Awakening, 2nd edition

by Kuili, Ray N.

  Ah . . . Screw it. It’s all wrong. What rules? These are all games. The rules stayed back there, in that former life. The life that came to its end this morning. That life is over now. And that wasn ’t even life. That was childhood. A long , incredibly protracted and naive childhood.

  But new life is real. It does not have false security that is not rooted in reality . I t does not have room for that naive belief in social norms and abstract concepts like “civilized argument .” There ’s no place for games in this life. Everything is serious from now on. Here they don ’t waste time trying to convince you—here they punch you in the face and watch you spit out your convictions with blood. It is life that newspapers and TV scream about every day—life with violence, dirt and blood. With ice-cold water and the cold stone of hands, indifferently drowning a kicking and screaming human being. A life where disobedience to power is a crime that leads inevitably to a swift , grave payback. This life isn ’t new—i t has always existed. Only until today , it was somewhere far, far away—in a different country, in a different neighborhood, in a different house. It was some one else ’s life.

  When it’s not about you , it ’s always far, far away. But this time it ’s about you. And so this life is the only reality.

  Here, in this real life, people don’t dream about great achievements, don ’t make big ambitious plans, don ’t feel proud of their successes. They simply live here. No, not live. They exist . And they embrace their existence—and for a good reason. Back in that previous life , it was a given that nobody was going to lay a finger on you. Not anymore. If people need it, they will lay a finger. Or an entire hand . . . There are just a few important concepts in this life: pain, fear, shame . . . no, screw shame . . . obedience. And fear again . . . fear, fear, fear.

  Today’s stupid demarches, daring remarks, and ostentatious bravery—all of this was just the shadow of a former life with its golden-plated hollow ideals. But new, real life had already claimed its rights. And that ’s why twenty minutes ago, having run into Alex in a hallway, I slid my eyes away. And when he asked , “So are you ready to vote?” I nodded. Nodded q uietly . . .

  Knock-knock . . . Alan lifted his head. Who the hell is that? Must be Alex—to make sure his elector is indeed ready to vote. Who else would bother to stop by for a visit, especially this late? Guess it ’s time for another obedient nod, if not worse . . .

  But it turned out to be someone else.

  “Still up?” Michael asked. “Good. Let ’s go downstairs, have a drink with everyone. We need to get our spirit s back up —they’ve been dying ever since we found that piece of paper.”

  Alan forced himself to produce a tight smile.

  “No. Thank you, but no.”

  “Let’s go, ” Michael said in a tone that signaled he would entertain no objections. “We need to get together for a drink. It ’s the last evening.”

  “There will be more evenings.”

  “They’ll be different. There will be a boss and a dozen employees. Let ’s go.”

  Indeed, Alan thought, what difference does it make? Tomorrow I ’m going face all of them anyway. Including Alex. At least here ’s someone who seems to care . . .

  “Give me a second, ” he said. “I ’ll grab my key.”

  As they walked shoulder to shoulder down the hallway, Alan caught himself thinking that until now he had never noticed that he was taller than Michael. Somehow it always seemed to him that they were about the same height. Perhaps, he thought, it ’s because we never walked together like this .

  “You’ve been having second thoughts, haven ’t you?” Michael asked suddenly when they approached the stairs. “Now you think that coming here wasn ’t such a great idea.”

  “Why?” Alan was taken aback. “Why would you think that ? I ’m . . . I ’m glad I ’m here.”

  It didn’t sound too convincing. He was caught off guard.

  “Glad to hear that, ” Michael said. Then he suddenly stopped. Alan turned to him – and faced an intent gaze of dark un blinking eyes.

  “Just in case you ’ve been having any second thoughts, ” said Michael, “try taking it easy. Some things it’s better to learn here.”

  “I’m not sure I understand, ” Alan said.

  “Good for you.”

  And Michael headed down the stairs, his steps emitting a hardly audible squeaking song.

  I’d like to see all this shit happening to you, Alan thought angrily. Would you be so tough and brave, huh?

  And then it suddenly occurred to him: yes, he would .

  Had it been Michael instead of him, he most likely would not have been yelling and kicking in the water . . . Most likely he would ’ve managed to avoid being put there in the first place. He would not have been on that boat . He would not have ended up overboard. And had he somehow end up there, he would ’ve rather jabbed Alex in the eye than yelled , “For you!” And finally, finally, had he had no choice but to yell . He would ’ve done it with no hesitation and without attaching any significance to the action. He would not be sitting on his bed by the nightstand like a mourner by a fresh grave. And he would make Alex pay dearly.

  “Mike!” he shouted without realizing fully why he was doing it.

  Michael stopped.

  “Listen,” Alan walked down to him and said, this time quietly , “Remember that note someone left in . . . uh . . . Alex ’s room?”

  “Yes. What about it?”

  “Has that ever happened to you? I mean have you ever had to live through a real blackmail attempt?”

  “I never give people any pretext to blackmail me, ” Michael was looking at him as though expecting something.

  Alex said the same thing, Alan was about to remark, but felt that that was too much for him.

  “What if you give no pretext, but someone keeps trying anyway?”

  “What’s there to try then?” there was irony hiding in Michael ’s eyes. “Let him try all he wants, why would you care?”

  Alex lost his patience.

  “Stop it. Really. You know what I ’m talking about. If someone is after you big time . . . Someone ’s bullying. Not like in high school. For real. Like a mobster. With no pretext, except he needs something from you and he ’s stronger . . . Did you ever have to go through anything like that ? When you need . . . when you need to figure out how to live through it . . . when you just need to survive . . .”

  “To survive, ” Michael repeated after him slowly. “Be careful there. You keep surviving for too long—and you forget how to live.”

  One day, millions and millions years ago, an ape was darting through the ancient shaggy forest, leaving behind blood stains on the ground and patches of brown fur on sharp hard thorns. She breathed heavily, every breath coming out of her breast with a whistling sound. With every drop of blood coming out of a wide -open wound on her back , her movements were becoming slower and slower. From time to time she was shooting back a frantic hunted-down look. There, among gigantic trunks entwined with green ivy , a striped fur kept flashing. The fur ’s owner was closing in, steadily and tirelessly, and although the ape, while squalling and howling, ran rapidly, the distance between them was closing . The ape didn ’t remember what sort of wild luck helped her to escape her chaser the first time, but to her bones she knew something else: she had to run. Run as long and as fast as s he could. And so she was running.

  Still, she was doomed. Less than a minute later, steel claws dug into her back again and bloodthirsty jaws swung open rapaciously above her stiffened neck. The warm screeching supper had been delivered fresh and ready to be consumed. But at that moment, which was supposed to be the last moment of the ape ’s life, something unexpected happened. Instead of a victorious roar , a plaintive bass mewing rolled across the bewildered forest. The terrible claws pulled in suddenly, and the ape, free , contrary to all her expectations, darted away. She didn ’t look back and never learned what had made the king of the forest set her free. Perhaps he got his paw stuck in a hardly n
oticeable yet dangerous crack in the old log. Or it could be that , carried away by his hunting ardor , he didn ’t pay enough attention to a falling branch. It was an old forest and the ape had seen many times these huge , heavy and very dangerous moldered boughs cracking under the weight of long , gray-haired patches of moss , and flying down.

  Whatever happened on that day behind her back stayed in the past. But something else remained with her to serve as a reminder of the accident for as long as she lived: the scars and the crippled leg . A nd fear. Until her last breath , she remembered vividly the claws mangling her back , and a confident wheezing. That moment when she was still alive, but was already doomed. The moment of ultimate helplessness. And the sticky viscous fear of that moment stayed in her mind, and intermixed in blind echoes with the millions of fears of millions of other apes, settled many years later in their descendants.

  Although of course this fear pre -dates apes. It began many millennia before they even walked the earth. It began wit h all sorts of primordial life—running, crawling away, fleeing death caused by another being. Accumulating, drop by drop, generation after generation, their deep horror was settling in their ge nes, penetrating every cell and saturating their brain s . And when man came into existence , this horror was already seared deadly into his soul and consciousness.

  Whoever we inherited it from, this is our primal fear. Fear of being defenseless. Fear of the moment when you are still alive, but already completely helpless. When you breathe , feel, and understand everything, yet there is nothing, absolutely nothing you can do. When you are completely helpless in the face of illness, mutilation, someone ’s jaws, catastrophe, circumstances, pain, suffering . . . And above all—in the face of other people. In the face of their evil, tortures, beatings, humiliations. In the face of the animal cruelty of a lynch mob who had found its human victim. In the face of murderers and sadists, executions and concentration camps, indifferent carriers of orders , and enthusiastic butchers. In the face of people.

  For nothing and no one causes people more pain and suffering than other people.

  And at some point, the dreary horror of a victim gave birth to its extreme opposite—an opposite that helped the grownup ape come to terms with fear, at least to some degree. Unknown to animals, its origins lost in the mazes of evolution, this opposite gained a life of its own—an independent and horrifying life. Long ago , it ceased to be a means of protection, a shield, a reaction. It broke free and made man , to serve it blindly—to serve, while believing wholeheartedly that he is serving himself. No longer a means to an end, this opposite became the sole purpose of existence for many, a poison that permeates any society and any group of people. It spawned a new breed of crippling fear—fear of a soulless system, built by people. Luring stronger than drugs, holding no barriers, demanding endless adoration and worship, wearing costumes of many colors, hiding behind countless alluring slogans, morphing endlessly, growing and weakening, but never dying, it became the most dominant obsession of mankind.

  And the name of this opposite is Power.

  Chap t e r Nine

  “Did you know that when, in nineteen eighty nine , they were electing the President of Poland, there were five hundred members of parliament voting?” Chris asked loudly with no particular connection to anything that was being discussed.

  “Yeah—so?” Alex said. “Alan, can you do me a favor, pass me a napkin, please.”

  “Nothing—except that President Jaruzelski won by a margin of—” Chris broke off. “Any ideas?”

  “Forty votes?” Joan guessed.

  “Twenty three?” lowered the stakes Paul.

  “A single vote, ” Chris said solemnly. “Out of half a thousand. Just one.”

  “That’s impressive, ” Robert agreed. “And the moral of the story is . . .?”

  “Every vote counts, ” replied Joan instead of Chris.

  “Precisely,” Chris confirmed. “Especially because there ’re eleven of us here instead of five hundred. And the stakes . . .” he looked back at Clark , sitting as usual at a separate table in the company of his crew. “Bottom line, we ’d all better think hard.”

  “So let’s go and think, ” Alex proposed, getting up. “Looks like everyone ’s done with breakfast.”

  “General Jaruzelski ’s presidency, ” said Michael, staying in his seat, “didn ’t last long.”

  He set his cup of coffee on the table and looked at Chris.

  “He was elected in summer, and in the December he was asked to leave, to put it mildly. So there could be more than one moral.”

  They took their time to settle down in the boardroom . At first, they went for the seats they had grown used to over the last four days, but Joan complained that the bright sun was for some reason hurting her eyes today and asked Kevin whether he ’d be open to the idea of trading seats. Kevin, being a true gentleman, promptly agreed . A second later , more unusual activity erupted in the form of Paul going round the room and looking rather loudly for , “Something less squeaky than that ancient piece of junk .” The antique he was referring to was an innocent noiseless chair in which he had spen t the last few days without once complaining about it .

  The trinity of observers watched these movements from their corner with their typical emotionless attention. Ed was taking notes as usual, leaving everyone to wonder what part of the seat exchange could possibly be worth documenting.

  At last, everyone was ready.

  “The time has come, ” announced Chris, habitually taking the role of facilitator. “Joan, are you ready to do the draw again?”

  Joan nodded graciously.

  “My pleasure. Unless someone else wants to try.”

  Everything was just like a few days ago. Scraps of paper rustled cheerfully under Joan ’s hand, Paul was quipping good-naturedly, Alex was contributing his direct no-nonsense remarks. The sun was pouring down generously on the speakers who, one by one , bathed in golden rays, walked t o the central table to speak about their aspirations and the steps they were taking to achieve them.

  However, upon a second look, any resemblance with the past was thinning rapi dly. A few days ago , Alan rarely took his eyes off a speaker, except to shoot a glance at Joan. Today he was spending most of his time studying the boats that rocked softly beyond the window, reservin g only occasional half-bored looks for the speakers. As for Joan, the only look he gave her was during her own speech.

  Joan, it seemed, had also gone through some sort of transformation. She was still emanating waves of charm, but at times a stern , adamant expression suddenly took over her face.

  Three days ago, Ross had used every opportunity to ask a question or to express his opinion. Now he was only smiling infrequently, somewhat oddly moving his head and occasionally stroking his thinning hair. And at times the smile vacated his face in a frightening manner, like makeup running down the sweaty face of a clown after a long and tiring performance. At these moments, it seemed as if Ross was forgetting he was supposed to smile.

  Brandon, who during the first few days frowned only on a few occasions, was now studying everyone with a great deal of suspicion. Looking at him, it was very hard to believe that this face was even capable of smiling.

  Kevin was nodding frequently—in fact too frequently —as if agreeing with every word uttered by every speaker. He would break his nodd ing only to look at Stella, who sat unusually calm and imperturbable.

  And Chris the Facilitator, Chris the Self-Appointed Leader, while having fully preserved his animated spontaneity, had obviously lost something during this week. At times, weird stiffnes s would surface in his words and gestures, as though what he really wanted to say was: “You guys take care, I ’m going home.” But obviously he didn’t say or even suggest anything of the sort and so the speeches went on.

  In fact, no one had any desire to speak or even listen to others and they all knew it. It became clear yesterday, during their hot discussion at the pier.

  “Come on, we all know each ot
her through and through already, ” Brandon had said . “It ’ll be a total waste of time.”

  “I’d say we know each other b etter than we should, ” Paul added. “The only way not to waste time tomorrow would be to talk our real deal.”

  “We can’t, ” Joan objected. “We would tip them off immediately.”

  “I understand that, but we don ’t have to be explicit about it. Anything real would be better than that throwaway talk.”

  “We’ll have enough time later.”

  “To do what? Conspire against our new boss?”

  The argument was about to inflame when Michael killed it with one phrase, which in a manner typical for him, crisply articulated what many of them felt : “If they suspect we know something, they may simply invalidate the results.”

  And so today the speeches were flowing.

  Furthermore, in order to minimize their potential exposure , Stella had asked Michael and Paul to speak , too. “Would anyone buy the story that you two declined to give up your last speech without knowing the truth?” she asked. The question implied only one possible answer, and so they ended up with eleven speeches to listen to.

  Eleven speeches . . . Stella felt warm satisfaction inside as she listened to the stories they had to tell. Somehow it seemed that the only people to preserve their equilibrium fully were Robert and she. And Michael, of course.

  It seems, she thought, he always keeps his cool regardless of the circumstances and surroundings. Having known him now for four days , it ’s practically impossible to imagine this man losing his mind over anything. Not that he strikes you as robot-like —quite to the contrary, he seems more understanding and compassionate than many others. But whatever his inner self is, he ’s definitely in constant touch with it. Constant touch and constant control.

  Now, others in this room are not so good about preserving their calm. Though in all fairness, you can ’t really blame them for that. The stakes are too high. And so is the pressure. Peer pressure. Now everything appears in a different light. Even Barnett ’s words about having “Certain plans for you ” have taken on a different meaning now . It ’s too hard to keep your cool when you get a glimpse of plans like that. Some things are too large to be consumed all at once. At least too large for most of us, anyway.