The 14th Day

by K. C. Frederick

  I’m free, he recognizes, and a surprising gust of elation blows through him.

  He gets up, wet-eyed and light, and walks away from the smell to the corner of the now-dark street where he turns toward home. There’s still a foul taste in his mouth but he knows that things have changed decisively. It’s in my power. From a distance he remembers again the way his time in the cold country ended: in those last days the melancholy would settle on him and stay, growing heavier as the day progressed. He’d awaken to find it waiting for him in the morning darkness, a reminder that he might have to spend the rest of his days in that alien place. He was trapped, he had to get out, yet it seemed impossible. And then at last he found a way to do it. At first he thought it had all been an unfortunate accident, knocking the man down in the street; but as he’s contemplated it more and more he’s come to realize that, however tangled the sources of that deed, in the end he left the cold country because of something he did: he took action. Something was necessary to do and he did it. Something is necessary to do now. Here in the cool night of this southern town he knows he can do it again. Jory is happy.

  From the moment he and Jory parted in the street Vaniok has known that things have changed decisively for his countryman. He’s going to have to do something now, he has no choice because of what I told him. And there’s only one direction in which Jory’s actions can take him. He’s going to leave. The idea has mass and weight; Vaniok can’t get out from under its shadow. They’re going away, both of them, Ila and Jory. Leaving me.

  There was a large globe at the back of the room when he was in Sister Mercy’s class. On that globe the homeland was a small rose-colored inkblot of a shape near the edge of a large land mass, and the lakes where he grew up were barely visible blue freckles, some distance from the black dot that signified the country’s capital. “Who can find where we are?” the nun would ask in her harsh, billy-goat’s voice and ten-year-old Vaniok would already have his hand up, eager to show he knew the answer to that question. If he were standing before that colored sphere today, he’d want to put his thumb on the homeland and spread his open hand toward the west: how many hand-widths would it take to span the blue ocean and reach the country from which Jory came here? Then he’d place his thumb in that country and swing his hand southward—it would take more than one set of outstretched fingers to reach this university town. Now Jory is going to move again. Vaniok can only guess how many more hand-widths it would take to reach the island he talked about.

  It was only after he left him that he realized what he saw in Jory’s face at the bar, the flash of desperation that came to his eyes when Vaniok told him about Carl’s friend who might be pursuing him. And yet it was a desperation tinged with relief, as if Vaniok had delivered to him a demon he’d dreamed of for a long time without being able to name it. Thinking about that moment later, Vaniok remembers a TV report of a fire in a skyscraper: flames coiled around the building, columns of black smoke as thick as oil poured out of every opening, heat that could melt metal pushed toward the top floors where a handful of doomed people stood at smashed windows, desperately waving sheets. For a few brief, jittering instants the camera’s searching lens found a woman driven by the heat and smoke to the ledge of a window from which she suddenly leaped to her death. Through the shaky image, from a distance, Vaniok had glimpsed her eyes—more likely he hadn’t actually seen them but guessed at them in his memory: what he thought he saw there was brute fear and despair but also a furious anger, a determination at the end to choose her fate, terrible as it was, and not just to let the fire consume her. One moment she was on the ledge, pleading for rescue, the next she was dropping to her death, her arms raised like a dancer’s, her face shrouded by her upflung dress, amid a chaos of smoke and fire, angled ladders, futile streams of water and the stuttering shadow of a helicopter’s twisting rotor. Even in her plunge to the pavement Vaniok seemed to read the woman’s ferocious determination to exercise the last act of will granted her, to choose the manner of her extinction. It was that that he saw in Jory’s eyes at the bar. Vaniok knew then, or he should have, that Jory was ready to jump.

  There’s a time when fear turns inside out, Vaniok knows. It’s a truth that resides in a pair of syllables: Bostra. Jory isn’t someone who willingly shows his emotions but even Vaniok can guess at his rage, his hurt and his fear. Expelled from his country by the convulsion of the Thirteen Days, moving from one strange place to another, guilty of a desperate act in one of those places, losing Ila here and discovering now that he may be a hunted man—who’d blame him if he simply accepted despair? But Vaniok is certain now that his countryman isn’t intending just to resign himself to his fate. Carl has been transformed from a petty antagonist into a dangerous presence, someone who’s made Jory’s situation more urgent; and Jory’s going to have to act. It’s what I gave him. Vaniok sees all this clearly. He has no idea what his countryman will have to do in order to achieve his freedom, but he’ll do something—he’ll have to.

  And it’s going to affect me, Vaniok thinks. There’s no way it can’t. Whatever Jory does, it’s not going to make things easier for Vaniok. Yet he feels no bitterness toward his countryman. He feels surprisingly capable, he knows that whatever is going to happen, he’s ready for it. It will be one more thing, I’ll deal with it. Whatever happens, he thinks, I’m going to have to play a role. He corrects himself: I’ve already played a role.

  When he arrives at work, the still air bristles with a sense of expectation Vaniok can feel on his skin. His morning is filled with a number of small, undemanding jobs around the campus and he’s grateful for the distraction. He knows that Jory is off on a landscaping crew with Carl, so that even as Vaniok brings a new blackboard to one of the classrooms in the Arts Building, a part of his mind is trying to guess his countryman’s whereabouts. In the intervals when he’s by himself, his place of work wears an air of unreality. A ventilator hums relentlessly somewhere in the high-ceilinged warehouse and under the familiar smell of wood and oil a hint of dust in the air tickles Vaniok’s nose with a sense of things impending. A gray forklift looks like a tusked animal at rest. Nearby, a half dozen bright wooden pallets are stacked against a wall, not far from a squat shape wrapped in cloudy plastic—the figures absorb his attention as if they belong not to the scene before him but to something remembered or dreamed. When the walls of the warehouse begin to close in on him he turns his thoughts to other parts of his life. This weekend he’ll join Ellen and Father Tom on his first building project. He sees himself atop a roof with a hammer, the sun on his back, in the company of other people. Music is playing; there’s cold beer. Who knows who he’ll meet? His life isn’t all work: he sees Ellen regularly for coffee, they have their private jokes, people at the Music Library know him and say hello. There are horizons for Vaniok and he basks in this idea as he goes about doing his work. All the same, he’s waiting for something, mentally looking over his shoulder.

  The morning passes and nothing out of the ordinary happens. Tense with waiting, Vaniok even begins to wonder if he could be wrong in his earlier intuitions. But at least there’s work. After lunch he’s part of a crew whose assignment is to move a refrigerator to the faculty lounge in the Economics building. It’s a job that two men could handle easily but for some reason four of them are picked for the task. When the men assemble, they look at each other and shrug; they have to find a way to divide the labor. For the first part of the operation Vaniok and a fellow worker stand and watch while the other two unload the appliance from its crate and strap it onto a dolly, then wheel it to a truck that will take it to its destination. But the truck’s tailgate won’t come down. There’s cursing and laughter, the men make suggestions, a few of them serious, but nothing works and in the end they have to call for another truck. The workers shake their heads and grumble but Vaniok can tell that, like himself, they’re pleased and excited by this break in routine. When the new truck comes at last, they haul the refrigerator across campus, Vaniok standing beside
it in the back of the truck, holding it even though it’s secure, the vibrations of the moving truck running through his hand as he surveys the scene, looking for a landscape crew. At the Economics building he helps unload the cargo and wheel it to the freight elevator. But it turns out that heating materials are being transported to the basement and the group has to wait almost a half hour before the elevator is free. Typical, one of them says, and they all laugh. Why not just leave the refrigerator here, in the hall, another suggests, where it’s conveniently close to the elevator. Call in an electrician and install an outlet. People would appreciate an ice cube while waiting for the elevator. They all elaborate on the fantasy—Vaniok proposes moving the lounge down to this level. Finally the elevator is free and they take their load to the second floor where, to the applause of two secretaries, they set it in place, remove the old refrigerator and cart it to the storage building where the university keeps machines that don’t work. We could have done this in forty-five minutes, someone says. Yeah, someone else answers, but look at all the fun we’d have missed. Silently, Vaniok agrees. How could he convey his delight in such simple pleasures? He smiles when he thinks of telling this story to Ellen.

  He’s still fashioning the story in his head when he and the others return from the Economics building. As they get out of the truck, Alex, who’s barely old enough to shave, comes up to him excitedly and tells him Royall wants to see him. Vaniok’s blood surges, the comic adventure with the refrigerator now in the distant past. He pulls away from the others, certain he knows what this is about. He isn’t surprised when Alex says under his breath, “Looks like your friend Jory got into a little trouble with Carl.”

  Vaniok nods and says nothing, careful not to let any of these others know what he’s feeling. This isn’t any of their business, after all. “I’ll get right over there,” he tells Alex without waiting to hear details. He tries to keep his voice calm but he’s already moving quickly. It’s started, he thinks. It’s happened. He’s jumped.

  When he gets to Royall’s little office his supervisor is clearly upset. “Close the door,” he says from his place behind the desk and runs a hand slowly through his white hair. Vaniok does as he’s told and the older man motions to him to sit down, then gets up himself, paces a step or two behind the desk before sinking into his metal chair. “This has gone too far,” he says. “This is too much.” Leaning on his elbows, he looks exhausted and confused. “He’s finished here,” he says as if to himself.

  “What happened?” Vaniok asks. “It’s Jory, right?”

  Royall starts to say something, then checks himself. “I can’t have this kind of thing going on,” he says quietly. “I just can’t have it.”

  Vaniok waits for him to settle down. Surprisingly, his supervisor’s agitation has calmed him. “What happened exactly?” he asks.

  “Jory went after Carl with a shovel.” Royall pulls in his lips, wrinkling his mouth. “He could have killed him.” He motions with his head. “All this happened near the new science building.”

  Vaniok tries to visualize the scene: all he can see is the building. “Was Carl hurt?” he asks.

  The other man shakes his head. “What I hear is, Jory came at Carl with a shovel but Carl had his back to him so your friend yelled at Carl. To give him a chance or something—at least he wasn’t a coward. Anyway, that gave Carl time to get himself ready. By the time Jory got to him he wasn’t able to do much with the shovel and Carl handled him pretty easy. They say Carl got in quite a few punches before they pulled him off.”

  Vaniok nods. Hearing about it is like remembering, he seems to have seen it all before. Of course, when I told him about Carl he had to do something. This is what he chose. From a distance it seems logical, predictable. The idea brings no more emotion than the working out of a simple mathematical calculation.

  For a time neither man says anything. At last Vaniok’s consciousness floats away from the serene place it’s inhabited, his attention sharpens and he asks, “Where are they now?”

  Royall frowns. “Jory just walked off somewhere. I suppose he went home. I sent Carl home for the day too.” He expels a long sigh. “But this isn’t going to be the end of it, I know that.”

  “I’ll go see Jory,” Vaniok says, overtaken by a sudden urgency. “Let me talk to him.”

  “What are you going to tell him?” Royall frowns. “I can’t have this kind of stuff happening.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” Vaniok says. He’s prepared to leave at once and do something, anything; he doesn’t know yet what it is he’s going to do. But, having made this resolution, he’s suddenly depleted, a man whose breath has been snatched from him. He sits in Royall’s little office, across the gray steel desk from his supervisor, aware that the feel of time itself has changed in the last few moments. Everything before now has passed in a rush while at the same time events have moved with incredible slowness—he remembers standing at the loading dock with the taped refrigerator: a thin rill of sweat ran down his neck, he clutched the stiff gloves he’d taken off his hands while the man driving the truck tried to get the tailgate down and others were yelling suggestions. All the while he knew that some place on campus Jory was probably working himself up to a desperate action. Now everything is still on the near horizon but elsewhere acts have been committed, consequences have been set in motion and things are rushing swiftly toward a conclusion. Yet at the moment all that seems far away. A few feet from where Vaniok sits there are papers on Royall’s desk, white, pink and blue; there’s a wood-framed picture, taken when Royall’s hair was still dark, of himself and his family squinting in the sunshine. A stubby yellow pencil with a thick point lies on the gray surface as if it’s been there for decades. Even Royall himself seems to have calmed somewhat; for the moment he’s content to sit across the desk saying nothing. And all the while outside the office time is galloping. Jory is finished here, as Royall said, he can’t stay in this town any longer. Now it doesn’t make any difference whether or not Carl actually has a friend who’s looking into Jory’s past—Jory’s got himself into big trouble.

  He’d better get to his island quickly, Vaniok hears himself thinking. Of course Jory knows this too, possibly he’s on the phone already, making contact with the people about the island. Yet even though all these things and more may be happening, here in Royall’s office everything remains tranquil, as if under a spell of enchantment. The sounds of the warehouse are muted and in this charmed space Vaniok is tempted by the idea of just staying here, sitting across the desk from Royall, saying nothing. After all, this isn’t really his problem. What can he do? At the same time, he can’t keep from trying to imagine Jory’s attack on Carl. If the man came to work this morning determined to do something, why did he wait so long? Jory would have been driven by a powerful need to break his connection with this place, but wouldn’t he have felt an equally powerful fear of moving on to yet another spot on the globe that’s even farther from the homeland? Frozen between the two, he must have tried to force himself out of his paralysis, challenging himself to do something within a certain period, say the next ten minutes, and then when that time passed, changing the deadline to an hour, to the end of the day. The way it was in Bostra. Finally it must have been unbearable to stay locked in conflict that way. There would be an instant, his hands gripping the handle of the shovel, when he forced himself to decide, Now. And it would be just like him to confront his antagonist that way, with a moment of opportunity and something in his hands that could have been a lethal weapon, and then to throw away the advantages of surprise by calling to Carl and thus einsuring the beating Carl apparently inflicted upon him. Ila was right: Jory is more of a danger to himself than others.

  “I’d appreciate it,” Royall says, “if you could do something, talk to him. Only,” he hesitates a moment, “only you should tell him it’s impossible to keep his job.”

  Vaniok nods.

  “Take the rest of the day off,” Royall says. “This is real unfortunate.” H
e shakes his head. “Real unfortunate.”

  When he leaves the warehouse Vaniok is trying to think ahead: Jory isn’t stupid, he doesn’t need anyone to tell him that he’s finished at work. He’s finished in this town too and he knows that. That was certainly why he attacked Carl in the first place. He’ll be at home getting ready to leave; he may even have made arrangements already. It would make sense for him to be gone as soon as possible. Out in the sunlight Vaniok pauses in his anxious calculation and he realizes that if he’s correct about this all he has to do is to wait and the man will leave on his own. It’s an appealing thought: certainly for a good part of the time Jory’s been here Vaniok has wished him gone. Now he’ll go. And he doesn’t need any final conversation with Vaniok. It’s true that Royall gave him the rest of the day off on the assumption that was going to see Jory but all his supervisor really wants is an assurance that the man isn’t returning to work. Vaniok is confident that Jory isn’t coming back. He remembers his feeling when Alex first brought him the news: It’s happened. There was a sharp, clear satisfaction: the shadow-stealer was going to be leaving at last. And the beauty of it is that it’s Jory’s choice—Vaniok may have told him about Carl but it’s Jory himself who’s chosen to make it impossible to stay here. I have clean hands, Vaniok thinks. Why not have a cup of coffee in some quiet place and let events take their course, unassisted by him? The idea excites him; he embraces the notion of being somewhere where no one can get hold of him, simply waiting for things to happen. Still, in the end it’s not a very persuasive fantasy. He knows all too well the question that won’t be silenced: What do I owe this man? The answer to that question isn’t easy. In the end, though, he can only come to one conclusion: he can’t stay out of this; he has to offer what help he can.