Sarat climbed off the waste bin and approached the man. She imagined him a dignitary—one of the representatives the Free Southerners dispatched from Atlanta every now and then to gauge the mood of the refugees and spread word of recent concessions by and humiliations of the Blues. But those were different beasts; they dressed in cheap, formless shirts and wore pins in the shape of the Southern flag and stammered for hours without saying anything of value. In the eyes of the refugees, those men were little more than dull sparks launched off the gears of some distant machine.
Gaines retrieved a small yellow envelope from his breast pocket. “I have an acquaintance to whom I need this letter delivered,” he said. “His name is Leonard and he lives in row nine, tent nine, in the South Carolina sector.”
“All right,” Sarat said.
“You’re not afraid of going to South Carolina?”
“No.”
“Don’t you want to know how much I’m willing to pay?”
Sarat paused. The man chuckled. “Don’t worry, this isn’t a dare, it’s a job. Jobs pay.” He handed her the envelope. “Go on, then, let’s see how you do.”
Sarat took the envelope. On its back the name Leonard was written in impeccable cursive. She walked southeast, past the administrative buildings and in the direction of the camp’s main gate.
Like the rest of the refugees from the other states, she’d never ventured into South Carolina. She had only heard stories of it: of mean, bitter people, the last uninfected remnants of their quarantined state.
Once, years earlier, the South Carolina slice was the largest in the camp. But over the years the sector had shrunk, ceding its northern and western borders to Alabama and Georgia—because from those states there was still a regular flow of refugees, but nobody else was leaving South Carolina. The whole state was walled off, sealed.
Sarat walked past unadorned tents, their tears left for the most part unmended. A few men sat on plastic chairs, reading and playing dominoes. They observed her as she passed.
She reached her destination to find a couple of boys playing cards on a rice sack table. They were perhaps fourteen or fifteen, the one with his back to her a buzz-cut redhead, the other a spindly blond naked but for a pair of Double Star shorts.
Beyond them, and beyond the tent in the distance, the soft white lights of the camp’s main gate burned. And beyond those gates the great Southern world, its cratered cities and salt-eaten coasts and parched, blistered gut, lay waiting. It was a world that for Sarat now existed only in the fiery sermons of radio preachers and the lyrics of war songs and the bucolic pastorals of Free Southern State propaganda. It was an abstraction, an idea, nothing more.
The blond boy, when he saw Sarat approach, sprang from the mandarin-crate box on which he was seated.
“What do you want?” he said, approaching.
“I’m looking for Leonard,” Sarat replied. “Got a letter for him.”
“This ain’t your place. Leave.”
The boy was pale, as though he’d spent no time under the Southern sun. A pink streak ran from the left side of his neck down to near his belly button; Sarat could not tell whether it was a rash or some natural imperfection or the remains of burned skin. He was three or four inches shorter than she was, and at least thirty pounds lighter, his hip bones like the blades of cleavers.
“I’ll leave after I give this to Leonard,” Sarat said, holding out the letter.
“You deaf?” the boy replied. “I said get out, now.”
He came to push her, his hands landing in the space between her shoulders and her breasts. It was then that something deep within her snapped. She felt a searing inflammation, a fire in the cavities behind her eyes.
With a guttural roar she leaped for the boy, palms turned to vises around his throat. He tumbled back onto the ground and she jumped on him, his arms pinned beneath the thick planks of her shins. Her first punch landed square; the boy’s nose cracked. Sarat threw another, and another, until her limbs felt as though they were not her own. With each punch she exhaled and the exhales soon turned to screams. In the wide, blood-splattered eyes of the wiry Carolina boy she caught, for an instant, her own rabid reflection.
A moment later she was lifted, her limbs still moving but her body caught by a pair of handless arms. She was set down on the dirt by a man nearly seven feet tall and wide enough to momentarily eclipse her view of the retreating boy. She tried to scramble around the man’s legs but he held her firm, his stumps hard against her shoulders.
“Enough,” the man said. “Stay.”
Sarat tried to break from the man’s hold but could not. She turned to see his face. It was ruined, the lips gone and in their place thin slivers of brown-crusted skin, the cheeks wrinkled and charred. She saw the cavernous aperture where his right eye once was and she was hypnotized by it.
“What’s this about?” the man said.
Sarat held out the envelope. “I have to give this to Leonard,” she said.
The man took the envelope, pinned it between his wrists. “You’ve done it,” he said. “All right?”
“All right.”
She saw the boy standing behind the man, blood still running from his shifted nose. There was a wild fear in his eyes but it was not the girl he was looking at, it was the man.
“You tell Gaines something for me,” Leonard told Sarat. “Tell him there’s two families that got no one to provide for them no more.” He held up the envelope. “And this alone don’t make that right.”
“Fine,” Sarat said. She turned to leave.
“Hold on,” Leonard said. He turned to the boy.
“Did I raise a coward?” he asked.
“No sir,” the boy replied, his voice hushed and mechanical, his eyes lowered.
“Sure looks like it right now. Apologize.”
The boy stepped forward. “I’m sorry,” he said.
Sarat said nothing.
“It’s all right,” Leonard said. “You don’t have to accept it—he just has to say it.”
WHEN SHE RETURNED to the administrative buildings Sarat found Albert Gaines seated on a bench by the central office. He was reading an old paper book whose cover bore the curled scribblings of a language Sarat recognized but did not understand. There was no illustration on the cover, only a geometric pattern and swooping, saber-curved lines. The writing resembled a more elaborate version of the same script Sarat had seen a thousand times before, on the sides of the food and water containers, the aid packages, and the Red Crescent vans. The language of foreigners.
“Leonard says to tell you this don’t make up for the other two families who got nobody to provide for them,” Sarat said.
Gaines looked up from his book and smiled. “Leonard has earned his fictitious chivalry, I suppose.”
He pulled a bill from his wallet and held it out to Sarat. “As we agreed,” he said.
Sarat stared at the money. It was a Northern twenty, a genuine greenback stamped with the portrait of some long-dead president. The bill’s holograms were of an ancient, granite-columned mausoleum, its contours shimmering in the light.
“Go on, take it,” Gaines said. “I know, I know, it’s Blue money, right? Well, remember this: there’s no sin in using what’s theirs against them.”
As she reached for the bill Gaines held her wrist. She saw he was looking at the reddened, blood-marked knuckles.
“Well, I assume it wasn’t Leonard,” he said. “His boy?”
“He pushed me,” Sarat replied.
Gaines removed from his breast pocket a gray silk handkerchief and wiped the blood from Sarat’s knuckles.
“Good girl,” he said.
He released her wrist. Up close, Sarat could better see the pockmarks in his face. They put more years on him, and yet he did not look as aged nor as tired as the men who lived in the camp. There was a vibrancy about him, a burning bulb of confidence lighting his ashen blue eyes. He sat different, the spine stiff and tall. He had about him a kind of calmness that reminded he
r of her father.
“Thanks,” she said, pocketing the money. “I’ll see you around, I guess.”
She turned to leave.
“Sarat,” Gaines said. “Would you like to join me for a late dinner?”
“You got a tent here?” Sarat asked. “I thought you were one of those Free Southerners here from Atlanta.”
“I do not and I am not,” Gaines said. “But I do keep an office here, and I suspect you’ll find the few provisions I keep there, meager as they are, to be a welcome respite from the sludge they feed you in this place. Come.”
Sarat followed him to the back of the main administrative building. He unlocked a side door. Since the day she arrived at the camp, she’d only set foot in the supervisors’ offices a handful of times. It was a dim, unremarkable building, the walls painted the sickly pinkish ivory of fingernails.
They descended a staircase she’d never seen before, and past a metal door to a small basement. Here the single hallway was narrow and the concrete unpainted. At the end of the hallway was a door. Gaines unlocked it and held it open.
Sarat stepped inside. The room smelled of mahogany and citrus. Behind her, Gaines flicked the light switch.
“Make yourself at home,” he said. “It’s always a pleasure to receive visitors.”
It was a low-walled room, narrow but long, with a couple of small windows that were level with the ground outside. To her left Sarat saw a desk of thick chocolate mahogany, its legs like the bottom halves of hourglasses. On the desk was a neat stack of manila envelopes and an old teardrop-tipped fountain pen from a previous century. Next to those lay a letter opener with a golden blade.
On the wall adjacent to the desk there were a series of maps—one Sarat recognized as the Mag, another seemed to detail the Tennessee line, where so much of the worst fighting took place. The third and fourth maps were alien, covered in strange circular doodles and large painted swaths of red and blue and brown.
The two maps furthest down the wall Sarat had seen before, in a book long ago. They were maps of the whole world—one from a hundred years ago, one from today.
“Do you know where you are?” Gaines asked, standing behind her.
She pointed vaguely at the square of land on the left side of the map.
“That’s Georgia,” Gaines said. “But that’s very close.” He took her hand in his and moved it a few inches northwest.
“And do you know the places where the aid ships come from? The places that send us all those blankets and all the food that ends up in the cafeteria?”
Sarat stared at the map.
Gaines pointed first to a big mass of land on the right side of the map. “Some of it comes from China.” Then his finger moved to the center, to a country whose sprawling borders covered the northern third of one continent and the rectangular peninsula to its east. “And some of it comes from the Bouazizi Empire.”
“What’s an empire?” Sarat asked.
“An empire is when many small countries become part of one big country, willingly or otherwise,” Gaines said. “An empire is what we used to be.”
Sarat looked over at the old map, the one from a hundred years earlier. The area Gaines had pointed to was, in this map, a mess of doodled borders, some describing countries so small, their printed names overlapped. On the new map, the entire mass simply bore one word: Bouazizi.
“Back when I was your age, the people in these countries had a revolution,” Gaines said. “It failed. Then they had another one, and another, and on the fifth try, they finally won.”
He pointed to a stretch of blue that marked the boundary between the Bouazizi Empire’s northern edge and the European continent.
“If you ever stand anywhere on this shore, say in New Algiers, you’ll see fleets of ragged little boats headed southward from the European shore,” he said. “Boats full of migrants from the old Union countries, looking for better lives.
“That’s what an empire is,” he said, “an orchestrator of gravity, a sun around which all weaker things spin.”
As Sarat continued to study the map, Gaines retrieved something from a small refrigerator nearby. A moment later she was interrupted from her thoughts by the smell of toast.
“Have you ever tasted honey?” Gaines asked.
“Yeah,” Sarat replied. “They give it to us every few months with the rations. It’s fine, I guess.”
“That’s not honey. That’s mush, grown by scientists in a lab in Pearl River.”
Gaines set the toast on a plate and the plate on the table. Sarat watched him unseal a small glass jar in which sat two hexagon-gridded sheets, sunk in a caramel-colored liquid. He spooned some of the honey on the toast.
“This comes from something living,” he said. “What you get from the living you can never truly copy, you can never fake. Taste it.”
Sarat sat at the table and took a bite. Instantly the sweetness set off fireworks on her tongue. She moved the honey against the roof of her mouth and found the quieter undercurrents beneath the sugar: a slight hint of coffee, an earthiness, something faintly metallic and damp. Somewhere in the caverns of her mind awoke memories of the place where she was born: the mud banks, the hot tin box, the mouth of the Mississippi. Like a stranger to herself, she was surprised to discover she’d started softly crying.
“We forget, sometimes,” Gaines said, “that there are still beautiful things.”
He asked her where she was from.
“I was born in St. James, Louisiana,” Sarat said.
“I have always loved Louisiana,” Gaines replied. He pointed at the old map on the wall. “Do you want to know what your home state once looked like?”
Sarat nodded. She had seen it before, seen the tentacles of marsh and swamp and the boot-shaped expanse of land they’d once formed. But she wanted him to show her. She followed him to the map. He pointed to the place where Louisiana’s shattered hourglass figure brushed against the western edge of Mississippi.
“You see here, where the river meets the Gulf? That used to be land. Beautiful land. And here, near where the eastern shore is now, there used to be the loveliest city in all of America.”
The girl observed the map. On the newer one on the wall beside it, the place where the man pointed was a uniform blue.
“Where were you born?” she asked him.
“I was born in a place called Rome,” Gaines said.
“Where’s that?”
“Well, the famous one was in a place called Italy, but the one I came from is in New York.”
Sarat watched the man’s eyes for signs of a lie, but there were none. She realized then that, save for the dwindling number of journalists who showed up at the camp every now and then and who always made great effort to appear geographically neutral, she’d never met a Northerner before.
“You’re a Blue,” she said.
“I didn’t say that,” he replied. “You asked me where I was born, and I told you. Had you asked me where I call home, I would have told you something different.”
“What are you, then?” she asked.
Gaines sat at the table. “Well,” he said, “when I was young, I was a soldier. This was back when there was no Red and no Blue, just the one military of the United States of America. Then when I was through being a soldier, I studied to become a doctor, and for a while I worked as a plastic surgeon. Do you know what plastic surgery is?”
“You made people look pretty.”
Gaines laughed. “I suppose I did, in a way. I spent most of my time helping people who had been very badly burned. I specialized in repairing damaged skin.”
“You still do that now?”
“I still practice medicine, you could say. I volunteer at the field hospitals along the Tennessee line; I worked for a while near your old home in Louisiana, out by the oil fields.”
“You help rebels.”
“I help Southerners.”
“It doesn’t matter to me,” Sarat said. “My brother’s just about set to
join the Virginia Cavaliers. He thinks he’s keeping it a big secret, but I know all about it.”
“Then for his safety you shouldn’t go around telling everyone, should you?”
“I didn’t tell everyone. I told you.”
Gaines smiled. “You know, before I practiced medicine, I wanted to become a mathematician. I was obsessed with very large numbers, and the way you can use them to tell secrets. But my father was a doctor, and he wanted me to study medicine. He used to say the only truly stable profession is blood work—the work of the surgeon, the soldier, the butcher. He said all industries rise and fall but as long as there’s even a single man still alive, there will always be use for blood work. And I suppose he was right.”
“So what are you doing in Patience, then?” asked Sarat. “I’ve seen the man they bring here once a week to hand out pills; you ain’t the camp doctor.”
“No, I don’t come here to hand out pills. What I come here to do—what you could say these days is my chief occupation—is something I don’t talk about with most people. But since I’ve taken a liking to you, Sarat, and since you were so kind to make that delivery on my behalf, and since you shared the secret of your brother’s affiliation with me, I think it’s only fair that I, in turn, share a secret with you. Isn’t that right?”
“That’s right,” Sarat said instinctively.
“What I do is travel around the Southern State—sometimes to camps like this, or towns along the border where the Blues and their Birds have caused terrible carnage, and I look for special people.”
“Special how?” asked Sarat.
“Well, courageous, I suppose,” said Gaines. “But courage isn’t enough. How do I say it? Let me ask you something. Do you ever see people in this camp who’ve been hurt by the Northerners, who’ve lost their limbs or their sight or a family member?”
“Hell, most people here are like that,” said Sarat.
“That’s right. And doesn’t it make you angry to know that the ones who did that to your people got away with it?”
“I guess.”
“And don’t you wish you could do something about it?”
Sarat paused, silent.
American War Page 13
