She breathed. She could force a tiny amount of air between her teeth, making a hsss she could barely hear. That was it.
Yeats removed his sunglasses and tucked them into his shirt pocket. His eyes were gray and characterless as stone. There was a flatness to his face. She’d have suspected a face-lift if it wasn’t crazy for a poet to reveal a mental weakness for vanity. Maybe he’d wanted to erase his expressions. Or maybe he was just like this. If you never smiled or laughed or frowned, she could believe that this was the kind of face you wound up with, smooth and empty as an undisturbed pond.
He unbuttoned his cuffs and began to roll up his shirtsleeves. He was close enough to scratch or bite or kick in the nuts but she couldn’t do any of that, of course. He is going to kill you! she shrieked at herself, but it made no difference. Her brain had become very fatalistic. It knew she was responsible for Jeremy and it was hard to argue she didn’t deserve everything she got.
Yeats folded his hands and closed his eyes. For long seconds he did not move. She thought, Is he praying? Because that was what it looked like. He couldn’t be, because the idea of a religious poet was even more ridiculous than a vain one. Belief in God was a mental weakness, revealing a need for a sense of belonging and higher purpose: desires poets were supposed to master. They were potential avenues of attack. They advertised your segment. She had been taught this. But Yeats was giving every indication of communing with a higher power. Her heart thumped painfully. There was nothing about this situation she understood.
“Sss,” she said.
His eyes opened. “Goodness,” he said. She thought he was mocking her, but maybe not. His eyes searched hers. She felt surveyed, as if by engineers: dispassionately, precisely, with instruments. “I was told your discipline was poor,” he said. “But this . . .”
Moments passed. She could see his nostrils flaring in and out. She said, “Sss.”
“You are, supposedly, gifted. You possess an aptitude for attack, considered sufficient to offset your deficiencies in defense. I would see this. Because presently, my dear, I have trouble imagining how this could be true. I will allow you one opportunity to speak to me. Use it to convince me why I should keep you. Vartix velkor mannik wissick. You may speak.”
Her throat loosened. She coughed, to prove it. She said, “Ug.” It felt good to make that sound. Yeats waited patiently. It would take one hell of an argument to convince him of anything, she thought. She had been in situations like this, where people said, Convince me, and in none of those had they actually wanted to be convinced. She could lay down a perfect argument and they just invented new bullshit on the spot to justify why the answer was still no. When people said, Convince me, she knew it didn’t mean they had an open mind. It meant they had power and wanted to enjoy it a minute. She didn’t know if that was true of Yeats. But she did not feel that she could talk her way out of this. Why should Yeats keep her? She was fucked if she knew. She was nothing but trouble.
“Fennelt!” she said. “Rassden!” These were attention words, which she’d collected from other students. It was incredibly unlikely they would do anything to Yeats; she didn’t even know his segment. If she fluked one, he was no doubt capable of shrugging off anything a student could manage. “Thrilence! Mallinto!” He didn’t react. Didn’t so much as flinch. “Die!” she said. Which was kind of stupid, but she was out of words. And she wanted it very much. “Die, you flat fuck!”
“Enough.”
Her mouth closed. Words clogged her throat, bobbing up and down. They tasted hot, like bile.
Yeats looked at her awhile. She couldn’t read him. She didn’t know whether she had lived or died.
“I have a name for you,” he said, “when the time is right.” He walked away. She heard him reach the door but couldn’t turn her head. “You may move, in a while.”
Some time passed. A bird landed near the golf clubs and began to hop hopefully around the little green mat. She breathed. Her chest loosened one muscle at a time. That was how she got herself back. Filament by filament. She had survived, somehow. She was still here.
• • •
She was collected by a woman she had seen once before, stepping out of a black town car alongside Yeats that time he had visited the school. She didn’t introduce herself but Emily already knew her name was Plath. She had asked. Plath was all cheekbones and elbows and gave Emily the feeling that she would push her in front of a train for a nickel. She had cruel shoes and a phone and looked at Emily in a way that reminded her of being stepped over on a San Francisco sidewalk on a bad day. “Can you move?” Plath said.
“Yes.”
Plath beckoned. Emily followed. There were stairs and then she was in the parking garage. A car Emily knew well was there and her heart leaped. It was the first moment she had truly believed she was getting out of here. She looked at Plath and Plath said nothing so Emily walked to the car. Its engine turned over. She opened the passenger door and inside was Eliot. “Hi,” she said. She wanted to kiss him.
Eliot didn’t speak. But he looked at her and she knew she was safe. He was still angry with her, of course. But he was not dangerous. She could relax in a car with Eliot. When the car exited the garage into bright sunshine, she closed her eyes. Somewhere in the snarl of streets, she fell asleep.
• • •
She opened her eyes and was somewhere else. “Where are we?” She saw a road sign. “Are we going to the airport?” Eliot flicked on the turn signal. The car drifted toward a lane marked DEPARTURES. “Hey,” she said. “Eliot. Yeats said I could still be a poet. He tested me and I passed. I don’t have to go away.” It was like talking to a wall. “Eliot, I can go back to the school.”
He pulled alongside the curb and took something from the seat pocket. “This is your passport. This is your confirmation number.” A blue booklet with a white business card tucked inside. The card had a string of letters and numbers in blue ink above TOM ELIOT, RESEARCH ANALYST. “Use the machines inside to check in.”
“Talk to Yeats. Eliot. Call Yeats. He’ll tell you.”
“These are his instructions.”
She stared. “But I passed.”
“It’s temporary,” Eliot said. “You can come home in a few years.”
“Years?” she said. “Years?”
“Please appreciate that this is the best possible outcome.”
“No. Eliot. Please.” He wouldn’t look at her, so she put her hand on his arm. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t move. Eventually, she understood that this was final. “Well,” she said. “Bye, then.”
“Your bag is in the trunk.”
“Thanks.” She opened the door. It was difficult, as if everything had gotten heavy. Her hands were numb. She dragged herself from the car.
Eliot said, “If you work hard, and discipline yourself, you can conceivably return in—” She shut the door on the rest.
• • •
First the red-eye from DC to Los Angeles: six hours. She landed at dawn and spent half a day moving the two hundred yards from Domestic Arrivals to International Departures. She hadn’t slept in the air so she curled up in a seat, but there were families and kids vibrating at high frequency and men with booming laug
hs. A younger couple discussed in-flight movies in a flat, broad accent. She was going to Australia. Her boarding passes told her so. “We should get Lord of the Rings,” said the man. Lawwwd, she thought. Lawwwd of the Reeengs. They sent convicts to Australia, right? It had been a penal colony. A place of banishment.
The desk called for first- and business-class passengers and she trudged to the gate. When she surrendered her boarding pass, though, the woman smiled and handed it back to her. “We’ll be boarding economy in a few moments.” Emily looked at her dumbly. She had just assumed. She walked back to the seats.
“Nice try,” said the man beside her, the one hoping for Lord of the Rings. He was friendly, and she smiled back, and it was the most fake thing she had ever done.
• • •
She slept fitfully, disturbed by rattling food trolleys and people squeezing by her seat. The flight time according to her screen was fourteen hours, which she thought had to be wrong, like maybe that was including the time difference. She didn’t know enough to sleep properly.
Somewhere over the Pacific, a flight attendant bent to her ear. “Excuse me. This is for you.” Emily, tangled in dreams of golf and Yeats, stared at the woman without comprehension. It was nighttime; the only light came from the screens in the backs of people’s seats and the little yellow glow lights embedded in the aisles. The woman handed Emily a folded piece of paper. It was an odd texture, thick, stamped with an aviation authority logo.
“Thank you,” Emily said. The attendant left and she unfolded the paper.
EMILY YOU ARE TO LIVE IN BROKEN HILL AUSTRALIA THIS IS TO BE YOUR HOME UNTIL YOU ARE CALLED FOR NO PREPARATIONS HAVE BEEN MADE YOU ARE TO USE YOUR OWN RESOURCES YOU CAN DO THIS ELIOT
She put the paper away and pulled her knees to her chest and silently cried into them. If she were at the school, she wouldn’t have been able to do this. She would have had to control herself. But here she indulged. She let herself sob. After this, things were going to be difficult, and she would have to concentrate, so it was probably her last opportunity.
• • •
She grew hypnotized by the in-flight map. The red line began in Los Angeles, curved across the ocean, and terminated at a cartoon plane that never seemed to move. The screen occasionally switched to statistics, like how fast they were moving and how cold it was outside, and these were fascinating because the numbers seemed made up. It didn’t seem possible for the cartoon plane that didn’t move to be traveling at 580 miles per hour. But it was. The flight was fourteen hours.
Her first problem, she realized, was that she was landing in Sydney with no return ticket, no luggage, wearing a school uniform. She didn’t know what the Australian immigration service was like, but it seemed probable that she would raise a few flags. She would look exactly like an overprivileged white girl disappearing in a cloud of petulance on Daddy’s credit card, and they would ask why she was here and where she was staying and when she was leaving. If they didn’t like her answers, they would turn her around and put her on a plane back home. Which, of course, superficially sounded like a great idea, except for the part where she failed to LIVE IN BROKEN HILL and USE HER OWN RESOURCES. Eliot had told her, Please appreciate that this is the best possible outcome, and she had come to believe that. She needed to get through Immigration.
She extracted herself from her economy seat and made her way to the rear bathrooms. In the mirror, she practiced some expressions. Then she washed her face and unlocked the door. On the way back, she stopped beside a girl she had identified who was sleeping and roughly Emily’s age, and opened her overhead locker and rummaged inside. There was a possibility of someone being awake and alert enough to say, Excuse me, do those things belong to you, of course, but not a large one, nor with serious consequences, and it didn’t happen. She found a little suitcase and a duffel bag and went through these, standing on tiptoe. Inside were a purse, a wallet, a digital camera, which she took because maybe she could sell it, and a book. Also a coat, which could conceal her school uniform, so she tucked that beneath her arm. She closed the locker. Two or three sets of eyes were on her, but they were glazed and disinterested, their owners critiquing her hair or fantasizing about schoolgirls, and that was fine; she was just getting some of her stuff. She cracked open the book and read it there, right next to the sleeping girl she’d robbed, like she was stretching her legs. Soon enough a man came down the aisle and she could retreat to her own seat without it looking like a getaway.
Just before the plane began to descend, she switched seats, to avoid a potential where’s my coat situation. She was among the first off the plane, and she walked briskly toward Customs, her new coat flapping around her ankles. The lines were short, not at all like in Los Angeles, and she was able to take her pick of Immigration officials. His name was Mark, and he was a 114 or 118, good-natured and reasonably intelligent but resigned in his job, which he considered important but dull. This she could tell right away. No glasses, no beard, a simple hairstyle but not a severe one, so no overt arrogance or vanity. No cross or religious markings. So she went for mirroring: She was Emily Ruff, simple and straightforward, slugging hours into a customer interface job as a DMV inspector. An entry-level position, but if you didn’t do your job right, people could get hurt.
“Hi,” she said. “Just right up, I don’t have a return ticket. I’m sorry, I know that means you have to give me the third degree.”
Two hours later, they released her from the interview room. They’d asked a lot of questions, but she never felt in real danger, not from the moment Mark’s face relaxed into her opening statement. She had lied a great deal, inventing a traumatic case at the DMV and a late-night Australian tourism ad culminating in a spur-of-the-moment urge to get away (You understand that, right, Mark? The need to leave?). She was charming and forthright and understood more about how the brain reached decisions than these guys did about anything, so that was that. She got rid of the coat before Arrivals, in case the owner was still hanging around filling out lost-and-found forms. She found a currency exchange place that let her sign for up to five hundred dollars on a credit card. Australian dollars were hilarious, she discovered: bright and shiny, like money for children. She liked them a lot. She bought a magazine and ate a cookie. She went to baggage claim and watched luggage go round and round, waiting for something wealthy, female, and unattended. A gray-suited official led around a beagle in a purple jacket, which sniffed luggage; when it found a banana in someone’s carry-on, it sat on the floor and the official gave it a treat. In Los Angeles, they’d been German shepherds. Eventually a purple Louis Vuitton suitcase completed a third lonely loop on the carousel, so she tugged it off, balanced her Pikachu bag on top, and headed for the exits.
• • •
The sun was brighter. The air smelled salty and felt wider, somehow. She found a cab rank and the driver wrestled her stolen suitcase into the trunk while she climbed into the back.
“Where to, love?”
The driver was white, something else she wasn’t used to. “Broken Hill, please.”
He turned in his seat. “Broken Hill?”
“Is that a problem?”
“I don’t know. It’s a thousand kilometers, is that a problem?”
“What are . . .” She felt stupid. “How far is that in miles?”
“Seven hundred miles, give or take.”
Why had she assumed Broken Hill would be near Sydney? “I’m sorry. In which state is Broken Hill?”
“New South Wales.”
“And where am I?”
“New South Wales.” He smiled at her face. “We have big states, love.”
“How do I get there? Which is the closest city?” She hoped he was not about to say Sydney.
“Adelaide.”
“So I can fly to Adelaide,” she said, “and drive from there.”
“Yes, you can.”
“Thank you. Sorry for your trouble.” She began to get out of the cab.
“Only three h
undred miles from Adelaide to Broken Hill.” He was grinning. “Welcome to Australia, love.”
“Thanks,” she said.
• • •
She couldn’t secure a flight that day, so she caught a cab downtown and checked into a mid-priced hotel. With the balcony doors open, bringing in a breeze from the green-flecked bay, she sifted through the suitcase, inspecting skirts and jackets. She found a romance novel, the kind you wouldn’t read on the plane, and a diary, for appointments, not confessions. Still, she turned the pages. This woman saw someone named Matt R. a lot. Emily wondered if they met in hotel rooms like this. If, after sex, the woman talked to Matt R., telling him her hopes and problems and idle thoughts. She closed the diary.
She had to get organized. Her stolen cards were already too dangerous to use; she wouldn’t reach Adelaide on those. She turned to the mirror and fiddled with a shirt. It was a little big, but she could work with the cuffs. She picked up the phone and dialed the front desk. “I want to play poker,” she said. “Something informal.”
Eventually, the guy stopped recommending casinos and steered her toward an upper room of a nearby bar. It turned out to be middle-aged men in expensive suits, friendly and patronizing while she lost the first two hundred dollars, smiling over their single-malt whiskeys and advancing theories about creative ways to cover her losses. By then she had a queen under her left thigh and a king and an eight under her right. It had been three years since she’d done this kind of thing, and a more attentive audience would have caught her. At one point, she tried to feed a jack into her sleeve and missed so badly that the card landed on the table. She tensed to run, but they only laughed and one man said, “That’s enough grog for you.” The man had red cheeks and was divorced, although he didn’t know it yet. “Sorry,” Emily said, and put the card back in her hand.
She took him for twenty-eight hundred in the final round, going all in. His face turned incredibly red, like a balloon. No one was smiling now. The game’s operator approached the table, but she didn’t need to be told; she gathered her winnings, thanked them, and when she reached the street, ran as fast as she could back to her hotel. That was how she got to Adelaide.