32. Justice Works

Justice Work's office was on the third floor of a triangle shaped walkup on the edge of Core City, close to the bus terminal and upstairs from a bail bondsman. Marina remembered the hallway smell, disinfectant couldn't fully cover up the coffee ground scent of mouse pheromones. The walls had recently been painted with glossy tan paint. Old graffiti leaked through. End the War Now, Karaya Libre y Socialista, S heart M, the outline of an erect penis. The door was open and the young shorthaired woman at the front desk looked up from the typewriter with a bottle of white out in one hand. She raised her eyebrows by way of asking her what she wanted, reached for the cigarette in her full ashtray and took a long drag.
“I’ve got an appointment with Danny.” She forced herself to speak his name. The young woman was turning to call out to him but he appeared behind her. He’d moved to a corner office, a small triangular room probably smaller than the one she remembered from the months of their affair, the months she worked with him at Justice Works. She stood by the windows set into the triangle and stared at the row of small office buildings and the many motionless cars filling the narrow street. “It's like the prow of a ship.” He stood close beside her. She could feel his heat. “Sailing traffic.” She turned toward him and stepped around and away, walked to his desk and sat on the client side. She shook her head and he nodded. Both of them knew getting anything restarted was the last thing they needed. He took a stack of folders from the top of a gray file cabinet and sat facing her. She watched him. He was tall, had small, intense blue eyes behind wire rimmed glasses. What had made her want him? It was clear to her now it had all been in her head.
“Ori's been desaparecido again. Do you have any moves?”
He went through some papers in the file.
“Habeas corpus…that sort of shit.” He pushed himself away from the desk. “At this point your strongest moves are political. Pressure. The Partido has to put on pressure.”
“God help Ori then.”
“Then there’s international pressure. Human Rights Council. Do you know AnaMarta Biaggi?”
“I know who she is. Is she approachable? Not radical chic?”
“She’s a celebrity, and she’s serious. If she takes on Ori’s case it’ll get visible and that’s pretty much his best chance.”
“I don’t think the City gives a shit any more if the world knows what it does to political prisoners. Why’d she keep Biaggi’s name when they divorced?”
“Write her numbers here.” Marina passed Danny her find-Ori notebook, open to the back page, where she kept track of the contacts. He spun his rolodex and took one of the cards. “Why do you think she kept his name? Being a celebrity wife is the best gig she was ever going to get. You gotta give her credit. She uses it for the cause.” He copied Biaggi’s number and Human Right Council’s address .
Marina raced downstairs before Danny could get started chatting about their families. He’d gone and married Amina Diaz and she couldn’t blame him, but she did. He married Amina just after the first time she and Danny were a couple, just around the time she joined the Partido and he went to law school. And then he rescued the boys when Julia and Marina lost them on the train, and next think she knew they were a couple again. Until Amina reeled him back in. She wasn't ready to compare childrearing philosophies with him.
Human Rights Council was a mile’s walk into Core City. It felt good to walk as fast as she could, through crowds that changed from poor men going into the bail bonds office, to people carrying grungy backpacks rushing to catch a subway to the boros, to high heeled women in suits and men carrying leather briefcases.
In the elevator to Biaggi’s office she was flanked by tall white women and men in well fitted suits. She felt small, brown and poor in her jeans, cowboy boots, and denim jacket. The receptionist, face bare of makeup and dressed in a woven Isla blouse, smiled. Marina was better dressed than the political prisoners on photographs all along the waiting room wall. She introduced herself, used Danny's name. The receptionist pointed her to a chair.
“Danny called ahead. I’ll see if AnaMarta can see you now. You’re lucky she’s in the City today.”
The cover story on the latest issue of the Council’s newsletter was on the prison Camp in the City's Karaya Navy Base. Marina took one of many copies spread out on a round table, sank into a soft amchair, and shuddered as she read. Camp Hunger Strikers Force Fed. The cover photograph showed Biaggi in a linen dress and with her jet black hair braided away from her face, standing with Danny McNeil beside a high mesh fence, a wedge of beach showed behind them. She read the caption: For hunger striking alleged undeclared combatants the secret Camp in Cayo Karaya is hell in paradise.
She heard heels approaching, looked up, and there was tiny AnaMarta Biaggi whom she’d seen on many tabloid covers, and from a distance the time Juan Biaggi performed at a Partido mass rally to commemorate the Insurreccion on Grito Day, and support the guerrillas. That was before Machi was born. Juan had stepped back from such public support, but after their divorce, AnaMarta had become a full time activist.
She extended her hand and Marina stood to shake it.
Marina followed her. She wore jeans, high heel boots, a woman’s long sleeve linen guayabera. Marina studied her single black braid. It was very thick and reached halfway down her back. Without asking she made Marina a cup of chamomile tea, sat her in a stuffed chair, and sat on a chair just like it right beside her. She curled her legs up on the chair and Marina did the same. “Danny told me you might come.” Something about the way she said Danny made Marina wonder how well they knew each other. What did women see in him? Was intelligence erogenous? AnaMarta leaned toward Marina and she got a close look at her face. The features were a bit too big and off kilter but had a particular balance that made her oddly beautiful She could see Danny wanting her. “What’s going on?” She gave Marina her full gaze, for a second Marina felt she’d gotten a peek at her soul. She began to sob. AnaMarta put her hand on Marina’s and kept her big brown eyes on her. Marina sobbed and sobbed. AnaMarta handed her tissues. This small kindness made her sob more.
The receptionist interrupted about a phone call and AnaMarta waved her away. Marina sobbed more. Between bursts of tears she got the story of Ori’s arrest out, of his prior arrests. She intimated that if they probed there were things in Ori’s past to be found. And Biaggi said she would help her. Marina walked outside into the sun unburdened for just this moment. It occurred to her that she had no idea just how she would be helped but she didn’t let that fill her mind, not yet. She wasn't alone looking for Ori.

Marina walked into the Phoenix Camp carsick from the winding uphill bus ride, right temple pounding with a terror migraine, into the crowd of strangers in faded jeans and frayed plaid shirts milling around the registration table. They looked like earthlings stranded on other planets in television space shows, left back in time [twenty years ago]. She pushed her way through them toward the ladies room sign, ran into the furthest stall, lifted the toilet lid and vomited for several minutes, over and over, everything in her gut. She emerged from the bathroom with the migraine almost lifted, hovering around her head, her vision still blurred, and walked to the registration table to sign in.
By the door into what she guessed was a meeting room she saw Danny surrounded by a group inching to get close to him. He was saying nothing, smiling and nodding. She looked away. Maybe later she’d get up the strength to greet him. She stood in line in between two clusters of people with a lot to say to each other. Why had she come? Just because AnaMarta gave her the flier, told her this would be her best help for finding Ori. She fought the impulse to run out the door, all the way into the small town, to the bus stop. Nobody here looked like they would be any help to Ori. She reached the front of the line and got her packet from a smiling young woman. She studied the label…The Personal is Political: A Conference for the Loved Ones of the Disappeared.
“Marina.” She turned to the voice. One of those gathered around Danny was waving her over.
She came closer, got a better look at the yellow curls, the oval face, the open grin, and felt a surge of relief as Myra from Moon Park folded her into her arms.

Twenty some people sat in chairs set up in a u shape around another 20 clumped together on exercise mats on the carpeted floor. Marina studied the hand woven cloths from Karaya’s mountain weavers hung on all four walls. Were any done by Graciela’s husband? She couldn’t think of his name. Myra led Marina to a small empty space on the left edge of the carpet. She felt safe close to the human clump, maybe part of it. They sat down just as Ana Marta Biaggi walked toward what must be the head of the room, with Danny. They sat together a few feet in front of Marina, in the two empty chairs that had been set up for them facing the group. AnaMarta greeted the gathering and launched into a speech with that earnest, intentional, inspirational cadence that reminded Marina of her father’s sermons. She let her mind wander. She didn’t want to listen, she’d learned to protect herself from disappointment in fathers, in leaders. Despite this well practiced skill of tuning speakers out Ana Marta’s words began to enter her mind
“….I returned from Ventura two months ago. I am here as an emissary of the future. What they have established there to share the wealth, to ensure that all children have health care and education, to ensure that all adults have socially useful work, that there is art, that people enjoy using their minds to make their lives and their world as good and full as they can, reminded me that the City can be Ventura. I saw clearly that here we have become beaten down by the years of the war, the years of repression in the name of that deceitfully named Peace in Our Time Act. We’ve come together this weekend to construct together whatever it will take to reclaim our movement to free the prisoners in the Camp.”
Marina wiped away a tear. Hope was a feeling she didn’t want to feel. Hope was pain.
Danny spoke next.
“Our movement has lost force and momentum for only one reason: it has been repressed. Home invasions by police, murders, kidnappings they call rendition, disappearances, torture. In the name of Peace in Our Time they have undone the City’s constitution and effectively brought the Isla Karaya war home.”
When the gathering began to break up at a signal Marina had missed Myra explained most of the work would be done in small groups. Marina attached herself to Myra. This meant joining a group of six white women. They all seemed to know who the leader should be, a woman with short, dark brown hair, big yellow brown eyes behind thick glasses, and a wide full lipped smile. “I’m Ellen Gates and we are the mothers of young children. Everyone here in the right group?” She looked at each person. Her yellow green gaze was soft and welcoming. She asked each person to say her name, one way their children triumphed over repression, one way repression was a danger to young people.
Myra spoke first. “Lisa knows children of all races. Her father and I when we conceived her made a commitment to teach her white supremacist thinking is a lie. I'm white and Lou's an islander. we didn't want her confused.” She burst into tears and Ellen sat beside her, put her arm around her. “I’m sick of raising my daughter in a bunker, of being afraid to take her outside, of thinking twice before I take her to the park, afraid of what she’ll see. We were at MoonPark on Sunday and police did a sweep of the encampment. I don’t want her to be there when they raze it, when they cut down that Virgin tree.” She collapsed in tears in Ellen’s arms and let herself be held.
The other women moved closer, clumped their bodies as close as they could to Myra’s. Marina did the same. She felt her nausea returning. Was this some kind of therapy cult? She looked away, at one of the hanging cloths nearby, she saw the small zinzonte symbol Esteban! The hummingbird was his weaver signature. She’d remembered Graciela La Vieja’s husband’s name. Myra grabbed Ellen’s shoulders, shook them. “Lisa never met her father. She doesn’t know who Lou is. He’s never come back from the Island war. What am I supposed to say to her?” She dropped full weight into Ellen’s arms and sobbed. Marina wiped the tears from her own face. So now she too was crying.
The other women spoke in turn: Dale cried from her first word: “Molly gets in fist fights in school with bullies. She’s big so she can.” Ellen Gates leaned toward Dale, her long face intense, her eyes liquid and blazing. “You’re raising a freedom fighter.” She touched Dale’s cheek and Dale bent toward her, her long black hair swept down and covered her face. “I don’t know what to tell her anymore when she asks about Ray. I can’t hear her say, where’s Daddy, without bursting into tears.” Ellen held her tight. “You don’t have to hide to cry. See if you can look at us.” Dale raised her head. “It’s fine for Molly to see you cry.” Ellen asked Myra to hold onto Molly and turned her attention to Rain who looked at each woman in the group, held each woman’s gaze.“Your masks are coming off. I want to drink in your tenderness. But it’s so embarrassing. I’d rather not hope.” Ellen took Rain’s hand and pressed it to her own cheek. Rain touched Ellen’s cheek and stroked her short dark hair. “Will my son Rafa ever live in a world where masks aren’t necessary? He wears an old fedora to school every day and brings a toy gun he hides in his lunch box in a paper sack. He plays at being a gangster.” Ellen nodded. “Turn those words around. My son Rafa will live in a world where masks aren’t necessary.” Rain’s eyes became moist as Ellen spoke. “Masks are a skill, Rain. It’s good that he can do that. Being able to give the appearance of compliance is the way we all survive.” A tear ran down Rain’s cheek. She wiped it with her fingers. “I need to cry but I can’t. It seems if I start I’ll never stop. Rafa doesn’t mention Ray any more. He’s put Ray’s photograph under his mattress.” Ellen smiled. “The tears will come in their time. There’s no rush.” Rain’s jaw squared, her teeth clenched, she curled her hands into fists. “This has to end. Enough. Enough. Alto a la impunidad.” Ellen offered her arm and Rain grabbed it, pushed against it until her whole body shook and she collapsed into Ellen’s arms. Ellen motioned the women to come close and all of them, pressed against Rain. Marina felt Rain’s thin body, felt her bones tremble. They held her for several minutes. Marina was close enough to feel Rain breathe, her chest, subside.
Brenda plopped her big body into Ellen’s lap and laughed, shook, pounded her hands on the rug before she said one word. Her wispy blonde hair bounced. Her words came slowly. “My little blonde blue eyed Roy came home the other day and screamed. ‘I won’t go back to that school. Brown boys can’t learn there. He knows Roberto is a brown man. He was his step dad for two years. The only Dad he knew. Roy screams at me, do something, find him, find him. He thinks I’m powerful.” She shook and laughed. “Me powerful.” The laughter turned to tears. “That’s just it. You are powerful. We are all powerful, otherwise they wouldn’t bother to repress us. We’re here to remind each other of our power. To reinvent how to wield it.” Brenda slid off Ellen’s lap and curled up in the center of their small circle, put her head on Rain’s lap.
Ellen turned toward Marina. “All the other women spoke? I have no choice? Ellen offered her hand to Marina. “This is your first time at our support group. We welcome you. We want you. You can say as much or as little as you want.” Marina clutched her own hands. She looked around. She moaned. “I don’t know what to say. I survive by never telling, never talking. Ellen smiled. “Maybe you’ve kept your grief and your terror and your rage to yourself long enough. Look around. What if you choose to show us just a bit of that grief, choose not to be alone any more.” Marina’s words of rage exploded from her. “Ori doesn’t have this.” Why should I?”
Ellen took Marina’s clenched hands. She brought her face close. Marina saw into her eyes. Could it be true? Could she be feeling Ellen’s mind reaching for hers? “Look around.” Ellen whispered and Marina looked at each woman. Myra’s familiar open grin, Dale’s stern yet warm expression, Rain’s eyes as moist for Marina as they had been for herself, Brenda’s fierce grin, and for that moment the boundaries between their minds dissolved. She took a deep breath and let herself enter a river of presence, this numinous effulgence of their conjoined minds. This was human goodness. For this moment she could choose to let go the inexplicable murderous harm people did, were doing to Ori that very instant someplace on earth. For all that people hurt each other, they were also able to love, to heal. She let herself be bathed in human goodness whatever that might be, she had never considered its existence except as a philosophical abstraction but here it was and she was in it, of it. “I’m not taking anything away from Ori if I let myself feel this.” Ellen nodded. “You might have more to give him, your mind will be better able to think. Our minds and our hearts are the best weapons we’ve got. We’re going to have to out think and out love our enemy.”
“My Machi invented a wilderness in the park with his friend David, a play jungle where they enact the Island war of their imagination. It’s as if their whole small boy lives have become guerrilla training. And I can’t tell if that’s heroic or tragic.” She let go, into this enveloping shared mind, and softly began to cry, and the tears grew until loud sobs racked her body. She would not have believed that she would be, could be, she was, the woman crying in Ellen’s arms as Ellen whispered in her ear. “You have already won the war. We have all already won the war.”
Ellen closed her eyes then opened them and gazed into each woman's eyes one by one. She sobbed, loudly, bringing her gaze back to the women whenever it wondered to the floor, or the windows, and each time she reconnected to the gazes an eruption of tears began in her belly and climbed out her chest in bellowing racking sobs. “Pablito cried himself to sleep again last night. He likes to wait me out, pretends to be asleep, so I leave him alone to his secret grief. He's such a little boy and already he believes it's not manly to cry where anyone can see him .Or believes his tears make my own grief more difficult to bear. He's already learned to pretend he's tougher than he is. Then, in the middle of the night he wakes me up screaming and crawls into bed with me. Donde esta Papi?”

For the night their group shared a cabin. Ellen choreographed removing the thin foam mattresses from the bunk beds, pushing the beds along the walls, laying the mattresses side to side, making a huge common bed. Myra and Marina lay close together, whispering in the dark, telling each other the stories of their husbands’ disappearances, laughing at their children’s heroism. “Machi has so many imaginary friends sometimes it’s frightening.” She could barely make out Myra’s smile in the moonlight streaming through the window screens. “He’s a precious boy.” Myra’s whispered words, for just that moment, eased Marina’s chronic fear. She let Myra take her hand, closed her eyes and entered sleep.

Dozens of small groups had already convened in clusters on the floor of the big meeting room when Marina and Myra walked in. Marina laughed, broke her laughter and spoke softly. “I haven’t overslept in years. I haven’t slept straight through the night since Ori was disappeared.” Myra took Marina’s hand and drew her to the wall where Action Groups were listed. “I never sleep either, not with Lisa sleeping with me and each of us having our nightmares about Lou at different times.” They studied the two dozen groups listed and wrenched themselves from each other. Marina watched Myra find the action group for mothers of young children sitting close to the bay window that faced a wooden deck and then a stand of pine trees. She looked around for AnaMarta who was leading the solidarity and the disappeared action group. Marina had been in many groups that offered solidarity to foreign revolutions, victorious like Ventura’s, or struggling like Karaya's. AnaMarta’s group was for solidarity coming the other way, for getting solidarity from other countries to pressure the City to release the Desaparecidos. This group was huge, maybe 30 people gathered around two tables in an adjoining room. Marina hoped she might get lost here. Seconds after she sat AnaMarta formed brainstorming groups of three. Marina didn’t want the intimacy of talking to two other women but within minutes her mind was flying. “If we can form delegations to do a road walk, like a pilgrimage, to the Coast, and then go to Ventura, demand that they force a prisoner exchange…” Dozens of ideas emerged. Marina relished the power of thinking, the promise of