American War

by Omar El Akkad

  SEN. AIKENS: So the two soldiers at the Rossville checkpoint would have known ahead of time that this bus was to be allowed through?

  COL. SINGER: They would have known it was an authorized vehicle, but we would never tell our soldiers to simply let a vehicle through. They would have known they would be expected to inspect the vehicle and check the paperwork of every passenger. Same as they would with anyone trying to come north from the Red.

  SEN. AIKENS: So if we can go ahead and skip to the point where the passengers disembark…yes, thank you. Now at this point, one of the two young men—Private Martin Baker, I believe—is still inside the guard building. So what we have here is his brother, Bud Baker Jr., essentially ordering the passengers to line up for individual inspection. Is that correct, Colonel?

  COL. SINGER: Yes ma’am. Again, standard procedure.

  SEN. AIKENS: Now I see that, with the first two patients in line, Private Bud Jr. is perhaps a bit curt, but those interactions take just a minute or two. When he sees the third patient, however, I think it’s fairly evident that his demeanor changes, wouldn’t you say?

  COL. SINGER: I suppose.

  SEN. AIKENS: Any idea why?

  COL. SINGER: Could be the size of the individual. You can see she appears to be a fairly intimidating woman, from a physical standpoint. Could be because she appears to be much younger than the first two people in line. Could be she reminded him of someone, or he thought he’d seen her before. Could be he just got a bad vibe from her—an instinctual thing.

  SEN. AIKENS: So the young man who wheels her forward, he hands the travel permits to the Private for inspection. And now—if we can just pause it here—Colonel, can you tell me what the Private is saying here?

  COL. SINGER: He’s asking her what her illness is.

  SEN. AIKENS: He didn’t do that with the first two patients.

  COL. SINGER: No ma’am.

  SEN. AIKENS: And her reply?

  COL. SINGER: The way she’s facing, the overhead doesn’t catch her face.

  SEN. AIKENS: But is it a fair assessment, Colonel, to say that the Private doesn’t believe her?

  COL. SINGER: I couldn’t tell you. Obviously he doesn’t just let her pass.

  SEN. AIKENS: That’s right. He orders her to stand up.

  COL. SINGER: That’s what the lip readers tell me.

  SEN. AIKENS: And when the young man pushing her wheelchair interjects, the Private doesn’t hesitate to raise his rifle at him and order him to his knees.

  COL. SINGER: Senator, you’re talking about two boys who were bound and blindfolded and made to sit there while a Red insurrectionist—one who was never captured—tortured and killed their father. You’re talking about two boys who lied about their age on the recruitment form so they could get out to the front, two boys who’d only been stationed at that crossing a few weeks. Obviously this isn’t the way we train our border guards to perform inspections. Maybe he was having a bad day. Unfortunately we’ll never know, given that, by the end of the week, everyone you see on that screen was dead.

  SEN. AIKENS: That’s not what confuses me, Colonel. If we could move ahead…so he turns back to this woman in the wheelchair, and it’s safe to say he orders her to stand up once more. And when she doesn’t, he kicks her chair over, sending her to the ground near where that young man is kneeling. Now he’s got the rifle pointed at the two of them, and I would expect at this point that, at the very least, he’s going to detain these two, if not the other ten patients as well. You stop the video right here and ask me what’s going to happen next, and I would bet my bottom dollar that nobody’s going to cross the border that day.

  COL. SINGER: I suppose.

  SEN. AIKENS: But then the other soldier, Private Martin Baker, comes out from the guard building. And he immediately lowers his brother’s rifle, tries to defuse the situation, correct?

  COL. SINGER: It appears so.

  SEN. AIKENS: And then he looks at the medical permit—the same one his brother just inspected—and he looks at the young woman on the ground and the young man on his knees beside her. But he doesn’t detain them, he doesn’t interrogate them. He…well, I would go so far as to say he takes pity on them. He tells his brother to let them through. To let the whole convoy through.

  COL. SINGER: Yes ma’am.

  SEN. AIKENS: In fact, if my briefing notes are correct, I believe nobody else in line even had their paperwork checked after that. The guards simply ordered them back on the bus and let the bus through. If indeed the person responsible for the Reunification Plague was anywhere further back in line, he or she wouldn’t have even gotten a once-over, is that correct?

  COL. SINGER: Yes ma’am.

  SEN. AIKENS: And that’s what confounds me, Colonel. Here you have these two young soldiers. Both of them having suffered the horrific experience of witnessing their father killed by insurrectionists. Both of them, as you put it, “wired for kinetics.” And yet one seems ready to shoot two of the patients and the other helps them back to their feet and waves everyone through. Don’t you find that at least a little perplexing?

  COL. SINGER: I’m not sure, ma’am.

  SEN. AIKENS: I mean, I read the military records that survive, Colonel, and both these boys, in just a few weeks on the job, had been reprimanded numerous times for mistreating Southerners at that crossing, and this was at a time when hardly anybody was crossing at all. Obviously they joined the military because they were hell-bent on revenge against the people they held responsible for the killing of their father. And yet on this day, of all days, Private Martin Baker decides to show compassion. If indeed your hunch is correct, and in watching this video we are in fact watching whoever unleashed that terrible illness on our country, can you imagine how many millions of lives would have been saved if he hadn’t?

  COL. SINGER: Neither of these boys knew that millions of lives were at stake, Senator. At the time, the Tennessee line had been quiet for the better part of a year. The Reunification Ceremony was just a couple of days away. All those two boys would have seen on that day was a busful of sick people headed north for treatment.

  SEN. AIKENS: A busful of Southerners.

  COL. SINGER: Maybe so, Senator. But I don’t think it would be unreasonable to expect that, in some circumstances, even someone hell-bent on revenge might find a temporary capacity for kindness.

  SEN. AIKENS: No, Colonel. I suppose it wouldn’t.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Five times in the first four years, I tried to escape. I tried to bribe the same smuggler who’d brought me here to take me back, to leave me anywhere along the western coast. When that failed I tried to go by land, and when the border guards brought me back to the orphanage for the third time, they said child or not, the next time they’d shoot me.

  I knew my parents were dead. But that didn’t stop me from inventing soothing fantasies—maybe they’d survived, maybe the plague never came to our home, maybe she’d done for them what she’d done for me. I tried to believe it, though I knew it wasn’t true.

  BY THE TIME I was sixteen, I was working as a dockhand in New Anchorage. There was plenty of money to be had working alongside especially reckless captains on salvage trips to the barrier reefs.

  Sometimes on my days off I stood at the same docks alongside the mob, cursing the newest refugees. By then the plague was starting to subside on the mainland, and most of the smugglers refused to ferry any more survivors northward, for fear of contracting the illness themselves. But a couple still ran quarantine houses near the California coast; anyone who lived a week in isolation without showing symptoms was deemed safe enough to travel.

  Nativism being a pyramid scheme, I found myself contemptuous of the refugees’ presence in a city already overburdened. At the foot of the docks, we yelled at them to go home, even though we knew home to be a pestilence field. We carried signs calling them terrorists and criminals and we vandalized the homes that would take them in. It made me feel good to do it, it made me feel rooted;
their unbelonging was proof of my belonging.

  On my eighteenth birthday, I came back to the dockhands’ dorm to find an envelope passed underneath my door. The paper inside was old and yellowing. It was a letter.

  Dear Benjamin,

  There are things I want you to know, things that are your right to know.

  When I first came to your home, I was empty. I believed there was nothing good in the world. Then I met you, and I learned I was wrong. The time we spent in the river together made me remember what it was like to feel joy.

  I told you once that a well-set bone grows stronger. The opposite is also true.

  I wish we could have met each other when we were both still children. I think we would have been best friends. I wish you could have seen my old home, our big brown sea, and the pirate ship your father built from clapboard. I wish you could have met your grandparents, who were good and honest people and would have loved you very much. You come from a long line of good hearts.

  More than anything, I hope you have a good life in your new home, and that despite how I wronged you, you find happiness. I loved you.

  Sarat

  30727-83161

  I tossed the letter into an old shoebox. I didn’t look at it again for almost forty years.

  TIME PASSED. I went to school and earned a degree in history. It seemed preordained that I should spend my professional life studying the civil war. By the time the plague ended, the country was in a ruinous state, and so many of the source materials on which a historian might rely to piece together the past were lost forever. But that did not dissuade me, and I pursued with rabid stubbornness every document, every long-forgotten archive, the testimony of every survivor. My colleagues, who knew nothing about my past, never found my tenacity particularly unusual; it seemed a natural part of scholarly life to go chasing after questions for which no truly satisfying answers exist.

  One day I was traveling back from a speaking engagement in Georgia. The passengers boarded the airplane and we sat waiting in our seats on the tarmac as the panels on the wings soaked up a little more energy from the sun. I was watching the monitor on the seat in front of me. It showed a map of the continent, the plane’s flight path, and the numbered coordinates that marked our location on the earth.

  Suddenly I realized the meaning of the numbers at the end of Sarat’s letter.

  As soon as I arrived back home, I rummaged through the storage boxes in the garage until I found it. The next day I flew back south. I went to the place they marked.

  It was the destitute southernmost country, near the shore of the Florida Sea. Even with the car’s air conditioner on high, the heat was overpowering. I drove past dust farms and shack-towns, places riddled with postwar poverty and the occasional three-star flag hanging limp from trailer-side posts—reminders that in so much of the Red, the war stopped but the war never ended.

  I arrived at a small farmhouse with no farm, only a large dirt parcel out front and a barren lake bed out back. There was a man on the front porch, cleaning sand from the gutters. He was younger than me, I was sure of it, but years of unmerciful sun had aged his skin considerably.

  “What can I do for you?” he asked as I walked up the driveway.

  “I’m not sure, to be honest,” I said. “I had…I had these directions. But I don’t know—if you don’t mind me asking, have you lived here a long time? I mean, before the plague?”

  His mild cheerfulness suddenly turned to suspicion, and I regretted bringing up the Reunification Plague in a part of the country where brash young men still wear shirts bearing stylized, blacked-out profiles of Julia Templestowe’s head.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Benjamin Chestnut.”

  “Well goddamn,” he said. “All these years I thought Mama was out of her mind. Come in, come in.”

  He led me into the house. In the living room, an old woman was seated on a decrepit couch, listening to old love songs. She was frail and thin, a wheelchair parked by her side.

  “Mama, you got a visitor,” the man said. “It’s the one you talked about all those years. This is Benjamin Chestnut.”

  For a moment she eyed me as though I were an apparition. She covered her face with her hands.

  “I was sure I’d die before you came,” she said.

  The old woman sent her son to fetch us drinks and called me to sit next to her on the couch. She touched my face as though she knew me. But I didn’t recognize her at all.

  “It’s there,” she said. “I can see it. It’s faint, but you got some of her in you.”

  “I’m not going to lie to you,” I said. “I don’t know who you are, and I don’t know why I’m here.”

  She laughed. “I think that’s the way she wanted it.”

  The old woman shook my hand. “My name is Layla Denomme Jr.,” she said. “I knew your aunt Sarat, a very long time ago. She used to come by the bar my mother ran in the old Augusta port, back before you were born.”

  Her son returned with a pitcher of lemonade. “I’m sorry for what I said all those years, Mama,” he said. “You were right, I guess.”

  She shooed him away. “C’mon,” she said to me. “Might as well show you what you’re here for.”

  Her son tried to help her up but she told him to go back outside and clean the gutters. She picked a walking stick off of her wheelchair and motioned me to follow her out the kitchen door.

  We came to a storm shelter built into the ground. The wood on the door had once been painted red, but had flaked away now to almost nothing. A padlock held the doors in place. The old woman wore a necklace on which hung the key. She gave it to me.

  “Go on, then,” she said. “They’re your property, now. She willed them to you.”

  I opened the door. Sunlight flooded the storm shelter. I saw my aunt’s old paper diaries stacked neatly on the ground below.

  “There are two dozen of them in all,” the old woman said. “I gave her my word that I wouldn’t lose them, and I wouldn’t read them. And on both counts I kept my word.”

  I stared at the books. A memory of them slathered in dirt within my mother’s greenhouse suddenly came up like nausea. I was afraid I’d be sick where I stood.

  “All these years, you held on to them,” I said.

  “That’s right,” the old woman replied.

  “Why? Why would you help her like that, and for so long?”

  “Why?” she echoed, bemused. “Because it was the right thing to do.” She chuckled. “Sarat told me you were a sweet boy, Benjamin, but you must understand that in this part of the world, right and wrong ain’t about who wins, or who kills who. In this part of the world, right and wrong ain’t even about right and wrong. It’s about what you do for your own.”

  She pointed to the west, out past the end of the property, where a few shacks and broken stables pockmarked an otherwise lifeless land. Dust swirled like cursive script under the sun.

  “You know, three of the Georgia delegates to the Reunification Ceremony were from these parts,” she said. “A few days after they came home, half the town was sick. That’s why you don’t see much of anything round here these days: plague came through and killed more people here than just about anywhere else in the South outside Atlanta.”

  She tapped the storm shelter door with her walking stick. “We lived in that little hole, Billy’s father and I, for eighteen months,” she said. “Lived off canned food, relieved ourselves in a little makeshift bucket we carried out once a week in the dead of night. Almost two whole years like that, until there were too many dead here for the sickness to keep moving.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “That must have been hell.”

  “That’s right,” the old woman replied. “And we were the only ones from around here who survived, because we were the only ones who drove to every store from here to three towns over, buying every last can of beans and bottle of water we could find; preparing for it.”

  It took me a moment to realize what sh
e meant.

  “Even a cruel favor is still a favor,” the old woman said, “and I repay what I owe. But now you have to take this burden from me. A woman can’t die in peace, carrying a secret that big.”

  THAT WINTER, I rented a small cabin by the lake in Nelchina. It was there I read the diaries, and it was there I wrote this.

  During that winter I learned about the place where the Chestnuts first lived. I learned how my grandmother and my father and my aunts had fled their home. I learned what the women in black had meant when they said my father had been tested in Patience.

  And I learned what had been done to her and what she’d done. In Patience, in Halfway Branch, in that floating prison in the Florida Sea. I learned about the day they’d drowned her, and the day that strange foreign man came to our farm and offered her the means to drown them back.

  By the time I’d finished reading, there were no more means of escape, no more means of delusion. Laid bare on the page was the truth of it: she was not some accessory or accomplice. It was her that did it.

  That was her last act of cowardice, all those decades later: forcing me to understand her, forcing me to choose what to do with the secret.

  So I chose.

  On the day I had finally taken from them all there was to take, I piled the diaries in a pyre and set them ablaze. If I had wanted to, I could have sold them for a criminal sum to one of the many wealthy history buffs who collect civil war memorabilia. I could have donated them anonymously to a museum, or to the Civil War Archive Project or to the Committee for Truth and Reunification. But I couldn’t keep myself from burning them. It was the only way I had left to hurt her.

  SHE’S ALMOST GONE from me now. I’ve lived to be older than she was, older than my parents. But sometimes I still think about what she must have seen in the days after she gave me away, when she finally set foot in the Blue country.

  On her way to Columbus she would have driven along the great Sunbelt highway, the road glimmering like a sheet of diamonds—past metropolises packed with the children and grandchildren of the original inland pilgrims. She would have seen the huge looming billboards commemorating Reunification, some of them vandalized with graffiti—the letters “KAR” painted big and blue—by angry Northerners who still believed the South was getting away with it all too easy.