1 #5
“I think he’s going to die soon,” Samir said.
“I know,” she said. “I’m so sorry.” Of course she knew. Who else was reporting to her? The doctor? The nurse? The gardener? All of them? What no one tells you about life in a surveillance state is that it’s exhausting.
“Samir, are you still there?”
“Something’s wrong with Marlowe,” Samir said. “She’s jumpy. She seems confused.”
“It’s PTSD,” Detective Waker said. “She told you that herself, didn’t she? A while ago?”
“I don’t think I fully grasped what she was saying.” Samir felt that he’d failed Marlowe in some complicated way. He’d been so distracted.
“Well, she’s lucky to have you.”
“I don’t know, Detective, is she?” He felt the old fury rising, all the unsayable things. I never wanted to be a citizen informant. “What kind of brother am I if I’m reporting on her? Doesn’t seem that friendly, to be honest.”
Detective Waker was silent.
“Nothing further to report,” Samir said, and hung up.
My constant, he thought, my enemy. I want to be a better brother.
He should call his husband. He sat on the grass, and selected a holographic setting for the call, so that when Mo picked up, it was as if he were sitting facing Samir, the two of them cross-legged and no more than a half-metre apart.
In actuality, Mo was on a business trip to Indonesia, but Samir had apparently called at a good moment; the sketchy outlines of a hotel room shifted faintly in the background behind Mo’s head.
“How is he?” Mo asked.
“Fading out,” Samir said.
“Are you out by the jasmine?” Mo was leaning forward, squinting a little, and Samir realized he must be able to see the faint traces of jasmine flowers behind him.
“My favourite part of the garden,” Samir said. The knot in his chest was loosening, a little. Talking with Mo always made him feel calm.
“I know,” Mo said. “How’s Marlowe holding up?”
“Not great. If we ever have kids,” Samir said, “do you think they’ll know us?”
“What do you mean?”
“As people, I mean. Or do we always just know our parents as our parents?”
“What? Samir, are you . . . ?”
“I’m sorry. I don’t know what I’m talking about.” They lapsed into quiet. Mo was watching him with concern. “I think I should go. Can we talk later?”
“We can talk at any hour of the day or night,” Mo said. “I love you.”
“I love you,” Samir said. “Good night.”
He ended the call, and sat still in the shadows.
He liked listening to the sounds of the city around him, the voices and trolleys and occasional car, the low electric hum of drones.
He should go in, probably. He should see if Marlowe was still up, if she needed anything.
But what a pleasure to be alone for a moment with the scent of jasmine around him, in the quiet, in the shadows.
When he was in his mother’s garden, he almost remembered her.
The impressions were too slight to be called memories, but there was a hand, warm soil in sunlight, a spade.
The windows of the towers cast a diffuse light that made the birdbath shine a little across the lawn.
There was no real privacy here anymore—all the neighbouring towers looked down into the garden—but the sense of an oasis remained.
He wished he were in Mo’s arms. What he wanted was to freeze time.
His phone screen lit up with the email he’d been waiting for, from his boss: In light of your failure to respond to my messages, and in light of your conduct at our recent client meeting, I have no choice but to consider your employment terminated. I hope . . .
Samir switched off his phone and closed his eyes.
There was no need to read further. He’d known this was coming.
The horrible thing was that there was another job available to him, if he wanted it.
“There’s a career in Service for you,” Detective Waker had once told him, a decade ago. “We always need intelligent people.”
“What do you like about it?” he remembered asking. “About working in Service?” In memory they were in a bar, in dim lighting, not far from here.
“I studied history before I came to Service,” she’d said. “It made me terrified of discord.”
“But there’s . . .” He felt a swell of rage that he carefully suppressed.
It was important to speak cautiously. Of course she herself was Service, but also Service was everywhere.
He knew that even if she liked him personally, even if she chose not to report everything he said, it was best to assume he was being recorded.
“There have been other states in history,” he said, “where order was maintained by means of . . . an internal intelligence apparatus.” He thought briefly of writing Stasi on a napkin, but there could be hidden cameras.
“We’re not the Stasi,” she said, which was eerie. His eyes may have widened slightly. “Or the KGB. We don’t terrorize, or threaten. We observe. We do not act unless there’s a clear and present threat to the State.”
It was dangerous to point out the obvious, which was that clear and present threat is a wildly subjective term, so he’d changed the subject, or he’d dropped the subject because a waitress had arrived; in any case the conversation had gone no further.
He remembered quietly shredding his napkin into a thousand pieces on his lap under the table.
He’d been out there in the garden for a long time, hours, his thoughts drifting, when he saw movement at the garden gate.
Samir sat very still at the far end of the garden, watching.
Someone was opening the gate slowly, taking care to not make a sound.
A man was entering the garden, moving like a shadow over the grass, appearing and reappearing between bushes and trees.
Samir hardly breathed. He watched as the man went to the third window to the left of the front porch, and looked into Kareem’s bedroom.
He expertly removed the mosquito screen—the sound was minimal—and climbed awkwardly up and in.
Only then did Samir move, to rise and cross the garden at a crouching run. He stopped below the window, listening, and then raised his head just enough to see in.
Kareem was lying still, breathing in an unnervingly slow, ragged way, too much time between breaths. The man who’d just climbed in through the window sat on the edge of the bed, his back to Samir. The two men were alone in the room, and the intruder was speaking.
“I wanted to see you again,” he said. Samir felt a wavering vertigo.
Did the man have his father’s voice? The accent was different, but the timbre of the voice itself was the same.
Samir was desperate to see the man’s face, but if he ran inside and into the room he thought the man might leave again through the window, so he stayed still, listening.
“I know you thought I was weak,” the man said.
“I could see it in your face. I know you judged me.” The man waited, but of course he’d come too late.
Kareem had passed to a point beyond speech, perhaps beyond response of any kind.
Kareem was a waxen figure in the bed, his chest barely moving.
“But we both know it wasn’t just because of the Resistance, it was that I didn’t have it in me to stay.
I believe the kids could see that.” The man was quiet, waiting, then sighed.
“I should’ve come sooner. I don’t even know if you can hear me anymore. But Nico was gone, and they deserved—”
The door to the room opened, and Samir caught a glimpse of Marlowe’s startled expression as he ducked below the windowsill.
There was a blur of movement above him, the man dropping from the window.
He landed hard beside Samir, then broke into a run.
Marlowe came to the window—Samir saw her face from below, her deep confusion—and then as Marlowe turned away, back toward Kareem lying still in the bed, Samir came to his senses and set off after the intruder.
Samir had never been a particularly athletic person, and was immediately out of breath.
The sidewalks were crowded at this hour, people walking home from the train stations, and the intruder had disappeared.
He stood just outside the gate for far too long, unsure of which way to run.
But someone down the block was moving too quickly, an impression of a man dressed in black slipping through the open door of a twenty-four-hour convenience store.
A moment later Samir was gasping for breath in a confusion of coloured packaging and glaring white light, chilled air, a woman behind the counter staring at him.
Movement up ahead, at the end of an aisle.
Samir jogged between shining packages of potato chips and found an open back door.
There was an open-all-night café in the alley behind the store, a few people at round tables under hanging lamps.
Samir studied them. Two couples, a group of college students, a girl alone with a book.
Music was playing somewhere. The café was a pool of bright light and beyond it, deep shadow.
He was tired and disoriented, sweating from his run.
He walked past the café, but it was hard to see much.
A few tidy trash containers, a couch that someone was throwing away, a bicycle rack half-filled with commuter bikes.
Whoever that man had been, Samir had lost him.
Finally he sat at a café table, out of breath.
A waiter appeared. “Can I get you something?”
“Water, please. No, seltzer.”
“Lemon or lime?”
“Lime, thanks.”
There was a particular shadow further down the alley that he had his eye on, just at the base of the dumpster.
Why did it look wrong to him? Because it had changed.
The shape had been different just seconds ago, he was certain of it.
Samir leapt up from the table and ran full-speed toward the dumpster, just in time to collide with the man he’d been chasing.
Samir grabbed his arm. The man doubled over, breathing hard.