by Amos Talshir
“You did great, Simon.” He clapped his son’s shoulder. “Everyone appreciates what you did for that woman.”
“Dad, she’s not a woman. She’s a really young girl.”
“Anyway, way to go. You took excellent care of her.”
“Dad, she’s a really pretty girl.”
“You saved her with the blanket.”
“I gave her hot chocolate, too.”
“That was smart of you.”
“She’s smart, too,” the boy said.
“That’s good.”
“And she’s got a sense of humor.”
“How do you know?”
“We talked.”
“What about?”
“She asked if I knew why they didn’t chase her.”
“Do you?”
“No.”
“Do you know why they closed the gates and they aren’t letting us leave?”
“No.”
“I heard people talking about a terrorist attack.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why?”
“Because everything’s too well organized here.”
“Everyone around us is stressed out.”
“I mean that the organizers aren’t panicking,” Simon said.
“How do you know?”
“They didn’t even try to catch her.”
“Where are they?”
“Gone.”
“So what does that mean?”
“That this is something different, something planned.”
“I’m telling you, it’s a terrorist attack. It’s happened before. In order to stop the attack, they blocked the gates, and that’s why the fans can’t leave. The sharpshooters on the roof are in case there are terrorists inside the stadium. And they turned off the light because the sharpshooters have night-vision scopes, and they can hunt down the terrorists in the stadium.”
“That doesn’t matter.”
“What doesn’t matter?” the father asked.
“Trying to figure out what happened.”
“Why?”
“Because we’re not going to be able to figure it out.”
“It’s terrorism. What’s there to figure out? Terrorism has taken over the world.”
“Dad, someone’s making sure we don’t know what’s going on, and that we’ll waste our time trying to understand what’s happening. If they didn’t try to catch her, that says a lot. They’ve never let streakers make a complete run through a sports field. That tells you something. This isn’t terrorism.”
“Let’s calm down. Tell me about the girl.”
“We have to get ready, Dad.”
“Why was she streaking?”
“I don’t know.”
“You weren’t interested?”
“I didn’t have time.”
“You let her take off without asking why she did it?”
“She’ll be back.”
“Back where?”
“She promised me she’d bring my blanket back.”
“Simon, there are a hundred thousand people here.”
“There’s a giant empty grass field here where you can see any movement, and anyone who wants to be seen just has to go down to the pitch.”
“I hope you won’t be disappointed.”
“She promised,” Simon said.
“So she promised. Pretty soon, they’ll catch the terrorists, and we’ll get out of here. I’m sure our plane will wait.”
“I think we should make preparations to live here a long time,” Simon said.
“You don’t think the plane will wait? It came here full of fans; it’s got no one to fly back with.”
“That’s not it. A full or empty plane, and flight times. Something else is going on here.”
“You think it won’t wait for us because it has to get back for other flights scheduled for tomorrow?”
Simon did not answer. Charlie knew there was a large chance his son would stop talking. Always, after talking about things that interested him, he would grow silent, feeling he had exhausted the matter. It would happen abruptly. Years ago, Charlie would become apprehensive, even anxious, that something had happened, that perhaps he had said something that hurt the boy. Over time, he and Clara had learned to realize it was all in the boy’s mind. He did not have the mechanism of persuasion, arguing or stubbornness. He would simply grow silent after stating his opinion, even if it was not accepted. This silence, too, did not help him fit in with his peers. But he was fine with this and usually did not express frustration or helplessness when faced with differences of opinion or disagreement. He would retreat to his own thoughts and preoccupations and even test his own assumptions.
Charlie would often go into his room after a “shutdown” of this sort and find Simon surfing specific websites, examining the views he had expressed. It had happened, for example, that they had disagreed on a historical fact, such as who was ranked after Michael Schumacher in the Formula One power ranking for the year 2000, Coulthard or Häkkinen? After Charlie had not accepted his opinion, he had seen the boy in his room, checking the list of races for those years. Even if he found out he had been right, he did not come back to gloat to his father about it. It was enough for him to know the actual facts. Charlie had learned to listen to his son. Especially to his silences. Those silences made him reconsider the disagreement that had made Simon grow silent.
Charlie had heard Simon say twice that they should prepare for a long stay. Well, he thought, what did the kid know about terrorist attacks? On 9/11, he hadn’t even been born. Twenty years had passed since September 2001. The world had learned to deal with terrorism. By this stage, everyone was ready to fight that global crap. Every coalition of countries had a counterterrorism unit. The various coalition countries cooperated, monitoring those guys in their training camps, embedding agents there who knew exactly what they were training for and even cooperating with them in order to know what their next target would be. Accompanying them to the attacks, and stopping them with no problems at the airports.
He looked around him, trying to penetrate the darkness that had descended over the pitch with his gaze. Pitch dark. In the stands, tens of thousands of cell phones glimmered in the fans’ hands. He tried to spot the sharpshooters on the roofs once again, to no avail. He believed that even if the terrorists had managed to make it through the airport and arrive at the stadium, they would be caught. The authorities already had a good track record with that kind of thing. The world had been suffering from these bastards for enough years to know how to deal with them. Maybe that was why the coalitions of states had been formed in the first place.
It was already clear to everyone that this was the plague of the twenty-first century, one that might destroy the world. You had to shoot them right between the eyes. No negotiations and no concessions for their ideology. Everyone already knew that they were ruining the world, and if, in the past, some had said that the motives of the poor, the abused, the conquered, should be understood, and that terrorism was their last resort, that reasoning no longer applied. The first opportunity the sharpshooter got to aim that red dot at their heads, he would squeeze the trigger, and that was the way it should be, Charlie concluded.
Simon extracted his smartphone from his backpack and positioned it on his knees. He took out the camera, connected it to the smartphone, then put both devices back in the backpack.
“What are they connected to?” Charlie asked.
“I have a sixteen-hour power source in the backpack. I’m using it so the camera and the computer stay fully charged.”
At that moment, Charlie was relieved. Although he had learned to live with the son’s silences, he still felt better when his son talked to him. These technical matters always stimulated Simon to talk. Charlie felt grateful that he, too, was a techie.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m transferring the saved photos from the camera to the phone, so the camera will be ready, with an empty memory and a full battery, and so I can send the photos out through the phone.”
“Good idea,” said the father.
“Very good idea,” the son said. “I’m getting organized.”
Charlie didn’t want to go into the whole discussion about getting organized long-term. Let his son get organized. That was just the way he was. Always preparing himself for all kinds of scenarios he knew from computer games, with nuclear missiles equipping themselves for doomsday and submarines preparing the world for the day life beneath the ocean became the last viable option for saving the world. For years, the boy had grown up on those crazy games. Charlie remembered exactly when it had started. When Simon was little, five or six years old, he had gone to the DVD player and put in The Matrix, an old movie Charlie was very fond of because of the underwater engines of the little monsters that attacked the Chosen One’s submarine. Charlie had joined the boy, trying to watch the incomprehensible film along with him. At first he’d tried to interest Simon in the submarines and the motorized animals in the water. The fights with the multiple clones in the black suits were also martial arts exhibitions of the highest order. But little Simon was interested in all that madness that was gradually taking over the world, and in the attempt by that Chosen One guy with the pale face to become the next leader of the world. All of it was way beyond Charlie’s comprehension. He stayed behind to watch the movie with Simon only to get a better take on his son, on what was going through his mind. He found it strange that his son liked that gal from the Matrix movie, with the bow legs and the botched nose job. The one in love with the pale-faced guy chosen to liberate the world.
Charlie often asked himself how much of him was in his son. It had started way back when the matter of the cracked vertebra in his spine was discovered. He found himself tossing and turning at night, asking himself whether this disease of Simon’s, this problematic vertebra that might make their life miserable, was his fault.
That concern—what would happen if the boy was disabled, and how he, his father, would bear the burden and the guilt—was relentless. Not only did he not find answers, but he also felt the concern for Simon closing in on him, returning him once more to the anger at his father, who had betrayed him by dying, left him alone in the house on the beach and made his mother disappear into the sea. Charlie promised himself he would not let his son down. Never. That was why he was so surprised to realize that Simon could not only take care of himself but even take care of the streaking woman. You could think that you were close to your son, that you knew him better than anyone and were aware of what he was capable of, but suddenly, you saw that he was capable of doing something for someone else. Something significant, which you might have been incapable of doing yourself.
Charlie mentally reconstructed how the girl had run naked across the pitch, with those two words on her ass. Free world. But the truth was that out of the entire free world around her, only his son had been there to help her. Charlie remembered how his son had raved over her, saying she was beautiful and smart and funny. A lot younger, he had said.
7.
In the meantime, Simon had fallen asleep in the seat beside him, with the phone in his hand. It warmed his heart that his son had nodded off. He could actually feel the energy gathering in Simon’s lanky body, feel the cells of his body growing stronger. Looking at his face, smiling even in his sleep, Charlie saw the cool air rejuvenating his son’s pockmarked adolescent skin, how his even breaths instilled health into his bones. Let him rest a little until this delay is over with, he told himself. For four hours now they’d been sitting in this darkness, in the cold, while all the fans around them were standing up and stamping their feet, trying to get warm and complaining about “all those Muslims ruining the world. They should be eliminated. The Desert Islam Coalition should be boycotted. All the unified coalitions of the new world agree that terrorism is coming from the Islamic Desert, and that no concessions should be made to terrorists. They should be killed off, to the last of them!”
After agreeing among themselves about their worldview at the moment, the visiting fans moved on to talking about the major victory of their team, Athletic, representing the Mediterranean Mara Land Coalition. Athletic, the team from the smallest coalition, would now continue on to the Coalition Championship. The fans enthused over the glorious future, talking about witnessing history in real time. A team from their small union would now take part in the final of the intercoalition cup against the Asian Progress Coalition, after defeating Los Españoles Estados Unidos in the half-finals this evening, and the Great United English States in the quarter-finals. Charlie and Simon were experiencing history in the making, an unexpected final lineup in the New Unions Cup.
It was cold, and Charlie watched his son sleeping in a seated position and regretted that his blanket was with that Matrix girl with the writing on her ass. Well, it wasn’t that bad, he concluded; Simon was asleep, and soon the terrorists would be eliminated, and the nightmare would become another experience.
***
Apparently, he had nodded off briefly, he thought as he opened his eyes in panic and didn’t see Simon next to him. His backpack wasn’t there, either. He checked under the chair: nothing there. Charlie examined himself, running his hands over his body. He was achy all over. He tried to get up and fell over sideways, feeling as if he had no leg. He panicked. His leg was asleep. He rubbed the muscle vigorously, looking around. It was already morning. He glanced at his watch: seven o’clock, first light. The people around him had unshaven morning faces. The pitch remained empty, with only automatic sprinklers clicking and spraying the daily quota of water to sustain the grass. Nothing has changed, thank God, he told himself.
Around the pitch, the local fans had gathered, allowing themselves to complain more than the visiting fans. He did not understand their language but perceived that the songs they were belting out, with the tunes of familiar soccer anthems, incorporated lyrics that sounded more like curses directed against the referees. He also noted words like democracy and dictatorship thrown into the rhythmic chanting. The visiting fans had been transformed into an audience watching the locals, mostly because they did not understand the local language, and it was quite clear to everyone that this ruling coalition might prove problematic. However, the love of soccer subsumed everything, including brutal regimes which oppressed the unified nations. All of them nurtured and elevated sports to an extent that equated loyalty to it with loyalty to the regime. You couldn’t stay faithful to what had once been Argentina or Spain. You had to be a fan of a team and must be loyal to Los Españoles Estados Unidos’ team; otherwise, you weren’t loyal to the coalition. Various coupes had already taken place, and the heads of soccer teams had become presidents and rulers, in the same way generals had once become presidents or movie and media stars had become rulers in the past. Here, the preference was for soccer players, ex-coaches, team owners, who were treated as if they had been elected by the people, or as if they were revolutionaries. At first, it seemed ridiculous, but over time, it became an accepted fact, just the way movie stars had been accepted as presidents. In fact, order prevailed, and everything ticked along in a proper manner. No one dared violate the rules, or harass tourists or the coalition’s regime. The unified country ran like a soccer game. One referee held everyone’s fate in his hands, at best utilizing the services of several other referees who did his bidding.
Charlie tired of his attempts to sleep in his seat and tried to rise once more. A sharp pain tingled in his side. His lousy back; that tingling had not left him since the time he would lie under the engines of the boats. For years now, fancy contraptions to elevate the boat engines had been available, but his crappy back wasn’t getting any better. Besides, Charlie preferred the method that made everyone line up for his services. It
had been quite a while since he had extracted the heavy motors from the water or hauled them to his repair shop on the coast. He would swim out to the boats stranded at sea, dive and fix the engines underwater. He could do anywhere between five and ten long dives, with his massive lungs filled with air. The trick was not the amount of air breathed in, but the slow exhalation method he had worked out. He had taught himself this technique for controlling his breathing when he’d dive at night in expectation of his father’s return from the sea. Charlie would promise himself that when he poked his head out of the water, his father’s boat would appear on the horizon. He would keep his head underwater for a very long time in order to give his father a chance to return.
In fact, Charlie thought, whose back wouldn’t hurt after an entire night in a seat? Well, his son’s back wouldn’t hurt, because he was used to sleeping in a chair. He had also taught Simon to control his breathing during their long night dives. And actually, he shouldn’t worry even if the boy had disappeared this morning. Supporting his back muscles with his hands, he managed to rise just as Simon approached him from the top of the stand. He walked over and kissed his father’s cheek, as he had been taught to do every morning since he was a little boy. The scent of toothpaste coming from him lifted his father’s spirits. What a kid! In the midst of a terror attack, he was brushing his teeth in the morning and flashing the kind of giant grin that made Charlie feel grateful he’d been born.
“Did you shave a little?”
“Just the mustache.”
“Are you getting ready for a date?”
“Don’t be pathetic, Dad. Mostly, I was charging my power source battery so it’s ready.”
“Ready for what?”
“If we have to stay here a long time,” Simon explained.