“Do you think you should have signed?” Domingo asked.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Who is the dead person?” Domingo asked, nodding at the viewer.
“The im? Her name is Anna Eminike. She’s a member of La Mano de Diós. She tried to recruit David Dai, my driver.”
“The one who ran away,” Domingo said.
“Right,” she said. David had run away. The blue and whites had not been able to find him, either. Maybe she could run away? But David must have known how to disappear because they hadn’t found him yet. She wouldn’t know how to disappear.
“He is a member of La Mano de Diós,” Domingo said.
“No,” she said, “he’s French.”
“Oh,” Domingo nodded, as if this explained everything.
Everybody thought David was part of La Mano de Diós, maybe he really was. Like the old saying, when three people tell you you’re drunk, lie down.
Nothing to do but wait. She couldn’t leave, she couldn’t call her attorney. Oh Christ.
So they waited, curiously silent, as if talking would get them in trouble. Maybe it would, anything they said could be taped and then edited, made to say anything the blue and whites wanted said. But the blue and whites could make up anything they wanted, nobody would say anything. So the fact that they were being made to wait meant that the blue and whites didn’t want to just throw her in a cell, didn’t it?
At least she was wearing comfortable clothes. Imagine if they decided to keep her overnight and she’d been wearing a suit. Imagine if she had still been working at the bank.
The body in the im didn’t look like that much had happened to it, there wasn’t so much damage, but Anna Eminike was dead. It occurred to her that Anna Eminike had been shot from the front, so she knew she was going to die. What was that like, to die? To know you are going to die in this mean place and that no one cares and that is that? But anyplace anyone dies is finally a mean place and death matters most to the person dying, right?
She didn’t want to die, but at least if she died it would be over. And everybody died, and in a hundred years, no one would know what awful things had happened. Did anyone care that in what was now eastern Europe they turned the Moslem invaders by, among other things, impaling thousands of captured men on poles, standing the spears in rows like armies? It didn’t really matter to anyone but the two of them that Domingo was brave enough to be here.
* * *
“Ms. Ling,” said the blue and white, a different one this time, “will you come with me?”
“Where are we going?” she asked. It was after ten. Domingo stood up cautiously, and she felt stiff in the knees and hips.
“Just Ms. Ling,” said the blue and white.
Domingo looked at her, not volunteering this time, hoping that she wouldn’t make him go with her. She wanted him to stay, didn’t want to be alone. “Go on home,” she said, moved by what impulse she couldn’t say. After she said it she realized that if he left he could call someone, do something. It made her feel a little better.
The blue and white didn’t seem to care if Domingo went home or not.
At the door Domingo looked back over his shoulder, as if he wasn’t certain of the propriety of what he was doing, but he went. The blue and white jerked his head for her to follow and they went into the hall after Domingo. Domingo glanced over his shoulder again, his fine silhouette floating ahead of her. I won’t forget, she thought, I won’t forget that people can be like this, that people can walk into the police station with you even when they are afraid.
The blue and white took her left, she saw Domingo stutter step when he realized that they were no longer following, and she leaned back watching for as long as she could until the corridor cut off her view. She could hear Domingo’s shoes, hesitant, and then she thought a little faster but she was too far to hear the squeak, and this corridor was meaner than the one they had come in, the walls yellowed as if by body oils, stained from hip to shoulder height as if people had rubbed along it as they walked. They went through a door with wire in a tiny window and the moment the blue and white opened it she could hear voices, crashing and echoing off of concrete floors and block walls. Creole and Spanish. There was the strong smell of vomit and beer and her stomach lurched. The left side of the room was holding pens full of people in street clothes, mostly men but two of them with women in them: patient women, in divers’ vests with goosebumps on their arms—prostitutes coming off of their pyroxin—or women just dressed like anyone on the street. One with a cut down the side of her head, and her hair matted back away from her face as if lacquered with hairgel instead of blood.
The blue and white walked Mayla across the room towards a door on the other side.
The men were calling her “pollo,” chicken, and laughing. “Polito,” someone said and for a moment she thought he was from Polito Navarro, that it was some sort of code that she was not alone, that the Uncles were here watching her, help—but then she knew again that the Uncles weren’t on her side. But she had jerked her head around, staring into the brown face of a man in a Guatemalan vest. He looked like a fish jock, with his bare arms. He had a big bruise on his cheek. “Politico,” he said again. Politician, a political prisoner.
The door opened on a small office, two desks and filing cabinets and paper and barely room to turn around. She smelled incense. (Didn’t people use that to cover the smell of marijuana? The blue and white wasn’t Haitian, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t use marijuana.) The blue and white gestured to a chair.
He didn’t say why he had brought her to this office, he just sat down and printed out a sheet of paper and handed it to her. She read it again but she didn’t really connect the words to meaning.
“You should sign,” he said.
And she did.
* * *
At the office of foreign services Mayla requested permission to go abroad. The application was familiar, she had been abroad before. She wondered why they gave people pencils. She filled out her passport number. Reason for Trip. For the last ten years she had been putting business.
Reason for Trip. She could say it was to see her family in the States. She could buy a plane ticket for Hawaii, pretend she was going to visit her cousins in Honolulu. She just needed to get to the States, she could apply for a conversion from a tourist visa to a resident visa once she was there. She couldn’t do it here, if she went to the U.S. Consulate in Caribe the government would know. They monitored people who applied for visas.
Reason for Trip. “Vacation.” Never explain a lot when you are lying. It’s a clear sign that something is not right.
She stood in line behind an overweight woman whose back had rolls of fat at her shoulder blades. The woman’s hair was artificially straightened, a curtain of shining black hair. Mayla wondered where she was trying to go, was she trying to visit family in the islands?
She wished the U.S. were like other countries and she could have applied for a visa through the mail, although her mail might be monitored for all she knew. Or she might just be paranoid.
The office was too small, too crowded. There were only four windows open. It was damp. People had to crowd because there wasn’t enough room for the lines to form.
She could just leave the application and go back to her grandfather’s.
Getting permission to leave didn’t mean she actually had to leave. It just meant that she could. And she could go, take a vacation and come back.
The big woman in front of her was at the window, but Mayla couldn’t see around her to know what she was doing. Not that it mattered.
Waiting. Waiting was getting harder. She wished she could do something, these days she had too much time to think.
The big woman turned, her application still in her hand. The big woman was scowling. There was no place to get out of her way so she shoved against Mayla to get past.
Time to get out, Mayla thought, but she wasn’t sure if she meant this office or Caribe.
“Identification?” the woman asked.
Mayla handed over her temporary ID. (The regular one had gone with the house. The replacement hadn’t come yet.)
The woman in the window said something inaudible and pecked out the information on the temporary. If it had been a regular card she could have scanned the information. Of course, in the U.S. it would have been tied to her thumbprint, no card at all.
“Application,” the woman said and Mayla handed it to her.
She pecked that information in, too. “Diós,” she said, after a moment, exasperated. She pecked the information in a second time. Then she sighed. “Your application is turned down.”
“It is?” Mayla said. “Oh. I’m sorry. Um, why?”
“Your file is flagged, in order to travel you must clear it with the Security Office. You’ll need to forward all queries to this address.” She handed Mayla a sheet of paper.
“Thank you,” Mayla said.
There was no place for the people behind her to step aside so she had to push her way out through the crowd. She wasn’t going to query, it was probably bad enough that she had even tried. Someone in the Security Office would probably notice that she had tried to leave the country.
She didn’t know what any of this meant.
* * *
Maybe it was just routine. Maybe her file had been flagged because of the bomb in the house. She sat down at the console in her grandfather’s office to compose a letter of inquiry but she couldn’t think of any way to word it that wasn’t incriminating.
She addressed the letter. She stared. I am writing to inquire about a permit to visit family in Miami. That seemed innocuous, didn’t it? Or would it draw attention to her? She had already drawn attention to herself by filing for permission. If she just let it drop, would the note just go in her file somewhere? Maybe they wouldn’t pay much attention, after all, her name probably just went on a report. There was data coming at them from all directions and she probably just got lost in the sea of information. But if she wrote the letter she might raise another flag. Too many flags and someone would notice her again. Best to lay low, hope that they had other things more interesting going on. Wait, and eventually she could leave. On the other hand, maybe the fact that she had applied and wasn’t querying the security office would be read as a sign of guilt—
The console rang a call and she jumped and slapped the receive. The console was set so it could be heard from the hall and it was amazingly loud, if she’d thought she wouldn’t have hit it.
No video. “Hello?” she said, she could not hear anything in her voice, but her heart, her heart, was her heart pounding in her voice? No video. She put her finger on the record and pushed it in. The indicator came on the screen, silent numbers clicking the seconds.
No answer.
She sat, thinking about cutting it off. Blue and whites playing mindgames? La Mano de Diós. She reached out and almost touched the cutoff. The air sounded open, like a seashell without the sea.
“Hello?” a man’s voice said.
“Yes?” she said. She waited at the cutoff. La Mano de Diós, surely. Leave me alone, she thought. The call would be monitored, the seconds clicked on, 12 … 13.… The blue and whites would think her an accomplice—
“May I speak to Mayla?”
Strange accent, familiar. “This is she.”
“Mayla?” The video came on and it was David Dai.
For a moment she was stunned. He was dead. No, she thought, it wasn’t him, it was Anna Eminike who was dead.
“Hello,” he said, wary. He’d cut his hair. It made him look different, younger.
“Hello,” she said. “Are you okay?” Oh God, were the blue and whites monitoring?
“I’m okay,” he said, “are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“Okay,” he said.
Where are you? she wanted to say, but if the blue and whites were monitoring she didn’t want him to tell her, but she wanted to know. They sat looking at each other. There were no real clues behind him, just a wall. He was sitting, wearing a diver’s top, but a lot of people wore those. The wrist fasteners looked like the heavy ones, not the ones people used for everyday swimming. “I quit the bank,” she said.
“You quit?” he said.
“It was sold, to Marincite. It was taken over, actually. It was my fault, partly.”
“What are you going to do?” he asked.
He was the only person who had asked that. She felt suddenly and profoundly grateful, and her eyes welled. But she wasn’t going to cry. “I don’t know.”
He sat silent again, but a different silence, the silence of someone trying to think of what to say about something.
How did you hide? she wanted to ask. I need to get away. She couldn’t even ask him if he was in Caribe, although she supposed he was or he would have told her where he was. The blue and whites couldn’t touch him in France, could they?
“I can’t really talk,” he said.
I need to escape, she thought. “Wait,” she said, her mind racing, wanting to ask him something, if the blue and whites asked she could always say she assumed they were monitoring and wanted to give them time to establish a trace, “are you really all right?”
“Kim,” someone called, another man. “Is this the spawning info?”
“I am on a call!” David snapped.
“I need to know about the salmon trays, what is the bio-compatibility, where is the rating?”
“I have to go,” David said to her.
“Are you working?” she asked, desperate.
“I’ll call you again,” he said, but he was lying. And he cut off the connection.
The screen blanked except for the indicator, which recorded the time of the conversation, one minute, ten seconds. It had seemed longer.
She played it back. It went fast when she played it back. She watched him, adjusting her memory to his image, she had not remembered exactly the way his eyelids were, without creases. Memory was important, untrustworthy. Tim had seen him get on the bus, and he had disappeared.
Where was he? Some place that they used salmon trays, whatever salmon trays were. And spawning. Probably a fish farm.
She called up a listing, printed out all the fish farms. She looked at all of them, but didn’t know what to do next. She didn’t know if the blue and whites were monitoring or not. They couldn’t monitor everybody on their lists, could they? Or maybe they recorded it all, but how could they screen it? Even with some very sophisticated screen they would get more than they could look at.
Or they would be here.
She picked up the list and went up to her room. She pulled a couple of tights out of her drawers and a couple of sweaters and underwear. No suits. Strange not to take suits. What are you going to do, Mayla? You are going to run.
She took her cards, her account access, her temporary work ID. The good one was gone with the house, but that was good because it had ID, work history, med insurance information coded on it, this one had nothing but her name and old address.
She didn’t take much, just a few things. She walked out of the house with a shoulder bag with the list of fish farms stuffed in with her clothes. Outside she had to walk awhile, but unlike David she didn’t have to catch a bus to get to a bank machine. She wondered if her account would be frozen.
She dropped her card in, if it took it she would keep going, but it just asked her for her name and she said, “Mayla Ling.”
“Read this code phrase,” it said.
On the screen it said, “Talk so people will listen, and listen so people will talk.” Which was a new phrase. She read it. At the bank they bought all their voice recognition equipment from the States, and quarterly they got updated codes to make things more difficult for counterfeiters.
“Please repeat,” it said.
They had denied access. She repeated the phrase, wondering if she should just run.
But the screen asked her to pick a transaction.<
br />
“Balance check.”
She had a pretty decent amount available.
“Withdraw.”
She took all but 100cr.
Then she stood for a moment, looking all around. She caught her reflection in the window of a shop and saw herself standing out, tall anglo woman, looking. So she walked. She needed to find a place to make a call. She needed a public exchange, even if it was to make just local calls. She should have known where one was, she’d seen them all her life, places where people who couldn’t afford service in their own place went to make calls. She needed to go down a few levels.
Right, she had something like 12,000cr stuffed in her shoulder bag and she was going to go down a couple of levels. A white woman. Might as well just get herself a jacket and paint a big bullseye on the back.
She walked to the shopping plaza and waited for a bus. David Dai had gotten on a bus. She would bet he had gone down, too. So she would go down. Wasn’t that the instinct of animals, to go to earth when trying to hide?
She waited a long time, standing in line with women who came to the plaza to work—girls with elaborate hair and jewelry and women with string bags with fruit in them. The bus that chugged up to the edge of the plaza was a taptap, sky blue and swirling with serpentine lines of neon colors and dots. They looked as if they had been painted on with a broad paintbrush. She’d seen them all her life, but she’d never gotten on one.
She paid her coin and sat down in the middle. The bus started sluggishly and the driver pulled on something, some lever, and the engine roared. She smelled the stink of petrol. Petrol was supposed to be restricted but the taptaps had been running her whole life. She looked out the window.
The taptap ran behind shops so she saw concrete and doors and garbage dumpsters. Sometimes the way got so narrow that people flattened against the wall to let the tap-tap pass.
She wasn’t in a hurry, not really. She wasn’t going anywhere. But she wanted to get to a place to make some calls, so she could figure out what to do next. She tried to watch the backs of the shops to see an exchange, sometimes a door was open and a heavy brown woman would stand impassively, leaning against the door frame, one foot up. But inside was always darker than the lit street and she could never see.
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