Celano spoke in an English not of the workers, and his accent had an inscrutable transnational quality to it. He tried to limit the more ornate syntactic constructions, the rarified diction he was given to, but in moments of greatest concentration—as his mind was consumed limning a Gordian thought, and lacked the resources to dress it simply too—he would drift toward the baroque language natural to his station. When he was not probing in this way, though, and merely telling what he knew, what he’d settled on, his language was limpid and plain. By register alone, then, one could hear where his mind was.
Even when they turned tortuous, though, the urgency of his words was usually enough to win the workers over, however alien they found Celano in these moments, however little success they had in so much as parsing the grammar of his ideas. More than that, it was his grasp of construction in its global dimensions, the niceties of the trade, and indeed the joints where it might come undone, that overcame their bemusement and earned their interest.
On that evening, Jenko later revealed, Celano had urged them to make their ancient grievances visible by new, still-forming means, that this was the lesson in the air, the meaning of Halsley’s rot. The security they lacked, the static wages, the uncompensated injuries, the part-timing, the lack of training programs—by being pressed in familiar ways, these concerns barely registered as having anything like the gravity they did. There was protest, of course, and for a time that could hold the attention of the media, which could in turn hold a nation’s. But no one can stay attuned indefinitely. Protest becomes noise. In any case, given the rigors of redress—no less than the remaking of a country’s self-conception—it couldn’t happen at any speed. It let their case be tabled.
Strike could have had more bite than protest. But hadn’t it lost its teeth to the old cowboy, Reagan, in a battle over air traffic decades ago? Their own situation was even worse, since Celano’s workers were mostly unskilled. It was nothing to replace them. So the pain they could induce, the attention they could command, was also nothing.
Both tactics, strike and protest, had their place, Celano granted. They’d done much good for labor. But their own historical moment, he said, seemed to ask them to reach further, to discover what lay beyond. Or before, primordially.
Their problems might not be exclusively, or ultimately, with the substance of the law. They might be with the very manner of its making, the mechanisms of the state they’d been taught to call democratic. It was no longer clear, if it ever was, Celano intoned, that voting your interests and living with the results, come what may, was a conscionable course. Democracy—rule of the people—might not be so simple as majority votes.
That meant shifting the point of attack, or expanding it at least. More than that, it meant a fresh translation of demos. Everything would flow from that. Now, the alliances brought with it, the unities created, they would be unfamiliar, unstable. After all, a lot of people were busy reinterpreting demos for a new era, each to their own purposes—the rich, the poor, the devout. The liberal, the statist, the autocratic too. Why, after all, should democracy exclude certain forms of dictatorship? But who exactly would count as the demos? There were Athenian notions to revisit. It wasn’t so obvious who was what.
These alliances might also be as unavoidable as they were unfamiliar. There was overlap in these redefinitions, yes, but even more discord than agreement, so that wasn’t why. Really it was the act of redefinition itself that arrayed them all against the state, which was itself happy enough with the old understanding and doing its best to stamp out the shifts of meaning the factions were floating. As far as the government was concerned, they were the same. Revisionists.
The particulars were still shrouded, Celano said, but the mist was burning off every day. He said no more. Which was wise, Jenko thought.
Celano’s abstractions quieted the room. There was a coded charge to the words, though the code was neither one he had encrypted nor one he was necessarily equipped to decipher. A murmur came from the workers as Celano stepped down from the podium and re-entered the partitioned space. They clapped with calloused hands. The taps shot beer into chilled mugs. They returned the tables to their places and began to play games of nine-ball, in teams.
The footfalls came on slowly, the soft slapping of leather on stone. Stagg twisted toward the staircase: a descending pair of unshined wingtips, then seersucker trousers, then a heavy wool cardigan a deep green.
“You got that text too, yeah,” Ravan said.
“I did.”
“And what’ve you found?” he asked, surveying the damage casually.
“Looks like a police raid. Same contractors, at least. Same matériel.” Stagg pointed to a charred strip of tempered vinyl that appeared military grade.
These raids were sometimes as destructive as any wrought by the factions they were meant to subdue. The government had already exploded several hives of the agents of opposition and their alleged abettors, on grounds of national security. Of course, political license for this kind of violence wasn’t easy to acquire. It depended on the sustained appearance of sedition.
There were certainly clear-cut cases of it. Lately, though, the basis for these interventions appeared to have grown thinner, more preemptive, even reckless. It was consuming credibility, and questions of this sort were losing their paranoiac ring: How many involved embellished charges, only to justify the tightening of control? Worse, how many of these police raids were passed off as the work of factionalists, for the same purpose?
Jenko’s hall looked to be one of these confidence-eroding cases. As far as anyone knew, alongside more mundane discussions of procedural matters, only Celano’s almost philosophical talks went on at Jenko’s. There was no history of violence to point to, and no manifest incitement to it either.
In the wake of the attack, the government had the usual choices: claim that the evidence of violence, or the intention to it, had to remain classified—this did not ease anyone’s worries, not at this stage—drum up some evidence, or disclaim the attack and count it as internecine warfare between factions.
The angle to be taken on Jenko’s hall was not yet established, or anyway known to the two agents.
“The meetings might have been a bother to the government—to us, I mean,” Ravan said. “They’ll have to make the case for going this far, though,” he said, gesturing at the wreckage. “Or implicate some enemy of labor in this. A pretty sophisticated one, by the looks of it. Anyway, I’ve just come from talking to Emile, the owner, at the station.” He relayed the substance of the workers’ meeting to Stagg, as told by Jenko.
“And where is Celano?” Stagg asked.
“He wasn’t there, but Penerin’s looking for him.” They walked through the space, the debris. “You know, I don’t think I’m seeing anything you’re not. It does look like our work—the same sort, actually, I’ve seen in other districts lately. That’s really why I’m here, to compare. But I don’t see a difference. Not one that makes any.”
Ravan paused over a shattered cue ball. A blue dust coated it. “The explosive traces, the shrapnel, the placement and timing—maybe the motives too—generations of R&D behind them all. That’s the way it looks, anyway. They’re convinced these are framings, Penerin and all. Not actually government work. The appearance of state oppression. That’s what they’re designed to give.”
“We are convinced,” Stagg said, touching Ravan’s shoulder with the tips of his fingers. His voice was flat.
“We are?”
“It’s not so easy to make the case, I guess, when things look like this,” Stagg said. “So… to form.”
“Well, yes, how does it play?” Ravan said. “And what do I know, we know, about what Penerin and my supervisor are convinced of? We know what they tell us. And they might not even know as much as they think, never mind what we do. I don’t see how any of us can be convinced of anything much, really.”
They ascended the staircase, leaving a precisely established chaos behind them.<
br />
17
“I hear you’re doing better,” stagg said over a crackling phone line. “A little bit better.”
“The wheelchair’s gone,” Jen said. “They took it back.”
“That’s good. You can walk.”
“Is that what you mean?”
“Well—”
“No more rolling around.”
“And your eye… I remember. It was painful.”
“I have whites instead of reds again.”
“Good.”
“I still see double at night, brights against darks. Everything haloes, and text, especially text, like on a computer screen, it doubles.”
“You’re not done getting better. That’s what the doctors tell me.”
“My ribs get sore, they’re sore now, when I’ve coughed too much, or laughed too much the night before.”
“Laughing is—”
“It’s happened once.”
“They take time. I’ve broken mine.”
“Have you. And your collarbones too?”
The line flickered with static.
“I’m sorry. What I—”
“My fingers work. They didn’t for weeks. They were all these colors. Green, orange, blue, red…”
“The bruises must have been deep.”
“Must have been.”
“But they’re gone.”
“My grip’s still weak. All my fingers tremble when they come together. I drop a lot of things.”
“That’ll change.”
“The stitches have all come out. I had twelve above my right eye.”
“I remember.”
“Left a scar along my eyebrow. My head just split there. And I’ve got stitches along the edge of my wrist. Odd place to get them. I don’t know how a lot of it happened.”
“That’s okay.”
“It wasn’t, though.”
“To who?”
“At the interview. You didn’t say it. But it wasn’t okay.”
“That’s not true. You were very helpful.”
“I was on drugs, for the pain.”
“You were helpful. And you have a copy of your statement. So if you did want to add—”
“See, I knew you would ask me that. That’s what I mean. It’s not okay. But nothing’s clearer now. I read it over four times. I could have been clearer, more direct, answering your questions, but the facts are the same. The tiny ones are sharp. But the big ones are dull, soft. The facts are the problem.”
“We aren’t expecting anything more from you. But yes—this is why I’m calling, mostly—as helpful as you were, we still don’t have anything concrete. I’m sorry to have to tell you that.”
“Nothing.”
“Though there are a dozen or so people under special watch.”
“There’s a profile, you mean.”
“And what you’ve told me has contributed to it.”
“But it fits twelve people.”
“Well, yes. Even they aren’t hard suspects. I don’t want to mislead you.”
“So it fits even more? I helped you put together a picture of a person—”
“Not a picture—not a physical description. Parts of it are that.”
“No, but a picture of a person, an idea of a person.”
“You did. It was vital, what you added to it.”
“But this idea fits twelve, and not even them so well you’ll call them suspects. Maybe it fits a hundred, really.”
“That’s true.”
“A thousand.”
“I don’t know.”
“And this was vital.”
“It could be. You were vital in creating it.”
“How is that even an idea of a person? What sort of picture matches everyone? What sort of picture is that?”
“Look, Ms. Best—”
“I think ‘Jen’ is better.”
“We haven’t had any incidents recently. Nothing in weeks, in any of the districts.”
“And that’s not good?”
“Well, of course it’s good. It’s—”
“But for the case. You need more. More beatings.”
“No. We don’t want to see any more—”
“You don’t want more. Obviously. Of course. You’re not evil. You only need more. It would help. And you wish I had more. But that’s what I mean. I can’t tell you very much about how it happened, not the way you want to know.”
“That’s not your fault.”
“Well that’s just idle. ‘Fault.’”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe you are evil, Carl.” She laughed and it mixed with the static and made the phone clip. “And my experience, my pain, it hasn’t moved anything, changed anything.”
“I just said it has. The profile.”
“It really is a stupid word you brought up.”
“Jen, we are going through what we have. What we know, in all sorts of ways, from every direction. Something can emerge.”
For a long time, they listened to each other breathe.
“You seem different today,” Stagg said finally.
“Different how?”
“Terse.”
“Just like you. Maybe it’s being off the pills. Or just the phone.”
“Maybe.”
“And does that mean you found me awfully chatty at the interview? You can be strange. Just like she said.”
“She?”
“My friend. The one who let you in.”
“Mariela.”
“Dress shoes and no socks. Wet pants.”
“The legs. She mentioned that?”
“You looked at my fingers the whole time I talked.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“The colors maybe.”
“I was listening.”
“You ran into Mariela on your way out.”
“That’s right.”
“She thought you were so strange.”
“Well, I’m not a cop. Maybe that’s who she’s used to dealing with.”
She laughed. “I’m sure she is. But there are lots of you now. Watches, I mean. That’s not strange, Carl.”
“Maybe I was bothered by your story. I’d only just heard it. It might have showed.”
“Maybe you were bothered?”
“Jen—”
“Do you have a girlfriend, Carl?”
“Your story—”
“Do you?”
“Yes, but this story—”
“She must be very understanding.”
“I’m sorry, if I didn’t—”
“Or she just tunes you out. I bet that’s it.”
“I was taking it all down.”
“I guess you’ve already got plenty to worry about, don’t you?”
“It’s a terrible story.”
Again there was a pause.
“You know,” Jen began, “what someone should seem like, why they should seem like anything in particular… Mariela’s ideas are definite. Not like the profile. The opposite problem. But maybe I’ve missed something. She’s managed to stay on her feet the whole time. And I’m still not better. Still, I was glad to go in the end.”
“Go?”
“Mariela’s too worried, too aware, whatever it is, to live with for very long. Does it even help? I wonder whether she took me in partly for that, to size up this threat. From a toll. I’m a toll. I don’t think that’s true. She did ask me a lot, though, long strings of questions, stretched out over days. She would pick up out of nowhere. About friends of hers I may have worked beside, people I saw that day, any signs there may have been, what did I miss, what did I not see. Or the lack of signs. Maybe I missed nothing, he was that good, or lucky. And how quickly I knew, and now that it’s happened, what will I do. She’s been trying to get me to call you, actually.”
“Strange as I am.”
“But I didn’t call you. You had to call. And that’s because I don’t think there’s much I know. She just assumes I must, that it’s only go
t to be fished out. I don’t mind talking about it. But the angle, the way it’s always a piece of a bigger puzzle. I can’t think like that.”
“You don’t.”
“Not as that. A reign of terror or whatever. And over a bunch of sluts.”
“But you’re worried about the profile.”
“I want to be useful, Carl. You aren’t calling me for personal reflections, ones that end there, tell you nothing about the future.”
“What about just your future?”
“I don’t think about that either.”
“It would be pretty hard not to.”
“It is hard.”
“Impossible almost.”
“No. But it doesn’t help, so I don’t.”
“And Mariela?”
“She thinks only of the future, as far as I can tell. That must be hard too. She has a kind of concern for the group at the front of her thoughts—her among the many. She’s helped me because of it probably. She might have helped anyway. But she thinks about things in this way I can’t. Like you.”
“About the city, the community.”
“The future of it.”
“Well, professionally, yes, I think about it.”
“This can’t seriously be your profession. This is about convenience. I’m sure of that.”
“It’s one of them.”
“Right, so there are others.”
“They pay me to consider the whole—”
“They pay you for the particulars, like these.”
“Yes, but for the benefit of the whole. I keep it in mind.”
“Professionally.”
“Right.”
“Maybe that’s what Mariela meant. That it ended there for you. Just a job to do. Or is that impossible too?”
“It could be. I’m not sure.”
“Anyway, she needed the space back. It was always temporary. Her boyfriend made it from Quito. Mariela’s the breadwinner now. Proud.”
“And—”
“I’m in my place, for weeks now. With my brother, for the meantime. He’s in the other bedroom. He’s helping me cover rent.”
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