He seemed to speak with difficulty. “Well, they would have been questioned.”
“In prison?”
“Yes.” He’d taken a toothpick from a cup by the register when we’d walked out, but he wasn’t using it, just turning it over in his hands, pushing the points against his skin. “Some of them…I don’t know. I didn’t see them anymore. Maybe they were suspicious of me, or maybe they…”
He didn’t finish the sentence.
I started the car. As we drove, the vision came to me again, those happy faces bobbing in a candlelit circle in a café, listening to the stranger tell jokes and play his guitar. Slowly disappearing, one by one, like the Cheshire Cat, until even the smiles were gone, leaving just a trace of a glow lingering in the darkness.
I thought of the photographs from the prisons, distress rising in my throat.
“Eventually, I came here,” the stranger continued, as if he felt he had to finish the story now that he had started. “I—I knew the right people. To arrange things so I could leave.” He looked down at his palms. “When I first arrived, I was a student for a while—I went to a university in Virginia with my savings. I had a visa. Then it ran out.” He bent the toothpick until it broke. “I asked for asylum, but somehow, they knew what I had done.”
“Who did?” I forced myself to ask.
“The Americans. The judge. I was told I couldn’t get asylum. There’s a rule, you see. You can’t get it if you’ve done certain things. And they said I’d done one of them, because I’d worked for my government. Because I had,” he drew a breath, “informed on people.”
My stomach cramped. As he spoke, I was overcome by a vision of the day Amos had locked me in the garage. The smell of it, the darkness.
He’d left me in there for three days.
There was no food and no water.
“There’s another rule, however,” the stranger was saying, “that even if you can’t get asylum, you can’t be sent back to a place where you’re going to be—well, if certain things are going to happen to you. But the judge said, ‘You worked for your government. Why would they now hurt you?’” I could hear the disbelief in his voice, as if this exchange had just happened. “He didn’t understand how angry my government would be—will be—when they find out I talked about what I did. What they asked me to do. It makes them look bad.” He gave a short, humorless laugh. “Obviously.”
I saw myself calling out in the dark until my voice was gone, pounding and clawing at the doorknob until my hands were bloodied and my nails torn loose. Finally, I’d curled against the door, noiseless, so thirsty I was sure I would die.
There was a cold sweat on my palms, the back of my neck, as I listened to him.
“So you didn’t get asylum,” I said.
“No.”
“And you came up here. Or your friends brought you here.”
“Yes,” he said. “Eventually.”
Much of my screaming—more than I cared to remember—had been for my parents. I’d kept picturing them standing in the priest’s driveway. It was clear what had happened: the priest had called them, and then they had called Amos. They must have realized their mistake. They’d seen the way he’d charged into the rectory, the way he’d wrenched me out, taken me away. They would be worried. They would come to the house. They would hear me.
They didn’t.
They were, if anything, even more terrified of him than I was. But with far less reason.
“How many?” I asked as we turned off the highway.
“Pardon me?”
“How many people did you…turn in?”
He turned to me, surprised.
“I don’t know,” he said. A gust of wind blew through the tops of the trees as we passed through Centerville, pelting the car with water. “Maybe a hundred. Maybe more.”
A chill ran through me, a literal feeling of cold making my skin draw toward itself.
“A hundred,” I repeated.
“Maybe. I really don’t know. It was a long time before I could escape.”
“How long?”
For a moment, I thought he wouldn’t answer.
“Five years,” he said quietly.
Turning on my emergency lights, I pulled over onto the shoulder of the road. The tires crushed the leaves and gravel.
The stranger looked at me. I kept my eyes fixed ahead, on the point where the black asphalt merged with the darkness. The emergency lights clicked softly as they blinked.
Before me, I saw the pictures, the limbs that had been boiled, the burns from shocks, the vacant eyes. The hopelessness.
“Did they die?” I asked.
There was a long beat while he seemed to struggle to decide what to say.
“Some of them confessed,” he said. “I know that. People will say many things, when they’re…under pressure.” He shifted slightly under the shoulder strap. “And in my country, a confession is a serious thing. It’s hard to undo it, once you’ve said you did something. Almost impossible, really.”
I squeezed the wheel.
“So, they’re dead,” I said.
He didn’t answer. His face was turned away, his throat long and white.
I unfastened my seat belt and opened the door.
“Wait,” he said, but I didn’t listen.
Outside, in the cold, I walked behind the car and leaned against it. The taillights throbbed red, pulsing into the night. I gazed down the empty road into the darkness. A cold drizzle had begun to fall, sticking to my face. As I stood there, it soaked into my jeans.
In the hospital, Amos had explained that I’d gotten sick, I’d refused to go to a doctor, I was a bit unbalanced, I’d tried to move a heavy load of firewood and it had fallen onto my hands.
When it was time for me to be discharged, they’d sent me back. He’d stood at the front desk and taken my arm. And we’d walked out.
I wiped the drizzle from my face. Slowly, almost calmly, I bent double and threw up. When it was over, I straightened. Then I put my hands on my knees and did it again.
When the feeling of sickness finally passed, I slid down and sat on the crust of snow. The rain dripped into my eyes, and I let it, leaning my head against the warm fender.
It was a long time before I stood up and walked back to the open door on the driver’s side. The stranger was as I had left him, looking down at his hands. My seat was flecked with rain.
I lowered myself onto it and closed the door.
“Your wife,” I said in the silence.
I could tell he was looking at me, but I refused to look back.
His voice was small. “Yes?”
“You left her there.”
His gaze shifted away. “Yes.” The word seemed to catch in his throat. “It was dangerous to leave. And she didn’t know. About…any of it.” His hands gripped together in his lap. “I thought that would protect her.”
The rain spattered the windshield. “Did it?”
He looked down at his thumbs.
I turned the key and reached for the gear shift, flicking my turn signal even though no one was there. We pulled onto the road.
“Are you angry?” the stranger asked as we pulled into the lot and confronted the silent brick hulk of the hostel.
“Angry’s not the word,” I said. “Let’s let it go for tonight. We can talk tomorrow.”
“Are you sure? I—”
“Yes. I’m sure.” I turned off the engine. “I need some time.”
The room Martin had given me was dark and cold. Mechanically, I stripped, pulled on my pajamas, brushed my teeth in the harsh light of the bathroom, lay down on the hard mattress. There was no moon outside the window, just the rainclouds. The first two pills didn’t work, and the second two didn’t, either. I couldn’t stop seeing the photographs with their raw, broken skin. The blue eyes of the doctor as he’d bent over me. The priest with his frightened face and rumpled sweater, standing alone in the light of the bulb that hung over the rectory door, realizing his mist
ake much too late.
Finally, upending the paper bag into my palm, I swallowed a handful of the white ovals without counting them. Gathering myself into a knot, I shivered, breathing in the slight wild-animal smell of the blanket. When the blackness hit me, it hit me hard, sending me sailing off into a place where there was no thought.
And I was grateful.
8
In the early afternoon, I awoke slowly, rising into consciousness like a diver floating toward the surface of the sea. There was a sharp, repeated sound somewhere in the distance, hard and regular, like marching. The prisoners, I thought groggily, imagining them emerging from the mist in the uniforms they would once have had, the fabric in tatters, their hands behind their heads. But no, it wasn’t them. It was knocking, someone knocking on the door of the room that it took me some time to realize wasn’t my own.
“Hey,” Martin called.
I sat up and walked unsteadily to the door. The light from the windows was blinding.
“Are you all right?” He looked me up and down. “I just realized you weren’t down at the store.”
“I’m taking a sick day,” I said, or tried to.
He was still looking at me, worried and uncertain, when I closed the door.
By the time I stepped out of the shower, I felt steadier, although I seemed to be having trouble grasping things and it took me a long time to get dressed. I sat on the edge of the bed, feeling as if I were outside my own body, struggling to pull my thoughts from circles into a straight line. Gradually, the previous evening came back to me.
At one point, there were footsteps that paused outside the door, soft and rubbery-sounding. I didn’t move, and eventually they went away.
I drank a glass of water, gazing into it between sips. Then I reached for my keys and left.
The drive down the mountain passed before I quite knew it, the car seeming to float over the road. I pulled into the gas station and parked by the pay phone, my stomach empty and my hair still wet.
The phone wasn’t in a booth; it was just mounted on top of a short pole. I stood and looked at it, fingering the coins I had found in my pocket.
I picked up the receiver, hearing the dial tone.
Then I let it drop again.
Massaging my forehead, I drifted into the convenience store and bought a pack of Marlboro Reds. There was a line of long parking spaces for tractor-trailers on the other side of the lot, and I moved the car there, in a corner, up against the grass. I climbed onto the hood and sat back against the windshield, pulling on a cigarette, my legs stiff from the horse ride I could hardly believe had happened just the day before. The sunlight flashed on the door of the convenience store as it opened and closed, admitting the stream of men and women who were going about their days.
The cigarette burned down to the filter. I stubbed it out on the sole of my shoe and got back into the car. There were too many people here; I needed somewhere quieter, more alone. It was like a deep internal itch, like the hard-edged restlessness I got when I didn’t take the pills.
I remembered where I’d been when I’d first seen the other photos, the ones the archaeologist had mentioned while I was cooking hamburgers in the store. It was spring; I’d been in my own empty kitchen, sitting by the table, a few days before I let the bank take the house. Almost all the other furniture was already gone, either moved to my grandmother’s basement or—in most cases—sold. I myself had already moved into the room at my grandmother’s and almost never came back. There were cobwebs in the corners, dust in the sink, newspapers piled on the front step in their orange bags. I’d brought the papers in and, already fatigued from the effort of walking, dropped them on the table. As I sat there, I’d grabbed the one that looked the least faded. And there they were, on the front page, the pictures. The worst ones were on the inside, so children wouldn’t see them. Naked men in pyramids. Men dragged at the ends of leashes, threatened by dogs, forced to touch themselves, hooded and strung with electrical wires. I’d sat there and absorbed the colors, the grinning people in uniform, the terror of men who flattened themselves against a wall. Then I’d looked out the window for a long time.
Abu Ghraib. In other places, where the TV was on, I heard people talking about those pictures—the newscasters on those shows where the men always wore suits and the women wore bright short dresses, as if they were flowers. I heard the men on the radio talk about them, too, the men who always shouted, who were always so sure they were right.
They all seemed to assume they knew what we—people like me—thought, because of who we were. It didn’t seem to occur to them that we could think differently. That we could look at something through different eyes. That we could stay up at night, imagining or remembering, asking ourselves questions.
They’d sold us a bill of goods; that’s what I thought. All of them. They sold us the army and sent the people we loved off to die awful deaths for reasons that didn’t hold up. They sold us pain and said it was fine. They had such contempt for us, and they thought we didn’t see it. Just because we lived where we lived and were who we were. They didn’t think any of us could look at such horror and see something in it that looked familiar, something that made us recoil. They didn’t have those kinds of imaginations.
And I faulted them for it. I blamed them in a way that was clear-eyed and hard.
They thought I was stupid and gullible, that I moved through life like a block, full of anger at the things they told me to be angry at and unable to feel anything else. They thought I didn’t know when something was inhuman or unjust.
They were wrong.
There was a rest stop along the highway, a patch of grass and trees with a small shelter housing the bathrooms and vending machines. I pushed my way through the door, approaching the phone in its shadowed corner. The floor beneath it was strewn with candy-bar wrappers, crushed paper cups, black clots of mud.
I stood there for a long moment, seeing myself as if from the other end of the room. My mind still felt as if it were suspended by threads, but also, I thought, had a clarity it seldom had.
I held this other receiver in my hand, feeling its weight.
Then I pushed my coins into the slot.
I didn’t know the number for the police, I realized as I looked at the keypad. But I could call the park office, where the rangers worked. That would be enough; after all, the park was their territory.
I pressed the numbers and waited for the ringing. There was a click as someone picked up.
“Hello,” a woman’s voice said on the other end of the line.
I gathered myself. “Hello,” I said.
“You’ve reached the office of Pine Grove Furnace State Park in Gardners, Pennsylvania,” the voice continued. “Please leave—”
I cursed under my breath and hung up. After a moment, I tried again.
“Hello,” the same woman’s voice said.
I sighed.
“Excuse me?” the woman said.
“Oh—” I gripped the receiver with both hands. “Sorry. I, um…is there someone I could talk to about…uh, somebody in the park?”
“Somebody in the park?” she repeated. “Are you having a problem at the campsite?”
“No, it’s—something else.”
“Well, tell me what you need and I’ll tell you if we can deal with it.” Her tone was impersonal and professional, her accent slightly southern.
“It’s kind of hard to explain. I wanted to…to report someone.” The word “report” had a jarring sound as it fell from my mouth, and I squeezed the cord in my hand.
“Okay,” she said, apparently unfazed. “What are they doing?”
“Well, it’s not something they’re doing, exactly. They did something before, in the past.” As I spoke, I saw the stranger’s face, with its hollow cheeks and fine lines. “People are looking for them.”
“I see.”
I could picture her leaning back in her chair and tapping a pencil, as if she had just realized she was talking
to someone who had a screw loose.
“What I mean is…” I paused. The metal keypad was covered with fingerprints, traces of other people who had wound up here, using this thing in a trash-strewn corner as the cars outside rushed by. The broke and broken-down.
“Ma’am?” the ranger said.
“Yes—sorry.”
“Can you tell me what this person looks like?”
I steeled myself.
“Tall,” I said. “Thin. He has black hair.”
“Caucasian?”
I had never thought about it. “Um…yeah. I guess so.”
“How old is he?”
“Thirty-nine. Maybe forty by now.”
“And how much would you say he weighs?”
The stranger hovered before my vision again. Hat in hand, eyes calm and gentle. A distinct feeling of self-loathing began to creep over me.
On the other end of the line, the ranger sighed. “Listen, ma’am, if you’re not—”
I hung up.
There was a picnic table outside, and I sat down on one of the wooden benches, listening to the roar of the traffic. Car after car, truck after truck. Other lives.
The ground shook as each of them passed, endlessly.
I looked down the hill, where a muddy path led nowhere, ending at a barbed-wire fence and a row of trees.
The lines in the photographs, I thought. The ones that came from whipping. If they had been less vivid, if they had healed, they would have looked just like the pink lines on the stranger’s back.
I tried to remember exactly what I’d just told the ranger, how much I’d given her to go on. It hadn’t been much, I thought. There was still time to reconsider, to decide what to do. Tall, thin, dark hair, about forty. That could be anyone. They wouldn’t pursue this; they’d think I was just some crank. Wouldn’t they?
My mouth and nose burned with the fumes from the interstate. I pressed my hands against my knees, looking down at them, feeling the table tremble. I am the wrong person for this, I thought. Every time I think I understand it, every time I’m sure, it slips away from me. Tell me what to do. Tell me what to do.
The traffic rushed on.
Ways to Hide in Winter Page 20