American War

by Omar El Akkad

  The woman sat down and set a plain folder on the table.

  “Sara T. Chestnut?”

  Sarat said nothing.

  “Are you Sara Chestnut?” the woman asked again. “That’s your name, yes?”

  Sarat nodded. The woman removed from the folder three small stacks of stapled sheets.

  “Sara, my name is Gabrielle,” said the woman. “I’m a repatriation specialist with the Peace Office in Columbus. I want you to listen carefully—are you listening?—to what I’m going to tell you, because this is important. All right?”

  Sarat nodded. The woman had a singsong voice, a cadence fit for explaining things to children.

  “I’m going to ask you to read and sign these three forms,” Gabrielle said. As soon as she said it, Sarat began signing the papers.

  “Hold on, hold on, let me tell you what they are,” said the woman. “Now pay attention: the first one is a declaration from the Peace Office. It states that the government of the United States, in capturing and temporarily detaining you as a suspected insurrectionist, was acting in good faith on information from a source the government now believes was not credible. It further states that, upon review, your status has been changed to No Longer Combatant. The second form is an agreement of indemnity, covering all branches and arms of the United States government in perpetuity. The third form is a solemn declaration that you will not engage in any action, nor counsel any action, against any branch or arm of the United States government, nor any of its members or representatives.”

  Sarat looked from the woman to the forms and back. “What do you want me to do?” she asked.

  The woman leaned across the table. She took Sarat’s hands in her own. The sensation of a stranger’s bare skin on hers felt alien to Sarat. The sensation of proximity without violence felt alien.

  “Sara, the war is over,” said Gabrielle. “You’re going home.”

  She heard the words, but they failed to register in her mind. Three times the woman repeated herself, until finally Sarat pushed her hands off and retreated from her chair to the corner of the room. There she knelt into a fetal ball and would not look at the woman or listen to anything else she had to say. Soon Gabrielle, exasperated, left the room, and the guards came in and dragged Sarat back to her cell.

  A few days later they returned and took her again. But this time it was not to one of the Visitation buildings, but to the airstrip. There she was made to board a small plane alongside a group of fourteen women. The women looked haggard and disoriented in the glare of the early morning sun, and said nothing to one another as they boarded the plane.

  Soon they were flying. From her small porthole window, Sarat peered out at the vast expanse of glittering blue surrounding the place that had been her prison. Her eyes badly damaged, she had trouble making out the geography over which the small plane flew. But she knew exactly what it was: the lapping Florida Sea, its bed thick with carpets of sea grass and schools of blind lionfish. It was real even though she could not see it clearly, and would remain real even if every last pair of eyes in the world went blind.

  The plane crossed the sea and descended upon the mainland. Sarat was coming home.

  Excerpted from:

  FOUND CAUSE: DIARY OF A FORMER SOUTHERN RECRUITER

  Some of the other ones would try all kinds of silliness. I knew one who would take them out to the middle of nowhere in the dead of the night and have them lie in open graves. He’d tell them, “This is where you’re going to end up, trapped forever in a black hole in the ground, unless you fight for the cause of your people. The Lord takes good care of those who fight for the cause of their people.” And that sort of thing was just fine if you were trying to get some burnout from the southern coast to put on a farmer’s suit, but a lot of the smarter ones saw right through it.

  What I found worked best was a lie slipped in with the truth. What I’d do is tell them about all sorts of terrible things the Blues had done—show them pictures of the victims from the firebombing of Burleson, the massacre at Patience, things like that. But along with those things, I’d tell them about the slaughter at Pleasant Ridge. Now the funny thing is, not once, in all my years working for the rebel South, did any recruit bother to find out if there had ever been a slaughter at Pleasant Ridge. They just assumed it to be true. The Blues had done so much to our people, why couldn’t they have done that too? After a while, even I couldn’t remember if there had been a slaughter at Pleasant Ridge.

  That’s what made it so easy to lie later on too, when the Blue surge came and they rounded us all up for interrogation. They wanted names and crimes and we gave them both in droves. One guy I knew just listed off everyone who worked on his old block. A week later the incursion force went and rounded up a bunch of accountants and butchers and grocery store clerks.

  Eventually, it got to be that the Blues had so much unreliable information on their hands, they had to let all those people go. But it was like a snake eating its own tail—by the time they got around to emptying those detention camps, they’d already turned most of the people there into exactly what they’d needed them to be in the first place. I always said the camps at Sugarloaf were the best recruiters the South ever had.

  IV

  January, 2095

  Lincolnton, Georgia

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I remember the day I first met her, the day she invaded my life.

  There was an iron gate that bordered our property, its entrance at the crossroads where the road met the winding driveway that led to the house. My mother had the gate built after she found out she was pregnant. She also paid the contractors to add another foot of concrete to the seawall. She even had them put in a smaller picket fence around the house itself, a moat that split us from the greenhouses and the rest of the property. My father said it was overkill; babies aren’t made of glass. But my mother, who had once given up hope of ever having a child of her own, insisted. My father said some nights she used to stay up till sunrise, imagining all the ways that fate and the devil conspired to take her only child.

  The two arms of the gate were decorated with twisting, curling bars that, when the gate closed and the two arms met, formed a metal outline of a pineapple. Near the entrance stood an old-fashioned mailbox, an antique from the days of government mail. A decorative wooden plaque atop the mailbox read: “Karina and Simon Chestnut.”

  Once, when my father was in his clouded place, he forgot to hit the clicker as the car approached the gate, and accidentally drove right into it. There wasn’t much damage—he never drove very fast—and none of us were hurt, but my mother asked him not to take the car out again after that. Most days he was fine, and in regular conversation you’d never be able to guess the damage that had been done to him. But my mother said you just couldn’t tell when the clouds would come over him and he’d retract from the world. Even a pristine mind can fog over, let alone one hurt that way. You just couldn’t tell.

  There was a buzzer in the grand room downstairs that went off whenever the gate opened. My mother, sick of the sharp sound it made, had recently ordered it altered to emit a prettier ring, two soft chimes followed by a faint rustling, like the sound of leaves in a breeze. On the night the stranger arrived, I heard the chimes; I climbed out of bed and ran downstairs.

  My father was standing on the front steps. At the foot of our home, the driveway ended in a circle around my mother’s rose garden. The roses were a pale pink. It was said by many a visitor that no such flower grew anywhere else in the South; the magic that encircled the Chestnuts’ place sustained them.

  I stood near my father and watched the car approach. It was the middle of winter. I was six years old. I still remember.

  “You should be in bed,” my father said. “You’ll give your mother trouble tomorrow if you don’t get your sleep.”

  But I pleaded, and he was too distracted by the looming car and our new guest to argue. I hid behind his leg and peered out, fascinated by the arrival of this strange
r about whom my parents had argued for weeks.

  The car pulled up to the house. The asphalt was newly laid and the wheels crunched against it. When my mother came out of the car she looked exhausted.

  I’d seen her this way before—the previous winter, when Zenith came through and devastated the greenhouses. The house, made of fine red brick, withstood the storm, but throughout the property there were shards of glass, solar panels twisted and cracked. For five days straight she worked with the laborers to repair the damage. I remember seeing that drained look on her face. It was in those moments when I think she secretly wished my father was well enough to help her, that his mind was healed enough not just to carry on pleasant conversation, but to hold important things in memory, to keep from wandering to his clouded place. Sometimes, when I refused to go to bed or played in the parts of the yard that were off-limits, my mother would yell at me. It felt then like she was yelling twice at the same time, once for whatever I’d done and again because she was mad that it was always her who had to do the yelling.

  The passenger door opened and from the car unfurled a huge, hunched body. The enormity of it blocked out the light from the driveway lamp and for a moment all I saw of her was a limbed wall of blackness.

  “Welcome home, Sarat,” my mother said.

  The stranger moved slowly out of the light. My father descended the porch steps. He looked confused, his eyes squinting as though he were trying to focus on a very faraway thing.

  “For God’s sake, Simon,” said my mother. “Don’t you remember your own sister? Come here and give her a hug.”

  My father stepped forward and hugged her; she tightened up at the feel of his arms around her, and did not reciprocate. When he pulled away from her my father had tears in his eyes but the stranger looked at him in a way I’d never seen before. There was a kind of vicious longing in her eyes, a recollection of something once tender, now poisoned. She looked at him as though he were a plaster mask of her own face, cast before the onset of some great deformity.

  I ran in for a closer look at our visitor. I hid behind my mother’s skirt.

  “Benjamin, this is Sarat,” she said, pulling me out from behind her. “This is your aunt.”

  I stared at the towering woman, dumbstruck. I had seen a picture of her once. In the picture she must have been a teenager, lean and bald-headed, a menacing smile on her face. But what stood in our driveway bore almost no resemblance to that image. This woman was fat, her gut pressed against her dirty gray shirt. But it was more than that. All of her seemed oversized—her limbs trunklike, her nose flattened and wide.

  She looked old; I’d been told she was my father’s younger sister—she was not even thirty years old—but she looked older than him; older than my mother, even. As a child I imagined there were only three ages anyone could be—young like me, old like my parents, or very old like my grandparents in the North or the women in black dresses who came to see my father. But this woman was none of these things.

  My mother ushered me toward our guest. I waited for her to lift me—to hug me and pinch my cheeks the way all our visitors did. Rarely did anyone come by the house without a present for me. The very old women in the black dresses—who called me the miracle of the miracle—would often take me aside and give me crisp hundred-dollar bills. But this visitor did nothing. Not knowing how to respond, I hugged her leg.

  She stood motionless. I felt my mother lift me up.

  “It’s past his bedtime,” she said. “I’m gonna take him upstairs. Come in, Sarat, come in.”

  Our guest looked at the house as though it were made of thorns.

  “Whose is this?” she asked.

  “It’s ours, Sarat,” said my mother. “It’s yours. We tore the old one down a few years ago when things got better, after…” She paused. “Come on in.”

  But she was looking elsewhere, to the eastern edge of the property, where the seawall curled south past three greenhouses and the broken old shed.

  “Why’s that wall there?” she asked.

  “The levee? We put that in around ’91,” my mother said. “Used to be the river would flood and wreck the greenhouses three, four times a year.”

  “The river don’t run that way,” our guest said. “That’s land for another ten miles. I used to walk out there.”

  “Sarat, the river moves,” said my mother. “It ate all that land a long time ago.”

  I thought I caught a twinge flash across her face, but quickly it was gone.

  She seemed to dismiss our home entirely. Everyone always said there was no finer piece of property in all of northern Georgia than the Chestnuts’ place. But she barely noticed it at all.

  “We got a room for you all ready,” said my father. “It’s a nice room.” He looked to my mother, who nodded.

  “That’s right, a nice room,” my mother said. “I think you’ll like it, Sarat. It has a view of the river, just like your old room did.”

  Our guest seemed to retract slightly at the mention of the river, as though some primal mechanism of defense deep within her had been triggered. I had no idea then of what water had done to her.

  She pointed at the old shed. “I’ll stay in there,” she said.

  “Sarat,” my mother pleaded, “there’s nothing in there but old glass panels and leftover wood. Come inside.”

  “I’ll be fine in there.”

  I saw my mother look at my father, who seemed not to find our visitor’s request at all unreasonable. I wondered if he even heard what she said, or if he had drifted to his clouded place.

  “All right, Sarat,” my mother said, “wherever you’re most comfortable. We’ll bring the spare bed out from the basement, and some sheets.”

  “No,” she said. “It’s fine as it is.” And then she was walking past the rosebush to the shed I’d only ever seen the gardener use to store his mower.

  I watched her move. She shuffled on stiff knees, the soles of the feet barely lifting. She reminded me of my pet turtle, every step a pained, deliberate undertaking. I wanted to stay up all night and see whether she would really sleep in that leaning, weathered shed, but my mother ordered me back to bed.

  My bedroom faced the rose garden and the driveway. The eastern side of the house obstructed my view of the shed. My bedroom window, which my mother always kept locked, made faint the humming of the solar panels and the sound of the river.

  But I lay awake in the dark, listening. Not long after our guest disappeared into the shed, there came from the place a loud cracking noise, like the structure itself was coming undone.

  Eventually I heard my parents whisper-arguing about it. I couldn’t make out any of the words, but I could always tell when they argued—it was something in the sharpness of the sounds, but only the ones from my mother’s mouth. I’d never known my father to be anything but tranquil, his keel perfectly even no matter the situation. The way other grown-ups treated him—alternating between overt gestures of sympathy and barely suppressed impatience—made it seem as though he was not supposed to be this way, that there was a fault, a failing deep within the workings of him. But in my eyes he was simply kind.

  I heard my mother go down the stairs. I heard the front door open and close.

  MANY YEARS LATER, when her letter led me to the place of her buried memories and I read the pages she left behind, I learned all about the moments that filled in the blanks between those things I’d witnessed with my own eyes. And by the time I was done reading, I’d learned every last secret my aunt had to give. Some people are born sentenced to terrible inheritance, diseases that lay dormant in the blood from birth. My sentence was to know, to understand.

  MY MOTHER WENT to the shed. Inside she found our visitor tearing the floorboards from the ground.

  “What are you doing, Sarat?”

  “I want to sleep on the soil,” she said. “Go back inside, Karina.”

  “All right, that’s fine,” my mother said. “You want some help? I think we have a crowbar or something
in one of the greenhouses.”

  “I’m fine—go back inside.”

  My mother ran her finger along the underside of the upturned planks resting against the wall. The wood was filthy and bleached a faint green from years pressed against the soil.

  “You remember back when you first hired me to take care of the old house?” my mother said. “You sat me down and you went through this long list you’d written of all the things I couldn’t do: ‘Don’t go near the shed, don’t go near the cellar, don’t open the boxes those boys on the boats deliver, don’t wake Miss Dana when she’s sleep…’ ”

  My mother paused. “Anyway, I remember when you were finally done, I didn’t know if there was anything left for me to do. Only thing you never said not to do was take care of that brother of yours. Guess I’ve been doing that ever since.”

  Our guest looked up from where she knelt on the floor. “How much of him is left?”

  “You don’t have to say it that way, Sarat.”

  “How much of him is left?”

  “He has plenty of good days,” my mother said. “He has plenty of really good days, when you wouldn’t even know it. Sometimes he gets lost in himself a little, sometimes he has trouble remembering new things, a few times he’ll forget old things. But he’s not…he’s good.”

  Our guest stared at my mother, unflinching. Then she returned to ripping the boards from the floor.

  WHEN I WOKE the next morning she was still in her shed. I sat on the steps of the kitchen door and waited for her to come out, half-convinced the image of her in my head from the night before was the doing of some strange dream. Inside, my mother and father sat at the counter.

  “It’s coming up on noon,” my mother said.

  “Just let her sleep, Karina,” my father replied. “It’s her first night out of that place in seven years.”