by Ellen Datlow
“Where’s he taking Harriet?” asked Gary. “The man with the raincoat and hat. Where?”
“Shhh,” said Imsa. “Every ghost story is your own.”
“Where’s he taking her?” he repeated.
“To find out,” said Sami, and their high, light laughter became the music of the jeweled wren.
The Air, the Ocean, the Earth, the Deep
Siobhan Carroll
The call came through at five a.m. A UN cargo plane had landed at LaGuardia. Airport officials had found four stowaways on board: three men, one woman, all from the Congo. ICE had sent two of them to Rosendale. The other two had been sent somewhere else, and no one was sure where. Andre had the A-numbers for the Rosendale pair, but he couldn’t take them. Could she?
Dasha dressed herself in the dark, moving quietly so not to wake Alex. She’d forgotten to dry-clean her blue suit; she’d better go with the black even though she hated it. If the trains were in order she could visit Rosendale and still be back for the court session at two p.m.
The kitchen television shadowed her as she brewed her coffee. The news was the usual horror show: highway blockades in Mexico, famine in the Far East, a cyclone in the Mediterranean. Rumors of a new illness emerging in Indianapolis, delivered by a blond man who couldn’t seem to stop smiling at the camera. The newscaster cut to blurred footage of an emergency room, a man yelling and pointing at nothing. Dasha turned down the volume.
• • •
Like most detention centers, Rosendale was deliberately nondescript. A former warehouse, it squatted in the middle of a near-empty parking lot, its bricked-up windows staring nowhere. Only the obscure sign above the door, CCA ENTRANCE, indicated its function to those “in the know.”
The waiting room was quiet today. An elderly man sat in the corner with his face in pale, manicured hands. A dark-skinned woman absently twisted the straps of her shoulder bag into a tight rope. The two children beside her chattered and clapped their hands as though in a playground.
The little girl leaned forward and grinned at Dasha as she sat down. “The man’s very slow today,” she said in carefully practiced English. “Is because he’s sick!”
Dasha glanced up at the guard behind the counter. The man looked ashen. She took her hands off the armrests and folded them in her lap, trying not to remember the flashes of video from the news. Beside her, the children launched into a new clapping game.
“Nkuyu climb out of the ocean,
nkuyu climb down through the air,
nkuyu crawl out from the corners.
which corners?
Right there!”
At the final “there” the girl pointed her hand at the front of the room, her brother at the corner. They both collapsed in laughter.
“Sirko?”
Dasha walked to the counter. Up close, the guard looked worse, his damp skin a bruise of unpleasant colors. He coughed into his sleeve as he checked the ID Dasha held up to the window. She also held up the two A-numbers—alien registration numbers—that substituted for her clients’ names, but he barely gave those a glance.
“Nasty cough,” Dasha offered. “They going to let you go home early?”
“Everyone’s goddamn sick,” the guard rasped. He jerked his head at the door. “You’re up.”
Dasha tried not to breathe during the pat down, even though the guard conducting the screening didn’t look sick. Was it her imagination or did Rosendale’s air have a strange feel to it? It strained through her lungs like syrup.
This isn’t helping, she told herself. Despite her weariness, she could feel the old anxiety rising in her, the fear that she wasn’t good enough. That had been the worst part in the early days: the thought that people might die because of her, because of a mistake she made. She’d learned to tamp those thoughts down. They didn’t help anyone.
She took a slow, deep breath, and turned to the files the guard had handed back to her, with a map of the Congo taped to the inside of the folder. A few years ago Dasha had had only a few Congolese clients. Then came the contested election, the rise of the militant DARP party, the gang rapes, the murders. Torture was common, and she wondered whether her clients would be among those affected. She felt a surge of anxiety and reminded herself that, if tortured, their cases would be easier to win.
But the first A-number she saw was Elie, a healthy-looking twenty-something with a tribal tattoo on his face and a good command of English. She ran through the obligatory public questions first—Do you need a lawyer? Do you want to fight your case or do you want to go home?—before she signaled to the guard and got an answering nod. They could move to the private interview room.
“Where did you learn English?” she asked when they got to that portion of the interview. She felt herself yawning and masked it with her hand. She was exhausted; too many late nights spent on too many cases, but Elie needed her help. They all did.
“College,” he replied. Like Dasha, he kept his hands on the table between them, and did not turn toward the rattling cough from the next room. A composed young man. That might count against him. “My father made money to send me to medical school in Bukavu. I was the first in my family to go.” He added, “I learned from tapes,” his gaze steady, his tone proud.
Dasha nodded, thinking. Good English was an asset at the interview stage but a detriment in court, where judges might suspect fluent speakers of being “economic” migrants. She looked down at her legal pad and moved to the next item on the list. “Why did you come here?”
“Political persecution.” Elie’s answer was ready, practiced. A good sign: such clients often came prepared, and might have brought documents with them. “I went into the party d’opposition in my college. GATO. I was at demonstrations. So, in October, two men in uniforms went to my friend’s house. They threw down my friend’s table, put his son’s hand under their boots. They asked him where I was. He lied and said I was at the market.”
Elie shook his head. “My friend’s cousin ran to the lieu de rendez-vous. He said, they come and they will bathe you.” He gestured helplessly to Dasha. “You know this?”
Dasha nodded, keeping her face blank. Where South Africa had “necklacing,” the DARP regions had “bathing,” in which targets were drenched in boiling pitch or gasoline, then set on fire. “I know this.”
She glanced at the developing case on her pad. “Do you have documents that prove you were a member of the opposition? A membership card? A photo of you at a demonstration? Letters you wrote to anyone that describe the situation you were in at the time?”
Elie drew out a faded newspaper and slid it across the table.
“Here,” he said, and tapped the column halfway down. Elie’s name was there, listed as a “supporter of the people” along with other members of GATO. Elie leaned back and pointed to the first name in the list. “This one,” he said. “He is dead now.”
Dasha glanced at her watch. Their fifteen minutes were up.
“I think you have a good case,” she told him. “But that does not mean we will win.”
“Please,” he said to her as she stood to leave. “Please, we must get out of here. There is a nkuyu in this place. A sickness. Kakengo has seen it.”
“Kakengo?”
“He was with me on the plane. He is also from the DRC.”
Dasha wrote Kakengo’s name—with a question mark—next to her next A-number. “I’ll see what I can do,” she said.
She caught herself yawning again on the way out the door. It was too early in the day to feel this tired, but the thick air of the center weighed her down. She slapped herself on the cheek, trying to sting herself awake, and rechecked her list of asylum seekers.
From the moment Dasha saw Kakengo she knew his case would be both easier and harder. The young man’s first action was to stick out his tongue, surprisingly pale in his dark face, and show her the split down the middle.
Dasha felt a pain in her hands and she forced her fingers out of their reflexive curl. She
folded them in front of her so that Kakengo could not see the bloody half moons forming on her palms. Keeping her face relaxed, she made a mental note—physical evidence of mutilation. But there was always the possibility the prosecutor would claim he’d done it himself, to build his case for asylum.
In the humid interview room, she ran through the Holy Trinity of questions: Is this your first time in the US? How did you get here? Why did you come here? Kakengo huddled in his seat, a thin man whose clothes sagged around him as though he were slowly melting into the ground. The first question he answered with a vigorous nod, but the other two proved more difficult. Kakengo struggled with the pen the guard had given him, scratching out simple words in French. Mal. Homme. DARP. Tué.
“Are you claiming political persecution?” She used the English phrase. His eyes widened and he nodded. Elie had evidently been coaching him. That could be helpful, providing Elie’s coaching hadn’t introduced errors into the story.
She extracted a few more details, and told Kakengo, in French, that he needed to gather what evidence he could. Kakengo’s case could be tricky; his mutilation supported his story, but he needed documents, and like many asylum seekers he had fled without them. He still had a sister in the DRC, he indicated. She told him they needed to contact his sister to see if she could gather documents for him. Kakengo’s face looked blank at the thought, whether in hope or hopelessness she wasn’t sure.
As Dasha got up to leave, Kakengo motioned behind him. Emphatically, he drew a stick figure on the piece of paper and then scribbled on it, a black scoring that obscured the figure and formed its own black cloud. He stabbed the pen into the page and looked meaningfully at her.
“I don’t understand,” she told him. “Is this a cloud? Gas?” She thought unaccountably of the thick air around her, the humidity damping her clothes. Kakengo shook his head.
“Une personne disparue? Une personne décédée?” At the latter Kakengo nodded and then, strangely, looked over his shoulder.
Dasha followed his gaze to the cinder block wall that stretched over them. “Someone you left behind?” she guessed.
At this he glared at her and scribbled another few lines on the page. Black lines. Meaningless.
The guard rapped on the door. They were out of time.
“I’ll be back,” she promised him. As Kakengo seemed intent on pushing the paper with the scored-out figure toward her, she took it and added it to her notes. And then she left him in the silent room, and headed out.
• • •
On the train ride home she reviewed that week’s cases: the Guatemalan woman who’d fled an abusive husband and the violence of the Maya district with her three children, the Bangladeshi climate refugees, and the Congolese. She wasn’t sure what to make of Kakengo’s scribble. A killing? Would it help the case or confuse it?
Dasha closed her eyes for a moment, and leaned against the thrumming window. And just then, she felt it. Someone breathing in her ear.
She jerked around. Nothing. Just stained fabric of the train seat, and beyond that, two young men in tank tops, arguing about a movie. You’re tired, that’s all, she told herself. It’s been a long day.
But when she turned back to her notes, Kakengo’s drawing was sitting on top of her pad, where it should not be. Dasha knew she had put it away. Hadn’t she? She slipped it back, trying to ignore the slow creep of unease at the back of her neck, that was not, could not, be someone breathing. She needed to get home.
• • •
At four a.m., Dasha jerked awake. The cell phone beside the table glowed green. A text message from Christine appeared on the screen as she picked it up: three asylum seekers at Clarkestown. Could she take them?
Dasha pressed the phone to her forehead, willing the pressure to bring the real world into focus. Beside her Alex groaned, and rolled over on his side. A cough erupted from him—a short, sharp thing, like the bark of a dog. Dasha jerked, and something in the corner of the bedroom moved.
She twisted the knob on the bed lamp. Yellow light flooded the room. Only familiar shapes met her eye: a souvenir kimono hanging from the back of the door; a wall of well-loved paperbacks; Alex’s framed copy of the Back to the Future movie poster. Everything seemed fine.
Everything seemed fine, but the devil was in the details. Dasha slipped out from under the sheet and lowered herself quietly onto the creaking hardwood. Turning slowly, she scanned the room, noting the film of dust on top of the bookcase that she’d have to clean later in the week. Nothing seemed out of place, no coat that had slipped off its hanger, no carelessly lodged book that had tumbled to the floor. Except—
Except the shadow box. Its large wooden frame still hung on the wall, its cedar shelves neatly aligned behind a pane of glass. The top shelf still held its cluster of shells, the bottom an assortment of medals from Alex’s grandfather. But the middle shelf, which should have been stacked with a neat row of her grandmother’s pysanky, stood empty. The colorful eggs lay jumbled beside the shiny abalone and faded conches.
Carefully, her heart pounding, Dasha crept over to the wall and peered into the box. At least none of the colorful eggs seemed broken. But how had they ended up on the bottom of the box? There wasn’t enough of a gap between the second shelf and the glass for them to fall through.
Pysanky could ward off devils, her grandmother had said.
Something stirred at the edge of her vision and she whipped her head around. Again, nothing.
Unbidden, a voice from the waiting room whispered in her ear—
nkuyu climb down through the air,
nkuyu crawl out from the corners—
Alex coughed again, a ragged, wet sound. Suddenly Dasha was back in the real world. Was Alex getting sick? The news footage from Indianapolis. The guard behind the counter. He should go to the doctor tomorrow.
It was no good trying to get back to sleep. Her head was full of Ebola, of SARS, of illnesses that clung to the breath of travelers. In the kitchen, she turned the kettle on and pulled out the Emergen-C. Useless stuff, she thought as she choked it down. Twenty-first century superstition, bolstered by a few questionable studies. But she drank it anyway.
• • •
“The last time we met you mentioned a word to me. Nkuyu,” Dasha said, the yellow notepad in front of her, her careful handwriting recounting Elie’s story. She drew out Kakengo’s scribble and placed it between them. Elie’s eyes flicked down to the paper and then away.
“You said Kakengo had seen nkuyu,” Dasha said, tapping the drawing. “What did you mean?”
Elie raised his pale palms to the flickering overhead light and the dead flies whose bodies could be seen through the bottom of the gridded plastic. “You won’t believe.”
A line she’d heard before, in too many cases. Dasha felt her stomach tighten, and carefully, keeping her face still, she said, “It is my job to believe. I am here to represent you. To do that I need to know everything.”
Elie settled lower in his chair. Finally he looked up, but he did not begin, as Dasha had expected, with rape and torture. “In my district, we say, a man should die without secrets. If a man dies with a secret, or if his family let the dead man stay in the sun, and do not put him in a tree or below ground or in a fire so that he can travel to another place, he comes back as nkuyu.”
“A ghost?” Dasha said dubiously.
Elie gestured to show he didn’t know the word. Then he said, “When a nkuyu sees a man, it walks behind him and tells its secret in his ear. The man’s spirit hears and takes this secret into itself. One secret—fine. Two—not so good. Too many secrets, too many times meeting a nkuyu, and the man who is alive will be sick with it. He may die. This is what they say in the country, about illness.”
“And Kakengo says he sees a nkuyu here,” Dasha said.
Elie shook his head. “I am an educated man. A doctor. But there is something wrong in this kimpasi, this place of suffering. We all see things here.” He pointed at the closed door, at the room
and the guards behind it. “In Congo there is too much killing. Too many dead men, whose families are dead or running, and who die in the sun. Too many nkuyu. And it is not just the Congo. It is everywhere. Too many nkuyu.”
Dasha nodded. Bad deaths, her grandmother would say. “Are people sick here?”
“Everybody is sick here.” Elie sighed. “In a hospital I would say, this is a virus, maybe a kind of flu. But in the country, we would get . . . un prêtre? A man who would listen to the nkuyu, and take their secrets into himself. But here, nobody listens.”
Dasha pondered what he had said. Was Elie’s story evidence of insanity? No, she thought, remember Kakengo’s drawing. Certainly a shared perception, and one that seemed rooted in a real illness. Staring at the legal pad, a sudden thought slid in and out of her like a knife. The pysanky. But that was a different superstition, a different culture. There was no connection here.
“Do you know anyone who has become sick since coming here?” she asked.
“Many, many,” Elie said. “First it was a man in the shower who fell. I did not know him. Then Luel, the Eritrean. A Somali. Now five detainees and seven guards. Many more are sick but do not say so. They fear they will be sent back.”
Dasha made a note to herself. She forced herself to think through the legal implications, ignoring the old superstitions wittering in the back of her mind. Could they get access to the center’s medical records? If an infectious disease was spreading here, she needed to secure her client’s safety.
Turning to Elie’s list of documents, she was about to begin her progress check when a sound from the next room interrupted them. “Nkuyu climb out of the ocean,” recited a voice. “Nkuyu come in through the air . . .” Dasha’s skin crawled. She put her pen down.
