Then one Sunday those six men walked into the stadium the day of the big bowl game, and when the dust settled and the bodies were counted there was no doubt the president would follow through with his threat. The executive order came out a week later, and a week after that the soldiers showed up at our door.
I remember the strangeness of that day, the absurdity that seems to accompany all violent beginnings. They came in a convoy of sorts, a black paddy wagon sandwiched between two cop cars. Four officers emerged from the cop cars. I recognized two of them from the previous November, when Father had called to report the vandalism of our garage door. Then the wagon door was flung open and out spilled a gaggle of reservists—they didn’t look like soldiers; they looked like armored accountants, flabby and uncomfortably corseted in their flak vests.
I think a small part of my father believed, right until that moment, we would be safe. Sure there were things said, slurs hurled across shopping-mall parking lots. Sure he’d decided to cut his hair and shave his beard, resigned now to the fact that so many of his countrymen could not distinguish one religion from another. And even before all that, back when this particular flavor of national paranoia was still in its infancy, he had decided to take precautions—to give his children Westerners’ names and teach them to speak and dress and think in a way that rendered them in the eyes of the majority benign, normal. He’d done all these things and in the end none of it mattered.
Still, he was calm until the very moment they ushered him onto the wagon. I remember he asked for a few minutes to lock our home’s doors and windows. He ripped a sheet from one of John’s notebooks and wrote our lawyer’s name and phone number on it and taped it to our front door, but just before they drove us away I saw one of the officers tear it down.
John squeezed my shoulder and said, A week, tops.
It was only at the very end that my father’s calm veneer finally evaporated. He turned to one of the soldiers, pleading. We’re from here, he said. We’re Americans. The soldier looked straight through him, and it occurred to me then that in this country it has never really mattered what you are, only what you’re not.
* * *
—
Khadija lay in her hotel bed, the window open to give some relief from the heat and the room’s mildew smell. At dawn she gave up on sleep and got up and dressed and went for a walk around the perimeter of the property. The sun came up over the barren hills.
The driver showed up at eight-thirty, as she’d instructed him to do.
“Mornin’,” he said, offering her a paper cup. “Coffee?”
“No thank you.”
The driver tossed the cup away and got in the driver’s seat.
“You mind if I stop for gas before we go out there?” the driver asked.
“Fine. Quickly, please.”
They pulled into the station at the edge of town, where in one corner of the lot sat an old gas pump, the only one left in Billings. The driver set the nozzle in the tank and walked around the side of the car and wiped down the front and rear windshields.
Khadija lowered her window. The smell of gasoline was sharp and reminded her of her childhood.
“Every time one of you folks comes to town, they take this piece of junk out of the garage,” the driver said. “I guess they think anyone who’s coming to visit is probably one of those people who spends a lot of time thinking about the way things used to be, so they’ll feel more comfortable in one of these cars. I keep telling them to sell it to some antiques dealer in Detroit, but they won’t do it.”
She ignored the driver. Save for a couple of old men sitting on lawn chairs under the awning of a nearby kiosk, there were no signs of life, no cars at the station, new or old.
She had expected to find more young people. But instead Billings seemed populated almost entirely with members of her generation. The young had left, that much was clear. Probably they’d gone to Canada or, if they couldn’t afford the cost of the visa, to the big Midwestern cities. Others probably went south, into the furious furnace of Texas and New Mexico and Arizona, to earn the state minimum tearing apart the wall their parents and grandparents once earned the state minimum to erect.
One of the old men sitting under the awning snapped his fingers at her. “You here for the anniversary thing?” he asked.
She said nothing. The old man pointed at her headscarf. “They gonna pay you, I suppose?”
“Shut up, Billy, for Christ’s sake,” the driver said. “You got nothing better to do than badger people all day?”
“I’m just saying, I’m just saying—you get one of those big-shot Chicago lawyers, might be good money in it. I mean, that’s how these things work, right? Big ceremony, big apology, big check?”
Khadija rolled up her window. The driver got back in the car. They drove away. Soon they’d left the city, and after a few minutes of driving down a deserted highway that ran through the middle of the old reservation, they reached the Riverbed Attestation Center.
At first, she didn’t recognize the place. The old dirt road had been widened and paved over. Where the reservists once stood guard at the entrance, there was now only a small blue highway sign that labeled the center a POINT OF INTEREST.
They turned onto the driveway and rounded a curve where twin concrete pillars leaned against one another like the lines of an upside-down V. It was a sculpture of sorts, set in a small circular green space around which the car turned to park at the front entrance. The entire perimeter, which had once been a mesh of chain-link fencing, had been replaced with thick adobe-colored stone. The new wall was high and adorned with etchings that didn’t seem to belong to any artistic or cultural tradition, a strange smattering of doodles and curving lines that in some places formed into the shape of crescents or stars but elsewhere was inscrutable.
The driver got out and opened the door for Khadija. “Take your time,” he said. “I’ll be waiting out here.”
She emerged into the morning light, dizzy. She walked through the sliding glass doors. A wave of cool air met her.
The woman at the reception desk looked up, frowned, then smiled.
“Good morning,” she said. “Are you here for the guided tour?”
“No,” Khadija said. “I’m here to see the director.”
“You have an appointment?”
“Yes.”
“So he’s expecting you?”
“That’s what an appointment means.”
The receptionist asked her to wait a moment and typed a message on her tablet. A few minutes later a man emerged from the back offices. He shook Khadija’s hand and introduced himself as the Riverbed’s director.
“It’s a pleasure to have you visit,” he said. “It’s always a pleasure when you visit.”
He spoke quickly, confidently, so much so that at first she did not understand what he meant.
He led her beyond a set of turnstiles and into a wide central room with large floor-to-ceiling glass walling off an outdoor space.
Inside the enclosure sat a rounded tile-and-alabaster fountain. The tile was painted a too-bright shade of turquoise and decorated with vaguely arabesque geometric patterns that repeated too often and too obviously, like the stitching on a cheap kitchen tablecloth. Spouts were dug deep into the fountain’s mouth, such that they were invisible to observers standing behind the glass. The water, bubbling up weakly, seemed to appear out of nowhere, to have no beginning.
“We managed to get the architect of the Rose Bowl memorial to design it,” the director said. “He came out of retirement to do it. I think it was very big of him, a really nice gesture.”
The director slid a keycard into a slot on the wall, and softly the front of the glass split into two sheets and parted to form a passageway.
“Please, come inside,” he said. “Only former protectees are allowed to step inside the enclosure.”
“I’m not interested,” Khadija said.
The director smiled and stammered. “Then perhaps…would you like to see the sleeping-cabin exhibit? The insides have been preserved with great care.”
“I don’t want to see the cabins,” Khadija replied. “Do you think I forgot what the cabins looked like?” She pointed down the corridor from where the director first appeared. “I want to see the repository,” she said. “The storage room.”
The director quieted. He still wore a smile on his face, but its fraudulence seemed to Khadija especially glaring now.
“I thought you might be interested in some of the exhibits,” he said, “the lengths to which the government has gone to commemorate and celebrate—”
“Let’s not waste each other’s time,” Khadija said. “I’m here for my brother’s things.”
The director appeared to be looking past her now, to the lobby, where a group of high school kids were beginning to file in, shepherded by a couple of teachers and one of the center’s volunteer guides.
“Yes, about that,” the director said. “Do you mind if we go to my office?”
“I do mind,” Khadija said. “I don’t want to go to your office; I want to go to the storage room. Now, please.”
“Dr. Singh, as I tried to explain in our correspondence, this isn’t a straightforward matter. There are…rules, provisions in the federal code.”
“This place turns fifty next Sunday,” Khadija said. “You know full well it all becomes public record that day. I don’t want to see this garbage, these stupid exhibits and friendship fountains. I want my brother’s things. You’re going to find them and you’re going to give them to me. Am I making myself perfectly clear?”
“Do you mind,” the director started, then paused. He lowered his voice. “Do you mind at least giving me some time to make some inquiries, then?”
“You knew I was coming,” Khadija replied. “You had six months to make inquiries.”
“Then another day won’t make much difference, Dr. Singh. I’ll try the commissioner’s office again, ask for an exception. But as I told you before, if they do this for you, who knows how many people will come forward with similar requests.”
“I’ll be here at nine o’clock tomorrow morning,” Khadija said, turning to leave. “Do your job, Director.”
On the drive back to the hotel, she felt an attack of claustrophobia. Her chest tightened. She rolled down the window and turned her head against the wind. The air smelled of dust and manure though she could see no farms or even homesteads, just the endless undulation of rural Montana, hills swallowing hills.
“It’s the ugliest goddamn thing, isn’t it?” the driver said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“That museum. I was there the day they unveiled that fountain. The designer they hired was this crazy old man. They asked him to say a few words and then they had to cut his mic when he started going on about the natural resiliency of the Middle Asiatic. Total shitshow.”
“It looked exactly how I thought it would,” Khadija said.
They drove into town. In the lot of an unused strip mall, about fifty men and women stood in line to visit a pop-up charity dental clinic, shuffling slowly through the entrance of a repurposed big-top tent, silent.
“Did you grow up here?” Khadija asked the driver.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You remember a neighborhood called Lewisia?”
“Sure. Down by the island, south side of the river.”
“Is it still there?”
The driver laughed. “What’s left of it. Been rotting away thirty, forty years now. Even the freight-train crowd won’t spend the night there.”
“Do you mind taking me there?”
The driver shrugged. “Sure. Don’t know what you’re expecting to find, though.”
They crossed the bridge where a few tiny offshoots split from the heart of the river. Near a tire yard and a couple of fenced-off weed fields, the driver turned onto a series of interlinked crescents that terminated in small culs-de-sac.
They drove past houses all identical and in identical states of ruin. The roofs of the Craftsmen sagged, the shingles mostly gone or dangling like dead skin. Large gashes in the walls marked the places where the copper had been torn out. Couches and hubcaps and broken windowpanes littered the driveways.
“I remember at the peak you couldn’t get in here for under two million,” the driver said. “And that was a lot of money back then. These days the city will pay you just to take it off their hands.”
Strewn among the lawns were various signs from old election campaigns, a rolling history of the people who had taken turns running the country through its century of decline—the Wall-War Republicans, the Compassionate Re-Segregationists, the No-Government Party. Each one less a social or political movement and more of a doubling-down, a rejection of some previous generation’s conception of what constituted the limits of decency and reason. Here in these dull insulated places, descendants of the first white-flight suburbs, it was easiest to look around and see proof of a whole nation run straight off the edge of the cliff, and yet still running, certain of no greater sin than to ever look down.
“So I guess this was home for you once?” the driver asked.
“No,” Khadija said. “I used to live here.”
* * *
—
The only one I felt sorry for was a Jordanian named Yassir. He said he was a cleric and community leader, but in truth he was some retired agricultural engineer they rounded up in Boise. Every morning he took a stroll by the edge of the fence and waved good morning to all the guards. He called them all Brother and held his hand to his heart whenever he greeted them and always said Thank you for your service instead of Goodbye. Everyone at Riverbed hated him.
Much later, all the reporters came to us looking for horror stories, stories of the cages in which they kept us, of sleep and food deprivation, of holes for toilets. But in reality the place felt more like a demented summer camp, full of faux-wood cabins hastily erected. Most of them were sleeping quarters, built in clusters around the largest building, a long narrow mess hall.
They built the place against the side of a hill, a quarter mile off the main road down a thin dirt path. There was no signage anywhere, and well before you reached the high chain fence that pinned the camp against the hillside you’d run into a phalanx of guards stationed at the intersection where the highway met the side road. It was a place designed to be nowhere, and we its uninhabitants.
Of my father, my brother, and I, I fared the best. From the moment we arrived, everyone there knew we didn’t belong, but the women didn’t care one way or another, and quickly they took me in rather than have one more headache to deal with in the form of a disgruntled nineteen-year-old. But the men wanted nothing to do with Father, and the boys wanted everything to do with John. Every night he came back to the cabin bearing the marks of their interest, bruises from fights that started the day one of the boys said John was not Muslim at all but a secret informant, a Sikh sent to spy on them. John said he didn’t mind the fistfights—it was something to do, at least—and I believed him. But you could see, every time, the confusion in his eyes when they called him these things. To be different among the different is an unwinnable state.
Nothing else bothered me. In time you learn to get by, you learn to accept the ugliness and the ignorance, because what else is there to do? Take on the whole country? But to see him like that, the boy who was of me and I of him, the boy I’d come to know before he even came to know himself—to see him carry the weight of his loneliness, the light of him dimming—it hurt.
On a corkboard near the entrance to the mess hall, the guards pinned a copy of Executive Order 1116, and on the ground every morning a delivery boy left a stack of Arabic newspapers published by some group in Virgin
ia called the Institute for Harmonious Relations. Most of us didn’t read a word of Arabic, and the rest didn’t care.
For a while, early on, you could hear them out beyond the fence—protestors who’d come to Riverbed banging drums and waving banners. This was back during the golden years of ineffectual demonstration, and I think some of these people, if they didn’t go out to the streets and rage at whatever it was they refused to believe their country had become, would probably have suffered aneurysms or grown a gut full of ulcers. Mostly they were old white folks, the COEXIST bumper-sticker crowd. By the second week they’d all gone elsewhere, lured away by some other outrage. Only one woman kept coming back every day for three or four months. She came up to the checkpoint near the fence and said she’d converted and wanted to be let in to live alongside her brothers and sisters. And every day the reservist stationed at the checkpoint, a man who once worked with my father at the sun farms, would shake his head and say, Go home, Karen.
It was the guards who fascinated me. They weren’t real soldiers, just men who played the part for a few weeks a year—accountants, salesmen, high school coaches—overweight, milk-smelling men with ham-slice complexions who turned to puddles in the summer sun. They rotated the guards so often that in a few months it became impossible to tell them apart. Every now and then somebody would stray too close to the fence and they’d yell at them to get back, and once a couple of them were disciplined for stealing jewelry from one of the detainees’ foot lockers. But for the most part they did nothing. They seemed to take a perverse kind of comfort in their laziness, as though when the history of this place was written, their passiveness would shelter them from judgment. They sat in their guard towers and officers’ quarters and counted down the hours, same as the rest of us.
I think that’s why they missed it, the night my brother crawled out the window and through a tear in the fence and out into the wildland. The last night I saw him.
* * *
—
The driver dropped Khadija off again at nine the following morning, and this time the director was waiting for her in the lobby. He ushered her to his office.
A People's Future of the United States Page 16
