Brutus remained silent, his eyes fixed on the row of expensive booze behind the bar.
“And think of your dear Lieutenant Colonel Sullivan. Isn’t he going to be disappointed when he hears you haven’t been exactly cooperative? But he doesn’t have to know. We can still be friends, Brutus. Looky here — I have a train ticket for you to Kaposvár.” Sure enough, he lifted the top of a ticket from his apron pocket. “Be a good boy and this day never happened, heh? Sullivan assures me he’ll welcome you back, no questions asked. You have fifteen minutes and not one second longer. That little girlie friend of yours is going to be awfully disappointed when you show up dead. What’s her name — Magda?”
“Fifteen minutes,” Brutus said.
Jimmy smiled. “See, good. You’re not the mouth-breathing retard I took you for.” He returned to his regular speaking volume: “And now if you’ll excuse me,” he said, and merged into the welcoming crowd. “Ere comes trouble, heh!”
Brutus got outside in a hurry. Something didn’t feel right. His legs sweated in his new pants. The normally centered part of himself melted into a swamp of bile in his gut. Every part of his body hurt again. The only way Jimmy could have known about Magda was if Sullivan had told him. And if Sullivan knew he had been seeing her, what did that mean? What had Magda told him? Now Brutus was getting all turned around inside. Fuck. It was so obvious. She wasn’t going to send that letter because she worked for these people, for Sullivan and this piece of shit bartender. The past couple of months, this whole time, he wasn’t trying to get into her pants—she was the one seducing him. Oh fuck. The whole plan was Magda’s doing all along. From the very goddamn beginning. That perfume. Something deep inside Brutus started to slip off its axis. She had probably tailed him all day long, laughing behind his back, mocking him. It had been Magda all along. Magda attacked him beneath the train station, she and those CIA-contracted thugs from the camp’s restricted zone. Not skinheads, no matter what that crazy old man said. Of course. Brutus must have been a nice little diversion for them, a brief respite from torturing Arabs.
The filthy homeless dude in the Burger King crown he had seen earlier was rooting through the garbage can next to the one with the weapons. Brutus panicked. He ran at the bum and shoved him to the ground. Two girls walking arm in arm through the park yelled at him. They spoke English, but he paid no attention. He pulled the duffel bag from the filth. The bum convulsed on the ground and for a moment, Brutus considered kicking him senseless.
For the first time in as long as he could remember, Brutus was in a position to decide his own fate. He could deliver the guns, or tell Jimmy where to find them, and it would all be over. But that wouldn’t solve anything. It might save his own ass, but it wouldn’t solve anything at all. What was to stop Sullivan from pulling the same bullshit again on somebody else? Maybe he and Magda picked a new sucker every month.
He felt sick. Feverish. He wanted to cry right there.
He took off in a trot, but not back to Eve and Adam’s. Clutching the stinking bag, he reached the parade of traffic on the körút. He was being followed. He had been followed all day, chased by shadows he never even knew to look for. But even that didn’t bother him now. There was one thing left for him to do and then he would be free. Free from the U.S. Army. Free from all the bullshit and hassle in his life. Free from Sullivan and the system that kept slavery alive and kicking. Something had to give. The bag had grown too heavy for one man to carry. He wove through the mess of bleating circus cars and over the trolley tracks. Car horns and angry hollering assaulted him from every direction. Brakes squealed. More car horns, and then even more still.
Lights dotted the Buda Hills at the other end of the bridge like a low-hanging constellation. The island was dark, free from the intrusion of civilization. That was where he was headed. His hands were filthy and bleeding from the broken glass in the trashcan. He smelled like garbage now, like someone’s refuse.
The word sounded strange in his head: refuse.
The winter air couldn’t dissuade him from his rising confusion and anger. It was so obvious now. They wiggled a bit of pussy in his face and he lost his shit. Fucking stupid. Magda was in on it the entire time.
No — that wasn’t right. He was getting paranoid.
The wind on the bridge was astounding in its ferocity. The Hungarian flags flapped like they wanted to come loose and get carried away. The city lights of Budapest formed a spectacle downriver, a grid on which the paths of innumerable occupying armies and their brutal histories could be roughly plotted. Brutus was finally ready to escape his complicity with the most recent imperial conquest, his complicity with the Man. That had been the problem all along. There was just no getting outside of his complicity or outside the very language the army used to keep him in his place. There was once a Brutus in Rome. Even resistance oiled the machine. That would sooner brook the devil than a king. Only refusal would make it stop.
Brutus stopped at the stone balcony hanging over the river halfway between Pest and Buda. Car lights lined the banks of the Danube in streaks of white and yellow. The bag he carried and the keys, the false ones, were the emblems of all that was evil in his life, of the doubt and resentment and anger. Magda’s betrayal — that was what bothered him the most. Cast them into the water, and he would be free at last. Only without them would he be whole again. He was laughing out loud when he pulled the locker keys from his pocket and held them straight out in front of him in a fist. The metal and molded plastic cut at his skin. He let go, dropping them into the river. No light flickered off them; the water made no sound as it swallowed them. They simply vanished.
His body stopped functioning. There was only pain now. Check the date, he thought — I’m all expired. He leaned forward and the frozen, metal railing burned through his clothes and against his belly. Watching the twinkling lights of the skyline, a slow smile spread over his face. The cold felt good somehow. Glorious.
He hoisted the bag onto the railing with the very last of his strength. As long as he held onto it there was nothing anyone could do to him. Brutus had the government by the balls. He knew enough to get Sullivan locked away for the rest of his hateful life, but that was not going to help him. It was clear now — no authority existed that Brutus was willing to run to. And with that understanding came his deliverance. Refusal was the only solution. He wouldn’t play along anymore. With both hands shaking, he held the bag out in front of him over the water. It was full of poison, full of black magic ready to seep out. He was ready finally to let go of all the pain he had collected, all the violence in his life, and to move on. He would keep moving. That was all anyone could do. Find an island and live off the land. Opening his hands, Brutus watched the bag plummet toward the river. It fell for a full minute, for four hundred years, for an eternity, before it broke the surface of the water. Then it was gone, all of it. He took a breath and tasted the blood rising to his lips. It tasted like the freedom that had been there all along, his whole life, unnoticed until that moment.
THE EMPTY CHAIRS
1.
Independence Day was three hours old and only Melanie and Nanette remained, the last customers of a bar with no last call. Even the prostitutes had gone home. “Bedtime, ladies,” Jimmy said, pulling the plug on the jukebox and killing “Strange Fruit.” He returned to wiping down the countertop.
Melanie still had more than half a vodka tonic left, which she swallowed in one long and breathless gulp. Nanette smashed out the end of another cigarette. They slid out of their booth and rose, unsteady, holding each other for balance. Jimmy leaned across the bar to kiss them goodnight. He smelled like a grease fire and had the gaunt look of someone nearing the end of a weeklong meth binge. “Sleep tight,” he said. “See you tomorrow, heh.”