“Yes. Of course I do. You said he jumped. What does that have to do with this thing?”
“I found one of those, well, a piece of one, on the lawn in front of that building. I saw it come down from the roof, just a minute or two before that man… fell.”
“Okay…” Claire said skeptically, waiting for the rest of whatever Owen had to say.
“Well, that man wasn’t military. There is no reason I can think of why he should have one of these disgusting brown heaps of shit, much less eat half of one before throwing himself down twelve flights.”
“So you’re saying…” She still hadn’t put the thoughts together. Maybe she just didn’t want to.
“I’m saying he was thrown.”
“And you came to that conclusion after finding a ration bar? And that is why we had to walk five blocks to go out to lunch when I had food ready and waiting for us here?”
“The ration bar, plus the fact that that man’s arm had been broken at the elbow before he was thrown over.”
“I didn’t see any broken arm,” she argued, stressing the “I.”
“I did.”
“Ok then. Say you’re right… why would anyone, a soldier, as you are saying, want to throw someone off a roof downtown in the middle of the day?”
“I don’t know the why. We never know the why, and we don’t ask. But I’m willing to bet that a few people in this neighborhood got R’n’R’ed because of it. People who maybe swore up and down that they saw someone else on that rooftop. People who maybe asked a few too many questions afterward.”
“R’n’R… what does that have to do with anything, Owen? People get R’n’R’ed all the time.
“That’s true,” replied Owen. “When you’re right you’re right. But let me ask you, Claire, where do they go?”
“Well, no one knows. That’s the whole point, isn’t it? They start new lives somewhere and in order to do that they have to let go of their old ones. No contact. It’s rough, but it’s… for the best.”
Owen planted his feet down on the floor and pivoted, seating himself on the edge of the coffee table as Claire kept on. She was talking very quickly, and Owen knew that the topic was an uneasy one for her.
“I’ve had a few close friends get R’nR. That picture on the fridge, the one of me and the blonde girl, the one you’ve avoided asking me about… her name was Rachel, and she was my very best friend, but we had to let that go. It’s not easy, but it’s for the best.”
“You keep saying that. You really believe it?”
“What else am I supposed to believe, Owen?” Agitation was growing in her voice. She swung her legs around and down from the couch so that she was sitting up and facing him. Her eyes were piercing through him. “You know it all, so tell me!”
He was looking down at his hands as he began to speak.
“That day… the day we met… you asked me if I had ever killed anybody. Do you remember that?”
“Yes.” The hostility was fading from her tone, replaced now with a cautious foreboding.
“There is only one answer to that question, for any soldier who has gone active. They make sure of that. If you are headed for your first tour, they make sure you get your hands dirty before you get there.”
Claire felt the course this conversation was taking, but didn’t dare to guess at it out loud. She felt sick. Owen continued.
“They lined us up, on that first boat ride… I remember it was my first time ever being on a big boat like that… they lined us up there at the aft. Didn’t say a thing to us. Just paraded these people out in front of us. Men. Women. Their hands were bound and they had hoods over their heads… No. More like sacks. Black cotton sacks. Please, don’t look at me like that. Please, Claire.”
She was unaware of exactly how wide her eyes had grown as she listened. Yet, horrified as she was, still she felt some impulse to hear more. She had to. She needed to know the rest, even if it would tear her up. It was as if she were walking through that haunted house at the carnival her class had been taken to when she was young. She had to keep moving forward, even if the way forward held only dark terrors and screams and a frantic, racing heart.
“Please, Claire… I can’t do this when you look at me like that.” Her terrified eyes caught him and twisted his insides, and he felt like he was walking conscious into a living nightmare. “Please. You need to know. Please.”
Claire was struck by his vulnerability in this moment. He was begging her, his voice weak and pitiful. Something she had thought impossible was happening before her giant eyes, and she realized that her mouth had been hanging agape for some time now. She pulled it closed, swallowed hard, and stared down at the floor.
“Ok,” she said. “Ok. Go on. Talk.”
“They…” He stopped for a second and coughed to clear his throat. When he felt that he could go on with full control of his voice, he continued.
“They brought them out, lined them up there, one for each of us. ‘Let’s see what you’ve learned,’ they said. And that was all they said. Everyone was hesitant, frozen. So this officer comes across the line, swipes his knife across one of their throats, kicks him flat-foot in the chest and off the back of the boat.
“It’s then that I see the sandbags tied to their legs, and as that first man goes overboard and out of sight, his sandbag slides after him. And then that man is done and they just bring another one out to replace him.
“So then we started, quickly discovering that there were no rules. Eventually it even became a competition for us. Seeing who could kill theirs quickest. Who could make theirs suffer the most.”
Tear drops were beating down on the floor beneath Claire’s frozen face.
“They just kept hauling ‘em out in front of us, and it felt like forever. I felt it twisting me. It twisted and twisted until something snapped and my hands got eager. And I remember being…” His voice was wavering, and he coughed once more to try to regain it before going on.
“And I remember being irritated… furious… when they told us there were no more.”
Claire looked up at him through her tears. He was staring out at the snow.
“And those were them, those were Reassign and Relocates?” she probed.
He nodded.
“But how do you know?”
“One of them I had… this woman… I managed to rip the cover off her head. She just looked at me with those eyes… those fucking eyes, every night it’s those fucking eyes! She looked like anyone I’d ever known. Like one of us. I couldn’t imagine what she could have done to warrant this. And I got the feeling, looking down at her, that she… well… she didn’t know what she had done either.”
“But how…”
Owen held up his hand to silence her.
“Then a few years later I’m being shipped again, and this time I’m on a rotating guard, and we’re taking turns guarding these poor doomed bastards. They’re all mumbles, gagged beneath their hoods. We called them mummers, because everything they tried to say… no matter how loud and desperate, no matter how quiet and defeated… everything just sounded like the letter ‘m’.
“We worked in twos, standing guard for two hours at a time. At one point, the other guy tells me he’s gotta piss, and is it alright if he goes real quick. ‘No one has to know’, he says. I shrug and he runs off to the head.
“While he’s gone I let myself into the cage and pull up one of their masks, just enough get the gag out. It’s a woman, maybe forty, and she tries to ask me for help, but I tell her to shut up and I ask her where she’s from. Amsterdam, she says. I ask her what happened, how’d she get there. ‘they told me I was an R’n’R’, she says, ‘and the next thing I know I’m waking up and everything’s black’.
“She tried to say something else, but I had to stuff the gag back in and get myself out of the cage before the other guard came back.”
Owen swung his ahead away from the window and faced Claire. Her expression had tamed down now, but thick wet streaks ran down her cheeks
and her eyes sparkled with moisture.
“Every night, I’m back on those boats,” Owen nearly whispered. “And I wake up and I just want to swallow a gun.”
She threw herself at him and buried her face into his chest.
“And what if that’s our little girl on that boat?” Claire sobbed. “That ‘s what you were thinking! Isn’t it?! What if our little girl ends up on that boat?”
He tossed his arms around her and she trembled within them, and he thought he would never be able to let go of her.
Chapter Sixteen
Gabriel was learning very quickly to hate this room.
Despite the high vaulted ceiling, he was gripped by a sense of claustrophobia, as if the weight of the entire building was pressing down upon his head and his shoulders from above.
Despite the openings of numerous small ventilation shafts throughout the chamber, he felt that he was breathing stale air. Air that hadn’t moved in decades. Air that he was just borrowing from the man before him, only to pass on to the man who followed.
Despite the thick venetian blinds that stretched drawn from the floor to the ceiling, which effectively obfuscated any of the radiant midday light that pressed against the window from the outside, long dark shadows played upon the massive wooden table before him.
He felt his stomach rising and dropping within him, and nausea worked its foul fingers on the back of his throat.
“You are drifting, Gabriel,” Lamar whispered into his ear from behind. “You need to focus. You need to stay in this room.”
Gabriel nodded.
Stay in this room. Stay in this room… what a wretched prospect, he thought.
He watched the Chairman’s lips moving. They were tight and busy. They had a job to do, and they were eager to do it and be done.
He wants out of here just as much as I do. Maybe even more, thought Gabriel. Ok, ok. Focus. Be in the room. Focus.
He worked to contain his mind, to settle his attention on the Chairman with the busy lips. And as he did so, sound crept back into Gabriel’s world. This silent movie… this muted scene... it faded into his life and was silent no more.
“I believe that about wraps up old business, unless there is something I have forgotten. Anyone? Good. Then let’s move on to new business.”
The Chairman spoke mechanically, rapidly moving to press this session along. He made no time for pauses between his thoughts or his sentences, or between his words and their syllables. Gabriel wondered that he had found time to breathe at all, rattling on as he had these last ten minutes.
“Does anyone have some new business for us today?”
The room was silent, as Lamar had told him it would be at this juncture. He had told Gabriel to let this silence resonate for a time, but it proved easier in theory than it was in that instant.
Wait for it, thought Gabriel. Wait for it.
The stillness hung terrible and thick. He could feel it pressing on his face and rattling within what felt to be a vast hollow inside his head. And he knew that he was to be the one to break this silence. And that was truly more horrifying than anything.
Wait for it.
He felt sweat beading at his hairline, and was certain that the color of his face betrayed his overwhelming anxiety. He took steady, deep breaths, as Owen had taught him, but his heart continued to race.
Finally, the Chairman spoke again.
“New business? Anyone?”
Gabriel raised his hand slowly. Silly as it seemed, he had practiced this motion for some hours. Had he raised his arm too quickly or too soon, it would be perceived as anxious. Too slow, or too hesitant, and the others would think him weak and nervous.
“Ah. Gabriel Yakima, the newest member in our ranks, has something to say. Perhaps Miss Geena has started a new tradition, and all new Counselors will now be speaking on their first day?” The Chairman nodded to Geena and then returned his eyes to Gabriel.
“Counselor Gabriel, you have the floor,” he said, returning himself to his seat.
You are a shark in pool of minnows, a voice told Gabriel. You are a giant. You are a maniac motherfucking crocodile and you will crush these cowering weakling little shits in your jaws.
It was Owen’s voice he heard in his head now, and he could almost smell the mildew of that basement gym.
You are a giant! You are a fucking god!
“Thank you, Chairman,” he said calmly, rising from his seat. “Ladies and Gentleman of the council, I know I’m new here, but I do have one proposal to make today; a new candidate for R’n’R…”
He swiveled his head over his right shoulder and looked down on Lamar with cold, reptilian eyes.
Lamar looked up at him from his wheelchair, a thick red blanket spread over his lap. His eyes were wide and full of shock, and his mouth hung open in disbelief as Gabriel turned back to the council and continued.
“I would like to recommend Lamar O’Connell for Reassignment and Relocation.”
A thick murmur of involuntary gasping sounds echoed through the room. Cecil studied the scene from his seat at the middle of the table, glancing from Gabriel to Lamar and back to Gabriel once again. Geena sat beside him, looking very confused and very pleased all at once.
“You ungrateful little shit!” Lamar erupted from down in his wheelchair. Old age had taken the bass from his voice, but still he boomed like thunder in this large chamber. “You dare to send me off! I made you! You were nothing! I…”
“All in favor?” the Chairman yelled over Lamar.
Sixteen hands rose up, including Gabriel’s own. And then another five followed hesitantly after. Gabriel sneered a feral grin down at the old man.
“The council has spoken, you old fool!” he snarled. “I hope you like boat rides, Lamar! Please allow me the pleasure of delivering you to your escorts. I’ve got a few choice words that I think you’d like to hear along the way.”
He spun around Lamar and grabbed both handles on the wheelchair, tilting Lamar back so that the two small wheels in the front were well off the floor. He made for the door, which the Chairman held open for him.
“This is the last time I push you around in this chair, you impotent old shit!” he hissed as they cleared the door.
Two guards stood waiting in the corridor. One of them advanced as if to take over charge of Lamar’s wheelchair. Gabriel waved him away.
“Give us a minute!” he snapped. “I’ve got a few things to say first!”
He wheeled Lamar down the hall and stopped about twenty meters away. He parked the chair sideways, so that Lamar’s knees were pressed up against the wall, and then he leaned into Lamar’s ear with his back to the guards.
“Are you sure about this, Lamar?” he whispered.
“Shut up, Gabriel. It would be a bit late even if I weren’t sure. But I am sure. I’ve helped put so many folks on that boat, it’s only fitting that I should ride it too. And you will play this. Those men see what you do to me, your own mentor, they’ll think twice about making a move on you.
“Now you have everything you need. The Frame is all yours. And when you starting shaking things up someone will come for you. Bet on it. And now you have this…”
Lamar reached his hand underneath the red blanket on his lap and came up with a small, black-handled chrome pistol.
“She’s old,” he told Gabriel. “Not as old as me, but still old. I’ve taken good care of her though. Careful now, she’s loaded.”
“Lamar!” Gabriel whispered so loud that it could hardly be considered a whisper so much as an airy shout. “What the hell are you doing with this?”
“Right now, well, I’m giving it to you. This was my plan B. In the unlikely event that we didn’t get the votes to send me off, I would have done it like the General did it. But I knew that my councillors could be counted on to follow their instructions. That’s why I have them. Now take it.”
He held the pistol out to Gabriel, butt first.
Gabriel took the gun, which was small and slid
easily into his pants pocket.
“There are six in the clip, plus the one in the chamber. The safety is on, but don’t go screwing with it now. Owen can show you how to use it. I’ve given him the keys to somewhere discreet where you can try it out, and there are plenty of extra rounds in my bureau. Now don’t take any more time. Bring me back to those guards and remember that you don’t like me.” He kissed Gabriel on the forehead and then pushed him away. “And get those tears out of your eyes. No crying. Man the fuck up.”
Gabriel patted his eyes dry and forced a smile.
“Ready?”
Lamar nodded, and Gabriel came back around him. He pulled the chair out and away from the wall, pivoted back towards the council room, and pushed hastily forward. The smile was gone, as were the building tears, replaced now by a look of cool malice. As he approached the guards, he shoved the chair out and towards them. It felt to Gabriel like he was pushing a small craft away from a dock and out to sea.
Goodbye, Lamar, he thought to himself.
He passed the three of them without a word or so much as a turn of the head and reentered the council chamber. The room was alive with low murmurs as he entered, but they muffled into silence as he crossed the threshold into the room. The Chairman piped up, smiling.
“I suppose NOW we are done with old business.”
A wave of quiet laughter swept through the room, but none laughed so hard at the Chairman’s joke as he himself did. His smile slipped away, though, as soon as he realized that Gabriel was not walking to his right and over to his seat, but rather left and around the near side of the table. He made for the first window, and everyone watched with wide eyes as he took hold of the cord and began to raise the blinds.
It was an overcast day, but still bright, and Gabriel’s efforts were answered with a pleasant view of the city’s main harbor. The window was nearly spotless, but for a few streaks where the cleaner had gotten sloppy. Strange, he thought, that for the last several decades the only ones who had seen this room as it was meant to be seen were the people who cleaned it.
He took a few paces over to the next window and began to raise its blinds as well. The room remained still until he had finished with each window. As he turned back towards the council, he saw the room all lit up and something stirred within him. The dark polished wood of both the table and the mantle over the dormant fireplace came alive in the light.
Keeping Luna Page 15