The Occupation of Emerald City: The Worker (7 page)

“I don’t know,” I say. I look around the room. It’s like a
teacher’s lounge. An expensive teacher’s lounge with dark red wallpaper and all
the burgers you can eat.

“It’s like a reward, isn’t it? Coke and movies if you can
survive the torture chamber.”

I smile. “Yeah, it
is
pretty ridiculous. Then again, so is everything else in here.”

“How did you get through it?” Joshua asks, grabbing one of
the hamburgers.

“What you mean?”

“Look around,” he says, waving one hand to the prisoners
sitting on the couch. “Look at them. They went through the same bullshit we
did, and now they don’t even talk anymore. Hey!” he calls out, snapping his
fingers. Neither of them turn away from the TV. “They’re fucking
comatose.”
 

The brunette, curled up in the fetal position at the end of
the couch, stares at the TV with bloodshot eyes. She only blinks when her eyes
become dry enough to warrant a forced reflex. She turns her head and stares at
me, and I’m sure beyond a shadow of a doubt that her brain simply isn’t
registering my presence.

“It was an explosion,” I say. “They put me in some kind of
room and shut out all of my senses. When I heard the sound, all of a sudden I
remembered who I was and what was happening. I was hanging and my body was numb
and I thought I was dead, but then I heard an explosion. It must have been
pretty far away.”

Joshua’s face lights up. “And the spell was broken!” He opens
the burger to pick out the pickle slice, tossing it on the tiled floor. “I was
one of the first people brought in, you know. In the beginning, before the
program became more intense, we were just in cells. I could speak to some of
the guards when their bosses weren’t around. Some of them were our own people
working for security contractors. Anodyne was here and I thought to myself,
these guys are always on TV working with
our
soldiers.”

My heart thumps against my rib cage. “How long have I been
here? I don’t even know.”

Joshua grabs another cheeseburger and peels away the wrapper.
He takes off the bun, picks off the pickle and tosses it on the floor again. “A
month, at least.”

“Oh God.” My face collapses in my hands. “It felt like a few
weeks. I didn’t even … every day felt the same.”

“I’m sorry,” Joshua says. “Just be happy you’re not like
them.” He gestures to the others. The movement of his hand waving through the
air so quickly causes the man to flinch. The woman with the ankle hair turns
and stares at me again with dull, green eyes. Like she’s trying to recognize me
from somewhere.

“I have to go back to work,” I say. I can feel my heart begin
to race. I feel like I’m back in high school again, always on edge, always
anxious and always worrying about the next event in my life that needs to be
plotted out: a test, then chores, then sleep, then breakfast, then studying
before homeroom, then finishing homework between class. That’s why I couldn’t
finish college. I always felt like I was missing
something
. My anxiety got out of control. My parents never
understood that.

Now, here, I’m missing something, and every second I spend in
here, the world I got so used to on the outside is continually
changing
. “If I explain to the union
what happened, they’ll help me get my job back.”

“Where did you work?”

Somewhere. Right? I was shoveling something. Coal. “The city
power plant.”

Joshua nods. “Good job. If it still exists, I guess.”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

Joshua leans over the table, squeezing a cheeseburger in his
hand so the bread compresses. “For all we know, the Coalition is running the
power plant now. Or maybe they’re just outsourcing it, just like they’re doing
with the torture in here.”

“International Law clearly stipulates that an occupying force
cannot take control of the occupied country’s government functions,” I say,
repeating words that my high school History teacher, Mr. Mantii, had drilled
into my head. The wrinkled old man had been fond of saying, “Repetition is the
mother of all learning,” and used it often enough to keep it stuck in my head
for fifteen years. He talked about the World Wars as if they were glorious. He
talked about banking as if it was the root of all evil.

“Yes, of course,” Joshua says. He takes a bite of the
wadded-up cheeseburger, stuffing half of it into his mouth. The brown outer
layer of the bread crumbles onto the table while he chews. “Because god knows
our country always follows the law. I overhead a lot of things in here from
guys speaking our language. They all want to go home, but they say our country
isn’t
secure
. That’s a strange word
to use, don’t you think? The country isn’t
secure
.
Secure from what?”

I can’t eat any more. Just a single quarter pound burger in
my stomach feels out of place, two tenths of a pound too much given my previous
diet. I haven’t looked at my body yet and I don’t want to. My shirt feels
greasy and loose and my pants hang loosely around my waist even while sitting.

“I was seeing a woman,” Joshua says. “Before they got me.
Lauren. She was pretty. Prettier than any woman who’s ever spent time with me.
Long brown hair, really nice brown eyes and thin shoulders.” He sighs, licking
the ketchup off his upper lip. “She would put her hair in pigtails sometimes
and she could just walk around in sweatpants and a t-shirt and still look
beautiful. She knew all the best little restaurants in the city.”

“I’ll help you find her,” I say. I’m not sure where that came
from. Since when am I the charitable type? I’m not. I just don’t want to be
alone again anytime soon. I’ve had enough of that.

Joshua looks up from his food. “I would appreciate that,” he
says. But then his shoulders sink. He tosses the half-eaten burger on the
table. “Not that I’m even sure if she’s still in the city. Hell, we only went
out a dozen times. I don’t imagine she’s even … you know what? I don’t even
want to say it.”

“I doubt she’s moved on, if that’s what you’re thinking,” I
say with a smile. “Occupations aren’t really the best time to jump back into
the dating scene.”

“No,” Joshua says, smiling. “That’s true. But what if it’s
really bad out there, and she’s changed? What if
I’ve
changed and I don’t know it?”

“There’s only one way to find out.”

Joshua holds out his can of Pepsi. “Then let me return the
favor. I can come down to your job with you. You’ll go in there and tell them
you were wrongfully arrested and I’ll tell them it’s true and everything will
be forgiven.”

“I appreciate the offer.”

I take a sip of my soda and relish the feeling of the bubbles
traveling down my esophagus, one of the little pleasures of life that I never
thought I could have truly missed so much. I love diet soda, the way my tongue
cringes at the bitterness of the aspartame, the artificial aftertaste that
takes so long to get used to.

“How did you get through it?” I ask.

Joshua sits back, grabbing a potato chip and holding it in
front of him.

“A potato chip?”

Joshua smiles, popping it into his mouth and crunching it
between his teeth. “I was in isolation, just like you. After awhile, I was
grinding my teeth so much that my jaw loosened one of the earmuffs. I could
hear something and at first I couldn’t figure out what it was. But then I heard
the wrinkling of plastic. And I heard the noise again.” He grabs another potato
chip, places it between his teeth, and crunches down again. “A guard. Somewhere
nearby. Maybe even inside the room, watching me. Eating chips.”

I rub my lips against my teeth, trying to imagine how much
time passed while I was in the cell. “I’m having a hard time remembering
anything.”

“I remember my cell,” Joshua says. “The walls were painted black
and there was a small light in the ceiling. No window. There were speakers in
the corners of the ceiling, four of them. They’d play this awful music all the
time, so loud that my ears would ring afterward for hours. Then, when the
ringing started to subside, the music would turn on again.”

The door opens and the two sitting on the couches cry out,
clutching themselves and curling up. Two young soldiers and one middle-aged man
dressed in a shiny gray suit step inside, each holding an M-16 pointed toward
the floor. Emblazoned on the man’s chest is the gold Anodyne logo. He looks
like the type who belongs in a corner office at a software company. He has dark
hair combed to the right and deep lines on his cheeks. His gray suit looks
tailor-made, given how snug it fits at the cuffs and shoulders. I can’t help
but notice he has a silver wedding band around his left ring finger.

“Time to go back to the cells,” the contractor says. He
stares at me with narrowed eyes. Maybe because I didn’t flinch like the others.
Maybe he
likes
to see people flinch.
“All of your papers should be ready to go.”

“I’m not finished with my soda,” I say. I have this sudden
urge to get a rise out of him.

“Too bad.”

“Shit, just let them take their food,” one of the soldiers
says with a thick accent. He looks older than his cohort, obviously annoyed by
the contractor. He
could
be feeling
his conscience getting the best of him, but I’m willing to bet he’s probably
just getting tired of dragging half-dead bodies from room to room. No one with
a conscience could get used to this.

“Just grab your shit and get going,” the contractor tells me.

I grab my soda and follow Joshua out. The contractor stays
behind both of us while the soldiers carefully help two of the others off the
couch. I risk one look over my shoulder. The soldiers are carrying the others’
weight on their shoulders, letting their guns hang from the shoulder straps,
and the detainees simply stare out as if their eyes were windows and their real
bodies are trapped inside, banging on the glass.

They take me and Joshua back into a cell, along with the two
others. The soldiers leave the door open and both of the comatose prisoners
stand next to the shit bucket and stare at the doorway. I can hear voices in
the hallway. Two pale men in gray pinstripe suits walk by speaking my language
without accents, talking about a prisoner who can’t stop wetting himself.
Joshua sits on the floor, next to a soggy thin mattress that looks stained with
shit.

A soldier steps into the doorway and motions to me. I follow
him back into the interrogation room. The general who interrogated me before
sits behind the desk, smoking a menthol cigarette and ashing into the tray
sitting next to an inch-high stack of papers. I sit down in the chair without
the assistance of the shadowing soldier who—for the first time—is
keeping five feet of distance.

Guess I’m not a threat anymore.

“Sign. Sign now and leave,” he says. His forehead is lined
with sweat and when he hands over the paper, his thumb leaves a wet smudge near
the top.

I look over the pages of notes. None of the text is in my
language. “What does it all say?”

“No terrorist,” the general says flatly. “That is all.”

I sign everything, hardly caring at this point. My lungs are
craving fresh air and I can almost taste that first fountain soda I’m going to
buy at the nearest market. I actually
want
to shovel coal—hell, I’ll give up the supervisor job and shovel coal
full-time just so long as I can work my atrophied muscles and get my heart rate
up and actually do something again.

The officer nods to the soldier behind me, and I feel a
gentle push on my shoulder. I stand up and follow the soldier out of the room,
into the narrow hallway that seems so uninteresting … the magical spell it had
over me in the darkness under the hood has dissipated. It’s just a hallway with
metal doors, and nothing more. It doesn’t feel dangerous anymore.

“Good luck,” the soldier says once I’m at the end of the
hall. He opens the door leading outside to a small parking lot. There’s a yellow
school bus with black windows waiting in the parking lot and beyond that, I can
see a cropping of houses off in the distance and a highway road cutting between
them. The weather is cool. It could have been days, but somehow I know better.
I know Joshua is right: it’s been more than a month.

As I walk toward the bus and my slippers hit the hard
concrete, I can feel the loose fat on my body jiggling. Not as much muscle
anymore. My entire body feels like a pair of loose clothes and yet the sun
bearing down on me, the cool air kissing the exposed skin of my neck all serve
as a reminder that things have already been at their worst. It’s got to get
better now. I’ll go back to work.

But it’s hard to picture the power plant. In my mind, it
looks like a big box with windows and a black smokestack and from the
smokestack, strings of smoke swirl out like from a kid’s drawing. That’s it.
That’s all I can draw in my mind. The details are gone.

I sit in the back of the mostly empty bus, watching Joshua
step on board. He tears his shoulder away from a soldier’s grip. The others all
sit near the front, either asleep or staring ahead with blank expressions, all
disheveled but no one even closely resembling what I would call a “terrorist”
even with their faces caked with dirt, their hair greasy and unkempt, their
eyes sunken just like the eyes of the homeless men who walk around my
neighborhood with squeaky shopping carts. They’re just civilians, wearing
pajama bottoms and t-shirts just like mine. It doesn’t look like they were
allowed to shower. Or maybe they couldn’t shower on their own like I could.

One young teenager can’t stop looking around, darting his
head in every direction at every sound, eyes wide, his puffy black hair
bouncing around. He keeps saying in a low voice that this is all a trap, and
the man next to him puts a hand on his shoulder and rubs gently to calm him
down. Another young man, wearing a white eye patch over his left eye, is
leaning against the black window and staring with his good eye—a beautiful
sapphire blue—at the middle-aged blonde sitting in the opposite seat.
She, in turn, stares at the green seat in front of her.