eli by brian gibson

A radioed voice, female, can just be heard through the siren’s wailing. “This office has been placed under lockdown,” she says. “Please remain calm and remain where you are. I repeat, this office has been placed under lockdown.”

Panicked, Eli sets his briefcase back on his desk. He had already packed it with all his things: pens and loose papers and letters of the day, but he fiddles with the latch for a moment before deciding to finish the paperwork he had meant to save for when he got home. Some of his coworkers strike up conversation, unfazed by the alarm system in the background. Raymond, a plump, ruddy-cheeked man who worked in the accounting department, pulls out a deck of cards from his satchel and announces a round of poker around his desk. Eli is glad to hear it; he’s rarely been beaten at poker. They each throw in five dollars to the betting pool and soon after the round starts, Eli amasses a sizable lead, grinning demurely even as he scoops the chips into his steadily growing pile. The others are happy enough to let him have his lead, mostly because he doesn’t gloat about it. If it had been one of the other men, he would have started trash-talking by now, and they all know it. No, the key to winning is all in control. He controls his voice, taking care to add in false tells and variations in tone, minute enough that they only notice subconsciously that he is doing so. He hunches his shoulders to give the impression of uncertainty. However, Carlo is looking at Eli more than he would like, enough to give the big joke away. When he catches Eli looking back at him, he winks badly at him like he loved to do, pressing his eye into a conspicuous squint. They knew one another outside work, and sometimes they went to bars together to play poker. Carlo always had a new joke about their co-workers, and even though Eli worried about what they would think if they ever heard what Carlo said about them behind their backs, he always loved Carlo’s jibes despite himself; he had a good-natured irony that made him completely incorrigible and at the same time, impossible to hold a grudge against.

When the round is over, the sun has nearly set and Eli’s hoard dwarfs the others’, but they still go through the process of counting the chips. To his coworkers’ dismay, the count reveals no shocking upset and Eli happily pockets thirty dollars. He thanks them for the game and, sensing a conclusion coming, returns to his desk. But as he leaves, he feels stares upon his back. They are finally curious about him.

“So what’s his deal, anyway?” he hears one of them ask. It’s a fair enough question. To them, he has no history, no family or friends that he chatters about like they do, no personality quirks they can make fun of. He avoids these subjects as a matter of habit, not out of any special disdain or fear of his coworkers. He is efficient at his work, always punctual on deadlines no matter how draconian or unfair they are, and that’s enough to sustain him at the office. The only one who knows anything about him is Carlo, but thankfully, he holds out. “If you mean poker, Eli’s just a natural,” he says. “He cleans the bars out every time we go for poker night.” 

“Yes, but you know, besides that,” Martin presses, as if Eli doesn’t hear what he is saying.

Carlo shrugs. “I think you ought to ask him that. He’s a private guy, but you should give him a chance. He hasn’t told me much anyway.”

The men murmur among themselves, clearly getting annoyed with Carlo’s evasiveness. “What did he tell you?” Raymond asks innocently.

Now would be the time to intervene. Eli gets up from his desk and goes to the coffee machine: a clear invitation. One of the sales associates, Ivan, takes the opportunity, sidling up to the fridge in a painfully unsubtle saunter, throwing his head around wildly as if to convince Eli that his legs had carried him there by pure coincidence. “So, Eli,” he says, “whereabouts are you from?”

“I grew up in Pennsylvania.” Eli’s parents were from Siberia and he had been there for part of his childhood, but he considers himself a Pennsylvanian in every way that counts. He knew how to write and understand Russian, but in speech, he could hardly string together a sentence longer than five words. His birth name was Elisei, but he has shortened it to Eli ever since he learned that people would assume it stood for Elijah. Sometimes, he wonders why Ivan did not do the same. An American name sometimes seemed the only way to live in America. They required no questions; everything that needed to be known was known. 

But, Eli can tell that Ivan had known him for what he was immediately. Eli had done his best to scrub his throat clean of the deep, rough accent he had learned, trying his best to imitate the easy English of the men on the radio. However, his English accent wasn’t perfect, still isn’t, and Ivan noticed quickly that he sometimes confused the American ‘a’ and ‘e’ sounds, a bad habit of his and a dead giveaway of his heritage.

“Were you born here?” Ivan asks, herding him into the crowd of employees. Eli notices them holding their own half-hearted conversations, trying not to appear like they are listening in, gripping tightly on his every answer. He grimaces at the question even though he had known for a long time that it was coming.

“I wasn’t.” Eli can’t bring himself to lie to them, but he desperately hopes that Ivan won’t ask any more of him. The men begin whispering openly to one another, their curiosity, Eli thinks, growing into something more.

“Oh really? Where are you from then?”

“I hardly remember anymore.” Eli gives a noncommittal shrug.

Ivan gives him a reproaching look, goading him with the secret slipping through his grasp. “Is that right? I’m surprised your family never said anything about it.” 

“They didn’t. They never liked to talk about that part of their lives. Too happy to be in America, I suppose.”

Other employees begin to chime in with their own questions. They begin listening for an accent, any distinct syllables that didn’t fit right in his mouth, and Eli tries to talk less so they wouldn’t have any material to work with. But Raymond had seen him writing something on Tuesday in another language, “in real flat, squiggly letters.” Soon, the questioning becomes more overt, almost hostile. They dance around the question on all their minds: Are you a Soviet? If they ask it, the questions and accusations will follow, one after another in a torrent. Commie, Soviet plant, sympathizer at the very least. 

“Are you absolutely sure you don’t know where you’re from?” Clive asks him. “We need to know. It could be important, Eli.” 

He is sure, but they continue. “Do you have any letters from your family? Maybe there would be something there.”

Eli surrenders his briefcase. They open it on his desk, pull out his paperwork, rifle through the stacks of checked boxes and forms for anything personal, anything not written in English. “I think he has a Russian accent,” Martin begins saying, emboldened by the procession. “I can hear it. I know what it sounds like. He’s a commie, 100 percent. I would bet my entire family on it.”

At last, they find what they are looking for. A pulp novel translated in Russian, with a worn yellow-and-red cover, something trashy he had bought on a whim. They flip through the pages feveredly, crowding around it and making remarks to one another. Then, they round on him.

“So, you were a Soviet this entire time and you never said anything?” Martin says, nearly screeching. “All this time and we never suspected a thing, and you just let us go on not knowing.”

Eli says nothing to defend himself. He hopes that they will run out of steam, that maybe the satisfaction of finding out will be enough to sate their appetites. Carlo stares at him, with a grimace somewhere between pity and betrayal. He understands it well enough. Maybe he should have told Carlo what he was, if only to save him the shock of finding out this way.

“You bastard!” Clive shouts. “We ought to report you right now. Why shouldn’t we? You probably know about this lockdown, don’t you? Are the commies going to bomb us to hell? Tell us!”

“He probably wouldn’t tell us,” one of the others remarks.

“What are we going to do? Are we going to die? Tell us! Please, we all have families. Wives, sons, daughters who need us. Can’t you understand that?”

“We need to tell someone. Can we get a message out? Do the phones work?” Some of the men rush to the phone, and begin dialing out to any number that would pick up, screaming into the phone to be heard over the clamor.

Then, the alarm system sounds once again, its screeching silencing the rising din in the office. The woman comes on the radio again, saying, “This concludes the lockdown. You are now free to go. This has been a bomb safety drill.” Her voice is calm as anything, her English featureless and perfect, unbearably even. Eli kneels to gather his papers and pens, stuffing them into his briefcase, and manages to catch the train just before it leaves the station.