In The Traces: The End
Part Ten of the story. Started 7.31.25; finished 8.3.25.
Where it started:
Previously:
X. “Aaron, brother! Welcome!” Chibuzo had his hosting persona strapped on tight in greeting me. He held out a hand and lifted me up onto the stern boarding platform as his escort team clambered over the deck-rails themselves, one by one. I stopped and looked up at the vessel as my luggage and I came aboard; my sense of awe at being aboard Tezeta never diminished. She cost Chibuzo upwards of $180 million, after mods. Every aspect had now been tailored to the nomadic remote-work lifestyle Chibuzo had been fashioning these past several months since his rupture with Anwuli - down to the home gym, 12-seat home theater, award-winning chef, and a crew of 28 (plus his three lawyers) who stayed on mostly without turnover each trip, and had his preferences and needs down to a science. The vessel’s interior was dark and silent as dawn continued to rise over-deck, bright-hot lines of chrome sharpening the long razor profile of the ship’s hull into a rapier point at the bow. At the tip of the bow Chibuzo had affixed a woman-warrior figurehead, wearing an eagle headdress, cast in the style of a Benin bronze. It was a totem of old Nigerian power, incongruous with the sleek skin of the rest of the hull - but very much a piece with the vessel’s owner. “I have your side of the master suite set up, if you want to drop your things and settle in,” he suggested. “Eggs and bacon will not be for another hour, but feel free to raid the fridge. I’m sure you remember your way around.” “It’s coming back to me, looking now. Thanks, Chi,” I said. “I’m going to check in with the captain, then have a cigarette by the helipad. Please, join me if you like.” As he had in getting me out here, Chibuzo evinced a tendency to phrase his directives as if they were suggestions. Each time I saw him, I observed to myself, there was a little less of the college boy, a little more of the oligarch. I paid close attention to his body language during our initial exchange, and in the conversation by the helipad which followed. If Chibuzo carried any tension about executing me, he was hiding it well: his posture and gestures were relaxed, and his manner betrayed no signs of a troubled mind. He drew his first-of-day smoke hungrily, exhaling through both nostrils and giving a little ahh. “A fine day,” he said, as I approached him on the helipad. He was looking out over an expanse of sea, empty except for a Los Angeles-bound cargo ship some miles away, on the northern horizon. “Truly,” I said. “Thank you again for having me out here.” “Don’t mention it, friend. Anything for my people.” We spoke for some 20 minutes then about what he and his other people had been up to lately; about recent business developments in Dubai and Bali, and a planned upcoming port-call to Van Phong to check in on some clients. We spoke around my reason for being here. But finally, I could bear the apprehension no longer, and I got right down to it, past the small talk. He’d just wrapped up a story about Annika, one of the girls aboard he’d been bedding the past few days, so I had a window to interject. “Chi, I wanna thank you for having me out here. I think I know the reason why you did.” Before he could offer an explanation, I continued: “I know what a huge liability I’ve become for you, and by extension Bonne Terre and the corporate image. I just wanna say: please don’t interrogate me. Everything I know is already in the reports, or was told to you over the phone. Believe me, please, I swear. Just, please. Quick and clean, no interrogation. If you could do that much, I can’t tell you how much it'd mean.” And here I did start to cry, I’ll admit it. Just tears; I found enough within me to keep the sobs at bay. “I can’t die in pain, I can’t. I can’t stand the idea of agony; I never could. I’m a coward.” Chibuzo’s face began in bafflement, scrunched up into critical thinking as I spoke, then returned to confusion as I finished. Finally, in a flash of understanding, he put it together. “Do you think I’m going to kill you, Aaron?” he asked. “It crossed my mind, yeah.” I’d never seen the word hilarity in action quite like I did then. It was as if he’d been transfixed: it burst out of him in great torrents, convulsing his body and leaving him gasping for air. It was a full minute before he could speak. “Oh Aaron, oh my brother. As if I could! As if I would ever want to!” Then he dissolved into great belly-laughs again. I was flushed, confused, grasping at stray thoughts. “But - the scandal, the embarrassment I’ve put you through - that a trial will cost you…“ “We fight the charges! What do I care? She can’t prove I put you up to it - anytime I had contact with Arcentrix, it was through you or Nangsa.” “But - the reports!” I exclaimed. “There’s a paper trail, right from me to you!” “My email is triple-encrypted, and you brought your work laptop with you. They can subpoena me until Kingdom Come, they’ll never find them. Any phone calls we made to each other can be explained by the fact that you are my employee, yes? Aaron, Aaron.” Here his tone shifted and softened. He took on the manner of a puzzled parent, wounded by some spiteful action of their child's. “I can’t believe you think I’d do such a thing.” My brain was still in frantic overdrive, trying to sort through all this information. Chibuzo continued: “I spoke with Carson, Nangsa, and Emil, and they agreed to take a half-hour with you each morning to review your case, and coordinate a defense through our Brooklyn office. You’re going to be fine, brother: my sharks swim faster and harder than any in the ocean, yah? Whatever nuisance charges the Bertrands want to file, ehhh, let them file. I will get you off, and keep myself out of it.” “And you’re sure I’m not making too much trouble for you?” “Aaron, please. You know me; you know who I am. I have negotiated with Boko Haram warlords, tribal chiefs, foreign ministers. I have had one-on-ones with each of the last two U.S. Presidents. Please do not mistake me for someone who is powerless.” Here he paused to spit - actually hacked and spat over the edge of the helipad. “Or someone who is afraid of what a pampered little white girl will do to me.” At last I began to accept the truth of my situation: that his laughter was not contrived, that he considered the murder-plot I’d imagined ludicrous, and that he would defend me at trial (albeit as a matter of macho pride) if a time for court dates came. I felt my stomach unclench. I felt myself tittering with nervous little spurts of laughter. Relief popped out of me like champagne. He laughed again too, gentler now, and brought me in for a hug around the shoulders to help still my spasms. Trust between us was, of course, not at an all-time high. But everything could be as it was once again, his actions told me. “You writers.” He shook his head, grinning in bemusement. “You and your imaginations!” *********** Over the next few days, I gigged around on the occasional correspondence assignment for Chibuzo - proofreading memoranda, that sort of thing - but mostly spent time in a lounger on the main deck, sunning and napping and reading here and there while chatting with the girls that Chibuzo had brought aboard. None of them belonged to the class of people who worked - two still had college to return to in the Fall, but of the rest, Chibuzo was the only non-crew member keeping regular work hours. This meant that all we ended up doing was gossiping about their mutual friends back on the mainland, browsing socials and news feeds, and speculating about the state of the world and our futures in it. It was a dumb, lazy little hiatus from whatever life had in store once we were back at port, punctuated by drinking and drugging at night. They were all reckless in that manner so specific to young people of their class: it was a posture with them, a series of choices that never went so far that they couldn’t unwind the consequences. Here, too, hundreds of nautical miles away from the nearest paparazzo, nothing was as consequential as on the mainland, and they took the chance to act accordingly. Each of the girls was connected to Annika socially, but stayed committed to polyamory as a matter of principle: Annika and her friends shared the attentions of Chibuzo and I evenly, without apparent jealousy, throughout the trip. But I kept the 9:30 meetings Chibuzo set up for me with his team of three lawyers, and stayed mostly on the sidelines when the harder partying went down. On my fourth morning of meeting with the lawyers, I got word that the Bertrands had filed a warrant for my arrest, which would be served upon my re-entry into America (Chibuzo assured me of bail). Even that critical development didn’t do much to break the happy laxity of life aboard Tezeta: his team assured me of the soundness of the strategy they were developing, and put me in touch with the attorneys who’d be running my Brooklyn defense. By day five, I’d had a few calls with them, and each put me deeper at ease in their competency. I liked the odds that I’d beat their case, and mount a successful counter-suit, more and more each day. So, in time, all felt good out here. We swam through nine long days all told, unburdened by the troubles of the world. In that way, I guess we were feigning innocence as well as recklessness. But out on the South China Sea, neither fiction can last indefinitely. Eventually, reality comes to claim what’s due. *********** I fell into the habit of waking in the pre-dawn light, staying up until mid-day, then crashing out for another couple of hours during siesta. In that early-morning time, I began to write, in a journalistic way, about what I’d been through at Arcentrix. Chibuzo encouraged me to do this - he was eager to get me doing anything other than fixating on my pending trial, and dragging the girls’ moods down in a proximal sort of way - and had gone so far as to find a couple exec-level contacts at The Guardian and The Atlantic for me to reach out to about placement. I didn’t know if bringing additional publicity to my actions was unwise, with a trial pending, but he insisted that I write the article/book anyway. He felt he owed it to me, as an honor-debt, now that I had to face felony charges in the line of duty as his employee. “You know, It might even be better if you were to get something published,” he reasoned with me one night. “That way, we can claim that your involvement with Arcentrix was the deep-cover research of an amateur journalist all along.” Time would tell. But I was far from either article or novel most days; even beginning to arrange my notes and impressions in a systematic way felt beyond me. Ideas for what I’d wanted to say about nanosurveillance and America emerged, vanished, re-emerged - only to vanish again. I’d write something I’d think was profound and thematic, like “Visiting the Arcentrix lab = nerve center of modern American experiment” or “In learning how to watch others, we confront our own helplessness” - only to find that the idea was too floofy or stretched, or that the notes I’d taken didn’t cohere around it. I began to feel like a fraud, pure and simple. I tried going chronologically instead, working beat by beat through each of the trips I’d taken into the company’s processes instead of searching for the piece thematically. But that just leant itself to a bunch of purple prose; without any sort of focus or through-line emerging from re-examination of my notes, nothing held together. Feelings of fraudulence flourished further. My writing, when I read it back, sounded like a faux-poetic grab-bag of overwrought impressions, emitted by a pedantic and self-important man-child utterly devoid of prospects, original insights, or self-respect. Well, maybe a bit harsh. How else might I put it? “A lackey.” “A hanger-on.” Where'd I hear those words before? Why were they so quick to mind? I turned them over and over in my head, searching for association. Then I remembered. What Marielle had said to me, on our call, about who I’d become around Chibuzo. A lackey. A hanger-on. *********** The words stuck, right where I didn't want them. *********** So when the sun finished rising, and the time came to take breakfast, I shuffled to the canteen to find some iced coffee and a muffin. Then I came right back to the office suite I shared with Chibuzo for more work. There were now two sets of charges Marielle had laid on me that I’d have to beat, if I were to put this all behind me. In neither case was my innocence assured. * * * THE END