The 14th Day

by K. C. Frederick

  Ila, he thinks, if you’d only have stayed with me an hour longer none of this would have happened. Yet even as the thought is taking shape he realizes that this isn’t what’s bothering him, that he’s evading something far more disturbing than tonight’s events. He puts his hand against the tree and pulls it across the rough bark, mimicking Ila’s gesture when she ran her fingers against his. He lifts his hand from the tree, he looks at it and lets it drop. In that palm and curved fingers he seems to read a truth he’s spent much of his time evading: that for all the excitement between himself and Ila, all the pleasure and satisfaction they take in each other’s company, neither of them loves the other. Ila and he feed each other’s hunger but when they’re apart they’re separate. Yes, he thinks, that’s the way it is, and for a moment he feels relief. He lifts his hand again, he looks at it. He’s able to breathe, to experience the world around him, conscious of nothing else. He touches the tree again and runs his hand along its rough bark, his finger tracing its wavering pattern. Then it all comes hurtling back, the emptiness he feels when Ila is gone.

  Jory is near despair. The events of the night have drained him. He realizes how frightened he’s become. What will I do? he asks himself and on the dark street where the cries of the basketball rioters are muffled by the thick-leaved trees, he thinks of Fotor. He wishes his countryman were here. For some days now he’s been carrying in his wallet the paper with the phone number of Fotor’s contact, as if it were some kind of talisman. Now it gives him some consolation to have done so. He takes out his wallet, removes the paper and looks at the numbers, trying to keep his hands under control. Did Fotor write this number, he wonders, and where?

  With a certitude and decisiveness that seem to rise up from the ground on which he’s standing, Jory knows he’s going to make the call—tonight—and the prospect heartens him irrationally. I just want to find out what this is all about, he tells himself; I want to find out if something’s really there. The idea has given him a sense of purpose and he walks back in the direction of the center of town where he finds an outdoor phone. The night’s tumult is already considerably quieter.

  He doesn’t allow himself any time to think about what he’s doing. He dials the number quickly, he listens to the ringing. Answer, he implores, running his fingers across the coiled metal wire, somebody answer. Don’t let this turn out to be nothing. The phone continues ringing. Just when he’s about to conclude that this is a practical joke of Fotor’s the ringing stops and a bass voice calls into the darkness. “Yes?”

  For a moment Jory is speechless: why did he call? At last, though, he recovers possession of himself, he’s able to explain who he is and how he got the number. It takes the person on the other end a while to assimilate the information but finally he asks, “Are you ready to go to the island then?”

  The question catches Jory by surprise. “No’” he answers quickly. “Not yet.” There’s another silence. “I just wanted to verify this number,” he says.

  “When you’re ready,” the voice tells him, “call this number again and get yourself here.” He identifies a section of the city, some thirty miles away. “I’m not going to give you the exact location until you decide to call,” he says. “You do that and we’ll take over from there.” Jory thanks the stranger and hangs up. There are isolated cries in the night, the last protesters fading away. Jory is still hearing the voice on the phone. The memory of that voice is unsettling, yet he feels better having made the call. He does have a contact, he’s not alone here. Yes, he realizes, it’s better to take action than to be acted upon. He’s ready now to return to his apartment. He prays for a dreamless sleep.

  And yet what sleep he manages to get is fitful. Throughout the night he keeps remembering his political period and Helani, the story he wouldn’t tell Ila. It was at the university that he first saw her at a table for one of the countless political organizations on campus. She was standing beneath a sign declaring her radical affinities—the letters of the sign were red, deliberately crude, and he was struck by the contrast between the shabbily aggressive rhetoric of the sign and the cool composure of the woman whose blue eyes met his with an air of confident welcome. Jory had never stopped at one of those tables before but now, without making any conscious decision, he was standing before her, absently thumbing through some of the group’s leaflets.

  When she greeted him he muttered something, vaguely expressing curiosity about the literature on the table. His lack of interest was transparent and the woman seemed to find it amusing. She was no great beauty—she was tall, strikingly tall and big-boned. Her face was handsome rather than beautiful, and there was a strength even in the way she allowed a smile to play on the corners of her mouth as she watched him. He’d already guessed that this was no woman of the people but someone who’d known privilege and was openly repudiating it. Determined at least to speak to her, he said something unmemorable. She waited a moment before responding. The clear hardness in her arctic blue eyes spoke not of anger but certitude. Later, when Jory tried to analyze his feelings toward Helani, he had to acknowledge that it was this last quality that attracted him: she had the passionate faith of a medieval saint.

  “Are you interested in our positions?” she asked. He was instantly compelled by her flat unmusical voice: the passion in it was audible even under the deliberate effort to suppress it.

  “I’m a student,” he said, “I’m interested in all sorts of things.” The faintest trace of a smile shadowed her lips once more and made him aware of how pompous his words sounded. “I’m interested,” he lied and then admitted, “I really don’t know anything about your group. I suppose I should find out.” She’d stepped closer, her hands rested on the folding table. Her wrists were quite large. She said nothing and for a moment she seemed to be lost in her thoughts. An unearthly distance entered her face and Jory looked at the repose of her large hands resting on the table. In their stillness they communicated the perfect peace of the true believer. It was then that he noticed the large ring she was wearing.

  “It’s Egyptian,” she told him though he hadn’t asked about it and her words made him feel suddenly lighter. He’d been used to doubts and hesitations, he weighed and considered motives and consequences on the papers he wrote in his history courses. But he learned to appreciate the simplicity of the story Helani told. She and her friends were fearless, they flung themselves into actions and demonstrations, they could make impassioned appeals from the steps of the library to crowds of passing strangers. Whether they were right or wrong in their assessment of the country’s problems, Jory told himself, there was an authority in their commitment that he respected. And yet respect was a pale word to describe what he felt for this woman.

  He got into the habit of greeting Helani when they met on the grounds of the university or on the streets of the town. He believed she respected him even though he kept his distance from the movement to which she was connected. When they talked, she’d outline her group’s position, seemingly confident that he’d come round eventually to accept their radical view of the world. One warm spring afternoon they met in the dining hall and talked together a long time. When the sun broke through the clouds, sending a bright band of light onto the wooden table where her hands were fixed in an emphatic gesture, Jory impulsively suggested they go for a boat ride on the lake. Surprisingly, she accepted.

  She was especially happy that day, he could see. He supposed later that it was because she’d just been taken into the group’s inner circle, which meant that she was being given responsibility for more than merely the fiery words Jory had by now come to accept as a kind of code. But he didn’t know anything about that then; he only knew she was happy. He and Helani went to one of the nearby city parks. There was a fringe of green on the trees that bordered the little lake on which he rowed a boat; there were birds that had returned from the north.

  It was beautiful, he remarked. But Helani, in the back of the boat, shook her head. “We can’t get distracted by natu
re,” she smiled sadly. “There’s so much injustice even though those birds are singing.” There were problems, she said for not the first time, that had been neglected for generations. There was the country’s class structure, still intact after all the shocks of our century. She talked about the miners in the south, the guest workers. As usual she was wearing the simplest of clothes, jeans and a work shirt, yet he thought she looked wonderful. He listened as he had many times before—this was, after all, a common topic. Yet that day there was a sudden urgency to what she said. “We have to keep attacking,” she told him. “We can’t let things go unchallenged.” Jory continued to row steadily, slowly. He didn’t feel the world was so bad. Certainly there were injustices but there had always been injustices. Things were improving, he told her. Even she’d have to admit that. “Those kinds of improvements can keep going on till the end of time,” she said “and still people will suffer. We have to hit hard,” she said, and her tone made him suddenly uneasy.

  “But,” he said, “doesn’t that just play into the hands of the men in the gray uniforms?” There were many people at that time who believed the men in gray, who’d become nuisances recently, would soon fade from public consciousness when the people got bored with them. Helani couldn’t keep the condescension entirely out of her voice when she answered. “Of course the men in gray will respond,” she said. “They’ll get stronger. They guarantee the questions we raise will stay before the public eye. The stronger they become, the more people will join our side. They’ll polarize the people and hasten the revolution.”

  Jory nodded noncommittally, though in truth he was troubled by the prospect of the men in gray hastening the revolution. Yet possibly in gratitude for her having gone boating with him, the next time he saw her at a table collecting money for further actions, he slipped her a small amount, only after checking to see if anyone was watching. It was more than he could afford and generous by student standards; it made him feel like a person of large gestures. Helani’s smile would have been reward enough. But she added, “My friend, I have the feeling you’ve just moved into an important stage of your evolution.”

  Only days later he heard the news traveling around the dining hall: there had been an explosion, Helani and an older man with criminal ties were killed making a bomb—God only knew where they’d intended to explode it. Worse still, in the flat above the one she’d been in two children and their nurse were also killed. Jory was stunned. He sat down at the nearest table and looked at the dark wood under his hand, the initials carved into the table. Was this a table he’d sat at with Helani? Once more he remembered the surge of confidence she communicated through her indefatigable certitude. He’d never been able to share that certitude but he’d appreciated it. And now it was gone, as she was.

  He didn’t know how he felt except that he felt awful. Contemplating the tangle of motives that had connected him to the dead woman, he had to admit he hadn’t even been honest with her. She was dead now and so was a man who was working with her as well as three innocent people. It was unreasonable to think the small amount of money he’d given her only days earlier could actually have been used to buy materials for the bomb that had killed five people, but on the other hand, it might have. He read every word in the newspapers about the death, including the fact that her Egyptian ring had been one of the means of identifying her. He read her name again and again in the black type, trying to conjure her large wrists, the elusive smile, her clear eyes. Hours after her death she was slipping further away from him.

  Jory went to her very proper funeral, saw her well-dressed parents, who were stunned with grief, saw the hearse move slowly away from the church, a trail of vapor following it as it began its slow progress through the drizzle to the family’s cemetery in an affluent quarter of the city. How she would have hated that ending, he knew. When he read about the march by the men in gray protesting the blast, identifying it as one more instance of the breakdown of civil order which they claimed the government was powerless to stop, a march that caused a predictable clash between the marchers and a group of student hecklers, Jory tried to find it amusing that Helani had been right at least about her actions provoking the men in gray.

  Yes, he would have to tell Ila if he told her this story, it was possible to believe that with the money he’d given to Helani’s group even someone as nonpolitical as himself had played a role in bringing about the events that separated him from his country.

  Vaniok quickens his steps when he sees Royall on the loading dock. Coming to work on the bus this morning, he heard people discussing the student rampage, he saw some of the damage. Now he’s eager to talk to someone about this remarkable event. “What happened last night?” he says with a little laugh when he comes up to Royall. He makes a gesture in the direction of the rioting. “I guess I slept through it.” As he says it, he realizes how comic it sounds: he can see himself in the middle of the tumult, dozing tranquilly in the doorway of a bookstore while all around him the street boils with chaos and destruction. Pleased with this image, he adds, “It must have been something to see.”

  Royall’s response surprises him. “God-damned punks. They should put the whole lot of them in jail.” His eyes are hard and stony, his words are bullets. Vaniok is at a loss for a reply, he’s not used to hearing this kind of language from his even-tempered supervisor. “Damned spoiled brats,” Royall spits out a postscript.

  Vaniok gropes for something to say. When he speaks at last it’s more tentatively. “What happened to the team last night—they were disappointed, I suppose.”

  “The team,” Royall snorts—the word sounds like an expletive—and Vaniok wishes he could think quickly enough to move to any other topic. Royall, though, isn’t interested in changing the subject. “Yeah,” he says, his eyes meeting Vaniok’s for a moment, “the team loses, go and wreck the town. That’s very intelligent.” His voice is full of scorn. “I suppose they call that higher education.”

  Vaniok feels accused, as if Royall is lumping him in with the students. Didn’t the man hear him say he was asleep when all this happened? But his tongue is tied, the language baffles him.

  Royall exhales loudly and looks into the distance, toward the center of town where the rioting took place. “Spoiled damned brats,” he repeats. “Who do you think is going to have to clean up after them?” He shakes his head. “I’ve got to get to work.” He turns away sharply and Vaniok watches his broad, stiff back. He feels as if he’s just been slapped in the face.

  He stands on the loading dock, his clenched fists jammed into his pockets. Damn it, damn it, he’s not responsible for what the students did. He takes a deep swallow of the morning air, holds it in his lungs as if reluctant to give it back and at last expels it with a sigh as he stands there looking at the gentle curve of the railroad tracks disappearing into the weeds. Take it easy, he tells himself. He can’t let these things upset him. Maybe Royall is having trouble with his family, after all. Vaniok doesn’t know anything about the man’s home life. He knows very little about his supervisor, in fact.

  The encounter leaves him wary, though, and he’s still on his guard when he goes to the room with the coffee machine. Edward and Parrish are there. Maybe they’ve already talked to Royall. Possibly they can shed some light on his mood this morning. “Hi,” he calls tentatively.

  “Hi, Van,” they answer without enthusiasm.

  “Looks like a good day,” he says.

  They mumble something in response, then turn away, resuming their conversation in low voices. It’s only after it’s happened and he’s on the other side of the room, a paper cup in his hand, that he realizes they turned from him an instant more quickly than they had to, their gestures making it clear that they weren’t expecting him to join in. As Vaniok pours himself coffee he tries to hear what they’re talking about: he can’t make out the words but from their expressions the two of them seem as angry as Royall was. Vaniok is puzzled. He can’t believe everybody’s upset just because they’ll hav
e to clean up some of the students’ destruction. How much of that would there be after all? he wants to ask them. And anyway, the day would have to be spent doing some kind of work, no easier than this. He takes an exploratory sip of his coffee, noting how the pair across the room have crammed themselves into a corner, their bodies tense, their voices pitched just beneath the threshold of his hearing. “See you,” he calls to them as he leaves and they nod without looking at him.

  Their behavior irritates him; worse, it frustrates him. He feels like a foolish child in a game of blindman’s buff whose playmates, after his eyes have been covered, have all slipped away, leaving him to grope in solitary darkness, looking for people who aren’t there. Something is simmering, something is going on this morning that he can’t figure out; these aren’t the men he’s used to working with. Royall, Edward, Parrish—something has made them angry and withdrawn. As if they’ve been betrayed, Vaniok thinks. Already he foresees a long day: nobody is going to be interested in talking to him about the basketball game. Or the riot. But there’s something more: he senses that whatever it is that concerns his fellow workers, they’re trying to exclude him. His suspicions are strengthened at the office where he picks up his work slip for the day and is greeted with the same kind of curt nods and grunts he got from Edward and Parrish. There are a few tight smiles, a remark or two, but nobody makes a move in his direction, they hold their ground, waiting for him to leave so that they can go back to talking to each other. More than ever, Vaniok is mystified about why the students’ actions should have caused so much bad feeling. As he leaves the office a voice rises behind him, an angry reference to the university’s president. Are they blaming him for the loss of the basketball game?