Freebird

by John Raymond

  “They’ve got some leads?” he said when the subject of his labial brains was done.

  “They’ve got some information.”

  “So you want me to help you find the guy who offed Holmes,” Ben said, and couldn’t help but laugh out loud.

  “He thinks it’s funny,” Doobie said.

  “Moses wants us to ask him why it’s so funny,” Slick said. “Fuck him. I’m not asking.”

  “I’d like to give the guy a medal,” Ben said, rubbing his eyes. “I hated that motherfucker, Holmes. The world’s better off without him.”

  “Thought you dug Holmes,” Slick said. “You kept his ass alive a year, right?”

  “I never liked him.”

  “Well, maybe they’ll let you pin a medal on the dude before you shoot him in the head,” said Slick. “Doesn’t really matter to us. Point is, you’ve got four hours to get your ass to Twentynine Palms. They’ve got a command room in DC. Plane’s waiting. They’re going to be ready for you in the morning. You in or what?”

  Still, he didn’t get into their car. He didn’t trust them that far just yet. Better to stay paranoid as long as possible. But he agreed to meet them at the airport at 2100 for a red-eye to Dulles. They would fly all night and head straight to the comm room for a complete debriefing, and from there he would throw down whatever speculations he might have to add. The other attending parties, he learned, would be Colonel Taymor, plus a few HUMINT and SIGINT guys, desk jockeys from the academy, most likely. The report they produced would go straight up the line to the Joint Chiefs, depending on what course of action they suggested. He predicted the whole process would take a week. He would pick up a day rate of three grand plus per diem.

  Hilarious.

  18

  Aaron’s grandfather was born in 1922 in Kraków, Poland. He had four brothers and three sisters. His father was a tinker studying to become a schoolteacher. His mother often cooked beets. The neighborhood where his family lived was called Kazimierz, a warren of cobbled alleyways and pocket squares peopled by tradesmen, cabinetmakers, grocers, and horses, centered on the comings and goings at the communal well.

  That made Grandpa Sam seventeen years old when the Nazis invaded Poland. Of course, Aaron already knew that. But did he, really?

  The storytelling had begun suddenly. Returning home to the hotel, late, hungry, they’d shuffled into the room. After food had been ordered, before cable, the words had begun to flow. Aaron wasn’t sure what to do at first. His video camera was not far away, but he didn’t want to scare his grandpa back into silence, so he sat on the edge of his queen bed, the sheets crisp with bleach, and listened.

  His grandfather’s memory of the invasion was vivid and sparse. He presented his images like small, precious heirlooms. Sitting in La Quinta, the air conditioner wheezing and burbling, he told Aaron about his mother tying the white armband with the blue Star of David onto his coat sleeve, the breadline queuing up at four in the morning, often dispersed by German dogs and soldiers with wooden truncheons, the rabbi paraded in the street and shorn of his beard, then forced to urinate on the Torah. He remembered the rabbi’s shriveled, weeping, unbearded face in the fresh spring light, he said. He remembered the rumors of Jewish gravestones being used to repave the street.

  In 1941 the Jews were consolidated into the ghetto of Podgórze, and Grandpa Sam’s family abandoned their house for the town of Dabrowa, where a cousin of his mother lived. They walked the dirt road hauling the few bags they’d been allowed to take from their home, and as soon as they arrived, the Nazis took all the men of the village away and shot them. It happened in a field on the edge of town after they’d dug their own graves, they were told, and from that day onward Grandpa Sam never saw his father again.

  His mother took the children back to Kraków and they found lodging in a pigeon coop on the roof of a building in Kazimierz. In 1942, the deportations began, and one by one his family members were lost. His mother was shot in the street. One of his brothers went to the camp Plaszow, another brother to Belzec. His sisters went to an orphanage, en route to Birkenau, or so he thought. Much was left out in the telling, and the daily life of the occupation was barely mentioned. It seemed he’d winnowed his memory down to a simple, streamlined tale, though the main events were unmistakable: one by one, everyone was swallowed by the earth.

  In 1943, Grandpa Sam was taken from the street and loaded on a train without windows or water. He could still hear the sound of a woman crying nearby, unable to stop. Through the slats of the wall, he could catch glimpses of frozen fields rushing by, stone walls, distant chimneys smoking. When he deboarded, weak and afraid, he was at Plaszow, where he worked in the clothing factory, producing uniforms for the German army. He didn’t give many details of his time at Plaszow, only that women were beaten and lorries were loaded with the sick and infirm, who were shot. Soon Grandpa Sam was being loaded into another train, enduring another terrible passage, and then he was entering the walls of Auschwitz.

  His first image of arrival was of naked old men. The new prisoners were put into rows of five, two yards apart, and commanded to strip off their clothes. He remembered the sagging, wrinkled chicken skin of the old men’s bellies, their yellow, clawed toenails. The guards shaved all the prisoners’ heads, though to say “shaved” was too kind. They were not shaven; they were shorn like animals, and hosed down, and taken to the Lager.

  In his description of the Lager, he became much more precise, as if he’d committed the dimensions of this hell to memory or done research after the fact. The Lager was a square about six hundred yards in length and width, he said, surrounded by two barbed wire fences, the inner fence electrified. In the Lager were sixty wooden huts, called blocks. There was a brick kitchen, an experimental farm, various huts with showers and latrines, one latrine for each six or eight blocks. Eight blocks at the end of camp comprised the infirmary. Block 24 was for skin diseases; block 7 was never entered; block 47 was for the political criminals; block 49 was for the kapos; block 37 was the quartermaster’s office and the Office for Work; block 29 was the brothel, served by Polish Häftling girls.

  He recalled ghoulish encounters with the German guards—shouted, half-understood orders he still heard in his dreams. He described unpredictable beatings that still ached in his bones and told about terrible scenes of murder and fratricide. He talked about his work in a sand mine, hauling dead weight for no other purpose than the expansion of his very death factory. He talked about his diet of rotten potatoes, thin soup, and occasional stale bread. The bread always defied Aaron’s imagination in these stories. What was this bread, exactly? He could never quite imagine it. Was it heavy bread, hard bread, brown bread? Did it come in loaves, slices, buns? How much life could a person squeeze out of this simple bread?

  Some of Grandpa Sam’s stories seemed a little misremembered or vague or even shaped by some other source material. Some of the details frankly seemed like they came from movies, like the shining leather coats of the SS or the flashing monocle of Dr. Mengele. Even the people digging their own graves bordered on cliché. Genocide cliché, Aaron thought. What a heinous notion. But the world had made it so.

  But then there were some details that rang very true.

  The day, for instance, his grandfather was called with the rest of the prisoners and lined up in the vacant lot in the Lager yard. The men were all commanded to step forward, but for some reason Grandpa Sam understood that stepping forward was a death sentence. He pretended to drop something from his pocket, a little scrap of paper, and bent over and held back a few steps, letting the other men go forward, and all the other men had been killed.

  Aaron hadn’t heard about the gay kapo in the camp, either. This kapo was a cruel overseer who took sadistic advantage of the prisoners, his grandpa said. At some point the men conspired to kill him in the showers. One man on each arm, one on each leg, and together they smashed him to death on the concrete floor. They lifted and smashed, lifted and smashed. It was hard to say wheth
er his grandfather had held an arm or a leg that day or if he’d merely watched. How did one ask such a question?

  Grandpa Sam was not a great storyteller. His mind was by no means a steel trap. He made his report in a flat voice, and he didn’t look at Aaron during the telling. But it was clear that some of the things he’d witnessed in those days would not be unremembered.

  Soon, after pizza was delivered, they were into the days following the liberation of the camp, and Aaron heard about his grandfather and another prisoner carrying a legless survivor through the woods of Poland to the German border. They traveled for days, if not weeks, with the man on their backs, crossing streams and ravaged meadows, trading him back and forth, hoping to find their way to the rumored DP camps. They’d schlepped his weight all the way to the gates of Berlin, from which point the legless man had survived and gone on to a distinguished career in life insurance in the Canadian province of Ontario.

  When they came to Grandpa Sam’s train voyages after the war, his fruitless search for his family, his tattoo as his train ticket, Aaron knew they’d reached the end of the tale for now. They’d skipped over many parts, and the phrasing hadn’t been elegant, but they’d gone all the way, just as he’d hoped, from the innocence of the shtetl to the darkness of the war to the bright American life ever after. And Aaron, for his part, hadn’t recorded a single word of it. His video camera was somewhere deep in his backpack, charged and sleeping. The words had been spoken in the hotel room and left there to memory.

  When the talking was over, Grandpa Sam remained on the edge of the bed, breathing heavily, as if he’d been hauling stones, and then, predictably, turned on the TV, fumbling with the unfamiliar remote.

  “It’s amazing what you forget,” he said, scrolling the menu.

  Aaron helped him find a station with Sam Waterston solving crimes and sat beside him and watched the show for a while. When the commercial came on, he rubbed his grandfather’s round, cement-hard shoulder, listening to the TV instruct them to buy pharmaceuticals and luxury cars, and when the show came back on, he murmured to his grandpa that he might take a walk. He wanted to think his own thoughts for a while.

  “You’re sure?” his grandpa said. “It’s so late.”

  “I just want some air, I think,” Aaron said.

  “Well, be careful out there.”

  “Of course,” Aaron said. “You want anything?”

  Grandpa Sam thought about it, or possibly just stared at the TV, happy for the intrusion. “No.”

  The streets of Dublin were empty, only a few scuttling figures moving among the neighborhoods of corporate office parks. Aaron wandered aimlessly, passing streetlights and bark-dust beds, spotting security cameras tucked everywhere. The eyes of surveillance seemed to find the dull, eventless streets of Dublin fascinating.

  He passed a few people waiting for the bus, talking about manicures and cheap restaurants, and thought about his grandfather and his mom. He had the facts now, but, in a way, the facts didn’t change very much. In the end, whose family tree didn’t hold mass murder somewhere in the branches? Everyone at the bus stop—Chinese, Japanese, Salvadoran, Indian—they’d all been on both sides of the gun at some point in history. Some became dentists, some became soldiers, like his uncle, but they all got the same lesson. He’d read there were more slaves in the world now than when Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

  He skirted a mall and wound up in front of the cinema multiplex, smelling the fake popcorn butter and bathing in the flashing lights. The lobby was nearly deserted, with only a teenage boy in a garnet uniform with a vacuum cleaner and a cardboard cutout of Hugh Jackman. A depressed-looking woman sat encased in the ticket booth, awaiting her last customers of the night.

  He bought a ticket for X-Men, the story of a hunted genetic minority involving diabolical medical experiments, and trudged into the theater. Somehow, he thought, he was going to find a way to tell his family’s history someday. Somehow, he would find a way to pull back the skin of the world and point at the dripping teeth and acid underneath. Look, he’d say, this is what we do. This is who we are. He would nurse the plan in darkness until the proper time came, telling no one, just in case he failed, but he didn’t want to fail. He wanted to tell the world. He had no idea how.

  19

  Every once in a while Anne realized just how little Susan thought of her. Not that Susan thought little of her in the sense of undervaluing her as a person, just that she literally never thought of her, period. Anne was quite sure, for instance, that Susan didn’t know where she lived. Why would she? She didn’t know what was going on with her dad, and she probably wouldn’t even recognize Aaron if she saw him, even though she’d met him at least fifteen times over the years. To Susan, Anne’s life outside the Bureau of Sustainability was a complete blank, a flicker of shadow behind a thick veil of professionalism that was really, in the end, more like rank disinterest on her part.

  On the other hand, Anne knew everything about Susan’s life. She knew about Susan’s husband, a doctor of obstetrics, and the infidelity of 1998; she knew about the family vacations to Madrid and Vieques; she knew about the travails of Susan’s kids at Occidental and Evergreen, respectively.

  It occurred to Anne that this must be the very definition of power, this blatant differential in consciousness. If ever there was a question of who wielded the power between two people, just look at who did all the thinking about the other one: that was the subordinate. Look at the one plagued by worries about the other’s dietary needs, the other’s social commitments, the other’s domestic schedule: that was the subordinate. The thoughtless, memoryless one: that was the superior. In every relationship, there was a king and a serf; it had always been so.

  Anne wondered if, taken to its extreme, this principle proved that God never thought about His creation. His complete ignorance was the ultimate measure of His power. Maybe so.

  In any case, with Susan being nine time zones away, in Zurich, Anne realized she had no choice but to schedule their Skype meeting at two in the morning, Los Angeles time. Susan surely had no idea exactly what the time difference meant, and it would never occur to her to worry about any inconvenience on Anne’s end. Anne, on her side, didn’t want Susan alerted to any of her ulterior motives going into the conversation, and that meant she didn’t want to create the slightest bit of turbulence in Susan’s pretty little executive head. Thus, she resigned herself to the 2:00 AM call.

  Staying awake was not easy. She downloaded a memory-improvement app and played some brainteasers as the clock edged past midnight, and around one o’clock she art-directed her computer’s frame—pointing her camera at a chair in the corner of her living room, adding a happy-looking bouquet of pink roses, a pile of books, turning on all the lights, making sure no black windows were visible. It was too late to call Aaron, though she was sorely tempted. The radio silence on his end was becoming so obnoxious, just a few unforthcoming texts dribbling in a day, telling her nothing. It was like a stiff, invisible arm keeping her at bay. He knew exactly how little to give.

  Of course Susan wasn’t there on the first call. Nor the second, nor the third. But forty-five minutes later, on attempt four, Susan picked up, full of zesty apologies. “Sorry, sorry,” she said. “The traffic is so fucking bad here!” Her pixelated face was rupturing and remaking itself on the screen, a scramble of data, and her voice, only vaguely synced to the picture, paused for large gaps of silence. The bad connection was aggravating, but not fatally so. How many satellites and way stations had these pulsations of energy traveled through before illuminating her box? That was another God question to ponder.

  “I thought this town was supposed to run like a machine, but no,” Susan said, unfreezing again. “Nobody knows what’s going on here. I thought I’d be back at the hotel half an hour ago. Really sorry, really sorry.”

  Anne reassured her that everything was fine and dutifully asked how the trip was going. It was nearly three in the morning now, and she couldn
’t have cared less, but she asked out of reflex. Their conversations always began with this stream of one-way disclosure. Whatever Susan’s day held, it became Anne’s burden, too.

  “Zurich is really fucking annoying,” Susan said. “They keep giving me little tiny potatoes and cheese, like that’s a real meal or something. These little, round, boiled potatoes and a few hunks of cheese on a huge, white plate. That’s it. I mean, one time, that’d be fine—maybe it’s traditional or something—but, like, eight times? Come on. How about a vegetable here? And then these Belgians I’m stuck with. Jesus. All they do is bitch about America, like I’m the fucking president or something. ‘What about your blacks?’ ‘What about your Indians?’ ‘The poverty on the reservations is truly a shameful secret.’ Like I don’t know this. I’m, like, first of all, they’re not ‘my’ blacks or ‘my’ Indians. You got that? Second of all, how about you go get some of your own blacks and Indians in your country, and then we’ll talk, all right? I don’t remember King Leopold was that cool to the fucking Congolese.”

  Anne was accustomed to Susan’s charismatic complaining. Her negativity was a form of bonding, and for years at a time, it could be charming and inclusive in its scope. Look at these troubles we are enduring together! Look at these struggles we are overcoming! Look how little I’m enjoying my self-evident power and glory! Only occasionally, when Anne fell out of sync with her boss’s agenda, did the routine become alienating, like now.

  “The Belgians are really serious people, though,” Susan went on. “God, they have such tiny, little technical questions about everything. I don’t know what the hell I’m supposed to tell them half the time. I’m just like, ‘I wish Anne was here! She’d know.’ They all think you’re a figment of my imagination.”

  “Ha.”

  “But seriously, they want to know the exact budget of the Richmond solarization program, down to the individual cells, the ad budget, everything. Can you get that to me? In some kind of organized file?”