by Asa Avdic
The secretary shook my shoulder, and not gently, in the middle of a heartrending scene in which Ross and Rachel break up again due to some far-fetched misunderstanding. I hadn’t heard him sneaking up behind me, so I jumped in my seat.
“We’ll be there in fifteen minutes; you might want to come up now.”
I sat up straight, intending to stand, when a wave of dread, so strong it almost felt like dizziness, rushed through my body and held me down in my seat. Why, why had I accepted this assignment? Sure, I was used to unpleasantness from Kyzyl Kum, where situations had often ranged from unpredictable and threatening to flat-out terrifying, but I had never, ever wondered why I was there and what use I was. But I was wondering now. How had I allowed myself to be talked into this?
My brain started up the familiar defense program I had run through many times these last few days: I needed the money, I needed the work, and above all I wanted those reports from Kyzyl Kum to disappear. I didn’t exactly have anything to lose, but I had a lot to gain. Repeating this a few times didn’t completely ease my worry, but it did calm me down enough so that I could tie my shoes, pull my jacket around my shoulders, take my bags, and go up on deck.
KATJA WAS ALREADY standing at the railing, next to the secretary. I went to stand on her other side and zipped my jacket all the way to my lower lip. The wind off the gray sea was bitingly cold, and my hair was flying in all directions.
“There’s Isola!” the secretary shouted, pointing at a dot on the horizon.
The dot slowly took shape, acquiring nuances and details, and as we approached I realized that my prejudices had led me to picture the place all wrong. In my imagination, the island looked threatening and militaristic. What lay before me was an undulating island in the archipelago, with something that looked like a rectory on the left-hand side. The building was neither particularly large nor impressive, but the cliffs below it fell sharply down into the water, which made the island look like a cake made of stone and grass. At the bottom there was a floating pier with a metal ladder that led up the cliff. As we got even closer, I realized that the pier was necessary to be able to dock the boat. The cliffs were taller and steeper than they appeared at first glance, and huge boulders jutted from the water even close to land. If not for the pier, it would have been impossible to approach the island, and I wondered how the first visitors had even managed to make landfall, much less build a house there.
We went ashore at the pier and the secretary immediately set out to climb the ladder that ran up the cliff wall. He seemed stressed.
“It would be great if we could hurry up a bit,” he called back to us, in a shrill, strained voice, to keep the wind from stealing his words. “The other boat is on its way, and I want to show you the parts of the facility that only you will have access to.”
I swallowed and tried not to look down as I climbed the vertical wall. By now it was raining instead of snowing—a misty, fine rain that made the rungs of the ladder slippery, and I cursed the worn soles of my tennis shoes as I watched Katja’s deeply grooved hiking boots climb surefootedly up the rungs above my head. By the time we got to the top, the secretary had already started walking toward the house, and Katja and I followed obediently; her enthusiastic steps suggested summertime runs and cross-country skiing in the winter, while mine dragged like those of an obstinate teenage daughter. As we approached the house, I realized that my first impressions had led me astray as well. Despite its inoffensive facade, there was still something threatening about the place. Maybe it was because of the proportions. It looked overlarge. The stories seemed to be too far above one another; the windows seemed to sit too far apart. It occurred to me that this could be because of the gaps between the walls of each room, the ones that would make it possible for me to move around freely and observe everyone while they remained oblivious to the fact that I was watching them. I brushed my damp hair off of my forehead and walked faster, half jogging to catch up to Katja and the secretary.
“What was this place used for originally?”
“Evaluations,” the secretary answered curtly.
“Evaluations of what?”
“Same as now. People in sensitive positions.”
“So this house was built so you could spy on your own?”
He glared at me over his shoulder.
“There are always people who hide their weaknesses, and there are always times and places where that can affect others,” he said. “Better to discover them before they do any harm. Which is what we’re doing now.”
He pointedly sped up to indicate that the conversation was over, toiling on up the hill, but I wouldn’t give in.
“Do you really trust my judgment so much that you will be satisfied with whatever I have to say?”
“Well, it’s not just you,” the secretary said, casting a loving glance back at Katja Ivanovitch, who had tactfully fallen a few yards behind to avoid overhearing our conversation. “You will each be handing in a report,” he went on, “and I’m sure that all in all, once we take both your viewpoints into consideration, we’ll have a perfectly satisfactory amount of information upon which to base our decisions as we move forward in the recruitment process.”
He walked even faster and put some distance between us as he hurried up to the house.
“THIS IS WHERE we’ll place you when you’re dead.”
The secretary patted a boxlike chest freezer in a room inside the medical station in the basement, which, for what it’s worth, really was like a small field hospital. Excellent for taking care of gashes, dislocated joints, bleeding, and abrasions. Less excellent for taking care of psychotic breaks due to stress. I recognized much of what stood on the shelves from the medical transports that used to come to Kyzyl Kum. Maybe a little too well. Various types of painkillers, anti-anxiety drugs, and sedatives were lined up on one shelf. I tore my eyes away as we were shown around, thinking about the “pharmaceutical solutions” Katja Ivanovitch had mentioned earlier.
My attention returned to the deep chest freezer when the secretary suddenly jumped into it and lay down flat on the bottom of it, his hands clasped over his chest. He looked like Nosferatu.
“. . . And then all you have to do is this!”
The secretary pressed on something that looked like a refrigeration coil on the wall. Apparently it was a hidden button, because just then a hatch opened silently in the floor of the chest freezer at his feet. With a surprisingly nimble motion, he flipped onto his stomach and climbed down into the hole feetfirst.
“Okay, you can follow me!”
Katja and I looked at each other.
“Ladies first,” I said, and Katja looked at me in confusion, but then she obediently climbed down. I followed her. And when I got to the next room, I gasped.
“Welcome to the Strategic Level,” said the secretary.
IT WAS TRULY a remarkable place. The light was dim and yellowish, the way I imagine gaslights must have looked in the olden days. The furnishings and technology looked old too, like a telegraph station from the first half of the twentieth century. Dark wood, shiny copper, worn green leather in the details. The ceiling was a bit low, like in a submarine, and I found myself stooping although I didn’t really need to. The air was raw and it smelled like a root cellar. The secretary flipped a breaker and several screens came to life. The images were black-and-white, grainy, and they displayed all the rooms in the house from cameras that appeared to be mounted just below the ceiling. I turned to him.
“I thought you said there weren’t any cameras.”
“These cameras aren’t linked to recording equipment. They are, thank God, too old to be compatible with modern technology. Like I said, we don’t want to take the risk of documenting anything. You can only see what is happening at any given moment, but the sound doesn’t work and, honestly, the image quality isn’t that great either. The cameras are mostly supplementary. In our experie
nce, you will provide better observation if you do it directly.”
“You mean by peeping through the walls?”
“By observing in a professional manner,” the secretary answered reproachfully. “And don’t worry about the electricity; even if there’s a disruption up there, everything down here runs on its own generator.”
He went to one corner of the room and pulled back a curtain. Behind it was a small galley. A refrigerator, a sink, and a small bunk bed, all within less than five square yards, so small it almost looked like it had been built for children. I thought of those who had been here before me. Days and nights without daylight, eyes on other people’s lives. The documenting, the silence. The little galley was steeped in loneliness.
THE SECRETARY CONTINUED to show us around. A wall-mounted cupboard full of canned goods. A box of hurricane lamps and emergency flares. Mild painkillers and bandages. And then, next to the steps where we had descended, an abnormally narrow door of dark wood, like a storybook portal into another world.
“This is how you access the rest of the house.” The secretary handed me a flashlight that gave a muted red glow, like a darkroom light, and waved me in; I walked in ahead of him. It was cramped, the ceiling low, and as I went up the steep staircase my head bumped the ceiling and my thighs brushed against the walls. The walls, floor, and ceiling were covered in a foamlike, sound-absorbing material, which my feet sank into and which sucked up all the noise I made when I moved. There was something peculiar about moving perfectly silently. The secretary was right behind me. Suddenly I came to a curtain. I turned around and shone the red lamp directly into the secretary’s face. He looked like a skull.
“A curtain means a new room,” he said in a muffled voice. “If you feel the walls, you will find sliding hatches. Slide them aside, and you can look into the rooms. Just make sure to turn off your lamp first.”
I shone the light on the wall, found a hatch at eye level, turned off the lamp, and pulled the hatch to the side.
I was staring straight into the parlor next to the grand staircase through two small holes. It was odd to stand there in the dense darkness that surrounded me and look into the other room, which was bathed in natural light. It made me feel like a ghost. The secretary spoke close to my ear: “There are audio loops in every room, so you can hear conversations quite well,” he said. “But of course, if people start to whisper or talk over each other, it will be more difficult.”
I turned on the lamp again and we ascended another steep set of stairs, up to the bedrooms. Only then did I realize that I would be able to see absolutely everything. There were peepholes into the bedrooms themselves, which contained beds and wardrobes, and there were even ones into the bathrooms.
“It’s crucial for you to be able to observe them at all times,” said the secretary, as if he had sensed my aversion to observing strangers in the bathroom. “People tend to feel more secure there. That’s where they reveal themselves.”
I shrugged in the darkness, as if to show him that I didn’t care, even though the thought of spying on people as they sat on the toilet made me feel like a rat.
“Let’s go back down. I’ve seen enough.”
I gave him the lamp, he turned with a pirouette, and I followed the dull red cone of light down the stairs and back to the underground galley where I would be spending the next few days after I was murdered.
BACK DOWN IN the room, the secretary took out the floor plans I had seen in his office. This time the bedrooms were numbered from one to seven: six upstairs and one on the ground floor. This last one was reserved for the person who would be woken in the middle of the night to corroborate my death. There was still no list of names to indicate who would be staying in each room. We walked through the different steps of the plan one more time. Where I would be murdered and discovered (the kitchen), where I would be carried (the chest freezer), and here, where I would make my way later on. We were interrupted when the secretary’s satellite phone began to buzz. He answered, gave a brief “mm-hmm,” and then hung up.
“The others are on their way in now; we’ll go down to meet them.”
We made our way up the narrow set of stairs and up through the hatch, closing it carefully behind us, and walked through the front door and down to the edge of the cliff above the ladder and the pier. Below us we could see a boat, slightly larger than the one we arrived on, that had just docked at the pier. The first person to come up the ladder was the Chairman himself, clad in a statesmanlike navy blue coat and shiny dress shoes. They say that the Romans never learned the secret trick the Greeks used when they copied their architecture and temples: the Greeks built them with pillars that tapered at the top and with arched horizontal planes, which made the temples appear light, almost as if they were floating. The Romans built their temples the logical way, with straight lines, which made those temples look as if they might collapse in on themselves at any moment. That was how the Chairman looked as he stood there in his thick overcoat. Like a man about to be crushed under his own weight. The secretary immediately darted up to shake his hand in his usual energetic way, and they exchanged a few words. The Chairman gave both me and Katja a brief nod as he moved to stand beside us to make way for the others, who were climbing up after him.
THE FIRST PERSON to come up the ladder gave me a surprise. She was a woman in her midfifties, and even though I didn’t know her, her face was very familiar. Franziska Scheele was one of the most famous TV hosts in the country; she worked for one of the many state channels, and her face had been on-screen for thousands of hours in our kitchens and living rooms. As far as I can recall, she had been the host of one of the country’s most popular political programs; it ran on Sunday nights and she had probably interviewed every leading politician in the Union. She looked much frailer in real life than on TV—she was as tall and thin as a teenage boy and lovely in a worn sort of way, like an aging author. Her black hair was pulled back from her forehead and knotted in a severe chignon, just as she always had it on-screen, and she wore a long, dark green coat with a fur collar; it looked tailor-made, warm and dry, like it was meant for a hunt on the grounds of a manor. As she took her final step up the ladder, she extended a thin, ring-covered hand with well-manicured nails into the air, as if she took for granted that someone would storm forth and help her up the last step—which the secretary did.
The second person to come up was a man, also around Franziska Scheele’s age. His clothing was meticulously expensive looking and casual: colorful sneakers, a cap, imported jeans, and some sort of down vest, like a prince consort from the old Western Europe. His face, too, looked familiar, although he was harder to place. I guessed that he was some sort of business executive; it seemed like I had seen his visage printed on the salmon-pink pages of the financial section of the daily papers.
The third man was old, over seventy, I guessed, and I found myself wondering what sort of position these people could possibly be competing for if a candidate who was past retirement age and could barely make it up the ladder was under consideration. But when the man shook my hand, he seemed like a younger person who had taken over an older person’s body. His white hair and furrowed face carried years’ worth of weight more than did his eyes, which were curious and clear. The eyes of a boy. It was the opposite with me, I had time to think. An old person looked out of my eye sockets.
Then came another woman, one I guessed to be about my own age. She appeared to have no trouble climbing up the ladder, and her handshake was firm and immediate. Neat and tidy, low-heeled shoes, a practical, short hairdo. I guessed she was some sort of director in the public sector, maybe not a higher-up, but not far from it either. And just after I had greeted her, the fifth newcomer and final participant in the experiment came up the last few rungs of the ladder and stepped onto the lawn. I gasped.
It was Henry.
HENRY
I NOTICED ANNA Francis long before she noticed me. I thi
nk that’s often the way it goes with her, that other people notice her before she notices them. Some people are like that; it’s like the stuff they are made of is more potent than others. When they enter a room, it’s impossible to avoid looking at them. Anna used to hurtle into work as if she were always late and had to run. She always seemed to be absorbed in her own thoughts, rooting around in her large bag, entangled in a coat or scarf. She took the corridor with long strides; it was like everyone else moved slowly in comparison to her. She always seemed to be on her way somewhere, whether it was to the morning meeting, the coffee machine, or the bathroom. Her desk was like a fort of paper, folders, reports, and half-full coffee cups in various stages of moldiness. She herself sat in a hollow in the midst of it all, as though she wanted to barricade herself off from the rest of the office. Her voice was sharp and piercing, and everyone in the whole unit knew who she was, but she wasn’t exactly well liked. Although she was admittedly good at what she did, she was also surrounded by a reputation for being difficult. Many people, for example, found it annoying that she always had to ask a ton of critical questions at every meeting, usually when the meeting was nearly over and people were starting to shift in their chairs. It was like she couldn’t stop herself from questioning things, whether or not it was an opportune time. That behavior worsened when we got a new boss who was young, uncertain, preoccupied by himself and his own career, and not really all that interested in what we were up to. The reasonable thing to do, of course, would be to pretend everything was fine and play along, but Anna made no secret of the fact that she thought he was an idiot. There were rumors in the unit that she had wanted the managerial job herself, but hadn’t gotten it even though she was more competent. Whether that was true or not, the unit meetings began more and more to resemble informal trials, in which Anna played the part of self-appointed prosecutor and judge. There was something self-righteous about the way she scrutinized every single suggestion our boss came up with, as if she seriously believed that she was the only one who saw through him, as if it hadn’t occurred to her that everyone thought he was a loser but considered it pointless, unnecessary, and unpleasant to fight it. But the more fruitless battles I watched her wage, in which all she did was make herself appear more and more impossible, the more I began to realize that she wasn’t trying to put on airs—that was just how she was. Once I figured out how she functioned, I began to like her a little more. Although I suppose I still thought she was annoying.