Liberty

by Andrea Portes

  Something is starting to happen where my chest isn’t working to bring in air, and now I’m trying harder to bring that air in and that’s just making it worse. I used to have this growing up. I’d just start hyperventilating when something was bothering me. Half the time I wouldn’t know what it was. My mom would have to talk me off the cliff.

  “Breathe, Paige. Just take a deep breath. There. There. In through your nose, out through your mouth. Good. Now again.”

  She’d stay with me.

  “Okay, let’s try counting to ten with this. I’ll count. Ten deep breaths. Here we go . . .”

  When I was five my parents got this picture book that showed you how to “Name it. Tame it. Reframe it.” They read it to me a couple of times and then afterward the three of us discussed it. We talked about times something had bothered us and what was really the matter and helpful ways to think about it.

  This is how conscientious they were and how they taught me: with patience.

  With kindness.

  And I miss them.

  11

  Tonight is the spring step sing, which is basically the spring version of Lantern Night. I know. I’ll get to it . . .

  So, Bryn Mawr has, essentially, a lot of traditions. When folks get accepted, part of the jumping for joy is the traditions.

  The biggest, most impressive of these, is Lantern Night. Where all the freshmen get a wrought-iron lantern the specific color for their class. You are not allowed to lose your lantern. No one ever loses their lantern. Losing your lantern would be like losing your engagement ring. Or your diploma. Or your dog.

  Now, my class color is red, which is all right with me because it means I can sing “Put on the red light” while holding up my lantern. That is from a song called “Roxanne,” by the Police. My mom was a fan. Which means she played them all the time, before losing the record, CD, MP3 player, or whatever else it is possible to lose. As discussed: my mom, really good at losing things.

  So . . . the fall Lantern Night is the big shebang. Everybody has to go to the cloisters and, under cover of night, sing all sorts of Latin songs that it is a requirement to learn. “Dona Nobis Pacem” is always on the list. But the spring step sing is when we all take our lanterns and, once again, sit on the gray stone steps in the Gothic quad and sing our respective school songs.

  I know what you’re thinking.

  You can’t believe I’m doing this. This goofy Hogwarts shit.

  Look, I don’t blame you. I know it sounds silly.

  The thing is . . . it’s actually really beautiful with the hundreds of lanterns flickering and the moon coming out over Clock Tower. And the chorus of Latin and Greek songs, sometimes in a round.

  Right now, they are singing “Pallas Athena.” Actually, we are.

  It sort of starts as a romp and then goes into these dulcet tones, almost like a lullaby.

  Pallas Athena thea,

  Mate mato kai sthenou,

  Se par he meie I man

  Hie ru sou sai soi deine.

  Pallas Athena thea,

  Mathe mastos kai stenous,

  Se par he meie I man

  Now comes the slow part:

  Hie ru sou sai soi deine.

  This part here, this last part, is the heartbreaker:

  Akoue, Akoue.

  That last part, practically a lullaby.

  Pallas Athena, goddess of learning and strength,

  We come to worship you, dread goddess.

  Bless us we pray; give us wisdom.

  Be with us always. Blessed goddess, hear!

  Sanctify our lanterns now, to shine forever clearly,

  Lighting the way, making bright the dark.

  As I’m looking around me at the sea of red, green, light and dark blue lanterns and the black silhouette of the trees against the cobalt blue sky . . . the song somehow travels up through my body in a process of emotional osmosis and, out of nowhere, my face is covered in tears. A river of tears as the song turns into the most gentle lullaby. No one next to me seems to notice. But maybe it’s happening to them, too. Maybe we are each in the middle of our own personal revelation, our moment of surrender to all of the things we squelch down during the day. All the things we cover with paperwork and to-do lists and Post-its.

  Athena won’t let us do that this evening. Somehow she beckons and insists.

  I want to cover my face, or disappear, but the only thing I can do is keep singing and letting the sounds of “Pallas Athena” reach down under all the defenses and fly my soul up through the branches and beyond the trees, all the way past the constellations, not even looking back at the moon.

  12

  Royce Hall, aka the dean’s lair, doesn’t look like the rest of the campus. It’s not gray Gothic architecture with spires and gargoyles like everything else around here. It’s a Colonial white house with black shutters and a red door for pizzazz. Apparently, there used to be a farm here, and this was the main house. I don’t see a barn anywhere, so I guess they leveled that. Too bad—a barn could have made a pretty cool art studio. Maybe with vaulted ceilings and skylights everywhere. The kind of place you could put a pottery wheel.

  The bright-red door to Royce Hall is ajar, and I poke my head in. Lots of books and folders everywhere and layers of dust. Dust through the air in a triangle, coming in through the sunlit window. No people. No one. Not even a receptionist.

  I walk up the narrow staircase, the steps creaking under me, to the second-story landing. Across the hall is the door for the dean’s office, also ajar.

  The dean turns to look at me and motions me in. She’s wearing a pencil skirt, her hair in a bun, sensible heels.

  As I walk in, she sits down behind her mahogany desk and offers me a seat in a forest-green patterned wingback chair.

  It’s not until I sit down that I realize the other chair is occupied.

  By the sociopath from LexCorp.

  13

  “You have GOT to be kidding me.”

  Normally, I would swear, but, let’s be honest, this is the dean.

  Madden stays quiet, respectful, lets the dean take the lead.

  “Ms. Nolan. Paige. I wanted you to make the acquaintance of a colleague of mine. Madden Carter.”

  I look over at the sociopath. He’s not as smug as he should be, considering.

  “Um, yes, we’ve met. Briefly.”

  “Right. Well, Madden and I go way back, to Exeter actually, and he assures me he has important business with you.”

  “Business?”

  “Yes. Business.”

  This is too weird. I can’t even look at this guy. All of a sudden I feel like I’m in that movie with the devil baby where everyone in the building turns out to be in cahoots.

  “Anyway, I’ll leave you two to discuss things in private.”

  She nods to Madden, then to me, before walking out and leaving me totally alone with him, here in our respective green snooty chairs. Not cool. I mean, probably not even legal. I am seventeen! In loco parentis and all of that?

  “Okay, I know this is a bit extreme, but I cannot keep chasing you all around Timbuktu and having you run away each time. I am not a psycho. I am not stalking you. I assure you.”

  “I am tentatively but hesitantly listening. Out of respect for the dean.”

  “Okay. Allow me to explain. We are very interested in you. In your talent.”

  “Talent?”

  “Talent’s not exactly the right word. Ability.”

  “Wait. Who, exactly, is this ‘we’? You and your pimp friends?”

  “Pimp . . . ? No. We, in this case, are a government intelligence-gathering agency.”

  “Ha! Right. Like what, the CIA?”

  “No, we are not the CIA. And I am not joking.”

  “Ah, so you’re FBI.”

  “Actually, no.”

  “Okay, well, I don’t really believe you, so you might as well tell me who you are—or, in this case, who you are pretending to be.”

  “RAIT
H.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “An operational intelligence organization. Reconnaissance and Intelligence AuTHority. R.A.I.T.H.”

  “That acronym totally makes no sense.”

  He shrugs. “I wasn’t in charge of branding.”

  “RAITH. So I suppose its mission is to travel through the fires of Mordor and retrieve a magical yet corrupting ring?”

  “Come again?”

  “RAITH. That is a Lord of the Rings reference.”

  “Never saw it.”

  “Now I know you’re a psycho. And the correct answer is never read it. As in, I have never read the entire J. R. R. Tolkien Lord of the Rings series and then avidly gone to see the films with initial excitement and then, through the years, a bit of disappointment.”

  “Okay, I have neither read the Lord of the Rings books nor seen the films.”

  “One more question.”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you a robot?”

  “Very amusing.”

  “I just can’t believe you’ve never seen or read The Lord of the Rings unless you’re a cyborg. Which is okay, by the way. I, too, plan on either downloading my consciousness onto a non-carbon-based life-form or injecting nanobots into my brain so that I’ll be able to manifest superintelligence and ultimate cyberconnectivity. That is, if the singularity is actually a positive thing, in the more optimistic Ray Kurzweil version of the world. However, there is always the possibility that the rise of artificial intelligence will go a little more the way Stephen Hawking predicted, where humanity will be in such a rush to master artificial intelligence that no one will stop to actually program the AI not to harm us, i.e., that won’t be a fundamental, seminal part of their code, so that when AI inevitably reaches superintelligence, we will all be wiped out as the superintelligent AI realizes we are a hindrance to whatever random programming goal the AI might have been given. Like being the most efficient letter-writing robot, or something equally banal.”

  Madden is just looking at me now.

  “And you’re asking me if I’m the robot?”

  “Well, it is worth contemplating. Since it involves the possibility of an extinction event.”

  “This rebel-without-a-cause act . . .”

  “How do you know it’s an act?”

  “That’s essentially what I’m asking.”

  “Am I a true rebel, is that your question? Welp, I was just broken up with by a Parisian for being too American. Whatever that means.”

  “So . . . let me get this straight . . . having your own opinion and always questioning the world around you, having the freedom to criticize your country and continually striving to make the world a better place . . . you don’t think that’s part of being an Ameri—”

  “Depends on who you’re criticizing. What about JSOC? What about KBR?”

  “It’s people like you who ask these questions that make this country what it is.”

  “Now you’re just flattering me. You want something. Clearly.”

  “Yes, we do. We want you, Paige. We want you to join.”

  “Your specter league of fake intelligence?”

  “Yes. Except it’s not fake.”

  “So I’d be working for the government?”

  “Yes.”

  I turn to him. “How do I know you’re not just some lunatic with delusional disorder? You know this is the kind of thing people walk across the street talking to themselves about, right? Top secret government agencies that ooooo nobody knows about ’cause of their ooooo double triple secret mission and ramble ramble ramble.”

  “Understandable, your doubt.”

  He takes out his phone and scrolls to a picture of him standing there next to the president. It’s an incredibly stellar fake.

  “Yeah, I use Photoshop, too. If you like, I can show you a picture of Jesus and me surfing.”

  Madden rolls his eyes, looks back at his phone, and dials.

  “Would you like to speak to her? The president, I mean. She went to a Seven Sisters college, too, you know.”

  I can hear the phone dialing and then a click, and an unmistakable voice on the other end says, “Madden?” Before I know it, I lunge, disconnecting the call.

  “You just hung up on the leader of the free world.”

  He dials the number back, off speaker, and appears to make some chitchat. Some apologies.

  I barely hear any of it because suddenly the floor around us is spinning and the molding on the walls is a crisscross of bars on a kind of ivy-covered carnival ride.

  He hangs up. “Told her it was a butt dial. She was very understanding.”

  I blink. “Let me get this straight. You are telling me that the government wants to recruit me for some black ops–type, probably illegal mission and that you just said the word butt to the actual president of the United States?”

  “I am.”

  “You want me to work for the government. The same government that I tried to contact over and over about my parents for the past two years and have not heard back from once, not one time, except for the initial cursory so-sorry-your-parents-are-lost, the-politics-in-the-region-are-complicated, so-sorry-we-don’t-negotiate-with-terrorists, oh-well phone call . . .”

  I don’t tell him the part about lying in bed awake at night for six weeks straight, bawling, sweating, screaming into my pillow, waiting to hear back from someone, anyone, always a different person, always a different department, about whether my parents were alive or dead, where they may or may not have been, whether they could get them back or whether they would try to get them back. I don’t tell him about the maddening uncertainty, realizing I am alone in the world and desperately clinging to my sheets, feeling like I am capsizing, a teetering, puzzled pawn in a maze on a sinking bureaucratic ship.

  “. . . That same government?!”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, dearest fake spy boss, I would rather peel my skin off and feed it to the Tea Party.”

  And with that I stand up. I will march out over those creaky floors, down that too-thin staircase, out the bright-red door, and into the sunset.

  Whatever that sociopath was talking about, I want nothing to do with it. Nothing to do with him, nothing to do with secret made-up shadow organizations, nothing to do with shilling for the government.

  That government abandoned my parents.

  That government left them for dead.

  Of course, when I get to the door, it’s locked.

  “Okay, seriously, what the fuck?”

  14

  “Why is this door locked, and where is the black-ops helicopter to spirit me away to Guantanamo Bay, where I will receive no due process but might possibly write a bestselling tell-all novel?”

  “Sorry, that was a fluke. Here.”

  Madden lets me out and shrugs, innocent.

  “Okay, for the record, I do not believe for an instant that was some wacky mishap. But fine. See you in the Matrix or whatever.”

  He waves me out. “No hijinks. You’re free to go.”

  Except . . .

  I don’t even make it to the green by the time he catches up with me. Rhoads dorm has a gray stone arch in the middle of it, almost like a gate to the rest of the campus. And it’s under this arch that everything changes.

  “Paige, stop. Just listen to me.”

  “Jesus. Seriously? You’re, like, obsessed. Just leave me alone.”

  He stops.

  “Paige, there’s something you should know. But I can’t tell you if you keep running away.”

  I’m looking at him now and sizing him up. He’s calm. Relieved. Kind of like a guy who has just shown his cards.

  The campus center café is a dorky place, but there’s something about it I find soothing. It’s steps away from my dorm, so it’s my main source of caffeine. And study breaks. And procrastination. It’s an airy place with high ceilings and pale birch booths. It is supposed to be calming.

  Madden is sitting across from me in the booth. Luck
ily, there’s practically no one in here, so the great possibility of me bawling my face off is slightly remedied.

  Now in front of me, on the table, they start to come. First, their passport photos. My mother. My father. Both of them looking just a little younger than when I last saw them. My dad, in an olive-green button-down with epaulets. My mom, with a scarf. Now this. This next picture. Grainier. A black-and-white picture taken from far away.

  And the wind is knocked out of me.

  It’s some kind of camp. Some kind of enclosure. There’s a yard, pale, filled with dust, a large fence around it. Near the corner of the yard, as if just arrived, stand two figures, one taller, one slight. In front of them two men are turned to each other, having what looks like an argument. Even though their faces are blindfolded and their hands are tied, I know it. I know this is them. My mother and father. Standing there. In this horrible place.

  There it is. My chest. Unable to breathe. The air just sitting there in the room, but not for me. Impossible.

  Madden looks at me, concerned.

  “Breathe, okay? Just listen to me.”

  I try to slow down, take my eyes off the photograph.

  “Five of us were assigned,” he says. “Most of us were young, new. It didn’t bother me, our inexperience. We had good intelligence. We knew where they were. We were sent to extricate them.”

  These words, these words are falling down and some of them are landing, some of them are landing in my head, some are going straight to my heart, others to the bottom of my belly. What to do with these words? What am I supposed to do with these words?

  “We trained in a mocked-up model of the site. Kind of like a movie set, built based on satellite images. We planned for everything.”

  And now I’m looking down at five files. Each one has a photograph in the corner. Each one in their dress blues, an official photograph, light-blue background, flag in the back—red, white, and blue.

  “Except our Seahawk taking fire from antiaircraft launchers seized from the Iraqis. Our helicopter crashed.”

  And now I’m looking at a picture of four caskets, draped in the flag, a cargo plane in the background.

  And now it hits me.