Tyrannia (3 page)

In the basement, Tristana and Evan were preparing the site. The professor was sitting Indian style on the dirt floor. He was coughing. Patrick set the materials down. In one of the corners he could see a natural archway and a dark opening, which must have been one of the tunnels that Evan talked about.

“Aha,” Tristana said, finding the pliers in the box underneath a bag of SunChips. She twirled them on her finger like a six shooter. “There they are.”

“Okay, remember,” Evan said, rubbing his hands together and standing over the professor. Everyone’s breath was visible. “The point of this exercise is to, you know, gather relevant information about what he knows.” He took a chair from the corner and scraped it to the center of the room. Tristana hoisted the professor onto the chair. The professor was tipping.

“Don’t fall over,” she said. “Shit, Ev, do you think we should tie him to the chair?”

“Hmm,” Evan said. “Then we would have to cut his hands free. I don’t know.”

“What does it say in the manual?” Tristana said.

“Right.” Evan sifted through the box that Patrick had brought in and found the Interrogation Manual. “Uh, shit,” he said to the professor. “You should know. You wrote this, didn’t you?”

“I don’t think he wrote it,” Tristana said. “He wrote the legal memos for the Department of Justice that allowed the manual to come into being.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Evan said, looking peeved. “It was, I don’t know, a grandiose metaphor.” He turned to Patrick. “How about you bring down the cooler of beer that I brought here yesterday? It should still be cold.”

Patrick hesitated. “Sure, where is it?”

“By the door, I think.” Evan had already turned back to the manual. Tristana ripped off the duct tape covering the professor’s mouth, and he screamed. The noise was muffled by the walls.

Patrick’s face was hot as he went up the stairs. Evan’s attitude and his commands were really beginning to get to him. Evan wasn’t recognizing the role that Patrick had in the plan, or that they were all a small society of equals. And wasn’t that harmony the point of the plan? Patrick had first come up with the idea of the plan. He would have to say something at some point to Evan—and Tristana. He found the cooler by the fireplace, not by the door as Evan had said, and took a beer from it. After the second beer, he saw Tristana standing in front of him.

“What the fuck are you doing?” she said.

He shrugged and stood up from the cooler. “I’m just bringing this downstairs.”

“Yeah, like, an hour later,” she said. “You need to stop pouting, Patrick. This is very stressful for Evan.”

“Evan? That’s who you’re worried about?”

“A little.” She took one of the beers from the cooler, took a few swallows, and wiped her mouth with her sleeve. “He’s under a lot of pressure.”

“We all are.”

“No, no . . .” She bit her lip and actually looked thoughtful. “Are you the one doing the interrogation? Are you down there?”

“No, he’s ordering me around like a lackey.”

“It’s for your own protection. Look, the professor . . . he thought, for years, that he could get away with what he did, you know? That he could lead a normal life after crafting the legal framework for all of those black sites, and see his family every night and tuck his children in at night. All while innocent people were being plucked from their homes all across the world. That’s what kind of monster we’re dealing with.” She finished the rest of her beer. “Evan’s down there with the manual—the manual that the professor advised on and signed off on—and he’s going to get more names. Places. Valuable information. You and I, we need to do our jobs and be there for Evan.”

“And what are we going to do with this information then?”

“Evan knows people in a lot of networks. All around the world.”

Patrick picked up the cooler. “So what’s your job then? Fucking him?” He couldn’t believe that he had said that, but was actually kind of relieved when he did.

“Fuck you,” Tristana said. She tossed the beer can against the targets and went down the stairs.

“I thought you were supposed to control your emotions,” Patrick called out after her.

What upset him more, though, was that after he went downstairs again—something which he was thinking about not doing—Tristana and Evan barely paid him any mind. Evan cocked his head a little to indicate where Patrick should set down the cooler, but he was putting the professor in a stress position and didn’t want his concentration broken. Tristana was flipping through the manual and then held out the book for Evan to read, like an assistant turning the sheet music for a concert pianist. Evan took off the professor’s pants. The professor was gritting his teeth. His gag was off.

“I . . . I . . .” he started to say.

Tristana perked up. “What was that? It’s okay. You can tell us.”

“This is ridiculous,” the professor blurted out. Patrick restrained a laugh, though he wasn’t sure what was funny.

Evan spat on the floor and paced around the professor. Patrick knew he was performing for Tristana more than the professor. And Tristana obliged; her eyes followed Evan and only Evan.

“It is ridiculous,” Evan said. “Because we know you know. You have to tell us what everyone knows—from the president on down.”

The professor shook his head.

“Tristana, give me those pliers,” Evan said. Tristana gave him the pliers. Evan took in his other hand a bucket of water that was in the corner.

He said: “So does that manual say to douse him with the cold water and then pull off his fingernails or . . .”

“Let me check,” Tristana said, wetting her finger and flipping through. “It’s like they use code words for all of the different techniques,” she said. “Euphemisms. It’s hard to keep them straight.”

“See, if I get him wet I might not be able to get a good grip on the fingernails,” Evan said. “There has to be a proper order of these things.”

“It’s not a cookbook,” Patrick said, but no one paid attention to him. He got himself another beer and downed it quickly.

“Aw, fuck it,” Evan said, pouring the water over the professor. “We’ll let you stew for a little bit. Then you can tell us everything you know.” The professor shivered and tried to shake the water off.

“I need a break,” Evan said, pulling down his bandana. He rummaged through his jacket pocket for cigarettes, and lit, pacing and smoking. Tristana leaned against the wall, her arms crossed, staring with boredom at the professor.

“My uncle,” Evan said between drafts of the cigarette, “he was a weird guy. I liked him. He didn’t take shit from anybody.”

“Okay,” Patrick said, not sure where this was going. The professor was really shivering.

“He told us kids we could never go in the tunnels because people would get lost down there. And never come back. It was actually the only advice I ever listened to, from any blood relations.”

“Why is that?” Patrick said, actually curious.

Evan smiled. “Because he said he’d kill me if I ever thought about going in the tunnels, and I believed him. He had a dishonorable discharge from Nam. You.” He flicked his cigarette at the professor. The cigarette, cinder-first, bounced off his forehead, but he didn’t pay it any attention. He kept shivering instead. “Did you ever serve there? I didn’t think so. Anyway, my uncle was pretty messed up from the war. I miss him a lot.”

Tristana went over and took Evan’s hand. Patrick cringed, and then hoped neither of his friends saw it. But they didn’t say anything. Tristana kept squeezing Evan’s hand and he had a wistful look on his face. When he looked sad, he didn’t look like a revolutionary at all. Or maybe a different kind of revolutionary, one that posed for glorious paintings back when people did those kinds of things.

“Come on, Tristana,” Evan said, putting his arm around her. “I
. . . I need to refocus.”

“Patrick,” Tristana said with a smile. “Make sure that he doesn’t escape.” Then she and Evan went up the stairs. Patrick could hear them both laughing. He imagined that she would tell him, while she straddled him on the cot in the living room, that Patrick was being a jealous prick and maybe they shouldn’t have trusted him at all, and Evan would have shrugged, unlistening, tracing his hands on the phoenix tattoo on her chest, a tender gesture that he would conjure at times. The professor coughed and Patrick blinked and turned to him. But the professor’s head sank down again.

Patrick walked to the professor and stood in front of him. “Look at me,” he said. “Look at me.”

The professor looked up at him. Patrick tried to say something like Evan would have said, something cutting, but nothing came to him.

“Do you know they were talking about you when you were upstairs?” the professor said, teeth chattering. The professor smelled like an untended fish tank.

Patrick shook his head. “Tell me what they said.”

The professor shrugged. Then he said, “Tyrannia . . .”

“I don’t have time for this,” Patrick said. He scooped up another beer and went up the stairs, but quietly, so that Evan and Tristana wouldn’t hear him. But he could hear them laughing softly. They weren’t paying any attention to Patrick. He went outside. It was raining. The fog rolled over the fields of buckwheat and thistle, and the dying apple trees. He stood on the porch and drank his beer. The plan was not going as he had thought it would.

“Fuck it,” he said. He tossed the half-full beer can toward the barn, where it spun in a shower of watery gold. Then he walked to the van, thinking that at any moment Evan would come out with his pants half on and say Where the fuck do you think you’re going, but he didn’t. Patrick got in, put the van in neutral and coasted backward down the hill. At the bottom he started it up and did a three-point turn. He looked at the farmhouse and the barn and the mist rising up the hill toward the barn and then gunned the minivan down the narrow road.

He took a couple of wrong turns, sat in the parking lot in an abandoned gas station, trying to retrace his steps, wondering how to get home. Driving again, Patrick thought about Evan’s story about his uncle, and whether anyone had a similar influence in his own life. No one came to mind. No teacher, no relative, no mentor, no crossing guard. Maybe Tristana. That was the only person he could possibly think of. But that was long past over. He felt saddened by this for about a second or two—the time for his heart to beat a couple of times—and then he was filled with an overwhelming sense of relief.

When he finally made it back, it was getting dark. There wasn’t any fog in town. The lights were on; his mom must have taken a taxi back. He stripped the back windows of the newspaper and peeled off the duct tape. He checked the minivan’s carpet for blood—miraculously, there was none. His mom was in the living room watching Deal or No Deal.

“Hey hon,” she said. Patrick kissed her on the forehead.

“Hey mom,” he said. “How was the trip?”

“Oh, fine. Work left a message, they want to know if you can work a double on your first day back.”

“Okay. I’m going to lie down now.”

“What have you been up to?”

Patrick shrugged. “Thanks for letting me borrow the van.”

“No problem, sweetie.”

“Okay, I’ll see you later mom.”

“Love you sweetie.”

“Love you too.”

In his room, all he could think about was the professor’s face, and his nonchalant shrug. He checked his email and went through all of Tristana’s old messages, and Evan’s old messages, and deleted them. He expected the FBI, or ATF, or whomever, to burst down his door, and wake his mother on the couch, and force her to the floor at gunpoint, and charge up the stairs. He was ready for the plan to end like that. But there was no commotion as he had imagined it. He fell asleep with the lights on.

He had no dreams, only the darkness of sleep, when his cell phone woke him up, vibrating and chirping on his nightstand. It was four in the morning. His lamp was still on and the house was quiet. He picked up the phone; Tristana was calling him. He let it ring three times, staring at her name, and then flipped his phone open.

“Hello?” he said.

The connection wasn’t good, but he could tell she was breathing heavily.

“Hello? Tristana?”

After a few seconds she finally talked. “Patrick,” she whispered. “You have to come back. Oh . . .” Her mouth moved away from the phone; he could hear her voice, panicked, and another more distant voice, as well as a rumbling sound. “Oh God . . . please come back. You have to help us. I can’t . . .”

“Do you know what time it is?” Patrick said.

“Time?” she said. “Are you talking about time?”

Another voice in the distance, a high wail.

“Is the FBI there?” he said. “Is this a trap?”

“I forgive you,” she said. “Of course, of course I forgive you. And I’m sorry too. I made a lot of mistakes, Patrick. But it’s almost too late . . . please come. The tunnel—”

Then he lost the signal. He tried calling her back, but he couldn’t even get her voicemail, only a recorded message that a connection was not possible at that time. He sat up in bed, arms crossed, biting his lip, wondering what possibilities were really before him. The whole day was beginning to sink into him. Then the phone rang again. It was an unlisted number.