Abundance

by Fine, Michael;

  “I need to be back in Buchanan,” Julia said.

  “Don’t you worry about Buchanan,” Jonathan said. “There’s nothing you can do in Buchanan now. Buchanan is overrun. Your hospital isn’t a hospital now, or won’t be one soon. Nothing pretty will happen there.”

  “Can you get me to the beach?”

  “Can but won’t. I’m not here for your convenience. You aren’t of any use to me on the beach or with those marines. You may be of some use to me here later. Deal with it, missy. You are not in charge anymore, and the sooner you understand that the simpler your life will be. This is Liberia. Liberia, Africa. Not Liberia, New York, LA, Chicago, or Providence, Rhode Island.”

  A helicopter drowned out all speech as it landed. The wind from its rotor shook the roof and the ground. Its engine whistled and then shut down.

  “Plenty-plenty woman palaver,” Jonathan said “Daniweil, pu she upstairs.” Too much talking to a woman. Put her out of the way someplace.

  “I’ll be back,” Jonathan said. He walked out a side door. Julia heard him shout and then curse. Yellow-Bandanna, Daniweil, was standing behind her.

  Now Julia was alone.

  It had once been a linen closet.

  Daniweil pushed Julia down the hall from the bar to the kitchen. There was a door just past the kitchen, between the men’s and the women’s changing rooms, big enough to walk into. But not big enough to lay down in. The shelves were empty. There were no windows. No chair. Nothing. It looked for a moment like Daniweil was going to leave Julia’s hands untied. Then he thought the better of it, turned her toward him, and retied her hands in front of her, loosely enough so she could move them against one another but tightly enough that any movement made the cloth tight on the wrist she moved.

  He shoved Julia inside and her flank hit the shelving. She grasped a shelf with one hand to keep herself from falling over.

  Then Daniweil closed and locked the door. And disappeared.

  Only darkness. A line of light peeked under the door, and there were thinner lines of light around the door.

  It was a few steps to the door. A cold metal handle. There was no play in the handle, but there were a few millimeters of give in the door, front and back. You could make it rattle. Pushing hard down on the handle didn’t move it. Slamming it with the back of your hand didn’t move it either. It wasn’t going to break off. The mechanism wasn’t cheap Chinese metal that would break just from her weight.

  The room slowly developed a hint of dimension. Julia began to see the sides of the lower shelving. The light seeped three or four feet back.

  The door opened inward, so it wouldn’t pop, even if she was big enough to burst the frame and she just wasn’t close to big enough for that.

  Carl was dead. He had been killed at that checkpoint. Carl, Sister Martha, the kiddo, the kiddo’s mother, her mother, and Carl’s driver. All dead. One RPG shell. Zig might hear by bush telegram even if no one made it out. Someone in a village saw the smoke from the Land Cruiser. The word goes village to village, cell phone to cell phone. Person to person when the cell phones are dead. Word travels in the bush. There are eyes. Maybe Zig had time to call the ministry or Merlin. Maybe.

  Sounds. Voices. Distant. From above and through the door. The voices from above were louder, which meant the closet had a dropped ceiling, Sound travels better in the space above a ceiling than it does through the walls. A shaking. A bigger truck coming or going. But no tire sounds, no crunching or hissing. The parking lot and trucks weren’t close. Distant slammed car or truck doors. Clear enough but distant. Across doors and through walls. Perhaps a window in the kitchen. The window in the women’s changing room looked out to the side. The window in the men’s looked out the back. Soft engine clatter and buzz. A single engine, droning.

  Bill Levin might eventually figure she was gone, but that might take weeks and he wouldn’t know what to do or who to call. Her mother and everyone in California had written her off the moment she set foot in Africa. If they got a ransom demand it would occur to them that Julia was missing but not until then. I’m alone, Julia thought. How did it all go south so fast?

  She had value. She had to have value. Otherwise they wouldn’t have kept her alive. Something to trade.

  Carl was dead and Sister Martha, the baby, the baby’s mother, Carl’s driver, and the mother’s mother were all dead. There wasn’t time to mourn. Julia had to focus, the way she did when a code came in to the ED. You can’t let what you might feel stand in the way of your thought process or choices. I’m trained to focus in a crisis. To take my own pulse first. To keep my head, Julia thought. I can think my way out. Bad things happen. You can’t let yourself get distracted.

  The smell of sweat. Her sweat. Dank, bitter, and sweet all at once. Old tennis shoe moldy.

  They were not an item. Julia was never going to get to be an item. Relationships weren’t her thing. She didn’t know how to listen. She had nothing interesting to say. When someone got close they could see her for who she was. They could see she was empty, that she had no compass, no drive, and no new ideas. They could see how she drifted from place to place, how all she ever did was follow directions, how all she ever had to do was stand in line, and how she got promoted by just for taking tests and waiting her turn.

  She was an American doctor so it was risky to keep her. She’d attract attention. But she was also a bargaining chip. The big man, that Jonathan, had said it. The marines were coming. They might come for her. They also might not come.

  Footsteps. Sudden, dull, and then gone. Concrete floor. Wood vibrates. No vibration.

  The very faint rumble and hiss of a jet, high up.

  Carl had changed, was changing. They were not an item, but he had turned to her in an interesting way in the last few days, as if he saw something in her and felt something, as if he was starting to feel what she felt. Not when they slept together the first time. She had felt it then, but there was always a huge distance between what she felt and how she acted, as if the world wasn’t ready for her to feel like that. She had frightened him away, doing what she always did, missing the cues and trying to get to close too soon. She had fucked him too soon. She always did that. She slept with men who she thought would never like her right away before they figured out that there was nothing much there besides a body to be pummeled. She never mastered the art of getting close to someone. A little talking. A little kissing. A little bit at a time, slowly getting closer and closer, testing each other, asking, is this someone I can like? Is this someone I can trust? Is this someone who can be part of me? She jumped into bed with Carl because she didn’t think she could ever be close to anyone. But it happened anyway. They were getting close. In spite of her emotional clumsiness. The real closeness had just begun. They were the only option for one another in Buchanan, but it was more than that. He started to come by on his own. He was sweet, very sweet. And strong. And smart. And able. He was starting to let his guard down and be with her when he was with her. And now he was gone. Julia would never get it right.

  She turned and measured by putting one foot in front of the other, her tied hands in front of her. Nine of her feet to the back wall of shelving. When her hands touched the back wall, her forearms rested on a shelf, in almost to her elbow. Maybe sixteen inches of shelving. Six shelves. Floor to ceiling. Six of her feet from side to side.

  Rape crisis training, years ago: California, outside, in Palo Alto, in the sunshine. Lock your arms. Raise one hip. Twist out to the side. Put your feet on his hips and then kick into his face, under the chin, and into his groin, and then run.

  She walked from back to front, and then turned and walked from front to back, marching in a tiny oval, eight of her normal steps around.

  She counted steps. At 40, Torwon and Charles and the Land Cruiser on fire. At 110, the popping and rattling of the guns as they went through villages after that. At 157, Carl, his face when she pushed him about the malaria kid. Then his face close to hers when he was on top of her, whe
n she could feel him and how he condensed into his body, driving into her, but how she couldn’t see him. Then his face and his eyebrows when he lay next to her in bed, talking. His eyebrows had suddenly become large and hard, and shaded his eyes, so she couldn’t see them as clearly as she wanted to. Then Sister Martha and the kiddo in the Health Center, the soft brown light from the window on the brown still face of that child, breathing so fast, the child’s whole self condensed into its breathing in just the same way as Carl had condensed into his body. Two hundred and thirty steps.

  You get away first. She’d get shot if they saw her run.

  Somewhere between seven and eight hundred steps she lost count. She had counted to fifty too many times. Seven hundred and forty-nine. Seven hundred and fifty. Seven hundred and fifty-one. Seven hundred and forty-two. Seven hundred and fifty.

  Who knows I’m missing? Julia thought. Carl might know if Carl is alive, but he is dead. Sister Martha is dead if Carl is dead. Zig will know if Zig survives the night, but then what? How long will the phones work? Zig could get the satellite phone at Merlin, if Zig lives and can get to Merlin before Merlin is overrun.

  How can I make a life for myself that lets me love and be loved and also build a world in which others can love and be loved, all at the same time? Julia thought. Assuming I ever get out of this mess.

  The light under the door began to fade. Julia sat on the floor against the rear wall of the linen closet, her back resting on the first shelf, her arms around her drawn-up knees, and her head resting on them. The light became very dim and red. It was the light from an illuminated exit sign in the hall—battery run. The batteries ran down after the generator was shut off.

  Julia slept.

  Then she had to pee. She stood. The light was still faint and red under the door.

  No voices. No car doors. No engine clatter. The generator was off for the night. The red lights from the exit signs would fade before dawn as the batteries ran low. There might be flashlights.

  She walked the oval. Urgent now. She squeezed her pelvis in. Then she counted. A hundred and fifty-seven steps. Then she just walked. Waiting was useless. They were not going to arrive at a rest stop on the highway. You might wait for a rest stop. You might wait until you go into a building and find a ladies’ room. There was nothing to wait for here.

  She pounded on the door. Why does nothing in Africa ever work? Julia thought. What am I doing here? Why can’t I ever, ever get it right? They are all dead, Carl and Sister Martha and that child. It is God’s will, which is what they say in Liberia and all across Africa whenever tragedy strikes. We must put our faith in God.

  “Hey, hello!” Julia yelled. She pounded on the door, and rattled it, and pounded again, and cried, “Hey, Hello! Hello! Anybody there?” over and over.

  No one came.

  I can’t trust my body, Julia thought. I can’t trust my mind. I can’t trust anybody. What good is trying?

  Then finally, desperate to pee, she called out, “Pee-pee! Hey Hello! Pee-pee.” She called again and again.

  A weak, inconstant yellow light faded in under the door. Footsteps. The door opened. A weak yellow flashlight exploded into her eyes. She backed away. A thud. The door closed and locked. When she went to grab the door handle and rattle it again, she tripped on something new at her feet, which thudded and rattled as it fell. It was a bucket, a plastic bucket with a cold metal wire handle.

  She stood it up, fumbled with her pants, and used the bucket. It wasn’t perfect. It was dark. Nothing to wipe with. But her body let her be.

  I want to live, Julia thought, and I want to love someone, and I want someone to love me, and I want to try to make a world in which people can love and be loved, because without that kind of world no one can love at all. I don’t know how to do any of this. Without us all together, men with guns will come and destroy the possibility of love itself. And love makes life real.

  She slid the bucket with her feet, slowly and carefully, under the shelving on the right side of the closet, so she wouldn’t trip on it when she paced.

  Now the closet smelled of urine, sweet and sharp at once, and of sweat.

  Then Julia sat and wrapped her arms around her knees again and laid her head on her knees. The floor was hard. Too hard. She wept quietly. No one could see.

  She slept again, in and out.

  Chapter Seven

  Terrance Evans-Smith. Kingston, Pawtucket, and Providence, Rhode Island. July 18, 2003

  THE WIND FROM THE OCEAN WHISTLED AS IT RATTLED THE METAL WALLS OF THE CAVERNOUS building. Terrance felt the breeze. It cooled Terrance’s skin. It was hot here too in summer. The moist air felt something like the moist air coming off the ocean at home, but the days here were almost twice as long, and long days meant there wasn’t as much time for the air to cool in darkness. The hot nights wear you down, because all you can do all night is walk. Walk the perimeter with a flashlight looking at the fence. Walk the buildings first outside and then inside. Clock in and clock out. Sit at the desk in the gatehouse in the morning. Raise and lower the crossing gate for each car as they show their ID. No matter how many weeks he had been doing this job, his mind still shut down in the middle of the night. He slept for an hour in the bathroom, his chin on his chest, sitting on the toilet.

  It was just a night watchman job. Ma thought it was the moon. She thought he came home and slept all day.

  Terrance took off his silly hat and put it on the top shelf of his locker. The he took off his uniform, which was too big for him, and hung it beneath the hat. Stupid hat. He only wore it in the morning when he was sitting in the gatehouse. Stupid uniform. The uniform made him meaningless, made him just like everyone else. Meaningless. No man. Nowhere. Not strong.

  No one here understood the power of the early morning, when you can see but not be seen. Invisible. Invincible.

  The white people watch at dusk. Their police cars prowl the quiet streets at night. People listen just after dusk, some on their porches taking in the cool evening air. Most sit in front of their TV sets, the colors from the TV washing the rooms, the people in their living rooms mesmerized, decapitated, paraplegic, comatose but still awake enough to hear.

  But no one is awake in the morning just after dawn. No one sees anything just after dawn. They stumble out of bed, shower, and get their coffee, but all they think about is getting themselves and their kids out of the house. You are invisible. Powerful. And back, ready to roam again.

  Terrance had an old Ford Taurus, mostly red, with one green fender off another car. Ma gave him the ninety-nine dollar down payment, and then he made the loan payments out of his pay envelope. The car cost thirty-nine dollars a week. There was no chance that the car would outlive the car payment. Too much white smoke came out of the tailpipe when he drove on 95. The engine rattled when he accelerated, but the damn thing got him back and forth, and it had lasted two months. It wasn’t an invisible car, not among the quiet houses, so the car went back and forth from the house to work and from work to the house again, evidence of his regular life.

  But regular wasn’t much. He had once been king. They owned the streets. People begged and whimpered when they stood in a house or drove an SUV off the road and into the middle of a village, smashing the market stalls as they came on. There was blood. Plenty-plenty blood. Bodies ripped apart. Blood made him invisible. Invincible.

  Terrance drove slowly on Davisville Road. He passed acres of houses. First the old base housing—grey, shingled, and needing paint. Then he passed some two- and three-story barracks and some ramshackle single-story houses that no one arranged into a neighborhood, scattered on the land like grass seed thrown down on dark earth. Then you come to the developments that were just outside where the base used to be, the squat brick- and stone-faced ranch houses, with bushes lining the sidewalks and pickups that had ladder racks in the driveways and delivery trucks parked on the streets at night. There were brown people mixed in among the white people in the cars on Davisville Road and mowing t
he lawns, and those people meant he didn’t completely stand out—except that he was even darker and the car was old and so beat-up.

  Some of the cars in the driveways or parked on the street were good enough to take. They were money. But Quonset was just two miles away to his work and too close for comfort.

  Terrance turned onto Post Road. He drove for about a mile and then turned to cruise the big old colonial houses that sit on the hill overlooking the harbor in East Greenwich. Doctors’ houses. Lawyers’ houses. Bankers’ houses. Financial planners’ houses. Houses with impeccable paint, with three- or five-car garages, with gatehouses and swimming pools and tennis courts. You study these places, the people who come in and out in the mornings, the painted vans that bring workmen—the landscapers and the plumbers and the electricians, the painters and the plasterers and the pest-control people, the lumberyard trucks, FedEx and UPS trucks, garbage trucks, recycling trucks, cable TV trucks, and the tree trimmers, their large green trucks pulling orange chippers. The men driving the trucks wear uniforms or baseball hats or hard hats, and there is often a pair of thick leather gloves wedged on the windshield on the driver’s side. The men in the trucks are mostly white men, but some are brown. The brown men often look uncertain, as though they are waiting for someone to tell them they have come to the wrong place or are here at the wrong time.

  Ma didn’t know his life. She dressed nice, she went to work every day, she came home to her place with the screen door hanging off and cleaned it. Every other Saturday she went to the fish market on Lonsdale Avenue where they do Western Union, and from there she sent money home. She had her job and her world where they tell her what to do and how to do it. She existed by following the rules. Just existed.

  But Terrance had lived. Lived large. Ranged free. When you live large you do what you want when you want to do it. When you live large you take what you want. When you live large you are who you want to be. They don’t tell you what you can’t do, they tell you to do more and to take more, and they tell you ways to be bigger and stronger. Old ways. Secret ways. Things people here don’t know anything about. You put a red thread around each wrist and a blue thread around your neck. You never eat pumpkin and fuck three times every day, right at dawn and noon and nightfall. You tattoo your right arm with the picture of a black monkey, just below the shoulder. You take a small bone from a dead man’s hand and hang it from your belt. You always carry the claw of a leopard. You drink the cane wine and take all the pills they give you, because pills make strength. When you go out, if there is enemy you dress like a woman, so you disappear and the bullets can’t find you. You take your women and smear them with leh, with white clay, from the face to the waist and that lifts them above the earth, so the bullets can’t find them. You find a big man who is strong enough to cut out the hearts of the living and brave enough to eat that heart while it is still beating. The big man is so strong that nothing ever comes near you, so no harm will ever come to you. You fly above the earth, and the enemy runs away, because they know you are coming, and they are afraid.