The After-Room

by Maile Meloy; Illustrated by Ian Schoenherr

  They kept walking, down a residential street in the direction of her parents’ house.

  “Let’s stop,” Benjamin said. He took her hand, which was shaking, and they stood on the sidewalk facing each other.

  “I’m scared,” she said.

  “We’re just having a romantic moment here, right?” he said. “And he’s going to have to cruise on by, or else say something. And then we’ll know more.”

  “I don’t want to be dragged into that car,” she said.

  “If he gets out, we’ll run.”

  The car came alongside them and paused for a moment. Janie’s hair blew across her face, and Benjamin brushed it away. When his fingertips touched her cheek, she jumped. He leaned toward her and her face grew hot. She didn’t want to kiss Benjamin as cover, after so long, but she didn’t know how to explain that. She could feel the man in the dark glasses staring at them.

  Then the car kept driving, slowly. Janie turned her head out of reach of the kiss, and the taillights rounded a corner and disappeared from sight.

  She slipped her hand out of Benjamin’s grasp, without looking at him. “Let’s go home,” she said.

  Chapter 15

  The Commander

  Thomas Francis Hayes was born and raised on a cattle ranch in Oklahoma, far from the sea, and his first love was a border collie named Jazz. Jazz was a working cattle dog who considered the family his primary herd, and he was happiest when Tommy and his parents were all in one room, around the dinner table, and he could be sure he’d done his job. Then he dropped to the floor, folded his paws, and watched them, satisfied. When the family spread out around the house, he would try to urge them back together.

  If the family was his herd, then Tommy was his particular responsibility. They ran together, worked together, played together, hunted together. Jazz slept at the foot of his bed, and Tommy slipped Jazz scraps from his plate.

  Jazz died when Tommy was fifteen, and it was the first great tragedy of his life. He wrapped an old orange blanket around the strangely motionless body—Jazz had never been still, running even in his dreams—and lowered him into a hole dug in the field behind the house. His father gave a speech about what a fine dog Jazz had been, loyal and smart and brave, and Tommy wept.

  When it was time to shovel the dirt over the blanket, Tommy was shocked that such a thing could happen, that dirt could fall on the still body and the world could go on without Jazz in it. Every morning he woke, expecting the sandpapery tongue on his face that urged him to get up and greet the joyous day, and then he was plunged into despair when the truth came rushing back.

  He joined the navy when he finished high school, and was sent to officer training in California. He joined the Pacific fleet, rose through the ranks, and met a girl on the beach in Waikiki. Cassie was wearing a white two-piece swimsuit and had an orchid tucked behind her ear. She was a mix of things, like many people in the islands—Hawaiian, Japanese, haole—with black hair and hazel eyes that tilted up at the corners like a cat’s. He had not known that such girls existed in real life. He felt like the hero of a film, with her: a film with sappy, romantic songs and waves crashing in the background.

  They married, took a house in Honolulu, and had a son named William who was as beautiful as his mother, a relentlessly cheerful baby, fat hands always reaching for the world. As a boy, William wanted to know how ships worked, and he wanted to be in the navy like his father. But the year he turned seven, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and their life became a different kind of film.

  Hayes’s war was hard and long. So many sailors and pilots were lost beneath the waves. Japanese planes hid behind the clouds, ready to dive and crash into the U.S. ships, to give up their lives to kill. It affected your mind, that awareness that death could come screaming down at any moment. On land, there seemed only to be starvation and mud and misery.

  Hayes was a captain by 1945, and was standing on a captured airstrip in the Solomon Islands when he heard about the attack on Hiroshima. Death again, screaming down, obliterating a city in a flash of light and a billowing cloud of radiation. Japan intended to fight to the last man and woman—civilians and housewives were armed with knives and guns against the invasion. But now the emperor had surrendered, because of the new bomb. So it was a good thing, this terrifying new weapon. Hayes was fairly sure of it. War had given him armor in place of skin: a carapace like a crab’s. That soft, vulnerable boy who had buried his face in the dog’s fur and wept was gone.

  His son was eleven then, and Hayes hoped that the boy could grow up in a world not torn by war. William spent the next years surfing before school, coming home with salt in his hair and his board under his arm, and tinkering with engines. In college, he signed up for reserve officer training, and he was likeable, with an easy authority, destined to be a fine officer. He never talked too long, or swaggered; he remembered people’s names.

  But then came the civil war in China, and William wound up on Quemoy. Chairman Mao was starving his own people, in the name of revolution. Chiang Kai-shek had withdrawn to Taiwan, and his reinforcing of two tiny islands so close to the mainland was like poking a great beast with a sharp stick. The shells came raining down on the islands. On that godforsaken rock that no one cared about except Chiang and Mao, the mechanics couldn’t figure out the trouble with a Jeep, and someone said that William was good with engines. He was standing beneath the hood when a 130mm Chinese shell struck.

  One moment Ensign William Hayes was in the world; the next he was gone. A young radio officer who had been William’s friend brought the news to Hayes, and broke down crying.

  Cassie left after their son’s death—there was too much sadness between them. After that, the only good moments of the day were those few seconds when he woke from sleep, thinking that his son was still in the world. Then the truth crashed down like a wave, pinning him to the bed, leaving him drenched and breathless. He slept less, but craved sleep more—not for its own sake, but for those few bright seconds on waking, when his son was alive.

  The chief medical officer said that sleeplessness would start to affect his brain, and prescribed pills, but the pills made Hayes’s mornings groggy and confused, and erased the moment when his son seemed still alive. So he threw them away. He would conquer this on his own, as he had conquered everything else.

  But without his son, what was the point? He went round and round about that question. When the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington recommended a nuclear attack on China in September, Hayes thought he had his answer. A spectacular revenge.

  But Americans were tired of war, and they didn’t want a new one over two islands no one had ever heard of. So President Eisenhower rejected the idea, and Hayes was enraged. Not just because of William. What about the people Mao had enslaved? His own people who were starving? Korea under Mao’s thumb?

  He began to think, night and day, about the new 8-inch nuclear shell, a thing of beauty, in its smooth titanium casing. The light casing reduced the weight, and so did the delicate new mechanism. He lay awake contemplating the simple genius of its design. He had not slept for weeks.

  One morning while it was still dark, he went to the chief artillery officer and told him he had orders to transport one of the new shells to another ship. Hayes seemed to be outside his own body, watching the conversation without much worry about which way it would go. He had a great deal of trust built up among the officers, and he would squander it all. The artillery officer was puzzled at first, but Hayes spoke of sealed orders and high-level instructions. They loaded the shell into a padded aluminum box, and then into a wooden crate. Two young seamen loaded the crate into a boat for transport.

  “Shall we come with you, sir?” one of the seamen asked.

  “Yes, please,” Hayes said, because he feared he might fall asleep. And it would be useful to have young, strong arms to help him. These two seamen did not seem especially bright or curio
us. And they were William’s age—the age William would have been—which made him firm in his resolve. Hayes had cash in a lockbox, and he brought it all, plus warm clothes, and a large empty canvas duffel bag. He also took a case of chocolate bars, on the chance that they might come in handy.

  When he set out in the boat with the two young men, he transferred the shell into the duffel bag and tested its weight. He could lift it, with the long shoulder strap, though he wouldn’t be able to carry it far. At dawn, they came in sight of a Taiwanese fishing boat.

  “Bring us alongside,” he said, as if he had planned this meeting all along. They hailed the fishing boat, and Hayes asked to see the captain in private.

  The captain, in his tiny cabin, was nervous—he probably had an illegal smuggling operation going. Hayes offered the man cash to take him and his luggage aboard, and keep his presence secret. He explained that this was part of a sensitive secret plan to help Chiang Kai-shek. They agreed on a price, and Hayes sent the two seamen back to the battleship, with more talk of secrecy. The young men were so fresh-faced and earnest in wishing him well that he felt a stab of conscience, but only a small one. He thought of William, and of the starving millions. He knew that what he was doing was right.

  Late that morning, they came in sight of another fishing boat, and Hayes repeated his conversation with the new captain, and transferred his luggage across. He asked to be taken to the Grand Canal, the great man-made waterway that went north to Beijing, and he picked out the tallest fisherman among the crew and asked to buy his clothes. A price, again, was reached. A wide-brimmed fisherman’s hat covered his foreign face.

  In the canal, Hayes surveyed the large boats and small boats, the freighters and junks and scows. After a time, he chose a flat, steady-looking canal barge. It housed a small family circus: acrobats who played in the canal towns. The daughters, who looked no more than five or six, did an act in which they walked on their hands. Hayes offered the suspicious barge captain cash and eight chocolate bars, and suddenly they had room for a gweilo passenger—why not? Everything had a price.

  A storeroom was converted into a cabin. Hayes, in his broad hat and the fisherman’s clothes, stashed his duffel bag beneath his cot, along with the rest of the chocolate. It made him happy to think of the satiny titanium shell hidden there: his precious cargo, his gift for Chairman Mao.

  Chapter 16

  Syncope

  Janie was rattled, as she and Benjamin let themselves into the house. The U.S. marshals who had followed her in Los Angeles seemed like they belonged to another lifetime, to a fading dream. It had been terrifying, but the result was that she had moved to London with her parents, and met Benjamin and his father there, and her life had begun. So she wouldn’t wish away those two marshals in their car now, no matter how awful it had been at the time.

  She tried to think that maybe this car, too, was just a messenger from the next stage of her life. But it didn’t feel that way. Janie didn’t want to have any more adventures in which people might die. She knew she should tell her parents about the sedan, and the man in the dark glasses, but then she would have to explain about the magician, the powder, the After-room—everything.

  Her mother was in the front parlor, reading student assignments as usual, and Benjamin went straight upstairs. Janie dropped her knapsack by her mother’s chair and flung herself across the couch.

  “Everything all right?” her mother asked.

  “Can we go away somewhere, for the summer?” Janie asked.

  Her mother was still reading. “Mmm—maybe.”

  “I wish we could go right now.”

  That got her a direct look. “Why?”

  “Just, you know, to be out of school. Same as you.”

  Her mother tossed the stapled paper on the ottoman and stretched in her chair like a cat, yawning. “I don’t know what we can afford. Where do you want to go?”

  “Maybe back to London to see Pip?”

  Her mother laughed. “Not on what we’re getting paid.”

  “We wouldn’t have to stay anywhere fancy,” Janie said.

  “We’d still have to get four people across the Atlantic.”

  “How about Los Angeles?”

  Her mother shook her head. “The Studebaker would never make it. And train tickets, sleeping cars—we’re just not making enough money.”

  “I wish you could get a writing job.”

  “Yes, you’ve said that,” her mother said. “You think we don’t want that, too?”

  “Sorry,” Janie said. She didn’t want to make her parents feel deficient.

  Her mother had a little carved wooden Japanese figurine of a mouse that she used as a paperweight, and Janie concentrated all her thoughts on pulling it toward her from the side table. The little mouse sat crouched over the seed in its paws. Nothing happened. Janie got up from the couch.

  At the top of the stairs, she knocked on Benjamin’s bedroom door. He didn’t answer.

  She knocked again. “Benjamin?”

  No answer.

  She said, “Benjamin, are you okay?”

  Nothing.

  She pushed open the door, and saw him lying motionless on the floor with his eyes closed. Then, as in a nightmare, she saw the glass of water on the nightstand. And the jar of powder she’d hidden so carefully.

  “Benjamin!” she cried, pulling him up to sitting. He slumped over in the other direction, and she struggled to keep him upright. Was he breathing? She felt for a pulse in his neck. It was there, but barely.

  She heard her mother’s feet on the stairs, and rolled the jar under the bed. Then she slapped Benjamin’s face. “Wake up!” she said. “Wake up!”

  “What happened?” her mother cried, behind her.

  “Breathe!” she begged him. “Just please breathe!”

  • • •

  “You say he fainted,” the doctor said, at the hospital. They’d given Benjamin something to open his airways and then something to make him sleep, and now he lay unconscious in the hospital bed. The doctor was short and balding and full of concern, with fuzzy gray hair at his temples.

  “Yes,” Janie said. “And then he wasn’t breathing.”

  “Does he have a history of syncope?”

  “Of what?” she said.

  “Of fainting.”

  “It happened once before.”

  “When?” her mother said.

  “The other day,” she said, sheepish.

  “And you didn’t tell me?”

  “He was fine, and he didn’t want to worry you.”

  “Janie!” her mother said.

  “We’ll keep him here for observation, do some tests,” the doctor said.

  If they drew blood, would they detect the powder? Would they know what it was? “Can’t we just take him home?” Janie asked.

  “I’m afraid not,” the doctor said. “We’ll take good care of him.”

  “Then I’ll stay here,” she said.

  “You need to eat dinner,” her mother said. “And do your homework.”

  “Homework?” Janie said. “Are you serious?”

  Her mother sighed. “All right. I have to go pick up your father. But then I’m coming back and you’re eating dinner, even if it’s in the hospital cafeteria.”

  “Fine.”

  When her mother and the doctor left, Janie took Benjamin’s heavy, sedated hand. She wasn’t just angry with him for stealing the powder back. She was angry that he’d put her in a position where she had to be the gatekeeper, and then he’d stolen it. They were supposed to be friends—more than friends. She didn’t want to be hiding the jar and nagging him about the importance of staying alive, while he kept running toward the After-room.

  She thought about writing to Vili again, but what more could she say, safely? A nurse came in, a trim black woman in a starched whit
e uniform. The nurse took Benjamin’s wrist and looked at her watch to count his pulse.

  “Do you think he’ll sleep for a while?” Janie asked.

  “If he knows what’s good for him,” the nurse said.

  Then she left, and Janie sat watching Benjamin for signs of consciousness. A few minutes later, she heard voices in the hall, the nurse telling someone that visiting hours were over.

  “It’sh very important,” a man’s voice said. The voice was familiar to Janie, but also mushy and strange. She listened, trying to puzzle it out. Doyle.

  “You can’t go in there,” the nurse said.

  But Doyle pushed his way past her. He had purple bruises under both eyes. His nose was crooked, his jaw swollen. “I need more of thad shtuff,” he said to Janie.

  “Sir,” the nurse said, putting herself between him and the hospital bed. “I have to ask you to leave.”

  “I jusht need a minute,” he said.

  “You look awful,” Janie said.

  “You think I don’t know thad?”

  “Do you know this man?” the nurse asked.

  Janie nodded, staring at Doyle’s battered face. “It’s okay,” she said.

  “It’s not okay,” the nurse said.

  “You should have stopped playing poker,” Janie told Doyle.

  “I know!” he said. “I was shtupid. But the shtuff is wearing off, and I can’t go back to the way I wazh.”

  “I’m going to get an orderly,” the nurse said, and she disappeared down the hall.

  “I thought your chemist could make it,” Janie said.

  “He said it wazh imposhible. I told him it couldn’t be. Kidzh made it!”

  “Do you know that someone’s following us?” Janie asked.

  Doyle’s bruised eyebrows came together in a frown. “Who?”

  “A guy in dark glasses, in a blue sedan.” Janie felt tears stinging her eyes, and she willed them back. She wouldn’t cry in front of Doyle. “I wish we’d never met you! Benjamin almost died because you wouldn’t help him!”