Those Who Knew

by Idra Novey

  In the excruciating weeks between her first surgery and the second, she recognized her days scaling the stairways of the port had come to end. To give up the Sublime had been more of a relief than she’d expected. After meeting Sara and her liberating giveaway of all the stock in Conspiracy, she’d felt an increasing desire to be unburdened of the store altogether. She’d grown weary of being trapped behind the register, being a receptacle for people’s rants about literature and politics, for students’ pronouncements about how much they longed for their Victor. No other politician had taken on the cause of free tuition after he lost his bid for reelection. Every afternoon, some student shuffling in for weed would indignantly insist that the media had been waiting to catch Victor at something, that the news had blown the pig farm scandal out of proportion.

  None of the students seemed to take into account Victor’s divorce or the power of his now ex-father-in-law. The scandal had certainly tarnished Victor’s reputation, but Olga was convinced that what had really impeded him from attempting any kind of comeback yet was the end of his marriage, the likelihood of the elder senator loathing Victor enough to prevent him from running for a position with the TJP anywhere on the island.

  Sometimes Olga would impart these thoughts to the students. Other days, she’d just nod during their nonstop Victor nostalgia, which had been helpful in one respect. The cult-like longing for Victor had certainly lessened her guilt about the new owners turning the Sublime into a nail salon.

  After her release from the valley’s rehab center, she had assumed that her stay with the newly returned Lena would last a few months, at most. Yet somehow a year had gone by as quiet and green as the fields of the valley and she was still playing grandma in the afternoons, still smoking with Lena in the evenings on the porch, watching the light sift through the trees. At breakfast, they took turns being the ornery one at the table. It was the rare morning now that Olga even considered a joint while still in bed. There was really no predicting where, or when, the least lonely years of one’s adult life might begin.

  Still, she knew she needed to do something more here in the valley, something on her own terms. As the road straightened past the bridge and the afternoon sunlight poured through the driver’s-side window and warmed her hands, she thought again of her conversation with Lena and Sara on the porch the weekend before. They’d all been high and Olga had told them about her resentment in college of the one woman granted a speaking role in the Campus Communists meetings. Olga had intended it as an amusing anecdote, but Sara, as her namesake would have, insisted the recollection must have surfaced in her mind now for a reason.

  Why don’t you run for municipal council here? Sara said. Even if you don’t win, you’d shake up the conversation. And who knows, there are more liberal, educated people moving out from the capital all the time. They’d vote for you, a detainee and former bookstore owner. Why not just put your name on the ballot and see what happens?

  But Olga didn’t want to expose herself to public scrutiny in the valley, or Lena and Cosmo to it either. They were too odd a household, too new here to risk that kind of exposure. It would be seen as arrogant for an outsider to march in with big ideas, even worse if someone managed to dig up her mother’s Jewish last name. She’d invite the same sort of hostilities Cosmo had confronted at the municipal school, where a group of boys kept pushing him around at recess and calling him Tourist Face. After one boy hit him repeatedly on the head with a stick and no teacher stepped in to stop it, Lena had switched him to the only private academy in the valley considered liberal. It was where all the wealthy but left-leaning parents in the interior sent their children. Nobody had hit Cosmo yet, though the kids were just as vicious in their haughty academy way, asking why he had dots on his face and where his father was and why he had a dog’s name.

  How’d it go today? Olga glanced back at her small passenger in the backseat.

  A little better, I guess. Cosmo shrugged, talking to the grime on the window.

  Why’s that?

  Edgar was my partner in reading. He doesn’t like anyone asking about his dad either.

  Is that right? They were now passing the tomato farm they always drove by on the ride home from his new school. Over the ground, low plastic tarps extended in every direction, sheltering the tomatoes reddening beneath them. By this point in the spring, the heat in the valley was relentless enough to cast a low haze over the road and fields, giving an impression that their lives were occurring over a buried layer of steam, trapped underground.

  How about we invite this Edgar over some afternoon? Olga asked. I want to meet him.

  * * *

  Outside the police station, Freddy sighed with self-pity. It was three a.m. and he did not want to be entering this door again. He hadn’t wanted to come to the station the last time he’d been summoned here to retrieve his brother. Every corridor stank of slumped, sweaty men, other angry drunks waiting for some family member to reluctantly arrive to claim them.

  A step ahead reaching the door, his boyfriend Alex held it open and assured Freddy he’d wait outside however long things took.

  Freddy nodded and stepped forward alone. Neither of them knew of any gay men beaten to death since the TJP took power but that didn’t mean it hadn’t occurred, or that there wasn’t an officer sitting in every station on the island waiting for an excuse to get away with it again.

  And who else was there to claim Victor? Their mother had died. Cristina’s father had covered the bail again and paid off the night officers to keep the incident out of the papers and protect his daughter and grandson. You need to pick him up now, Cristina said to Freddy when she called and woke him up. If you don’t get him out of there before the next shift comes in, neither of you will ever see Edgar again.

  Freddy assured Cristina he would get there as swiftly as he could. Moving from the dim, moth-filled light outside the station into the first corridor, he felt overwhelmed with gratitude for the steadying thought of Alex outside, willing to accompany him yet again on this dreadful task. The second time Alex had stayed over, Victor had shown up drunk around this same hour, shouting about what a disgusting traitor and whore he’d married, how Cristina’s whole family should be in jail. Freddy had assumed Alex would feel uncomfortable and leave.

  But after Victor vomited and passed out, he found Alex in the kitchen making coffee. Alex confided his mother had been a drunk and he’d made coffee with far worse going on in the living room. While Victor snored on the sofa, they’d had sex in the kitchen, after which they made another pot of coffee and swapped stories.

  Perhaps it was the relentless, sputtering reminder of Victor there, a room away, or simply an openness that Alex produced in him, but by dawn, Freddy found himself telling Alex what he’d heard from Lena about Victor leaving her unconscious on the floor. And there’s more, Freddy had murmured, even more brutal.

  I don’t know anyone on this island, Alex had replied, who isn’t one degree removed from more brutality than they can bear to admit.

  Two weeks later, Freddy unlocked the drawer where he stored his Scenes to Be Incinerated and passed them to Alex, then sealed himself in the bathroom until he heard the couch creak and Alex’s even steps across the wooden floor. For a large-boned man, Alex moved with surprising lightness. He worked as an orderly at the municipal hospital, helping people out of beds and into the shower. Freddy had never met anyone so capable of being present without being imposing. When he emerged from the bathroom to hear Alex’s reaction, he stopped in the doorway as he had the night he’d confronted Victor. I’ll understand, he said, if you find me sickening for doing nothing about this.

  But you did do something. Alex touched his face. You wrote it down.

  Yet what had writing and locking it all in a drawer changed? This time, according to Cristina, Victor had gotten into a fight outside a bar and smashed a man’s windshield with a rock. The last time, Victor had clanged
some man’s head against a telephone pole like the clapper of a bell. Victor had sworn the man and four others had oinked at him and pushed him outside the bar, yelling that he and his cousin should have been sold off as pork, too. But when Victor sobered up, the story changed to just one man oinking at him and Freddy realized there likely had not been any pushing at all.

  Down, down the dirty corridor of the sixteenth precinct Freddy dragged himself toward the room where his brother waited, past the notice board full of pinned-up illustrations of killers and children who remained unaccounted for. At the second door, Freddy felt a dread so withering it was like the onset of a flu. But he forced himself to press the security button, to continue moving forward through another thick bulletproof door, another beep and click.

  This time, he knew to brace for the sight of his brother handcuffed to the metal chair just past the warden’s desk. And indeed, handcuffed to the same chair sat his once-senatorial brother with a swollen gash on his forehead and a streak of dried blood above his left eyebrow. But it was Victor’s gaze that made it hardest to continue walking toward him, the terrifying indignation of their father in his brother’s eyes. A voltage of rage too high for the flash of any other emotion to register in his eyes, even briefly.

  Next to Victor, behind the wooden desk, the warden was balder and older than last time. He stared at Freddy with scorn. Are you the brother? he asked and Freddy nodded.

  You need to state your answer. The warden dropped his hairy forearms against the desk and leaned forward. Do you think you can act like a man and answer the question? We’ve got rules here. I don’t care if this lying bastard was a senator once or not. Are you the brother?

  Freddy glanced at Victor’s irate, misshapen face, and then back at the bald warden who was plainly relishing the threat in his tone, his air of violence, of viciousness. Freddy swallowed. He wondered what it would take for there to be a true reckoning with the repressive roles men imposed on each other, a moment when acting despotic would finally be recognized as the weakness that it was.

  Yes, sir, he said to the warden, I am the brother.

  LINEAGE IN PURGATORY

  (WORK IN PROGRESS BY FMG)

  SET

  Four chairs.

  A few paper flames pinned to the back curtain.

  Harsh, hellish lighting.

  Actors enter one at a time,

  each dressed in a bedsheet like a Greek philosopher.

  The Father enters in a worn, yellowed sheet.

  He goes right to the fourth and farthest chair.

  Does not acknowledge audience.

  The Burdened Son emerges next, gives audience a hostile stare.

  His sheet is blood-stained.

  He kicks the second chair out of the row.

  Sits down heavily in the third chair, beside the Father.

  The Theatrical Son enters.

  His sheet is wrinkled satin.

  He sings an out-of-pitch aria for the audience.

  His chair is out of alignment from the kick of the Burdened Son.

  He sits on it sideways.

  Last comes a boy-size Inheritor.

  His sheet is clean and white, one end tied to something offstage.

  How the Inheritor’s sheet is tied, offstage, should not be visible to the audience.

  If necessary to tie two sheets together to pull this off, so be it.

  He yanks.

  INHERITOR

  I can’t get to my seat.

  FATHER

  So what?

  Do you think Purgatory makes anything easy?

  THEATRICAL SON

  He doesn’t know, Father.

  He’s just come in.

  FATHER

  Well, he needs to be told what he’s coming into.

  He needs to know that all anyone’s guaranteed here are time and flames.

  The Theatrical Son rises, crosses to the small Inheritor.

  Attempts to rip his sheet and free him.

  FATHER

  What the hell are you doing?

  You can’t tear the sheets in Purgatory.

  BURDENED SON

  You better stop interfering.

  The Inheritor doesn’t belong to you—I made him!

  THEATRICAL SON

  And what did you make him for?

  To watch him stand here, stuck this way?

  He tries to tear the Inheritor’s sheet with his teeth.

  FATHER

  You won’t be able to tear that.

  Stop making a fool of yourself.

  All you’ve ever done is make a fool of yourself.

  The Theatrical Son sings another off-key aria.

  He gnaws more intently on the Inheritor’s sheet.

  The Burdened Son rises.

  BURDENED SON

  You better get away from him.

  You’ll end up in the flames for this.

  THEATRICAL SON

  Or you will.

  Who’s the one here doing nothing to help the Inheritor?

  All you care about is claiming him.

  The brothers grab each other.

  A few houselights flicker over the audience.

  The Inheritor’s sheet falls open.

  Someone offstage hands him a sign:

  WELCOME TO PURGATORY

  The Inheritor holds the sign over his exposed parts.

  Lights go down.

  * * *

  Lena squinted through the windshield at the low, leafy rows on either side of the road. She hoped she’d made the right turn and hadn’t misunderstood the instructions on her phone. There had been no signs with the road’s name. Many of the roads in the interior went unmarked for long stretches as if they had been made by, and for, whoever had grown up along them and no one else. After a year in the valley, Lena still couldn’t even hazard a guess at what was hidden all around her, under the endless rows of dense leaves.

  She checked the clock on her dashboard and swore. She was nearly an hour late for the school she was supposed to visit today and they dismissed at three. She had forgotten to bring anything for lunch and had yet to spot a farm stand to buy some fruit and ask if she was on the right road.

  For her hunger, there was no one to blame but herself. And no one had asked her to drive out and observe the classrooms in this tiny school. She’d been the one who declared these visits were essential. She had criticized her predecessor for never bothering to observe even half the schools whose curriculum it was his job to oversee and improve.

  Although at this point, given her diminishing sense of even what direction she was driving in, Lena feared she might not be observing any classrooms today either. And she was ravenous.

  She rummaged in the glove compartment for a granola bar, though she knew she’d forgotten to replace her reserves there. She had thought there would come a point in her life when there would be fewer hours like this, of self-recrimination so wrenching and overwhelming it felt as if she were devouring herself, wordlessly slicing up her soul just to stuff it back in her own mouth.

  She hadn’t realized her decision to visit every school in the valley would require this many hours lost on roads with no signs, and no one out tending to whatever was growing along them. She’d have to buy something to eat from the vending machine once she found the school—if it had a working vending machine. A school she visited the month before had not even had a working water fountain. In the classroom she’d observed there, two windows had been patched with masking tape and cardboard. Halfway through the class, a scrawny, feral-looking cat had slipped beneath the cardboard and hissed at a boy seated near the window. The teacher remarked on none of it. He’d just gone on lecturing in a resigned monotone until the cat drew closer and the boy smacked it with a notebook.

  It’s happened before, the teacher told Len
a after the class ended, and she promised him she would rally on his behalf for a replacement window, though from the way the man nodded, she knew he didn’t expect it to happen, and despite her repeated calls for emergency funding, nothing had been done yet. The TJP budgeted little more for municipal schools than what they’d received under Cato. And no one, since Victor, had given more than lip service to the increasingly prohibitive cost of the college entrance exam, and of the universities themselves. In the capital, a leaderless, mostly online movement had begun to launch a Green Party. But there was also a newly formed, far better organized and funded conservative coalition called the United Front that had begun to gain seats by running ads about cracking down on the recent epidemic of carjackings and armed robberies.

  When Lena made the trip out to the coast with Cosmo to see her family, she tried to dissuade her father and brothers from voting for the Front, insisting the same fascists who worked for Cato were behind it. But her brothers shrugged at this and said the TJP was doing nothing for businesses but taxing them. Lena was grateful they could at least disagree with each other aloud now, though it only increased her humiliation when she accepted her father’s check for Cosmo’s tuition. She abhorred the capitulation these transactions represented, the smug satisfaction with which her family responded at the news she was taking Cosmo out of the municipal system after less than a year. All her colleagues at the Ministry sent their kids to academy schools in the valley. They urged her to get over her feelings of hypocrisy, insisting Cosmo’s well-being had to come first.

  She liked to fantasize that if she’d gotten pregnant with the child of anyone but a tourist as pale and blond as Oscar, she would have found a way to keep him in the municipal system. She had not expected motherhood to water her down this relentlessly, to dissolve her into the muck of compromise over and over.