The Dying Game

by Asa Avdic

  I SAT UP so violently that I hit my head on the top bunk. Something was wrong. My body was wet and sticky, and the sheets smelled sour, as if someone had dumped a pail of water on me as I slept. I must have turned off my alarm in my sleep; it was later at night than I had expected. I hurtled out of bed and stumbled over to the monitors. By way of the grainy green screens I could see Jon moving nervously back and forth between the various surveillance cameras. He seemed to be running around the corridor and banging and yanking at doors as he shouted something. Suddenly he took off down the stairs and I hurried into the wall, shivering in my own cold sweat, to try to figure out what was going on. As he ran into the kitchen and I tried to follow, I heard whom he was looking for and what he was shouting. It was Franziska’s name.

  A FEW MINUTES later, the three of them who were left sat down in the kitchen. Henry made coffee—again—while Lotte tried to soothe Jon, who was on the verge of a breakdown. He alternately sat there with his head hanging between his legs like a person trying to overcome a dizzy spell, darted up to stare out the window, paced around the room, had an outburst, and sat down again. This went on for some time. Lotte, in her terry-cloth robe, gazed at him in concern as he paced and stroked his back gently when he sat down. Now and then she exchanged worried glances with Henry, who appeared to have aged since setting foot on the island a day and a half before. But I noticed that she observed Henry with at least as much concern even when he had his back to her. I assumed she had come to the conclusion that if there was no mysterious stranger hiding on the island, which seemed increasingly unlikely, then Henry was the top suspect. I was following Henry’s movements in the kitchen when he suddenly looked right at the spot on the wall where I was hiding and stared directly at it. I was startled and quickly backed away from the peepholes. It occurred to me once again that the person, whoever it was, who had struck me when I found Katja must have inferred that I was still alive. Maybe that person was Henry. On the other hand, Lotte was the one who had brought a satellite phone to the island. Shadows seemed to be falling from every angle. Henry walked over to the table with the mugs of coffee, passed them around, and sat down. The two of them looked up at him as he said, “I think it’s time for some straight talk.”

  HENRY

  “SOMETHING IS GOING on here. Something we don’t understand.”

  I had repeated this line several times in my head to make sure it would work as I intended. Lotte and Jon were still staring at me, and when no one said anything I went on: “Clearly someone or something here is causing people to disappear. We started out with seven of us. Now there are three of us. One is in a chest freezer half a floor down, and another is at the bottom of the sea. Two simply vanished. Is there anything either of you can tell me that might help us understand what happened?”

  But still no one spoke. Lotte squirmed a little bit, but my hope that she would start talking was not fulfilled. So I kept going: “Then I’ll start. I came here on a special assignment.”

  Lotte gasped sharply.

  “Is there anything you’d like to say before I continue?”

  She shook her head in silence, but her eyes shifted back and forth; she didn’t want to meet my gaze. Instead her left hand flew to her mouth and she began to bite her nails, an absent expression on her face. I started talking again before she had time to gather her thoughts too much.

  “I came here to watch over Anna Francis.”

  Lotte’s eyes grew wide, but she still didn’t say anything.

  “That doesn’t seem to have turned out so well, does it?” Jon sounded tired and angry. “What was the plan for watching over her, anyway? Get drunk, screw her, and fall asleep?”

  He glared at me as if to say this whole situation was my fault.

  “No, it didn’t go so well. I didn’t realize that we might be dealing with life-threatening situations; I understood it to mean that I was supposed to observe her.”

  “So why would Anna Francis be under observation?” Jon continued.

  I looked at Lotte. She was still biting her nails and staring out the dark window. I tried to sound as if I were speaking straight from the heart, but in fact I was choosing my words carefully. Don’t say too much; don’t say too little.

  “As I understood it, she was one of the most interesting candidates, but there was some uncertainty about how she would manage the pressure, so they wanted to keep an extra eye on her to see if she would break down.”

  Lotte looked doubtful.

  “I don’t get it. Why would they bring someone here if there was a risk she would have a breakdown?”

  “I don’t know much more than that. Apparently there are a number of things about her background that are unclear, but as far as I know they wanted to test her, in the hopes that she would manage well. I suppose she was just too good to pass up.”

  I could tell that Jon was trying to make sense of what I had just said.

  “So, Henry . . .” he said slowly, “what does that make you? Are you even a candidate? Or are you just the secret police?”

  “That,” I said, “is something I’m not sure I have the right to tell you.”

  I went on before he could say more.

  “I’m telling you this because you should know that I brought a gun with me to the island, due to this task; it’s a service weapon I am permitted to possess because of my military rank and placement. And now that gun is missing.”

  “What the hell are you saying?” Jon said.

  “My service weapon is gone. And I want to know if either of you took it. So now I have a question for you, and I really hope that you will answer it honestly. And before you respond, I want you to think about the fact that there is a loaded gun on this island and four people are already dead or missing. I don’t think I need to remind you of the gravity of this situation.” I allowed my gaze to wander between the two of them and tried to make eye contact with each. “Did either of you take my gun?”

  Jon stared back at me with vacant eyes and shook his head slowly. I tried to get Lotte to look at me; at last she couldn’t keep from meeting my gaze and speaking.

  “No, I don’t have your gun. But I also haven’t been completely honest either. I am here as a candidate, but I had another assignment as well. I was supposed to observe the rest of you and then report back to the secretary and tell him how the events proceeded.”

  I latched on to this track right away.

  “How were you supposed to do that?”

  Lotte squirmed.

  “I don’t want to say.”

  “So you didn’t bring a satellite phone with you?” I said.

  She recoiled.

  “How did you know?”

  “You don’t have to look so suspicious; Anna Francis and I saw you with it behind the house on the first night. You weren’t particularly discreet about it.”

  Lotte looked pained.

  “What is all this?” Jon exclaimed; apparently he had heard enough. “You’ve been sitting on a phone all this time? For God’s sake, take it out and call for help! What are you waiting for?”

  Lotte looked even unhappier.

  “I don’t have it anymore.”

  “What? Where the hell is it, then?”

  “It was stolen. It disappeared the first day.”

  Jon heaved himself out of his chair and began to pace. Suddenly he stopped and stared hatefully at us.

  “What the hell is wrong with all of you? You have a phone, you have a gun—you don’t say a thing about them and now you’ve managed to lose every single useful object! We are on a fucking island! There is nowhere to lose anything!”

  Neither of us said a word. His outburst seemed to have sapped the last of his strength, and he sat back down and looked dejectedly at Lotte. “A phone. Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “Maybe because I received strict orders from the start not to rev
eal the fact that I had a phone?”

  Lotte sounded like she was about to start crying, the way you might near the end of a long, toxic fight.

  “What were you really supposed to be keeping an eye on and reporting back about?” I asked.

  She turned to me and squinted.

  “Funny that you would be the one to ask.”

  “Why?”

  “I was supposed to be keeping an eye on you.”

  This situation was slipping out of my hands like soap in a bathtub.

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you.”

  In an attempt to gain a little time and take back control, I quickly stood up and walked to the coffeemaker. With my back to the others, I picked up the carafe and slowly filled my cup as I tried to think fast.

  “Why?” I said, my back still to the others.

  There was a hint of schadenfreude in her voice.

  “From what I heard, you were the wild card, the risky candidate.”

  I covered my eyes with my hand. This was too much to deal with. More than I’d expected. I cursed the secretary and all his mystery-making. It really would have been helpful to know all this.

  Lotte went on; her voice began to sound hysterical.

  “And now you’re telling me that you’ve done some sort of mysterious service in the military and you brought a gun to the island, so tell me—why shouldn’t I believe that you are the killer?”

  I had truly lost control of the situation by now, and I had to recover it somehow. I took a step toward her, but she began to back up; her voice rose into a falsetto.

  “Don’t come any closer! It was you! Oh, my God, it was you! How could I be so stupid? How did I miss this? You were the one who was with Anna; you were the one who was in the boat with the colonel; it was you, you, you, you, you, you goddamn murderer!”

  I took a quick step forward and slapped her face. In the shocked, dense silence that fell after the blow, I took her face between my hands and said, in as calm a voice as I could muster:

  “I am not a murderer.”

  She stared back at me. Her eyes were wide and panicked, almost rolling back in her head. I held her eyes and said once more, softly and calmly, “I am not a murderer. You have to believe me.”

  Suddenly her body relaxed. She looked down.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m sorry. I’m just so scared.”

  I continued to hold her, more gently now. It was as if I were holding up her entire weight by supporting her head in my hands.

  “You have every right to be scared. This is a tense situation; there is no such thing as a normal reaction to it. But if we’re going to get out of here alive, we have to cooperate and stick together. We have to hold out until the boat arrives tomorrow afternoon, because right now it’s our only hope.”

  “If it arrives.”

  That was Jon. His voice sounded broken.

  “Who knows what’s really going on here? Maybe they just gathered us all here in order to get rid of us. Who knows what the papers will say in a few days? Plane crash? Boating accident? Has that occurred to you two? What if they just want us to go away? Maybe there is no project after all.”

  I felt the hysteria spreading through the room again. Lotte’s entire body began to tremble. I tried to take back control before it was too far gone.

  “No matter what happens, we can’t do anything right now. It’s the middle of the night, it’s still dark, and we wouldn’t be able to find anyone now even if we try. My suggestion is that we go back to bed for a while longer, all of us. Either in our own rooms with the doors locked, or else we can all sleep in the same room. As soon as it gets light out we’ll start searching the island again, for Franziska and the others. We’re too tired and afraid right now. We need sleep and daylight to do anything more.”

  I looked from one to the other. Two pairs of tired, bloodshot eyes looked back at me. Jon gave a short nod. Lotte was still standing beside me, and I felt her arm against mine as she leaned against me. At least I seemed to have calmed her down enough that she no longer thought I was going to kill her.

  “May I sleep in your room?” she asked in a small voice.

  “Of course. How about you?” I turned to Jon. “There’s plenty of room on the floor in my room.”

  He shook his head. “I’ll take my own room.”

  “Lock the door.”

  “You don’t have to tell me twice.”

  He rose from his chair and abruptly left the kitchen, his steps heavy. Lotte and I followed him up the stairs.

  ANNA

  AS THEY WALKED up the stairs, I remained inside the kitchen wall and tried to master my breathing and my thoughts. Should I follow them up? Or should I go down to my basement and try to make sense of what I’d just heard? I couldn’t quite get a grip on it. It felt like I was at a masquerade and all the guests had suddenly taken off their masks only to reveal new, grotesque ones underneath. Was Lotte tailing Henry? Was Henry tailing me? Or was it like Jon said, someone wanted to get rid of all of us? And if so, why? It seemed so absurd, but so did any explanation right now. Theories formed and burst as swiftly as soap bubbles. My breathing grew heavier and I felt like I was about to faint. Suddenly the walls seemed way too close, as if they were slowly pressing together over my chest. That familiar feeling of drowning from the inside, in your own body.

  I realized that I had to get out of there before the panic attack struck full force, and on mincing steps I moved through the wall and down to the cellar, where I threw myself into the hallway and ended up on all fours, panting for breath. My head was spinning and my throat felt laced up tight, but the more air I tried to inhale, the more my head spun. My lips began to go numb and my hands felt like they were asleep. I knew what was happening, but I couldn’t hold it back any longer.

  I lay on the floor in a fetal position and tried to follow the lines of the oblong baseboard with my eyes, just as I had learned. “Breathe in rectangles,” said the self-help book someone had lent me when the panic attacks were at their worst in Kyzyl Kum. That helped sometimes, but this time it was too late for that sort of trick. Lying on my side made me feel nauseated; I tried to turn onto my stomach, but that was even worse. It was like every part of my body, every organ, every single cell, needed to vomit. I tried to sit up, but my head was spinning too fast and I ended up lying on my back with my legs tucked up as I rubbed my face with my hands, as if I were trying to make sure it wouldn’t disappear.

  The yellow light in the basement cavern made the room seem even smaller and very close, and I tried and failed to ignore the thought that I was running out of oxygen. That was the worst part about panic-attack thinking, that as soon as you had a thought, it was as if it became true, no matter how inconceivable and unrealistic it was. My heart was pounding like a dormouse’s. The ceiling sank lower and lower; I breathed harder and harder; black spots began to appear in my vision. I curled up in a fetal position again and tried to focus on the wall clock; the minutes passed, ten minutes, fifteen minutes, thirty minutes. The panic came and went in waves, but it didn’t ease up.

  And then I thought of the bottle of pills I had grabbed earlier up in the medical station. Or had that thought been there all along? Had I just been waiting for the right moment to open the bottle? The perfect excuse.

  WHEN I CAME home from Kyzyl Kum, I was addicted to FLL. At least that’s what the doctors said. I wasn’t so sure, myself. It was actually one of the field doctors who gave me FLL for the first time, after I complained of difficulty concentrating. Because the more chaotic the situation in Kyzyl Kum became, the harder I found it to do one thing at a time. My headaches from the explosions would hang around for weeks. It was like there was always this rushing sound in my head, louder and louder. The doctor who gave me the FLL explained that it was an experimental drug for people with diagnoses that involved serious concentration pro
blems. He also explained that it was relatively untested, and despite the fact that most of those who had tried it reported a positive experience, not much was known about the long-term effects. But the nasty thing about FLL wasn’t that it lacked sufficient clinical trials to be used in the well-established health care system back home; the scary part was that it worked so well. Instead of whirling around like one big mess in my head, my entire existence suddenly dropped down into various boxes, all perfectly organized and sorted. Suddenly I was able to work with great concentration until I was actually finished with something, even if everything around me was chaos.

  At first I took my pills only when things were extra stressful. It didn’t seem all that remarkable. Other people drank; I didn’t. Although I had self-medicated with alcohol on occasion earlier in my life, I didn’t dare do so then, because I became far too clumsy and hungover, and I experienced excessive anxiety. Plus it made my headaches worse. FLL didn’t have those effects at all. In fact, I enjoyed that membrane that would drop down between me and reality. It made things sortable and kept them at a comfortable distance; it made me feel calmer and more focused instead of troubled by constantly spinning, troublesome thoughts. In time it seemed silly, almost irresponsible, not to take the pills more often, because they helped me function better. Other people needed me to function. I began to take the tablets almost daily. And yet it never felt like a habit. I had no problems abstaining on a quiet day.