Waxing Gibbous

Waxing Gibbous

… … … … … …

It was snowing outside. It was twilight, the moon had just come out and it was dark outside. The world was silent, except for the smooth harmonies of Simon and Garfunkel playing softly in the background and a soft hum of the heater. Happily, Anala pulled a silver ornament out from the box and put it on the tree, which stood tall and proud before her in its colorful and neon glory. It was Christmas Eve but despite the cheery atmosphere of the room, Anala looked distastefully at Connor, who sat on the couch, reading.

        “Connor!” she called, “Come on! Help me decorate the tree.” She picked another ornament up from the box: a little white angel decorated with glitter.

        “Can’t. Busy.” Anala looked at him and rolled her eyes.

        “You’re reading Sam Harris, Connor. Not exactly Christmas material, is it?”

        “Just because it’s a specific time of year doesn’t mean I’ve got to give up my usual pursuits.”

        Anala nodded slowly and dropped the piece of tinsel she was holding. She then walked over to him and yanked the book out of his hands. Holding her hand up to silence his protests, she sat down besides him and spoke.

        “You’ve been brooding all day. I’m getting tired of it. Why?”

        Connor avoided her gaze but answered, “Christmas is a time for family, that’s all.” His voice was so quiet she could barely hear him.

        “Oh, I get it. I’m the wrong sort of company, right?” Anala asked harshly. Connor glanced at her.

        “That’s silly, Anala,” he said, “I just…I’ve never had a Christmas without my family.”

        “Where’s your family now? Do you know?” Anala wondered why she had never asked him this before.

        “Mum’s dead, killed by Militia Men at the London Riots,” he said without emotion, “and my sister joined the Party. I haven’t spoken to her in months.”

        They were silent for a while until Connor spoke again.

        “What about you?”

        Anala shrugged. She picked up a plain red ornament from the box and toyed with it as she spoke.

        “My family never celebrated Christmas. Not the way it’s supposed to be celebrated, at least. We weren’t Christian. But to me, it’s never been about religion anyway. More about friends and family.”

        “Yeah,” Connor agreed. He turned to look at Anala again, who was looking down, still fingering the red ornament in her hand. She wore an unreadable expression on her face

        “You know,” Connor said slowly, “I thought I’d be spending Christmas alone this year, with the war and everything.” He gave her a warm smile, took the ornament from her hands and got up to hang it on the tree.

        “Want to sing for me, Anala?” Connor asked. He took his place at the piano and motioned for her to sit beside him. Anala noticed that the glum in his face had not completely disappeared but nonetheless grinned and joined him.

        “Only if you sing with me, Connor.” Connor laughed and began to play.

        “Sure, if you enjoy making your ears bleed…”

        And so the two began to sing:

        “Silent night, holy night

        All is calm, all is bright…”

… … … … … …

“I’ve told you time and time again—you can make this stop.”

        Silence.

        “Look—just one little word. One phrase. Something. Anything.” He was almost pleading but Anala took no notice. She just continued to stare at the other man in the room—a guard with a blank expression on his face. He seemed almost statue-like, stiff and unaware of his surroundings. She longed to be like him.

        “Anala, pay attention.”

        She turned to face Damian, whose face was a foot away from hers.

        “No,” she said simply. She thought she saw something unrecognizable cross his face but if it had, he masked it too well.

        “Do you know what we can do to you?”

        She just shrugged.

        “Here’s something you don’t think of everyday: our profile on you has led to us to find out that you’re…pure.”

        If anything could have caught her attention, that was it.

        “What—what do you mean?” she asked, shivering slightly.

        Damian looked grim.

        “I think you know what I mean. Would you really like to become spoiled?” Anala’s eyes widened. She jumped up out of her seat, nearly hitting Damian in the chin, and began to back away from him very slowly.

        “No—no,” she stammered, “You…you wouldn’t.”

        “Who says? The Premier himself has suggested this. I have no choice but to follow his orders.”

        “You—you can’t!”

        “I wouldn’t. But he,” Damian nodded to the expressionless guard, “is instructed to if it comes to that.”

        Anala looked at the guard with wide eyes, unconsciously clutching her shirt very tightly. She could not believe this was happening—was this a dream? She had expected pain, insults, anything but this.

        “You’d—you’d allow this?”

        “I have no choice,” he said, watching her carefully. She finally averted her gaze from the guard and for a moment, the two sets of dark eyes met. Damian noticed that the glimmer in Anala’s eyes had dimmed significantly to give way to the new fear, the new vulnerability that seemed to cast an endless shadow over her face. His eyes slid over her petite and thin body, which had stiffened and was now allowing her feet carry it further and further away from Damian and the guard.

        “You know what to do,” Damian said gravely.

        Anala gave a small whimper of fear in response. Almost numbly, Damian twitched his fingers but it was sign enough. The guard moved silently and swiftly towards Anala, who had backed into a wall and Damian wanted to close his eyes but couldn’t, couldn’t, and he watched as the guard placed his hands on her shirt and yanked the loose fabric from her body and Anala began to scream as she pulled back the fabric in an attempt to cover herself and tried to push the guard away but she was too weak, too weak from her imprisonment and he was a Militia Man, trained by the Premier himself. Damian’s dark eyes followed Anala’s frail body as she slid to the floor in an effort to escape from her attacker. He saw her take a deep breath and watched as her arms went limp and he knew that she had given up, that her resolve had won out but when the guard grabbed the hem of her pants, Damian felt a powerful force wrench his heart away from his body…

        “Stop!” he bellowed. Immediately, the guard let go of her and moved away. Damian couldn’t take his eyes of Anala, who was still sitting on the floor, bent over shaking and crudely covering her chest with the gray shirt she no longer wore.

        “Leave us,” he spoke to the guard, still not averting his gaze from Anala’s figure. He didn’t notice the guard bow low and exit.

        For several seconds, he stood there and watched her, his body shaking with anger at some ghostly and possibly inexplicable origin. Finally, he walked over and knelt in front of her.

        “Anala,” he said softly. He was surprised to hear how smooth his voice sounded, how devoid it was from any anger, detestation or hatred. Apparently, Anala noticed the same thing for she looked up at him, surprise etched into every corner of her face.

        Damian hesitated and then spoke, “Put your shirt on.” He closed his eyes and knew that the shuffling in front of him meant that she had, for once, complied. Once the movement stopped, he opened them and found her position unchanged. She was still kneeling, staring at him. Dazed, he reached out and lightly touched his fingertips to her tear-stained cheek and felt a wave of surprise as the brown skin reddened beneath his fingers.

        “You’re blushing,” he whispered and felt a strange tingling in his stomach as the skin turned even more red. Acting on their own now, his fingers began to trace the outline of the now-dry tear streaks on her cheek as his eyes refused to leave hers.

        “Why?” she whispered back and he knew that she wasn’t simply referring to the blood rushing to her face.

        He didn’t answer her query. He himself didn’t know why he had stopped the guard; he had witnessed worse interrogation methods on other prisoners before…

        “You didn’t talk,” he muttered. His fingers had somehow found their way to her mouth and were tracing the outline of her lips.

        “I won’t ever talk.”

        The fingers stopped moving and Damian drew his hand away.

        “Hmmm.” The fingers had fallen onto her hands now and were absentmindedly tracing patterns on her palm. In his head, Damian observed that the sparkle in Anala’s eyes was slowly beginning to return.

        Anala opened her mouth to say something but a loud buzz issued from the intercom located within the room. The noise was small, slight, but enough to bring Damian out of his reverie. Quickly, he stood up and responded to the guard’s call that Anala was ready to be taken back to her cell.

        As he watched her leave, he felt the terrible anger that burned his soul return.

 

        That night, Damian visited the Party Archives and fished out Anala’s file. They had raided her house after her arrest and had either photocopied, photographed or kept in original form all evidence deemed as “relevant”. In it contained photos, credit card bills, a printed history of Web sites from her laptop, tax records, letters from her parents, and other items that ended up being long stacks of papers on Damien’s desk as he poured over Anala’s past, looking for something, anything…

        He had never bothered to read the journal they had found hidden unintelligibly under the mattress of the small, springy bed with the blue stripes or to look at the photographs they pulled out from the photo albums with the picturesque covers or watch the videos they shamelessly stole from the messy piles of CDs and DVDs with permanent black ink markings. Damian thought it was all irrelevant, regardless of what the protocols his father had placed forced him to do. Why bother looking for the things that made a person happy? He had not wanted to understand her but rather approached her like a particularly nasty exam set forth by a particularly nasty teacher: something to finish fast to the best of his ability and return it to the teacher to assess it. Something to soon forget. She had been a puzzle, his puzzle, to figure out and he had anticipated that all it took was a small background check and pain. He had assumed and assigned her the characteristics of his typical prisoner and took away all the things he presumed made her happy. But he had been wrong.

        Or had he? Damian stopped shuffling the papers in his hand and paused to think, frowning. She was not happy here. How could she be? No one was. He had made her unhappy, perhaps the unhappiest she had ever been in her life, but that was usually enough to force words, terrible and powerful words, to stream out of a prisoner’s mouth like vomit. But she had not been like that. She had breathed in her unhappiness like it was cool lemonade on a hot summer day and used it to build some sort of sickening sanctuary. She had allowed the darkness he made sure swirled around her like a tornado to consume her and in it, she had found something Damian could not quite grasp. The more pain he inflicted seemed only to strengthen her hold on her unhappiness and the more words he threw at her seemed lost in that tornado. She’s holding on to something, he thought, but what? I’ve killed her future, I’ve killed her freedom, I’ve killed Connor. How much does a person need to kill to kill a soul?

        Shaking his head, he returned to the papers and with a heart that beat irregularly, he opened the envelope and spilled out the photographs and suddenly, he couldn’t find his breath. Damian blinked and Anala still stared at him happily from the glossy paper, her black hair settling neatly around her shoulders and her lips curved upwards into a wide smile. She was resting her head against a man’s shoulders—Connor’s to be exact—in front of what appeared to be France’s Louvre Museum with her arm around his back and his around hers. Damian wanted to fling the photo into the fire that was crackling in the stone fireplace. Instead, he looked at the picture more closely and with satisfaction, spied several blackheads on her somewhat clear brown skin. His eyes turned to Connor, whose face radiated with happiness. Disgusted, Damian dropped the photo back in the envelope. So they were pretty close, then? You’d think his death would have affected her more. Or maybe, she’s just a b***h who faked all this and she really didn’t care for Connor at all. Seems more probable, anyway. Damian smiled at this thought but the smile quickly faded as he turned to the next photo, which was of just her. She was carrying a small girl who looked like her—a sister or cousin perhaps—and was giving a full-body pose on the porch of a small house. They were making faces. The girl had her tongue stuck out and Anala had her eyebrows raised and lips pursed. Damian snorted. Childish, he thought and the photo joined the previous in the envelope.

        The next one was the one he first saw and he had purposely not picked it up to look at it more closely. He picked it up now and for a moment, wondered why he had been so foolish as to be blown away by this photo. It was just a regular photo of Anala, taken without Anala’s knowledge for she was not looking at the camera. It was taken outdoors and she appeared to be standing on some sort of field with sheep. But as his eyes passed over the quizzical look on her face, and her hands holding a simple beige-colored purse and her lips parted slightly in wonder at whatever she was staring at, he felt his thoughts slowly ebbing away.

        BOOM

        The thunderclap bought Damian back to his senses and he delicately placed the photo back on the desk and turned to the photocopied papers of pages from her journal. Her handwriting was nothing remarkable, being slanted slightly to the left and mostly in neat print that sometimes faded away into a strange version of cursive where she had begun to write fast. Thinking nothing and feeling many somethings, Damian began to read:

        Distance does not make the heart grow fonder but rather intensifies the ability to forget, at least in my life. Perhaps I have been so conditioned by myself to be unsatisfied with this house and the people that, through some unhappy twist of fate, reside in it that I no longer can properly say "I love you" to anyone...

Oh dear. What am I doing? Am I introspecting? No no no Miss Freud-Within-Me. You shall retain your silence and I shall go on living this life with Mr. Verbose-And-Unable-To-Condense-Pertinent-Information in my unhappy and elated delirium. Perhaps this is why I make such a perfect host to any virus: I am in a constant state of delirium where my world blurs colors so they all become various shades of gray and I construct a cage, not a wall but a cage, where the largest of beasts are deterred but the smallest living things, or the smallest words, or the smallest actions, can filter through easily, slowly, one by one until the empty spaces are filled with some heterogeneous mixture of teensy weensy things that forms a great big something out of pure nothings. There is no great thematic revelation, no happy moment of truth, no inaudible click where things magically fall into place…

        And Damian could read no more and put the paper away. So that’s what it is, then, he thought, she thinks pain can be liberating, doesn’t she? She doesn’t like it, no one likes it but she knows she needs it. And her memories—her memories of Connor and of the little girl and of America and of sheep remind her of happiness and there we go then, she has both! It’s not balanced; there’s much more pain than pleasure but she doesn’t care because it gives her something to think about and when she writes down those thoughts in that bloody journal I gave her, she knows that her thoughts aren’t stupid thoughts at all because she knows people find enlightenment in darkness. Damian furrowed his brow and a strange expression crept into his face as he realized her for perhaps the first time. She’s living, she’s alive today and that’s all that matters to her because she knows her last days weren’t wasted. She doesn’t care whether she lives or dies, yeah today I surprised her so she wasn’t prepared but she knows she’s probably going to die wait.

        Damian turned to the computer on the desk and after several moments of trying, managed to successfully access the live video feed from the camera in her cell. Despite the late time, she was awake. She lay on her side, her head resting on her hand and slow tears dripping down her face as she traced imaginary patterns on the floor. Another thunderclap and he saw the corners of her mouth twitch upwards into a very small smile and her eyes glazed over. She was thinking, no dreaming, about something. He could tell.

        He turned off the computer and sat in silence for a while. After the fifth strike of lightening and twenty rounds of the minute hand on the clock, he got up and began to make his way towards the cells. Damian walked in a slight daze and he did not see a guard nod at him or hear a Ministry official call out his name or notice the lights flick off and come back on. He simply walked and when he entered the control room to the cells, he heard a voice order the guards out and saw them leave out of the corner of his eye and he eyed the fire alarm on the wall. He clasped the cool metal and pulled and barely heard the shrill ringing echo throughout the halls of the building. It was late and he was in the basement with the prisoners alone. He had several precious minutes. He turned and swiftly walked to Anala’s cell and opened the door.

        “What the…” she asked but did not finish as she noticed Damian’s face and cried, “What are you doing?” as he grabbed her by the upper arm, picked her up and began to drag her out the door.

        “Shut up,” he said. Anala looked at him, confused but kept her mouth quiet. Was she going for her death? Was there a fire? She was hoping he would explain but when he did not, she decided that she’d never hear him over the ringing anyway.

        As they made their way through the hallways of cells and down flights of stairs, she found herself surrounded by more and more guards who were rushing to the high-security cells to save the prisoners from what they did not know was a nonexistent fire. No one noticed them in the chaos. Anala did notice, however, that the walls became damp, stone walls and the lighting seemed darker and all of a sudden, they seemed to be the only two around. They were underground. Finally, Damian stopped at what Anala saw to be a dead end and he turned to face her.

        “You know this used to be a castle? This building?”

        “Yes…”

        To her surprise, he pressed a stone on the wall and then, there was a grinding noise as the stones shifted to reveal a dark tunnel.

        “It leads to the beach,” he said simply, “Walk two miles south on the beach. You’ll see a beach house. Go in and tell them Adrian sent you. They’ll take you abroad.”

        “What?” Anala asked stupidly. She still did not understand.

        “There’s not much time. Hurry!” he said urgently.

        Anala stepped into the tunnel but paused and looked back at him.

        “Is this a trick?”

        “No,” he hissed, “ Now go!” He was looking over his shoulder.

        “Why are you doing this?” she asked.

        Damian looked back at her, a pained expression on his face.

        “I…” but he trailed off and he noticed how cold the air was and without warning, he grabbed her face with his hands and pressed his lips against hers but quickly drew back. Anala stared at him with wide eyes.

        “Go! Now!” And without waiting for an answer, Damian pushed Anala completely into the tunnel and shut the door behind her, leaving her in complete darkness. She stood there tentatively and touched her lips with her fingers, feeling the tingle his lips had left on hers. Finally, she put her arms out and began to feel her way through the tunnel.