Free The 14th Day by K.C. Frederick Page B

pretended to be. His voice would take on a wavering quality that made Jory think of a signal on a shortwave radio coming from an enormous distance, at times barely audible, then all at once strikingly clear. “You and I,” he’d declare, “we aren’t all that different.” This pronouncement would be accompanied by a halting motion of the hands, his head moving in unison, as if he were conducting a complex and mournful piece of music, perhaps for the first time. “Neither of us really believes in anything,” he’d insist. “You’re just trying to convince yourself otherwise.” He’d fall silent for a time, his head lowered so that Jory might hope the liquor had got to him at last; and then, without looking up, he’d say, “You can make a vocation out of your exile.”
    But usually Fotor was less dramatic. More likely he’d be urging Jory to action. The man was constantly on the make, bartering for clothes, a car, language lessons, he watched TV attentively, quickly learning the local expressions. “We have to move on,” he’d say. “The clock doesn’t stop. You too, Jory, you should prepare for a career here, or somewhere. It can be done. We don’t have to work at these kinds of jobs all the time. These are jobs for animals.” Jory could only shake his head. Of course, he knew all that. Still, there was another side to the question. Once we start to make those kinds of accommodations to our circumstances, he tried to tell Fotor, we start to surrender. Didn’t he know that to the people who passed them in the street they were shadows that could disappear the moment a cloud covered the sun? You couldn’t accept that; only if you refused to see yourself as a shadow was it possible to go on. All of them from the homeland—he, Fotor, the rest of them—were part of a continuing story, a story that had to be remembered, kept alive.
    Fotor would smile his bison’s smile. “Of course,” he’d say, “of course,” his eyes directed elsewhere, as if he were calculating sums, which may very well have been what he was doing. In the end Fotor, with all his contacts, had managed to find the perfect place for himself, a warm green island where he was going to be in charge of a concession. “The government is very corrupt there,” he said gleefully as he made plans for his departure. “There are unlimited opportunities. From one store I’ll soon have two, then many. All you have to do is write me when I’m there and I’ll see to it that they let you in.”
    Here in the truck, Jory can imagine Fotor’s island, the little store with a roof of thatch where he sells souvenirs and cold drinks, the back office where he works out more important deals of one sort or another in places hundreds of miles away. Outside, the fierce heat is broken occasionally by pounding rains. There’s blue water, miles of untracked yellow sand, a rudimentary sun, as simple as a child’s drawing. The place Jory conjures up is starkly empty and yet for a few seconds, listening to the truck’s steady drone, he lets himself contemplate the prospect of living on that island.
    He can imagine himself there with Fotor, the two of them facing each other across a rattan table, cool drinks beside them. Would Jory finally ask him the question he hadn’t been able to bring himself to ask in the last place they were together: “What happened to that man I knocked down? Did I kill him?” Palm fronds would hiss, Fotor would stare back unblinking. “I mean,” Jory would pursue quietly, trying to make it seem like some unimportant matter he wanted to clear up, “I’d just like to know.” Meaning Am I completely in your power or do you even know yourself whether I killed that man? “Really,” Jory would press, his voice rising just a little, “I’m curious, that’s