Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 140, No. 6. Whole No. 856, December 2012

Cog in the Wheel by Sarah Weinman

In the five years since Sarah Weinman’s EQMM debut with “Boy Inside the Man” (5/07) she’s been busy writing for the Wall Street Journal, the National Post, and other publications, and for National Public Radio. She serves as News Editor at Publishers Marketplace and is in the process of editing an anthology of twentieth-century suspense fiction for Penguin Books that is scheduled for publication in the fall of 2013.

The hell of it was, she hadn’t even noticed him.

Weeks, months, even years later, when she probed the recesses of her memory for some telltale sign of wrongness she should have picked up on, a clue that would have pointed to disaster she could have helped avert, she came up empty. Her memory might have been truthful or tricking her, but the conclusion was inescapable: Nothing was amiss, no protocols violated, no atypical behaviors. The discrepancy between banality and catastrophe couldn’t be explained no matter how often her superiors pressed her. “Surely there was a sign,” voices repeated again and again, in darkened rooms and in court hearings, in public depositions and private, off-the-books meetings.

Eventually they were satisfied with her stubborn insistence of normality and left her alone. Or, if not satisfied, then long past the point of frustration, exhaustion plainly evident on their faces. They would glean nothing further from her. She could go home, on with her life, back to her repetitive, anonymous business. There were more important people to lay guilt upon, more powerful people to blame or who would pin blame on others. She was just another cog in the wheel, who wouldn’t change a damn thing if knocked out. Another one of the nameless, faceless people nobody cares about.

But nameless, faceless people still feel guilt. They still scrounge for every last scrap of dignity and strength to get through the day. Lord knows she did. Getting up in the morning was hell. Looking at her husband was agony because of the way he looked back at her now, ever since she’d told him what happened and what her role had been. And she still had to go to work in the same place that undid her. The same place that destroyed her.

All because of another nameless, faceless, easily forgotten person. One who slipped in and destroyed a country and changed the world.

The hell of it was, nothing really changed afterwards.

Oh, there were more security measures. Shoes examined, bodies scanned in full, junk touched, protests launched. Flying, once so glamorous that commercials played up the sex angle, turned into an arduous ordeal where nickels clamored to turn into dimes. She didn’t fly much anymore, and figured the next time she took a transatlantic journey they’d charge for breathing the canned oxygen, having run out of new ways to fleece travelers.

Even in the days before the War on Terror, customers glowered when they reached her. Fidgeting, eyes darting everywhere, secrets bursting to come out of their mouths, ears, even noses, stories to be shared in too much detail. If anything, the new security measures brought on more gabbing talk about nothing. She barely heard it. The same as it ever was. The mandate was to get them through, ask a token question or two, and keep the line moving.

What had changed was the nature of the line. After the event, she’d been moved off of the main concourse into the specialty wing, where the perceived troublemakers waited for hours for bureaucrats to decide their fate. Would they be able to complete their travel plans or be forced to go back where they came from? Would they stay on course or be taken to some other darkened room, not unlike the ones she was taken to, where more faceless bureaucrats would ask uncomfortable questions, eliciting answers by any means necessary? She tried to push those thoughts from her mind day after day. It was hard. Those in limbo, as she thought of them to keep a sane distance, had a more hunted look about them. Frustration was only the beginning. Sometimes there was despair, even terror. Mostly there was listlessness, what with their fate completely out of their hands, no way to communicate with the outside world, no way, even, to go take a piss or a shit. That’s how I feel, she’d think, what with eight-hour shifts punctuated by a grand total of a half-hour break. Nothing else. Those were the rules.

She could quit. She’d come so close, even picking up the phone to tell her supervisor she was done before putting it down again. She’d saved so many resignation e-mails in draft, from florid, confessional essays to terse one-line declarations. Her husband had flat-out told her she should, to the point of offering their marriage as a sacrificial lamb if she didn’t. But she didn’t, and she didn’t know why. She hated this unending litany. Everyone around her knew it. They used to ask why, but years of noncommittal answers giving way to narrowed eyes and the silent treatment made them stop. Some of them probably figured it out.

It had only taken years of blindness to fade before the ugly truth emerged: She needed to be here because she wasn’t fit for anything else. A new job in a new place would reveal her to be tainted. She could wrestle with it in this purgatory, absorbing the frustration of scores of travelers like heroin shot directly into her jugular vein. But anywhere else she’d be unduly exposed and judged as harshly as she judged herself for her actions, or lack of them. Where she hadn’t been noticed before, now they would notice her. That’s what she deserved.

So here she was, sequestered from the world, in a space akin to no-man’s-land. Like some standalone, in-between place, she thought, not part of America, not part of any country at all. Ugly gray walls, even more deplorable brown carpeting. The juxtaposition made her laugh out loud on her first day back on the job. Now she barely registered the hideous décor, the way she barely registered those in limbo or her coworkers, each with their pet dramas and crises she wanted no part of.

It was, in a word, perfect, for her state of mind. Everything suspended, nothing resolved. And then, when she least expected to, she noticed.

She’d processed twenty cases by four p.m. that day, not a record, but nowhere near a slow day. There were protests and cries as always, and her face remained stone throughout. Stay behind or go ahead, be deported or move on to the proper destination, she would not show any emotion. None of it mattered; all expressed emotion broke over her like a wave cresting over the surf. So late in the day she realized she’d hit some kind of Zen point where there was nothing to do but to stare impassively and speak in robotic tones. “Free to go”; “I’m sorry but your request has been denied”; “Wait here and my supervisor will speak to you.” Memorized phrases she could rattle off in her sleep.

At four P.M. her supervisor had come out, but not to see any of the detainees. Instead, he went straight to her cubicle and asked if she was doing all right.

“Why wouldn’t I be?” she responded, wincing at the prickly tone creeping into her voice. She didn’t have to ask how she’d become so bitter; it had shown up one morning, six weeks after the event, never to leave. She wasn’t used to it, but she wasn’t ashamed of it anymore, at least.

Her supervisor sighed. “You know why,” he said. “I have to ask every week around this time.”

Before he could say why she cut him off. “Regulation,” she said.

“Yes. Regulation.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” she said.

He shrugged. There was no answer. He too was a lifer. Lumpy in the wrong places, hair combed over for his own dwarfed vanity because nobody else gave a shit. He had no one at home, that much she knew. Once, perhaps, but not for a long time. He never talked about anything other than the job, anything other than keeping the line moving. Which was why “Regulation” pained him. He didn’t really care about her welfare, and if she quit he wouldn’t miss her. Or anyone else they worked with. But what he did care about were the rules and sticking to them. One morning she’d dawdled a moment too much and the result was a ten-minute lecture during her fifteen-minute lunch period, which led to afternoon indigestion and a faster move through the queue.

The conversation ended and he turned around without another word. She exhaled. Then came the ringing sound that signaled another customer. Back went her impassive mask. She looked down at the files now in front of her to register the name of her next guest, as she thought of them in her darkest moments, just enough to have the requisite two-minute non-conversation. The man shared his name with many from at least sixty different countries. It didn’t stand out.

“Can I help you?” she said automatically, her face still down.

“You could wave a magic wand and let me into the country,” he answered. She could hear the smile in his voice. She couldn’t help herself. She looked up.

And wished she hadn’t.

The same damn question asked so many times. “How did you not notice anything amiss?” Customs people asked it. FBI people barked it. CIA, NSA, name your acronymic intelligence agency, they all asked it. Sometimes nicely, a lot more times less so.

Each time she had the same answer. “My job was to keep the line moving. Not to notice things that weren’t there.” How frustrated they all were! But she couldn’t lie. She couldn’t invent a motive or even some gut feeling. He was another nameless, faceless traveler with all his papers in working order. It wasn’t her fault he got on the plane and instigated the disaster that wrecked the country.

Of course it was her fault. She knew that every morning, every evening, every waking breath. Why hadn’t she been fired? She had practically begged for it, a week after her return from leave. When all of her colleagues looked the other way. When her supervisor at the time shook his head, his sad eyes saying a lot more than he ever would with words.

She knew she wouldn’t quit. The economy wasn’t so great, though compared to how things were now it had been a bright and rosy time. She and her husband needed the money to make the house payments. And when the meltdown did happen and her husband lost his job, quitting, never much of an option to begin with, stopped being one outright. Six months turned into a year turned into two years, and only when the ninety-nine weeks of benefits ran out did her husband find work — at half the salary with none of the benefits.

So she stayed put and turned back into the robot everyone demanded she be. Then she started bringing the automaton self home. Her husband didn’t complain; he was smart enough to keep his mouth shut. But boy, did she hear his gripes loud and clear, the ones she couldn’t express herself.

All those thoughts raced through her mind during the fraction of a second between looking up and registering the face now in front of her. Because what she felt now was true-blue, genuine shock. What she wanted to voice, but did not, was that she was looking at the impossible. The spitting image of impossible.

It wasn’t him, of course. Even in her stunned state she could see that this man’s nose sloped to the left where the other man’s twisted slightly to the right. His eyes were brown, not blue. His skin a half-shade darker. But looking at this one she finally reckoned with how obsessed she had become with the other man, the one she let get away, the one who changed the world.

Was it so trite to think she had a shot at reversing course and redeeming herself? Yes, it was trite. But damned if she didn’t believe it in that moment of taking this man in, what he represented — or what he didn’t represent.

She looked down at his file again, more for show, but he wouldn’t know that. “Your visa expired three months ago.”

“It’s the wrong visa,” he said. “I have proper papers but they wouldn’t allow me to produce them.”

“Who wouldn’t allow you?” she asked.

“The agent out there,” he said, gesturing to the customs line behind the door. “He trusted his computer, not the papers.”

“The computer says your visa expired three months ago,” she repeated.

“May I show you my papers?”

She sat up a little straighter, flexing her shoulder muscles back. He couldn’t have a gun in his pocket, or even a weapon. Such things would have been taken away from him. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that he would have something lethal in his pocket. Pills? A non-metallic shiv? Should she call her supervisor and draw attention, or would that be profiling?

In the end, she said yes. He rifled through the left pocket of his coat and placed three sheets of paper on the counter, underneath the glass separating them. She took the papers and looked at the first sheet. Same name, same vitals, and a stamp where it was supposed to be. This visa was good for another eighteen months.

But. She examined the other two sheets. They matched the first one. And yet. “Hold on a minute,” she said, turning her back. She went back to her cubicle and called up the sample documents. And there it was: a fleur-de-lis that wasn’t supposed to be there. The flower that changed the world, she thought morbidly.

Five minutes later, to give the appearance of deeper scrutiny, she faced him again. “I’m sorry but your request has been denied.” She held up his papers. “We’ll keep these.”

She felt nothing as his face transformed into frustration, then rage, then despair. He wasn’t getting in. It was that simple. But where so many others had walked back to their seats in defeat, he had one more thing to say before sitting back down, uttered so softly she wasn’t even certain he said it or if she imagined it:

“You let my brother in. Why not me?”

Six months later the world changed again. Not by plane, but by car, several different ones all over the country. So many dead, among them a name she had willed herself to memorize just after four p.m. that day, the twenty-first case she had processed. She knew at the time, even as his body professed defeat, even as she beckoned her supervisor over to handle the situation with near-eerie calm, that he would find another way. No-fly lists wouldn’t deter him. Several rounds of increasingly intense Homeland Security questioning wouldn’t stop him. Her rejection was just more ammunition in a war she had become part of without even trying.

He left behind a video manifesto that placed blame among the typical high-ranking suspects. He never mentioned her by name but included a single oblique reference: a three-second shot of a fleur-de-lis, changed exactly as it had been on his fake visa.

She quit her job the very next day. No apologies, no explanations.

After all, she was a mere cog in the wheel.

The hell of it was, she had noticed him.

Copyright © 2012 by Sarah Weinman