She Will Persist

1

Listen, I'm not one for intense pessimism. I'm not so stuck in a depressed mental state that I over-exaggerate depictions of pain and sadness and remorse like I'm some middle schooler discovering poetry for the first time. I'm not that guy. I may be struggling a little, but I don't make that shit known.

But this girl was really making maintaining that mindset difficult.

She was leaning her back against the concrete wall and with her eyes shut. Her limp hands lay encaged in her lap, sucked to the ground by heavy bonds. She had filthy, scrapy hair varying in lengths, dark in this light, encrusted in blood in various places, and shielding most of her facial features from view. Raggedy jeans and a hopelessly ripped t-shirt hung off her frame in shreds.

My fingers strayed to my front pockets, and I straightened up as I shoved them deep into the fabric. I continued to train my eyes past my own reflection and through the small glass window into her prison cell.

The girl brought her head back to normal level with a shake of her shoulders. The movement slightly brushed her hair back from her face. She drew her knees to her chest, causing the metal restraints to echo in the emptiness of the cement containment. Her right eye eased open, a shocking icy blue. It locked onto the wall across from her, gleaming with simple, wistful melancholy.

As my eyes drank in her appearance I aligned her physical characters with the statistics the agency had gathered about her that I read this morning in the debrief before coming to watch her. 

She was an assassin. A successful one. Calculated, tricky, strategic. She probably thought like I did. So in order to get to her, I had to act like I didn't.

I'm a spy --calculated, tricky, and strategic is my job. 

I released the cumbersome bolt that slid across the only entrance to the cell and stepped into the confining space. I kept the door open a crack behind me, letting some light trickle in and illuminate the closest portion of her face. The one eye she had open shifted between sadness and fear, but also a glimpse of alarming curiosity. Her blue iris twisted like a kaleidoscope as her head swiveled to let her eye run from my boots up to my eyes. Her blue one locked on to my brown ones, and we stared at each other.

"Hey," I said.

I was truly a master of social interaction.

I leafed my thumbs through my belt loops and raked my tongue over my lips. "Do you know where you are?" I asked her.

She closed her eye and moved her head away slowly. We were about the same age, 20 years old about. She looked maybe even younger.

I shifted my weight, letting the small beam of light from the open door shine on three vicious scars that sliced the flesh around her left eye. They cut deep valleys into her skin —gnarled, deliberate and rustic. The sight of them made me stiffen and now I realized why she was only using her right eye. She winced at the sudden exposure but still didn't react to my question. 

"Why did you let us bring you here?" I asked. "Why didn't you try to hide from us, or fight back?" More silence. I curled my toes inside my boots. "You could have, but you didn't. You're here, not looking to escape, being infuriatingly uncooperative." Her right eye stayed shut, and her head remained tuned towards the small window fitted into the back wall.

"All I want is answers," I said.

Silence.

"It's not that hard."

Another minute of silence.

"Just one word?" I asked hopefully.

Still nothing.