Tristan’s darkness was complete. He could not move. He could not talk with the speed he had once been able to. He slurred often, and occasionally he would mix up the word order of his sentences so that what came out sounded like a made up language from the triplets’ childhood. When this happened he would stop himself, take a deep breath, and speak one word at a time slowly until the sentence was correct. This sometimes took several minutes. He was also plagued by terrible migraines, more intense even than those suffered by his youngest brother Dominique. He couldn’t bear touch of any kind on his skin, and voices above a whisper set him moaning, moans he quickly clipped because they too induced pain. His brothers held on to the fact that he still possessed the capabilities of movement and speech, even if they caused him such pain that he said it felt like his brain was boiling.
For two weeks after waking up Tristan was inconsolable over his blindness. He locked himself away in a dark room in the basement of the hospital’s secluded Tournament wing and didn’t attempt to speak. He ate very little, drank sparingly, and didn’t bathe, preferring to wallow in his own filth and misery. He played the scenario over and over again in his head. How Black had outgunned them and outmaneuvered them, even in the chaotic nightclub. Not even the fact that he had dropped the indomitable Goran Brander consoled him. Blindness was the price he’d paid. Mazaryk’s vengeance was terrible. He was useless now as a striker, his life in the Tournament was over. His life as he knew it was over: a dreadful trade off.
With Tristan having sequestered himself from all contact, Dominique sat alone with Yves as he recovered. His brother’s swallowing was prolonged and painful, his hitching Adam’s apple looked like a rolling pin trying to smooth a stubborn piece of dough. He communicated only in grunts or single syllables and he often paused for long stretches. All the while he sat statue still so as not to inflame his lower back. With his jaw clenched against twinges of pain he looked like an actor playing a corpse on stage. Their conversations were rather one sided. For his part, Dominique would hold his aching head in his hands as he spoke to his brother, and wear his ever present aviators to protect himself from the light that often set off his hair-trigger migraines. Both wore medical gowns and ward slippers, although Dominique was the only brother who could shuffle about in them.
“It’s because they have no women on their team. I could talk to the women, confuse them,” Dominique said, to which Yves rolled his eyes.
Yves kept flashing back to Eddie Mazaryk and the furious look in his eye as he hovered over him, his small jaw clenched as he spoke through grated teeth, seconds before Ales had finished him: You think this is a game? he’d said. The blood tonight is on your hands! This after Mazaryk’s team gunned down at least eight innocent bystanders without a word. Their pain wouldn’t be on the level of the players, but they were no doubt hurting all the same. And Mazaryk had the gall to call his swath of destruction their fault?
“Insane...” Yves mumbled.
“Tristan? I don’t think he’s insane. He’s too busy puking and moaning to be insane,” Dominique asserted. “He won’t even take a drink. That’s what worries me. Tristan Noel refusing to touch a stiff drink. This has to be the longest stretch of sobriety he’s had since he was twelve.”
Yves would have shaken his head if he could. He wasn’t talking about Tristan; he was talking about Eddie Mazaryk. The man was crazy. His mouth and his gun had two totally different agendas.
There had to be something he could take from this disaster. His team would persevere. They had to. He wouldn’t allow himself to think in terms of total defeat. He would hunt down Mazaryk in time. He grew surer of this with every sucking breath and dribbled swallow.
So Mazaryk thought he didn’t take the Tournament seriously. No surprise: that’s what everyone thought. Not giving a fuck was something of a Silver trademark. How could he take it seriously? It was a big game. Yves had the vague notion that extraordinary things were wagered on every shootout, but the players were never told how much, or by whom. The Tournament was nothing more than the product of fabulously wealthy men and women who had been born in the wrong era and yearned for the days of the gladiator and the Coliseum. It didn’t deserve to be taken seriously. He owed them nothing. At first he fought only to maintain the extravagant lifestyle being a member of Silver afforded him. Over the years, though, he had grown to hate those he fought, Mazaryk especially. And the goddamn English. Who didn’t hate the goddamn English? But he still had no loyalty to the organization itself. He didn’t represent France... he represented himself.
He had the feeling, however, that something about the Noel philosophy didn’t sit well with Eddie Mazaryk and Black. It was hard to read Mazaryk, he was less like a man than he was like a dream of a man, here one minute and gone the next. His expression was transitory, as if changed by the very light surrounding him. That night at club Frieze Mazaryk had been genuinely angry. Three shots point blank to the gristle at the base of his brother’s skull made sure that they all understood just how angry he was.
Yves also knew that unbridled anger was a weakness, a loss of control. Perhaps, just perhaps, it was a chink in his armor. Tristan had shot Brander, after all. Even the big man was only human.
He would think on it. Lord knew he had the time.
————
Two weeks later, Tristan saw a light.
It was blurry at first, like a candle viewed through eyelashes, and it arrived by such slow degrees that he took notice of it only when it triggered a migraine, but sure enough, he was beginning to see the green electronic display of his monitoring system. It slowly gained in strength until Tristan was both ecstatic and crippled with nausea. Even what little light he could see was enough to make him vomit up everything he had within him. Doctors set him on an IV drip and left him alone, afraid to disrupt what they saw as nothing short of a modern miracle.
Tournament Medical determined that the concussive force of the shots, coupled with the trauma of his head striking the ground, had temporarily damaged the optic nerves behind both eyes. They had settled back into place in the ensuing week and were beginning to heal. The migraines, however, would remain intense for some time, and might resurface intermittently for the rest of his life. There was no record of any player taking three diode hits to the head from as closely as Tristan had. His case was the worst head trauma of the Tournament, and they would watch it carefully. Tristan imagined his migraines as a scaly monster lying in wait in the cold, dark depths of his brain, muddying its waters with oily effluence while waiting to surface.
Shortly after the incident itself, and well before Team Silver’s convalescence, Team Black and their administration were fined 50,000 Euros for damages to the club, over one and a half million Euros for medical damages to individuals outside of the organization, and an even half of a million Euros for what the collective administration deemed “severe and endangering offensive tactics.”
For administrative reasons, and for secrecy’s sake, the fine needed to be hand-delivered. Allen Lockton was dispatched to courier.
Chapter Twenty-Three
SARAH BLAMED THE WEATHER. November is the beginning of the rainy season in San Diego, and were she to go out she would have to wear a coat, or at least a sweatshirt, and Sarah hated coats and sweatshirts because she thought they made her look frumpy. And what was the point of going out to the bars all covered up? Her friends bought the weather excuse for a little while, but it never rains forever, even in November on the west coast.
The truth was Sarah just didn’t feel like doing anything. This was as much of a surprise to her as it was to her friends. When she did allow herself to be dragged to the bars at night, she wasn’t her usual self either. Where once she would have moved about from table to table, chatting with people here and there and forgetting to sign out her various tabs, now she would sit quietly in a corner and check her phone or sip slowly on the tiny straw of her gin and tonic, waiting patiently for her friends to finish up whatever they were doing.
When Sarah became the one to remind others to close out their tabs, her roommates knew something was wrong.
“I can’t believe you haven’t told either of us,” Annie said one night at a loud karaoke bar. Both Annie and Jessica had sequestered Sarah in a corner, refusing to let her up until she talked.
“Who is he, Sarah?” Jessica asked.
“Who is who?” replied Sarah, playing intently with her straw.
“We see how you look around each place just as you get in and then go sit in a corner and pout all night. Who is he?”
Jessica leaned in conspiratorially, “That bartender? The one with the sideburns? He only works on Tuesdays and Thursdays.”
“No. Not him.”
“Aha! But it is a boy!”
“No. I mean I’m not sure. I don’t even know him. So it’s weird that I think about him like this.” Sarah bunched her sandy blond hair up into a controlled mess behind her head as she spoke. It didn’t matter how it looked anymore. He wasn’t here.
“Aww, it’s love!” Annie squeaked, hands together and blinking up to the ceiling.
“No. I’d just like to see him again. It’s been a while.”
“How long? Did you sleep with him? What’s his name?”
“Nothing like that. I’ve just seen him a few times, around campus.”
“His name! His name!”
“John. John Northern.”
“John Northern? Sounds like a porn star!”
Both roommates cackled, lit up by the idea of Sarah Walcott, the Grande Dame of their flat, smitten with serious feelings for anyone. Sarah rolled her eyes. Playing the sober one was new. She didn’t much like it. Usually she did the drunken cackling.
“What year is he?” asked Jessica, steadying herself.
“You do of course realize that it is our duty to help you in every way we can. It’s a roommate code,” said Annie.
“I don’t think he goes to school,” Sarah said.
This threw the girls, who arched their eyebrows and took a few sips in thought. It certainly wasn’t uncommon to date outside of the school. San Diego was huge, after all, but neither of them had ever done it.
“Is he older? Like a rich older guy?”
“No. He looks mid-twenties,” Sarah said, flashing back to when they had met off of Gillman that night in October, when he had seemed like he was expecting her.
I believe I was told to stay away from you, he’d said.
Did she like this guy? Really like him? It had been a long time since she’d had a crush on anyone, ever.
“And anyway, it’s probably nothing. Like I said, I haven’t seen him in weeks,” she added.
“Sarah, you dress to kill then sit in a corner and put on a sweatshirt when you see he’s not here. Look—somebody bought you a drink and you haven’t even touched it. It’s clearly not nothing.”
And they were right. Sarah knew it when she asked her father about him at their monthly meal. Her mom seemed surprised. Her dad had stopped eating altogether. Sarah had never voluntarily brought up a boy as the topic of conversation in the past. It led to uncomfortable questions.
Sarah loved her parents, but they were... her parents. It disconcerted her that they were getting older, her father in particular. He would go through periods in which he looked terrible. In the interims between dinners, time seemed to physically beat upon him. His normally combed and parted gray hair was sometimes frazzled, and his whole face would sag just a bit. He was beginning to hunch too, and at his age once you started to hunch you never went back to straight again. Both of her parents were becoming frail, just like her grandparents before them, and this terrified Sarah. She was increasingly aware that they were going to die one day. It could come at any time and she would be left alone.
And then she thought again of John Northern.
She wondered if he had aging parents or dying grandparents who kept trying to give him old lamps and strange china. She couldn’t picture them. Here was a man that breathed life, a man who seemed to walk above it all. In her mind he owed nobody anything and was prone to nothing. He was everything that her family was not. At times her father seemed a flickering and guttering candle. John Northern was a bed of coal, ready to flare at the slightest breath of wind. That her father had told her to stay away from him only served to show how different the two of them were.
So she would keep looking for him. He’d said he had to go away for a time. In typically alluring fashion, he hadn’t offered a hint of where he was going. But he had said he’d be back.
So Sarah sipped her gin and tonic and waited.
Chapter Twenty-Four
LOST WITHIN THE CROWDED outskirts of Mexico City there was a dusty public park, still unnamed, that rested in the center of the Santa Anna housing development. It was a simple, square block of land, mostly dirt, but flecked here and there by scrub bushes and floundering young trees. It was newly renovated and still recovering from the crushing weight of bulldozers and backhoes. It lay in an area that a onetime mayor of the city had set aside as part of a “greening” campaign. The idea was to spare any new developments the same fate as many others in the inner city. There the housing was stacked and squeezed, additional units of stained concrete tacked on to already precariously overpopulated zones. The campaign was ill fated and underfunded, as were most developed by the local government, but in the Santa Anna development there was at least still some room to breathe.
The Vega family had always wanted to move from their cramped, inner city flat out to a place with more space, a place to accommodate a growing family. Miguel Vega, Diego’s older brother and business partner in Vega lawn services, was particularly adamant about this. He was claustrophobic and not fond of the city in the first place. Their first child, a small and frail boy named after his father, was prone to lung infections, and Miguel blamed the city air. When his wife Maria became pregnant with their second child he insisted that they move out to where the air was clearer and the water better. It would be good for Miguel Jr., he said, and nothing would interfere with the health of his wife and the growth of his child still in the womb.
And so the Vega family moved. With the business as collateral, Miguel secured a modest home loan. This, paired with a small but healthy savings, was enough for a down payment on a small ranch style house of four rooms, with two bathrooms and a porch. For Miguel and Maria Vega it was a palace. They had a room of their own, one for Diego, and even a spare room that they agreed to rent to Luis, at a family discount of course. As soon as Diego saw the house he immediately went out and bought a rocking chair for the porch. He declared that he wouldn’t even need the room, and if anyone wanted him they need look no further than his chair.
The Vega brothers and their family had lived in Santa Anna for almost two years now, in which Maria gave birth to a baby girl, now just over a year old. The constitution of Miguel Jr. was also improved, and although Miguel was convinced it was due to the new surroundings, Maria secretly thought that he had just grown out of whatever childhood malady was ailing him. He was now a rambunctious seven years old, and he knew the nooks and crannies of their neighborhood like the back of his often dirty and occasionally scraped hands. He had his uncle’s coarse hair and ten-gallon smile, and his father’s narrow face and sharp nose. He was also tall for his age, like his father. Miguel was fond of telling him how he would easily overlook his uncle Diego by the time he was a teenager.
On this day, Miguel Jr. was going out to the park of which his father was so proud, the park where several young children met almost every night to carouse, especially now that the temperature had moderated. He opened the whitewashed front door of the Vega household and was about to bound down the cinder block steps when he froze, his hand on the screen. There were two white people just down the street, standing together and looking about at the houses as if they were lost. One was on a phone, the type of phone his papa and uncle Diego had, that you could take anywhere. If they were lost, he could help. He kn
ew everything about the park, even where his neighbor Martin had buried a shiny metal square that said BOBCAT on it and had a picture of a tiger. Martin had made him promise not to look while he buried it, but he had looked anyway.
Then, as Miguel Jr. watched, a big black man came out of a car nearby and stood next to the other two. The man was very black. Blacker than he was. Blacker than Uncle Diego even. He looked from the black man to the other two, torn as to what to do. The nice looking man on the phone was pointing at a house nearby and talking at the same time. The man shook his head and seemed sad, or mad. Maybe both. What if they were neighbors? They sure didn’t look like neighbors, but mama had told him to always help neighbors. Maybe he could just go out and call at them. See if they were okay. Maybe it was their BOBCAT treasure Martin had found.
Then the man on the phone looked directly at Miguel Jr. and stopped talking. Maybe he smiled, but Miguel Jr. was suddenly shy and so he jumped back inside and slammed the door shut and called for his mama before he could see for sure.
“MAMA! There are people outside!”
Maria was in her bedroom wiping down the shutters, amazed by the dust’s persistence as she moved about the fixtures, maneuvering her full figure in between the light stand and the window. The door to the master bedroom was never open, the windows were always closed, and still the dust came. But she’d take the dust of the Santa Anna developments over the grime of inner Mexico City any day.
“MAMA!” Miguel Jr. called again.
Maria shook her head and pushed back her long black hair, repositioning a clip here and there. What did that boy want now?
“I’m coming, I’m coming,” she said. She gave the window bordering one last wipe and went to see her son.
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