Granta 122: Betrayal (Granta: The Magazine of New Writing)

by Неизвестный

  Just then the lights switched on in the gymnasium and a hush fell. Frederick, leader of the readiness workshop, walked in with his wireless microphone. Everyone watched him. He stood at centre court, tucked the microphone under his arm, and started to clap methodically, as if he were killing something between his hands.

  Soon everyone was applauding, moving in close to hear what Frederick would say. The drill, apparently, was over.

  He thumped his mic, said hello, hello, and everyone fell silent. He was such a cock, Edward thought. An impossible cock.

  ‘So,’ he said, in his quick, high voice. ‘Good stuff tonight, good stuff. We made OK time. Maybe we’re a half-hour slow, and I don’t need to tell you what that means.’

  ‘Boom!’ someone yelled from the crowd, to an eruption of laughter.

  ‘Boom is right,’ replied Frederick. ‘But it’s not funny.’

  The laughter stopped.

  ‘This is supposed to be the easy leg. We didn’t even do the highway drill tonight. Do you all know how much time we’ll lose on the highway?’

  ‘Too much!’ the crowd yelled.

  ‘That’s right. The highway is an ugly variable. You do not disrespect the highway. It murders your plan. You can’t control it, whereas this . . .’ Here Frederick gestured into the gymnasium. ‘This you can control, down to the second. Which means I’d like to see us shave off that half-hour. Maybe forty-five minutes. We need breathing room. We need to be joining our settlements without panic, with time to kill. Next time we do this I want time to kill. Tonight we had no time to kill at all. And you know what?’

  Someone from far in the back of the gym shouted, ‘What?’

  ‘I’m disappointed,’ Frederick said, and he hung his head. The gymnasium seemed to groan.

  ‘But do you know what else?’ Frederick asked, brightening.

  No one responded.

  ‘I’m proud as hell of all of you. Every single one of you.’

  Except me, thought Edward. He was pretty sure that Frederick wouldn’t be proud of him.

  They broke out in groups for the critique and Edward sat in a circle with his neighbours. His parents, because they weren’t meant to be part of tonight’s drill, were dismissed. Since they had no way to get home, they were probably waiting for him outside.

  The group leader for Edward’s neighbourhood was Sharon, and she led them through the discussion. Everything had gone fine, although Edward, she pointed out, had not registered, even though he was here in the gym. He was on time but he had never registered. Did he have trouble finding them? No. Was something wrong with Edward, was he perhaps injured or confused? No. Edward was fine. Edward didn’t register with his own settlement because he’d brought unscheduled evacuees with him, and these unscheduled evacuees had turned out to be a serious liability.

  ‘I hate to see our neighbourhood disgraced,’ said Sharon.

  ‘I hardly think –’ Edward started.

  ‘Hold up, Eddie,’ warned Thom. ‘You don’t talk during your critique.’

  ‘What’s a good punishment for Edward?’ said Marni. She was joking, but people seemed to take the question seriously.

  Geoff jumped in. ‘I think we should do something humiliating to his parents. That’s much more disturbing, because he’d have to see them get hurt. I think that’s a good punishment. I mean, I don’t want his parents to be seriously harmed, but I think there’s really nothing worse than watching your parents, who are essentially defenceless, get hurt in some way.’

  Everyone laughed. Everyone except Sharon, who glared at Edward.

  ‘OK, guys, I get it,’ said Edward. ‘If there’s ever a real crisis, I’ll be sure only to look out for myself. Don’t worry, I’ve learned my lesson.’

  ‘Unfortunately, Edward, this is not about you learning a lesson,’ said Sharon. ‘I’m glad your neighbours think it’s funny, but this is about deterring others from suddenly deciding they can bring friends with them on an evacuation.’

  ‘My parents aren’t my friends,’ he said. ‘We’re not friends. They’re my parents. I thought they’d gotten a call, too. I didn’t realize some people didn’t get called. Who here with parents in town wouldn’t have done the same thing?’

  Some hands went up.

  ‘Yes, Liz?’ said Sharon.

  ‘Me,’ said Liz, putting her arm down. ‘My parents are at home asleep right now. It would never have occurred to me to bring them along.’

  A few people echoed this. They’d left their parents behind.

  Good for all of you, Edward thought. You murderous fucks.

  ‘Does anyone think it’s strange,’ Edward ventured, ‘that the parents weren’t called tonight?’

  ‘Honestly, Edward,’ said Thom. ‘This is the second time you’ve spoken during your critique. We shouldn’t have to warn you about this. You can’t learn from what happened tonight unless you’re completely silent now.’

  ‘I thought that what I learn doesn’t matter,’ Edward snapped. ‘Isn’t this about all of you learning not to be like me?’

  ‘No chance of that,’ said a young woman on the opposite side of the circle, who stared at Edward so defiantly that he looked away.

  On Edward’s way out, Frederick broke from a mob of admirers and grabbed his arm.

  ‘Edward, a word.’

  He’d never been this close to Frederick, or even had a private conversation with him before. As much as he disliked him, he couldn’t deny how compelling Frederick was. Impossibly handsome, confident, with the body, for some reason, of a small gymnast. His trademark jumpsuits could double as children’s pyjamas.

  ‘What you did tonight was incredibly brave. You demonstrated a priority for love and loyalty. You protected two fragile people who had no other saviour, even though technically they were not in danger, and would have been much safer at home. You made a choice, and on the individual level, that choice was courageous and selfless, even if at the level of the group you risked destabilizing our entire operation. If those had been my parents, and I didn’t have the years of training that I happen to have, and I also didn’t have the elaborate set of instincts and survival habits that I happen to have, it’s possible I would have done the exact same thing. In other words, if I were you, and knew next to nothing about how to succeed at this, I might have brought my parents here tonight as well. It is completely possible. It’s precisely because I can relate, however abstractly, to what you did that you won’t see any lenience from me. Not a trace. On the contrary, you will meet great resistance from me, and if you do anything like that again, I promise I will crush you. But I want you to know, face to face, how much I admire you.’

  When he got outside, his mother was asleep in the car, his father leaning on the door.

  ‘I bet you’re expecting an apology from me,’ said his father.

  Edward was tired. He said that he wasn’t, that he just wanted to get home. He had a big day tomorrow.

  ‘Because I didn’t do anything wrong,’ his father continued.

  ‘I know that, Dad.’

  ‘It doesn’t really seem like you know it.’

  ‘I do. I would like to go home now, that’s all.’

  ‘OK, go. Go straight home. Your mother and I will walk.’

  ‘You’re not going to walk.’

  ‘Katherine! Katherine!’ his father shouted into the car, banging on the window. ‘Wake up! We have to walk home. Eddie refuses to drive us.’

  ‘Dad, get in. Please. I’m driving you home. Don’t worry.’

  ‘Because we wouldn’t want to put you out.’

  They waited in the line of cars revving to leave the high-school parking lot. Some people took these evening drills – hellish and deeply pointless as they were – as social encounters not to go to waste. So Edward and his parents waited in traffic – his mother asleep, his father grinding his teeth – while athletically attired settlement leaders strolled up to cars and leaned against drivers’ windows, chatting it out.

  Edward di
dn’t dare honk. These glad-handing semi-professional tragedy consumers would turn on him, attack the car, eat his face off. Or, worse, they’d stare at him and start to hate him slightly more, if that were possible.

  His father, on the other hand, hadn’t registered that they weren’t moving.

  ‘That Hannah is a Nazi cunt,’ his father said.

  ‘Dad, you can’t say things like that about people.’

  ‘She’s a Nazi cunt with a tiny cock.’

  ‘OK, Dad.’

  ‘What, you don’t agree? You don’t like her, either. Tell me you don’t agree.’

  ‘I don’t agree. She’s in a tough position. She’s just doing her job.’

  That set him off.

  ‘Just doing her job! Gandhi was just doing his job.’

  Gandhi?

  ‘Not Gandhi, that other one. That other one!’

  His father was in a rage.

  ‘Which other one? Hitler?’

  ‘No!’ yelled his father. ‘The other one! The other one!’

  At work the next day, a receptionist fell from her chair and died. The paramedics set up a perimeter around her desk while colleagues from the office looked on, whispering. Edward couldn’t understand why the paramedics wouldn’t touch her, even if it was clear she was dead. What was the protocol in cases like this? One of them squinted through a monocle at her corpse. The others pushed back her cubicle partition, then staked a low net around her body. They took pictures and air samples and questioned the co-workers who sat nearby, but they stayed away from the body.

  The paramedics consulted a two-way radio, then turned to question the assembled onlookers.

  Had anyone touched this woman? Her clothing? Her hair? Her skin?

  No one answered, but of course they had touched her. Edward had still been in his office when she collapsed, but he understood that they’d tried to revive her. They’d loosened her clothing, breathed into her mouth, pounded on her chest. The usual hopeless tricks, taught by sad specialists at colleges and adult education centres. And, one year ago, at this very office, for a reasonable discount. Were you not supposed to touch someone who died?

  A few hands went up, and these people were escorted to a private office.

  ‘What’s going on?’ someone yelled. ‘Where are you taking them? What are you going to do?’

  ‘Calm down, they’ll be fine,’ someone else answered, and this set things off.

  ‘How do you know? You don’t know anything. You have no idea what’s going on.’

  The paramedics announced that the office would need to be cleared at once. Everyone out, quickly and safely, and this quieted people down. They were to please follow their evacuation drill. Employees could wait across the street in the park. They wanted to be able to see everyone from the window.

  For what? Edward wondered to himself. So they can take aim and shoot us?

  It would be a little while before this was resolved, the paramedics explained, so employees were free to go get coffees if they wanted to.

  Edward hung back until most of his employees had filed out. It was really not appropriate for a paramedic, or anyone, for that matter, to tell his employees to take a coffee break. But he would let it go.

  He introduced himself as the owner and asked what was going on, what did they think?

  They stared at him.

  ‘Because we thought it was an aneurysm,’ he went on. ‘Except she’s so young. A stroke, maybe? At any rate, it’s horrible. Was it a heart attack? Probably not. What do you guys think?’

  When they didn’t answer he continued to theorize out loud, naming ailments. They were leaving him stranded. He couldn’t handle this conversation by himself.

  ‘Sir,’ said a paramedic, ‘we’ll have to ask you to leave with the others.’

  ‘OK,’ Edward said. ‘But do you know how long this will be? I want to know what to tell my employees. We have kind of a crazy day ahead.’

  It was true. Edward had five job candidates to interview after lunch, and he had been planning to spend the morning in preparation.

  The paramedics shook their heads and stared at him again, as if they were baffled that Edward expected them to know anything at all.

  Edward wasn’t finished. This was his office, and they were sprawled out in his chairs, and they’d moved and probably broken office equipment he’d paid for, while then completely ignoring him. Or, at the very least, failing to take him seriously.

  ‘It’s Kristina,’ he said.

  Again they looked at him in their queer way.

  ‘Kristina is her name,’ Edward said, gesturing at the dead woman. ‘She’s from Ditmars. I hired her about six months ago. She went to college . . . I forget where. She was a terrific employee. Here’s her emergency contact information, if you want it. But maybe you don’t want it. Maybe you guys don’t care. Maybe this is simply too boring for you and that’s why you can’t speak. You’re bored. Well, her name is Kristina. Show some fucking respect.’

  One of the paramedics stood up.

  ‘Sir,’ he said, gesturing at an officer holding a cellphone. ‘This is Deputy Arnold Sjogren, and Kristina was a close friend of his sister’s. We know exactly who she is, we grieve her passing, and now we are doing our jobs. The longer you stand here yelling at us, the greater risk you place yourself in. I can’t speak for my colleagues, but I personally do not require a lesson in respect. We are risking our lives today, and you are not. Who should be showing respect to whom?’

  It was cold outside, not yet ten in the morning. Kristina must have only just started work when she died. In truth, Edward reflected, she had been a detached presence in the office. When she was trained, including a short session with Edward himself – since he tried to impress upon all new employees the larger aims of the company – she seemed indifferent to the joy that sometimes escaped from Edward when he articulated their mission.

  Across the street stood his employees, some of them shivering and coatless, holding their arms. Others huddled together, hugging, crying.

  His team was standing in the little patch of dirt that passed for a park. When Edward approached they fell silent. Edward knew he made them uncomfortable. He shunned public spaces at work for this very reason, protecting his employees from the destabilizing effect of his terrible presence. A broad swing set creaked on the other side of the square. As the boss, it seemed that he should speak. To sum up, or lead them in prayer, or say something, perhaps, cheerful? Maybe it was too soon for that.

  ‘Well, poor thing,’ said Edward, finally.

  ‘Did you call her family?’ someone asked, and the others nodded, leaning in.

  This alarmed him. Was he supposed to do that? How could he call Kristina’s family if he didn’t know what was going on? At any rate he’d left the emergency contact card with the paramedics.

  ‘They’re taking care of it,’ Edward said, gesturing up at the building.

  But were they? He could feel them thinking that this was his job. He was supposed to take care of it, not some asshole paramedics who didn’t even know her. What if one of them had died? he imagined them thinking. Would Edward, the so-called boss of this outfit, neglect to call their families, leaving it to some rookie EMT who might not even be able to pronounce their names? What kind of boss was he? Any one of them could have died today. They could die tomorrow, or next week.

  After they stood there for a time looking at their feet, someone volunteered that they’d been discussing how Kristina might have died.

  They looked to Edward again, and again he hated being in charge.

  ‘Did you learn anything? What did they say in there?’

  Edward shook his head. ‘I shouldn’t really comment,’ he said, adopting an air of secrecy. ‘They asked me not to say anything. I’m sorry. I’d better not.’

  Oh, was he something. For a few moments Edward’s employees could – wrongly! wrongly! – see him as a person with exclusive information, entrusted with a secret. An insider. And in exchange
, what? What did he get for this lie? Well, for one, Edward would never forget what he’d said here today, how low he’d fallen. That seemed fair. A fair deal. He might as well bask in their awestruck sense of his power. Why not enjoy it for a while?

  People started to drift off. Jonathan took a sandwich order, but when it grew too complicated someone suggested that they all go, and they looked at Edward expectantly. This was going to take a while. He sent them off with his blessing – explaining that he should really stay here in case they needed him – and he was left alone in the park, staring up at the window to his office, where, for some reason, the shade had been drawn.

  The first job candidate showed up at 1 p.m., right on time, minutes after the hazmat truck and the mayor’s motorcade pulled away. Edward and his employees had only just been cleared to return to the building. Elise Mortensen was announced when Edward got to his office, where he had discovered that his papers had been disturbed. His filing cabinets were open, in great disorder. On his shelves the books had been spread apart. A smell ran through the room, too, something floral that he hadn’t noticed in the outer offices. He didn’t have time to take stock of what had changed, nor to wonder what they had been doing in his office, so far from where Kristina died, when Elise Mortensen came in, adopting an exaggerated tiptoe, as if she were disturbing him, which she kind of fucking was, and asked where to sit.

  Edward fumbled through the interview. He actually started with the dreaded opener, Tell me about yourself, so he could collect his thoughts. Elise Mortensen saw the green light and stepped on it, telling Edward about herself at good length. She acquitted herself of a monologue of qualifications that kept rising in tone, which assured Edward that it wasn’t going to end any time soon. He kept his eyes fixed on hers and established a pattern of interested nods, then withdrew his attention entirely, to the place where it rightly belonged. On himself.

  Edward tried to piece the morning’s events together. What interest would the mayor have in Kristina’s death, and why would Frederick from the workshop be part of the mayor’s entourage? This was arguably the worst part of the morning, standing across the street watching the mayor exit his car, followed by business-suited staff spitting into their phones, and then, what the fuck, small-boned Frederick from the workshop, wearing his jumpsuit, carrying a gym bag. At that point Edward figured it was OK to bring his employees back across the street so they could wait at the entrance. In truth it offered Edward another chance to discuss the situation with officials, perhaps get back in there and establish his authority. This was his office! He paid rent here, and the death had happened during working hours at his business. But of course he was rebuffed at the door by a police officer, even while his employees looked on, knowing – how could they not know? – that Edward had no influence here. No role to play. He was merely a bystander like they were.