Above the Ether
Page 14
These girls, though, in their white dresses, are all sent to the cities. High end. Many thousands of dollars a night. Some are sold outright, to wealthy men who put them up in their own apartments. Some are even married off, becoming one of many wives of a single husband. Soon they will have children. Living as mothers to babies they had no choice in birthing.
“Where will I go?” one girl whispers as he listens to her breathing.
English. Perfect English.
The doctor shakes his head. “I don’t know.”
“Can you help me?” She is whispering.
He is quiet for a long moment. They rarely ask for help. By the time that they are here, in this camp, they’ve been broken. Their hope of escape has been wrenched from their hearts. He’s not sure how. Or what the gang members do to break them.
Sometimes he will see bruises. Even cuts. But that’s rare.
Instead, the girls, if they do talk, tell stories of being kept alone in pitch-black rooms. In the dampness of isolated basements. In the backs of panel vans droning constantly across pitted roads. For weeks or months, they were kept in these places. They aren’t sure how long.
But it’s been made clear to them that there’s only one way to escape the torture of a timeless darkness. Only one way out of the hell that’s been created for each one of them.
Compliance.
“Can you?” she whispers, in her perfect English, so that none of the guards will hear. “Can you help?”
He’s checking her pulse. The closest gang member is thirty feet away. Outside the tent.
“If you try to leave,” he whispers, “they will hurt you.”
“Yes,” she whispers, “but I can try.”
The doctor checks her reflexes. Looks inside her mouth. Shines a light into each of her brown eyes.
“Please,” she is whispering.
He pauses again. Staring at her. In a moment, he says, “I cannot.”
“I am fifteen,” she whispers. “I don’t want this to be happening.”
He nods. “I am sorry,” he says.
“You could do something,” she is whispering. “Who knows if it would work. But you could do something to give me a chance. Even the smallest chance.”
The doctor thinks about all the words that he could offer. How they could be said. He blinks his eyes shut. How do you tell a person to give up? He opens his eyes.
She still stares at him. “But,” she is saying, no longer whispering, simply talking to him before he can speak, “it’s obvious that you won’t.”
Insects so small they’re barely visible, spreading through hemlocks and fir trees, slowly stripping them of their needles.
From inside the forests, it’s now possible to see the sky and moon and stars.
From outside the forests, the once dense and green foliage is thin now, brown, and dying.
The camp is overflowing. With people from the Gulf. The security firm has begun to do more patrols through the camp. The gang has become more visible throughout the tents.
The new people must be brought in line.
A man is caught stealing from one of the makeshift restaurants. Like all private enterprise in the camp, the restaurant pays fees to the gang for security. The man, caught with food in his shirt, is beaten bloody in the street, then dragged by gang members, mouth bound, hands bound; they drag him by a rope tied to his feet. A mile they drag him, across rocks, dirt road, over timbers laid down to mark off one neighborhood from another. There’s a sign on him, handwritten in Spanish.
Thief.
Within a few days, construction starts on an addition to the camp. Construction workers in crisp, corporate uniforms begin to outline the wooden foundations of more tents. Laid out in long, neat rows, the addition will house thousands of people. Progress is quick. The workers efficient.
Most of them who do the work, they are brown-skinned. From the south.
Only sometimes do they glance toward the existing camp.
Few if any have legal documents.
The doctor stands at the wire fence. Watching the construction for another few minutes. Then he makes his way back to his tent.
His wife is gone again. The note says she’s gone for a walk. It’s the same note, in fact. One she’s written before.
He knows he should not worry. But he does.
When later that night she returns, he tries to tell her about the addition to the camp. “They’ve begun an expansion,” he says. “Which should help.”
She turns to him. Still standing. Staring. “We’ve come to a place,” she says quickly, “where it is easier to build tents than to let us live freely. That is not a form of help.”
He looks away. The air tonight is warm, almost hot, but the breeze blows.
“Where do you go when you walk?” he asks.
She doesn’t answer for a minute. “Nowhere,” she says. “I just walk.”
That she’s lying is clear to both of them. But it’s also clear he is not to ask anything more.
“I love you,” he says.
She nods.
“We’ll get out of here,” he says. “I promise. We will.”
She nods.
“It will just take a bit more time,” he says.
She leans toward him, touches his head. Looks closely at him. Then gets into her bed.
Parks overgrown with fast-growing privet, flowers choked off from water and light, young trees subsumed, native undergrowth left to die in the shade of a plant once used as a barrier or hedge.
Lakes and rivers swarmed with mussels from thousands of miles away, brought here on the hulls of ships, now killing off the other shellfish in this lake, sucked into water treatment facilities, clogging water pipes as the mussels grow and multiply inside them.
Roadsides covered in vines across mile after mile after mile, coating telephone poles forty feet in the air, enveloping stop signs, fences, shrubs, and trees, creating scenes that are now dying still lifes, deeply green silhouettes of what it is that once stood here.
He watches the boy die. Lying on the table. Infection. His feet were cut terribly in his walk across the desert. His grandmother stands next to him, holding him until finally his breathing stops.
He watches the girl die. Lying on the table. Bronchial pneumonia. Two weeks in a crowded container, a long steel box shipped into this country; most people died en route. Others, like this one, survived a few days more.
He watches the woman die. Childbirth. The doctor’s hands and arms are covered in her blood. The newborn dies as well. Malnutrition. The journey north. The will and strength to complete such a trip. But still not enough to survive.
At home, he sits in a chair. Sipping from a glass of wine.
It’s cool tonight. By comparison.
His wife is gone. She’s gone every night now.
He knows he should be worried. But he thinks still about four deaths. In one day.
Even now, all these years later, one death will upset him.
Four has left him numb.
He stares toward his wife’s bed. The sheets. Just one pillow.
In his mind, he absently runs through the faces he can remember. The people who have died in his care. Not just in this camp. But back to his time at the hospital in the city. The clinic in the countryside.
He does not want to think of each face. He simply lacks the ability to stop.
He pours another glass of wine.
When his wife comes home, she holds a large, tan envelope. She sets it next to her husband.
She sits. On her bed. Looks up at the ceiling of the tent.
“Many people died today,” he says.
She doesn’t look at him.
“Children. An infant. A mother.”
She still stares upward. A beautiful woman. Long dark hair. Olive skin.
There’s blood all across her hands. Dry. Her fingers and palms stained dark. They are almost purple.
He thinks he should stand, walk to her, check her hands. A doctor
. Something is wrong.
But he doesn’t. Instead he looks at the envelope. It isn’t thick. But it bears the official seal.
“What has happened?” the doctor asks.
She lowers her head. Stares at him. Dark eyes. She doesn’t smile. She is beautiful.
Her hands, dark with blood, rest on her bare knees.
His wife. The drug lord’s daughter.
Dark with blood.
The drug lord’s daughter.
“They were never going to let you out of here,” she says now, in her perfect English—it’s been years since he’s heard it, and now it’s as if a stranger speaks to him. “You are much too valuable to them.”
He holds his glass of wine, suspended where he was lifting it when he first saw the blood.
“But I could no longer live here,” she says.
He loves her. But he hardly knows her. Met when they were twenty-five. She’d lived overseas.
“You have many abilities in this camp,” she says. “So much that you can offer. And you’ve done so. Which makes me proud. I’m sorry I haven’t said so. But I am. Because I love you.”
She still stares at him.
“However,” she says, “while I do have great value to the world, here in this camp I have only a few abilities to offer. And as I did not want to give my body over to anyone but you ever again, there was only one other thing that I could do. One thing to buy our freedom.”
The glass is heavy in his hand. He should set it down. But he can’t think where he would put it.
“The violence was about to come here,” she says. “With all the money and trade that flows through these camps, the gangs would not leave each other alone forever. They want in on each other’s territory. Always. That will never end.”
He’s still silent. He stares at her dark eyes. Her long, dark hair.
“The violence was about to come,” she says again.
She blinks. The first time in many minutes.
He’d always thought they ended up in this specific camp by chance. But he’s realizing that isn’t so.
“There were only four,” she says. “That was the price.”
He shakes his head. “Who?”
“Men,” she says. “With history. Come here under false identities. Wealthy. The wealth of the drug trade. And so many people shipped to the north. All with ties to other gangs.”
He looks down at her hands again. Stained with blood. They rest on her knees.
“I was able to get close to them,” she says now, staring. “But don’t worry. You have no reason to worry. They only looked,” she says. “They didn’t touch.”
The wine has dripped all across his white shirt. Red stains, circles of red, like blood soaking out from his chest and stomach. Like the blood from the woman who died with her baby, blood that covered him; it felt like it covered all his body.
“We leave tomorrow,” she says. “We must go far to the north. That’s the one condition. We must go far away.”
Perfect English.
“I never knew,” he says. “Never thought,” he gets out.
She stares. “It will be okay,” she says. “If you love me. Then it will be okay.”
He nods.
“I cannot stay trapped here,” she says. “I cannot live trapped again. For too much of my life, I was trapped.”
He nods.
She stands. She undresses herself. Steps forward and takes the wineglass from his hand. Her fingers, darkly stained, move the glass so delicately. With such grace. Setting it on the table.
“Lie down,” she says, removing his shirt.
“Hold me,” she says, before she kisses his mouth.
“I need you to love me,” she says, as she presses her face against his neck, both naked now, quiet movement, he loves her, more than he’ll ever be able to say. He loves her, holds her. He has never really known her. He’s always realized that. But she loves him.
He loves her.
He’s just never really known her.
“Always,” she says. “Love me.”
Fish pulled from the ocean with such speed and efficiency that, this year, virtually none will survive the winter.
Whales hunted methodically, across the polar cap, until no more can be found.
Primates squeezed into such small areas that they themselves have finally decided that they will no longer breed.
He dresses the body of a prostitute. One he’d frequented from time to time.
She was killed. By some customer, they said.
But he is sure it was her pimp.
His finger traces the track marks along her toes.
Her mother selected the girl’s pink dress.
He tries very hard to make her pretty.
CHAPTER 15
The Restaurant Manager
Goods of all possible types, stacked neatly under the bright lights of this warehouse turned into a store. There is food, and there is lumber, and there is soil in bags and fruit in bags, and there is clothing and footwear and ice. Quartermaster to the masses, a limitless supply of all that anyone should ever need.
In a bar, after work, he sees a man almost beaten to death.
It leaves him shaking. In his seat near the bar. Police and an ambulance come. They ask for descriptions of the men who did this.
“It was just one guy,” the bartender tells the police. “Some skinny kid. White. Never seen him here before.”
The restaurant manager sees his hands shaking. When he can, he gets another drink.
He stares up at one of the TVs still playing behind the bar. Baseball. Bright colors. The motion of statistical graphics, replays, a bunt, an out.
He turns away. Too much motion. Too much color.
The kid hit the man so many times. So fast. The man not able to stand. Get away. He just rocked back and forth with the motion, finally slumping over against the arm of the chair.
When one of the man’s friends stood up, trying to help, the kid beat him so badly that he was laid out, on the ground, within half a minute. Less.
The other people in the bar simply stared. No one stood to stop it. No one stood to help.
All anyone could do is stare.
Throughout it, the restaurant manager sat on his bar stool. Looking over his shoulder. Watching at an angle. Not realizing that he could turn his body fully around, he instead only turned his head, his hands still resting in front of him, on the bar.
Now, as he pictures it again, his stomach churns. All that blood. So much blood. The two men not just beaten unconscious but injured terribly.
“What happened?” a guy behind him asks.
The restaurant manager doesn’t turn.
“Fight,” the woman next to him says. “More like a beating.”
“Why?” the guy asks.
“Some big guy started throwing ice at someone. Some guy who was having a seizure. On the ground. Foaming at the mouth. Big guy sitting over there, where all that blood is, guess he thought it was funny. Threw some ice at the guy having the seizure. Black guy. On the floor.”
The man behind the restaurant manager says, “Damn. God damn.”
“Fucked with the wrong person’s friend,” the woman says.
“Damn,” the man says again. “God damn.”
The restaurant manager tries to tune them out. Looks up at another TV. Updates on the flooding along the Gulf. The city there decimated. The farmland washed over with water and debris. He’s seen the footage twenty times. Its effect now is not to horrify or to scare. Now it only numbs.
He looks down at his phone. Text messages. His fingers shake. He can’t quite get the messages to open.
The kid was so violent. So much blood. Covered in that man’s blood. It wasn’t like a movie or a TV show, a couple punches and the man goes down.
This man would not go down.
And the kid, he wouldn’t stop.
When he was a child, the restaurant manager had a neighbor, another child, maybe six or seven years old
. He liked to torture cats. Stray cats, his own cats. He’d tie things to their tails. Shoot at them with his pellet gun. Once the restaurant manager watched from his window as the neighbor beat a cat to death with a simple, heavy branch.
This was the same.
So brutal. So empty. Devoid of a decency the restaurant manager has never articulated, but that he had otherwise always assumed all the people of the world want to share.
TVs lined up side by side, ever larger, flat black screens. Some are widely curved.
Refrigerators, one after another, blurring finally into the ovens, the dryers, the washers, the microwaves, and the air conditioning units, and the silent dishwashers costing hundreds and thousands. Silver and white and black, more cycles, more features than it seems possible to offer. Or that could ever be used.
Computers, by the hundreds, the size of briefcases or folded up so small they’ll slide into a purse. More power, more capacity than the computers that launched rockets and capsules and humans all the way to the moon.
Outside, in the morning, the wind blows even harder than usual. He can barely open the door of his house.
The news blames it on the remnants of the hurricane. Even a week later, its dissipating power spreads out across the country.
There are tricks to living with this wind. He parks his car parallel to it, with the driver’s door facing east, so that he can open and close the door without the wind smashing the door back on him, or wrenching the door against its hinges.
Driving, he feels the wind, it bounces the car around even on neighborhood streets. But he always knows now, without thinking about it, where the wind is relative to his position. Even turning onto busy streets, he has to account for the gust blowing against his side; it wants to push him into the wrong lane. He pulls harder on the steering wheel, leaning the car into the wind. Like sailing a ship along Eighth Avenue.
The restaurant crew is all on time. This is not a small thing. Crews like this, for these restaurants, the simple act of getting the employees here is part of his job as manager. Helping his employees navigate the mediocre bus system. Helping them arrange to get their children to first or second grade. Helping them find free clinics for sick family. Siblings, parents, or their children, the people who work here tend to be the ones in charge of everything.