The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done

by Sandra Newman

  While he speaks, I’m trying to hallucinate. I’ve got the starving children massed out in the courtyard. I make them wail: Hey, Chrysa, someday everyone’s gone forever! Let usss eeeat you! Someday everyone’s gone forever!

  And I tell him through the dust ruffle that I would be glad to do his marketing stuff; but what about the children? They’re expecting me to feed them.

  Eddie doesn’t answer. Eddie doesn’t answer. Soon I understand, and burn with embarrassment. I’m only pretending to hallucinate, to earn pity. Eddie saw through me. Now he’s going to tell Ralph.

  6A coyote howled in the courtyard, everyone was out of the house and only a real coyote. Eddie was gone too. I prayed to God for Eddie to be downstairs although I knew he wasn’t. Finally I just lay in the cool night dust slack-jawed and thought that the coyote must have brown fur and his pawpads would be rough and warm. They would feel to him like my bare feet do, on the poolside tiles.

  He howled. I lay and hummed along quietly. Finally I guess he was all howled out.

  7I don’t know exactly how long I malingered. It’s easy to mistake a month for two weeks, and vice versa. It can’t have been important to our ancestors to tell.

  It seemed like one incredibly long bad day.

  8Then I crawled out from under the bed and stood up. I reeled there, wondering, how did that happen? I almost got back under

  but didn’t, and there I was.

  Healed!

  In the windows, the day was blue. The grass below shone. I felt pretty atrocious, but that seemed less important now. It occurred to me that if I never told anyone I was depressed, I could have a brilliant career, and no one any the wiser.

  Upright Considerations and Doubts:

  “WHERE CHILDREN COME FROM”

  1In the spring of ’71, my father was conducting studies in Peru.

  1.1He and his colleagues shared an unfurnished hut, little more than a frame for mosquito netting.

  1.2Its backyard was virgin jungle.

  1.3Out front, the ramshackle village had been abandoned; it was a ghost town soon to be reabsorbed by forest.

  1.4All the men carried rifles.

  STATE SECRETS:

  •Who his colleagues were.

  •What they were doing there.

  •Why all the people had left the village.

  2One night, Dad was woken in his hammock by a series of rhythmic cries.

  2.1A novice in the Amazon, he lay for a long time matching the noise to imagined perils.

  •improbably huge mosquito swarms

  •japing guerrillas

  •the voice of the anaconda, which a man hears only once

  2.2Finally he was fully awake. He crept out, snagging a rifle on the way.

  3He walked down the dead street.

  3.1It took him a while to find the noise: he kept scanning the black wall of jungle.

  3.2I was sitting in the middle of the road.

  3.3Filling my lungs and squalling. Filling my lungs and squalling.

  4I was tied by a string to my older brother’s wrist: he was lying dead beside me, and the thing making me scream was a sizable vulture perched on his chest, flapping its wings aggressively to drive me away.

  5My father scared the vulture off and took me back to the minimal shack.

  5.1Since some of his colleagues were medical personnel, they were able to save my life: I was malnourished, wormy, tubercular.

  5.2I became a project mascot.

  5.3Then Dad took me home and adopted me.

  STATE SECRETS:

  •How my brother died.

  •What peoples lived in that region.

  •Was it Peru specifically or just a Peru-like country.

  •What did Dad care.

  •Are the other starving children still sitting in the street, in that Peru-like country, and why.

  6“The second I clapped eyes on you, something told me, that’s my daughter.”

  6.1“Your father is in love with his own legend, end of story.”

  6.2I found a photo of myself, a bony tot among enormous leaves. I stand with one fist up, smiling. My head is shaved. Because the photo’s black and white, it looks authentic.

  6.3Eddie: “What if Dad just got the maid pregnant?”

  7I’ve never been to Peru.

  Another Side

  “I got a phone call from your father, saying he’d found you. He called you a maiden in distress. I was mostly worried, cause Eddie was very small, that you didn’t have some contagious disease. I said that, and your father puffs himself all up and says, ‘Lannie, that’s ludicrous. This is a little girl, a little baby girl.’

  “I was so. Pissed. Then he got home and it turns out he thought I said ‘religious beliefs,’ not ‘contagious disease.’ The phone connection was always terrible, you know.

  “I didn’t think anything about it, then. I mean, I thought it was terrific. I kept waiting, maybe he’d bring back more. My friend used to save me news clippings of Mia Farrow.

  “We were just young then. You know. We thought the rules didn’t apply to us.”

  I Have Told My Friends in Confidence:

  • I was dropped here from outer space.

  • He blew away my whole tribe in a bio-warfare experiment.

  • I’m just adopted, from an agency, and my parents are so lame they had to make up this fairy tale.

  I Have Believed:

  • The story he told like gospel.

  • I don’t know what happened, anything but that dumb story.

  The One Sure Thing:

  If Dad had got the maid pregnant, we would never have heard the end of it. It’s just the sort of thing Mom loved to announce at dinner, on those rare occasions when Dad was at home.

  I was first just cries in the night of jungle.

  EEddie – epileptic. E is for Eddie like C is for me, and everything beginning with his letter eyes/eggs/envelopes are eloquent of once, of our

  FFrailty. A flimsy duo: I the foundling just, not fed, there was no food where I was from, Eddie got called

  fag

  by kids at school. Therefore afraid to seem feminine, of being

  Ggay. “Get away from me, girl meat.”

  He called me goon, too, and geek, though he was the

  one I loved/ I was the one he loved

  and I, when I grew up, was gonna

  Htake him home. To outer space.

  “When you’re better.”

  and his is only petit mal, a small evil, his long, long look at what you cannot remember. Mom says his name, then we say nothing. We girls wait where we happened to fetch up, seized:

  and watch Eddie watching what the dead see.

  Sometimes his face twitches, though uninhabited

  AFTER DINNER: 1975

  There are three cans of Coke on the concrete shoulder of the pool. They’re friendly there: if I get scared I can drink Coke. I’m holding on to the ladder because I can only doggy-paddle still. Beside me, Eddie treads water. I don’t want him to say Watch Me Do a Somersault but I know he’s going to.

  I don’t want Mom to come out of the house.

  But I’m still not scared yet.

  Watch me do a somersault, says Eddie, and I turn my head toward him. He holds his nose and goes under with a big splash. I look away and when he comes up, I say it was pretty good.

  Dad comes out of the lit open French doors, stalks to the pool and nose-dives, as fast as that. We usually would hooray.

  When he comes up I call out in truthful instinctive longing, Daddy.

  He says, How’s my sea horse?

  I’m fine, Daddy, I say. Daddy, why did you go away that time?

  He says he was in Timbuktu hunting killer gorillas. The gorillas there are so fierce, they eat up Daddies there in two big bites. Chomp, womp!

  We usually would jabber and ask.

  I say THAT’S NOT TRUE. I’m scared.

  Mom comes out of the house. She stomps to the concrete shoulder.

&nb
sp; She’s messy. Her slippered foot troubles the Coke can on the left. That’s mine, she’s going to kick it over.

  “It’s an accident,”I mouth. It didn’t happen yet, but I think as if it did.

  Mom watches us like a bad ghost. Eddie starts to splash.

  Mom says, I want to know how I got painted as the villain of this piece, trembling and evil.

  We paddle way below her. I’m scared.

  She kicks my Coke over into the pool as she turns to go back in the open lit French doors.

  The Coke drains a shadow into the turquoise water.

  Dad says, This is getting out of hand. He swims. He swims hard, disturbing the whole water.

  When he’s done I say to him, Daddy, I’m sorry I said what I said about you saying something wrong.

  He says, Let’s just make believe you were quiet as a mouse. Can we do that? Let’s all pretend we’re quiet, quiet mice.

  Easy in Hindsight

  1As teens, we realized Dad was a criminal against humanity.

  1.1Reading between the lines, we held him responsible for US policy in Latin America.

  •Dad brought down Allende.

  •Dad “disappeared” trade unionists.

  •Behind a two-way mirror, Dad supervised tortures, commenting on pregnant women dying in awful pain.

  1.2“CIA plus biochemist,” Eddie sniggered, “Sick or what?”

  2One night in an Italian restaurant, we cornered Mom.

  2.1“You can’t keep hiding all your life,” we chanted, “We deserve the truth.”

  2.2Our mother began to cry in a way we had not seen.

  2.3Hands shaking, she scrubbed her face with a red cloth napkin.

  2.4It was the first time we’d realized she could grow old.

  3“I don’t know. I don’t know, I don’t know. I don’t know, all right? I just don’t know.”

  4The gypsy violinist gave our table a wide berth.

  4My brother, desperate, gripped his salad fork and threatened to kill her.

  4.1I said, “Please,” in a whisper and then focused on the statue behind Mom’s head.

  •It was labelled “JVPITER.”

  •Its torso was crisply muscled.

  •Its plaster eyes were all white.

  •It had bare, albeit genteelly meager, genitalia.

  4.2“Eddie!” Mom wailed as he stamped to the exit. Then she turned to me, took a deep breath, and sneered, monstrous:

  4.3“Eat your food,” said my broken mom. “At effing least.”

  5We cleaned our plates, but declined the dessert menu.

  5.1As she lay her Mastercard in the salver, I piped up.

  5.2“You’re not my mother. You’re not my mother. Why couldn’t Dad just leave me in the jungle to starve?”

  5.3It was my turn to cry.

  6“Don’t make a scene, Chrysa. Who’s your mother? Holy Mary? If you want to know, I wish he’d just left me in the jungle to starve, too. I don’t know why I married that prick. I must have been crazy!”

  6.1She noticed JVPITER then. “Hello!” she said over her shoulder in surprise, and glanced at his wee equipment.

  6.2“Well! You can’t live with ’em!” said my mother, and laughed like a mule.

  7Eddie was waiting for us by the car, still holding the salad fork.

  7.1This dinner flashes before me whenever anyone says the word “dysfunctional.”

  Back in the Bedroom: A Caparisoned Elephant

  I got out from under and stood. I was all better. In the windows, the day was blue. How the grass glittered, rinsed and rinsed by heady sprinklers.

  I hadn’t stood up in so long, it was like swaying on high. It was like mounting a caparisoned elephant. I was grown up. I was tall.

  And I thought that once upon a time, a little boy was separated from his elephant by the chicanery of the Raj, and some twenty years later, still a boy ungrown because of the draining lack of elephant, he was brought in state to Delhi and remounted on the animal, festooned for this occasion in ribbons and paint and gilded finery; he climbed up and was initially awkward and bobbled from side to side, but then the elephant took; the elephant became as it were magnetized and attracted the boy’s whole frame with its alternative balance and they promenaded off toward the open jungle, shedding tinsel on the Ministry lawns.

  Later that day, Ralph came up to see me. He opened the door without knocking, and when he saw me sitting up on the bed, all showered, in clean clothes, he stepped back.

  “Sorry. I thought you were asleep.”

  I said, “That’s okay.”

  He stood in the doorway, absolutely still. Finally I looked up and said bravely that I wanted to eat, but I didn’t want to eat in my bedroom, but I wasn’t sure I could make it down the stairs.

  He smiled. “You can’t win, then, can you?”

  There was a fly in the room that kept buzzing as if it was really desperate. Ralph just shut the door and went away.

  So I made it downstairs and found him in the kitchen and he cooked me spaghetti with green spaghetti. Eddie had taken the chairs so we ate standing up.

  And when I grew mawkish, hanging my head over the smeary plate,

  Ralph said, “Cut it out.”

  And he told me the story of his ugly stepsister, who had two passports at fourteen and traveled the world lightly with a briefcase of towels and cash, and broke the bank once at the Yak and Yeti Hotel Casino, Kathmandu, playing cards stalwartly through the many power cuts.

  CAIRO SECTIONS

  Argument

  Eddie met the only woman he ever loved in Cairo,

  when he was 22. He could never say what it was about her.

  During their romance, she gave him three snapshots of herself

  as a young girl. Although these photos did not resemble her,

  he treasured them for the rest of his life.

  11. 1987: The Pyramids of Giza / The Sahara Desert

  Your sister Isis comes to you rejoicing for love of you.

  You have placed her on your phallus and your seed issued in her

  . . . the sky is pregnant of wine . . . may you ascend to the sky,

  may the sky give birth to you like Orion . . .

  The Pyramid Texts (2025 BC)

  A

  •The King’s and Queen’s chambers reeked of urine.

  •They contained nothing but 100 years of graffiti.

  •There are no taxis.

  •There are no other tourists.

  •He keeps looking in his guide book to find out why he came here.

  B

  •Nagged by souvenir hawkers, Eddie strays into the desert.

  •He hides himself between two tall dunes before it strikes him: This is the mother fucking Sahara.

  •He’s thrilled.

  •His prick stirs, he notices once again his thirst.

  •Over that dull crest, desert for 1,000 miles.

  •I could die out here, he thinks to intensify the buzz.

  •Then he shuts his eyes and walks blind into the sand

  Preface

  At the age of 22, Eddie went on a trip around the world. It was a college graduation present from our Uncle Jerry. The ticket was: London – Cairo – Singapore – Melbourne – Tahiti – LA, with 7,000 dollars for expenses and side trips. Eddie expected to be gone for ten months.

  Mother was unhinged with worry over Eddie’s epilepsy. “One beer,” she opined, “one joint, and – kablooey!” She cut out articles about American tourists taken hostage, highlighting victims with medical complaints in pink.

  If Eddie tried to watch TV, she used the commercial breaks to scaremonger: the Zambian hospitals staffed by Nazis; how Ann’s son became a cabbage; Third World-dumped medicines that caused “instant” cancer.

  At the climax, Eddie would storm out, raving:

  “Stick me in an incubator! Someday, I might get sick!”

  1Eddie called collect from London every night to tell Mom she smothered him.

  1.1Three
postcards arrived the following week:

  1.2Dear Mom,

  Got here without dying. This is just to let you know I decided to use my middle name from now on cause I suddenly realized, Eddie = Oedipus, which just freaks me out. Like, I can’t believe I was so lucky to get away, now I see what’s really happening. Anyway, this is the last time I’m writing, so if you want to think I’m dead, it’s not my problem. – JACK

  1.3Chrysa,

  Here in London which SUCKS. They all look like fucking walruses, I totally get that Beatles song. So I’ve got this Finnish chick now, Martina, she’s like seventeen. She’s like, she left her hometown because “the people were not sincere,” so basically dumb chick. But that’s why I’m not writing after this cause I can only write when I’m lonely, sorry. Tell Mom I’m trying to be cool but I can’t deal with her right now. – JACK

  1.4Chrysa,

  Getting the fuck out of Europe to Africa, I can’t take it here. It’s like everything’s neutered with so-called “civilization.” Like Martina ran off with some other Finnish asshole named Casper (honest to shit real name) cause he sleeps with both men and women because he’s comfortable with his masculinity or some shit, which I don’t have to leave California to hear this shit. Like friendly ghost jokes or what. So I’ll write from Egypt if I don’t suddenly have a fit and die. – JACK

  1.5That was the last we heard.

  10. Cairo International Airport / First Sight

  The arrivals hall is a filthy bare hangar. It’s 3:00 A.M.: he’s groggy from sleeplessness and the flight. Around him, a thousand grubby Egyptians jostle. There is no single file; there are no ropes and no officials. The windows show only the anonymous airstrip.