by Josh Weil
We had just started down from the funnel tower, our footsteps shaking through the ladder’s rungs, when Mirza said, “From Canada, is possible see Banner two point five exact.”
“What’s he say, Pete?” Eli called up.
“He’s talking about the space thing again.” And then, to Mirza’s shoes, directly above: “You said we could see it from here.”
“Yes. But in Canada we can be in it. It is to go over Ontario. Aim light beam at Montreal, Toronto. If we chigger to train on day before, we are in this beam when it reflect down. Ten times more bright than moon, Pete. Half so big. Surface area size of sport field.”
“It’s going to look like half a moon up there?”
“From Canada. This is what I’m saying. From here is very minor size only, such as this.” He held one hand out against the dark sky, as if we could see his fingers.
Below, Eli was saying to Greg, “Look, I never claimed it was safe. Safe’s for like, like, safe’s for our ’rents. I mean nowadays the cars are full of drug gangs and violent frigging like very violent gangs.”
“Like Jack,” Greg said.
“No shit,” Eli said. “Hey, Jack,” he shouted, “what would you do if some drug gang, like, we jumped the rooster and some frigging gang was in the hotel. And they were like, like they had knives, or baseball bats or something? What would you do, eh?”
On the rungs above, Mirza flashed a grin through the gap between his arms. Too quiet for the others to hear, he said, “Is made of Kevlar.”
“We’re counting on you, Jack,” Eli called. “We’re just frigging American teenagers. You’re, you’ve been there. What would you do, eh? Like back in Serbia, on one of those trains where they hang the …”
Mirza started a noise that if you hadn’t been close enough to see his face you might have thought was laughing.
“This is serious,” Eli shouted up. He had just started laughing, too, when the ladder began to shake. “Whoa fuck,” Eli said.
We all joined him in pretty much the same. The tank clanged back at the ladder and the rungs vibrated like they wanted us off.
“Fuck off,” someone said and “Jack, Jack,” and then, “Grab his fucking ankles, Pete, or something” and then, suddenly, he was done. The ladder went still again. Somewhere inside the tank something came loose and dropped all the way down, pinging at the walls: ping, ping, ping.
Up above, we could see the soles of his shoes, pale and floating. He was hanging from a rung, all his weight pulling on thin stretched arms. We listened as much as watched, as if expecting to hear the creaks of his knuckles losing their grip.
It would have been easier for us if he had fallen. Oh, there still would have been the guilt, but it would have made sense. We had assumed his parents were divorced, but afterwards we began hearing rumors: that his dad was stuck in Canada ironing out immigration; was in Serbia, dead in a mass grave; was in jail awaiting trial for war crimes. Dead dad, us talking, him throwing himself off the tank; it would have been bad, but it would have been understandable and understandable would have eventually become forgivable. But it wasn’t.
Because there was still that time, so late in the year that only a few beech trees clung to their leaves, when Eli christened us the Culver Liberation Front. We agreed to meet in the funnel, bring whatever the CLF might require: a topo map of Franklin County, a set of walkie-talkies, MREs from the Gulf War. Mirza took out a plastic bag full of combs. Each was black—the cheap drugstore counter kind—and he had attached them in pairs, hinged at one end, one half’s teeth cut off to make a thin plastic handle, the other half superglued to a line of gleaming razor blades. He showed us how to flick one open. We sat in the new fall cold, practicing, excited not so much by the weapons as by the sense that for the first time Mirza was opening up to us, showing us what we had always known was in him.
And there was the time we got in a fight. The truth is it wasn’t really a group fight. Eli mostly watched, scared. Greg just shouted like a coach. Mirza wasn’t there.
Afterwards, they told Mirza, “Pete should have used one of your combs on him” and “You’ve got to show Pete how to punch” but mostly there was just the four of us plotting how to get the ones who’d done it out to our concrete plant, where we could take them on our turf. It was decided that in case anything went wrong, we’d use Mirza as backup.
This was said: “He could take Greg’s pellet gun and
One of us said, “He could take Greg’s pellet gun and go up there on the
I said, “He could take Greg’s pellet gun and go up there on the conveyor belt.” “Jack,” I said. I said, “Jack, you’d see everything from up there. They couldn’t touch you. You could just pick them off. You could shoot them all in the fucking face,” I told him. I said, “You could shoot them all in the fucking face.” I said that.
III. The Railroad Tracks
I was fifteen, too short to call average, straight brown hair my mother still cut. When I looked in the mirror I thought there was something feminine about my face. Once, I trimmed my eyelashes. I was an only child and my mother was going back to school and I did all the cooking. I read spy novels and historical thrillers and there seemed only two possible careers for me: writer or CIA agent. My father lived abroad in the kinds of countries in which the novels took place and each letter I got I opened with a small prayer that he would have bought a ticket for me. I was as obsessed with the idea as Mirza was with his space mirror. That winter, just before I turned sixteen, I stopped caring. I gave up the idea of becoming an agency man. I quit reading spy novels. What I’m about to tell, here, I never told anyone, not my parents, not the shrink, not even Eli or Greg. And Mirza, well, Mirza already knew.
It was the second to last time I saw him, and the last time I would see him alone. We had taken to walking back from the plant together, just the two of us—Greg and Eli lived on the other side of Culver—following the railroad tracks until the bridge over Bull Hill Road where I’d leave him to walk the rest of the way alone.
That night we walked in silence, as usual. Just the whispering of our jackets, occasionally the small clatter of one us slipping off the rail. He was in front, balancing like a gymnast. Every now and then he would waver. His arms would lift like wings. We moved along, quiet and even paced, until he suddenly said, “I have not thought of snow.”
November had come that weekend and brought the first snow with it. Just a few inches, but enough to change the appearance of the world: the usually black depths of the woods glowed with moonlight on branches; the dark ties between the rails were gone as if pried up and carted away over night; brown fields shone silver.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Banner two point five.”
I groaned. Ever since they launched it, Mirza had talked about nothing else. From what he said, it was up there now, attached to the space station, waiting for the signal.
“I have not thought how much more bright,” he said. “Ten times moonlight, but look here at moonlight on snow. Is already ten times more bright. Ten times plus ten times, Pete.” He craned his neck to look at me, then walked on.
“Hey,” I said to his back. “What is it about it, anyway? I mean, it’s such a crackpot idea. I mean, is there anybody who actually thinks it’s going to work?” He looked over his shoulder again, gave me his smile. The only smile I’ve ever seen that never made me want to smile back. “Even if it does,” I said, “I mean great, it’s just like a big flashlight.” I sped up until I was on his heels. “Jack.” Sometimes he forgot to answer to our nickname for him and I touched his shoulder. “I’m really asking.”
“This is only test flight,” he said. “They have plan put one hundred, two hundred, maybe more. Imagine this. Would be possible to make on ground lighting enough for whole city. No more streetlight. No more headlight. In Siberia, even in north part of Canada, in winter is so much dark, yes? No more. Now daylight one hundred percent.”
“Okay,” I said. “But—”
&
nbsp; “One hundred percent productivity.”
“You’re talking efficiency?”
“Pete! This is what I’m talking. They target one city, another city. Okay? Whole side of world dark, yes? Whole half of world sleeping. But one city, in all of whole side of world: daylight. So beautiful, Pete. You can’t see?”
“No.”
He shook his head. “You have not live there.”
“Neither have you,” I said. He turned away. “Serbia’s not north. Its not even as north as here.”
We were almost to the bridge when the train’s headlight winked through the trees. I stepped off the track and started down the snow-covered bank. Mirza just stood there.
“Hey,” I called. “Get off.” I could hear the rumble. The headlight flickered through the trees, then broke around the corner, suddenly steady, coming fast. “Jack,” I shouted, “don’t be a dick.”
The whistle ripped a hole in the air. The headlight slung his shadow on the tracks. Slowly, he jogged towards me, slid down the snowy gravel. For a moment, I could hear his breathing beside me, and then the engine blasted all nontrain noise out of the night. The cars banged by, wind roaring off their sides, thundering towards the border.
“You’re crazy,” I mouthed.
I don’t know if he understood me, but he smiled like he did—that awful smile—and then was gone, rushing up the bank towards the train. For a moment I just stood there, watching him reach the cars, run, picking up speed. By the time I scrambled after him, he was racing at full sprint. The train was still passing him. It was way too fast. Beside it, I couldn’t even hear my own shout, couldn’t hear anything but the bdoom-bdoom, bdoom-bdoom.
I was almost to him when he jumped. His legs flailed, thin arms struggling. Then he was on it. Just like Eli said. I ran full out beside him, an arm’s reach away. Clinging to the side, he watched me. In the blur of the dark, I saw him start to slide away, felt my legs begin to go, the sharp jab of my breath, and reached for him. I grabbed his ankle. I pulled.
For a strange weightless moment all of his mass was attached to all of mine, my wrist an extension of his foot, my arm a continuation of his leg. He was guiding me through the air and I was following, easy, as if gravity, for that floating space of time, had freed us from its grip. Then we hit.
My feet slammed down, still running, stumbled, crashed, and I was on all fours, my only thought to stay clear of the wheels, then rolling away down the embankment to a stop. Above me, the train boomed on. Then was gone. Just its noise draining out of the night. Then that was gone, too.
Limping up the bank, I saw a large dark lump a dozen yards down the track. It wasn’t moving. He was on his face. I dropped next to him, shoved my hands under his chest—felt him breathe, felt the warm slick blood—and rolled him over. His jacket was soaked. His hair was pasted to his head, blood smeared over his chin. He was missing teeth. His lower lip was torn and hanging.
“I’ll get you home,” I told him.
Looking up at me, he mouthed something that might have been in Serbian, or might have just been swallowed in his throat.
I leaned forward. “I was trying to help,” I said. “I didn’t want you to …”
All these years later, I can still see his face full of blood and moonlight, his eyes on me, his horrible failure to smile.
Mirza lived down a long slope of oiled gravel twisting its way through coniferous woods. Most of the snow had gotten stuck in the high boughs and they were matted thick. The moonlight had gotten stuck in them too. It was dark. Limping along, my ankle throbbing, I clung to his jacket, convinced I was helping him stay on his feet. We passed no lights of neighbors’ houses, no TV sounds. Occasionally, a mailbox showed itself, hunched on its post, lifeless as its salted drive.
It must have taken us an hour to get to his home. We didn’t talk. I didn’t think he was able. Until, just before his house, he stopped, leaned over, drooled a splatter of blood onto the snow. Slowly, painfully, he said something through his ripped mouth. I couldn’t make it out. He had to say it again: “We were just moved to Viäegrad.” He formed the words with torturous deliberation, eased them through his mouth. “Bosniaks. Moslems. They come to us at home. With knife—” He drooled into the snow again, made a fist, lifted it to his mouth. As slowly and purposefully as he had talked, he mimed a blade across his face, carving a picture into his forehead, his chin bone, his cheeks. “Ubica,” he said. “In face of my tata.” Even in the dark I could tell he could see my eyes searching his, could feel him willing me to see in his face what they had done to his father’s. Then he reached over and touched my cheek. His fingertip was cold and so gentle that if we hadn’t been alone I would have blushed. He traced the same carving on my face. “Ubica,” he said. And I realized he was making the shape of a u.
When we got to his home it was as dark as all the others, a garage-less, small cape with unfinished dormers and a front door that hovered three feet off the ground. No deck at its foot. Not even any steps.
He started up the short dirt drive. When I tried to go with him, he made a noise in his throat, unpeeled my fingers from his jacket. Still, I followed him until the light over the side entrance snapped on. He shoved me back then, so hard my heels slid in the snow. I could see his face, now: the blood thickened around his mouth, clumps of his hair frozen in red-stained spikes. His stare was harder than his shove. I backed out of the light, watched him walk around to the unfinished steps, open the storm door. The unlit inside swallowed him.
I would have left then if a window hadn’t cut its shape into the black. It was upstairs, a dormer. Another one went on next to it. I caught the figure of a woman, blurred, moving fast. In a third explosion of window light, she stopped. The edge of the glass sliced her down the center, showed only part of an oversized T-shirt, bony shoulders, piled gray-streaked hair; I could tell by her movements that she was upset and, by her tilt, that she was looking down the stairs.
I kept expecting her to go to him. Instead, she took a step back, and he rose into view—hair, face, chest—as if coming up through the floor. He hadn’t washed off the blood and he was trying to talk to her through his mangled mouth, to soothe her, but I could see she was furious. When he reached for her she smacked his hand away. Her shouting was loud enough now that I could hear. Her fury seemed unhinged from anything I could understand, unraveled from reason, not just the Serbian words, but the simple fact of it with her son looking how he did. When he tried again to touch her, she raised a hand as if to smack his cheek—my throat shut—but hit him between his shoulder and his neck instead, then slapped at his chest, then was beating him with fists. He tried to get ahold of her. She jerked away, was suddenly gone from the window frame. A door slammed. I could see her in the window—a bedroom—pacing.
The first-floor windows flung their light onto the snow. Mirza went straight through the kitchen into the living room, picked up the phone. There was the slight movement of his dialing, and then he went perfectly still, motionless as the dried flowers behind him hanging off a nail in the wall. On the floor above, his mother tore in and out the window frame—jerking gestures, she was talking to herself—before she was gone again. For a moment, the entire house was still. Then she burst into the kitchen.
Mirza took one look at her and hung up. They stood watching each other, both motionless, him with one hand pressed to his face, one reaching towards her, her with the arm I couldn’t see raising a hand I couldn’t see to what looked like the side of her head. He took a step. She stepped back. Between the dark lump of her fist and the dark mass of her hair I could just make out the shape of a gun.
I don’t know how long they stood like that, only that the forest quiet seemed to reclaim the night and I became aware of a highway nearby. Once in a while a truck would moan through the trees. Mirza was trying to talk to her. She was talking, too. It went on. The house gradually drifted back to sleep, as if grown used to the lights and the chattering and too tired to care. The cold bit my face. My feet we
re freezing. I thought about going home.
When she finally put the gun on the counter, he went to her as if it was a signal they had arranged beforehand, and I had a strange feeling, as I watched him pull her to him, as she let him, that this was something they had done so many times before they had grown good at it.
IV. The Concrete Plant
I told myself I’d talk to someone about what I’d seen. My parents, a teacher. But in my head, it always sounded like a confession; I could hear the questions—they were always aimed at me—but never my answers. In my silence, I tried not to let my mind imagine what it was like to live in that house. I told no one. I did nothing.
Even in going to the library there was something that seemed wrong. Not twenty-four hours after it happened, I was on the public bus to UVM. I went in before dark and when I got out again it was still light. That—the easiness of it, the tiny bit of time it took—seemed wrong, too. Ubica. It meant murderer. That night I lay on the floor of my room feeling his fingertip on my face. I told nobody that, either.
A week went by and none of us had seen Mirza since he fell on the tracks. That’s what I told Eli and Greg and everyone: he had slipped in the snow, fallen face-first on a rail. He didn’t return our calls. He hadn’t been in school. But one morning when we heard on the news that they had cut the mirror loose from its station, that one hour before midnight it was to streak across the sky, we knew where we would find him.
It was a quarter past eleven when we heard him come through the hole in the chain link. From inside the funnel we listened to his footsteps on the frozen gravel, the faint thumps of him climbing. But the longer we listened the more it didn’t sound like he was on the ladder. It was as if he was climbing some other part of the plant. The sound drew closer, then seemed almost level with us, then kept going, the clanks and thuds coming from above our heads.
“Holy fuck,” Greg said, “he’s on the belt.”
Through the funnel’s mouth, in the big square of sky above us, we saw him. He’d wedged a flashlight in one underarm and we watched the beam creep along the defunct conveyor belt as it rose past the funnel, his dark shape covering constellations and crawling on and freeing them behind.
