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Walter coiled the telephone’s wire around his fingers. He always had little things that he did with his hands when he wasn’t paying attention. It was rare that he wasn’t focused on his body language, though, so it rarely came out. This was part of why he preferred phone calls. It was easier to talk when he wasn’t distracted by other things. It was easier to talk when no one could see his face. He crossed his legs a bit as he sat in the chair. It was dark, and he could hear the wind in the trees outside.
That familiar voice flickered on the other end. “Good news! We are going to be able to help eachother!”
“I am interested. What have you found?”
“I have found proof that Florence’s father is still alive”
“Really. And why are you telling me that?”
“I am here to make a deal with you, DeCourcey. I am sure you will find it advantageous.”
“What do you want?”
He looked around the room he was in, his little bubble of light in the world. He saw that familiar orange glow coming from other windows outside. He knew he appeared the same to them. A faceless, nameless rectangle of colour announcing his existence to the world. Sometimes he wondered what evidence he really had that he existed. How he would prove his life to someone else. The distant voice brought him back,
“I want a return to the status quo. You want your little human rights victory, a boost to your image, some good publicity, is that correct?”
He could feel his heartbeat. He knew the script.
“That is correct.”
“Good.” His voice was measured and slow. Walter wondered if he felt the same way he sounded. Walter was sure that he never did. “All you need to give me is a tiny victory on the chess board. That shouldn’t be too hard. And we want Anatoly back.”
It didn’t seem like too much, though he knew just how much this game must have meant, for Molokov to want it so much. Normally, he was so caught up in the pace of everything, that he never realized just how much he felt like he was trying to climb a mountain on stilts. He knew his place in the world. He knew it painfully, and he couldn’t remember not knowing it. It was an indisputable fact of the universe. A wrong move could send the world tumbling into its looming fiery end. Another move could send it towards another death, of ice, instead. A slow spiralling into a tense nothingness. He wasn’t sure which one was worse. He didn’t know why he was dwelling on these feelings. He didn’t realize how long he had spent not saying anything.
“...DeCourcey?”
“Yeah, yeah. That sounds good.”
“Wonderful.”
Pause.
“Hey, uh, what do you want?”
“DeCourcey, I have already told you what I want. What are you asking me?”
“No, what do you really want? Out of all of this? Beyond this, even. What are we even doing here?”
There was silence from the other end. He worried that he had gone too far.
“I… want to help people. That is what we are here to do, is it not? To set the world on the right course?”
“Of course.” Walter said, knowing that there was a hidden layer to those words. That help and harm had a complicated relationship to eachother. Regardless, he still believed he was doing the best that he could. “But what’s the point? What are we doing this for? I am sorry, I shouldn’t be asking you for advice,” he added. He wished he could have just kept his mouth shut. This conversation should have been over already.
He paused for another moment before responding. “I want to write a part of history, DeCourcey! I want to make something in the world with my name on it. I want to be in those books I always read. This is our chance. Our moment to reach for fame, and glory and significance. Don’t you want that too?”
Walter imagined a young Molokov sitting for hours, reading a book, doing little else. Longing for a distant world. In that way, they weren’t all that different. He had spent his childhood staring into a screen, watching far away people living lives he couldn’t understand. There was a kind of dull pain to it. To wanting to be someone else. To trying your hardest to be like them and never completely succeeding. Becoming an uncanny mixture of all the things you watched but never were. It took more prodding from Molokov for him to notice that he got lost in thought again.
“It’s a deal,” he said. “You get Anatoly and the chess game, I get Florence’s father.” he thought for a moment. “ And you can call me Walter. If we are really going to be cooperating like this, we might as well be on a first name basis, don’t you think?”