The Amateurs

by Liz Harmer

  Brandon nearly spoke then, but again resisted. Doors came around to the empty seat at the head of the table, sat in his chair and rolled himself on it around to where Brandon sat. He pushed his knees up against Brandon’s.

  If Brandon started laughing at this—laughter began filling his head like the onset of a sneeze—he knew he would never be able to leave.

  “Here is the climax to the scene. Here is what you want to know. You all want to know why I would stay behind if port is so wonderful, right? If I trust it? That’s what the papers want to know and the interviews and all the reporters and the scientists and all the fucking ethicists too. ‘Why did you send the Testifiers in, Mr. Doors?’” His imitation of an American accent sounded like Homer Simpson. “‘With all due respect, Mr. Doors, shouldn’t you send yourself?’ ‘Where’s my mommy?’ ‘Where’s my daddy?’” Doors laughed. “Brandon, you, you of all people. I know the rest of you have put it together. Welcome to your mind being blown. Welcome to your betrayal.”

  Dawn, ordinarily so unflappable, let out a cry. “We thought it was for the best,” she said. “What could we do?”

  Brandon looked up into Doors’ eyes, with their gaping pupils. Then at Zahra, who stared back, stony. So. Doors was nothing but an asshole.

  “And it is for the best! The old liberal myths are dead. Humanity—the concept—is dead.” The heat flowed from where Doors’ knees touched Brandon’s, and it seemed to Brandon as if Doors might be about to grow enormous, to extend hugely into space, magical and demonic, to loom above them, taunting them. “You’re too attached to the old myths, Brandon. We hold no things to be self-evident. No things. Interrogate your premises. You believe you’ve uncovered something. But why should death be worse than life?”

  Now Doors stood, leaned over the table and braced his arms against it. Veins pulled across them like thick tree roots.

  “Yes, I’m going to tell you what happened. Yes, port is perhaps dangerous. I know its dangers quite intimately, I know that it speaks to you and knows you.”

  “What?” Benji jumped up like a teenage boy defending his girlfriend against a slight.

  Brandon pitied the others: Benji’s good-natured argumentation, Dawn’s scowl, Zahra with her hard glare. This was the charisma and danger of a cult leader. For him, it no longer mattered. He had already made up his mind to leave. Only he was, finally, immune. But immediately he questioned this immunity.

  Doors banged his fist on the table. “Of course I know everything. What did you think? Where is your vision? I know the power of port to persuade. I know that it infects you and takes hold like a virus, like rabies, wanting you in its clutches. Port knew where I wanted to go. It is not mere science; it is witchcraft. We are only at the beginning of understanding what this means. But I do know that what has happened here does not belong in the annals of atrocity.” He banged his fist again. “Good riddance. Earth can breathe.”

  “But you’ve been telling us,” Dawn said, “that people can come back. That they are choosing not to come.”

  “How do you weigh the costs? Every human is a cost to other creatures, to the oceans, the trees. Why is a human worth more?”

  Brandon stood. He felt rather than saw the others turn, spectators at a ball. He walked to the door. “I’m done,” he said.

  “Good riddance,” Doors said, face tight with anger. Then, as the door was closing, “Best of luck out there!”

  * * *

  —

  Brandon walked with painful slowness, until he saw an opportunity to duck into a stairwell and down into the parking garage. The garage, he knew, was guarded by one person on rotation with the latrine crew and the hall crew, and there he’d find his old Turing, the car he’d been able to buy in cash after only a few paychecks and his staff discount. Its aquamarine rounds and headlamps had the comforting curves and eyes of a human face. Let them realize too late why he was carrying a pack heavily laden with bottles. Let them realize how they’d underestimated his courage.

  At the exit, he leaned out the driver’s window and gave the chubby, tightly belted guard his most charming smile.

  “You’re with the other group,” the guard said.

  It was the assumption Brandon had hoped he’d make, and he channelled Buddha-like warmth and calm.

  “I was told there would be only four,” the man added.

  “I’m bringing up the rear. Last-minute addition.” Brandon gestured at the back seat, where he’d laid five extra solar packs. “Supplies.”

  The guard nodded slowly and pushed a button. The garage door hoisted open in excruciatingly slow increments. Brandon lifted his foot off the brake and watched the man press the intercom button. He prepared for the possibility that another car would speed out after him. But no one was following.

  It had been a full year since he’d driven the Turing, but with no trouble the tiny car bounced out of the alleyway and onto Pineapple Avenue. Then onto Coloda Street, only a few empty miles from the freeway.

  The radio poured out static. He found an old PINAkey in the glovebox and pegged it in. In ten minutes, the shining white fortress of PINA was too far away to see in his rear-view mirror, and he was alone in a car with a song he loved. The wind was on his face on an abandoned highway, and although the Turing could only get up to fifty-five, tears and sweat cooled his skin. He wildly drummed his hands on the wheel, letting the car swerve. He sang along so loudly that he hardly recognized his own voice.

  Of course, there was no other car on the freeway. He swerved around broken branches, a line of small mammals, possibly rabbits, and then what looked—if he hadn’t known better—like a half-built beaver lodge. Probably, he mused, there were animals he’d never heard of. He felt a pang at the memory of the peace he’d felt port offering him, how he’d envisioned it would be when he and Zahra held hands and jumped through.

  What a fucking lonely world, he thought. His mother had gone in after his father, hadn’t she? She’d gone to be with his dad in some earlier life, to persuade him to keep his gall bladder. His mother, possibly doubled, and his father, still living, and acned, bespectacled Brandon doing algebra in his running shorts. She’d gone there, or—Brandon admitted it, finally, for the first time, like a person unbuttoning pants that were two sizes too tight—he didn’t know where. Nobody knew.

  There was a figure sitting in a field. Maybe it was a steer resting in the grass? But how strange it would be to see a steer like that, all alone, one black smudge in an otherwise empty field.

  The overgrown grasses were shaded by trees, and some of those trees bore markings of human activity. Here a wooden swing, there jagged letters scratched into bark. Below the tree, a winding path of packed dirt. The lonesome figure sat unshaded in a blaze of midday sun, surrounded by a frantic buzzing in the grasses topped by purple and white flowers, uncertain what he was doing, how he had got here, and who, indeed, he was.

  He was a he. That much was coming into focus, as this field would have through a camera’s lens. A man, he thought, knowing this from memory and without needing to open up the waist of his pants and peer in. Though he did this anyway, finding only standard-issue white briefs under jeans that bagged to his ankles. I am the sort of person who buys off-brand white briefs, the man thought to himself. Then: I am the sort of person who knows the difference between kinds of briefs. And inside that blue-striped elastic band, of course, the usual.

  The buzzing deafened. He swatted at his ear.

  The things he knew: maleness, femaleness, erections, piss, denim, pants, briefs, the colour white, the existence of brands. Each scrap of knowledge branched off indefinitely. Still sitting steer-like, he squinted off into the green-gold distance, shading his eyes with his hand. In the distance he saw a shape that might have been a house next to a shape that must have been a barn.

  Everything about the field was idyllic, the sunshine and the plant life, the butterflies. He wanted to remove his brown loafers and trouser socks and run through the grasses with his arms outs
tretched, like a young child assuming the posture of a plane. The only thing to darken the moment was the fact of how alone he appeared to be. Even the sky was cloudless. He stood up with a little difficulty, becoming dusted with pollen in the process. He put a hand to his face, finding there a thick beard it pleased him to pull on. Aside from another person, what he wanted to see most was a mirror.

  He slid his hand into his pocket, and his fingers found the corners of a business card. Before he could draw it out, the ground began to shake, and then there was a buzzing so intense he thought it would deafen him. Something large came zooming close: a formation of old fighter jets in a migratory vee. He flattened to the ground, hands behind his head, and the grasses bent back like lithe dancers as the jets passed. He lay there long after the planes were gone, waiting until the insects had resumed their buzz and flutter, and then, still, he waited. The moment clarified as he took note of the small papery wings around him, how their shape and texture seemed an echo of the thin pointed shapes of certain leaves. He thought of nothing aside from the moment he found himself in. Every far-off rumbling moved through the front of his body. A mouse even a metre off made the grasses sway noticeably. He thought of the phrase the winds of change and no longer knew what he was waiting for. Then, the light shifted.

  Twilight, cooler air, a distant sound like fireworks, but with no light show in the sky to match. He thought, And it was morning and it was evening the first day.

  * * *

  —

  He approached the farmhouse as the sky turned starry. He saw no animals, but there were animal smells, along with another smell, strong and persistent, worse than manure. The house inside was dimly lit, with a slight orange glow framed by the windows. He was a field mouse far away from his nest. Or was this his own house, abandoned? He came closer to the windows that backed into a high row of hedges, two panes of which were drawn open so that the curtains lightly guarding its inner rooms moved in and out as ominously as a ghostly nightgown. He lifted onto tiptoes, attempted to see through. Smell of lit tobacco, the flickering of a candle flame. Were those whispers voices? Was that a human coughing? Retching?

  Again there was the popping of fireworks. A flash of light.

  He retreated, pinning himself against the cold stone between those windows, and tried to breathe. His mouth was gluey; he badly needed water. He inched around the side of the house and tapped on the window with a bent index finger. “Hello?” Spittle so thick he could hardly speak. He attempted to swallow.

  Something shifted, as though that mouse in the field was moving again. There was a series of pleasant sounds, of metallic or plastic parts fitting together perfectly, reminding him of when he was a young father clicking open and shut the parts of his son’s Transformers. In his mind, he followed this blast of recollection: orange shag carpet installed by the previous owners, all those cars and robots strewn across it, each frozen in some moment of transformation. A child’s fat fingers. The light from a basement window far above their heads. Shuckashuckashucka: his son making machine-gun sounds.

  His hand was still reaching toward the window, but he had pulled his face away. This was not his house.

  Through the open window poked a bit of black metal piping. “Hello? I am a father,” he said. This admission filled him with amazement, and other facts spilled forward. I am a father, he thought, and the phrase was familiar. But then he said, “Mon fils, ma fille,” the French coming out unexpectedly, and his voice sounding nothing like it ought to have sounded.

  The snowman shape of his shadow appeared on the wall of the house, brightly haloed.

  “Ah, man. It’s just Philippe,” said a man’s voice.

  His hands, quaking, were rubbery.

  “What are you doing sneaking around out here?” said a second man.

  “He injured?” said another.

  “Looks all right. A little shaken up. You okay, Philippe? You see something, buddy?” These voices were addressing him as though he was a very old man. He looked down: his hands were veiny, moist-palmed.

  He was afraid to turn around. The voices were indistinguishable from one another. If he turned around, the men would see his face and see that he was not Philippe. A hand fell hard on his shoulder. He turned. Lights flashed in his eyes. The three rifles that had been trained on him slowly lowered.

  “Boy, are we glad to see you! Thought we’d lost you out there.”

  Philippe—could that be right? It seemed almost right. He gaped at them.

  “Well, let’s get inside.”

  The three men were dressed in layers of fatigues, from white T-shirt to full khaki gear, plus belt and rucksack. Each held a rifle at chest level, and together they marched him around to the door. Inside, a fourth man was seated regally on an arrangement of three blue kitchen chairs, his booted legs propped across two of them. The table in front of him was painted blue also, the scratch of bare wood showing through along the corners. Candlelight provided a flickering glow. The man with the propped legs was arranging papers, folding and unfolding them, moving them around in the manner of a reader of tarot cards. His eyes were set keenly on these pages. He lifted a pencil from the table and held it in his hands, poised to write something, then returned pencil to pocket. He did this twice. The movements he made were balletic, as though choreographed: the swoop of his hand, the flight of the pencil. He did it a third time and then stopped, pencil in hand, not writing.

  Philippe stood at the door as the other soldiers filed past him. The last one, the smallest, took his arm and led him as one would a blind grandfather over to one of the empty chairs. Young men lacked all imagination, could not understand the minds of others. This thought surprised Philippe, as though it had come into his head from some other source.

  His surroundings were unfamiliar, but Philippe understood that he was supposed to recognize them. Copper pots and a blackened pan hanging from hooks around a big sink, wooden counters, plates piled everywhere. A rope of garlic bulbs dangled, and dried herbs hung like witches’ brooms. The room was dim, but the lit steeples of wax on the table and the counters shot it through with uneven light.

  With sooty hands, a soldier picked up a hard round loaf of bread. His biceps tensed as he tore pieces off. An unlabelled green glass bottle was passed around and arrived in front of Philippe.

  “This is the last loaf and the last of the wine. You got anything hiding in a cellar somewhere?” The man who spoke these words was very pale, as though untouched by the sun, with eyes blue-white, like ice.

  “Hey, give him a minute. He’s disoriented or something.”

  “Yeah, so am I. Hungry too.”

  The man with the propped legs was shuffling his papers again. The blue-eyed one took a swig from the bottle and stared at Philippe. The small one, who stood behind Philippe, put two hands on his shoulders.

  The fourth man stood at the sink staring out the window. “We’d settle for whisky or anything hard at this point,” he said.

  “If you have flour and oil and water, je pourrai faire cuire du pain,” Philippe said. “Mais, mais. But—” His accent was stronger now. The words strained against the forms his mouth was trying to make, as though he’d recently been Novocained. “Si vous avez de l’eau, water, j’ai, I am at this moment quite thirsty.”

  “If you have flour and oil and water?” said the icy one. “This is your house, bub.”

  “Clearly he’s in shock,” said the voice from the small man behind him.

  Were these his pans, was this his table? Was he French? He rubbed his hand along a splintering edge, picking at dried paint with his thumbnail. “How long was I missing?”

  “A full twelve hours. Um, douze heures.”

  “Did you see me out there in the field?”

  The men shook their heads. Gnawed at the bread. The man at the table looked up at him.

  “We thought we lost you, bub. Er, sir. Monsieur. We are getting ready to shove off. We’re leaving at dawn.”

  “Et je suis Philippe?�
� He had slid into the French again as if into a slippery patch of mulch. “I’m Philippe? This is my house.”

  “Poor guy,” one of them said. “Amnesia, d’ya think?”

  “We found you here two days ago. Just you. Seulement vous,” said the one standing behind him. “All our guys are gone, and we’re the only ones left.” He pulled up a chair and sat beside Philippe. Shoved hunks of the bread into his mouth. “I don’t think you’ve got flour or anything, because this bread was stale when we got here. Place had been ransacked.” The moist sound of chewing was close to Philippe’s ear, then a slurp. “I’m Private Daniels, remember? The medic?” He lifted his hand and pointed at each of the others. “Mitford, Cooper, Ambrose.”

  “Daniels, Mitford, Cooper, Ambrose,” Philippe repeated.

  “Oui, bien.”

  “And Daniels is a fucking show-off.” Mitford gave the small man an ice-pick stare.

  Daniels shrugged. “I like a chance to practise my French.” He handed Philippe a canteen, and Philippe drank until his lips ached. “J’aime beaucoup d’avoir un chance…Une chance?”

  “We all need to get some rest. Why don’t you go on upstairs.” Cooper had a rifle in his hands and motioned with it toward another room. This seemed a vague threat, and obediently Philippe stood up. His legs threatened to buckle, and he grabbed the table for support. This caused the papers spread in front of the seated, pencil-poised Ambrose to shift and flutter, and Ambrose looked up with a sorrowful, reproving stare.