by Amos Talshir
“Mr. President, I’m more interested in your escape skills than in the art of assassinating you,” Simon confessed.
“I was betting that you weren’t an idealist, but just a clever individualist,” the president said, walking away from them, dragging his feet, weary from the dance. He entered his VIP box without any of his cabinet members accompanying him.
20.
Simon had time to pack up his speaker kit and the power source as he urged Rose to get going. She asked him where exactly he thought he was going, and he said it would soon be dark; the bats would fly out of their burrows, and he wanted to be near the tunnel to find the place from which they would exit. Veronica asked to join them. Rose asked what the bats had to do with anything, and Simon told her how Veronica had noticed the bats hanging from the bottom of the roofs. Veronica emphasized that she had not known they were bats, and therefore the discovery was all clever Simon’s, who deserved a kiss. Simon extracted himself from her kiss, trying to get his thoughts in order. Rose said that at least he was getting kisses out of all this devastation. Simon said he did not understand that word, “devastation,” in the local language, while Veronica asked them not to talk about devastation, since she actually thought a new future was opening up before her.
“What would you call our situation in English?” Rose asked.
“Lockdown, revolution, chaos?” Simon suggested.
“I think ‘chaos’ is more accurate,” Rose said. “I think we’re living in the ruins of everything that we’ve known. We’ll no longer know what once was, and everything we’ve achieved no longer exists. That’s the meaning of the word in our language.”
“Maybe that explains the behavior of the bats,” Simon said. “The chaos disrupted everything the bats were familiar with in this stadium. Generations of bats lived in their world under the stands. Mother bats suckled their blind babies in the quiet caves, until the babies learned to hang upside-down on their own and send out sonar waves that would allow them to navigate the world waiting for them outside. When they were ready, and knew how to transmit and intercept sound waves, they took off for their inaugural night flight from the burrows under the stands. And what did they discover? That the world was head over heels!”
“I understood that wordplay!” Veronica cheered.
“And there are no soccer games and the stadium is full of other mammals all night,” Simon continued after smiling at her. “They lost everything they took for granted. Even bats, which are blind, and sleep hanging upside-down during the day and are awake at night, can wake up one night to devastation they weren’t expecting. Just like us, only we wake up in the morning.”
“Simon, sweetie, you can’t compare birds to people,” Veronica said.
“They’re not birds, Veronica. They’re mammals, just like us.”
“What are you trying to say? I don’t get it.” Veronica sought an expression of support from Rose, who was gazing at Simon.
“I’m saying we can learn from the bats. They quickly came to a decision to take action against the new situation, and that’s why they attacked the sharpshooter. They perceive change more quickly than we do, since they have sonar. But it’s not just that their sonar clears the way for them and serves as their eyes. Their entire principle in life is listening to echoes. To act in accordance with the returning sound, to get a read on your situation, your location, even your feeling, based on the echolocation that returns to you and makes it clear what’s going on with you. It’s the most sensitive, beneficial way to experience what’s happening to you, to listen to the reverberations returning to you from your surroundings.”
“You’re really into those bats, huh?” Rose whispered.
“I think people would feel more and experience what’s important to them more powerfully if they adopted the echo that comes back to them. If they were more attentive to the sound they make and the emotion they express as it returns after encountering those around them. They’d find the best way to walk around. Maybe even how to fly.”
“What’s echolocation?” Veronica asked, slightly ashamed. “Do you understand it, Rose?”
Rose embraced Simon in a warm hug of appreciation, murmuring, “You’re such a smart kid.” Simon wrapped his arms around her waist and she sank into his tall body. She felt his excited breathing on her forehead, which was resting against his chest, and he contracted his stomach muscles in reaction to the touch of her breasts on his belly. They stayed that way for a long moment as Veronica watched them, trying to take in both them and the bats.
“Echolocation is experiencing what comes back to you as a result of what you did,” Simon said, trying to regulate his breathing after the hug. “That’s the bats’ specialty, and I think you, Veronica, echolocate more than most people I know.”
“Is that a compliment?” Veronica wondered.
“Very much so,” Rose told her. She turned to Simon. “Will they continue to attack?”
“The vampire bats won’t change their locations, and they’ll fight to obtain their food,” Simon replied. “The longer the lockdown lasts, the more aggressive and daring they’ll become. They attacked the sharpshooter because he was more exposed. The moment the sharpshooters learn how to defend themselves, the bats will change targets and start attacking us at night, while we sleep in our seats. They don’t need a lot, but they can’t get by without the little they do need.”
“God, that’s scary,” Veronica said, switching to French, for some reason.
Simon led them down the route crossing the halls under the stands. From there, they reached the tunnel leading to the dressing rooms. When darkness covered the entrance to the tunnel and the giant floodlights had not yet come on above the pitch, Simon noticed the first flock of bats clinging to a massive ventilation duct located toward the bottom of the tunnel wall. He hurried toward the vent, taking a ladder down into a long, narrow space under the tunnel. Rose and Veronica quickly followed him down. They saw a labyrinth of nearly dark corridors, which still received a bit of illumination from the lights on the pitch, coming in through the ventilation ducts. Countless rooms branched off from the corridors. Simon explained these were built as potential dressing rooms and fitness and treatment facilities and had never been used.
“Eek,” Veronica whispered. “Why are we here?”
“We need to find Rose a new place to sleep,” Simon said.
“What happened to your seat?” Veronica asked.
“I found out I was sleeping next to someone I don’t trust,” Rose replied.
“But you’ll be scared to death here.”
“Fear isn’t as bad as betrayal,” Rose said. “He wasn’t just an ally who committed to the resistance’s cause along with me. He was my partner, my beloved. Until I found out that Simon was the only one looking out for me.”
Simon looked down and drifted off to seek an appropriate place for Rose to spend the night. Rose tracked him with an apologetic look.
“Everyone I sleep with betrays me,” Veronica said. “Either they cheat on me with their wives, or they just don’t respect me. I’m already used to being betrayed.”
“Don’t agree to take it.”
“I’m scared of being alone.”
“You won’t be alone.”
“But I am alone.”
“Because you’re not really alone. If you were alone-alone, you’d find someone who really wanted to be with you. You’re worth it.”
“That’s easy for you to say. How old are you?”
“Twenty.”
“I’m thirty-five. You know that for me, the end of the world has already arrived?”
“Even at the end of the world, it’s better not to be alone,” Rose said.
“You’re not alone,” Veronica said. “David will be possessive of you, and Simon will take care of you.”
Rose grew pensive, looking small, as if she needed
protection. She had lost the wild façade of the girl who had run around the stadium naked. She had lost her fierce aggression in regard to David’s betrayal, ensconcing herself in quiet anxiety when facing the new reality. She had left her parents’ home when she was fifteen. She couldn’t bear her father’s tyranny toward her mother. The desirable lounge singer had become the mayor’s despised wife. Now, without her fellow resistance members and without a seat of her own, she was vulnerable to being hurt. The Others could see exactly who was not in their seat at night. She had become a disrupter of the peace.
“You’re safe here,” Simon said. “They won’t know where you are, but you can’t go back to your seat, because then they’ll hurt you.”
“I’m ready for that,” Rose said.
“During the day, you can go out to the turf without them noticing, because then they have no way of knowing who’s not in their seat.”
“So I’ll meet you during the day?”
“It won’t last long. My dad and I are planning to get out. After we gather enough information, we’ll be outside.”
“Escape? When?” Veronica asked.
“As soon as we can get out of here.”
“You don’t know what’s going on outside. Don’t leave me alone,” Rose beseeched.
“Only for the time being, Rose. When we escape, I’ll take you with me,” Simon promised.
“But you’re just a kid.” Veronica choked up on sudden tears. “I’m going to cry. Those are the only sort of things that make me cry—when a man promises a woman he won’t leave her all by herself. But that only happens in the movies.”
“I’m scared, Simon,” Rose whispered.
“What do you want from him? He’s a sixteen-year-old boy,” Veronica scolded, stroking her cheek.
“You have to stay here,” Simon said. “They’ll know you’ve disappeared from your empty chair, but you’re safe here, since they don’t take the risk of exposing themselves and don’t go into the stadium to look for missing persons. Besides, I’m almost eighteen.”
21.
Simon’s nights grew longer with the anticipation of meeting Rose in the morning. He and his father took care to bathe at the sinks in the restroom facility, but the toothpaste was gone, and Simon suggested they brush with ground-up blades of grass. Simon had read online that the leaves contained chlorophyll, which was a sanitizer. Charlie agreed. Their teeth were tinted green, but their mouths emitted a fresh scent enhancing the sea of kisses in which Simon and Rose drowned their love.
Rose believed that abandoning her on the pitch was just one indication of David’s betrayal—of her and of the resistance’s ideal of liberation from the regime oppressing the freedom-seekers. She suspected David not merely of failing to truly strive for liberty, but of collaborating with “the Others” who had enforced an even more brutal oppression upon the audience in the stadium, and perhaps upon everyone who was outside as well.
Rose was scared to leave the burrow on her own; she had grown used to spending her nights there in the company of the bats. She believed only in Simon, who provided her with the snacks left behind once a week at the center of the sports arena by the helicopter. Every morning, when Simon arrived to bring her up to the daylight, she could taste the hot chocolate he had given her that night on the frozen turf. In the dimness of morning, in the bat burrow, Rose would kiss Simon. He grew addicted to the lips that had bestowed that first hot-chocolate-favored kiss upon him on the pitch. He encouraged her, telling her they would soon go free, and she draped herself upon his lanky body, covered him with her kisses, and was no longer certain she remembered the taste of the hot chocolate, which had now been replaced by the taste of grass. Simon promised that soon they would convene with the president in private and receive the information they needed to break free. Then they would walk hand in hand on the turf, exposing themselves to Charlie’s eyes as he gazed down upon them from the height of his seat.
Charlie had begun to believe that this was truly happening to him. The deepening relationship between Simon and Rose actually heightened his terrible anxiety. The long hours in which Charlie was at the mercy of his painful thoughts began to increase his bitterness. He did not have the strength to stop it; he did not have the immense sea by his side so that he could exhaust his body by swimming. The thoughts got the better of him. He knew this bitterness had been nesting within him since he had moved out, leaving Clara and the kids. It had been spreading in his body ever since he’d admitted to himself that he and Clara had lost even the little that still united them—their physical connection and touch.
This bitterness would assault him every time he was on his own in the boat engine repair shop, where he had been living since leaving the house on the bluff. He tried to approach Clara in his imagination, but instead, he envisioned the image of the man she was with now, with whom she shared the view of the sea, under the bluff. During those long nights in the stadium, he tried to fall asleep in his seat while the bitterness assumed a clear and apparent color, shape and presence. It gnawed at him and spread inside him. Not only was the distance not helping him to recover, but he also could not banish the visions of Clara in the other man’s arms. He delved deeper into his imagination, repelling himself with his thoughts. He tormented himself, imagining Simon being abandoned by Rose as she returned to her former lover. It was all very nice to get hot chocolate, to be warmed in a blanket, to meet a good boy who took care of her just like his father, who had fixed a bicycle chain for a tourist, and then bam, she would leap back into the arms of her lover from the resistance. They had a shared language and a lot in common: sensitivity to delicate things, to ideas, to a worldview. Charlie knew these words, from which love was built, and had never been good enough at them. Now Simon was snared as well. He had love, and disappointment had already launched itself in Charlie’s mind…
He could have resigned himself to life in this hell if he only knew that Emily, his daughter, and Clara, her mother, were safe. Or at least if they were here with Simon and him, in the stadium. They would learn to live together and hope for better days. Perhaps things would change and become possible in this lockdown.
Every night, he charged his cell phone through Simon’s power supply and tried to call Clara and Emily during the day, the moment Simon set out on his love walks with Rose—until the battery ran out. He never did so when Simon was around. He thought Simon believed that everything was fine at home. At first, he would still try to call neighbors, acquaintances and the repair shop as well. After long waits on the line and recorded messages reporting service disruptions, or changes, or new numbers, or unpaid bills and unavailable subscribers, he understood he must talk, even if only one brief time, to Clara or to Emily. All other words, vague and recorded, were lying.
This morning, like every morning, he had a feeling he would manage to talk to them. The moment he saw Simon and Rose hand in hand on the pitch, he felt charged with new strength and tried to call home. If he got lucky and managed to talk to them, they would not sense even a trace of despair or sadness. He would cheer them up and perhaps cheer up himself as well. He went to his hiding spot behind the immense concrete posts supporting the stand, where he concealed himself so as not to be exposed to any of the others, whose batteries had died and who might ask him for his phone. He couldn’t relinquish a single moment of the phone in his hand with its line free, in case Emily or Clara tried to call him. They might have tried, but it hadn’t happened, and he kept hoping, doing his best, to no avail. He was encouraged by the thought that Clara was unwilling to talk because of terrorism or the revolution, or some other reason, whatever it was, growing angry at himself for acting like a lovesick kid who refused to believe that she simply wasn’t calling him, putting the blame on revolutions and global collapse. She just doesn’t want to talk to you, you idiot, he told himself.
“Hello?” he called out.
“Dad?” he heard Emily on the other end
of the line.
“Sweetie, how did you know it was me?”
“I’ve been waiting just for you, Daddy,” Emily said weakly.
“Emily Emily Emily Emily.” Charlie tamped down his shouting. “Talk, talk some more!”
“Daddy, where are you? Where is everyone?”
“We’re here.”
“Where’s Smiley? Doesn’t he remember what he promised me?”
“He remembers, he does, Simon’s here.”
“Dad, there’s no one over here. Everyone ran away. Hercules disappeared too.”
“Where are you, my girl?”
“At home.”
“Where’s Mom?”
“At home with me, but she can’t talk.”
“Oh God oh God oh God oh God…”
“No, just Mom and me,” Emily reported.
“Why can’t Mom talk? Never mind, tell her we’ll get there and everything will be okay. Simon will come too and help you two out. He’s already a big fellow, and he knows how to help out.”
“I know. Smiley always helps me.” Loud noises interrupted what Emily said next.
“Emily, Emily, Emily,” Charlie called out. “Take care of Mom…”
An earsplitting noise rang out.
“Mom’s sick…” Her voice grew faint.
“Tell her we’ll bring her medicine.”
Another thundering noise.
“All the stores are closed, Dad. There are no people…” Her voice faded away.
“I’ll come, I’ll come, Emily…”
The line went silent.
“Will Smiley come?”
The connection was reestablished. “Mom wants Smiley.”
“What’s going on with you?”
“We’ve got nothing…”
The line went dead.
Rivers of sweat dripped from Charlie’s scalp to his neck, streaming down upon his ears. The cell phone boiled in his hand to the point of burning him. Charlie soaked up the sweat with the hem of his filthy shirt and tried to chase away his thoughts at the sink in the restroom facility, where he would wash his shirt for the umpteenth time. Emily’s weakened voice filled him with suffocating terror. He had to get out of the stadium and get to her and to Clara. He didn’t know what to think, but from the little he’d gathered from Emily’s tentative speech, he had learned they were isolated at home, since they hadn’t been in a shopping mall or airport terminal when the takeover occurred, as he’d already realized from the information Simon provided. The image began to darken in his imagination. How long could Emily survive at home with a sick Clara? What were they eating? Were they vulnerable to a break-in by homeless people? His stomach roiled within him and he held himself back from weeping in despair. He wanted to hug Simon, to tell him the truth and promise him they would make it out of there and do everything to get to Mom and Emily. Simon was right; they needed to escape. There was no room or time to indulge themselves with thoughts of what would happen and whether they would resume living together. He had to banish the bitterness and erase the anger. He believed he could disengage from the pleasurable wallowing in suspicions of betrayal. And it was actually Simon, who had worried him throughout his childhood with his fragility, who now imbued him with the ability to resign himself to this pain. His boy, walking hand in hand with a woman who had split up with her lover, now looking down at her from the stand. This pain was buried within that relationship between a man and a woman, from the moment the wish, the desire, the attraction, the infatuation came into being. His boy had fallen in love with a woman who someone else hoped was still his love. This thought did not dull the pain Charlie experienced each time he thought of Clara but did pave the way to learning to live with this pain, until he recovered from it, at some point. They had to escape from the stadium, he thought for the first time.