by Sonja Larsen
I didn’t do those things anymore. I didn’t ride in cars, or sleep in different places. I didn’t wake up every day to a new block of colour in my life, a chance to read maps or have conversations, or sift through reams of paper in the basement. I didn’t do dishes or cook. Not even for the Old Man. I didn’t wash the Old Man’s clothes or polish his boots. Instead, I ate and slept and worked in this room, in this corner of this room. A window, the couch that I slept on, a desk. My life had become a monochromatic strip called Control.
On the clipboard before me were dozens of names, thousands of combinations. Sometimes I looked back at my old sheets, to see if I could duplicate what I’d done before, if somehow one night could be made to look like any other. But it never quite worked. Every day I had to start over. Factor in who was newly arrived, who was exhausted, who was coming down with the flu. Calculate who had left recently, and the domino effect of this departure. Who was lonely, who’d been left behind? Measure fatigue, stress, depression; from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.
Calculate his kiss like a small electric spark. No one had ever given me that kind of kiss, simple and empty of expectation. John, whose lips brushed mine for the briefest of moments, dry warmth pressed against my surprised mouth. A New Year’s tradition, he’d said. Not at NOC it wasn’t. Or his birthday present. Estimate the risk. The risk of remembering these moments, of wanting more. Once you started, it was hard to stop. Music, chocolate, tenderness, fresh air. More.
Even if I’d tried to schedule someone else to drive, to save John from that job, Mary T would have changed it on the list, as she had half a dozen times before. She had a keen eye for favours, generally, and I suspected kept an eye on me and John in particular.
“You’re it.” I said to John now. “You’re the only driver there is.”
I hardly looked at John anymore. I looked at his hands, at the edge of his face. John was right. I got mine, and he couldn’t rescue me from it. He would’ve been crazy to try. But I wondered what he thought it was exactly. What did I get? The status as one of the Old Man’s special girls, occasional nips of bourbon, beauty makeovers and storytime. And if it was mine, if it was what I deserved, staring into the perfect square inside the picture on the Old Man’s wall, too sleepy to even pretend at pleasure, then why didn’t I have it anymore? Why was I now exiled at the Control desk, in the corner of this room, scrambling to get us from point A to point B and back again?
I woke up in the morning to see Beth as she hurried out of the kitchen and down the stairs, a big tray held out before her. Beth did my job now. Since Beth started cooking for the Old Man, he’d gained ten pounds. Beth knew how to make eggs Benedict and lobster bisque.
I sat at my desk in the corner and watched her go. Let her, I thought. Let her count down the days to the revolution by cooking, by stirring hollandaise sauce for her beautifully poached eggs. Let her future be caught up in every moment of that act, let that be her measure as a soldier, as a woman. Never get good at something you don’t want to do, my mother taught me. It was a lesson she said she learned from my father. And I didn’t want to make the Old Man’s eggs, I didn’t want to oil his riding crop. I didn’t want the complicated gift of his skin on mine anymore. That’s what I told myself, and maybe it was even true.
After Jayne left I took back looking after the files, and after Lisa left, I took over some of her work ironing his shirts and handwashing his clothes. I removed the women’s underwear I found pushed between the cushions on the Old Man’s couch, a worn cream-coloured polyester pair with tattered lace around the crotch. Their used-up sexiness made me sad. But I left the half-full jar of Vaseline underneath the couch, the pink coiled hair of Susan, NOC’s only remaining redhead, still embedded inside.
Spoiled Jayne and prissy Susan who brushed her long red hair one hundred strokes a night, and now Betty Crocker Beth. Even the clearest memories I had seemed suspect. What about Rena with the red star tattoo or Lisa, with that look of concentration on her face, the careful way she pronounced each word as she went through the pieces of the gun. Were their khaki uniforms like the lipstick and eyeliner, just another one of the Old Man’s dress-up games? Was that why they’d left?
As I measured out the minutes in the day, reminding people when it was time to move from one task to another, summoning cadre and dispatching cars, there were dangerous leftover moments. To sit and watch the wind blow through the trees, and what might be the shadow of a man behind the red curtain across the courtyard. To study my own reflection in the window. Minutes when I realized I was waiting, not just for the revolution but an end to these small treacherous observations. The passage of time. The movement of women in and out of the Old Man’s office.
I had taken to laying my wrists against the heat of the radiator, keeping the veins against the heat for as long as I could while I counted and recounted, named and renamed.
The ones I knew: Polly, Mary T. Me. Jayne. Beth. Susan.
The ones I wondered about. Lisa and Struggler. I could not imagine either one, but maybe that didn’t mean anything. The ones I suspected: The new girl who’d escaped leaving my dog tied outside a supermarket. Or Linda, a tough-looking girl but painfully shy with long curly hair she kept constantly twirling with her fingers.
Linda usually slept at the Lower East Side apartment, where she worked with John, calling businesses to get donations of food and money. The Old Man called her down after class one day, and started keeping her for days running at NOC. She spent those days sullenly carrying out minor tasks while she waited for the Old Man and she had a look of dread when he finally did call her. What might have been a gift for me, a chance to tell it all, to leave nothing out, was a punishment to a girl like Linda. It surprised me that the Old Man couldn’t see that.
I made a point of sitting by her at the next class time. I had seen her before, her pen on paper, taking energetic notes. That night when I looked over at her notebook she was writing out page after page of lyrics to Bruce Springsteen songs.
“Candy’s Room,” “Badlands” and “The Promised Land.”
Had she been doing this all along, all these months, or was this something new?
“What did you say to her?”
That’s what Polly and the Old Man wanted to know after Linda left the Lower East Side apartment a few days later with a backpack full of canned goods.
“What did you say?”
I said I didn’t remember, and that was the truth. I remembered wanting to sit beside her, and the look of the lyrics, the way she wrote out the whole chorus in neat schoolgirl script. I remember thinking I might have reacted differently that first time, if I’d known that I was one of many, or that being special would prove to be so difficult, and so fleeting. But maybe not. My track record for saying no was not very good. And anyhow maybe Linda didn’t need me to tell her that.
Polly walked me down to the telephone on the ground floor and sat looking pissed off while I dialled the number for Linda’s family. The Old Man was just assuming I’d said something to her, because I’d sat beside her two days before she left. If they actually knew I’d said something to her, things might be worse. If I said anything at all. Still I had to make the calls.
“Is Linda there?”
“I have an urgent message for Linda.”
“Can you tell Linda it’s very important she contact me?”
The voice on the other end of the phone said she wasn’t there, and I believed him. I thought about Linda and the missing cans of tuna and baked beans. Not the baggage of a woman going home to her loving family.
One message. Two messages.
“Can you tell me where I can find her? There’s something I need to tell her.”
I didn’t even know what it was I was supposed to say. For two weeks I kept calling. Three messages. Four and five.
Had I said anything? I didn’t remember saying anything.
Now I sat in the corner at the Control desk and I made the lists
, all the lists, and I stroked the soft pink burn marks on my wrist when no one was looking. Reminding myself of my skin, my veins, the choices I still had the power to make.
Polly. Mary T. Me. Jayne. Beth. Susan. Maybe Lisa. Maybe Struggler. The new girl. Linda.
And Tanya.
It wasn’t just my imperfect egg or Linda’s defection, or Beth’s bisque, but Tanya and how one night the thing I knew I must not say flowed out of me as though I’d been rehearsing for weeks. That’s what got me into this corner, this public exile, my “promotion” to Control Officer.
“Tanya’s too young,” I’d said to the Old Man. I do remember saying that.
Tanya was fourteen or fifteen. A true Party kid. Her dad and her mom ran a field office in Oregon, and I’d met her there for the first time when she was ten and I was thirteen. She’d come the previous summer to visit her grandmother and aunt who lived at NOC and stayed ever since.
Tanya lived in limbo between kid and cadre. I did not think she was a Party member since she seemed to pick and choose assignments she liked. Cars mostly. She had a crush on John H, the tall blond mechanic who’d recently become one of the Old Man’s right-hand men, after his previous one went AWOL. Already Tanya had spent hours in the Old Man’s office, sometimes along with John H, sometimes alone.
“That’s too young.” I said to the Old Man. “You know that, right? I don’t know about you and Polly, but this time you’d be making a mistake. She’s a tomboy, a kid. I’m not saying that because I’m jealous.”
And I wasn’t. I’d kept my mouth shut about Jayne, and Susan, and, despite what he believed, Linda.
When I’d said that, the Old Man didn’t get mad, but he got tired awfully fast. He had me fix him a bowl of chocolate pudding, and then he went to sleep. After a while, he woke up and asked me what I was still doing there. That was in the fall and not long after, I was re-assigned to the Control desk.
Tanya’s grandmother didn’t seem worried about the attention the Old Man gave to Tanya. She called him the Old Man, too, even though she was clearly older than he was. I was pretty sure she was a Central Committee member although her job at NOC was to train the cooks and run the kitchen.
Tanya’s aunt, Diane, was a different story. I could see it in her face whenever Tanya was called down to the Old Man’s office. I could see it in the way she stroked the scar tissue that covered her throat and chest, the way she always did when she was stressed. Her ex-husband had shot her. They had to do open-heart surgery to keep her alive. But she survived, she told me, because that’s what she was. A survivor.
Diane also worked in the Control department. Each week she mapped out the schedule, colouring in each of the tiny squares, according to the information she’d been given. When the woman who ran the department before me went AWOL, Diane carefully coloured herself in for the job the next week. Senior Control Officer. But instead that job was given to me, younger and with less seniority in the Party.
“I see how this works,” Diane said to me when she found I’d been promoted over her. Did she? When Tanya got called down to the Old Man’s office, I watched Diane’s hands run up and down her neck and chest, a secret code for the not-so-secret way things were. I sat at my desk. Tanya ran down the stairs. This was how it worked. But even if the tips of her fingers against her survivor’s skin were saying something neither of us was quite willing to admit, I didn’t think I’d let a comment like that go again. It would only take a word from me to Polly or Mary T or maybe even the Old Man himself. Only a word for her to be transferred, or lectured, or maybe even slapped. I hoped she could see that too.
I’d earned this place that might be exile or may be another gift. It was mine, this corner of the room, this window, the voices of strangers drifting in over the CB radio. Truckers and neighbourhood patrols, taxicabs and lonely men. In the Yiddish I couldn’t understand, and the southern drawl of a trucker who called himself Green Eyes, I felt as though I’d found a secret hiding place. It wasn’t music, but it was something. It felt like any moment the voices would speak to me, tell me what to do.
For months I’d spent nearly every day at my desk in the corner of the room. Days went by and no one said my name. Not even my initials, SL. Control, they called me. I thought some days that the Old Man had forgotten who I was, even though he knew everything there was to know about me. That he’d forgotten where I was, even though he put me there. And every time I heard his voice on the radio I found myself hoping and dreading that the number he would call for was mine.
Control. This is what he gave me. Watching Tanya and Polly and Mary and Beth go up and down to the Old Man’s office when he called for them, and teaching myself to be concerned only with the shifting holes in the day created by their absence.
When I first came to NOC I thought: now I know everything. The safe house, the voice on the tapes, the Old Man’s many names. Everything, I thought. But I’d come to understand how foolish that was. I did not know everything and I did not want to.
I did not want to know what happened to Barbara.
I did not want to know what was happening in the basement the day all the senior staff were summoned there and, as Senior Control, I was left in charge. Next came the Old Man’s voice over the radio.
“Send Maureen down.”
Maureen’s face looked pale and shocked at the sound of her name. Maureen wore sweaters, cardigans with flowers and blue cable-knit pullovers. Even after six months at NOC, Maureen didn’t smoke and she didn’t swear. She told me that her father slapped her face when she told him she was calling off her wedding to join the organization, and it didn’t sound like that was the first time he’d hit her. She was recruited so quickly and easily that the field office where she started out was worried she was a cop. But the Old Man had a theory that agents didn’t last too long at NOC. “Nobody works this hard for a fuckin’ salary,” he said.
“Bring legal pads and pens,” the Old Man shouted over the radio.
Shorthand, that’s why he was calling her. She’d gone to secretary school. Maureen’s face softened a little.
In this house where many of the women began to bleed on the same day, I could see that we were each caught in our separate revolutions. Nicole had lived at NOC for five years, and had not talked to the Old Man once in the time I’d been there. Maureen with her prim plump body might have been the same way, except for shorthand. Watching Maureen go, I thought about how we fell into the centre of things because of our interesting histories, our useful hands.
The thing in the basement went on for days. What were they doing down there? I didn’t know. A trial of some kind, I thought. The punishment for defection in the military was death. Had anyone ever actually been killed for leaving? It could have been a court martial. I didn’t want to know. But I did know what Maureen was doing: she was writing it all down.
Writing it down. I’d started writing it down too. Not all of it, but what I could: dreams, poems, fragments of conversation, thoughts I could not shake, words to pop songs I didn’t know if I was remembering or writing.
I’m a practical girl in a practical world, but it’s practically all over now.
For Christmas that year my mother sent me a photocopied version of the family photo album she’d been putting together at her parents’ house in Seattle. In one photo, my grandfather, young and overexposed in the Xerox, stands in a line of men wearing fedoras, each one proudly holding a fish. All the men in the photograph are preachers like him, men who quoted the Bible and promised heaven and hell at revivals and on Indian reserves and in the poorest parts of town. Maybe I was born to it, a dissatisfaction bred into the bone with the world as it was. Like my mother, like her father and his father before him: a darkness inside we wanted to fill with something radiant. And yet despite everything, they’d all had trouble being true believers. My grandfather left the Nazarenes and his family, losing years to a gambling addiction. Even before my mother went AWOL from the Church and the Party, there had been a family histo
ry of broken faith and sudden departures.
With less than two months to go in the countdown, my mother’s present, bulky and sentimental, made me wonder what she and others in the field had ever been told about the deadline. The closer we came, the more difficult it was to imagine. Maybe when the revolution started, we would all go into hiding, go into full combat mode. There had to be part of the plan the Old Man hadn’t revealed and, like the sound of his voice, I longed and dreaded to hear it.
In my journal I write:
He once told me—watch out for the third purge, Sonja. The 1st and 2nd will pass you by but watch out for the third. The third purge is of idealism.
Looking at me behind my Control desk, it might have looked like I was working on a list or a memo. But really I was writing again.
What had the Old Man meant by that? That I would always want more, that I would never be satisfied?
On the next page I’d written down a line from a song I heard while I was down in the basement courtyard. Looking up to see which window the song was coming from, I saw the octagon of brick-framed sky above me, cold and clear.
You can’t walk in your sleep if you can’t sleep, the song said.
Sometimes I felt like I was sleepwalking. Sometimes I felt like I couldn’t sleep at all. Like the Old Man’s words, I didn’t fully understand it, but I wrote it down anyway so I wouldn’t forget.
Midnight, and I was sitting at the watch desk scanning the street. When Polly told me I was on night watch I’d been surprised but not unhappy. Maybe the Old Man would call for me. I’d spent whole shifts in the Old Man’s office. And if he didn’t call, maybe that was okay too. Sitting almost alone with my notebook.
But I soon understood why Polly had wanted me on the desk.
On the watch log I wrote, All quiet.