The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead

by Chanelle Benz

  Natalia leaves Milla’s room and goes downstairs where the house is buzzing with Daddy’s high-tech security alarm, the radioactive locusts and AC. She opens a Coke and lays on the couch with the lights out. She can feel the ghost of Milla stomping down the hall, affectionate and graceless, going into the kitchen to make brownies. Her own room has been made into a study.

  The wind picks up and she hears the trees beating each other in the backyard. She gets up and peers at the photographs on the wall, finding one of her high school graduation, a shiny girl in a shiny blue gown—vice president, Key Club, National Honor Society—she’d played soccer too but was never as good.

  She picks up her Coke and turns off the AC. If she could just see Milla for five minutes and put her arms around her, tell her she loves her. But Milla won’t come to the house or answer her calls. She doesn’t forgive her for not coming back, for letting them think she was dead, for failing to be the good, big sister. They’ll never be close again because of all she did and did not do.

  In the kitchen, his chair turned to the sliding glass doors, Daddy sits in an old robe waiting for morning. Natalia can feel the tiredness radiate off him. In Beirut, when she first saw him, she could feel she was his daughter, felt the lines of their lives intersect. But now that she’s home, they’re strangers, afraid of blaming each other, then hating each other, and losing each other all over again.

  “Hey, honey.” He looks older than sixty in the hangdog of his neck and chin. She’s aged him. “Have some of our fine Colombian coffee. Did you get any sleep on that old couch?”

  “Not much.” Natalia hesitates, then pulls up a chair next to him like she used to in the mornings before school. “Are you going back to Bogotá?”

  “Not for a while yet.” He crosses an ankle over his knee. “I have to go into the office and throw my weight around while they’re investigating you.”

  “I hope it won’t affect your position.”

  “I’m almost retired.” He puts a hand on the top of her head. It stays there for an impossible moment, then unable to stand it, she gets up and goes to the counter.

  “This one looks familiar,” she says, facing the cupboard and taking down a mug. “Turkey Trot.” She looks back at him. “Daddy?”

  He’s watching the birds outside. “You came in fifth.”

  “Daddy. I don’t want you to think I’m ungrateful.”

  “I’d call you lucky,” he says, not without bitterness.

  “Somehow I don’t feel very lucky.” She puts the mug back and chooses another. “Look . . . I can’t live here, I can’t stay in Milla’s old room. It doesn’t feel right.”

  “I’ll arrange something,” he says slowly, his eyes on a red cardinal.

  “Don’t worry about me, I’ll take care of it.”

  He looks at her. “I’m on the line for you, Natalia. If you want to stay elsewhere, then we’re talking a place of my choosing.” He looks back out the window. In the backyard, the sun is tearing the horizon pink. “And I’d like you to see your mother before you go.” He uncrosses his legs. “There’s cream in the fridge.”

  “Sugar?”

  “By the stove. At least there’s one thing about you that hasn’t changed.” He waits. “Do I still know you?”

  It’s the question she’s been dreading. “I don’t know,” she says.

  “Your mother has not changed. But when we thought you were gone, Milla needed her and so I finally had to give over to God and forgive the woman.”

  “I don’t expect forgiveness.”

  He gets up. “Well you make it so damn hard. You’re only home because that man is dead—” He cuts himself off, oddly out of breath.

  But she can’t speak to her father of Erik. It seems a violation to mention him. Instead she says, “You said you have a heart condition? What does that mean?”

  “They scraped out my arteries. Give me another.” He holds out his mug and she pours in fresh coffee. Then he rests the mug on his knee, watching the liquid slant then settle. “Didn’t I teach you to value your family and your faith?”

  “Am I on trial?”

  “Not before me, but when the time comes I worry for your soul,” he says.

  She wants to tell him that she couldn’t shoot the boy because of him, couldn’t take one life to keep a hundred, couldn’t save Erik because he taught her to fear the stain on her immortal soul.

  “I thought you had to die to the world to save it.” She looks into his tired red eyes. “I was wrong.”

  KANGWA, 2001

  After the women’s prayer group, Natalia left the confines of the tents—tarps stretched over a patchwork of corrugated tin. She walked along the outside of the camp, looking out at the border: a bronzed, anonymous nineteen-year-old girl. Near a pile of plastic debris and broken cooking pots, there was a Humvee.

  “Hello,” said the driver in English. He was a giant blond man. Under his American accent, there was a foreign undulation.

  “Hello,” she said, apprehensive, looking around for any other person.

  “You shouldn’t be out here alone.” He had pale, sad eyes that looked like they were being drained. “The local patrolmen aren’t above rape. You are part of the Faith Redeemed Ministry?”

  “Yes sir, we’re building an orphanage.” She wondered who he was. Not old, not young, remote but not condescending.

  “I thought that all of you had returned to the States,” he said.

  “Some of us are staying with our pastor.”

  “Has he mentioned that the army is heading east? They’re looking for Rebels hiding in these camps.”

  She shrugged. “This camp is just widows and kids.”

  “You should leave,” he said without urgency.

  “We want to finish what we’ve started,” she said, repeating the words her pastor had said that morning.

  “What about your family?” he asked. “Don’t they think you should be coming home?”

  “I’m nineteen.”

  “I see,” he said, smiling and leaning out of the window. “I am Erik.”

  She relaxed under his smile. “Natalia. Are you German?”

  “Swedish. I like the name Natalia. It becomes you.”

  When he said her name, it was as if he saw only her and the rest of the world blurred behind her. Then she felt ugly in her stained tie-dye T-shirt, her worn Tevas, the gold cross necklace from Daddy. “I should get back,” she said, gesturing weakly at the camp. “They’re expecting me.”

  Natalia woke with the screaming. She lay for too long sweating under her wool blanket. The shots seemed to be coming from the opposite side of the camp.

  She crawled out of her tent and found people pushing in every direction. She rushed to the pastor’s tent, but it was on fire. Stepping back, she turned into a pile of men’s bodies, some facedown, some spilled at odd angles, all of them curled and flailed against one another, and next to them was a heap of children lying like discarded toys, legs burned, their small heads full of bloody gaps. She screamed, but no one seemed to know her. Only a young soldier came toward her, dragging a woman already gouged by bullets and she ran—running toward the blue line of morning as if eventually she would become it. For it seemed to her that there was only the earth and no God.

  Natalia was at the edge of the camp, lying next to an old woman with a mouthful of flies. A man was speaking over her in a language she did not understand. He was wearing fatigues and handed another man his gun, then carried her body to a truck bed. Over the scalding metal, she stared up at a placid sky. She knew then that she had died.

  Erik held a canteen to her peeling lips and cupped the back of her head. He put a jacket over her waist, saying in English, “You’re in shock.” He opened a medical kit. “This will sting,” he said. Her eyes closed. His hum was louder than thought. Then he was gone, and she too went.

  Then Erik said, “Open your legs,” not knowing that she was only a body.

  There was another man standing with him, bea
rded, uneager.

  “He has been trained as a doctor. He must look.”

  The man said something. He looked even more harassed. Her body jerked when he touched her knee, causing the jacket to slip. There was dried blood on her thighs.

  “Breathe,” Erik said, holding her shoulders to the truck bed.

  Someone somewhere was making a terrible sound.

  Erik pressed the jacket over her mouth. “It will all be over soon.” He peeled one of her hands from the side of the truck and held it.

  Her foot kicked then her body dropped back. Tears wet the sides of her hair. Her legs parted.

  “Söt flicka.” He smoothed the tears. “Let us take care of you.”

  After he and the man had spoken, she was propped against Erik in the truck bed, her head under his chin.

  “We couldn’t interfere,” he said, his fingers combing out the clots of dirt in her hair. “It isn’t what we were hired to do—it’s against the interest of the mining company allied with the army.”

  “I don’t understand . . . Are you a soldier?” Her lips split when she spoke.

  “A mercenary,” he said. “And they”—he gestured at a truck behind them beginning to pull away—“they are a private military. They’re leaving before the UN arrive. I’ve finished my contract and will stay with you until they come. But you must call me Viggo.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Erik has a criminal record, while Viggo is an accountant.”

  She closed her eyes. “Is everyone I knew dead?”

  “Some escaped. You’ll find them and go back to the States.”

  She thought of her childhood bedroom, of Milla, of Daddy, of the mundane safety of home and was repelled. “I can’t,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because somewhere on the other side of the world I’m screaming.”

  He was silent for a moment, then said, “What happened to you was a short hell.”

  She opened her eyes. “Where will you go?”

  “Back to Stockholm. I’m opening my own company. Not a little army but a group of analysts.”

  She wet her cracked lips. “Do you know what the soldiers did to me?”

  “I know,” he said.

  She shifted in his arms, hugging herself. “Do you know exactly?”

  “I can make a very good guess.”

  “Because you’re a mercenary,” she said then reached up, stopping his hand in her hair. “Have you done what they did?”

  “No.” He brought her hand down and held it. “But not one of us is better than any other.”

  She turned to see his face. From that angle, he looked like a minor god who knows the world but is not of it.

  “You’re safe, young, and alive,” he said. “The only thing that matters is now. Say it over and over.”

  “I wish I was like you,” she said, looking into the wreckage of the tents and though she was dead she tried to breathe.

  THE KALAHARI DESERT, 2002

  “What are you thinking of?” he asked.

  “Sleep. Bacon,” she said.

  “You need to center yourself. Find a focal point.”

  “How can I if I can’t see?”

  “Begin to feel your feet spreading on the ground. Empty your body. You must remember this when you’re frightened and know that terrible things are about to be done.”

  “Should I be frightened?”

  “Let go of thought, let go of your body.”

  When he carried the heat of her in his arms, Natalia knew safety. She knew that if she could be with Erik, she would not fear death. If they would not be parted, death would be okay, whatever the eternal boredom, possible nothingness, lack of personality. If she could be with Erik, death would take only her body.

  “Are you there?” she asked.

  “I’m here,” Viggo said.

  “Again?” she asked.

  “I’m coming in,” Nils said.

  “Who?” she asked.

  “Again,” Lucas said. “Almost over,” said Christien and Natalia was cold.

  “Erik?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “I’m ready.”

  The Peculiar Narrative of the Remarkable Particulars in the Life of Orrinda Thomas,

  AN AMERICAN SLAVE

  WRITTEN BY HERSELF.

  “THE POETRY OF THE EARTH IS NEVER DEAD”

  ~ KEATS

  LONDON

  PUBLISHED BY ASHWELL & CRAWFORD,

  STATIONERS’ HALL COURT

  1840

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  Upon the Editor’s journeying south to Turnwood Plantation in order to discover what fate had befallen his younger brother, Frederick Crawford, he was acquainted with these papers whose tale furnishes that history. At the time of its composition, its author, Orrinda Thomas, who has been known to the Editor since a child, could not foresee what barbarous events would transpire. Yet the Editor can attest that he has found these eloquent words to be not only written unaided, but deplorably true, and a rebuke to those who revel in the oppression of their fellow man and dare to do it in Christ Jesus’s name. It is the Editor’s intention to demonstrate how the pernicious cruelty and terror of slavery in this country endangers all men black and white, from North to South.

  RALPH CRAWFORD

  BOSTON, March 25th, 1840

  August 28th, 1838

  We sleep outside so we will not be smothered. The breeze rolls in from the river, over the levee, down the corridor of oak trees and into our makeshift bedrooms on the verandah. It is late August, and Louisiana is the eighth circle of Hell.

  Last night, I watched the smoke from the sugar vats. Observed that the Spanish moss in my mattress is hardly flat. (Likely the house slaves do not think mine worthy of the rolling pin.) I could not sleep for waiting. For what? Keats’s immortal Nightingale? The Communion of William Cullen Bryant? Nothing in the wind but night and smoke. Yet, near dawn, my reward:

  Lord, You alone have chosen me, yet

  this ornate darkness keeps me from sleep.

  The lines came with that queer, molten flush which signals a passion of Poesy. But instead of the customary frenzy of the next passage, I was seized by the unnerving certainty that one day Greatness shall indeed be conferred upon me, and I will be more than the High Brown Bard, the Sable Songstress, the Nigger Muse . . . and simply Orrinda Thomas, poet. The price of the Sublime remains to be seen.

  Your superstition is getting worse with age, said Crawford buttering his toast this morning as we sat in Turnwood’s rose and ivory dining room, the gold-framed figures of the plantation’s patriarchs sternly disgusted by the sight of a black woman sharing le petit dejeuner with a white man.

  “Think of Orpheus,” I said.

  “Jam?” he asked.

  “No, I thank you—whose song moved Gods and mortals alike. Despite his greatness, Orpheus was torn to pieces by the Maenads. They could not hear his voice for their howls.”

  “Your thesis?” he asked, stirring his tea.

  “It is the poet’s Bad End,” I said, lifting my cup.

  But this foreboding is not solely my fancy. Our arrival in Louisiana did not augur well. On our way to Turnwood Plantation, our carriage stopped at a town but I did not descend. It was as if everything bad that ever happened there had lingered. Goodness did not live there, only a suspicious poverty of the Spirit. Porches offered barefoot children aged in their movements, and men whose eyes repeated the violence done to them.

  Crawford climbed down from our carriage, leading the horses to a trough of water (outside of what we took to be their General Store—more resembling an outhouse). He tipped his hat to the clerk with his unrelenting air of refinement, but that fellow was too busy gaping at me to notice Crawford hiss through his teeth: “Orrinda, do not get down.” The children had begun drifting toward us like white gnats.

  When I was a child, I developed the infernal, nervous habit of smiling when about to get a beating. I’d be begging ha
rd for forgiveness all the while grinning. Mrs. Johnson would be winded trying to thrash the smile out of me, so what had I to do yesterday morning but sit in the carriage and Smile?

  Crawford tossed his top hat in the carriage and leapt up, shouting to the horses as the children clotted and swarmed, throwing eggs and rocks, howling oaths at our backs. (Baboon and the like.) Somehow they had gotten wind that the Savage Poet had come.

  “This journey is foolish beyond permission!” I cried, hugging my head to my knees.

  “The more fool you for consenting to come with me!” Crawford laughed, lashing the horses on.

  “But why in the world do we skip gaily into the belly of the beast?” I wailed. “It is one thing for me to be a learned Negro in Boston, but Louisiana?”

  “O Orrinda . . .” Thankfully, he was struck in the neck by an egg. The yoke of indignity silenced his ill-considered oratory until we slid into the haze of the pines; the town clinging like an illness just past which leaves one sour and weak.

  At last, Crawford slackened the reins, saying, “We should see this as proof of how mightily you are needed here.”

  “Oh yes,” I said, smoothing out my skirt. “They need me hanging from one of these trees.”

  “Come now. We must be brave. Do you not see that of all the places that must witness Negroes not as beasts of burden but as brethren capable of Beauty. Bards—”

  “Being bludgeoned by alliteration! I do hope that isn’t the new Introduction to my book, Crawford.”

  “Minx,” he said, rubbing his neck with his handkerchief. “Is the egg gone? This is a new cravat.”

  “But truly, if I am not greatly mistaken these Southerners have no wish to see me as any thing more than a nigger parrot who has forgotten her cage. I’ve never performed farther South than Philadelphia, I fear—”

  “Look.” Crawford drew the carriage to a halt. “Perfectly haunting,” he said.