Life Undercover

by Amaryllis Fox

  “Exit tax,” he says.

  I can see the pens with the decoy film, tucked in my satchel pocket. I can feel the actual film inside my body. I wonder if they’ll search us. But instead they hustle us back into the truck and throw our luggage in beside us. I listen for the sounds of Shwedagon Pagoda and Inle Lake, which we’ll pass on the way to the airport. Each comes on time and I check them off in my mind, small comfort by small comfort. Then the canvas is drawn back a third time, and we are not at the terminal.

  The airport is nearby, although from what I can tell of our surroundings, so is Insein Prison. The building beside us looks like a cross between the two—an airplane hangar with razor wire around its perimeter. My calm evaporates. I try to tell myself that it’s possible we’re on a charter flight or that we’re being held separately from the normal passengers to ensure that we don’t make a scene. But then a prisoner is pulled from a van near our pickup and escorted inside with a rag tied over his face and his hands bound by cord. One arm hangs limp from his shoulder, as if only his skin is holding him together. I feel for Daryl’s hand, but he is ahead of me, being pushed toward the door.

  The soldier beside me prods me to follow. Inside, there is a tall table, around which a few officers are huddled. A dozen or so children in military uniforms sit on the cement floor. The bound man is not there. I eye the metal door he must have passed through. What is this place? And will we ever leave it?

  The soldiers direct us to sit on two low plastic stools. The short one crouches between us, while the tall one walks over to the table and lights a cigarette.

  We are there for some hours. I watch the boy soldiers play jacks. They are nine or maybe ten years old, wearing miniature uniforms with tiny epaulets on their shoulders. One smokes a cheroot, a type of Burmese street cigar sold on every corner. He taps ash into a soda bottle. Against the wall and cradled in laps, there are guns, one per boy, taller than their child owners, if you count the bayonets. Game after game, they play without cracking a smile. Their bodies move through the motions. Their eyes have the glassed-over distance of narcotics and loss.

  Officers come and go. Sometimes, they shout. Mostly, they shuffle papers. One prods a new prisoner across the room and through the far door without stopping. Now and then there is a cry of pain from beyond the door. After one, a soldier turns to us and grins. “Car battery,” he says, and I don’t know whether to believe him. I remember my uncle attaching jumper cables wrong when I was little, producing a little burst of sparks. I wonder how much it would hurt to channel that voltage through my body. I wonder if I’d scream.

  A few hours after that, we’re taken through the door. A beige-tiled hallway stretches to the left and right. We’re separated, put into rooms, and the doors are locked. It happens in an instant. One moment we are together, and the next, I am alone in the universe.

  The room is empty except for a chair and a pot. No bedroll. No mat. No sign that this place is designed for long-term holding. I walk a circle around the cell for a long time. Then I sit down in the middle of the floor and close my eyes. I try to tell my family where I am. I try to tell Min Zin that I’m okay. I ask God that they not rape me.

  Every so often, the silence is punctuated by another cry, of cruelty or of pain.

  After what seems like days but I learn later was less than twenty-four hours, a soldier opens the door and stands there until I understand I’m supposed to go with him. We walk back to the main room. Daryl is there, and so are our passports. The remnants of our luggage are piled on the floor. The pens are gone. The lining of every bag has been slashed. An officer I haven’t seen before is scribbling something across our visas; then he closes our passports and hands them back to us. My vision blurs for a second. I press back tears. Of relief. And of sorrow for the bound men left behind.

  Outside the hangar door, it is the last dark before dawn. There are more trucks now, empty of their prisoners and piled with weapons like abandoned toys. I take them in, the trucks and the guns and the razor-wire barricades. All this violence and might to silence some college kids with slogans and signs. All this orgy of force just to keep one woman from speaking her truth. I can feel Suu Kyi’s words tucked inside me, and I know that today the soldiers have failed.

  * * *

  —

  When we land in Bangkok, Min Zin is waiting for us, along with Ko Ma and a few others from the treehouse. Their eyes dance as we get off the plane. There is an electricity around us, a sense of having fought back the darkness. Min Zin leads us to a restaurant with trees growing out of the floor, and we drink unnaturally colored cocktails while he asks us about the interview and the soldiers and the airplane hangar with razor wire around its perimeter. Story by story, we alternate between exhilaration and despair.

  The next morning, we set about keeping our promise to Suu Kyi, knocking on the door of the BBC’s Radio Bangkok and asking if they’ll broadcast the interview back into Burma on shortwave. They square us up for a minute, detecting both our hubris and our good intentions. “Sure, let’s give it a go,” a young Aussie says. We reconstruct the film with their technicians and listen to the first recording of Suu Kyi’s voice heard outside Burma for almost a year.

  Not long after the BBC broadcasts the interview, CNN calls me and asks for comment on how Suu Kyi’s words are affecting morale in Rangoon. Min Zin tells me about his years in hiding and how much it meant to him each time he heard a fresh rallying cry, proof that the resistance was alive beyond his makeshift prison walls. I picture the resistance fighters still holed up in attics and basements and storerooms a few hundred miles across the border. I imagine the fuel this radio broadcast might offer them. For the first time in my life, I feel the high of not just observing the world but actually changing it. I want to stay in the moment forever. But September is almost gone. Oxford is about to begin. And my mother is worked up with worry, ever since she learned of our detention. There’s no option but to go home.

  Min Zin kisses me good-bye at the airport. I watch my beloved jungle recede out the airplane window and, with it, the first version of myself that feels real.

  7

  I turn up at Oxford wearing a lungyi and Burmese flip-flops. I’m an awkward outsider in this stronghold of Britishness, and I keep the memories of Min Zin and Tocqueville close. I hide in my dorm room and talk with editors at CNN.

  I chose Oxford to take advantage of its renowned international law program, to follow in the footsteps of Suu Kyi and Min Zin and one day do my part to challenge tyranny on behalf of the powerless. But the pondering lectures make me feel more like I’m in a socialite’s salon than a forge for the warriors of freedom. Each week, I write my required essay and trudge to my tutorial—a one-on-one session with this or that brilliant and eccentric professor, beginning with the offer of sherry and snuff and ending with the strong suspicion that nothing we’ve just discussed applies to the real world. At night, I pull on my billowing academic gown and shuffle to the dining hall, with its cathedral ceiling and gallery of oil paintings suspended between stained-glass windows speckled with rain. I sit alone amid the riches and long for the low, plastic stools of Burmese tea stalls and the makeshift meals of Min Zin’s treehouse floor.

  A few months into this period of all but hibernation, an older student knocks on my door and introduces himself as Emmett Fitzgerald, my college “grandfather,” explaining that a third-year student is traditionally assigned to each first-year to guide them through the university’s mess of ancient rules and customs. He’s Irish and recklessly handsome, with a smile that brings out innuendo in a joke the way air brings out flavor in wine. It’s pretty clear that in the Venn diagram of Oxford cliques, our circles would not have naturally overlapped. But we take to spending evenings in my room, indulging in the obligatory philosophical debates of college dorms everywhere: Are plants conscious? If you could save your sister or a thousand strangers, which would you choose? Is this all a
simulation? In my room, we are equals. Outside its door, he’s a rower and I’m not anyone at all. He dates pretty girls and I stay home.

  Our evening rambles through philosophy and laughter tap a hole in my armor, and I begin to consider the possibility of making friends. I meet Anthony, a soft-spoken South African whose dad owns a teddy bear shop and whose mom is a schoolteacher. He’s gentle and funny and an outsider like me. The night we spend together becomes two and then three, until before I know it, we are one another’s shadow. He’s not Min Zin but he doesn’t try to be, and in this removed kingdom of spires and stone, we find shelter in each other’s care.

  He takes me to drink Pimm’s at the boat races and dance in costume at masquerade balls, but my memories of Burma turn from a source of comfort to a source of dismay. How can we swank around parties while the Burmese junta is killing students like flies? Anthony tries to make me laugh. He takes me to our college bar, where the idiocy of drinking games sends me deeper into the dark. Then one night, I drink too much of the whiskey he’s left in my room. I write him a letter to explain how it hurts too much, feeling the world. Then I slice open my left wrist.

  It bleeds more than I would have guessed, red across my homework. I watch the blood expand in circles across my law-book pages. I think of Min Zin and the years he spent in the silence of an attic to escape a death sentence so that he could fight for his people. And then I realize that I’m an idiot.

  I grab a washcloth and hold it hard against my wrist, run downstairs and out the door to find help. By the time I’m stitched up and home, Anthony’s waiting for me in my room. The next morning, he tells me that when he arrived and saw my note covered in blood, then read my rambling description of pain hitting me like a train, he thought I’d set off to jump in front of one, and he called the police to have every train in Oxfordshire slowed to five miles per hour.

  Emmett comes to visit. Looks the blood-crusted letter over with his blue Irish eyes. Then turns to me and says, “Y’know, kiddo, you need to learn some kung-motherfuckin’-fu. You feel the world and it just socks you, right? Wham! Harder than most people. Well, sure, if you take the force of that punch, it’s gonna get you every time. But now, you see, kung fu masters, they can take the force that’s coming at them and throw it right into their next move. Harder they get hit, the stronger their game. Master that kung fu, and you’ve got yourself a superpower, kiddo.”

  The next week, I pass an Amnesty International flyer on my way through the quad. I rip off one of the phone numbers and stick it in my back pocket. By the end of the year, I’m humming in sixth gear—writing about human rights for the school newspaper, planning debates at the Oxford Union, organizing campaigns for student office, raising funds for prisoners of conscience. Slowly, I stop seeing myself as a sponge, soaking up suffering till it drowns me. And I start seeing myself as a converter, metabolizing suffering into action.

  * * *

  —

  During my second year, I find a note in my mailbox asking me to meet a professor at the Fuggle and Firkin, a pub in central Oxford, for a drink. We sit upstairs on a green velvet sofa: him, me, and two former students of his—men in their twenties, who ask about my travels in Thailand, about my experience with the junta in Burma. I seem set on making the world a better place, they tell me. Have I heard of a group called al Qa’ida? I know the name, from the Africa bombings and the USS Cole. How about the Taliban? Yes, I saw their strange press announcement, I say, before they blew up the giant Buddhas. I comment on how young the Taliban fighters seemed, almost as if they could be here at Oxford, in a different life. I talk about how I’d tried to see into their eyes through the TV. They look at one another and smile.

  They ask if I’ve given any thought to what I’ll do after university, and I tell them yes, in fact, I’ve been offered a job working with refugees in Southeast Asia. They nod politely and ask if they can suggest an alternative; they explain that they need people like me, to help them learn more about the Taliban, about al Qa’ida, about the threat extremists pose. They talk about how most people don’t understand how quickly civil society can fall apart, but I do, don’t I, having lived out “there,” by which I sense they mean somewhere beyond the realm of rules about your salad fork. The more they talk, the less I like them. They ask me if I’ll think about helping them. I’ve been breaking into foreign regimes already, after all, so why not do it for them? They talk about the importance of secrets, and I think about my dad’s safety-deposit box and my mom on the floor of my bedroom listening to “Everybody Hurts.”

  I tell them, “I don’t believe in your cloak-and-dagger stuff.” I say, “Thanks for the pint.”

  I never hear from them again. Never find out what flavor they were—MI5, MI6, GCHQ. I see the professor at high table in our college dining room from time to time.

  That spring, I’m asked to be a guest liaison for the Oxford Union, the university’s famous debating society. The job entails meeting guest speakers at the airport or train station and transporting them to their hotels, then taking them out for supper to run them through the schedule for the following day. I fall in love with the rhythm and passion of debate, the principle of equal time for opposing opinions, the assumption of respect for every person who stands before the house, regardless of their background, so long as their ideas are sound. It is Jeffersonian and noble, the sort of thing described and underlined in Min Zin’s books in the jungle. I find it electrifying, following the politics of the Union presidential bids, until Anthony decides to run for treasurer and the Jeffersonian nobility gives way to sausage-making and backroom deals. I learn the endless variety of ways that small-print rules and regulations can be used to override the voice of voters. Here in this cauldron of hubris and potential, aspiring politicians and lawyers raise competing points of order to ensure that some arcane strategic advantage be awarded to their slate of candidates. Showboats and loophole hounds prevail. By the time the game is over, the next round is already ramping up to be played, with candidates for next term’s offices whispering over their pints in the pubs down the road. Between rounds of play, there’s no time left to govern. The real service is done in the back office by unnamed employees and volunteers with pencils in their hair.

  Anthony and I escape the power games to spend the summer of 2001 in Bosnia, working with kids left orphaned by the Srebrenica massacre. I’m twenty and it’s my first time living in the immediate aftermath of war, the first time I witness the way violence rewires young minds. The kids one-up one another about how violently their dads were killed, the way American kids fight over whose dad has better tickets to the Broncos game. “My dad’s eyes were gouged out with a spoon,” one boy tells me proudly. They bring knives to school. They throw stones at the Croatian kid, who happens to be a six-year-old girl. But somewhere underneath that, they remind me of my sisters, now six and thirteen, and I ache for what they’ve seen. The last night, we hold a slumber party in the youth center’s gym, piling blankets and pillows on the basketball court. The six-year-old Croatian girl climbs into my lap and falls asleep, while one of the big kids confesses that he’s scared he’s inherited the violence of his father. On the train back to England, I write to the Thai refugee camp and accept the job for after graduation.

  * * *

  —

  I go home to visit my mom and sisters in Washington, D.C., before my last year at Oxford begins in the fall of 2001.

  I’m sitting on the steps of our house in Georgetown, sipping coffee and watching my mom walk Sam, our golden retriever, in the park across the street. Our neighbor pulls up at the stop sign. He has the top of his Volkswagen Rabbit down. His face is white. “Turn on the news,” he says. And I switch on the TV just before the second plane hits.

  My sisters are at school on the grounds of the National Cathedral, so once Flight 77 plows into the Pentagon, their campus is evacuated. Mom and I put Sam in our Jeep and fight through gridlock to get to them,
while the radio tells us we’re at war and the black plume of smoke from across the Potomac expands across the sky. “Let’s get out of D.C.,” I suggest, once we have both girls, “till we understand what’s going on.” So we drive to a suburban Denny’s, the only place left open, and watch the news on the TV there. My head is swimming. We’re at war. I look at my sisters in their school uniforms, with their hair in neat braids—and I remember the kid back in Bosnia, with the dad and the spoon and the eyeballs.

  Lisa, my childhood friend from London, is living in D.C. by now, and the following day we drive up to New York City, just the two of us in her beaten-up truck. We have no reason to go. It’s just instinct, like putting your finger to a wound. We can see the smoke from the New Jersey Turnpike. When we get to the tollbooth at the mouth of the Holland Tunnel, Lisa realizes she’s forgotten her wallet and begins to cry. The woman inside the window begins to cry, too. She waves us through.

  Across the river, the downtown streets are dusted gray, like the pictures of Hiroshima in my high school history books. Every lamppost, every wall is covered with flyers, each with a person’s face and the word MISSING in capital letters, like a howling, hopeless prayer. We walk south through the ash.

  A few blocks from ground zero, the road is closed and we can’t go any farther. Neither of us has spoken in hours. We look at each other, then at the firefighter manning the barricade. “What can we do?” I ask, and he points us to a water station where bottles need unpacking. Shift after shift, the emergency workers come and go in suits and respirators with horror in their eyes. One of them picks up a red tennis shoe and stares at it, while the others work around him.

  When I get back to Oxford, time and again, I wake up swearing I smell smoke.