The Cause (6 page)

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.

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, an 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.”

I didn’t move.

“I should also disclose that two men have died.”

“How?” I asked.

“Training.”

“But how?”

“How is not important. I warned everyone people would die here. More will follow.”

I heard him reach down and leave something. Then the sounds of his steps drifted away. I fumbled around the dirty concrete floor until my fingers bumped into the pages of a book. On top of it, I felt a glossy photograph—my Earth photo—and a large box of matches. I took out a match and lit it, shining its crown of light above the photo. The Earth was still, unwavering, static. Calm and tranquil, the color of an eye deep in space, wrapped in the blink of a tiny instant of time. A tear came to my eye. I moved the match toward the ceiling until my arm was straight. Then I stood, moving the light farther from the Earth on the floor until my hand hit the ceiling, the Earth accepting the darkness, yet I could still see the faint glimmer of atmosphere, the cerulean blue marble as still as a whisper, refusing to rotate. Then the match went out, and I bent down and picked up the photo and moved it close to my heart.

After a minute, I moved the flame of another match over the book. The book was
The Call of the Wild
, and I spent the next hours devouring it until the last match was gone. Then I used the first pages to provide light for the next until the book was finished.

The next set of hours turned into loneliness. Some of them I
slept, but when I awoke, the fictional dog Buck barked in my head—out on the tundra, the lead pack dog plowing through mounds of fresh snow. Hazy and still partially in a dream, I plunged through an ocean of snow, through its thickness and permeability. Dappled spots of white frost blew across my face, the snow bite of a fierce Artic wind before me weaned and the darkness returned pure and heartless through the sub-arctic winds of the North Pole. I came out of it to find the animal in me, the Buck I struggled to understand.

My mind drifted from one thing to the next, floating from the dog Buck and his lesson with the club, to the fight with Seee and my own lesson, to two weeks ago at the hangar, saying goodbye to the America that was burning in the flames of riots and chaos.

Then I heard Seee’s voice. “So you’ve decided to stay?”

“Yes.”

“You haven’t been outside yet. Perhaps you’ll want to reconsider.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Wait and see. I’ll be honorable and give you one last chance once you reemerge.”

“Honor is for losers. Evolution—extinction—remember?”

He laughed, and the sound of it bounced through the corridor. “You’re right. Should I bury you now then?”

I said nothing, and the walls grew silent once more. Each of us held his breath. It felt like the moment before our first clash, everything standing still, an instant stolen from time.

“Tell me how you became known as The Conductor,” I said, breaking the silence awkwardly.

“Do the men really gossip like this? Like schoolgirls?”

“There were rumors, but you never know what the truth is.”

“In this case, I do,” he said. “Tell me what you heard, and I’ll tell you how accurate it is.”

“I heard that for ten years you stalked a target. I don’t know where exactly it was, but it wasn’t a simple mark.”

He finished opening my cell door which squealed on the rollers. I heard him step into the room, the shuffling sweep of bare feet. He sat down, his back scraping against the cinder-block wall with the lidless toilet. The darkness was immovable, yet I felt I could see the expression on his face, the muscles in his cheeks relaxing. A light I imagined shining over his face showed a curling smile.

“If I was authorized to snipe the target, it would have been a simple job. But they wanted more discretion. They wanted deniability. As well, the CIA used the assignment as a punishment. They wanted to sweep me away after the ordeal with Hassani, but that is another story for another time.”

“They told me you dressed yourself up as a bum, rags for clothes, dirt under the fingernails.”

“No. The story is veering off course already.”

“So how was it then?”

“I wore a threadbare brown second-hand tweed double-breasted suit. In fact, I had others—flea-market clothes, but not rags.” From there, he described his wardrobe, how nothing in it was ostentatious, yet not completely cheap. He bought his items from a Saturday market held out in the open space in the Plainpalais area of Geneva and paid cash. He kept an unshaven look (stubbly but not bearded) and used special eye drops to make it seem as if he had cataracts. He dyed his hair gray and smoked cigarillos down to the nub. He made himself look like a man in his fifties and carried himself with a slight limp. Then he hit the streets as The Conductor, waving his hands in the air frantically, directing invisible symphonies and string quartets.

“For the first two months, I didn’t go near the target’s location. I stuck to the city center streets, getting the people used to me. I would always keep my distance, never invoking any fear with my bizarre behavior. At first they stared and pointed. They said to themselves,
Who is that crazy man?
But they knew what I was doing. They saw my arms swinging, hands gyrating, gesticulating
like the great maestros motioning for crescendo. Music was playing in my head and I was leading the violins, violas, cellos, and horns. They hypothesized about what affliction I had. If they guessed obsessive-compulsive disorder, then they guessed it right. This is who I wanted them to believe I was—a habitual man disturbed by the thought he was a conductor, harmless, minding his own business, yet showy. The same times every day, they would see me pass. They looked at me sorrowfully at first. Others would even say hello, but I pretended not to hear. They were other sounds drowned out by the thunder of the orchestra. I dove into my own world, and they seemed to understand, and above all, not question it. A few months passed. They would see me tick by and come to think of me as timely as the city clock mounted high on a bell tower. It grew such that they expected me to walk by their cafes and Laundromats and small stores and arcade shops. They would say, ‘There goes The Conductor. I wonder what he’s playing in his head today.’”

It wasn’t long, he told me, before they would raise questions if he didn’t keep his routine.
Where is The Conductor today? He’s missed his rounds
.

They would surmise illness. The next day, he would be there once again and the faint tickling worry would disappear. He compared himself to a stray cat coming around to a house to be fed. If the animal failed to show up, there would be anxiety in the household imagining the worst.

“Why such an elaborate ruse?” I asked.

He said the target’s mansion was impenetrable. There were high, electric barb-wired fences surrounding the estate. The perimeter was covered by infrared detectors and video cameras and guarded by a hundred men. Parts of the garden were mined. The target’s bedroom was inside the interior of the mansion, away from any window or balcony. Inside, twenty other guards took shifts twenty-four hours a day. They monitored the chefs. Food was dipsticked. Acid levels tested by doctors they had
employed for years, and then fed to tasters. Packages, luggage, and any other object coming into the premises were X-rayed and then put under a Geiger counter.

Seee said, “It was impossible to get to him from the inside. His office was equally difficult. If it had to be done quietly, there was only one way to do it—in transition—from one place to another.”

“So how did you get close?” I had forgotten about the barrier of darkness between us. His story had entwined me. Finally, there seemed to be a string of understanding between us.

“I’ll explain that in a minute,” Seee said. “I walked the streets around his office each mundane day only passing in the morning at precisely the same time. I threw my hands in the air, orchestrating ad-nauseam the intro to Mahler’s
First Symphony
. I used delicate feather strokes with supple fingers, raising eyebrows gently and puckering my lips as I walked by. Or I would bounce my hands like field rabbits, humming Tchaikovsky’s
Nutcracker
if I wanted to appear friendly and ambient. Or Penderecki’s
Passacaglia Symphony No. 3
when morning nerves would unravel, when I would grit my teeth and resist shoving a Welrod pistol into my trousers before I left. I weaved myself into The Conductor bit by bit, stitching into every bodyguard’s fabric of conscious that I wasn’t a threat. I never went too much over the top. I never carried a conductor’s baton, as that in itself could be conceived as premeditated. I studied my character, read books on conducting and music theory, taught myself how to play piano. I forged the right papers and went to institutions, watched, and even counseled, OCD patients under the guise of being a doctor.

“Eventually, the target’s guards got used to me walking by the office building on Rue du Rhone. They had already checked me out, I’m sure. But my information was nothing but my cover. The bodyguards would see me around town performing Stravinsky, Haydn, Wagner while off work doing their shopping or sitting
on a terrace having dinner. I was everywhere, yet nowhere. Invisible. Part of the landscape of Geneva as much as the UN or the Parc des Bastions, or the Jet d’Eau. After a year, chance had it that my timing got better. One day, my rotation around Rue du Rhone corresponded to an intersection with the target. His car pulled up to his office building, and he stepped out of the car and was immediately swarmed by five of his bodyguards. That day, I gave a heavy berth and passed a meter away. One of the guards raised his hand to me and asked me to halt, which I ignored, as if I were an imbecile in my own unbroken Schubert world. I grumbled and mumbled something incoherent, humming simultaneously in an off-cadent slur. But this was an important day, because I had managed to break through their minds. I was not pushed or hit. I was not harassed. Had I not given berth, they would have surely thrown me out of the way, but this day I was within striking distance.

“As time went on, I eroded their will to watch me closely. I camouflaged myself into the surroundings even though I was in plain sight. I was becoming part of the background. I could have been a parking meter or a streetlight. They saw me no differently.”