Military Policeman Arresting the Spirit (Yannis Tsarouchis)
September 788 U.C., Heinessen
Yang had been to so many “events” in the few weeks since his return to Heinessen that he had completely lost count of them all. They blended into some unidentifiable mash: faces swirling around him dizzyingly, chatter swimming in one ear and out the other. At the beginning, he had tried to keep it all straight in his head, but now the barest effort exhausted him. The whole thing had already taken its mental toll, and was now beginning to take its pound of flesh. He was twitchy, and couldn’t sleep well at night, and food sat uneasily in his stomach.
He had developed a problem— or realized he had always had a problem that he had simply never noticed before— where his face would become frozen in some sort of rictus. He would make an expression for one fragment of a conversation, walk away, and then, five minutes later, catch his own reflection in a dark window only to find that his cheeks were still held tight in the caricature of a smile that was all he was capable of putting on. He would have to relax his muscles, one by one, and constantly check with his fingers that he wasn’t twisting his face into some odd grimace.
It was one more thing to be self conscious about, he supposed. His dress uniform felt stiff on his back, and he was sweating in the too-crowded room. The lights gleamed above him, and figures in white uniforms walked to and fro. There was the hum and buzz of human voices above the music from a band playing at the front of the room, but none of the snatches of conversation were intelligible to Yang, no matter how close to him the speakers were standing. Everyone might as well have been reciting poetry in the Imperial language, which Yang only half remembered from his childhood days with his father on Phezzan. Words he heard only carried their individual units of meaning, and didn’t coalesce into sentences.
The event of the night was the retirement party of some vice admiral to whom Yang had never spoken for more than a second. Yang was only attending because his name had been added to some inscrutable list of “who’s who” on Heinessen, and the invitation had made it clear that he was not allowed to refuse. He was lucky that his friend Cazerne had been invited also, having worked in the same department as the man who was retiring. Yang usually had to go to these things alone, so it was a relief to scan the room and let his eyes linger on a familiar, friendly face.
What Yang most wanted to do was leave. But he was trapped in this party by obligation, and by the fact that Cazerne had promised to drive him home, so that he wouldn’t have to take a taxi. Cazerne, on the other side of the room, was clearly enjoying the party, making small talk with some of the higher ups in his department and laughing as though he didn’t have a care in the world. This was his element, in a way that it wasn’t for Yang.
There were plenty of people who wanted to talk to Yang, and they all wandered up to him at one point or another. There wasn’t anywhere he could hide at this party, aside from the bathroom, and he could only let himself go there every so often, or Cazerne would scold him. So he was lingering at the side of the room, near the windows and decorative ferns, trying to look out at the city lights. A dense springtime fog had rolled in over Heinessenpolis, and only the faintest gleam of neon signs could be seen, cutting through the mist with their captive St. Elmo’s fire. The well lit party, on the upper floor of some hotel, felt like a ship floating on a dark sea. It was a moment of respite, or at least it was until a woman began making a beeline for him from across the room.
Yang didn’t notice her approach until it was far too late for him to get out of her way, and she planted herself in front of him, a charming but predatory smile on her face. That was the first thing he noticed.The second thing was that she was tiny, not even five feet tall, but that didn’t make him any less nervous. She wasn’t in uniform, and was instead wearing a blue dress: cute, but not overly flashy. She had red hair cut quite close to her head, showing off large gold earrings.
“And you must be Lieutenant Commander Yang Wenli,” she said.
Yang scratched the back of his head, which caused his white beret to slide out of position. “I am,” he said. “Nice to meet you…?”
“McCall,” she said, and stuck out her hand. “Patricia McCall. I write for Pretty Woman Magazine. I’m so lucky to find you here— I’ve been told you’ve been dodging our calls!”
Yang had no choice but to shake her hand. Her grip was shockingly firm, but she let go of his hand quickly, still smiling.
“Er, sorry,” Yang said. “I don’t really…” He trailed off into mumbles. “My schedule is very full.”
“I can see that,” she said. “You’ve been photographed in thirty different places this week. Of course, I would have loved to get in on the ground, but I understand that wherever the fleet sends you takes precedence.”
“Are you, er, here to interview me?”
She laughed, a charming, bright sound. “Would you be so kind?”
“Not right now. Sorry.” He hoped that his refusal would make her give up and go away, but she continued to smile.
“Alright, I’ll call your house again and you can keep ignoring me.” She didn’t seem particularly put out.
“I didn’t realize that a magazine like yours would have any representatives at a retirement party,” Yang said, struggling to find something to say to her.
“Oh! Well I’m not here on business.” She laughed. “It would have been nice if I could have sat down with you, but it wasn’t my reason for coming.” She pointed across the room at a tall man— his rank was indistinguishable at this distance, but he was speaking to Admiral Sitolet, so he wasn’t nobody. “My husband was on the invite list.”
“Ah,” Yang said. He had now completely run out of things to say. That didn’t matter, though, because Patricia seemed completely happy to fill any silences.
“You know, Pretty Woman is thinking of doing a regular column on you, Lieutenant Commander. Not weekly, but monthly?”
“What? Why?”
“Why would we do that when you won’t interview with us?” She laughed again. “I think we could spin that. There’s allure to someone who won’t talk to the media.”
“I’m not alluring,” Yang protested. He thought the edge of panic was creeping into his voice. She noticed it, and closed in like a circling vulture.
“You are! I mean, you’re the Hero of El Facil. Not everybody gets a name like that one. Like Lawrence of Arabia— there’s mystique to it. And it’s catchy.”
“It’s just a thing people say,” Yang said. He looked out the window uncomfortably. If anything, the fog was getting thicker. Even looking away from Patricia, he couldn’t escape her— he could see both of their reflections warped in the glass. He tried to smooth out his expression, a check and double check that he wasn’t holding strange looking tension in his forehead.
“The fact that people are saying it makes it interesting to us in the magazine business, Mr. Yang.”
“Yeah…”
“You seem to be an intelligent man,” she said. “I can understand why you’d be uncomfortable with being profiled.”
“Flattering me isn’t going to get me to pose for photos for you.”
Her teeth peeked out from her lips. “I think I’ve had to accept that you’re not going to come by for a studio interview. We’ll have to make do in some other way.”
“Why me?” He knew he sounded a little pathetic, but it slipped out. She seemed to find it amusing, if not endearing.
“Are you asking to learn the secrets of my trade, Mr. Yang?”
He opened his mouth to say something, but she laid her hand on his arm.
“Oh, I’ll tell you,” she said. “It’s not really a secret, but it’s not something we’d print in the magazine itself.” She laughed. “You know, we get financial support from the fleet— not enough to keep our rag afloat if we don’t have a readership, but enough that they can make asks of us.”
“And they’ve asked you to write about me?”
“Mmm, not in particular. But we have to devote page space to the fleet somehow, and we like doing it in a way that will sell copies on its own merit, and not detract from the rest of the issue. You, my friend, fit our bill perfectly.”
Yang looked down at his feet. “I’m not exactly ‘Twenty Hottest Young Officers’ article material.”
“You’re cute. Don’t sell yourself short.” When she laughed, her tongue stuck out a little past her lips, held in place with her top teeth. “But you’re also not wrong.”
“Then why…”
She looked him up and down. “I’m sure that the fleet PR people would prefer we could treat you like some kind of everyman hero. You fit that description pretty well— that’s the kind of cute you have. Next door neighbor-like. But I think… there’s only so far that can carry a paper. An element of mystery— now, that sells. And getting a glimpse into the life of Heinessen’s most elusive hero…”
“Why are you telling me all this?”
She looked at him carefully. “I feel a little bad for you.” But she didn’t sound it.
“Oh.”
“Some people are born famous, and some people achieve fame that they’ve been looking for. They’re all prepared for what it entails.”
“But I’ve had greatness thrust upon me,” he said, completing the quotation.
“Exactly. It’s a hard thing, thrust upon you.”
Belatedly, he realized that she was making a dirty joke, and she was waiting with an expectant smile to see if he would react. If he were better at this, he would have made a comment about her doing the thrusting. But instead, he said, “I would prefer, uh, not that.”
She winked. “Perfect, Mr. Yang. I’m happy to keep that kind of scandal out of the papers.”
He was completely lost as to how to respond to that, and his expression must have reflected his incapacity. She laughed and touched his arm again.
“Of course, scandals sell papers, so it would be exciting for me . But it would be bad for our relationship with the fleet, unless you also are on the outs with them, and they need to make people hate you, so that they can discharge you without public outcry. It’s a fine line. You’d better be careful.”
“I don’t intend to cause a scandal,” Yang said.
“That’s the thing: almost no one ever does. But I’ll stop pestering you. It was good to meet you in the flesh, Mr. Yang.”
“Er, yeah.”
“I’m sure I’ll see you around, even if you don’t see me.”
And then she went flitting off through the party, leaving Yang by himself. He got a glass of wine from one of the waiters coming around with refreshments, and returned to his contemplation of the window.
“You must have really fumbled that one,” Cazerne said, coming up to him.
“Hunh?” Yang asked, turning on his heel to face him.
“You know who that was, right?”
“A magazine writer,” Yang muttered. “I’m not going to do interviews unless they make me.”
“I sincerely hope you change your mind,” Cazerne said.
“I don’t want to be an exhibit,” Yang grumbled, and took a sip of his wine. “ You can’t order me.”
“I told Mrs. McCall that you would be happy to give an interview, if she asked you in person.”
“And why would you tell her that?”
“Have you ever once looked at a copy of Pretty Woman Magazine ?”
“I didn’t realize you were an avid tabloid reader.”
“Hortense buys them for the recipes.”
Yang made an amused noise. “And people buy Girls, Girls, Girls! for the articles.”
“You could interview with them, if you wanted. The only interview article that people would be guaranteed not to read.” Cazerne chuckled.
“What’s your point?” Yang asked. “As I said, I’m not going to speak to every reporter who wants a piece of me.”
“ Pretty Woman is infamously invasive. If you give them enough information from the beginning that they get bored of you, they might not pry into your life too much.”
“I don’t have a life to pry into. You know that.”
“Maybe that’s part of your problem,” Cazerne said. “Why don’t you socialize? Make some friends?”
“Are you not a good enough friend for me?”
“I’m the best friend you’ll ever have, since I want to help you make your life better. What I mean is that you should find a woman to talk to.”
“Mrs. McCall is married. And so are all the women at this party.”
“Not all,” Cazerne said. “I could introduce you to a few of the women in my department.”
“No, thanks,” Yang said.
“I didn’t realize you had taken an oath of perpetual celibacy.”
“I don’t want to meet anyone who cares about me because I’m famous now. I don’t want— augh.” He rubbed the back of his head. “That’s all anyone you could introduce me to would want from me— to be the Hero of El Facil.”
“That’s lucky. That means you don’t have to do any real work, since you’ll always have that going for you already, unlike the rest of us,” Cazerne said with a smile.
“You know what I mean.”
“Is there anyone you’d want to talk to at a party, then?”
“Aside from you?”
Cazerne made a face at him. It was unfortunate that the answer to his question was yes. There was a woman who Yang would very much enjoy talking to at a party.
“No,” Yang said. “Not really. I want to go home, honestly.”
Cazerne sighed and checked his watch. “Forty minutes,” he said. “Then I’ll take you home, old man.”
“Thank you.”
“But in the mean time, let me introduce you to people.”
Yang grimaced.
“That’s the spirit,” Cazerne said.
Cazerne’s promised forty minutes stretched to an hour as he dragged Yang around the party. Yang’s desire to escape turned from shuffling on his feet to answering only in monosyllables when asked questions. He wanted to be drunk, but the waiters with drinks on trays were very careful to only come around every so often— this party was meant to be a subdued event, and so the alcohol was limited. Yang might have been able to get more if he had left Cazerne’s side, but Cazerne kept him pinned down in whatever conversation he had invited him to, and Yang was forced to fiddle with the empty wine glass in his hand and wish he was somewhere else.
Finally, at long last, the first guests at the party began to make their excuses and trickle out— mostly the oldest of the officers— which gave Yang license to leave. As long as he wasn’t first out, it wouldn’t be rude.
“Did you enjoy the party?” Cazerne asked as he escorted Yang to the elevator. The doors swished shut behind them, and they listened to the tinkling music as they descended the thirty-three floors to the ground.
“It was fine,” Yang said. He checked the time. “Want to go to a bar?”
“No,” Cazerne said. “I’m taking you home. I thought that was where you wanted to go.”
For some reason, suddenly the prospect of going home to his empty house disturbed Yang, and he wanted to stay with Cazerne’s friendly company— the only company he could stand— for as long as possible. The idea of going home, and then not being able to sleep, made the rest of the evening stretch long and dire before him.
The elevator dinged and the doors opened at the ground floor. The lobby was gold and sparkling, and nearly empty, since the hour was late. There was the hotel concierge at the reception desk, and the doormen standing in the haze outside. And one woman in business clothes, lounging on one of the lobby chairs. When the door of the elevator opened, she looked over with an expression that changed from bored to excited, and she stood up immediately.
“Oop,” Cazerne said, a sudden tiredness in his voice as he shoved Yang’s shoulder to get him to shuffle out of the elevator. “Let’s go.”
And then Yang noticed the heavy camera that the woman was hoisting, and the clicking of her photographing him. Yang had no idea what expression he was wearing, but he was sure it couldn’t be good. Cazerne hustled him through the glittering lobby, their steps sounding loudly as they crossed the marble floor.
They were lucky that Cazerne had street parked his car a few blocks away, and so they didn’t have to wait for the valet to retrieve it from the below-street garage. They instead half-jogged down the road, escaping the camera and vanishing into the fog.
The mist wrapped around Yang like a blanket, softening the world into a comforting dimness. Cazerne steered him with his hand on his elbow, afraid Yang would wander away and be lost in the gloom. Perhaps he would be: Yang wanted to keep walking, to admire the strange softened glow of the city lights, and the still quiet carried by the fog. But instead of doing that, Cazerne loaded him into his car in the most perfunctory manner, and Yang rested his forehead against the cool glass of the window as he drove him home.
Cazerne listened to talk radio on the drive, which spared Yang from needing to get in a single word edgewise.
Yang’s house on Silverbridge street was long and squat looking, though it actually had two floors, being split level. Its modernist construction did its best to disguise how cheap it was as a building— even though this was more senior officer housing, all of the houses on this street had been erected as quickly as possible, and at as cheap of a cost as the fleet could manage. The flowers in the landscaping outside, which had been planted by a previous resident, were beginning to bloom, though their colors were muted in the near-darkness. As Cazerne parked in the driveway and waited for Yang to get out, Yang didn’t move.
“You alive?” Cazerne asked.
“Hm? Oh. Yeah.” Yang shook himself, but made no move to exit the car. “Want to have a drink with me?”
Cazerne, who hadn’t taken his hands off the steering wheel, glanced over at Yang. “I have someone at home waiting for me, you know. We could have stayed at the party longer if you wanted to keep socializing.”
“Just one drink,” Yang said. Cazerne could hear the desperation in his voice.
“Alright. Just one.” He turned off the car, flooding the space between them with sudden silence from the radio and engine. They trooped up to Yang’s door.
He never bothered to lock his house, so he didn’t need to find his keys, and he let them both in. Yang kicked off his shoes at the door and headed directly for the kitchen, where he retrieved the bottle of rum, and sodas from the nearly empty fridge. His set of tumblers, a housewarming gift from Dusty, were the only clean dishes he had, and so he poured them both drinks and returned to the living room.
Cazerne was standing in the center of the nearly empty room, looking around without any expression on his face. Yang handed him his drink.
“Do you have a place to sit?” Cazerne asked.
“Oh. You can have the beanbag,” Yang said, and pointed to the area of the room near the window, where between boxes which contained Yang’s still-packed belongings, there was a messy pile of blankets atop a beanbag chair: the one piece of furniture from Yang’s old apartment that had been his, and had come with him when he moved. It was a juvenile object, but it was comfortable, and surrounded by books, which meant it suited Yang fine.
Cazerne took one look at it, and then his eyes glanced over the dirty dishes and empty takeout containers on the floor nearby and said, “Nevermind. I’ll stand.”
“My old place came furnished courtesy of the government,” Yang said. “I haven’t had a chance to get furniture yet.”
“Are you planning to?”
“Yeah, I guess. I’ve been busy.” It was a lousy excuse, and they both knew it. Seeing his home through Cazerne’s eyes made Yang ashamed of letting him in the house, though he had been the one to invite him, and he hadn’t considered that he should be ashamed of it until this second.
Cazerne sipped his rum and soda. “You can’t live like this, Yang.”
“Okay.”
“Okay? Do you have a plan to fix it?”
“I— no. I’ll figure it out.”
Cazerne sighed. “If you need help—”
“I’ll figure it out. You don’t have to worry.”
“Worry? It’s only at the level of concern.”
“How long will it take for you to escalate it up the chain?”
That did make Cazerne laugh. “I didn’t realize you had suddenly gotten good at working to a timetable.”
“If I have a deadline, I can procrastinate to it.”
Cazerne finished his drink. He had downed it quickly, presumably because he didn’t want to linger in Yang’s house. “You shouldn’t want to fix this because I’m telling you to,” he said. “Though if you can’t find a better reason, then it’ll have to do.”
“What other reason is there?”
“You can’t possibly enjoy living like this.”
Yang shrugged. “It’s fine.”
The pitying expression that Cazerne looked at him with made Yang want to squirm out of the way. He raised his own glass and drank, instead.
“I hope you find a reason to want to improve your life,” Cazerne said. “But if you want Hortense to pick out furniture for you, I can ask her to do that.”
“Eh,” Yang said. “Don’t worry about it.”
“It’s my job.”
“No, it really isn’t.”
“Then call it a compulsion of mine. If I see a problem, I have an itch to fix it,” Cazerne said. He looked at his empty glass. “Where do you want the dishes?”
“Oh, er, you can put it in the sink,” Yang said, and gestured vaguely at the kitchen.
Cazerne went to put his cup away. From the other room, Yang heard Cazerne’s sharp intake of breath and a wholly un-minced oath as he saw the state of Yang’s sink.
