by Sloan, David
As it rang, a police car came up fast, its lights flashing. He tossed the phone on the seat so he wouldn’t get pulled over for texting. But the police weren’t after him. The car sped off the next exit and appeared at the parking lot of a large grocery store to the left of the road. It joined three other squad cars already there, blue and red strobes whirling away. Tucker squinted at the scene as he passed by—was somebody getting thrown onto the hood of a car? But then it was behind him. Lena’s phone went to voice mail.
“Hey babe, crazy stuff happening, call me back,” Tucker said after the beep.
Tucker arrived at his apartment a few minutes later and sprinted in expecting to see his roommates watching the last two minutes of a game. But they weren’t. To his amazement, they were watching the news.
“Did you see it out there?” one of them asked, not looking away from the screen.
“See what?” Tucker leaned toward the image of a reporter in front of glass doors. “Wait, is that the thing at the grocery store?”
“At three grocery stores. They’re calling it a ‘flash famine’. Bunch of people were at the stores, and about thirty minutes ago, they all just turned and grabbed as much food as they could and ran out of the store. Seriously messed up, there were like eighty people and they took all the food. Like, empty shelves. Two old ladies got trampled. The ones they caught say they’re going to be shipping the food to some country in Asia. And I just ate my last Hot Pocket for dinner. You got some I can have?”
But Tucker was watching the TV where grainy surveillance footage was playing on a loop. There it was—all of the aisles crowded with people shopping like normal, filling up carts. Then all at once, they turned, grabbed as much food as they could throw into their carts, and rushed out in a body, knocking over several cashiers and bystanders. It was a shocking display of sudden group movement, like they’d all had simultaneous panic attacks. Squinting his eyes, Tucker could see very clearly that some of the people who rushed out had something taped to their shirts: a distinct banded pattern of red, white, and blue. The flag of Thailand.
Tucker felt sick and more than a little angry. He now knew why Lena had spoken to Wol Pot for so long. And he now knew why Lena needed to know the exact moment that Wol Pot announced his hunger strike.
He yanked his phone out of his pocket and dialed, eyes still on the TV. As he dialed, he said to his roommates, “I’m surprised you’re watching this instead of the game.”
“Oh, we’re not. They were in a time-out.” And they flipped the channel back.
Lena’s phone went to voice-mail again. Tucker stepped into his bedroom and closed the door. After the beep, he whispered harshly, jabbing the air with his finger to make his point. “Babe, I know what’s happening and we got to talk about this. If they trace this thing back to you, and then they trace it from you back to me, then we’re both screwed. We gotta talk. I can’t believe…” He waited a few seconds and hung up. Tossing the phone on his desk, he lay down to think. He didn’t expect her to call back tonight—she was obviously busy. But tomorrow…
And that’s when it occurred to him. I was going to go grocery shopping tomorrow. I’m out of Hot Pockets, too.
[Midwest Division: Sweet Sixteen]
[Thursday, April 26]
“Tucker, come in.”
Dr. Tonkin welcomed his young undergraduate assistant into his office from behind a moderately disheveled desk. Three people were already occupying one corner of the office, each holding notepads and looking like they were ready to be told what to do. Tonkin himself looked tired.
“I’d like you to meet the new additions to our staff,” he said with some irony. His previous “staff” had been made up of Tucker, four graduate students, and the department secretary. But the sudden, unexpected increase in Tonkin’s workload went far beyond the limits of the group’s normal capacity. The Wol Pot hunger strike was now in its fifth day and had become a State Department fiasco, pulling Tonkin into a whirlpool of meetings, press conferences, and the minutiae of international communication. Tonkin was the liaison with Wol Pot who was trusted by both the Thai and the US, so he was stuck in an overwhelming situation. But if the work overwhelmed Tonkin, then it also overwhelmed Tucker. The department had secured some flexibility from Tucker’s teachers, giving him extra time to work, by Tonkin’s request. Everyone that worked for him was asked to focus on the situation. But even with that, they still needed help.
“You might know John from some of your classes,” Tonkin said, pointing to the bearded student closest to him. “He has offered to help out with odd things: answer calls, take minutes, and such. And Tanya here is my new volunteer website updater and online person. And here we have Carla, who has offered to help me with some translations. She’s new this semester, just transferred from Georgetown, right?”
Tucker gave benign nods to the recruits.
“Tucker,” Tonkin introduced, “has been working with me for the past year. He knows everything about how I work and how my office is set up. Anything you need supply-wise, ask him. He’s been answering some e-mails and doing some media monitoring, so Carla, I may have you take over some of that if it keeps up at this pace. I need Tucker to focus on doing write-ups for me. By the way, Tucker, I have a press conference tomorrow, so I may have you look over my statement tonight.” Tonkin paused for a moment as he lost his train of thought. “For now, I need Tanya to stay and talk over some things with me. Tucker, find chairs for John and Carla, they should have computers by this afternoon. I’ll let you decide where they should be set. Can everybody meet here again at noon?” Tucker looked at the other three and wondered when or if he’d be having lunch.
John and Carla followed Tucker down the hall to the graduate student offices, a big room full of desks with dividers between them, most crammed with textbooks on foreign policy, journals, and empty cellophane wrappers.
“John, take this one,” Tucker said, gesturing to the first empty space he saw. “It has a phone hook-up. Sorry it’s so cramped. Carla, you can have this desk.”
“Do you have any coffee around here?” Carla asked, putting her purse down. Tucker led her through the labyrinth of chairs to the coffee machine in the far corner of the room. She stood straight and moved with confidence, like someone who naturally expected to be in charge. She would have been intimidating to Tucker if he hadn’t been a foot taller.
“So, you can translate?” Tucker asked. “What do you speak?”
“I went to high school in Laos, so I’m fluent in Laotian. I speak a little bit of Thai and Mandarin, too, but not as much.”
“Your parents were in the military?”
“My dad is a military contractor. He sets up communication equipment and trains soldiers on how to use it. What about your parents?”
“My parents met in the Peace Corp, but we moved back here when I was little. Now my dad teaches history at the middle school in Ashland and coaches basketball, and my mom teaches French. And they both run the family farm. We stayed pretty busy growing up.” Tucker realized that he was explaining more than he needed to. “Your folks still over there, with all that’s going on?”
“No,” Carla said, “but I still have friends there. Hey, listen.” She tossed her hair back and lowered her voice. “About Dr. Tonkin. He seems kind of stressed with this whole thing. Is this… I don’t know how to ask this. Is this typical of him? Everyone talks about him like he’s this foreign policy genius, but in the office today he seemed like he was in over his head.”
Tucker shrugged. “I mean, this isn’t exactly what he had in mind for this week. The Secretary and him thought this would be four days of talking and hammering out a joint statement about unity and good will. But now it’s been a week of press conferences and tough questions and a deadline for getting everyone into formal negotiations before an old Thai man keels over from starvation in front of the world. So, yeah, he’s in over his head, but he is smart. He wouldn’t be in on all these meetings if the big guys up there didn�
��t trust him. Or if Pot didn’t trust him.”
“Sounds like you’ve been doing a lot, too,” she said, smiling. He smiled back, a little dazzled.
“Um, yeah,” he said. “I mean, I help out, do some research for him sometimes when there’s something he doesn’t have time to look up. Not that he always reads them. I did a thing on South Korea last week and he hasn’t said anything about it. But with everything going on, I don’t really care.”
“South Korea?” Carla looked confused. “Aren’t they neutral?”
“Well, yeah, but—it doesn’t matter. The memos are the small stuff. Checking his speeches and press statements takes a lot longer. He needs more done tonight, which sucks. I have a lot of people coming over to watch the game tonight.”
“Wait, he has you check his press statements?”
“Yeah, why?”
Carla surveyed him with meditating eyes. “Why don’t you let me do it?” she finally asked. “You deserve a night off, and he said he was going to have me do some of the writing anyway, if things get too busy. Why don’t you just forward me whatever he sends you, and I can take a look at it and get back to you. He won’t even have to know it’s from me; I’ll send it back to you when I’m done.”
Tucker felt a sudden surge of gratitude. Here was a woman who understood the importance of basketball. “Are you serious? You’d really do that? But it’s gonna be two or three pages, and you’ll have to fact check everything, review the most recent statements from everyone that’s involved, think up possible follow-up questions. You sure you got that?”
Carla shrugged. “That’s what I’m here for,” she said. “Actually, if you have some other revisions that you’ve done for him, I can read over those to get a sense of how you’ve been doing it.”
“Sure, I can e-mail you like fifty of them. I’ve been doing this stuff for a year. Listen, if you finish in time—and you probably won’t, but still—you should come over to my place. There will be plenty to drink all night.”
“Maybe,” she said. Then she looked at the time. “Hey, I need to make a call before noon. I’ll be looking for your e-mails then, huh?” She spun on a dime and stepped crisply away. Tucker caught himself watching her leave. He flinched slightly, instinctively, as if anticipating that Lena would slap him up the back of his head at any second.
* * * *
The sun was just setting that evening as Tucker drove west to the Mollifly Motel, a few miles outside the city. In the passenger seat was a peace offering sealed in Tupperware.
He had to park his car three blocks away and walk up. What had formerly been a dive completely unknown to anyone but the desperate or cheap had become a permanent campground for international reporters and activists. Wol Pot and his delegation had moved there from a high-profile downtown hotel the day after the hunger strike began, as it wasn’t exactly effective to protest poverty and hunger in an elegant four-room suite. The small motel was feeling the pressure of image, too. It had been forced to take down the sign touting its great continental breakfast after a wave of snarky comments on the cable news channels.
The motel itself was now inaccessible; police had cordoned it off and security details were posted at every entrance. The public could gather, but only on the opposite side of the street. A reverent congregation of forty or fifty supporters, each holding a lit candle, stood in vigil. Tucker recognized several from NSAC, the Nebraska Social Action Coalition, of which Lena was the ringleader. Some in the vigil were praying, some were chanting, some in English, some in Thai. Tucker made his way to the front of the crowd, using the streetlamps and candlelight to find the back of the head of the person he had come to see.
It had been five days since he’d seen Lena, two days since they had spoken on the phone, and six hours since he’d received the e-mail strongly suggesting that he show up to the vigil. He hadn’t written back; she didn’t know that he wasn’t planning to stay.
“Wazzup, girl,” he said, tapping Lena on the shoulder.
“Finally, you’re here,” she said, turning and shushing him. “You can get a candle over there.”
“I can’t stay. I’ve got everybody at my place to watch the game. You should come too, babe.”
She heaved an angry sigh meant to be understood by everyone nearby, though Tucker ignored it.
“Look, I even brought you some Skyline Platter so you’ll know what you’re missing.” He lifted the lid from the Tupperware container and revealed a crooked stack of chips, homemade peach salsa, and melted cheese that was the nucleus of his locally-famous party dish. A man next to him turned at the smell and looked at the food with some longing.
“What is wrong with you?” Lena scolded. “This is a vigil for people who are fasting!” She snatched the container out of his hands and closed the lid tight. Then she grabbed his arm hard and pulled him out of the crowd to a safe distance.
“Tucker, if you didn’t come to support us, what are you doing here?”
“I came here for you,” Tucker said defensively. “It’s freezing out here! You’re starving. You’ve barely eaten more than Wol Pot.”
Lena just folded her arms and raised her eyebrows with the disapproving look Tucker had seen countless times.
“Lena, you all are wasting your time holding candles out here in the cold when you could be back at my place getting warm, is what I’m trying to tell you.”
“I’m sorry, wasting my time? You came here to tell me that I am wasting my time by showing my support for a man that you and I both know and respect? You’re telling me that it would be a better use of my time to come down to your place with all your drunk roommates and watch a stupid game?”
Tucker bit his lip to keep from reacting to the blasphemy of “stupid game.”
“Okay, that didn’t come out right. But babe, listen to me. I know what you all are trying to do. I get it. And you’re right. I like the man, too. But I’m saying that it doesn’t matter how many people you get out here and how many news programs show you all on prime-time TV, it isn’t going to change the reality that…”
“That is not what we’re trying to do, Tucker. We are not trying to manipulate anyone here! There are people dying of starvation right now, and we have it in our power to let them know that however long it takes, we will work to get them the help that no one else is giving them. The only way a hunger strike works long-term is if there’s continuous support and attention, and that is my responsibility. Our responsibility.”
Tucker looked down at his impassioned girlfriend, always most beautiful when she was fighting for a cause, and shook his head.
“Lena, he’s almost done. If he survives long enough to be extradited, he either won’t last long as a leader, or Many Hands will assassinate him, or…”
“Many Hands wouldn’t do that,” Lena butted in.
“Oh no?” Tucker had to stop himself. He hadn’t come to debate politics. “Lena, all you’re doing is keeping him up with a bunch of candles and creepy chanting. Meanwhile, the best basketball team in your school’s history will be playing Gonzaga in one of their most important games ever. And it’s all happening when your boyfriend has a per-fect bracket for two rounds straight. This will never happen again!”
Lena snorted disgustedly. “How can you think that witnessing the heroic effort of someone who’s right here is less important than watching some college boys play basketball a thousand miles away?”
Tucker couldn’t help himself. “You’re the one who planned this whole thing for the same night. The whole school, except for you and these people, will be watching this game at the same time, indoors, with heat, and with surround sound. And I can tell you that you do not want to be listening to that man’s stomach growling in surround sound, ‘cause—”
“Tucker!” She smacked him hard on the shoulder. “That man is doing something real, and you know it. The only reason you came out here is because you feel guilty that I’m doing what you should be doing.”
“Oh, I’m the one that
should feel guilty, huh? I’m not the one that secretly convinced a bunch of kids—including all of your NSAC friends—to go rob grocery stores to make a statement. You know how many people got arrested because of what you did? And you did it so that he looks like the one who organized the whole thing,” said Tucker, gesturing to the motel.
“I told you,” Lena snarled, holding her breath. “I wasn’t there.”
“Don’t talk to me like I don’t know you. I know who called that play. And by the way, it was a really bad idea, and I would have told you that if you had talked to me about it before.”
By this time, the argument had become so loud that much of the crowd had turned to see what was happening. Lena realized that they were drawing attention and tugged Tucker down the street another hundred feet. But they had nothing more to say. They stood in silence, staring past each other’s heads.
At last, Tucker said, “I’m going back. Come if you want. And for the record, I didn’t come out here because of guilt. I came out here because I haven’t seen you in five days, and I wanted to give you the chance to come be with me.”
“Well then why don’t you stay, and you can be with me?” Lena challenged, speaking through a whole spectrum of emotions.
For a moment Tucker didn’t say anything. But then, “I have to get back. They’re throwing this party for me. Call me when you’re done.”
He walked away from Lena, away from the murmuring crowd, away from the side-lined cameramen and reporters, and went back up the street to his car. As he walked, he pulled open the Tupperware container, picked up the entire stack of chips and cheese, and crunched down hard through the middle.
* * * *
It wasn’t until the second half of the second half that Tucker noticed Carla, coat still on, standing near the door. It was hard to notice anyone; his apartment was jam-packed with roommates, neighbors, friends, people Tucker didn’t even know. Thanks to his roommates, word had gotten out that the man with the perfect bracket was having a party. By half-time, there were so many people crowding around their relatively ancient TV that Tucker’s roommates begged their neighbor to let them use his nice 54-inch flat screen. The neighbor agreed after they handed over a hefty deposit. Now, with five minutes left in the game and Nebraska riding a barrage of three-pointers to victory, it was getting hard to see even that massive screen. Everyone was standing, jumping, cheering with every big play. There was a couple in the middle of the couch that made out every time Nebraska made a shot. After one particularly fast run of Nebraska field goals, Tucker couldn’t take the affectionate display anymore and got up to go to the kitchen. That’s when he noticed Carla, wedged in between some of the latecomers. She gave him a small, uncomfortable wave when he noticed her. Tucker was surprised—Carla seemed like the outgoing type in person, but she looked out of place among the partying fans.