Court Merrigan's work has appeared in Pindeldyboz, Insolent Rudder, The Summerset
Review, Angle, among others, and is forthcoming in Porcupine. Originally from Nebraska, he currently
resides in Thailand.
|
En had a thing about photos. True, she had
all kinds of superstitious hang-ups. Mirrors and colours and candles and etcetera. But she made a special point
about photos. She said you could never leave them behind. Infact pictures were unguarded portals to your soul.
She mentioned this after she put a couple pictures of us on the TV. It was like she expected to leave, to have
to leave. I sometimes saw her looking at them wistfully, as though they were already gone.
Not that she took everything so seriously. For instance, next to those sacred pictures
she carefully placed animal bobbleheads. These she got from cereal boxes--a moose, a squirrel, a polar bear. She
didn’t much care for cereal, but she loved the bobbleheads. Many mornings in a row I went without the eggs and toast
I’d taught her to make and she got nine or ten bobbleheads up there. I didn’t mind. I’d have eaten banana slug sushi
if it made her happy. When I finished up a box, she’d have a new one, emptied of bobblehead, ready the next
morning.
Around then is when we both took to eating cereal at night, too. It was not that we
loved cereal as much as all that. But those were the days when the stories began filtering in from the hinterlands
on the backs of staggering survivors. The pandemic was spreading upcountry, worse than the worst conjectures of the
grimmest of doomsayers, but it wasn’t until it was far too late that the full gravity of the situation was appreciated.
Then a vaccination centre (useless, since there was no vaccination) inexplicably appeared, and the gates burst. Our
quaint town, home to the university where I was paid a ridiculously high salary to quote long lines of Shakespeare
and Keats and Ginsberg to students mostly unable to comprehend Seuss, became a seething slum overnight. Never mind
that we were hundreds of kilometres from the outbreak zones deep in muggy rice country. Where En was from.
We nonetheless remained chockfull of bravado. No one anywhere yet believed or
accepted the outbreak could be as devastatingly biblical as it fast became. Home, reputedly safe and serene
across the waters, crossed my mind. En, however, lacked a passport, or any official papers whatever. Moreover,
she grew daily more worried for the fate of her upcountry village and would not have abandoned her homeland. But
she wouldn’t leave without me, and I wouldn’t go anywhere without her.
In the early going, the university still paid my salary and the airconditioned
supermarket where we bought cereal, owned by a multinational both image-conscious and profit-hungry, remained open.
We were there often in those days. With all the newcomers, food that wasn’t pre-packaged was an unknown quantity.
Not everyone in town, after all, was a penniless beggar. Plenty found the mouldering pepper-packed titbits of
dubious origin that passed for food among the peasants as unpalatable and potentially toxic as I did, and were
equally willing to pay the premium for properly packaged foodstuffs. But then came the quarantine. The managers
of the superstore, out of touch with their bosses across the ocean, were not above massive price gouging as the
shelves emptied. The last box we managed to acquire cost nearly fifty times the normal price.
From our balcony overlooking the sea, filthy with floating turds and plastic sacks and
castoff shirts and sandals, we watched the helicopters come. They hovered over town authoritative as scripture,
blaring massively-decibeled bilingual announcements that foreign nationals would be evacuated on that day and that
day only. The pronouncement warned that only bona fide foreigners with proper documentation would be allowed on
the helicopters; the King’s Own Guard had shoot-to-kill orders for any natives who attempted to contravene this
directive. Foreigners had until sunset. We watched the helicopters thud over town, clutching each other as the
sun started downward.
* * *
I met En some months previously. I was on a
motorcycle tour upcountry on semester break, crossing the sprawling rice-plains on uncharted backroads. My ninth
day out, a blinding rainstorm materialized. I rounded a slick bend too fast and there was a buffalo calmly working
over its cud in the middle of the road. The dumb animal neither blinked nor moved as I smashed into it and flipped
into a muddy ditch. My helmet prevented my head from splitting open, but several of my bones were not so fortunate.
A peasant sheltering under a nearby banyan tree witnessed the incident. After ascertaining I was alive, he left me
on the roadside to arrange transportation to a clinic some kilometres away. There, a quaking young doctor fixed
me up as best he could and one of the clinic’s three rooms was vacated for me. I remember only a soupy haze and
strong brown hands that seemed constantly to be supporting my battered frame, and rain so heavy I fancied I was
underwater.
The clinic had an endless supply of very strong painkillers: the superstitious peasants
are great poppers of pills, of whose seemingly magical qualities they greatly approve. Thus I remained in a feeble
state of intoxicated semi-consciousness. All the while it rained. Understanding only the rudiments of the vernacular
and nothing of the rapidly twilling local dialect, attempts at communication were tortuous. The young doctor and his
nurse, utterly unsure of what to do with the wounded foreigner in their midst, opted to do nothing.
On the third day it was made clear to me that floodwaters would soon swamp the clinic.
The bridge to the main highway and hospitals and airports and home was already washed out. The young peasant who’d
arranged my transportation reappeared. It turned out my motorcycle was being kept in his village. Also, the buffalo
was dead. Also, his village, very near the scene of the accident, was on high ground. The panicky doctor placed me
in his care, quickly rattling off a series of instructions I’m not sure the young peasant could follow. I was
presented with my fully intact wallet and passport. Then we were off, in the back of a pickup with a tarp rigged
over it, as I assured the doctor I would be most generous in repayment of his services. The nurse made me as
comfortable as she could, propping me on cushions damp in the misty air, raindrops big as bullets pounding out a
ceaseless staccato on the tarp.
Doped up as I was, I found the ride pleasant, enormous drops from the leaky tarp
tapping my forehead, running down the bridge of my nose, tickling down my chest. At one point there was a great
deal of sloshing water and frantic yelling. I learned later that a creek had turned into a washing torrent, which
reached the doors of the pickup, and the young peasant, trailing us on a motorbike, was carried off. He survived,
but his motorbike was never found. The road washed out minutes after we passed. When we reached the village, I
was conveyed by means of a crude rope-and-pulley device up to a snug and wide room atop a stilted teak house, safe
from the water that flowed around on all sides. I was deposited on a soft pallet, and was soon sucking sweet orange
tea through a straw, which was served by a deep-brown, wide-smiling girl, who knelt next to the pallet and observed
my every swallow.
I was in the house of the man whose buffalo I had so unceremoniously vanquished and
whose son had nearly drowned. His family of nine talked and cooked and slept in that one room. They rightly thought
I would be unable to tolerate such living conditions. So they decamped to various houses around the village, leaving
the girl to look after me. En.
| "Weak and bruised and aching, I think I was never so happy as in that
backwater with nothing but time and her, limping around a world as lush and luminous and Edenic as any the explorers
knew. En was more lovely by the day and was close to me every night." |
She was 19. Before her mother’s death brought her back to the village at 15, she
attended a year of Catholic boarding school in the provincial capital, where the charitable Sisters of Mercy taught
her halting English. But everything you needed to know about her you got by watching. She was suffused with gentle
life and soft-eyed wonder. She knew almost nothing, but was rich in the inherited wisdom of a hundred generations of
mud-tilling peasantry. For me she had an earthy reverence no citified girl anywhere in the world could match. She
lavished on me the assiduous care of a doting mother, shy new bride, and dutiful daughter.
The family buffalo, while it still existed, was kept underneath the house. This
accounted for the rank bovine reek that stalked my feverish dreams the first few nights, herds of fire-breathing
bison bent on revenge. Awake I remained in my drugged haze, unremitting rain on the tin roof above. En kept a
small fire going and over it produced rice and broth dishes from a few unlikely-looking sacks in the corner, delicious
even to my jaundiced tastebuds. My depth perception unbalanced and my motor control shaky, she ladled food into my
mouth, my innocent-intentioned hand resting on a soft thigh. After I finished, she ate soundlessly with her hands,
obsidian-pupiled eyes glistening as a slight smile curved into her high-boned cheek. She gave me a yellow-spiced
soup, which soothed my throat and long-stemmed leaves, which had the miraculous effect of causing the itching inside
the casts on my right shoulder and left foot to disappear. She dried my clothes by the fire. They came back
smoke-smelling but precisely folded. She attended to my bathroom needs deftly and with no expressed embarrassment.
She was never more than 10 feet away and never had her back turned for more than a few seconds. She hummed tunes
whose gentle warblings modulated into my brain while stroking my forehead by the hour.
Below came alarming rustling and shrieks and hissings. The creatures of the forest
sought high ground. En executed several snakes and scorpions, and clubbed away a furry raccoon-looking creature that
clambered up the ladder. She hauled the ladder up and set bitter incense sticks in the corners. We were cut off from
the world while the storm pelted on.
There were no windows in the room and not much to look at. Faintly visible in the
wet halflight was a small Buddhist altar in the corner, a portrait of the King and Queen smiling benevolently down,
and a couple blue-faded pictures from an old tire calendar. So I passed the hours peering into her face, memorizing
every contour and pore and shade. At nights a chill settled in. En crawled onto the pallet next to me, pulled a
blanket over us and rested her head in the crook of my shoulder, my arm resting lightly on her. She was a little
furnace, chasing the chill back into the dark. Though aroused by the soft press of her belly and breasts, I was as
comfortable as if I lay in a palace, and every night I soon drifted off to sleep.
The rain stopped. Within minutes, the clouds broke and sunlight poured over the
saturated land. I watched it march yellow across the floor from the entranceway. Everywhere the gaping chinks of
the walls were shiny stripes. The light melted the cobwebs in my brain. Not only the light--my supply of drugs
was gone. It had been one week since my accident.
By the heat of the afternoon, I was ready to get out of the room. My body ached
mercilessly, but sobriety impelled me forward. Leaning on En and hopping unsteadily on one leg, I made it to the
entranceway, where I sat and dangled my legs over the edge. Word spread and what seemed the entire village turned
out to see my appearance. Protective En refused to let me attempt getting down on my own. The young peasant, whose
name was Ni and who was En’s brother, came to the rescue, hoisting me on his back and piggybacking me down. Once
there, ground foggy with evaporating damp, sky so crystalline clouds seemed an impossible illusion, it was obvious
someone would have to be continuously at my side. At a grunt from En’s father, squatting and smoking under the
shade of the house in his empty pen, En got the job. I was relieved. Ni had a rough grip and unpleasant scent.
Besides, I already needed En like a lifeline.
The two of us wandered the village, me leaning heavily on her and using a cane Ni
had fashioned out of bamboo, surrounded by a dozen dirty-faced children and almost as many mangy dogs. The village
sat on a rise overlooking the rice-plains, now a vast expanse of silver-sheened water. It consisted of around 20
houses, all wisely stilted off the ground, and a few structures for silkworms and silk, weaved by the village women.
There were a couple tiny sundry shops, tissues and toothbrushes and hard candy and rice whisky on offer. On the
village road were silent-passing refugees headed back to the low-lying areas, towing children and handcarts. As
we watched, the dogs stopped barking and retreated whimpering to the shadows and the children fell silent. Most
had lost everything they did not carry. The women and children were grim-faced and the men looked hung-over. En
told me they were. Nothing left but to drink.
She took me to the empty shed where my motorcycle was. The thing was trashed: shattered
headlight festooned with bloody tufts of stiff black hair, handlebars and forks bent in, long streaks of bare chrome,
blinker brackets crunched sideways, speedometer cracked open. Just looking at the thing gave me icy trembles and
visions of fiery screaming crashes, crunching metal and bone. Leaning heavily on stoic 100-pound En, I turned away.
Not a chance I could get on the thing again. I’d have to get out of town another way. Though with En next to me,
I felt no especial hurry. We walked on.
Weak and bruised and aching, I think I was never so happy as in that backwater with
nothing but time and her, limping around a world as lush and luminous and Edenic as any the explorers knew. En was
more lovely by the day and was close to me every night. Chewing on long-stemmed leaf with her next to me on the
pallet, memories of what it was to sleep alone drained away. As her heat rose next to me I once stroked the back
of her neck, but that was as far as it went. I depended too much on her to risk anything, no matter how my heart
pounded. She gave me no hints. We were chaste as children.
The village was besieged with green undergrowth that everywhere threatened to snag
my clumsy feet. Garish green creeping tendrils, grasping creepers outfitted with thorns, sickly-sweet scented
orange flowers whose wispy stems belied a hardy elasticity that easily tripped up a handicapped pedestrian: they
abruptly appeared with the sickly verdure of tropical life. We made an excursion to some rice paddies nearby,
down a narrow trail through a banyan grove, laughing uproariously at my shaky attempts to stay upright. Hunched-over
workers knee-deep in mud stared as if we were an alien race. I saw that with me, En was no longer one of them. I
began to grasp at my responsibilities.
The doctor took a break from overseeing repairs to his mud-encrusted clinic and came
to the village. He arrived with the nurse. She had a saw. The X-ray machine at his clinic was destroyed, the doctor
said, but in a few days, maybe a week, the bridge would be repaired and it would be possible to reach the provincial
capital, where he supposed hospitals still functioned. However, in his professional opinion, based on his memory of
my X-rays, my breaks were sufficiently healed by now. If the casts came off, he said, I would require at least two
weeks recuperation here. I looked at En. The casts came off.
Nearly a month of sweat and grit made the stench intense. The skin beneath was a
splotchy purple, which, I was assured, looked much worse than it was. My foot could take no weight and my shoulder
couldn’t support so much as an empty backpack, but they seemed functional. More important, I still had them. More
important yet, I had En. The doctor, sweating mightily in the close room, asked how I felt. Never better, I
said.
Communications reopened. The village phone was placed in my service and I reluctantly
placed calls to the university and family back in the US, the former laconically beginning to note my absence, the
latter frantic with worry. I soothed my family, in particular my elderly mother, who’d been pestering the embassy
daily, explaining that in this part of the world it was indeed possible for a flood to cut off communication and
transport for weeks at a time. I was all but ordered to return to civilization, causing me to spend most of the
call deflecting innuendo. In light of the hysteria, I didn’t get around to mentioning the accident or my injuries
or En.
Leaving the village was definitely on my mind. Each day came a keening fear of a
future alone. This was no imaginary demon. I knew all about the solitary life. And now here was En, so perfectly
kind that it seemed a perfect folly to ever be without her. One blazing afternoon alone in our room, I said as
much.
She agreed with a few deep nods--indicators of deep excitement. Her father, I
thought, would not be so thrilled. I contrived an excuse: I wished to formally repay En’s family for their
unstinting hospitality in cash and coastal goods, with En to serve as delivery girl. Once with me, En would not
leave, and I hoped her father would have no choice but to accept our fait accompli. To demonstrate my good
character, I bequeathed my motorcycle to Ni. Who had already begun repairs with such tools as he had and, by
all accounts, was making a remarkable success of the job. I didn’t doubt that his havenot resourcefulness would
have it like new in no time. Ni reacted to the gift with a quick smile and immediately jogged off to continue
work on his new possession. En’s father remained behind. With En as my soft-voiced interpreter, I made my
case in that overhead room.
At first I thought her father’s clipped response was disgust or dismissal. I
launched in on an arsenal of secondary arguments. But En shook her head and placed a small palm on my arm, just
as she did to steady my wobbly walking. Do not worry, she told me. He understands. I will go with you.
I realized En had not translated at all. She made her own case. I did not care.
It wasn’t for me to question the universe in a bountiful mood. Meanwhile, I was informed a university vehicle was
en route to ferry me home. The staffer with whom I spoke seemed somewhat bewildered at my being so far away to begin
with. It would arrive in three days.
| "The countryside was an alluvial plain, ownership and property and
division blotted out by flat mud deposits. Everywhere peasants laboured to return the country to its former
condition. I could see they would be at their work a long time and might never succeed entirely. I pulled En close,
happy to have spared her their Sisyphean labours." |
There were some details to sort out. To begin with, in view of the great generosity
of En’s family, coupled with the loss of her labour, it was agreed I would send a monthly remuneration to her family.
I readily agreed to the paltry requested sum. I felt as soft Westerners of my type do, that it was beneath my dignity
to quibble over money. For her father’s part, he seemed almost miffed I didn’t deign to bargain.
I was at great pains to make it clear to all and sundry that En was to me no mere maid,
that my feelings were of a far more intimate nature. Evidently this confirmed the general village belief that, as we
shared sleeping quarters, we were betrothed. It was therefore necessary to cement our bond, as well as En’s new status
as the chosen one of a (relatively speaking) rich (if foolish and foreign) man. One evening, the whole of the village,
starting with the monks and her father and ending with tiny children, lined up to tie a white string around each of our
wrists. Incense wisped around us as a coterie of old men kept up a steady chant. Half my forearm was covered in
white string and I learned that in the eyes of the village, we were now officially engaged. En told me it didn’t
really mean anything, but I saw by the soft turn of her head she didn’t believe this herself. Neither did I. Nor
did I want to.
Then there was En’s leaving ceremony. It seemed as though every female in the village
had something to contribute--bits of silk, hairpins, silver-coated cups, all specially deemed to be bringers of good
fortune. I sat behind En as the women came. En showed me every item as the giver watched, and I conferred upon each
a beneficent nod. Also, it was necessary to consult the village medium. She was a small woman dressed in a white
gown that resembled pyjamas and was soiled at the heels. She twitched in a trance, clutching a statue of the Elephant
God and muttering incantations in a voice resembling a coal miner with a two-pack-a-day habit. She closely examined
our palms, rubbing goldleaf on mine and making prints of En’s on a square of raw yellow silk with the blood of some
creature. She spoke in the deepest dialect and I understood nothing. After, En told me with great relief that the
medium had foreseen a long happy future, so long as we avoided malevolent waterspirits. I decided not to mention
that my apartment overlooked the sea. After the medium returned to her rather mousy normal state, En’s father placed
a fistful of bills in her hand. I concluded you get the news you pay for.
My last night in the village, it was de rigueur I be with the menfolk, drinking rotgut
ricewhisky around the fire. The men asked a few polite questions, the same ones I’d been asked seventy dozen times
since I’d been in the country: where was I from, how old was I, what did I do, did I like the food, was it too spicy
for me. They seemed satisfied with my pat answers. Of course, they weren’t really interested. Not with the serious
business of drinking at hand. The talk quickly went beyond my comprehension and lasted half the night. Out of
boredom, I kept on drinking. Whenever I picked up a glass, my compadres began chanting and I was required to down
its entire contents, which were immediately replenished. There was also all manner of food, chunky and chewy and
crunchy, whose vaguely nonvertebrae origins I did not dare hazard a guess at. But to be polite, I turned down
nothing.
Owing to the poor condition of the roads, the university vehicle arrived half a day
late. Not that I was aware of it. I was dead to the world, having passed out without coming to know my putative
fiancée on any more intimate terms, despite my intentions and the bleated-out cries of encouragement from my erstwhile
drinking buddies as I wobbled away from the party. En stroked my forehead gently as I woke. Those first few bleary
moments of consciousness with only her in my vision did not linger nearly long enough. I stood up shakily. Below
were a couple befuddled representatives from the university, somewhat scandalized to find the celebrated professor
reduced to such primitive straits.
They did not quite believe En was coming along. My words to the effect on the phone
had been politely disregarded as the ravings of an injured man. How could the prized professor bring himself so
low--this coarse peasant was unfit, probably, to sweep the hallways of their sacred institution. The representatives
milled around as though I had proposed a suicide assault on the royal citadel. Clearly they wanted to consult their
superiors, but could not without being so inexcusably rude as to publicly question my judgment. En hovered behind my
left shoulder, eyes downcast and saying nothing, her presence undeniably real as she followed the proceedings. The
representatives were somewhat softened to learn En was my fiancée, though this also bewildered them further. Also
it created a catch in my throat as I mouthed the words for the first time. In the end, they concluded there was no
accounting for the strange ways of foreigners, and on this provisional basis accepted her presence. They loaded up
our possessions, which fit into two small bags, and had been mostly acquired in the preceding three days.
I expected (and hoped for) a great send-off from the villagers in whose presence my
life had so greatly metamorphosed. I did not receive one. En’s grandmother waved feebly from the doorway of a shack,
and that was all. No one there believed in goodbye. Then we were out on the highway, lined with debris encrusted in
dried mud, finely mote hazing out the late afternoon sun. The countryside was an alluvial plain, ownership and
property and division blotted out by flat mud deposits. Everywhere peasants laboured to return the country to its
former condition. I could see they would be at their work a long time and might never succeed entirely. I pulled
En close, happy to have spared her their Sisyphean labours.
* * *
Back in the coastal town, we at last consummated
what had been nearly two months in the making. After, we fell asleep with the ease of long-time lovers, her warm body
a shield from the terrors of the night. We did not leave the bed until the following afternoon. We did not leave the
apartment for days. I reshaped my former views of an indifferent universe and the inevitability of suffering. Her
placid ways smoothed over the rough edges of my life in that hot country, and soon all the time before her seemed a
pointless struggle.
Only one thing grated, and then only briefly: En was no virgin. That she was already
despoiled must have been general village knowledge. Surely her father would never have placed his daughter alone for
nights on end with a strange foreigner, even an injured one, had she still purity to preserve. Several times I began
to question around the edges of her history. En evaded my inquisitions with such gentle alacrity that I cheerfully
gave up. She was in my blood and no remote history could change that. My rather palatial suite nineteen stories above
the sea became a snug home. If En remembered the medium’s prognostication, she didn’t mention it. And if the
university mucky-mucks had anything to say about my live-in, they didn’t do it in my presence.
In the village En was so thin she had angles. With access to all the food her stomach
desired, she rounded out. She insisted on cooking and daily prepared more food than we could eat in two settings.
Nor did she shy away from fatty, sugar-laden western food, developing a taste for steak and cheese and pasta ladled
over in thick sauces. Her skin shone and the doctor said she was as lustily healthy as any human being had the right
to expect. She didn’t much care about the suite’s view or the spectacular sunsets, but she delighted in the elevator
and the remote control and hailing taxis.
I enrolled her in English classes at the university, with a view to the eventual
completion of her education. We went to a market to get a book bag for her. She took great care in selecting it,
asking me over and over if I was sure about the dimensions of the textbooks. Rank food stalls with upcountry fare
had appeared, which En leaped at the chance to patronize, and beggars were everywhere underfoot. Later that week,
all communications with her village were cut off. The following day, newscasters pointed out purple blots on an
upcountry map, epicentres of the outbreak. Under one was En’s village. Within days, the vaccination centre arrived,
the town was overrun, we began our cereal diet, and prices began their swift ascent. The day En’s classes were to
begin, the university closed. The quarantine came down. Then the helicopters appeared.
En and I stood on the balcony in the blood-red afternoon, the scene below fit for
Dante. The appearance of helicopters set off a contagion of panic. Thousands rushed to the sea, maybe thinking to
swim for it. There they thrashed madly, as parasites might in the blood, adding a nautical disaster to the one on
land. A rumour spread that sunlight killed the disease. People threw their clothes onto bonfires, smoke hazing
upwards to the helicopter blades, naked forms sprinting madly through the streets. Looters smashed storefront windows
and guzzled whisky and shoved ice cream down their throats. Copulating couples writhed beneath trampling feet.
Stones were hurled at helicopters that hovered too low.
Another announcement. I had an hour. I knew when the helicopters disappeared over
the sun-rimmed horizon they would not return. The quarantine would not be lifted until the outbreak was over or
everyone was dead. Probably it was only a matter of days until the whole country was likewise blockaded. We had
to make a run for it.
“Come with me,” I said, “They will take us. They have to.”
“They will not,” she said.
“We will try,” I said.
She grabbed the pictures of us. One she slipped down her shirt, next to her heart.
The others she ripped up, scattering glossy pieces on the floor.
“The lost spirits. Now they are many,” she said. “We must not let them follow us.”
“I think they’re already on our tail,” I said, and pulled her out.
In the hallway a door cracked opened and a man stared at me beneath the security chain.
He was a local and had no hope of a helicopter. He handed me a pistol.
“You may need this,” he said, and slammed the door before I could thank him. I did
not know his name nor could I recognize his face if I saw it again.
The rendezvous was at the university quad, two kilometres away. On the promenade we
elbowed our way through the frenzied crowd, slipping on shit and blood and flailing limbs, jostled by whooping peasants
leaping the railing to the brown-turned sand to sprint over the low-tide mudflats to the water, me clutching my
passport and the pistol. A naked man with a patchwork of spidery purple tattoos running from thighs to cheeks leaped
off the railing at me. I brandished the pistol. He snarled and leapt onto the beach. Two fighter jets screamed
overhead at very low altitude, banking in the distance. More announcements echoed from the sky but we couldn’t hear
them in the tumult.
We made it to the street. An on-fire truck careened past to smash into a building.
On a stoop a few doors down three small children bawled over a prostrate body, likely their mother, before her skull
was split open. I rushed past but En held me back. En squatted by the smallest child, a little boy with no shirt
and a bloody mouth. His sister pushed the screaming boy into En’s arms. I was certain our chances of escape were
doomed, but En would not relinquish the boy nor listen to me. We ran on through the madness. En tripped over a piece
of rubble. I held her up with the same grip she used to hold me in the village. I heard her twilling her dialect
into the boy’s ear. Nearly to the haggard-looking palms fringing campus, we heard popping rifle reports.
At the university gates, soldiers tried to push back the human press. More shots.
The crowd retreated, momentarily more fearful of impending instant death in front than a lingering one behind. I
pulled En forward through the screaming tripping mass of bodies. We launched ourselves over a few ranks of supine
forms and were through to the gates, deep purple scratches bleeding and weltered over in bruises, but still standing.
We passed the child through the wrought-iron bars, and the gate cracked enough to allow us through. A squad of
soldiers with bayonets fixed closed ranks behind us. We sprinted to the quad as the firing and screaming went on.
A helicopter was there and a straggling line of desperate foreigners and hangers-on held out documents to a frazzled
captain at a makeshift desk, backed by shifty-eyed soldiers. I dropped the pistol when one lowered his rifle at
me.
En held the boy so tightly his wails were muffled and snot ran over her shoulder. We
didn’t even know his name. But the captain, shouting over the din, wanted to know.
“Ni!” I shouted. “Ni!”
“Your son?” said the captain, pen posed over a sheaf of documents he’d long since
stopped filling out.
“Yes,” I said. “He’s mine.”
“And this is your wife?”
“Yes.”
He eyed the peasants with down-arched eyebrows.
“Documents, please,” he said.
All I had was my passport. I handed it over and said the other documents were lost.
The Captain said, “They are from this country?”
“My son was born here,” I said. “I am taking my family home.”
“Only foreigners on the helicopter,” said the captain.
The volleys and screams just a few hundred meters away grew more intense. The Captain’s
cheek twitched but he did not look.
“I cannot go without them.”
“You will go without them. All foreigners must leave.”
“She’ll be killed!” I screamed.
The captain gestured to an orderly, who stepped from behind the desk and reached for me
with a gloved hand. Eruption of noise from the gates, loud enough to hear over the helicopter, the screeching of
twisting metal, another volley of shots. Everyone turned to look, even the captain.
The crowd had burst the gates. It swallowed up the soldiers at the gate and made for
the helicopter. The Captain barked orders and the soldiers around us formed a ragged line and raised their weapons.
The orderly dropped my arm. We ran for it.
We jumped in as the skids began to leave the ground. Close behind were two teenaged
soldiers who’d dropped their weapons. One of them was the orderly. I helped him in as the chopper paused. The crowd
engulfed the captain and his small islet of men and came on. The best sprinters made leaping grabs for the skids. The
chopper faltered and seesawed. I helped the orderly smash fingers and arms with my heels until they let go and then
we were off over the ocean. A few small shapes below were far out, still swimming for it.
We huddled together and no one spoke or looked at each other. We landed somewhere an
hour later, the boy asleep on En’s lap. The unarmed soldiers were hauled away and we civilians were escorted across a
sweltering tarmac to an empty hangar. I feared we would be asked for documents, but instead we were unceremoniously
stripped, sprayed with power hoses by rubber-gloved men, and doused in a choking powder that tasted of tar. We were
issued garb that looked suspiciously like prison uniforms, then escorted onto boats that took us to a southern island.
We lived in medical and diplomatic limbo for half a year, fed by the Red Cross, living in tin huts, drinking rainwater,
transforming into a family. But we lived. No documents necessary.
The pandemic passed. A consular officer from the US embassy appeared and offered me a
flight home. There was martial law but plenty of work. A few Midwestern cities were contagion-free. My hometown was
not one of them. And I was going nowhere without my family. The consular officer told me En and Ni could not possibly
accompany me. No one from this country, he said, was going to be allowed into the US for a long time to come.
The coastal town was mostly deserted, but largely still standing. The corpses had been
burnt and life was slowly returning, a few shops and a few bicycles. The place had fared far better than the
countryside, to which travel was impossible and it was speculated not one in a thousand had survived. My suite had
been swept bare by looters and then sullied by the cooking fires of the squatters. Scattered among the cinders and
cigarette butts was half a charred bobblehead. And one glossy scrap, last remains of those pictures of us. En
clutched it to her breast and pulled Ni back from a pile of glass shards. I swept them aside. We would start
here.
* * *
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