Freeze Frames Read online

  “Fine. Just transmit a one oh oh four seven, will you?”

  “A what?”

  “A change or correction to an application form. The parameters should have been transmitted with your packet.”

  “Yes, of course. I do remember seeing the file now.”

  On the high street in Kew stands an imposing Eurostil building, all glass front and slender columns, a branch of Barclay-Shanghai-Consolidated. Armed with several large checks, one from her publisher, another from the Free University’s public affairs fund, Janet walks in one sunny afternoon to open a checking account. Does she have references? Well, she can give them. But does she have the references with her, signed and ready? By British citizens, please. With the situation in America so dodgy, they are worried about money transfers and suchlike. Surely she understands? No, she does not understand. She has checks drawn upon British banks in her possession, paper checks, stamped and validated for instant deposit. Ah. Another manager must be called.

  This manager, tall and grey, sports incredibly refined vowels. Janet tells her story once again, waves the checks about, mentions Rosemary’s name several times. He understands, he tells her, but with the situation in America so dodgy, they would prefer to have a British co-signer. Janet tells him, with some vehemence, that she is not a minor child or a half-wit. The manager bows several times in an oddly Japanese manner and apologizes as well. He drops his voice, leans forward in a waft of lemon-drop scent.

  “The real problem is that you’ve not got your red card.”

  “If I don’t have a bank reference, I won’t get one.”

  He blinks rapidly several times and looks round the cream-colored lobby. Janet does, as well, and spots a large brightly-colored poster.

  “It says there that anyone can open a Christmas Savings Club account. ‘From nine to ninety years of age, all are welcome.’ It must be a special deal, huh?”

  The manager blinks again and stares.

  “I want to open a Christmas Club account,” Janet says, as calmly as she can manage. “According to your own advertising, I may do so anytime before fifteenth November. It is November ninth today.”

  “Ah, why, so it is.” He sighs in a long drawn-out gush of defeat. “If you’ll just step up to this counter?”

  Janet deposits over a thousand pounds in her Christmas Savings Club account and receives in return a bank number, an electronic access number, and a passbook with a picture of Father Christmas on the front. Later that day, she brings up the bank’s public information files on her terminal and spends several hours studying them. As she suspected, holders of one account may open another electronically. She opens herself a checking account, transfers most of her Christmas Club monies into it at a mere one per cent penalty, and has two numbers to transmit to Immigration on Form 10047.

  o~O~o

  On the twenty-seventh day after the junta killed the United States of America, their underlings restore full international telephone service to the corpse. Thompson brings Janet the news with her breakfast.

  “They say the service isn’t at top quality yet, Ma’am.”

  “As long as I can get through, I don’t care.”

  Janet checks the time: seven o’clock here, minus eight makes damn! eleven at night there. Mandi will most likely be asleep, but Janet cannot wait. Even reaching her daughter’s answering machine will be better than nothing.

  Picking up the handset gives her a moment of doubt. Will this call bring Rosemary trouble? For a moment she considers the shiny plastic oblong, studded with buttons. Somewhere inside it lies the white strip of encoded optics that sum up Rosemary’s identity as a communicating being. Somewhere in a vast computer is the Platonic ideal of this actual number, the electronic archetype which gives this physical object its true meaning, its being. Frail things, these archetypes, and so easy to destroy with one electric pulse, one change of code. What if the junta is automatically wiping codes that dial certain numbers? Could they do that?

  Not to a British citizen’s account, surely. Janet punches in Mandi’s familiar number. Although the call seems to go through smoothly, after two rings a long beep interrupts. A switch of some sort—Janet can hear a different ring, oddly faint. Her hands turn sweaty—FBI? Military police? At last a voice, a taped voice:

  “I’m sorry. The number you have reached is no longer in service. Please access the directory files for the area which you have attempted to call.”

  A click. A pause. The message begins again. Janet hangs up with a fierce curse.

  Gulping coffee, she throws on a pair of jeans and a striped rugby shirt, then sits on the floor cross-legged with the keyboard and the remote wand in her lap. Switching the terminal over to remote phone mode takes a few irritating minutes, but at last she can dial on-screen and start the long process of accessing the international directory number. The British memory banks still show Mandi’s numbers as functioning. She should have expected that, she supposes. When would they have had time to update? If indeed the junta will ever allow them to update.

  On her next pass Janet tries the normal directory number for San Francisco. Much to her shock she reaches it. For all their talk of rebel sabotage, obviously the junta had disabled the phone system at some central source, some master switch or whatever it might be, so that it could be restored cleanly and all at once when they had need of it again. In this directory she finds Mandi’s old number clearly marked as out of service.

  When Janet tries a search on Mandi’s name, she turns up nothing. A moment of panic—then it occurs to her to try Amanda Elizabeth Hansen-Owens, Mrs. Sure enough, such a name appears, cross-referenced to John Kennedy Owens, Captain. My daughter is married. I wasn’t there. In the next column, however, where a telephone number should appear, Janet finds only code: UNL-M. She windows the screen in half, leaving Mandi’s entry visible, and in the Help utility finds at last the decipherment of codes. UNL-M. Unlisted, military. For a long time Janet stares at the screen. She wipes it clear and turns it off, lays the keyboard and the wand down on the carpet beside her.

  At least Mandi has been allowed to marry her officer. At least. Even if the little bastard has hidden her away from her mother. Don’t be ridiculous! She’ll call you. She’s not dumb. She knows you’re at Rosemary’s. Or that Rosemary will know where you are.

  Or, Janet supposes, she herself could call friends in California and see if they know Mandi’s new number. Mandi had a job in a bookshop—perhaps she could call there? But she was going to quit when she married, because she would be living on base, too far away. Perhaps her old employer will have her new number? The thought of Eddie’s prison sentence stops Janet from calling him. She should wait until the situation settles down, until the normal traffic on the telephone lines picks up. Surely the junta won’t be able to tap every call, surely they wouldn’t bother, not just on the off-chance that she and all those other enemies of the state might say something subversive in a casual conversation.

  At lunch, in a little Italian restaurant near the Houses of Parliament, Janet tells Rosemary of her morning’s frustrations.

  “I’m honestly afraid to put people at risk by calling them,” Janet finishes up. “Or am I just being paranoid?”

  “I don’t know. You’re quite possibly being realistic. A dreadful thought, that, but there we are.” Rosemary contemplates her wine glass with a vague look of distaste. “Poor Eddie. I only met him briefly, of course, during that last flying visit, but he was such a nice fellow. It’s so awful, thinking of him in prison.”

  “I’d hate to have the same thing happen to Mandi’s boss or any of my friends.”

  “Well, of course. Or your nephew. What was his name? The one who’s so good with horses.”

  “Richie. Although, you know, he’s probably the safest person I could call. He lives way the hell up in the Sierras, and I can’t imagine anyone suspecting him of subversion, up in that tiny little town.”

  “True. What about Robert?”

  “Yeah. Wha
t about Robert?” Janet lays down her fork. “I went back later and looked for his number on the directory. It’s been taken out of service, too. But I’ve never found his name on the lists. Of the prisoners, I mean.” Janet’s voice breaks. “Or the casualties.”

  Her mouth full, Rosemary nods in the best sympathy she can muster. Janet leans back in her chair, turns a little, too, to look over the crowded restaurant, and sees Patel standing at the door.

  “It must be time for me to head out to the Free You,” Janet says. “There’s my bodyguard.”

  “Well, he can wait while you finish.”

  “I’m not hungry anymore. I don’t know who I’m more worried about, Mandi or Robert. Robert, I guess. At least I know now she’s married.”

  “And she’ll call. She must know that I’d provide for you, one way or another.”

  “Yeah. You’re right. She’ll call.”

  But Mandi never does call, not that day, not the next, not for the entire week after service is restored. Janet wakes every morning to a winter come at last, stands by her window and looks out on slate grey skies, afraid to leave the flat and miss her daughter’s call, which never comes.

  o~O~o

  “I suppose she’s just afraid,” Rosemary says.

  “I hope she doesn’t hate me.”

  “Why should she? She’s been allowed to marry Jack.”

  “Well, maybe so. Do you know what I really think? She’s disowned me. They may even have made her do it, for all I know. But I do know she’s got too much to lose by associating with me.”

  “Oh my God! No!”

  Janet shrugs, finding no words.

  “I’m so sorry,” Rosemary says at last. “But I think you’re right.”

  “Yeah? So do I.”

  With Officer Patel trailing behind, they are walking across the plaza in front of the Free University. Around them students in long hair and American blue jeans drift by. Some wear crumbling leather jackets; others, bulging canvas coats decorated mostly with pockets. A few carry books as well as the standard terminal units.

  “It’s very odd, this place,” Rosemary says. “Do you suppose they actually learn anything?”

  “I’m about to find out. It’s not exactly a new idea, though, a free university. The ones back home have been around for a long while, anyway. Well, I suppose the junta’s closed them now.”

  “I suppose so, yes.” Rosemary pauses, watching a particularly grubby couple saunter by. “Better to give them this than to have them rioting again, anyway. Not that they were real riots, compared to yours.”

  “Um. Maybe so.” Janet stops walking and points to a small crowd, standing by the steps up to the RiverBus dock. “There’s your photo op.”

  “Right. I see Jonathan. I suppose I’ll have to wear that silly hard hat he’s carrying, even though nothing’s been built yet.”

  Today the work starts on the new flood barrier round the university. Wearing plastic hard hats, men in suits stand uneasily next to men in work clothes wearing solid metal ones. Sandbags, the first, temporary line of defense against the river, he scattered about and rather randomly. The media, Minicams and mikes at the ready, cluster near a van serving tea in foam cups. When Rosemary trots over, Jonathan does indeed hand her the yellow hat. She puts it on as the cameras close in.

  o~O~o

  In the middle of the night Janet wakes from a dream of San Francisco in late afternoon, when light as gold and thick as honey pours down the hills and dances on the trees. There is no light in the world like the muted sun of Northern California. Sitting up in bed she weeps, knowing that she will never see it again. She will never see her daughter again, either. She knows it at that moment with a cold hard twist of sickness in the pit of her stomach.

  And she weeps the more.

  The phone call from Immigration comes some ten days before Christmas. Janet’s application has gone through. Would she please pick up her red card in person? They require a witnessed signature and a look at her old passport. For the occasion Janet puts on a grey suit that she’s just bought at Harrod’s—severe trousers, a softened jacket with pleats—and wears it with a peach-colored silk shirt suitable for a woman her age. As she combs her hair, she looks in the mirror and sees her face as a map: all the roads she’s taken are engraved on her cheeks and round her eyes. For the first time in her life she feels old. There’s nothing for me to do in Britain but die here. The image in the mirror saddens and droops. What can she do against the men who taken over her homeland? She can write and lecture, yes, but it’s so little, so weak, so futile. Perhaps she should just give up, live out her last years as an exile, write poetry, maybe, teach for a pittance at the Free University and keep her mouth shut. My big mouth. Look at all the trouble it’s gotten me into.

  She turns and hurls the comb across the room. It bounces on the bed, then slides to the floor with a rattle.

  “I will not give up. I’m only a mosquito, maybe, on their ugly hide, but goddamn it, I’ll draw what blood I can.”

  During the cab ride down to the Immigration offices, Janet begins planning her next book. Since her research material has no doubt been confiscated by the junta, she will have to write a personal memoir, hazy on hard facts, but if she works on the prose, she can make it sting. She will dedicate it to Mandi, she thinks, then changes her mind. She refuses to make danger be her last gift to her daughter.

  Picking up her red card turns out to be easy and anticlimactic. Two clerks look at her passport, one asks her to sign various documents. In front of the pair Janet promises, quite sincerely, that she will refrain from attempting to overthrow the British government. The first clerk hands her a packet of paper documents and the small red card, laminated in plastic.

  “Keep this with you at all times,” he says. “And your passport, I suppose. We’ve not had any guidelines on that, but you might as well.”

  “Thanks, then, I will.”

  When she leaves the building, Janet finds herself thinking of her mother, of her mother’s house up in Goldust, her nephew’s house, now. It was a wonderful place to be a child, that house, with the mountains hanging so close and the big trees all round. She remembers hunting for lizards in rock walls and rescuing birds from her mother’s cats, remembers thunderstorms bursting and booming over the high mountains as well as drowsy days of sun and the scent of pine. What if she had never left the mountains? What if she’d married Jimmy, the boy in high school who loved her, married him and settled down to get pregnant the way most girls did up in the mountains, or maybe taken a job in the drugstore till the babies came? She wouldn’t be an exile now, drifting down the streets of a city that will never be hers, no matter how much she loves it. She would have gone crazy, probably. She reminds herself sharply of that. She always knew that she would have to leave Goldust from day she learned to read and found a wider world beyond the hills.

  But Mandi would have been happy in that house. She loved visiting her grandmother. Mandi might have been happy living in Goldust, too, safe and tucked away from the world.

  Driven by her memories, Janet finds herself drifting to the nearest card phone, built into a red plastic slab inside a red plastic kiosk, sheltered from the sound of traffic plunging past. While she fumbles through her wallet, out the door she sees long lawns behind wrought iron fences. It should be safe to call Richie, it really should. Why would the authorities bother her nephew, a rural teamster? But he might know where Mandi is, he really just might know.

  When Janet slides the card through the slot, she can feel her shoulders tense and hunch. With shaking fingers she punches in the code, hears other beeps, and then rings. The phone is ringing. By the most slender of all links she’s connected again, for this brief moment, to the Sierra, to Goldust, to what was once her mother’s house. She can picture the yellow telephone, sitting on Richie’s old-fashioned wood slab desk, right next to the pictures of his family in their red acrylic frames. Three rings, four—a click, and the room changes. She can think of it no oth
er way, that the piece of space at the other end of the line has changed, grown larger, as if she could see the shabby wicker furniture, scattered with cats.

  “Hello.” The sound of Richie’s voice brings tears to her eyes. “You have reached 555-5252. Richie, Allie, and Robert aren’t home right now. Please leave us a message, and we’ll call you back.”

  Another click, a long tone. Janet hesitates, then hangs up fast. She cannot risk leaving a message, tangible evidence to some kangaroo court, perhaps, that Richie knows a traitor. As she takes her card out of the slot, the names she heard finally register. And Robert. Not just Richie’s name, not just his wife’s name, but Robert’s name as well.

  “He made it to the mountains. Oh thank God.”

  Janet reaches for her wallet to put the card away, but her fingers slip on the vinyl, and she nearly drops her purse. She glances round: two people have queued up to use the phone. Her paranoia stands at the head of the line. What are they really, this Pakistani woman in the pale grey suit, this Englishman in pinstripes? Agents, maybe? She pretends to drop her purse to gain a little time, squats, cooing unheard apologies, collects her things, shoves the card away along with the wallet and the handkerchief, her stylus and her notebook, her U.S. passport that used to mean so much. With a gulp of breath she stands, settles the purse on her shoulder, and lays a hand on the door. The Englishman is looking at his watch. The Pakistani woman is studying a tiny address book.

  Janet gulps again, then swings the door wide and steps out. The Pakistani woman slips into the booth; the Englishman drifts closer to the door; neither so much as look her way as she strides off, heading blindly toward the gate into the park, searching for the safety of green and growing things. In the rising wind leafless trees rustle. Out on the ponds ducks glide. Janet smiles at them all like an idiot child. Robert is free, will most likely stay that way, because indeed, the junta has no reason to hunt him down, the apolitical artist, the popular teacher of the least political subject in the world.

  But no news of Mandi. She watches the ducks glide back and forth, the midges hovering at the water’s edge, while she tries to make up her mind once and for all. Will she dare call Richie again? It was stupid of her to endanger him at all, stupid and selfish. At least if the military police do try to trace that call, all they’ll get is the number of a public phone near Green Park. My daughter. I don’t dare call my daughter. She doesn’t want me to. She feels her joy at Robert’s safety crumple like a piece of paper in a fist. She sobs, staring at an alien lawn, at the roots of alien trees. Overhead white clouds pile and glide as the wind picks up strong.