The Occupation of Emerald City: The Worker (4 page)

I hear a door open and they push me into a cool room and lift
my body up onto a slab of ice-cold sheet metal that gives under my weight. I
struggle harder now, unsure of what’s happening and yet sure I would rather see
the pain coming than be subjected to this pitch-black nightmare where my mind
simply adds a picture of a needle or knife to every sound—clink, pop,
click—my ears pick up. The invisible soldiers bind my arms and legs with
thick leather and pull off the hood. They pull a wet strap across my forehead,
then place a thick wet rag over my mouth and nose.

My tongue sops up the stale water in the rag. It tastes like
iron. I can’t move my head. All I can see is the concrete ceiling and a single
bare halogen bulb. My tongue can’t push the rag away from my mouth. Air seeps
in through the fabric. Tears burn my eyes.

Water begins to filter through, dripping slowly into my
nostrils. I hold my breath until my lungs scream for oxygen, forcing my mouth
open as wide as it can get. The cold water seeps through the cloth, down my
throat. Water fills my lungs, causing my throat to close and open. My limbs
shake against the leather, chafing my skin.

The water continues. I gag, convulse, feeling my heart beating
inside my ears. This is the end. This has to be death.

The water trickles to a stop and the strap on my forehead
loosens. Tears have blurred my vision but I can see the vague outline of a
soldier standing over me. He pulls away the cloth and applies strong pressure
to my stomach, just below the ribcage, forcing the water out of my lungs. My
first breath feels like Heaven on earth. The second one stings as it glides
down my enflamed esophagus.

“Eleven seconds,” says the interrogator. I can’t see him but
somehow I know he’s standing in one of the corners, away from the overhead
light, enveloped by shadows.

“Please,” I whisper. My heart won’t stop racing. Every
exhaled breath could be my last, and my entire body knows it. My legs shake
hard against the straps.

“Not very impressive,” says another voice.

“Please!” I scream at the soldier holding the wet cloth
beside me. “Please I’m not a terrorist I’m not a fucking killer I’m just a
fucking
worker
!”

A gloved hand pushes my head back down, reattaching the leather
strap across my forehead. The soldier places the rag into my mouth. I clench my
eyes shut and try to take one last breath. My chest begins convulsing the
moment the water splashes across my face. I inhale violently, feeling water
running up through my nostrils and down the back of my throat, entering my
lungs.

My arms convulse, pulling at the leather straps. I’m King
Kong, or I’m King Kong’s sacrifice. Water continues to enter my lungs. I’m
gonna die. Pins and needles stab every inch of my body and I imagine my lungs
as two red water balloons, filling quickly and stretching the rubber until the
color brightens. I’m going to die. My brain feels hot. My heart thumps against
my rib cage.

The cloth and head strap come off. A strong hand applies
pressure to my stomach and forces the water out.

“I’m a terrorist,” I say between gasping breaths. “I’m a
terrorist.”

“What are your objectives,” asks the interrogator from the
shadows.

Breathe in. “I’m a terrorist.” Breathe out. The entire room
spins in a counter-clockwise circle.

“What are your objectives.”

“I’m a terrorist.” Every breath feels like Heaven. Just
months ago, “Heaven” was a bottle of beer after a long night of work. It was my
couch, my television, the technology channel on and the cool autumn air sliding
in through the living room window.

Someone mumbles something in another language. I breathe in,
breathe out.

The soldier unlocks the straps and holds my body in a sitting
position while the other soldier cuffs my hands behind my back. They unlock the
ankle straps and pull me off the table. I see the interrogator out of the
corner of my eye before they put the hood back over my face. He’s standing next
to the middle-aged man with the Anodyne logo on his chest.

They put me back into the small concrete room I’d been in
before, only now the bright overhead light has been turned off. I sit down in
the far corner, huddling my legs close to my chest and breathing deeply,
quickly, without the benefit of automatic response. My body refuses to breathe
on its own—I have to regulate it consciously. I have to force myself to
take in fresh air.

I start to cry. I can’t stop. I feel like I’m dying, or maybe
I’m already dead. My hands won’t stop shaking. I want the light. I don’t want
the darkness. I don’t want to sleep. I just want … I don’t know what I want.

“Hey,” a quiet voice calls out. I immediately turn to the
door, but it’s still closed.

“Hey,” the voice says again.

I look up, toward the small vent at the ceiling.

“Are you okay?” the voice says. It’s a young man’s voice,
low-pitched.

“Yes,” I say softly.

“What?”

“Yes,” I say, swallowing hard and taking a deep breath. “I’m
… I’ve been better.”

“We’ve all been better.” He grunts out what sounds like a
laugh. “Are they feeding you bread?”

“What?”

“Are they feeding you bread? White bread?” he says louder.

“Yeah,” I say. “Well, they were.”

“I fucking hate white bread.”

I lean my head back against the concrete. “I like the
multi-grain stuff. The real expensive organic stuff. Fills me up.”

“You sound like a lower-class,” he says, then adds quickly,
“no offense intended. Just the way you talk.”

“I’m not upper-class.”

“You got family on the outside? Someone who might be looking
for you?”

“No,” I say. “They said … they said my family read about me
in the paper, but I think it was all made up.”

“That sounds about right for these fuckers. They said my
family was trying to get me out, but they wouldn’t let me out until I signed a
bunch of papers. And I sure as shit won’t sign any papers they hand
me—none of it is in our language. There’s gotta be a Red Cross guy
somewhere making his rounds and I’m just counting …”

“I said I was a terrorist,” I blurt out. I don’t want to be
left alone. I want to talk to this stranger, to confess as much as I can and
hope he’ll say something to make it all better.

He’s silent a moment. “Are you?”

“No,” I say. “They had me pinned down. On a metal table. They
poured water in my mouth and I couldn’t breathe. I told them what they wanted
to hear. I thought I was going to die.”

“How long did you last?”

“What?”

“How long did you last?”

“I don’t know,” I say. I bite my knuckle to stifle back
tears. The room smells like cold stone and I’m not
entirely
sure if someone’s pumping a chemical in through the vents
or not. They could be drugging me, somehow. The guy in the next cell could be
an interrogator. This could all be a trick. This could just be a trick. Stop
thinking. I close my eyes. Stop thinking.

“I lasted ten.”

My chest inhales a deep breath. “You confessed to them? They
did it to you, too?”

“Yes and yes,” he says. “And to answer your next question:
no, I’m not a terrorist. I’m a reporter. What about you?”

“I work for the city power plant. Some men … they broke into
my apartment while I was asleep.” I lean against the cold concrete wall and
close my eyes. “I was half-asleep so I didn’t fight back.”

Not quite true. I didn’t fight back because I was scared to
death. I had just spent the last thirty hours working on and off, trying to
keep the power plant running after the first bomb exploded downtown. When the
men in black masks broke into my apartment, I didn’t even hear them picking the
lock. I stepped out of my bathroom, toothbrush in my mouth, and saw black
shadows running through the living room.

They grabbed me and held me down. I begged for them to let me
go before they pulled the black hood over my head. It was thicker and heavier
than the hoods used in this place. It smelled like vomit and every time my
mouth made an “M” sound, my lips touched the wet fabric.

“The kidnappers brought you here,” says the man in the next
room. “And they told the Coalition you were a terrorist. Or an insurgent. And
then they collected their ten thousand dollar reward and went back out to find
another person. Five hours from capture to paycheck, the easiest ten thousand
dollars they’ll ever make. Whether that money turns out to be worth anything is
another story.”

“How do you know all this?” I ask.

“Because I followed a group on the second day of the invasion
when the call first went out around the Capital. Before the bombing was even
over, the Coalition was already putting up rewards for people who might cause
trouble. Didn’t take me long to find a group that was going around grabbing
whomever they could, and I tried to tail them to see where they were taking
people. They caught me, told the Coalition I was plotting points of attack for
an insurgency.”

I run a hand through my greasy hair. I use the blanket to rub
the cool sweat off the back of my neck, noticing a loose thread from where I
had been picking it. I pull on it very slowly, wrapping it around the palm of
my hand.

The man sighs. “I don’t even know how long I’ve been here. I
need some sort of sensory stimulation or I’m going to lose it.”

“So talk,” I say, pulling the thread apart. I’ve got about
six feet of thread. “Please talk.”

So he does. He talks about his wife, about their dog that
spent the first three months shitting up pieces of half-digested couch and then
eating the shit before they could stop it. He talks about his job at the
newspaper, how there was always pressure to show some national pride instead of
criticizing the government’s state-owned enterprises. He talks about the
prostitute he met during a story on homelessness who claimed to have slept with
three local judges over a period of two years.

And through it all, I very carefully lay out the thread on
the concrete floor, starting with a single line and then overlapping the
threads where necessary. It’s a circuit diagram of a MIDI board. It requires a
little imagination where the connections to the 6402 are made, but I can still
picture the circuit diagram. I built one of these a couple months before the
bombs exploded.

I feel calm. Listening to this man talk, letting my fingers
stay busy, putting my brain to work, this is everything I need to stay sane.

“Many countries invaded,” the man says. “But no one really
knows why. Oh, they’ve got their official reasons: our country is dangerous,
our country hoards water, our country upsets our neighbors. But there’s no
real
reason. Don’t you find that
strange?”

“No.” I wish I had a stopwatch. I could use the thread to put
together different circuits by memory, and time myself doing so. I could make a
game of it to pass time. Engineers did that in the break room at the plant all
the time. We thought it was fun, everyone else said it was a waste of a lunch
break.

“I’ve been thinking about it a lot,” the man says. “That’s
all I do in here. They keep asking me weird questions, stuff about the military
and gun laws. They asked about the Emerald Guard, too. I wonder if our boys
even put up a fight.”

I laugh. “I doubt it. Everyone I knew in high school who
joined the military did it so they could get a different government job when
their service was up.”

“I suppose.” The man is silent a moment. “I don’t think this
Coalition
really knows what they’re
doing here.”

“Governments never do,” I say. I pull the thread up, erasing
the carefully designed circuit. I begin again, this time looping the thread
around in one large two-foot square box. I try to blink away the darkness
again. “I spent years in the Holy Land and no one anywhere had a plan. It was
just Palestinians killing Israelis and Israelis killing Palestinians. Everyone
was a victim. Everyone was the agressor.”

“They say they’re here to take out the corruption. That’s
what I heard when I first got here. Fix the banks, the trade policies, all the
politics. But I don’t buy it. I have a hard time believing anyone would come in
here just to fix our political system.”

“Does it matter?” I ask. “Really? We’re stuck in here and we
might never get out.”

“A little knowledge can be a powerful thing,” he says. “I saw
a guy with an Anodyne logo on his shirt. I wrote a story about their contract
work with governments in the east. I can’t believe they would sell out their
own country.”

“Why not?” I ask, suddenly angry. I can still picture the
Anodyne man’s face when he told me he didn’t care. I feel stupid now for
thinking he would help. “They’re a for-profit company. How much money is
patriotism worth for a security contractor?”

“It’s just strange.”

“Why?” I ask. “Why is it so hard for you to believe someone
doesn’t buy into nationalism? You wanna know what I was thinking when I saw the
city start burning from the parking lot of the power plant? I thought to
myself, ‘huh,’ and then I went back to shoveling coal. I didn’t give a shit
what was happening.”

“Then I pity you,” the man says. “I really do. This is
our
country. They’re invading our
country and our own security contractors are in here. They’re torturing us, for
god’s sake.”

“It’s a piece of land,” I say. “They’re a company that pays
taxes. Our government was a customer and now Anodyne has a new customer.”

The man doesn’t answer. I hear his body shift on the mattress
and wonder if he’s stuck in a room with a blinding overhead light. Maybe he can
sleep through it somehow.

My legs feel hot and numb, the way they did when I first
started taking my medication a couple years ago. It got better over time,
better than I’d ever felt in my life, but the first month on the meds made me
even more anxious. I could only sleep a few hours a day, and my legs always
felt sore, making my body toss and turn in bed. I had to take deep breaths at
work when anything unexpected popped up. Sometimes if it got too bad I would
have trouble getting out of my car before my shift, frozen in place.