Your throat loosens. You cough, to prove it. You say, "Ug." It feels good to make that sound. Thoreau waits patiently. It'll take one hell of an argument to convince him of anything, you think. You've been in situations like this, where people say, Convince me, and in none of those situations have they actually wanted to be convinced. You could lay down a perfect argument and they would just invent new bullshit on the spot to justify why the answer was still no. When people say, Convince me, you know it doesn't mean they have an open mind. It means they have power and want to enjoy it a minute. You don't know if that's true of Thoreau. But you feel like it's going to be difficult to talk your way out of this.

"Eliot and Jane didn't see me coming," you begin. "Despite them supposedly being able to tell my set, they still couldn't predict me. I think that means I'm better than anyone else here, and I think you know that. And sure, that means I could be a threat. I could tell you I'm not, but we both know I'm probably that good. But I think you know I'm no threat to you. You clearly have some control over me here, so I'm a threat that can be mitigated. And besides, wouldn't having a potential threat within the system be better than having one outside? The devil you know, right?"

Thoreau continues looking at you. If anything you've said so far has made an impact, you certainly can't tell. His eyes still scare you, but you press on.

"The organization shouldn't just be made up of 13's or 42's or other sheep sets. Maybe the public school system is just an assembly line for functioning adults, but if you're limiting the organization to specific sets of people willing to do whatever you say, then how are you any better? Just because I don't fit your prescribed mold doesn't make me a factory reject. It makes me superior. And you know that, don't you?"

"Enough."

Your mouth closes.

Thoreau looks at you awhile. You can't read him. You don't know whether you've lived or died.

"I have a name for you," he says, "when the time is right." He walks away. You hear him reach the door but can't turn your head. "You may move, in a while."

Some time passes. A bird lands near the golf clubs and begins to hop hopefully around the little green mat. You breathe. Your chest loosens one muscle at a time. That's how you get yourself back. Filament by filament. You've survived, somehow. You're still here.

~

You're collected by a woman you've seen once before, stepping out of a black town car alongside Thoreau that time he visited the school. She doesn't introduce yourself but you already know her name is Plath. You'd asked. Plath is all cheekbones and elbows and gives you the feeling that she would push you in front of a train for a nickel. She has cruel shoes and a phone and looks at you in a way that reminds you of being stepped over on a San Francisco sidewalk on a bad day. "Can you move?" she says.

"Yes."

Plath beckons. You follow. There are stairs and they you're in a parking garage. A car you know well is there and your heart leaps. It's the first moment you truly believe you're getting out of here. You look at Plath and Plath says nothing so you walk to the car. Its engine turns over. You open the passenger door and inside is Eliot. "Hi," you say. You want to kiss him.

Eliot doesn't speak. But he looks at you and you know you're safe. He's still angry with you, of course. But he's not dangerous. You can relax in a car with Eliot. When the car exits the garage into bright sunshine, you close your eyes. Somewhere in the snarl of streets, you fall asleep.

~

You open your eyes and are somewhere else. "Where are we?" You see a road sign. "Are we going to the airport?" Eliot flicks on the turn signal. The car drifts toward a lane marked DEPARTURES. "Hey," you say. "Eliot. Thoreau said I could still be a poet. He tested me and I passed. I don't have to go away." It's like talking to a wall. "Eliot, I can go back to the school."

He pulls alongside the curb and takes something from the seat pocket. "This is your passport. This is your confirmation number." A blue booklet with a white business card tucked inside. The card has a string of letters and number in blue ink above TOM ELIOT, RESEARCH ANALYST. "Use the machines inside to check in."

"Talk to Thoreau. Eliot. Call Thoreau. He'll tell you."

"These are his instructions."

You stare. "But I passed."

"It's temporary," Eliot says. "You can come home in a few years."

"Years?" you say. "Years?"

"Please appreciate that this is the best possible outcome."

"No. Eliot. Please." He won't look at you, so you put your hand on his arm. He doesn't say anything. He doesn't move. Eventually, you understand that this is final. "Well," you say. "Bye, then."

"Your bag is in the trunk."

"Thanks." You open the door. It's difficult, as if everything's gotten heavy. Your hands are numb. You drag yourself from the car.

Eliot says, "If you work hard, and discipline yourself, you can conceivably return in-" You shut the door on the rest.

~

First the red-eye from DC to Los Angeles: six hours. You land at dawn and spend half a day moving the two hundred yards from Domestic Arrivals to International Departures. You hadn't slept in the air so you curl up in a seat, but there are families and kids vibrating at high frequency and men with booming laughs. A younger couple discusses in-flight movies in a flat, broad accent. You're going to Australia. Your boarding passes tell you so. "We should get Lord of the Rings," says the man. Lawwwd, you think. Lawwwd of the Reeengs. They sent convicts to Australia, right? It had been a penal colony. A place of banishment.

The desk calls for first- and business-class passengers and you trudge to the gate. When you surrender your boarding pass, though, the woman smiles and hands it back to you. "We'll be boarding economy in a few moments." You look at her dumbly. You'd just assumed. You walk back to the seats.

"Nice try," says the man beside her, the one hoping for Lord of the Rings. He's friendly, and you smile back, and it's the most fake thing you've ever done.

~

You sleep fitfully, disturbed by rattling food trolleys and people squeezing by your seat. The flight time according to your screen is fourteen hours, which you think has to be wrong, like maybe that's including the time difference. You don't know enough to sleep properly.

Somewhere over the Pacific, a flight attendant bends to your ear. "Excuse me. This is for you." You, tangled in dreams of golf and Thoreau, stare at the woman without comprehension. It's nighttime; the only light comes from the screens in the backs of people's seats and the little yellow glow lights embedded in the aisles. The woman hands you a folded piece of paper. It's an odd texture, thick, stamped with an aviation authority logo.

"Thank you," you say. The attendant leaves and you unfold the paper.

ELISE YOU ARE TO LIVE IN BROKEN HILL
AUSTRALIA THIS IS TO BE YOUR HOME
UNTIL YOU ARE CALLED FOR NO
PREPARATIONS HAVE BEEN MADE YOU
ARE TO USE YOUR OWN RESOURCES
YOU CAN DO THIS
ELIOT

You put the paper away and pull your knees to your chest and silently cry into them. If you were at the school, you wouldn't have been able to do this. You would have had to control yourself. But here you indulge. You let yourself sob. After this, things are going to be difficult, and you'll have to concentrate, so it's probably your last opportunity.

~

You grow hypnotized by the in-flight map. The red line begins in Lost Angeles, curves across the ocean, and terminates at a cartoon plane that never seems to move. The screen occasionally switches to statistics, like how fast you're moving and how cold it is outside, and these are fascinating because the numbers seem made up. It doesn't seem possible for the cartoon plane that doesn't move to be traveling at 580 miles per hour. But it is. The flight is fourteen hours.

Your first problem, you realize, is that you're landing in Sydney with no return ticket, no luggage, wearing a school uniform. You don't know what the Australian immigration service is like, but it seems probable that you will raise a few flags. You'll look exactly like an overprivileged white girl disappearing in a cloud of petulance on Daddy's credit card, and they will ask you why you're here and where you're staying and when you're leaving. If they don't like your answers, they'll turn you around and put you on a plane back home. Which, of course, superficially sounds like a great idea, except for the part where you fail to LIVE IN BROKEN HILL and USE YOUR OWN RESOURCES. Eliot told you, Please appreciate that this is the best possible outcome, and you've come to believe that. You need to get through Immigration.

What do you do?

You chat a few people up over the course of the rest of the trip. While you don't know any command words, you do know a great many attention words, which, combined with your natural sleight-of-hand talents, enable you to misdirect enough to procure a few items. A purse, a wallet, a digital camera, and a long coat, which conceals your school uniform.

(04-24-2015, 05:45 PM)Sai Wrote: »Visiting for a funeral would explain why you had to arrive on such short notice. If you claim to have relatives that are picking you up outside of the airport, you can even justifiably not know the exact address of where you're staying. Furthermore, you will have at least a few months before your stay becomes questionable and you need to respond to inquiries about why you haven't left the country. By then, you'll be a bit more established and can decide if it's worth remaining as Emily and coming up with an excuse for your extended stay or finding another way home.

(04-24-2015, 07:09 PM)Mirdini Wrote: »Your lack of carry-on luggage, clothes and cash (who even prints their return ticket in advance anymore?) can be explained away by someone having stolen your baggage back in Los((t)) Angeles, but you having to catch this flight to make it to the funeral.

Good thing you had your passport along with your ticket in your pocket! And your relatives (or the driver sent by your relatives? You're not sure.) are waiting outside so you'll be able to figure things out after you head home with them.

(04-24-2015, 07:10 PM)Sai Wrote: »Edit: The fact that we were sobbing on the plane is an asset for this story. See if we can keep our eyes red and puffy. Make sure that others that were near us on the plane are also nearby when we go through immigration, though odds are that this will be the case naturally.

As the plane begins its descent, you go to the bathroom and work on looking upset. You rub some soap in your eyes; it stings, but the effect on your face is quite convincing. You look as upset as you feel now.

You leave the plane with those around you who might have seen you crying, and follow the crowd briskly towards Customs, your new coat flapping around your ankles. The lines are short, not at all like in Los Angeles, and you're able to take your pick of Immigration officials. His name is Mark, and he's a 114 or 118, good-natured and reasonably intelligent, but resigned in his job, which he considers important but dull. This you can tell right away. No glasses, no beard, a simple hair-style but not a severe one, so no overt arrogance or vanity. No cross or religious markings. Wedding ring. 110 through 120 usually have an increased emphasis on the importance of family, so you can lean on that.

"Hi," you say. "Just straight up, I don't have a return ticket. I'm sorry, I know that means you have to give me the third degree. I'm here for a funeral. Unexpected." You let a tremor creep into your voice.

Two hours later, they release you from the interview room. They'd asked a lot of questions, but you never felt in real danger, not from the moment Mark's face relaxed into your opening statement. You'd lied a great deal, inventing a doting aunt on your mother's side that had provided so much for you over the years. She was always there for you to talk to, when you felt like nobody else would listen. When she passed so suddenly, you dropped everything and booked the first flight you could (You understand that, right, Mark? The importance of family?) You were charming and forthright and understood more about how the brain reaches decisions than those guys did about anything, so that was that.

You're through Immigration. Now what?

Fortunately, you find enough cash in the purse to prevent you from using any credit cards for now. Australian dollars are hilarious, you discover: bright and shiny, like money for children. You like them a lot. A quick check at an internet kiosk reveals that the nearest city to Broken Hill is Adelaide, and no flights are available until tomorrow.

You exit the airport. The sun is brighter. The air smells salty and feels wider, somehow. You wander for a few hours, and eventually find a seedy motel. You spend time inspecting the premises, and find no security cameras. You check in using cash.

You get to your room and start getting organized. Your stolen cards are too dangerous to use; you're not going to reach Adelaide on those. You pick up the phone and dial the front desk. "I want to play poker," you say. "Something informal."

Eventually, the guy stops recommending casinos and steers you toward an upper room of a nearby bar. It turns out to be middle-aged men in expensive suits, friendly and patronizing while you lose the first two hundred dollars, smiling over their single-malt whiskeys and advancing theories about creative ways to cover your losses. By then you have a queen under your left thigh and a king and an eight under your right. It's been three years since you've done this kind of thing, and a more attentive audience would have caught you. At one point, you try to feed a jack into your sleeve and miss so badly that the card lands on the table. You tense to run, but they only laugh and one man says, "That's enough grog for you." The man has red cheeks and is divorced, although he doesn't know it yet. "Sorry," you say, and put the card back in your hand.

You take him for twenty-eight hundred in the final round, going all in. His face turns incredibly red, like a balloon. No one is smiling now. The game's operator appraoches the table, but you don't need to be told; you gather your winnings, thank them, and when you reach the street, run as fast as you can back to your motel. Now you have your Adelaide money.

~

From Adelaide it's a bus ride, the world outside draining green until it's the color of snakeskin. The air-conditioning barely works and you keep being woken bu little trickles of sweat. There's only one other passenger, a woman with skin like coral who nods off before you're even out of the city and sleeps like she's dead. You wriggle around in your seat, seeking escape from your own body heat.

Eventually you open an eye to a passing sign: BROKEN HILL, POP. 10,100. One corner is missing and the rest is peppered with gunshot. It flares in the afternoon sun, leaning drunkenly out of the baked red earth. You sit up and see a gas station, abandoned, and a tin structure with no windows that is you don't know what, also abandoned. A flat, sagging house with a dirt yard full of disemboweled cars. You glimpse a tall iron structure, vaguely Soviet, but it's on the other side of the bus and you can't see it properly. A thin dog scratches in the dirt. Another low store, this one advertising CHEAP PARTS, although for what you don't know. The windows of the stores on either side are blank. Everything is widely spaced, the center of its own little wasteland, and why not, because, you're quickly realizing, that's all there is out here: land, land, and land. You pass signs that say SULPHIDE ST and CHLORIDE ST, because they'd named their streets after minerals, apparently, and the bus turns onto OXIDE ST and begins to slow. You see a sign that says CITY CENTER and think, You've got to be kidding me. When you step off it's into burning air, the heat crawling into your nostrils and down your throat, and they haven't updated that population sign in a long time, like maybe twenty years, because there might be ten thousand flies here but not people. Definitely not people. You're standing at a crossroads; the streets are single lanes in each direction but still as wide as highways. There are a handful of buildings like they've fallen from above. The sky feels oppressively low, as if it's pressing down, combining with the blasted earth below to crush this town to nothing, and it makes you feel as if you're expanding, like your insides want to crawl out of your body like supposedly happens in space, where there's nothing to hold you in. "Home," you say. It's supposed to be funny, but you feel like crying until you die.

~

The waitress brings food and coffee and instructs you to enjoy. You watch Eliot spread a napkin across his lap, pick up his cutlery, and begin to dissect his eggs. He pops bacon into his mouth and chews.

"Go on," Eliot says through bacon. "Eat."

You pick up your knife and begin to push food around. It's beyond you how Eliot can shoot people dead and fly all night and then tuck into a hearty breakfast. It's wrong. Because Eliot knew those people he shot at the ranch, including a woman he shot dead, Jane Austen, and you shouldn't have an appetite after something like that. It suggests to you that Eliot really is psychopathic - not the crazy, voices-told-me-to-kill way, but actually, medically psychopathic, in the sense of lacking the ability to feel anything. But even this bothers you less than the way in which Eliot is eating, which is with quick, purposeful movements, his eyes sectioning up the plate for maximum efficiency. This is wrong because Eliot hasn't slept since you've met him. He should be exhausted.

"This is even better than I expected," Eliot says. He points at your plate with his knife. "You need to eat."

You eat without enthusiasm. Your bacon tastes like nothing. Like a dead animal, fried. Your eggs, aborted chickens.

"I'll say this for the Midwest," Eliot says. "They know how to do a breakfast."

You poke a bacon strip with your fork. In its rufescent flesh you see the man you shot on the overturned pickup. The way he folded up. You put down your cutlery.

"Are you all right?" No concern in Eliot's voice of course. It's just a question. An inquiry after facts. You rise and totter to the rear of the diner. You find a single, dirty toilet, lower yourself to your knees, and vomit. When you're done, you sit back against the wall, eyes closed, sweat popping all over your body. You decide to stay here awhile. You're safe in a bathroom. It's a four-by-six cubicle of sanctuary, for as long as you want.

When you can no longer believe this, you wash and reenter the diner. A man in a trucker cap with hollow cheeks and serial killer glasses eyes you over hash browns. You can read his face clearly: he thinks you were doing drugs. The waitress is sneaking looks at you, too. And there's a red-cheeked man wedged into a booth seat, who is watching a burbling TV bolted into the ceiling corner but wasn't a moment ago. You feel an urge to explain yourself. It's not what you think. I've just had a really rough day.. But that would be crazy. You'll convince no one.

You shuffle back to the booth. Eliot has finished his own breakfast and switched plates with you. "Hey," he says. "Order more. I'm paying."

"Are you?

"Well, no," says Eliot. "But you know what I mean."

You sit.

"You could use the protein," says Eliot, chewing.

"What's your plan?"

"Hmm?"

"These people, they're going to find us again, aren't they? They're looking for us right now."

"No doubt."

"So we need a plan."

Eliot nods. "True."

"Do you have one?"

"No."

"You don't?"

"I have a short-term plan," Eliot says. "I plan to finish your eggs." You say nothing. "Food is important. I'm serious about the protein."

"Do you have a plan or not?"

"No."

"Shouldn't you, I don't know, be concerned about that?"

"I am concerned about that."

"You don't look concerned."

"Would it make you feel better if I were sweating? Running to the bathroom to blow my cookies? It shouldn't. A panic state is not helpful to good decision making."

"It would make me feel better if we were moving," you say. "Like if you got your eggs to go."

"Well, I like to know where I'm going before I try to get there. It's a mistake to try to execute a plan before you've thought of one, in my experience."

You exhale. This is going nowhere. Do you have any ideas?