8
Blake woke up from a sleep that could have lasted no longer than an hour. He'd been jerking painfully back and forth from his waking anxieties to the unconscious horrors of dreamland for a few days now. There was a small mirror on the wall opposite him and in it he saw his face, pale and sallow looking. He thought that perhaps two hours sleep was all he'd gotten in so many days. His eyes had taken on an unwelcome waxen texture that pulled at his lids when he tried to open them. His thoughts felt slow, sticky, unresponsive like he had been drugged.
The worst of it was the sense of limbo, like a sleepwalker wandering around all his waking life, talking, working, resting in partial realization of his situation but unable to summon the strength to break the powers shackling him to his dreams.
Since arriving in this place—and still unaware exactly where this place was since there were no windows in the back of the police van—the only human interaction he’d had was between himself, his interrogator, and the men who had placed him in his cell. Things held little solace.
The walls of his holding cell were made of a soft brown spongy material that gave in to the touch. A stainless steel toilet hunkered in the corner of the room only a few feet away from the head of a cot in the other end, away from where he lay. Blake thought his mind was starting to play cruel tricks on him, changing the colors of the walls, the cleanliness of the room. Things had changed on him at least once now and though he tried frightfully he found nothing to attribute this to but his own mental trauma. Certainly the fixtures, the lighting, the door, the walls, all those were the same and had been since he arrived, but he could have sworn . . . He remembered, or remembered remembering, the walls had once been a light red, instead of the dull khaki they were now.
He'd been interrogated twice already and, although no physical harm had been done to him, the sessions played on his mind. The type of questions he had been asked was the most unsettling. They hadn't asked his name, or questioned him on the length of his stay in England. They already knew. They knew his name, place of birth, nationality, his habits, his cell phone number, email, even the names of his brothers. The man who questioned him stated this information dryly, from the beginning of their conversation. Perhaps, Blake thought, the man wanted to intimidate him with the power of the state, that a foreigner could never have escaped the eyes of the security net.
The interrogation room felt exceedingly cramped for some reason. Feeling claustrophobic had never naturally held a place in Blake's personality, but here the walls had drawn in on him, flexing closer until his chest constricted into a painful knot that made it very hard to concentrate. It worried him that the man was asking him questions that were seemingly irrelevant to his transgression.
The first of the real questions had confused Blake the most:
"Young man, do you have a problem with authority?"
"No. I don't think so.”
He sat opposite Blake. He wore a brown shirt beneath a blue blazer and sharp black rimmed glasses; he clicked a thin black pen impatiently while he waited for an answer to each question as if measuring his response time. His thin face, which was slightly pock marked, remained motionless throughout the entire proceeding, only twice relaxing to take a measured sip of coffee. He looked neither young nor old and exuded an aura of being difficult to read while at the same time making you feel as if he knew exactly what you were thinking.
"I don't think so." Blake repeated.
"That is a lie." The man said evenly. "Your literature states as much." His mouth had made two small twitches as he said the words “lie” and “literature.”
This isn’t fair,” Blake had protested. "“Who are you? Does this have anything to do with anything? Aren't you going to give me an attorney or something, maybe let me see the light of day, or just deport me?"
That’s enough for now. I’ll show you back to your cell," his interrogator had said calmly.
Blake thought he had been in incarceration for three days. Thankfully, he was not being physically abused: his meals were ample and brought regularly. He hadn't been struck or hurt in anyway, and his captors, as yet, hadn't tried to force any 'information' from him—the whole ordeal still began to wear on him in ways that were difficult to explain. He thought that it was something to do with his complete ignorance of his situation. The difficulty stemmed from that, surely. He had always assumed even the basest of prisoners in the free world knew how long they will be locked up, but he knew nothing. Several times he had considered the possibility of contacting his embassy but had no way of doing so and ultimately abandoned the idea.
After three full days, he still had nothing but vague questions to feed any conclusions he might have as to why he was still being held, or quarantined, as he was beginning to think of it.
Blake reclined in a dubious pose of relaxation, which really held neither relief or comfort for the stress of the moment, when a woman was led into his cell by one of the guards.
The guard led the woman, who was blindfolded by way of a large hemp bag that covered her entire head and left only a few strands of hair visible below it. Blake watched as the other man released the woman from the shackles that bound her ankles and wrists before finally he pulled the bag from her head and stepped out of the door without saying a word.
As the clear, hard, poly-fibrous door slid shut behind the guard—who similar to his interrogator was not wearing a police uniform— Blake's new cell-mate blinked her eyes incredulously. She appeared to be taking a while to process her surroundings. Her eyes travelled slowly over the back wall and the two opposite cots before finally resting with unconcealed consternation on Blake.
Although he felt equally confused about the situation, Blake thought it might behove him to introduce himself. The young woman looked at him fearfully.
He said, "Hiya, Blake."
Rosie averted her eyes from his and began to cry.
"Who are you then?"
Blake was laying morosely on his cot when she broke the hours long silence. He sat up slowly. She regarded him through a mess of hair that nearly covered her face. She looked in a sorry state, but at least she’d plucked up the courage to introduce herself.
"My name's Rosie."
"Mine's Blake."
"Why are you here Blake?"
He took this to mean, what have you done wrong?
"We'll I suppose I'm here because I'm not a Brit. Just another foreigner locked up under special exceptions to human rights. God help me."
"That can't be why you're here. Not even the UK just locks aliens up without cause."
Don’t they? I also tried to write something on the Houses of Parliament. Unsuccessfully."
She looked at him quizzically, not unlike a teacher wondering at a pupil's stupidity.
"Why would you do that? I mean, didn't you know they would catch you?"
"The thought crossed my mind, but I guess in all honesty, no, I didn't think so."
"And now you're here."
He grunted. "To stay. They cuffed me, threw me in the back of a police van, and drove me to here. They still haven't told me why they're holding me, or whether they're going to press some kind of charge. Does England usually lock up nonviolent offenders and throw away the key?"
Rosie dropped her head. This little question seemed to strike somewhere deep. She looked up at him for only a second and dropped back when she saw him looking at her. She was pretty but for all her dishevelment. Her emotions contorted her face into a strange totem that tried to completely hid her beauty. Her shoulders shook as she began to cry again.
Blake wondered what he had said.
"I'm sorry. Did I say something?"
"No," she said weakly, "it's just that I don't know why either of us are here, really. If you're telling me the truth."
They remained silent in the moment. From across the room Blake made an effort not to look at her—he'd always hated seeing women cry—but he felt her presence; perhaps it was her eyes on him but it was hard to tell.
"Do you regret doing what you did?" Rosie asked him.
The question caught him off guard and he answered without thinking.
"No, I guess not."
"Well, that's not very intelligent, is it?" She prodded him haughtily. "Are you glad you're here?"
Blake looked up at her. Rosie sat of the edge of her bed with her ankles intertwined and hands resting in her lap. She reminded him of a teacher he'd had only a few years ago.
"No, I suppose not. It felt like the only thing to do at the time."
She laughed back at him with an obvious trace of resentment.
"I've seen you before. Not you, you. But you, time after time. I'm usually on my walk to work and you're usually sitting on the grass by the canal peering off at some ridiculous world under the slow moving waters. Sometimes I think to myself that I'm better off, that my life is more productive and comfortable, more accepted but, after this fiasco, who can say. It sounds like you'll be out of here before I will." She let out a pathetic whimper. "In the same cell. They don't even have the decency to give me my own cell." Blake took a deep breath; he didn't want to frustrate his new cell mate further, but her bizarre mixture of arrogance, pedagogy and remorse had been mounting a strong attack against the more tactful side of his personality.
"Maybe this is your wake up call," he suggested quietly.
"My wake up call? What exactly am I to wake up to? I'm already perfectly aware of why I'm here. More so than you are! You might not understand why you're here, but I know that I'm being held under suspicion of corporate espionage. I work in retail! And I've been working like a modern day peasant since I was sixteen because I thought it was the only thing to do, and now I'm some sort of supposed mercenary spy. Don't even f*cking think about telling me to wake up. Waking up is only another nightmare."
Blake fidgeted on his cot. She was crying again. He’d let her be.
"Maybe you're right. I've searched for adventure all of my adult life. In one way or another I've always found it too. But this, all of this, is just the result of foolishness, or pride maybe. It's hard to tell.“
"You, a terrorist, well, how should I know otherwise. You don't look like a terrorist. I don't look like a terrorist. But at least your words are divisive enough . . ."
She stopped as a knock sounded from outside and a guard thumbed in the passcode. As the door slid open she mumbled a few unintelligible words at Blake.
The guard stepped in and pointed at Blake.
"Let's go. We'd like to ask you a few more questions."
Blake stood up wordlessly and the guard shackled him and led him from the room.
The walk to the interrogation room was short and the door clanged shut at his heels. They strapped him to a chair and chained his hands to the table. He stared down like a man defeated.
Before him the very same crisply ironed fellow clicked his pen and took a deep breath.
"Very well then, young man. The time has come to ask you some very specific questions. Are you prepared to answer?"
Blake looked at him.
"Very well, then. Please tell me what reason you had for doing what you did four nights ago."
Finally, Blake thought, something I can confront.
He told the man that he had no problem doing so. He told him that he grew weary of seeing men and women going about their daily lives so unhappily, and that in seeing the day by day he'd come to a realization no less than a year ago that produced in him an actual hunger that must be sated regularly, that urged him to throw words in people's faces, that demanded of him to, however arrogantly, criticize the things he disliked, to rail against the abject existence of living for money and material gain, that it’s unsuitable to humanity's mental development, of living for what he only saw as social constructs like unsatisfying work or power, of the rich seeking to maintain their existence and the poor succumbing to the malicious influences of the worst of the rich, of the horrible bondage behind money that leaves people rooted in one place and unable to seek out the places that can change their lives.
The interrogator leaned back in his seat, eyebrow twitching, seeming oddly satisfied.
Blake did not stop. He told the man how easy it was to see which things were worth living for and which were truly worthless, that the trouble with material is supply; if a thing is so scarce not all men and women can have it, then only the powerful will gain its ownership, that needless to say power is not always equivalent to morality. But, should we live for the things, mental and spiritual, that can only be shared and never stolen, such as humor, music, goodwill, creativity and knowledge perhaps the rest would dwindle as embers doused in holy water. If one man should learn of a piece of divinity, how can its knowledge but give those around him a pedestal to stand on?
Blake's speech slowly came to a halt like a weather balloon deflating to the ground. The interrogator only looked at him as his words trailed off. The pen clicked again and again mechanically bringing Blake's attention back to his surroundings.
"A fine soliloquy, indeed, young man," applauded the clean looking fellow sarcastically, "but I'm afraid its only merits lie in that. That is to say, as part of a dialogue, your logic falls short. Your state of mind is only a result of the unsavory development of your brain. You see money as all that is bad in the world when in reality it’s only a medium for people to interact with each other and a way to reward those intelligent enough to learn how to use it. Are you so naive as to believe that money is such a plague on society?"
"Yes! And what types of questions are these? And why are you holding me here?”
The man smiled for the first time; it shone across the table like a corpse candle on a foggy night. He clicked his pen.
"Perhaps, we will continue this conversation another day."