Because

by Jack A. Langedijk

  “So I said to her, with all my fourteen-year-old wisdom, ‘Okay, how about if I order you to do it the same way as before. That I order you to say hello the same way, will that help you?’”

  Robert smiled at the doorman’s odd solution.

  “And she quickly responds to me, ‘You can’t order someone to feel something,’ ‘Okay, okay, okay,’ I said, and now I was pleading with this little imp of a girl. ‘Okay, forget that I ordered you...just please just say hi again. Please let’s forget this happened.’ Then she said to me, ‘But I can’t forget; because I’m scared of you now.’

  “And then, Mr. Sanchez, I think I said the wisest thing I’ve ever said in my whole life. And it was like, right at that moment...right at that moment, it all started to help change what I was or even had become. I said to her, ‘Okay, let’s make a deal. If I will try to do everything I can to help you not feel scared of me, will you please—please try to say hi to me?’’

  Robert leaned in closer. “So what did she say to that?”

  “Just before she could answer, one of the other guards came to me and asked me if she was being trouble. I said no and that she had just fallen down. He then yelled at her to move it and she got up so fast and ran off.”

  “So what happened next?” Robert asked.

  “Well, the next day she did say hi to me and I said hi back. Oh, it wasn’t any ground breaking moment, I assure you. It was awkward and forced and she stayed a lot farther away from me than she ever had. Also, she didn’t even look at me. Whenever I saw her come, I always tried to put my gun behind me to make her feel safe...Anyway, for a few weeks the hi’s she shared were pretty quick. You must understand, I had spent the last three years becoming numb to everyone and everything I was doing. But each day with little Grace, I felt something was changing...and you know, Mr. Sanchez, I loved that feeling—that feeling of what I was now trying to become—to become someone who doesn’t make other people scared. Becoming someone trying to help. I even started saying hi to the other girls. And even though there was little I could do about what the other guards did, I could at least try to make these girls feel safe around me! And soon, I felt as if I wasn’t their guard or jailer anymore. Now I felt like I was actually protecting them! I had become someone they didn’t have to fear. As each day passed, my Grace started to walk closer to me and after about three weeks, she started looking right at me. And the hi’s became questions—simple questions of ‘how are you?’ And soon there were answers. We were able to find ways to talk without anyone noticing.

  “And one day she had asked me, ‘Aaron, what do you want to become?’

  “‘What can I become here?’ I asked her.

  “‘Well, you’ve become someone many of us girls feel safe with now.’

  “Oh, Mr. Sanchez, I cannot describe to you how those words made me feel! I could not believe what a simple hello could do. It could actually make someone feel safe, safe in that horrendous place, safe with so many mean and cruel people around. Anyway, Grace says to me, ‘But that is not what I’m asking you, Aaron. I mean after you are gone from here. What do you want to become?’

  “Her question was something I had never thought of. So, I told her, ‘I never thought of any other world but here. From the moment I left my village and followed those men into the forest three years ago, I never thought any other world existed.’

  “‘When I get out of here,’ she said to me with this amazing, defiant hope in her eyes, ‘when I get out of here...and after I find my family, well, first I want to go to school! And one of the things I want to become is an agriculturist.’

  “‘What’s that?’ I asked her.

  “‘It’s someone that helps people figure out ways to grow things where it was impossible before. Or just make things grow better.’

  “‘Oh,’ I said to her. ‘ And what do you mean one of the things you want to become? How many things can one person become in one life?’

  “Grace then laughed. Oh, and she had the greatest laugh, Mr. Sanchez. ‘I want to become a wife and a mother, she says. And then she goes on and on. Oh...I want to become a great mother and even a better grandmother. I’d like to become someone people want to listen to. I want to become so many things, Aaron. I want to become like my father.’ Then she told me about her father who had gone to a university but decided to go back into his little village to start a school. Many people asked him why he was doing this. Apparently he was so smart that he could have become anything: an engineer, pilot or maybe even climb a great mountain like you, Mr. Sanchez...or play in a great orchestra...Grace’s father, he could have become famous, so people asked him why he chose to be just a teacher. And then Grace told me she questioned her father too and, he told her about a man named Shakespeare who, he said, had asked the greatest question there ever was. You must know Mr. Shakespeare, don’t you, Mr. Sanchez?”

  Robert’s eyes seemed wet as he laughed and said yes!

  “Well, the thing that Mr. Shakespeare asked was...” The doorman stopped, looked up and closed his eyes.

  “Okay, the first part is easy...it was ‘to be or...not to be!’ And then...it’s something like...that is always our question in life: what do we want to BE? And then her father told her, ‘You see, my little Grace, your papa is very greedy; he doesn’t only want to BE one thing, so that is why I became a teacher. Because, imagine if in my class there is a wee little girl like you and I help her become a scientist and she creates a medicine that cures people all over the world, or a boy who becomes a great leader and frees our country so no one lives with this fear anymore...Imagine, Grace...all the amazing things I could help children become if I am a teacher! And all these things that you think I could do to become famous, well, Grace, look, don’t you see? I am doing them, am I not? You see, as a teacher, I have become someone who helps many—even hundreds of children to become so many amazing things—and I can help create so many wonderful beings in this world. Could there be any greater purpose in life? And this helps your papa, Grace. I like constantly becoming what others need me to be to help them become who they want to be. I love being that, Grace...I pray I never stop becoming that until I die.’

  “Grace’s eyes, Mr. Sanchez, when she spoke of her father, her eyes became like an open field. You know, that kind you feel this sudden urge to run wild in!

  “But I had been there so long...so long, Mr. Sanchez. So I said to her, ‘Yeah well, I’m not your father. Nor am I in his class and I don’t think I can ever become anything good, Grace, because I have done too many bad things to become anything good.’

  “‘That’s not true, Aaron,’ she said. ‘Look what you have become to so many of us girls.’

  “‘No...no, Grace,’ I said to her. ‘Sometimes people do things that are so unforgivable they can never become anything else.’

  “Grace then suddenly lifted her hand—it was our sign—the cue we always used if we thought someone saw us talking and we needed to stop. I didn’t see anyone but she looked around and saw that no one was watching us and then she reached inside her dress and pulled out that book. She showed me that book, Mr. Sanchez and she quickly opened to this page—the Taj Mahal—and she told me, ‘If you want to be forgiven, Aaron, go here, to the Taj Mahal.’

  “And then she read out that passage to me:

  ‘Should guilty seek asylum here,

  Like one pardoned, he becomes free from sin.

  Should a sinner make his way to this mansion,

  All his past sins are to be washed away.’

  “But I never had a chance to go to India and see the real Taj Mahal, Mr. Sanchez, so that’s why I come here each day, hoping to maybe wash some of those sins away and become...well...become someone I want to be.”

  “And are you?” Robert simply asked.

  “Ah...I’m trying, Mr. Sanchez. Life is such a long journey of becoming.”

  After a moment of silence, Robert looked back in the booklet and the torn page and asked, “So why is this ripped?”
/>   “Grace took it before she left.”

  “Left?” Robert asked. “Where did she go?”

  “Well, there had been talk in the camp that the United Nation soldiers were closing in on us, which meant we had to pack up camp and move. This happened many times. When I told Grace this, she told me she heard that the UN soldiers were helping a lot of us children that had become soldiers to get back to our families and homes. Oh, Mr. Sanchez, seeing the look in her eyes—the excitement of seeing her family again...well...I just knew who I wanted to be then. I wanted to become the one to help her do that! So, that night I came up with a plan to escape. There were six of us—Grace, me and four other girls. You see, whenever we had to move from a camp in a hurry, we had to dig these holes in order to bury anything we could not carry and then we would come back to retrieve it at a later time. Well, there was lots of digging and the girls had to help. And so we dug this extra hole that no one knew about and covered it with some branches and things. The plan was a couple of hours before we were about to leave, the six of us would hide and cover ourselves in that hole. And we knew they wouldn’t have time to look for us with the UN soldiers so near and when the UN soldiers got close, we would come out and be saved.

  “Each of us guards was given about five girls to watch as everyone packed up to leave. And I arranged it with another guard that I would take Grace and the four others. But the plan had changed and we were to leave an hour earlier. As soon as I heard this, I ran as quickly as I could to get the girls but when I got there, they had already disappeared. It seemed that another guard told them they were to leave camp with him. This guard had ordered them to gather their things and be ready to leave in ten minutes. But in our plan, Mr. Sanchez, I wasn’t coming to get them for another hour but they knew this was their only chance to escape, so in those ten minutes they slipped out and went into our special hole to hide.

  “But when this guard could not find the girls, he started yelling and screaming to me about the missing girls. And now, it was too dangerous to join them in our hole—I was scared I might give them away. So, when we were all about to leave, our leader asked where the girls were and that guard who was going to take them blamed me. He said he had seen me always talking to these girls and said I had let them escape. And then the same man who cut my ear came to me and asked me where they were. I shook my head and I told him I didn’t know and then he said, ‘Do you know what happens when someone loses what I own?’ Again, I told him I didn’t know. He asked me again where they were. I was so scared, Mr. Sanchez, but at the same time I was so happy...so happy they couldn’t find the girls. He then had two of the boys grab my arms and they pushed me to my knees. He kept asking me, ‘Do you know what happens when someone loses what is mine?’ But for some reason, no matter how scared I felt, I knew I wouldn’t tell him where the girls were. Then he lifted up his machete as the two boys held my arms over this bench. First he asked me was I right handed or left. For some reason, I lied and said I was left-handed. And he asked, ‘Okay boy, one last time, where are my girls?’”

  The doorman stopped and released a peaceful sigh.

  “And I just can’t explain it to you, Mr. Sanchez. I mean, I knew what they would do to me. I knew if I didn’t tell him, he was going to cut off my hands. Yet somehow it was okay because right at that moment, something mattered more to me than my hands.”

  The doorman held out his arms.

  “And do you know what I thought of? All I could think of was what Grace had told me about her father and why he was a teacher, so he could show his students all the things they could become. And I thought that’s what I want to do—I wanted to become like him, to give those five girls a chance to become something...anything. So I just said, ‘They are long gone, you will never catch them.’ And then it came down. My left hand was gone. And just as he raised his machete to cut off my other hand, we all heard a gunshot and everyone started screaming and running...and me, Mr. Sanchez...”

  The doorman gave one of his deep warm laughs...“Ha ha...well, me...I nobly fainted.

  “It was Grace who was there when I woke up. I was in some truck and the UN soldiers were taking us away. All five girls were there and about eight others were rescued. We were all taken to some place they called a rehabilitation centre where they tried to help us erase all the things we had done and become. They helped us just be...just be people again.

  “I didn’t see Grace a lot at that place because they worked with the boys and girls separately. But one day in one of those sessions, Grace came into our room and asked if she could join our circle. You see, Mr. Sanchez, Grace’s parents had come for her and she was leaving the next day. And that’s when she gave me that book, Mr. Sanchez. Grace stood up in the circle and showed everyone that book and said, ‘This book, in many ways, was my salvation. Whenever I missed my family, I would read about one of these wonders of the world. Whenever I heard the crying of the other children in the camp, I would go to them and tell them about these wonders and imagine we were there. But one boy...’ and then she pointed right at me, Mr. Sanchez. ‘This boy, Aaron, every day he found ways to make me and some of the other girls feel safe in that mean awful place.’ And then, Mr. Sanchez, she handed me the book and said...”

  The doorman suddenly had difficulty speaking, so he cleared his throat to quell the emotion behind his words. But the wetness in his eyes betrayed the beauty of what he felt. He brushed his stump across his face to wipe away the tears.

  “I’m sorry, but it always makes me cry...Good tears though, Mr. Sanchez, happy ones. Anyway, she handed me that book and said, ‘Aaron, I want you to have this book now, not because you need it to be your salvation, but I want to give it to you because I think YOU belong in this book. Because you...you have become one of my wonders of the world, Aaron.’

  “Then all the other kids clapped. Oh, Mr. Sanchez, I just can’t tell you what that meant to me.”

  Robert wiped away his own tears that now fell freely and openly.

  “And do you know, Mr. Sanchez, there’s not a day I don’t miss my hand? You know maybe forty, fifty times a day I might miss it. Sometimes I reach out to pick up something and it’s like, ‘Oh my, I can’t do it!’ I just forget my hand is gone. But you know what I think about when I look at it? Do you know what I think, Mr. Sanchez?”

  Robert heard the doorman’s question but couldn’t help feeling overwhelmed with a question of his own. He looked at the ugly scar where the doorman’s ear had once been. Then he stared at Aaron’s stump, which only half an hour ago caused him to feel nothing but pity and sorrow for the doorman. Robert thought of all the grief and anger he felt at the rehabilitation centre whenever he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror or saw the other amputees. All the feelings he never told anyone about having something stolen from him which would never be returned. But now, as he looked down at his own stumps, his own missing legs, he just couldn’t hold back a question of his own and so he blurted out to Aaron, “How can I become like you?”

  The doorman laughed that precious welcoming laugh of his. “Ho ho. Really? Become like me? Do you want to have no left ear or no hand like me, Mr. Sanchez?”

  “No, that is not what I meant, Aaron. I meant—”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Mr. Sanchez, I know what you meant. I’m sorry for my joke. Forgive me. It is just I saw you staring at my hand and ear...so please forgive my joke. I do understand your question. In truth, I do. You see, when I look at myself or when I miss my hand or ear...Well, that’s when I ask myself two questions, Mr. Sanchez: do I become a man without an ear and a hand? Or, what kind of man can I become without an ear and a hand?”

  “You. Aaron. Do you know how long I’ve been looking for you?”

  “You have been looking for me?”

  “Yes...Yes...” Robert laughed then stopped suddenly.

  “What is it, Mr. Sanchez? Are you all right?”

  “Aaron, what time is it?”

  The doorman looked at his watch, “It’s fi
ve minutes to noon. Why?”

  “Oh my God, I have to talk in a few minutes!”

  “Well, come, I will take you.”

  “No, wait...Aaron, I need you to do something for me. If you—”

  “Anything, Mr. Sanchez, anything!”

  “Could you please take me to my car?”

  40. SIX MONTHS AGO – MT. EVEREST

  Nancy squirmed in her sleeping bag, trying to find the most comfortable position to write and still stay warm. Robert had told them that night at supper that after every climb he ever made, he always wrote a thank you to the mountain. He told them how he would tuck it away under some rock before he left. Troy, Philip and Nancy all vowed that they would do the same.

  Nancy had the same book light she used to read each night attached to a small pad of blank paper that her mother had given her from one of her business trips to China. “City of Dreams Macau” was the name of the hotel. Nancy looked at the hotel’s logo and smiled to herself, thinking it was the perfect page on which to write her thank you to the mountain. She immediately started to write and then quickly scribbled over what she had written, tore the page off and then tucked it in her backpack.

  She started again. Dear Mount Everest. She nodded and thought, Yeah, that’s the best way to begin.

  Dear Mount Everest,

  Hi, I’ve never written to a mountain before so I’m not sure where to begin. As a matter of fact, I’ve never been to a mountain before...well, that’s not true, I saw some but I’ve never really been this close to one before. I guess I’m pretty close since I’m pretty high up on you now. Hope we are not too heavy! LOL...

  Okay, before I thank you, I’d like to tell you how beautiful you are. Really, I never thought about it before. I was never much into nature and stuff but it’s quite amazing how different you look all the time...I think you’re a girl, right? Because Ang and Mingma, they always refer to you as ‘she.’ Anyway, you’re very beautiful!