by Susan Choi
Frazer knew her, though not well. She hadn’t yet hooked up with his old friend Tom Milner back when Frazer lived here; she had been a girl of some contiguous circle, sometimes at big parties, usually piously listening to somebody play the guitar. He had slept with her once, but nothing beyond the historical fact of the encounter remained with him. When she’d called it had taken some time before he’d realized who she was.
“Is this your apartment?” he asked.
“God, no. Tom’s turtle-sitting. It belongs to some guy from his job.”
“Wow. Very nice.”
She nodded, and then said, as if her thoughts were on delay, “Sort of gross.”
“I wouldn’t mind. This guy’s far away, right?”
“I think he’s in China or something.”
“How’d Tom get such fancy friends?”
“They’re not really friends,” she said defensively.
“I’m just kidding around, Sandy.” Wow. Was she tense. “Is Tom here?”
“He’s getting lunch for them.”
“And where are they?” He was bouncing on the balls of his feet, tense himself now, preparing.
“Okay, um.” She’d blanched a little. “You ready?”
Past the fish tank the vast living room gave onto a corridor hung with nicely framed photos of distant-looking locales, and a few of those long, skinny vertical pieces of paper with Chinese calligraphy on them. This might have been the first time his mind—disordered and overwhelmed as it had been by the density of the past day’s events, by Sandy’s telephone call and the all-night discussion with Carol and the scramble to get his disguise and the rush to the airport—had focused on Jenny. Until now he had given no thought to what exactly he would do with these people. Once he and Carol had agreed to get involved things had been too swift to focus on details. Now Jenny, always resident in some chamber of his brain but for the past few years forcibly exiled to those most remote, floated effortlessly and inevitably forward and he understood that one significant problem was solved. He would entrust the day-to-day contact to Jenny. She wasn’t merely the only person he could trust in this way, she was the best he could imagine. He would just have to find her. More focused now than before, he made himself set Jenny aside for the moment and shifted his thoughts back to what lay before him. One door along the hallway was ajar, revealing another cool, dim room with a free-weight setup and a luxe sheepskin rug on the floor. He caught a glimpse of a large photo of a white man posing importantly in karate pajamas, and allowed himself one more brief thought of Jenny. That would have amused her. Another door opened onto the bathroom, and then there was a door at the end of the hall that was closed. Sandy knocked very lightly on it, in what he recognized as some kind of code, and after a long moment during which a miniature rugby match seemed to have erupted inside the room, the door opened a crack and Sandy leaned in and whispered, “That guy I talked about, Frazer, is here.” The door shut again, then reopened, and Sandy nodded at Frazer and stepped aside to let him in, without following. He heard the door close behind him.
It was so dark in this room that the gray twilight he had left behind in the hallway blazed like noon in his vision and at first he couldn’t see anything. There was only the smell, a pungent sex-and-locker-room smell overlaid by fathoms of stale cigarette smoke, and the overwhelmingly motionless heat. The windows were shut, though outside was a blazing summer day. As his eyes started adjusting he could see that the blinds were down and that blankets had been tacked up as well, so that he only knew that some fraction of natural light must have penetrated the room from his awareness that the blankets were brown. And from his ability, now, to make out the room’s contents. This room must have been the smallest apart from the bathroom in the entire apartment, and while the rest of the apartment exuded a vibe of Zenlike order and calm, in here was a rampaging mess. There were empty wine jugs and soda-pop cans and straw wrappers and sticky paper cups and balls of cellophane and grease-stained sacks and other food-speckled pieces of garbage all over the floor, intermixed with used tissues and ripe-smelling articles of clothing and bedding. The mattresses, probably dragged here from some other room, were propped up bunker-style against the windows, and it didn’t look as if come nightfall they got pulled down and slept on. Whatever sleeping was done here was done on the floor. At thirty-one Frazer was suddenly aware of how young younger people seemed to him. Twenty-year-olds, when he’d been in his late twenties, had seemed almost like peers; now they seemed to him like children. Spooked, false-bravado-burdened children. These were staring up at him like three wild near-fledglings disturbed in their nest. They were stiffly seated Indian-style on the floor in a little half-moon, an arrangement he guessed had been the source of the rugby-match noise, and they had stuff in their laps and on their shoulders, weighty, cumbersome-looking stuff that he belatedly identified as ammunition bandoliers and large guns. Two machine guns and one singlebarrel shotgun, with the barrel sawed off. “Whoa,” he said, without stopping to think. His eyes had started running from the smoke; whatever drugs he might have sampled in youth before getting hooked on the great drug of exercise, he’d never been able to smoke cigarettes. They made his heart race in an uneven, scary way. His heart was racing now. “I’m not armed,” he said, willing his hands to remain at his sides, though they wanted to float upwards, palms out.
Even through watering eyes he could see them clearly now: the married couple who called themselves Yvonne and Juan, Yvonne blond and wild, Juan short and compact, with small round glasses and huge hair, a huge beard. And Pauline—the girl they had kidnapped. Pauline was the one with the shotgun. “Have a seat,” Juan said, nodding curtly at the floor. Frazer got himself onto the floor, wobbling unaccountably, perhaps from the heat. Pauline was seated to the left, Juan—who clearly meant for Frazer to negotiate solely with him—to the right. Yvonne was seated in the middle, looking sullen, as if she didn’t like Juan doing all of the talking. She was startlingly dimpled—Frazer saw them when she tightened her mouth. A sprinkling of freckles on the bridge of her nose. But it was Pauline Frazer kept stealing looks at. She was tinier than he’d realized she’d be from her pictures; she didn’t seem much more than twice as tall as her gun. And she was prettier, too, in a way that brought Frazer in mind of pale, solemn women in long sweeping gowns gazing out from the dusk of old oil paintings. Although now she had circles dark as bruises under her eyes, and like the other two was so evidently food- and light-deprived as to have turned slightly green. Frazer realized they all might be sick. He wished he’d thought to bring vitamins.
After a beat of awkward silence he said, in the way he’d rehearsed to himself, “I’m saddened and angered by the deaths of your comrades. They were murdered, but they died fighting for what they believed in. I’ve felt for you, the past several days. I was happy when I learned I could help you.”
His speech seemed to startle and disorder them completely—he had his vision of the fledglings again. They widened their eyes, swallowed, and glanced frantically at each other. Pauline’s head dropped forward so that he couldn’t see her face anymore.
“Um, thanks,” Juan managed. “We appreciate your sympathy and—feeling for us. And for our comrades. They were our friends and our comrades and we will avenge them.” He seemed to have located his desired rhetoric again. “Their deaths will be avenged, bullet for bullet. Have no doubt about that.”
“It took the pigs five thousand four hundred bullets,” Yvonne said suddenly. “They said so in the paper. That’s six hundred bullets per person.”
“I know,” Frazer said. “It was insane, disproportionate slaughter. Those cops had such blood lust—”
“They needed so many bullets because our comrades were fighting so hard,” Yvonne interrupted.
“Would you shut the fuck up?” Juan said, elbowing her, so that his gun, which he had cradled in his arms, jumped with his movement. “I’m doing the talking.”
“Hey,” Frazer said nervously.
Juan
didn’t seem bothered. “Now we’re under siege, like our comrades,” he said. “We need to know what you’ll do to help us.”
If at any moment in the past twenty hours, perhaps while gazing out the window of the plane, mesmerized by the unfolding of the continent, Frazer had possessed the quietude to form an expectation of his encounter with these people—to imagine, say, that his plan for helping them would be greeted with immediate enthusiastic gratitude—he now learned his expectation had been wrong. The three fugitives were affronted, in their triadic way, from the instant he opened his mouth. He began at the beginning, with his idea for moving them East, having assumed they’d be desperate to leave the West Coast. Though he hurried to explain about the idea he’d had for a book, and the money it would make them, and all the revolutions, or perhaps expatriations to sympathetic foreign lands, it could buy them, their attention was already gone. At the mention of East they’d gone wide-eyed again, and Yvonne and Pauline had begun poking Juan.
“. . . wouldn’t just be some money-making venture for you but more importantly a way to get your message out, tell your side of the story, especially now—” was what Frazer was saying when Juan finally broke in.
“We can’t leave California!” Juan said. “Is that what you’re saying?”
Frazer blinked at him carefully. “I know it seems risky. The airports are all being watched, and bus stations and stuff, and your pictures are everywhere. But I have a plan—”
“No, no, no! I mean, we can’t leave California. We—we’re at war. This is our battleground. Our comrades died here, and this is the terrain we know, and a soldier sticks to terrain that he knows, we can’t just take off, are you crazy? We can’t! No! Jesus!” Juan jumped up, gripping his gun—he was short but he was powerful, Frazer realized. He seemed to have jumped to his feet without the aid of his hands, simply shot straight up into the air. This was when Frazer had seen that, in spite of their obvious fractiousness, the trio could chime. They had a single gaze trained on him now: defiant, distrustful, and even, in Pauline’s case, contemptuous. Frazer felt, within the horrible general heat of the room, a specific plume of heat emitting from his scalp.
“You know,” he said, “I don’t know about you, but when most people commit what’s considered a crime in a certain—terrain, and then events keep confirming they’re still in that terrain, even as recently as last week, such that thousands of FBI agents are crawling all over the terrain day and night looking for them, maybe even finding and killing a bunch of their friends in the process, they move. They move to new terrain!”
“So you’re saying it’s our fault our comrades got killed?” Yvonne cried.
“No! I’m saying you’re in danger of getting caught or killed too, serious danger, especially here. You’d be safer almost anywhere else. In the East you could lay low a while, marshal your resources, live to fight another day. Unless you’re interested in dying a martyr’s death, in which case you should just walk out onto Telegraph Avenue and wave your guns around and I’ll go home and save myself a lot of trouble and a lot of money, if you don’t mind me mentioning money.”
Frazer could see Yvonne’s dimples—from the tight mouth, not a smile—again. Juan was shifting from foot to foot edgily. Pauline had started worrying a clump of her hair, staring into her lap. After a moment Juan said, with a significant look at Yvonne and Pauline, as if trying to recover their moment of union, “You’re right if you’re saying we need money. Money’s an evil and we don’t seek it for ourselves. But we need it. We can’t survive otherwise.”
“I understand that. And that’s why you need to come East—to survive. Leaving California doesn’t mean giving up. It’s a strategic move to ensure you don’t have to give up. I mean, look at you! Stuck in this tiny room, without light, without space to stretch out and breathe, eating—” he gestured around at the scatter of take-out-food garbage. “If you come East with me, I can guarantee you a place where you can breathe and relax and think clearly and plan your next move. And where you can, if we play our cards right, replenish your funds.”
“Doing what?”
He was careful to not show impatience. “What I said. Writing a book. About your views, why you’ve done what you’ve done, like in your communiques, but longer—” Juan was grimacing.
“I don’t know,” Juan said. “A book seems so, I don’t know.”
“Bourgeois,” Yvonne said.
“But it’s another way of waging war. A war of words. And it would help you make money.”
“I prefer manifestos. I mean, Mao wrote a book. Definitely. It just seems like, in this country books are such shit.”
“I agree,” Frazer said. “Though I think that’s even more reason—”
“It’s enough to have to think about going away. It’s true that our struggle is an international one. We’re in solidarity with freedom fighters all over the world. We should be able to be anywhere. But California’s the place where our comrades got killed.” Juan sat back down and they all became blank-eyed and silent.
After what he felt was a lengthy, compassionate pause Frazer said, “At least will you think about it? The money you’ll make will be worth it. And until it comes through I’ll support you myself.”
“Why?” Yvonne said.
“Because I’m on your side,” Frazer said, meaning it. And that was when Yvonne smiled at him, dimples and all.
They batted more questions at him. How would they get there? In cars . . . Whose cars? Those of various friends . . . What kinds of cars? A Lincoln, an Olds—but the tone was shifting, from one of challenge to one of anxious curiosity. They asked about things he hadn’t even thought of—How many nights would they be on the road? Which roads would they take?—and in response to these questions he simply made up answers. Because he could see, now, that the more authoritative he acted, the more they took to him. At one point Juan said, “If we decide to do this book, will we have to type it out? Because I can type, but these two are useless.” To which he responded, as Pauline and Yvonne hotly broke in that they were not useless, “Are you kidding? This is a professional setup I’m getting you. You’ll have a transcriber, a ghostwriter, whatever you want. That’s standard.” And again, he had noticed that his authority seemed to draw them toward him. But they hadn’t yet decided—they would have to hold council in private.
After a while a tiny knock came at the door—it might have been repeating itself for several minutes without having been heard, because they had finally thought to ask what he, Frazer, did, and he had started telling them about racism in professional sports, and they’d seemed interested, and he’d been speaking with great animation.
The knock was Tom, with their lunch and a new jug of wine. “Hey man,” Tom said to Frazer, ducking his head in greeting. “Long time no see.”Tom seemed nervous, which surprised Frazer now. He himself felt terrific.
The three fugitives dove for the wine, raking up sticky, stained cups off the floor. With not quite as much interest they unwrapped the food, although Frazer noticed Juan open a hamburger, squint closely at its surface, then close it and hand it to Pauline. “Maybe you’ll have a chance to come to a decision after you’ve eaten,” he suggested, and they all nodded, without another glance at him. Frazer let himself out.
He found Tom and Sandy back in the living room, slowly eating from a sack of their own. They turned their two gazes toward Frazer with what seemed like reluctance, as if Frazer were a surgeon coming out of the O.R. to give the bad news to the family. “So this is pretty surreal,” he said cheerfully.
They kept looking at him in the same defeated, dread-filled way until Tom said, like a man with a concussion, “Are you getting them out of here?”
“That’s up to them,” Frazer said. “I hope so.”
“Oh, man,” Tom said, with what Frazer recognized, even through Tom’s stupefied tone, as real feeling. “I need them out of here now. My friend’s back in a couple of days.”
“Stop worrying. Why’d you call
me if you wanted to keep worrying?”
In response to this Tom and Sandy stared at Frazer not only as if they hadn’t known him for years, hadn’t moved in the same large, loose, yet loyal and right-thinking circle as he had, hadn’t viewed him as someone of rare capability, but as if they hadn’t even met him before. Then they went back to eating their lunch.
“What’s the special thing about Pauline’s burger?” Frazer asked, after a minute.
“Huh?” Tom frowned at him.
Frazer grinned. “Pauline,” he said, making quote marks in the air with his fingers. “What’s the special way she likes her burger?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, man.”
“The burgers you got them. Jesus, Tom. Were they supposed to have certain toppings or something?”
“Uh, no. I mean, yeah. One was supposed to be plain. No ketchup or pickle or anything. Pauline doesn’t like toppings.”
“Blech.” Frazer made a face involuntarily.
Tom shrugged. “They hardly eat anyway. They just taste stuff and toss it aside.”
A few more moments passed with no sign from the room down the hall and no conversation in the room where Frazer stood. He strolled along the walls, looking unhurriedly at the aquarium, the pictures and calligraphy scrolls. “This guy’s into Oriental stuff,” he commented to Tom.
“He’s a karate instructor,” Tom said. “He’s in Japan or something right now, but he’s coming back. Soon.”
“White-guy karate instructor, huh? Jenny would get a big kick out of that.” Frazer took a beat to chuckle reminiscently. “What about her, anyway? You heard from her lately?”