Inside

EIGHT

Kigali, 1994

WHEN TUG FIRST set eyes on the country, he thought it was the most beautiful place he’d ever seen. And he wasn’t someone who had dreamt of Africa in childhood and pictured himself exploring it in a safari jacket and jungle gear — though plenty of the North Americans and Europeans around him harbored precisely such fantasies. Some, to conceal their infatuation, spoke of Africa in carefully jaded tones. Others talked openly about their fascination with its rich, complicated history and their long-held desire to experience it in person (for men, this usually meant its women). Aid workers were romantics who pretended not to be, their personalities swinging like pendulums between idealism and pragmatism.

Months later, a woman working for the Red Cross asked him to spend the night, both of them sweating, drunk, and sloppy with loneliness. At three in the morning, her thigh sticking to his, she confided that as a child she’d been obsessed with Dian Fossey.

“I wanted to see the gorillas in the mist,” she said wryly. “I saw them the first week. Now I’ve been here two years.” A stocky, muscular former field hockey player, she turned surprisingly clingy and weepy in the night; she said she realized she had never cared about anything as much as she had about those gorillas. Tug felt, perhaps unfairly, that this was just something she said after sex, a bit of extra drama to keep the attention coming. Although he actually would have liked to hear more about the gorillas and what seeing them was like, he didn’t want to indulge her. No doubt sensing his skepticism, the gorilla woman — as he always thought of her afterward — ignored him in the morning, pretending nothing had happened between them.

To Tug, Rwanda was a surprise. He’d last been stationed in Guatemala, where he spent six months ferrying food and medicine to families in the department of Suchitepéquez after floods and landslides devastated the towns there. He had grown used to the country, liked the people, and his Spanish was pretty damn good. He hadn’t necessarily wanted to leave, but his father was seriously ill and he needed to get back home. He stayed for two years while his father went in and out of hospitals. His mother was frail and his sister, who lived in Toronto with her two children and a salesman husband who spent half his life out of town, had made it clear that she couldn’t or wouldn’t take care of their parents on her own.

This was when he met Marcie, who worked as a paralegal for his parents’ lawyer. She was blond, attractive, and extraordinarily capable in what he considered domestic matters. Tug knew how to rig tents and set up a basic medical facility, where in a given terrain the latrines should be dug, and that when you hand out rice you give it to the women first, never to men and especially never to young men. Around children with their hands outstretched he crackled with energy, thriving on their need. He could go weeks without sleeping more than three or four hours a night. At home in Canada, by contrast, he froze up. Faced with insurance companies, with the routine upkeep of his parents’ house, with his mother’s small talk about the neighbors, he barely had enough energy to get through the day.

But Marcie, thank God, was good at all of that. She didn’t mind paperwork, didn’t freak out when put on hold, listened to his mother solicitously. She wasn’t a traveler; she came from a large, close-knit family and hated to leave home. They spent every weekend together, and either she cooked or they had dinner with her parents in their sprawling farmhouse in Hudson. She always brought a casserole or cookies to his mother, who protested weakly, insincerely, and loved being fussed over. In almost no time at all, his family and hers were entwined; her parents often visited his father in the hospital, and they all spent Christmas together. After a year, he proposed to Marcie while they were on vacation in Florida, and they were married two months later in a small ceremony in Hudson. As he slipped the ring on her finger, she cried a little, tears crinkling her cheeks, and he thought, This is it. This is the shape my life will have.

When his father’s condition improved — at least, as much as a seventy-year-old man’s can — he contacted the NGO for a new posting. Marcie wasn’t thrilled with the separation but understood that he was itching to get back in the field. She admired his drive to help other people, and he basked in that, never wanting to admit that the exigency of it was like a drug, or how much adrenaline was involved. This was the first gap between them, and he told himself it wouldn’t matter, years on, when he was through with international aid and they were living a settled life together somewhere.

Rwanda was where they sent him. He was assigned the same tasks — assistance, medicine, infrastructure — but for different reasons, not natural disaster but civil conflicts that put the displaced in camps and the country on edge.

He knew little about the country, but when he looked out the plane window, he felt that he had seen it before, in films or on television or maybe — this was hokey, but also his actual thought — in dreams. The landscape was hilly, green, wreathed in clouds, incomparably beautiful, somehow both severe and lush. It looked otherworldly, somewhere you’d go after exhausting your time in the earth’s ordinary places. His heart lifted as it always did when he saw somewhere new: there was so much to see and do, and he felt the old energy returning, the sense of clear-eyed purpose that would help sculpt his days.

I wish Marcie could see this, he thought, and took a blurry photograph.

He had a room in a ramshackle, single-story housing complex along with some Belgian and Swiss workers. In the evenings they drank beer together in a hotel bar surrounded by other foreigners, mostly journalists, nurses, and UNAMIR personnel. In December of 1993, there was either nervous tension in the air or else everybody knew what was coming, he couldn’t say which. He had only just arrived, and as far as he knew maybe every day in Rwanda was like this. He had no perspective on the situation, and the others at the bar were of little help. Their attitude was that you should figure things out for yourself rather than be instructed; everybody considered this hard-won knowledge a mark of toughness. Laughing at the newcomers and their mistakes was a tradition that built morale among the ones who had been there longer.

At first the days were long, hot, and pleasantly full. The coordination of supplies in the camps was an endless task, and the supplies were inadequate to the enormity of the need. Reddish mud from the dirt roads coated his boots and clothes, and the boxes themselves, then dried to dust that ended up in his mouth and nose and ears. He worked under a bilingual Quebecois named Philippe who gave quick, clear orders in English and French. Tug set up dispensation stations for medicine and water and walked the camp, checking on conditions. He saw what appeared to be a dying woman, her sunken cheeks spotted with flies, and next to her a boy was nestled calmly against her bony knee. He checked her pulse — she was gone — and then asked around, but couldn’t find any relatives to claim the child.

Philippe told him that a group of nuns running an orphanage would take him, and added, “AIDS, most likely. Won’t be long.” He meant before the boy died. Tug took him over to the nuns, and he went along placidly. Probably he didn’t have enough calories in his system to make a fuss.

The housing complex was supervised by a resident manager, Etienne, and his wife, son, and daughter. In the late afternoon, when Tug returned home, the son would be kicking around a soccer ball made of banana-tree leaves with his friends in the courtyard, while his sister watched. Etienne was friendly and genial, and the collared shirts and brown pants he wore every day looked elegant on his tall, thin frame. His brother-in-law had studied at the University of Laval, he said, and told many stories of his life there. At one time Etienne and his wife had wanted to visit him in Quebec, perhaps studying there themselves.

“But,” he said, his voice trailing off, his delicate fingers making a vague wave, signaling, Tug supposed, a vast array of circumstance, economics, the pull and problems of home. “I am here instead,” he finished, and offered Tug a beer. Often they would spend an hour together like this, drinking beer in the late afternoons as the boys played around them. He asked Tug about Marcie, his family, and his education. And he explained that his wife’s family were Hutus, and that his own relatives had left Kigali and gone to the south.

“We stay here,” he said firmly, gesturing at the complex, where he swept the courtyard and greeted the residents regally, as if it were his kingdom.

He had heard from his brother-in-law about hockey, and especially about the Montreal Canadiens. He asked Tug about the Stanley Cup and his favorite players, and this — of all their discussions — captured his son’s attention. Yozefu was eleven years old and found this new sport intriguing. He demanded to know the rules and the names of the teams, how the game was played and for how long, and Tug was soon explaining the minutiae of penalty shots, sudden-death overtime, and off-sides. The boy and his friends clamored for more information. Tug, laughing, used a long, sturdy branch to maneuver their soccer ball around the courtyard, showing them the basics of stick handling.

Yozefu caught on quickly, moving the ball from side to side, imitating Tug’s lunging motions and kicks. Tug taught him to say, “He shoots, he scores!” and the boy ran around repeating this over and over, laughing like it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard.

In the doorway of the family’s apartment his sister stood in the shadows, staring fiercely, a half smile curtaining the whiteness of her teeth.

Then the boy stopped and asked Tug why the shoes with blades in them didn’t get stuck. Machete shoes, he called them, because that was the only kind of blade he could picture. And Tug started to answer, before realizing just how impossible it would be to explain. There was no way that Yozefu could understand the idea of a game played on ice, that he could imagine a rink or any part of winter at all.

So he just said the ground in Canada was different. The boy shrugged, and he and his friends played stickball for a while longer until they reverted back to soccer, sometimes shouting “He shoots, he scores!” for no reason, whenever they felt like it.

In Kigali, despite the tension in the air, Tug was happy at first. In times of trouble you put your head down. You set your own worries aside. When people are talking of war and famine, of an army massing to the north, of civilians arming themselves with machetes, of children dying in camps, your only choice is to get through each day. People need help, so you give out water and rice, bring sick children to the hospital, and talk to their parents. Every single day is triage, a blur of urgent activity, a sprint. You don’t worry about your mortgage or the last time you went to the dentist. You don’t have time to think about any of that, and it feels like freedom.

He and Etienne listened to the radio in the courtyard, under the shade of a banana tree. Radio was everything here, and new songs were playing that had shocking lyrics, rippling with hate. In the evening, at the hotel bar, he discussed the songs with his Swiss counterparts, who shrugged them off, telling him he didn’t understand the history here. Tug agreed that he didn’t; he didn’t understand why the Belgians were here in such small numbers when the war was a result of systems they’d instituted. He didn’t understand why the Canadians had sent sufficient forces to seem involved but not enough to actually do anything.

But the big picture wasn’t his area of expertise, and never had been. He was good at logistics, at surveying the topography and figuring out where to put the food tents and the field hospitals. He had always been like this, ever since Boy Scouts, taking refuge in practical problems. These were the universals, and beyond them were moral issues and cultural complexities that you could spend a lifetime trying to decipher without getting anywhere at all.

His fellow aid workers called him the Silent Canadian. Except on the subject of hockey, he would rarely be drawn out much. He didn’t mean to be evasive; he just wasn’t a talker by nature. As a child, he and his father would sit together in the garage working on a Meccano kit or a woodworking project; his mother and sister would be in the kitchen cooking or cleaning, chatting all the while. What his father liked most was to get away from that — he called it the hen party. “Silence is golden,” he told his son, and the worst thing was to talk a lot without having anything to say. He had impressed upon Tug the integrity of saying only what you mean, and the emptiness of words without action backing them up.

At Christmas there was a party at the hotel. Though no one wanted to admit it, this was the hardest season for people far from home: the weather, the food, the company, it all felt wrong. On their way to church, Etienne and his family stopped by to wish him a merry Christmas. They were all dressed in their finest, and Etienne’s wife and daughter were more beautiful than Tug had ever realized, their skin glowing against matching pale yellow dresses. Esmeralda, the girl, shyly stepped forward and handed him a doily she’d stitched. It reminded him of his mother, who also stitched and embroidered; when he told the family about this, they all nodded, evidently not surprised. It only made sense that women were the same everywhere.

Marcie had sent him a care package of thoughtful gifts. Foot powder, medicated lotion, propylene socks. And, of course, fruitcake. On a dim, crackling line he called her at her parents’ house, and in the background heard Christmas carols, cocktail chatter, her nephews yelling.

“I miss you,” Marcie said. “I wish you were here.”

“Me too,” Tug said. It was true when he said it, but by the time he got off the phone and went home to bed, it wasn’t. He longed for certain things: a hot shower, Marcie’s body, a hamburger. But longing was part of life here, and it made him happy to feel his lack of these things, as sharp as hunger. He was addicted to want. He didn’t know how this had happened, whether it was because of his childhood or some quirk of his personality or genes, but somehow he had become a person who needed to do without in order to appreciate what he had.

Between Christmas and Easter the situation worsened. Battles were raging to the west of Kigali; there was talk of full-blown civil war. On the streets of the city he saw gangs of teenage boys dressed in clownish outfits — the Interahamwe. They looked like garden-variety delinquents, driven to vandalism by boredom, but in their eyes was a frightening flatness. They didn’t react to his presence and seemed, in fact, not to see him at all.

Etienne shook his head. “It’s going to be bad,” he said.

“Why don’t you leave?” Tug asked.

Etienne again made that sweeping gesture with his hand, encompassing the complex, his family, their extended relatives, maybe even the country itself. Tug couldn’t tell if this was obstinacy or pride. “This is where we are,” he said.

Meanwhile, Marcie wanted to know how much longer he would be there. He thought he’d be back by August, he told her. “August,” she echoed, her voice tinny with distance, but in it he could hear all the unsaid, freighted things. Soon, he knew, she wanted to start having children. Their life was waiting for them just over the horizon, and she was in a hurry to get there. To think of her putting her dreams on hold was a weight on his heart.

It was not awkward, apparently, for him to tell Grace about this. He spoke as if these words, these emotions, belonged to another person.

“Certain facts are known,” he said. They had been reported, brought to light, so he didn’t need to relate them all over again, did he? The story had already been told. How the gunshots and mortar blasts increased as the army moved closer, how the Interahamwe responded, how the radio blared. Everybody knows this happened. Even in the camps people weren’t safe, and now they had to worry about bombings on top of starvation and disease. Those who could leave did, and there was an epochal movement to the south.

Tug stopped sleeping. The nights were bright with smoke. Then the president was killed, and the murders began in earnest. Children with hatchets. Blood in the streets. Relating this, his voice grew not hoarse with emotion but clipped, the words whittled to precise points. “There was a river,” he said. “You must have seen the pictures. It was piled with bodies. There were always screams in the distance, and sometimes they were close. There were dead children, and live children looking for their dead mothers.”

Within hours most of the white people were evacuated. That’s what happened: they left the country to its murders. He found himself in a hotel room in Nairobi, sitting cross-legged in the bathtub, and couldn’t remember how he had gotten there or how long he was supposed to stay.

In Nairobi people spoke of phone calls in which their friends said good-bye just before they were murdered. Some were calm and resigned; others screamed for help until the very last second of their lives. All of this via telephone. Technology existed to hear the murders, but not to stop them.

Tug shared a hotel room with two other aid workers, and they were cramped but had clean sheets and towels. They couldn’t stand this, or one another, and lacking an outlet for their rage they fought among themselves instead. Tug went down to the bar, and this was when he found the gorilla woman, and spent the night with her, listening without sympathy to the story of her life. Later, one of his roommates spent the night with her too, and said she had brought out a knife, wanting him to hold it to her throat. “She loves danger,” the guy said, raising his eyebrows in sexual implication.

Some people went to Goma to work in the refugee camps. That these refugees were murderers was discussed as little as possible; such were the ethics of aid. Then, when a cholera epidemic spread through the camps, the world finally began to pay attention. When the murderers died.

Tug and his roommates were sent to Entebbe to coordinate a field office. Grateful for work, they bent themselves to the task.

And Marcie, so relieved that he’d been evacuated, begged for him to come home.

“Who are these people?” she said angrily, meaning not the murderers but his supervisors at the NGO. “How can they expect you to do this, to stay on, just to fulfill your contract? This is sadistic. They need to let you come home.” She was crying into the phone.

Tug said nothing. Truthfully she didn’t feel real to him just then — just a voice on the phone, a crackle of sobs.

“I love you,” she said. “Come home to me.”

He stayed as long as he could in Entebbe, and four months later they were allowed back in. Of the spectacular green country he’d first seen, virtually no trace was left. What remained was a place that no one could fall in love with. Every farm had been left untended or destroyed. Kigali stank of rotten bodies, a riot of flies everywhere, and packs of dogs grown so aggressive and fat on human flesh that people were shooting them on sight. Here and there the first exiles were streaming into empty houses, and to see them sweeping the floors was surreal, an act of domestic normalcy patently inadequate to the task of cleaning up what had happened here.

At the complex, everything he’d left behind had been taken, not that there was much besides a few clothes and magazines. There were bullet holes in the wall.

Inside Etienne’s apartment there was no trace of anyone, just a bad smell he couldn’t locate the source of. He stood there sweating, thinking only that he would soon go back to work doling out medicine, salt and sugar solution, water-purification tablets. Then he heard a shuffling noise and braced himself, expecting one of the huge rats he’d seen poking through the piles of garbage. Instead, a bloody heap he had thought was trash shifted itself and came toward him. He took a backward step, then he heard his name.

It was the boy, Yozefu, and Tug was so happy that he embraced him. The boy tried to hug him back, but couldn’t. He smelled terrible, wrapped in torn, dirty blankets, and the light in the room was so dim that it wasn’t until they were outside in the sunny courtyard that Tug realized Yozefu had only one arm.

He had seen a doctor, and a family down the road had been feeding him occasional scraps, but his bandages were dirty and his skin red hot to the touch. Tug took him straight to the hospital for antibiotics. He was due at the camps but stayed on as a doctor cleaned the boy’s wounds and put him on an IV drip. As the fever came down, Yozefu told him what had happened.

His own uncle, his mother’s brother, had come in the night. He said he would hide them in his own house, but this was a lie to get his squad of three into their house. They killed his parents, then raped his sister. Yozefu didn’t use that word, just said they had stuck things into her, including a branch, a bottle. When he yelled at them to stop, they said, “Then you kill her.” Esmeralda looked at him, crying, begging. So he did. He used the machete they’d given him. Then his uncle took it back, hacked off his arm at the elbow, and left him to die.

He stayed in the house with the bodies of his family until another uncle found him and brought him to the doctor. But they had to move the medical facility because of the bombing and he was on his own again, so he went back to the house. In the time he’d been gone the bodies had been dragged into the courtyard and burned. He cleaned the house and courtyard and hid himself away.

He never once told Tug how he felt, or used a single emotional word. He spoke only of actions and facts.

Tug spent two days and nights at the hospital with Yozefu, but the boy had a septic infection that the doctors couldn’t stop. It was three in the morning when he died. He was eleven years old.

And that was it. Tug became a zombie, useless in the field, and his supervisors ordered him first to Nairobi, then to Entebbe, then to London, and finally he landed in Montreal. At the airport, Marcie crushed him in her arms. Once at home, he took a shower and changed into his clean old clothes. It was August and children were playing on the street outside, shouting and laughing. His sister and her children came to see him, as did various friends. At night, in bed, Marcie caressed his shoulder with the tips of her fingers, a touch that didn’t ask for anything, that only sought to assure him that he wasn’t alone.

He went to therapy, which was what you were supposed to do when something bad happened. Everybody said so. His therapist was a professorial type, bearded, cardigan wearing, with an office full of books. In the first session, Tug told him a little bit about what he’d seen, what brought him here, and they talked about control — what he could have done then, what he could do now. The therapist suggested he keep a journal, or write a book, or a song. He was a big believer in making things.

Tug didn’t mention Yozefu, but a couple of sessions later he told him about the bodies in the river, the wailing of babies. He explained how you treat a corpse infected with cholera, stuffing wadding down its throat and into its anus, then disinfecting it with chlorine and wrapping it in plastic, to keep the disease from spreading, whereas in Kigali the bodies had been left to putrefy in the streets, and only eventually got burned. He didn’t mean to be graphic or shocking. He was simply trying to make a point about the importance of dealing with the dead. But he found that he was drawn to concrete details, and after talking for forty-five minutes without interruption, he felt marginally better. Emptier. Afterward he went down the hall to the washroom and sat in a stall, not thinking about anything at all. He heard the door open and someone came in; from the professorial shoes, he knew it was the therapist. The man hurried into the stall next to him and threw up in the toilet.

Tug canceled the next appointment, wanting to give the therapist a respite from the terrible details; then he decided to cancel the next one too, and after that it was just easier not to go anymore.

Marcie encouraged him to stay home and relax — no one deserved a vacation more than he did, she said — but it made him feel fidgety, restless. She had holiday time coming up herself and wanted to go somewhere, maybe the beach, but he told her he didn’t want to travel. No planes, no highways, no vistas, no sensation of touching down somewhere new. He wanted the opposite of adrenaline, with none of the energy that had so animated his days in the field. He was most comfortable tiring himself out by walking around the city, appreciating the wide-open streets, the uncrowded avenues, the scentless air. Even the most hectic neighborhoods felt blanketed with calm.

The therapist had told him to write down his nightmares when he couldn’t sleep. So one day he was in a stationery store, browsing for a notebook, when the clerk and the manager got into an escalating argument about scheduling and overtime. Suddenly the clerk pushed a pen display off the counter, announced she was quitting, and stormed out. The pens scattered everywhere, rattling like pebbles. Tug spent the next ten minutes helping the manager clean up the mess and listening to her complain about her flighty help, and before he knew it he had a job.

He liked working at the paper store. There was always something that needed to be arranged, inventory to be checked, questions to answer, money to handle, all joyfully inessential tasks. If someone didn’t like their notebook, they could exchange it. It made him laugh to think that anyone would spend three hundred dollars on a pen. He learned more than he thought there was to know about acid-free paper. Eight hours would pass without his noticing, and by the time he walked home that was almost an entire day that he could live with.

Marcie didn’t really understand the stationery-store thing, but she was supportive. That was her nature. She wanted to be there, always offering hugs and solicitude. She tried to pay attention to him when he needed her and not to bother him when he didn’t. In other words, she was trying to do the impossible, and therefore she failed.

Upon his return, Tug took up drinking. It seemed like the best way to get through the hours between leaving the store and going to bed; otherwise, there was just too much time. Marcie stopped inviting friends over, for fear he would pass out at the table or throw up in the sink. Once, he took her sister’s hand, raised it to his mouth, and licked her fingers, an act for which he later had no explanation. In fact, he could hardly remember it happening. When they talked about the things he did while drinking, it seemed to him that they were discussing someone else entirely; he shared Marcie’s concern and disgust, and he shook his head right along with her, wishing that this man, this other Tug, would shape up and get his act together.

As things got worse, he stopped talking to Marcie without noticing that he had. Indeed he rarely thought about her at all, even when she was in the same room. Late one night, he was watching hockey and drinking Canadian Club when she came downstairs to ask him to lower the volume. He didn’t ignore her on purpose; he just didn’t register her presence until she picked up the remote and turned off the television.

“I need to sleep,” she said, her voice trembling. “I have a huge meeting at eight. Can you please just turn it down?”

He kept looking at the television, wondering where the picture had gone. So Marcie positioned herself in front of him, still talking to him, bending over with her face close to his. She was in his line of sight, and he tried to nudge her aside, but he wasn’t very gentle and she fell over the coffee table, landing hard on the floor, rubbing her elbow and crying.

“I know you’re an asshole right now because of Africa,” she said. “But you’re also just being an asshole. Don’t you get it?”

He did. He knew this darkness inside him wasn’t Africa’s doing. It had always been there inside his deepest self, and all his time abroad had done was to wear off the veneer, revealing the truth at his core. Or maybe it had given him permission to acknowledge that most of life just didn’t matter.

Months passed, more of the same. In the winter he took to walking for hours after he got off work, letting the cold air pinch his nose and ears. He spent as little time as possible at home, hoping this might make things better for Marcie. He was standing in the park one evening watching some boys play hockey, the rink a pool of light in the darkness, their skates clashing and whistling in rhythm, when Yozefu came to him unbidden, unwanted. He saw the boy not as he’d been in the days before his death but as he’d looked when Tug first met him.

He saw him laughing as he kicked the banana-leaf puck around the dusty courtyard, yelling, “He shoots, he scores!”

He started to cry, pulling his hair with both hands. Sobbing, choking on his snot, he curled into a ball next to the rink and tried to huddle there for warmth. Probably he would have spent the night there, but one of the hockey fathers came up to him and said he had to leave, that he was scaring the children.

This was the end of one part of his life. Afterward, he was calmer. He stopped drinking so much. He went to work, came home, was well behaved.

But he still wasn’t sleeping, and he spent his nights on the couch, hollow-eyed, watching TV with headphones on, so as not to keep Marcie up. They went out to dinner with friends and he would sit quietly at the table, a pleasant smile on his face, rarely saying anything at all. He was like a well-trained dog, patiently attending his master, observing human behavior that had nothing to do with him. Many of these people complimented him on how well he was doing, and he couldn’t tell if this was sarcastic, encouraging, or ripe with condescension, like telling a child how good he is at checkers. After a while he understood all they meant was that compared to the alcoholic rages, the quiet calm looked more like normalcy, and perhaps this was enough. So he tried to adopt the contours of a regular life, molding himself to it as if his personality were made of clay.

He got a promotion at the stationery store, to evening supervisor, and his hours changed. By the time he left, the parks were quiet and there were no boys to remind him of Yozefu.

Christmas came, then went.

In January there was an ice storm, and the store lost its electricity. He called the manager, who told him to close up early and go home, so he walked home with the sting of sleet against his face. The city was stippled with light and dark, some buildings still sparkling, others black, a pattern of blankness and power.

When he got home, the lights were off, and Marcie was startled to see him. He explained what happened, and she burst into tears.

“It’s just a storm,” he said, puzzled. “The electricity will come back on.”

She was sitting on the living-room couch, and candles flickered on the coffee table in front of her. There were two glasses of wine there, sedimented with red.

“I’m sorry,” she said, now crying hard.

He had no idea what she was talking about. “It’s okay,” he said.

“No it’s not,” she said. She was curling into herself, her head down. “I know I should be more patient, but I just needed somebody. I’ve been so lonely. I’m so alone.”

Tug had trouble focusing his attention on the scene before him, this woman and her tears. With some difficulty he realized she was still talking.

“I guess you want to know who it is,” she was saying. “It’s Jake. I know, I know, it’s terrible, but he and Joanne are having trouble and he and I were just, well, comforting each other, I guess. That old story.”

“Who’s Jake?” Tug said.

Marcie raised her head, tucked her blond hair behind her ears, and drew a deep breath. When she spoke, her tone was acidic. “Jake and Joanne Herschfeld,” she said, very slowly, “are our friends. We had dinner with them last weekend.”

“Oh,” he said. “Right.”

“You’re not even here,” she said. Then the anger passed and she started sobbing again. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m messing them up, I’m messing us up. I should be supporting you. I’m evil, I’m terrible, I’m the worst.”

Feeling sorry for her, he put his hand on her knee. (She told him later that it was the first time he had touched her in months.) He wanted to say something to make her feel better. He looked down at his fingers and thought of a child running through the streets carrying his own severed hand in the one he still had.

“This,” he said, looking at her. “This is nothing.”

By the time the power came back on she was living with her parents. Over the next week she emptied the apartment of her possessions, and was gone.

Should he have felt sad? Probably; but he didn’t. He was enormously relieved. And best of all, he was freed from the obligation to think about the future, in which he no longer had any interest. He was released.

Of that day on the mountain he wouldn’t say much, only that the idea of not having to sit in front of the television at three a.m. waiting for the night to end, of not having to pretend to be happy for the sake of other people, was perilously tempting. It was luxurious, almost a reward. He never said that he wanted to die.

He did say, “I wish I’d stayed in Africa.”

When Grace thanked him for telling her all this, he shrugged. “You can tell people your story,” he said, “or any terrible story, and it doesn’t make any difference. Things just keep happening, over and over again.”