It’s important to look sane.
Grand Central Station, a cathedral of polished marble. The bathroom is dark mahogany, toilets hidden behind shutter-style doors. He washes his face in the porcelain sink, combs his wet fingers through his hair. His drop location has been compromised, and he wonders why the alternative is somewhere where security will remember a man who is bleeding through the back of his shirt.
He hangs his head over the sink and whispers, “Don’t fuck me.”
A carousel of men in sleek peacoats and camel wool scarves arrive and depart through the bathroom’s door, sparing him disparaging glances. He was hoping to wait here until the crowd thinned but the crowd never thins, the trains never stop. He has no time. The skin of his back has split like a too-thin pastry crust and he’s dripping blood onto the floor. Soon one of these well-dressed men will summon the police. And then?
He’s heard all the names. Mole. Plant. Spook. He exists at the whim of the State and only for as long as he can prove himself useful. Missing the drop should be the end of him. Normally there can be no compromise, no opportunity given for those like him to fall into enemy hands. This body, like all of them, has a limited lifespan.
But this time, what he’s got kicking between his ears is too valuable to let go. His exfiltration will proceed. They’re giving him the chance to save himself.
He should have gotten out years ago. But then he would smoke a good cigarette or see the reflection of painted lips in dark liquor and think that someday he’d hear something that could wrangle him a real future, a face and a name he could live with.
His moment has arrived. If he can survive. The drop was compromised; his pursuers will be looking for a man whose face has slipped off his skull. Are they watching now? He doesn’t know. He pulls at his loose cheeks. It’s important to look sane. It’s too easy to disappear a man in this country.
He ducks into a stall and shoves a ream of toilet paper down the back of his shabby no-color coat.
* * *
The lockers are on the station’s second floor, a mausoleum of gleaming brass. The key he has is for locker #12. Inside is a battered suitcase as flimsy as cardboard. He shouldn’t open it here, there are too many eyes on him already, the toilet paper has soaked through, and he’s dripping a game trail. But he can’t help himself.
Inside the luggage is the lower jaw of a broken denture, a passport, and a letter addressed to John. Skeins of thread, thank God. He almost puts the denture into his mouth but can feel those eyes on his back and so he doesn’t. He slides the passport into his pocket and heads out the revolving doors and into the dark, sleety street, clutching the luggage to his chest, whispering John, John, as he passes picture windows full of Christmas toys and tinsel. Two blocks and a patch of skin the size of a salad plate sloughs off his stomach and lands wetly in the street, steaming. He hurries, holding his face on with one hand.
He finds a tenement and rents a room the color of driftwood, so narrow he can sit on the bed and reach the far wall with his feet. It’s not the room he needs. There’s a shared bathroom at the end of the creaking hall. Sink. Tub. Mirror. He locks the door and sits on the floor and peels off his coat, the blood-soaked shirt, the mountain of toilet paper. The skin of his back sags like wet wallpaper. He’s here only a moment before someone rattles the door and says in the local tongue, brusquely:
“Who’s in there? Hurry up.”
The skeins from the suitcase are thick white cotton, and there is no needle. He pounds the side of his fist into the vomit-colored tile until a sharp sliver breaks off. It will have to do. He sews up his belly first, clumsily, poking eyeholes in the flesh and then pulling the thread through like he’s lacing a shoe.
“You dead in there? I gotta shit.”
He can’t reach the space between his shoulder blades so his back is a messy, bad job, uneven. Despite each knot the rest of him continues to slide, to misshape. He may be too late. As he threads in a growing pool of his own blood the pounding keeps up, the voice on the other side of the door getting angrier.
“Open the door! If you’re beating off in there, I’ll crack your fucking skull!”
Bloody gaps sewn shut, he sets the denture, too small, awkwardly in mouth and then opens the passport to discover the rest of his name.
John Chamberlain.
His back is healed. The plastic jawbone fits. When he stands and looks in the mirror he’s whole, if not a full foot shorter, stout, balding. His eyes no longer weep blood.
John Chamberlain laughs at this reflection. It’s good to be someone, however briefly.
The bathroom door rattles.
“Goddammit, lemme in!”
Inside the letter is another key and the next drop’s address. There he will find the next identity and the next drop, on and on, a chain he will follow two hundred miles until he comes to a place that is safe. Where, this time, he will hold what he knows against them.
But when John Chamberlain opens the door, the man on the other side is not a working-class beefsteak but a thin man in a suit with a gun. This man’s lower eyelids hang far too low, revealing the red meat of his cheeks. The skin of his gun hand is bunched like a satin glove.
John Chamberlain understands perfectly. Because it’s not only secrets you can traffic in to prove yourself useful. And his is not the only State.
Yes, it’s too easy to disappear a man in this country.
* * *
Ⓒ Ashlee Lhamon