The Stringers, page 10
Seeing me standing there with nothing but a devastated expression seemed to make him feel naked and ashamed. He went back to acting like I wasn’t there.
The screams and shouts and banter quieted as a plainclothes man with a slight limp in his right leg stepped into the house. He had an eager look on his face like that of an archeologist entering a tomb that had been hidden for a thousand years. He walked into the hallway and picked up one of my father’s books, opening it and skimming several of the pages. While others laughed and had thrown the books on the ground, he handled it delicately, a solemn expression apparent. He avoided stepping on one of Father’s framed wedding pictures. He picked it up and ignored a joke about it from one of the men that garnered few laughs. His solemnity disappeared, however, as he looked over at Father’s study like a child coming downstairs on Christmas morning to find presents underneath the Christmas tree and their stockings stuffed with candy. Two men opened the doors for him and he was about to go inside when I walked out of the kitchen and screamed at him.
“Get away from there!”
He stopped, turned around slowly on his bad leg, and looked at me with an intrigued smile.
“Roy Farrington?”
“Yes. Would it be too much trouble to ask who you all are and what you’re doing in our house? Where’s my father?”
“Sorry, but that’s confidential.”
“Confidential? Which part?”
“All of it. For security purposes I am not authorized to tell you anything.”
I wasn’t normally an ill-tempered person, but his authoritative tone boiled away all the patience inside of me. I was standing in my home and men had come in and attacked my father and beat him and taken him away and one of them addressed me like I was inconveniencing him by asking who he was.
“Where are you taking my father?” I demanded. “Who are you? What are you doing here? Get out! Get out!”
Some of the men snapped up their guns and aimed them at me, but the man gestured at them and they lowered the muzzles. He hobbled over to me and gazed at me intently like he wanted to see what I looked like up close. I waited for him to say something, but when it was clear he had no intention of speaking to me, I asked him the same questions again, this time in a calmer voice.
He explained, again, that he couldn’t answer any of those questions except for the one about who they were, and the answer was they were members of ISA and had come to bring my father into custody. I asked him on what charge and he said he couldn’t tell me, nor would he show me an arrest warrant or search warrant, which I hadn’t even requested. Confused, I asked him why he wouldn’t show me a warrant.
A silent spell fell over the house as the man and his colleagues looked at me. The man smiled then informed me that a provision within the National Defense Reauthorization Act excluded the ISA from having to adhere to the normal constitutional limitations placed on domestic law enforcement agencies. He then asked me whether I had read the law and I told him I hadn’t, which made him nod his head. I felt ignorant and foolish, but not wrong.
Unable to think of a response, I watched mutely as he strode into my father’s study, the doors wide open for me to witness him open every drawer in the desk and examine my father’s personal items from the desktop. One of the men with him stooped down and collected the items, including my father’s flashlight, placing them in a fortified container he had brought with him that had a thumbprint identification lock on it.
I didn’t move while he did this, thinking there must have been some mistake. I then saw the man reach for Father’s letter to mother, which had fallen on the ground. He ripped it open, scanned some of the lines.
I was going to run up to him and take it out of his hands, certain he would either tear it apart or toss it in the container, but rather than laugh he seemed perplexed by what my father had written as he set it down on the desk untouched.
He walked out of the room with his colleague behind him. I approached him despite the men who appeared on the brink of shooting me with their weapons and insisted he provide me with more information if he were truly from the ISA. The man appeared distracted by something and when he put his hand to his ear I realized he had taken a call. When he was finished his hand came down and he looked at me without any hostility or animosity.
“You can go to our office and get more information there,” he said.
“Can’t I access it on the ISA’s site?”
“No. We don’t provide that kind of information online for security purposes. You’ll have to go there in person.”
“That’s it?”
“I cannot give you anything other than that. I’m sorry, but that is protocol.”
“What about me?” I asked.
“What about you?”
“Why aren’t you arresting me as well?”
“Because we’re not after you. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Neither did my father, but that didn’t stop you from beating him like that.”
He smiled. “I don’t think you know him as well as you think you do.”
“Better than you do, I’m sure.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure if I were you.”
I glared at him and wanted to argue about it, but I couldn’t deny the authenticity in his tone. He was too confident of himself to be lying. With liars there is always a hint of dishonesty, however subtle, the last remainder of decency. Liars blinked their eyes. This man didn’t blink once as he regarded me with sympathy.
“Go to the office and talk to the people there. They can assist you. I’m not authorized to give you anything further. Now if you’ll excuse me…”
The man gestured to the men, and they responded simultaneously as if they were robots commanded remotely. They brought the secured container out with them, and the rest of the men cleared out of the living room without bothering to clean up any of the damage they had caused or look at me. They exited out the breach they had made in the front doorframe. On the street, their heavy transport vehicles waited for them. They stepped inside their vehicles and drove off.
I stood there alone in the living room, surveying the ruined books and damaged furniture and the blood-stained carpet and Father’s study. I blinked my eyes and wondered once more if it was just a dream. When I bent down to touch the shards of glass, they cut my skin. Reality was the nightmare.
If I wanted to learn more about it, I would have to go to the ISA office, where they were permitted to disclose what they had done to him.
I looked over into Father’s study and looked at the desk and Father’s letter that the ISA officer had read. I wondered what kind of letter Father had written as to have that sort of sway over a man who had just ordered him beaten and hauled away like a dead carcass, and I wanted to read it to find out.
But as I approached the study I turned away, unwilling to go near it. I grabbed my Prizm, ran out the open gap on the front of our house to meet the deluge of rain that had suddenly arrived. I jumped into our car and looked up the directions to the ISA office as I set the controls to the auto-driver. The rain poured on the windshield and the wipers did nothing to give me visibility. I grew so anxious that I turned off the auto-driver and took control, driving well above the speed limit despite the fact that I hadn’t actually driven the car since I had taken my driver’s test. I squeezed the steering wheel like a man’s throat. My head was lurched over it as I peered into the stormy blackness beyond the luminosity of the headlights, hoping to catch up to the vehicle that held my father. Perhaps I would be able to have the entire matter cleared up before he was processed and entered into the system.
I kept telling myself it was a mistake. An enormous mistake. Father was an upstanding citizen, a man of fierce integrity. They had the wrong man. They had to.
The parking lot at the ISA office in downtown Bellevue was full when I reached it, which I thought odd considering how late the hour was. I was forced to park two blocks down the street and walked to the building. By the time I reached the entrance my clothes were soaked down to my socks, which made a squishy sound every time I took a step. I went inside the foyer and was directed by a sign to the waiting room for people wishing to find out more information about ISA arrests. There, I had to go through a security checkpoint and was forced to remove most of my clothing except for my trousers and have a security guard pat me down twice and provide them with my ID and answer a series of random questions.
I was then escorted with my clothes in my hand to a changing room, where a guard observed me dress and brought me back to the checkpoint, where they confiscated my Prizm for safekeeping and then told me I was permitted to go to the waiting room.
I finished tying my shoes, and when I turned the corner into the waiting room I stared ahead of me, incredulous at the great mass of people that filled the area almost to the brim so that I hardly had space to move through.
On the right side of the room there were counters lining the wall with ISA employees sitting behind them, bulletproof windows placed between them and the people sitting on the other side speaking to them. Behind the people in the chairs at the counter there was a line that weaved around the room like that at an airport, and in the line there were couples holding hands as one of them cried and older people who stared down at the floor and fathers with crying children and children crying with no parents at all who were led by a teenaged sibling. At the counter people shouted and cried and screamed and yelled and protested, and the ISA employees behind the bulletproof glass were nonchalant and yawned as they listened and nodded their heads, irrespective of what was said to them. Scattered throughout the room were security guards dressed exactly like the men who had arrested Father. They were also posted at the entrance and near the counters, but even excusing the blank expressions of their darkened helmets they seemed blasé about the people near them who argued with the ISA employees and shook their fists at the glass with dark red faces.
I stared at the scene, speechless. I had never been inside of the ISA office before, save for one time when Casey had to run by to pick up something he had forgotten and we had gone to the fifth floor, but in all that time I had never heard him mention or say anything about a waiting room. In fact, prior to that night, I hadn’t known what a waiting room was.
Now I knew, and I had a difficult time believing such a room existed.
“Are you here for something?”
I looked around to see who had called to me in the murmured voice. After getting rejections from the people on my left and right, I turned and realized it was one of the guards at the door who pointed at me and repeated his question. I told him who I was and explained the situation about my father and how he had been arrested and that the officer in charge had directed me here.
“Then take a number,” he replied, pointing at the machine on his left.
I walked up to the machine and studied it, confused as to what to do. I hadn’t seen one like it previously. It had a screen, but the ambiguous wording in the instructions eluded me, and it annoyed the guard so much he came over and touched the screen several times, and then a piece of paper came out at the bottom through a hole. I looked down at it and thought for a second that it had to be a mistake. The ISA couldn’t possibly ask us to use paper when we had our Prizms and could have the number downloaded onto it.
“Take it,” the guard said. “Or someone else will and you’ll be stuck here for another hour.”
I obeyed and took the piece of paper and walked over to the beginning of the line. I read the paper and the number was 436. I hope it didn’t indicate how many other people were ahead of me in the line, but I counted them one by one. By the time I got to 150 I stopped because it didn’t matter.
Even if there were only 150 that was still 150 people standing in the way of me and finding out what happened to my father and why.
In front of me in line was a woman of Eastern European descent with a baby girl in her arms and a toddler tugging at her skirt. She was dabbing her face with a handkerchief and her children were crying with her but the toddler’s questions made it evident that they did not know why they were there or what they were supposed to do. This made the woman cry harder to where she doubled over and when she brought her head back up she had to brush away her long blonde hair to look at me, as I had been observing her out of the corner of my eye. I turned away, embarrassed, but she spoke to me in such a distraught tone that I couldn’t help from looking back at her.
She told me her name was Yvonne and I seemed like a nice young man and could I hold her baby girl Elaine for a moment while she cleaned herself up?
I smiled and told her it was perfectly fine. She handed Elaine off to me and rummaged through her large handbag for a makeup kit while I rested Elaine against my shoulder. She was light, but squirmy, and she cried at being torn away from her mother and placed in the hands of a strange person, but I when I sung a lullaby my mother had sung to me every night when I was a boy, the sweet, poetic lyrics lulled her to sleep and her head fell against my chest.
Yvonne tied up her hair with cord and threw it over her shoulder like the end of a scarf. She took back Elaine and smiled at me and thanked me for singing her that lullaby. She rocked Elaine back and forth like her arms were a crib and asked me what had brought me to the waiting room. I told her my story of how they had come and beat my father and taken him after entering the house without a warrant, thinking she would sympathize but not really believe me. Instead she nodded her head and sighed.
“It’s the same with all of us,” she said. “They came for my husband Victor this afternoon. He had barely left work when they arrested him. Luckily, he was in the middle of a call with me when they came, so right before they severed our connection I heard him say something, and I knew right away it was them. I didn’t bother to contact the police. No one else would do this.”
“I don’t understand. How can they?”
“They have guns.”
“No, I mean how are they allowed to?”
“Allowed to? They do whatever they want. Who’s to stop them?”
“It’s against the law, isn’t it?”
“They are the law, aren’t they? And they have guns. Even if you have guns, which would be foolish to try and use against them, they have bigger, better guns than a normal person is allowed to have. Victor had a friend who tried to defend himself. They shot him and arrested his whole family.”
“Has this ever happened to you before?”
“Yes. This is the third time they have arrested my Victor.”
“Why?”
She shrugged and kissed Elaine and whispered in her ear, and then she bent down to speak to her toddler boy, who was jerking at her skirt. He asked where his father was in a cracked voice and Yvonne told him they were trying to find out and that she was sure he would be with them again soon.
“Don’t they ever tell him why they had arrested him?” I asked.
“No. They don’t have to.”
“Aren’t they required to?”
“Why? What is my Victor going to do to them if they don’t?”
“Take them to court, perhaps?”
“As my great-grandfather said when he was living in Romania during the Communist regime, you can’t sue the person who inflicts injustice against you when they’re the ones who also get to decide if they wronged you. Victor might as well take them to see their own mothers. Who do you think the court will side with? They always side with the police of the ISA. And going to court requires money. The ISA has taxpayers’ money, our money, to pay for their costs, so we have to pay for our defense and prosecution. It would be nice to have that much money, but we don’t.”
“If your husband doesn’t know why he’s arrested, then how can he know what to do to avoid it?”
Yvonne smiled as though I were as young as her toddler. “What part of Bellevue are you from?”
“Lake Hills.”
“Ah, the nice area.”
“I suppose.”
“And what are you? A student?”
“Apprentice.”
“Where?”
“At the Record as a journalist.”
Yvonne froze and stopped hopping Elaine on her hip. Her toddler let go of her skirt and looked up at me like I had just used a swear word in front of him.
“You want to be a journalist?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Why…because I’m curious. And I love to write.”
She didn’t speak at first. “Are you going to write about this?”
“What do you mean?”
“Nobody writes about the waiting rooms.”
“What do you mean?”
“Every ISA office has a waiting room like this, but everyone seems to be like you. They don’t know it exists unless they have to come here.”
“I would write about it now, if I had my device with me.”
“They don’t let us bring them in here.”
“Yes, they told me it was for security purposes. They’re afraid someone might use it to set off a bomb or something.”
Yvonne said nothing, but she smirked and looked at Elaine and then at her toddler, and her toddler mimicked her smirk and they laughed together. She kissed Elaine, then her toddler, wiping at her eye.
“I just hope they let Victor go, like they have the last several times.”
“Why wouldn’t they?”
“You never know. Sometimes they release them, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they let them go, but not for days, or weeks. A woman I knew had her husband detained for three years with no word. There’s no way to know.”
I wrung my hands, terrified at the prospect of not seeing Father for three years and not knowing whether he was alive or dead, and if he was dead how he had died. Worse, I dreaded the thought that I’d never see him again and not ever find out why. Not knowing why was the worst fear of all. Even in the worst of circumstances, knowing why something had happened provided a small comfort.
It reminded me of the story of Job in the Bible; had he known why he was suffering, it wouldn’t have been nearly as horrible for him. But it would have also missed the point, it seemed.
