Complication by Isaac Adamson

with fluid. Blood colors our sputum, our hair falls out in clumps, our voices subside into watery rattles. We drown of our own bodies. This is what happens. To me, to my friends. Because I’ve been careless. Because I’ve made a mistake.”
    Â 
    He gives the accordion case a sudden kick. It rings metallic, and the sound brings me part way to my senses. Now is the time to make a run for it. But then if he wanted to attack me, why the big speech? Besides, I am standing closer to the door, and once I get to the street, if police really are there waiting, then I will only have to scream. But then I know none of these things will happen because the question is already escaping my lips even as my teeth clench to hold it back.
    Â 
    â€œWhat’s inside the case?” I ask him.
    Â 
    AGENT #3553: And he tells you?
    Â 
    REZNÍCKOVÁ: Vokov lifts the accordion case and lays it on the table. Neither of us speak, both studying the dull metal box as if some complicated chess problem is posed upon its surface. He takes from his inner coat pocket a curled sheaf of papers several pages in number and unrolls them atop the case.
    Â 
    â€œThis,” he says, “is The Defenestrator .”
    Â 
    AGENT #3553: A samizdat 5 .

    Â 
    REZNÍCKOVÁ: I guessed as much, though he didn’t say so, and I’d never actually seen one before. It was just a handful of plain, typewritten sheets. He flips through the pages, explaining how all previous issues had been hand typed, page by monotonous page, copy by mind-numbing copy, on cheap onionskin. Quality paper is a tightly controlled commodity, he says, difficult to acquire without drawing attention. Every printing press and photocopier in the country is state owned and as closely monitored as materials at the Semtex plastic explosive factory. But Vokov says his friends have recently gained use of a cyclostyle stencil printer from an old parish school in Podolí.
    Â 
    AGENT #3553: Did he give you the name of this school?
    Â 
    REZNÍCKOVÁ: He did not. “Now we can crank issues out in no time,” he said. “Which means we can include news, real news transcribed from the radio broadcasts that sneak through unjammed. BBC, Radio Free Europe, Deutschewelt.” But news, he explains, is not their primary focus. The Defenestrator publishes short stories, serialized novel excerpts, feuilletons, poems, even an essay written by a famous exiled novelist living in London that had been smuggled across the Austrian border by members of the French Human Rights League. The people behind their publication know the Parallel Polis contributors, who know the Revolver Revue writers, who help distribute Edice Petlice , who have connections with Vokno ’s 6 people. Among their number included half the signers of Charter 77. Or so he told me.

    Â 
    â€œFifty copies are inside the accordion case,” he says. “Tomorrow I was to take them to the top of Petřín Hill and deliver them to a man unknown to me. You know the rest.”
    Â 
    AGENT #3553: And did you know the rest?
    Â 
    REZNÍCKOVÁ: Each copy would be passed hand-to-hand in secret, I suppose. One trusted friend to another. I’ve heard there is or was a special pew in St. James Cathedral under which you could find such materials. Though if I know it, so must you. In perhaps six months time, I figured, each copy of The Defenestrator would have been read by some fifty or one hundred people. With fifty copies, that meant nearly five thousand individuals.
    Â 
    AGENT #3553: You really think so many would be interested in unsubstantiated [unintelligible] printed on cheap onionskin?
    Â 
    REZNÍCKOVÁ: What I wondered was why Vokov would share all these incriminating details, why he would trust someone he’d never met. But then he’s got nothing to lose, I thought. And by telling me of this operation, he is also implicating me. If I choose not to go to the police