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Treason

Salvatore Buttaci

    Lorna dropped herself in slow motion onto the cold concrete floor. A cross between sitting and sprawling, it never failed to please the eye. “My final words, all right?” she promised again. “Somebody tell me what the hell got us into this hell?” But none of us spoke except Clay. “We did the treason thing, Lorna. What else you wanna know?”
    We were “The Seven,” an unimaginative handle the media had ascribed to us. We had committed “The Big T” at a time in history when most disillusioned New Americans were clandestinely turning their backs to the Power in Charge. Our mistake was turning our backs in front of the Power in Charge. We didn’t care a nano-hoot about the serious dues we would owe the piper. In our secret underground theater, we were working on a play about blowing up the Power Palace. During our last rehearsal, at the end of the first act, we were apprehended by the ForensiCops who worked double shifts to uncover traitors via their Vocabulary and their Gov-DNA games. I had written into our scenes enough poison to kill an elephant, but they were just words, euphemisms, undetectable I thought, but I was wrong. The Trial of EveryPerson was our traitorous three-act play in which the characters swear allegiance to the just cause of toppling the Power in Charge and replacing him with a true man of the people. It was a noble, well-planned endeavor––as I said, a just cause!––but as with most good intentions, it never grew wings or even wheels.
    “We didn’t do anything!” again the red-haired Lorna broke her promise to let it lie. We shook our heads. She was so beautiful and quite annoying as well.
    Clay wanted to know what the media bums were spouting off about them. He rose from the floor on deceptively thin legs, brushed off the seat of his green prison trousers and said to no one in particular, “We are famous.”
    Clementina Hernandez stood at the cell door, looking out at the corridor. Without turning she said, “How about ‘The Seven-course Meal for the Fishes’”?
    We turned towards her at the same time as if we were sharing the same head. At seventeen she was the youngest of our acting troupe and the person who saw the proverbial half-full glass and the rainbow after the storm. Even in this bind it was strange she could learn to be so cynical. She had been the last to join us, despite our objections.
    It was dangerous work we told her. We were actors but what we were involved in made us also traitors. We reminded her that this was 2106, not an easy year to be on the wrong side of the law. Walk away we pleaded, but her brother Garrett was part of our company and she adored him, wanted to be with him, and Garrett had a hard time saying no to her. Besides the two of them hated their father so much that even if we failed, she could deliver up to him one or two more deaths in the family for him to chew on and swallow down into bellyful remorse.
    Clay on the other hand was in his forties. That’s surprising because when he laughs, it’s a hollow cackle the old and toothless are famous for. “I like that!” said Clay. “Food for the Fishes. How about ‘The Seven Hooked Bait’? Clementina, I think you got what it takes, Kid. Nothing like a little comedy to spark up a funeral. Why not, right? Maybe we can write a song-and-dance routine, practice it, take it on the road.” If our eyes darting at Clay could have been poison darts, he’d’ve been one dead pricked fool. Clay just winked. I’d known him for years. He enjoyed lighting the short fuse on the keg of everyone’s patience. He was good comic relief and he knew it. I’d seen him in some very funny plays and decided he’d be good in mine.
    “Save the jokes,” Garrett told Clay. Then sarcastically added, “It hurts when I laugh.”
    Again Clay winked and slowly sat down, his back sliding down the prison wall.
    Meanwhile, on the outside, life moved along. They had shut us down, but the world was still spinning. Slave laborers in Wormwood went right on being slaves, their heads bowed as the Munitions foremen shouted orders to keep working. They never looked up to see if the sky was falling. We should be so lucky, I thought to myself. Angel City buried under boulders of an expired planet. We’d all be at peace. Instead, the sky did not fall and the conveyor belt of conformity pulled the slaves through their lethargic paces. As for us, we were traitors living on limited time.
    Where once the suburban streets of Wormwood teemed with the clamor of happy talk and uplifting laughter, music and drama, now they were dead-silent as the old-time churches our ancestors attended, where they read their holy book, before the law mandated reading a crime against the state. A crime punishable by torture, and those avid readers who had trouble putting a book down, were burned with their books.
    It took little to imagine on the outside of these stone walls the cleats of the ForensiCops sounded against the pavement as they corralled workers into moving four-abreast. In their black-gloved hands, they brandished aluminum skull bashers and would drive them crashing down on the heads of those who fell out of step or fell from hunger or dropped from exhaustion. They were heading to or from the armament factories on Munitions Row in the old Chinese Theater district of Angel City.
    I turned to Ophelia and asked, “Remember Act One?” Her eyes ignited into those green sparkles I had come to depend on back when rehearsals hit rock bottom and I would question my own sanity. It was Ophelia whose faith invigorated my lapsing courage. I had only to look at her, the way she tilted her head as I directed her scene, that smile worth all the hell we’d pay once the curtain rose and we sealed our destinies. Ophelia the eternal optimist who refused to wax cowardly in the face of doom. I loved her with a suppressed passion. I had for a year now this dream where Ophelia and I become procreation partners and blissfully live out our lives together. If I had been a wiser man back then, I would have listened to my fears and trashed the play, opted instead for love and life.
    “It was your best act, mon directeur,” she said, tearing me from my daydream.
    “My only act. Our last rehearsal. Remember? Once the heckling cops––who the hell invited them!––started shouting us down, no way we could get on to Acts Two and Three.”
    She took my hand. Even in this Wormwood Prison, even on one of our last days alive, I felt blessed. Excuse a playwright’s melodrama, but Ophelia’s touch made me so glad I was alive and close enough to her now to hope she would never release my trembling hand. All right, maybe not trembling. Maybe perspiring. Warm. But for sure I was happier than I’d been days ago before the ForensiCops hauled our asses to this dungeon without luxury of trial. Now here, one step before the fall, I was scraping the memory barrel for last-minute pleasures.
    Clay started talking again. “Your Act One didn’t even make it in the next day’s rag. That’s why we sit around now in the dark, assuming the reviews were rave. Something like ‘The Trial of EveryPerson’ was a welcome relief from all the other outlawed plays that were never presented to an audience. The three-act play, abbreviated to a short first act, boasted an outstanding cast of seven. It demonstrated how these seven, including the director Floyd Cavour, in a matter of less than half an hour, could so dramatically throw their lives away. Tall, raven-haired Ophelia L’Esprit was a believable heroine, with enough beauty to choke a horse and––”
    “That’s enough!”
    “I hit a nerve, Cavour?”
    Ophelia waved her hand. “Let him talk, Floyd. He is happiest when his mouth moves, even when what comes out is worthless chatter.”
    Clay found that funny. “If they serve me a last meal, I’m gonna turn it down and let you eat it, Cavour. And you know what I’ll order? My last meal? Roasted Crow!”
    Lorna screamed “Shut up!” We were all too tired and hungry and downright numb to fight the flinch her loud outburst caused. “Give it a rest, Clay,” Lorna went on. “We are heading for the Big Fan. Do we really have time to laugh at one another? We should hold hands and then our breaths and hope for a speedy ending.”
    The Big Fan reminder quickly sobered Clay. Pinching his lips, he made the mum sign and walked to the far corner where he sat down again.
    So for the next who-knows-how-long we sat or stood or leaned or lay against the stone, silent as that speedy death Lorna hoped for. After awhile Clementina did her best to fill the silence with sobs, but no one comforted her, nor did Lorna scream ‘Shut up!’
    I looked at each face, trying mentally to memorize them all. After all, I had secretly recruited them for the cast of ‘The Trial of EveryPerson’ and because of my success in convincing them to break the law in the name of drama and integrity, I felt responsible for what had transpired. Their deaths rested heavily on my conscience. I was their director.
    And I had directed them to this prison and soon to their deaths.
    Years ago when I was about five, Grandfather told me stories that his great-grandfather told him when he too was only a boy. If I had been older, he might not have confessed a thing to me for fear I’d tell others and be hustled away to prison or even death. At five I was a precocious child, a kind of wall with ears. Those tales he told delight and haunt me still. Grandfather said once there was a book of laws written to protect the people’s freedoms, but the book had been destroyed. One great man led an army across a river somewhere in Old America. Another, homely as bruised fruit, but with a heart heavy with compassion, freed the dark-skinned, shouldered a civil war, united a nation, and died at the pistoled hand of a pro-slavery fanatic. So many stories!
    Then, according to Grandfather, in a string of decades everything changed. Five successive war hawk Presidents dragged the country into the Third and Fourth World Wars, ordered an end to rights of privacy, personal liberties, citizens’ rights, until the great book that once kept a nation brave and free was tossed into the flames with all the other good books in the great and small libraries of Old America. When Grandfather spoke the stories, his voice got weak; his eyes, misty. “Why are you crying, Grandfather?” And he would force himself to smile, even to laugh it away. “Happy tears, Floyd. Every last one of them.”
    I sat there meditating on his stories. With execution not too many breaths away, nothing could depress me more than those Grandfather stories that caused him to weep like a child. They had happened long ago. A hundred years or more? Too many war years had toughened the hide of a gentle nation that did not learn the old adage: “If you fight the monster long enough, you become the monster.”
    The enemies of Old America had brought to our doorsteps evil of every kind. Chemical rains, poisoned waters, fires blazing across the country, and then finally nuclear devastation that nearly leveled a continent.
    American leaders demanded totalitarian rule. They renamed us New America, as if that could make a difference. New America. And none of us aware of the Old America and how much better it was, at least during the early times before the tyrantsrejected God, the same God who blessed Old America. The same God, the same Old America, Grandfather said the people once loved.
    “Floyd!”
    I turned my head to the sound of my name. I saw Clementina hunched over the sleeping Vander Harris. “Floyd!” she called again. “I think Harris is dead!”
    As if on an actor’s cue, we ran to where Harris lay facing the prison’s far wall. Clementina was touching his bearded face. His eyes were barely visible behind thin half-closed slits. Then Clay was kneeling down beside Harris’s body. “Cold as kraut,” he said. “Must’ve died hours ago. Maybe a day.”
    Clay stood up beside me. “Then there were six,” he said.
    “If we’re lucky,” said Lorna, “they can carry us out of this jailhouse too. One by one. Let the bastards open the cell and find the job already done.”
    Clementina was shaking. “I thought he was asleep. He was lying there, his face to the wall. What killed him?”
    I wanted to tell her life killed him. Long before these three days. Magnificently he had portrayed in my play an archangel who shows EveryPerson the way to freedom. Now some merciful angel had come and taken him out of harm’s way. If Grandfather was right, Harris was already a free man in a new life. But to Clementina I said, “He had enough.”
    Garrett embraced his young sister, unembarrassed when she cried against the chest of his green prison shirt. “We need to be strong, Tina,” he said. “Strong together. You and me. All of us here.” Then he looked down at the man whose death made us the Six. “Rest in peace, Harris.”
    Absent now of his cutting wit, Clay knelt on one knee and said to the body still curled against the wall, “Vander Harris excellently portrayed the archangel who lead the people to salvation. More than white wings impressed the audience of Harris’s angelic quality. He looked, spoke, walked, and flexed those wings the way we would imagine an archangel would. Rest on your laurels, good fellow Harris. Sleep now.” Finally, one by one, each of us paraded past Harris with quick goodbyes. I thought of Grandfather, how he believed after all this the good of heart would march into a new life. If he was right, I figured Harris was right up there with the rest of the good folks.
    We let the silence keep us still for awhile. Then we heard Lorna why play acting was so terrible to deserve a death sentence. “A play,” she said. “We didn’t do all those things our characters did or planned to do. It was all made up. Did we bomb the Power Palace? Did we say we meant it when we threatened to bring down the government in the name of a Pax Americana? It was fantasy. Nothing at all.” Then Lorna looked at me. “You wrote the damn play, Floyd. Were you planning a revolution?” I nodded. “Great news, that!” she screamed. “So you wrote treason we thought was a play. We acted in it in all those rehearsals. A play without an opening night. And when we finally get it right––best rehearsal of all, and that was just the first act––the bastards call down the curtain. We are on our way out because we were too stupid to realize how stupid we were!”
    Clay made a futile motion to throw his arm over her shoulder. She’d have none of that. “Hey, it’s not definite we’re dying,” Clay said. Ophelia rolled her green eyes and twisted an unpleasant curve to her lips. Garrett shook his head.
    “He’s right,” I said. “Those bumbling scientists accidentally discovered the Time Portal.”
    Clay smiled. “They found the perfect way to get rid of undesirables: dump them into the time warp.”
    None of us knew exactly how it came about. We were actors, not scientists. We did know they were playing with photons and temporal equations for over a century, then one of their golden boys found an equation that worked. First a monkey, then a slave, and then a political prison crammed with Republicrats who were ushered through the Time Portal into the past or the future. Fact is they never came back. The Power in Charge announced those criminals were somewhere or somewhen. It didn’t matter; they were gone.
    Garrett the skeptic asked, “And we take their word it worked?”
    “Not at first,” I said. “Not for plenty of years. Thousands of prisoners were exiled through that portal. It was easy to suspect time exiles were possible.”
    Lorna stood at the steel bars of our cell. “Maybe they burned them. Said they disappeared somewhere in time.”
    “They disappeared all right,” I said. “About twenty years ago, a young kid about fifteen, was pushed through the Time Portal. His father had been arrested for treason, and they decided his whole family would be likewise punished. You see, this traitor had only one son. The kid. Nobody else, so the father and son bought the portal. Now here’s the weird part: last year––and this tidbit comes from a ForensiCop’s lover––the same kid comes back! Older now, maybe thirty-five, but he’s the same traitor’s son they exiled years before! So this time they hang him to make sure he’s gone for good.”
    Clay stood beside me now. “Floyd knows what he’s talking about. Me and the director here, we know the story.” What he was really saying was, “It gets worse.” The Power in Charge knew the Time Portal held no guarantees dead was dead. They couldn’t risk a condemned man or woman coming back with an army to bring on the New American Revolution. So they spiced up the sentence. First the prisoner had to swim through the waters where––
    “The Big Fan,” said Clay. “Oh, it’s still the Time Portal that takes you to the past or future. But first you swim through the spinning Big Fan.”
    I took over from there. “It spins underwater. Biggest whirling fan you could imagine. Takes up nearly all the water space so a prisoner’s chance of swimming through its sides, outside the fan’s circumference, without touching the giant blades.”
    “About as possible as these prison rats being served cats for dinner,” said Clay, “but not impossible.”
    All eyes shifted from Clay to the steel bars that made up the door of our dark cell. The guards had switched on the lights, one by one, till they were all beaming brightly. We let our eyes slowly squint open. It was time. Three days since our arrest. Harris had his Big Fan sentence commuted when he closed himself up and died. The rest of us would swim for our lives or take to the bloody blades.
    Four ForensiCops entered and shut the cell door. Hard steel echoed up and down the stone walls. I recognized one of the cops. It was his lover who had shared with me too many top secrets when the two of us met in bed upstairs from one of the secret clubs in Wormwood. Now he was looking at me as if I were familiar, then averted his glance towards the other five. Judging by the other cops’ discomfort, I assumed this one was the commander. When he handed the document to one of the them, I was sure. He nodded and the cop began reading. “The Government in Power of New American Forces has judged and found guilty these traitors: Clay Laird, Clementina Hernandez, Floyd Cavour, Garrett Hernandez, Lorna Peres, Ophelia L’Esprit, and Vander Harris.”
    “Where is the seventh?” asked the commander.
    Ophelia pointed to the body of Vander Harris. “Harris is dead,” she told him.
    The ForensiCops chuckled. The commander said, “Lucky Harris.” Then he hardly looked into anyone’s eyes except mine. Maybe his lover got talky one night. Dropped the name of Floyd Cavour. “Oh, Darling,” she might have said, “he was a passing ship in the night. Nothing much happened. Nothing ever does ‘cept with you.” Or she said, “Send that lying bastard two trips to the Fan!”
    “Have we met before?” I shook my head. “Speak up!” I stared back at him. “Not formally.”
    He smiled, remembering. “In your underground theater that evening,” he said. “I was there. Do you recall that?” I shook my head, thought better of it, and said, “No, Sir.”
    He pulled on his ear, then the other one. Then he folded his arms the way people in an audience do when they’re waiting for actors to show their talents. Go on, they want to say. Impress me. What can you do? “You were the leader,” he said. Now he was pulling on his thin blond moustache.
    “The director,” I corrected. “I directed the play. I also played the jailer. A bit part.” I smiled at the irony. “It was our last rehearsal.”
    “Yes, the last one,” he said.
    Anger seething inside me now translated into newfound courage. What did I have now to lose? Grandfather used to tell me that truth sayers pay with their lives, and if I wanted to live, I ought best learn the art of deception, but at this point––the end point of my short thirty-seven years––what could happen worse than death?
    “Yes,” I began, “the last rehearsal but outstanding enough to make its point.” I raised my chin to show I’d said that with pride. “Outstanding enough to make it to Theater Row, if there was a Theater Row, but you fellows in Power saw to that by closing all the theaters.
    Why was that? Don’t you like a good show?”
    He was uncomfortable. The commander did not like being on the other side of the grilling game. He looked like the kind of worm who would take pleasure in the squirming of those whom he considered worms. His smile was shaky. A tic pulled the right side of his fuzzy blond upper lip so high it nearly closed his right eye. “Theater,” he said, “is counter-productive. Make-believe. Fiction. Old America perished because of such stupidity! And what good did it do you? What profound theme did you teach your audience? All of whom, by the way, suffered because of you and your acting monkeys. They were heavily fined two-weeks pay and hours added to their work week. Was it worth the bother?”
    Then he addressed one of the ForensiCops. “Corporal, read them procedure now.”
    The corporal coughed first, then read how the six of us would walk through the cell door, down a lengthy corridor, into the spacious hall that preceded the huge door leading into the pool that housed the Big Fan. “If you succeed in swimming around the Big Fan’s blades, you will reach dry land where the Time Portal stands. Walk through it.”
    Clay stepped forward. “Do we line up in the order you called our names?”
    The commander shrugged his shoulders. What do you wish?” he asked Clay.
    “To go to the head of the line. I was the first to join the cast. Me who showed up because I like acting. And life was getting much too real. I needed a little fantasy to keep my head on right. Now I want to be the leader.”
    “Then you are first. And who then will be second?”
    Ophelia stepped away from the group, placing herself behind Clay. I followed and stood behind her. Garrett held Clementina’s hand, even while he stood in front of her on the line.
    We waited for Lorna who had raced back into the dark cell towards the dead Harris whom she tried desperately to awaken. Kicking his body. Cursing his good fortune. Begging the cops to let her go home. I made a gesture to the commander that said, Let me persuade her onto the line. “Go ahead,” he said.
    I held beautiful Lorna in my arms. Lorna who saw no treason in the words and movements of our treasonous play. This sensitive woman who hated injustice and often spoke of the need for political change, even revolution, if that’s what it took. Lorna who now had stopped crying, embraced me back, and walked to the end of the death line.
    Those about to die see their lives march before their eyes. So they tell me. All their past sins and dreams dance across their mental screens, giving cause for regret or remorse or resignation. Some say the last the drowning hear is sweet music, a coda to close their lives. But in that single-file line all I could think of was, how hilarious we six condemned fools looked! An idea for a new play: six barefooted characters in their dark green prison shirts and trousers, each representing a day of the week. Harris at rest would be Sunday. We would each extol our particular day. We would recite how essential we were. Monday is a work leader. Tuesday is an obedient slave. Wednesday is. And so on. And which of us was today? What was today? I think, Saturday. We would possibly all die on the liveliest day of the week. Secret clubs. Underground theaters. We won’t be there this week. We’ll be busy swimming for our lives.
    “Move,” ordered the cops, tapping our shoulders with their shiny skull bashers. “Keep the line going.” So we walked and then stopped at the hall of the funnel into which each of us would dive. From the opaque glass of the funnel door, we saw the fuzzy outline of the Big––no! the Colossal––Fan and heard so clearly the deafening whirr that agitated the pool waters into rotating steel arms spinning out frantic waves.
    The man whose lover I would never kiss again asked, “Any final words?”
    “Can I read an entire play?” quipped Clay, then waved his hand and shook his head.
    I had plenty to say, but this was not the time for it. I had said it all in The Trial of EveryPerson, but nobody got to hear it beyond the select few, and that was only act one.
    I wanted to tell all of Grandfather’s stories, but he had told them in secret and I had made a promise I’d keep forever. I would love to have spit the most venomous words into the ears of these four cops, to the Power in Charge. Instead I shook my head no.
    Ophelia raised her hand like a schoolgirl. The commander wordlessly called on her. “I wish to say goodbye to my fellow actors. If there could be another world, another life for us out there, I would like to perform with them in a play of three acts.”
    Garrett and Clementina said nothing. Lorna smiled mysteriously. Even in these last minutes she worried me. We needed to keep our heads about us if we hoped to swim past the blades. I knew we all wanted to live. Why else had we resented this almost certain death sentence?
    Standing in our single line at the funnel door, Clay raised one arm the way a soldier in battle raises his to lead a charge or commence a volley of gunfire, then when the door opened, Clay dove into the pool. In turn we each followed. One by one, in what appeared to be nighttime pajamas, we moved our arms and legs away from the magnetic pull of the rapids caused by the killer blades. It would be for us either a watery grave or a watery womb from which we would be reborn in another time.
    I cupped my hands hard into the powerful waters, imagining the Power in Charge in his watchtower viewing it all through his retinal vidpod. Laughing sadistically. And I wondered if somewhere good leaders of New America would ever get their act together long enough to amass troops and depose both tyrant and his armies. More than likely it was too late for that dying nation to be redeemed.
    Meanwhile, I propelled my arms and legs and refused to tire and be sucked into the blades. I did see red waters as I plowed my way forward, but I kept swimming. On my left, blades screamed, their powerful currents forcing me away into a safe narrow route towards the Time Portal, which I could barely see yards ahead of me. Swim! Swim!
    I repeated in my head. Save your life. You can make it.
    Far enough now from the Big Fan to shake myself free of the water, I stood alone at the giant door. Then I heard behind me Ophelia. When I swung around, she was climbing the last of the marble steps at poolside. We fell into each other’s arms and would’ve remained there forever if time did not demand our entrance through the portal. Holding hands, we stepped our naked feet onto the threshold.
    “Wait!”
    The two of us spun ourselves around, reached down to help draw Clay, then Lorna, from the water.
    Clay had his back to us as he searched the waters. Then he said, “Garrett and his sister were behind me. She caught herself in the fan. He was strong. He could’ve made it but he dove in after her.”
    “What happens now?” asked Lorna. “Act Two?” Then she leaped through the Time Portal and each of us followed at the heels of the one ahead of us. We were flying through an endless color pattern of concentric rings that tossed us like cloth dolls for what felt like forever.
    Finally all four of us stopped spinning. We were still dressed in those ugly green prison suits, barefoot but dry as before the Big Swim. We were alive, far from Wormwood Prison, free at last of the Power in Charge. Past or future. It didn’t matter much. We could be hopeful again.
    “Did you sign the book?” asked a woman with a notepad. “You’re late.”
    We four knitted eyebrows at one another. Late for what? Where the hell were we? Did we jump from the frying pan into the fire? Our eyes took in the hectic scene that surrounded us. People everywhere. Some wearing wild costumes. Others moving huge electronics on wheels. In the corner a small crowd of what appeared to be dwarfs laughed in high falsetto. A young girl in pigtails entertained another crowd by tap dancing in shiny red shoes.
    “Excuse me,” said a tall, balding man. “Your names?” We gave them, which he wrote down on the long sheet in his hand. “I don’t have you down here,” he said, “but if Adrian sent you, Adrian knows what he wants.”
    He turned to walk away, then turned back to give us another hard look. “Dark green? Somebody screwed up here. You know what the color of the day is, for crying out loud.”
    Looking around, he said, “Nobody clued in the extras?” Then back to us. “Five busy ladies for days now have been sitting behind closed doors dyeing material and clothes a lovely light green, not dark, ok? Trade those horrible duds in for light green or you will look very silly parading around like that when they hustle you onto the set.”
    “Where in hell are we?” asked Lorna. Oh, no, I thought. Now she’s done it. Which started the balding man knitting his eyebrows. “Well, let me put it this way, Lady. This ain’t Kansas! Did you say hell? Guess some call it that. We call it Hollywood and we’re gonna give ‘em hell!”
    Clay responded with one of his hearty toothless laughs that started us all laughing along with him. Lorna, of course, was not yet satisfied. “And this year is what?” she asked. But no one bothered to answer. Important thing we were acting again. Wormwood a lifetime behind us. Hello, Hollywood!
    Clay nodded his head towards one of the doors. Ophelia reached for my hand. “Come on,” he said, “let’s get ourselves dyed light green!”

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