The Refugee Sentinel Read online

  Going back to her Vigna target, the sole complication was that Seattle was going to close its airport in a day or two and remove the one reliable spot for her to locate a taxi-driver. After he had appeared as a marker on her tablet, his difficulty had gone down to one out of ten. And she had turned out to be right: Mr. Vigna had died on schedule and as expected.

  She looked up at the receptionist. “I want to order hot spring water for a bath.”

  “I’m afraid, we don’t offer spring water for bathing purposes, Ma’am.”

  “Then what I’ve heard, about the Olympic being Seattle’s best hotel, is a lie.”

  “We pride ourselves on our reputation, but the nature of this request is,” he stammered, “out of scope at the moment.”

  “Out of scope? Both sea-borders are dealing with the same floods.”

  “Ma’am, more than half of Seattle is flooded as I’m cert—”

  “Spare me the drama. If you can’t do this,” she paused for effect, “I won’t set foot in your one-star bungalow again.”

  “Let me check with my manager, please.” He disappeared behind a wall divider and returned after a moment with her card key. She guessed the manager must have calculated her probability to survive Defiance Day and derived her customer lifetime value. “Good news. We can indeed accommodate your request, Ms. Gao. However, this resource comes with an unfortunate extra charge.”

  “Money is not a consideration.”

  “If I may, hot spring water delivery of this volume would cost five hundred thousand dollars.”

  “I’ll give you another fifty thousand if you deliver in the next fifteen minutes.” She headed for her room, done tolerating him.

  Half an hour later, Li-Mei had undressed and slipped her hairless body in the tub. She shuddered with pleasure as the hot water covered her surprised skin. Her head dipped under the surface and the ceiling danced blurry in front of her water-filtered eyes. She exhaled, watching the bubbles race to the top, then sat up in the tub, stretching a dripping arm across the marble floor to pick up her tablet. She propped the tablet on her naked breasts. The screen greeted her with two horizontal sections – “Completed Targets” colored in green and “Outstanding Targets” colored in orange. A large, bold number “7” emerged in the middle of the “Completed Targets” section.

  The orange section consisted of a table with three columns and four rows:

  HI-PO

  EARMARKED LOVED ONE

  TARGET

  Sarah Perkins

  Yana Perkins (daughter)

  Colton Parker (father)

  Gregory Schwartz

  Cecilia Schwartz (mother)

  Gordon Vigna (grandfather)

  Floyd Dubois

  Lillie Dubois (wife)

  Victor Saretto (ex-husband)

  Eaton Wilkins

  Chloe Gurloskey (mother)

  Natt Gurloskey (stepfather)

  Li-Mei read the names in the rightmost column, the only names she cared about, for what seemed to her the one-millionth time – Colton Parker, Gordon Vigna, Victor Saretto and Natt Gurloskey. She touched Vigna’s name and smiled as the photos and profile data she’d seen countless times, inundated the screen. Once more, her fingertips flicked through Vigna’s life, one page at a time, each detail and pointless fact, until she reached the bottom of the last screen. She selected an icon reading, “Confirm Target Deletion.” First, the screen responded with, “Communicating with Mission Dizang,” followed by, “Target Deletion Confirmed. Congratulations, Agent Taxi.”

  Other than the sweat trickling down her temples, Li-Mei’s face remained as stiff as a wood carving. She returned to the tablet’s home-screen - the rows in the orange table had decreased from four to three. For an imperceptible second, the corners of her mouth tilted into a smile then flattened again.

  The top of the screen showed a large green “8.”

  eighteen days till defiance day (3

  Colton’s face looked like a melted candle. He grimaced, his pupils dilated and he dropped the toothbrush in the sink. He collapsed to his knees, slamming his forehead on the padded toilet seat. He closed his eyes.

  The call had him disoriented. The person on the phone wasn’t Sarah, couldn’t have been. At least not the Sarah he had kept alive in his memories, who had made him marshmallows in bed on weekend mornings and sung him to sleep with lullabies on weekend nights. This phone woman was distant, a gone-bad version of Sarah.

  He picked up his cell and dialed the office. Three-thirty in the morning was as good a time for a message, with his stupor still thick and the office still empty. He wasn’t much of a faker but going to work today, after this call, was not going to happen.

  “Hey Mike, this is Colton. Look… I won’t be coming in today. Just crawled out of the bathroom vomiting a storm. I’ll call you later today when I feel better.”

  He stopped in the kitchen with Sarah’s words still ringing inside his skull. Had he forgotten about her? How could he? He missed her. He missed the lashy feel of her wet hair after a shower during those endless Seattle Sundays filled with rain and sex. He wasn’t sure if this was how heartache felt or guilt, but he hadn’t been whole since.

  In the beginning, the sheer shock of their divorce had carried him through. As in, I’ll show the bitch. How dare she run away with my baby? Her late work nights must have meant polishing the pole of some PhD who was supposed to take us to the Moon. He must have taken her somewhere all right, with her back against a lab fridge and her legs in the air. At the same time while Colton was changing Yana’s diapers... The bitch. It was her fault. Had she come home that night, their lives would have turned out different... and normal.

  In time, alcohol and the wet fear of being alone had declawed his accusations. He did miss her, the curve on her nose and the strands of hair she shed through the house. He missed how she snorted when she laughed and cocked her head sideways when she was in a good mood. When they had started going out in college, he dialed a radio station on Valentine’s Day for two hours to request a song for her: “I Just Called To Say I Love You.” In a way, she was always going to be the grace of his life. A morning of waking next to her was worth a million Defiance Days. Then smelling her hair and nuzzling in her morning breath, while she tried shielding it from him but in the end, capitulating to his full-on kisses. Then making love to her in the shower. She had given him countless mornings like that.

  He had shared her with the algae for the first, and only, two years of their marriage. He had hoped Yana’s arrival would bring them closer, but it hadn’t. Sarah wasn’t distant or tired or having an affair. She was crazy busy… all the time. And each time he complained about her absence, she would give him the same save-the-world bullcrap he’d grown to despise. “Don’t you want your child to live in a world with snow caps and potable water? A world with wildlife other than ravens and sparrows. Don’t you, Colton?” He had no antidote to her pitch. Not after the North Cap went, fueling a frenzied debate to replace countries with a central government structure the Australians had proposed calling The United Lands of Earth.

  He had no antidote because he knew she was right but, most of all, because he loved her. He was a junior, a Finance major, about to flunk out of Northeastern University when they met. She was a year ahead and cruising, the future Valedictorian of the College of Applied Biochemistry. She was spoken for with a post-graduation job offer from Amgen and a marriage proposal from Roger Maletta, the senior goalie who had strapped the Huskies on his back to two consecutive NCAA East Hockey titles.

  One of the two offers had to cancel the other and, as luck would have it, Sarah chose Amgen in Seattle over staying put and being married to Maletta in Boston. It must have been a close call, because the combination of Maletta’s orphan beginnings and chiseled abdomen had delivered three years of dating Sarah, despite him cheating on the side. She either put up with it or he satisfied her savior complex, which Colton got to appreciate later. Regardless, Maletta had drawn the short st
raw; Seattle - the long one, and she dove into her algae work, in the shadow of the Space Needle, with abandon she hadn’t applied to anything else in life. Colton loved how happy she was as the Savior in Chief of an Earth that was dying a little bit more by the day.

  During his senior year, he commuted between Seattle and Boston to see her on weekends, as if his academic work needed more obstacles. His life became a sleep-deprived series of shuffling in and out of classrooms and airports. He was broke and in the bottom ten percent in all his classes. But he spent time with Sarah, giving her the only gift he could – his time and thoughts. Seattle grew on him, all because of her, despite its ridiculous rain slugs, which Sarah called “my algae mustangs,” a fixture in her lab work. In a few months, she let him stay at her one-room apartment, instead of at the Thunderbird on Aurora, the only place his budget could afford.

  On Saturday nights, lying next to her, he’d been afraid to fall asleep, afraid to jinx the moment, as she slept in his arms snoring softly like a kitten. When he did fall asleep and awoke, he was happy to wake up next to her. When he proposed a year later, on one knee, looking up at her, during the seventh-inning stretch in a game where the Red Sox were crushing the Mariners and the cheesy “Marry Me, Sarah. Yours, Colton!” flashed on the main scoreboard, he thought he’d have a heart attack.

  She blinked at him, her mouth frozen in the middle of chewing a hot dog. In his head, he heard a reverberating “No,” but his eyes saw her stand up and nod in tears, her lips mouthing a “Yes,” then smiling and adding, “I love you, Colton” with coleslaw drizzling down her cheek. If the world ended tomorrow, a thirty-percent likelihood event per the ULE Ministry of Science, he wouldn’t care. Bliss was bliss, no matter if it lasted for a day or a decade. Later that night, the United Lands of Earth Senate passed the “Defiance Day” bill. Still, he didn’t care. An atheist for life, on the night she had agreed to marry him, he was a born-again Christian and Mormon and Jew, all in one.

  Now he was reduced to looking for her hairs around the house. He missed her with a bi-directional force that threatened to blow him up and, at the same time, crush him like a can of Coke. Sleep refused to come. Would the warmth of another woman’s body do, if he imagined it was Sarah’s?

  The Déjà Vu Gentlemen’s Club was bustling on a Friday night.

  twenty days till defiance day (4

  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.

  thirty six days till defiance day (5

  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. T
he 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.”