Frontline

by Alexandra Richland

  Late-afternoon sunlight beams into a small opening at Trenton’s feet. He drops to his knees and sticks his head inside.

  “Hello? Can anyone hear me?”

  His voice muffles in the stillness.

  “Hello?” Trenton shouts louder.

  Kency clears his throat. “Mr. Merrick, perhaps we move on and join others up the street?”

  Trenton pulls his head from the hole and slumps back, resting on his haunches. He feels a fresh trickle of sweat stream down his neck. Even in the humid, breathless air, a chill spreads from his aching muscles through the rest of his body.

  “There may be someone in there,” he says. “We must make sure before we go elsewhere.”

  “All right, Mr. Merrick.” Kency pulls a small jar of menthol rub out of the Red Cross fanny pack on his waist that Trenton gave him, and twists the cap off.

  Trenton yanks his dust mask down around his neck, runs his finger around the jar’s rim, collects a glob on the tip of his finger, and smears it beneath his nose. The vapor rises up his nostrils and clears the dust and mucus from his sinuses, but even better, blocks the choking stench.

  “We have to make this opening bigger so I can fit inside.”

  Kency’s eyes widen as he takes the jar back from Trenton.

  “Very dangerous, Mr. Merrick, sir. What if the house collapses on you?”

  “Kency, are you here to help me?”

  Trenton tries to keep his tone civil as his frustration mounts. He remembers that Kency has seen enough heartbreak in the last three days than most people will experience in a lifetime. His mother and father were inside their house when the quake hit and made it as far as the front door before the roof fell in and crushed his father. His mother was buried up to her waist and lost feeling in her legs. She’s being treated in a military hospital, which is nothing more than a row of tents on the outskirts of the city. His younger brother, who was playing out in the street at the time and was clear of the house, is watching over her, but his sister is still missing.

  The pounding from chisels and sledgehammers rings from neighboring buildings. More and more aid workers arrive each hour, charging into the city with medical and construction supplies, but they only get so far. Their momentum drains as they spend hours walking the streets, looking for someone in charge who can send them to the areas most in need.

  After a while, they give up, pick the nearest building and the victims in the worst shape, and get to work. There is no organization, no coordinated command, no streamlined effort or purpose. It’s like trying to staunch the bleeding from a gaping wound with a handful of Q-tips.

  Trenton swallows the last of the water from his bottle. At the peak of the afternoon sun’s strength, all aid workers are instructed to drink a minimum of a gallon to keep hydrated. That was five hours ago. It takes only minutes in the heat before the bottle sweats and the water inside warms to a temperature that’s beyond anything refreshing. It slips down Trenton’s throat, thick and warm like bathwater, and sweats out of his pores.

  “I shall go get more?” Kency points to the bottle as Trenton tosses it aside.

  “Not yet. Let’s make this hole bigger first.”

  After ten minutes of taking turns driving a sledgehammer straight into the concrete, Trenton’s able to kneel and push his entire body through the hole.

  “Hand me the flashlight,” he says to Kency.

  The house looked bad from the outside, but the thin beam from the tiny flashlight shows an even more chaotic interior. The ceiling collapsed inward, splitting on its seam, and spilled chunks of plaster and cinderblock into the middle of the room. A plastic chair and overturned table are all Trenton can make out with the weak light. Dust drifts aimlessly on the air like snowflakes that can’t find the ground. There are no windows or openings for what’s left of the daylight to illuminate more of the room.

  “Hello?” Trenton yells again. “Can anyone hear me? Hello?”

  Trenton pulls himself back out of the hole, resigning to the fact that there is no one there. Kency has disappeared, but Trenton’s not surprised. He’s run off a couple of times in the past day, but always returns, sometimes with water and a chocolate bar or two. With the crowds behaving but growing more restless every hour, Trenton doesn’t know how Kency manages to grab what he does and make it back without getting mobbed.

  Though a communal spirit settled over the city in the hours following the terror and panic, it likely won’t be long before tempers boil over and looting begins. Everyone’s only in this together until some people find food and others are left to starve. A crisis reveals the best and worst of humanity, and always to their extremes.

  On a clear night, the moon and stars shine over Port au Prince with a soft, white glow. Residents amble along streets filled with music pouring from the front of candlelit buildings, their windows and doors open to the world.

  Tonight, however, a thick, humid air of silence covers the city, interrupted every few moments by the shrieks of crying children and the ground-shaking rumble of more buildings collapsing. Small fires in the gutters throw orange and yellow light across the faces of the homeless families huddled together in the middle of the street.

  The journalists refer to them as the survivors. True, they’re not buried beneath destroyed buildings or lying wounded in front of an aid camp, screaming for a doctor. But can someone really survive a catastrophe like this, walk away without so much as a scratch or bruise, and simply continue with life? Their bodies are intact but their minds are in pieces. They look to Trenton with pleading stares. After a few minutes, he learns to stop meeting them and keep his eyes firmly ahead.

  Trenton’s steps carry him to the city’s outskirts where crumbled buildings give way to a village of low-slung tents. Sun-faded cotton sheets of all kinds of patterns and colors are tied together with string, elastic bands, and wire, wrapped around thin sticks picked up from the trail that stand in the mud. There is no waterproof coating on the sheets, no reinforced ties grounded with metal stakes to protect the shelters from high winds. If there’s a storm, this village will blow away as easily as sand grains on the beach, or be pelted into the ground under heavy rains.

  The last time Trenton stayed awake this many hours in a row, he completed and presented his thesis entitled Microfinance in the Third World: Hidden Profit in the Foreseeable Future to a group of Wall Street bigwigs and venture capital gurus during the final week of his Master’s degree. The men concluded the Q&A by granting Trenton a standing ovation. One man, a senior partner at Lockhart and Turin, took Trenton aside after the presentation and told him it was this kind of thinking that might just make a difference in the world.

  Trenton sneers at the memory while surrounded by citizens of the poorest country in the western hemisphere. “A lot of good that kind of thinking is doing this place now.”

  Halfway up a grassy slope with a dirt path stomped into the side of it by years of wandering feet, Trenton enters a small area of dark blue tents donated by an American charity hours after the quake hit. He had the shipment loaded into the same plane he took down to Haiti three days ago. They’re sturdy, water resistant, and needed by every Haitian in the Port au Prince area, probably every Haitian in the country.

  He unzips one of the tent’s entrances and is greeted by a dark, empty room—no sleeping bag, mattress, clothesline, or food. He yanks off his muddy boots and places them next to the opening, zips the entrance closed and spreads himself across the plastic floor. Pebbles and hardened tree roots dig into his back and hips from every position he tries.

  Though fatigue seizes his body, Trenton can’t slow his mind. The enormity of what needs to be accomplished overwhelms him. What right does he have to rest when possibly thousands of people won’t survive to see the morning?

  Trenton feels the earth’s rhythm pulse like his own beating heart. The tiniest tremble outside of that rhythm shakes him awake; a taunt of imaginary vibrations. He remembers an aftershock rumbling beneath the building he w
orked on through his first night. Screams erupted from the streets. People darted toward the nearest shelter, stopped, and backed away, knowing any opening, no matter how inviting, could become their death trap. Trenton pressed his back against the nearest wall and tucked his chin into his chest until the vibrations weakened and finally stopped. When a hurricane blows, you find shelter. When floods spill through the streets, you seek high ground. When bombs fall from the sky, you head underground. But when the earth beneath you splits open, there’s nowhere to hide.

  He awakes to the sound of the tent’s door slowly unzipping. Adrenaline surges into his heart and he bolts upright, looking around for something to use to defend himself. All he feels is the small flashlight in his pocket. He aims the beam at the tent’s entrance to see the smiling face of Kency.

  “Found ya!”

  Trenton lets out a loud, relieved laugh. He wondered on the walk back if Kency knew how to find his tent. They spent the previous night here, but with the layout of the city and its surrounding area shifting by the hour, he worried Kency might lose his bearings. What a ridiculous thought. He doesn’t give this kid nearly enough credit.

  “Where did you go? You just disappeared!”

  “Went to find food, but there’s none.”

  It’s only then that Trenton feels the burning emptiness of his stomach through the numbness of his arms, back, neck, and legs.

  “Went to the doctors.” Kency points west down the mud slope back to Port au Prince. “Went to see manman m’.”

  “How is she doing?”

  “She sleeps.” Kency shrugs. “We sleep now, too.” He stretches out on the tent floor as if it’s a feather bed and doesn’t show the slightest hint of discomfort.

  “Any sign of your sister?”

  “No.” Kency turns on his side, his back to Trenton, and cushions his head against his forearm.

  Trenton turns off the flashlight and lies on the floor next to him. Sleep doesn’t return. The pains in his limbs and back throb every second, and a headache burns behind his tired eyes.

  With Kency breathing softly, Trenton crawls out of the tent. The moon hangs bright and round in the starry sky, casting a silver glow over the water in the harbor. He sidesteps back down the muddy slope, scraping his shins and calves on prickly weeds and burrs.

  Tent City is as alive during the night as in the day. Candlelight glows beneath some of the tent coverings. Those who are awake lope in between shelters and talk to each other in a mix of Haitian Creole and English. Trenton can only pick out certain words: missing, rescue, food, water, sick. Others sit in the entrance of their tents and cradle their children, swat at flies and mosquitoes, and stare at every passerby as if they’re coming with directions to a dry, stable household. It will take more than a few days. It will take months. Probably even years.

  Right now, donations are pouring in from all over the world, but most won’t slip through the sticky fingers of the corrupt Haitian government. This is the group of generous souls who seized the first shipments of donated clothing when they arrived in Haiti, set up distribution booths, and tried to sell the clothes back to its citizens. It reminds Trenton of a key word in the title of his thesis: Profit.

  The solutions seemed so simple from the comfortable perch of a private study room in the university library. Page after page of textbook readings, graphs, charts, and statistics offered reams of theories on how to wane fledgling developing countries off first world aid and get them standing on their own two steady economic feet. All they need is A, B, and C to achieve X, Y, and Z.

  The acclaimed lectures that made so much sense in the sheltered confines of an Ivy League institution are so simplistic in the face of the chaos decimating Haiti, it would all be laughable if the whole situation wasn’t so hopelessly tragic.

  And yet, here he stands on the shore of a country that was more or less forgotten by the rest of the world until a crack in the earth opened beneath it and almost swallowed it whole. So despite the enormity of the task ahead to rebuild the country, accompanied by the sick tingling in his gut telling him that there’s nothing he can truly do, there must be some reason Trenton decided to cancel a month’s worth of work and meetings and transport his life from a Manhattan penthouse to a tent in Port au Prince.

  “An activist, first and foremost, must be an optimist,” his father once told him. “Otherwise, what’s the point?”

  Trenton kneels in the sand and rinses his arms in the warm shallows of the Port au Prince Bay. Saltwater stings cuts and scrapes he didn’t even know were there. His body feels entombed in a hardened shell of sweat.

  He stares up at the moon and wonders what time it is. Alarm clock screens everywhere in the city sit darkened; cell phones dead hunks of plastic, the wires that carry signals and electricity to them strewn over the ground. Time has no more precision here. Seconds and minutes, so precious in Trenton’s daily life back home, move by in large blocks. Days are measured in the worsening infections in open wounds, in the mounting pressure from a collapsed rooftop on a weak foundation, in the number of breaths left in the lungs of a buried human body.

  Somewhere deep inside the camp, a song stirs in the still night. It begins with one voice, a low hum, carried over the air as others join in. Soon, a chorus lifts the melody higher, vaulting it into the darkness, a hopeful prayer from a lost people.

  Trenton scrubs the last of the dirt and dust from his hands and arms.

  “And now back to work.”

  They are words of encouragement, but Trenton states them earnestly, like a promise—to himself, to his father and mother, to Kency and the rest of Haiti. He cups his hands in the ocean, presses the water to his face, and watches as thick clouds of dust wash from his skin, swirl in the shallows amongst the sand and silt, then disappear.

  The Celibate Spy

  When his shirt and trousers land on the floor beside the bed, Randall Wolverhampton knows he’s in trouble.

  Her skin smells of cigarettes and strawberry perfume. Pale, shapely thighs straddle his checkerboard stomach and red lace panties brush against his abdomen.

  “Relax, Randall.” A thick Russian accent coats each word, soft as a kitten’s purr. “Enjoy the ride.”

  “Miss Babkin, I really must protest. This is not at all why I’m here, and far outside the boundaries of agent etiquette.”

  She steadies herself with her right hand against his bare pectorals and laughs so hard, her breasts bounce beneath the thin silk of the red negligee. “It is one of the few pleasures one experiences in our line of work.”

  She lifts his hand and tries to guide it to her left breast. Randall retracts it.

  It shouldn’t be more than a second or two now . . .

  Miss Babkin frowns. “Do you not find me attractive?”

  “Why, yes of course.” He forces a smile. “But you see, Miss Babkin . . .”

  Her eyes squint into tiny slits. “Then kiss me.”

  Randall gulps.

  Any second now . . .

  FOUR HOURS EARLIER

  “So you mean to tell me you’ve never had a shag on the job?”

  Randall averts his stare and thinks of anything he can to change the topic. His mind, numb with embarrassment, won’t engage.

  “I’m aghast, old boy. Aghast.”

  Twenty-five years younger than his overseer, Randall is referred to as “old boy”. It only adds to the shame. For a junior agent in MI6, stationed in the city of Newcastle Upon Tyne, just thirteen kilometers inland from the North Sea and five hours north of London, shagging is bloody well all Randall should be doing. Lord knows there isn’t much spying to be done amongst the sleepy suburbs, quiet downtown core, and the rolling hills that surround it, populated with rows of turnip and herds of sheep.

  When new installments of those James Bond films hit movie screens in recent years, a London Times survey reported that being seduced by a secret agent has risen to number three on the Most Common Women’s Fantasies list, just behind footballers and pop sta
rs like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.

  “It’s 1969, my man! Do you know what they’re already calling this decade? The Swinging Sixties. You’re missing out on the party!”

  Randall frowns and stirs his tea. The soft chimes his spoon creates as it plinks against the inside of the porcelain cup do nothing to drown out the chuckles from across the table.

  Agent Philip Lawrence, age forty-six, is the antithesis of any Sean Connery fantasy object that swirls inside a woman’s wet dream. His eyebrows and nose hairs haven’t been acquainted with a pair of scissors in decades. A slick forehead, bulbous nose pocked with shards of broken blood vessels, and crinkled cheeks, are surrounded by two bushy sideburns snaking down his face. Both come to an abrupt halt beside his protruding chin. He offers Randall a gap-toothed grin beneath a white moustache stained nicotine yellow.

  “When I was your age, of course, it was the war. I was parachuting all over Europe. Many a French, Belgian, and even German maiden, on occasion, were only too happy to share their beds with a tired, downtrodden solider of the king’s army. I took advantage of their hospitable nature on dozens of occasions, I daresay.”

  Late-morning sun pours through the front windows of the empty café. Its black-and-white tiled walls and floors give the place the sound and feel of an echo chamber. In the absence of other patrons and conversations to add to the din, their words bounce into every empty corner of the room.

  Randall clears his throat. “Uh, the war aside, sir, I’ve been meaning to talk to you. I . . . uh . . . wondered when I might get the chance to change stations . . . perhaps even see some action?”

  “Rather a nice piece at your six o’clock, wouldn’t you say, old boy?” Philip cocks his chin over Randall’s shoulder.

  Randall knows whom Philip has spotted. The stare he feels burning into the back his head belongs to Laura, the café’s lone waitress during the afternoon slump between the lunch hour and the dinner rush. She also rents the apartment upstairs.