Blackbird

by Michael Fiegel

  “Or Patrice. Patrice? What the fuck.” I flung the ID towards a trash bin, nearly made it.

  “I didn’t tell you to be a nobody waitress at a nowhere diner,” he said. “You chose that.”

  Both of us quieted for a moment as some random passers-by passed by. In the distance, we could just barely hear sirens. I started walking again, in a random direction, and he followed after as I yelled back at him, choking back tears.

  “How has any of this been a choice? You took me and you broke me and you made me and now I choose to sit here and smile while you spit the world down my throat?”

  “I never forced you to swallow.”

  “Go to hell,” I yelled, knowing as I did that it was meaningless, because we had been there already, and come back. And where did that leave us?

  We were about to find out.

  I turned and started to walk back towards the club, and saw him stiffen as if to … to what? Hit me again? But it was a bluff, or a feint. Instead of stopping me, he just stepped to one side, and laid a hand on my shoulder.

  “Xtian …”

  “Let me go,” I said, shaking him off. Wondering if he would.

  He did.

  Dead Pressed

  01/21/2017

  While the country has been busy figuring out what the hell happened in the election two months ago, I have been busy thinking about what happened in the club. Thinking of how, even after all we have done together, that it was one more nobody that made the difference for her. One feather on the wrong side of the scale. Why does this one stick with me? It was just one more person, one more day. There are so many more things that have happened to us that could have tipped the balance. But it was this. This one, stupid, pointless inconsequence.

  I should not even dwell on it. She has probably forgotten. Perhaps it is just my brain trying to keep itself alive. Focusing on recent events, replaying them over and over, because my long-term memory is fading and failing. The days blend together, the weeks puree until everything is one unimportant gray clump of time. It would be easy to just let it happen. Lie back in the easy chair, turn on the television, and let it all blur together into reruns.

  But I am not content. There are things happening, important, insane things, and I am not part of them. Everything about this insane presidential election. This pipe dream of a wall along the Mexican border. The Russians allegedly being involved. All of it hammering home day after day how broken society is. Globally, but especially nationally. Fundamentalists are having conniptions about trans people in the wrong bathroom, but no one blinks an eye when two dozen horny football players gangbang an underage sex-abuse victim in a high school lavatory.

  This is to say nothing of the literal circus the TSA has become to calm the masses tired of standing in three-hour lines. Clowns and miniature horses? Marching bands. It makes me wonder why there has not been an attack on American soil like in Brussels, or Istanbul. All those victims all lined up …

  “You wish,” she said, when I mentioned this. And I do. And I know her intent was to wound when she said it. To point out that it was just that, a wish and nothing more. Reminding me that I threw everything away to come here with her. That there will be no second chance for me. And she is right. There will not be. Not as long as we stay here, stagnant.

  I have done this before, of course, in Portland—not this most recent pit stop, but the last time, before DC, before Xtian, before all of this. But then, it was not by choice. They fired me, basically, sent me so far underground that I had nearly forgotten myself. And I coped then, in a fashion. I did without certain things, had to adapt. To change. Not so different from where we are now. Nor so far away. The main difference is that this time is voluntary. I got us into this. And the “us” is the second difference. Back then, I was alone. Dealing with anything is easier when you are alone. No matter what you decide, the vote is always unanimous. And no matter how terrible the outcome, it is always easy to find the person responsible.

  This? This should be easy, too. Me at home, lounging in a chair watching television. She at work at her diner, earning a paycheck. Ordinary. Simple. But it is not. It is anything but.

  This is as complicated as it gets.

  • • •

  “Well, are you sure you love him?”

  I shook my head and shrugged as Delia watched me put grounds in the coffee maker. Our own little Women’s March, just the two of us. Sans marching. I wanted to be out in the streets, but I couldn’t afford to miss a shift, and wasn’t sure Delia cared. She seemed more concerned with my plight, and I regretted bringing Edison up again. We’d had the conversation during a few shifts already, and although her questions changed, my answers remained the same.

  “No, I’m not sure,” was all I could say. It was easier than the complicated truth. Especially considering the disaster a few months ago. We hadn’t talked much since then. But did that mean things had gotten better, or were they still stuck on terrible?

  Did I love him? Maybe. If nothing else, probably yes, in the same way as I might love a dog, or a car, or (god help me) a job. Which is to say that all those things really mostly suck, but it’s easy to find yourself overlooking the suck if it’s all you have. It’s not so bad, you say. The muffler’s fallen off, but it will still get me around. It pukes all over the sofa, but it’ll keep me warm at night. At least I get paid. Comfortable chains, gilded cages.

  “Then just leave him.” Delia waved her hand like she was shooing away a fly. She seemed so confident about relationships, even though she couldn’t operate the coffeemaker. If only she knew what my life was really like. That she’d started work just a few days after Christmas seemed like the perfect present, considering that Edison hadn’t bothered, never did. Delia and I were like a sitcom together. She was the ditzy blonde and I was the sociopath who’d seen too much.

  “I can’t leave,” I said. I didn’t know where I’d go.

  “Are you sure? Maybe he’d just let you go.” She reached for her hidden cigs behind the shake machine. She was about to offer me one when the bells over the door jangled, and a man walked in, just an ordinary guy, jeans and a T-shirt, flannel tied around his waist, sneakers. No one you’d look at twice. Except I did. It was how he carried himself. The little almost invisible sidelong glances, the way he took the room in. He didn’t need a suit; he was the suit. He sat down with an easy confidence, back straight in the corner booth, didn’t even reach for a menu, just sat there waiting. And it was then I was sure it was a costume, and that he was trouble, although I wasn’t sure for who.

  I turned to ask Delia if she’d grab the table, but she was already out back feeding her addiction, and there was no choice. As if there would have been. He looked over at me, slow, and smiled. Genuine, it seemed. Seemed. I slid a knife under my notepad, dropped it in my apron, and grabbed the half-empty pot of steaming hot coffee. All smiles and sugar, I flounced over.

  “Coffee?” I asked.

  “Two cups.”

  “Waiting for someone to join you?” I asked as I inverted two mugs, filled them.

  “Yes,” he said. “Christian.”

  I dropped my pen. Not accidentally.

  “Excuse me?” I said, kneeling down. Right hand reached for the pen, left slipped into my apron. A soft sound stopped me, the brush of metal against denim, and I looked up under the table and saw the gun peeking out from beneath the flannel, not pointed at me, but close enough to count. I slowly put my hands out to either side, palms down, and looked up at him. He smiled, and it was a nice smile, if no longer genuine.

  “I just want to talk,” he said. “For now.”

  I looked up at him, ran the odds. Fifty-fifty. Maybe a little better. Chance.

  “Cream and sugar?” I asked, standing up slowly, unthreateningly.

  He shook his head.

  “Black.”

  Of course.

  “Sit down,” he said. “You’re off the clock.”

  Black. The clock. Code? One of them? Not neces
sarily. They were just words. Maybe he was government? Hell, for all I knew, they and the government were the same. Edison had never been clear on that. Regardless, it was obvious that whoever they were, I didn’t want to screw around. They had the place surrounded, or at least there were enough of them to convince not just the customers but the staff to leave in a hurry. That we were alone, so quickly, made an impression. It also convinced me that one way or another, what I had was over. I couldn’t very well just come back to work. Seattle was done. Well done.

  I can’t say it felt all bad to realize that. I was ready to move on. Edison seemed to thrive on drama and conflict, seeing it even where it didn’t need to exist. He liked chaos. For me, this wasn’t a sign that it was time to go out, guns blazing, fires burning. It was just time to go.

  The man sipped his coffee, winced at the heat as he looked me up and down. I focused on my coffee, alternately adding more cream and more sugar, postponing the inevitable. Plus it kept my hands from shaking. Not fear, per se, but adrenaline. I felt like a caged bird, beating itself against the bars. The cat waiting patiently nearby.

  “The license,” he said, setting his cup down, folding his hands. “How we found you. Patrice, I think it was? Incident in a club back in November, lost license. Fake name, but we pulled real fingerprints off of it. He’s not in the system, but you’ve been there since kindergarten.”

  Stupid stupid stupid …

  “Stupid, they said. A mistake. But you’re not a stupid girl. Are you?”

  I didn’t answer; I was starting to wonder.

  “You wanted to be found. To be rescued.”

  “Did I now?”

  “You know who we are,” he said, all but confirming my theory, or perhaps just trying to push me down a false narrative. Either way, I wasn’t going to just let it go at that.

  “Enlighten me,” I said. “Who exactly are you?”

  “Please. You know how this works. My name doesn’t matter. Especially since if you’re lucky, you and I will never cross paths again.”

  “Well then who do you work for? For all I know you’re an ISIS sympathizer.”

  He rolled his eyes but humored me nevertheless.

  “I’m a strand of the same web you and he are part of. That you pretend to be part of. I just happen to be somewhat closer to the center of it all. Close enough to see more of what’s going on. More than you. More than him, maybe. Certainly, enough of it to be able to find both of you.”

  “And vague enough to avoid the question.”

  “Use your imagination. You knew … Nick, I think you knew him as? I’m higher up the food chain than him. You know what he could do? You can imagine what I can do. What we can do. We bury the messes. Control the chaos. And when it becomes necessary, tie off loose ends.”

  I kept up a good, calm front, leaned back.

  “Well if you’re here to kill me, you need to speed it up, because the dinner rush is coming.”

  There were violent thoughts in his head, I could tell. I’d seen the eyes enough. But he held it down, just sighed away the moment. Listening? Was that an earpiece? Edison said those were just a good way to get an ear infection.

  “I’m not here to kill you,” he said. “Quite the contrary. I’m here to set you free.”

  I ignored the obvious fact that those two things were not entirely contrary and shrugged, surprised at how genuine it felt to not care. Was I not free? I could leave whenever I wanted, couldn’t I? There was a twinge in there somewhere, a flutter. Maybe it was the coffee. I added another sugar, as if that was going to help, swirled coffee around in my cup as if reading tea leaves. Could you predict the future with coffee grounds, I wondered? Folger’s new age crystals?

  “You don’t care?” he asked.

  “I’m waiting for the other shoe,” I said. “The part where you want something from me.”

  He smiled.

  “See? Smart girl. I told them.”

  “Just get to the point,” I said. “You want me to kill someone? Maybe blow up a bus full of kids?” It came out so quickly, so smoothly, that it startled me. I guessed I had gotten over that. Probably Nick had something to do with that. There were worse things that could happen to children than what I did. I learned that firsthand.

  I should have known it was none of that. I should have known what it was. It still surprised me to hear him say it.

  “We want him.”

  • • •

  I died for the first time when I was sixteen. My father died at the same time. The key difference being that he was in the bottom of a shallow pit with a bloody hole in his face, and I was up top with a shovel in my hand. He was going to die anyway, and not because of me; the hole in his face was a self-administered remedy when he knew they were coming, knew he had messed up for the last time. The other hole—the pit—was mine. I buried him, let the dirt cover his fish noises. He would have died anyway, if not in a hospital then by their hands, when they finished the torture, but technically I killed him—and myself at the same time. The only thing I felt at the time was amazement that I had not done it sooner.

  After it was done, and I had ransacked the house for money and whatnot, I had the whole world before me. Powerful with options, knowing that no matter what I did, where I turned, it would be into the unknown. No name, no family, no attachments, nothing except me and a backpack full of (I thought) unmarked twenties and tens, the final remnants of my former life now buried in a smoldering pit behind the house. I could become anything. I could buy anything.

  And the first thing I did with the money was to go see Alien in theaters. I remember rooting out loud for the alien because the crew were so stupid, let themselves get picked off. Whose fault was it? It was the space miners who ignored common sense, set off a bomb that blew up in their faces and their guts. All the alien did was try to survive, follow its instincts, try to find a worthy host. Kill or be killed. Survive, breed. You cannot set a fire and then ask it to play nice.

  The rest of the cash I frittered away on random things. Now, of course, I have a healthier respect for money. Especially since right now we need more of it. I cannot pay the bills with stolen underwear, and Xtian cannot support us on part-time diner earnings, no matter what arbitrary number they assign to the minimum wage. I cannot stand to see her doing that job. Waitressing is like whoring, service for cash, and she is better than that.

  Both of us are.

  So it is time to die. Time to kill off who we are, to move on, to start anew somewhere else. It will not help the money situation per se, but it cannot hurt. We can move somewhere cheaper. Somewhere east, or south. Maybe somewhere either of us has never been. I have done it many times. She has done it thrice with me. We can do it again. Moving is easier than stasis as long as you ride the wind.

  And perhaps that is the mistake I made. With her. I could have walked away the night I killed Nick and sealed my fate. Could have gone anywhere, and started fresh. But I went back for a peek. I fought inertia, and I looked in the hole, when I should have been filling it in. And here we are. We. Stuck in the same cage.

  There is no other choice, now. We are changing. What we have is not working. I cannot let it chain us down. The club, this limbo we find ourselves in. The woman in brown, whatever her name was, she does not matter. The past does not matter. All that matters is what can be done in the present, to change the future.

  I could let Xtian decide. I cannot see what harm it could do. She has trusted me all these years. Perhaps it is time to return the favor and trust her. I owe her that much.

  • • •

  “Dead pressed,” said my new worst friend. He waited for a reaction, but I just gave him a blank stare and sipped lukewarm coffee. Too sweet.

  “You know what that is?” he asked at last.

  “Yes,” I said. When you put an explosive under pressure, so much that it can’t be detonated on its own. In order for it to explode, it needs a detonating agent. I didn’t say this; I figured it wasn’t a vocabulary lesson. H
e wasn’t Edison.

  “It’s you. He’s kept you down so long, put so much pressure on you that you wound up here, can’t do shit for yourself. Paying his bills. Feeding him. And for what?”

  He was right, and I hated that. He could have been reading my mind over the past few months. I had been complaining about the exact same things to Delia earlier.

  “But forget him for a moment or forever,” he said. “Consider what you want. A normal life. A family. Safety. A nice house. Kids. Whatever. You can go back to where you belong, and he can never get to you again. You can be whichever you that you want. Simple as that.”

  I wasn’t sure it was him talking at that point, not entirely convinced it wasn’t something inside me, trying to talk me off the ledge. Which way off, I wasn’t sure.

  “Pick an identity. Christian, Edith, Nichole, Alice, whatever. Fucking … Lindsay Lohan. I don’t care. Pick a country. Anything you like. Find your family if you want. If you still consider them family. Run away. Whatever. You don’t matter to anyone after today.”

  “I matter to—” I started. Maybe unconvinced. Maybe finally realizing the truth.

  “Listen.” He tented his hands, trying to play patient. “I know your story. Not everyone does—you hid pretty well. But I took the time to find you. So I know. And I don’t much care, frankly. It’s trite. Like some fucking Internet fanfic, ‘Mary Jane Melodrama and the Killer with a Heart of Gold.’ You bore me. You’re not unique. You’re not important.”

  “Then why would you let me live?” I ask.

  And with that, he seemed to turn off, ran out of script.

  “Why let anyone live?” he asked, dismissively.

  “Yeah. Why?”

  He shook his head as if talking to a child. I guess he was.

  “No one wants to kill everyone in the world,” he said. “That would be pretty fucking pointless. We only do what needs doing. You want to round off in the spreadsheet, you need to lose a few after the decimal point. Everyone has a potential value, for a limited amount of time. And you have about three minutes to decide whether or not to help us out.”