Every Lost Country

by Steven Heighton

  “I still feel sick about that dog,” she says.

  He nods slowly, looks straight ahead. “I know.”

  “So…did it die? I looked for it before we left …”

  “A bullet severed its spine, love. I’m sorry.”

  “And that killed it?”

  “Not directly, but it’s dead now. Out of its pain.”

  “But if its spine was cut, there wouldn’t be any pain, right?”

  The kid’s ultrasound is always on, full scan.

  “It was shot in the lungs, too,” he says.

  No response. In this sand, not even a sound of footfalls. He feels certain she’s working things through and will keep pressing him, asking how it actually died, who actually finished it off. The dog was a bitch, maybe eight or nine. Her fawn pelt was threadbare, foam-flecked purple lips drawn back from a panting yellow smile, bloodshot sclera exposed as she rolled a panicky eye toward Book. She’d had several litters by the look of her. Book’s first interest in medicine was veterinary, on his parents’ farm, where from the age of ten he would help care for the sick animals—and would have to finish them off (his father insisted) when they couldn’t be helped. The other half of caring for them, his father would say.

  “Do you ever wonder if she’ll take you back now, after this?”

  “What—your mother?”

  “Of course my mother,” she shoots back with that rhetorical Greek syntax she unconsciously defaults to in argument.

  “You know she’s not like that,” he says. “If she makes up her mind, there’s no unmaking it.”

  “But you have to keep trying, Papa! Or start again—especially after this.”

  He has known the girl feels this way, deeply, and yet she has never said so, not once. Still, this talk had to happen sooner or later. He looks around to make sure Amaris and Choden aren’t close enough to overhear. They are, though. He says, under his breath, “Sophie—love—listen. Your mother has always been the one for me, okay? But I can’t convince her of that. Or, no—she knows it—it’s just that it’s beside the point now.”

  “Beside the point?”

  “I was gone too often. And at times when she really needed me there. You know that, Sophie—I mean, if anyone understands, I know it’s you.”

  “But she even said—she told me she told you—it didn’t have to be like this, but you wouldn’t meet the conditions! After the police came we were talking about it and she told me and she didn’t mean to but she did.”

  Diki watches them with a curious, concerned frown, like a child hearing her parents fight for the first time.

  “We need to keep our strength up, love. They’ll be coming after us tomorrow. Maybe they won’t wait that long. I need to get you home. We’ll talk about this later.”

  “For fuck’s sake, there might not be a later!”

  “Don’t talk that way!”

  She rips her hand free. “We’re being chased through a desert by, like, helicopter gunships and soldiers who’ll be shooting to kill and you’re worried about my language?”

  “I don’t care about your language! I mean don’t talk nonsense. There’ll be a later.” As if she were still young enough to lie to, he adds, “And there’s no way they’re going to be shooting to kill.” She rolls her eyes at him, as if locked in a trivial, routine dispute back home—he’s a bully for not letting her stay out an extra hour with friends. For her, everything has an ultimacy, so when things really do go ultimate, like now, she has no higher gear of expression to shift to. And yet she is right. There might not be a later.

  He says, “Your mother told me I had to stop leaving, period. No more crisis postings overseas. She wanted me to work in admin, or with patients in the city if I still had to do outreach work. Street health clinics. Emerg, in Scarborough, with all the gang shootings. She said there’s a refugee crisis at home—in the Corridor, in the housing projects—and she was right, damn it, I knew she was, but I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t stop leaving right then. It was just when—”

  “You blew a chance to bring us back together because you wanted to keep going overseas?”

  “It was just after the tsunami. I’d promised her, but they were frantic for doctors on Bangkaru, paramedics, nurse pracs, anyone. They had nobody. And if I hadn’t gone right then, I’d still be wondering how many fewer might have died. Maybe none, maybe dozens, or more—I don’t know. Family’s important, Sophie, but it’s not everything. It can’t be. And that choice—it was murder, the worst. She shouldn’t have done it. It’s the one thing about her, damn it, all the tidy deadlines, the firm agendas, the conditions…I shouldn’t be saying this.”

  “She says you’ve done enough for the world. She respects you for it but she thinks it’s, like, someone else’s shift now—you should be back with us.”

  “With us? What do you mean—has she—you mean she ’s—”

  “Before it kills you.”

  “You mean with all of you?” Book’s heart seems to fill, dilating warmly, the way a collapsed lung might feel being reinflated. “She says this now? No…she must mean …”

  “I don’t know! I don’t know—I guess she means just, like, back in town, to see Pavvy and me every week?—but maybe she’s going to feel different now.”

  He nods and tries to look encouraged, to look encouraging, to feel it. Whatever it takes to get them both through this. Anyway, it is time to go back, to remain close for a while, if not to go actually, improbably, home. They’ve become one of those centrifugal modern families: Sophie in her room with her cellphone, texting back and forth with her boyfriend about crazy, half-baked holdups, Nika charting stats in her lab, Pavlos the angry little soccer star booting goal after goal, alone on a field, Yiayia in her black weeds watching Oprah, Book in a blood-spattered field tent eight time zones away.

  She asks him more about his video “confession” and he’s relieved that she’s on another scent, maybe picturing her mother and brother and grimly muttering yiayia viewing the clip as it plays and replays on the various networks. Ruefully she smiles—“She’ll be wondering how we turned into such a bunch of criminals”—and he shams a chuckle to sustain the new course of her mood. The thought of his own brief fame, or shame, or however it’s playing out at home, doesn’t excite or trouble him. From up here on the roof of the world, with the blood of the dead and the wounded in his hair and under his nails, that other place seems even more inscrutably foreign and virtual.

  An hour deeper into the small hours. The waning moon has passed overhead and leads the party westward. Dechen rides sidesaddle on the yak, her glowing pipe augmenting a witch’s profile: hooked nose, crumpled mouth, pointy chin. Norbu hunches against the cold with his parka hood up over his baseball cap, machinegun hidden on the far side of him. His jeans keep getting baggier, droopier. The kid has left his best friend and his uncle behind, and Choden isn’t sure but she thinks his parents must both be dead—so she has told Book, adding, “Alas, Lewis—Lhasa is a city of such things.” (With Palden for the last time, shining the penlight into his eyes, Book asked if his family would be wondering about him, and Palden said he had a big family but they never saw or talked to him anymore—never, since he’d enrolled in the PLA. In a glum, almost sulky monotone, as if hurt now at being left behind, he added, “Be seeing you soon, I hope, Lewis.”)

  They come over a gap between high dunes. Below them, half filled with sand, there’s a sprawl of roofless ruins, and just past them the sands end and another stretch of moonlit hardpan rises toward a ridge of bare, snowless peaks and the higher Himalayas beyond. Though Kyatruk is the highest peak in the area, from here it’s hidden. A paradox of perspective: how the high peaks you see from fifty miles away vanish behind the lower ones as you near, so getting a view of a mountain is like getting a clear vision of a life—you have to pull away from it before its shape starts to emerge from behind all the concealing layers.

  The ruins look ancient, as if a forgotten city has been all but swallowed by the dun
es. Choden kneels in the sand in front of a truncated wall and studies the patchy remnants of a mural lit up by the moon. The lenses of her glasses are an inch from the wall. These ruins, she explains, were once a monastery, likely destroyed during the resistance, in ’59 or a year or two later. “It’s very fine work!” she says, “part of a very large painting.” Her tone is buoyant, as if the rest of the mural is safely buried and will soon be uncovered and restored, not abandoned to the bleaching sun and the sandblasting winds. Amaris crouches next to her and makes out two doughy elephants wrestling, human figures riding a sturgeonlike fish across a lake, a couple embracing in a pagoda. The dense detail is wonderful, both whimsical and baroque; she thinks of Hieronymus Bosch and then, oddly, Peter Greenaway.

  The remains of two walls meet at right angles to break the cold wind breathing down out of the mountains and in that corner Tenzin, a cigarette in his lips, hitches the yak by its nose ring. An exhaust of white breath chuffs from its muzzle as Tenzin unloads it. While Choden and Book sit with Lasya—Book murmuring questions as he palpates her huge, taut, moon-pale belly, she gnawing her lip between answers—Amaris, Sophie, Sonam and the monks help Tenzin to roof in a shelter, using a ragged square of tough canvas that a yacht-sized sail could be cut out of. With stones pulled from the rotten mortar, they weigh down two sides of the canvas sheet along the top of the right-angled walls. Tenzin props a stretcher pole in the sand to hold up the sheet’s fourth, unsupported corner. Near the pole, just under cover of the sheet, he starts a small fire with twigs he takes out of the panniers, some clear liquid from a small bottle, and dry loaves of yak dung.

  Choden tells Sophie, “The fire is really just for the tea. Really our heater is Zapa.” She nods toward the back of the shelter, where the yak stoically munches hay from a small mound that Tenzin has set out. Its withers are just below the level of the sagging canvas; its decorated horns would poke into it if its head weren’t lowered. Choden urges Amaris and Sophie to find a spot in the sand close to Zapa, for warmth, but the big animal scares them. What if it panics in the night and stampedes? Or when it pees, shits? Choden seems tickled by their fears and instantly imparts them to the other fugitives, who guffaw in chorus, as if she has just nailed a killer punchline. Sonam, Lasya and Diki soon establish themselves in the gloom almost beneath the yak’s belly and now the other Tibetans settle in around them. Amaris, Sophie, Book and Choden find spots closer to the fire, while Norbu chainsmokes and paces back and forth in front of the shelter, his gait stiff and twitchy, as if he’s on crystal meth.

  “Sleep now,” Choden tells them, and Amaris sees Book break from what he’s doing—shining the penlight into his messy doctor’s bag, searching—and stare up at Choden with a zoned, blank look, then shake himself, run a hand through his mussed hair, like a night driver trying to stay awake. “Right—thanks,” he rasps.

  “Please,” says Choden. “I’ll be sure to wake you all when the tea is ready.”

  “I’m okay,” Amaris lies—though a moment later she’s stretching out beside Sophie, who’s already curled in a ball, motionless: baby fat still on her sunburnt cheeks, those plump, chapped, open lips. Soft snoring. Lew is such a fool to risk losing her for the sake of his work, any work. Amaris has never wanted kids, not since the abortion that followed her shattered engagement, but now she sees how you can fall hard for them, feel yourself called to their care.

  Choden goes to help Tenzin and Dechen. Over the small fire they lean whispering, Choden now with her glasses off, the three faces ambered like archetypes, maiden, hunter, crone. This is not the twenty-first century. This is not even the first century. Smells of methane and clover honey waft from the flames and the smoke collects until a gust of wind steals in from the back, under the canvas, and clears the air.

  “Your stomach okay?” Book whispers to Amaris, startling her back to awareness. Now that he mentions it, there is a discomfort, hard to isolate among all her pains—a cramping, low down, though it’s too early for her period, thank God.

  She sits up. “I’m not sure, why?”

  “Mine’s a bit off. Always a risk, eating and drinking in a village.”

  “I don’t know if anything ever tasted that good before,” she says.

  “I know,” he says with sudden feeling.

  “Those apricots!”

  “And that chang.” He extracts a vial of pills from his kit, shining the penlight on the label and holding it back from his face. He asks, “What’s your favourite film?”

  The question usually bores her—everyone wants to know what the filmmaker’s favourite film is—but she has never been happier to answer: “Weirdly, it’s this old Soviet-era documentary, sort of, called I Am Cuba.”

  “‘Weirdly’ why? It’s a great film.”

  “You’ve seen it?”

  “Twice, in Sarajevo.”

  “No way.”

  “An MSF fieldworker had a copy there.”

  “‘Weirdly’ because it’s Soviet agit-prop kitsch—not exactly my staple diet. But it’s a gorgeous, gorgeous thing. All that polarized black and white, those long tracking shots …”

  “You notice the cartoonish Yanqui in sunglasses,” he says, “in the bar scene?”

  “Sure, I’ve seen the film a dozen times.”

  “It’s Dr. Strangelove. Right down to the shades and the grin.” As Amaris pictures the character, Book adds, “That’s where Kubrick got him, I’m sure of it”—and he too seems relieved to be talking culture, forgetting nature, the elements around them, his own creaturely fears. She’s grateful, sensing he has convened the moment for just this reason.

  “Maybe you’re right,” she says. “Yeah.”

  “I’d take long odds.”

  “And Kubrick would have loved I Am Cuba,” she says. “Those tracking shots, the flow, the linked stories. Wait a minute—didn’t they both come out in ‘64?”

  “But couldn’t Kubrick have seen the film while making Strangelove? I heard he kept improvising as he went along, changing characters.”

  “Hmm, maybe, yeah. I’ll have to see it again, both films, when I get, you know. When we get home to the city. Lew, by the way, full disclosure—I overheard a lot of your talk with Sophie. I hope—I mean—I couldn’t help overhearing—”

  “Voices carry out here.”

  “—and it’s not my business, but I think they’re right. You need to go home.”

  “Including your voice,” he says. “Sorry if I shouldn’t have heard your own story.”

  For a moment she’s quiet, then says, “I’m okay with that. I guess neither of us are any good at minding our own business, eh?”

  He looks down, smiling, then brings a pill of some kind to his mouth and slips it under his tongue, to absorb the medicine faster, she guesses.

  “Lew—what are you doing out here, really? I mean, okay, I realize now you’re not some mole for the Dalai Lama, but…most of the humanitarian types I’ve known have either been fakes or else trying to compensate for some, uh, some kind of misconduct. You know, moral crusaders who’ve been on the take, charity fundraisers having serial affairs, whatever. I’m not saying—I mean, mostly you seem really different, but …”

  The pill under his tongue makes him mumble and speak with text-message brevity: “Wish I could say I’ve turned down bribes, but no one’s offered. As for affairs, no. I loved Nika. Anyway, she’d see through a lie, if I tried, and there’d be no…there’d have been no court of appeal. To her, life—it’s like that film, all black and white, polarized—to a fault. It’s her one real fault.”

  “I wasn’t prying, you know, about …”

  “You were prying and I’m grateful. Nice to talk about that other life, even so.”

  “I just sense you’d rather be in, you know, Monaco or Vegas, making a living at the poker tables, not doing crisis postings in Bosnia.”

  “If you can’t bluff your wife about an affair, you’ll never make a dime in Vegas.”

  “Ha, that’s a point.”
/>   With sudden, untypical shyness—his eyes dodging hers almost bashfully—he says in that drunk’s mumble, “Maybe I just really care for people. I mean, I feel linked to them, all of them, I always did, and if there’s a way I can help them …”

  “Sure, okay, but …”

  “Except that’s a lie, you’re right.” He grimaces, gulping down the pill, as if tired of whispering around it. “You’re right, in a violent crisis, it’s hate as much as love.”

  “I wasn’t thinking so much of hate.”

  “But you should. I hate them, the ones who make these messes. Death squads, governments, fanatical mobs, multinationals. I try to screw them up by getting in their way, depriving them of their body count, bearing witness—all that. Which is why folks like her”—he tilts his head back toward the fire—“they blow me away. The ones who have the best reasons in the world to hate, sometimes just don’t. That’s as good as a miracle gets.”

  “Lew, why did you take that pill? Is it—”

  “It’s just Lomotil, for my gut.”

  “For a second you looked so angry, I thought, you know. Your heart.”

  His adamant gaze softens—another quicksilver shift. He looks almost grateful; weary. “Thanks, no, it’s Lasya, her pains are starting, pre-labour, at least—can’t be worrying about my gut. Tell me if you need one, okay?” He says this gently, as if sensing what she doesn’t want him to know: that she’d be embarrassed now to ask him for a pill like that.

  Over the wall of dunes, dawn transfuses the icy sky with tropical reds and pinks. Choden stirs a few sleepers awake for tea and food. Book rests his hand on Sophie’s shoulder, tells Choden the girl should sleep on. From someone’s stomach, a seismic rumble that might be funny at any other time; the Tibetans find it funny anyway and their laughter ripples through the shelter.

  Amaris drains her mug and eats a rolled ball of mushy, nutty flour that Choden calls tsampa, then curls up in the sand. She spoons with Sophie, pushing her face into the warm, fleecy back of Sophie’s hood. The sleeping girl presses back against her for warmth and Amaris slings an arm over her. No fighting this exhaustion. From the border of consciousness, too far gone to return, she registers a faint mosquito whine—maybe a spotter plane, high above them—but this sand is quicksand and she’s sinking, nameless.