Burn Zone
Fiction: The first chapter of the new novella from Cairo Smith.
This is the first chapter of the novella Burn Zone by Cairo Smith, available now in digital and paperback editions.
Burn Zone follows a White House staffer detained by an international coalition for his actions during a failed American war.
It is a closed-court ensemble tribunal thriller rendered in modernist fragmentary style.
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ONE
NOW
They’re playing that cartoon again.
Carter Clemens is on the floor, staring up at the old flatscreen on the wall of the cell. The concrete is his seat and the sticky white-painted brick is his backrest. He is soiled, disheveled. They haven’t let him bathe in three days. He stinks in the same blend tee and jeans he was wearing when they picked him up at home, when he went quiet so Sara and the boys wouldn’t cry.
At least they gave him a bucket to shit in. Even if they don’t take off the handcuffs.
He looks familiar. He has one of those faces, born after the towers fell, now a man in full. Plain brown brows on an Iliadic head. A man cut for television, for an easy life, if there were any easy lives left to lead. Three days of dark beard shade cheeks and jaw without a smile.
There are words on the wall below the TV. Minutemen Class of 2031. Paul Revere High School. We love you, Mr. Jefferson. Best custodian ever.
These are words for a janitorial closet, not a cell. A cell would have a toilet and a sink.
At least you don’t shit much when you don’t eat.
Carter shifts. His wrists are red, abraded. Pinned behind his back. His shoulders are giving out from three days contorted. Years of reconstruction rations do not leave a body strong.
Minutemen. Paul Revere. This must be near Boston, all the way back East, a five-hour headbagged flight from John Wayne with a Coalition muzzle jabbing his cheek through the cloth the whole time.
Boston. How pointed.
He wonders if the dust on the sticky walls is shortening his life, the microparticulates of his hand circling around in a cosmic turn, people and donut shops and the Mayflower eternitized, now unraveling his ribosomes. What better physicalization of a haunting could man make than radioactive corpse dust?
He wonders if he’s imagining it all.
He wonders if he has enough life ahead for the microdeath on a closet wall to matter.
A headsman would be clean, but you can still see after, still feel, teeth grinding, face a grimace, no air to scream. Von Leveling proved that in The Terror, poking heads in baskets.
Lethal injection’s too slow.
Nitrogen inhalation’s the best, Carter reasons, eyes ahead, blinking, trying to become unaware of the body, the indignity.
Coalition tribunals don’t go for gas, though.
They go for firing squads.
Carter puts firing squads somewhere in the middle for pain.
They’re playing that cartoon again.
The video starts again on its loop. The color is bleeding in the bottom row of the pixels. The whole thing looks like a show for children, choppy and stiff, speaker warbling with corporate stock sound, palette ten years out of date and expressions uncanny by domestic sensibilities.
Domestic sensibilities are what dragged us to hell in the first place. So thinks the prisoner.
He doesn’t see himself a prisoner. He sees himself purgatorian. Dead already, on the advice of the Meditations. The thought was supposed to bring comfort, bring calm. But dead men don’t need to piss or drink water or stop skin from sloughing off on dew-damped cuffs.
The narrator speaks. They got an American for this. A Don LaFontaine of a Tokyo Rose.
“The national emergency has come to an end.”
A globe. Spinning. Bad animation.
The screen settles on the US of A.
“The War of American Aggression is over, and peace-loving leadership is back in control of the White House.”
More cartoon. Carter stares like he hasn’t watched it a thousand times over. They show Avett in the Oval, bearded like he was in the final six months. He growls as Coalition troopers in manta-blac bag him and toss him in ADX Adirondacks. Blond bulldog. Rabid. No mention of the bullets and two knee-shatters he took beneath the portrait of Washington, flare-blinded for good.
A brown-haired woman with veneers and an Old Glory pin swaps in for Avett at the Resolute Desk. Seamless, like changing to a new cassette. It’s supposed to be Saunlin, but they didn’t get her eyes and cheeks right.
It’s shoddy work, Carter tells himself. Slapdash, visionless. Even in cuffs he finds respite in appraising, in dismissing the slop of his Coalition comms monkey counterparts.
At least Avett propaganda had some shred of aesthetic commitment.
Four pulsing arrows arrive on the American coasts, hot cerulean, merging into the Coalition rounder as they fill the body and guts of the fat cow belly of the heart of the nation. All Columbia goes blue. War over. Old Glory becomes the veneer like Saunlin’s veneers. CHICOMs, Euros, Norks, and Ivan fill in underneath.
What do you have beneath fake teeth when the glue rots?
Stumps.
Carter’s stomach writhes with the pain of emptiness. The narrator goes on.
“Coalition forces are here to help rebuild the country and restore our values.”
Chibi COFOR troops fix up storefronts, plant flowers, teach little kids. You can’t tell in mute cartoon who’s domestic American COFOR, recruited post-surrender, and who’s part of the international occupation. That’s the point of the navy COFOR jumpsuit. Sexless. Nationless. A higher order.
That’s what Brunn said.
He called it great evil.
Carter believed him.
Thus the cuffs.
“Every day, radiation is being swept away, and fresh food is coming by the ton from your friends overseas.”
Apples. Plums. Christmas.
A man in a rattlesnake ballcap lurks, vicious, armed. The shadow of Avettism. The insurgent.
Watch out, American children! Watch out!
KAPOW!
The COFORs nab him and his Armalite in a puff of action. Schoolmistress wags a finger, stern. No blood is sprayed across cartoon pastoralia.
“Remember, anti-Coalitionism is anti-Americanism, so make sure to report any weird talk and or dangerous stuff to your local rehabilitation office.”
Carter shuts his eyes. The wrist pain sharpens. The cartoon is not meant for him, not as warning, not as guide. The cartoon is for the hungry American children of a hundred thousand classrooms returning to school for the first time since Temporary Measures.
It’s a taunt, he tells himself, to play schoolroom propaganda for adults in tribunal detention.
“We have your children.”
He wonders what they’ve told his boys and he sobs and the dust burns his eyes.
He cannot reach his face to dry the tears.
The guards are here. They look well fed. Two deadbolts roll over and the closet-cell door swings open with a suck of cool air.
There are only two guards that Carter ever sees. Both domestic. Always together. The corporal is always first to come in, thin wheatgold hair and a slawed white Texas face. Even through her shapeless COFOR fatigues he can tell she’s a woman. There was a time when that might have meant something to him. He can’t remember it now.
The second, the lowly, is an overtall squirrel of a young man. His voice is drab, base Western American, that underenunciated talking-head drivel that pours from every suburbanite past the mid-Rockies.
It’s Carter’s voice, too. The voice of his loved ones. Proud of nothing. Tethered despite its best tries to a back-East government of madness, and now of ruin.
A voice resigned.
At least Texas still has some grit.
“Get up.” The Texan speaks. “You smell like shit.”
“I know.”
Forgive me. Even though you did this. Forgive my state.
“Keep still. Face the wall.”
Carter stands and does as asked. The COFOR Texan takes the cuffs and all the wrist skin that’s scraped across their edges.
She’s not acting scared, not in her movements, even though she has to pretend he’s dangerous. Tribunal protocol.
She must know he has too much to lose.
“Strip, Clemens. Laskey, keep your weapon on him.”
Laskey. The squirrel. He has a name now.
Carter strips and they take him naked to the locker room off the gymnasium. The whole grotesquerie is coated fuzzy gray. Squirrel Laskey checks a Geiger. “It’s fine enough.” Small comfort.
They say the mold eats the fallout.
The Texan corporal turns a knob. Rust like vomit spurts from the central shower spigots. She lets Carter wait till it’s running half-clear before forcing him into the coldshock.
He bathes in the stream of lead and rotted copper. Parched, he laps up gulps of it. At the very least it’s something to fill his stomach. The hard water carries the worst of the grime from his ass and loins. He scrubs with a scrap rag, exposed.
If there’s any thrill in the staring guards’ hearts, he does not want to know.
“What’s your name?” He asks of the woman.
“I’m Corporal Blye.”
“Corporal.”
He wins no kindness with his small talk, but at least there is dignity in making the examination mutual. Her gaze stays fixed on Carter as he shivers and works his bare body clean.
Blye. Sure enough, it’s stitched on her breast. But there’s no Lone Star to be found on the Coalition patch.
She knows full well.
No honor for a turncoat.
Not in his eyes.
But a woman’s got to work.
Laskey speaks to Carter now. Voice cracking, failing to be clinical. Just a boy. “What’s that scar on your back?”
Carter tells him. “Pre-war. Dirt bike accident, ’29.”
“You dirt bike?”
“Yeah. You?”
“Yeah.” Laskey hesitates. “I used to all the time back home. I do still sometimes here too. If you go out past Diamond to Franklin Park there’s a great circuit. Great when it’s not mudded out.”
Blye stops this. “Laskey.”
Unsoiled, Carter stands like a man again. He shuts off the water. He holds his jaw tense. “In another life, Laskey. Thank you.”
There is little sleep naked on concrete floor, even without cuffs. Carter wakes from a dream of deathlight to windowless, clockless time without time in his cell. Someone has left him fresh long johns and purified water. He makes use of both, then dry-heaves from mold, then pisses deep orange into an empty CHICOM canteen and caps the lid. It stinks less than to do it like this than to use the Lowe’s bucket as a urinal.
Ninety minutes later someone knocks.
The looping TV goes black.
He searches for meaning.
“Yes?”
Enter Sara.
My God. Sara. Sara in good clothes. Pearls and blazer and turtleneck, dressed for court. My God, did she fly here thinking she was coming to court, to a fair trial, to anything civilized?
These thoughts torment Carter as the door creaks and his wife steps inside. What is she feeling? What is this face she’s making, holding everything creased where once was smooth? He used to be able to see her analytically, round nose and little chin and big, blue eyes. Then some time around when Carl was born his brain flipped and he could only really see love.
Love. Hello love. How can love be present in waking nightmare? Surely love and nightmare, great forces that they are, would obliterate each other on sight.
His throat clamps shut from the dissonance.
He still can’t tell what this strange expression means as she looks him over.
Then the sound reveals the heart.
A small squeak.
Involuntary, high, from the back of her mouth.
Horror. Her horror at the sight of him.
“Sara.”
He wants to tell her to look away, to fly back to San Clemente. To forget this and remember him as he was. But it’s too late. In her horror she shrieks, red with sympathy like oxygen swell.
“Where are your clothes?”
“They took them.”
Oxygen sympathy combusts Mercurial to anger. She screams at Blye and Laskey outside before Carter can stop her. “You won’t give him any clothes?!”
The words pile atop each other, his and hers, grasping, her head askance and body full of unspendable action.
“Hey, hey, don’t. Sara.”
“Why, why were they, what—”
“What?”
“Were they doing something to you?”
“Doing what? They searched—”
“I don’t know.”
“They searched, they searched me. What?”
“I don’t know. I’ve heard, they’ve been, the Russians—”
He closes the distance and holds her. He has something to give her even now, he sees. Relief from her fears. He clings both to her and the purpose he finds in the act of rendering comfort, the delay of his unmaking.
“These aren’t Russians. Baby. These are American Coalition troops.”
Blonde Sara lets herself be held and sniffles like the undergrad she was when they met. She will trade woman as pillar for woman held for ten seconds, for old times’ sake.
In the secret space between them she mocks the new phrase.
“‘American Coalition.’”
He grips her shoulders. Fear in the shape of the Texan cuts him. “Don’t start with that.”
Someone is moving between the balls of his feet like a near-still metronome in the hall. He is four feet tall. He has Carter’s eyes and Sara’s hair and he’s staring past Blye’s hip into the custodial enclosure.
“You brought the boys?”
Sara’s mouth opens. “I—I—”
Carter presses with his eyes.
“They didn’t give me a choice.”
He believes her. New shame floods his body. “I don’t want them to see me like this.”
Blye is letting young Carl stare.
Sara presses in. She flashes hate toward the guards in her near-whisper. “They wanted you to see the boys seeing you like this.”
“Do you have water in your purse?”
She sees the state of his lips. “My God.” Sara cranes and digs through mom flotsam. Black leather, a Coach bag from Venice, barely worn. She had been saving it five years, he remembers, in the closet. Saving it for the end of the war. Now here it is.
He doubts there will be another.
“Here.” She tries to nurse him the water, from habit, from something. He insists on taking the carton for himself and drinks it dry.
“Carter.”
“Yes?”
“They’re not letting you come home.”
He knew that much from the first ram smash against their living room door.
“They’re putting you before some kind of tri, tri—”
“Tribunal.” He nods.
“But you’re not a prisoner of war. You’re not a soldier.”
“I was regime.”
“You were a civil servant!”
He lets her protestations roll off his shoulders to the floor. “It’s their ball game now.”
She can’t understand his resignation. She searches him. “Did you do something?”
To the concrete, “No.” Lying.
“Did you do something?”
“No!” To her. Meaning it. “I did my duty! That’s it! They can run me through the apparatus and squeeze every drop of history out on the floor, all they’ll see is a man who tried to follow his conscience.”
She swallows. “Then fight.”
“I will.”
“Fight your way back to us.”
Tears now. That mutual collapse. “I will.” He swears it with his eyes. “Just take care of the boys. I can survive this.”
“I know.” Her words paint him gleaming.
“I love my country.”
She’s kissing his coppery forehead. “I know. I know.”
He looks to the silhouetted boy outside the scene like he means to talk, but turns back. “Tell them I’m fighting to get back to them. Make sure they know.”
Silence from Sara reveals more than words. He watches her defiance sputter for life like firecracker doused in rain. Too stricken to meet his waiting lips, she collapses on his chest. “I will,” she seems to want to say, but something thorny stops her.
Instead she says, “They need their father.”
Find the rest of Burn Zone by Cairo Smith on Amazon, available in digital and paperback editions.
