by John Case
In the end, it didn’t really matter. There was a war on, and not just the war in Iraq. As Wilson saw it, the real war had not started until that very morning. It began the second he walked out of Allenwood a free man.
But there was another way to look at it, too. In a sense, the war was as old as the Ghost Dance – older, even.
So there wasn’t any point in meeting with the government to talk about Jack Wilson’s future. He didn’t have one.
And neither did it.
Three
HE COULDN’T SLEEP
The thing was, he didn’t know what they’d ask him to do. All he knew was that a lot of people were going to get wet. Otherwise, what was the point? Still …
The night slowly drained toward dawn. At some point, he fell into a light, fitful sleep, the kind that leaves you tired. When he woke up, it seemed to Wilson that he’d just dozed off – and that it was now morning. But a glance at the clock told him it was noon.
He took a quick shower, called room service, and dressed quickly, putting on the clothes he’d bought the night before. Breakfast arrived on a trolley, looking like an African village on wheels, its chafing dishes gleaming like so many silvered huts. Bacon and eggs, toast and hash browns. Orange juice and coffee.
wait in room dont go out
He nibbled on a slice of raisin toast. It was all he could stomach. Except for the coffee. He drank a pot of it, slowly pacing from one end of the room to the other, saucer in one hand, cup in the other. Seeing the remote, he picked it up and, without thinking, touched the On button, then just as quickly snapped it off as a wave of applause hit him in the face.
Regis and Kelly. (Twelve to one.) He might as well have been looking at his watch.
In China, people could smell the time of day. There were coils of incense made with spices and herbs, and as the incense burned, the fragrance changed. Sandalwood, frankincense, lavender, patchouli. A procession of scents marked the hours.
The same thing was true in prison, except that instead of incense, there was television. A cascade of laugh tracks, sound tracks, and quiz shows created a background hum of ambient noise. After a while, you didn’t need a watch to tell the time. You could hear it.
Except in Supermax.
Supermax was different. He’d spent four years in the Feds’ Administrative Maximum Prison in Colorado, locked down twenty-three hours a day the first two years. And it was like doing Supertime. He lay on a concrete bunk in a concrete cage, watching a twelve-inch black-and-white monitor. The monitor was embedded in the wall, and permanently tuned to “spiritual programming” and lectures on anger management. High up on the wall, a four-by-forty-eight slit of a window offered a view of the sky. Fluorescent lights burned day and night.
Most days, the guards took you in shackles to a bigger cell that had a chin-up bar. This was the exercise room, and it was yours alone for an hour a day. The strange thing was, he looked forward to going there because, every so often, he’d cross paths with another prisoner. That crazy-looking English guy, the one with the bombs in his shoes, was one. And the Unabomber – Ted Kaczynski – he was another.
Seeing Kaczynski gave him hope that when they moved him from Level 1 to Level 2, there’d be someone to talk to. But it took him two years to make that trip and, in the end, Wilson never saw him again. Too bad. Because the two of them – they thought alike in a lot of ways.
wait in room don’t go out
With a growl, Wilson dropped into a chair beside a bank of windows overlooking the atrium. Eight stories below, the lobby was steeped in the false twilight that bad weather brings.
He waited. Watched. Dozed, thinking, What if it’s a setup? What then? What if – A soft knock rattled the door.
It took him by surprise because he hadn’t seen Bo enter the hotel, hadn’t seen him cross the lobby floor. Lifting himself from the chair, Wilson went to the door and pulled it open, only to be surprised a second time. No Bo. No friends of Bo. Just a young Latino guy standing beside a luggage trolley. On the trolley: a pair of suitcases, cocooned in shrink-wrap.
“I guess you’ve been waiting for these,” the bellman said.
Wilson blinked, did his best to conceal his surprise. Said, “Yeah. Yeah, I have!”
“Okay if I put them in the corner?”
“Yeah, sure. Wherever.”
The kid lifted the bags by their straps and, one at a time, stacked them on the luggage caddy next to the armoire with the TV and minibar. Wilson fumbled in his pockets for change, found a ten-dollar bill, and handed it to him.
“Hey, thanks!” the kid said. “You need something, you ask for Roberto, okay?”
When the door closed, Wilson sat down on the edge of the bed and stared at the suitcases. They were carry-ons – black Travelpros with retractable handles and inline wheels. Nice suitcases. And not particularly light. You could tell by the way the kid carried them, shoulders hunched and elbows tight against his sides. They probably weighed twenty pounds each.
He took a deep breath. This is it, he thought. The rest of my life. Shrink-wrapped. Crossing the room to the computer, he logged on to the Yahoo! address that he’d visited the night before, and clicked on the Draft folder. The connection was slow. It seemed as if the page would never load, but when it did, he found a single message with the Subject and To lines left blank.
Good meeting with contacs. You and me, we show good faith, they get it together for us. Okay? This means (you ready? here goes)
Remove shrinkwrap.
Do NOT pull out handels. Do not!
Take to terminel at Dulles.
Now, pull out handels.
Walk away.
You have 10 minutes.
I am in hourly parking lot 6 to 6:30.
Look for Jeep in Row 15.
No show? I go. But then you have a problem.
Hope not.
Wilson parsed the words with a deepening frown. No question, the message was authentic. Draft mode was exquisitely private, and even though the words were unenciphered, he and Bo had agreed on a convention to authenticate the messages between them. The first sentence of every communiqué would contain four words. No more, no less. It was prehistorically simple, but it worked well enough.
Falling back in the chair, he raised his eyes to the ceiling. One target ought to be enough, he told himself. One person ought to be plenty. An undersecretary of something or other, or just a derelict. In fact, a derelict would be perfect because there wouldn’t be any publicity – and it would still make the point. Anything bigger was stupid. Anything bigger was overkill.
The more he thought about it, the more upset he became. How would he get away? Not just from the airport, but … all the way away? The feds would be looking all over the place. Unless … unless it was “a suicide bombing.”
Wilson thought about that. You have 10 minutes. Would he? Would he really? And what about Bo? Look for Jeep in Row 15. Okay. He’d look. But what if there was no Jeep?
The room felt uncomfortably warm. A bead of sweat zigzagged down his spine. His heart was revving like a motorcycle at a stoplight.
Get a grip.
The words fell from his lips in a whisper. “You have to make this work,” he said. Then he took a deep breath and, leaning forward, erased the message from Bo, letter by letter. When the box was empty, he typed
Please don’t be late.
and sat back, thinking, I’m gonna need things. Gloves. And a hat …
He thought a while longer.
And a sling …
Four
IT’S ONE SAD story after another, Wilson thought, riding in a cab out to the airport. And you have to get past that because, after a while, the stories no longer matter. The faces no longer matter. All that’s left is the event. It’s like …
The Arizona! No one thinks about the sailors, burning, drowning, dying in their bunks. Or the good volk of Dresden, incinerated from the air. The streets of Hiroshima, the trading desk at Cantor Fitzgerald – the dead ar
e everywhere. So you can call it whatever you want. You can call it an atrocity. But in the end it always comes down to the same thing. It’s History.
And as for the dead, no one remembers their names. But Manson and Mohammed Atta – they’re a part of us now, as familiar as the dark. The truth is, after a while the shock fades and even a massacre artist like Cortéz is celebrated as a hero. A bringer of culture, a great explorer. Prometheus, drenched in blood.
The past softens. What begins as a massacre is packaged as news and consumed as “infotainment.” Eventually, it turns into a television mini series.
But not this time. This time, there won’t be any reenactments. Or any news, for that matter. Just the event. Then nothing. The idea made him smile.
No one remembers the yellow ribbons and teddy bears, he told himself. The snapshots and handwritten notes – artifacts that appear out of nowhere, like mushrooms after a soaking rain. All forgotten. In the end, the walls and floors are washed down with hoses. The abattoir turns into a memorial. Tourists gawk.
Like when that English princess died in France. He was in Colorado at the time, locked down as a Level 1 prisoner in Supermax. But there was a program about it on one of the godsquad shows. People stood in the rain for hours, waiting to sign some kind of “book of remembrance,” at her funeral. He wondered about it for a long time. What did they get out of it? Eventually, he decided they wanted a piece of her death, a piece of her celebrity.
“You need a receipt?” the cabdriver asked.
Wilson snapped out of it. “No, that’s okay.” He took a deep breath. Put on the hat.
He had to remind himself, because he almost never wore a hat. But this was different. This was it, and there were cameras all over the place. So he clapped the Borsalino on his head, pushed open the door to the cab, and stepped out into the slush.
A light snow whirled through the air.
Flight crews and passengers were coming and going with suitcases, carry-ons, and kids. Good, Wilson thought. It’s busy. “Busy” is good. “Busy” is what they want. “Busy” is the whole point.
Moving quickly around to the back of the car, Wilson waited as the driver popped the trunk, then he stepped forward. “I’ll get them,” he said.
Seeing his passenger’s arm in a sling, the driver looked surprised, but figured what-the-hell.
Wilson reached into the trunk and, using his “good” arm, hauled the suitcases out by their carrying straps.
“You want a skycap?”
Wilson shook his head. “That’s okay,” he said, handing the driver a couple of twenties and a ten.
He was standing by the curb with his overcoat draped across his shoulders like a cape. A chenille scarf hung from his neck, which served also as a fulcrum for the silk sling in which his left arm was hung. Taxis, cars, and vans pulled in and out around him, disgorging passengers under the “Departures” sign. A few yards away, a young white cop strolled along the middle of the road, slapping the roofs of idling cars, chiding everyone to “Keep it moving! Let’s go!”
The temperature was just below freezing. Wilson could see his breath tumbling in the air as he stood in the slush, staring at the suitcases. Pull them out. Pull the handles out. But …
The cop was looking at him.
What the fuck, Wilson thought and, reaching down, jerked the handle up from the suitcase, half expecting a thunderclap of light and fire. Nothing. He pulled out the second handle. Nothing again! With a sigh of relief, he shot the cuff on his right arm and checked the watch he’d bought for the occasion.
This was not the kind of watch that complements a cashmere overcoat. It was, instead, an inexpensive digital sportswatch with a plastic band the color of graphite. Set to TIMER, it read 10:00:00. Pressing the button at the base of the watch, the one marked START, Wilson watched the numbers begin to morph, forming and re-forming. 9 minutes, 54 seconds … 9 minutes, 51 seconds … 9 minutes –
Looking up, Wilson swung his head from left to right, and caught the eye of a skycap. The man hurried over.
“Where to?”
“B-A.”
“You got it!”
A thin black man with flashing eyes and perfect teeth, the skycap bent to his task, depressing the handles into the suitcases. Then he swung each of the bags onto a cart and turned to go. “First class, right?”
Wilson faked a chuckle, but his heart wasn’t in it. “I wish,” he said. His voice sounded hollow, even to himself. A soft guffaw from the skycap as the man leaned into his cart, and pushed off toward the automatic doors. Then a whoosh of air, a burst of noise, and they were in the terminal, engulfed by the chaos of the place. The skycap nodded toward a line of passengers that serpentined inside a maze of ropes, curling back and forth in front of the ticket agents’ counter.
“You could be here awhile.”
Wilson shrugged.
“I’ll put these up front,” the skycap told him. “That way you won’t have to kick ’em through the line.”
Wilson fumbled a five-dollar bill from his pocket, thanked the man for his help, and joined the winding queue in front of the British Airways counter. There were fifty or sixty people ahead of him, bored and impatient, tired even before their trip began. With their luggage and carry-ons, they looked like refugees. Wilson watched as the skycap made his way to the front of the line, where he stopped and dragged the suitcases from the cart, using both hands. Then he called out something to one of the ticket agents, and nodded in Wilson’s direction. The agent looked up, saw the sling, and nodded.
Wilson’s shirt was damp with sweat, which gave him a chill, but his face was flushed and hot. His stomach was waltzing in his gut and, worst of all, a moiré pattern was beginning to form in the corner of his right eye, a silver flutter that amounted to a hole in his peripheral vision. Soon, he knew, the glitter would spread from one eye to the other, and then he’d be blind. Or almost blind. Bedazzled, in any case.
Like a dance troupe, the people in front of him lifted their suitcases. Stepped forward. Stopped. Set their bags down, and fell back in conversation.
The first time it happened, when he was nineteen or twenty, Wilson didn’t know what it was, or what to do. He’d been scared to death. Thought he had a brain tumor. Thought he was going blind for real. But no. They gave him a CAT scan at the hospital, and the results were normal. The doctor called it an ophthalmic migraine, a rare condition that seemed to be stress-related. There wasn’t much in the literature about it, but they thought it had something to do with intelligence, because the only people who “expressed” a migraine in quite that way were “off the charts.”
So the eye thing wasn’t a problem, really. Just an inconvenience. And the trade-off was that, while he ended up with a migraine, it didn’t hurt. And it wouldn’t last long. Half an hour at most, and only a couple of times a year. Often enough that by now Wilson knew what to do: Ride it out.
Which wasn’t so easy, really. Because the only time he ever got these things was when he was under a lot of stress.
Not that he couldn’t handle it. In high school, his senior year, he caught three passes in a game with a herringbone pattern undulating in the air between him and the ball. Years later, in a meeting with the government’s lawyers – when they told him they were fucking him – he had one then, too. And no one noticed. No one saw what he’d seen: the gleam in the air, dancing between them. So he sat there, blind as a bat and surrounded by lawyers, listening as the guy from the Pentagon explained what he called “the facts of life.” 35 USC 131. Eminent domain as it applies to intellectual property.
The next time it happened was … when? At his sentencing! And, after that, on the Con Air flight out to Colorado. Where they buried him alive for what amounted to wishful thinking. (Or as the court put it, for “solicitation of murder.”)
But no one knew about his eyes, no one ever guessed. Not the guards, and not the other prisoners. So, really, it was just one of those things, one of those “Here we go again” kind of thi
ngs.
Still, it wasn’t something you could ignore. And now it was taking over, glazing everything in the corners of his eyes. His peripheral vision was almost gone. People and things were beginning to disappear. Soon –
“– time?”
Wilson blinked. “Sorry?” The woman in front of him, a girl, really, was asking him the time.
“I just asked, ‘Is this your first time?’”
He tried to focus, to see around the aura or through it, but of course he couldn’t. Even so, he could tell she was young, maybe twelve or thirteen, with henna-colored hair, cut short. And a backpack. Green earrings, which snapped into focus for a moment. Gumbys. “First time for what?”
“Flying.”
The question was so naïve, so very much out of left field, that he almost laughed. “No,” he said. “I’ve been up a couple of times.”
She nodded thoughtfully. After a bit, she asked, “Is it scary? I’ve never actually flown before.”
“No kidding!”
He glanced at his watch. 5:48 … 5:45 … 5:43. “It’s a lot more dangerous on the ground,” he said. “Planes are pretty safe.” The line edged forward a couple of steps, and he saw that she moved awkwardly, leaning on a cane and dragging her left leg.
“Looks like you’ve been skiing.”
A soft, regretful chuckle. “No, I’ve never been skiing.”
He thought she was going to say something else, but the moment passed. Then the line inched ahead again, and so did she. No cast. Just the cane. Something congenital, then.
“What about you?”
At first, he didn’t know what she meant. Then he remembered the sling, and – “Oh, you mean this! Yeah, I was at … Killington.” He could see Gumby’s awkward smile floating behind the moiré pattern. In five or six minutes, the girl would be gone. Almost all of them would be.
He could almost see it: the blood and the glass, bodies wet and smoking on the marble floor. People staggering through the rubble, shell-shocked, deaf and bleeding. And the silence – like after a car crash. Everything would be silent, if only for a couple of seconds. Then the quiet would give way to a wail of recognition. The air would fizz and the cries would go up, filling the vacuum with noise until it exploded into a long, collective scream.