Empire City

by Matt Gallagher

  The lawyer cleared his throat. “One, we’d protect your cousin.” Jean-Jacques just blinked. If these guys were as bad as the Bureau said, Emmanuel deserved the consequences. “Two, you help deliver Mr. Gray, the War Department will authorize your return to the International Legion. You’ll get a combat platoon there. Helped draft the paperwork myself.”

  Empty seconds passed. Jean-Jacques took all that in. Don’t think too fast, he thought. They’re trying to get you to say something too fast. He considered why the War Department would change its mind. What could possibly matter more than the PR the Volunteers offered? Celebrity had replaced service. GI Joe from World War II, Mud Grunt from Vietnam, the thing that’d made them heroes was their normalcy. Boys-next-door saving democracy with rifles and heart. The Volunteers were the exact opposite. Three men in a military of five million. Their heroism lay in the extraordinary.

  A military of five million, Jean-Jacques thought again. That’s it. More than anything, wars need bodies.

  “Recruitment,” he said, amplifying the last syllable of the word. “Yeah. An army of peacemonger vets would be bad for that.”

  “Hypothetically,” the lawyer began.

  “I got you,” Jean-Jacques said. “That stays here.”

  He said he’d do it. To get back to the Legion, he’d do pretty much anything.

  “One final question for you, Corporal.” It was the older agent talking again, Larsen from the task force. Jean-Jacques thought for sure he was going to make the typical remark—why hadn’t they been selected for the Hero Project? Federals loved that one. Instead Larsen cocked his head and asked, “Why leave Abu Abdallah breathing?”

  Getting this question from citizens was one thing. They didn’t know any better. Getting it from federal cops was another. They should have. The new anger he’d come home with rose into his throat like sour phlegm, but Jean-Jacques managed to keep it there, despite himself.

  He stared out at the younger agents with the fringes of his eyes while remaining fixed on Larsen. “Duty, homie. That’s all.”

  They thanked Jean-Jacques again. He stood up and chugged the rest of his beer. He tossed the bottle into a corner trash bin, making the lawyer flinch. As he reached the doorway, he turned to ask the thing that’d been bothering him since the agents had begun their pitch: Why had his little cousin become an activist? How did a kid from Little Haiti become interested in rehabilitation colonies? Why give a fuck?

  It was the stammering one, Stein, who answered. “Because of you.”

  * * *

  They’d left Haiti because wants had become too impossible and needs had become too scarce. His mother paid off smugglers an aid worker recommended. She and her precious, plump toddler boarded a wooden sailboat headed northwest toward the Keys, a small pack between them to carry the entirety of their lives. America awaited, and not just regular America. Empire City was their goal. Empire City, the place of old stories and new dreams.

  Empire City was also where a cluster of relatives had found refuge. One was willing to pretend to be his mother’s sister so they could get the right papers. That woman was Emmanuel’s mother. She’d urged them to hurry. The news said the government soon planned on making it even harder for Haitians.

  Glimmers of the journey had lingered with Jean-Jacques. Nothing more than images, really, disjointed and useless to trust. The boat, overcrowded, packed full like black sardines. A little son and his mother fighting for space with shame, then elbows and teeth. Twelve nights under a tarp fine as silly string, clinging to one another for warmth against the open Caribbean wind. Nuts and jerky and bits of fish the men caught and cooked in seawater. He hadn’t wanted the fish, not at first. Fussiness soon gave way to hunger.

  Then, light and fresh as young rain: a trace of a private smile on his mother’s mouth, her long, lean face up and defiant against the horizon. She’d set her left hand over the teardrop hanging from her neck, a little cheap turquoise thing, too scratched and worn for any thief to take notice, and she was tapping at it, ever slightly. Through constant dredging of the memory, this moment had been placed just before land was spotted, before hope and survival were, too, that isolated beachhead on Big Mullet Key their sailboat would run aground on, sparking songs of jubilation and prayers of joy to the three Christian gods and the old vodou ones, too, to anything up there that was listening. That face. Alone with herself and her pendant. Had it been a birthday gift from her parents, left over from a childhood in sleepy Port-de-Paix? A trophy her future husband had won her in the fixed street games, disregarding the odds with all the power of a bright new love? Maybe a family heirloom that dated back to the Haitian revolution. Maybe still just something she’d found in the dirt at the port. There was no way to know now. He’d never asked about the pendant when he still could have. But it was Jean-Jacques’s remembrance. That image, that moment, that distant smile had happened, and it’d happened on that sailboat, his mother’s secret thoughts alone against the sky of the unknown.

  * * *

  The streetlights outside the Bureau’s satellite office burned with a watcher’s eye. Summer’s throes meant sticky air and bug songs and a fat sort of indolence. Jean-Jacques couldn’t figure the last time he’d been in Ash Valley. High school, maybe, for a water polo match? The outer district was white working class and had been for a century. Too far out for the gentrifiers to care, too raw and sunken for the suburbs to come for it. Polish, Irish, Hungarian, Albanian, Appalachia transplants—different but not, the same but not, united in a sort of tacit understanding that there were worse places in the world to live.

  Jean-Jacques would’ve found it decent enough if it weren’t so gray. It was like the entire district had been dipped in chimney smoke. There was nothing ironic about Ash Valley, especially its name.

  He got into the car he’d borrowed from one of Britt’s boyfriends—they’d proven to be welcoming and helpful, to him at least—and considered texting Flowers. After the Bureau’s interview, or whatever it had been, he felt like alcohol, good alcohol, too. And maybe light talk with a bohemian who didn’t care about the things he did and didn’t care that he didn’t care about the things they did.

  He texted his cousin instead.

  Emmanuel answered in seconds. “Need you, son… Xavier Station. RIOT!”

  Jean-Jacques closed his eyes and held his breath, letting out air slowly through his nostrils. He felt the magnetic pull of family, supreme, inevitable, the same pull he’d resisted eight years before, knowing it was all or nothing, knowing he needed to make a break for far away or he’d be stuck forever. He’d promised himself then to never return. He’d abided by that even as his mother lay dying, she herself telling him to not come back, that she’d be fine and would be in the front row the next time they redeployed back to America, clapping along with all the other proud Ranger moms. But instead she withered away like a raisin person, eighty pounds of flesh stretched across brittle bone in a one-room apartment, alone. All because he’d believed it weakness to come back, even for her. Even as she’d believed the very same.

  For duty, yes. For country, yes. But also: for pride.

  He read the text again. “Need you.”

  Yes you do, he thought. And I need the Legion. That’s what I need.

  Jean-Jacques rubbed at the teardrop under his shirt, once, twice, a third time just because. Then he turned on the car and drove to the expressway, toward his cousin’s appeal.

  CHAPTER 10

  THE BLINDFOLD BROUGHT familiarity to Sebastian. He could see just enough through the threadbare. It didn’t feel quite natural, but it didn’t feel totally alien, either. Like riding a bike, if you’d feared and brooded over your last ride so much that frequent, crushing nightmares resulted from it, and you’d spent the years since in a drunken daze trying to ice the memories. Yes, he’d done this hostage thing before, and he’d done it for twenty-six days. He would survive this, as he had in Tripoli. He’d survived there, from having to shit into a cardboard box to the Pale
stinian chair exercise the guy with the asterisk scar liked putting him through until his muscles turned to jelly and he collapsed into his own filth. He would survive this. He would because he could. One second, one minute, one conversation at a time.

  First things first, Sebastian told himself. Keep your leg from twitching.

  His leg did not keep from twitching. He wished he could reach the box of Valium in his pocket, but somehow doubted the Home Guard or whoever had seized the ballroom would help with that.

  As he sat on his knees against a back wall, a cable tie around his wrists and black sheer cut from pantyhose around his head, Sebastian’s mind drifted. He thought about the crippled vet he’d met earlier that night among all the parade soldiers, the one with the pretty wife. Could he, well. Could he still fuck? Speaking of, Mia and Pete, in Germany… he’d never have guessed. Was he even her type? She tended to be really picky. But I guess Pete’s everyone’s type, he thought.

  Sebastian had a rotten habit of picturing the bedroom scenes of his friends.

  His mind returned to his first captivity. The afternoon before his rescue, day 25—he’d kept track with floss shreds in his grooming kit—the insurgents had unbound him from the metal pipe in the basement and told him to enter the password for his laptop. They didn’t believe his story about being an intern with an identity crisis looking for his probably dead cousin’s body. Why would they? They were convinced he was an American spy, and thought something in the laptop might prove that. Sebastian inputted the password. Objecting would only heighten their suspicions. Besides, they had guns.

  They looked through everything. They found his thesis on the Spanish Civil War, hapless American volunteers dying for someone else’s cause. They laughed as he tried to explain. They found old photographs from a school trip to Kurdistan, making fun of the Kurds as donkey people and wondering why he took so many shots of mountain roads. “If you’re in the ocean,” the one with the crooked smile asked, “do you take pictures of water?”

  Then they found the video file labeled “Your_Eyes_Only.”

  A fellow intern had made it for him before he flew to the Near East, with the express promise that he delete it. He hadn’t, of course. She’d done it because she thought it brave, his going to the war. He’d asked because he’d believed the same. Still, as he again watched his lady friend smile at the camera with a coy, light heart and then coo his name with something else, he wished more than anything that he’d listened to her. Because she’d done this for him, him alone, and sharing it with anyone was a violation beyond words, let alone sharing it with dirty, horny terrorists in a Tripoli basement who were breathing like asthmatics behind him as she reached down under her panties.

  “Number one, sex,” the one with the crooked smile had told Sebastian, patting him on the back. They thought it was a moment of kinship, somehow. The intern/sort-of girlfriend was naked as the sun and touching herself at this point. “Sex, so good, number one. So good.” Then he made the fisting motion and said something in Arabic and the others laughed.

  The venom of shame coursed through Sebastian, first in the basement and years later in the ballroom. Shame for not attacking the laughing Arabs. Shame for not being able to in the first place, not unless he wanted to turn departed by a bullet to the skull. Shame for even having the video, for being the type of person who wanted a video like that and asked for it from someone who cared about him, someone who trusted him. Shame at being impotent and virile all at once, yet not enough of either to do anything but sit there and watch others watch something that was supposed to be only for him.

  The laptop was destroyed during the rescue the next day. Sebastian never mentioned it to his soon-to-be-ex sort-of girlfriend, even when they were still talking and trying to find in each other what had been lost. Superstitious as he was—though he liked to think it was more providential than that, because of God and stuff—he’d come to believe it ended because of the video. He’d failed her then by not protecting her at her most vulnerable, so he’d go on to fail her more after he returned home. If she hadn’t left him when she did, he’d just continue failing her again and again, like two star-crossed travelers stuck in a loop.

  Ignoring her, and her life, and her hopes, and her ideas. Refusing to leave his apartment for anything but the laundromat and bars. To Sebastian’s mind, those weren’t reasons for why it ended, but the means. He’d wanted to explain to her about the video, because then maybe she’d understand like he did. But he never had. Whenever he’d opened his mouth to try, all that came out was garble.

  * * *

  Sebastian found out Mia was kneeling next to him in the ballroom when he whispered, “Mia, you there?” and the person to his right said “No,” but the person to his left said “Yeah.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I am.” A couple seconds passed. “Are you?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  It seemed like as soon as the ballroom went dark, even before the cell phones got confiscated, they’d been surrounded by Home Guardsmen with rifle-lasers dancing on Pete. Well, men in Home Guard uniforms. Who knows who these jokers really are, Sebastian thought. Western separatists, maybe. Greek militants still angry about Crete accidentally getting nuked. Disgruntled employees who wanted a 401(k) plan. Homegrown jihadists? That was a terrifying idea. Regardless, Pete had been marched off and everyone else ordered to remain still and silent.

  Some were better at it than others.

  Sebastian swallowed to wet his throat. “Mia,” he whispered again.

  “Yes.”

  It wasn’t the right time for this question but he’d been wanting to ask it since learning he hadn’t been the Rangers’ main priority. “Did you know it was me there? In Tripoli.”

  Seconds passed, then: “Why do you think I volunteered for it?”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome. Now. Sshh.”

  It was good advice, Sebastian knew. And he believed her. Not just cause she was a good friend—though she is, he reminded himself. But because the alternative defied the odds of chance. She’d come for him, on her helo, freely, he thought. Which meant something he knew about that day was still true.

  She’d lost her leg that day. Because of that choice, because of him.

  Sebastian’s mind drifted some more. He again swallowed to wet his throat; the cotton mouth would not go away and a slow march to sobriety was becoming a likelihood. The cravings for Valium had passed into thirst. Five minutes later, Sebastian couldn’t help himself.

  “Excuse me,” he said, trying his best to sound mannered. “State of emergency. With my lizard.”

  A gruff voice replied, somewhere to his front and out of threadbare sight, “Use your pants.”

  “You serious?” The bourbon wasn’t yet totally out of his system. “I just need to use the bathroom.”

  The charging handle of a rifle was drawn, metal tonguing off against metal. Sebastian didn’t say anything to that.

  * * *

  “This thing on? Empire City elite! Your attention, please.

  “I’ll say it only once: this is not a democracy.

  “I am Veteran Zero. My men and I represent a coalition known as the Mayday Front. We are not criminals. We are not terrorists. We are patriots and humble warfighters, here for our due.

  “Holy shit, Tupac’s here! My man. Love your show. Thug Life in the A.M. Gangsta, gangsta. Who’s the gangster now, ’Pac? Give here that gold chain. For the cause.

  “Where was I? Something, something, honoring the social contract… yes. The broken, the scarred, the fucking enlisted will be discarded no more. Invisible no more. We killed for you. We died for you. ‘To care for him who shall have borne the battle.’ Lincoln’s words. Smart man, that dead man. But even he could not foresee what you would do to his beloved republic.

  “George fucking Clooney! You were a delight in Imperial Dreams. Bit weepy, though. And The Great Tet Raid! So righteous, you got that bitch Robb elected. My, my, those are swee
t cuff links. Burberry? Just touching them gets my dick hard. Appreciate the contribution.

  “You people have disrespected my people for too long. Do you know how insane it is to raise money for individual warfighters while allowing the abuse of the warfighting class to continue forevermore? Have even one of you assholes bothered to consider the warped looking-glass logic of that?

  “You’re goddamn right that’s a literary reference! I’m a man of letters.

  “General Collins—an honor. If I didn’t think the political system was inherently corrupt and defective, you’d have my vote. I heard you pegged the War Department secretary to get your division more funding. Amazing. Tell me, where are you on jobs? Twelve million living vets of the Mediterranean Wars, yet the only steady work my men here can find is as jailers at the colonies. Fucked up, right! Guarding other warfighters from proper society. General Jackpot, please—give mind to the hinterlands. It’s a real struggle out there.

  “Rich people! Listen the fuck up. We’re not unreasonable. We fought for this country. We love this country. But you forgot about us. Can’t do that. Not in the Home of the Brave.

  “ ‘American Service.’ A fine ideal. One I champion myself. And why we’ll be ransoming you off in groups. To pay tribute to the service of those left behind by your plundering.

  “That’s it for now. Just… sit tight, it’ll all be over soon. The honor is ours.”

  * * *

  Sebastian saw shapes like puzzle pieces approaching through the threadbare. They didn’t fit together, though, one long and bent, the other bulbous and plush, like they were jigsaws from different sets. A lot of these guys acted and sounded like warfighters, he’d decided, but they must’ve been out for a while. Especially the fat ones.