The Cause Page 6

  Throughout the years, she had been the bearer of my bad will. Whenever I spoke with her over the phone in college, or afterward, when I was working in the Silicon Valley, she provided the circuit I could wire my frustrations through, her ear a forbearing conduit into which I could voice my current problems by taking them out on her. So when she spoke of the Pembroke’s teenage girl getting pregnant, I told her she had already told me about it for the third time now. When she told me my uncle had been laid off from his county groundskeeper job after thirty years, my voice would lift and I would say she sounded like a broken record.

  She played this role throughout the years. She acted out the part of the wall I could throw a ball of my anxieties into, and they wouldn’t rebound back. She would absorb the aggression, hide it away within herself, knowing that when it came down to it I would always be there for her. What I failed to realize was our conversations had become a struggle for her, that I intimidated her intellect, that the boy she had reared had outstretched her aptitude and now she struggled to find common ground, and in so doing, often repeated herself. But the realization she was my intellectual inferior made me haughty and dismissive, and her repetitive conversations created a negative feedback loop that accumulated inside, the frustration of her failing to understand me combined with the fiery problems of my habitual life in school and at work exasperating an already sullen and weighty attitude within me. Yet, when my father died, I no longer received the luxury of forgiveness, no matter how many times I voiced it. The weight of my neglect reversed onto me, and deservedly so. The front door of our home where I grew up for seventeen years, slammed back in my face, no matter the amount of apologies. It got so bad even my brother felt sorry for me. This sense of not being able to forgive myself took me into the gym where the catharsis of pain would prick my mind away from guilt. There I would learn to become a fighter, even if self-forgiveness hid itself away in a closet of my mind.

  In the darkness, I reached through the iron bars of my cage and groped around. The back of my hand bumped into a canteen, and I pulled it to the bars, but it wouldn’t fit through. My throat ached with thirst. I pushed myself painfully up to my knees, uncapped the lid of the canteen, pushed my mouth through the bars and drank. I drank as if I wanted to be drowned.

  They had dropped me in The Hole. Unceremoniously left me there. I fell back to sleep and thought about joining my parents in the other world. A length of time passed; I guessed bled into a couple of days. Time seemed measurable only by the number of times I closed my eyes. Occasionally, the squeak of an interior steel door opened and closed; feather-light footsteps the only sounds escaping the place that I myself did not manufacture. The person who came to feed me let in no light. Nothing escaped the steel door when it slid open. The shroud of darkness hung itself around me unbroken. The blind fed the blind. Whoever delivered the food wouldn’t speak even after I tried to arouse a response from him. The shuffling sounds of his footsteps the only voice he offered.

  The days I swallowed in bites. Killing time by eating a meal in tiny morsels. My shaking fingers would tear off a crust of bread and roll it into a ball. Then I would plop it in my mouth and savor it between the lower jaw and cheek, every succulent nutrient sucked out of a stale crust with each dimension of tongue. A game to pass the time. Locked in there with just my thoughts—my new best friends. Never one to be friendly with myself, here I had to try—easing into it as slowly as fucking. “Why don’t we take our time with breakfast today?” Then another shadow of myself would answer, “How do you know it’s breakfast—they just brought you a tray two hours ago.” I would drop a gumball of bread in my mouth and I would hear, “They’re fucking with you, Isse. Time isn’t a sensation they want you to feel.”—“I know.”

  Darkness creates its own characters. A puppeteer winding you up with your own strings. When we would get to know each other better, Seee would say that the darkness had its own sort of light. He said I just couldn’t see it yet, but that I would.

  Throughout the day, or night, or whatever time it was when I thought I was conscious, my mind constricted, became prone to fear and hallucination. Rebelling against these sinkholes, I learned the dimensions of the room by heart—a divot in the concrete floor near the bars where someone must have dug before giving up; the commode’s oval egg shape; how there was a screw loose in its base; the gritty floor and pebbles stacked into a small pile in the corner. On this discovery, I imagined the invented games someone must have played. I went through the pile, fingering every little rock, discovering their shapes. I asked myself why I had chosen this world, when life back in L.A. as a cop had been certainly easier than this one. As I fingered the largest of the pebbles, I remembered being a kid, skateboarding downhill and hitting a stone in the road when I was eleven. The board came to a violent stop and my momentum threw me forward onto the pavement. I suffered some bad scrapes and a broken arm. My mother ran me to the emergency room where we waited six hours with my bone sticking out, and then they had almost refused us because of no health insurance. I laid the stone back on top of the pile, felt the small bump in the middle of my forehead, and for the first time in a long time, a tear fell out of my eye.

  Later, I found three names scratched into the wall behind the commode, hidden at an angle from any flashlight that might have shined upon it. I felt the deep grooves in the wall. The last name was Jaybird, dated roughly two years before. I wondered what he must have been like, whether he had the same thoughts as me. The others dated back as far as five years before, all in the month of September. These were the others stepping into the same trap as I, suffering here, perhaps dying here. I listened for their ghosts when all I listened to was silence. I heard nothing, which is perhaps the hardest thing to listen to, as silence itself is an abstraction on a planet teeming with sound, where in outer space it reigns supreme. I filled my mind with thought for long hours. Long ago, I had read an article in Wired about screen forging and thought about what sort of algorithm it would take to do such a thing. I imagined how I would have approached it—hijacking events, manipulating bit streams. It kept my mind active, and it gave me something to think about, but I needed more than that to feed the loneliness of solitary, so I thought about how I’d kill Seee. A misguided bullet? A little push near a cliff edge? Every option dangerous, and I would have to run afterward. But where? I had been too eager, and hadn’t asked Pelletier for any details.

  I healed slowly, started a regimen. I practiced a limited number of yoga positions, the ones that were possible in a small space—inversions, back and forward bends, boat poses. Then, I put on the yolk of the oxen and told the farmer to whip me—little thunderbolts and wheel poses, compass positions. I wanted to cut up the earth and plant new seeds, grow new samskara. Where the old roots of wrongdoings dug into my thoughts, I plowed over them with sweat and strain. I wrung my body out like a wet, healing rag. The pain bit like bee stings, but I welcomed each prick, the punishment a light in the darkness, a torch to help erase the stupidity I felt for stepping out of line. My burning muscles and strained tendons stretched like rubber bands bending away from my own self-loathing.

  After some time, Seee visited me down in the dungeon. I heard a voice while doing pushups far off in the darkness. Perhaps he stood there silent for hours before he said anything, submerged like a periscope, peering above the surface, letting his gravity weigh down on me, attracting me to what later he would offer for those strong enough to survive. I hadn’t yet understood how to see, so therefore he had to speak before I really knew he was there. The first words I heard in days were a kindness. “How do you feel?” he asked.

  I paused with my nose touching the dust in the middle of pushup seventy-six. “Like a million bucks,” I said, continuing my set. I asked him how long I’d been down here.

  “Three days.”

  “Should I believe that?”

  “I don’t care what you believe.”

  “Is it night or day?”

  “You’ve already lo
st track?” He seemed disappointed.

  I finished my set and then sat in a lotus position. “Breakfast is bread and water so it’s throwing me off.”

  He laughed from somewhere out in the darkness. “Lunch and dinner are the same then?”

  “There’s varying degrees of staleness.”

  “I’m not sure Kumo likes you.”

  “It’s hurting my feelings.”

  He sighed. “You’re disappointed you lost.”

  “You don’t fight honorably.”

  The reverberating walls echoed his voice. “The Red Coats fought with honor. Then they were shot apart like pheasants by a bunch of inexperienced farmers with inferior arms. In a fight you should never expect the honorable, and you of all people should know it.”

  “So that was the lesson?”

  “As I’ve already said, there is no word fair in a fight. Lesson one in Primitive Law. Nature knows no losers. Losers are extinct, overrun by evolution. Losers are fools who fail to adapt.”

  I said nothing. I wanted to hear his movements in the thick of the darkness—if he’d scrape a foot on the ground, touch his face, that sort of thing. He didn’t. In darkness, there is a thirst for sound. Silence for me rang in a monotone chime, a flat-lined EKG buzzing sound without curve or wave or spastic discord. Too many shotgun rounds without the use of ear protection. In The Hole, you quench this thirst by creating your own noise—rubbing your scalp, hearing the flick of your middle fingernail between your thumbnail, cracking knuckles, the bristle of growing whiskers, the gulp of water swallowed down your throat, the tranquility of breath. In the dark, the body becomes more self-aware, and in this I was listening for a tell, but he sat there quietly, and I did not so much as hear him breathe. He could have been a phantom whom I was in dialogue with, another voice like my mother and father. Finally I said, “You’re a voice from afar, strong and reverberating, as if you are in a cathedral.”

  “True,” Seee said. “And I can tell you that down here it’s more heaven than the hell of what you’ll find above.”

  “God doesn’t exist.”

  “Perhaps,” he said. “But while you’re alive you’ll still hear my voice, and I will always speak the truth to you.”

  Somehow the conversation turned into a direction I wanted to veer away from, so I said, “Tell me about this name—Seee. It is a strange name.” Conroy’s question of the letters A-B-C in the hangar flashed back in my mind. The few days were a lifetime ago, and I had trouble remembering if it actually happened. “Is it a letter? As in the letter A or B? Is it the third letter in the alphabet? Perhaps it is an abbreviation, like ‘C’ for ‘cat’ or ‘C’ for cruel, or ‘C’ for cunt.”

  He answered without malice. It was apparent that plebeian methods of arousing an emotion from him were ill-suited strategies. Instead, he asked, “Why would I disguise the meaning?”

  “So it is not a letter? It is an action. Like to ‘see’? Spelled S-E-E?”

  “Yes, a bit ironic considering our current environment, but sometimes darkness is the necessary light.”

  “Profound,” I mocked. “Or perhaps your name is a command?”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” he said, absorbing my tone. “It is my bushido one word containing two edges. The first edge being that my former name has been dropped.”

  “And why did you drop your given name?”

  “Because I am no longer an object owned by the state. I repent their means of identifying me, cataloging my life and eventual death, which is all they really care about.”

  “Data is a virus,” I said. “It’s always out there somewhere crawling over everything.”

  “Data is never static. This is true. But it can always be changed, no matter how many places it lives.”

  “And the second edge?”

  “The new name is a new life, a death of the old belief. But it is more of a plea than a command, as you suggest.”

  “A plea for what?”

  “A plea for you to look.”

  “Look at what?”

  “To see the world in its true form.”

  “What if I see it clearly right now?”

  “You don’t.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Take your father, for example. He was pushed down the hill into a desperate situation like so many others. Why? Tell me who is killing the standard of living in America?”

  “I don’t know. Wall Street? The government?”

  “You don’t believe it? I can hear it in your voice.”

  “Some of it, sure.”

  “You’ve really no idea what you’ve stepped into here.”

  “And what about this place? This cave? This jail? This darkness? Am I not being pushed down the hill?”

  “Pushed into the earth, yes. Hopefully you’ll come out with better eyes.”

  “Is that what this is? You have brought us here to bleed and be tortured and we are supposed to learn something from this?”

  “The reason you’re in this place is because you’re a man who’s looking forward, not back. You’ve seen the pain of the past. Start again from the womb and come out to see the light. For Christ’s sake, Isse, move into the future. Open your eyes and truly see.”

  My senses sharpened. I heard him get up to leave. My face was hot with anger. “So that’s it? That’s all you’ve got to say to me?”

  “And Ye Shall Know The Truth And The Truth Shall Make You Free.”

  He was quoting John 8:32, the CIA motto, but in his tone there was bitter irony. I heard the faint shuffling of his footsteps fade away. I thought about the job I came here to do, and how I had failed so miserably with the first attempt.

  “Go shout it on the mountain!” I screamed. “But don’t pretend the mountain is yours!” Seconds passed without a response as my voice bounced off the walls. I yelled again to unhinge the ricocheting echoes that were dying with the feather-footed steps of my captor. “You’re a coward!” I laughed and kept laughing until I heaved over succumbing to a fit of coughing. I pushed my right arm through the bars and tried squeezing my body through them. I clawed. I reached. But I wasn’t a ghost, a mirage, or cloud, and the bars rejected me. In the end, I remembered wondering if he was ever really out there.

  Chapter 6

  “A prince should therefore have no other aim or thought, nor take up any other thing for his study but war and its organization and discipline.”

  -Niccolo Machiavelli

  Voices came to settle accounts after my first encounter with Seee. I questioned whether my imprisonment was a result of the men betting on me. Perhaps this darkened cell was a consequence of their betrayal? But how did I betray? By accepting a challenge? The voice telling me to do right by my country, the one magnetized by Pelletier, seemed harder to heed.

  A more logical voice told me it would have been petty for Seee to imprison me as an act of revenge. This was not a man with revenge on his mind, visiting you in the darkness, acting civil, hoping for change.

  The voices continued their arguments and left me without definitive answers, for Seee himself framed himself as an enigma. Pelletier had told me little about the man. I wrestled with my own intellect, and inside my head I wobbled, questioned everything, felt immersed in a ground-and-pound between duty and belief.

  I thought about how my battle with Seee so quickly transformed from victory to defeat. I believed I would float to triumph as easily as a hydrogen airship. He simply struck the match and watched the flaming Hindenburg plunge from the sky. Perhaps this was the whole lesson? He allowed the takedown, casting it as bait for a fish that couldn’t help but strike. Once the hook sunk in, he showed the men how easily it was to reel me in. The David, inside the grip of Goliath’s thunder, able to not only fight through incredible odds, but also wind up on top, the victor. A lesson on turning disbelief into belief, a microcosm of what was to come, but at the time, the clue buried itself under a hundred other misconceptions I had about him. The man plucked himself into our subconscious, a
n inception planted there as a seed to grow a belief, supplanting our fears and doubts, not only in ourselves, but what we could achieve together, united in brotherhood. In the months to come, we would truly find roots, and Seee would take us there, shining light on our branches, pruning them until we became the young saplings that could once and for all grow into giants.

  The next day Seee came again, and once more we spoke in the darkness. He spoke of why he had beaten me. He said that a mean dog had to understand the club. He talked about Buck and the red-shirted man in The Call of the Wild. He said I was still in a phase of bewilderment, maddened and enraged, and the club would probably have to come down again. He said I had the potential to be cunning and shrewd, but that I had to use my pent-up anger in more constructive ways. I listened, but I did not hear.

  Then, perhaps two or three days later, he came again, and feeling starved for company and hurt about his negligence, I said, “You’re coming so frequently the guys will start thinking we’re lovers.”

  He exhaled deeply. “Perhaps I was wrong about you. You should ask yourself if you really want this. It will only get harder.” The metallic sounds of a key shoved into a latch echoed in the darkness.

  “Just who are you, Isse Corvus? A trophy of a man who has conquered other men at sport? Is that enough for you?” His steamy breath was now close to my chin. He was stepping toward the cage, so close to the bars that I sniffed him in the darkness beyond the stenches of myself that reeked up the room—sweat, the smell of fire, the blood of something slaughtered. Perhaps there was a club in his hand. I anticipated a blow, but it didn’t come. “Warriors of the past would have cut off your head without thinking twice. Ask yourself what invisible force is holding you captive. You’re here aren’t you? So why don’t you know?”

  The cell door slid open. “There will be a group leaving in three hours who’ve called it quits. You can join the other cowards if you wish. If not, stay in this room.”