The Invention of Exile

by Vanessa Manko

  “I’ve lived here fourteen years and you come now. Why?”

  “We know your kind is thinking about infiltrating the U.S. It’s our job to keep people like you and your kind out.”

  “What is my kind?”

  “Anyone who is suspected of subversive activities. That, and there are new developments.”

  “What do they have to do with me?” Austin watches Jack cross the floor to sit in the windowsill, torso twisted slightly so that he faces outward. His raised leg swings in and out of the streetlamp light shining through the front window. His ease, his nonchalant demeanor angers Austin, the impudence, thinking he can come here and persecute him with these accusations. It is unconscionable.

  “You’ve been on our radar before, and due to new developments, we’ve been advised to keep an eye on you. You’re a perfect candidate for illegal entry so I’m here to ensure that you won’t try something funny, or at least warn you not to do it. Of course, crossing the border is more difficult now than it was years ago, but you have your connections, Sonoran smugglers maybe? And besides, you’ve got to see it from our perspective. How are we to know what you might do with these inventions of yours?”

  “What about them? You’ll soon see. Once they are patented, I’ll gain admittance to the U.S. and join my family.”

  “I’m not so sure about that.”

  “Why do you say that, why would you say such a thing?”

  “Again, it’s my job to make sure people like you don’t enter the country and that means taking all means necessary to ensure that it won’t happen.”

  “But my work is good, it’s useful.”

  “We know. Quite useful too.”

  “Thank you.”

  “The steamship engine. Now that is some good work there. It’s been reviewed several times. We’ve flagged it, you see.”

  “You have?”

  “Yes. We are impressed with it.”

  “But it’s mine. Surely, you wouldn’t take my idea—”

  “We use whatever is useful, whatever we can if it helps us do what we need to do.”

  “And what of me?”

  “Well, we can appreciate your intelligence, your inventions, but we can’t trust your activities and motives, even if we do find your skills to work in our favor.”

  “I see. So you will take my ideas and use my inventions to your own ends, to the U.S. government’s ends, and you’ll leave me, my family, in this dastardly state? And what about the individual, the man himself?”

  “I work for the U.S. government and will protect and serve her in any way I can, and again if it means keeping your kind out, well—. But, listen, I’m not going to get into theories or pretend to philosophize with you about the individual and the pursuit of happiness. This is how it goes. It’s the way it is, you see.”

  “You have no feeling. You are an unsympathetic individual.”

  “I’m trained not to have feelings. It’s what you might call a requirement of the position.”

  “To lack empathy.”

  “If that’s what you call it.”

  “Yes. Empathy. Write that down in your notebook,” Austin says under his breath as he turns to pace back and forth. This is all too much for Austin, who now finds that he is gnashing his teeth, his hands are clenched and he begins to glean an understanding of what is happening. Could they have intercepted his designs, prevented them from getting to the patent commissioner and then stolen them for their own ends? The bastards! It was an outrage, that they could do such a thing, a betrayal of the postal system and his rights to read his own mail. He feels certain that it is unlawful, to treat a man so, to confiscate his work and tarnish his reputation. No. He will set it all straight. They will soon see. He will take an action of recourse, yes. That seems a fine way to handle things, to get him out of such a trap. Yes. An action of recourse, the word, recourse, like a refrain. These patent agents and embassy clerks, damn them, all in league with miscreant men who will outright steal his ideas, the scoundrels. They will soon see. He will simply go by other means, he’ll go above their heads, all their heads, to the ambassador. Why has he not thought of something like this before? It is brilliant. He will write to the ambassador! That is a man who will clearly see his predicament, who will surely be a man of reason.

  Dear Sir Ambassador,

  I am a trained engineer and applicant for American citizenship and herewith are my inventions along with an oath of a single inventor, declaring that I—and I alone—am the sole inventor of the enclosed. Be so kind as to review my inventions for sea and air travel. It has come to my attention that these designs have been stolen by a branch of your government and are thus deterred from getting into the right and just hands of the U.S. patent commissioner. I write to you with a plea, requesting that you mail these designs, under embassy authority, to the U.S. patent commissioner, thus preventing unlawful confiscation. I congratulate you on your discretion in these matters.

  Yours sincerely and humbly and with my trust in your good and gracious services,

  Austin Voronkov

  Inventor

  Satisfied with this decision Austin finds himself seated now, staring into the evening which seems to have proceeded forward in brazen unawareness of Austin’s predicament. Jack is gone. He steps outside, the later-hour sidewalks almost haughty in their stillness. Well, it was just like them really, just like them and all their cronies. They would do that, show up unannounced, torment a man, and then casually walk away to leave a man wondering about his own mind, left now with a little inkling that perhaps his mind truly was fraying, his very hold on reality exhausted, no longer working in the same way. Oh, but enough! He will not allow himself to go so far astray with such needling thoughts. Surely the authorities will know how to handle such a situation, best to, as he’s done, write to the ambassador at the U.S. embassy. They will act on the behalf of an applicant for American citizenship. Yes. He will write to them directly.

  • • •

  HE IS NOT CERTAIN what day he noticed the car, a taxi parked across the street, two doors down from his boardinghouse. It may have been Tuesday of last week, or just as easily Wednesday, or it may have been there all along and only now has he begun to pay attention. How he could’ve missed it baffles him and he is angry with himself, to have not been more aware, watchful. The curve of its hood, rising just above the median’s plants, glimmering in the sunlight. He begins to test the taxi. He wakes late at night and again early in the morning, peering out the window to find it still. But no one is ever in the car. He has never once seen it pull in or drive away. The driver most likely is somewhere else then, melding into the street activity, watching.

  The car’s presence is a disturbance. He is unable to concentrate, the image of it parked across the street burns into his mind. Sitting at work before his papers, rising to look out the window, to pace and return once more to his desk. Rise, peer, pace through the afternoon. It means nothing, nothing, he thinks, but when the car vanishes, it is as if a migraine has lifted.

  It returns two days later, parked across the street with one tire up on the sidewalk. The insouciance, he thinks. In his notebook he begins to keep an account of the car, searching for patterns within its presence and absence. He has, these last few weeks, turning into a month, examined the street with more scrutiny, the waiters in the café, their shifts, comings and goings, the deliverymen, the men selling tortillas, anyone he may see more than once, watching them pass by the taxi, seeing if anyone will open the car door. The rhythms of the street, the bus schedule with its timed stops dispensing the regular passengers, on the lookout for the unfamiliar, searching for a pattern, a repetition, some link. The street moves and breathes from the point of the taxi. He fills his notebook with a kind of code, a daybook record:

  Tuesday, 3:00 a.m., taxi.

  6:00 a.m., taxi.

  Waiter A. Café opens. 8:00 a.m.
<
br />   Bus arrives. 8:20 a.m.

  Waiter B. Work. 9:00 a.m.

  “The taxi is not marked,” the boy says.

  “No license?” Austin says, annoyed with him.

  “No.” The boy shakes his head, shrugs his shoulders.

  He had paid him to inspect the taxi. No identifying markers, no way to trace it. Clever, Austin thinks. The taxi is an everyday image, able to blend into the city, innocuous, but he is on to them. As a precaution, he continues hiding his designs—more papers stuffed into the slit in his mattress, pressed behind the lattice woodwork of his bureau, beneath the floorboard in the corner of his bedroom, wedged within the medicine cabinet door.

  • • •

  A TUESDAY. He is leaving the boardinghouse and steps through its narrow front door and out into early gray. No visible sun yet. It’s still hidden. Anarose, her back to him, stands on the edge of the sidewalk. Arms crossed. She spins around at the sound of the door.

  Austin freezes. She calls his name and takes a step closer.

  “I came to make sure you were okay,” she says. “I haven’t seen you in a while.”

  He looks to his left then right, trying now to remember which route he’d taken the day before. He’s been diligent about varying his walks. At the corner he can see a taxi, unmarked and unknown. He does an about-face and continues in the opposite direction.

  “Are you not going to speak to me?” Anarose says. She has stayed where she is, watching him. “Where are you going?” she asks, following him now. The early sun breaks through a cross street. It’s in his eyes now and it is hard for him to see. He ducks into a back alley, tension along his face, grimacing. He feels her two steps behind him, and he tries to conceal his own weary affliction, hiding it like an addict. The taxis line the avenue ahead. He tries to look without staring too intently. His glance grazes over the taxis, searching for the unmarked one. Just to be sure. The threat is soon multiplied, surrounding him, one after another in long rows that line the avenue, each probable. The people on the street, in the park, entering and leaving, the taco vendors, all an assumed link to any parked taxi.

  “What are you doing?” Anarose says. “Won’t you stop and talk to me,” she says, her steps sputter and falter until she is in sync with him.

  “If you want to speak to me, you must walk faster. Please.”

  “You must tell me what is going on.”

  “I don’t want to involve you.”

  “Involve me in what? What is it? Are you in some kind of trouble? Are you?”

  They are rushing by a few early risers, newspaper stalls, crossing to the next street. He can feel Anarose next to him, her steps struggling to keep up. He stops, looks to her. He can feel an onlooker now, hates to have eyes on him. He walks to her, takes her wrist, and brings her to the next side street, her feet dragging compared with his long, bounding stride.

  “Austin, tell me what is going on,” she says. They have stopped now, the street noise hushed in the cold shade of the buildings, the narrow alleyway and the sound of trickling water and his short, quick breathing drowning out the city.

  “Look here, you simply need to know this,” he says, his stare fixed on the ground, his voice low. “If you come to the shop and one day I am not there, you must promise me something.”

  “You are frightening me.”

  “Please, just promise me,” he says.

  “Tell me—why did you run off from me that night at the café?” she says, shifting and then taking a step closer to him.

  “Take my designs to the U.S. ambassador.”

  “What?”

  “You must take them to the ambassador!”

  “The ambassador?”

  “Please.” He brings his eyes to hers now, pleading. “You must tell them that they are designs by an applicant for U.S. citizenship. You must give them to the ambassador.”

  “But I don’t see what good—,” she says, her eyes wide, anxious.

  He breaks from her gaze and turns from her, brusque and quick, as her words trail off, he continuing to walk. He feels foolish now to have told her. How could she understand? He hardly knows if his suspicions are correct, if he can trust his own instincts, and now hearing her slow steps behind him he realizes she can never know what he has known and the city pulses in on him from the sides of the buildings, the taxi tangled within his mind, and her look of fear, her confusion, alarm. It makes him want to protect her and flee from her both, and within that back-and-forth he wishes to slip once again into the vast city, anonymous and alone.

  “What’s the use of you getting all involved in this?” He stops and shakes his head, arms at his sides.

  “I don’t understand any of what you are saying. You are frightening me. If you want me to take the designs to the ambassador I will. I don’t see what good it will do—”

  “You promise me?” He looks up to her now.

  “Yes, yes, I promise,” Anarose says.

  She is staring at him, nodding vacantly, wary. How could she ever know what he has known, he continues to think as he walks beside her, eyes to the ground, their steps now slower, his heart’s racing settled, even and steady as they amble on, the city enclosing him, trapped, he filled with fury and shame and a sudden longing for his first years in Mexico City when solitude was a solace even in the ache of loneliness.

  • • •

  THEY HAVE WALKED ALL the way to the Alameda. She stops, falling back to sit on a bench. She beckons him to do the same.

  He feels a reprieve, his breathing settled and calm. He looks around, feeling Anarose watching him. He can hear her telling him to sit calmly, sit still. “Do not upset yourself,” she keeps saying. He’d hardly known what it was to sit and watch the passersby, he always walking through the park.

  The early sunlight comes and goes, the clouds drifting and dispersing. He sits back, eyes closed, and he can feel the sun on his face—the warmth and pinch of it and then, as it hides behind a cloud, the darkness and cool of shade. It goes on like that, back and forth, the sun burnishing his eyelids, then a swath of chill, until he falls into a gentle, lilting rest. He can feel Anarose get up and hears her footsteps drift away and a few moments later come back. She blocks him from the sun and then he feels a brush along his cheek. He opens his eyes to see her before him, marigolds in her hand.

  “You offer me a bouquet of death,” he says.

  “What?”

  “The marigolds. They symbolize death.”

  “Yes, I know, but you say the strangest things.”

  “But it is the truth.”

  “They are lovely just the same.”

  “Where did you find them?”

  “A few dropped along the pathway. Left over from the markets, I think.” She twirls them in her hand and brushes them across his face again. He looks at her, bent forward, her hair around her face, the flowers drawn close to her neck. She is smiling and then it vanishes as their eyes meet. He looks away, opening his satchel, removing a notebook. She sits down now, rummaging in her bag. She pulls out an apple and a green paring knife, trying to peel it.

  “Here. Give that to me,” he says. He takes the knife and apple, holding both firmly in his hands, and, in one even motion, he peels the skin, coiling. She laughs and then cuts the apple into pieces. She offers him a slice before eating most of the apple on her own.

  He begins to draw lines, arcs.

  “Oh, you with all your measurings and these drawings. Look at all these marks, all these equations. They own you, you know that?” she whispers, slumping back into the bench. He watches her now, her profile and pouting lips. Could he relinquish his fight, let it all go, simply stay here, live in Mexico City, allow gravity to do its work? He turns from her, unable to let his thoughts settle on that idea. It feels like the deepest form of betrayal—not only of Julia, but of his very self.

  • • •
>
  THE LETTER ARRIVES ON a Thursday in early May. A thin rectangle of blue, postmarked from the United States. The handwriting, a fine, legible print, is not in a hand that he recognizes. It is clearly not the letter he is expecting.

  On this late afternoon he had walked through the Alameda, across the Zócalo and hurried into the post office, near closing hour.

  “Voronkov,” the clerk had said, “Austin Voronkov?”

  “Yes. That’s me.”

  “Letter,” he said, and then had dropped the thin envelope on the counter, passing it toward Austin with a nudge of two fingers. He did not pick it up at first. He stepped back for a moment, looked down at his shoes, behind him once, twice, and then stepped forward to make sure that it was indeed addressed to him and not some mistake. He placed his palm across the letter and slid it off the counter, slipping it into his pocket. He wouldn’t open it here. He’d wait. The letter resting in his coat like a heartbeat. He left the window at once as if he feared the postal clerk, realizing his mistake, might take it back from him. Ridiculous, he knew. Was it not addressed to Mr. Austin Alexandrovich Voronkov?

  He stands now in the middle of the lobby. Hands at his sides. People passing him—bumping him. Why do they have to come so close, sideswiping him in such a way? He then nearly propels himself toward a corner, hand over his coat pocket as if such a gesture will be able to mute what shouts within. He can wait no longer. He removes the letter from the front interior pocket of his blazer. He tears open the back flap, but not before reading the address—known by instinct and yet remote, like a language one used to know. He wavers back and forth between the two extremes of near and far as if he is examining it beneath a telescope, aiming to get it all into focus, though his eyes are now blurred by tears.

  Dear Father,

  I wanted to write myself so that you’d have it from me and not indirectly from mother, but I’m writing with very good news and can only hope that you actually do receive this letter. You know, we are never sure when we send things off to you and simply cross our fingers and hope for the best. But the good news—I’ll be coming to Mexico City for six months. Father, I’m so happy to write to you with this news and mother is overjoyed that I’ll be going. You will just have to wait a month and I’m sending this early to give you warning and to prepare yourself. In the meantime, sending much love and I will write again once I arrive, which will be on or about May 15.