Sudden Lockdown

by Amos Talshir

  “But how do you know all that?” Charlie asked. “From the internet?”

  “No, that’s exactly it, Dad. That’s what’s so special about them. I looked up information about them on the UnionNet and dove deep into all the sites on resistance and protest movements all night. They don’t exist on the Net. So I thought they’d cleansed themselves off the Net in order to compartmentalize their activity, but that’s exactly what I was supposed to think, wrongly. They didn’t cleanse anything; they weren’t on the Net, and they didn’t take over the Net now, although they wouldn’t have any problem doing it. The proof is that they never stopped all the online reports about the takeover of our stadium. They don’t exist online, so we can’t know anything about them. They don’t use the Web or cell phones, so they’re not subject to information leaks. We don’t and won’t have any information about who they are, so we can’t speculate on how they’ll act and what could stop them.”

  “I’m not getting all of this,” Charlie whispered.

  “Dad, they’re like Tibetan monks who avoid all luxury and indulgence. You get that, right? The Others are media monks; everything’s clear and simple as far as they’re concerned. To get somewhere, you have to walk. To talk to each other, you have to meet. They’re frugal, and they believe in their path.”

  “So we don’t know anything about them?”

  “Exactly, but that’s a lot,” Simon said.

  The massive container touched the turf and its giant walls opened up, spreading out over the grass. An immense amount of small rectangles, the size of a pack of cigarettes, scattered out over the turf like a vast mountain stacking up unexpectedly. The helicopter began to rise, gathering up the walls of the container with a pull of the cable. The panels rose in the air like the limp wings of a giant bird. The human masses stared with thousands of pairs of eyes at the hill of rectangles suddenly towering on the pitch. The helicopter took off and disappeared beyond the limiting sightline of the stands, and the first voice Charlie heard was the woman standing next to him, who clapped her hands over her face, her words escaping in utter despair from her trembling lips.

  “Los alimentos, dear God, they’ve dropped provisions on us,” she said, “like in Africa.”

  Simon knew the word comida, meaning food. But he translated for his dad, telling him he thought she had used a fancier word with the same meaning. He remembered hearing the word she had used in a broadcast about the humanitarian aid offered to the Black Coalition in Africa, which consisted of pretty talk about people who were dying like flies.

  For the first time, after two days, Charlie and Simon noticed their seatmates: the woman to the right, who talked in their language but in a Spanish accent, and her companion, to whom she had served sweets throughout the game. The couple had sat near them on the plane as well, and appeared to be trying not to stand out, or perhaps even to hide. They were still trying to blend in, and if the woman hadn’t made her frightening statement, they wouldn’t have noticed them now, either. The link to the wretched people of Africa, who, at best, received food handouts showered down from the sky, frightened anyone who heard her declaration in the row of fans. The Spanish word she had used, alimentos, invaded their muddled thoughts about terrorists and mysterious maneuvers, granting them an immediate, simple grasp of their situation. Suddenly, she had said “provisions” with a terrible, restrained, runaway fear. She had uttered a word in Spanish that not all of them even knew they understood. However, not only did they grasp the word, but also realized that from now on, they were people for whom someone supplied provisions. Which meant something they had not thought about for the last two days.

  Those sitting in the first rows began to descend cautiously to the turf. A slow, measured progress toward the hill of small rectangles was evident from every direction. Simon looked for Rose with his blanket and saw her remain standing in her spot, far beyond the turf, on the opposite stand. Charlie proposed that they go down to get some food as well, if their neighbor was right and it was indeed food. The first of the fans had already reached the outskirts of the food hill, gathering up the small rectangles in their hands and filling up the pockets of their shirts and any other place they could think of. It was obvious that there was plenty for everyone. People scraped the edges of the hill like ants, making room for those following them. Apparently, the lesson about maintaining order had been learned the previous night, when the fan who had charged the cleanup truck had been shot.

  Simon and Charlie reached the hill of rectangles as well and discovered that they were indeed snacks, some kind of granola treats with no wrapper. They stocked up on a reasonable amount of them and returned to their seats. Simon asked his father for his opinion on whether Simon should seek out the girl with the blanket. Charlie said that to the best of his understanding, this would not be a breach of the rules. If he did not feel, deep inside, that he would be violating the rules of the game or wronging anyone else, then it should be fine. Simon said he believed Charlie had understood the Others’ rules of play and began to go around the remains of the hill of little rectangles.

  Charlie followed Simon with his gaze, thinking of that last piece of cake snatched away in preschool before shy Simon had time to reach the tray. He had stood there among all the kids whose faces were already smeared with chocolate frosting, his eyes seeking help, as if he had not taken such a loss into account. He had made Charlie and Clara so sad. The boy did not even cry, and certainly had not tried to snatch back a piece of cake from another boy who had taken two. Simon simply stood there next to the empty tray, spun around and returned to his place. To Charlie, it seemed as if not enough time had passed, and yet now Simon was leaving to meet a girl who had nearly frozen at night, naked in the middle of a stadium in which a hundred thousand fans who didn’t know what was going on around them were trapped. He asked himself what chance his son had of getting to that piece of cake. A hundred thousand people, not many of them women, trapped in a stadium, with unknown snipers shooting holes in the heads of those disrupting the peace. His ex-wife was sitting with their daughter, panicked, in the house on the bluff, with the streets empty of people. His neighbor with the Spanish accent had made it clear to him where he was living, with just one word.

  Los alimentos, she had said. Food handouts, like in Africa.

  12.

  Charlie was aware of his own tendency to delude himself. The delusion that his father would always return from the sea. That his mother would always be with him in the house on the bluff. That that house would always stay his. The delusion of love and ecstasy on the beach with Clara. That they would forever roll around in the golden sand, his body enveloping her pink limbs, and she would call out, Oh God, oh God, as he loved her. Oh God, oh God, oh God, as she writhed in the sand under his body. Don’t ever stop, she whispered into his neck, promising him she wanted him for the rest of her life, that she would murder him if he stopped.

  Charlie could still hear her oh God in the links of the collarbones in his neck, but he had forgotten the touch of her body a long time ago. Ever since she had addressed him in her Nordic language, which he could barely understand, tearing his heart and pride and soul in shreds. She had told him she couldn’t sleep with him anymore. That she felt depleted and foreign, and all that was left in her was the energy required to care for her son and the girl who had come into being out of force of habit. That she could no longer bear the proximity to Charlie’s body, after he had punished her with the terrible fear of isolation on the bluff. That she could no longer sleep with him since he had never loved her, she said. You were just there and accepted me since I gave myself. The desire and pleasure that had brought her closer to him distanced his love for her. She wasn’t angry at him, she told him. She blamed only herself for being a victim of her desire for him, but she couldn’t keep on sleeping with him since he had never loved her. The god whose name she had so enjoyed calling out had punished her, and she had been left yearning for love a
nd punished for her passion. Later on, when Simon’s condition had improved, and Charlie felt that he had played a part in his recuperation thanks to swimming, he had hoped Clara would allow him to return to her. It did not happen, and Charlie no longer understood her and her god and what she wanted from him. Charlie tried to put out the fire in his blazing, betrayed body through night swims into the black horizon of the freezing sea. Further, further still, with Simon swimming by his side.

  Charlie began to return to his seat but could not stop himself from looking back and watching his son climb up the local fans’ stand, where he would meet the frozen naked girl whom he had treated to hot chocolate when a hundred thousand people hadn’t lifted a finger for her. Now she was sitting there with her friends and his boy was expecting a warm reception, and she would look at him and tell him something that only she, and other women, could understand. Something that would make it clear to him that he was delusional. Despite the fact that he had been the only one in the entire world who came to her aid.

  Charlie thought about his wife, who would reprimand him for the insecurity he was creating in the boy by following him around. Much to his chagrin, he had not managed to overcome this need, although it was clear to him that tracking the boy did not actually do any good. It wasn’t as if he could surround him with a protective wall every day and every moment. He took the stairs back up to his seat, admitting to himself that he was too weak to deal with both his son’s variance and his wife’s new demands.

  When she first met him on the beach, under the bluff on which his parents’ house stood, he had certainly been good enough for her. She came from the cold coalition of the north, while he was a Mediterranean boy. She loved the tent he had set up for her and her friend and, throughout the days, lay on the sand and tanned down to her very bones, marveling as he swam to the horizon and returned several hours later, dripping with water that he splashed around by shaking his black hair. He didn’t try to approach her and they didn’t talk until he fixed the bike she had rented in the city on the mountain and brought to the beach, and she had thought he was a miracle worker. Later, he revealed that her chain had simply slipped off its wheel, and any child could have fixed it.

  After Simon was born, fixing her bicycle chain became the last good memory of what had occurred between them. Countless times, she recounted that memory to the child, who might already have picked up on the abyss forming between his parents, as he sat in his special sleep chair. They tried to patch up their relationship and had Emily, but everything had already fallen apart, and he left the house on the bluff over the beach, while she stayed there with his son and daughter. He didn’t try to fight. His parents’ house was precious to him, but he thought it was the best place for his son, the place where the boy had kicked a ball beyond the waves and swum away into the horizon. He consoled himself with trips to soccer games with his son, thanking Clara anew every day for not preventing the two of them from going. But he remained tense throughout his days and nights due to Clara’s expectations of him. Deep inside, in his heart and in his body, he felt that he had not done enough for Clara, had not loved her enough, had not been good enough for her, that really, after all, he had only fixed her bicycle chain.

  Charlie sat down in his seat in the stand, and his seatmate with the Spanish accent asked where his son was. He told her that his son had met someone, and she asked whether it was that girl to whom he had given the blanket on that freezing night. She was invigorated and friendly despite the two cold, nerve-wracking nights spent in their seats. Charlie had noticed that she and her partner were not conversing and thought about himself and Clara. They, too, had stopped talking. In fact, they had never really talked. Perhaps Clara had, in a language that was foreign to him. But he had not talked; he had repaired boat engines and was willing to fix anything for whoever needed it. He was always surrounded by endless people whose world had collapsed due to something small or large that had malfunctioned, and he would save them and they would call him an angel, at sea and on shore. Only Clara had been content with the bike chain he had fixed for her years ago.

  It seemed as if his seatmates still hadn’t begun to talk to each other, and perhaps they were not even actually a couple. She asked Charlie whether they had stocked up on enough food to get through the winter, and he asked what winter she meant.

  She said that was the way it always was: wars went on into the winter even if they started during the summer, certainly when they broke out during the fall. He thought he should take part in the conversation, because Clara was always angry at him for not participating in the conversation with their distant neighbors on the bluff. He told his seatmate he knew some wars in the Mediterranean Basin that had begun and ended in summer.

  “In poems it’s different. Poems don’t necessarily reflect reality,” she said in a pleasant voice, speaking his Mediterranean language in an accent that was both Spanish and French. “In poems, wars go on into the winter. Maybe because of Napoleon’s war on the Russians.”

  “What poems?” Charlie asked, then regretted it, fearing she would think he was being dismissive of these poems and already sorry he had joined the conversation.

  But she smiled for the first time since being frightened by the provisions being dropped down from the heavens. She said that this was what it was like in Spanish poems, although she liked French poetry, since love always had a better chance there than in Spanish poetry. She said all this in the Mediterranean language.

  “I don’t really know much about poetry,” Charlie said, smiling at her and thinking that perhaps he should have offered his hand and introduced himself. He hoped she would initiate this move. She did not extend her hand to him but was nice, saying that talking to him was the first time she had managed to distract herself from the grim thoughts about what was happening to them in the stadium. He didn’t ask, but she told him she had actually been French before the unification but had moved to the Spanish Coalition and then left it in favor of the Mediterranean Coalition, because she was the type of person who couldn’t find her place. “Like in the poems,” she said again.

  “What poem?” he asked, regretting the paucity of his conversational skills once again, resorting to another question about poems. Like the people whose boat engines he fixed, who would ask pointless questions about the engine, but were merely trying to initiate a conversation. That’s how cultured people behaved, Clara would tell him. And he would realize he had to be more cultured and maintain a conversation.

  “Not a specific poem,” she said. “I can’t find my place in the poetic sense of the word, like in poetry. Who is that girl?”

  He did not reply. It occurred to him that the woman next to him was not as innocent as she was trying to appear. Poems about love and wars in winter—it all sounded cut off from reality. He didn’t usually have such complex thoughts, but the fact was, no woman had ever talked to him about poems on love and winter. He also wasn’t sure he quite got this whole “can’t find my place” thing; perhaps it was her limited grasp of the Mediterranean language, because she was a Frenchwoman living in the Spanish Coalition. Or perhaps it wasn’t a matter of language so much as culture, in which he was not very fluent. A murky idea began to surface within Charlie’s consciousness. He didn’t understand what was going on around him. This was his dominant thought at the moment: Charlie, you don’t understand what’s going on around you. His son, Simon, had often told him the same thing. This isn’t sun and sea and fishermen and a house on a bluff anymore. You can’t even explain what it is you don’t understand. Is it the language or the intention? Is it the woman or reality as a whole? He had never thought about it. But suddenly, this woman with her poems had made him think he was an unevolved person. Not just here—with poems and people he didn’t know how to talk to. Everywhere. His entire life on the bluff, at sea, swimming, in long dives to repair engines stuck underwater. It all closed in on him. Clara telling him she had never received love from him, cro
oked Simon, the long nights of swimming, pleasantly alone. I’m unevolved, Charlie thought, sitting in his seat in the stadium.

  Since they had been locked up in the stadium, and he had been certain it was a terrorist attack, the end of the world had arrived, as far as he was concerned, when he had thought they would be late for the plane that was supposed to return them home. How naïve of him. The sniper had blown up the heads of the rapist and of the man who had run toward the truck. The pitchfork claw had collected the bodies and the sprinklers had washed the blood off the grass. There were no more hotdogs at the kiosks. A helicopter had dropped down alimentos and his neighbor was gossiping to him about his son’s girl and about poems on summer and winter. What else needed to happen before he stopped believing anyone, anything, women!

  “That boy shouldn’t run around,” she said.

  “He can take of himself,” he replied.

  “I wish I could count on someone like that,” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” Charlie said. “I need to take a piss. I forgot because of the helicopter.” He had never had much patience for neighbors. Actually, he had never really had neighbors on the house on the bluff.

  “Will you come back soon?” his neighbor asked in her Spanish accent.

  He didn’t know what to tell her.

  “I could come with you. I actually haven’t gone yet either. He’s afraid to move from his seat, and so am I.” She pointed at the man sitting next to her; her partner, perhaps, Charlie thought.

  Charlie allowed her to move past him and followed her. She walked with an obvious ease. From behind, he saw an agile body with long, fit muscles. As a swimmer, he knew how to recognize such muscles. She wore red running shoes and formfitting orange tights. A mound of disheveled blond hair enveloped her head and shoulders, and Charlie suddenly thought that she resembled Brigitte Bardot, whom he had seen in the old movies his father had played on old video cassettes. Little Charlie would sit with his father on the terrace looking out on the sea, watching the TV screen and listening to the creaking of his father’s rocking chair. He did not understand the language, and whatever Brigitte Bardot was saying disappeared into the darkness. Only her cheerfulness and the ease of her conduct with men imprinted themselves upon him along with the creaking of his father’s rocking chair. Mom would go out to the terrace briefly and scold Dad for allowing Charlie to watch such movies.