Foreign Document
For two years he’s taken this exact journey to a job where, in total solitude, he moves fifty sealed, opaque, shoebox-sized boxes from one corner of a mansion to the next.
The following tale is from an Alternate Timeline that feasts on the events our own.
If you’ve received this transmission via digital mail, you may encounter errors that have been eradicated in the living document. Time is tricky. Use the order of alternate events as your guide.
FOREIGN DOCUMENT
Written by Tim Barnes
Loosely inspired by the June 9, 2023 indictment of Donald Trump.
Event Date: 2022 (Earth Years)
Like a bored zombie, Victor Rose III showers, steps out of his roommate-filled apartment, onto the city concrete, and into a rusted hand-me-down car that he guides onto the freeway. Left hand on the steering wheel, and right on the radio, he settles on a frequency between stations—a disjointed fusion of progressive rock and mariachi. Miles later, he parks in a strip mall where he gathers a to-go breakfast and the latest Daily Harbinger before starting a ten-block walk to the next phase of his daily routine.
Six blocks in, a dog barks. He reflexively squats with open arms to pet Dasha, the adorable mutt of an older woman whose name escapes him.
The woman speaks with a voice that crackles like freshly poured seltzer. “Dasha sure does like you…”
He smiles as if he’s never heard that line from her before. Four blocks later, he approaches a deep-rooted tree with an electric vehicle parked underneath it. It unlocks, despite him not having a key.
While maneuvering the e-car through uncharted roads, into the boonies, far up a hill, toward a nameless mansion that never appears on Google Maps, he plays a game with himself: “Take one sip of this latte whenever I remember something from the last four days of work that has nothing to do with boxes.”
The blending of days, weeks, and months worry Victor. For two years he’s taken this exact journey to a job where, in total solitude, he moves fifty sealed, opaque, shoebox-sized boxes from one corner of a mansion to the next. The money is great—$150k a year that he can only access once he decides to quit. Until then, it’s $15.00 an hour—still far above what Victor’s made before.
“The bargain is worth it,” he tells himself. Likely because he’s saving it to open a restaurant in the city. The Victor Rose Garden, he’ll call it. After twelve years of disappointing his hard-working folks in almost every conceivable way, he knows that opening a restaurant with the family name will beat the graduation ceremony they’ve allways wanted to attend. “And by the end of this year I’ll have enough to do it.”
His shadow hovers over the passenger’s seat, waiting for him to score a sip in his made-up game.
“Let’s see… Monday was that King Kong-sized fly that kept buzzing around… Felt great when I finally killed that sucker.”
One sip.
“Tuesday… it rained. Does that count?”
Sip number two.
“Wednesday… what the hell happened Wednesday?”
He parks near a large gate surrounding a modern structure in the same shade of blue as the sky. He’s stricken by how much it looks like a cage. Hoping his horoscope will brighten his mood, he flips through The Daily Harbinger and scans through the signs until he lands on “Leo.”
Today is your day of transference, dear Leo…
“Perfect. All I do is transfer things.”
…Prepare for deep bonding and connection in the days ahead. But beware of watchful eyes and false dichotomies… There’s always a third door…
He steps onto a lawn of fake grass outside of the gate and lifts a concrete manhole hidden underneath it.
With both feet firmly underground, Victor faces two doors—one green and one blue. Between them is a security camera. Below it is two lights that glow red. In front of it all sits green folded shirt.
“Third door, my ass…” he thinks—grabbing the green button-down and pulling it over his t-shirt.
Though Victor works alone, he’s long assumed that someone works a shift before him. “They probably exit from black after I enter the green. Bet they have to wear a black shirt, too. I wonder what they’re sign is…”
The red light next to green flickers and the door unlocks. He enters a waiting room equipped with a metal table, a metal chair, a metal box, a plastic burner phone, and a metal hand truck in front of a closed elevator. He places his wallet, phone, keys, and chewing gum into the metal box. The burner phone rings. A cheerful, automated voice speaks through it.
“Hello, Green! Please move the boxes from the home cinema into the pool room! You’re a valued worker!”
He pushes the hand truck into the elevator. It’s two sliding doors open in the kitchen. Though fully furnished, the mansion has no internet, no dust to sweep, no soda or beer to drink, no water in the pool, and no books or magazines to read. There’s just tap-H2O, eggs, toilet paper and soap.
Victor whistles a prog-rock/mariachi tune and pushes the hand truck from the kitchen, down a long hall, into the home cinema, toward a stack of boxes in front of the screen. It’s always the last place he leaves the boxes and the first place he finds them—which means it must be the same for the person who works the opposing shift. But there’s something different.
He notices an odd shape on the ground. Leaning closer, he recognizes it as blood. Roughly ten drops that form a line leading up to a lone cracked box on the ground with a smudge of blood on its puncture wound. The boxes are made of thick, hard plastic with curved corners, and he’s never considered how sharp they could be if they were to crack or break.
“The person who works before me must have dropped it and got cut while trying to pick it up…”
He looks at the security camera next to the projector and goes full detective mode.
“…Bet the camera didn’t even see it happen from that angle.”
Boredom evaporates into a cloud of fierce curiosity. The crack isn’t substantial enough to showcase what’s inside, but he knows that if he were to, say… drop it again while making it look like an accident, perhaps he could. The flickering, blank light from the projector makes his shadow loom over the stack of pristine boxes. A strange impulse jolts from his amygdala into his fingers, which organize themselves and lift the cracked box as if attempting to stack it, but then smash it back onto the ground.
It cracks open like hard candy on concrete. Paper spills out. Each piece, somehow, lands upside down revealing nothing but white. However, one page briefly captivates Victor on its way down, and his eyes catch an image printed on it. A symbol comprised of a spiral, numerous dots, four circles, two curved lines, one straight line, and two mostly straight lines with tips that curve into angles like cursive checkmarks.
The burner rings, and the cheerful automated voice speaks through it. “Stop what you’re doing and leave now! A car is waiting for you outside!”
“I’m… I’m… I’m… sorry,” Victor stutters into the flimsy device. “I didn’t mean to—”
“Don’t worry, Green! You’re a valued worker! See you tomorrow!”
For the first time ever, Victor leaves the job early. He gathers his things in the waiting room and, while climbing up the ladder, attempts remembering every detail of what just took place. The memory is instant and vivid, appearing with the precision of a photograph. It lingers so long that he notices a small watermark of words on the upper left corner of the page that cptivated him: “UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, DEFENSE INTELLIGENCE AGENCY”.
The e-car is nowhere to be seen as Victor emerges from underground. However, a black SUV approaches. He steps in, and sees that the driver is wearing glasses with metal lenses.
“Hi, I’m Victo—”
The driver cuts him off. “You don’t have anything from the boxes in here, do you?”
“Um… No.”
The driver removes his glasses and speeds away. The silent drive back the to strip mall makes Victor question everything. “What the hell have I gotten myself into? Classified documents? Am I working for Trump or something?! Is this driver my mystery co-worker? Can’t be... There’s no blood or bandages on the hands.”
Mixed into his panic is the symbol from the document. It’s pattern now watermarks his every thought. He sees the spiral in a cloud… The lines in the branches of trees... The dots in the dust that floats on the surface of his eyes… The curves in the cinnamon roll he orders each day for breakfast… It’s meaning in every horoscope he’s ever read before work…
The SUV halts. Victor exits. A phone in the car rings, and the angry driver repeats what’s said in a cheerful tone. “Thanks again for being an excellent worker! Hope you’ll come in tomorrow, Green!”
The driver hangs up and speeds off.
By habit, Victor approaches his old car so that he can head home and rest. But before his hand reaches the handle, a voice rings out behind him.
“Victor. You’ve seen a symbol, haven’t you?”
The voice is old, with crackles that remind him of the records his parents play. It’s followed by Dasha’s bark. He turns to pet the adorable mutt, and then looks up at the woman holding its leash.
He gives a suspicious smile. “You know, I’ve been meaning to ask… What’s your name?”
Gabby scoops the last bit of guacamole with a half-bitten chip. “Don’t worry, this ain’t a Trump thing. I used to move boxes during the Carter administration.”
Victor hasn’t yet confirmed or denied anything about his job or the symbol, but Gabby persists, nonetheless. “Ever hear of the dark web?” she continues. “My son showed it to me. I use it to meet other people who’ve moved boxes. All of 'em as clueless as you and me about what it all means. I mean, I’ve got a few theories. But now I want real answers. There’re mansions all over the place, you know. All got identical boxes full of all kinds of stuff. They get nobodies like us to do jobs we don’t understand. Smart, really. If everyone’s clueless, no one can get in trouble. See, I was a runner. I assume the person in that big SUV you got kicked out of was too. Runners move boxes from one mansion to another. I’m sure you’ve already guessed there’s another person working a ten-hour shift there, right? Well, ten pus ten is twenty. There’s four more hours in a day, man! That’s when the runners start their transfers.”
“Transference…”
“No questions asked, right?” she rambles, again, while feeding the guacamole chip to Dasha. “But maybe that’s just because they never gave us a person to ask 'em to. They still use that cheesy voice on the speaker system that sounds like the Movie Phone guy?”
Victor chuckles. It’s been a minute since that sound leapt out of his mouth. “They use burner phones now.”
A server approaches their table outside of the Cactus Bar and Grill on the upper level of the strip mall and hands them the check. Victor thinks about how casually Gabby references the system of his employment.
“Wait—who is ‘they?”
“That’s the messed-up part. Could be shadow-gov, actual-gov, rival-gov, or just some eccentric billionaire.”
It’s remarkable how with one sentence, Gabby manages to make Victor go from feeling at home with her to feeling like he’s stuck talking to a crazy person during his first break in two years. He tunes her out, focusing instead on the constellation of four freckles on her right cheek that he’s certain once formed a straight line but now seem to be on a curve. Then there’s her eyes. “Wait. Has her left iris always been split like that? Part blue part brown?..”
“Something the matter?”
He places his card over the check and, perhaps consciously, ignores her question—offering a personal anecdote in its place.
“What I really want to do is open a restaurant. Shit is expensive though. I got a job hosting at a pasta joint downtown right out of high school. Thought I could work my way up, you know? Skip college. Learn the ropes. But the damn place closed within a year.”
The server takes the check. Gabby presses him for answers.
“You’re seeing it, aren’t you? Right now. The symbol. Can you draw it?”
“Symbol? No, It’s just… this horoscope I read today. It’s getting to me, I guess.”
“Ah, so you’re already the type who looks out for patterns. This symbol… did it have spirals?”
A fog clears in his mind. The symbol shines like a moon above the sea, and shatters as the server approaches. This time, to drop off the receipt. Victor signs it but keeps his eyes on Gabby.
“If I did see a symbol, how would you know that?”
“You’ve been messing around with your food.”
She points at his plate, where he’s been using his fork to shape his leftover rice into a spiral for the last ten minutes.
“It’s common—I hear—for people who've seen one. They start seeing the symbol everywhere as if it’s a… a highway connecting the universe. What I’ve gathered—on the dark web, of course—has me convinced that it’s all connected to something bigger. Some think it’s war tactics and blueprints for weapons. I think they’re alien markings. They say just looking at one does something to you. Probably why they keep the pictures covered and shuffle 'em all around the country.”
“Have you seen one?”
She shakes her head.
“I quit once I got pregnant. Saved up enough by then to cash out. Buy a house. Raise my—”
She tears up. Dasha sits up and places a paw on her leg.
“My son… He died a few years ago. Dasha was his dog.”
Out loud, Victor says, “I’m so sorry to hear that.” But in his mind, he thinks “This poor woman is using these symbols as an escape from her own sorrow.”
“Look, I should probably go,” he says—sobering up from the shocking events of the day. “We aren’t supposed to talk about the job and I really need that money.”
A man in sunglasses takes a seat at a table near them. He’s wearing a suit that stands out because no one in town ever has a reason to be in one. Gabby leans in and whispers as she gathers her things. “Let’s talk about something else so that Monopoly Man over there doesn’t get suspicious. Tell me about that old job of yours at the restaurant.”
Victor signs the check and goes on his favorite rant. The one he’d typically say at a house party before his box moving gig. “Well, people tend to underestimate what it means to be a host at a restaurant. It’s not all smiles. It’s politics just like everything else. You seat someone in server’s section, next guest rolls in—you gotta seat them in the next server’s section. And they’re all watching you like a hawk the whole time. Sometimes, even though a customer doesn’t want to sit at the table in the back right next to the bathroom, and even though the server doesn’t like who you’re seating in their section, you have to figure out the right level of confidence to pull it all off. And the real trick of it all is making the managers, servers and customers think they’re the ones controlling you when it’s really the other way around.”
He leaves a healthy tip and walks toward the elevator. Behind him, Gabby snaps a photo of the check and then snatches it. There’s no signature on it. Just a half-finished scribble of the symbol.
Gabby’s arm interrupts the closing elevator doors so that she and Dasha can join Victor in the seconds-long ride down to the parking lot.
Victor gives his best fake smile and asks about the man in the sunglasses.
Gabby shrugs. “Beats me. He circles the mall right around the time you park that beat up old thing you call a car. I think he checks to see if you’ve made it in time for your shift.”
“How long has she been watching me?”
The elevator door opens.
“Thank God…”
Victor steps out, but hears Gabby say, “You don’t strike me as a believer.”
He steps back in, confused and almost hypnotized by Gabby’s two-colored eye.
“You don’t trust me,” she snipes. “And I need you to. Why don’t you?”
“I just—”
“Sectoral heterochromia iridum.”
“What is that? Some kind of spell?”
“It’s the name of the condition that splits my eye in two colors. You were wondering about that, right?”
He nods.
“And to answer your other question… I’ve been watching you since you started the job. Same goes for Kirsten. You don’t know that name, but it answers your other-other question… The mystery of the person who works the opposite shift. I’ve watched you both. Not just with my eyes… But also, in here.”
She places a finger on his temple and speaks, not from her mouth, but from her mind. “Once you give in to the symbol’s will and stop resisting its imprint in your mind, it does indeed give you powers.”
“So you have seen one?”
She unfurls the check from the restaurant.
“Finish the drawing…” she thinks to him.
“Can’t you just see it in my mind?”
“It doesn’t work that way, smart-ass... You must see the symbol in the physical plane...”
Electricity spouts from her left hand toward the pushbutton panel. The doors close, trapping them in. She raises her right hand at a security camera in the corner. It sparks and breaks.
While looking down at Dasha, she speaks out loud. “I don’t want to do this, but I know that you don’t plan on showing me the symbol willingly. I already tried with Kirsten. Took me months to talk her into breaking a box, but her conscience got the best of her in the end.”
“I’m sure cutting yourself and bleeding alone at a creepy job moving mysterious boxes will do that to a person.”
She lifts a handgun from her purse—all but confirming what happened to Kristen when she left from work earlier.
"I still don’t understand!”
“Does it matter? I’m pointing a gun at you.”
“Sure. Sure. Yeah… but you also won’t ever see the symbol if you kill me. Whoever employs me… I mean, they probably shipped the image far away by now.”
Dasha runs in panicked circles around them.
Gabby’s mind shouts, “Please. Just finish the damn drawing! I just want my son to live a human life!”
“What makes you think I can bring your son back from the dead?”
“Because he isn’t dead.”
Through tears she speaks out loud, “He’s Dasha!”
“The dog?”
She explains, in and out of thought like lightning, and speech like thunder.
“My son, John… he had cancer. A disease of the flesh. And, well… he died. And I couldn’t live with myself. No parent should out-live their child. I heard rumors about the symbols. I went on a hunt for one that could bring him back. But you can only make a trade. I wanted to bring his life into my body so I could take his place in the great beyond. I found someone… Thomas, who had seen a symbol that allowed him to commune with the other side. All I know is it had spirals. He didn’t think he could pull it off, but I made him try. There were only two people in the room when it happened—me and Thomas. But there was also my son’s dog, Dasha. Thomas made a trade, alright—but it was all wrong. My life stayed in my body. My son’s life entered Dasha’s. And Thomas’ entered the great beyond.
Victor turns to Dasha.
“John?”
Dasha sits up and gives a sharp bark.
“Please finish the symbol. I must make the trade.”
Victor speaks, improvising through fear, panic, and hints of anxious humor. “Okay, okay. If this is all true, maybe I can do it for you. You… want to move your life into the dog’s body and move your sons into yours? I’m sure I can figure this out.”
“I can’t risk trusting this with someone else again.”
She moves the safety switch and emits a deranged scream. Victor centers his mind on the symbol. It allows him to think without words but instead in shapes—hidden from Gabby’s understanding. He becomes a part of a spiral, which rotates both clockwise and counterclockwise, and clicks like a combination lock that opens the floodgates allowing foreign energy to flow into his veins. A new power extends from his core into his fingertips.
And then… he’s gone.
And there is silence.
And then… he’s back.
“People always underestimate the host,” Victor thinks, while placing the receipt and handgun back into his purse.
He looks up at the body that once belonged to him. “Hello, John.”
“Thank you,” speaks John, through Victor’s former flesh. John cradles Dasha. “Mother isn’t in here, is she?”
Victor shakes her head. “Do me a favor and open a restaurant.”
She enters his rusted old car. The music plays clear from the radio. And a cloud covers the sun, causing his new shadow to fade.
The third person present tense felt somewhat influenced by film narration (thinking of Wes Anderson, per our last conversation). I love a good body swap. I also thought...geez Dasha has a lot of EQ for a dog. Turns out it was John. And of course Victor would be a leo. The best sign.
So what happened to Gabby?