by Rohan Wilson
‘It was an administrative thing,’ I say. ‘They recorded his name incorrectly at Menik Farm. UNHCR probably. They did the processing. Somehow he …’ I pause to clear my throat. I’m trying as hard as I can not to buckle into a teary wreck.
‘The Australians must have checked though?’ she says.
‘They confirmed his identity last week. I’d already set up some filters searching for his name. It triggered an alert.’
Alessandra still hasn’t moved towards me. ‘His family?’ she says.
‘Lost.’
‘Rin, that’s terrible.’
I press my lips together to stop them from quivering.
‘All of them?’
‘As far as we know. Their bodies haven’t been found.’
‘Oh my God.’
I press my lips tightly. I’m blinking and blinking. My vision is blurred. Right at that moment all I want is for her to open her arms and hold me. Alessandra seems not to realise this. How could she? She doesn’t know that I’m so pathetically in love that I feel transported. She inclines her head and gives a sympathetic frown. ‘Well, at least he made it,’ she says.
I nod because I can’t rely on my voice.
‘He’s a good kid. I like him. I’m glad he’s okay.’
Okay, because he isn’t dead. Okay, because he’s landed in a Cabey-Yasuda migrant facility. That’s her definition of okay.
‘We should send him something,’ Alessandra says. ‘What does he need? Food? Clothes? I’ll have Landon organise a package. We’ll send whatever he needs.’
Internally, I’m trying to convince myself to stand up to her. I’ve got to fight for Yamaan, he needs me. I keep my head down. I’m breathing, readying myself. When I look up I am clear-eyed and steady.
‘We can’t leave him there. It’s not right.’
Alessandra gives a slow, sad shake of the head. She smiles. ‘Darling—’
‘I’m going to pay his detention costs. I want to bring him home.’
She looks suddenly very sombre.
‘He deserves better than living in a prison.’
The part I don’t add, because it’s too hurtful to say, is that Yamaan wants a life away from me. It hurts so much that thinking about it makes me want to curl up in a ball. I don’t add that part. I already know what Alessandra believes is best for me when it comes to Yamaan—she’s happy to share that opinion.
‘I’ll pay his costs. I’ll bring him home. It’s the right thing to do.’
She shakes her head with pity. ‘That’s not—they don’t do that anymore.’
I keep my gaze steadily on my mother.
‘The Australians changed their policy,’ she says.
It takes me a second to figure out what she means. ‘Changed it? How?’
‘Let’s not talk about this. Yamaan’s safe. He’s alive. That’s all that matters.’
‘Wait,’ I say, and I smile because this must be a misunderstanding. ‘Wait, he came in through that MWD bullshit, right? He pays off his debt then he applies for a visa. Isn’t that how it goes?’
‘The Migrating with Dignity program has been suspended.’
‘For how long?’
‘As long as it remains plausible.’
‘Plausible,’ I say.
Alessandra doesn’t reply.
‘If you’re worried about plausibility, you must be worried about lawyers,’ I say.
‘Lawyers can’t access our facilities. We have complete authority to prevent communication. Eaglehawk, Bunbury, Port Lincoln, all of them. No lawyers, no NGOs.’
‘Even without direct communication, the rights groups will find out. They’ll be furious. They’ll—’
I stop. They’ll what? Call for a boycott of TabaPets? Australia has anti-boycott laws in place to protect manufacturers like CYC. Organise a boycott and you face jail time where, without seeing the joke, the prison operator will have you making those same products. Nor can the rights groups organise much of a protest. Anti-protest laws protect detention facilities from disruption. This was part of the original political process in Australia when CYC forced the opening up of the market through investor–state arbitration. The point being that without these protections, there was no market.
My mother smiles sadly. She knows what I’m thinking.
‘So just like that—out of the blue—you suspend MWD.’
‘Shanghai Industrial love what we’ve been doing,’ she says. ‘They activated the contract extension clause.’
‘The TabaPet contract?’
‘Five more years.’
‘Great. Well, that’s fucking great.’
‘We meet tough deadlines. If you have a captive workforce, you can meet tough deadlines. Shanghai Industrial appreciates that.’
‘It’s not like there’s a shortage of refugees,’ I say. ‘Why does it have to be the Maldivians? Can’t you let them out and bring in some new ones?’
‘It costs ten thousand per client just to fly them in. Ten thousand. Then there’s security checks, there’s health screenings, there’s insurance. How far would our margins fall if we turned over five thousand clients at once?’
‘I realise that—’
‘We’re competing with factories full of robots. Do you know how many companies worldwide still use labour to assemble electronics?’
‘Six.’
‘Six. We’re a dinosaur. CYC is only financially viable because we’re excluded from the labour laws of the countries where we operate.’
‘Sure. Right. I understand that.’
‘I don’t think you do.’
‘I understand. But you also need to recognise the aesthetics of this situation. There’s a narrative in play. A strong narrative. The Maldivians have lost everything and will never get it back. People have sympathy for them.’
Alessandra says nothing. She inclines her head.
‘It will look bad if we keep them too long,’ I say. ‘Very bad. Come on, we’re manufacturing toys. Who will buy a toy for a child that was made by slave labour? By the survivors of the August disaster, especially?’
‘You’re being melodramatic. These people are non-citizens. They have incurred a debt to CYC and a debt to the Australian government for the cost of their detention. It’s not slavery to expect them to repay that debt.’
‘Will the Maldivians see it that way? They work because they know that in a year they’ll have their visas. Take away their hope and you’ll make them desperate.’
‘It’s a calculated aggression. If your cards are good enough to call a bet, they’re good enough to raise with.’
I’m losing control of the conversation. Breathe, I say to myself. Think. I run my fingers through my hair and look up at the ceiling. What would Yamaan say? He could talk a cloud out of drifting. Then it comes to me. I look at Alessandra.
‘Yamaan is a member of our personal staff,’ I say.
‘I fired him, remember?’
‘He’s not just anyone. He lived in that house at Feydhoo Finolhu with us. Think about how it looks to other people. That you are so—and I’m just playing devil’s advocate here—that you are so flint-hearted that you abandoned a member of your personal staff inside Eaglehawk MTC.’
This may have made an impact. My mother turns to look at the bonsai shelved on the wall. This tree, the one she’s admiring, it has a name. The Hiroshima Survivor. She tells the story to everyone who visits. Its trunk has scars from the glass blown by the bomb blast in 1945. Here we are, more than a century later, and the damn thing is still kicking. Want to know how much she paid for it? No, you really don’t. It would make you puke. She stands a while, staring. There’s the hum somewhere of the hidden water pump, drip-feeding the tree. When she turns back she says, ‘What do you suggest?’
‘Get him out of there.’
‘You mean bring him to New York.’
‘We could arrange a work visa,’ I say and I’m giddy. It feels like someone else is speaking. ‘He was an employee.’
&nb
sp; A second passes. Another. Alessandra is staring at me.
‘He could live with me,’ I say.
‘Listen—’
‘I love him.’
‘Rin. Listen to me. I told you. Didn’t I?’
My eyes are watering.
‘Didn’t I? You fuck a guy like Yammy. Fuck him as much as you need to. Get it out of your system. Under no circumstance do you make commitments to people like him.’
‘Like him? Like, poor? Is that what you mean?’
‘That’s it precisely. Poor.’
‘I can’t believe you just said that.’
‘The poor are greedy, Rin. Envious. They want what we have. And they will take it. Don’t you see? He’s doing it already. Even if he doesn’t know it, he’s doing it.’
‘By trying to get a visa?’
‘By putting himself in this situation. A situation where we are now obliged to help him. Find him a job. Bring him to the US. Just to clean up the mess you made by growing too attached.’
‘You grew attached to me. You brought me to the US. How is this any different?’
‘Stop being so naïve.’
I pick up my coat. I pick up my bag and hang it in the crook of my elbow. ‘I can’t talk to you right now. You’re really pissing me off.’
‘Anyone with a clear mind can see what Yamaan is trying to do.’
I have my hand on the door switch but I haven’t pushed it yet.
‘Walk yourself through the outcomes here. What is it that you want? To bring this man to New York so you can fuck him some more? To marry him? These are not good outcomes for you or me or the company.’
Alessandra is right. They are not good outcomes for her or for Cabey-Yasuda. The daughter of the CEO at the largest corrections company in America bringing a refugee into the country. What a story. Our competitors would get hold of it. They have surveillance on us, all of us. It’s part of the game. They would get hold of the story soon enough. Before lunch the next day the Wall Street Journal would have a feature written confirming my relationship with an asylum-seeking Muslim recently freed from one of CYC’s own facilities and then we’d have shareholders feeling jumpy. They’d seriously question Alessandra’s decision-making. The board and the shareholders and the media could try to force her out of the company.
‘Let me tell you something about Yamaan.’ She’s pointing at me now. Angry. ‘I hired him because of his ass and his dimples. Turned out he was a good kid too. That’s where it ends. He was a good kid. He was a servant. Now he’s an Unlawful Non-Citizen being processed in Australia.’
‘I have to go,’ I say.
‘We’re different to other people, Rin. Remember that.’
I nod.
‘We can’t have ordinary lives and we can’t do ordinary things. We have important work. No one else can do what we do.’
She’s waiting for me to agree. Thing is, for the first time in a long time I don’t.
‘Rin, you’re my only—’
But I close the door.
Question: what am I becoming?
I’m in a cab on the way to Battery Park. The Guy Holland building. My vast, unused apartment. The display in the cab is showing delays at the intersection with Broadway, owing to an accident, and an estimated arrival time of eighteen minutes. The cabs in the street start and stop and merge lanes in perfect order, all run by an algorithm. I’m not so different from them—running on autopilot. The cab has speakers so I find some J.H. Jones on my wristband and flick it out and lean back in the seat with the volume so hard it sounds like white noise. Eighteen fucking minutes. I dim the windows.
Answer: I’m becoming my mother.
The thing about Alessandra, the thing I wrestle with, is the nature of her cruelty. It’s induced, you see? She has to be cruel to do her job properly. In this industry, you make money by withholding as many of the basics from your clients as you can, like decent food, clothing, medicine, warmth, or whatever. The job has made her cruel. She can’t have sympathy for our clients because it costs us money. All that shit about the poor being greedy—I don’t think she really believes it. She gives a lot away to the Red Cross every year. She makes a lot of political donations too. The problem isn’t that she’s cruel, the problem is that she wasn’t always cruel. The problem is she’s being made cruel by Cabey-Yasuda.
I see this happening to Alessandra and I ask myself: what am I doing in this goddamn company? I see what it does to people. How it messes them up. Now, they want to withhold visas from these poor bastards so they can meet a contract extension? No. This is too much. If I stick around, if I participate in this bullshit, I lose the right to call myself human. And then I start to wonder if it hasn’t happened to me already. Maybe when my head was down in the subclause of some fishy contract? Maybe in Houston when I broke Michael Trevino’s arm? Don’t know. Now, after watching Alessandra discard Yamaan so fiercely—a man who cooked and cleaned and cared for her—now I feel I’m reaching a chasm. If I keep going, I fall in. If I keep going, I become like her.
Another fact: losing Yamaan again might kill me.
When I step into my apartment, I wheel my suitcase against the wall and look around for a place to put my coat. There’s nowhere. There’s no furniture in here. I take a lap around with the tick tock of my heels resounding off the concrete walls and after a while I throw the coat on the floor and take another lap, unpicking the pins from my hair and throwing them on the floor too. I walk every which way with nothing to stop me. Tick tock tick tock. There’s no furniture in here because I sold it all when I went to Yokohama. Alessandra gave me the apartment after I graduated from Yale two years ago. She told me she picked the nineteenth floor since she’d been my mother for nineteen years and it felt auspicious. The truth was that no one bought a Manhattan apartment below the fourth floor these days, and never on the ground floor. You never knew how long you had before the sea would take it.
There’s a bed in the bedroom but there’s nothing on it, no sheets or pillows. They’re stuffed inside the closet in a kind of nest where I’d lain for days in mourning last August. I slide back the door and it’s like sliding back the lid of a tomb. A box of cigarettes, half empty. An ashtray. A few empty wine bottles. Some Xanax. I spent days hidden in among the bedsheets and pillows piled there. Days, with no other contact, half unconscious with the drugs. At some point Alessandra brought the police around and broke the door down to reach me. I pour a couple of Xanax into my hand and swallow them.
‘Send a message to Yammy.’
‘Okay. Recording.’
‘No, wait.’
I unbutton my shirt and then I unclip my bra. When I stand in front of the mirror, I press my forearm under my breasts to lift them slightly.
‘I love you so much I want to die.’
Probably a stupid thing to do, but I want him to understand I’m serious.
‘All right. Send it with a timer. Make sure it gets deleted.’
‘Okay. Sending with a timer.’
I curl on the bare bed and cover my face. Perhaps if I sleep, it will pass.
The trouble is, laying there looking through my fingers, I see a plastic bag lodged hard under the window in the corner. For a while, I just stare at it. I’d thrown it there from way across the room sometime last August. The strange part is that now, thinking back, I can’t understand why I’d been so angry. Angry at what? Angry at who? Angry, sure, but it soon gave way to something else. Something worse.
After a time of staring at it, I seize the bag and sit perched on the edge of the bed, holding it close. Really, it shouldn’t upset me. It’s nothing. Only a mat. I brought it home from Malé on my last visit, my last month with Yamaan. A long and tawny coloured carpet of woven reeds patterned through with black zigzags and fringed around in white. It smells of cut hay.
I’d watched Yamaan perform salat on it once, standing, kneeling, bowing. It had taken a long time before he’d trusted me enough to take his prayers while I was around. To give him privacy
, I crouched off to one side on the broad tiled deck of the beach house at Feydhoo Finolhu, still in my swimsuit, peering from under my sun hat. He spoke to the sky with his eyes closed. Here was a secret side of him, the side I never saw. It was the life he lived when I went home to New York. What hit me was how vulnerable he seemed when kneeling, begging protection, begging forgiveness. In a way, I was jealous. Would he ever feel that sort of yearning for me? My sole ambition would be to make him feel it.
I press the mat to my cheek and that’s when I really start to break down. There’s nothing stable left inside me now, nothing to keep me upright. I slip off the bed to the floor. I sag and sit, pressing my forehead to the heated windows. Across the bay, the dorsal spike of Jersey. The statue on Liberty Island stands with her fist in the air in the late dusk. Nineteen floors down little waves break the Battery Park levee wall and the spray douses the tourists and joggers and cyclists.
At high tide this part of Manhattan sits beneath sea level.
I sit there so long that lights come on in buildings a mile away in another world. The weather turns bitter with a lashing rain. In the dark, my reflection grows distinct upon the glass. The woman there has enormous black eyes because her makeup is running. Her pale hair is unpinned. I don’t like the look of her.
‘Who are you?’ I say.
Her lips stretch and circle. Red lips and white teeth and black eyes. Blood, bone, bruise. Rin Braden. I don’t know her. She looks unloved and unlovable, like a girl at a party who drank too much and puked everywhere. Her nose and mouth are small, her eyes are huge, with skin like she’d never seen the sun. Pug-faced and pug-sized.
I don’t like the look of her and I don’t feel safe around her.
‘Who are you?’ I say. ‘Who are you who are you who are you?’
The small mouth moves. The lips pucker. Such violent, bitter thoughts. After all, that girl in the glass has everything. She will never go hungry. She wears the best clothes and lives in the best cities and eats in the best restaurants. She wants for nothing. It’s only a base and ugly greed that makes her unhappy. Greed for her heart’s sole desire. Greed to love and hold and treasure Yamaan Ali Umair.
