Every Lost Country

by Steven Heighton

  From far off, a sound, a dog’s bark, maybe—she hopes. She stops and stands, trying to quiet her breathing. The sound comes again and this time, as she feared, it’s a shot. Of the stream flowing out of the lake and down the valley as far as she can see, the moon makes a braid of trembling light. No other light in view.

  The moon has almost set and still they’re on the move, a ghost-lit procession filing down the scoured, treeless valley along the river. From ahead and behind, the whine of the SWAT team’s all-terrain vehicles, driving at a crawl. They’d reached the vehicles an hour’s trek below the glacier, where the boulder fields ended. From there the guards had driven, while the soldiers, who must have ridden up with them yesterday, kept walking, half-speed, on either side of the trail. The shuffle and crunching of boots on gravel, the clink of weapons, coughs appearing as puffs of breath silvered by the moon. The captives stagger along. The small girl on her father’s shoulders pitches in sleep. The Chinese are stumbling too. A freakishly tall one, who looks like an Asian Abraham Lincoln, face caved and mournful, has dropped his assault rifle, maybe dozing as he walks. In a popular film, a Tibetan, or Book or Amaris, would have pounced on the rifle and known how to use it and shot down or held off the soldiers and led the captives back up the glacier to freedom. Instead, they all pause and stand numbly as the soldier picks up his rifle and the officer marches back and rants up at him, the soldier absorbing the tirade with a look of sad yet dignified submission.

  Each step takes Book farther from his daughter and from safety, yet he half wishes they could speed up, so he could generate some heat. A Tibetan kid dressed like a Blood or a Crip—baseball cap, dark parka over a hooded sweatshirt, droopy jeans with a wallet chain, hulking court shoes—has politely, silently offered Book a thin blanket, which he has accepted, caping it over his shoulders and knotting it at the throat. His bare ears still burn and throb. His hand, just covered by the blanket, grips his medical kit.

  A young nun and a much older layman are wounded and Book has treated them briefly, up on the glacier, just out of sight of the pass, when the officer called a halt. It was a place where the trail skirted a crevasse. In the near-dark Book worked by penlight—Amaris holding it—cleansing the tidy through-wound in the man’s side and applying antibiotic cream and gauze, then treating the stout calf of the nun, whose tibia must be smashed: on either side of it, tattered exit wounds, about a dozen small holes. As Book flushed the wounds and tweezed out whatever lead or bone fragments he could find, the SWAT team, their submachineguns slung around to their backs, dragged away the bodies of the dead nun, the man who’d been carried up the glacier and was now being carried back down, dead, and the old man Book had tried to revive. The Tibetans were pointing, chattering. They began shouting. Book and Amaris looked up from their little operating theatre. “Oh fuck,” Amaris said, more quietly than he’d ever heard her speak. Two guards were heaving, flopping the nun’s body like a rolled carpet into the crevasse. “What are you doing?” Book called out, but the Tibetan clamour washed over his voice. The penlight, aiming straight into Book’s face, shook in Amaris’s hand. Two other guards had the second body. The kid in the baseball cap and parka stomped toward the crevasse, shaking his fist, but a soldier, looking more Tibetan than Chinese, stuck the bayoneted tip of his rifle in front of the kid’s nose. The bayonet looked puny and lethal. “Stop!” Book and Amaris said together, Amaris standing with the penlight pointed at her feet, Book holding a sterile pad in one hand, bloody tweezers in the other. The second body went down. No sound as it fell and came to rest somewhere inside the glacier, ten feet below or hundreds.

  The puffy officer stepped between the Chinese and the Tibetans, holding his small pistol by his hip. His grim face, fitted with hornrimmed lenses, swivelled slowly like a surveillance cam, passing over the Tibetans, Book, Amaris. At Amaris he stopped. He frowned as if trying to place her. He said something. He said it again. Amaris glanced fiercely at Book as if he, the international medic, ought to speak Mandarin. “Just help me,” Book told her and knelt again by the silent nun’s leg, Amaris crouching, taking a breath, aiming the penlight. The officer stood frozen. Book glanced at Amaris. She’d pieced herself together. He was rigging a splint with one of the aluminum rods that flagged the trail, bending it back and forth until it snapped, then binding the shorter length in place with medical tape over the gauze. The nun’s face was tight, but she let out no sound, only clutched the hem of her robes hard as if she thought Book might try lifting them higher. An old woman’s wailing kited over the din as the SWAT team (Book sensed the action as much as saw it) tumbled the old man’s corpse into the crevasse.

  The officer, turning away, muttered, “We could bear them no farther.”

  “But far enough,” Book heard himself say, “that it’s almost dark and you’re out of camera range.”

  The officer stopped in his tracks, his back still turned; after a moment, he walked on. Amaris watched Book’s face tensely and said nothing.

  Now the wounded nun in her robes and purple knit cap hobbles in front of Book. He has mimed an offer of help, but she has chosen to crutch herself on the shoulder of an elder nun, a short, burly woman whose tonsured head is bare. Both nuns wear cheap sneakers. The wounded man, in a sheepskin coat and a roguish fedora, walks behind Book. Book turns to check on him, and this man, this casualty, grins in his patchy beard. At times he grunts and stumbles and Book takes his hand, but on the whole he seems unnaturally strong. Amaris walks behind the man. Her pretty, impatient face, usually churning with strong opinion and emotion, is immobile now, swept blank. Briefly her eyes flare at Book, as if he could assure her that this moment isn’t real. In a crisis, people always assume a doctor’s competence extends far beyond medical matters.

  In fact, Book has no idea what to do.

  “You all right?” he calls back.

  She won’t answer him, or she can’t.

  “Hang in there,” he says, shamming an upbeat tone, “we’ll be all right.”

  “Is this where we high-five, Lew?”

  “What?”

  “You shouldn’t have crossed that border,” she says hoarsely.

  “Amaris, it’s not like…it wasn’t like multiple choice up there.”

  “Borders are there for a reason, Lew.”

  “And if they’d crossed to our side before getting shot,” he says, “that would have been ideal.”

  She says something under her breath, do-gooders, he thinks he hears, though it’s hard to tell—it sounds like she’s mumbling in her sleep. She’s too exhausted to keep arguing, he sees. Normally she loves to argue, unlike himself.

  He calls out loudly, “Okay—we need to stop soon!” The words, especially that jaunty okay!, sound absurd out here, useless, though the officer, somewhere up ahead, does speak a little English. But he doesn’t respond. Instead, a young soldier trots up and walks alongside Book. In the moonlight Book can make out the browner face and blazing red cheeks of a Tibetan, or perhaps a Mongol—the one who aimed the bayonet at the hip hop kid, back up on the glacier. He’s compact in a sporty way, a small, dynamic package. Despite the cold, his gloves dangle by strings from his cuffs. A thumb hooked under the strap of his rifle, his free hand bringing a cigarette to his mouth for flashy drags, he seems like a kid who has just enlisted, proudly playing soldier.

  He pins up his fleecy earflap on Book’s side.

  “You will smoke?”

  Book nods. Any heat source is welcome now. The man, or boy, passes him his cigarette. Book puffs, coughs for a moment, takes another drag, hands it back. Against his will he says, “Thanks.”

  “Do not mention it, friend.” The man speaks stiffly, like an extraterrestrial impostor.

  “You know English,” Book says.

  “A little.”

  “We have to stop. I need to tend the wounded, and these others need rest. The wounded need water. Tea. Tell your officer. Am I speaking too fast?”

  “I think so.”

  Book slows do
wn. “Why are we not camping? Some of these Tibetans …”

  “Camping?”

  “Stopping for the night.”

  “Too dangerous!” the soldier says in a jovial tone, passing him what’s left of the cigarette. Book half turns and hands it on to the wounded man, who receives it like something edible. Amaris has fallen farther back.

  “Dangerous because,” the soldier says, pronouncing it be-cows, “in the dark, without the tent, the Splittists might try to evade back up to our border.”

  “None of these people could make it back up the glacier tonight,” Book says. “Or tomorrow.”

  “I think you are right.”

  “So talk to your officer.”

  “Okay, I go right now.” He doesn’t. Still springing along, he cups his hands in front of his mouth and lights another cigarette with a plastic lighter. “Permit me to introduce myself. My name is Palden Jangbu.”

  “So you are Tibetan.”

  “You may call me Pal. And you…?”

  “Canadian.”

  “I mean your name, please to meet you.”

  “Lewis Book. Look, we have to stop now. Please talk to your—”

  “Your name is Book?” Palden has a look of tickled curiosity.

  He’s around twenty or so, maybe a bit older—the moonlight makes it hard to estimate.

  “Yes.”

  A fit, nimble elf with an assault rifle.

  “I am pleased to have a chance to practise my English. More smoking?”

  “No.”

  “Does the camera woman speak English either, I hope?”

  “I don’t think she speaks anything else.”

  “But she is Han Chinese, as anyone can see. Lieutenant Zhao will speak to her, if ever we should stop.”

  “She’s from Canada.”

  “I don’t think so. Lieutenant Zhao thinks not so, either.”

  Book steps from the path and trots up beside the limping, wincing nun and points toward the river. “We rest here,” he says and halts, gently gripping the arm of the wounded man as the man walks up, his colouring lurid now, especially in contrast with the robust glow of Palden’s face. Palden has stopped and tossed down his cigarette. One of the captive men stoops to retrieve it. Palden frowns thoughtfully.

  “But Lewis Book—it’s not time to stop.”

  “Do you want more of these people to die?

  “Not far to the base now, Lewis.”

  “Maybe that’s not a fair thing to ask you,” Book says.

  “Pardon me?”

  “What is it?” Amaris calls.

  “It’s for safety of us all,” says Palden. “We must…oh, dear.”

  The Tibetans, maybe thinking an order has been given, are falling out and flopping along the path. Palden shouts something and Lieutenant Zhao hurries back toward them. Though he’s pudgy, he picks his way through the sprawled refugees on concise, almost dainty feet. His small mouth sucks in around a cigarette. He flings it away. Curtly he addresses Palden, who salutes and launches an amiable reply, but the lieutenant cuts him off and turns to Book—Book digging out his glasses, kneeling beside the wounded man, who is cross-legged on the ground and now sags back with a pneumatic groan.

  The lieutenant’s moonlight shadow obscures Book’s view of the wound.

  “Amaris, the light. Something’s wrong.”

  She crouches on the other side of the man, fumbling to get her mittens off. “Fuck. Fuck it.” The older nun helps the injured nun down onto the ground and then sits beside her and glares up at Lieutenant Zhao, her flat face and bulging eyes taking the full, last light of the moon. She speaks angrily, pointing to her mouth. The moon, behind Zhao, blacks out his face. Ignoring the old nun, he tells Book, “You are not yet to stop.”

  “We have to,” Book says. “Even for an hour. I have to treat these people. And everyone needs water and tea.” He looks down as Amaris snaps on the penlight: the man’s sheepskin coat over his belly is darkly saturated, glistening.

  “Didn’t you say it looked all right?” she asks.

  “It did. Then he walked for hours.”

  He wants to slice open the man’s coat but knows a homemade coat like this, even bloodstained, is too precious. He starts untoggling the front. From above him, a sound like a deadbolt snapping clear and he looks up: Zhao holding his automatic pistol high above his own head. The muzzle flare and ripping blast go together, far too loud for a weapon so small. Amaris gasps and the penlight wavers, steadies. Zhao waits a few seconds, then fires again. The Tibetan child screams and screams.

  “We are not yet to stop.”

  Book’s ears reverb with the shots and the shunting of his pulse as he strains to make out Zhao’s face.

  “Look at this,” Book tells Zhao. “Can you see this?”

  Zhao, lowering the pistol, leans slightly closer.

  “He’ll die,” Book says.

  He makes out Zhao’s eyes behind the glasses. They’re skimming back and forth between the wounded man’s torso and…not Book’s face, but Amaris’s.

  “We may stop here, then,” Zhao says at last. “Not long. And the Sergeant Jangbu”—he nods toward Palden—“he will assist with the small torch.” Then he points at Amaris and snaps some phrase in what must be Mandarin. She stares back at him, then glances at Book.

  “This woman I will talk to.”

  The officer with his pistol leads her off the trail, away from the party, toward the river. Her breath tightens and so do her muscles, which feel used up, worthless, and she’s furious at her body for this defection after how many years of punctual gym time, swimming, sweating on the treadmill, the Stairmaster, the elliptical, in the Nautilus room. If the fight-or-flight response is meant to help you survive, why does adrenaline make you feel so shaky and scared? Then she thinks: calm down, it’s all right, you have a passport, a Canadian passport, not on you (as the officer knows—his men conducted a quick search up on the glacier), but back up at the camp, yes.

  The officer points at a low boulder beside the river and says something in a growl, like a Kurosawa samurai. The voice doesn’t go with the puffy face, the silly earflap cap, the chunky horn-rims. She sits on the rock saddletop. Its cold comes up through her tights. Still, the air is milder here and bears notes of moisture, the wet, sweet smell of the river. Up the bank, the old Tibetan nun and the kid in the baseball cap and baggy parka fill clattery cook pots with water. Another kid, in a toque and parka, like a gangmate of the first kid, stands smoking. A few steps from Amaris the officer hunkers over his small combat boots, dipping something in the shallows. Moonlight glazes the icy stones and pulses on the rippling current of the channel. It’s a night full of photons in dancing animation and her eyes, even now, are framing it—by this stage in her life it’s less a habit than a molecular instinct—panning, zooming in. It calms her now as it always does.

  The officer stands and comes toward her, holding a dribbling mug. He hands it to her with a grunt and a few words that might be English, though the river is a white-noise machine and neutralizes sound. She pours the water straight down her throat. The officer takes back the plastic mug and goes and repeats the process, though this time when he stands and returns, he doesn’t hand it to her, as she is so hoping, but arranges himself on a second rock, facing her. He studies the mug’s lip, as if for crumbs or lipstick, then drinks. Over the mug, he eyes her through his glasses. He shifts on the boulder uncomfortably, sits straighter. He has realized he has taken the lower rock. His knees are forced up toward his chest, like a pudgy adult wedged into a schoolchild’s chair. She hunches down further to accommodate him, but her face is still higher than his.

  He says something.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, “I really don’t understand. I don’t know Mandarin. I don’t even know if that is Mandarin.”

  He repeats it, further roughening his voice, while trying to inch his spine upward. As for Amaris, if she hunches any lower, her chin will be in her lap. Usually she does the opposite—tries
to stand taller, sit straighter.

  “I’m not Chinese,” she says. “I’m sorry. I speak English, okay? You speak English. Please speak English to me.”

  “So you are not Chinese,” he says, “according to you.”

  Hearing English she feels safer, in spite of his tone and his face—haggard, unhappy, like a customs officer on a long nightshift.

  “My biological parents were Chinese,” she says. “I never knew them.”

  “Biological parents? I do not understand. Surely there is no other kind.”

  “I was adopted, when I was a baby.”

  “I see.” He nods, as if accepting the explanation—then he lets off another burst of Chinese while his impassive, pouched eyes gauge her from behind the lenses. It’s awful to feel you need help. She swallows the salty clot in her throat. Not in front of him she won’t.

  “My birth parents died in Vietnam,” she says firmly—“Vietnamese Chinese. I left with other refugees. I mean, I was taken along—okay? When I was a baby.”

  “Ah,” says the officer, leaning forward, “you were a refugee? You have sympathy for the refugees?”

  “Yes. I mean—yes, I was. But listen—”

  “And your parents, they were on the imperialist side in the Vietnam War?”

  “I have no idea,” she lies. “They lived in Saigon.”

  “I think you speak Chinese. Tell me your name.”

  “Amaris McRae.”

  “Your true name.”

  “I was adopted,” she says, “in Vancouver—in Canada! By a Canadian couple!”

  He drains the mug. Without freeing her gaze, he clips the mug onto a carabiner hung from his belt, next to the holster. He digs a packet from the leg pouch of his trousers and tips out a cigarette and a brass lighter. His stubby hands work nimbly at his mouth. He drags on the cigarette the way someone dying of thirst might suck water through a straw.