The Refugee Sentinel (3 page)

Mitko Benjamin liked the sound of mornings more than any other time of day. A morning felt right, his clock going off at six forty-seven sharp and filling the room with the cries of seagulls soaring above an ocean shore. Each time, he would wake a moment before the alarm and count down to the first piercing squawk.

Three, two, one… and take it away, Mr. Seagull. He’d leap out of bed and kill the alarm, until the birds came back to life twenty-four hours later, to face the same inexorable ending, all over again.

Snooze buttons were for spoiled Americans. As a child, Mitko had grown up in Estonia without snoozing – reporting to the kitchen every morning with clean hair, teeth and feet. Otherwise, he wasn’t allowed to have breakfast.

He stood up and cracked his back. Not bad, not at all bad for a piano back. He took three steps forward, pivoted around the straw chair where he always folded his clothes before turning in, and opened the window. Its handles unlocked the sounds of the morning and comforted his palms with a mixture of smooth metal and worn-out paint. He inhaled through the nose. The November air rushed in the room as an icy-cold tease then warmed up as long as he had the courage to commit.

Mitko left the window open and, after a few more gulps, headed to Big Cold. The showerhead’s ice water added to his appreciation of mornings, rushed his blood, and triggered dancing orbs in the temples of his eyes. Each night when he went to bed, he looked forward to seeing the dancing orbs. Ten minutes under Big Cold acted like a time machine, reminding him of his Estonian childhood when he raced against Grete across the frozen field behind their house, toward the well to pull out water for father and his work that day. His father would hug both Mitko and his sister. With a single hand he’d put the two pails they had dragged over the fire, then tussle the boy’s hair. His father would smile. Mitko would smile in return… to this day.

He stepped out of the freezing shower and, with bluish but warming hands, brushed his hair. He opened the Wednesday drawer, its contents prepared two weeks prior: a pressed purple shirt, khaki pants, fresh socks and new underwear.

Mitko left home at seven-thirty-am even if his shift didn’t start until noon. He slid his feet in the shoes he had polished the previous night and grabbed a coat. As the door locked behind him, he padded his left pocket for the assuring bump of the apartment keys and twisted the door handle several times. The door stayed shut and he stepped onto the wet Seattle pavement. For one impossible second, the morning song of chirping birds masked the smell of the flooding, the curfew and of no running water on weekends. Then the black mildew along Fourth Avenue bridge hit his nostrils. He kept walking.

The morning was warm with the natives grumbling at the forty consecutive days of rain during the always-mild Pacific Northwest winters. The Olympic would stay empty until spring seduced the tourists back to Mitko’s adopted city. Then the peak season would begin and each day would copy the last. Each morning, a fresh score waited for him at the closed piano cover, in case he forgot he had played the same repertoire the prior day. He didn’t mind. He molded each piece to the lobby’s mood. His music channeled the intangible hum of conversations, ruffling shoes and arriving elevators, and flung it back at the world, in a way, giving life to the energy that had created it.

Mitko loved that “November Rain” was on the score for the month. The ancient ballad was the first complete piece he had learned to play as a child. Back then he had played for fun and with naïve nonchalance. Today the piano gig put bread on his table in a foreign land. Gratitude was a sign of nobility, so he thanked Guns ‘N Roses for composing the song, as his fingers directed the keys.

Each day, he had a thirty-minute lunch break and two bathroom breaks, an inconvenience his aging metabolism spared him most of the time. The Lobby Manager would cut the shift at seven-thirty-pm and send all non-essential staff home. Mitko was non-essential but played on for free, because more than anything else he liked spending time with the piano. Afterhours also meant no score and less pandering to half-drunk patrons. It meant Guns, Ravel and Chopin. And Mitko loved that. Though he had stopped chasing progress and no longer did pieces like “The Flight of the Bumblebee” by Korsakov, he was going to play until he was good at it. He strived for containment and against the closure of his abilities. Despite his age, he was determined to not let it happen.

Life had mostly passed him by, but Mitko didn’t feel bitter. On holidays, his chest would tighten some then he would go to bed early and squeeze his eyes shut, hoping sleep would fast-forward through his thoughts of what could have been – growing old with a family of his own, raising a daughter and a son, squinting at the sunsets through a bedroom window, before he fell asleep.

Li-Mei didn’t dry her body after the bath – she enjoyed how the tracksuit stuck to her back until the moisture lasted. She had been sitting or lying down since injecting heroin in Vigna’s tongue a few hours ago and craved exercise. She took the stairs to the lobby.

Past eleven on a Thursday evening, the Olympic’s lobby was semi-dark and deserted, other than a few salary men at the bar, wearing suits and buying stiff drinks on their corporate cards. She was in the main staircase when the music swallowed her – an elderly hotel employee was playing on a Grand Stein. The Stein sang wounded and alone, its music filling the mahogany lobby, hugging the hotel’s Persian rugs and corporate art, then streaming through the rotating doors and ending over the rotting bridge-walk. In all, the music stretched from the piano to the outside, from birth to death, like a person’s life but shortened and more intense.

She watched the man like a praying mantis studying a fly. The pianist was blind, a cripple… Defiance Day would do a favor to his kind, she thought. However, something in his music took her back to her childhood in Jenli, with Taxi. The pianist swayed in unison with the melody, his fingers creating music, the man and the instrument extensions of each other. His face told stories of the courage to do what’s right even if the battle he waged was lost everywhere else, other than in the chords of his piano. Li-Mei liked to think she used to be similar – when her hair, bones and ear were whole… back when Taxi was still alive.

She approached the piano, one slow step after the other, buying time to recognize the man’s melody. She had heard it somewhere before and within five feet of the Stein it clicked in place: Kreisleriana by Schumann.

“Do you play Schumann much?” she said.

“Schumann sounds the best when it rains,” said the pianist.

“Must be Seattle’s adopted composer, then.” She laughed. “May I sit with you? I’m Li-Mei.”

“Mitko.”

“Are you working the night shift?”

“I’ve been off the clock since six.”

“You’re either overpaid or have an unusual idea of spending time off.” He hadn’t moved his head to acknowledge her presence and she wondered if a more self-conscious woman would have taken offense. “You’re playing without a score?”

“Going by a score would be a waste. Schumann humbles you each time, with or without one. Like clockwork…”

“I can’t be inspired by someone who checked into an asylum after failing at his own suicide.”

“You choose to remember the asylum. I choose his music.”

She nodded. “If Defiance Day is a smog, your music is like oxygen.”

“Thank you, Ma’am,” Mitko said as his fingers marched into the closing chords of the piece. “How long are you staying with us?”

“Through Defiance Day. Planning any further would be pointless.”

“You wouldn’t believe the rates we offer after.” With the Kreisleriana finished, he popped his knuckles and rested hands on his knees. “Ten bucks a night. Fifty million of us, left in a world built for thirty-four billion. You do the supply and demand math. I’d love to see Stanford or Harvard fit this on their pricing curves.”

“These fifty million will get to experience what the Soviets had described as Communism, in the twentieth century.”

“Is today any different, you think? Our own government commands us to slaughter each other.” Mitko waved a hand through the air. “Apologies… I’m sure you didn’t come here to be lectured by an old croon.”

“You’re fine. I agree laws can’t conceal that Defiance Day is about killing.”

“On the other hand, maybe Defiance Day is how we save our unborn children.” He rubbed his hands, getting ready to start a new piece, and spread them over the piano keys, as if warming his hands over a booming fireplace. “Your generation, Ma’am, must redeem all prior ones – from the Roman Empire to yesterday, when water capsules landed on the Moon. Could Defiance Day be overdue? I lose sleep thinking if the children of the fifty million survivors will remember history well enough not to repeat it. Or if another thousand years from now, when you and I have long become fossils, another old man will talk to another young woman in another hotel lobby, lamenting the coming of another Armageddon.” The crevices of a smile fissured his face. “But what do I know?”

“May I ask a personal question?”

“Many years from now, when you get to be my age, you’ll realize that Father Time, as he pushes us to the finish line, makes any question as impersonal as the other. What is it?”

“Will you vote on Defiance Day?”

Mitko dug into the piano, starting an etude by Chopin, and laughed. For a moment his laughter danced in sync with the music. “I have outlived love. Anyone I would care to Sacrifice for is gone. Therefore, spending my remaining years in prison, as they threaten the non-voters, is a better deal than becoming a murderer.”

“Your company is a treat, but I should get going.” Li-Mei slapped the lacquered Stein top. “Will I find you here tomorrow, if I get another lyrical urge?”

“I’ll be here, for as long as my arthritis lets me.”

“Like clockwork?”

“Good night, Ma’am.” Mitko said and surrendered to the piano, as if the conversation with Li-Mei had not happened.

She walked outside and the rainy night changed her breath into vapor puffs. The trees along the Fourth Avenue suspension bridge were boxed with wooden planks from all sides, like tree prisons, or worse, tree coffins. The night was quiet, despite a dead Vigna still parked around the block and still sitting in his own urine. They hadn’t even ticketed him yet. Way to serve and protect Seattle PD, Li-Mei thought. Their incompetence would likely help with her remaining targets. She couldn’t imagine how accurate her hunch would turn out to be.

Sarah’s voice died along with the phone connection. Colton hadn’t budged. Did she really expect he would? She slammed her fist on the desk. What was her winning good for, if it couldn’t buy her daughter more than three weeks of life? She kicked the office chair and it swiveled in place. The fluorescent bulbs cast long neon tongues in contrast with the otherwise dark ULE embassy. It was just past six-am in Washington DC. She rubbed the bridge of her nose and headed to Avery’s office to begin another conversation she could predict, blow by blow. At least she’d release some steam.

Maybe Colton had been right, all along. They were married and there were still birds in the sky; and he kept asking her to choose Yana. But she had chosen Earth. Saving Earth, to Sarah, meant saving her daughter. She knew the opposite wouldn’t hold. Now she saw it more like he did – this world cared about surviving; it cared about restoring its atmosphere and establishing a colony on the Moon. Whether an eight-year-old lived another several days or not was of little consequence to Mother Earth.

Colton used to tell her how, underneath its mask of gracious benevolence, the world remained a strong animal that ate the weaker ones. And she had refused to acknowledge his theory as anything but ridiculous. How foolish of her. He hadn’t become a three-time World Poker Champion by betting on the wrong hunches. And Sarah had not known what weak felt like, until tonight and this last phone call.

An oak door with no designation other than the number “1327” stood semi-open, shedding a triangle of pale light into the dark corridor.

“Avery?” Sarah said, a few steps before she knocked. She entered. Inside, a man with small glasses and a large forehead stared at the ceiling tiles. “Do I look stupid to you?” she said and closed the door behind her.

“You look as frayed as a live wire.”

“Earlier I spoke with our Territory’s Secretary of State. Mr. Secretary is as powerful as the janitor down the hall, after the dissolution of the US of goddamn A. Do you know what he told me?” She didn’t wait for the answer. “He told me to show the world what American mothers are made of. And to steel myself.”

“What do you want me to do, Sarah?” Avery said, arms stretched, palms facing down as if to convince a suicidal jumper not to jump.

“Last year, my work alone created a million kilojoules of energy for this sorry excuse of a Territory. God knows we’re not a country anymore, because we’ve stopped acting like one.”

“Did we not dispatch thousands of drones across the Milky Way to explore evacuating Earth?”

“I gave them more energy than New York City will consume in ten years, Avery. And in return?”

“Did we not castrate eighty percent of our boys at birth? Or sterilize any woman who gave birth? Did we not apply the death penalty for misdemeanors or worse?”

“Don’t you preach to me. I’m called selfish for refusing to let my one daughter be murdered. Or for not celebrating being the definition of an American mother’s strength in the Thesaurus.”

“We did it all, Sarah, and nothing worked. The Defiance Day Protocol is our last chance.”

“What a thankless bitch I must be, Avery,” she said.

“You’re a Hi-Po. And should act like one of the ten million highest-caliber humans in the world. But hell no,” he stood up on the other side of the desk, keeping his distance, “you’re the one Hi-Po in Hi-Po history to oppose Defiance Day. And spit on her ULE-given right to be exempt from Earmarks or Sacrifice.”

“Give Yana a Hi-Po status and I’ll behave.” She pointed her index finger at him and jabbed the air with each word. At the same time her heart sank an inch. Yana’s life was slipping through her fingers and what had she, the mother, chosen to focus on instead? Lab reports and clinical research papers assuring the ULE that limitless algae energy was right around the corner. “Are you sure you’re playing at the right table, baby?” Colton used to say. How she had hated his gambling analogies. “What’s the point in saving the planet,” he’d say, “when you haven’t taken the time to get to know your daughter?” Hadn’t Avery’s defensiveness proven Colton’s point, yet again?

She shook it off. It was too late to retreat. If she had played the wrong table, then so be it. Her scientific mind believed nature didn’t tolerate imbalance. Somewhere else on this sinking Earth, it didn’t matter how far away, another mother loved her daughter twice as much as Sarah loved Yana. And made up for Sarah’s deficiencies, or as a religious person would put it, paid for her sins.

Avery voice came to her, as if from another dimension, “This isn’t a library card, Sarah. High-Potentials are identified by the ULE as the finest human specimen.”

“She’s the daughter of a Hi-Po specimen, it must count for something.”

“You’re not listening. We’ve tested her multiple times upon your request. The results are conclusive: Yana is not a Hi-Po, even if she’s the daughter of one. You’re it… for hundreds of miles around. The US Territory likely has no more than three million of you. The rest could be in goddamn China for all I know. Even if I wanted to add a random eight-year-old to the list, I wouldn’t know where to begin. Only the Congress of the United Lands of Earth could change that.”

“I don’t give a damn about The ULE Congress,” she said, her voice both serene and furious. “There’s got to be a way to save her.”

“I’ve been trying for two months and have nothing.”

“Did you try all your connections?” She was running out of words to ask the same question, over and over again. She already knew the answer.

“Favoring the populace over High-Potentials is treason, Sarah. You know that.”

She took a deep breath. “She’s my only child, Avery. The only one I was allowed to have before they burnt my ovaries. I won’t lose her to a stupid law. Do you understand that?” Either room 1327 was full of dead people or their silence was a sign of consent.