by Jay Brandon
“This was a bad idea,” he muttered.
“I believe I said let’s not get on board, but you overruled me. Anyway, it’s too late now. It’ll be fine. I’ll probably have to save you again once we land, but I’m getting good at that.”
Jack lay there groggily next to her, thinking that maybe she had rescued him too easily. Maybe these had been ploys designed for Arden to gain his confidence. He needed to pay careful attention to her, she might be leading him straight to destruction. But if that was the goal, Jack’s death, that could have been accomplished by just not letting her save him. So either she was on his side after all or she was an opponent with something more devious in mind than his mere destruction.
So his thoughts circled and barked at each other. After awhile, for rest, he replayed the conversation with his mother. He pictured her standing in the kitchen of their home in Fort Wayne, with the three windows and the yellow curtains, then realized that he was picturing his mother younger than she was now, and that the kitchen might well be a different color by now. He hadn’t been home in a while. But he did stay in touch. It had been more than half his short lifetime—he was twenty-six—since he had lived with his family, but they still grounded him in reality.
The mental idyll didn’t last long. Inevitably he began worrying again about the reception he would face when he landed, and about the woman lying beside him. He also thought about her grandmother, the Chair, and what plans she had for him. Jack tried to remember how long it had been since he had trusted someone. Far too long. But he was lucky, he always had his family.
Arden glanced at him as if he had spoken. So he did. “Where are your parents?”
She gave the strangest answer to this commonplace question he’d ever heard: “They’re dead, I think.”
He just lay there blinking at her, thinking he had mis-heard, or that she hadn’t heard his question right. Arden stared overhead. In a soft voice, as if to herself, she continued, “At least I’m pretty sure Mom is. She would have gotten in touch with me by now otherwise. Dad…” Her voice trailed off as if that one word said worlds.
Jack looked at her profile: smooth cheek, straight, strong nose, one clear blue eye, not meeting his. “You were estranged?”
Arden laughed very quietly. “We were never—what’s the opposite of ‘estranged’?—we were never really connected. I used to think that’s how all fathers were, kind of—well, not there, robotic.”
“Caught up in business?” Jack was good at reading people, beyond good, but he was getting nothing from Arden except sadness. He didn’t have a clue to her thoughts. Maybe she could stop the subliminal signals people give off. At any rate, there was very little emotion in her voice.
“He didn’t have a business. That was part of his problem, I realize now. Never really found himself. He and Mom just drifted from place to place, carrying me along. I used to be afraid I’d wake up one morning or come home from school one afternoon and they’d be gone. Then I started hoping for it. Finally one day it became true. I was too much for them to keep up with. They left me with a friend in St. Louis, one I had never met. Mom looked deep into my eyes and cried and said they’d be back for me soon. But they weren’t. I’d hear from them once in a while, but in the meantime I was growing up in one home after another where I didn’t have quite the status of a step-child.”
“Foster care?”
“More or less,” she answered.
This would account for her near-telepathic ability to read people. A child in a stranger’s home has to be that sensitive, to read signals the sender tries not to send. Arden’s first lessons must have been very harsh.
But something was missing from her story. “Your mother is Gladys’s daughter?” Jack asked.
Arden nodded. “But they didn’t have much contact. I almost never saw Granny. And Mom didn’t tell her where I was when she left me. It took Granny a few years first to realize I was missing, then to find me. That was when she put me in the boarding school in Switzerland, when I was twelve. Which was heaven.”
Yes, the Chair would not have had a place for a young girl in her complicated, secretive life. But she had found a safe place for her, and where Gladys had monitored her closely from a distance, Jack guessed. Arden had obviously thrived in the Swiss finishing school. But the years between eight and twelve are very, very long. They must have seemed forever to the young Arden, lost in America.
“I heard from Granny regularly when I was in Switzerland. She was evaluating me, of course, although I didn’t know that then.”
The school Arden had attended wasn’t quite the European counterpart of his own Bruton Academy, but it did have a small gifted and talented department, consisting of one teacher and a handful of students who didn’t know they were all being groomed and observed.
Now Arden was reading his thoughts. “I never heard of any of you people until Granny swooped in a couple of years ago and carried me off. But I dreamed of you. I longed for the Circle. Sometimes I think I’m still dreaming, that I imagined all of you simply by wanting it so bad. Wanting there to be something more than what I saw around me every day.”
“We all felt that way before we were gathered in,” Jack said. “You know that.”
She nodded. “I do.”
He felt as if she’d opened up to him, but her story had large missing elements. After a minute Jack asked, “Was your mother ever—?”
“Was she considered for the program? I think so. Pretty sure. But I never got the chance to ask her about it and Granny won’t say a word. She clamps down completely if I bring up the subject.”
The phrase “clamped down” meant a great deal when you were talking about Gladys Leaphorn. She had an emotional side, Jack guessed, but she could cut off everything—emotion, her own thoughts, a group discussion—more effectively than anyone else on earth.
Arden continued, “I always thought Dad was the restless one, moving from job to job, but now I think it may have been Mom, wanting to be part of something she imagined like I did, but never got invited to join. Probably taking up with Dad ended her possibilities of learning about the Circle forever. I think she sensed it, though. Probably that’s one reason why…”
Why she hadn’t been closer to her daughter, Jack thought. She envied her own child’s possibilities.
At least that was how he finished up the story in his own mind. Arden didn’t talk any more. He wanted to put an arm around her, but in the narrow confines of the airline chair-beds she might take that for an advance. And he had no intention of advancing on her. He did feel he’d gotten to know her much better. He continued to think about her and her life story for the next hour as he skimmed in and out of sleep. Those thoughts kept him preoccupied from the larger ones.
It wasn’t until some time later that he realized she might have made up the whole estranged-parents story just to put him off guard.
It was a little after noon, British time, when they arrived at Heathrow. Jack and Arden stood awkwardly in the aisle of the plane, feeling strange with no luggage. They had no story, either, and no defenses. Police might well be waiting for them as soon as they stepped out of the exit tunnel. They both watched the flight attendants, trying to decide if they’d gotten any security calls during the flight, but if they had they were good at concealing their thoughts. The one who had taken their boarding passes in Houston still glanced at Arden hostilely when her back was turned. Only Jack saw that.
“Listen,” he whispered urgently as they were in the tunnel, “if I get arrested, there’s an address in Chelsea…” He tried to give Arden the beginnings of a plan. She just frowned at him and took his arm as they came out into the light.
“Well, if we’d had the extra three days I thought we were going to have we would have seen ‘Spamalot,’” she said angrily.
Jack answered defensively, “Is it my fault the kid runs away and freaks out the nanny? What is this, number four? I’m not the one teaching Mary that she’s in charge, that she should be on
the transatlantic phone to us every time…”
“If we would just stay away one time and not let her get away with this nonsense, it would do her worlds—”
The two men in black suits watching the deplaning passengers glanced at the arguing couple and looked away, as people always do. A woman and man having a spat in public put up an invisible barrier that repels others. The two plainclothes police—Jack was sure that’s what they were -- gave them a close look for a moment but couldn’t hold it as Jack’s face grew angrier and Arden tilted her chin at an imperious angle. She spoke in a clipped sort of upper-class twit accent, not exactly British perhaps, but certainly European, giving off a flavor of travel in expensive places.
“So just let her be homeless for a while, you’re saying,” Jack said in a low but incredibly hostile voice as they walked past the two men. Maybe they weren’t bobbies at all, or probably they were looking for someone else, but if they had been waiting for an American man traveling alone Jack and Arden had slipped by them for the moment. They hurried down the terminal.
He was mad at her. Jack wanted to strangle Arden. In their few seconds of role-playing he had felt real anger, as if they were a little-to-like couple who had been confined together too long. She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye and he saw a flash of hatred there, too. Then Arden grinned.
“That was exhilarating, wasn’t it, babe?” She took his arm. “Next time let’s play a young couple who have just fallen in love and see what that feels like.”
Jack and Arden got through customs quickly, having no encumbering baggage. The rest of the passengers streamed toward the exits with their suitcases, greeting relatives. Jack headed back into the airport. Arden followed him without asking questions as he took a couple of turns and ended up at a row of lockers. Barely glancing at the numbers, he found one and opened it with a combination. Inside sat a large black gym bag, on end. Jack unzipped it to reveal clothes, a shaving kit, other items.
“You keep a bag in Heathrow?”
“Doesn’t everyone?” Jack was rummaging in the space behind the bag and came out with a few still-wrapped flat packages. He glanced at each one critically, then at Arden’s hips, finally tossed most of the packages back and handed two to her.
“Panties?” she said, noting that he’d guessed her size correctly. “And stockings?”
“Really that part of my life is in the past. I don’t keep nearly the selection I used to have. Here.” He also came up with a small pink kit containing a few cosmetics and other sundries.
“Pink?” Arden said critically.
“Yeah. Don’t chicks still like pink? Come on.”
They made their way to a ticket counter. While Jack waited in line Arden ducked into a women’s room and came out sans packages, though her pink carrying kit now bulged. Jack rose considerably in her estimation when he didn’t glance below her waist or make any remark at all. He just matter-of-factly handed her a boarding pass.
“Prague?” she said. “We’re not checking out the Jack-sighting here in London first?”
He just shook his head, didn’t ask whether she had overheard the conversation with her grandmother or whether Granny had shared information with her.
This flight was very short, little more than a hop, the plane not even half-full. Arden and Jack spent the time in near-complete silence, Jack lost in thought that turned into dozing. Arden stared at the seat back in front of her or out the window, feeling the tug of the continent where she had grown to adulthood. Only other expatriates know the way she felt, not a homecoming but more as if falling back into a very vivid and recurring dream. For Arden the feeling was stronger and stranger because she had spent her whole childhood on the move, never settling anywhere, so America was as much a concept as a reality to her. She had no home, never had had one until she’d found the Circle, and she knew how she was thought of there. Arden sat blankly, waiting to … become.
Before they even left the airport in Prague, Jack found an internet connection and got on his game. Instantly he was absorbed, paying no apparent attention to the passing people or anything in the real world.
“You really are addicted, aren’t you?” Arden said, standing beside him with her arms crossed.
“Czechoslovakia isn’t very wired, I don’t know where I’ll find another connection. And it’s late in the time zone where I’m playing.”
She didn’t care for an explanation. After a few minutes, when it became clear that Jack wasn’t going to stop soon, Arden walked away. The passengers in the airport terminal were mostly men, most of them wearing suits and a large proportion of them foreign to the country where they found themselves. She could tell by looking, by the way they walked, their wristwatches.
Arden had come to Prague a couple of times while she was in school, when it was supposedly flowering in democracy, but couldn’t claim to know the country well at all. She found a phone and checked in, but didn’t talk long. She was staring out the large terminal windows when she sensed someone coming and turned slowly.
The man wore jeans, a universal standard, and a red polo shirt. His hair was dark and long, and he walked purposefully, unlike a European, but with an awareness of others that kept him from brushing shoulders.
It was Jack.
For a moment she was surprised, because she hadn’t recognized him. His hair was wet, she realized now, he had obviously combed it with water and changed his shirt, changing his appearance subtly enough that he seemed different. Maybe he was. She didn’t know him well enough. Maybe this was another doppelganger.
“Somebody shoot you with a zombie dart?” He snapped his fingers in front of her face.
No, this was Jack. She grinned at him and didn’t explain why. Outside, before they got into a cab, she did ask, “Where’s your headquarters here?”
“Good question,” he said, and to the cab driver something in Czech, a language she didn’t know. She started to ask a question, realized Jack wasn’t saying anything else in front of the cabbie, and sat silent for the rest of the way into city center.
They checked into a hotel on the edge of Lesser Town, the old part of the city. Adjoining rooms: they presented themselves as business associates with a company Jack made up as he signed the register.
“Which would be more convincing if either of us had a briefcase or a laptop,” Arden murmured as they walked up the two flights of stairs to their rooms.
“Airline lost our luggage,” Jack said.
“Even our carry-ons?”
“Okay, we’re very careless business travelers.”
They opened their hotel doors, glanced in, neither felt the need of saying anything about the rooms. Arden said, “I’m going to go correct the lack of clothing and luggage situation. Want to come?”
Jack shook his head. “I’m a little beat. I’ll just crash here for a while, then I think there’s an internet café a couple of blocks from here.”
Arden didn’t say anything, didn’t remind him that he’d claimed to her grandmother not to have been in Prague for three years. She just nodded, went into her room, emerged five minutes later, and went off to look for Prague fashions.
Jack did crash, though he hadn’t intended to. As soon as he lay down for a moment jet lag wiped him out. His dreams were Kafkaesque, invaded by Prague, so waking in the dark felt like continuing to sleep. He moved slowly, having trouble remembering where or when he was. Then he suddenly snapped to consciousness, on high alert that, he knew from experience, would not let him sleep any more tonight.
It was late, he knew nothing about Prague nightlife any more, but he went out. The hotel felt unbearable, for some reason. The night was cool and pleasant and frightening. His sleep had given whatever enemies Jack had here plenty of time to prepare something for him. So here he went, walking into it.
The old castle dominated the landscape as he walked uphill into Lesser Town. He had always loved that name, thinking the houses and even inhabitants would be diminutive. In other cities it wo
uld be called Old Town, because that’s what it was: the original city of Prague, founded in the ninth century, though the area had been settled since Roman times. It had stayed the same for centuries, Jack had read, peasants and merchants supporting the inhabitants of the huge castle, everyone knowing their place. But since the collapse of Communism the modern world had made inroads even here. Nightclubs stood shoulder to shoulder with centuries-old hostels. Jack heard the music but had no desire to go in.
He wondered where ‘he’—his double—had been spotted in this sprawling old city. What had he been doing?
For that matter, what was he doing now? Walking dreamily through the old continent, waiting for lightning to strike. Jack suddenly felt very far from home. He was never troubled by homesickness, probably because he hadn’t had a home in so long, but suddenly he had a fierce longing to be back in America, just for a few minutes. What’s happening to my country? He felt like a traitor, who had fled when the trouble started.
Jack hadn’t touched his cell phone in hours, almost a day, which wasn’t unusual for him. Sometimes he forgot it when he went on trips. His friends had always accused him of being an eighteenth-century kind of guy, even given his current occupation. Now he felt as if he’d travelled back in time to his rightful place.
Lesser Town was not quite deserted as midnight neared, but the streets felt heavy with sleep. Still, an occasional car passed, music drifted out of a few doorways. Jack stopped at one, read the sign in Czech over the door, and realized his walk had not been random. He went in.
The room inside was low-ceilinged, smoky, and so big he couldn’t see the far walls. There were wooden tables with spindly old wooden chairs, filling the room but not cramming it. On the walls that he could see were posters, some of them peeling off, announcing rallies and concerts and even a chess championship. The lighting came from sconces on the walls and lamps on tables. There was no bar and no stage, though up at the front of the room a woman crooned softly. She had no microphone, and might have been a patron suddenly struck with an urge to perform.
