by Turner, Ivan
I returned to the common room straight faced and without emotion. Some people noticed the oddity of me entering with a box in my hands, but it was not until I stood up on one of the tables that the room began to go quiet. I waited, saying nothing, until everyone in the room had ceased his or her conversation and focused his or her attention on me. Sparing one glance at the stricken Igor, who seemed to know what I held in my hands, I put the box on the table at my feet and took off the lid. Reaching inside, I pulled out the first letter.
“Does anyone here know a Susan Wu?” I kept my voice low, but it carried through the silence. People from other rooms had moved into this one and I had the attention of all of the workers in the building.
Tentatively, a hand went up.
“This is yours,” I said, holding it out to the lady. She came forward and took it slowly from my hand. She must have recognized her own handwriting on the letter immediately because all sense of hesitation left her and she tore it out of the envelope to scan its contents. In a moment, she had turned viciously on Igor.
“This is the letter I gave you,” she screamed at him. “I paid you to send this!”
He shrank away from her, no lie coming to his defense. Before the scene could get any uglier, I reached into the box and pulled out another letter.
“Barney Jefferson. Who wrote a letter to Barney Jefferson?”
Jonah Jones came forward, his large face looking much like a saddened child’s. But before he could send an accusation Igor’s way, I pulled out the next letter.
“Martin Jones.”
“Paula Glock.”
“Shlomo Uris.”
“Daniel Tiri.”
Lydia came and took the letter without looking at me. She then melted back into the crowd.
As I read more names and returned more of the lies, the noise in the room grew. I had to shout to be heard. Eventually, though, handing them out became easier because those that had given letters to Igor found their way forward while those that hadn’t left the room. Igor himself moved close to the guards for protection. When the box was empty, I got down off of the table and went to him.
“This is yours,” I said, handing him the box. “Now it’s full of your promises.”
The next several days were not good for Igor Grundel. His usual campaign through the common rooms had come to a halt. No one would speak to him but everyone, even those who had not had dealings with him, had terrible glares for him. There was no free moment when there were not ten pairs of eyes on him. Because he could not go to his room during socialization, he sat by himself in a corner, close to one or more guards. He sat with his eyes closed so that he did not have to face accusing eyes. Two days after I had outed him, there was an accident at the work site in which he was almost killed. The word accident may be improperly used. After that Samud came to the site to investigate. I saw him talking to Igor, the little man throwing words furiously around and waving his arms in the air. In the end, though, Igor did not get his transfer. His betrayal had ended in his being betrayed.
For myself, the situation was largely unchanged. My meetings with Dr. Miktoffin had stopped on a dime as did my meetings with Samud. No one offered me gratitude or friendship for what I had done. Though Igor was hated now and could do no more harm, I had not elevated my status any by uncovering the scandal. Everyone hates the messenger. But no one tried to kill me and no one glared at me angrily. Somehow, I had dropped down on the list of people Jonah liked to speak with, which wasn’t a bad thing. So I went back to sitting alone and brooding over the picture of Jennie and the letter I had written her.
As November wore on and the cold became colder, work became harder and my misery burrowed deeper. The dynamic in the common rooms returned to normal, less the inclusion of Igor, who still kept to himself for safety. My mood had become a consistent gloom. I awoke depressed, worked depressed, ate depressed, and slept depressed. I began to dream of Jennie getting onto that bus, her ghostly visage through the dirty window ripped away from me. In almost every dream she was killed and I awoke with a heart wrenching fear that would not dissolve. My hours of sleep shrank until my eyes were sunken into my head. I did not eat well.
I prayed for a long leap through time.
Then, on Thanksgiving, a day we were given off out of respect for the country to which we had once belonged, I had an epiphany.
The holiday was nothing but a normal day off, something we had every Sunday anyway. We were kept in our rooms except for mealtimes and socialization, which was the ninety minutes following each mealtime. Throughout breakfast and breakfast socialization I brooded. Throughout lunch and lunch socialization I brooded. Between lunch socialization and dinner, however, I came to a conclusion. I could no longer rely upon my ersatz power to save me from myself. A long leap, I realized, would not take me any closer to Jennie or to my family. In fact, it would take me further away. It had been so long that I was suddenly sure that my days of time tripping were over. If I wanted to get out of the United Arab Nation occupied territory of the United States, I would need to do it myself.
During dinner socialization, I stood in the center of the room and looked around at all of the faces. They were all the same. Everyone had conceded to the life given him or her by the UAN. Though they considered this portion of their lives a bit of purgatory, they had accepted it. We could hardly think of ourselves as prisoners when we were well fed and well housed. The cage was gilded well. There was no burning desire for the captivity to end. These people had been completely beaten down by the lack of hardship. No one absolutely hated being there enough to want to get out. No one, that is, except me.
I found Carlos Castillo sitting at a table with Doreen Lander and Jesse Cataldo. The conversation came to an abrupt end when I appeared between them and all eyes fell upon me.
“What do you want?” Carlos asked.
“Are you ever going to do it?” I asked.
“Do what?”
“Escape.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’m going to do it,” I said to him. “With or without you.”
His jaw was clenched as he struggled to find a response.
“Stuff it!” Jesse yelled at me, but I ignored her.
The thing of it was that I really had no idea how to perform an escape. I wasn’t even sure how people managed to move from room to room at night. When I told Carlos that I intended to go with or without him, I was bluffing, hoping to draw him. By all accounts, cracking into his select clique was near impossible. In the weeks I’d spent as part of the work unit, I’d seen a handful of people sit with him and Doreen, but I couldn’t be sure that all of them, or any of them, were in on the escape.
Then Carlos laughed. I couldn’t tell whether he was laughing at me or at Jesse’s juvenile outburst. Doreen just stared. I could see that I wasn’t getting anywhere so I walked away. The trouble was that I didn’t know how to press. I didn’t have the skill to make Carlos think he needed me despite the fact that I would probably be nothing more than a liability. All I knew how to do was pretend that I was serious and hope that something would come of it.
Something came of it.
But not the something I expected.
For the rest of that night, I drew stares from some of the other people. It was the first time since I had virtually destroyed Igor Grundel that anyone had paid me any attention. I didn’t like it. Carlos ignored me and I sat looking at the picture of Jennie, becoming worn out with each new fold, and trying to will the others away.
The next day we were back to work. The weather had turned foul and there were flurries about. It was early for heavy snow, but not out of the realm of possibility. If it snowed, I doubted that we would be given time off. We arrived back at the apartment wet and dirty and exhausted, knowing that the Thanksgiving holiday (which had consisted of no thanks and no giving) had probably left us worse off for having had the rest.
After dinner, I was sitting by myself, glaring at Carlo
s and Doreen, who were, in turn, completely unconcerned with my existence. Sensing a presence at the table, I shifted my attention in preparation for a Jonah Jones lecture. But it wasn’t Jonah Jones who sat across from me. It was Lydia Tiri. She looked very old. When I had met her all those years (weeks for me) ago, she had been a lower middle aged woman with some life to her. The work she had done for Warren Li, carting around supplies with her husband, had seemed to give her life a purpose. Now she was withdrawn, her face lined, shoots of grey showing in her hair. With long bony fingers, she held out the letter I had returned to her.
“Why did you do this?” she asked. It was not an accusation. She wasn’t telling me that I had done something I shouldn’t have done. She simply wanted to understand my motivation.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have an answer for her. As I thought about it, I couldn’t really put my motivation into words. I had just felt it needed to be done. That’s what I told her.
“When I gave this letter to Igor,” she said. “And he told me he had delivered it, I felt strong again. I was sure that Daniel had survived and made it out of this city. When you handed me back the letter, all of that confidence just…left.”
Again, I don’t feel as if she was accusing me, but I felt guilty anyway. Igor had been right about what these letters had meant to the people who sent them. But when I had seen that box and known it was all a fraud, I just felt that I couldn’t let it go on. I was sorry for having taken so much away from all of those people, but not sorry for what I had done to Igor.
“Did you write to that girl?” she asked.
I nodded.
“I saw you calling to her when you arrived. You made a lot of noise and my window looks out onto the street.”
I felt my eyes water up.
“I couldn’t see her very well,” Lydia continued. “Is she the same girl you were with five years ago?”
I nodded again. “Jennie.”
“Jennie,” she repeated. “With an ie.”
I looked her in the eye and smiled. “You have a good memory.”
She changed the subject. “You went to see Carlos.”
“I want to escape.”
“That’s what I figured. That’s what everyone figures. Only someone who hasn’t been here that long would try and see Carlos about an escape.”
I shrugged. “I’ve been here long enough to know it would do no good. I’m desperate.”
“Me, too.”
We sat alone for awhile, saying nothing. Surprisingly, I found some comfort in her presence, as if all I had been missing these past weeks was a companion. Any companion.
As the socialization began to break up with people yawning and stretching and the guards getting ready to escort their groups back to their rooms, Lydia said to me, “Carlos is never going to do it.”
“I know,” I replied.
For the next week, Lydia came to sit with me during socialization. She kept me company every night and I was glad of it. The loss of someone special was something we shared and that brought us together. Sometimes we talked about Daniel and sometimes we talked about Jennie. Sometimes we talked about escaping.
December 6th was a Saturday. Though we weren’t given any extra time on Saturday nights, it was still Saturday night. The common rooms were more upbeat because everyone had the next day off. People shed their expressions of defeat for a little while and became the people they had been once upon a time. Lydia and I did not. Even if I was a social person by nature, I don’t think I could have risen above the emptiness inside of me. Though I showed very little of it to Lydia, I was finding my imprisonment to be more and more intolerable day by day. I had not seen Samud in some time and the regular schedule was beginning to gnaw at my psyche. It was ironic, really, that the very stability I had sought out when I had first starting leaping through time had now become my enemy. I wanted desperately to get out.
On this particular Saturday evening, we were joined by a third person. He came to the table, going unnoticed until he sat right across from us and looked at us both with his squinty eyes.
“Are you going to do it?” he asked.
“Do what?” I replied, the irony of it all unhidden.
“Escape,” he whispered, his eyes shifting in all directions to take note of any who might be watching us.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Lydia just stared at him with cold eyes as what had become a perpetual frown on his face spread into that old familiar miserly grin. “You’re a bad liar, Cristian. Don’t worry. No one else knows. I just figured it out.”
I was about to rebuff him and a quick look at Lydia showed me all I needed to know about her feelings. Igor had taken something from her without ever having really given it. He had done that to us all. But I remembered something about what I had felt before I knew this. I remembered sitting with Samud and noting his surprise at my knowledge of the cleared manifest and where its people came from. That information had come from Igor and that information had been sound. To me that meant that there was some legitimacy to him no matter what he had done.
“Could you have gotten those letters delivered?” I asked him.
“No,” he admitted. “Nothing goes over the border, but it’s not just the U.S. that wants it that way.”
Lydia held up the letter to Daniel. It was always with her, only pocketed away when she was either working or eating. “Did you have a good laugh over it? Over all of them?”
“Mrs. Tiri, I didn’t do it for laughs.”
“Then why did you do it?”
To him, this was a ridiculous question and he made no attempt to hide that belief as he gave what he felt was the obvious answer. “For profit.”
She would not be put off. “And where’s the profit in coming to us now?”
He smiled. “The profit in leaving is in escaping the fact that there’s no more profit to be had here.” He explained it as if she were less than a child and it irritated me, though I said nothing. Lydia said nothing also.
Igor breathed. “I was already beginning to lose credibility here. There’s only so much you can draw out of a crowd with nothing but a promise for a return. Trying to get that transfer was a last ditch effort.”
“Why didn’t you try and get it yourself?” I asked.
He made a raspberry sound with his lips. “Samud detests me. He did business with me because it suited him. Just like you.”
“And you thought he would do it for me?”
“Mr. Cristian, you are transparent. Your relationship with Samud was easy to identify. I knew that he liked you and you liked him. When he went away and you had to sit in socialization every day, your mood became worse and worse. You missed him.”
I think I may have blushed.
Igor pretended not to notice. “The timing was right. Or it was the best I was going to get. It was always a longshot because he would know what I was up to. I never expected him to show you those letters, though.”
“Do you have a plan?” I asked, returning to the subject of escape.
But he shook his head. “I don’t make plans. I take advantage of circumstances.”
Lydia made a noise of disgust.
He looked at her but seemed unoffended. “Mrs. Tiri, I think you’ll find that you’ll be able to rise above your feelings for me in order to escape.”
“If you can’t come up with a plan,” she said, “then how are you going to help us escape?”
“By taking advantage of a few circumstances so that we can carry out your plan,” he answered simply.
Though Igor was not infallible, as I had proven, he never did anything by accident. Every move he made was determined by a series of circumstances and possible outcomes. He looked at situations and broke them down in to individual pieces, fitting them together different ways in order to determine what actions he might take in order to generate positive responses. And he did it all on the fly. When he had approached Lydia and me about the escape, he had done it after a we
ek’s observation but with no contemplation. He had never sat down and considered what might be the best day. In fact, he was never sure he was going to come to us until he had actually decided to do it. He was a watcher of people and when I had chosen company after so many weeks in the unit, it was an event he had deemed interesting.
Of course, I don’t think he realized that we didn’t have a plan of escape. He knew we hadn’t had anything solidified, but I’m reasonably sure he wasn’t expecting that we didn’t have anything at all. I was loath to confide this in him, but he could see it. He sat with us all throughout the next day, our day off, during three meals and three socialization periods waiting to “take advantage of circumstances” that just never arose. Finally, as the evening turned into night and the time for us to go to our rooms approached, he slammed his hand down onto the table and said, “You can’t even get out of your rooms, can you?”
I looked at Lydia and she at me and we both felt like ignorant children, but we did not answer him.
Agitated, he shook his head at us and walked away. I supposed he saw us as another of his mistakes. With me he was oh for two.
The next evening he came to us and asked if we had a plan yet. We just looked at him with glazed eyes. When did he think we’d had the time to devise an escape plan? As he walked away, though, I did notice something. We had drawn the attention of Carlos Castillo.
The next day, when Igor came again, I looked again and saw that, again, Carlos had looked our way.
On Tuesday, when Igor came again to ask us if we had devised a plan, I had an answer for him.
“Look at Carlos.”
“What?”
“Carlos is my plan. Look at him.”
When Igor turned his head, Carlos averted his gaze. But he wasn’t quick enough to escape Igor’s notice. The wheels must have started turning because Igor took a seat. “What are you thinking?”
“Carlos has been planning an escape since he got here. He doesn’t care who knows it because the only people who even exist to him are the people he talks to.”