Forty Leap (15 page)

Something came of it.

But not the something I expected.

For the rest of that night, I drew stares
from some of the other people. It was the first time since I had
virtually destroyed Igor Grundel that anyone had paid me any
attention. I didn’t like it. Carlos ignored me and I sat looking at
the picture of Jennie, becoming worn out with each new fold, and
trying to will the others away.

The next day we were back to work. The
weather had turned foul and there were flurries about. It was early
for heavy snow, but not out of the realm of possibility. If it
snowed, I doubted that we would be given time off. We arrived back
at the apartment wet and dirty and exhausted, knowing that the
Thanksgiving holiday (which had consisted of no thanks and no
giving) had probably left us worse off for having had the rest.

After dinner, I was sitting by myself,
glaring at Carlos and Doreen, who were, in turn, completely
unconcerned with my existence. Sensing a presence at the table, I
shifted my attention in preparation for a Jonah Jones lecture. But
it wasn’t Jonah Jones who sat across from me. It was Lydia Tiri.
She looked very old. When I had met her all those years (weeks for
me) ago, she had been a lower middle aged woman with some life to
her. The work she had done for Warren Li, carting around supplies
with her husband, had seemed to give her life a purpose. Now she
was withdrawn, her face lined, shoots of grey showing in her hair.
With long bony fingers, she held out the letter I had returned to
her.

“Why did you do this?” she asked. It was not
an accusation. She wasn’t telling me that I had done something I
shouldn’t have done. She simply wanted to understand my
motivation.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have an answer for
her. As I thought about it, I couldn’t really put my motivation
into words. I had just felt it needed to be done. That’s what I
told her.

“When I gave this letter to Igor,” she said.
“And he told me he had delivered it, I felt strong again. I was
sure that Daniel had survived and made it out of this city. When
you handed me back the letter, all of that confidence
just…left.”

Again, I don’t feel as if she was accusing
me, but I felt guilty anyway. Igor had been right about what these
letters had meant to the people who sent them. But when I had seen
that box and known it was all a fraud, I just felt that I couldn’t
let it go on. I was sorry for having taken so much away from all of
those people, but not sorry for what I had done to Igor.

“Did you write to that girl?” she asked.

I nodded.

“I saw you calling to her when you arrived.
You made a lot of noise and my window looks out onto the
street.”

I felt my eyes water up.

“I couldn’t see her very well,” Lydia
continued. “Is she the same girl you were with five years ago?”

I nodded again. “Jennie.”

“Jennie,” she repeated. “With an
ie
.”

I looked her in the eye and smiled. “You have
a good memory.”

She changed the subject. “You went to see
Carlos.”

“I want to escape.”

“That’s what I figured. That’s what everyone
figures. Only someone who hasn’t been here that long would try and
see Carlos about an escape.”

I shrugged. “I’ve been here long enough to
know it would do no good. I’m desperate.”

“Me, too.”

We sat alone for awhile, saying nothing.
Surprisingly, I found some comfort in her presence, as if all I had
been missing these past weeks was a companion. Any companion.

As the socialization began to break up with
people yawning and stretching and the guards getting ready to
escort their groups back to their rooms, Lydia said to me, “Carlos
is never going to do it.”

“I know,” I replied.

For the next week, Lydia came to sit with me
during socialization. She kept me company every night and I was
glad of it. The loss of someone special was something we shared and
that brought us together. Sometimes we talked about Daniel and
sometimes we talked about Jennie. Sometimes we talked about
escaping.

December 6
^th
was a Saturday.
Though we weren’t given any extra time on Saturday nights, it was
still Saturday night. The common rooms were more upbeat because
everyone had the next day off. People shed their expressions of
defeat for a little while and became the people they had been once
upon a time. Lydia and I did not. Even if I was a social person by
nature, I don’t think I could have risen above the emptiness inside
of me. Though I showed very little of it to Lydia, I was finding my
imprisonment to be more and more intolerable day by day. I had not
seen Samud in some time and the regular schedule was beginning to
gnaw at my psyche. It was ironic, really, that the very stability I
had sought out when I had first starting leaping through time had
now become my enemy. I wanted desperately to get out.

On this particular Saturday evening, we were
joined by a third person. He came to the table, going unnoticed
until he sat right across from us and looked at us both with his
squinty eyes.

“Are you going to do it?” he asked.

“Do what?” I replied, the irony of it all
unhidden.

“Escape,” he whispered, his eyes shifting in
all directions to take note of any who might be watching us.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Lydia just stared at him with cold eyes as
what had become a perpetual frown on his face spread into that old
familiar miserly grin. “You’re a bad liar, Cristian. Don’t worry.
No one else knows. I just figured it out.”

I was about to rebuff him and a quick look at
Lydia showed me all I needed to know about her feelings. Igor had
taken something from her without ever having really given it. He
had done that to us all. But I remembered something about what I
had felt before I knew this. I remembered sitting with Samud and
noting his surprise at my knowledge of the cleared manifest and
where its people came from. That information had come from Igor and
that information had been sound. To me that meant that there was
some legitimacy to him no matter what he had done.

“Could you have gotten those letters
delivered?” I asked him.

“No,” he admitted. “Nothing goes over the
border, but it’s not just the U.S. that wants it that way.”

Lydia held up the letter to Daniel. It was
always with her, only pocketed away when she was either working or
eating. “Did you have a good laugh over it? Over all of them?”

“Mrs. Tiri, I didn’t do it for laughs.”

“Then why did you do it?”

To him, this was a ridiculous question and he
made no attempt to hide that belief as he gave what he felt was the
obvious answer. “For profit.”

She would not be put off. “And where’s the
profit in coming to us now?”

He smiled. “The profit in leaving is in
escaping the fact that there’s no more profit to be had here.” He
explained it as if she were less than a child and it irritated me,
though I said nothing. Lydia said nothing also.

Igor breathed. “I was already beginning to
lose credibility here. There’s only so much you can draw out of a
crowd with nothing but a promise for a return. Trying to get that
transfer was a last ditch effort.”

“Why didn’t you try and get it yourself?” I
asked.

He made a raspberry sound with his lips.
“Samud detests me. He did business with me because it suited him.
Just like you.”

“And you thought he would do it for me?”

“Mr. Cristian, you are transparent. Your
relationship with Samud was easy to identify. I knew that he liked
you and you liked him. When he went away and you had to sit in
socialization every day, your mood became worse and worse. You
missed him.”

I think I may have blushed.

Igor pretended not to notice. “The timing was
right. Or it was the best I was going to get. It was always a
longshot because he would know what I was up to. I never expected
him to show you those letters, though.”

“Do you have a plan?” I asked, returning to
the subject of escape.

But he shook his head. “I don’t make plans. I
take advantage of circumstances.”

Lydia made a noise of disgust.

He looked at her but seemed unoffended. “Mrs.
Tiri, I think you’ll find that you’ll be able to rise above your
feelings for me in order to escape.”

“If you can’t come up with a plan,” she said,
“then how are you going to help us escape?”

“By taking advantage of a few circumstances
so that we can carry out your plan,” he answered simply.

Though Igor was not infallible, as I had
proven, he never did anything by accident. Every move he made was
determined by a series of circumstances and possible outcomes. He
looked at situations and broke them down in to individual pieces,
fitting them together different ways in order to determine what
actions he might take in order to generate positive responses. And
he did it all on the fly. When he had approached Lydia and me about
the escape, he had done it after a week’s observation but with no
contemplation. He had never sat down and considered what might be
the best day. In fact, he was never sure he was going to come to us
until he had actually decided to do it. He was a watcher of people
and when I had chosen company after so many weeks in the unit, it
was an event he had deemed interesting.

Of course, I don’t think he realized that we
didn’t have a plan of escape. He knew we hadn’t had anything
solidified, but I’m reasonably sure he wasn’t expecting that we
didn’t have anything at all. I was loath to confide this in him,
but he could see it. He sat with us all throughout the next day,
our day off, during three meals and three socialization periods
waiting to “take advantage of circumstances” that just never arose.
Finally, as the evening turned into night and the time for us to go
to our rooms approached, he slammed his hand down onto the table
and said, “You can’t even get out of your rooms, can you?”

I looked at Lydia and she at me and we both
felt like ignorant children, but we did not answer him.

Agitated, he shook his head at us and walked
away. I supposed he saw us as another of his mistakes. With me he
was oh for two.

The next evening he came to us and asked if
we had a plan yet. We just looked at him with glazed eyes. When did
he think we’d had the time to devise an escape plan? As he walked
away, though, I did notice something. We had drawn the attention of
Carlos Castillo.

The next day, when Igor came again, I looked
again and saw that, again, Carlos had looked our way.

On Tuesday, when Igor came again to ask us if
we had devised a plan, I had an answer for him.

“Look at Carlos.”

“What?”

“Carlos is my plan. Look at him.”

When Igor turned his head, Carlos averted his
gaze. But he wasn’t quick enough to escape Igor’s notice. The
wheels must have started turning because Igor took a seat. “What
are you thinking?”

“Carlos has been planning an escape since he
got here. He doesn’t care who knows it because the only people who
even exist to him are the people he talks to.”

Now that greedy grin returned to Igor’s face.
“You want Carlos’ plan?”

I shook my head. “I want Carlos
and
his plan.”

“Well then,” Igor said, standing once again.
“I guess I’ll just go over and talk to him.”

And that’s just what he did. He went over and
sat down at Carlos Castillo’s table without being invited and took
full advantage of Carlos’ curiosity. Things must have gone well
because he didn’t return to our table for the rest of the
evening.

Between midnight and 12:01 am, I felt myself
being shaken out of my sleep. Groggy, I rolled over and looked up
at Igor’s ugly face. “Shift change. Let’s go.”

Apparently, at midnight there was a changing
of the guard. The guards didn’t much care if the prisoners went
from room to room because no one ever caused any trouble. If they
saw it, however, they would have to do something about it. So it
was common knowledge (common to everyone but me) that you could
move around for about five minutes during the shift change. There
were cameras in the halls, but apparently they were unmonitored
during shift changes as well. It was as if we were being given
leave to sneak around. Even though I thought it strange at the
time, I didn’t give it much thought. I had never spent any time in
captivity and the relative comfort and safety of our surroundings
lent to a distorted image of what a cage was supposed to be
like.

Igor gave me all of fifteen seconds to dress.
I had to go to the bathroom, but he said I could do that when we
got to Carlos’ room. The shift changes were short so we had to move
quickly. He didn’t even bother to check the halls and steered clear
of the elevator. We went quickly to the stairs and climbed two
floors to Carlos’ room. When we entered, without knocking, Igor
closed the door softly behind us. Doreen and Jesse were both there
but Lydia was absent. As if reading my mind, Carlos gave me a sour
look.

“We didn’t have time to get both of you. Next
time, maybe you can come on your own.”

“Why now?” I asked.

“It’s not important,” he said. “And keep your
voice down.”

“It’s important to me. If I’m going to trust
you…”

“Trust me?” he said. “Without me, you don’t
go anywhere.”

Igor looked away sheepishly.

“That’s not the point.”

“Igor says you’re serious. And I
know
he’s serious. The rest of these people are serious up until they
have to get their hands dirty. They
like
it here. It’s easy
work and no responsibility.”

I tried to gauge the accuracy of what he was
saying. There were too many people involved for his beliefs to be
true across the spectrum. But he believed it. That was clear at
least. I also guessed that he’d chosen me because of Igor. If
anyone was serious about getting out, it would be Igor. His
reputation was shot. He was universally despised. Someone had tried
to kill him.