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A Plan Was Commissioned

Ricardo Bernhard

Excerpt translated from the Portuguese by the author

At first, no one finds it strange when Benjamin, the choreographer, gets up from the table. But then he doesn’t move again. He doesn’t head to the sideboard for another spoonful of the risotto everyone liked, doesn’t adjust the waistband of his always-tight pants and sit back down, doesn’t leave the dining hall to do something elsewhere in the palace—nothing. He just stands there, silent. Heads turn one by one, and all eyes converge upon him.

The women, who still find him beautiful, take the opportunity to admire. The spell of the early days hasn’t broken. Valentina, the jeweler, believes it never will. The men still haven’t decided what to make of the guy. Seeing him like this, shamelessly begging for attention, only adds to their misgivings. Nicholas, the computer programmer, feels a twinge of anger inside, a flood of inferiority on the outside, and sinks deeper into his chair.

Benjamin doesn’t check if everyone is looking at him. He doesn’t have to. It’s as if his body, used to the stage, can gauge attention without effort—who it’s from, where it’s coming, how it’s being given. He knows: he has what he needs.

“I need to share something with you.”

Benjamin is fully aware that everyone around the table is thinking he just wants to be in the spotlight. The narcissistic dancer, proud owner of a sculpted ego. It isn’t true. He would rather not have to request the attention of any of them, let alone the entire group. But this will become clear,

“Today, in the office, I opened a desk drawer just to grab a sheet of paper and a pencil—and found this.”

Before showing it, he emphasizes that he didn’t say anything at the time because he needed to tell everyone together. It was too important to do otherwise. As he speaks, he realizes that it might sound like he’s stalling for drama, clinging to the spotlight. But now they will see.

“It’s this.”

Benjamin pulls an envelope from his back pocket. He leans forward slightly, and Sara, the biologist, fans herself. Except for Nicholas, all the men prefer to believe she’s mocking him.

“I read it right there in the office,” Benjamin says. Everyone can see that the seal—a handsome red seal, probably embossed in wax—has been broken. He takes out a single sheet and unfolds it. “What’s handwritten here seems to be—no, actually, is—a set of instructions for what we’re supposed to do in the palace.”

“Pass it here,” says Oliver, the tennis umpire, stretching out his arm.

He is the last person Benjamin would have chosen to hand it to, and yet he complies. Oliver reads the document with furrowed brows, a deep vertical crease between them. His entire face resembles cracked desert earth, and if he doesn’t look older, it’s only because his permanent tan gives the illusion of health, as if he’d just come back from a long walk under the sun. No one in the palace has seen sunshine in ages; whatever comes in through the skylights doesn’t count. When Oliver is done reading, he slaps the paper.

“So you found this, huh? Just sitting in a drawer? Left like that?”

He lets go of the sheet. It falls among the plates, on top of dirty napkins. Everyone else is curious about the letter, but no one dares reach for it. They’re afraid of what it says.

“Mission? Or how did you put it? Instructions?” Oliver stares at Benjamin as if insulted. “I don’t acknowledge this envelope, honestly. I don’t think it’s legitimate at all. The presidency wouldn’t hide instructions in some desk drawer. It doesn’t track. If it were official, the sheet would be on a table, white on dark wood, surrounded by desk lamps, plenty of pomp and circumstance. They would make sure it wouldn’t go unnoticed. As far as I’m concerned, this envelope is old stuff, something left behind by mistake. Or it’s a dumb prank from one of those courtiers trying to be funny. I’m not buying it. I’ll wait for the real instructions.”

There’s no reason for Benjamin to remain standing, but he does. Tense, he grips the edge of the table tightly, which some take as an attempt to intimidate. He stares at the sheet lying among the plates, waiting for someone to pick it up, read what it says, and challenge Oliver’s take. The challenge comes sooner than that.

“What if the order was for the envelope to be in plain sight, and some knuckleheaded staffer put the damn thing in the wrong place?” asks Esther, the psychologist. As she speaks, her eyes widen as if she were stating the obvious.

“Do we have any reason to suspect the envelope isn’t legit?” Abigail, the historian, seems to back Esther, but quickly follows with: “Do we have any reason to assume it was supposed to be anywhere else?” It’s unclear whether she’s questioning what Esther said, what Oliver said, or what both said. Abigail doesn’t clarify. She slips back into her own thoughts.

“You’re not far off” says Sidney, the film director. As usual, and without realizing it, he speaks with the lofty detachment of someone delivering the final word. It irritates nearly everyone. “Nothing here is by chance. And if it is, it’s in our best interest to treat it like it’s not. Our unwritten mission,” Sidney glances sideways at the letter, which Oliver has picked up again, and runs his fingers through his gray hair, “is to pay attention to all shifts in context, as slight as they may be, and from them, try to grasp what is expected of us. If we grasp that, we’ll be able to fulfill the ending that’s been set. And then get out.”

Sara tilts her head in that way Nicholas knows will end in tears, unless someone reassures her with the right words or gestures.

“This can’t be,” she moans, tucking her hair behind her ear. “Won’t someone from the presidency show up to explain why we were summoned here, what we’re here for, what they’ll do with us?”

Esther rests her toned arm on the table and strokes Sara’s hand. Nicholas watches, checking if it will be enough to hold back the impending tears. It is, but Esther is careful to wait until the biologist has fully pulled herself together. “We all know we shouldn’t expect anything from the presidency.”

Sidney wants to read the letter and asks Oliver for it. The umpire lingers, rereads the whole thing in silence, and only hands it over when the director gets up to insist. Sidney sits down, and Benjamin takes the cue to finally do the same. Empty-handed, Oliver questions the choreographer.

“Which desk did you find the envelope in?”

“I need to think … it was by the wall next to the exit… one, two… no, it was in the last desk.”

“Which drawer?”

Complaints about the cross-examination arise around the table, led by Abigail. Benjamin answers over the grumbling.

“The middle drawer … second row … on the right side, if you’re sitting at the desk.”

“Was the envelope lying on top of the stack of paper? In the back? Underneath? In the middle?”

Abigail huffs. “Unbelievable.”

“It’s important, alright?” says Oliver. “Anyone has the right to ask whatever they want. Maybe a detail will turn up that can help us fulfill the ending that’s been set, right, Sidney?”

Still reading the letter, the film director pretends not to notice the taunt.

“It was stuck behind the ream, in the back of the drawer,” Benjamin answers, picking up the empty envelope and turning it around in his hands. “It’s not very big.”

Oliver plants his elbows on the table and leans forward in a confrontational stance. “Now, tell me if this is how you expected to receive a mission. Left in a drawer, brought by one of our own … and why precisely this one,” Oliver claps Benjamin hard twice on the back, but Benjamin doesn’t budge, “among all of us?”

Sara is losing it again. Her fingers keep fidgeting with the blond strands around her ear. “No, no, no. Someone from the presidency has got to come here, now. Now. Hellooo,” she calls out to an unspecified spot in the dining hall. “How do we even call someone?”

Sara looks at Esther, who immediately grabs her hands. This doesn’t do it this time, and Sara sends Abigail a wordless plea for help. The historian merely shrugs.

“Let’s not dream of the impossible,” Sidney cuts in, swirling his water like it’s red wine. “These are not the parameters. We’re not the ones who initiate anything, you know that perfectly well.”

Esther squeezes Sara’s hands, offering her a look of compassion. Nicholas braces for a comment that the biologist won’t like.

“The presidency is in no hurry. Or it hardly ever is. When it is, the urgency is explosive—and best not provoked.”

Abigail nods. “Let’s take this envelope seriously. Let’s fulfill this mission. Funny—if Oliver hadn’t raised any doubts, I think we would’ve even been glad to see the envelope. Finally, a justification. A meaning to all this.”

Around the table, some nod, others shake their heads.

“Against gullibility. Against naïveté,” Oliver mutters about himself, leaning back in his chair, briefly disarmed.

“Let’s get to work on this assignment,” Esther claps in encouragement. “It can’t be that complicated.”

Sidney lets out a long whistle and looks at the letter, still in his possession.

“Calm down,” Oliver says, slapping the tabletop. Silverware and cups clink; the result is anything but calm. “We need to treat this envelope as conditional. Let’s keep things moving while we wait for another sign from the presidency, some kind of confirmation that the letter is real, and meant for us. Whatever that might be. Another letter? A symbolic object? A visit from a courtier that Sara wants so badly? I don’t know. Something’s got to come, either to confirm the mission or tell us that it was a mistake, that our task is actually something else.”

“What mission have we received, anyway?” Nicholas wants to know.

Sidney has set the letter on the table and is leaning over it. He reads it again, tracing the lines with his finger. Finally, he takes a deep breath, closes his eyes, and slides it between the plates, up for grabs for anyone who wants to take it.

Valentina is closest. She pulls it toward her but doesn’t pick it up. She is aware that they’re expecting her to read it out loud, but that she won’t do. Feigning absent-mindedness, she starts reading it silently—or tries to. Anxious, anticipating the first complaint, she can’t focus.

“Valentina!” Sara exclaims, as if she can’t believe it. Oliver smiles, taken aback by her surprise. Nicholas hates him at this moment. “Read it for us,” Sara pleads.

Shaking her head, Valentina pushes away the paper. Had it been anyone else reacting that way, the table would’ve been swept by hissing sounds, snide remarks, and glances at the ceiling—a whole wave of bad temper and hostility. But not with Valentina. As she refuses to read the letter, her dark curls sway over her heaving chest, her face closes, skittish, into an expression of wounded beauty, and everyone feels a mix of pity and awe, in varying degrees. Any of them could read the letter out loud, couldn’t they? So why not?

Valentina pushes the paper toward Nicholas. He’s sitting next to her strictly because it was the only available seat. That is, the only available seat among the eight chairs the group usually picks. The rectangular table is massive, but everyone always gathers around that one end, nearest the inner corridor of the palace. At this point, no seats have been claimed by daily use, and whenever he can, Nicholas avoids sitting next to Valentina. In his case, the awe everyone feels in varying degrees around her is mixed with a specific kind of intimidation. It’s such a strong and pleasurable kind of intimidation that Nicholas fears it.

“Will you do the honors?” Sidney snaps Nicholas out of his daze.

They are all clearly waiting for him to do the honors, and Nicholas picks up the sheet after all. With his lazy, faltering voice, he starts to read. To his surprise, the handwriting looks childish, definitely not presidential:

Two neighbors cannot stand each other, but neither will move. If it came to that, and they are prepared for it, they would rather die than leave their own land. They do not attack each other, do not provoke one another: on the contrary, they go to great lengths to avoid crossing paths. Their routines are perfect metronomes, synchronized by mutual hostility. They are mirrors that must never reflect the same light. In the neighborhood, people have come to call this a cold peace. That characterization doesn’t seem adequate. Peace has no place in intolerance. So much so that a certain fear courses through the village like a persistent winter chill—the fear that one day, by accident, the neighbors will bump into each other. Because they are getting old. Their focus, their grip on routine, may not outlast the hatred they hold inside. The village shudders at the prospect of violence. If they unleash brutality, no one knows how far it will go. It is not lost on anyone that intolerance inhabits other souls too, that blood summons more blood.

Develop a plan that may lead the two neighbors to achieve and sustain genuine harmony, for the wellbeing of both and of the entire neighborhood.

“Wow,” Nicholas lets out, leaning his head back.

Sara snatches the paper from his hands. They all wished they could have taken the document themselves. Even those who had already read it—spoken out loud, the mission has regained its sense of novelty. Inside each of them, pulses the desire to feel the letter’s physicality, to see the cursive lines that form the letters that make up the words that describe the task, to witness how a yellowed page may contain the impossible. It is a silent pulse. As they wait their turn to hold the paper—each reader, leaning forward or back, feels it taken the moment they finish, snatched up by an anxious hand—no one speaks.

What happens, after the letter has gone from hand to hand and returned to the middle of the table, is that someone leaves the dining hall. Crushed by the complexity of the task—soon to be dubbed the stated-problem—someone gets up and disappears down the palace’s corridor. It is Abigail, though no one is in a position to register this, though no one cares. After her, another leaves, and then another, and another, until only Benjamin remains in the dining hall. He stares at the sheet lying among the dirty plates and doesn’t know what to do with it.

II          East Palace no. 16, 20h00

Twelve weeks and four days before the letter was found—but only Benjamin, the choreographer, has been keeping that count, secretly tracking the time spent inside the palace by drawing small quadrilaterals crossed by diagonals on sheets of paper kept beneath his mattress—twelve weeks and four days before, each of the eight had received at home another envelope bearing the seal of the presidency. The first envelope, designed to dismantle the more or less normal life they had been leading on the island. All eight of them sensed it from the beginning.

Inside the envelope, they found a single sheet of paper containing a single sentence, brief, too brief:

The presidency requests your presence at East Palace no.16 at 20h00.

On the surface, each of them had a different, unique reaction. One cried. One dropped to the floor and did pushups without stopping. One grabbed a book of crossword puzzles and completed them one after the other. One screamed in an empty office after hours. One ran countless laps around a block where one could feel one was no longer welcome. One flipped through old photo albums pulled from an attic cabinet. One stared into the mirror until the reflection turned into a stranger’s face.

And yet, in substance, the reactions were one and the same. All eight thought the same thoughts. Perhaps any island resident, upon receiving that message, would have watched their mind leap from idea to idea along the same path, in a necessary sequence. To receive that message was terrifying. It could only mean they had done something wrong. At the palace, they would be issued an ultimatum. Or not even that—it might be too late for an ultimatum. A punishment, rather, would materialize at the palace. How swiftly each of their minds went searching for the failings that might justify the punishment. Neglect of someone dear. The humiliation of a subordinate. Foolish megalomania. Desertion of the real world. Lucrative megalomania. Harmful cowardice. Idealism as pathology. What human life couldn’t be seen as a swamp of misdeeds? Not that they had gone much beyond or below the most ordinary, everyday sins. Not even with the letter from the presidency in their hands did they have the courage to acknowledge the greatest evil, the one they would confess to no one, not even themselves. The most they could manage was to contemplate, vaguely, elliptically, the prospect that maybe, well, maybe, it was for that other reason—perhaps it’s because … But soon the mind slipped away, toward other oddities. Don’t we all carry a fatal guilt we can’t possibly face?

They slipped away toward smaller oddities. Or perhaps not smaller. Tangible. Like the absence of a date in the message. That seemed to stray from the standards of official documents issued by the presidency—or at least by other institutions on the island. The truth was, none of them had ever received any communication from the presidency. Perhaps the absence of a date helped set it apart, alongside the wax seal and the imperial script. The lack of a timestamp could reinforce the idea that all communications from the presidency were urgent. Delivered the same day they were issued. Requiring immediate action from the recipient. To report to the palace such and such at 20h00. On which day? The day when the invisible army of staff and conscripts dropped the letter into the mailbox. All eight of them inspected the envelope. There was, in fact, no postmark. Strange, terrifying.

It was also intriguing that, of all the palaces on the island, the presidency had specifically designated East Palace no. 16. Why that one, and not another? But then, what palace wouldn’t provoke perplexity? What place, no matter how modest? If they had chosen a nondescript public office as the meeting place, would that have lessened their apprehension? On the one hand, a public office might imply a particular matter, narrowing the scope of possible reasons for the summons. Besides, the prospect of a meeting with a lower-ranking official could suggest the insignificance of the summoned. On the other hand, weren’t the punishments meted out in ordinary public offices often crueler? East Palace no. 16: a destination vague enough to sustain the hope that there might be a destination after the destination. Not that they allowed themselves any hope.

Perhaps nothing on that page unsettled them more than the two-digit pairs split by a lowercase letter: 20h00. Nighttime, crystal-clear logic. 20h00 because the matter was sensitive, grave. 20h00 because utmost discretion and reserve were required. Discretion and reserve that none of the eight maintained when they received the message. Each wondered whether the neighbors had received a similar missive. Perhaps the same one. Perhaps another, with minor variations: another palace, another hour. Had a war broken out, and all able-bodied islanders been summoned to defend the nation? It was something to investigate. Each knocked on their nearest neighbor’s door. No, no, no, they had received no letter. Had it stopped there, it wouldn’t have been so bad. But each of those neighbors made the sign of the cross when they heard about the presidential message, and bid farewell to the summoned as if they’d never meet again. Heads bowed and feet dragging, the eight made their way home, each quietly admitting they wouldn’t have reacted any differently, had the circumstances been inverted. They hadn’t. The circumstances were irreversible.

All eight considered ignoring the summons. What if they took refuge in the home of someone close but unexpected? It had to be someone close, because only great affection would give them the courage to do something as drastic as sheltering someone summoned by the presidency. And it had to be someone unexpected, because otherwise a few minutes after 20h00 would suffice for a threatening knock to be heard at the door of the hiding place. They imagined it: someone close, someone unexpected, the furtive welcome, whispers through the house, curtains drawn tight, a sense of adventure hollowing out the chest—and hung their heads, hopeless. It was an impossible proposition. They didn’t even have anyone truly close, someone to whom they could make such a request. They had once, yes, but … best not to think about it. There was plenty of unexpected people, but that counted for nothing. Show up at anyone’s gate, and they’d be driven off like lepers. And on top of that, they’d have to witness them crossing themselves, just like their neighbors had—a gesture reserved on the island for moments of utter shock and gravity.

The sea. Each of the eight lived near the sea. They could try to slip onto one of the boats that made the daily crossing to the mainland. That wouldn’t require someone both close and unexpected. Any skiff, manned by any sailor, merchant or mercenary, would do. All they needed was cunning. Some of the eight knew themselves to be more cunning than others, but that edge quickly shrank, dissolving into irrelevance, once they considered the meticulous inspections carried out by the coastal inspectors. No sack ever traveled unsearched. No compartment ever sailed unscoured. The sea, liquid freedom inaccessible to those summoned by the presidency.

Each in their home, watching their destinies shrink, the eight wondered: why not stay put? Why not test how much their presence at the palace really mattered to the presidency? A half-smile pulled at each of their lips. They must already be going mad. Nothing had begun yet, and already they were going mad.

Time was short. The envelope had arrived late, and the few hours left before 20h00 had been squandered on disbelief, on flailing, on pointless inquiries, on ill-conceived plans. Now there was no time to prepare properly for the inevitable. Their eyes ran over closets, drawers of personal items, pantry shelves, what to bring, what to bring? Soon their eyes closed, preferring the void, preferring the dark. There was no way to prepare for something so unknown. The best thing to do was to leave with the clothes on their backs and not risk, under any circumstances, being late.

That’s what they did. They walked down deserted streets, crossed ornamental gardens, and entered East Palace no. 16 at precisely 20h00. In the palace they stayed, exploring the rooms, talking, sometimes warming to the others, sometimes growing suspicious, until Benjamin found the document meant to explain the summons and give purpose to their presence, though even then, they sensed that perhaps nothing could be explained, and perhaps their stay would never lead anywhere at all.

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Ricardo Bernhard is the author of four novels. His fiction has appeared in Your Impossible Voice, Right Hand Pointing, and OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters, among other publications. He lives in Toronto.

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