The Dying Game

by Asa Avdic

  Lotte knocked at the door as she opened it, but then we just stood there. Jon and Katja were on the other side of the room, Katja with her back to the wall and Jon leaning over her with his hand against the wall, blocking any escape. He was standing just barely too close, so you wouldn’t have noticed it if it weren’t for Katja’s pained expression and how relieved she was to see us step in.

  “Great, there are the plates!”

  Jon looked nowhere near as uncomfortable as Katja did. In fact, he looked pleased. Clearly he had no problem standing way too close to a woman who didn’t want him to. No new story there.

  I couldn’t see Lotte’s face, but she straightened her back and let slip a heavy sigh, as if this were something she had seen far too many times. And I’m sure she had, too. Conference centers, dinners, liquor tables. Increasingly drunk men with their thick wallets and their privilege, pouring glass after glass of vodka, becoming more and more erratic and indiscreet, feeling a growing urge to have and take, ever more inclined to place the blame on both those who said yes and those who said no. She was asking for it. Fucking prudish whore. Despite all the equality projects and state policy documents about fair treatment, it was still always the same thing.

  “We certainly don’t mean to interrupt, but we’re here to set the table.”

  Lotte strode confidently to the table, grabbed a tablecloth that was folded on top of the lovely, glossy jacaranda surface, and began to shake it out. Katja seized the opportunity, wriggled past Jon, took the other end of the tablecloth, and helped Lotte draw it evenly across the table. I entered the room and, with a certain amount of effort, set my wobbly stack of plates on a small serving table. Jon remained near the wall, bouncing on his heels with a glass in his hand. Apparently it didn’t even occur to him to help.

  Katja cast a quick glance at me to see if I was on the same page, and then she said loudly, “Does anyone know where the wineglasses are? I could find only the little port glasses in here.”

  Lotte, who seemed to be the sort of person who was almost pathologically compelled to take command of every situation, took the bait at once:

  “I know where they are. They’re in the kitchen; let’s go get them. Come on, you can help me carry them.”

  She gave Jon a commanding look, and at last he seemed to catch on that she expected him to lend a hand. I took a few steps after them and closed the door to the dining room as quietly as I could once they had left. I turned to Katja.

  “Do you have the glasses?” she whispered. “I have the stuff here. You’ll have to do it.” She handed me the little tube.

  THE SECRETARY TOOK out a transparent vial with a tiny dropper at the top and gave it to me. In the yellow light of the Strategic Level, the liquid looked yellow as well.

  “This is a sedative. It is tasteless and colorless, and it takes only one drop to cause drowsiness. It has the advantage of several hours’ delay before the substance begins to take full effect.”

  He looked at Katja as if to confirm that he had understood the medical effects correctly, and then he turned to me again.

  “So it’s best to make sure to keep good track of your own glasses.”

  “We’ll put it into the port glasses,” Katja explained. “Once people have had a couple of glasses with dinner they won’t pay much attention to whether everyone else is drinking or not.”

  “Good,” said the secretary, “so all you have to do is get one drop in each glass without anyone noticing. It won’t knock them out completely, of course, nor do we want it to, because that would seem suspicious, but it will make things a little easier when it’s time for you to . . . well, to do what you have to do. And don’t forget—two drops in the primary witness’s glass.”

  WHEN ONLY THE colonel’s glass remained, we heard steps and approaching voices.

  “Hurry, hurry!” Katja exclaimed as I dropped in a double dose, carefully, carefully: tiny, tiny drops which wouldn’t even be visible on the bottom of the glass. Cool and collected, I plugged the dropper and quickly stuck it through the neckline of my shirt and into my bra. Katja stared at the door. She had seemed so calm and confident earlier, but now she almost seemed to be panicking with stress, and I wondered how much fieldwork she’d actually logged.

  “Stop looking so guilty and start setting the table,” I hissed through my teeth as I handed her all but two of the place cards, which I put down where I stood and at the spot beside it. Then I went to get the stack of plates from the serving table, and I had just lifted them up when the others came through the door. The colonel and Franziska were first, and Henry was right behind them. He stopped in the doorway for a moment and looked around.

  “Do you need help with anything?”

  “You can take a few of these,” I said, nodding at the plates in my arms.

  He walked up to me and lifted away half of the stack.

  “Classic Anna Francis, picking up all of them at once,” he said quietly, flashing a grin.

  “So observant and insightful of you to perform such a fundamental analysis of my personality when you met me for the first time only a few hours ago,” I said back, just as quietly.

  He smiled again and then said, at a normal volume, “How do you want these on the table?”

  “One large and one small one at each place. I’m sure you can handle it.”

  Henry nodded and began to set out the plates, starting at the end of the table. I did the same, from the other direction. As usual, my eyes were caught by his hands as they handled the plates. There was a precision to his movements, a sort of economy. Not too much and not too little. I looked away and concentrated on my own task.

  When I was little, Nour called me Miss Smithereens because I broke glasses and plates so often. Part of Nour’s teachings on labor and the worth of money involved cleaning up after yourself if you broke something. Plus a deduction from my weekly allowance. “You have to learn what things cost,” she liked to say. But this time, I didn’t drop anything. Henry and I walked around each other with the large and small plates and then the napkins, knives, forks, more cutlery, wineglasses (which eventually showed up when Jon and Lotte brought them in) without speaking; it was like silent, harmonious choreography as we moved in relation to one another, around and around the table. The room filled with food and drink, and at last we were ready and everyone was able to take a seat.

  IT WAS AN unusual group who gathered around the table and began to pass the appetizers. Small hors d’oeuvres, canapés, made of pretty, hard-to-identify ingredients. One reddish salad, one greenish one; some sort of leaf, a cube of smoked meat, a slice of pale fish. It was the appetizer version of the “seven sorts of cookies” tradition. The colonel, whom I had seated next to me, passed each little platter on to me, and I passed them on to Henry, who was sitting across from me. Next to him were first Lotte, then Franziska—and when I looked at her plate, I realized that she had not, of course, taken one of each option but had selected two microscopic pieces, which she was now pushing around the plate. I couldn’t blame her. There weren’t many older women who managed to stay on TV year after year. Most of them were switched out in favor of younger talent when they were around fifty. Women who made less of a fuss and cost less money. Who were more agreeable. The fact that the Minister of the Interior was her brother-in-law surely must have made things easier for Franziska; in fact, I’d already heard her go into great detail about it. Contacts equaled power, and if you had them you could afford to make demands. But apparently not gain weight.

  Franziska noticed that I was looking at her plate, and her eyes moved to my own overfull one.

  “My, aren’t you hungry!”

  You could have shredded paper in the corners of her mouth, her smile was so cutting. I wanted to say something back, scrutinize her, let her know that I knew she was trying to bully me, but I quickly realized that it wasn’t worth fighting. I would be spending only one
night with her. So instead I looked down at my food and hmm’d noncommittally. But it bothered me that she was going to walk around thinking she’d shut me up and shamed me.

  THE SECRETARY TURNED to look at me.

  “Your task is to drink the witness under the table.”

  I looked back at the secretary and awaited the explanation.

  “The witness, that is, the person Katja will wake up once you’re dead. The one who will confirm that you have died. Make sure to sit next to him at dinner. You don’t know who it will be yet, but it will be the person who is assigned the room on the ground floor.”

  The secretary pointed at the floor plan that was spread out on the table.

  “We’ll block off some of the rooms on the second floor, blame it on water damage, so that one person will have to sleep on the ground floor, which will make it logical for him to be the one the doctor wakes when she ‘finds’ you.”

  “And my job is to drink him under the table during dinner.”

  “Yes; after all, we don’t want him to be too observant when he has to view and move a living corpse.”

  “So we’re going to drug him and get him drunk?”

  The secretary pursed his lips at my disapproving tone.

  “Well, in these sorts of situations it’s better safe than sorry. The effect of the drug will increase the more he drinks, and the groggier he is when he is woken up, the better. Plus, it shouldn’t be very hard to do. He’s an alcoholic.”

  “WOULD YOU LIKE more wine?”

  I didn’t wait for an answer, just took the bottle and refilled the colonel’s glass.

  “Thank you, thank you!”

  He immediately lifted the glass to his mouth and took a large gulp. I quickly glanced around at everyone else’s glasses; sure enough, the colonel had drained his long before the others. Most people finish their first three glasses as a group; they drink at about the same speed as the people they’re drinking with. After a few glasses, once the buzz has shaved off the first layer of self-consciousness and control, that effect tapers off. It’s unusual for people to do what the colonel was doing and drink faster than the rest of their company right from the start. Unless they have a drinking problem, that is.

  IT WAS A strange, tentative conversation going on at the table. All the participants were unique, interesting, competent, used to being the life of the party. What’s more, they were all in competition for the same job. And even if I didn’t know what sort of position they were preparing for, it was apparently so desirable that everyone present thought it was worth spending a few days on a godforsaken island in the outer archipelago. It also seemed, thus far, that everyone was obeying the Chairman and not discussing their assignment with anyone else. I assumed they didn’t want to destroy their own chances by gossiping. Jon and Franziska had found some sort of conversational method in which they took turns talking about themselves as soon as the other stopped to take a breath. The conversation was muddled, since neither was actually listening to what the other said. I heard them refer endlessly to various celebrities in politics and business by first name. An invisible canon of Very Important People they were apparently attempting to impress one another with. Katja was sitting on the end of the table between them, listening. The few times she tried to break into the conversation and get a word in, she was quickly pushed back out.

  AT OUR END of the table, Henry was the one who had invisibly taken command, and he had done so in his usual manner, by getting others to talk. From the way he alternately asked questions of the colonel and refilled his wineglass, I suspected that he had also become aware of the colonel’s weak spot and was trying to exploit it, just as I was. On the one hand, this was a good thing, because it meant I could sit back and let him do the work; on the other hand, I wondered what reason Henry had to try to booze the colonel under the table. Maybe it was his competitive nature; maybe he wanted to increase his own chances of getting the job by putting the colonel out of play or at least casting him in a bad light. Lotte broke into the conversation now and then, and as her shoulders sagged lower and lower she became less boastfully self-involved and more interested in the rest of us. Suddenly she turned directly to me.

  “So what do you do now that you’re back home?”

  I hesitated in responding.

  “I’ve gone back to my usual job.”

  Lotte looked surprised.

  “That’s unexpected. I thought you would have been given some top job, after all the buzz surrounding you.”

  I didn’t know whether she noticed my reaction, because she continued in a friendlier manner, as if to take the edge off her snide tone.

  “It seems like you did a fantastic job. Difficult. It must be incredibly demanding to work in a place like that.”

  I hmm’d noncommittally a little and kept chewing my food, which seemed to expand in my mouth.

  “At least it’s lucky that you don’t have a family to worry about. My husband and children would never let me go off to a place like that.”

  “I have a daughter,” I said before I could stop myself, and I immediately regretted it.

  Lotte looked surprised.

  “Oh, how old is she?”

  “Nine.”

  “Well . . . I see. Okay. Was she with you? No, she couldn’t have been, right?”

  “She lived with my mother while I was gone.”

  Lotte appeared to be waiting for me to say something more. My brain was rushing around looking for things I could say that wouldn’t invite any more painful explanation.

  “How many kids do you have?”

  Henry had come to my rescue. I wondered if he had seen the panic in my eyes. Lotte turned to him.

  “Well, they’re older now, and they don’t need my full attention all the time, so that’s why I am able to consider this position in the first place, but they’re twelve and fourteen—boys. One . . .”

  She babbled on about hockey practice and the quality of various schools. I didn’t dare to look at Henry; I just kept focusing on Lotte, and eventually I managed to squeeze out a question or two that made her keep talking about herself, and the conversation slowly moved to safer ground.

  WHEN I TOLD Nour I was pregnant, I made sure to put it off until it was too late to have an abortion. Probably because I knew that was what she would suggest, and I was right. We were sitting in her kitchen, it was a Sunday, and Nour had seemed surprised when I told her I wanted to come visit her, but she hadn’t asked why, just told me I was welcome. When I got there, she had gone so far as to put coffee on the kitchen table, and some sort of dry buns, which had probably been in her cupboard for months. I wondered who had brought them over; as far as I was aware, Nour didn’t get many visitors anymore. It seemed unlikely that she had bought them herself, much less baked them.

  In my mind, I had thought up the perfect sentence, a sentence that would convey all the information and answer all her questions in one elegant formulation, while simultaneously closing all the doors on any solution but the one I had already chosen. “I found out I’m pregnant and since it’s too late for an abortion I’m going to keep the baby.” It should have worked, but it didn’t, because Nour didn’t say anything. Then she took out her ever-present pack of little brown cigarillos, reached for the matches on the table, puffed until it was lit, took a deep drag, blew it out, and looked thoughtfully at the smoke.

  “Seriously, you’re going to smoke right now?”

  “This is my kitchen, and you’re here of your own free will,” Nour said, standing up to get an ashtray.

  She came back, sat down, and continued to look at me.

  “How many weeks are you?”

  “Nineteen. So as you know, it’s too late to get rid of it.”

  “What if I said it isn’t too late?”

  “What do you mean?”

  I felt myself break into a cold swea
t. The scent of the coffee mixed with the smell of the smoke in the air, and nausea rose in my throat.

  “I might know someone who can fix it anyway. You used to be able to get an abortion until the twenty-second week, you know, if there were extenuating circumstances. Rape or illness or insanity. If the mother was considered unfit. That kind of thing.”

  The nausea was getting stronger; there was a sour taste in my mouth and my pulse was pounding in my ears.

  “So that’s what you think? I’m an unfit mother and I ought to get rid of it?”

  “I’m just saying that it’s not easy to be a single mother.”

  Nour’s tone was hard and curt. She leaned across the table.

  “Do you really want this child, Anna? Do you want to be like me? Do you want to be on your own with a kid who will keep you from working, keep you from . . .”

  She suddenly stopped talking. My cheeks went hot. It was like she had slapped me. I stood up on awkward feet and swayed a little. It wasn’t quite the sort of decisive movement I had intended. Nour refused to meet my gaze, looking stubbornly out the window instead.

  “I’m just saying it’s not that easy,” she said at last.

  “Nour, I’m terribly sorry for destroying your exciting life and your career by being born, and I apologize from the bottom of my heart . . .” My voice was on its way up to an unpleasant falsetto, and I could hear how ridiculous I sounded, but I didn’t care. “But this child is mine, and I’m not going to get rid of it and I will take care of it and love it and just because it was apparently so fucking hard for you doesn’t mean it will be hard for me. I’m going to keep it, and you just have to accept that.”

  She continued to gaze out the window, pursing her lips slightly in annoyance, and then she said in a caustic voice, “Well, then I suppose I’ll just have to say congratulations and good luck. See you when you come crashing down. Because you will. Make no mistake.”

  I yanked my cardigan from the back of the chair where I had been sitting, my head spinning, but before I left I bent over the table.