The Stringers, page 11
The minutes transpired slowly while the rain continued to slap against the ceiling above us, and gradually people sat down on the ground when they saw the line was not moving. Without my Prizm, I kept checking the time on the old fashioned clock hanging over the doorway. When I had come in it had already been an ungodly hour, but by now it was nearing midnight. I found it peculiar that a government agency would be open so late, yet at the same time I was glad it was. If I had had to wait until morning to find out anything, I would have lain in bed all night staring at the ceiling envisioning every single possibility and outcome. Going to sleep would have been impossible.
At the counters, the ISA employees acted sluggish as they interviewed people, most of them yawning constantly and glancing at the clock. I was amazed at their calmness when a certain man no shorter than six foot seven pounded the glass and shouted and was forced out by two armed guards who had to threaten him with their rifles before he would oblige. After him more people gave up and left the line to go home, while others slept on the ground until they were kicked awake by the person behind them. Although I continued to draw closer to the counter I pitied those who left, knowing they sought the same information as I did but they had reached a point of such helplessness that they had surrendered any hope.
I wasn’t there quite yet.
Yvonne reached the counter with her boy now asleep in her other arm along with Elaine as she approached the glass. She placed Elaine on the counter to hold her boy with both arms as she talked in a drowsy voice to the ISA employee, who seemed distracted by the clock, which showed it to be nearly midnight. Yvonne spoke softly into the holes in the glass, and as she talked tears trickled down her face and she wiped them away with a handkerchief. The ISA employee, a short overweight woman with big glasses, offered no empathy and interrupted her several times as she tried to explain herself, and I got the impression the woman was trying to take her time with the interview.
A minute before midnight the woman shook her head at Yvonne and muttered something and looked away as Yvonne dropped her head into her hand and wept, and Elaine, who was wide awake, wept at the sight of her mother weeping, and the weeping drowned out all the rest of the noise in the waiting room. Yvonne picked up Elaine and her boy and struggled carrying them away from the counter. Before she moved past me she stopped and looked at me without wiping her face and I could scarcely see her eyes behind the glistening reflection of the lights on her countenance.
“There’s no hope to be found here. I will have to go elsewhere to learn these things.”
“Where’s that?”
She cocked her head to the side. “I wish I were as innocent as you. Don’t ever lose that. Promise me?”
I had no inkling of what she meant, but I promised her anyways in spite of the uncertainty of what I had promised to do. She gave me a sad smile and then walked out of the room, her children still weeping into her shoulder.
With no one in front of me, I rushed over to the counter and looked at the woman, and as soon as I opened my mouth to speak to her the clock chimed. As soon as it did, the woman shook her head at me and explained that the waiting room was closed and I had to come back tomorrow. I leaned over the counter and begged her to tell me just the basic details of what had happened to my father so I could get some sleep, but she refused to listen as she disappeared behind the shutters closing down on the glass in front of me. I considered clawing at the shutters but refrained, seeing the guards watching me behind their faceless helmets as they moved from their stationary positions towards the remaining people in line.
“Time to leave,” one of them said. “Come back tomorrow. Anyone refuses to leave will be in violation of the Cyberspace Freedom Act and arrested.”
His blunt words were sufficient to disperse us. I followed the crowd as we shuffled into the foyer at the security checkpoint, where we were given back our Prizms. I held mine in my hand and didn’t put it on my head, and I noticed none of the people around me put theirs on. They talked amongst each other in a traditional manner with a natural ease, as if it was their normal method of conversing.
I didn’t speak to anyone and chose to listen instead, albeit when I did so their voices dipped down into whispers and they turned their shoulders to me so that I was segregated and alone.
I walked out of the building and back to my car. It took me several times to get it started and as the auto-driver assumed control, I kept turning the windshield wipers to remove the rain that tapped the glass like hands wiping tears away from eyes, and the cracks of lighting in the distance sounded more akin to wails than discharges of electricity in the atmosphere.
When I returned home it appeared as if our house had been burglarized.
Windows shattered. Doors broken. Curtains torn.
The floor in the foyer was wet from the rain as I stepped inside, staring down at the cracked door with sprinkles of Father’s blood on it like chicken pox on a child, the trail leading back into the living room where a scarlet circle soaked the white carpet. The cold breeze blew in through the windows and the entrance, leaving me chilled in my wet clothes that clung tightly to my skin.
I stooped down to grab Father’s books and attempted to put them back on the wrecked bookshelf and place everything back to where it had once been, as if erasing the memory and evidence of the event. I shivered the whole time and thought it was due to the breeze, but when I went upstairs and got into dry clothes and retrieved my overcoat and threw it on I shivered even harder as though naked. My fingertips, swollen and numb, lost their touch, and I dropped Father’s two-hundred-year-old copy of Tennyson’s The Princess onto the wet carpet. It made a spongy sound as it slapped against the aged leather cover.
I gasped as I bent to grab it, but my fingers slipped again and again, and the harder I tried I felt tears thickening in my eyes until I cried out and clutched the book with both hands, scooping it up and against my chest. I cradled it in my arms like a newborn and carried it up to the bookshelf, laying it to rest in its crib, where it would be safe and nothing would hurt it again. But even a short inspection showed its brief time on the carpet had left some of the pages in water and their tired edges could not bear the stress. Afraid it would break apart in front of me, I turned away and went back into the kitchen. I saw Father’s glass of brandy where he had left it on the kitchen counter by the sink and I grabbed it and tipped my head back as I let the last of it trickle down my throat. I swallowed without tasting its potency and let its fire burn inside me, providing me the warmth I lacked.
I looked back at the scarlet circle, my chest heaving out and in. I looked over my shoulder at the black hole in our doorframe.
A burglary. No, a kidnapping.
That’s what had happened.
I didn’t want to admit it. But there was no other way to explain it. Someone had come and taken my father away from me. It hadn’t been the ISA. It had to be a group of fraudsters, imposters.
I turned on my Prizm and checked the police alerts. No signs of activity in my neighborhood. No calls had been made. No neighbor had contacted them, wondering why there were vehicles outside my house and darkened men taking my father against his will.
Why? Hadn’t someone been curious? Or had they known in advance?
I saw Father’s bottle of brandy sitting on the counter, alone. Like me.
Neither one of us wanted to be left alone.
I grabbed it and held it at my side, a glass in hand, and stood in the center of the living room while I poured several glasses and sipped on it, the rain tapping on the ceiling like a stranger at the door we didn’t have because the men who had come had broken it down and hadn’t replaced it and they had no intention to do so, because as Yvonne said there wasn’t anything I could do to make them replace it. The clock in the corner of my eye ticked softly, and I watched each second transpire like they were precious stones slipping out of my grasp. It was well past midnight but I felt no need to yawn or close my eyes or sit down.
The ISA office opened at nine, like all government offices. I intended to be there the moment the doors opened and then I would be able to find out why they had taken Father and what terrible thing they had mistakenly accused him of. And I knew I wouldn’t sleep until that happened.
After consuming a generous portion of the brandy, I helped the time pass doing the best I could to fix the damage. I put spare boards from the garage against the windows and sealed them off. One of the doors off the upstairs guest bedroom replaced the front door, but it wasn’t the same size as it left a small slit in the bottom. I wiped away the rainwater and put the furniture back into place, and when I had finished rearranging everything I stepped back, slightly drunk and with another glass of brandy in my hand as I surveyed the repairs. I prided myself for carrying all this out alone but was ashamed at how pitiful the boarded windows and door too short for the doorframe appeared. I had helped cover up what someone else had done and had forgotten to take pictures of it as evidence. But who would have believed me?
Lying down against the sofa I lowered my head over the back and let my brandy fall onto the coffee table that had one leg missing from where a man had kicked it over while hitting my father, and suddenly I touched my chin to feel tears. I then wiped my eyes and there were more tears and I realized I had been crying for some time. I didn’t bother to look at the clock to see how many hours were left before I could go back to the ISA office. I took off my device and placed it next to me on the sofa and felt relieved and liberated. I tried not to think of Father too much and instead remembered Mother, but all it did was remind me of times she had been happiest, and all of those memories had involved Father.
The letter. I wanted to read it. I was certain it would answer a lot of questions I had about him. I looked over the sofa into the study and saw it lying there by itself on the desk. It shouldn’t be left alone, either.
Yes, it should. The man wanted it left there.
I didn’t sleep, but I also wasn’t awake that night. I drifted in and out of an unnatural state of consciousness, slipping into a dream-like trance. I hallucinated and saw Father standing there in the living room with that rueful expression and untold secrets he had hidden from me and the windows smashing and the doors cracking and the dark faceless shadows screaming at him and them ignoring me and the man who kept looking at me like an estranged uncle who knew me only by relation to his brother. I saw Father again and again with his pleading eyes and that final look before he had been hauled away out of the foyer and the terrible and innate knowledge that I would not see him for a long time.
The grotesque reminisces ended the same every time. I stood at the counter at the ISA office and the clerk told me they were closed and would be closed for eternity and I would never see my father again and somehow it was because of me, and the metal shutters fell down over the bulletproof glass like the gates of heaven slamming in the face of a man who has died and thought he was going to paradise but instead has been sentenced to the inferno. Then I would blink and realize I was still in the room, hurry to the bathroom, and retch my anxieties out along with brandy.
I was awakened by the sunlight bleeding through the gaps in the boards on the French doors in the living room. I stood up slowly and grabbed my head, a terrible headache tormenting me. I looked down at the empty brandy bottle on the floor and cursed at myself for my lack of self-control, but then a painful jolt of memory reminded me of why I had done it in the first place. I stumbled over to the kitchen for a glass of water and habitually went to access my clock, but remembered I had left my Prizm on the coffee table. I grabbed it and put it back on and when I looked at the clock it said it was ten o’ clock. I swore and dumped my water in the sink before I left the house and drove to downtown.
The morning fog had partially lifted like a blanket in the midst of being folded, offering a blurry stripe of white peaks racing across the Cascade Mountains. The traffic was backed up for miles, the cars lined up and down hills and around corners and as far as I could see. I used the horn generously and yet it didn’t help reduce the number of drivers in front of me or allow me to get across the intersection.
During the long wait between lights, I looked at myself in the rearview mirror. Once more I doubted my own grasp on reality, questioning if last night had really happened. Or had I just woken up from a bad dream after a night of too much drinking? Had all the damage to the house been my fault when I had gotten too rowdy? I wondered if Father was still upstairs asleep after taking care of me while I had passed out and had left me to take care of myself during the less pleasant moments in the bathroom to give me a motivation not to do it again while he had quietly fixed what he could until the morning when he could visit the nearest home improvement store to fix it himself.
I knew it wasn’t true because when I checked Father’s IGP to call him and ask him, he wasn’t there. Father was always up at this hour, making his famous eggs and bacon breakfast that left a lingering delicious smell in the morning when I came downstairs. His IGP also no longer had me listed among his family contacts, and when I checked to see who remained in his family contacts there weren’t any, and then when I checked other information I found myself pushed out and told that his profile wasn’t accessible at this time for technical reasons.
As I drove up to the ISA office I saw how much taller it really was now that I could see it in the light, how it loomed above me along with the other government buildings on the city block. It had an opaque exterior and a jagged surface on the walls, and the entrance had a thick overhang like that of a cave. The agency’s massive seal was carved into the front of the building. In the center of the seal, the Roman goddess Veritas gazed outwardly in her shimmering white hooded robe. In one hand she held a book, firmly locked with a clasp, and a key in the other. At her feet was a scroll with the words “Veritas Tutis” engraved in what appeared to be solid gold.
The parking lot was less occupied, and after finding a space I approached the entrance, submitted myself to the previous inspection and pat down and confiscation of my Prizm, only this time they asked me why I had come back after being there until midnight, and I told them I hadn’t gotten any answers.
Somehow my answer didn’t appear to make any sense to them, but they shooed me into the waiting room without further questioning. The line was shorter, but the shouting and screaming and protesting had not diminished. I took my number and waited in line and when I got to the front of the line I sighed triumphantly as I inquired about my father to the overweight woman sitting on the other side.
“What’s his name?”
“Carl Farrington?”
The woman paused, then raised an irritated eyebrow.
“Are you sure that’s his name?”
“Yes.”
She then asked for further information; his birthdate, Social Security number—informing me it was confidential and wouldn’t be shared with anyone—along with his healthcare account number and his address. I provided it all, having done so before as part of my application process for my apprenticeship. The woman shook her head and scowled.
“I don’t see anything.”
I stared at her. “How can that be?”
“You said it just happened last night.”
“But they would have an arrest record, right?”
“Usually.”
“Usually?”
“I’m sorry, sir, but not everything works around your schedule. They do it when they can.” She paused, put on a pensive expression, and then looked back up at me. “Then again, if there was an arrest they would have done it by now. They have that taken care of before they make the arrest so they will have everything ready to be processed before they take them into custody.”
“What about the jail?”
“The ISA doesn’t use county or city jails. They have a separate detention center.”
“Isn’t there way to find out who’s being held there?”
“It’s not accessible to the public.”
“Why?”
“For security reasons.”
I slammed my hands on the counter and glared at her. “Then how the hell am I supposed to find out what the hell happened to my father? Your people came into my house and took him from me!”
The woman looked at me with her expressionless gaze. “I’m sorry, sir, but there’s no record your father was arrested.”
“Isn’t that your problem?”
“No.”
“It’s someone’s problem!”
“I’m sorry, sir. There’s nothing I can do…now, if you’ll step aside, there is someone else waiting behind you.”
I stood with my mouth hanging open as the person behind me pushed me with their shoulder and approached the counter. I looked at them, wanting to turn my anger on them. But it wouldn’t have done any good.
I walked out of the waiting room. After I had my Prizm returned, I was greeted by dozens of messages from other apprentices wondering where I was and how come I didn’t show up to class and whether I had finished the assigned reading and the homework. I glanced at the first sentences of their messages as I left the ISA office and took my time getting back to my car. I sat in the driver’s seat and watch more messages pile into my inbox.
None of them from Correen. I wasn’t surprised.
I saw one of the messages from Casey. He wanted to know how my date with Correen had gone and whether I had enjoyed the night. Others had asked the same. Plenty of people to talk to, and they were available then. Technology made it possible.
But I didn’t have the interest.
I looked up at the sky. Murky gray clouds swirled like dirty water churned in a bucket. In the tiniest corner of the Cascades, I saw a glimpse of the sun, knowing elsewhere in the state there were no clouds and no rain and the people were enjoying the bright sunlight and warmth until it grew dark and the cold returned.
Another message. I didn’t look at the name. I grabbed the Prizm and ripped it off my head. I went to toss it out the window but as I wound my hand back I stopped and let it fall onto the passenger seat. I turned the engine on and crushed the pedal with my foot like it was someone’s head.
