Tyrannia

by Alan Deniro

  “Yeah, so.” Tristana sighed. “How do you feel?”

  “Fine, I guess.”

  “Are you feeling angry about the professor? Rageful? I mean, you’re not going to let your emotions get in the way of things?”

  “I don’t think so,” Patrick said. For him, executing the plan was never that much about a sense of righteous anger. Sure, there was an abstract belief in a just cause, and in a way he was afraid of the professor, though the professor himself, aside from his ideas, posed little threat. And he wasn’t even really afraid of getting caught. Instead, the plan for him was a form of self-discovery, to throw himself into a project that would define who he was. Doing this, he would see himself in a different light.

  “Good,” Tristana said. “I think of emotions as little as possible. They really cloud things.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, we’ll meet at your place at dawn—uh, that’s 5:57. Got that?”

  “Got it—oh shit.”

  “What?”

  “I forgot to tape up the windows of the minivan.”

  “Well you better get on that. I gotta fill out some briefs now. Later.”

  “Later.”

  When he was in line at Walgreens with the tape, he got a call from Evan, who was the bona fide leader of their group. He was a real anarchist. He went to a lot of protests with bags of blood to throw at police. He had been arrested seven times and Patrick wondered if he was sleeping with Tristana.

  “How are you feeling?” Evan said.

  “Tristana asked me the same thing.”

  “She would. We’re like, one mind,” he said. Then, “We’re all like one mind.”

  “Uh-huh. I feel fine by the way.” He fumbled in his pocket for a dime to finish paying for the duct tape. The woman behind him with two kids pulling at her knees rolled her eyes. She would never know about the plan. And the cashier giving him the receipt and the bag with the duct tape would never know about the plan.

  “What, you going zen on me?” Evan said. He said zen like it was a curse word. “I don’t want you to feel ‘fine.’ You have to, you know, listen to your heart. And your heart should be fucking pissed.” Evan and the static on his end intertwined, as if the hissing interference was coming from his throat.

  “Okay,” Patrick said. “Listen. I’m angry. You can’t hear it on the phone, but I am.”

  “Patrick, this is going to be great,” Evan said. “It’s going to be a fun weekend. The farmhouse, it’s nice. It’s really nice. I have a ton of beer too.”

  “That’s good,” Patrick said, though he didn’t know if he would be in the mood for getting wasted while executing the plan.

  “Okay, look, I have to go,” Evan said in a slightly exasperated tone, as if Patrick was the one who had called him. “I have to print out the manual at the copy shop.”

  “Great, see you tomorrow.”

  Evan hung up and Patrick laughed as he started up the van.

  Back in his driveway, he got to work on the windows. The air was still damp, so he wasn’t sure if he was getting a good seal with the duct tape on the window. And the tape was clinging to the newspaper. After about a half hour, he got all of the back windows taped up with the newspaper. He tossed the duct tape roll onto the front seat. They would need more of that later. He lay in the back for a few minutes, watching the translucent light filter through the news of the world and its ads. Only the ads for flat-screen televisions would not let the light sift through, black rectangles like those monoliths from 2001. At last, he closed his eyes. He was excited. He was starting to feel something.

  “Is that Febreze?” Evan said while Patrick was driving the van.

  “Yeah,” Patrick said. Evan was wearing his black bandana over his nose and mouth, so Patrick wasn’t sure how he could smell anything.

  “It’s nice. Really nice.”

  They were on the outskirts of town, past the last outposts of the higher-end outlet malls. Patrick was driving the van well within the legal speed limit. Evan and Tristana were in the back seat, and the professor was lying down in the back-back. The duct tape, the interrogation manual, and their box of clothes and sundries were riding shotgun. Evan’s uncle’s old farmhouse was about fifteen minutes away.

  The professor started flailing around and mumbling.

  “Hey, hey,” Evan said. “Sit.” He leaned over the seat and beat the professor on the shoulder blade with his billy club a few times. The professor screamed, though the duct tape muffled most of the sound. Tristana laughed, and ran her hand through Evan’s stringy braids. Patrick turned his attention back to the road. He would have thought that the minivan might have attracted more attention on campus, but on Monday morning there were few students and workers around. The execution of the first part of the plan was flawless.

  “I have your dossier in the front seat here,” Evan said. “You’re, like, a fucking monster.”

  The professor bucked his head around. His glasses flew off his face, underneath the seat.

  “Whoa, you’ll break your glasses, professor,” Tristana said. She leaned down and fished under the seat for the glasses. Patrick watched her from his rearview mirror and saw her T-shirt ride up. He saw the tattoo on her lower back—a series of Sumerian cuneiforms that she told him was the ancient word for freedom—for the first time since they broke up. Tristana found the glasses, folded them, and put them in her purse.

  There was a long honk outside and the flash of a white roofing van. The van was inches away from the window.

  “Jesus, Patrick, you ran that stop sign!” Evan said.

  The other van stopped, and then sputtered forward in the intersection again.

  Patrick wasn’t sure whether to slow down more or speed up.

  “Sorry, sorry,” Patrick said, his face flush. He sped up. “That sign . . . it wasn’t there a couple weeks ago.”

  He knew the excuse was itself incompetent.

  “What the fuck would have happened . . .” Evan began, but Tristana put a hand on his shoulder.

  “It’s okay, Evan. No harm, no foul.”

  Evan sighed and then leaned over the seat. “What do you think professor? What is your expert opinion? No harm, no foul?”

  The professor didn’t say anything, and couldn’t say anything. The one-way banter continued until they reached the farmhouse, but Patrick didn’t pay attention to any of it, focusing on the road with the efficiency of a vice.

  The farm was desolate, set in a sloping valley with an abandoned apple orchard. Evan said that there were limestone caves underneath the main house. His great-great uncle had mined a tunnel that connected the storm basement to those caves. “No one knows where they end,” Evan had said in one of their planning sessions in Tristana’s flat. No one had lived at the farm for ten years, and in that time, the house and the other buildings had fallen into severe disrepair. The front porch of the house sagged and bowed. The front door was ripped off and an upside-down lawn tractor blocked the gap. The grain silo, shorn of its shingles, looked like a stone obelisk from an interplanetary civilization. The barn’s paint was fading, and many of the fence posts on the property had been knocked over or driven over.

  “We’re home,” Evan said. “Park outside the barn.”

  Patrick parked there and the three of them got out. Evan opened the back hatch and yanked at the professor’s collar, pulling him out and to the ground.

  “Black site,” Evan said. “Black site. You are now leaving the United States of America. You are in the Kingdom of Tyrannia now.” He pulled down his bandana for a second and scratched his nose. “You are not a citizen here. You don’t have any rights here, on account of the accords that our country has signed with the underworld. Do you understand?”

  The professor looked up at him and said nothing.


  Evan laughed. “All right, all right. I’m throwing a lot at you. Come on.” He took the professor by the shoulder and helped him up, almost helpfully. The professor complied. Evan had come up with the name of Tyrannia during one of their brainstorming sessions. Patrick felt like he was watching a movie on DVD, with a bored director’s commentary having a distant opinion on whatever they were doing. We chose the farmhouse on account of the caves. It was a great set. A great set. Uh, and we knew the professor would be scared there . . .

  “Patrick can you get the stuff in the front seat?” Tristana said. She had put the professor’s glasses on her forehead.

  “Sure.” What was Patrick’s motivation? Well, that’s a good question. He took a class with the professor—a long time ago—and that’s why he was expelled, because he plagiarized his first paper in the class . . . uh, I think it was on the separation of powers . . .

  “Thanks.” She gave him a warm smile that he knew was manipulation, but he didn’t care. He took the box and shut the door with the back of his heel. As he went up the stairs, Tristana called out from inside the house, “Watch out for that last step. You’ll fall through.” Patrick edged around the step and then the upside-down tractor. He could hear the other three in the basement. The living room had been a hideout for local kids with BB guns, beer, and huffing addictions—targets taped up on the walls with bull’s-eyes blasted through on the outlined heads, breasts, and groins; shattered bottles of MGD littering the floor; glue canisters. In the kitchen there was a twenty-year-old snowmobile and the oven was ripped out. He went down the stone stairs, and the air changed from being rancid to something colder and cleaner.

  In the basement, Tristana and Evan were preparing the site. The professor was sitting Indian style on the dirt floor. He was coughing. Patrick set the materials down. In one of the corners he could see a natural archway and a dark opening, which must have been one of the tunnels that Evan talked about.

  “Aha,” Tristana said, finding the pliers in the box underneath a bag of SunChips. She twirled them on her finger like a six shooter. “There they are.”

  “Okay, remember,” Evan said, rubbing his hands together and standing over the professor. Everyone’s breath was visible. “The point of this exercise is to, you know, gather relevant information about what he knows.” He took a chair from the corner and scraped it to the center of the room. Tristana hoisted the professor onto the chair. The professor was tipping.

  “Don’t fall over,” she said. “Shit, Ev, do you think we should tie him to the chair?”

  “Hmm,” Evan said. “Then we would have to cut his hands free. I don’t know.”

  “What does it say in the manual?” Tristana said.

  “Right.” Evan sifted through the box that Patrick had brought in and found the Interrogation Manual. “Uh, shit,” he said to the professor. “You should know. You wrote this, didn’t you?”

  “I don’t think he wrote it,” Tristana said. “He wrote the legal memos for the Department of Justice that allowed the manual to come into being.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know,” Evan said, looking peeved. “It was, I don’t know, a grandiose metaphor.” He turned to Patrick. “How about you bring down the cooler of beer that I brought here yesterday? It should still be cold.”

  Patrick hesitated. “Sure, where is it?”

  “By the door, I think.” Evan had already turned back to the manual. Tristana ripped off the duct tape covering the professor’s mouth, and he screamed. The noise was muffled by the walls.

  Patrick’s face was hot as he went up the stairs. Evan’s attitude and his commands were really beginning to get to him. Evan wasn’t recognizing the role that Patrick had in the plan, or that they were all a small society of equals. And wasn’t that harmony the point of the plan? Patrick had first come up with the idea of the plan. He would have to say something at some point to Evan—and Tristana. He found the cooler by the fireplace, not by the door as Evan had said, and took a beer from it. After the second beer, he saw Tristana standing in front of him.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” she said.

  He shrugged and stood up from the cooler. “I’m just bringing this downstairs.”

  “Yeah, like, an hour later,” she said. “You need to stop pouting, Patrick. This is very stressful for Evan.”

  “Evan? That’s who you’re worried about?”

  “A little.” She took one of the beers from the cooler, took a few swallows, and wiped her mouth with her sleeve. “He’s under a lot of pressure.”

  “We all are.”

  “No, no . . .” She bit her lip and actually looked thoughtful. “Are you the one doing the interrogation? Are you down there?”

  “No, he’s ordering me around like a lackey.”

  “It’s for your own protection. Look, the professor . . . he thought, for years, that he could get away with what he did, you know? That he could lead a normal life after crafting the legal framework for all of those black sites, and see his family every night and tuck his children in at night. All while innocent people were being plucked from their homes all across the world. That’s what kind of monster we’re dealing with.” She finished the rest of her beer. “Evan’s down there with the manual—the manual that the professor advised on and signed off on—and he’s going to get more names. Places. Valuable information. You and I, we need to do our jobs and be there for Evan.”

  “And what are we going to do with this information then?”

  “Evan knows people in a lot of networks. All around the world.”

  Patrick picked up the cooler. “So what’s your job then? Fucking him?” He couldn’t believe that he had said that, but was actually kind of relieved when he did.

  “Fuck you,” Tristana said. She tossed the beer can against the targets and went down the stairs.

  “I thought you were supposed to control your emotions,” Patrick called out after her.

  What upset him more, though, was that after he went downstairs again—something which he was thinking about not doing—Tristana and Evan barely paid him any mind. Evan cocked his head a little to indicate where Patrick should set down the cooler, but he was putting the professor in a stress position and didn’t want his concentration broken. Tristana was flipping through the manual and then held out the book for Evan to read, like an assistant turning the sheet music for a concert pianist. Evan took off the professor’s pants. The professor was gritting his teeth. His gag was off.

  “I . . . I . . .” he started to say.

  Tristana perked up. “What was that? It’s okay. You can tell us.”

  “This is ridiculous,” the professor blurted out. Patrick restrained a laugh, though he wasn’t sure what was funny.

  Evan spat on the floor and paced around the professor. Patrick knew he was performing for Tristana more than the professor. And Tristana obliged; her eyes followed Evan and only Evan.

  “It is ridiculous,” Evan said. “Because we know you know. You have to tell us what everyone knows—from the president on down.”

  The professor shook his head.

  “Tristana, give me those pliers,” Evan said. Tristana gave him the pliers. Evan took in his other hand a bucket of water that was in the corner.

  He said: “So does that manual say to douse him with the cold water and then pull off his fingernails or . . .”

  “Let me check,” Tristana said, wetting her finger and flipping through. “It’s like they use code words for all of the different techniques,” she said. “Euphemisms. It’s hard to keep them straight.”

  “See, if I get him wet I might not be able to get a good grip on the fingernails,” Evan said. “There has to be a proper order of these things.”

  “It’s not a cookbook,” Patrick said, but no one paid attention to him. He got himself another beer and downed it qui
ckly.

  “Aw, fuck it,” Evan said, pouring the water over the professor. “We’ll let you stew for a little bit. Then you can tell us everything you know.” The professor shivered and tried to shake the water off.

  “I need a break,” Evan said, pulling down his bandana. He rummaged through his jacket pocket for cigarettes, and lit, pacing and smoking. Tristana leaned against the wall, her arms crossed, staring with boredom at the professor.

  “My uncle,” Evan said between drafts of the cigarette, “he was a weird guy. I liked him. He didn’t take shit from anybody.”

  “Okay,” Patrick said, not sure where this was going. The professor was really shivering.

  “He told us kids we could never go in the tunnels because people would get lost down there. And never come back. It was actually the only advice I ever listened to, from any blood relations.”

  “Why is that?” Patrick said, actually curious.

  Evan smiled. “Because he said he’d kill me if I ever thought about going in the tunnels, and I believed him. He had a dishonorable discharge from Nam. You.” He flicked his cigarette at the professor. The cigarette, cinder-first, bounced off his forehead, but he didn’t pay it any attention. He kept shivering instead. “Did you ever serve there? I didn’t think so. Anyway, my uncle was pretty messed up from the war. I miss him a lot.”

  Tristana went over and took Evan’s hand. Patrick cringed, and then hoped neither of his friends saw it. But they didn’t say anything. Tristana kept squeezing Evan’s hand and he had a wistful look on his face. When he looked sad, he didn’t look like a revolutionary at all. Or maybe a different kind of revolutionary, one that posed for glorious paintings back when people did those kinds of things.