The girl looked at my father. He said, “True, more or less. But, as usual, Adorno is oversimplifying things.”
The girl said, “You’re here for the aliens.”
My father’s eyebrows shot up.
The fat girl said, “Well, you don’t look like UCR students. You don’t look wealthy enough to be tourists. Besides, tourist visas are hard to come by unless you’ve got a lot of money, and no offense but I don’t think so. So either you’re here because you work in the software industry or because of the aliens. And no offense, but you look more like the latter than the former.”
I said, “So which are you? Aliens or software?”
“Software,” she said, sounding a little annoyed. “Second year, full scholarship to UCR.”
About three decades ago, a software zillionaire in Taiwan had died and left all his money to the University of Costa Rica to fund a progressive institute of technology. He left them his patents, his stocks, and controlling shares in the dozen or so companies that he’d owned. Why? They’d given him an honorary degree or something. All the techie kids at my school dreamed about getting into one of the UCR programs, or else just getting lucky in the visa lottery and coming out to Costa Rica after college to work for one of the new start-ups.
“I’m Dr. Yoder,” my father said. “General practice. We’re on our way out to join Hans Bliss’s Star Friend community, as it happens. Their last doctor packed up and left two weeks ago. I’ve been in contact with Hans for a few years. We’re here at his invitation.”
Which was what he’d told me in the car when he picked me up at practice. After I’d drunk Gatorade.
“Amazing how easy it is for some rich lunatic like Bliss to get visas. I bet there are twenty people on this bus who are headed out to join Bliss’s group,” the girl said. “What I’ve never figured out is why everybody is so convinced that if the aliens come back, they’re going to show up to see Bliss. No offense, but I’ve seen him online. I watched the movie. He’s an idiot.”
My father opened his mouth and shut it again. A woman in the seat behind us leaned forward and said, “Hans Bliss is a great man.
We heard him speak in Atlanta and we just knew we had to come out here. The aliens came to him because he’s a great man. A good man.”
I had gone with my father to see Hans Bliss talk at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia last year. I had my own opinions.
The girl didn’t even turn around. She said, “Hans Bliss is just some surfer who happened to be one of a dozen people stupid enough to be out on an isolated beach during a Category 3 hurricane. It was just dumb luck that he was the one the aliens scooped up. If he’s so great, then why did they put him back down on the beach again and just take off? Why didn’t they take him along if he’s so amazing? In my opinion, you don’t get points just for being the first human ever to talk with aliens. Especially if the conversation only lasts about forty-seven minutes by everyone else’s count. I don’t care how long he says he was out there. Furthermore, you lose points if the aliens go away after talking to you and don’t ever come back again. How long has it been? Six years? Seven?”
Now the whole bus was listening, even the bus driver and the soldier with the gun. The woman behind us was probably twenty years older than my father; she had frizzy gray hair and impressive biceps. She said to the girl, “Can’t you see that people like you are the reason that the aliens haven’t come back yet? They told Bliss that they would return in the fullness of time.”
“Sure,” the girl said. You could tell she was enjoying herself. “Right after we make Bliss president of the whole wide world and learn to love each other and not feel ashamed of our bodies. When Bliss achieves world peace and we’re all comfortable walking around in the nude, even the people who are fat, like me, the aliens will come back. And they’ll squash us like bugs, or harvest us to make delicious people-burgers, or cure cancer, or bring us cool new toys. Or whatever Hans Bliss says that they’re going to do. I love Hans Bliss, okay? I love the fact that he fell in love with some aliens who swooped down one stormy afternoon and scooped him up into the sky and less than an hour later dropped him off, naked, in front of about eighteen news crews, disaster-bloggers, and gawkers, and now he’s going to wait for the rest of his life for them to come back, when clearly it was just some weird kind of one-night stand for them. It’s just so sweet.”
The woman said, “You ignorant little—”
People at the front of the bus were getting up. A man said something in Spanish, and the girl who didn’t like Bliss said, “Time to go.” She stood up.
My father said, “What’s your name?”
The soldier with the machine gun was out on the asphalt, waving us off the bus. People around us grabbed carry-on bags. The angry woman’s mouth was still working. A guy put his hand on her arm. “It’s not worth it, Paula,” he said. Neither of them were wearing face masks. He had the same frizzy hair, and a big nose, and those were his good features. You could see why he was hoping the aliens might come back. Nobody on Earth was ever going to fall in love with him.
“My name’s Naomi,” the girl said.
“Nice to meet you, Naomi,” my father said. “You’re clearly very smart and very opinionated. Maybe we can talk about this some more.”
“Whatever,” Naomi said. Then she seemed to decide that she had been rude enough. “Sure. I mean, we’re going to be stuck with each other for a while, right?”
My father motioned for her to step out in front of us. He said, “Okay, Naomi, so once I tell the people in charge here that I’m a doctor, I’m going to be busy. I’d appreciate it if you and Adorno kept an eye on each other. Okay? Okay.”
I didn’t have the energy to protest my father’s request to Naomi to babysit me. I could hardly stand up. Those drugs were still doing things to my balance. My eyes were raw, and my mouth was dry. I smelled bad, too. I stopped when we got out of the bus, just to look around, and there was the hangar in front of us and my father pushed me forward and we funneled into the hangar where there were more soldiers with guns, standing back as if they weren’t really making us do anything. Go anywhere. As if the hangar was our decision. Sun came down through oily windows high above us, and somehow it was exactly the sort of sunlight that ought to fall on you on a movie set or in a commercial while you pretend to sit on a white, sandy beach. But the hangar was vast and empty. Someone had forgotten to truck in that white sand and the palm trees and the beautiful painted background. Nobody was saying much. We just came into the hangar and stood there, looking around. The walls were cinderblock, and a warm wind came in under the corrugated roof, rattling and popping it like a steel drum. The floor was whis-pery with grit.
There were stacks of lightweight cots folded up with plastic mattresses inside the frames. Foil blankets in tiny packets. So the next thing involved a lot of rushing around and grabbing, until it became clear that there were more than enough cots and blankets, and plenty of space to spread out in. My father and I carried two cots over toward the wall farthest away from the soldiers. Naomi stuck near us. She seemed suddenly shy. She set up her cot and then flopped down on her stomach and rolled over, turned away.
“Stay here,” my father said. I watched him make his way over to a heap of old tires where people stood talking. An Asian woman with long twists of blue and blond hair took two tires, rolling them all the way back to her cot. She stacked them, and then she had a chair. She sat down in it, pulled out a tiny palmtop computer, and began to type, just like she was in an office somewhere. Other people started grabbing tires. There was some screaming and jumping around when some of the tires turned out to contain wildlife. Spiders and lizards. Kids started chasing lizards, stomping spiders.
My father came back with two tires. Then he went and got another two tires. I thought they were for me but instead he rolled them over to Naomi. He tapped her on the shoulder and she turned over, saw the tires, and made a funny little face, almost as if she were irritated with my father f
or trying to be nice. I knew how she felt. “Thanks,” she said.
“I’m going to go find out where the bathroom is.” I put the soccer ball down on my bed, thought about it, and picked it up again. Put it down.
“I’ll come,” my father said.
“Me too.” Naomi. She bounced a little, like she really needed the toilet.
I put my soccer ball down on the gritty concrete. Began to guide it across the hangar with my feet and my knees. My balance wasn’t great, but I still looked pretty good. Soccer is what I was made to do. Passengers in white masks, soldiers with guns turned their heads to watch me go by.
The October after I turned fourteen I became the first goalie for not one but two soccer teams: the club team that I’d belonged to for four years, and the state soccer team, which I had tried out for three days after my birthday. Only a few months later, and during state matches I was on the field more than I sat out. I had my own coach, Eduardo Sorken, a sour, bad-tempered man who was displeased when I played poorly and offered only grudging acknowledgment when I played well. Sorken had played in the World Cup for Bolivia, and when he was hard on me, I paid attention, telling myself that one day I would not only play in the World Cup but play for a winning team, which Sorken had not.
There was a smudgy black figure on the outside wall of the ranch house back in Philadelphia where I lived with my father. I’d stood up against the house and traced around my own outline with a piece of charcoal brick. I’d painted the outline in. When my father noticed, he wasn’t angry. He never got angry. He just nodded and said, “When they dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima, you could see the shapes of people who’d died against the buildings.” Like that’s what I’d been thinking about when I’d stood there and blackened my shape in. What I was thinking about was soccer.
When I kicked the ball, I aimed for that black silhouette of me as hard as I could. I liked the sound that the ball made against the house. If I’d knocked the house down, that would have been okay too.
I had two expectations regarding my future, both reasonable. The first, that I would one day be taller. The other, that I would be recruited by one of the top international professional leagues. I favored Italy or Japan. Which was why I was studying Japanese. Nothing made me happier than the idea of a future in which, like the present, I spent as much time as possible on a soccer field in front of a goal, doing my best to stop everything that came at me.
A pretty girl in a mask sat cross-legged on the floor of the hangar, tapping at her googly, earplugs plugged in. She stopped typing and watched me go by. I popped the ball up, let it ride up one shoulder, around my neck, and down the other arm. During flu season, up in the bleachers, during matches, everyone wore masks like hers, bumping them up to yell or knock back a drink. But our fans painted their masks with our team colors or wrote slogans on them. There were always girls who wrote DORN on the mask, and so I’d look up and see my name right there, over their mouths. It was kind of a turn-on.
Sometimes there was a scout up in the bleachers. I figured another year or two, another inch or two, and I’d slip right into that bright, deserved future. I was the future. You can’t stop the future, right? Not unless you’re a better goalie than me.
I went in a circle, came back around, making the ball spin in place. “Hey,” I said.
She gave me a little wave. I couldn’t tell whether or not she was smiling, because of the mask. But I bet you she was.
I was magic out on a field. In front of a goal. I stopped everything. I was always exactly where I needed to be. When I came forward, nobody ever got around me. I put out my hands and the ball came to me like I was yanking it through the air. I could jump straight up, so high it didn’t matter how short I was. I had a certain arrangement with gravity. I didn’t get in its way, and it didn’t get in mine. When I was asleep I dreamed about the field, the goal, the ball sailing toward me. I didn’t dream about anything else. This year, on the weekends, I’d been wearing that black silhouette away.
I stood a few feet away from the girl, letting her see how I could keep the ball up in the air, adjusting its position first with one knee, then the other, then my left foot, then my right foot, then catching it between my knees. Maybe she was a soccer fan, maybe not. But I knew I looked pretty good.
I was already a bit taller than that silhouette I’d painted. If you measure yourself in the morning, you’re always a few centimeters taller. I’m named after my mother’s father. (Italian, but you probably guessed that. Her mother was Japanese. My father, if you’re curious, is African American.) I never met my grandfather, although one time I’d asked my mother how tall he was. He wasn’t. I wish they’d named me after someone taller. My father is six foot three.
I circled back one more time, went wide around my father and Naomi. The little lizard-chasing, spider-stomping kids were still running around in the hangar. Some of them were now wearing the foil blankets like capes. I kicked the ball to a little girl and she sent it right back. Not too bad. I was feeling much better. Also angrier.
You could have gotten half a dozen soccer matches going all at once in the hangar. According to my watch it was less than two hours until the start of the match back in Glenside. Sorken, my coach, would be wondering what had happened to me. Or he would have been, except for the flu. Matches were always being canceled because of flu or civil unrest or terror alerts. Maybe I’d be home before anyone even realized what had happened to me.
Or maybe I’d get the flu and die like my mother and brother had. That would show my father.
Along the wall closest to the hangar doors where we’d come in were the soldiers who were still guarding us. Whenever people tried to approach them, the guards waved them back again with their machine guns. The N95 masks gave them a sinister look, but they didn’t seem particularly annoyed. It was more like, Yeah, yeah, leave us alone. Scram.
The makeshift latrines were just outside the hangar. People went in and out of the hangar, got in line, or squatted on the tarmac to read their googlies.
“So you’re pretty good with that thing,” Naomi said. She got in line behind me.
“Want my autograph?” I said. “It will be worth something someday.”
There was a half-wall of corrugated tin divided up with more tin sheets into four stalls. Black plastic hung up for doors. Holes in the ground, and you could tell that they had been dug recently. There was a line. There were covered plastic barrels of water and dippers and more black plastic curtains so that you could take a sponge bath in private.
I tucked my soccer ball under my arm, took a piss, then dunked my hands into a bucket of antiseptic wash.
Back inside the hangar, airline passengers sorted through cardboard boxes full of tissue packs, packets of surgical masks, bottled water, hotel soaps and shampoos, toothbrushes. A man with an enormous mustache came up to my father with a group of people and said, “Miike says you’re a doctor?”
“Yes,” my father said. “Carl Yoder. This is my son, Dorn. I’m a G.P., but I have some experience with flu. I’ll need a translator, though. I’ve started learning Spanish recently, but I’m still not proficient.”
“We can find a translator,” the man said. “I’m Rafe Zuleta-Arango. Hotel management. You’ve already met Anya Miike”—the woman who’d made the chair out of old tires. “Tom Laudermilk. Works for a law firm in New New York. Simon Purdy, the pilot on the flight down.” My father nodded at the others. “We’ve been talking about how we ought to handle this. Almost everyone has been able to make contact with their families, to let them know the situation.”
My father said, “How bad is it? A real pandemic or just another political scare? Any reports of flu here? I couldn’t get through to my hospital. Just got a pretty vague official statement on voice mail.”
Zuleta-Arango shrugged. Miike said, “Rumors. Who knows? There are riots ongoing in the States. Calexico has shut down its borders. Potlatch Territories, too. Lots of religious nuts making the usual statements online
about the will of God. According to some of the other passengers, there’s already a rumor about a new vaccine, and not enough to go around. People have started laying siege to hospitals.”
“Just like last time,” my father said. Last time had been three years ago. “Has anybody talked to the guys with the guns? I thought Costa Rica didn’t even have an army. So who are these guys?”
“Volunteers,” Zuleta-Arango said. “Mostly teachers, believe it or not. There was a quarantine situation here four months ago. Small outbreak of blue plague. Lasted about a week, and it didn’t turn into anything serious. But they know the drill. Simon and I went over and asked them a few questions. They don’t anticipate keeping us here longer than a week. As soon as someone at the terminal has sorted through the luggage, they’ll get it out here. They just need to check first for guns and contraband.”
“My kit’s in my luggage,” my father said. “I’ll set up a clinic when it shows. What about food?”
“We’ll be getting breakfast soon,” Purdy, the pilot, said. “I’ve gotten the flight crew together to set up a mess table over by the far wall. Looks like we’ve got two kerosene grills and basic staples. Hope you like beans. We’ll make an announcement about the clinic when everyone sits down to eat.”
I’d been caught in a quarantine once before, during a trip to the mall. Hadn’t turned out to be anything serious, just a college student with a rash. During the really bad flu, three years ago, I’d stayed home and played video games. My father had been stuck over at the hospital, but our refrigerator is pretty well stocked with frozen pizzas. My father stays over at the hospital all the time. I can take care of myself. When I got the e-mail about my mother and my brother, I didn’t even page him. It’s not like he could have done anything anyway. I just waited until he got home and told him then.
The Starry Rift Page 6
