The 14th Day

by K. C. Frederick

  Thinking of Zita as she starts her car, Ila smiles, warmed by the thought of her friend’s optimism. She’s confident that she can find that kind of success if she wants to. She can almost convince herself she’s on her way to those real estate classes now. Yet at the very time she’s thinking about her friend she’s remembering Stipa, who was brought back so powerfully by Miss Lorraine.

  Stipa was always dressed conservatively, which made older people like him, especially people at the bank where he worked, and he voted unashamedly for the Heritage party, as most of the leading bankers did. But when he had political discussions with Ila, whose loyalties were with the Progressives, his defense of Heritage was hardly that of a zealot. “No,” he’d say, “they weren’t ordained by God to save us from chaos—they’re hardly saviors.” He’d laugh quietly. “I vote for them knowing they’re scoundrels because they reflect all our qualities, good and bad. The same legislators who find it perfectly valid to make improvements on their summer homes with public funds, the ones who appoint their in-laws to fat jobs, can sometimes surprise us with their bravery and odd moments of integrity. This is just like our people: all through our history we’ve had enlightened lawgivers who sprang up in the wake of tyrants, mad kings competing with saints for the souls of their people, warriors who became monks and holy women who faced down barbarian invaders. I find it refreshing when a group doesn’t claim purity.”

  And, she was quick to ask, speaking of those who saw themselves as saviors, what about the men in gray? To which he’d answer that the country had seen their like before and it could survive them.

  Stipa, Stipa, she wants to say, all the while you posed as a cynic and you were the most idealistic of all.

  Already Ila is back in the university town, amid familiar scenes. Passing the thickly shaded campus, she feels again the excitement that’s come to her recently, she recognizes that her life is now being lived in this other country, where there’s no Heritage party, no men in gray and no Stipa. There’s a sadness that comes with this realization but she left Miss Lorraine’s feeling that the future is hers to shape. Ila is determined she isn’t going to wait for things to happen, she knows she’s going to act. There’s no question, something’s going to happen and Ila accepts the consequences. The thought excites her, she feels exactly as she did when she awakened from her dream of the ocean. That was only a foretaste, she realizes. There’s a real ocean and there’s no reason she can’t go there.

  Jory sits among the plants and tools in the back of the truck. From here he can see Carl’s broad shoulders, sunburned neck and prominent ears framed within the cab’s window; without even looking at him, the big man is able to communicate his disapproval. Jory turns away with a flush of resentment: Carl is a fool, a small-minded man who probably couldn’t find the homeland on a map. It’s no surprise that he strikes out at someone he doesn’t understand. Would he be more hospitable if Jory learned to prattle about basketball with him? Blessedly, the engine starts up. When the truck pulls away, rakes and shovels clatter, an earthy smell rises from the bushes bound with twine, their roots encased in burlap. As the engine shudders into gear, vibrations pass into Jory’s back through the cool metal; the ride settles into an even pace. He watches the landscape move by, absently running his finger across the hard, pointed tines of a rake, his earlier feelings already subsiding. It’s taken only a few moments of the truck’s steady, jittering progress to calm him, to allow him to think more clearly.

  Because, he’s beginning to realize, it isn’t really Carl he’s upset about. Carl is stupid and narrow-minded but he isn’t worth the trouble, he isn’t the problem. Jory glances toward the cab: this time the sight of the man brings no reaction. Still, there is something that’s bothering him: it’s that message from Fotor that Jory can’t put behind him. Reaching out like that, all the way from his island, Fotor is the demon at the bottom of the lake who teasingly brushes the swimmer’s leg. Jory doesn’t want to follow that thought, though. He lets his mind go blank for a few moments before he catches a glimpse of the university’s arboretum, a green rectangle bounded by a low stone wall. He walked through it not long ago—it might have been that day after he got Fotor’s message, when he was so upset. And still, he remembers, he told himself this town was going to be his last place of exile. He smiles at the memory. He was hopeful then; he’s determined to be hopeful once more. What’s happening now has nothing to do with either Carl or Fotor. It’s his life, after all.

  The truck climbs a hill, stone dormitories slide by. His earlier discomfort is only a faint, bitter aftertaste; out here in the sunshine it’s easy to feel better about things. Yes, he assures himself, I can still make choices, I’m not trapped. Really, there’s no reason to be upset by Fotor, who’s an amusing man in his own detached way. It would be just like him to send that emissary of his as a kind of joke. And from Fotor’s point of view, giving him that phone number might be considered a thoughtful gesture. In case of emergency, the man who gave him the number said. As Fotor and Jory have good reason to know, emergencies can never be discounted. No, he shouldn’t be upset by his countryman’s action, he ought to be grateful. It must mean something, after all, that he didn’t tear up the paper with the phone number but has kept it all this while.

  Once more he remembers the face of his fellow exile, the little smile that always played about the corners of his mouth. There were times when Jory was convinced the man had the moral vision of a lizard but he was pleasant company, and he had a brain. In that country to the north Fotor took an interest in Jory; he was always trying to make a convert of him. Chameleon that he was, he found his countryman’s dedication to the homeland droll. “You can’t really believe that a sane man would agree to hold his breath until those thugs who are running things there are finally sent packing,” he’d say. Then he’d gesture with the bottle and refill Jory’s glass. “Oh, they’ll be gone eventually but as the nuns used to say about the end of the world, only God knows when it will happen.” He’d laugh to himself. “I’ve heard people say that God has a sense of humor. That may be, but I’ve never been able to understand his sense of timing.” Fotor’s little performances would go through several stages, the least welcome for Jory being the one near the end when the man was quite far into his cups, or pretended to be. His voice would take on a wavering quality that made Jory think of a signal on a shortwave radio coming from an enormous distance, at times barely audible, then all at once strikingly clear. “You and I,” he’d declare, “we aren’t all that different.” This pronouncement would be accompanied by a halting motion of the hands, his head moving in unison, as if he were conducting a complex and mournful piece of music, perhaps for the first time. “Neither of us really believes in anything,” he’d insist. “You’re just trying to convince yourself otherwise.” He’d fall silent for a time, his head lowered so that Jory might hope the liquor had got to him at last; and then, without looking up, he’d say, “You can make a vocation out of your exile.”

  But usually Fotor was less dramatic. More likely he’d be urging Jory to action. The man was constantly on the make, bartering for clothes, a car, language lessons, he watched TV attentively, quickly learning the local expressions. “We have to move on,” he’d say. “The clock doesn’t stop. You too, Jory, you should prepare for a career here, or somewhere. It can be done. We don’t have to work at these kinds of jobs all the time. These are jobs for animals.” Jory could only shake his head. Of course, he knew all that. Still, there was another side to the question. Once we start to make those kinds of accommodations to our circumstances, he tried to tell Fotor, we start to surrender. Didn’t he know that to the people who passed them in the street they were shadows that could disappear the moment a cloud covered the sun? You couldn’t accept that; only if you refused to see yourself as a shadow was it possible to go on. All of them from the homeland—he, Fotor, the rest of them—were part of a continuing story, a story that had to be remembered, kept alive.

  Fotor would smi
le his bison’s smile. “Of course,” he’d say, “of course,” his eyes directed elsewhere, as if he were calculating sums, which may very well have been what he was doing. In the end Fotor, with all his contacts, had managed to find the perfect place for himself, a warm green island where he was going to be in charge of a concession. “The government is very corrupt there,” he said gleefully as he made plans for his departure. “There are unlimited opportunities. From one store I’ll soon have two, then many. All you have to do is write me when I’m there and I’ll see to it that they let you in.”

  Here in the truck, Jory can imagine Fotor’s island, the little store with a roof of thatch where he sells souvenirs and cold drinks, the back office where he works out more important deals of one sort or another in places hundreds of miles away. Outside, the fierce heat is broken occasionally by pounding rains. There’s blue water, miles of untracked yellow sand, a rudimentary sun, as simple as a child’s drawing. The place Jory conjures up is starkly empty and yet for a few seconds, listening to the truck’s steady drone, he lets himself contemplate the prospect of living on that island.

  He can imagine himself there with Fotor, the two of them facing each other across a rattan table, cool drinks beside them. Would Jory finally ask him the question he hadn’t been able to bring himself to ask in the last place they were together: “What happened to that man I knocked down? Did I kill him?” Palm fronds would hiss, Fotor would stare back unblinking. “I mean,” Jory would pursue quietly, trying to make it seem like some unimportant matter he wanted to clear up, “I’d just like to know.” Meaning Am I completely in your power or do you even know yourself whether I killed that man? “Really,” Jory would press, his voice rising just a little, “I’m curious, that’s all.” At last Fotor might pick up his glass and take a sip of his drink. After he put it down he’d shrug. “Come on,” he’d say reassuringly, “what difference does it make? You don’t owe me anything.” On that elemental island where the two of them were dust motes on a smooth expanse of glass, would Fotor continue to insist that underneath everything they weren’t all that different? “No,” Jory’s lips make a silent answer to his countryman’s assertion. As the tremor of the truck’s downshifting passes through his body, he’s returned to the present. He has things to do here; he has no time to think about Fotor’s island.

  In a few minutes this truck and another one are at the Life Sciences building, a newly-completed white cube perched atop a hill of bare red clay. There Jory and his fellow workers unload the greenery while some of them begin digging holes and others fill wheelbarrows with loam or carry bags of peat and fertilizer to the site. When the holes have been dug they carefully put the plants into the ground, first pulling away the burlap sacks, then cutting the twine that binds the shrubbery. They fill in the earth around the plants, add peat moss and pellets of fertilizer, then rake the area and water the bushes and small trees, placing a layer of cedar chips around some of them. Muscles strain, backs are wet, breath comes quickly, but in time a ring of dark green rises from the red clay, encircling the white cube.

  Jory pats the cool loam with his ungloved hand. So he’s a gardener now. The uncle for whom he was named would have found that amusing. The large, red-faced bachelor lawyer with the thick mustache lived in one of the densely settled suburbs of the capital, but he wore tweeds and affected a curved pipe and a walking stick like a country squire. Whenever Jory came to visit they’d have to go first to his uncle’s garden, where they’d walk solemnly among the growing things, stopping at certain points to admire. “There’s nothing like the fragrance of a tea rose,” the older man would exclaim, bending toward the plant, his eyes shut as if he were intending to bestow the softest of kisses on the damp petals. After the stroll among the flowers they’d repair to the dark-paneled study for serious talks about life. A bottle of whiskey would be set beside one of the decoys that was likely to be on the desk and the two of them would sit in silence while the older man sucked on his pipe, finally sending up a haze of blue smoke that veiled the hunting prints on the wall. “Now,” he’d declare enthusiastically, leaning forward with the anticipation of an archaeologist about to open a long-buried cask. “Now we’ll talk. Yes?”

  What they invariably talked about was the younger man’s future plans. As both of them knew, Jory’s father made no secret of his disappointment that his only child had chosen to work in a library. “It isn’t a profession,” his father told him more than once, pushing his glasses up on his nose, “it’s just a way of not having to make up your mind about something more definite.” Though Jory would never admit it openly, there was more than a little truth to this guess about his motives. But if he didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life, he was certain what he didn’t want to do: he had no intention of following his father’s path into government service. He wasn’t going to crawl up the same kind of bureaucratic ladder like a trained chimp, stopping for applause each time he reached another of the rungs labeled with a Roman numeral. Uncle Jory had no great love for library work either. He had his own, not very secret agenda for his nephew: that he would eventually go into the law. “There’s no better place to explore than in a library,” he’d insist, confident of how that exploration would turn out. How little either of the brothers understood about him.

  Both men were reacting to the catastrophe that had shaped their lives, the plane crash in which their parents were killed when Jory’s own father, the oldest child, was nineteen. The young man took over the leadership of the family of four boys as if he’d been preparing all his life for this responsibility. A tall, grave youth, he was determined to preside over an orderly world that couldn’t be disrupted by accidents like the one that had so precipitously turned him into an adult. It was no surprise that he would gain a reputation for steadiness in his job with the government. His brother, younger by a year, took a different lesson from his parents’ tragedy. The estate the older man had left turned out, after many legal battles, to be much smaller than anyone had imagined. Though accusations were made that their father’s business accounts were hopelessly scrambled, which was the charitable view, or deceptively inflated, which was the more common, the younger brother was convinced that the family had been cheated out of a large share of its money by sharp lawyers acting for an unscrupulous partner. Now he had a mission: to become a lawyer himself in order to ensure that others wouldn’t be taken advantage of in the same way. Yet as a lawyer, Uncle Jory’s successes came from finding tax advantages for wealthy clients rather than from righting the wrongs of the oppressed. Occasionally, during one of his serious talks about life when he’d had too much to drink, he spoke dolefully of himself as a failure and it was clear then that he hoped his nephew would follow the path from which he’d strayed.

  His uncle, his father—they had lives. Whether successes or failures, they were lives. While he has what? Once more he thinks of Fotor, who had a way of getting under the surface. What would he say about Jory’s present situation? You’re terrified, Jory. Don’t try to deny it. What happened to you up north, why did you snap toward the end? Was it that you lost the heart to keep going on? The voice would be soft, even gentle, with no accusatory edge, just a man who was curious, asking questions. Didn’t you even feel a sense of relief for a moment, he’d go on, at the thought of going to prison, ending this pointless existence of waiting? He’d pause for a while, as if expecting an answer, then he’d go on. And what is it like here, now that you’ve left that place, your name itself changed? Hasn’t it become harder to keep up your personal religion of hope and memory? Doesn’t your being a fugitive allow you still another distraction? Aren’t you sometimes tempted by the idea that you’ll simply disappear?

  No, Jory answers, no. You have it all wrong.

  “Hey, Jory, we’ve got to get this job done today.” It’s Carl, of course, who’s caught him the one moment he’s stopped to catch his breath.

  “O.K.,” he answers with a jerk of the head. Ox, Jory says to himself, keep your eye on y
our own work. As if he doesn’t get at least as much done by the end of the day as the other man does. He breathes deeply, calming himself. Better to block Carl out of his mind and keep within the tunnel of his work.

  He pushes a wheelbarrow of freshly-turned earth up a slight incline. He remembers the pleasantly harsh smell of his uncle’s tobacco, which vividly brings back those long afternoons in his study: the decoys, the whiskey, the hunting prints—he even remembers fondly the roses he was asked to admire. Carefully, he maneuvers the wheelbarrow to the place where the bushes have been planted; he lifts it and the thick, moist earth slides out, some clumps adhering to the blue metal even after he’s shaken the wheelbarrow several times. How would he have resolved the questions about his career if he’d have been allowed to stay in the homeland? Though they would no longer be the same kind of questions since the people with the greatest interest in the answers are dead now. Once again these thoughts have brought him to a feeling of emptiness. The family’s story—the brothers’ rivalry, their parents’ sudden death, countless things that came before—it could all end with him, here in this alien place. Kneeling before the mound of earth, he pats it with his hands gently, like a man searching for something he’s lost.

  “Jory,” Carl yells. “We need that wheelbarrow over here.”

  He rises and starts toward the wheelbarrow but stops in mid-stride, thinking I will not come instantly when you call. He stands beside the wheelbarrow, his hands hanging free, and the bright warm day swims around him. So different from that other, colder place, and still he remembers a similar moment, his breath frosting, his hand bleeding, a man lying in the snow beneath him. Time stopped for an instant then and Jory accepted everything that might happen to him, prepared for whatever followed. Even though that moment passed after a few beats of his heart and the world began to totter and sway once more, Jory remembers the tranquility of that gap in time. Now, as the memory fades, he takes a deliberate step toward the wheelbarrow. When I’m ready.