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

by Неизвестный

  When the mayor came back out, Frederick pointed at Edward in the small crowd.

  ‘There he is!’ yelled Frederick, and the mayor’s entire entourage peered into the crowd, as if a rare animal had been sighted.

  Edward froze.

  ‘That’s the man! What’s up, buddy? How are you doing?’

  Edward raised a hand, said, ‘Hi.’

  But next to Edward stood Philip, who met Frederick’s greeting more forcefully, said things were good and what the hell?, a tragedy, right?, to which Frederick smiled and shrugged, pointing at the mayor with a knowing look, and it was suddenly clear that Philip and Frederick knew each other well, had lots to say. This wasn’t about him. Edward lowered his hand and stepped slowly behind Philip, where it was warm and safe, waiting for the motorcade to leave.

  There was a final interview, and then he could go home. Edward thought he would die. At times like this, when he didn’t want to be seen by anyone in the office, and with the bathroom so conspicuous at the other end of the office, the entire staff watching him go in and come out, Edward peed in a tall jar that he kept in his drawer. He was sealing the lid when the last candidate was announced: Hannah Glazer. Oh dear God. It was Hannah, his parents’ settlement leader.

  On his desk was Hannah’s résumé, which he couldn’t focus on, but he willed himself into the conversation. As ever, it was difficult to look at her and be reminded of an enormous segment of life – the segment in which you were naked with a beautiful person and she was not repulsed by you – that was not available to him. She wore sharp black clothes, her eyes clear and mean, and her hair was arranged in one of those old-fashioned styles, pasted to her head at the top and then curled out at the bottom. Quite lovely.

  ‘What interests you about the position?’ Edward started.

  ‘You’re kidding, right?’ Hannah said, glaring at him.

  So he would have found no viable candidates today. A receptionist had died, and he’d have to interview for her replacement, and now he’d need to schedule another day of interviews for this position as well.

  He had to hold up appearances, or else his appearances would turn deranged. ‘I’m not kidding, no.’ Maybe they could keep this short.

  ‘Are we going to be pretending today?’ Hannah asked.

  ‘Pretending what?’

  Edward looked longingly at his window, wondering if he could get up enough speed for it to shatter if he threw himself against the glass.

  Hannah stood up. She spoke calmly, but she was seething. ‘I seriously question your ability to be fair here, given what happened. Last night I did my job. I did my job. And today when I very much need this position, a position I am ridiculously qualified for, here you are, mister fucking policy dodger, ready to dole out a punishment because I followed instructions in a difficult situation.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Edward. ‘What punishment have I doled out?’

  ‘Not hiring me,’ she said. ‘I saw your eyes when you knew it was me. You knew you weren’t going to hire me.’

  ‘That’s not true.’

  It was, for the most part, true.

  Hannah sat down. She seemed miserable. ‘I wonder if I could interview with someone else. Is there someone else on the hiring committee so I could be assured a fair shake?’

  ‘Well, it’s just me. There’s no committee. This is my company. If I recuse myself from the interview, for my intense bias, my inability to evaluate your suitability for a position in the company that I created from nothing, a company I understand better than anyone else in the world, you’ll be in this room alone. Shall I do that?’

  Hannah didn’t laugh. ‘I’d like to continue this interview under protest,’ she said.

  Was that a real thing? Was there a form you could fill out?

  ‘Listen,’ said Edward. ‘I would understand completely if you didn’t feel comfortable going forward, if you maybe wanted to try somewhere else.’ Please, please, try somewhere else.

  ‘You sound like Frederick now. Get the person to believe her rejection is actually her own idea. Classic Frederick. Old school. I bet you’ve been told that before.’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘I guess it’s no secret about me and him,’ Hannah said, grinning.

  Edward stared at her, waiting.

  ‘That we’re involved. I mean, everyone must know at this point.’

  He wished he didn’t. That was knowledge he’d very much rather not have. He picked up her résumé, waving it at her. ‘Shall we?’ he said. ‘An actual interview, and to hell with the past?’

  Hannah Glazer was right. She was ridiculously qualified for the position. Edward was crestfallen. She was sharp, articulate, preposterously experienced and when he queried her with difficult production scenarios – bottlenecks on the front or back end, human error, acts of nature – she produced a staggering arsenal of troubleshooting techniques, more sophisticated than any he’d ever heard, which she rattled off casually, as if they were too simple to be of interest any more. To deny her the job now would be impossible.

  On her way out Hannah looked at his couch. ‘Is that where you do it?’ she asked.

  ‘Do what?’

  She leered at him.

  ‘What?’

  ‘All of the desperate people who come looking for work. Is that your casting couch?’

  ‘This isn’t like that. It’s a couch.’

  ‘You didn’t think, when I walked in, that within twenty minutes, if everything went well, you’d have me down on it?’

  Edward couldn’t answer. Was that an option that he’d somehow missed? Twenty minutes into the interview she was yelling at him about his bias. Was that some deeply veiled flirtation?

  ‘So you’ve fucked no one there? I’m curious.’ She didn’t seem curious. She seemed irritated.

  He looked at the brown couch and thought back, and back, and back. The tally, indeed, on that particular activity, in that particular location – or, in fact, on any couch ever – was, indeed, zero.

  His phone rang that night and this time he wasn’t going to screw it up. He grabbed his bag and headed over to the high school, alone.

  The roads were quiet, street lights shining so hard the neighbourhoods were bright as day. A siren issued into the night, deep and low. He’d not heard this before, and the closer he got to the high school, the more the sound became like an engine rather than a siren, rumbling beneath the ground. When he reached the turn-off, he came upon a sea of abandoned cars, doors jacked open, hazards flashing.

  Edward stopped fast. The cars behind him closed in, trapping him there. He could do nothing but leave his car and walk, as the others must have done. When the drill was over, it would be one hell of a mess driving out of here, but for now he had to get inside.

  He was one of the first to check in with Sharon, and it seemed she almost smiled at him. Maybe he could show her that last night was a fluke.

  From across the gymnasium he watched Hannah’s settlement grow, waiting for a sign of his parents. Now that he had checked in, he wasn’t supposed to leave, and since this was a drill, since it didn’t matter, he resolved not to care. Probably his parents hadn’t been called. This was some new thing they were doing. Anyway, he’d long ago given up trying to understand the methods of the workshop. Even if his parents had been called, the phone was broken, and how would they know? It couldn’t matter. But Edward couldn’t stop looking over to Hannah, even as the gymnasium filled with bundled-up people, and children, and, of all things, animals, a few of them wandering sleepily across the hardwood floor, moaning. He’d never seen it so crowded here. The generator roared over the chaos – something felt different tonight.

  To be fair, he’d had that feeling before. They were good at making you believe that this was the real thing, at last.

  Finally, Edward spotted his father joining Hannah’s settlement. He was alone. Hannah waved him in and he disappeared into the crowd.

  The lights never switched on and Frederick never appe
ared to praise and chastise them. Instead the settlements headed outside to get in line for buses, which were departing from the back field of the school. The siren was so loud that when he tried to speak nothing came out. Some terrible noise cancellation was at work. Was this intentional? Edward looked at Thom – who was terminally available for eye contact, lying in wait for it – and Thom smiled, giving a thumbs up. Thom was excited. He’d wanted to leave for years. He was ready to roll.

  Only one other night had the drill run this long. To Edward, that night seemed like years ago, when the workshop began. But probably it was only last winter. It was a viciously cold night and they’d waited in this exact spot while the buses revved up. He’d been so scared! But then Frederick’s girlish voice had rung out through a megaphone and everyone had hurried back for their critiques.

  So there was still time. Frederick could call this off and get them back inside.

  As the settlements filed behind him, headed to their own buses, Edward waited and waited and waited, until finally Hannah approached, and, behind her, her settlement, mostly old-timers from Wellery Heights and whatever other neighbourhoods bordered nearby. He had only a moment for this, but he had to do it. There was nothing in the protocol about it, anyway. The protocol hadn’t been written this far. It was a blank fucking chapter. Edward grabbed his father, who looked startled, and then the two of them opened their mouths soundlessly at each other. They couldn’t hear each other, couldn’t hear anything. It was his mother Edward needed to know about. His mother. He shrugged where and he mimed other things, things to indicate his mother, which anyone else from any country in the world would understand, but it was no use, it was stupid. Or his father was stupid, because he either did not get it, or did not want to, smiling dumbly at Edward. Finally Edward grabbed his father’s left hand, isolating the ring finger, and held it up to him, tapping on the ring.

  Do you get it now, you stupid old man? Where is she?

  Edward’s father smiled, put his palms together, closed his eyes and leaned his head against his hands. A universal sign. His mother was home sleeping. His father had left her there asleep, and don’t worry, she was doing fine.

  His mother was asleep, alone, at home. In an empty city. She was fine.

  The buses travelled south. Frederick had been wrong about the highway. It was not an ugly variable. It didn’t present a problem at all. In a caravan the buses climbed the on-ramp, entering a freeway that seemed reserved for them alone. They drove for hours. The driver was in radio communication, but otherwise the bus was quiet. Edward sat by himself in a rear seat, staring from the window. At this point, he reasoned, the drill should have been called. They’d not even rehearsed this far, so what on earth could they be testing? Wasn’t it, after all, a pain in the ass now that they were so far from home, and how exactly were they going to get back? The buses, of course, could be ordered to turn around. But as the sun started to come up, and as muffins wrapped in brown paper were sent back down the line, that didn’t seem so likely.

  During the second day of driving, after he’d slept and woken and then slept a little bit more, he heard a commotion at the front of the bus and the bus steamed and seized and buckled as it started to slow down and pull off the highway.

  Thom slid into the seat next to him.

  ‘Holy fuck, right?’

  ‘What happened?’ asked Edward, still waking up.

  ‘Sharon.’

  Edward tried to look, but there were too many people mobbed together.

  ‘Is she all right?’ he asked.

  Thom shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. All of a sudden she fell from her seat. I only got a quick look. But fuck, man, I think she’s dead.’

  It was a pretty sight. Ten – or was it more – glittering silver buses pulled over on the side of the highway. Edward’s was the only bus that had discharged its passengers, and this was spoiling a lovely image: ragged, tired travellers wandering up and down the embankment while the passengers from the other buses, from behind darkened glass, looked on. Edward found a soft, dry place to sit. What a drill this was! He wondered, surveying the fleet, which of the buses carried his father. Sharon had been removed, conveyed in a sheet by some of the younger fellows from the settlement, who’d hiked her into the woods and returned already. Now they were sharing a Thermos down in the grass, and Sharon was gone. Edward wasn’t sure what the hold-up was now, even while Frederick and some others, including the mayor, huddled in conference down in the shadow of the last bus.

  It wasn’t long before a signal was given and the buses revved up again. Edward stood and joined the orderly line his settlement had formed to board the bus, but the door didn’t open.

  Frederick and his crew had boarded their bus. One by one the other buses wheezed into motion, crawling from the side of the road to join the highway. His neighbours reacted differently to the situation that dawned on them, but Edward stood out on the shoulder to watch. Of course the windows of the buses were dark, so he couldn’t see, but in one of them, perhaps pressed against the glass, perhaps waving at him this very moment, waving hello and, of course, goodbye, was his father. So Edward, just in case, raised his own hand too. Raised it and waved as the other buses built up speed down the highway and disappeared from sight, leaving the rest of them alone in the grass by the side of the road.

  GRANTA

  * * *

  THE NEW VETERANS

  Karen Russell

  * * *

  When Beverly enters the room, the first thing she notices is her new patient’s tattoo. A cape of ink stretches from the nape of the man’s neck to his hip bones. His entire back is covered with blues and greens, patches of pale brown. But – what the hell is it a tattoo of? So many colours waterfalling down the man’s spine that, at first glance, she can’t make any sense of the picture.

  Compared to this tattoo, the rest of the man’s skin – the backs of his legs and his arms, his neck – look almost too blank. He’s so tall that his large feet dangle off the massage table, his bony heels pointing up at her. Everything else is lean and rippling, sculpted by pressures she can only guess at. Beverly scans the patient’s intake form: male; a smoker; 6’2”; 195 lb; eye colour: brown; hair colour: black; twenty-five. Sergeant Derek Zeiger, 4th Infantry Division’s Company B, 1st Battalion, 66th Armor Regiment.

  In the billing section, he’s scribbled: THIS IS FREE FOR ME, I HOPE AND PRAY . . . ? I’M ONE OF THE VETERANS.

  And it is free – once she fills out and faxes in an intimidating stack of new forms. Ten sessions, 100 per cent covered by military insurance. Sergeant Zeiger is her first referral under the programme created by H.R. 1722 bill, Representative Wolly’s triumph for his constituency: Direct Access for US Veterans to Massage Therapy Services. At the Dedos Magicos massage clinic, they’d all been excited by the bill; they’d watched a TV interview with the blue-eyed congressman in the office break room. Representative Wolly enumerated the many benefits of massage therapy for soldiers returning home from ‘the most stressful environments imaginable’. Massage will ease their transition back to civilian life. ‘Well, he’s sure preaching to our choir!’ joked Dmitri, one of the oldest therapists on staff. But Beverly had been surprised to discover her own cellular, flower-to-sun hunger for exactly this sort of preaching – in the course of a day, it was easy to lose faith in the idea that your two hands could change anything.

  On the table, her first H.R. 1722 referral from the VA hospital has yet to budge. She wonders how long this soldier has been home for – a month? Less? Dark curls are filling in his crew cut. Only the back of his skull is visible, because he is lying face down on the table with his head fitted in a U-shaped pillow. She can’t tell if he’s really asleep or just pretending to be completely calm for her; often new patients try to relax, a ruse that never works – they just disperse their nervousness, spring-load their bones with guile.

  With the man’s bright tattoo for contrast, the rest of the room looks miserably generic. The walls are bare
except for a clock lipped in red plastic, which feels like a glowing proxy for Ed’s mouth, silently screaming at her not to go a penny over the hour. The young sergeant’s clothes are wadded on the floor, and she shakes out and folds them as she imagines a mother might do.

  ‘Sir? Ah – Sergeant Zeiger . . .?’

  ‘Unh,’ moans the soldier, shivering inside a good or a bad dream, and the whole universe of the tattoo writhes with him.

  ‘Hullo!’ She walks around to the front of the table. ‘Did you fall asleep, sir?’

  ‘Oh, God. Sorry, ma’am,’ says the soldier. He lifts his face stiffly out of the headrest and rolls onto his side, sits up. ‘Guess I zoinked.’

  ‘Zoinked?’

  ‘Passed out. You know, I haven’t been sleeping at night. A lot of pain in my lower back, ma’am.’

  ‘Sorry to hear it.’ She pats his shoulder, notes that he immediately tenses. ‘Well, let’s get you some help with that.’