Choice of Evil b-11

by Andrew Vachss

  “Where’s everybody else, Rusty?” I asked him.

  “Uh, there was a little thing. Earlier. They’ll be back soon.”

  “Okay. I’ll just—”

  “He’s here,” Xyla announced, standing in the doorway to the computer room.

  “Uh, see you later,” the big guy said.

  As soon as we got into her room, Xyla opened him up.

  To my surprise, the child did not rush through the evening meal in her eagerness to play the new game. Indeed, she politely inquired if she could, again, select the menu and, given permission, spent the better part of an hour examining the various options before making a decision. Which was: Pasta in a cream sauce of her own creation speckled with chunks of albacore.

  “It would be better with bread,” she assured me.

  “Bread doesn’t keep well,” I replied. “And since we are going to be—”

  “Well, couldn’t you pick some up? When you go out the next time, I mean?”

  “I will. . . try,” I finally agreed, understanding intuitively that the child was not referring to typical manufactured bread—she expected me to visit an actual bakery. That was out of the question. Still, if I remembered correctly—and, in fact, I have never failed to remember correctly—there was a bakery of some sort right within the airport.

  We ate in relative silence, for which I was grateful. The child’s manners were superb—she invariably asked if I would pass a condiment rather than reaching for it herself. But her visage appeared troubled.

  “Is something wrong, Zoë?” I asked.

  “Do you like it?”

  “It?”

  “The *food*. Do you like the food?”

  “It’s delicious.”

  “Well, you didn’t *say* anything.”

  “That was bad manners on my part,” I said, truthfully enough. “I was enjoying it so that I forgot myself.”

  “Oh, that’s all right,” she said, smiling. “I just. . . When people don’t say anything, I never know. . . I mean, I always think. . .”

  “I promise to tell you what I’m thinking, Zoë. How would that be?”

  “Oh I would *love* that. You’re not. . . teasing, are you? You’ll really tell me?”

  “I certainly will. But only when you ask, fair enough?”

  “Okay! And I won’t ask all the time, I swear.”

  “Whenever you like, child.”

  Throughout the rest of the meal, we talked around pockets of silence, but never once did she ask what I was thinking.

  “Can I do it myself?” she asked as we started to clean up after dinner.

  “I thought it would be easier if we both did it.”

  “No. I mean, yes, maybe it would. But it doesn’t have to be easier, does it? I mean, I would like to do it myself. It would be fun.”

  “Very well, Zoë. And thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.” She smiled.

  Not having access to a newspaper, I flicked on the television set to watch PBS as the child busied herself in the kitchen portion of the basement.

  I must have been resting my eyes, half-listening to the television, when the child tapped me on the shoulder. Startled, I turned to her, waiting for her to speak.

  “What’s that?” she asked, pointing at the screen.

  It only took a second to ascertain. “Some footage of tribal warfare,” I told her.

  “Why are they killing everyone?”

  How to explain xenophobia and its natural byproduct, genocide, to a child? “They hate each other,” I tried for simplicity, knowing what was coming next.

  “Why?”

  I was not disappointed, but no closer to an explanation. It was clear that the child was not trying to be annoying, that she was deeply puzzled by what appeared, on its surface, to be patent insanity. Yet, in thinking through to a response accessible by a child of Zoë’s age, I could not escape the internal logic. After all, tribalism is per se insanity. Still, I made another attempt:

  “Do you know about Indians, Zoë? Have you ever studied about them in school?”

  “Not really. But I know. . . something about them, I guess.”

  “All right. You know Indians are aligned into tribes, yes?”

  “Yes. Like Apaches and Navahos and—”

  “That’s right. Now, even today, there are tribes too. In the Balkans, in Africa, in the Middle East. And some of them hate each other. They have for many, many years. Sometimes, when that kind of hatred builds up long enough, one tribe attempts to exterminate the other.”

  “Exterminate? Like with—”

  “Yes, like with termites in a house. But the difference is. . . it would be. . . as if the goal was to exterminate every single termite from the face of the earth. So no more termites would exist anywhere.”

  “But. . . people. . .?”

  “To a virulent tribalist, people of other tribes are the same as termites. Mere vermin, to be disposed of by any means at hand.”

  “They all want to kill each other?”

  “Yes.”

  “In. . . these different places?”

  “In other places too, Zoë. Kurds and Iraqis. Turks and Armenians. Serbs and Croats. Hausa and Ibo. The list is endless.”

  “But not in America, right?”

  “Child, what you must understand is that those thoughts are everywhere. In America too, certainly. Do you know anything about Adolf Hitler?”

  “Yes. He was an evil man. He wanted to kill all the Jews.”

  “That is correct. And there are people in America who still follow Hitler.”

  “They want to kill all the Jews too?”

  “Yes. And there are others who want to kill all the blacks. And blacks who want to kill all the whites. And—”

  “Why?”

  “The reasons are too complex to explain simply, Zoë. Some are mentally ill. Some are inadequates who can only feel superior by denigrating others. Some are profiteers, who make money from hatred. Some actually believe in a sort of manifest destiny—that God has designated them to rule the earth.”

  “Will America be like that someday?”

  “It is not impossible,” I told her. “With the technology for mass destruction so readily available that any moron can kill thousands all by himself, race war in America is not out of the question.”

  “So where is it safe?”

  “There’s no *place* that is safe, Zoë. Only people are safe.”

  “I’m safe now, right?”

  “Yes, you are perfectly safe here.”

  “Do they kill children too?”

  “Exterminators do not discriminate on the basis of age,” I explained.

  She started to cry then. I was. . . confused by that reaction, especially as I had assured her of her own safety. Her immediate safety, in point of fact, and children have a more truncated view than adults—the “future” to them usually is not very much beyond the present. I had no wish for the child to be in distress, and vaguely understood that I could have responded to her inquiries in a way different from that which I had elected. Still, beyond the usual platitudes so beloved of adults, I was bereft of any actual comfort potential, and I sensed that Zoë would be impervious to hollow clichés. However, by the time I had reasoned all this through in what I acknowledge to be a laborious fashion, the child quieted down, utilizing some self-soothing inner mechanism I could not immediately detect.

  “Aren’t we going to play checkers?” she asked me, rubbing her eyes as though to banish traces of her just-departed tears.

  It induced no consternation that the child grasped the principle of checkers almost immediately. By that time, I had grown accustomed to her quickness. We played only three games—“practice games,” she termed them—with me showing her the consequences of each move as she proposed it, before she announced she was ready to play “for real.”

  This proved problematic. Unlike Risk, checkers is a finite activity, with all probabilities susceptible to near-instantaneous calculation. The
refore, it was impossible for the child to defeat me. And having proposed the activity myself, it would be unseemly for me to dominate the contest. Fearing she might detect a deliberate miscue, I provided full disclosure: “You understand, Zoë, this game really isn’t for children.”

  “Why not?” was the reply, as expected.

  “Well, because it takes years to actually win a single game. Years of practice. And most children don’t have the patience for that.”

  “I’m very patient,” she assured me.

  “I am certain that you are. But, still, won’t you get bored playing if you never win?”

  “It’s still playing,” the child said. “It’s just not winning.”

  That comment seemed far too sagacious for a child of her age, but I allowed it to pass and we began to play “for real.”

  Zoë lost every game for almost three hours without a word of complaint.

  “Sleepy,” she finally said, her head lolling.

  I did not think it proper to undress the child, so I simply opened the bed and placed her there, covering her against a possible chill.

  ############################################## “Would it work if we put something inside first?” the child asked me early the next morning.

  “I’m not certain what you’re asking,” I told her. Which was certainly the truth.

  “Inside the biscuits.”

  “I don’t. . .” I began, but then, upon actually looking at what I had been doing, I understood the question. The “biscuits” to which the child had been referring were not fresh from a bakery. Rather, they came in a tube designed to be stored in a refrigerator. One simply pops open the tube by pulling a strip down the side of the container. Inside, there are eight white disks of dough which, if placed in the oven for the requisite time, emerge as biscuits. I eat such products frequently. So frequently, in fact, that I go into auto-pilot mode as I cook for myself, never paying attention to the process.

  “You want to put something inside the biscuits *before* they are baked?” I asked her.

  “Yes, please.”

  “Why would you want to do that, Zoë?”

  “Just to make it different. Maybe. . . even better. Just to. . . I don’t know. . . see what happens. Do you think it would work?”

  “I must say I don’t know. The biscuits are a specific design. If they are separated to insert something, that might alter the result. And whatever was inserted would be subjected to the same degree of heat for the same duration.”

  “But can’t we *see*?”

  “If you like.”

  “Goody!” the child exclaimed, clapping her hands. She immediately began to forage through the entire supply of foodstuffs, holding up various options much as an artist might examine a dab of color before applying it to canvas. She finally settled on an entire palette: Celery, onion, radish, parsley, and other herbs.

  “Are you going to put all that in the biscuits?” I asked her.

  “No, silly. Each biscuit gets a different one.”

  “Very intelligent,” I complimented her. “That increases significantly the prospects of success for at least a portion of the experiment.”

  “And they might *all* be good too.”

  The child was still during the baking process, but stole occasional glances at the oven. When the timer sounded, she reached it before I did. She turned the oven off, opened the door, and took out the metal tray with the biscuits, being careful to wrap her hand in a towel first. I never use a pot holder for such tasks and the child had apparently observed my propensity for utilizing whatever was at hand.

  “They *look* real good,” she said, holding out the tray.

  I was constrained to agree. The appearance of the finished product did not vary visually from what I had grown accustomed to over the years.

  “Which one do you want?” she asked.

  “Do you remember which is which?”

  “Yes,” she said proudly. “Just tell me which one you want, and I’ll pick it out.”

  “Oh, the. . . parsley.”

  “Here!” she said, reaching unerringly for the correct biscuit. She watched as I took a tentative bite. It tasted as it usually did but, perhaps, there was just a hint of parsley. . .?

  “It’s quite good,” I told her.

  “See?”

  “Yes, I do. Now perhaps you would like to sample one yourself?”

  “I’m going to try the onion,” she declared.

  We then reversed roles, me watching her with some interest. “Ummm! It’s really, really good!” she sang out.

  The radish biscuits—she had, for some reason, made two of those—were, we both agreed, the least successful of the batch. “Now you have your own recipe, Zoë,” I told her.

  “My own?”

  “Certainly. You are the originator, so it is certainly your own.”

  “You mean it’s a secret?”

  “Not necessarily. I only mean you hold the key. If you share your recipe with anyone else, they could certainly pass it along. But if you keep it to yourself, only you will know.”

  “You know too.”

  “I promise I shall never tell another living soul.”

  “Swear?”

  “Yes, child. I swear.”

  “What should I call it?”

  “Well, what about ‘Zoë’s Secret Recipe’?”

  “No, I don’t like that. It’s not really a secret, it’s more like a. . . they *look* the same, right? As the regular ones?”

  “Yes, they do.”

  “So it would be a surprise? If you ate one and you didn’t know?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Zoë’s Surprise,” the child said. “That’s what I’m going to call it.”

  “Perfect,” I assured her.

  True to her word, although the child insisted on playing checkers throughout the day, she never once complained about not winning. In between, she busied herself with drawing. Although she watched television programs when I did, she displayed no independent interest in the medium. Nor was she at all drawn to the video games, the first of my captives who resisted such temptation. She continued to be somewhat ceremonious about meals, but as it mollified her to be allowed to alter either content or presentation, I silently acquiesced to the point where it became the norm.

  I observed her closely for signs of dissociation, especially as she displayed no anxiety whatever concerning the progress of reunification with her family. Some children segue into an altered state to cope with unbearable trauma and, despite my best efforts, children have reacted in such a manner occasionally. However, Zoë was fully oriented—albeit often preoccupied—at all times. And although her curiosity was, in general, boundless, it was all outwardly focused.

  “I’m going to be gone when you get up tomorrow morning,” I told her. “I have to go out and check the newspapers, and pick up some of the things you wanted. But I have to leave quite early to do that, do you understand?”

  “Yes. But can’t I—?”

  “Zoë,” I said patiently, “it would be impossible to take you along. I already explained—”

  “Not that. I just wanted to. . . Oh, never mind.”

  “Wanted to. . . what, child?”

  “Never *mind*!” she blurted out, stamping her foot. The first display of willfulness I had observed. I made a decision not to press her, and she soon returned to what I had come to understand was her normal affect.

  In order to encourage her to go to sleep earlier than usual—I myself could not rest until she had achieved that state—I read her another story.

  As soon as she was asleep, I disabled the computer, proofed the surroundings, and tested the restraints. Everything was in order.

  I awoke at 4:00 a.m.—my wristwatch has a silent alarm which causes it to throb against my pulse. After showering and shaving, I selected an anonymous business suit and a well-used carry-on bag. But when I re-entered the main room to have a cup of tea before I left, Zoë was up and bustling about.
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  “Why are you up so early, child?” I asked her.

  “Well, I had to make breakfast, didn’t I?”

  “It’s too early for you to eat. Why don’t you go back to—?”

  “Not me, you. You have to eat something before you go out. It’s important to always have something in your stomach.”