The Occupation of Emerald City: The Worker (2 page)

Everything blends together. The bodies amassed under the tent
are a massive mound of clothing and flesh. The air at night is near freezing.
Some people can’t fit under the blankets and then the crying begins. When I
find myself without a blanket and the air begins numbing my skin, I think of my
job at the power plant. It’s always as hot as a furnace on the first floor, and
I can smell the collective deodorant of six different workers mixing in the
air. I can almost feel the heat, and it keeps me warm.

But I can’t block out the crying. The crying puts me on edge.
It makes me anxious. My heart begins to speed up. I start thinking about what’s
happening. I have no answers and that makes me afraid. My anxiety gets worse
until I feel like I’m having a heart attack. My hand reaches out and find
someone else’s—a man, a woman—and I squeeze, not searching for the
owner of the hand. I just need to feel the hand.

My heart slows.

The next morning, soldiers set a tray of cheese sandwiches
and orange juice next to the barbed-wire fence. The young woman sitting next to
me asks me to go grab the large tray of food. She’s got a punk-rock look to
her, with short dyed-black hair and a hole in her lip where a ring had been.
She’s a rebel, a real hard-ass, but there’s no way she’s walking toward the
barbed-wire fence with a dozen M-16’s trained on her.

“They like you,” she says, but offers no evidence to back
that theory up.

No one’s going to do it. They’re going to sit until they’re
starving and then someone’s going to crack and run, frightened and hungry,
toward the tray and the soldiers are going to panic and start firing their
weapons.

I stand up, turn to the fence, and slowly walk to the tray,
staring past the two soldiers standing behind the barbed wire. I bend over,
pick it up, listening to them whispering something to each other in another
language, then turn and walk back to the group. Everyone’s staring at me.

Later in the afternoon, a middle-aged man with a pasty bald
head stands up to stretch his legs and the soldiers yell. A woman starts crying
quietly with her face in the dirt and the soldiers yell. It reminds me of tense
afternoons at home when I was a teenager, after my parents got into a fight and
staked out territory in the house. I’d sit on the couch and my father would sit
down next to me on the couch in a huff and start rifling through his paperwork.
If I turned on the TV, he’d yell. If I got up, he’d find a reason to yell. I
had to sit, perfectly still, until he sighed heavily and left the room.

“They can do anything,” someone whispers during one night,
any night, it doesn’t matter because every hour feels the same.
“They can do anything our government has done and get
away with it. Our government has done some bad things.”

The guards wake me up while it’s still dark and grab me by my
arms, pulling me over to the barbed wire. I follow their shouting commands: lie
down, hands over my head, don’t fucking move. They cuff my hands with cold
metal, wrap a black hood over my head and guide me back into the building. It’s
warm. My skin prickles.

They pull me into a room with a concrete floor and take off
the hood before shutting the door. I fall forward, unable to stop the momentum,
crashing into the gray wall immediately. It’s small, not even enough space to
sit. I have to stand to stretch my legs and wonder if this used to be anything
or if they built this themselves—it could have been a small closet, cut
in half. It smells like vomit
. It’s
impossible
not to touch any of the brown stains lining the wall and floor.

This place could be anywhere, and that frightens me. I like
to be in control, so I can predict the future. I like knowing my schedule ahead
of time so I can plan meals in advance. I like knowing the hours of
neighborhood stores so I can be sure what’s open and what isn’t when I’m going
out to run errands. I like taking my anxiety medication at 4:30 p.m. every day.
Some people might not want to know what the stains on the wall are, but I do.

What do they want from me? I can remember arriving for work
at 4:50 just like I always did. The day had started out the same as any other
day. Only with more tension. I could feel it between Deon and Ramirez and Blake
in the boiler room and at first, I thought they’d gotten into a fight somewhere
outside of work. They all went drinking most mornings after third shift, and
sometimes they fought. It was my job to make sure they didn’t fight on the job.
I thought that day was probably the kind of day where I’d have to keep them
separated.

But then Blake came up to me in the break room. When he
talked to me, he narrowed his eyes and spoke in a low voice, scratching
nervously at the pale, dry skin on his square chin. He stood close and told me
he had heard things on TV about an invasion, a real honest-to-god invasion of
Our Country. He told me he had a gun stashed in the trunk of his car.

I remember shivering violently.

The air blowing in through the vent in the ceiling begins to
warm. It gets hotter and sweat breaks out on my forehead. My entire body begins
to glisten. The warm air travels down my esophagus. It dries out my lungs, my
throat. I have to scream. I pound against the wall, panicked. It’s gotta be
something else, there’s gotta be something in the air and now they’re going to
kill me because they’ve got me confused with someone else and everything’s
going to hell and now I’m going to die.

The ceiling vent releases a burst of cool air. I open my
mouth, wiping at the sweat across my face, pulling down my pajama bottoms to
provide reprieve for as much skin as possible. The air gets colder. It only
takes a few minutes for the wet sweat on my skin to beginning chilling me right
down to the bone. The tips of my fingers numb first. Goosebumps break out and
pop up like pimples between the hairs on my chest, arms and legs.

The air warms again. It reaches a level of comfort and
continues well beyond, so hot and so dry that I feel like I’m suffocating. Then
the air changes its mind again. The sweat along the back of my neck cools
before sliding down my spine.

I scream. My chest is tight.

It continues again and again, a circular seasonal change of
summer and winter. Every second feels like my breaking point and when the door
finally opens, I stumble out, falling to the tile floor, and feel two hands
press hard on my back to keep me pinned.

“Look at his back,” a voice says. “Look how hairy it is.” I
feel the soldier get closer until I can feel his warm breath on my sweaty neck.
“You’re fucking disgusting, terrorist.”

They put a hood on my head and drag me into another room.
They drop me to my knees and pull off the hood. The same man sits behind the
same metallic table, drumming his fingers on a pad of white paper. A stack of
files and a thin green book sit next to the pad of paper.

“Please,” I say. “Let me prove who I am.”

“I know who you are.”

“You’re violating laws,” I tell him. “International laws.”

The interrogator holds up a piece of paper. “See this? This
is a set of rules that I’m allowed to follow. These are your country’s rules
for terrorists. You do not get a lawyer unless I say so. You do not get a trial
unless I say so. You do not get
food
unless I say so.” He reaches under the stack of papers and pulls out a thin,
gray book with no words written on the cover. “Hey. Look here. This is your
country’s interrogation manual. This is where we’re getting all of our ideas.”

“Please.” I can’t help but break down in tears. “It’s not my
government.”

“Of course it’s your government,” the man says
matter-of-factly. “You live in this country, this is your government. Unity,
right? That’s your country’s motto.” He scratches his chin, licking his lips.
He looks content, like he’s just eaten a big meal. He leans back in his chair
and stares at me. Daring me.

There’s no good answer, I know that. He thinks I’m some sort
of nationalist, or he’s got me confused with someone else.

“You can avoid all of this if you simply confess and provide
me with information,” the interrogator says with more sympathy in his voice
now.

“I don’t have any information,” I say. I fight the urge to
tell him to visit our official Web site—WelcomeToEmeraldCity.com. If he
did some research, he could probably find the email I sent the government,
complaining about the Web site’s inability to process a simple parking ticket
payment. There’s proof of my existence outside of this place. There’s proof of
a boring life dedicated to a boring job.

“Where were you when the Coalition invaded?”

“At work.” I can remember sitting in the coffee shop near my
condo, reading the paper at a table by the windows and drinking my
vanilla-flavored latte. The newspaper’s tech section had a
lengthy piece on new carbon-capture tests in coal
power plants.

I hadn’t thought anything of the news report. The TV hanging
over the front counter was always tuned to one of the news networks that always
made a big deal out of nothing. The more they could sensationalize, the more
panicked viewers they drew in.

So I let it slip in one ear and out the other. It was
impossible to live in Emerald City without finding a way to drown out all of
the political white noise. I finished my latte, glanced once at the TV to see a
foreign minister addressing the cameras, then left for work to arrive promptly
at 4:50 p.m., ten minutes early.

Four hours later, the sky lit up.

“We’ve spoken with your parents,” the interrogator says,
leaning back. “They say you were disgruntled with your job. You’ve been drawn
to anarchy before.”

“No.” He’s lying. He has to be lying now.

“You wanted to wreak havoc, or die trying. So you planned to
destroy the power plant once Coalition soldiers began patrols.”

“My parents don’t give a shit about me! They couldn’t even
remember my fucking birthday when I was a kid!”

“Where are they?” he asks, leaning back.

“Eastern Europe. The Middle East, maybe.”

He raises one bushy red eyebrow. “Why would they be in the
Middle East?”

“My father’s a consultant. He works with a lot of foreign
companies. So they move around.”

The interrogator smiles. “Are a religious man?”

Do I look religious? I think. Do they think they caught me
praying? Have they been watching me on some security camera somewhere, tucked
away, watching me shit in a bucket? “No.”

“Are you a Jew?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

My eyes burn. I squeeze them shut. “My parents never talked
about our heritage.” My parents hardly ever talked, especially not to me. They
worked. And when they were home, they fought.

“You love your country, though. You’d kill to protect it.”

I don’t respond. It’s not a question—he’s made up his
mind on the issue. He’s probably lived in his home country all his life. He’s
probably never had to learn another country’s history on an intimate level just
to fit in. I spent my elementary school years in the Middle East while my dad
worked for a power utility. I learned about the history of the Holy Land, made
friends with three boys who believed in three different gods and then my family
moved again. And again.

And again. And every time, I had to learn about a new world
just to fit in.

“You would risk your life to defend this country,” the
interrogator says.

“No.” How am I supposed to explain it to him? The
absence
of nationalism inside my body? The fact that I never felt closer to anyone than
my grade school friends in the Holy Land who were wrenched away from me before
we could plan a sleepover, before we could chase girls on the street with mud.
This country is piece of land with an imaginary line around its border, nothing
more.

“I want names,” he says.

“Of who?”

“Others who are planning like you.”

“No one’s planning anything.” I lean forward, eyes wide. It’s
the serious look I give employees who stretch their lunch breaks. “Listen, you
have to have the wrong person. I swear to God, I wasn’t planning anything. I’m
just a supervisor.”

“You’re a terrorist!” the interrogator screams.

“No,” I say, shaking my head again and again. “No. No. No. I
just want to go back to work. I’ll work for free if you let me go. Whatever you
need! I can’t be in that cell! I need my medicine!”

“Take him to isolation,” he says to the guard, in my
language, for my benefit.

“I don’t even know what the Coalition is!” I scream. “You can
take whatever you fucking want, I don’t care! Take my home! Take my money!” The
interrogator jerks back slightly, staring at me, watching the color drain from
my face.

He waits. But I have nothing left to say. My mind has never
prepared for this.

Finally, he waves me away.

The soldiers pick me up and put the hood on again, dragging
me back out into the hallway. I let them do the work so they can earn whatever
pay they’re getting for this mockery of justice. I’m too weak to walk on my
own, too weak to fight even though I’m already anticipating the blasts of cold
and hot air on my skin and my heart’s begun a snare roll against my rib cage.
God, what I wouldn’t give for my medication right now. Three years of drugs and
now I’m quitting cold turkey. A medication that came with a fucking novel
filled with warnings.

They drag me down the hall, taking one turn and then another
and then another and I’m sure they’re just walking me in circles around the
compound. Trying to confuse me or something. Trying to turn this place into
something it’s not.

Finally, they stop me and remove the hood and handcuffs. I
see a pale man standing next to the soldiers, in his late thirties with a high
forehead and thinning black hair greased back. He’s got small ears and a few
moles on his right cheek and a cut on his cheek. His dark eyes stare at me
while I examine the logo on the breast pocket of his blue collared shirt. It
says “Anodyne” in bold red letters. I’ve seen that logo before.