Benighted

by Kit Whitfield

  His face is white against the tiles, and he sags down again, covering his eyes. He lies still.

  “Well,” I say. My voice shakes a little. “Now I know.”

  I turn around and leave without saying anything else.

  “Does anyone know you’re here?” Albin asks Steven.

  “No.” He doesn’t move his head as he talks.

  “Did they charge you with anything?”

  He frowns at Albin. “Charge me? They just pulled me in here.”

  Paul lies with Albin’s jacket folded under his head. His eyes are half open, his tentative fingers are rubbing at his temples in precise, masseur’s circles.

  “That’s pretty bad for you,” Albin says. He sits leaning against the wall, his neat legs trailing across the straw, one hand resting in his lap. It’s an informal posture for him, asymmetrical. He looks at Steven with amiable concern. “Hard to know what to tell them.”

  “What’d they do to your face?” Steven hunches. He isn’t facing Albin; he looks sideways to talk, his eyes on the scar Ellaway put onto Albin’s face months ago.

  Albin shrugs. “Like I said, it’s hard to know what to tell them.”

  Steven frowns, rubs his fists together. He drops the conversation.

  I don’t watch when the interrogators go down. I take off the headphones and walk quietly back to my office.

  Ally isn’t among them.

  That doesn’t make it any better.

  Afterward, there’s a kind of lull. They sit in their cages, separate, each concerned with their own bruises. I didn’t watch, I couldn’t, but now I stare, wide-eyed, trying to see the remnants of every blow. It doesn’t look too bad, I tell myself, there’s no permanent damage done. Hard questioning, with the occasional slap to remind them that they’re helpless. Steven’s nose is bleeding, he keeps touching it with the back of his hand, always surprised to find new blood there.

  “Put your head back,” Carla says. “Pinch the bridge of your nose.”

  He looks at her, creases his face and then does as she says.

  “No, the bridge. Higher up. No, not like that, like this, look.”

  Steven studies her.

  Carla sighs. “No, farther back.”

  He cranes his head, his hand blocking his field of vision. Carla shakes her head, points, looking as if she’s trying not to call him stupid.

  I’m seeing what Steven sees. There really isn’t a difference between how she does it and how he does.

  Carla points one more time, then lowers her hand as if tired, gives him a brief, dead-eyed smile that wouldn’t convince Leo.

  It’s the smile that does it, and her posture. Something in the way she lays her hands in her lap. I see suddenly, and with a slight sense of shock, that she’s doing it on purpose.

  The nights should be getting shorter—we’re past the solstice—but on my pad of blankets, each night seems longer than the last.

  “You know, you were talking in your sleep,” Albin tells Steven.

  “Yeah?” Steven rubs his head, looks at Albin’s worn, imperturbable face.

  “Yeah, you were.” Paul is standing up, leaning against the bars, stretching one leg out behind him.

  “What was I saying?”

  There’s a definite pause before Albin shrugs. “Oh, nothing really.”

  He doesn’t say it convincingly.

  I play the tapes over. Steven’s a sound sleeper, he hasn’t said a word.

  “Do you think we might get out again if there’s another power failure?” Albin asks Sarah.

  She looks at him, dark-eyed. “Yeah. And maybe it’ll rain keys as well.”

  “You got out during a power failure?” Steven says. He leans forward.

  Albin shrugs. “It was a while ago.” I have to hand it to him, he can sound nonchalant in a prison cell. “Nothing major.”

  Steven glances around. There’s nothing for him to see. “I guess that’s why they’ve got me here,” he says.

  I raise my hands to the headphones, look at the switchboard, the camera, anything that might not be recording this. The green light is on, but I want to break the camera open to see if it’s working.

  “What, you got out during a power failure?” Albin looks only mildly interested.

  “No, I mean, loitering. Being outside, yeah?”

  “Well, yeah.” Albin shrugs again, unimpressed. “That’s mostly what they lock people up for.”

  “Yeah, but I mean, I was really—out, you know?”

  “Everyone who’s out is out, kiddo.” Sarah glares at him. She’s been huddled in a corner for the last hour; her eyes are still wet. Her voice is too high. “You think it’s something special?”

  Steven glares back at her, turns to Albin. “How much have you been out?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Can’t really remember when we started.”

  “You been doing it for years, then?”

  “How come you work in a hospital?” Albin says.

  “What?”

  “How come you work in a hospital?”

  Steven rubs his hands together. “I don’t know. Tried to train as a nurse, once.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t do that.” Carla’s voice is soft, musical. The edge to it is narrow as a scalpel.

  “What? Why not?”

  Carla shrugs, smiles. She tries to toss her hair out of her eyes, manages quite well despite her sprained neck. “Well, you wouldn’t be very good at it, would you?”

  Steven sits back, stares at her, too startled even to scowl.

  “Well, I saw the floors after you’d cleaned them.” Carla sighs, as if he’d asked. “And the way you crashed around the beds, disturbing the patients, it wasn’t very good. I don’t think you had what it took.”

  “What the—what the fuck do you know about it?” Steven manages. This pretty, well-spoken woman has decided to insult him for no reason. I’d be upset, too.

  Carla shrugs, gesticulates, her hand waving through the air like a dancer’s. His back turned to Steven, Albin leans forward, watching. Carla smiles, her white little teeth glittering, her eyes crossed like a cat’s, her head at a dizzy angle. I can see her hand, tangling straw behind her back, but Steven just sees a smiling mask, and the wheeling, drunken pitch of her voice could be mistaken for carelessness. “Come along. You don’t think no one saw you take them, do you?”

  “What the—what are—” Steven gets to his feet, goes up to the edge of his cell, but there are bars and then space, Paul’s cell is between them, and he can’t loom over her so far away. Paul sits cross-legged underneath them, one fist resting against the other.

  “I didn’t say anything,” Carla says. “I felt sorry for you. I didn’t think you’d get another job if people caught you stealing drugs. I don’t know, though, I think I should have told. Now I’ve got to know you a little. I think I should tell them, when I get out.”

  “I’d talk to a lawyer when you get out.” Paul doesn’t move, doesn’t look up when he speaks. “See if you can justify it to him. If you ever get out. You’ll never get a lawyer in here. You could be here for years.”

  “Why did you take them?” Albin picks up the rhythm, it goes from one to another like a game of catch. “Couldn’t you handle the furring up?”

  “You should be able to, you should handle it.” Sarah’s rocking in a corner, talking more to herself than to Steven. “You think it’s worth it, running around outside, you think you’re worth it? You don’t get any of it, you’re not worth it, you’re just too stupid to think of anything else.” The others look at her as she starts to cry. “You could have left people out of it, you could have just kept to yourself and not dragged people down with you but we’re all in here and we’ll never get out and you’re going to die down here, you’re going to be here for the rest of your life and they’ll kill you in the end and throw you out of the window…” Her voice rises and rises; she faces him in a crouch, her hands clawing her knees, and she stares at him like he was a locked door. She should be
in a hospital. She’s come loose. “You wait here long enough and you’ll see if it’s worth it,” she cries, and then she wraps her arms around herself and starts chanting in a whisper. “You wait for them and they’ll cut you with a silver knife and leave you to rot on the floor, they’ll cut your eyelids off and wait for you to go blind, they’ll break your fingers and give you a key you can’t turn in the lock…”

  As Steven stares at her, it happens, so quickly I don’t see till it’s too late. Paul’s hand comes through the partition, grabs Steven’s leg and yanks it from under him so he falls. He falls forward, his face knocks against the steel bars and he falls backward, his head cracks the floor as he lands. Paul’s face is still the same, it’s intent and pale but there’s nothing alien in the features as he says, “You could end up like your brother.”

  And just like that, they stop. Sarah huddles into herself and weeps silently, and the others turn their faces to the wall, lie down as if to sleep, and they don’t say another word.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  There’s a bar looping out from the wall, and that’s where they chain him. Two guards bring him up from below, cuff one of his hands to the wall, and leave him standing there. His hand is tethered too low down and he has to stoop, bent over to one side.

  “You needn’t stay.” I sit on the only chair. There’s a desk in front of me, not a solid wooden block with drawers and status, just four legs and a Formica surface like something out of a schoolroom. It doesn’t hide any of me.

  “We’re just down the hall if you need anything,” one of them says.

  “That won’t be necessary.”

  He gives me a suspicious look, wondering whether to be amused. Chain her ex-boyfriend to the wall and lock the door behind her. There’s another fillip my reputation can do without.

  “This won’t be an interrogation,” I say, and I succeed in sounding sharp. “You can escort him back when I call you, but until then, you needn’t waste your time unless you have nothing better to do. Do you have anything better to do?” I don’t sound defensive, I sound biting. I hear in my voice that I outrank them both.

  “Yes, Miss Galley,” he says. He isn’t happy, but he’s not obliging me unhappily, he’s obeying me unhappily. There’s a difference.

  They go out and close the door. It’s only when I hear it click that I look at Paul.

  He looks tired. Pulled down by his chained hand, he’s clumsy and off balance, as if he’d been knocked into that position. His gaze flickers over me, watchful. An inmate’s look.

  “Well.” I sit still in my chair. “You’re quite an interrogator.”

  Metal clinks against metal as he tries to stand straighter. “Will you take these off?”

  “I don’t have the keys.”

  “You could get them.” His eyes are bloodshot, the blue I loved so much enmeshed in red filaments.

  “Someone else would have to stay in the room. I’m not rated to handle prisoners solo. I want to talk to you.”

  Paul jerks his arm. Metal digs into his wrist. “Have you got me where you want me now?”

  “No.”

  “Why not? I can’t run now, you always know where I’ll be. I can’t even stand up straight unless you let me. Doesn’t that make you feel better?”

  “No.”

  “I wasn’t going anywhere, you know. You could have trusted me.”

  “I did.”

  “Yeah, up until the moment they arrested me for knocking on a friend’s door.”

  “I’ve just seen you and your friends work over a man you’ve got nothing against. You don’t know anything about him except that I think he’s guilty of something. And you knocked him to the ground. I heard what you were saying to him, and there are words for that. It’s called psychological torture. Or bullying, if you want to speak social worker. So don’t tell me that when push comes to shove you won’t fight for yourself tooth and nail like everyone else.”

  “I never did. You always say you expect people to fight it out, then act betrayed when they do. I never said anything. If he did it and I didn’t, I’m not going down for him.” He’s right. It’s normal to fight for your life and rip apart anything that gets in your way. It’s only trees that live off air and sunlight, we have to kill every time we want to eat. Animal or vegetable, we live off each other’s flesh. I think this every day. I ought to be used to it by now.

  I don’t move. “I guess I thought you were a nicer person than me.”

  “Well, I’m not.” He covers his cuffed wrist with his free hand, his arm covering him.

  “I can’t get you released, not yet.” Because he was wondering, he was worried that he might be destroying his chances, that if he said the right thing I might let him go. I should put him out of that misery, at least.

  “You could if you wanted.”

  “We can help each other.”

  Paul leans his head back, stares at the ceiling. “Fuck you,” he says. “Thanks a lot.”

  It hurts, badly, but it isn’t the end, he still cares enough to curse me. “You’ve got the makings of an interrogator, you know, Paul. You’re good at knowing how people work. You’re just used to using it to be nice. But we need information out of that man, or more of us are going to die, and I think you might be able to get it.”

  He shakes his head a little, mutters something.

  “If he confesses, you go free. They can’t hold you anymore.”

  “You can’t.” He stares at me. “You’d really keep me here to do your dirty work for you, wouldn’t you?”

  My hands twitch, and I press them between my knees. “I would.” It’s raining outside. Water clatters against the window. “I’m not asking you to do anything I wouldn’t do myself.”

  “Then you’re a bitch.”

  The word from Paul is a slap, but I can’t be weak. “If you like. I’ve spoken to my boss. He agreed with me, after I showed him the tape. They’re not going to interrogate you again.”

  “What?” Paul’s head comes up with a jolt.

  “I’ve called off the dogs. No more question sessions, no more beatings. And I was able to do that because of what you did to Harper. My boss agreed with me. He thinks you should be left alone. If you keep trying to get things out of him.”

  Paul blinks. I hear him inhale and his breath is shaky. He’s too smart not to know what this is, an exchange, a sell-your-soul deal. Take on the job of the torturers, do it to others and they’ll leave you alone. Be a devil instead of a damned soul. But I’ve just told him no one’s going to beat him anymore, that he can sleep at night knowing no one will come in and wake him and bang his head against the wall. After everything he’s been through, he’s going to be left alone.

  He turns his head away. He doesn’t want me to see tears in his eyes. It’s a measure of how much I’ve lost him.

  I wanted something normal. It’s out of my reach now, and all I can get is something crooked and dark, and finite. Once he’s out of here, he won’t accept these terms anymore. What I make him do to get him out will drive him away from me as soon as he steps out the door. I should give him up now, get used to being without him.

  I cross the room, lay my hand against his face to turn it toward me. “Hey—hey,” I whisper. His skin is pitted and fragile from too long without sunlight. He leans back against the wall, raises a hand to push me away, and I catch it, hold on.

  “Stop it.” His eyes are closed, he won’t look at me, but we’re pressed together and he doesn’t struggle. He’s had too many moments of sleep on bare tiles and hard-fisted interrogators and cold, floodlit nights, he’s too weakened to turn away comfort.

  “It’s okay.” I stroke my thumb across his face, wiping away the tear.

  “What have you done?” he says into my hair.

  “I’m sorry.” My eyes close, I lean against him, he’s gaunt and filthy and familiar. Our clasped hands fall to our sides and hang there, a pendulum pulling us down.

  I raise my mouth to his, and he flinches. “No
.” His head turns aside. “Not that easy.”

  “How easy do you want it to be?” We’re so close, less than an inch away from a kiss.

  He untangles his hand from mine and takes my shoulder, holds me away. “I don’t want to kiss you.”

  “Don’t you?” His hand is warm through my shirt. He could always hold back when I couldn’t. It was one of many advantages he had over me. The handcuffs chink against the bar.

  He pushes me back farther. “Not like this.”

  I open my mouth to say, you didn’t used to be conservative, but I stop myself. This isn’t a game. I’m asking him to destroy a man, and if he doesn’t want to seal the bargain with a kiss, we’ll have to find some other way. I turn around, walk quietly to my desk, sit down.

  “If you want to get anything out of this man, you’ll have to know what you’re looking for.” My voice has calmed. “If I give you the information, it’ll help you, you and the others.”

  Paul leans against the wall, trying to get his breath. I’m steadier than him. “You can’t bring them up here,” he says. It sounds almost like a plea.

  “No, you’ll have to pass it on to them. He’ll be there, too, but you can get around it. I’ve seen his records, he didn’t get much schooling when he was a kid. If you tell the others in, I don’t know, French, German, some other language, he won’t be able to understand you.” I don’t say it would match perfectly well with the way they’ve been treating him. “You do speak some other language, don’t you?”

  He doesn’t look at me. “Spanish. A little Albanian and Turkish, too, but the others don’t speak those. Or Croatian. I know some Croatian, Lewis knows some Russian, I might be able to get something across.”

  “I’m sure Spanish will do.”

  “Yeah.” He stands awkwardly, his manacled hand holding him down.

  “Okay.” The sound of my voice makes him shift a little, but there’s no good position he can stand in. “Cheer up,” I say. “You’re gonna get to hear all the stuff I never told you.”

  He doesn’t respond, and I lay my hands on the table. There’s a slight tremor in them, a seasickness.