Lost City Radio

SIX

ELIJAH MANAU was a rosy-cheeked man from the capital, and had been living in 1797 for six months when the soldiers came. He was a timid man, and not without reason. To be exiled here to teach in this humid backwater was a testament to his consistent mediocrity. He had scored near the bottom on the regional placement exam, well below the cutoff for a job in the city at one of the better schools. The dispiriting results were announced on the radio a few nights after the test, in alphabetical order. It took several hours. His family was neither wealthy nor well connected, and so nothing could be done. He was thirty when he left home. He had never been to the jungle before. In fact, he had never left the city.

Manau carried with him the shame of an exposed man who had imagined his mediocrity to be a secret. It was dawning on him that he may have become the failure his father had always predicted he would be. The town, his new home, was perpetually soggy and heat-swollen. The rains came and brought little relief. He rented a room from a man named Zahir, who had lost both hands in the war. Zahir’s son, Nico, was an unwilling student, seemed to distrust his teacher and housemate. Sometimes Manau helped them tend to their small plot, but in truth, he had no skill for it. The earth held no romance for him. Manau longed for concrete and everything else he had left behind. Nico’s crippled father dug holes with his stumps, he carried heavy loads on his back, balancing rucksacks on his broad shoulders with help from his son. The man was a rock. At night, Manau listened to the mosquitoes thrumming in the humid air, to the distant cawing and various shrieks the jungle produced and, with his thin curtain drawn, he checked his naked body for the progress of the sores and rashes that were always afflicting him. It was his daily chore, an exercise in personal hygiene that had devolved into a strange kind of vanity. The pitiable condition of his person played a central role in his sexual fantasies. To be nursed back to health! To be massaged and anointed in fruit essences, in herbal potions! With a cloudy shaving mirror and the kerosene lamp, he examined himself — the carbuncular skin blossoming on his back and buttocks, beneath his armpits — and was satisfied that one day soon, he would look pathetic enough to stir something soft and generous in a woman’s heart. In the city, it was assumed that the heat made jungle women freer, and the prospect of these unknown women, their bronzed and beautiful legs spread wide, had, in fact, been Manau’s only consolation when he was informed of his teaching assignment.

Most mornings, after the rains, Manau arrived to the school early, to sweep the puddles away. The roof leaked, and there was nothing to be done about it. At the very least, he could be grateful for the raised wooden floor of the schoolhouse. Zahir said it would have to be replaced in a few years, but for now, it was fine: able to withstand, with a minimum of creaking, Manau’s unhappy pacing. The government had seen fit to send fifteen primitive desks where his students sat diffidently, waiting to be entertained — twenty had been promised, but an official in 1791 kept five for himself, and no one complained, so neither did Manau. He taught cheerlessly every morning, and sent his students home for lunch a bit earlier each day. They were all primitives. Manau had hoped to be seen as a knowledgeable and cultured gentleman from the city, but instead they were amused by his ignorance of trees and plants, disappointed by his inability to distinguish between the calls of various birds. “I don’t care about birds,” he said one day, and to his surprise, the words came out angrily.

It wasn’t that the children disliked him. Manau was inoffensively boring, taught listlessly, but he let them out early, on some days canceled class altogether, and no one seemed to mind. The day that the soldiers arrived in a pair of rusty, creaking green trucks, Manau was quick to call off school: there was an excitement in his students’ faces that he couldn’t compete with. He’d written some rules about fractions on the blackboard. He had never liked arithmetic. Outside, the engines rattled, and the soldiers set up tarps in the plaza. It was, he would later learn, the first time in more than a year that the soldiers had come. The presence of outsiders was electric and disconcerting. Eyes were wandering. Manau heard anxious fingernails scraping against the desks. It was no use. Go out into the streets, he ordered, learn about life! He smiled proudly as the schoolhouse emptied, as if, by dint of laziness, he had stumbled upon a new pedagogy, an educational masterstroke. His students left, all of them except Victor, whom he asked to stay.

In Manau’s visions, it was Victor’s mother, a widow, who would eventually take him in. She was older, he knew that, but with these jungle people, one could never tell. In his time in the village, Manau had learned a little of her past: she had fallen in love before with a stranger from the city, who had disappeared into the jungle at the end of the war. People said he was dead. So she was a free woman, and wasn’t Manau also a stranger from the city? The possibilities were quite obvious. But what stirred Manau most was what he could see: she was a real woman, with substantial thighs and a pleasing weight to her. She wore her black hair tied with a red band, and her smallish mouth seemed always ready to break into a smile. She was doe-eyed, a hint of pink in her cheeks. Her name was Adela.

Now the classroom had cleared, and her boy stood before him, waiting. “Victor,” he said. “Was your father a soldier?”

The boy looked baffled. In fact, Manau wasn’t sure himself why he had asked it. Only recently had his isolation become so stark, so complete, that he had resolved to do something about it. He saw her every day in the village, carrying a tray of silver fish on her head. Her undersized boy sat in the first row, next to Zahir’s son. Manau saw them; they were there — all he had to do was speak.

“No, sir,” Victor said. “I don’t think he was.”

“Oh.” Manau nodded. The boy was anxious to leave, swiveling his head every few moments toward the door. “Do you want to be a soldier?” Manau asked.

“I don’t know, sir.”

“It would break your mother’s heart if you left.”

“Do you know my mother, sir?” the boy asked very politely.

Manau suddenly felt the red skin beneath his clothes awaken in complaint. He steeled himself against the urge to itch. “I do,” he said.

“Oh.”

“But not well,” Manau added. “Not well.”

Insinuating a woman through her child, thought Manau, what a despicable and cowardly thing to do! He wanted to be done with it. From his bag, he produced a new lead pencil. He offered it to Victor, and the boy took it without hesitation. Manau meant to send the boy off, but Victor coughed into his hand and asked permission to speak. When Manau assented, the boy said, “Sir, how old were you when you left home?”

“What a strange question!”

“I’m sorry, sir.”

Manau stood, and wondered what he might say. Was it a trip around the world at age twelve, a stowaway in the hold of a ship headed north? Could he lie and say he’d been to the other side of the continent, or farther — to Africa? Might he say, I have seen the grand cathedrals of Europe, the skyscrapers of New York, the temples of Asia? Of course, by leaving home, the boy meant something completely different. Seeing the world was incidental: if you were born in a place like 1797, leaving was what you did to begin your life.

“I’m from the city, boy. We don’t have to leave.”

Victor nodded, and Manau was aware that what he had said was terrible, cruel, and untrue. In the city, like here, the children dreamed of escape.

“I’m thirty years old and I’ve only just left my home,” Manau said. “Why?”

The boy bit his lip, shot a glance toward the door and then back at his teacher. “It’s Nico,” he said. “He’s always said he would leave with the soldiers. He says he doesn’t care if his family starves without him.”

Manau nodded. His landlord had often confessed that fear: “Without Nico’s hands, we’ll go hungry. What can I do with these stumps?”

“Why is it your business?”

“Somebody should do something,” Victor said. “He’s my friend.”

“You’re a good boy,” Manau said. He thanked Victor, patted him on the shoulder, and told him not to worry. “I’ll talk with his father.” He led the boy to the door and watched him scamper off to join his friends. The teacher returned to his desk, straightened some papers, then erased the board with a wet rag. Outside, the boys hovered around the soldiers, entranced. Soon their mothers would come to shoo them away, to send them into the jungle to hide. But that fear was old-fashioned, and the children knew it. When he strolled by on his way, Manau saw in their eyes looks of excitement, looks no student had ever shown him.

LATER, WHEN his mother died and he left 1797, Victor would remember this day as the beginning of the village’s dissolution. Nico spoke of leaving, and Victor worried. The two of them watched the soldiers, admired them from a distance and then up close, brought water and fruit when they were told to. After an hour, Nico asked one soldier where he was from. The young man looked barely eighteen. He gave a number and said it was in the mountains. Victor and Nico nodded in unison.

“How can you boys stand this heat?” the soldier said, scowling, his face flush. He sat slumped and sweating beneath the shade of the tarp.

“We can’t,” Nico said. “We hate it here.”

The soldier laughed and called over a few of his friends. “They hate it here too,” he said, and everyone agreed they were smart boys.

Victor didn’t hate it. He watched his friend enumerate the town’s shortcomings for the soldier and felt ashamed. There’s no work, Nico said, but that wasn’t exactly true: all anyone did was work. Nico said there was nothing to do, but Victor still considered climbing trees an activity. All Nico’s complaints sounded cruel, uncharitable. In the afternoon, they would go swimming in the river — that’s how we stand the heat, he wanted to say. And it’s great. It’s beautiful. The water is cool and murky, and at the bottom you can plunge your toes into the cold mud, feel it close around your feet, suctioning like it wants to drown you. The thought of it made him smile. You come out clean. But he didn’t say any of this. Nico spoke with such confidence that to contradict him seemed almost dangerous. He listened in silence until the young soldier eyed him and said, “What about you, little man? What do you have to say?”

The soldier pointed with a thin, bony finger. Victor looked quickly over his own shoulder, and everyone laughed.

Just then, the mothers arrived and hurriedly dispersed their children. His own mother was there, and she glared at the soldier. “Shame,” she said, and the soldier backed away, as if from a wild animal.

“I’m fine, Ma,” Victor muttered, but it was no use. She wasn’t listening. The mothers were taking turns shouting at the soldiers; the children hung their heads and listened. Victor’s mother held his hand tightly; her voice rose above everyone else’s. There she was, with an accusing finger drawing circles in the air, upbraiding the captain. “What do you want with our boys?” she said. “Can’t you see they’re all we have?”

The captain was a burly giant of a man with wide, round eyes and a mustache flecked with gray. As Victor’s mother spoke, he nodded apologetically. “Madam,” the captain said when she was finished. “My sincerest apologies. I will instruct my soldiers to avoid speaking with your boys.”

“Thank you,” Victor’s mother said.

“Do you hear that, men?” the captain shouted.

A round of yessirs came from the enlisted men. They stood at attention out of respect for the women.

The apologies continued. As the captain spoke, he twirled his cap by the bill. “I’m afraid we have sullied relations with the people of this fine village,” he said, shaking his head. “We are only here to help. It is our solemn mandate.”

The women all nodded, but Victor knew the captain was only addressing his mother. He could see it in the man’s eyes. She squeezed his hand, and Victor squeezed back.

“I assure you we want nothing with your boys, madam,” the captain continued, his lips curling into a smile. “It’s this town’s women who are so beguiling.”

THAT EVENING, the canteen was crowded with soldiers. They were stripped down to their undershirts, had taken off their boots and laid them in a pile by the door. The heat that day had been an animal thing: scalding, heavy. The entire village had given in to its weight, with the evening set aside for recovery. A breeze blew now and again through the open windows of the canteen. Inside, it smelled of feet and beer. The soldiers were drinking the place dry, singing along to the radio. The wooden floor was shiny and slick. Manau was feeling gloomy, sharing liter bottles with a few disaffected, unhappy men. They grumbled about the dwindling beer supply and the thirsty soldiers. There was only one glass, so they drank in circles. “Who do these brats think they are?” Manau heard a man complain. “They’ll leave us with nothing.”

It was a real concern among the regulars. Periodically, someone offered the soldiers a rueful smile and a toast, then mumbled curses under his breath.

Nico’s father arrived, placed his stumps on the bar, and confirmed their worst fears. It would be ten days before the next truck came. “That’s if the roads aren’t washed out,” Zahir added. He knew the delivery schedules well. Whenever the beer truck or any other truck came, he lent his broad back to the driver for loading and unloading. He had a special cart that clasped around his chest so that he could be useful even without his hands.

Manau nodded at his landlord, at the gathered men, and felt tolerated. Nothing builds community like complaining. He looked Zahir in the eye and knew there was something he should tell him. What if Nico were to leave? Victor had spoken of it as a child would: without nuance, certain of right and wrong. “He doesn’t care if his family starves without him,” Victor said of his friend, horrified. Manau didn’t see it so clearly: what a place this is to grow into adulthood! No one would starve — even Zahir must know that! Of course, the boy wanted to leave. He was the oldest boy in the school by nearly two years. He had celebrated his fourteenth birthday a few months before, on a dismal, rainy day, surrounded by children who barely reached his shoulders. All the boys his age had gone off to the city. Let them, Manau thought. Let Nico go, too. It struck Manau as comic: the slow disappearance of the place, the boarded-up houses all along the streets off the muddy plaza. Padlocked, shuttered, rotting inside. Their owners don’t visit, they don’t send money. It won’t be long now; soon they’ll stop pretending, pack up en masse, and close the town for good. They’ll say a prayer, turn their backs on this place, and let the jungle surround it, colonize it, disassemble it.

After the mothers came to scatter their children, a few parents had come to Manau to complain: How is it that you let them go? Why on this day? The mothers were desperate that their children stay, because mothers are the same everywhere. What if they leave us? Manau’s mother had been worried for her child as well, had stayed up with him the night he listened nervously for his score on the radio. She had wept when it was announced; she knew what it meant. Where will they send you? she’d asked. Now here he was. Manau had felt for a while the unreality of his own actions. Nothing had the weight, the shape, or the color of real life: it was what allowed him to observe his naked, degraded body with amused detachment; to imagine, with eyes closed, Adela loving him on the creaking wooden slats of her raised hut near the river. It was what allowed him to glare now at the captain across the fetid, smoky canteen, without fear, certain that no matter what he might say or do, the town’s demoralized men would back him up. He hummed along to the radio, felt the distant beating of his own heart, and smiled to himself.

Outside, Victor, Nico, and a few other boys stood on plastic crates, looking through the window at the canteen. Nico’s sister, Joanna, was there, with a friend, teasing the boys. “Monkeys,” the girls pronounced. “No minds of your own.” The boys shrugged off the charge. Nico had been at it all day, stalking the soldiers around town, even following a few who went off into the jungle on a reconnaissance exercise. He returned, not a little disappointed, and told Victor that they hadn’t fired their guns.

“Not even once,” he said.

The canteen was bursting with noise and life. It was such an odd sight: these fifteen strangers, and in the background, a few of the regulars nearly hidden behind a curtain of smoke. Someone sang tunelessly, the melody soon eclipsed by whistles and laughter. Victor stood on his tiptoes to take it all in. Was that his teacher there, now turned away, now smirking toward the soldiers? The captain who had smiled at Victor’s mother sat in the center of a circle of soldiers, their eyes glistening with reverence. He told war stories that contained no corpses, no dead: only long stretches of marching with guns at the ready. “Nothing to shoot at. Just walking. Enough to wear out two pairs of boots. Enough to rot your feet.”

“You never found a battle?”

“The jungle is endless,” he said. “We called our squadron leader Moses. We were the wandering tribe.”

Victor strained to see. Nico, by contrast, could rest his elbows on the ledge. Still, Victor could hear all of it, and now he looked at his friend, unimpressed by these mundane accounts of the soldiering life. “That’s what you want to do?” he asked. “Walk around?”

Nico shrugged. “What do you know about anything?” he said. “There’s no war anyway.”

“It sounds stupid.”

“You sound stupid,” Nico snapped. “At least they go places.”

Victor punched him in the arm, and his friend tumbled off his crate. He hadn’t meant to do it. The other boys stepped back, hushed.

Nico stood up. One of the younger boys started to wipe the dirt off his back, but Nico slapped his hand away. He was smiling. “An accident, huh?” Nico said.

“Yeah.”

“You’re good at those, aren’t you?”

Victor didn’t speak. He didn’t breathe.

“Say you’re sorry.”

“I’m sorry,” Victor muttered. He held his hand out, then felt Nico’s open palms shove his chest. He fell back, his head bumping hard against the wall. He heard a gasp. He was sure that one of the girls screamed. It was dark, then light. Victor gasped for air. He blinked: Nico was over him, along with a dozen others. There were haloes of light around all these young, familiar faces.

“You can’t tell anyone.”

“He’s fine.”

“You killed him…”

Once, climbing trees over the river, Victor and Nico had seen a helicopter skirting the treetops downstream, bobbing unsteadily in the sky. A vision from a long-ago windy day. They had climbed the tree hurriedly, nearly falling twice, to get a better look at it. Transfixed by its motion, Victor wondered where it would land, where it was headed. He hadn’t considered for a moment that the machine held people inside; to him, it was shiny and steel and alive of its own accord. It was male and female, a being unto itself. He saw its past and its future. It lived on a mountain top overlooking the city. It had blood inside and a beating heart. And then, just before it faded from view, the helicopter caught the sun’s reflection: an explosion of silver light, like a star against the bright morning sky. The distant whirring trailed off, but for minutes after, Victor blinked and could still see the helicopter’s glow etched in red, burning against the black insides of his eyelids.

It was only when he dived into the cool river that the last traces of the moment had passed.

Strange, Victor thought, that they were even friends.

Noise, shouting; his peers forming a wall around him. Nico crouched by his side. “I’m sorry, Vic,” he said. “Are you okay?” Victor felt himself nod. One of the girls ran her fingers through his hair, and he felt he loved her.

AT THE bar, the men of the town listened with their backs to the soldiers. War stories. Manau noticed his landlord had dropped his head down into his chest, as if he were trying to see into the workings of his heart. It was his turn to drink, and he was taking his time. Another man was rubbing his back, and it was a long moment before Manau’s landlord looked up. He was squinting. “I don’t like this talk,” he said. He lifted his glass between his two stumps, effortlessly, raised it to his lips, and drank. Not a drop was spilled. He passed the glass to Manau.

What elegance, Manau thought. He emptied the foam on the floor, nodded to his landlord. The soldiers were boisterous and happy, and Manau was sure he hated them. They would come and go, they would forget. He would stay. We will stay, Manau thought, and that pronoun crackled in his brain. In the local dialect, there were two kinds of we: we that included you, and another, which did not. Barely anyone spoke that language anymore — a few of the ancient women of the village, and no one else. But some of the old words had slipped into the national language, including these. We that includes you was one of Manau’s favorite words. On this evening, as he watched his landlord raise a glass and lament the distant war, he felt something like kinship. It was the drink. It was the heat blurring everything into a gauzy half-light. The soldiers were unrepentant strangers, the captain a morbid comedian, but Manau belonged.

Victor’s mother stepped into the canteen. She was met with cheers from the soldiers. The captain, his ruddy face beaming, proposed a toast — To the children! he shouted importantly. Manau watched Adela blush and then frown. Were they making fun of her? The idea scandalized him. She wore a simple blue skirt and a thin white T-shirt decorated with a sailboat. The shirt was old, the neck stretched wide enough to reveal her right shoulder. She was barefoot. When the toast had finished, the captain insisted she sit with them. “For only a moment, madam,” he said. She demurred, instead walked up to Manau and asked if she could speak to him. In private.

It took his breath away. “Of course,” he said too quickly. He almost added, “madam,” then didn’t. He wondered if it were bad taste. Did his breath smell of beer? Did he seem drunk? He offered her a smile and pushed these thoughts aside. Was there a trace of romance in her tightly pursed lips?

He followed her outside. The children didn’t bother scattering. They stood crowded around the window, surely up to no good. Tonight, he thought, we are the carnival. We are the circus at the center of the world. Let the generator hum and the music play; the glasses clink and the bottles clang! God bless the coarse men and their churlish grins, the soldiers stupefied by drink — they are the children’s heroes! Again, the word we passed ahead of him, a fluttering banner, and Manau made a decision to improve his posture starting the very next day. It was a beginning, a place to start. He would improve everything about himself. Become a better man and make his mother proud. He followed Adela into the darkness that began just a few meters beyond the canteen. She held him by the arm, as if he might get away. “Your son is a good student,” he said as they walked. Was he slurring? “A real smart one.”

“I see him reading all the time,” she said. “Old books his father brought him.”

They were a distance now from the canteen. It hadn’t rained all day long, and the air was humid and full of insects. They walked slowly along the town’s empty paths, almost to the end, where the forest began.

“You asked him, Mr. Manau? About my boy’s father?”

“I did.”

“Why?” she asked.

There was a strength to her he admired. When she passed through town, Manau always noticed her calves, her supple leg muscles. They made him feel weak. Her hand was wrapped loosely around his bicep, but he knew she had him. His body, no matter how disfigured or warped by the heat, would never be to her liking. An itchy patch of skin smoldered beneath her faint touch. He had the irresistible urge to be honest. It didn’t come often.

“I’m lonely,” he whispered, shutting his eyes.

He opened them a little later — a few seconds, a minute — and she was still there. Adela had softened a bit, or seemed to. It was hard to tell in the weak light. She touched his face. “Our teachers never last very long,” she said. “It’s not easy.”

“It isn’t,” he insisted in a low voice.

The night seemed to be momentarily empty of all sound. It was her hand on his face, and only that. In an instant, it had passed. She withdrew her touch and, in the darkness, he followed her hand with his eyes. It dangled by her side, a glowing thing, and then she clasped it with the other and hid them both behind her back.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Adela shook her head. “Victor doesn’t know the whole story. He was very young.”

“I won’t ask again,” he promised.

“It’s okay,” she said. “You didn’t know. I’ll tell him. Soon.”

“I should be going.”

“Of course,” she said.

He wanted to leave — he meant to — but instead found himself looking down at his feet, immobile, planted in the earth before her. He met her gaze. She was waiting for him.

“Yes?”

“It’s a terrible thing to ask of you.”

She shook her head, not understanding.

“It’s my skin,” he said. “I itch.”

Her head turned almost imperceptibly. “Are you asking me to scratch you?”

He nodded — was she smiling?

“Where?” Adela asked.

They were hardly a hundred meters from the canteen, from the children and the soldiers and the war stories. It was a universe away. The night was pierced with stars. When she died, he would remember this, this touch: her fingers clawing his back, softly at first, then vigorously, as if she were digging in the earth for treasure.

THERE WERE dozens of children by the time he made it back, so Manau had to wade through them to get to the door of the canteen. It was as if they had become drunk just by being near the place. They were all his students. “Mr. Manau,” they yelled. “No school tomorrow! No school!” He smiled and felt buoyant. Some of the children pulled at his pant legs. A soldier’s head poked out from the window and nodded at him. Manau didn’t spot Victor or Nico among them, and again, the idea flashed through his head that he should tell his handless landlord about the boy, but the thought lingered for just a moment, and then he was inside.

In fact, Victor was there, hidden among the children, leaning against the wall of the canteen. He was fine, he told himself, but there was a softness to everything, a pliability that he found startling. He felt that he could look at something and bend it — a tree, a rock, a cloud — and it worried him. Gingerly, he touched the knot on his head. There was no blood, only this heat within him. He felt faint. The canteen’s walls quivered, the entire structure shaking with laughter.

Inside, everything had come unmoored. Drunkenness had exploded inside, and no one had been saved. The soldiers had spread about the room like ivy, a couple of them leaned over the open window, chatting with the children, blowing smoke above their heads; the men from the bar had joined the smaller group in an oblong orbit around the captain. When Manau entered, Nico’s father raised a shout, and soon everyone was applauding the teacher. The scratching still warm on his back, the burning trails of Adela’s fingers, and now this: he felt like weeping. Manau accepted the ovation with a raised hand, and took a seat between his landlord and the captain. A glass was poured, and he raised it to his lips, nodding first at the men gathered around him.

“Mr. Zahir was just telling us about his hands,” the captain said as Manau drank. “Weren’t you?”

Manau’s landlord nodded and cleared his throat. He was hopelessly drunk, his gaze scattered and diffuse. “It wasn’t far from here, you know.” He motioned with a waving stump, and Manau saw the scarred flesh, dimpled and leathery, that closed around the place where his arms ended so abruptly.

The captain poured Zahir a glass. “Terrible,” he said.

“I was accused of stealing from the communal plot. It’s overgrown now, and no one tends to it, but it used to be at the edge of the town, just past the plaza. They did tadek.”

Tadek, Manau thought, shaking his head. “Here? Who?”

“Why, the IL, my friend. Who else would commit such an atrocity?” the captain said. “Please, go on.”

“It was Adela’s boy that chose me,” Zahir said. “He was only four years old. Let’s go, they said. I went.” He motioned for more beer, and one of the soldiers filled the glass and passed it to him. Zahir began the balancing act, but the glass slipped from between his wrists. He stopped. “But why speak of this?” he cried, turning to the captain.

“These soldiers don’t remember, Don Zahir. They don’t know. Even this teacher of yours, this learned man — even he doesn’t remember.”

“But I didn’t live here then. I’m from the city.”

“Of course.”

“And in the city,” Zahir said, “everything was fine?”

Manau met his landlord’s gaze. His son would leave, if not now, soon. He would starve. His wife and his daughter, too. The town, with any luck, would disappear into the jungle. Manau shook his head. “No, you’re right. In the city everything was—”

“Terrible,” the captain said. He smiled. “Pardon me, good sir. But let it be said: everything was terrible.”

Manau nodded. “I’m sorry, Zahir. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“That’s all of it. They took my hands! And yet I am not a helpless man.”

“Of course not, Don Zahir,” murmured the captain.

“And do you know what I miss most?” Zahir asked in a low voice. He leaned in close.

“Playing guitar,” one of the other men said. “Don Zahir, you could play beautifully!” He sang a tra-la-la, a rising melody, and lovingly stroked an invisible instrument.

“No, no, that’s not it.”

“The earth, fertile and damp, in your hands.”

Zahir shook his head. “You talk like a bad poet!”

“What then?” Manau asked.

“I’ll tell you.” He threw an arm over Manau, another around the captain. “My fingers,” Zahir whispered, “inside my wife.”

“No!” the captain protested, overjoyed.

“Yes!”

“Don Zahir! What vulgarity!”

But he had the face of an oblate praying for grace. Manau sat in awe. He would have lent Zahir his own hands for a night of love, if such a thing were possible.

“She was so wet,” Zahir said, “and so warm…Dear God!”

“To women!” the captain said.

“To women!” shouted the roomful of men.

And even outside, a few of the children saluted as well. The girls among them blushed and curtsied.

“I’m still a girl,” said Joanna, smiling beatifically.

“Victor, are you okay?” Nico asked for the hundredth time. He was starting to worry.

Inside, Nico’s father fell silent, and Manau felt a warmth descending from above, something narcotic. The glass was passed to him again. No one mentioned the beer truck or the impassable roads. They would drink it all. What is tomorrow? An idea, nothing more.

WHEN VICTOR was carried into the canteen a few minutes later, the men and the soldiers were still in ecstasies over Zahir’s revelation. The radio played unaccompanied by a single voice, each man plunged into private ruminations of warm vaginas they had known. Years ago, decades ago, it didn’t matter how long it had been; the smell and the sheen of imagined sex was everywhere in the room. They looked at their hands and fingers with hopeless devotion. Beer had been spilled in great quantities, the floor now wet enough to skate on.

All around Manau, men dreamed lustily. The captain and Zahir whispered conspiratorially about the pleasures of the flesh. A few of the soldiers had fallen asleep, splayed out on the floor, musty boots beneath their heads as pillows. Manau was done with memory’s women; they were few anyway. He looked up to find Nico standing awkwardly in the doorway, with Adela’s boy, limp and dazed, in his arms.

Victor was a frail and sickly child. It wasn’t something that Manau had always recognized. He was a smiling, good-natured kid, and his mother kept him clean and neatly dressed. But now Manau was sure he had never seen such a fragile human being.

“I fell,” Victor said, before Manau had a chance to ask. “Will someone call my mother?”

The child’s voice was enough to blot out waking dreams. The captain snapped to attention, his face contorted in an exaggerated expression of worry. These army men love a crisis, Manau thought. But Zahir was up at once, took Victor from his son. The boy’s thin arms slung around the older man’s neck. “You’ll be fine,” Zahir said. With his right stump, he patted the boy’s head.

“I pushed him,” Nico said. “It was my fault.”

But no one was listening. The captain was up. “We’re taking the boy home,” Zahir said.

“Will he be okay?” Nico asked.

“Yes,” Manau said quickly. “He’ll be fine.”

“He won’t die?”

“Of course not.” Manau paused.

Nico nodded.

He wasn’t a boy anymore. He could be reasoned with. The bar had emptied, and they were alone. “You can’t leave,” Manau said. “Not now. Victor told me everything. And I forbid it.”

Manau let that final grand statement linger there. I forbid it. It had authority, weight. “Do you understand me?”

Nico nodded.

“Do you have anything to say?” Manau asked.

But he didn’t. Or wouldn’t. So Manau left him in the empty canteen and went off into the night to see about Adela’s boy.

HIS HOME wouldn’t be this crowded again until his mother died. Then he would once again be the center of attention, women and friends and strangers huddled around him, afraid to speak, afraid not to. But this night, the night before Nico left, a drunk army captain told him he was a tough boy, a true son of the homeland. This night, his best friend’s handless father carried him through town, and his nervous, frightened teacher kept pace, scratching himself as discreetly as he could. A midnight procession beneath an infinity of stars, and the children followed, worried for their classmate. They sang songs, they saluted women. They’d tried to rouse him unsuccessfully by the canteen wall, before Nico had finally said, “Enough, I’ll take him.” In the end, it had for Victor that same movement and madness that his mother’s death would have — except this was a celebration. He was the center of the world. A battalion of soldiers stood guard outside his door. Don Zahir dropped him in his bed. Victor heard his mother’s voice, too concerned to scold him. Warm rags were placed on his forehead, and he dreamed of a helicopter made of silver light. The old women appeared by his bedside, uttering prayers in the old dialect.

Did he whisper in Don Zahir’s ear, did he tell him Nico was leaving? He meant to. Later, he told himself he had. It was no use: in the morning, his best friend was gone.

SEVEN

SHE HAD held it in her hands, glanced over the names: not one had registered. How had she not seen it that first day? While Victor played in the control room, pressing buttons and turning knobs haphazardly, Len watching over him, Elmer took the list and pulled out a black felt-tip marker. Norma gasped. What was worse: realizing Rey’s name was there, that she had somehow missed it, or seeing it disappear again?

“Wait. Let me see it.” She reached for Elmer’s hand. “Why do that?”

“It’s not safe.”

“Let me hold it.”

He relented with a sigh and passed her the paper. “Did you know about this?” he asked.

Norma spread the list across her thigh, smoothing its wrinkles with the palms of her hands. “Of course not,” she said, without looking up. “I never know.” She ran her fingers over the letters of her husband’s name. It was there, Rey’s false name hidden among two dozen others. “Did you?”

He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Norma,” Elmer said. “Either I destroy it or we go to the police. This list — they could be collaborators, sympathizers. Rey is still a wanted man.”

Even if he’s dead.

And so everything would be canceled, the list never read, no special program for Victor or the rest of them, the sons and daughters of 1797, with no one to tend to their memory. People disappear, they vanish. And with them, the history, so that new myths replace the old: the war never happened at all. It was just a dream. We are a modern nation, a civilized nation. But then, years later, a tiny echo of those missing. Do you ignore it?

“It’s a mistake, it must be a mistake.” She wanted to laugh, and she did — but it came out nervously, awkwardly, as if she were hiding something. Elmer frowned. “I’ll keep it,” Norma said. “I can do the show without his name.”

“But I’ll hold the list.”

“Don’t you trust me?”

Elmer sighed. “Everyone on this piece of paper could be guilty of something. I don’t want to take that chance. It’s my life too, you know. I’m responsible for this station.”

“I’ll get to the bottom of this.”

Elmer shook his head, and he certainly had his reasons — good, solid reasons — but she wasn’t listening. He spoke, he explained with his hands, his fists opening and closing. His face was soft and understanding — it didn’t matter. Surely he invoked her own safety, their friendship, strained at times but real — she couldn’t hear him. Hadn’t he always cared for her? Hadn’t he stayed by her side through all of this, and never betrayed her? There were other men — he said carefully — who could not truthfully make such claims.

But Norma wouldn’t hear him. She stood and knocked on the window of the control room until she had the boy’s attention. She gave him a big smile, and could feel the muscles of her face working. He was young. He smiled back.

Norma held the list up to the light. There was a single spot of black ink next to her husband’s false name, where Elmer had touched the paper with the very tip of the marker.

“What are you doing?” Elmer asked.

The boy watched through the window. Norma folded the note into fourths. Without saying a word, she lifted her shirt and slipped the list into her underwear.

Elmer rubbed his chin. “Is this your idea of a joke?”

She pointed Victor to the door. On the other side of the window, Len shrugged. The boy disappeared through the door. He would wait for her. Norma turned to Elmer. “I’m sorry,” she said, and left the control room without another word. He let me leave, she thought, the door closing behind her. “Norma,” Elmer said, but that was all.

Victor was waiting for her in the station’s dilapidated version of a green room. He sat on a couch of sunken cushions, poking his pinky finger into the torn upholstery.

“Lunch,” Norma said in her sweetest voice. Her heart was pounding: she could feel it in her chest, in her throat. “Do you want lunch?”

Victor grinned. Boys his age were always hungry. Of course he wanted lunch. To the elevator then and through the lobby — give the receptionist a smile and a nod — now out into the streets. She took his hand.

They left the radio and made their way to Newtown Plaza, to the reconstructed heart of the city, twenty blocks or more from the station. At the station she’d left behind, Elmer was stewing. She felt sure of this, could almost see him, pacing the halls of the radio, considering his options. Maybe he would send someone after her. Maybe there would be police waiting at her apartment that night. Norma doubted it. Elmer had let her go, after all, with the list. She could feel it against her skin. She was safe for now. Norma and Victor passed restaurant after restaurant, and at each one, the boy slowed, lingering for a moment at its doorway. Chickens turning on spits in the windows, buxom waitresses handing menus to passersby, and Victor took each one, stuffing them into his pocket as Norma dragged him on. She wanted to be tolerant of his curiosity, but it was hard at a moment like this. There were soldiers on every other corner, so much a part of the scenery that they had become nearly invisible: the same boys with rifles that had tormented her once, that had dragged her Rey off a bus twenty years before. Pedestrians moved chaotically between the featureless, modern buildings, beneath a clouded sky that threatened to clear. Taxis honked, vendors shouted, police whistles squealed.

They found a place and sat in the back, far from the noise of the street, in a corner of mirrored walls and glowing tubes of neon light spelling out the names of local beers and sports teams. The waitress was pretty but with bad teeth, and had a jungle accent she seemed to be trying to mask. The food came quickly. Victor drank orange soda through a straw and ate greedily with his hands, content to do so in silence. Norma picked at the fries, sipped her water. Eleven: in a year, Victor would be a different person; in five, unrecognizable and nearly a man. He ate, smiling now and then with bits of chicken stuck between his teeth. He swished mouthfuls of orange soda, puffing out his lips and cheeks. She had the urge to rub her hand across his shaved head: it would be prickly, like sandpaper. Her mind skipped over moments of the previous ten years, and then the decade before that, images of Rey and his various names, his hidden histories, his evasions, his disappearances and disguises. The boy deserved to know.

“There was a name on the list.” She breathed deeply and exhaled. Slowly. Norma took a pen from her purse and wrote the name on a napkin, in capital letters. She observed it. How long had it been since she’d written it out — this oddly spelled name from her past? A decade — or more? Since she wrote him love letters in the weeks after his disappearance, addressed to the name on the ID she’d found in her pocket—that long. She sighed. “Do you recognize it?”

Victor worked on a mouthful of chicken. Looking the name over carefully, he shook his head. “How do you say it?”

Norma smiled. She took a sip of Victor’s soda. The bottle was cold and moist in her palm. She wiped its wetness on her forehead. The headache she’d had since the station subsided for just a moment. Her voice nearly broke.

Victor repeated it. “What was he like?”

The boy wanted to know what he was like. She’d never heard anyone say the name aloud; it made her smile.

Or rather, nearly cry. One of those smiles that hold back so much, a dishonest smile. Where to begin? In the mirrored walls, Norma could see the street and its furious movement, men and women caught in the city’s fevered charade of reconstruction. It was worth asking: Had there ever been a war? Was it something we all imagined? Newtown Plaza was only a few blocks away, a monument to forgetting built atop the ruins of the past. What was he like? Thank God for mirrors, Norma thought, and for these people and those people rushing past, for the frantic work of survival, but none of them were Rey and none of them knew his name: he was a liar, a beautiful man who told beautiful lies. In the restaurant, there were neon lights and long-legged waitresses with breasts bursting from orange tube tops, women dressed like candy to be eaten, bedecked in the colors of boxes of laundry detergent. Clean, young vixens! This city would drive her mad, or her loneliness would, and still Victor watched her in the mirror, eyes darted about, a nation at feeding time, chicken was torn from the bone, devoured, a dozen young and old faces were adorned with greasy smiles. An insipid melody floated just below the hum of conversation, and Norma felt her head might explode.

“Are you all right?” the boy asked. His voice was soft.

Norma shook her head. “No.”

“My mother was this way sometimes.” He paused and leaned forward. “Like her head was coming loose.”

That was it exactly. Her head had come loose. Norma drew a deep breath. It had come loose that first night she met Rey, had stayed that way for decades. How much longer would this swoon last? Victor wiped his mouth carefully with the same napkin she’d written on. Norma took it from him and spread it flat on the table. It was stained and greasy, the smudged ink barely legible. Unrecoverable. She could feel the blood coloring her cheeks.

Victor apologized, but she waved it away. “See,” she said, “I don’t know what he was like. I thought I did. He wasn’t a stranger. We were together for so long. And we’ve been apart so long.” She sighed. “Then he reappears sometimes. And today, it feels”—how did it feel? — “like a joke.”

The boy looked confused. “A joke, Miss Norma?”

“No. You’re right, not a joke exactly.” She curled her bottom lip. “I don’t know what to call it. I’ve been waiting for so long.”

Victor was a child and a stranger, as much a foreigner as she would be in Arabia or the Ukraine — but she wanted him to understand. More than that, she felt that he could, if only he wanted to.

But what was he really thinking? She could only guess: about the chicken probably, its lingering taste on his lips, or the satisfying heaviness in the pit of his stomach. The glittering jukebox behind her, with its shiny buttons and compact discs and selection of songs he’d probably never heard? The buxom waitress and her bad teeth? It was as if Victor had suddenly gained a new tint to him, something that set him apart: he wasn’t a boy any longer. His gaze could move in a hundred different directions, find a hundred distractions, but Norma could see only this: that he had brought a piece of paper from the jungle. And on that piece of paper, a name that proved he had communed with the dead.

“I haven’t seen my husband in ten years,” she said. Victor seemed to be listening, and that was enough for her. “I’m not stupid, Victor. He’s not missing. He’s on a list they keep in the palace: his name can’t even be said out loud. Every night on the radio — can you understand this — I want to talk to him. But I don’t. If I let myself say his name, it would be terrible.”

“What would happen, Miss Norma?” the boy asked.

“At the very least, inconvenient questions. More likely, arrests, investigations, disappearances.” She sighed. “It’s worse than that: if I said his name again, it would be admitting I still thought he might hear me. I’m not sure I can take that.”

“What if I said it?”

She cupped her hands over Victor’s. “Can I tell you something?”

“Yes,” Victor said. He pushed his plate away and reached for the soda, offered her the last of it. When she demurred, he drank it, sucking on the straw with a frown.

“I’m a bit afraid of you.”

He raised his eyebrows for an instant, then let his eyes drift to the table. He wouldn’t look up.

“It’s okay,” Norma said. “I expect you’re probably afraid of me too. Aren’t you?” She pressed his hands; they were still a boy’s hands, his fingers thin and bony, the skin soft. “A little bit scared?” she asked.

The boy nodded.

“It’s scary,” she said, no longer to Victor or to herself, but to the space between them. “It is.”

“I didn’t come alone.” Victor paused and took a breath. “I came with my teacher. He might know. His name is Manau.”

“Tell me what happened.”

The boy slipped his hands from beneath hers and scratched his head. “He was my mother’s friend. Her boyfriend. He was supposed to take care of me. But he didn’t. He left me at the station.”

“Just like that? What did he say?”

Victor took the empty glass and jabbed the straw at the ice melting at the bottom. He sucked, and there was a gurgling sound for a moment. Then he stopped. “Nothing. He said you would take care of me.”

“I–I am,” Norma stammered. “I will. But why did he say that? Why did he leave you?”

Victor shrugged. “He was sad. The old people said he loved my mother.”

Norma sat back, suddenly amused. As if being in love excused everything. How much could be explained away that easily, how much of her past? This Manau: he had abandoned a boy in the middle of the city because he was heartbroken?

“It’s like being dizzy,” she said, sighing. “Trying to make sense of all this. It’s like being very, very dizzy.”

“He knows. I’m sure Manau knows. He can help.”

“My husband is…was not a simple man,” she said. “He plays tricks.”

“That’s not nice.”

Norma rubbed her eyes: the lights, the boy, the note. “You’re right. It isn’t. I’m dizzy,” she repeated. “That’s all.”

THE TABLE had been cleaned off, the bill paid, when Victor confessed he’d dreamed of his mother. She died in the river, he said. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, you poor thing,” Norma said, but that wasn’t why he told her: maybe the river brought his mother here. The lunch hour had died down, the waitresses congregated by the neon-lit bar, chatting and sipping sodas.

“So what do you want to do?” Norma asked the boy.

“The ocean,” he said. “I want to see it.”

The city’s beaches are desolate for most of the year, lonely expanses of windswept sand beneath crumbling bluffs. Vagabonds warm themselves around crudely built fires, and sometimes the waves drag a swollen body onto the shore. In winter, the city turns its back to the sea, the clouds drop low and heavy, flat and dim, a dirty cotton ceiling. What beach? What ocean? Every now and then, the wind changes and brings hints of it — a brackish smell rising through the city — but those days are rare. A highway runs along the coastline; the sounds of passing cars and crashing waves melting into a single, blurred noise. Some of the beaches farther north double as work areas, the careful labor of separating and burning trash carried out by a diligent army of thin, tough boys with matted hair. They poke through the heaps with sticks, gathering pig feed from the festering piles.

Victor, Norma thought, could be one of them. They were his age, his build, his color, their stunted brown bodies stepping expertly through the refuse. And if he were? If he had come from 1797 and not found the radio that first day, if he had wandered the streets hungry and dazed, if he had made a home in the alleys of Asylum Downs, or been picked up by police in the slums behind the Metropole, would that have been surprising? A boy like Victor could live and die in any of a dozen squalid shanties, in The Settlement or Miamiville, in Collectors or The Thousands or Tamoé, and no one would ever know. No mysteries or questions to be asked: another child of obscure origins come to scrape out a life in the nether regions of the city, his success or failure of no consequence to anyone other than himself.

They rode to the coast to look for her. Norma told him — or began to tell him — that it didn’t work that way, that the river flowed across the continent in the other direction, that the ocean was infinite. But she stopped. This was for him to discover, and he would be cured of his dream when he saw it himself. Norma let him talk, he sputtered on about his village, about his mother, about Manau—“We’ll find him!” he said, though the city was as large as the sea, and this Manau was only one man. She was happy to be in a taxi, with the windows down, the air rushing in, so loud she couldn’t hear her own mind thrumming. She watched his lips move, hearing only scattered words, and held his hand to reassure him.

At the beach, Norma and Victor watched a small, stooped woman drag a sack behind her. She moved glacially, arthritically, along the ebbing and flowing line of surf, and together the three of them were the only ones there. They watched her for a moment: she sifted sand into her sack through a sieve, then inched forward and did it again. The wind scattered trash across the beach. An occasional strong gust lifted sand into the sky and out to sea. Though the sun was still hidden, it wasn’t too cold.

Victor went to work, untying his laces, pulling off his socks with greedy resolve. He wiggled his toes, stuffed his socks into his sneakers, and put them all beneath a stone bench at the edge of the sand. He peeled off the sweater that Norma had lent him that morning — given him — an old wool thing that Rey had shrunk in the wash years before. Norma shouldn’t have been amazed, but she was: to Victor, the sweater was simply something to wear against a chill. It meant nothing to him, did not signify anyone living or dead. Of course! He was free of her past, and why wouldn’t he be?

Norma and Victor walked out onto the sand. She didn’t reach for his hand, as she had in the taxi, though she had an urge to. Instead, she watched him as he bounded ahead, almost to the water’s edge and back. He spun and waved his arms. She followed him toward the water and stopped just where the sand became moist and mushy. It had been years since she came to the beach, since she was a girl. Had she ever come in winter? It seemed possible that she never had. Norma took off her shoes, rolled up the cuffs of her pants, and stepped into the wet sand with one foot. She pressed firmly into the cool earth, and it felt good. She pulled her foot back to the dry sand, and crouched to admire her work: a perfect imprint of her foot. She made another, just ahead, and walked this way to where the waves spread out over the sand, a thin skin of advancing and retreating water. Then she retraced her steps, walking backwards. There it was: her disappearance. She had walked into the ocean and not come back.

As a girl, she’d spent an afternoon at this beach, carving massive footprints, giant paw-prints, around her father, while he slept with a straw hat slung low over his eyes. How old was she then? Eight? Nine? Norma smiled. Her mother, she recalled, wore a black bathing suit and hat with a dramatic, swooping brim. A bow, perhaps. She’d had the air of a movie star, thought herself much too elegant to swim, so she alternately read or smoked or stared off at the sea. Norma crawled in the hot, bright sand around her parents, carving a trail of strange footprints. She lost herself in it: the curve and sharpness of the claws, the heft of the heel. She filled her plastic bucket with seawater, wetting the sand so it would stick. When her father finally woke, Norma showed him her work. She was serious and determined. The beast she had imagined as she worked was terrifying and vicious. “A strange animal came while you were sleeping, Daddy,” she said. “He had fangs and claws.”

He took the cigarette that Norma’s mother offered him. He squinted at the footprints around him. “What did the animal do?”

“He ate you whole.”

Her father looked at her, feigning worry. “Am I dead then?”

She told him he was, and he laughed.

A gust of wind blew sand in her face, and she realized Victor had been talking. His teacher had come with him all the way to the city. They’d left 1797 a few days before, been together all the way to the central bus station in the capital. Then Manau walked Victor to the radio station and left him there. Norma nodded: it was inexplicable, cruel. To abandon a boy in the city, to leave him to fend for himself? And just as inexplicably, Victor seemed to hold no grudges. Why did Manau leave?

“He was home,” Victor said, as if it were that simple. Of course, Manau left me, Victor said. Of course: he was heartbroken.

Norma sat on the sand and stretched her legs in front of her. Victor ran off and returned a few minutes later, carrying an armload of driftwood and kelp and a tin can of mysterious origin, rust blooming at its edges. This forgiving boy, this Buddha — he was panting, out of breath, his face flush. “It’s pretty,” he said. “Isn’t it?”

She smiled. It wasn’t clear if he meant the ocean, the sand, or his collection of debris, but in any case, Norma felt it impossible to disagree with the boy about this or anything.

THE DIRTY sand, the lightless horizon — these details couldn’t obscure the beauty of what lay before him: endless water. It moved, it was alive: its briny smell, its mottled surface of foam and breaking waves, an infinity of water and surf, rising, falling, breathing. The ocean simply could not disappoint.

Everything had been tinged with green, the bodies and hands and faces of everyone in 1797. His mother was there, too — he was sure of it — but beyond this, his dream had left him nothing: a bitter taste in his mouth, perhaps, but no image to be interpreted, no narrative to untangle. Back home, there was an old woman who interpreted dreams. She claimed to have lived with the Indians deep in the forest, claimed to know their language: medicine, she told Victor, and tree are the very same word. Victor had gone with his mother once to visit her, had waited outside, digging in the earth with a sharp stick. His mother paid the old woman with a bundle of dried tobacco and a half dozen silver fish.

“What was the dream about?” Victor had asked then.

“Your father,” she’d said, but hadn’t told him anything more.

Before they left this morning, Victor had asked permission to look through Norma’s bookshelves. He’d never seen so many books. He didn’t tell her he hoped to find a map of some sort and, on it, his village and its river. If he could trace its crooked and curving path to the sea, it might be possible. Which way did the river flow? These were things they had never learned. At home, tacked in the wood by the door, there was a map, yellowed with mold, its lines and colors fading. It was from before the war, with names, not numbers. His father’s map. But Victor couldn’t remember anything about it, except that when he asked his mother to point out their village, she had sighed.

“We’re not on it, silly.”

When he took the map down to show to his teacher, Manau looked at it and smiled. He pointed to the capital, traced the shoreline with his fingernail, then took his red pencil and scratched out the old name. To the left of the starred city, somewhere in the vast ocean, Manau printed the word ONE.

“What’s it like?” Victor had asked.

“Beautiful,” said Manau.

For homework that long-ago evening, Victor corrected his map, updating the names of the various cities with a mimeographed map Manau gave him, replacing each name with a number. The order of it became clear as he worked: less than three digits along the coast, below five thousand in the jungle, above that in the mountains. Odd numbers were usually near a river; evens near a mountain. Numbers ending in ones were reserved for regional capitals. The higher the last digit, the smaller the place.

At Norma’s, he thumbed through books and found nothing. Books on the history of radio, picture books of jungle plants, dictionaries for languages he’d never heard of. She sat in the kitchen while he blew dust off heavy leather tomes, turned the frayed, dissolving pages of books that hadn’t been opened in years. There were line drawings of birds and plants in notebooks of heavy parchment. Others had text so small that he could barely read them. Victor spent a moment with a graying book of faces, photos of young men and women in formal dress. Each page had a few faces crossed out, with a date beneath the picture. He looked for Norma, but when he couldn’t find her, he put the book away. Closing his eyes, Victor saw it again and again: his mother at the rock, now steady against the current, now floating away, now diving into the foamy waters. Which way did the river flow? When he’d come to the city, had he moved closer or farther from her? Had he followed her to the sea?

All day, he thought of the ocean. He imagined the word ONE inscribed somewhere in the sea. When they rode to the beach and he saw the size of it, he didn’t despair. It filled him with energy. He felt certain his mother was there. Now he sat beside Norma to gather his breath, and thought of his dream, and before him was so much water. Her eyes were on the surf, on the waves that broke at the horizon. He dropped his armload of stuff on the sand. “What do you have there?” she asked.

He showed her. “This,” he said, “is a sword.” He gripped the driftwood by its base and took a few swipes at the air in front of him. “See?”

She took it from him and, with florid strokes, carved her name in the air. “Dangerous. And this?”

The kelp reminded him of home, of the green moss that clung to the lower limbs of the trees. Was it possible to explain? How it formed curtains of green swaying in the wind, its lowest edges skimming the surface of the river? He tried. The color was just right: a deep, dark green, nearly black, soggy and waterlogged. “Can you picture it?” he asked.

She said she could.

They sat listening to the sea. It was neither cold nor warm. A bank of clouds had fissured, jagged bands of light breaking through. Victor asked, “Are you still dizzy?”

Norma scooted closer to him. “No,” she said. “Are you?”

“What’s going to happen to me?”

Norma smiled. “I don’t know,” she said. “You’re a strong boy, aren’t you? You may be stuck with me for a while.”

He jabbed his driftwood sword in the air. For a moment, it was just the ocean and its rhythms. “Is that all right?” Norma asked, and something in her voice made Victor blush. He didn’t answer right away.

“My mother loved you,” he said. “Everyone in my village did.”

Norma said nothing.

The stooped woman had made her away across the beach, dragging her sack behind her. Victor stood suddenly and walked over to her. She smiled and kept working, scooping the sand into the metal screen, letting the smaller grains fall through. Whatever remained, she dropped into her sack. “Auntie,” Victor said, “can I help?”

“Nice boy,” the woman said.

He took a handful of sand, and let it fall through his fingers, then offered her the pebbles stuck to his palm. She smiled and dropped them into her sieve. They didn’t fall through. She thanked him and tossed them into her bag. She patted his head, and nodded at Norma. “Nice boy,” the woman repeated, “helping an old woman like me.”

“Won’t you sit and rest with us a moment?” Norma asked.

The woman smiled, exposing a mouthful of pinkish-red gums. “Oh, you young people have time to sit and rest! Not me!”

“I’ll gather rocks for you,” Victor said.

She sat and handed Victor her sieve. He knelt down and scooped a handful of sand into it. He ran his tongue along his teeth and stared at the sand as it slipped through the wire netting of the sieve. When he was done, he brought it to the woman for inspection.

“Very good,” she said. From an inside pocket, the woman unrolled a piece of bread. She tore off the crust and offered it to Norma and Victor, but both refused. She ate only the doughy, white inside of the bread, chewing slowly, methodically. A tiny radio hung around her neck by a shoestring. After finishing her bread, she took the single battery from her radio, rubbed it between her palms, then replaced it. The radio crackled to life, spitting out scratchy sound, static, voices.

Norma glanced at her watch. “One of the daytime shows, Auntie,” she said. “Love advice or police reports.”

“On Sunday,” Victor announced, “I’ll be on the radio.”

The woman looked up. “How nice.”

“I’ll say your name. If you want me to.”

She glanced at Victor. “That would be just fine.”

Victor was on his knees again, sifting pebbles. The woman began explaining to Norma how she had stumbled upon this work, how her husband had been in construction. She wanted to talk, she couldn’t help it. Victor listened as she told how her husband had fallen from a beam and died, how she had approached his partner and begged him for something to do. She’d stayed home all her adult life. What could she do? This is what she was offered. She sold the pebbles to a concrete mixer on Avenue F.

“He cheated me,” she said, her voice breaking. “My husband promised me. He said he wouldn’t leave.”

“They do that,” Norma said. “They say those things. They may even mean them, Auntie.”

Victor listened and emptied the sieve into her sack of pebbles, and twice interrupted to ask her name. Both times, the woman ignored him and stared at Norma. “Are you from Lost City, madam?”

Norma blushed and nodded.

Smiling, the woman took Norma’s hand in hers and squeezed. “Why weren’t you on the radio this morning?”

“A day off, Auntie. That’s all.”

“You’ll be back?” the woman asked. “Tomorrow?”

“Or the next day,” Norma said.

A flock of sea gulls circled overhead. The clouds were thin and gauzy now. “I’m so happy,” the woman said after a while. “I’m so happy you’re real.”

Norma held her hand and stroked the back of her neck. Victor sat and placed his hand on the woman’s back. She was dirty and smelled of the sea. She had crumpled into Norma’s embrace and didn’t even notice Victor.

“Auntie,” Norma said, “is there anyone I can help you with?”

The old woman leaned back, nodding. “Oh, Norma,” she whispered. She pulled a piece of paper from her pocket. “I had a man type it for me,” she said. “What does it say?”

Norma read two names aloud, and the woman nodded. “God is merciful,” she said. “Tell them I work this beach. They’re my children.” Then she gathered her things, and thanked them both. “But especially you, boy,” she said. “Give Auntie a kiss.”

She bent down and offered him her cheek. Victor kissed her obediently.

When she had walked a little ways, Victor grabbed his sword. Then he grabbed a handful of sand and dropped it into his pocket. He stared off into the ocean, scanning from right to left across the horizon. His mother, of course, wasn’t there. But Norma was, walking just ahead of him to the highway, holding the old woman’s list in her hand, tightly, so it wouldn’t fly away.

EIGHT

WHEN HE was still a young professor, as the war was beginning in earnest, Rey revived his old pseudonym to publish an essay in one of the city’s more partisan newspapers. The central committee had decided it was worth the risk: a calculated provocation. In spite of the paper’s tiny circulation, the essay caused something of a controversy. In a series of articles, Rey described a ritual he had witnessed in the jungle. He named the ritual tadek, after the psychoactive plant used, though he claimed the natives of the village had more than a half-dozen discrete names for it, depending on the time of year it was employed, the day of the week, the crime it was designed to punish, et cetera. Tadek, as Rey described it, was a rudimentary form of justice, and it functioned this way: confronted by a theft, for example, the town elders chose a boy under the age of ten, stupefied him with a potent tea, and let the intoxicated child find the culprit. Rey had witnessed this himself: a boy stumbling drunkenly along the muddy paths of a village, into the marketplace, seizing upon the color of a man’s shirt, the geometric patterns of a woman’s dress, or a smell or sensation only the boy, in his altered state, could know. The child would attach himself to an adult, and this was enough. The elders would proclaim tadek over and lead the newly identified criminal away, to have his or her hands removed.

If Rey’s article had been merely an anthropological description of a rarely used ritual, that might have been the end of it. This much was not controversial, as the jungle regions in those days were known primarily for being unknown, and the lay person could hardly be surprised by a violent pagan rite emerging from the dark forest. But Rey went further. Tadek, he argued, had been near extinction, but was now experiencing a renaissance of sorts. Furthermore, he refused to condemn it, did not call it barbarism or give any pejorative spin at all to his descriptions of its cruelty. Tadek, in Rey’s view, was the antique precursor to the absolutely modern system of justice now being employed in the nation. Wartime justice, arbitrary justice, he contended, was valid both ethically (one could never know what crimes were lurking in the hearts and minds of men) and practically (swift, violent punishment, if random in nature, could bolster the cause of peace, frightening potential subversives before they took up arms). In measured prose, he applauded a few well-publicized cases of tortured union leaders and missing students as successful, contemporary versions of tadek, whereby the state assigned guilt based on outward signifiers (youth, occupation, social class) no more or less revealing than the geometric pattern of a woman’s dress. The drunken child was perhaps extraneous in a modern context, but the essence was the same. Tadek’s presence in the jungle was not some vestigial expression of a dying tradition but a nuanced reinterpretation of contemporary justice as seen through the prism of folklore. The nation-state, in wartime, had finally succeeded in filtering down to the isolated masses: to condemn them now for re-creating our institutions in their own communities was nothing less than hypocrisy.

In the city, among the literate classes, there was shock and disgust. Tadek was discussed on the radio (there were nearly a dozen stations then), and to the surprise of many, some people, often calling from scratchy pay phones in the city’s dustier districts, defended it. They didn’t employ Rey’s arguments — no one did — but invoked instead tradition, community, culture. They were happy to see it coming back. They told stories of village cripples, living symbols, who took their punishment without complaint. They were lessons for the children. Detractors called it retrograde and barbaric. A few case studies of tadek appeared in other local papers, alongside similarly disquieting dispatches from the interior: shootouts in formerly calm and altogether forgotten villages, policemen kidnapped from their posts in broad daylight, army patrols ambushed and relieved of their weapons on windy mountain passes.

The government had no choice but to shut down the partisan newspaper and a few others. A radio man who had done a series expanding on Rey’s articles was jailed briefly, questioned, and released. A congressman who considered himself very progressive introduced a bill to outlaw the practice. The bill passed, of course, with senator after senator rising to the dais to express his indignation. The president himself denounced the practice of tadek when he signed the legislation, saying the very concept offended the dignity of a modern nation. He preached continued faith in progress, and, as he did in nearly every speech in those days, alluded vaguely to a discontented minority bent on disrupting the calm of a peaceful, loyal people. The war itself, so long in coming, had finally arrived, but received only these oblique official references for the first five years of its violent life.

When Rey published his articles, the war had been raging in the interior for nearly three years, but in the city, it had scarcely been felt at all. Everything in the capital was different when the war began, so clean and ordered — before The Settlement was settled, before the Plaza was razed and replaced with Newtown Plaza, back when The Cantonment was a cantonment and not a furiously expanding slum along the northern edge of the city. In this place — which no longer exists — it was an affront to imagine tadek could be real. It offended the city’s sense of itself: as a capital, as an urban center in dialogue with the world. But it wasn’t only that: the war itself was an insult to the literate classes, and so tadek was patriotically legislated out of existence, and with it the war — all nation’s unpleasant realities excised from newspapers and magazines, deemed unmentionable on the radio.

Early on, Rey’s editor at the newspaper went into hiding — this had been previously agreed upon — but before he did, he promised Rey no one would give him up. That name of his hadn’t been in circulation in many years, and he had never really been a public figure outside of the small, insular world of campus politics. But still, the tension was real: for weeks after, Rey expected armed men to burst into his home, to kick open his door at dawn and take him back to jail, back to the Moon. No one will read it, they’d told him. But Rey slept nervously, tightly entwined with Norma, with a chemical certainty in his blood that each evening together would be their last. They had been married only a few months, and he hadn’t even warned her.

Somehow, he had imagined he could take this step without her ever knowing. One afternoon, before the worst of it, he came home and found his wife in the kitchen of their one-bedroom apartment, standing by the stove, stirring a pot of rice. He kissed her on the back of her neck, and she shrank from him. The obscure newspaper that no one read was right there, on the kitchen table. “They’re going to kill you,” she said.

He’d had precisely the same thought when the project was proposed. He’d been assured it was safe. He composed himself before he answered her. “No one knows who I am.”

Norma laughed. “You’re serious? You can’t really believe that.”

But what else could he believe?

“Why would you write these things?”

Of course, he’d been asked to, and it had been approved. But he couldn’t tell her that. Rey reached for her, and she pulled away. Rey had proposed, and they had married; four years had passed since the day they met, and still the questions had not come. Now, with the essays published, out in the world, Norma was going to ask what she was entitled to know. She was his wife, after all, and he her husband. These were the questions he had expected since the day he proposed to her in his father’s apartment: “Who are you?”—in various permutations. Now they had come. “Ask me anything,” he said, and she began, as any journalist would, at the beginning: “Why didn’t you tell me your father was alive?”

“I thought I was going to die.”

This much was true.

“And I was sure they would come back for me. I wanted to protect you. The less you knew about me, the better.”

He had not lied — not yet. It still shocked him sometimes: that he hadn’t died in a pit and never been heard from again. But here was the proof: he was in his own apartment, with his wife, who was preparing dinner for the two of them. Hundreds of men might be doing the same thing at that exact moment. Thousands. Who could say he was any different from them? Many of these men, he could suppose, did not expect to die that day. Rey sighed. The kitchen was dark and claustrophobic. He longed for a beautiful day, for thin, high clouds spread like muslin across the sky. For a breeze. Before the war came to the city’s finer neighborhoods, there were parks of olive trees and lemon trees planted in rows, and flower beds bursting with flowers of alarming colors, shady places for napping on a spread blanket, places where couples might stroll, hand in hand, and discuss in whispers all manner of personal things. This, too, the war would bring to an end. The city would become unrecognizable. In only a few weeks, at the height of the tadek controversy, Rey would write his will, would go over it with a colleague from the university, a law professor, who would view the entire affair as a morbid paranoia. You’ll live to be old, the law professor would say over and over again, laughing nervously, laughing all the more because Rey would not. Rey would leave Norma everything. When the radio man was jailed, Rey knew they would come for him, too. It was only a matter of time: he visited his father to promise him a grandson but didn’t explain. He begged his wife for forgiveness. All this would come later, but now he approached Norma, felt her tense when he touched her. He turned her around, until she faced him, but she wouldn’t look up. He took Norma’s hand in his, and worked his thumb along her knuckles, weaving figure eights. He could hurt her, he realized, and it could happen easily. The thought frightened him.

“Are you IL?” she asked.

He thought for a moment he should say what they had taught him, what the bearded professor at the Moon had told him: that there was no such thing. That the IL was an invention of the government, designed to frighten and distract the people. He almost said it — and just then she batted an eye. “Tell me the truth,” Norma said, “and I’ll never ask you again.”

She was his wife, and they were in their own home; the doors were locked and bolted, and they were safe. Rey felt his heart surge for this woman, for this illusion called life: tomorrow the longed-for sun might come out, and they could walk through that quiet city park. The worst of the war was so far off it was unimaginable.

And so Rey had pronounced himself cured, as if subversion were a disease of the body. “No, I’m not IL. Let me explain.” At the Moon, he told his wife, they buried him in a pit and he stood there for seven days, unable even to bend his knees properly, unable to squat. The hole was covered with wooden boards, with tiny slats wide enough to see a sliver of the sky: just a sliver, but enough to pray on. What did you pray for, Rey? Clouds, he said. By day, when the sun blazed above, it was stifling and hot, like being baked alive, and he felt insects all over but couldn’t decide if they were real. He convinced himself they weren’t. If he jumped, he could almost reach the top, but after the first day, he couldn’t jump. Rey spent hours trying to reach down to massage the cramped and leaden muscles of his calves. It was a delicate procedure that involved pulling his leg up toward his chest, until his knee hit the earthen walls of the hole he had come to think of as his, tilting to one side, and reaching down into the darkness. My hole wasn’t wide enough, he told Norma. My tomb, he might have said. He dug at the sides with his fingernails, scraped at the bottom with his curled toes. Rey longed to knead his calves, but had to content himself with scratching a spot just below the knee. He scratched until it hurt, and then he scratched some more. On the fourth night, a couple of drunken soldiers took the cover off. Rey saw stars, the glittering firmament full of light, and he knew he was far from the city. The sky was beautiful, and for a moment, he believed in God. Then the soldiers unzipped their pants and urinated on him: a wordless, joyless transaction. He expected them to laugh, to joke, to find happiness in cruelty, but there was nothing, only the starlight and the marmoreal glow of his tormentors’ faces. Rey slept standing. He could smell himself. The fifth day passed, and the sixth. He was unconscious when they pulled him out on the seventh and placed him in a cell with a half-dozen prisoners: the bearded man in the wrinkled suit and a few others, all of them shrunken, deformed, able simply to lie on the floor, unable to speak.

Rey promised Norma: he’d been cleansed of all political ambitions. “It’s simple,” he said with such fervor she might have believed him. Indeed, the essence of what he said was true: “I want to live. I want to grow old with you. I don’t ever want to go back.”

BUT IT began only six months after he’d returned from the Moon, a few years before the tadek controversy, on a morning crosstown bus, the day Rey spotted the man with the beard. He wore the same wrinkled suit, the same look of amused indifference. Was it him? It was; it wasn’t. Rey rubbed his eyes. Here, among strangers, he usually did his best thinking: divagations of the mind, blurring and then effacing that which he did not care to remember. The Moon, the Moon: it stayed with him, a song whose melody he couldn’t escape. His uncle Trini had found him a job in Tamoé, inspecting the settlements, working for the government agency that ratified land takeovers. It was temporary, an invisible post in an invisible bureaucracy, something to hold him over until he could muster the strength to return to the university. He’d been there only three weeks, wandering among the shanties, asking questions of mothers who eyed him suspiciously, as if he were coming to take their homes away. He wrote names on his clipboard, drew rudimentary maps of the squalid neighborhoods on graph paper the office provided him. He lunched in silence at the open-air market, and these were his days. He remembered the Moon, imagined it just behind every hill. The bus ride was an hour and a half each way, spent between sleep and a kind of autohypnotism he’d perfected: watching his fellow passengers until his eyes crossed, until they became shapes and colors and not people at all. The city passed in the window, now and then a word calling him from the newspaper someone might be reading, the war appearing in headlines, still on an inside page, still a distant nightmare. He himself never read the newspaper; he made a point not to.

Now the bus took a tight turn, the passengers swaying with it — dancers, all of them — and Rey caught another glimpse of the man: we were chained together, Rey thought, and he shut his eyes tightly. The dreams were evenly spaced now, not every night, but twice-weekly explosions of filmic violence. He ground his teeth in his sleep, could feel the soreness in his jaw each morning, the grit of enamel peppering his tongue. He stayed with his father, slept on the sofa, and Trini came over every evening to see his shell-shocked nephew; together, they relived better days over steaming cups of tea. “You need a woman,” Trini said, and it was the only thing Rey’s father and uncle could agree on.

The man in the wrinkled suit was staring at him. Or perhaps Rey was staring. It was impossible to tell: one would have imagined that the city was a perfect place for anonymity, a place to disappear, a place so opaque it would do your forgetting for you. But here he was. Their eyes met. It’s my second home, the man had said. Rey shuddered. It meant he was marked. A time bomb. More than anything, Rey wanted to get off at the very next stop: he was content to wait for the next bus on any strange, unknown corner of the city, anywhere far away from this man — I’ll be late for work, he thought, it doesn’t matter. Rey noticed he was sweating, his heart skipping along, frantic, while the man in the wrinkled suit — Rey could see him now, amid the somnolent, workaday crowd — the man seemed perfectly calm. He met Rey’s gaze; he didn’t flinch or turn away.

Rey rode the rest of the way with his eyes half-closed, pretending to sleep. When he awoke, the man was gone. It was a clear day in Tamoé, a day of bright sun that acted upon him as a drug might: Rey found himself knocking on the wrong doors, stumbling over his prepared speech — I represent the government; I am here to help you legitimize your claim on this land, on this house. Sweat beaded on his brow, stung his eyes. Doors were slammed in his face, women refused to speak with him without their husbands present. He left business cards and promised to return, but the day stretched on in an opiate haze, Rey trudging from one dusty street to the next. He represented the government — just as those soldiers had, the night they pissed on him beneath the stars. The generous embrace of power, Trini called it, with a smirk. “Don’t worry, boy,” his uncle had said. “If they blacklisted everyone they sent to the Moon, there’d be no one left to hire.”

A couple of days passed before he saw the man in the wrinkled suit again: on the same morning bus ride through the city to Tamoé. This time, the man boarded a few stops after Rey and nodded at him — it was unmistakable! brazen! — before burying his face in a newspaper. The next day, it was the same thing. And the next. Rey called in sick on the fourth day, an unnecessary courtesy he felt compelled to provide: he was a minion in a swollen bureaucracy, and no one would have noticed. Still, he wrapped himself in a coat, stumbled outside, and called from the pay phone on the corner, shivering. He dutifully reported symptoms as vague as they were real: a slight sense of vertigo, a pain in his shoulder, a shallowness of breath. He said nothing of the fear or the nightmares of paralyzing intensity. What he needed, he decided as he spoke to an uninterested secretary, was some rest.

Rey returned to work the following day, and this time, the man in the wrinkled suit was waiting for him at the bus stop, seated on the bench with a newspaper folded under his arm, staring blankly at the passing traffic. Rey hadn’t mentioned this apparition to anyone — not to his father or Trini. It felt like an assault. There was no one else at the bus stop. Rey glared at the man, and the man smiled back.

“Are you following me?” Rey asked.

“Won’t you sit?” The man’s tone was warm, avuncular. “We have things to discuss, you and I.”

“I find that hard to believe,” Rey said, but he sat anyway. “I’m not scared of you.”

“Of course,” the man said. He had gained some weight since Rey saw him last. Then again, one might assume they all had. At the Moon, a soldier came by twice a day and dropped pieces of bread into the hole, along with a plastic bag full of water. “Tamoé,” the man said, “is the future of this stricken nation.”

A bus came; a woman with a bag of vegetables stepped off. The bus driver held the door open, waiting for Rey, but the man in the wrinkled suit waved it away.

“In Tamoé, the foundation will be laid. Is being laid, I should say, at this very moment. Tell me, do you enjoy your work?”

What was there to like? It was a slum like any other. Rey coughed into his hand.

“We have people there,” the man continued. He nodded slowly, the edges of his mouth creeping toward a smile. “I would like you to meet them.” He reached into an inside pocket and pulled out an envelope. “I can’t visit them with you. It wouldn’t be safe.”

Rey looked at the man and then around him at the busy avenue. From a distance, they were simply two men — strangers, acquaintances — chatting. Was anyone watching them? Listening? They could be speaking of the weather, or the weekend scores, or anything. The man placed the envelope on the bench between them. “Why me?” Rey asked.

“Because I know your name,” the man said. “Not the one you were born with. The other one.”

The name, the ID. For an instant, an image flashed before him: the woman he hadn’t seen since the night his misfortunes began. Norma was her name. Norma. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Rey said, but the words had a disappointing lack of weight to them: they sounded weak, tenuous.

“I see they succeeded in frightening you at the Moon. There are other things you can do for us. Quiet things. Clean things. You needn’t be public anymore to be useful.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Of course. There aren’t many of us who really know you.” The man eyed him and didn’t blink. “Shall I say your other name? Shall I prove it?”

Rey felt suddenly that his youth was a decade in the past, that he had become, seemingly overnight, old and decrepit, a man with nothing to lose. He was dying. He shook his head. He hadn’t seen Norma again, hadn’t thought of her until that exact moment. Would he even recognize her? He had spent six months confined by the unsettling substance of his own dreams. Rey took the envelope without looking at it, slipped it into his inside coat pocket. It was thin and waxy. He knew instinctively the envelope was empty. It was a test.

The man smiled. “Avenue F–10. Lot 128. Ask for Marden.”

They’ll lock me up again, Rey thought, and this time no one will see me. This time they won’t spare me. If he went to the police, what would he say? What would he have for them? An empty envelope and vague descriptions of a man with a thin beard and an ill-fitting suit. And where did you meet this man, the police would ask — oh, here it is, where I give myself away: when I was a prisoner, sir, at the Moon.

The man scratched his brow. “You have questions I can’t answer,” he said. “In the meantime, I’ll ask you one: those soldiers. The ones who kept us company when we last met. Do you hate them?”

The bus was a half-block away. Hate was a word Rey never used. It meant nothing to him. The soldiers had pissed on him joylessly, with the detachment of scientists performing an experiment. When Rey was a boy, he and his friends captured beetles, placed them in plastic tins, and set them on fire, blissfully cruel: a group of boys, charmed by this collaborative act of malice. Why did this memory fill him with such nostalgia, and why were the soldiers so dispassionate in their cruelty? They had tortured him with the same conviction with which he wandered around Tamoé. That is to say, they had done so listlessly, by rote. How could he hate them? It was their job. If they had so much as snickered, Rey felt certain, he could. Loathe them. Absolutely. Without that, they seemed strangely innocent.

The bus jerked to a stop before them, and Rey made as if to rise, but the man in the wrinkled suit held him back. “You’ll wait for the next one,” he said. He got on the bus and didn’t look back.

HE KEPT on to the envelope for two weeks. That first night, after Trini had come and gone, after his father had gone off to sleep, Rey held it up to the light and verified it was empty. There was a script letter M in the upper right-hand corner. The envelope was sealed, thin, and insubstantial.

Rey returned to Tamoé all that week, expecting each morning to see the man with the thin beard. He never did. He walked around the neighborhood as he always had, taking notes, drawing his crude maps, filling out forms with illiterate men who insisted on looking everything over before signing an X to the bottom of the page. He studiously avoided Avenue F–10, never crossing it on foot: if he was to work on the north side of F–10, he took the bus a few stops past and spent the entire day there. On other days, he confined himself to the south side, never nearing this new, artificial border.

It took him two weeks, but when Rey finally decided to see Marden, he did it right away. Later he would wonder why he went at all, and decide it was curiosity — a natural curiosity — and tell himself that a healthy interest in the unknown would always be useful. In his career as a scientist, and in his life, if he were allowed to live it. It was not the hate that the man in the wrinkled suit wanted him to feel: Rey felt proud of that somehow. Still, he was afraid. He dressed that day as he normally would, washed his face under the cold-water tap of his father’s apartment, and folded the empty envelope into his front pocket. When he pulled the door shut behind him, Rey felt a heaviness in the act.

Avenue F–10 ran roughly east-west through Tamoé, a potholed four-lane road divided by a gravel median, dotted with the occasional withering shrub. The avenue was lined with squat apartment houses, crowded repair shops, and a few restaurants of questionable cleanliness and limited menus. If a place like Tamoé could be said to possess a center, F–10 was it: one of two avenues with streetlights in the newly colonized district. On his north-side days, Rey’s bus ride home crossed the avenue: he could sense its glow, its energy from blocks away. After dark, groups of boys congregated beneath F–10’s streetlights: laughing, alive, they squatted around these totems, bathing in the pale orange glow. Rey found it perplexing: it seemed the youth of the district never left Tamoé; instead, they came here, to this avenue, just to stand in the light.

That morning, Rey got off in the heart of F–10 and walked east. Even by day, it was crowded with young people. Women sold tea from wooden carts, emollients of pungent odors, syrups that promised to cure any cough. Moto-taxis clustered on the corner, ferrying vendors to the market a few blocks away. But ten blocks on, the avenue regained the provincial air that defined the rest of the district. The asphalt disappeared abruptly, and the four-and five-story apartment houses, Tamoé’s most solidly constructed buildings, were replaced by shanties, of the kind that concerned Rey and his work most directly: ad hoc homes of considerable ingenuity, homes built of material scavenged from the city. Illegal, ubiquitous, inevitable, the city would grow and grow and no one could imagine it ever stopping. The avenue itself petered out at the base of a crumbling, yellow hill, a dusty lane running headlong into a mound of scree. Here, a shirtless child had planted a red flag in the pile of rock. A half-dozen children ran around it, ignoring Rey, now and then clambering up, only to be repelled by a hail of stones. They played war. A thin, black dog sat at a safe distance from the children, chewing nervously on a piece of Styrofoam.

Lot 128 was set just off the dusty edge of the street, to the left of the pile of rocks. It was a house like any other on the block, mud brick with small, paneless windows on either side of the door, and lined with a knee-high fence of woven reeds. Rey stepped over it. The number was painted neatly in the center of the door. Rey resisted the urge to peek through the windows. He knocked twice and waited.

“Marden,” Rey said when the door opened. “I have a message for Marden.”

The man in the doorway was large and pale, wearing an undershirt and dark drawstring pants patched at the knees. He was older than fifty, perhaps much older. His hair was the color of a used cigarette filter, and his face, jowly and slack, had that same exhausted, yellow-gray pallor. If he was Marden, the name seemed to have no effect on him, or rather not precisely the effect Rey had been expecting: a look of recognition, even camaraderie. The man looked down the street suspiciously, then waved Rey in. He pointed to a chair in the center of the room, and squatted in front of a tiny gas burner resting on the dirt floor. With a bent fork, he tended to a single egg. It bobbed and sank in a pot of boiling water.

“Breakfast,” the man said. He apologized for having nothing to offer his visitor, but he did so in a tone Rey could not mistake for warmth.

“I ate, thank you,” Rey said. The man shrugged and tapped his egg.

The room was dark, the air full of dust and smoke and steam. Besides the chair, there was a twin bed and a radio on the nightstand. In the generally colorless room, there was one grand splash of reddish orange: a finely knit bedspread, fiery and bright and out of place.

The man must have caught him looking. “My mother made it,” he said. “Years ago.”

Old men have mothers, too. Subversives, too, even those who live Spartan lives. Rey tried to smile. The man turned off the burner and flipped the egg into a bowl. The water settled in the pot, steaming. He tapped some instant coffee into a cup, then filled it with the same water he’d used to boil the egg. He stirred with a fork and handed the cup to Rey. “When you finish,” he said, “I’ll have some.”

Rey nodded and took the cup. Sugar? he almost asked, then thought better of it. He held the cup to his lips. It smelled like coffee, at least.

“This message?” the man said, without looking up. He sat with his legs crossed and peeled his egg carefully, gathering the tiny bits of eggshell in his lap. “Who gave it to you?”

“Are you Marden?”

The man glanced at Rey, then brushed off his fingers and took the egg into his mouth whole. He chewed for a minute or more, nodding. Rey drank his coffee, for lack of anything else to do. It burned his tongue. Then he sat forward, with his elbows on his knees and his chin resting in his palm. He watched the man eat. The loose skin of the man’s cheeks puffed and stretched. He swallowed with an exaggerated expression of satisfaction and rubbed his belly. “I’m Marden,” he said. “Where’d you get this message?”

Rey put down his coffee and joined the man on the floor. He pulled the envelope from his back pocket. “I don’t know his name.”

Marden looked the envelope over, squinted at the M, and broke into a grin. “Very nice,” he said. He tore the envelope in half, then into quarters, then into eighths. He handed the bits and pieces back to Rey. “Where is he finding people these days?” he said, amused.

Rey held the scraps of the envelope in his cupped hands. “What do I do with this?” he asked.

Marden shrugged. “Smoke them. Bury them. Confetti at your wedding. It doesn’t matter, kid.”

“I don’t understand.”

“When he asks, tell him there were eight pieces. When we need you, the professor will find you. He’ll tell you where to leave a message for me and you’ll do it.” Marden coughed dryly into his hand. “You work in Tamoé?”

Rey nodded.

“Avoid this part of the district. Wait for us. It could be months. It could be a year, or even two. No one knows.”

“No one?”

“I don’t. You don’t. Not even the professor does. We do as we’re told. You’ll be a messenger. Your job is to wait.”

Rey put the pieces of the envelope back into his pocket. His coffee had cooled a bit, enough for the bitter liquid to go down without too much trouble. He finished it and passed the cup to Marden. Was this all? Had he waited two weeks to have an empty envelope torn to pieces before him by a jowly, yellow-haired old man? It didn’t seem right.

“Were you at the Moon?” Rey asked.

Marden frowned. “I’ve been there,” he said after a moment. “You have as well?”

“Yes.”

“Keep it to yourself.” Marden sighed. “You won’t be coming back here. We have people all over the district. Things are happening.”

The meeting was over. There were no good-byes, no handshakes. The door opened, and the small room released him.

Outside, the children ran in frantic circles, raising a film of fine dust, a low, sandy fog over the street. He could feel it in his nostrils, he could taste it. The day was just beginning. The children paid him no attention. Rey walked away from the hill, down the avenue, absentmindedly scattering remains of the envelope along the way.

WHEN REY returned to the university that year, just before his twenty-fifth birthday, he still hadn’t seen the man in the wrinkled suit, or been to the eastern end of F–10. He’d worked, documenting scores of Indian families and the exact addresses of their ramshackle homes. He interpreted hand gestures and forged signatures for people he thought might benefit. He learned a bit of the Indian dialect, enough to say “good day” and “thank you” and “you’re welcome.” A half year in Tamoé, and the dust became a part of him: in the evenings, his clothes shook off clouds of it, his skin felt heavy with it. He was going to be buried alive if he stayed much longer. Every Friday, he made his way to the central office of the district, a blandly decorated room with a single desk and a sun-faded flag, on the district’s other lighted avenue. He turned in his paperwork, wondering only briefly what became of these maps and forms and records. Once settled, Rey knew, nothing would move these people. They didn’t need his help for anything beyond peace of mind: only a cataclysm would clear the area. He thought now and then of the man in the wrinkled suit, but on these rare occasions, the entire episode was cloaked in absurdity. There was no war of subversion in the making: where were the soldiers? The young men of the district seemed content to spend their evenings leaning against lampposts, posturing for the girls that passed by. The man in the wrinkled suit had invoked the future of the nation when he spoke of Tamoé, but who was the mysterious contact in this vanguard district? A terse, phlegmatic man with an unhealthy pallor, peeling eggs, alone. Marden, with his faraway look and peripheral existence, hardly seemed capable of leaving his home — to say nothing of instigating a general revolt.

Rey arranged to work part-time and resumed his studies. Despite all the talk, the president’s warnings, and the bellicose editorials, life at the university had not yet changed. There were no soldiers inside its gates. Students still gathered in the main courtyard and discussed the coming conflict as they had before, with that strange mix of awe and anxiety. It made Rey nervous to return: there were more than a few people who might remember one or another of the speeches he’d made, his brief and intoxicating turn at the university as an outspoken critic of the government. The prospect of meeting these people made his heart quicken. He’d been on committees that planned trips to the mountains. He’d met in dark rooms to plan protests. Most significant, he’d acquired another name, and with it came responsibilities. But then he had disappeared. His old friends would have questions: Where have you been? What did they do to you? Are you all right? Every so often, in the months of his recovery, Rey’s father handed him a note that some concerned young man had brought by the apartment. They were always polite but insistent: that he contact them, because they were waiting. Rey never responded: what could he say? There were people at the university who had looked up to him. He hadn’t seen anyone in nearly a year; he had fled to Tamoé. By now, they must consider him a traitor. They had surely interpreted his silence this way, and if they asked, he would have no answers.

Do you hate them? It tormented him, this question. At the university, Rey slipped into class just as the professor began lecturing, and left before the hour ended. He wore hooded sweatshirts even on sunny days, and walked quickly through campus, careful to keep his gaze fixed on the ground before him. All the things he would say to Norma years later were true. He was afraid of politics. He was afraid of dying. He was afraid of finding himself a broken man of fifty, living in a slum at the edge of the city, waiting for the arrival of obscure messages from the great brain of subversion. When Rey met her again, when he saw her and saw that she had seen him as well — he felt a shiver: even at a distance, she recalled for him, in all its immediacy, the terror of what he had done, of Marden and the man in the wrinkled suit and the blank horrors that still penetrated his dreams. He had risked too much. He had come so far from that night of dancing, that night of bombast and boasting. He’d only wanted to impress her. Because she was beautiful. Because she didn’t seem to mind looking at him either. And now she was walking toward him. The IL had found him at a bus stop; why did he believe, even for a moment, that they would forget him now? That he could just walk away? It was a cold, cloudy day — the malaise of winter.

Norma smiled at him, and she looked like sunshine. She hadn’t forgotten him, either. Rey panicked.

It was true. It was always true: you could believe one thing and its opposite simultaneously, be afraid and reckless all at once. You could write dangerous articles under an assumed name and believe yourself to be an impartial scholar. You could become a messenger for the IL and fall in love with a woman who believed you were not. You could pretend that the nation at war was a tragedy and not the work of your own hand. You could proclaim yourself a humanist and hate with steely resolve.

When, after the conflict, the displaced thousands returned to the site of the Battle of Tamoé, they found their homes burned, their avenues cratered, their hills littered with unexploded ordnance. Tanks had run through their streets, bulldozers had razed entire blocks of houses. Their beloved streetlights had fallen too, but in any case, there were few young people left to gather around them. The entire district would be rebuilt. Without a monument to the dead, without so much as a plaque to commemorate what had been there before. It was announced that the families who had their paperwork in order would be permitted to return, would be forgiven. If they could find their old plot, it was theirs, regardless of their role in the battle or their sympathies for the IL. An office was set up on a burned-out block of F–10 to process the petitions. A line gathered there each morning before dawn. For months, they came, heads bowed like penitents, carrying the forms Rey had written for them or the maps he had drawn, and it was all they owned in the world.

NINE

MANAU ARRIVED in the city and inhaled. Its odor was enough: that potent mix of metal and smoke. He was home. Adela’s boy held his hand, and Manau felt keenly the possibility of forgetting: her taste, her body, her caresses. He shut his eyes.

The boy looked up at him: “What will we do?”

Manau squeezed his hand and pulled him along. He carried both their bags over his shoulder. The street outside the bus station was full of people, spilling off the sidewalks, scrambling between the cars. The boy had said almost nothing the last hour of the bus ride. Even this simple question — what will we do? — had to be viewed as progress. He gazed at everything with wide, fearful eyes. The boy was not home: he was in hell. And the city was a terrible place, to be sure, but the world was made up of terrible places. Maybe Victor was too young to take solace in that fact. And there were other facts: Adela was dead, and now they were both alone. Manau tried, as he had for the previous four days, to clear his mind, but still he was pursued by the urge to weep. Ten days before, he had made love to Adela on a mat of reeds. It had been a moonless night. Around them, above them, in the near distance of the forest, birds had made their bright and inscrutable music. A pang of desire shot through him at the memory: he and Adela had scratched one another and pushed, they had rolled clumsily off the mat and onto the ground. The moist earth had stuck to their bodies. Later, the rains came to clean them: a sky split by lightning, curtains of purple water crashing loudly over the trees.

In the city, the sky and its clouds glowed white. It was a year since he’d seen this shade of color above.

“Is it going to rain?” Victor asked. “Is that what you’re looking at?”

Manau managed a smile. “I don’t think so.” He didn’t say that they were in the coastal desert now, that as long as he stayed in the city, Victor would not see anything recognizable as rain. Always cloudy, this city, always humid. It’s a trick, Manau wanted to say. “Are you hungry?” he asked instead, and the boy nodded.

An Indian woman squatted on the sidewalk, selling bread from a covered basket balanced on a crate. She puffed on the stub of a hand-rolled cigar and did not smile. Manau took two rolls of bread and paid her with a handful of coins. The woman held them in her palm for a second, then frowned. She took one between her molars and twisted it. The metal coin bent in her teeth.

“It’s fake,” she said, handing it back. “Don’t give me this jungle money.”

Her mountain accent was thick with masticated vowels. Jungle money? Manau mumbled an apology and fished a bill from his pocket. The boy watched the proceedings without comment. He had already eaten half of his roll. The woman scowled. “Pay first, then eat, boy.” She held Manau’s bill up, inspecting it. “Where do you come from?” she asked.

“From 1797,” Manau said. He tried a joke: “The money’s good, madam. I made it myself.”

She released a mouthful of smoke. Not even a smile. “You people have ruined this place.” She handed Manau his change and turned to serve another customer.

Manau felt his blood rising. The city was impregnated with the smell of ruin: it swirled in the sodden air and stuck to you, wherever you went. It followed me all the way to the jungle, Manau thought, and now he stood accused of bringing it home again. He looked at the woman, at the boy. In the neighborhood where he was raised, there was an Indian woman who shined shoes and sharpened knives. She walked the streets, chatting with the women who knew her, offering candy to the children. She lived beneath the bridge at the end of the street, and she always smiled and never complained, not even when the war got bad and half her customers moved away — that’s how they were supposed to be: these mountain people, these desperate poor.

Manau spat on the sidewalk in front of the woman.

“Move on!” she hissed.

Then he had done it, not for himself but for the boy: with a swift kick, Manau upended the woman’s basket of bread, knocking it off the crate. There was a shout. Bread spilled everywhere on the dirty sidewalk, rolled into the gutter. In an instant, the woman was up, her face hot, her fists clenched. She would have attacked and certainly hurt him — but there was no time: the passersby had turned on her, had swarmed her, they were stealing her bread. The woman scurried behind them, swatting at hands, but it was no use. Her bread disappeared into the hands of men in work clothes, and mothers in housedresses, and ratty street kids with matted hair. “Thieves!” the woman yelled, red to bursting, her face a livid, unnatural color. Something animal had been unleashed in her, and she waved her cigar in frantic, menacing loops. She attacked a man who had snatched a roll and, for a brief and shocking instant, it seemed she might bite him.

A day’s worth of bread vanished in fifteen seconds.

It happened so fast that he couldn’t be sure why he had done it, only that he did not regret it. Not at all. Manau tossed some change at the upturned basket, took Victor’s hand, and backed away. He looked down the avenue. In the distance was the radio’s spire, a woven metal phallus pointing skywards, adorned with blinking red lights. “Let’s go,” Manau said to the boy, and they went toward it, first walking, then racing, as if someone or something were chasing them.

IT WAS only ten days before, as they drank palm wine and waited hopefully for a breeze, that Zahir had invited Manau to touch his stumps. “Be kind to an old man,” he said, though Manau did not think of his landlord and friend as old. “I’m sad today.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. It’s about time you did. You stare.”

Manau blushed and began to protest, but Zahir interrupted him. “It’s all right,” he said. “Everyone does.”

The sun had sunk behind the trees, and the sky dimmed toward a lacquered blue-black. It was the edge of night in the jungle: a nimbus of mosquitoes buzzed around the kerosene lantern. Manau sipped his wine from a gourd. Nico had been gone for months now, and no one had heard from him. That night and every night, Manau was careful not to mention Zahir’s son. When the wine loosened his tongue, Manau felt he might confess, but then he was unsure what to say, and so said nothing. Nearly half a year had passed this way. A harvest had come and gone.

In a few hours, the night breezes would blow, Manau would excuse himself, and wander off to look for Adela, forgetting Nico and his unfortunate father for another day. If the moon was out, or even if it wasn’t, he would invite her to swim.

Now Zahir was waiting, eyes shut tight, holding his arms out for inspection. Manau took another sip from his gourd and set it on the floor. He placed a hand over each stump, felt the rough skin against his palms. He held Zahir’s right arm by the wrist, and went over the wound with his thumb. Where it had scarred, the flesh turned in on itself, like a sinkhole or a crevasse or the dry and jagged bed of a stream.

“It’s been seven years,” Zahir said, opening his eyes. “Seven years today.”

Manau let go. He had come to think of his landlord’s stumps as a cruel birth defect, a trial Zahir had always borne. Of course, this wasn’t true. He knew it wasn’t. Still, it was startling: seven years ago yesterday, Zahir could scratch his temple, light his own cigarette. He could love his wife with ten more possibilities. Manau looked down at his own hands, and they seemed like miracles. He cracked his knuckles; they gave off a satisfying pop. He wiggled his fingers, then caught Zahir watching him.

“I’m sorry.”

“You get used to it. Really. Do you believe me?”

Manau made a point of looking Zahir in the eye. “Of course,” he said.

The dark began just a few feet beyond the steps of Zahir’s raised hut. The towns people shuffled by, nearly invisible, now and then calling a greeting. Manau felt unable to speak. In a little more than a week, he would leave this village, and all the stories he’d heard here would seem burdensome and foreign, woeful tales foisted upon him: his crippled friend, the dozens of missing, the town and its never-ending battle against the encroaching forest. Flood, neglect, war. Manau would look at the boy — his fellow traveler — and be reminded of this day and others, when Zahir told him of 1797 and its history. He would feel disappointed in himself, that he had allowed it, that he had accepted these memories that were not his. At the time, it had seemed painless, even pleasant: the crepuscular light, the lulling haze of the wine, the stories that always ended badly. He had very nearly belonged. He might have made a home there, if Adela hadn’t died.

Zahir said, “The IL came and asked for food. We told them the war was over. They accused us of lying. We told them there was no food to spare. They said someone must have stolen the food if there was none to give. There was a thief in town, they said. So they took the boy and did tadek.”

He rubbed his face with the end of his arm. On feast days, after he drank, Zahir let his wife tie tassels to his arms. Red and white. Manau had seen him, had seen the whole process. When she reached his stumps, she slowed, massaging the rough skin there, gently, adoringly. Surely she missed his hands too, but the way she lavished attention on his stumps, you would never guess it. She tied thick blooms to them. Then, when the music began in earnest, Zahir danced to the drum and the flute, waving his arms like a bird.

“And Victor picked you?” Manau asked.

“Because he knew me, I suppose. He was Nico’s friend, you understand. They were always good friends. He could have picked anyone. It’s a miracle he didn’t go to his mother.”

Adela without her hands — Manau was seized with terror, imagining it.

“Victor doesn’t remember it,” Zahir said, “and that’s for the best. What good would it do?”

None, thought Manau. But did Nico remember it? What good would that do? Or what evil had it already done? Manau fumbled for his glass. His wine was warm, but it went down easily. The breezes would begin soon.

“Do you want to know something else?” Zahir said. “I deserved it. The boy was right.”

“No one deserves that.”

“I did.”

Manau waited for his friend to go on, but Zahir didn’t. The silence lasted a minute or more, and Manau didn’t ask for explanations. He didn’t dare. They listened to the forest. When Zahir spoke again, it was in another tone of voice.

“But that was the second time the IL came,” said Zahir. “The first time they came to shoot the priest.”

“There was a priest?” Manau asked.

Then, a woman’s voice from the darkness: “Oh, yes, there was a priest.”

It was Adela. She had snuck up on them. She stepped into the orange lamp light, and Manau felt something warm in his chest: he wouldn’t have to look for her later. She was right here; maybe she’d been looking for him.

“You found us,” he said.

Her hair was braided loosely; a few strands fell just above her eyes. She very nearly glistened. Adela held her hand out, and Manau obliged with a kiss.

“Don Zahir,” Adela said, with the slightest bow.

He received her with a nod.

Manau offered Adela his chair, but she sat at the top of the stair instead. She pulled her skirt above her knees. He noticed her bare feet, her ankles. “Is there wine?” she asked.

“For you, my dear, there is always wine,” Zahir said, and Manau stood without waiting to be told. He went inside and came back with a gourd. He poured carefully. A full cup. She took a sip.

“Zahir,” Adela said, “you were telling a story.”

“The priest and his fate. These are old tales.”

“Tell it,” she said.

Zahir sighed. She was irresistible, and not just to Manau.

The beginning of the war: a sun-drunk group of fighters stumbled into town. They were young, Zahir said. They stank of youth, and for this reason, many people forgave them. Also, if truth be told, the victim was not a man universally liked. The priest had come from abroad some thirty years before and, at the time of his death, still clung stubbornly to his accent. He refused to learn any of the old language, and did not contribute to the upkeep of the communal plot. He looked down on the Indians who came to trade medicinal plants and wild birds for cornmeal and razor blades and bullets. They didn’t know God, he said. And so the IL waved their weapons and bound his hands, and no one protested. The rebels kept their faces covered. They ordered the entire village, some hundred and twenty families in those days, to gather to watch the execution. The shooter was a young woman. She was very pale.

Zahir took a deep breath, then drank from his gourd. He asked for a cigarette. Manau lit one and held it to Zahir’s lips while the old man smoked. Manau took a few puffs as well, held the cool smoke in his lungs. It was that last detail that seemed so strange to him: a woman! They were bad people, these IL, but he couldn’t help being intrigued. This jungle wine did strange things to the brain: he had to touch Adela right then. He stretched his leg out; his right toe could just graze her elbow if he nearly slid off his chair. The night had come swiftly, and the breezes were beginning.

She turned to Manau and smiled. She swatted his foot away and pinched her nose.

When the cigarette had burned down, Zahir announced he had come to the interesting part of the story. “Isn’t it so, Adela?” he asked.

“If I remember correctly, Don Zahir.”

“Of course you do,” said the cripple.

The IL gave the priest’s home to the poorest family in the village, the Hawas, and they had no choice but to accept. A great show was made of carrying their few possessions to the priest’s house. But when the IL left a few days later, Mr. Hawa moved his family back to their lean-to near the river. The village begged him to stay, but he wouldn’t listen to reason. His wife was heartbroken. She insisted on bringing with her a large bronze crucifix, and would have brought the priest’s iron stove as well, had her husband allowed it.

“We were all very afraid for him. We told him, if the IL comes back and finds you have refused their gift, they’ll certainly kill all of you. But Hawa would not be convinced. He was a hunter. He spent most of his time on his canoe, deep in the forest, killing the animals he saw on the shores of the river: pythons, alligators, the spearfish you can only find three days’ walk from here. He said he had seen these IL. They were jokers, he said. He wasn’t afraid. I talked to him myself. What about the priest, I asked him. The priest had it coming, Hawa said.”

“And what happened to Hawa?”

“He left, with his two sons, for the war. Years ago. His wife stayed. And then she left too.” Zahir shrugged, as if to indicate the story was over.

“You’ve left out the best part, Don Zahir.”

“Have I?”

Adela nodded. Manau could make out the sly contours of her smile. The evening’s breezes had begun.

“What we did to the house.”

Zahir grinned. “Well, yes. Of course. What else could we do? We burned it.”

The empty house was a hazard. The IL were killers: what if they returned, and Hawa was away? They would kill someone else in the village just to make it right.

On a warm February evening, in honor of Independence Day, the priest’s home was burned. They prepared it with axes and saws: disassembling the simple structure until it was just a pile of wood and paper and old, musty clothes. A bonfire. It burned cleanly, part of the last Independence Day that would be celebrated in 1797 until the end of the war. By the next year, the men had begun to leave, and then the boys, and the conflict could be ignored no longer. Manau knew the story. No one was sad to see them go, because they were expected to return.

Zahir never left, and that must have been its own challenge. Almost every man his age went. Manau had heard him say it before, part apology, part denial: “I liked it here; why should I have left?”

Now Zahir recalled playing his guitar while everyone sang, while the fire burned. He sang; he danced. It seemed impossible that he could have forgotten this part. “Was it a beautiful festival, Adela? He doesn’t know, you must tell him!”

There was something not right with the story. Where did they bury the priest? Manau wondered. He pushed the question from his mind, and focused on the scene: the party, the breezy night, the towns people when they were still optimistic. He reached for her again, and touched her. She pinched his foot this time. A breeze curled around them.

“It was very beautiful,” Adela said.

MANAU WALKED Victor to the station. Adela’s boy. Adela. He took him by the hand to the front desk, where a receptionist typed disinterestedly with two fingers. They stood before her, Victor just tall enough to peek over the edge. They waited. A half-minute passed before she made eye contact.

“Yes?” the receptionist asked finally.

“We need to see Norma,” Manau said. He was tired, a kind of exhaustion he’d never felt before. “Norma,” he said to the boy, “will take care of you.”

The receptionist smiled. She had a round face and lipstick on her teeth, just a tiny red smudge of it, and Manau wondered if he should tell her. He didn’t.

“I’m sorry, that’s not possible,” the receptionist said. She pointed upwards, to small speakers in the ceiling. “She’s on the air.”

Of course she was. That was her voice filling the room, reading the news so sweetly. He hadn’t even noticed the sound before. It had registered in his mind as a lullaby.

“What is this about?” the receptionist asked.

“The boy,” Manau said. “He has a list for Lost City Radio.” He turned to Victor. “Show her. Show her the note.”

Victor took it from his pocket and passed it to the receptionist. She read it quickly, running her index finger beneath the words as she did. Turning the page over, she glanced at the list of missing, and then instructed Manau and Victor to sit. To be patient. To wait. She handed the note back and picked up the phone. She spoke in a low voice. They dropped their bags and slumped into the cushions of the sofa, while Norma read the news without comment, even-toned. She was masterful. Manau could hardly concentrate on the words.

That night in the jungle, on Zahir’s porch, when the breezes began, he excused himself and led Adela into the darkness, to love her. He carried with him the reed mat that Zahir’s wife had woven for him. Manau bade Zahir a good evening, stepped down the raised porch onto the ground, still soft from the afternoon shower. Adela asked him to wait, and he did, around the corner, just beyond the reach of the light. The moon had not yet risen, and the black night made him impatient. There were murmurings from the top of the stairs. The jungle breathed, noises of all kinds, but there was nothing to see in the inky darkness. Manau was aware of people walking by him in twos and threes, scarcely perceptible, dim shadows. Whoever they were, they said his name politely as they passed by: Manau, Mr. Manau, professor. Could everyone see but him? He smiled brightly, hoping the passersby — his students? his neighbors? — might mistake his smile for recognition. He couldn’t see a thing. It could have been the trees talking. Or any of a dozen ghosts that his pupils believed in. Nico was the latest phantom all the boys and girls claimed to see. Where? he asked. At the edge of the forest — where else? Manau, Manau, Manau. Have you seen Nico? they asked. No, I haven’t. Unless dreams count. They do, mister! the children clamored. Of course, dreams count! The children, like everyone in the village, were always accompanied. Manau was alone. He didn’t allow himself the luxury of believing in ghosts. Now he smiled in the darkness and waited. What were they discussing? It was this obliterating loneliness that Adela had begun to cure. Manau thought then that he didn’t miss the city anymore and never would again. He thought then that he would die here in this jungle redoubt, of old age, having mastered the antique language of the forest, having learned which plants brought nourishment and which were poisonous. It occurred to him to light a match, to survey his kingdom, but it flared and blew out in the breeze: an instant of flittering orange light — and that was all. Enough to see his hands. Clouds had blotted out the sky. It was a lightless, moonless night. Still, he would take her to the river or to the field. Or both. And he would love her.

Then he heard her descending the stairs, heard the creak of the wood. He turned back, but he couldn’t see her. The lamps had been extinguished, and the darkness was complete. Manau reached for her.

“Today is seven years since Zahir lost his hands,” she said.

“I know. He told me.”

“I had to pay my respects. Give him my apologies.” She sighed. “It was my boy that did it.”

Manau nodded, though he was sure she couldn’t see him. They were walking, he thought, toward the field. He could feel the soggy earth beneath his feet. Her voice, he noticed, had nearly cracked. Was she crying?

“It was the IL, not Victor,” Manau said to the darkness. He heard her sigh again. She must know I’m right, he thought. The boy is innocent. Except for her fingers between his, he might have been alone. “What does Zahir say?”

“He won’t accept money. I offer it to him every year. He says he deserved it.”

“He told me the same thing. What did he do?”

“I don’t know.”

They made their way to the field, walking through the town on instinct, muscle-memory: turn here, go straight, let the mud slather your feet, step over this log that has fallen across the path. Even Adela agreed it was the darkest night in years, and so the storm, when it appeared on the distant horizon, was welcome. Lightning shivered across the sky, and Manau turned in time to see her: Adela, made of silver.

“Don’t cry,” he said.

“He has nightmares. They’re worse this year since Nico left.”

Manau pulled her to him. In a week, she would be dead. “Does he remember?”

“Of course he does. Nico never let him forget it.”

The storm began, a music all its own. They were silent for a spell.

“I gave him tea so he could sleep.” Her voice was a whimper. “Poor boy, poor Zahir, poor Nico.”

“Don’t cry,” he said again.

They waited for the rains to begin. Manau lay his mat down. She said no, that she should go back and check on her boy. He kissed her. She kissed him back. In the distance, there was more lightning. Then they were naked, and then they were being rained on. The sky heaved, and the wind blew. “I have to check on my boy,” she whispered, but her body did not complain. Instead, she moved beneath him, with him, the rain falling faster now, until they had both arrived at the same place.

“I’M STEPPING out for some air,” Manau said, and surely he meant it. Surely he did not mean to walk away and leave the boy there at the station, waiting for Norma alone. He might have suspected himself capable of such a thing, if he believed what his father had always said about him. But he didn’t — not until that day. He was a weak man, which is different from being a bad man. Manau would walk home from the station, walk through this gray and noisy city, and console himself with this distinction. He’d managed to hide this from himself for a short time in the jungle. Now it was clear. Why had Adela counted on him? Why had the town?

When they were finished, when the rains had passed, Manau rolled up his mat, and invited her to swim.

“I don’t know how,” she said.

The clouds had cleared; the stars cut a bright swath across the night sky. They could see each other. She dressed, she covered her silver body. Manau remained naked. He carried his clothes in a bundle.

“I’ll teach you.”

“But it’s bad luck to swim on a moonless night.”

It was what she said as he dragged her in. “Superstition!” he exclaimed, and soon after she was laughing and must have forgotten it herself. He tickled her. The water was black and slick and calm. When the wind blew, raindrops fell from the trees, disturbing the surface of the slow-moving river. It would rain every night for the next week, and each night would be darker than the last. The river, when it took her, would be something altogether different. Unrecognizable. Violent.

She splashed; a bird chirruped. The silver fish swam invisibly about their ankles. Manau did not teach her anything that night. Nothing about swimming or the currents or the rain-swollen river.

“What’s this?” Victor asked, looking up from his list.

“The money the man gave me for you. On the bus. So I don’t forget.”

“Where are you going?”

Manau said, “I’ll be right here. I’m stepping out for some air.”

The boy nodded. It wasn’t a lie. Outside was the city with its leaden sky, and the street with its waves of sound. The boy didn’t protest, nor did the receptionist with her lipstick-stained teeth.

Outside Manau breathed deeply, that city smell, and he was hit by a nostalgia that surprised him. The station sat on a busy boulevard of ashy green trees. Perhaps he’d been here before, perhaps not, but it was all familiar. Across the street, a computer school had let out its morning classes. Dozens of students loitered in front of the entrance, gossiping, making plans. They had about them that optimism all young people have. Foolishness. A bus came and went, depositing a family of Indians at the corner, and the students paid them no attention. Mother and father looked about with dismay, at the size of the place, at the crowded sidewalk. Perhaps they were coming to the station as well, to see Norma, to be found. The children cowered and disappeared into the folds of their mother’s dress.

Four lanes of traffic and a row of dying trees stood between them and the station. They didn’t cross, and Manau didn’t cross to them. Maybe they were waiting for someone. The crowd of students thinned. Some returned to class, a few waited impatiently for a bus, others set off in loud, happy packs down the avenue. It occurred to Manau that there were more people in the building of the computer school than in the entire village of 1797.

After some debate, the family of Indians trudged off down the boulevard. They clasped hands and walked slowly.

When he looked back through the window of the radio station lobby, Victor was gone. Manau ran in. “The boy,” he said to the receptionist. He was breathless. It was no longer Norma’s voice over the speaker, but someone else’s. “Where’s the boy?”

The receptionist looked startled for a moment, then regained her calm. “They called him in, sir. I’m sorry. The producer came to get him. He’s talking with Norma.” She paused. “Are you all right? Would you like to go?”

It hit him then, a live-wire shock. That last word. “Go?”

“Go in,” she clarified.

“Oh.” He felt numb. A smile adorned the receptionist’s moon face. “No. That’s all right. I’ll wait outside.”

She nodded. He took the bag he’d left by the couch and stepped through the doors again. The street was indifferent and loud. Buses passed, and women on bicycles, and boys on skateboards. He recalled the size of the city, and it awed him. The possibility existed that someone here might be happy to see him. The jungle town he had known would soon sink into the forest. Where was the boy? He was speaking with Norma. Even now, she was solving his problems. Whatever she can do, he thought, is more than I can. He still heard the voices — Manau, Manau, Manau — and they came from everywhere. From cracks in the bricks that had built this place.

He realized suddenly he’d been holding his breath. He inhaled deeply. Then he walked down the avenue. It was so simple. A block passed by as if in a dream. And then another and another.

Each was easier than the last.

When they were done swimming, they gathered their things and walked back to the village. Their wet clothes clung to them, but the night was cool and dry. Everything was fine. He recalled it now as he walked through the city, how recently his world had been dismantled. The storm passed that night, but of course another was on its way. They found Adela’s hut, and she lit a lantern so she could check on the boy. A forest of insects was sawing away at the night.

“Will you take care of him?” she asked. “If something happens to me.”

“Nothing’s going to happen to you.”

“But if it does.” She was serious. She whispered in his ear, “Say yes,” and Manau did as he was told.

TEN

FOR NORMA, the war began fourteen years earlier, the day she was sent to cover a fire in Tamoé. She was just a copy editor at the radio station then, and had never been on the air, her voice an undiscovered treasure. She and Rey had been married for more than two years, but she still thought of herself as a newlywed. He was due to return from the jungle that afternoon. It was October, nearing the sixth anniversary of the beginning of the war, though no one kept time that way in those days.

Norma arrived on the scene to find the firemen watching as the house burned. A few men with guns and masks stood in front of the fire. A polite crowd had gathered around the house, arms crossed, blinking away the acrid smoke. Norma could still make out the word TRAITOR painted in black on the burning wall. The terrorists didn’t move or make threats — they didn’t have to. The firemen were volunteers. They wouldn’t take a bullet for a fire. It was late afternoon at the edge of the city, and soon it would be dark. There were no streetlights in this part of the district. Norma’s eyes stung. The firemen had given up. One of them sat on his hard plastic helmet, smoking a cigarette. “Are you going to do anything?” Norma asked.

The man shook his head. His face was dotted with whitish stubble. “Are you?”

“I’m just a reporter.”

“So report. Why don’t you start with this: there’s a man inside. He’s tied to a wooden chair.”

The fireman blew smoke from his nose in dragon bursts.

And for the duration of the war, more than the firefights in the Old Plaza, more than the barricaded streets of The Cantonment or even the apocalyptic Battle of Tamoé—this is what Norma remembered: this man inside, this stranger, tied to a chair. For the rest of that long night and into the early morning, as the news came from a dozen remote points in the city, news of an offensive, news of an attack, as the first of the Great Blackouts spread across the capital — Norma took it all in with the drugged indifference of a sleepwalker. Cruelty was something she couldn’t process that day. On another day, perhaps, she might have done better. She looked the fireman in the eye, hoping to find a hint of untruth, but there was none. The people watched the flames dispassionately. The fire crackled, the house fell in on itself, and Norma listened for him. Surely, he was dead already. Surely his lungs were full of smoke and his heart still. For Norma, there was only a light-headed feeling, like being hollowed out. She felt incapable of writing anything down, of asking a single question. At the edge of the crowd, a girl of thirteen or fourteen sucked on a lollipop. Her mother rang the tiny bell on her juice cart, and it clinked brightly.

WHEN REY returned from the Moon to live on his father’s couch, it was Trini who made certain he didn’t give up. It was Trini who told him stories and reminded him of better, happier times. On the evenings Rey’s father taught at the institute, Trini would come to look for his nephew, and convince him with persistent good cheer to leave the cluttered apartment, to see what the city had to offer. “The streets are full of beautiful women!” he would say. So they took long evening walks through the district of Idorú, toward Regent Park and through The Aqueduct, often making it as far as the Old Plaza — known simply as the Plaza in those days. Once there, they gave themselves over to the noise of the street musicians and the comedians, to the crowds of people seated around the dry fountain, all smoke and talk and laughter, and Rey, because he loved his uncle, made every attempt to be happy, or more precisely, to appear so.

It’s true that his days were oppressively lonely, that he slept poorly, that the same nightmares kept coming back. Rey spent his time pacing his father’s apartment, rearranging scattered papers or reading his old man’s dictionaries. During the morning hours, he prepared mentally for his midday excursion out to the corner for a bite to eat. It was pure torment. He was afraid that no one would speak to him, and equally terrified that they might. He postponed lunch as long as he could, until three or even four in the afternoon. Once it was taken care of, Rey could sleep, sometimes for as long as an hour.

But on these night strolls beneath the city’s yellow streetlights, everything was softer, simpler. The shoeshine boys and pickpockets gathered at one end of the Plaza, counting their day’s take. Along the alley on the north side of the cathedral, a half-dozen women set up their stalls, selling fresh bread and old magazines, bottle caps and matchbooks from the city’s finer hotels. A crew of jugglers might be preparing for a show, and everywhere, the industrious city seemed poised to relax.

One night in June, Trini and Rey arrived in the Plaza in time to see the flag being lowered. It took fifteen soldiers to fold it. A cornet played a martial melody, and some tourists took photos. Rey kept his hands in his pockets. He felt nothing. In a week, he would start his work in Tamoé, become a representative of that flag. He and his uncle had been talking about it, how strange it was to be tortured by the state and then employed by it, all in a matter of months. The government, after all, was a blind machine: now its soldiers stood at attention, and the flag was folded and passed from one to the next, down the line, until all that remained was a meter square of blood-red fabric and a set of hands at each corner. The cornet blew a last, wailing note. Rey was going to say something, when he turned and noticed that Trini had stopped, was standing still with his back straight and his hands together. Then Trini saluted. He caught Rey looking and smiled sheepishly.

Trini had started a new job a few months before Rey was taken to the Moon, as a prison guard in a district known as Venice because it flooded almost every year. In fact, it was by petitioning Trini’s supervisor that Rey had been released. The prison in Venice was dangerous and sprawling, with multiple pavilions for the nation’s various undesirables. Six days a week, he was in charge of terror suspects. The war hadn’t officially begun yet, and there weren’t many of these men, but their numbers were growing, and their demeanor was unlike that of any prisoners Trini had previously encountered. They were not cowed by any show of force, and their swagger was not a put-on: it came from a very honest and confident place. Some had the look of students, others came from the mountains. They felt they owned the prison, and of course, they were right. If it was trouble Trini had wanted, here it was: violent and unremitting. It could boil over at any time.

Rey and Trini walked through the Plaza, past costumed men selling jungle medicine, past hunched-over typists at work on love letters or government forms, to a side street where Trini knew a woman who sold excellent pork kebabs. “Special recipe,” he said, “my treat.” Sure enough, there were a dozen people waiting. They got in line. Down the street, a city work crew painted over a graffitied wall. “A guard was killed today,” Trini said to Rey. “An execution. The IL.”

“Did you know him?”

Trini nodded. “We’re in for trouble. Lots of it. Those little boy soldiers folding the flag — they have no idea.”

The line inched forward. The smoke made Rey’s eyes water. He inhaled the scent of charcoal and burning meat. One night at the Moon, he had smelled something like this. It had gutted him: the realization that these soldiers were going to burn him alive, that they were going to eat him. He’d decided very early on that these torturers were capable of anything, and he’d never expected to leave that place alive — why not let himself be eaten?

Of course, they were only celebrating a birthday.

“Are you all right?” Trini said.

Rey nodded. A moment passed. Trini hummed the melancholy tune of an old song.

“How come no one’s ever asked me what happened?”

“What?”

Rey looked up and down the line. He felt something sudden and hot within him. “At the Moon,” he said, and a few heads turned. “What they did to me. How come no one’s ever asked. Don’t you want to know?”

Trini gave his nephew a blank stare. He blinked a few times, and the edges of his mouth curled downwards. “I work in a prison.” He coughed and waved away the smoke. “I know exactly what they did to you.”

A few people fell out of line. Rey stood there, silent and seething. His jaw hurt. He remembered everything, every detail of every moment. At night, he had been surrounded by other broken men whom he could not see. They sobbed alone, and no one comforted anyone else. They were afraid.

“They were going to eat me.”

Trini raised an eyebrow. “Keep your voice down.”

“Go to hell.”

“I do, boy. Six days a week.”

Half the line had cleared out by now, abandoned their places. Too much talking, too much indiscretion. A breeze blew, momentarily clearing the smoke from the street. A man in a knit cap sat on the curb, rolling a cigarette. Rey stepped out of line. Trini followed and caught him at the corner. They walked together — or rather, not together at all, but in the same direction. Finally, at a busy intersection, Rey and Trini waited side by side to cross.

“Talking doesn’t help,” Trini said. “I’ve learned that. It’s why I never ask.” The light changed, and they crossed the street toward home.

THE TELECENTER was crowded at this hour. A pale, unhealthy-looking man with greasy hair gave Norma a number: it entitled her to booth number fourteen. Then he gave her a form and motioned for her to sit. “You write the numbers here,” he explained, “and I dial them for you.”

Norma nodded. “How long is the wait?”

“Thirty minutes. Maybe more,” the man said, scanning his list. He looked up with a smile. “But you must have a phone at home, madam. Why are you here with us?”

Norma blushed. She did, of course, have a phone, but what difference did that make? It never rang. Is that what the man wanted to hear? That she, too, was alone? She ignored his questions and asked him for a directory.

“A local call, madam?” the man said, then shrugged and pulled the tattered book from beneath his desk. Norma thanked him in a whisper.

The end of a working day — all over the city, it was the same. Evening in America, past midnight in Europe, already tomorrow morning in Asia. Time to call and check in, to reassure those who had left that you were on your way, that you were surviving, that you hadn’t forgotten them. To reassure yourself that they hadn’t forgotten you. Norma sighed. There were twenty-five phones in twenty-five cubicles, each with its overflowing ashtray, and each, she could see, occupied. Men and women hunched over, cradling the receivers tenderly, straining to hear the voices on the other end. Most had their backs to the waiting area, but she knew them even without seeing them: these were the voices she heard every Sunday. She knew them from the needy murmur that rose in the room — always that sound. The phone collapsed distances, just as the radio did, and, like the radio, it relied on the miracle of imagination: one had to concentrate deeply, plunge headlong into it. Where were they calling? That voice, where was it coming from? The whole world had scattered, but there they were, so close you could feel them. So close you could smell them. You had only to close your eyes, to listen, and there they were. They respected the telephone, these people. They handled it as if it were fine china: for special occasions only. The radio was the same. It was even more. Norma hoped no one would recognize her.

She had sent Victor to sit, and she found him now, seated beside a young man with a shaved head and a tattoo that ran diagonally across the side of his neck. Victor had saved her a place, no small accomplishment in this crowded room.

“Manau,” she said when she sat down.

Victor nodded.

It was not a common surname; at the very least, Norma could be grateful for that. She had already decided they would not go home that night. Elmer might have sent someone there, to wait for her to arrive, to bring her and the boy in. Elmer was afraid, of course, and this wasn’t irrational: ten years on, and still the government took no chances with the war. No, going home wasn’t safe. Instead they would find this teacher, this Manau. They would ambush him: squeeze it out of him, whatever he knew. She felt she might strike this man when she saw him. That was the kind of anger she felt: how many times in her life had she hit someone? Once, twice, never? She thumbed through the phone book and found it: twelve different Manau households, in nine different districts. No Elijahs or E. Manaus. He lived with his parents then. Of course. Two could be discarded by the fancy addresses. Rich families don’t send their young to places like 1797 to teach.

She carefully wrote the ten numbers on the form the greasy-haired man had given her.

“What will we do when we find him?” Victor asked.

“We’ll ask him what he knows,” said Norma. “What else can we do?”

“Okay.”

Norma closed the phone book. “Why?”

“What if he won’t talk to us?”

She hadn’t considered that. Not really. By what right would this Manau, this spineless creature, withhold anything from her? Norma was about to answer when her number was called. “Come with me,” she said to Victor, and they stepped through the people to the front desk. She gave the greasy-haired man her form, and took Victor by the hand to their booth. “He’ll talk,” she said to Victor, to herself.

It was hot, and there was barely enough room for the two of them. They pressed in. There was only one chair and a small table with a phone, a timer, and an ashtray. Victor stood. The phone had a green light that blinked when the call was patched through. They waited in the airless booth, and the boy said nothing. The man at the counter dialed their way down the list of numbers. Norma picked up the phone, each time seized by an expectant, implausibly optimistic feeling. Six times she asked for Elijah Manau, and six times she was told there was no such person. She was beginning to suspect he didn’t have a phone, that it was all a waste, when on the seventh call, a woman with a tired voice said, “Wait, wait. Yes, he’s here.” Norma wanted to shout. The woman cleared her throat, then yelled, “Elijah, you have a call!”

Norma could hear a voice, a man’s voice, still far away. “Yes, mother,” it said, “I’m coming. Tell them to wait.” If he was surprised, Norma couldn’t hear it. It was as if he’d been expecting their call all along.

IN THE weeks that followed, whenever Trini came over to visit, he would tell Rey of the latest IL transgression, the latest threat. It was only a matter of time, he said. We’re in for trouble. Rey began his own work in Tamoé, and together they shared stories about the teetering ship of the state as seen from the inside: its myopic bureaucracy, its radical incompetence made manifest in Tamoé or in the prison’s dark terrors. Rey’s father chimed in, that it had always been that way, that everything was always getting worse. He could be counted on for a dose of pessimism. A half a year passed, Rey met Marden, he returned to the university. Trini filed reports and made official complaints, but nothing came of it. Another guard was killed today, he told them one evening, looking distraught, and Rey told his uncle to be careful. Quit, Rey’s father said, but there weren’t many other jobs available. Bodyguard, security guard — and were either of those really a step up? Safer?

Just before the war was declared, ten months after Rey was released from the Moon, the prison officials made a tactical retreat, ceding an entire pavilion to the IL. It was a truce of sorts, and it held for longer than anyone had expected it to: for a year, and most of another. Trini continued to work at the prison, and no one entered the IL’s pavilion. The IL taught classes there, held trainings, and the prison officials preferred not to think of it. Every now and then, an operative was caught and tossed in with his comrades. They clothed and fed him: he had survived the Moon to be nursed to health within the prison’s liberated territory.

It was in November, nearing the war’s second official anniversary, when the inevitable happened: the prison break that marked one of the IL’s first successes in the city. A tunnel the length of four city blocks had been dug beneath the prison walls into an adjacent neighborhood, rising out of the earth in the living room of a rented and then abandoned home. The press went crazy, and a scapegoat was urgently needed. Those in charge wanted a peon, a single man with no family to make a fuss. They found Trini.

When he was arrested, Trini was living with Rey’s father. They came on a Sunday afternoon, kicked in the door, and threw everyone against the walls: Rey, his father, Norma, Trini. They would’ve taken them all if Norma hadn’t threatened them: I work at the radio, she said. I’ll make a big fuss. She was only an intern then, but the soldiers weren’t going to take any chances. They took Trini. He didn’t resist. They took Rey, too, but only as far as the street, and then they let him go. The woman wouldn’t stop yelling.

“I warned you!” she screamed. “Murderers! Killers! Thieves!”

The soldiers fired shots in the air to disperse the gathered crowd. Idorú was that kind of neighborhood: where everyone spied on everyone else, where police were not welcome. Because his hands were cuffed, he couldn’t wave good-bye, but with great effort, Trini did manage a nod to his family — his brother, his nephew — before he was pushed into the back of an army truck.

WHEN REY disappeared, Norma returned to that night in Tamoé, that night when the war became real. It shook her, it fed her nightmares. She imagined it had been Rey bound to that chair all along; that all the years they had spent together were a lie, that her husband had always been imprisoned by the war. The accusations that he had been IL were, for Norma, irrelevant; the war had long ago ceased to be a conflict between distinct antagonists. The IL blew up a bank or a police station; the army ran its tanks over a dozen homes in the dark of night. In either case, people died. Rey went off to the jungle, the IL made its last stand in Tamoé and lost. Most of the district was razed. Then the killing flared and burned out in the jungle, and then it was over. Just like that, the lights came on. And where was Rey? The war had been for many years a single, implacably violent entity. And it had swallowed him. An engine, a machine, and the men with guns — they were simply its factotums. When enough of them died, it was finished.

That night of the fire, the long bus ride back to the station gave her time to consider her options. Norma felt an animal fear churning in her gut, and suspected she wasn’t cut out for journalism. Perhaps she could leave the country, board a plane bound for Europe, and become a nanny, a surrogate mother to a gaggle of wealthy children. She could learn a new language — and seeing the world, wasn’t that her right? She was twenty-eight, too old to go back to the university and pursue some other profession. It was too late to do what her father had always asked of her: learn secretarial skills and marry an executive, a man with a driver and a house bunkered somewhere in the hills where problems would not intrude. She had married Rey. He studied plants and was not an executive. He went off into the forest for weeks at a time. They had survived the tadek episode, but she knew enough to recognize that with Rey, problems would always intrude.

So lost in thought was Norma that she didn’t notice the soldiers lining the sidewalks in front of government buildings, or the driver pushing the bus faster and faster through the streets, or the unusually light traffic. It was late when Norma arrived, nearly ten, but the station was busy. She turned in her unused tape recorder, put her untouched notepad in the file cabinet, and was prepared, had she been asked, to resign. She felt sick with shame, with fear, but no one seemed to notice her. Norma shared a desk with another reporter, a pudgy-faced young man named Elmer. He worked long hours, even sleeping at the station some nights, and so, she wasn’t surprised to find him at the desk, rubbing his temples and looking happily beleaguered. A green pen poked out from between his teeth. He gave her a smile and said, “This world is going to shit.”

Norma didn’t know what to say. Elmer took the green pen from his mouth and twirled it between his fingers. He passed her the text he was working on. “Assassinations,” he said. “A half dozen all over the city. All the same, Norma, my dear. Men burned in their own homes.”

Norma sank heavily into her chair. “Where?”

“Venice, Monument, The Metropole. A few in Collectors. One in Ciencin and one in Tamoé. Weren’t you there?”

A phone rang at the next desk. Norma nodded. “I didn’t see anything,” she said. “It was already over when I showed up.”

“Didn’t you get anything?”

“There was a woman. She was selling juice.”

The phone kept ringing.

Elmer gave her an incredulous look, but Norma didn’t turn away. Something in him alarmed her. He was red-faced and excitable, too young for the deep creases on his forehead. He would be old soon. He was a mama’s boy, and he would grow wings before striking another man in anger, but on this night, this splendidly violent city night, he was enjoying himself.

“What?” Elmer asked.

How perverse: this adrenaline, these dead men.

“It’s awful.”

Elmer nodded and said, “It is,” but he couldn’t mean it. She was sure of that: he said the words, but they meant something altogether different when he did. He was a voyeur. He wanted to see how bad things could get. If pressed, it was something he might admit. Perhaps he was even proud of it.

“Rey called for you.”

Norma looked up. “He’s back?”

Elmer handed her a note where he had scrawled the name of a bar not far from the station. “But you should stay, Norma. Tonight, you should stay.”

“Tell them I was sick.” The phone had stopped ringing. She stood to go. “Please.”

It wasn’t a long walk to the bar, but the empty streets made it seem so. She saw only one person on her way: a hunchbacked old man pushing a shopping cart piled high with clothes down the middle of an alley. There was scarcely any traffic, and the air was still. Winter had ended, spring hadn’t yet come. Norma liked this time of year, this time of night. Why weren’t more people out to enjoy it? A streetlight flickered, dimmed, then glowed brightly. She was alone in the city, and she knew, however vaguely, that something terrible had happened. In fact, many terrible things had happened all at once. She heard the clink of the juice-cart bell, still echoing blithely in her mind. She never saw the dead man: how could she be sure he was real? As long as she didn’t know, there was an innocence to the evening, and it didn’t seem forced to her. It seemed sane.

The bar was quiet. The radio was on, and everyone listened. Norma scanned the room for Rey and found him, sharing a corner table with a few men she didn’t recognize. No one seemed to be looking at anyone else; instead, they watched the radio, a dented and scuffed black box sitting atop the refrigerator. A red-haired man chewed his fingernails. An olive-skinned woman with braided hair sat at the bar, tapping her foot nervously. There was an air of worry throughout the bar, and the waiters moved through the crowd with the grace and silence of mimes. The announcer was describing the evening’s events: dozens of dead, a shootout in the Monument district, sections of Regent Park on fire. Armed gangs had taken to the streets: there were reports of looting downtown, and burning cars in Collectors. The city was under attack. The president would be speaking soon.

Normally, the people would have jeered at the mention of the man, but on this night, there was no response.

Was it so long ago that the IL had been a joke? A straw man?

“Rey,” Norma said across the silent room. He saw her and held his finger to his lips. He got up and wove through the chastened, hushed drinkers to where she stood by the door. He looked tired and sunburned. He took Norma by the arm and pulled her out into the street. There, beneath the washed-out light of a street lamp, Rey kissed her.

“What a way to come home, no?”

“Let me see you,” Norma said, but it was dark, and she couldn’t make out the details of him.

He’d arrived at the train station just after the first fire, at four in the afternoon, around the time she’d been leaving the station for Tamoé. The buses had stopped running from the station, and so Rey had walked three hours, until he was tired of carrying his bag. He’d been stopped twice at checkpoints. Then, when he felt his legs were about to give out, he found himself in front of this bar, realized he was near the radio, and decided it was best to stay put.

“How will we make it home?” Norma asked.

Rey smiled. “Maybe we’ll stay here.”

And, in fact, they did. Norma had just asked him about his trip, and Rey was telling her about a town in the eastern forest where the Indians still knew the old language, where he’d met an old man who had walked him deep into the forest and showed him a dozen new medicinal plants. Norma could sense the excitement, the curiosity in her husband’s voice. The town sounded like a lovely place. “I’d like to see it myself,” she said, then there was a distant rumble. They fell silent. It was somewhere off in the hills, and for a moment, nothing happened. For a moment, they both thought they had imagined this unexplained sound. Then there was another, and then another, a deep shaking, a call and response in the hills. An earthquake? The lights along the street flickered again, and this time, they did not recover. There was a shout from inside the bar. The president had been about to address the nation. He had just cleared his throat when the radio went dead. Inside and outside, the darkness was complete.

LISTEN TO me, youngster. It’s how Trini began all his letters. This was his last one, and Rey kept it with him always. By his bedside, in his wallet, in his briefcase — it migrated among his things, but was always near. Sometimes Rey woke in the middle of the night, took it to the kitchen, and read it there. He pulled it out on the bus, or between classes, or as he waited for his contact in some dingy bar in Miamiville. Trini had missed their June wedding. Rey and Norma left an empty chair for him at the table of honor. Rey’s father read the toast Trini sent from prison. He had missed the tadek mess, though he never would have known who was behind it. He had missed the beginning of Rey’s work at his alma mater, the first steps in his career. He’d missed all of this, and the war’s rude beginnings as well. Of course, there had been other prison breaks since, and other scapegoats, too.

Trini did not cultivate anger. It never appeared in the letters, and yet, for Rey, it was the essential message of the text. Trini wrote with a single fear: that he had accomplished nothing in his life, that he would never have the chance to make up for the wasted time. Nothing notable, exceptional, or even brave. He tended to list his disappointments, and this last letter was no different: the woman who wouldn’t speak to him again, the son who would never visit him. In this last letter, he mentioned the boy by name — something he’d never done before — and wondered if the boy’s mother had changed it. It came down to this: everywhere else, he was forgettable — everywhere except here, in this prison full of men he’d mistreated, men he’d arrested, men who never forgot a slight. In his last letter, Trini told stories. About getting drunk with a bicycle thief in Ciencin. About waking up in the arms of a wealthy heiress in La Julieta. He had almost beat a man to death in The Thousands, and claimed not to remember anything about the incident, except that they’d only just met, and that minutes before, they had been laughing together. None of it mattered, Trini wrote. It was a long letter, four pages of cramped handwriting, full of implied good-byes, confessions, and retractions. But Trini had only one thought, repeated on every page: to survive. To live long enough to walk out of the prison. If he were to pull this off, he wrote, it would redeem a life of mediocrity, a life without substance. It would be an accomplishment.

Trini was serving his second year when he was killed in a prison brawl. When Rey’s grieving was over, he met his contact. “I’m ready,” he said, and took his first trip into the jungle not as a scientist but as a messenger.

IN PREPARATION for his guests, Manau showered and shaved. It was the first time he had done so since his arrival in the capital. He’d spent the previous day and a half shuttling listlessly between his bed and the kitchen table, where his mother sat watch over him, making sure he ate. He did, three times that day with little enthusiasm, then returned to his room, where in his absence, Manau’s father had set up an office to organize his extensive stamp collection. The room was crowded with envelopes, laminating books, and tin boxes of small, obscure tools. A magnifying glass hung from a hook on the wall above his bed. There had been no regular mail ser vice in 1797, and his father’s obsession now struck Manau as absurd. He had received only two letters during his year in the jungle, neither from his father. The old man wouldn’t waste stamps on him. Manau’s life scarcely seemed believable to him. He hadn’t yet unpacked his bag.

Manau put on a fresh shirt and a pair of pants that he’d left behind when he moved to 1797 a year before. The crease had kept, and he found this admirable. In the jungle, nothing lasted, no condition was permanent: the heat and the soggy air and the light degraded everything. The weather changed a dozen times in a single day. It was the earth in flux, as changeable as the ocean, as terrifying, as beautiful.

Since arriving in the city, he had found that his hours did not need filling. Nearly two days had passed in and of themselves. It was only a matter of time until Victor found him, and Manau neither dreaded nor looked forward to it. Norma would do her job. She would come. And he would tell her what she wanted to know, the secrets Adela had whispered to him on those dark, hot evenings not so long ago. Manau sighed. Or rather, so very long ago. Time had never been his friend. He had awoken one day to learn he was thirty years old, his life half-finished. Now he was thirty-one, and he could sense that the details of this past year wouldn’t stay with him very long. Can you remember the forest, the feel of it and smell of it, the people you’d known there — can you really recall any of it without actually being there?

His hair combed, his pants pressed, his body as clean as it had been in twelve months, Manau went to the front room. He was idly rearranging the family pictures when his mother came from the kitchen. Even with his back to her, he could tell she was waiting. She made no sound. Manau let her stand there for a minute. “Who are these people who are coming?” she asked finally.

There were photos here that could not be real. That was not him, and these were not his parents. He squinted at himself. A thin film of dust covered the glass, and with his index finger, he brushed it clean. Still, he couldn’t recognize the face in the picture.

“Elijah?”

He turned to his mother and realized, with a shock, that she might cry. Manau frowned; these people and their obscure emotions! She had aged, even in these last two days. He gave her a smile — what question had she asked him? Oh, yes. “They’re people I knew from the jungle,” he said. “They won’t be here long.”

“Well then, I’ll make tea,” she said, and this seemed to satisfy her. But still she wouldn’t stop looking at him. Manau held her gaze for as long as he could manage, then turned away.

“Thank you, Mother,” he said.

They came within the hour. Manau himself opened the door. “Good evening,” he said to the woman he supposed to be Norma. “Victor,” he said to the boy, and then another word appeared in his brain and had slipped out before he himself could have known what it meant. It was from the old language: we that includes you. The boy smiled. They embraced for a moment, long enough for Manau to feel the weight of what he had done when he left the boy at the station. He wanted to say more, but was afraid his voice might break. Instead, Manau invited them both in with the wave of an arm. “Please,” he managed, “please, sit.”

Norma had not expected to see such an old-looking young man. This Manau was ragged and thin, surprisingly pale for someone who had lived in the tropics for a year. He was dressed neatly, but moved with the languor of a man who spent the entire day in his pajamas. She felt sorry for him. Manau’s mother, a woman a decade older than Norma, entered the room with a tray of tea, smiling with the exaggerated glow of a theater marquee. She cast worried glances at her son, she rubbed the boy’s head. Victor’s hair had grown just a bit in the previous two days, into a fine, black stubble. Norma smiled politely when she was introduced, grateful that Manau didn’t explain everything about who she was.

This Manau: he began with apologies that made Norma uncomfortable. She focused on the room to avoid staring as the man began to break down. It was decorated in pastels, or in once-vivid colors that had been allowed to fade. She couldn’t tell. “I made a mistake,” Manau said. He was hoarse, color bloomed in his cheeks. “I’m sorry,” he said, and it seemed he didn’t know whom exactly to apologize to. It seemed, in fact, that he might choke, that he might expire before them. Norma let him talk. Her anger had dissipated completely, but she felt he owed this to them, to the boy. He babbled about promises made and broken, and looked pleadingly at Norma when he described Victor’s mother and her drowning. Before long, Victor had moved to his teacher’s couch, was comforting this grown man with words that Norma couldn’t make out. The old language perhaps, but she doubted that Manau could understand them, either.

She let some time pass, a minute or more, but could hardly contain the impatience she felt. Her Rey was on this list — alive or dead, here was someone who might be able to tell her more. It was all she had ever wanted: more of Rey’s time, of his heart, of his body. If she had been honest, she would have admitted it years before: that she’d always wanted more from Rey than he was willing to give. The night of the fire in Tamoé, the night of the first Great Blackout, she and Rey had gone back into the bar, had huddled inside the tense room full of strangers while someone went in search of a car battery to power the radio. A few candles were lit and, as they waited, people began talking. “I live in Tamoé,” someone said. “I knew this was coming. These people have no scruples.” Another: “The police do nothing.” Another: “They torture the innocent, they disappeared my brother!” Someone said, “Fuck the IL!” and someone — not Rey — answered, “Fuck the president!”

And so on it went, a civilized shouting match in the flickering yellow light. The room had grown unbearably smoky, and someone opened a window. Norma recalled it now in such fine detail: the way the cool night air filled the room, the yelling that continued, the waves of words, exhortations, of confessions and condemnations. It was impossible to make out who was speaking, only the barest facts that their accents exposed: this one, from the mountains; that one, from the city. This man and that woman, and the varying shades of their anger, spreading, that evening, in all directions. It was a knife edge they walked: they might gather in a giant, tearful embrace; or a dozen weapons might be pulled, and they could kill each other blindly in this suddenly dark, suddenly cold room.

Then someone mentioned the Moon, and Norma felt Rey tense. Whoever the state kills deserved it, someone yelled. Trini had been dead for almost a year, murdered, Rey always said, by the state that had betrayed him. She pushed her body into Rey’s, and realized in that moment what she’d been afraid of: that he might say something. That he might say the wrong thing, because how can you read the mood of an anonymous crowd in a poorly lit room? She held him tightly, wrapped her arms around his chest. She ran her hands under his shirt and locked her fingers. There, in his shirt pocket, was Trini’s letter. She felt it. He’d read it to her one night, and they had cried together. Trini had been such a nice man. But be quiet now, Rey, she thought, stay quiet, my husband.

“Hush,” she whispered.

“Have you seen the list?” Norma asked Manau when he’d finished apologizing. She didn’t wait for an answer; after all, she knew that he had. She said slowly, “I need to know about the list.” Norma touched her own forehead; she was sweating. Had she begun to lose him that night?

Manau nodded. He knew why they had come. Why she had come. He rose and excused himself. “I have something to show you.”

Norma sat with her memories. The boy wandered the room, scrutinizing the photographs in their dusty frames. “It’s Manau,” he said, pointing, but Norma couldn’t do more than smile at him.

Back in his room, Manau opened the bag he’d brought from 1797. He rummaged through it without turning on the light. He didn’t need to: there was only one thing he had for Norma, and he found it right away. It was a piece of parchment, rolled up, wrapped in bark, and tied with a string. Adela had given it to him for safekeeping. It smelled of the jungle, and he was seized by the urge to lie down, to sleep and dream until these visitors had gone away, but he didn’t. There were murmurs from the front room. They were waiting. Manau shut the bag and then the door behind him.

“I’ve been to the Moon,” Rey said that night the war began, and Norma pinched him, but it came louder the next time: “I’ve been to the Moon!”

She bit his ear, she put her hand over his mouth: was it too late?

“Fuck you, IL dog!” came the first shout.

“What’s this?” Norma said when Manau gave her the parchment.

Then the boy had joined them. “What is it?” he asked. Norma untied the string, unrolled the bark, and spread the parchment on the table. Victor held the edges with his little fingers. Manau helped him. That night fourteen years before, the night the war came to the city, what saved Rey was darkness. Someone yelled, “You IL piece of shit!” and there was a stir, but what more could they or anybody do? It was the first Great Blackout, the war had arrived in the city, and they all were strangers to one another, people stranded on their way to other places, crowded now into this dreary bar. They were squatters. “Quiet!” someone else called, a man’s voice, heavy with authority. “The radio!” A crackle from the speaker, a blue spark from the battery. On that night in Tamoé, an angry crowd marched on one of the police stations, carrying torches and throwing stones with the zeal of true believers. The first shots were fired in warning. These were followed by shots fired in anger, and then hundreds of people were running, scattering through the dark night, doubling back to retrieve their wounded, their fallen. The next day, the first funerals were held: slow, dismal processions along Avenue F–10, to the hills where the district ended, where the houses ended. Caskets sized for children were carried to the tops of the low mountains and burned in accordance with the traditions of those who had settled the place. That night in Asylum Downs, many were too afraid to leave their homes, and those who owned radios and batteries listened for news with the volume humming almost inaudibly. Men gathered their guns in case the looters came, and they locked their frightened wives and sleepy children in the most hidden rooms, the ones farthest from the street. Shots were heard into the early morning, the last casualty of that long night coming just after dawn, when an old man, a beggar, was killed next to his shopping cart piled high with clothes, in an alleyway not even ten blocks from the bar where Norma and Rey stayed but did not sleep. All night, the radio spat news that was progressively worse, and sometime after midnight, the decision was made to padlock the door of the bar. The windows were closed as well, and again the room grew thick with smoke. Some people managed to sleep. In the middle of the night, someone called for water, and suddenly everyone was thirsty and hot. Outside, bandits scurried along the streets, but no one paid any attention, because the news held them all rapt: tanks, it was announced, had moved into the Plaza, were patrolling the main arteries of their city. Looting was widespread. A couple had been seen jumping hand in hand from the balcony of their burning apartment building. Inside the bar, a woman fainted and was revived. Two times in the night there was an urgent knocking at the door, followed by a thin, high-pitched plea for help, but the candles had burned out, and inside it was dark, and no one could look anyone in the eye. There was no obligation to do anything except stay quiet and wait. Norma held Rey, and they rested with their backs against the door, and eventually the knocking stopped, and the pleading ended, and the sounds of footsteps could be heard, now fading, as the supplicant moved elsewhere in search of refuge.

“Hush, Rey,” Norma said.

It was then that Manau’s mother stepped back into the room. She’d been watching through the cracked kitchen door, listening to her son and his visitors for the last half hour, unable to discern who was what to whom in this strange trio. Something was not quite right with the woman named Norma and her own son: what had happened to her Elijah? She carried a tray and a thermos with hot water. “Does anyone want more tea?” she said, with all the innocence she could muster. Her son, the woman, and the boy were looking over the parchment, no one saying a thing. “Oh,” Manau’s mother said, because silence had always, always troubled her, “what a fine drawing! What a handsome young man!”

“It’s Rey,” Norma said.

“It’s your father,” said Manau to the boy.

Understanding neither comment, Manau’s mother returned quickly to the kitchen, where she stood by the door and listened for many minutes, but heard nothing.

In the morning, when the door was unbarred and the windows opened, Norma kissed Rey good-bye and walked back to the radio station. She had washed her face with a splash of water from a communal basin. “How will you make it home?” she asked her husband. She felt an acute exhaustion, a soreness that ran the length of her legs. Rey smiled and said he would walk. The air still smelled of smoke, and the sky was stained sepia. Many buildings had burned the previous night, and some, at that hour, were still burning.