Above the Ether

by Eric Barnes

  ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND DEAD.

  The words cross the bottom of the screen.

  “Holy shit,” the epileptic says.

  “Yeah,” says his friend.

  “How long you fuckers staying here?” the dipping man now says, his voice muddied by the pile of dip under his tongue.

  And the carousel operator knows what’s happening now. He’s late to it. The epileptic, of course, he’d realized right away. But now the carousel operator is realizing. He’s late to this. Because he’s a lot of things. Things that are bad. But he’s never once cared about the color of someone’s skin.

  The carousel operator is a thin kid. Not that tall. He doesn’t shave.

  He stands from his barstool now.

  The man with the dip already loves this. “Is he your fucking boyfriend?” the man asks, an accusation as he points at the epileptic, voice still altered by the huge load of dip.

  The epileptic turns from this man to his new friend, the carousel operator, ready to get out of here. Ready to walk away. Why bother? A scene repeated through his entire life. His dead brother’s life. All his friends’ lives. A story his mother told him as a child, that would repeat itself, over and again, and sometimes you fight and sometimes you walk, because if all you do is fight, his mother said, you’ll fight your entire life, consumed finally with an anger that you can’t let go of or control.

  But as the epileptic turns to the operator of the carousel across from his own ride at the fair, he sees the kid now in this bar in the middle of the night and knows something different has already started.

  The man with the dip wants to speak again. He’s ready to posture. Hurl insults. Intimidate the two of them. But he can’t. Because the kid from the carousel has already hit him in the mouth. The kid hits him again. And again. The kid keeps hitting him, even when the man is on the ground. Bloody. Eyes closed.

  Lame hands held up.

  Wait. Stop.

  But the kid doesn’t stop. Doesn’t hesitate. He’s down on one knee. Hitting the man repeatedly. Methodically. Like a doctor giving CPR. Or a butcher at work on a steer.

  The man with the dip has friends, of course. Who stand. Three of them. Whether they know him or just sympathize, they are about to join the fight.

  The kid turns to them and before any of them can step forward, the kid has grabbed one of them, a man, much bigger, he’s fat, the kid pulls him forward, so that the fat man’s momentum takes him to the ground as the kid knees him in the face, then steps around and begins to hit another of the friends, again and again, until he also falls.

  The epileptic is still holding his beer. Watching. Stunned. He hasn’t had a chance to understand this. All he knows is the condensation on his bottle. Dripping cold across his thumb.

  But what he sees already is something he feels but can’t yet say. What he feels is not this kid’s ability or grace or some sort of preparation or training for the assault he’s launched against these dumb hicks here in the bar. What the epileptic sees is a willingness.

  The willingness to cause harm.

  One of the friends of the man with the dip is the man who is missing an arm.

  It’s bad.

  The carousel operator throws him to the ground, holding his one arm behind him, the epileptic watching as the kid twists that one arm so far that it separates from the shoulder or maybe it’s broken. All the epileptic knows or anyone knows, any of these people who watch this fight under the dim lights of this warehouse now operating as a bar—the music’s so loud with the drums and grinding guitar, and the singer has begun to moan, howling really, the man keeps howling—but all any of them know is the screaming, above the music now, the one-armed man can only scream.

  The fat man gets on his feet. Grabs the kid. Holds him tight. Starts hitting him hard in the side of the head. Fist on skull. The kid’s eyes close. His head shakes with every blow.

  But the kid is able to grab the man’s arm. He twists it. Badly. Till the man lets go of the kid, screaming, the kid pushing back on the man and they both fall to the floor.

  But the kid, the carousel operator, his friend of these few hours, it’s like the floor wakes him up; repelled by it, he’s standing, and another of the dipping man’s friends is on him.

  And so the violence spreads.

  This man carries scars as well, across the face. He’s probably thirty, and he’s big and strong and he’d walked forward slowly, having watched what’s happening, smiling with disdain, knowing that he’s stronger and tougher than anyone he’s ever met in all his life.

  What the kid does to him leaves everyone in the room in a self-imposed silence. The kid hits this man first in the nose, breaking it, a pain even the strong man can’t but stop to feel. And stopping leaves him open to a circling violence, the kid hitting the man in his ear, the other ear; he swings once with his hand open, and he may well have punctured the man’s left eye, there’s blood and there’s fluid and the man has dropped to the floor. But still the kid is circling. Slowly. Hitting him in the throat, in the side of the neck. He hits him again in the nose.

  The man’s strength, probably, works against him at this point. Because he stays partly upright. He doesn’t curl up. He doesn’t pass out. Or die.

  The kid hits him again in the throat. There’s something about this. How he hits him in the throat. The epileptic considers this. In the seconds that substitute for normal moments or minutes. This kid he barely knows embodies a violence he didn’t recognize, has never known, that at most he read about in some classroom for literature or heard about on a street corner, the stories of legend and fear that no one challenged but that, still, no one ever in their hearts could truly, honestly believe.

  Finally, the man lets himself lie down on the floor.

  The kid is covered in blood. Both his hands. He’s bleeding from his nose and mouth and the side of his head. There’s blood down the front of his shirt, as if he’s spilled a bowl of it on himself.

  He turns, looks around, takes in the entire room.

  After a moment of stillness, the kid kicks the first man in the face. The guy with the dip who pushed his black friend. A brown, fibrous wad now spills out across the wooden floor. It lies near the guy’s bleeding mouth. The kid kicks him again. Again in the mouth.

  The man’s face now, it’s misshapen. Warped.

  His palette, the epileptic thinks. The kid’s fucking broken the man’s palette.

  All this has taken just a few minutes. Not even five.

  A violence beyond what anyone present can ever describe.

  A violence unspeakable.

  A violence that, clearly, is only a repetition of so many moments in this kid’s life.

  And on the television, the epileptic sees, turning now, as if the fight had not happened at all, he turns to see the buildings fall. Three of them. This is live. Happening now. One after another. Collapsing, disintegrating, gone, already washed over with the water that continues to flow.

  Everyone can sing. It’s not clear how. It’s not clear why. No hymnals. No program. No common book or printed words of song or prayer. But when they sing, they find the tune, the note, the voice all mean to express. The singing rises, but in a sense, it’s wordless. Really, these are only sounds.

  The words are the least important of it all.

  He’d prefer to avoid the desperation.

  Settle terms. Exchange cash. Move on to why they stand together in this deserted playground.

  He wishes he could afford a hotel.

  He wishes he had a girlfriend.

  He wishes he were long since married.

  He wishes he even knew this woman’s name.

  But none of these things has, for him, ever once seemed possible.

  CHAPTER 8

  The Doctor

  Cities where the flu spreads like a plague.

  Not the plague of olden times.

  Not some virus wiping out humanity in all its forms.

  Just the flu. That kills the elderl
y, small children, the undernourished, and the poor.

  Still these two years later, his wife refuses to speak in English. Even though she’s long spoken it better than him.

  “Please,” he says to her.

  She shakes her head. Lying on her small bed. She won’t eat today. He knows already that she won’t. But he tries again.

  “Please,” he says.

  “No,” she says. She picks up her book. Reads again by the sunlight that illuminates the white canvas around them.

  Someone knocks on the flimsy door frame to their tent. He goes from this room, where they live, to the next room. A room created simply by two sheets of canvas hung from the ceiling. But they call it a room.

  The woman knocking has a prescription that needs updating. Medicine for her heart condition. The doctor renews the prescription he wrote for her.

  The doctor is allowed to prescribe drugs still. And so he does. He’s allowed to treat patients still. Even perform certain operations. And so he does those things too.

  The authorities here, they welcome anyone who relieves them of a service they are required to supply.

  And the doctor needs the money. To pay for a tent he and his wife can live in without other people. To purchase better food than the rations distributed twice a week from the back of a truck. To buy protection for himself and, especially, his wife.

  Why wouldn’t he want to buy these things?

  He’s been a doctor for more than ten years. Before coming here, they had a home with a courtyard. A bedroom that overlooked the bay.

  The doctor cannot distribute the drugs. The security firm handles that. But they will honor his prescriptions.

  And, of course, the doctor is paid in cash.

  There are almost one hundred thousand people living in this camp. Just across the border. Built alongside the wall.

  Building the camp here was a mistake. There are tunnels underneath the wall that come out in tents in the heart of the camp. It is not just the easy access between both countries that’s a problem. It’s the economics of the matter. People in the camp have many financial needs. Helping others cross the border is an easy source of money.

  The people who come through a tunnel into a camp like this, they are mostly transporting drugs. The people who want freedom, who want to escape into the cities and farms to the north to start a life here, to work and live and marry, all of them now use boats, not land. Once the wall was finished, it blocked the easy overland entrances that had existed for so many decades.

  That’s when the migrants shifted to boats.

  The number of migrants didn’t change. All that changed was the number who died in crossing.

  Sometimes refugees are able to buy their way out of the camp through these same tunnels. But the cost is now beyond the means of all but a very few.

  He finishes writing prescriptions. Finishes with his patients. He’s checked a man’s sprained arm. He’s checked a child’s pink eye. He’s checked a woman’s belly.

  Yes, he tells her, you are pregnant.

  She begins to cry. He’s not sure if they are tears of sadness. She hides her eyes, and so he isn’t sure. But if she’s sad, unbearably so, then she will be back. He does not need to tell her that he can take care of that issue too.

  She leaves. He steps outside for a moment.

  They have no children, the doctor and his wife. They could never conceive. Even with the help of drugs and doctors. There was no diagnosis. They tried every option. All failed.

  They are forty now. They tried for fifteen years.

  He wonders, of course, if he’d have been able to have children with a different woman.

  For him, it’s a merely clinical question.

  His wife, he thinks, she wonders this too. But for her, he is sure, it’s a different question. One unspoken. Never discussed.

  He simply sees it in her eyes.

  Hospitals have set up tents in their huge parking lots. Treating children and the elderly, all of whom have the flu. Some die. Most do not. Billions of dollars are spent treating the illness. Doctors turn to the TV cameras, begging everyone, next year, to please get vaccinated.

  “This could be so much less severe,” one doctor says, “if everyone listening simply got one shot.”

  He and his wife crossed the border knowing they’d likely end up in a camp like this. First, they walked a hundred miles through the desert to the coast. Then they paid their way onto a small boat. Once a fishing boat, it was loaded now with almost fifty people. This was the safest boat they could afford. It was intercepted within a few days of being out in the Gulf. After much processing, days of questions, they were taken to this camp.

  The doctor and his wife knew this could happen. But the violence at home had gotten to where they could no longer stay. Friends of theirs disappeared. Police demanded larger bribes for even less protection. Homes near theirs were firebombed in the night.

  Drug violence. All of it. Violence institutionalized. Violence fueled unintentionally by the desperate flood of workers fleeing the thousands of failing farms and villages throughout the countryside.

  They had known a camp like this was likely. But it was a theory then, a thing they’d read about, heard about, seen in videos and read about in the papers.

  There are five of these camps. Spread evenly across the border. The biggest of them are on the coasts, camps that hold the migrants who can’t escape the coast guard or the navy, or who can’t escape the weather or the fragility of their small boats, or who can’t escape the callus ineptitude of their sea captains or overland guides. The camps on the coasts hold many hundreds of thousands of migrants.

  In that sense, the doctor and his wife are fortunate. This camp is smaller, less chaotic.

  He’s not sure why they were brought to this one.

  Luck.

  “Have you gone to the administrators today?” she asks. In Spanish, of course.

  “Not yet,” he says in English.

  She turns back to what she’s reading. He sits near her. Reading a newspaper.

  In theory, the camps are only holding pens. Where the administrators tend to the migrants as they wait to be processed before release. Background checks. Medical screening. Citizenship tests. An assessment of one’s reasons for seeking asylum.

  What do you want? What will you do? Will you make something or only take?

  In reality, far fewer are released than gain entry to the camps. The politics, the economy, the fear engendered by stories of crime and violence. All combine to keep the doctor and his wife and the hundred thousand people around them detained here indefinitely.

  He takes a sip of wine. Offers his wife a glass. She declines. Lunch was chicken and rice with fresh tomatoes grown in the camp. The girl who cooks for them worked for years in one of the luxury hotels on the Gulf’s coast, back before the hotels began to close.

  Beaches steadily washed away. Hillside resorts that no amount of rocks or concrete barriers could keep from collapsing into the ocean. Heat that fewer and fewer travelers chose to bear.

  Some days, he knows, he’s come to find a comfort in how he lives here. In his position, his authority over his patients. His relationship with the authorities.

  He never mentions this to his wife. She’d kill him, probably. If she even knew such a thought had crossed his mind. She’d slit his throat in the middle of the night.

  Not an idle thought.

  She’s the daughter of a drug lord. He ruled the southern provinces. Until he, like all of them are eventually, was taken away in the night. Stripped. Tortured. Slowly killed. By another drug lord, one who wished very much to replace him.

  One who would later be taken away in the night himself.

  That the daughter, his wife, was only thrown out to live in the street is hard to believe. Just fourteen. Most like her, the fallen families of drug lords deposed, are raped, and tortured, and eventually also killed.

  She was allowed to leave. For years she lived abroad, she told
him. On her own. He met her when she was twenty-five.

  He looks at her on her small bed. Eyes closed. Dark hair across her pillow. A beautiful woman. Pretending to sleep.

  But she is only thinking. Waiting. Wanting to leave this horrific place.

  “And you know,” she says, on television, a doctor, calm but her exasperation shows at the edges of every sentence, “you need to know, nothing will kill more people this year than obesity, inactivity, and the simple, stupid choices people make.”

  In the night, he wakes as she gets into bed with him. Whispering in Spanish, touching him, she has him ready before he’s even really awake, atop him, moving gently. She whispers still, between her short breaths. He’s half asleep, half awake, she kisses his neck and then his chest, pushing harder. But almost silent. She comes soon, probably she’d been touching herself in her bed before this started. Her breasts just barely brush against his chest as she rocks forward, back again, whispering to him, and he comes now too.

  She’ll sleep the rest of the night with him.

  He loves her. The way she touches him. The way she smells.

  He hates so much the many ways in which he’s failed.

  In the morning, he sees patients in the front room of their tent. They’re lined up to see him. He has a nurse who works with him. She was a scrub nurse working on transplants at one of the university hospitals. She is much overqualified for the job. The colds people have. The pains and vague discomfort.

  Most of the illnesses here are a function of the sadness people feel. The worry that they won’t ever get out of this camp. The depression that this is all their journey will possibly achieve.

  This is his worry too. So few visas are now issued. So many more people cross the border, most caught and sent directly to these camps. Fear of the refugees grows steadily. Anger toward them. Resentment and distrust, and for many people it is simple hatred.

  His cousin made it out of his camp. Legally. He lives far west now, in a city there. He tells the doctor about the hatred. He’s an architect working as a cab driver and weekend busboy. Unable to get any other job despite the visa and work permit he was granted many years ago. “They don’t like us,” the doctor’s cousin says when they speak by phone. “They see us all in the same light. We’ve come here to take, they think. Take money. Take jobs. Offer nothing. Give nothing. I tell people I designed office buildings. Hospitals. A library. A museum. They look at me and laugh.”