The Prisoner - Carlos J. Cortes [41]
day two
Inferno, Canto VI: 10–12
Gross hailstones, water gray with filth,
and snow come streaking down across the shadowed air;
the earth, as it receives that shower, stinks.
The Divine Comedy, DANTE ALIGHIERI
chapter 16
01:15
“Pet. No calls.” When a thin bar atop her communications console flickered from green to red, Odelle stood, laid a hand on her desk, and reached down to remove her shoes. She eyed the door of her office. “Pet. No visitors.” There was a dry metallic snap as the lock released its bolts.
A few steps from the center of the room, Odelle glanced through the vast panoramic window of her office at the DHS headquarters to a forest of skyscrapers dotting the night like the fruit of strangely prolific vines. “Pet. Privacy.” The glazed surfaces flickered and frosted over.
Splaying her toes like a cat’s to grip the carpet’s luscious pile, she stood on the balls of her feet and stretched both arms toward the ceiling, an almost forgotten memory pushing to the forefront of her mind. Nothing is impossible if you keep trying, her mother had once scolded Sonia, Odelle’s kid sister. The little girl wanted to give up after trying to place a piece in a puzzle for two full minutes. Sonia had looked up at her mother, her three-year-old face set in the patronizing expression one uses to address the dim-witted. “Can you shape water?”
After that, Odelle’s memory was hazy. She couldn’t recall Mother’s reaction or her likely retort, but Sonia’s question had remained forever etched in Odelle’s mind. She relaxed her feet and pushed to stand again on tiptoe, her calves bunching with a welcome ache.
Through a door flanked by floor-to-ceiling bookcases crowded with legal texts, she padded into the bathroom. After unbuckling her belt, Odelle sat on the toilet, trousers pooling over her feet. Pet.
They had been impossibly young, students at a godforsaken college in the middle of nowhere, hemmed by fields of wheat stretching for miles around: wheat the color of Araceli’s hair. Between classes, they would run back to their room and hold hands, and hug, and kiss, and splash water on their faces to hide telltale redness.
Odelle sidestepped over to the washbasin. The faucet detected her nearness and released warm water.
After graduation, they’d moved to a dingy apartment, transformed into heaven with eggshell-colored wall paint, posters, and love. The writing is always on the wall, Felipe Ho, her Sino-Spanish professor of criminal law, would insist as he tugged at a few sparse hairs dangling from his chin. Odelle agreed, but only to a point. Sometimes it wasn’t writing but posters. She should have understood that the placards with caricatures of a brutal government on their apartment walls weren’t idealistic delusions of the impossibly young but a testimony of commitment. Could she have altered destiny? Would van Gogh’s cornfields and Turner’s fogs have made any difference? Probably not, but she wouldn’t have felt so foolish at Araceli’s betrayal, given that the evidence had stared into her face for years.
Like a thief, Araceli had left before dawn to join a coterie of activists, the dangerous ones, old enough to be beyond puny idealism. When Odelle finally found her, there was only a husk left of the Araceli she had known—a meek pregnant creature who made calf eyes at Eliot Russo, the Lord of Dreamers. The scene was etched in her mind, as painful as a brand: Russo’s expression of pure contempt as Odelle foolishly wondered if Araceli molded to his body as she had molded to hers.
Three days later, the riot police charged a group of demonstrators. In the confusion, Araceli’s man, the mighty Lord of Dreamers, scuttled away like a startled crab, leaving Araceli sprawled on the tarmac after she’d tripped—at the mercy of storming shields, truncheons, and rubber bullets. Odelle had studied a film of the demonstration, painstakingly recorded by NBC cameras, a thousand times; she’d frozen three frames to store in the darkest repository of her memory. In one, a fallen Araceli stretched