“How’s it going, Don?” he says.
“Good,” I say. “Surprised to see you here. You have an appointment?”
“Me? No. I was just hoping you were free for a minute or two.”
I look at the kid at the desk. He’s standing as well. He’s new. The last one burned out or transferred or went AWOL – I don’t know exactly which. He just disappeared. This one replaced him. This one seems nice enough. He leans over stiffly and pushes a few buttons on a keyboard. “There’s a ten o’clock, sir, but he hasn’t arrived.”
“Looks like I’ve got that minute.” I stand aside, wave Amos into the office.
“Can we take a walk instead?” he says. He smiles but only with his mouth.
“Sure,” I say. I am suddenly afraid that somehow he’s found out my plan. Maybe I’ve gotten too careless, allowed myself to be seen. Why reports of such sightings would make it to Amos, I don’t know – SecFor or the Colonel who runs the Medical Group seem likelier options. But a scared mind is a creative one, and so I conjure all the ways Amos might have discovered what I intend. Maybe Nell figured it out and called him; I might have mentioned his name to her once or twice. I try my best to act calm, but I’m sure my guilt is leaking. I say to the kid, “When the ten o’clock arrives, just ask him to wait for a moment.” I hope my voice is steady.
“This won’t take long,” Amos says to the kid.
“Yes, sir,” the kid says. Now it is Amos’ turn to open the door, this the entry way to the portable that holds my office. He nods and I step past him and out to a lot filled with cars. I am ready to see SecFor personnel waiting for me in their dour berets, Amos just a ruse to lure me into a trap. But no one’s there. Still, my body prepares to run. Dumb, I tell myself. My old legs wouldn’t get me far.
Amos walks past me. “Let’s stroll,” he says, his hands clasped behind his back.
“Fine by me.” I fall in next to him. Maybe he doesn’t know. I try to calm myself, but my body remains on guard.
He takes us along a path that strings between another set of portables. Those and the others are all like mine, clustered close with streaks down their sides from rain. The base had to expand so quickly there was no time for more permanent facilities. We exit that copse of buildings to a sidewalk next to a road. The Eye is there before us, from the ground to the clouds. It extends into the stratosphere. There it just ends, like someone cutting a line. Amos stops on the sidewalk and crosses his arms. I want my attention in the present, so I angle my body to block the Eye from my view.
The early afternoon air is warm. It smells of oil and diesel. “It’s a beautiful day,” Amos says.
“To fly?” I know he’s stationed in a bomber wing.
“In general.”
To the east are the red-roofed dorms for unaccompanied enlisted. To the north is a fence line and beyond that are former civilian homes – single story, white siding the color of dirty snow. Now they are all either abandoned or commandeered. I see a dry fountain topped by a cherub, a fir tree gone shaggy from a lack of care.
“Normally you ask how I’m doing,” Amos says.
I’m startled. “What?”
“Normally you ask me how I’m doing. Is that some sort of therapist thing?”
“Just common decency, I think. How’re you doing?”
“Good.”
“Most people don’t seek me out if they’re good.”
“Friends do.”
“Sure,” I say.
He turns to me. He has a bulbous nose, red cheeks. He reminds me of the football coach at my high school, a man who yelled less often than people assumed. I feel a breeze. The grass is gray-green and cut so short it doesn’t move. Behind him are a trio of radio towers painted orange and white and within it all is the constant thrum of jets taking off and landing, a noise so regular that I rarely hear it anymore. It surrounds me now due to my nerves.
“How’s Nell?” he says.
“Fine. How’s Julia?” It’s a guess. I think his wife’s name starts with a J.
He doesn’t correct me. “Good. The kids are good.”
“Something on your mind?” I say.
“Your therapist training tell you that?”
“Common sense. At school, the only thing they teach us is to blame clients’ fathers.”
“It’s always the father’s fault?”
“Every parent has screwed up somewhere. Sometimes it seems like the best you can do is cause as little damage as possible.”
“That’s pessimistic.”
“I won’t argue with you.”
“You have kids?”
“You know I don’t. What’s on your mind?”
“Thoughts,” he says, and looks away. At nothing in particular as far as I can see, but the pause that follows is as obvious as a spotlight. I know what he’s going to say even before his lips move. He does not surprise. He turns back to me and his shoulders are higher and his spine straighter and for the first time since he walked into the office, he’s looking me directly in the eye. I would call it defiance if I didn’t know it was something else.
“I’ve figured it out,” he says, just like they all do. I don’t even have to ask what the ‘it’ is. “I had to tell someone. You were the first person that came to mind.”
“How’d you do it?” I say.
“Thinking. Looking at the signs. Only one option made sense.”
“An attack?”
“You’ve heard it before?”
“Yep.”
“Like I said, it’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“Then why aren’t there more of them? Why just this single Eye?”
He doesn’t respond to that. I feel I should warn him that I am not confidential. He is not my client, and even if he was, the Air Force requires I share anything that might be of concern. But I also get a sense that it wouldn’t matter. There is something in his demeanor that tells me he’s decided something. And that’s probably why I say nothing, because I’ve decided things as well.
“It has to be an attack,” he says. “I don’t know from whom. And perhaps the whole point is that they don’t need more than one. This is their FOB, and it’s enough.”
“An FOB they’ve occupied for three years.”
“It’s an attack.”
“I know,” I say. We’re passed by the occasional car.
“You believe me?”
I frown. Nell and I have been together so long even my own expressions remind me of her. She learned over the years to mimic my frown perfectly. She’d ask me a question she meant as a joke and I would take it seriously, my face tunneling down. When I’d see the same look on her face, I’d know I’d missed something.
Amos knows none of that. He says, “You don’t believe me.”
“Can I be honest?”
“That’s what friends do, don’t they? They’re honest.”
“Whether I believe you isn’t the issue,” I say. “There’s just no way to know. You could be right. You could be wrong. We’ve got no evidence either way. And the research says that when faced with that kind of blankness, most of us run back to what’s familiar. We can’t handle the vacuum, so we create meaning any way we can. You’re an Air Force officer, so you’re certain this is an attack. How else are you going to see it? You’ve got years of training tell you it’s so. But you turn on the news and you’ll see religious types in Tennessee or Alabama calling it the Second Coming or some physicist in Berlin speculating that it’s a localized black hole. One of Nell’s cousins says that the Eye sucked up all those people for experimentation. He works in a fishery. I’d like to imagine there’s some connection between his hypothesis and his job. He, you, me: we have no knowledge here. We’re all just guessing. That’s the only thing we’re able to do.”
I want to pat him on the shoulder but I think he’ll reject that as patronizing, and I can see that all I’ve said has left as much of a mark as a tennis ball tossed against stone. And if he asked me if I really belie
ve what I’ve told him, I think for the first time I would collapse, and I would confess that I don’t. But he, like all the rest, is so wrapped up in his own crises that he can’t notice my insincerity.
So he says, “It’s an attack.”
I nod. “It’s an attack.”
“It’s an attack.” He stares off at the Eye. “It’s an attack. That’s why it’s here.”
I wait.
He returns his attention back to me. He holds out his hand. It’s steady. I tilt my head, but take the proffer. We shake. He doesn’t let go immediately. Then he nods. When he walks away, he follows the road back towards the parking lot near my portable. I wait until he disappears. More cars pass and I look to see if he is driving one of them, but either I miss him or he goes a different way. When I return to my office, my next client is waiting. I pass the entire session saying “Interesting,” and “Tell me more.” That must be good enough, because when he leaves, he’s actually smiling. Maybe I helped someone today. That should make me feel better.
In the few moments of quiet, I study the clock. I think of Amos and what I’m about to do. I wonder if I could convince Nell of the rightness of my beliefs, or if like Amos I would fail. I’d like to think she’d believe me. Really, I’d need her to. I have her picture in my wallet, an old fashioned sort of keepsake. I take it out. I gaze at it until my next appointment comes.
***
When my final client steps out of my door, the sun has started to set. It falls behind the Eye. When I first came here, I was troubled by how the Eye could outdo a star. Now it just seems normal, the Eye grander than the sun along with everything else.
I find I’m thinking again of Lerner. In the 60s, he ran an experiment in which seventy-two women watched others being subjected to electrical shocks. At first, most of those women were appalled by the suffering they saw, but then a transformation occurred. Many of the women started blaming the victims. After all, the women reasoned, if the victims were suffering, that had to be because the victims had done something to earn that punishment. They were convinced there had to be justice in the world in spite of what their experiences had to say.
Among my colleagues, we joked about ‘Not me’ syndrome in our students. Show undergraduates work by Lerner or Milgram or Zimbardo and most of them will say “Not me. I’d never do that.” We laughed at the kids for thinking they were somehow immune from the biases and pressures. I wonder now if we laughed because, even though we didn’t say it, we assumed that we actually were immune, too smart or educated to become victims to such circumstances.
I wonder how any of those professors would do here. If I told Lerner what I was about to do, maybe he’d just smile and nod. I met him once, at a conference in Montreal. In those few minutes, he was cordial, collegial. Maybe that’s why he’s received all the fame.
I say goodbye to the kid at the desk when I leave.
I take a different route out of the base. Instead of heading south and home, I drive west. State Route 370 has been consistently maintained, in part to transport supplies, in part for those airmen who took houses along its corridor. There are a few checkpoints between the base and where I’m going, but no one really pays attention to those leaving the Eye. Mostly the guards are jealous. And someone might recognize me and ask me why I am so far out of my normal zone of travel, but they did not on the previous two trips I made this direction, and even if they do, I have a story about some client I need to see. The land here is flat and at first, to the north of the freeway, there are few buildings. There is no hiding from the Eye. But I don’t want to hide from it. I want to see it. I want it to see me. I can spot as well the constantly circling war planes. I wonder if Amos is up there. My thoughts wander to Nell. Perhaps I should have sent a note to her, or left one to be discovered. If I’m taken, she will likely have only other people’s stories to understand what I did. I wonder if she’ll get all the details. I wonder if she’ll be able to make sense of it all.
I pass an abandoned shopping center, the discarded carapace of a hospital. There is a vehicle behind me when I turn off, but it doesn’t follow, and I am amid homes so identical that they look pressed from a mold. They are all in decent repair but I know they are empty because there are no cars. Often, we think the absence of people makes a place look desolate, but that’s not the case. In the little town of Redlands where Nell and I first met, on cool evenings we would walk for what seemed like miles up and down those low hills amid Craftsman homes or the monstrous Victorians built by the agriculture barons who had made that desert bloom. We wouldn’t see a soul. But we never thought the place was abandoned. You note an absence of people, yards empty, sidewalks clear like chalkboards in an unused class, but you don’t assume the people are gone. Instead, you write their existence into the homes you see, their presences marked not by physical appearance but by the cut of their lawn and a light in a window and primarily by a car in the drive.
There are no cars here. No one around to watch. That’s one of the reasons I chose this place. That, and old notices on the internet of a hill, a mound of fill and soil abandoned after the development of this housing tract, the area now overgrown in weeds but still with a view all the way to the city. When I first looked for it, I was afraid someone would notice my searches and track me, but no one has. And so now on top of the mound is a tarp in approximate shade to the grass. I park my car and take the satchels from the trunk and hike to the top. Crows swirl overhead. The Eye sits on Omaha like a crown, so massive it takes up most of the sky. Between me and it are nothing but empty plains.
I’m breathing heavily when I reach the apex. I set the satchels down and lean on my knees, trying to suck in air. My pulse pounds in my ears. It would only be appropriate that I have a heart attack. Pain stitches through my chest. Thankfully, it fades and I’m able to stand again. Still, I move gingerly as I pull off the tarp.
Beneath it is a drone. It’s a quadcopter, one of the larger models. I found the thing in a barn, off a gravel road near corn fields gone to seed. Up until that moment, I hadn’t known what I was looking for in those searches. If I’d found a gun – and I found those later – I might have started taking shots at the Eye. I know there are soldiers who have, their bullets disappearing impotently into its haze. Or maybe I would have taken my life. The drone provided another option. I had to practice with it a bit, the massive remote control like a brick in my hands, the vehicle floating a few feet over our backyard. I got good enough. Now the device is charged and ready. It has its own slots to latch cameras and the like, slots I’ve jury-rigged to hold the satchels that I now attach as securely as I can. This is a one-way flight; as soon as the drone nears its destination, Offutt will detect it. The base may try to shoot it down. And their reconnaissance will certainly come back to me and I’ll be arrested. I know that. I could try this in a place with more people to deflect possible blame, but I’ve told myself that I welcome the blame. I tell myself that again.
I power up the drone. Its blades sound like a growing swarm of bees. A light on the remote verifies that it and the drone are connected. The drone lifts off. It is unsteady, the satchels not perfectly even in weight. Still, it can fly, and with the controller I push it in the direction of the Eye. In the satchels is the photograph I found today. There as well are notes to grandparents, a video tape of a family reunion, DVDs and thumb drives filled with images of dance recitals and little league games and picnics and sunsets over a lake. There is a child’s drawing taken from a refrigerator. There is a collar for a dog, a trophy with a plastic bowler atop, a family Bible filled with faded handwriting, a framed paystub from a plumbing company, the word ‘First’ scrawled across it in blue ink. There are announcements of births, of weddings, of funerals. There is the first letter Nell ever sent me when I was still in the service, counting off each day until I’d see her again. I told her once a long time ago that I still had it. She seemed touched. I wonder if she knows that I’ve kept it in all the years since, that it is the most precious thing
I have other than my love for her.
I don’t know what’s inside the Eye. None of us do. I don’t know what made it, or who, if indeed there is anyone and it is not just some cosmic accident that without purpose or malice has left us hurt so deeply. But if there is anyone inside, soldiers have sent bullets and scientists have sent probes and there has been no response. Since it gripped me, I have not been able to shake the feeling that perhaps they, whoever they are, simply don’t understand us, in the same way we do not understand them. I do not have a gold record, and I have not included samples of Bach or Berry or Balkanska, but what I have included, I hope, shows who we are, and perhaps what has been lost. What I have lost with Nell gone, the distance between us greater than the space inside the Eye and without.
I watch the probe fly on. Soon enough, the drone becomes little more than a speck against that column of dying red. This close, the entire journey will take only a few minutes. If they have not detected it yet, they will soon. I count down the time beneath my breath.
The first thing I hear is a klaxon. It comes from the direction of the Eye. Soon other sirens take up the call and I glance behind me. In this flat landscape, I can already see light bars streaming. The SecFor trucks are rushing from a checkpoint located only a few miles distant. I look back towards the Eye. I can’t see the drone anymore, but I’m sure it’s almost there. They won’t be able to stop me. The drone is now seconds away. The light on the remote control still shows a strong signal. I stare at it.
As I watch, that light dies.
My attention rises to the Eye. It remains there, as unknowable as ever. I seek some change, some twitch in its topography. Nothing. I don’t know what that means. Did someone shoot the drone down? Did its motor or battery fail? Or did it make it and this is the only response to be offered? I smack the side of the remote like the old man I am, but it surrenders no answers. I don’t feel sad. I don’t feel defeated. I don’t feel a thing, beyond a sense that I should have thrown in my own towel long ago.
Interzone #265 - July-August 2016 Page 7
