15
Suz
Itaipu Visitors’ Reception Center, Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil
Had she been on vacation and not on a mission, Suz would have loved being here at the Itaipu Visitors’ Reception Center. She repeated the thought to herself. Then she played it through again a third time. I’m on a mission. That word surprised her. She wondered how people could walk by her and not know that she was effervescent. Not in a happy ebullient way, but in a fizzy, disoriented, overwhelmed kind of way. Her thoughts pushed to the side by the bubbles of hysteria that churned through her psyche.
The text that had come during her taxi ride had said: You are a tourist. Enjoy your day.
As if. . .
When you get out of the taxi, smile. When you thank the driver smile. Smile as you walk into the complex.
What is all that smiling about? she wondered. Opening the door and moving with the flow of visitors into the open space.
It’s almost 3:00, I should eat, she told herself and her stomach mutinied. She leaned shaking and sweat-covered against a pillar. She hoped that she was alone – that no one was watching her. She hoped she wasn’t somehow messing anything up now that her plastic smile had fallen off her face. She didn’t feel alone. Real or made up, she still felt like someone was watching her every move.
Her eye caught on the cafeteria sign; she shook her head. Suz decided to go to the orientation film, instead. A dark room was what she wanted.
Suz was the last one to leave the little theater. She would have stayed and watched the documentary again had the little clean-up man not shoo-ed her toward the door with his broom. Now, she found herself standing in line for tickets. She glanced over the offerings and tried to decide which would be the less painful to undertake.
Under normal circumstances she would have wanted to do everything. Today, she didn’t want to do anything except find those boys. If she and Jack were here to explore this would be fascinating. But right now her legs were rubbery and her vision blurred. Nerves for sure, but some of it also had to be that she hadn’t eaten anything that stayed with her since the MRE lunch on Monday. This was Wednesday. She had to eat. Maybe some juice. Something. She couldn’t help anyone if she fainted.
She snagged a bottle of papaya smoothie before joining the bus tour of the dam. She could sit, and the bus was air-conditioned which was good since the air was heavy with moisture and heat. She moved with the group outside under the multi-color striped awning. Thirty-five degrees Celsius the clock read. That was somewhere in the nineties, she thought. She sidestepped to the very back of the bus where she unscrewed the top of her bottle and began to sip slowly at the unctuous juice. She’d be beside the bathroom if things didn’t go well.
The tour would last only two hours. It was two hours when she knew, hoped, she’d be alone. They could track her on the phone GPS unless she slid it into someone else’s bag surreptitiously, and she disappeared. Called for help. Made a collect call to Iniquus. “I’m here in southern Brazil, come and find the children.” But she didn’t know if the children were here or not. They could be anywhere. She might just be the bait to pull attention in the wrong direction. Instead of helping, she could very well be the person who thwarted their rescue.
Suz closed her eyes and let that thought blanket over her. Wow. It all came back to chess. Jack was a master at the game. She despised it. He thought it was fun to try to outguess and outmaneuver; she didn’t like to play games. Any games. She liked the win-win mentality where everyone got to be happy. When she asserted that point along with a “why can’t we all just get along?” Jack would smile at her. Suz interpreted that smile as “endeared by her naiveté”. She hated that he looked at her like that. It made her feel childish, like an ostrich with her head buried in the sand. Jack would sometimes ask her how she could live in a sunny little bubble when she knew what he did for a living. It wasn’t a challenge, or put down, he seemed genuinely confused. It was probably the same confusion she felt at why he did what he did for a living.
Yes, she knew what he did for a living. She knew that he shot people dead without a second thought. Not a single qualm. She knew he jumped onto ships in the middle of the ocean to kill pirates, with his bare hands if need be, and free hostages. He bombed buildings where terrorists sat at their tables, drinking tea and planning on exploding school buses. He tracked genocidal maniacs into the jungle, where they enslaved women and got little boys hyped up on drugs and had them fight. Jack was the mechanism by which she was afforded the luxury of innocence.
His work, the work of men and women like him, allowed her to sleep safely. What was that quote he used? Yes, George Orwell. . .“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.” It was a luxury she hadn’t understood until now. And that seemed silly because, so far, nothing bad had happened. She took a plane ride; she had sat down to take a bus ride. And she was barely up to the task. What was going to happen if she was called on to be Jack-like? She stared at her lap. She couldn’t imagine coming out the victor. This was a game she didn’t have the smallest inkling how to play.