Woke Up Lonely (42 page)

“Eleven months,” Jerry said. “You know the slits wouldn’t even let you sing in your room? I was never much for singing before, but just for being denied”—and he blew out another show tune that sent the cats tumbling from his chest.

“Terrible,” Sissy said. “Man’s just gone afoul of God.”

“Our captain near got beat to death. Others too. And whenever there was free time, which was pretty much never, but when there was: no football, ’cause the huddle meant plotting. Like we was plotting to escape. Stupid slits. I still have nightmares.”

“And they still got the
Pueblo,
” said Buzz.

“Correct,” said Jerry. “Like some trophy. Not that we tried too hard to get it back. Day we was released, a hospital in Seoul gave us each an ashtray souvenir. You believe it? Eleven months of turnip soup—and eyeball was a treat, mind you—and they give us ashtrays. I mean, this was in ’sixty-eight, so we was no one’s favorite army. But still. I hate this country, I really do.”

Olgo could not fathom where this was going, but he was decided to go along with it.
Left and came back
were the only words that mattered now. He glanced up at Sissy, waiting for more.

Jerry sank into his chair. “I know it’s an awful thing to say.”

Sissy patted his hand. “We all of us been disappointed.”

Jerry spat into a napkin. “Second I heard Thurlow was in with those same who took the
Pueblo
—man. What was I thinking? Sissy’d done lost her sisters and there I was still going to meetings and saying my heart’s broke ’cause of my wife and kin. Well, I had my eyes opened. And got my son out. But it didn’t feel like enough, so I been biding my time, jus’ hopin’ I’d get the chance to do more. And along comes you four. And along comes you.” He laughed and just as suddenly coughed up something with such force, it might have come from his colon. His face was twice its color, and his eyes were clear in tears. “It’s stupid, I know, but even at my age, I’m still looking for a hero. So maybe that hero is me.”

Olgo heard him—a hero, yes—though he kept his eyes on Sissy.

“Anyway,” Jerry said, recovering himself. “Here we are. You gotta figure everyone finds his own kind eventually. We’ll eat and then get a move on. We got a long night ahead of us. I best put my jeans on.”

Sissy lifted her paring knife and said, “It’s not like I’m okay with this, Dad goin’ back in and all. But he’s strong. He knows his up from down.”

Jerry smiled and looked at Olgo. “Plan is for you to show up like you been invited, like you’re interested. You’ll have ’em all over you, so while that’s doin’, I’ll swing round back. Best way is to isolate and ambush. Guy who used to do this in the seventies was called Black Lightning. I kinda like that. Even m’ jeans are black.”

Olgo nodded. He still had no idea what they were talking about.

“Try to look a little more excited,” Jerry said. “Who came for me in North Korea? Who came for you? You seen the news? Hostage Rescue blew up the place whether you was there or not. So fine. No one came for us. But you know what? We’re sure as hell gonna come for your wife.”

And like that, the energy that was clotted in Olgo’s body dispersed while something like old age moved in—fatigue, apathy, or maybe just a set of revised priorities. Suddenly, this all seemed very hard.

An hour later: Olgo and Jerry were in the station wagon en route to an abandoned factory, a box on stilts at the mouth of a floodplain that burbled with sewage now and then, where Olgo’s wife would sooner spend her time than with him.

“And the RYLS?” Olgo said.

“A front group. Dating Service snatches you in, you think it’s gonna be something nice, and next thing you’re saying your life before was shit, you were so lonely you wanted to die, but this, this talking and sharing and crying, is a whole lot better.”

“How do they get you to do it?”

“Dunno, really, but the exit counselor said it was thought control and just wanting to fit in, and maybe just ’cause the most of us is kinda sad and lonely anyway, they was workin’ that for gain.”

Olgo shook his head. “My wife isn’t lonely. She hasn’t been lonely since the day we met.”

Jerry laughed. Said, “Ooowee,” and mopped the windshield with his palm.

“What?”

“Nuthin’.”

“What?”

“Well, I weren’t sitting on yer bedpost, but with your attitude like that, I’m not surprised she left.”

“My
attitude?
I thought you were ex-Helix.”

“I am. But I ain’t stupid about life, neither.”

Olgo pressed his eyes closed with his fingertips.

Jerry nudged him in the arm. “Don’t let the bear getcha. It’s gonna be all right.”

They pulled into the grounds, and when Olgo stepped from the car, the condemnation of landscape into which he’d been cast was staggering. The trees were bald and black and immobile despite the wind galloping down the riverbank. The snow was two feet deep. In the distance: a trestle for the freight that rolled through every day and the skeletal remains of a holding tank that looked, for its imposition on the sky, like a gallows befitting the evil of mankind. He breathed in deep, coughed it out. The snow was colored urine and coal, smelled it, too, and everywhere you looked: garbage, like someone had leaked the bag from one end of the grounds to the other.

The only building alive was the boiler room. It was up on cement risers, maybe fifteen feet above the ground where Olgo and Jerry hid. Light blazed through the windows, which were two banners of glass come down the facade. It was behemoth, imposing. Olgo did not want to go in there at all.

Jerry said, “You go up the front; I’ll circle round back. I seen your wife on TV. I’ll try to separate her from the others.”

“Why can’t I talk to her and you distract?”

“’Cause you’re a threat now. A floe.”

“A what?”

“An outsider. Now come on.”

“So you’re just going to talk to her? How are you going to talk her out of there in two minutes if it’s really as bad as you say?”

“Can’t. I’ll need about three days.”

“We don’t have three days.”

But then even in the dark, Olgo could see the denture whites of this man’s smile and something of the Black Lightning sobriquet flash in it. “Leave that to me. You just keep the others busy, act like you ready to join.”

“How?”

“Just tell ’em your story. You don’t even have to lie—it’s Prereq enough. That’s what they in there call a past you want to leave behind.
Good Prereq.
”

Jerry tiptoed off, under the building, into the dark. Olgo looked at the twenty steps he’d have to mount to get to the entrance and sat on the bottom one. He might not be able to endure the experience of Jerry talking to Kay, reasoning, and exposing the manipulation to which she’d been subject. If
reason
could turn his wife, love had no role to play in her decision. And if love had no role to play, maybe she had never loved him at all.

Olgo took the stairs like an old man. His knees cracked. The space between his toes was crammed with ice. But for feeling this dreary, would being eighteen again make any difference? He reached the front door, and because he was exhausted and cold and defeated even by the prospect of having to steal his wife back, he forgot to knock, just walked in.

“Hello?” Because while there were fluorescent work lights clamped to the lintels overhead, there was no one around to make use of them. “Hello?”

He looked around. Brick walls, peeling paint. The floors inches thick in debris, which crackled and skittered underfoot. A toilet moored in junk; machinery whose purpose he’d never know, rusty, limed, a tetanus party. It was like the industrial revolution had come to this place to blossom and die. He slipped, fell, and the plaster dust came over the sides of his legs like waves into a boat.

Laughter from the other end of the floor. He picked his way across. A wall, half-crumbled, hid his approach. He scanned for a breach, eye to the hole. And, wow, what a difference a wall makes. On his side was the collapse of industriousness in America; on the other was an IKEA showroom. Navy-blue couches with white trim, Chinese lanterns chandeliered from the pipes overhead, twenty people arranged around a table, cast in haloes of light, sipping tea. The floor, overspread with quilts; and in a corner, a wood-burning stove going full blast. Everyone shoeless, in bright wool socks that bunched at the toe, symbol of Christmas comfort the world round. Olgo could smell the tea, an herbal blend, sleepy and sweet, and felt his tongue unstick from his palate. He scoped the room for his wife and, not finding her, began to pay attention to the scene, which was the group listening to a speech by Thurlow Dan. Listening rapt, listening whole. Faces angled at the CD player as though it were the man himself.

Olgo tuned in. “It’s like this,” Dan said—assured but tender—“every person on earth is always, every second of his life, and in one way or another despite his good deeds, shackled to himself and suffering for it. We default to egotism and isolation. We default to the loneliest place a heart can go. But you know what else? Every one of us, consciously or not, also lives the lives of his generation and his peers—friends and family, the people we love—and so the task here is simple but huge: to rise above ourselves and see each other.”

The track ended there. No one said a word, but all eyes shifted at what seemed to Olgo to be Olgo. Stares funneled and condensed in his peephole. He had not known he would show himself until this moment, when he was to be their star. His feet were asleep. Threads of wool cleaved to his neck as sweat watered his armpits and inner thighs, and it seemed from one second to the next that the blood was either draining from his limbs or storming through them. He was about to stand when a voice belonging to a man pressed against the other side of the wall began to address the group.

Oh, how stupid, these people weren’t seeing him at all. His heart lunged at the speaker through the brick. It was Jonathan, of course, which meant that when Olgo rounded the wall, he seemed to be looking at not just Jonathan, but at Jonathan with Olgo’s heart flopping around his feet like the day’s catch.

No one was startled to see him. Jonathan put out his hand and said, “Ah, great, you’re a little early, we weren’t expecting the pledges for another hour, but welcome! We’re so glad you came.”

Olgo, who had sunk his fists into his coat pockets, removed one for a quick shake hello. He didn’t want to blow his cover, though it was hard. Jonathan was depressing. Not especially young or handsome—he wore jeans and a hooded sweatshirt; his hair was thin and straight and piebald; no feature stood out for its beauty or size—which meant he had less tenable and thus more winning qualities to offer Kay Panjabi.

Jonathan said, “Come meet the others,” and introduced them one by one. A mixed group of men and women, midthirties, forties, fifties, with nothing shared in their lives but the joy of their comportment. One gave him her seat on the couch. Her name was Teru. Used to be an accountant. Came into the Helix three years ago. Was thirty-five but looked eighteen. “Here,” she said, and she passed him a mug of tea. “You look exhausted. Let me take your coat—my God, it’s freezing!” He did as told—the coat really was cold and wet—and when she gestured at his boots and then at a corner where everyone else’s were gathered, he let her have them, too.

“Fresh socks,” she said, and she held up a pair—thick, woolly, ecru with blue heel and toe. He said thanks. The socks had been beached on the stove; they were warm to the touch. Teru vanished with his old pair like a nurse with the offending bullet.

A woman bearing a tray of peanut butter cups and caramel popcorn drizzled in chocolate and coconut shavings walked by. Olgo noticed a dish of oatmeal cookies on the table. This new woman, whose name was Myla, sat next to him. Tucked one foot under her thigh, put the dish between them, and said, “Whatever it is, don’t worry. You’re in the right place.”

Her eyes were gray and swimmy, as if filmed in a clear lubricant that gave them the appearance of water. “Cookie?” she said, and she broke one in half.

He shook his head. He was getting tired. He flexed his toes, sipped his tea. Noted an aroma float into the room and waft around his face like a turban.

“Pie,” she said. “Mixed berry. Fresh cream, too. I made the crust myself”—and here she smiled. “Pie makes pretty much everyone feel better. And if you’re here, chances are it’s ’cause you want to feel better.”

Olgo looked past her. He said, “Is this it? Is this all of you?” He’d lost all hope that his wife was elsewhere, but then where was she if not here?

“There’s more in the back. One’s making tandoori chicken. Her specialty, apparently. Oh, no,” she said, seeing his face, “how rude of me. I mean, there’s vegetarian options, too.”

“It’s not that,” Olgo said, and he upturned his nose, trying to detect something of his wife’s favorite dish in the smell of mixed-berry pie. But it was no use—the pie overwhelmed. There’s no fighting pie; there never was.

“You want to talk about it?” she said. “I’m all ears. When I came in, my husband had just died, and even though my friends and kids came by and took me out, it just wasn’t any good. But I get what I need here. You will, too.”

The irony was not lost on Olgo, who’d been trying to talk to pretty much anyone for three weeks, and here was this woman offering him the gold standard. Well, what harm in talking? Retain your pretense, betray no facts, but still: get it off your chest. But when he opened his mouth, he wasn’t so sure or in control.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s hard.”

“That’s okay,” and she squeezed his arm. “There’s no other world besides this one. No TV or radio, no clue what horrible things are happening out there. So just talk if you want. Otherwise we can sit and drink our tea, and that’s not so bad, either.”

“It’s just—” But then he felt the hurt rush his mouth as though to secure a home there and never move out.

“For me,” she said, “I didn’t even know what I felt or why, just that I felt awful. And scared. Like maybe things were just never going to be right again. But look at me now.” And Olgo looked; she looked calm and together and happy to be alive, which was the exact opposite of how he looked, he knew it.