Eleven Twenty-Three (51 page)

Tara spits in Mr. Scott’s face.

He wipes the bloody saliva off of his cheek
using the sleeve of his coat. He smiles sadly and glances up at the
night sky peeking through the canopy.

“Okay,” I cough. “Okay, fine. We were set up
from the beginning. We were pawns. I brought this home with me in
the briefcase. Whatever. I get that much. But—but just tell us
why
, okay? Just tell us why this is happening to us, and
I’ll be satisfied with that alone.”

“In good time, Layne,” he says. “In good
time. But first, we have other matters to attend to.”

“That’s right. We do.”

Mitsuko clears her throat and takes a meek
step forward.

“What I mean is that—before you do anything
else—what about—what about our deal?”

I narrow my eyes and spit out the corner of
my mouth. Vitriolic blood races through my veins and my nerves
twitch with the almost unconquerable urge to grab the gun from Mr.
Scott’s pocket and send a bullet right through both layers of her
double-speaking mouth.

“Deal?” Mr. Scott repeats, cracking a
menacing grin that he allows me to notice.

“Yeah, our, um, deal.”

“What deal was that, Ms. Miriyama? I’d like
Mr. Prescott and Ms. Tennille to hear this, if you don’t mind.”

“Please don’t,” she pleads. “Please don’t do
this. Just let me go like you promised, okay? Please? Just let me
go and you’ll never hear from me again. I swear to god.”

Tara looks at me, wholly baffled.

“Wait a minute,” she says, turning to Mr.
Scott. “You mean Mitsuko was a part of this from the
beginning
? I am going to tear your fucking
throat
out, you bitch—”

“Hold on there, cowgirl,” he interrupts,
holding a hand up to stop Tara from rampaging again. I notice that
there’s a scar on his wrist from having a briefcase handcuffed to
it for so long. I’ll have a scar to match soon enough. “You’ve got
the wrong Miriyama. Mitsuko only came to us last night. She showed
up at the barricade line and asked to speak to whoever was in
charge.”

“
Are
you in charge?” I ask,
momentarily swallowing my rage.

“Not at all, Layne,” he says. “Truth be told,
I abhor what’s happening here to your town. But I have a role in
this, so I play it. Just as you will. Understand?”

“Not in the slightest.”

“Well then why are you doing this?” Tara
says. “If you’re not behind it, then who is?”

“Men you will never meet who have made deals
you will never know the full details of.”

“Wait, I don’t—”

“
Anyway
, Ms. Miriyama came to the
northern barricade line last night in hopes of cutting a deal for
her life. When I found out that the sister of one of your closest
companions had approached us, I was most curious what she had to
offer. So I met with her. She informed us that three of her friends
were hatching an elaborate escape plan that would play out sometime
the following evening, though she wasn’t sure when exactly.”

“And let me guess,” Tara says, fuming. “She
offered to infiltrate our group and give away the details of our
plan. Right?”

“Not to mention handing over your position
once you made it past the barricade line,” Mr. Scott says. “She
offered these services in exchange for her freedom once you were
caught. This was fortuitous for my associates, and eliminated a
great deal of planning and coordination on their part.”

“So they took you up on your offer,” I say to
the ghost. “Congratulations, Mitsuko. We’re done for because of
you. Hope it was worth it.”

“Go to hell, Layne. You would have done the
same thing.”

“You know that’s not true. I was trying to
save
us, Mitsuko.”

“Did you forget the briefcase in your hand,
asshole?” she says. “You’re the one who brought this mess on us to
begin with. So don’t even attempt to scorn me now for enacting a
little self-preservation tactics, okay?”

I am about to speak up, but Mr. Scott holds
up his hand to stop me. A few feet away, one of the Japanese men
offers him an almost indiscernible nod.

“It doesn’t matter anyway,” he explains,
letting his mouth hang open as he checks the watch on his arm.
“It’s almost eleven twenty-three.”

No one says anything. The wind builds
again.

“Whoa, wait a minute,” Mitsuko stammers. She
checks her own watch. “It’s
not
eleven twenty-three. It’s
only—”

“My superiors go by a different clock,
unfortunately,” he says. “Goodbye, Ms. Miriyama. Your father
conveys his apologies.”

“
What?”
she stammers.

But it’s already too late.

I almost don’t notice what happens next, it
happens so swiftly. One of the Japanese men reaches into his pants
and retrieves a small dagger. He hands it to Mitsuko and steps
away. Mitsuko inspects it curiously. The soldiers back off.
Something suddenly seizes her, and she regards Tara and me with
bulging, fearful eyes. She clenches her stomach.

These images of Tara and I staring her down
with cold, unfeeling eyes, will be the last things Mitsuko’s lenses
ever record, before the file cabinet is sealed.

The other businessman holds out a tiny remote
and aims it directly toward her chest. He presses a button and
immediately slips the remote back into his pocket. He moves several
feet from her.

Mitsuko plants the knife directly into her
own heart, whispering something as she cuts deeper and deeper into
her chest. Tara quickly turns away. I light a cigarette and watch
Mitsuko stab herself five, eight, thirteen times with the knife.
She keeps whispering as she buries the steel deep into her ribcage.
I can hear the blade as it grinds against the bones inside.

“There are so many things, Layne…”

Mitsuko rips the knife from her chest and
holds it out in the glare of the floodlights. She gurgles blood and
stares at me. I stare back.

“…So many things we’ll never understand.”

Mitsuko whispers again, but this time, I
understand her.

“I’m so…sorry—”

Mitsuko stabs herself once more, and
collapses to the ground.

“Ships never just pass in the night,” I
murmur.

“Exactly,” he says into my ear. “You figured
that out for yourself, I see.”

“I did.”

“Then you probably saw this coming too, huh?”
he says, stepping aside.

I look up from Mitsuko’s yellowing corpse
just in time to see the Japanese man holding out the remote again.
Only this time, it’s aimed at Tara and me. He presses a different
button than before, but the effect is the same. I open my mouth to
voice protest, but all that comes out is an incomplete senten

[
TIME
UNDETERMINED
]

Jasmine Reynolds holds out her hand and tells
me to read her palm.

The walls melt around us, and the windows
have all been opened to let the stench out.
Picnic at Hanging
Rock
plays on mute from a small TV in the corner. Hajime, his
younger sister Mitsuko, Mark, Chloe, Tara—they all watch us through
identical dark sunglasses that hide their intentions. I take a deep
breath and clutch Jasmine’s hand in mine, staring at the lines in
her palm.

Jasmine picks away stray bits of pink hair
from her eyes and waits intently for me to tell her her fortune. I
hesitate, having difficulty speaking.

“Well?” Chloe asks over my shoulder,
adjusting her sunglasses.

“Yeah, Layne,” Jasmine echoes. “Well?”

“Um, it doesn’t look good, Jasmine,” I
mutter. “I hate to say this, but frankly I’m afraid for your
future.”

When I come to, I’m lying on cold metal in
the back of a large truck. Mr. Scott is sitting on the bench across
from me, sending text messages on his cell phone. When I look
around, I feel someone touching my hand, and realize Tara is passed
out next to me. The truck picks up speed.

“You two have a plane to catch,” Mr. Scott
says, pressing buttons on his phone.

I push the hair around on my head and try to
sit up. My body hurts in ways I didn’t think were possible. I moan
and use the wall for leverage. I press my back against the light
blue panel and fight off the pulsations at the back of my
skull.

“Where are we?” I ask.

“I told you: there’s a plane bound for San
Francisco that leaves from Orlando in about three hours. My
superiors want you on it. We’ve arranged to stop briefly at the
airport hotel for you two to get cleaned up.”

The truck hits a bump that jolts me from my
seat. I grab at Tara’s shoulder and keep her in place. She sleeps
soundly.

“You know, my girlfriend had a dream about
you our first night back in Lilly’s End,” I say, cringing under the
fluorescent lights. “She had a dream that you were a writer.”

“Oh yeah?” he says, not interested.

“Yeah. So…is that what you are? Some sort of
writer?”

“Actually, I used to moonlight as a freelance
writer for an expat magazine in Beijing,” he says.

“How is that—?”

“But not anymore,” he intones gravely.

Mark Conet walks alongside me through thick
jungle foliage just after the latest mid-morning drizzle. The
leaves are still spotted with droplets of water. Somewhere close, a
monkey jostles in the canopy. A black bird hops from branch to
branch high above us. My clothes stick to my skin. Mark wipes at
his brow and points straight ahead.

“It’s just up here, if I remember
correctly.”

But he doesn’t have to remember. The smell
coming from the other side of the foliage gave away its position
some time ago.

We press onward. Soon, Mark pushes aside a
large banana leaf, revealing a clearing. Beyond the trees is a
smoldering village that Mark calls Htee Koh. The mud is packed with
corpses. Village leaders have been hung from the trees, and a young
girl no older than sixteen is propped on a makeshift cross, dried
blood running down her legs.

I will never unsee this.

As we step out into the open, the full force
of the shit and rotting flesh hits me. I can hear the flies swarm
over the bodies and scatter as we draw close. I notice that most of
the cadavers are adults. When I ask Mark about this, he shakes his
head and suppresses a chuckle.

“The older boys are usually forcibly
recruited into Than Shwe’s 400,000 strong military. In a few weeks,
they’ll be in fatigues hunting down their own kind in villages just
like this one. They have no choice in the matter.”

“And the rest?” I ask.

Mark points at the smoldering fires and the
piles of ash in the center.

“The rest of the kids are usually thrown into
the fire while their helpless parents watch.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“You won’t find Him anywhere near here, my
friend. But anyway, this is boring. What I wanted to show you is
just up ahead.”

As Mark leads me past the bodies, the
blood-drenched rice pounder, the destroyed houses and smoking
children, he explains that soon enough, the Karen, Shan, and
Karenni people will be just as extinct as the Dodo or an
isolationist society. The military junta continues to view them as
a threat to their infrastructure, and so hunts tribes of them down
at every opportunity. They ransack the villages, forcibly recruit
the young men, and rape the women. Those unlucky enough to be left
alive are often forced to work in meth labs and future tourist
sites across the country. Once the soldiers are finished with the
slaughter, they burn everything down and leave the corpses to rot
in the jungle sun, serving as a warning to any others out there
still resisting Burmisation.

“But forget about that for a minute,” Mark
says. “Look at this, man.”

We stop at an oversized black pile very
recently set ablaze. I peer into the orange flames, at the shapes
inside. I gasp.

Inside the fire are more bodies. But it’s not
tan-skinned villagers this time. It’s Mr. Henry and Pastor Robbins.
My grandfather and grandmother. The twins. Chloe and the Tennilles.
It’s Tara and Mitsuko and—somehow—Mark himself being immolated.
It’s my mother and father and me. It’s all of us.

“Get it?” Mark says, laughing.

“America is in a recession, and has been for
some time,” Mr. Scott says. “And from what we can tell, it’s not
going away any time soon.”

“I thought you said you were going to offer
an explanation,” I sigh, leaning my head against the wall of the
truck.

“This
is
an explanation, Layne. Just
listen for a moment.”

I say nothing and close my eyes.

“Do you realize how much money your
government owes to other nations around the world, Layne? Do you
have any concept of this? No? Well, we’re talking ridiculous
numbers here, you understand? Trillions and trillions of dollars.
And that’s just on the books. Those numbers don’t even begin to
take into account the deals made under the table to fund secret
wars, the drug trafficking, the black ops, the coups, and the
population control tactics.”

“Um, okay.”

“At the current rate we’re going, with Iraq
and the 9/11 cover story to tend to, not to mention a snowball of
economic failure and a generation wasting away with ennui, this
country is never going to bounce back like it used to. It cannot
recover from this. The debts cannot be paid, and yet they must, if
America is to retain its status as a world power.”

“I’m starting to regret I even asked,” I say.
“Even as a history teacher fascinated by contemporary events, this
doesn’t interest me in the slightest.”

“What if our government, in an effort to
retain its status, paid its debt in blood instead of dollar bills,
Layne?”

I open my eyes and sit up straight. I stare
across at the suited man, who stares right back at me.

“Now you’re starting to get it,” he smiles,
nodding. “You’re starting to realize that your town,
my
town, and all the others to come are not in American hands anymore.
They’re under contract to the Japanese, British royals, the
Chinese, the Saudis, and maybe half a dozen others that we’ll never
even know about. You’re realizing that your government isn’t quite
powerful—or corrupt, to give them
some
credit—enough to
enact genocide such as this. So it contracts out our lives to the
highest international bidders instead. It simply facilitates the
conditions and the unwitting test subjects for the others who have
more cash in their proverbial pocket. Our government’s debts to the
world are being paid off with the voters’ deaths.”