Above the Ether

by Eric Barnes

“They will kill you all,” the doctor says. “For whatever it is that you are doing. You can’t outsmart them. You can’t cheat them. You can’t ever get away from them.”

  The boys nod.

  “Where are you from?” he asks.

  They tell him. A town not far from where he grew up.

  “Make a new choice,” the doctor says to the standing boys. “Or end up like your friend.”

  They nod.

  From his bag, the doctor pulls out three vials. He hands them to one of the boys. “When he starts shaking again,” the doctor says, “give him one of these. Okay?”

  The boy nods.

  “What is his name?” the doctor asks, turning back to the boy on the bed.

  They tell him.

  The boy, bleeding, blinks his eyes. Stares vaguely toward the doctor.

  Moments later, the doctor turns to leave. But pauses. Closes his eyes. He doesn’t turn back. Instead he says aloud, “The vials. The medicine. It is very strong. If you aren’t careful,” he hears himself say, “and you give him all of it at once, he’ll die quickly. Quietly. Before you or he realize what has happened.”

  Outside, there is only the sliver of a moon in the sky. More stars than he ever remembers seeing. His town was near a city. Then he lived with his wife in another city.

  Cities that washed all these stars from the sky.

  Here, though, in this camp and across the miles of land around it, there is so little light. And so the night sky shines so brightly down on him. For a few minutes, he tries to count the stars. For a few minutes, he tries to fix the constellations long sought or barely witnessed.

  But he can’t.

  Back at his tent, his wife sits in bed. Lamp on. Reading. He tells her about the wounded boy.

  He notices her knife sits close to her, on the wooden crates they’ve turned into her bedside table.

  “What did you do for him?” she asks.

  He shrugs. Turns his hands up. Starts to answer but he can’t. He needs a minute.

  He says finally, “I told his friends how to help him die.”

  Photos that were originally taken on film. Photos more than a hundred years old, of cityscapes during the day. Horses pulling wooden carts. Women walking their children to school.

  A longing to document daily life as it once was.

  One of the girls being trafficked north thinks that she is pregnant.

  “Why do you think this?” he asks her.

  She tells him how long it’s been since she had her period. He goes to the cabinet of medical supplies. Unlocks it and gets a pregnancy test for her. He hands it to the girl.

  He goes outside while she’s in the small, wooden bathroom. He squints as he stares up toward the sun. Hot and still and blinding. It’s been months since they’ve had rain.

  Ten minutes later, the girl returns. Holding the plastic device. She nods. He takes the test from her. Looks at it. He nods also.

  She sits down on her bed. Looks away from him. Like all the girls, she wears just a white dress. She has long hair, dark, and light brown skin and she is beautiful in a specific way. Recognized but not described. Yet she looks like all the girls.

  It’s a part of this gang’s brand.

  The doctor gets a chair from nearby. Brings it to her bed. Sits. Staring at her.

  The girl still looks away.

  The doctor knows that normally the girls who pass through the camp have not yet been put to work. The gangs won’t risk disease or pregnancy before the girls have been sold into service north of here. And so, the doctor wonders how this girl got pregnant. He wonders if the rules have changed. Or if she was working on her own, unbeknownst to the gang.

  She turns to look at him. She is maybe fifteen. “What will happen if I have this baby?” she asks him. In English now. So that the guards outside the tent won’t understand. Perfect English. The type taught in the private schools back in the south. “What will they do?”

  The doctor stares at her. It’s a moment before he answers. “They won’t let you,” he tells her finally. “Once you begin to show, they will make the decision for you.”

  She looks down at her hands.

  “I loved that boy,” she says. Still staring down at her hands.

  “Who?” the doctor asks.

  She looks up at him. “The boy,” she says. Glancing down. Toward her belly. Looks at the doctor and says again, “The boy I loved.”

  It’s a moment, then the doctor nods. In his mind, he chastises himself. For his assumptions. His callousness. Why wouldn’t it be a boy? Why couldn’t this girl be in love? Why couldn’t she be a teenager who, swept up in a moment, simply was not careful?

  “I’m sorry,” he says out loud.

  She nods. “Will you do the operation?” she asks. “Or will it be someone else?”

  The question startles him. He’s not sure why. It takes a moment to answer. “It’s early enough that you don’t need an operation,” he says finally, “You will take a pill. Then there’s another step. Simple. You’ll take care of that yourself. This will take a few days. There will be a bit of blood. And cramping. But you’ll be here the entire time.”

  She nods. “You’ll give this pill to me?”

  He stares. Usually his nurse does this. But he answers the girl. “Yes,” he says. “I will give this pill to you.”

  She nods, again looking down. “There was a time when I had great hope for my life,” she says.

  He does not have anything to say.

  She thanks him. He can only nod.

  In a moment, as he still stands there, she looks up at him and says, “We will do it now.”

  The doctor gets the pill for her from the dispensary. He is supposed to tell the gang when any of the girls are pregnant. But he doesn’t. The same if they have any disease.

  He decided early on that the gang does not need to know.

  Probably, he sometimes thinks, the gangs prefer this too.

  He returns to the girl sitting on her bed. He holds the pill out to her. She closes her eyes, muttering something, then leans forward, her mouth open.

  It’s a moment before he realizes she expects him to put it on her tongue.

  Finally, he does. Then holds the cup of water as she drinks from it. Carefully swallows.

  After a moment, she thanks him one more time.

  He shakes his head. No need, he whispers, in Spanish, but probably she can’t hear him as she lies back down, turning away from him as she curls her knees up, slowly wrapping them in her arms.

  Then the doctor moves on to the next girl on this row.

  More photos than can ever really be viewed. Hundreds from just a night out with friends. A thousand from just one trip to the beach.

  Revealing, mundane, staged, or blurry.

  Moments not captured but created. An intrusion, artifice, photos retaken, again, until they’re deemed to express some sort of perfection.

  In the early morning, he makes love to his wife. She cries some, but smiles. It’s okay. Just sadness. But not sadness about you.

  New visas will be announced today. The end of the month. The reason for her crying.

  She kisses him. Holds him close.

  Later, he goes to the announcement. Held near the main entrance. Dutiful. He stands near the back of the crowd as names are read out by a man in a khaki suit standing on the bed of a large truck. Guards from the security company surround him. He speaks into a bullhorn.

  Not many names will be read. Usually only twenty or thirty.

  He thinks about the day ahead. There is a birth. Rounds at the hospital tent. Deliveries of medicine from the security company. Other supplies he’ll need to get from the gang’s dispensary.

  Their life back home had, for many years, been so very normal. He’d had a small practice but also worked at the hospital most days. His wife worked as a curator at the history museum. Her specialty was the art of primitive people and early societies.

  On weekends, they had dinner with friend
s.

  Neither of them had family. Or, at least, family that they any longer saw. Hers dead. His already moved north.

  The only sadness was their inability to have children of their own.

  He thinks about the teenagers he treated. The dying boy. The pregnant girl. Had he and his wife had children when they wanted to, the children would now be that age.

  He wonders if they too would have ended up like this.

  No one would mean for this to happen. Yet this camp and the city they left and the towns across the countryside, all are filled with children on a course toward utter despair. Launched on that path unintentionally. But that is the path they’re on.

  Names are called.

  In the crowd, when people hear their name, some cheer loudly, some go silent, some just sink in place, to the ground, hands spread over their damp faces.

  Most people whose names are called aren’t here at the announcement. They’ll be found in their tents. The announcements are a formality, a public expression of false and unrealistic hope.

  In the years before they left their home for the border, the violence rose and rose. Rising exponentially as rival gangs and competing law enforcement—the local police, the federal police, the army and special forces—all fought one another in a cycle that was often more about retribution than any achievable, measurable gain.

  Kidnappings. Bombings. Drive-by shootings.

  The violence was no longer confined to the people working in the drug trade and to those trying desperately to fight it. It had become, instead, a commonplace infection throughout the entire country.

  The demand, from the north, grew unabated, unrelenting. A pull that no one in the north has committed to diminishing.

  And so, the homes of police chiefs were all firebombed, their surrounding neighborhoods going up in flames.

  Midlevel drug traffickers were assassinated in big restaurants, the passersby, the patrons of a café, all caught in the heavy gunfire.

  The desperate focus of the police on ending the drug trade soon left regular criminals, the thieves and murderers and rapists, to move about unwatched and undeterred.

  Finally, he and his wife had to leave.

  Names are called.

  A man comes up to him, holding his arm. The man has recognized the doctor. He thinks his arm is broken. The doctor checks it. After a minute, he tells the man the arm actually isn’t broken. He carefully pulls the man’s shirt sleeve off of the bad arm. He ties it into a makeshift sling.

  “The elbow is sprained,” he tells the man in Spanish. “You’ll need to come see me tomorrow at my tent. Okay?”

  The man thanks him. Wanders away. Milling about like all the thousands here, each of them waiting for their names to be called.

  The doctor wonders why he comes to these announcements. He looks down at the dust at his feet. Kicks at it. Small clouds rise.

  Names are called.

  But not his own. Not his wife’s.

  He watches the dust in the air near the ground. It circles above his shoes.

  He remembers how she smiled, eyes wet. Kissing him. As she was above him.

  The dust settles. He can see each speck, one after another, finally reaching the ground.

  He closes his eyes again. Then moves on throughout the camp.

  Photos from an airplane as it passes close to a mountain. Passengers, the flight attendants, everyone leans toward the left side of the plane. Phones out, although very few people have cameras with lenses. All take pictures of the snowcapped mountain.

  One man, where he sits, he can’t quite get a picture of the scene outside the window. Instead he ends up with a photo of the stranger in the seat next to him, a woman; in the photo she holds her phone, looking at a picture she has taken of the mountain outside the plane.

  He pays for sex.

  He gambles his money away.

  He struggles with pills. Going months without them. Then telling himself he deserves something more.

  CHAPTER 12

  The Restaurant Manager

  Cities on fire.

  Built out into the plains, now drier and hotter than ever before. Yards brown. Trees dead.

  A simple ember from a backyard barbecue can set blocks of homes ablaze.

  He holds a plastic cup, drinking iced tea. No sweetener. He’s gotten to the restaurant early. A different one this week. That’s his job. Rotating through each location. Checking on what the workers need.

  He glances down at the cup. Clear plastic. The restaurant name and logo printed on the front, wet with a haze of condensation he absently disrupts with his thumb. Along the bottom edge of the cup, words are printed. Many. He finds that he is squinting. The words aren’t so much printed as stamped into the plastic mold.

  The type of plastic, the manufacturer’s name, a serial number, the cup’s capacity.

  Embossed plastic letters that no one ever wants to read.

  This restaurant was built in an area of downtown that the city has tried to redevelop. Bringing stores here. Restaurants. Attractions for kids. Bars for adults.

  Most haven’t worked. This restaurant, he knows, most months it only barely turns a profit.

  The wind blows even harder here as it funnels through the narrow spaces between tall buildings, focused with a force that often keeps people from walking forward. Instead they turn a corner.

  Take the long way. It’s much easier.

  The wind is why this area failed. It has driven so many people away.

  He sips from his tea. No customers right now. But they’ll have a small lunch crowd in another hour.

  On the light posts outside the window of the restaurant, banners fly. Tattered now. Barely attached by wires that rattle and whip and ring out as the wind blows hard across them. He watches a banner, trying to piece together the words once printed on it.

  TOMORROW’S CITY … TODAY.

  Suburbs left blackened. Smoking and decimated. As if bombed out. A leveled city, a cratered village, or is it the surface of a moon?

  At night, the documentary about the city that was abandoned is on the television again. Its repeat schedule must meet up with his habits after work. He’s seen bits of it a few times lately. He grew up near the city, in its twin city to the south. Newer, the twin was not abandoned.

  But the northern end of the city finally declared bankruptcy on its debt. Its pensions had long since gone insolvent. Its employees had been fired. City services finally ended. Buildings were allowed to burn. Video from a helicopter shows a home in a once nice neighborhood, the flames of a fire ripping through the house’s roof. A father of four hauling bodies on his own out to the curb. Standing there. Neighbors watching. And still no one ever came to help.

  The restaurant manager grew up fearing that place. And fearing the few people who stayed, like that father on the TV screen and his now dead wife and children.

  That’s what happens. It’s sad. But that is what happens there.

  He moves slightly in his chair. Repositioning.

  Why would someone ever choose to stay in a place like that?

  Fires in blighted buildings. An insurance play. Or a homeless camp out of control. Or kids, bored teenagers, with nothing else they want to do.

  He and the girlfriend break up. A mutual decision. There was nothing wrong. But, for neither of them was there much interest in the other.

  Forest fires covering hundreds of miles, moving with a will of their own through rural towns and midsize cities, fire so hot and so fast they create weather systems of their own. Massive planes, tankers filled with chemicals and water from a lake, make bombing runs on the fire lines, again and again; the planes entering the tall, sheer walls of smoke, disappearing as they approach the fires, like small birds gone over the horizon.

  His mother calls him most days. Sometimes twice a day.

  She wants to go home. Back to her country. She no longer wants to be here? He tells her about the violence there. About the stories his cousins tell.


  We can’t go back, he says.

  She cries into the phone. Sentences that mix Spanish and English.

  I want you to help me, she says. I want you to help me go back home.

  CHAPTER 13

  The Carousel Operator

  Trash as an industry. Shipped by rail and by barge. To other cities. Other states. Across oceans. Into oceans.

  One hundred and thirty million cell phones thrown into garbage cans every year.

  He does not know himself anymore. What he once was, he isn’t. What he’s moving toward has no definition.

  He sits on the edge of his carousel. The epileptic sits next to him, holding a tower of blue cotton candy at his mouth. The tip of the cotton candy whips around in the wind, back and forth, till finally the wind simply bends it to the side.

  “Have you seen the trees here?” the epileptic asks, his lips and tongue turning bluer as he chews. “How they’re bent over? Like a kid’s book. Some crazy world without colors where everything is bent to the side.”

  The carousel operator nods. They’re sitting behind a sleigh on the carousel, sheltered from the worst of the wind. But still it blows hard on them. Enough that they have to raise their voices to be heard.

  No one has come to the carnival tonight.

  “It happens,” the epileptic says. “It’s a school night. Maybe no one heard we’d come to town. There’s not a lot of traffic here. So not many people have seen us.” He shrugs. “It can happen.”

  The carousel operator nods. He’s learned tonight that, on balance, he’d rather work his ride than sit here doing nothing.

  “Why’d you leave your friends?” the epileptic asks him. Once again, he presses the big wad of blue cotton candy toward his face.

  The carousel operator shakes his head.

  “They find religion?” the epileptic asks, chewing. “Express some desire to repent for their sins?”

  He’s smiling some as he chews.

  The carousel operator shakes his head again. “Man,” he says. “Man.”