American War

by Omar El Akkad

  THE CHESTNUT TWINS RETREATED from the alley, headed in the direction of Mississippi. They walked in the shadow of the cafeteria building’s tin awning, against the tide of departures from the chapel. Men and women in their Sunday best shuffled toward their tents, orange cups in hand, talking about all the things the Baptist minister had said—Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice—and here he said it twice more, with his hands as much as his voice—Rejoice! Rejoice! Insofar as you share Christ’s sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed.

  The men leaving the chapel wore prewar suits and ties—not the cheap, three-star ties manufactured in bulk and handed out by the Free Southern State at every opportunity, but fine ties of wool and sometimes silk, imprinted with smooth gradients or arabesque geometry or even just the logos of old American football teams. The women wore their least faded floral dresses and swoop-brimmed sun hats they decorated with pressed flowers or paper made to look like flowers. In these last vestiges of older, better lives the refugees sweated and were terribly uncomfortable, but they wore the clothes anyway, because there were no other occasions to wear them except Christmas or Southern Independence Day.

  Sarat and Dana sat on the steps of the now deserted chapel building. They watched a couple of camp workers lead a shell-numbed woman and her baby girl to their new home in the furthest outskirts of the Mississippi slice.

  A Tik-Tok, marked with a large red crescent, rumbled along the dirt remnants of Highway 350, which split the camp almost down the middle. A couple of FSS soldiers sat inside and another two stood on the back fender. The tiny, three-wheeled vehicle struggled for traction, its feeble motor squealing, its tires kicking up dust.

  “I bet they’re going to repair the gate,” Sarat said. “Bet a militia rocket hit it again.”

  “You’ve got to stop talking like that,” Dana replied.

  “What? You wanna go see? I’ll bet you five bucks.”

  “I don’t mean them, I mean like today, with Bishop. Like you’ll believe anything anyone tells you, like you don’t know when the joke’s on you.”

  “I don’t do that.”

  “ ‘I know where the snipers are…’ ”

  “I do!” Sarat protested. “The minesweepers showed me.”

  “You have to grow up, Sarat. You’re not a little girl anymore. Look, just try not to give anybody reason to make fun of you, is all. You’ll make more friends that way.”

  The two girls sat in silence. Soon the Tik-Tok returned, missing three of its original passengers but carrying a new one, a vaccination officer from Atlanta. Accompanied by a bored-looking soldier, the volunteer moved from tent to tent, asking for the immunization records of any child under the age of five.

  “I made a friend today,” Sarat said. “His name’s Marcus. He lives in Alabama.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Mmm-hmm. You can ask him about the sniper, if you don’t believe me. I showed him.”

  Dana shook her head and chuckled. She watched the health worker. She was a woman in her early twenties. She was a Northerner, a volunteer with the One Country Coalition, doing her year of service.

  “You remember when they gave us that stuff?” Dana asked.

  Sarat nodded. “Told them we were too old for it. Probably didn’t do anything.”

  “Maybe it did. Maybe we’d be dead if we didn’t take it.”

  “Marcus’s dad says anyone who stays in the camp too long is gonna die here,” Sarat said. “You think we’re gonna die here?”

  Dana thought for a while. Across the road, the health worker was shooing away a gaggle of children she knew as repeat customers, trying to get their hands on the caramel candies she handed out after every vaccination.

  “No,” Dana said. “Well, maybe a hundred years from now. But not, like, tomorrow.”

  “All right,” Sarat said. “A hundred years is all right.”

  In the face of the children’s pleading, the health worker relented and gave all the candies away. Soon the children began to dissipate, their small jaws mining hard for sugar.

  Dana leaned close to her sister, resting her head on Sarat’s arm.

  “I’m sorry for saying you should grow up,” she said. “Don’t ever grow up. Don’t ever change, beautiful girl.”

  THE HEALTH WORKER PASSED from tent to tent. She asked the children their ages. Some knew and others didn’t. Those who didn’t she asked to raise their right arms over their heads, such that the crease of the elbow rested somewhere near the top of the head, and the fingers dangled around the left ear. The children whose fingers touched their ears she estimated to be older than five years of age, and for them the vaccine would do no good. On this basis the vaccines were administered: a few drops of clear liquid to ward off the viral paralytic that had long ago been defeated but now, riding the saddle of war, returned.

  LATE AT NIGHT, when the weather cooled and the camp’s ragged bustle gave way to the hard, graceless sleep of the dispossessed, Martina visited her friend Erica Yarber’s tent for a game of cards. For the better part of five years, this had been a ritual, practiced three or four times a week by Martina, Erica, their friend Lara, and whichever women from the neighboring tents decided to join them on any given night.

  It was a large tent, near the border between Alabama and South Carolina, once occupied by Erica, her husband, and her teenage son. But the son had moved west to join the fighting and the husband’s heart gave out one morning and now she lived alone.

  Martina arrived with a jar of pickles, red in their Kool-Aid brine. Their taste repulsed Martina, conjuring cherries marinated in sweat, but the other women enjoyed them. The women almost always brought with them something to eat or drink: boiled and dry peanuts, day-old cafeteria bread massaged with oil or bacon grease, sweet ears, kettle chips, a mason jar of corrosive, tent-made Joyful, in addition to whatever else the women managed to acquire that day through serendipity or altruism.

  The game was Fight the Landlord. Ten bucks a point, first to a hundred. They used three decks, and in this way the game moved more quickly and opportunities for bombs and rockets were increased. They played by the light of rainbow candles made from melted crayons and shoelace wicks. On a nearby tablet, a Dixie Radio broadcast trickled from the speakers. It was a big-lunged, brass-backed man singing. Young love has made me old, tired, restless, and blue.

  “Mag on Mag, nines on eights,” Martina said, laying six cards on the shaky plywood table.

  “Nope,” Lara said.

  “Nothing,” Erica followed.

  Martina swept the hand and set it facedown in a neat pile in front of her. Lara’s Joyful was starting to do its work.

  It had become, over the years, the South’s wartime drink. Joyful, a Frankenstein hooch, made from whatever was on hand, no two jugs ever the same. Martina took another swig. She tasted the ingredients of this particular batch: a festering, months-old orange juice, and beneath that an aftertaste of corn and mouthwash. She felt the onset of drunkenness; every once in a while the candle flames stood still and it was the room that flickered.

  Soon the game was called and Martina collected her winnings and the ladies retreated to Erica’s small, makeshift living room. Here there were arranged a set of cushions made of stitched charity blankets and foam. With no couch to use as a base, the cushions were arranged flat on the ground in the style of a Bouazizi majlis. The arrangement was sectioned with low tables made of the discarded cardboard boxes in which the camp’s water bottles came.

  The women sat on the cushions and left the door of the tent ajar to let in a little breeze. Soon Erica was fast asleep where she sat.

  It was quiet, Erica’s snoring their only accompaniment. Between the Joyful and the good tobacco, a warming balm washed over Martina’s body, and the pains of the day began to recede.

  “You know I had a sister once,” she said.

&nbs
p; “You never told me that before,” Lara replied.

  “Never told no one. Never told my husband, even. She died when I was five. I don’t remember nothing about her anymore, except she had thumbs that could bend both ways. She used to show that off all the time, soon as she figured out nobody else could do it.”

  Lara sat upright against the cushions. She blinked a few times to shake off the weight that had been building on her eyelids.

  “How’d she die?” she asked.

  “Got a cold one day playing in a creek that ran by our house. By nighttime she was shaking and coughing up blood. She was dead by morning. Didn’t even take a whole day. I remember my parents wouldn’t let me in the bedroom, didn’t want me seeing her the way she was. But I was out in the hallway and I could hear it, the sound she made when she was fighting so hard to breathe. I wish they would have let me see her. I think just the sound of it alone is worse than if they’d let me see her.”

  “I’m sorry,” Lara said. “That must have been hard.”

  “Ahh, it’s all long gone now. Time buries time, my mother used to say. It broke my father, though. For months afterward he just went round talking about how there used to be drugs that could have fixed her right up, but everybody used them too much and they didn’t work anymore. And what did work, we couldn’t afford. He kept saying it over and over, like saying it would change things.”

  Martina stamped out her cigarette butt in her empty measuring cup. “I remember the day we buried her. We brought this preacher out to the farm to say a few words. Man must have been a hundred years old, half-blind and pretty well senile. He walks up to the grave—my parents dug a plot for her right there on the farm, made a cross out of fence posts—he walks up to the grave and we stand behind him, all dressed up in the finest clothes we own. And we think he’s just going to read a passage or just say a couple nice things about heaven or the Lord calling her home or whatever. But he doesn’t do any of that—you know what he does? He starts singing. He had this song like, We’re all children in the kingdom of Jesus. He sings that line a couple times—I think he just made it up in his head, none of us ever heard this song before, we’re just standing there like idiots behind him, none of us saying a word—and then he starts with: the boys and the girls are children in the kingdom of Jesus, the cats and the dogs are children in the kingdom of Jesus, the mules and the antelopes…just keeps going and going, like he’s taking attendance on the Ark. Finally I can’t help it anymore, I start giggling. My mother smacks me on the back to shut me up, but I can’t help it. I’m trying, damn near wetting myself trying, but I can’t. And then suddenly it hits me that I’m laughing at my own sister’s funeral, and I get this guilt right in my gut—hits me like a train. And I start crying harder than I ever cried. But that old man doesn’t care, he just keeps on going—the frogs and the horses and the squirrels and…”

  Martina chuckled and shook her head. “I’ll never forget that goddamn senile old preacher. How’s he gonna go and make a little girl hate herself at her own sister’s funeral?”

  “Jesus,” Lara said. “Maybe ya’ll really are Catholics.”

  Soon the first blue of dawn began to leak into the charred sky. After the Joyful buzz wore off, Martina excused herself and walked back to her tent. In these hours the camp was at its calmest, and the tents running afield in all directions were beautiful in a rugged, delicate way—strange desert fauna reticent and frozen, a harvest of life.

  When she reached her tent she opened the door slowly so as not to wake the children. She stepped inside and saw her son knelt down, pushing something under his mattress. At the foot of his bed his boots were caked in fresh mud.

  “May as well show me whatever it is you got under there,” Martina said.

  The boy jumped at the sound of his mother’s voice. He started to say something, then thought better of it. He reached under the bed and dragged out a black hard-shell guitar case. The strap showed signs of wear but the case itself was immaculate for its age, and appeared to Martina to have been at one time used prolifically but also with great care.

  “They give you that?” Martina asked. “Some kind of gift or something?”

  “No,” Simon replied. “Found it in an abandoned studio.”

  “Don’t lie to me.”

  “I swear it.”

  “Sit.”

  Simon sat on his bed. His mother sat beside him. She saw he’d cut himself across the left side of the forehead. She inspected the cut with her thumb. Simon pulled back.

  “You know what they want in return when they start giving the kids round here gifts, right?”

  “Mama, I just stole it, is all. I swear. It’s not like it was really stealing, anyway. It was just sitting there—nobody was ever gonna come back for it.”

  Martina sighed. “If that’s what you tell me, that’s what I’ll believe,” she said. “But just the same, you’re getting old enough that I won’t have much of a say in what you’re doing or where you’re going anymore, so let me say it now: If you want to fight, if that’s where you’re headed, go to Atlanta when you turn seventeen and sign up with the Free Southerners. Put on a uniform, fight by the rules. I won’t like it, but you’ll be a man then and the decision’s yours to make. But not the rebels. I don’t care what they give you, I don’t care what they promise or how they make it sound, you and I both know what they recruit the camp people to do, and I won’t have you do that, you understand?”

  “Mama, c’mon. I’m not gonna join any rebels, I’m not gonna blow myself up, I won’t do nothing like that.”

  “No matter what they tell you, some things are just wrong, war or no war.”

  “I know, Mama.”

  Martina hugged her son. Then she smacked him on the back of the head.

  “And it is stealing. Don’t do it again.”

  “All right. I’m sorry.”

  She kissed her son good night and tiptoed past the sleeping twins in the next room. She reclined on the mattress into which her scent and shape had seeped over the years. She closed her eyes. Sleep came easy.

  Excerpted from:

  NEITHER BREATHE NOR HOPE: THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE SOUTH CAROLINA WARTIME QUARANTINE

  In Cairo, the capital of the Bouazizi Empire, the old gray buildings of the Students’ Quarter loom over alleyways of stone and brick. They are tired, pre-revolution buildings, their roofs laden with pigeon coops and thatched janitors’ shacks and cracked solar panels. It is frighteningly hot, even in January. For much of the year it is too hot to be outside; soon even the hardest-bitten residents will retreat northward to the Mediterranean seaside, or to the burgeoning indoor and underground cities that have largely replaced the ancient ones above the ground. It is too hot to live the old way. But traditions die hard and, at least in the coolest winter months, many still try.

  The cacophony of the alleyway bazaars rises from below: the dangling din of the silversmiths; the embers exploding off soot-lacquered grills; the indignant howls of tourists haggling for a bargain. And beyond that, the sounds of the greater metropolis: the airplanes circling Mathlouthi Airport, the Bouazizi Empire’s largest hub; a symphony of horns from the unmoving cars along the August 14 Bridge. Old and new Cairo endlessly colliding.

  It was in this very neighborhood, three quarters of a century earlier, that the students rushed the alleys of Khan El Sisi and the soldiers met them with rifles drawn. Today, there is little to commemorate that massacre but a tired, sputtering fountain whose alabaster tiles leach the rust from the tourists’ coins.

  In his small apartment overlooking the Martyrs’ Fountain, Mahmoud Abd-el-Ghafur sits and listens to these sounds coming through the arabesque window coverings. This is not his real name, and this not his real country. His name is Gerry Tusk, and his country is America. He is a traitor.

  On January 14, 2075, the day after Southern rebels killed 38 federal workers in Lexington, the President called a half-dozen government researchers to the Executive Building in Columbus. They we
re tasked with devising a way of pacifying the population of the country’s first rebel state. Three months later, a group of War Office agents (who were themselves told the effects of the sickness would end harmlessly in a few months) arrived at a rebel rally at the South Carolina statehouse with canisters of invisible disease tucked under their jackets. Along the state’s northern border, the Blues formed a phalanx larger than any seen during the war. Everyone in the besieged state expected an incursion, but it was in fact a quarantine. Within a month, the sickness had spread across the state, and the fiery core of the Southern rebellion had been cooled. The rest of the Free Southern State, after seeing the effects of the virus, quickly put up a quarantine wall of its own.

  By the time Gerry Tusk arrived at the government labs in Lynchburg ten years later, the war had turned in the North’s favor. And the rebel state whose induced coma turned the tide for the Blues was now a glaring embarrassment, the shame of a nation. The young virologist, still new to his work and enthusiastic, was tasked with finding a cure.

  Unlike most Americans, he would have seen the effects of “the Slow” firsthand. On the last Friday of every month, an armored convoy traveled five hours south from Lynchburg to the Carolina quarantine wall. Once across, they found themselves among the comatose.

  For his guinea pigs Tusk picked both children in whom the sickness had yet to manifest, and adults fully consumed by it. In this way he was able to test both cure and inoculation; an alchemist in search of living metal.

  Most came willingly, ushered into the isolation vehicle by soldiers in thick protective suits. The younger Carolinians, who knew full well what they would soon become, begged to be chosen. The older ones, who were by the age of thirty barely able to do anything more than breathe, eat, and breed, sometimes cursed the Northerners, but were easily compelled. And the eldest were wheeled without protest into the bus, their limbs paralyzed, stiff as stone.

  Every month, for the better part of a decade, Gerry Tusk would have taken this trip. He would have seen those children plead desperately for a cure he could not give them. Perhaps over time it turned something within him bitter.