Spy of Red and Blue

XII

The days passed by without him even noticing. He stayed in a bare apartment in the city. His job was at a lonely little office besides the railway station, putting away files and running the Xerox machine, writing down things without bothering to wonder what he was even doing. He guessed that the place was some kind of front organization for the CIA, but couldn't be bothered to find out for sure.

He barely saw anybody in the rooms most of the time, just the receptionist telling him what to do day after day after day. It was nice and quiet. He ate alone in the canteen. It was always empty there, too. Perhaps it was all busywork, but he didn't care. He received checks in a large yellow envelope each week. It wasn't much, but it was enough for him to subsist on.

For the first time in twenty years, there was nothing to be worried about.

Shopping was a new sensation. He had seen the fast food restaurants and grocery stores piled high with food of all kinds, bananas and apples and oranges and many kinds of breads and cereal. Never did the GDR have that. There was even more variety now: he had never seen so much food even before he had gone off to war. He pushed a shopping cart through the aisles of cans and jars, thinking that this was how Sofia walked, though she was many kilometers away from him. He wanted to buy his own automobile; contrary to Stephen's words, the public transportation was much worse than Berlin.

On the weekends, there wasn't much to do. He walked the city, looking at the immigrants, the few Italians and Chinese and Germans walking out of shops. He walked past streets where young black men were hard at work teaching kids how to not get hurt in a riot. The place felt so disconnected that it wasn't hard to convince himself that his past had all been a dream. He couldn't bear to meet August again, but would sometimes leave money on his doorstep or in his mailbox. He never bothered to check whether his son actually took it, although he noted that the money always disappeared after a while. It was not his responsibility; he only wished to assuage the poisonous guilt within him, the guilt of abandoning his wife and son. It was easier to simply go through the motions without thinking of their significance.

He took the interurban to Polk sometimes, always going to the same bar to chat with the bartender that had talked to him the first time he came. It was easy to convince himself that she was Eva, only warped by the tunnels of palingenesis.

A lot of places nearby he still vaguely remembered from years ago, though he didn't find much comfort in the past anymore; there was nowhere to hide.

Was he himself a product of reincarnation?

"How are you doing today, Al?"

"I'm fine. You?"

"Oh, the usual."

She smiled. "Fancy you coming back."

"I decided to live here for now, until I decide what I want to do next."

"That's not a bad idea. It's better to have no idea than a bad one."

She continued, "I was a teacher before, you know. Taught elementary school in Texas. Houston. It was my dream, helping kids become their best selves."

"Why did you stop teaching?"

"Stop? I sure didn't want to stop. It was a political question."

She shook her head and explained, "The red-baiters again. The idiots who think that the fluoride in the tap water is going to turn us into communists. The people who join the John Birch Society and cheer for General Walker and all of the other fascists strutting around these days. Turns out that these same people are real touchy about what their kids are being taught in school. No communism, no internationalism, no revisionism, as they say it. It was bad in Houston. We were always afraid of getting fired for saying something wrong."