Love at the Speed of Email

by Lisa McKay

  By this time both of my siblings, who had witnessed this whole gift exchange, were literally rolling on the floor. I think it was probably half the screaming rubber chicken and half the fact that I was not laughing.

  “I am not using that chicken in my workshops, Mum,” I said.

  “Why not?” she asked. “It’s perfect.”

  “Mum!” I said. “I’m already fighting an uphill battle. I am young and a woman, and I’m trying to teach disaster-relief workers about stress and trauma. If I bring out that chicken I will blow any respect points I have earned from having worked in jail and with the police and traveling solo around the Balkans. I do not yet have the years or the moxie to pull off that chicken during a workshop. I know my limits.”

  This was the chicken that my mother went to find the night I brought Mike home. Lo and behold, she came back with not one but two bright yellow chickens.

  “Look,” she said, holding up the new, fuzzy one. “I found a new chicken. Check it out!”

  My mother closed her hands around the neck of this new chicken and it began to writhe in her grasp. Large, alarmed plastic eyes protruded from its head as if on springs, and a pointy red tongue shot out of its beak and fell sideways, limp.

  I couldn’t look at Mike, so I looked at my sister instead. Michelle was looking back and me and giggling with her hand over her mouth in that way that you laugh when you’ve just seen someone fall down a flight of stairs at the library with an armful of books. The way you laugh when you know you shouldn’t be laughing.

  We all admired the choking chicken routine for a moment, and then I let desperation and curiosity compel me to open my mouth – someone had to say something.

  “What happens when you press that button?” I asked, pointing at the “Press here” button buried in the yellow feathers on the chicken’s chest.

  “I don’t know,” Mum said intrigued, “I’ve never done that. I didn’t even know that was there.”

  As she touched the button, a familiar song started to play and the toy chicken, eyes wiggling maniacally, began to dance.

  “The chicken dance!” Michelle and Mike exclaimed at about the same time.

  “What’s the chicken dance?” My mother asked, marveling at the new skill of this wondrous chicken.

  “You’ve never seen the chicken dance?” Michelle asked.

  “It goes like this!” Mike said, leaping up, sticking his hands in his armpits and starting to jump around the kitchen, singing.

  “Come-on,” Mike urged us.

  Michelle, still giggling, apparently deciding that she had nothing to lose and joined in without hesitating.

  I stood there for a second with the plate of leftovers I’d been warming up for Mike in my hand.

  How exactly had we descended to the level of performing the chicken dance in a brightly lit kitchen in front of my parents within fifteen minutes of walking into the house?

  Then I sighed, put the plate down, and joined in.

  *

  When I came downstairs on the second morning of his stay, Mike was already up. He was sitting on the porch swing on the back deck, staring out across the cane fields and the river, out to the blue sweep of sea neatly hemmed by a ribbon of beach.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Hey,” I said. “Where’s everyone?”

  “Your parents are around somewhere,” he said. “Want some coffee?”

  “Please,” I said, sitting down on the swing beside him. “Morning is not my time.”

  “I know,” he said with a small sigh. “It’s my time.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “I don’t know what you take in your coffee, though,” he said.

  “Milk,” I said. “One sugar.”

  He started to get up and paused.

  “Lis,” he said, “what are we going to do?”

  It felt like he didn’t really need an answer right then, but I answered anyway.

  “We have time. We’ll figure it out.”

  As Mike started to stand again, the screen door slid open and my mother stepped onto the deck.

  “You two,” she said to me.

  “Yeah?”

  “Your father and I are out tonight, so you can cook for yourselves, eat leftovers, or find some other option.”

  I looked at Mike.

  “Do you want to go on a hot date tonight?” I asked him.

  “Who with?” he said.

  “Me,” I said.

  “Well then, how can I say no to that?”

  *

  After dinner that night I waited for Mike to kiss me. He never did.

  We walked along the riverbank, licking our ice cream cones, until we found a free bench. We sat. I dripped chocolate down my white pants. I listened to the wind snap the flags above us against the poles. I shivered in the unseasonably cool breeze and wondered whether Mike would notice and put an arm around me to help keep me warm.

  He didn’t.

  I thought about scooting over and kissing him but decided against it. The guy was in my country, at my house, and surrounded by my family and friends. The least I could do was respect his personal space.

  Part of my brain was listening to what Mike was talking about, and another part was busy mulling over the question he had asked me that morning.

  What were we going to do?

  Our three months of emails had been flavored by friendly frankness that had strayed into barely perceptible flirting on only a handful of occasions. I guess I’d assumed that it would be different face-to-face – that if we were going to work, a different sort of energy would immediately enter the equation.

  It didn’t. Not that night. Not for the entire first week he was there. Not even during a classic and completely unscripted moment on day four when I took Mike to meet my grandparents.

  That day my grandfather, cheerful and garrulous as always, talked at length about a documentary he’d just seen on crocodile farming in the Northern Territory and then pressed the DVD on us so that we could take it home and watch it ourselves. But it was my grandmother who was in particularly fine form. She served Mike tea in china teacups and delicious slices of cake, and somewhere in there she also served him the totally out-of-context and completely inaccurate statement (delivered with the utmost gravity) that I was “definitely going to adopt two black African babies very soon.”

  Mike looked at me, puzzled. I hadn’t let him in on any adoption plans. In the moment, I could only smile and hope he understood that this was because there weren’t any.

  But I can’t blame all the embarrassing moments that occurred that afternoon on my grandparents. The last one was all me.

  “Darling,” my grandmother said, handing me three of my own books just as we were leaving, “can you sign these, please? One of them is ours and two are to give away.”

  I sat down the deck, twiddling the pen while I tried to figure out what to write inside my grandparents’ book.

  “What do you think,” I began, looking up at Mike, who was standing in front of me. At that precise moment the pen flew out of my hands, up into the air, and straight down my cleavage like a guided missile.

  Mike didn’t say a word. His lips twitched, but he turned his head and looked out at the river while I, blushing, retrieved the pen from where it had lodged itself firmly in my bra.

  That entire first week, Mike kept a maddeningly respectful distance. We went walking, we played board games, we spent hours and hours sitting on the porch swing together, talking. He didn’t make a move. He didn’t even look at me wrong. I started to wonder if he was even interested.

  *

  More than our first kiss, more than any particular words, the real emotional landmark for me was the first time Mike reached for me.

  We were on the porch swing talking, not of the letters that we had written to each other but of the ones we’d written before that: my essays and the five years’ worth of mass emails he’d sent to me.

  “What did you learn?” Mike asked, lau
ghing, when I told him how carefully I’d combed through his old letters.

  “I learned that I don’t ever want to move to Tajikistan,” I said.

  Mike groaned at the reference to the toughest year of his life.

  “Well, that proves that you don’t need to experience something firsthand to learn a valuable lesson,” he said.

  We fell silent. Mike was sprawled down the length of the porch swing, his head resting near my shoulder. My arm lay along the back of the chair, behind him.

  “It’s funny that you say Tajikistan was your personal Waterloo,” I said. “If I’d had to guess, I might have guessed Uganda. Your letters from Uganda were very … raw.”

  “Where do I begin?” one of his first letters from Uganda had started …

  How can I relate northern Uganda to you when I feel often overwhelmed and confused by it myself?

  The war here is silent. No gunshots at night right now. Just occasional nights when the rebels abduct a few children to either conscript them as army/sex slaves or chop off their fingers/ears/lips and then release them back so as to promote as much fear as possible within the population.

  The villagers are terrified of the rebels. So they’ve migrated to centralized camps for “internally displaced peoples” (IDPs) where they can supposedly be protected by the government army. It’s just, the war has been going on for 18 years now and the government doesn’t seem to give a lick whether the rebels mutilate and kill the pesky northerners. And the government troops that are supposedly protecting people in the IDP camps sleep in the center of the camps, surrounded by the IDPs. Who’s protecting who?

  The camps are awful. Masses of children with big eyes wearing tattered clothing, all with bulging bellies and flies buzzing around their faces. Idle men who used to farm fields sitting around getting drunk. Women walking long distances to collect water from dirty ponds using dirty plastic containers. Thatched mud and straw huts crammed so closely together that when the dry, dusty wind blows a cooking fire too far, the whole tinderbox camp goes up in flames. Piles of feces all over the ground. Desperate people begging me and expecting me to help them.

  Mike fingered the stem of the wine glass he was holding as he thought about what I’d said about his Uganda emails. The drops of water beading the smooth surface of the glass reflected a dozen blue horizons. We watched them rotate as the glass turned. Nothing else stirred under the hot, heavy silence of that summer afternoon. We were an unfathomable distance from the desperation of those camps.

  “Uganda was raw,” Mike said. “But Tajikistan was harder. When I arrived in Tajikistan I thought I was extraordinary and indestructible. I thought that if I could live in solidarity with the poor and love Tajikistan and work hard enough, then the changes I wanted for that place and those people would happen and things would make sense. All of these expectations collided with a hard reality, and I was the one who broke.” He shrugged. “By the time I got to Uganda… I don’t know how you’d say it. I was less idealistic? I was less arrogant? I’d stopped expecting to feel as if I were saving the world every day. I’d accepted that humanitarian moments are rarer than you’d think in this work.”

  That was right, I remembered. He’d written about humanitarian moments in the second half of that letter from Uganda:

  Sunday I was the ugly mzungo (foreigner). We work six days a week. I was looking forward to being able to sit on the veranda reading and sipping a cold glass of water that Sunday. I was looking forward to being able to eat lunch (we don’t eat while we’re in the camps because we just can’t eat food in front of the people). I was looking forward to being able to forget, if only for a day, that on the other side of those iron gates are naked children with bloated bellies. But there’s a cholera outbreak in Pabbo camp now, so Saturday night it was decided that we would work again on Sunday.

  So Sunday I arrived at the office early. I figured the earlier we left the office, the earlier we could finish our work and the earlier I would be able to get home. There was just one hurdle in this plan: my staff. Rather than arrive early in the morning as we had agreed, they arrived late. And then, after leaving the office two hours behind schedule, we had to spend an additional half-hour getting some supplies they had forgotten.

  The day in the camp was long, hot, frustrating, and as time went on I became more and more the ugly mzungo. You know, the foreigner who is short on patience and stressed out about everything.

  Late in the day, after we had analyzed water from our last point, I was walking back from a spring. The spring is located about 10 minutes from the huts on the edge of the camp. It’s a beautiful walk though lush banana trees, paddies bursting with amber rice shocks, rolling fields of cassava and sweet potatoes. Several women carrying yellow jerry cans to the spring passed us as we walked back to our truck. And just at that moment, right in the midst of all my ugliness that stemmed from the frustrating day at the end of a wearisome week, just at that moment I realized that I was catching a glimpse of something really beautiful: a snapshot of what life must have been like for these people before the start of the war 18 years ago. And hopefully a snapshot of what life will be like for these people someday when the war ends.

  Until then I have the opportunity to serve these people. Right now that means working to prevent the cholera from spreading, in the hope that fewer of these people die and can someday leave the camps and return to their villages in the green rolling hills. And every now and then I have a moment where my heart is filled with love and compassion.

  In humanitarian aid work, feel-good moments are rarer than you might think. Most days are painful struggle. Cross-cultural misunderstandings. Being viewed as a wealthy vending machine. Feeling perpetually compromised in your own beliefs, ideals, and desires. Staring into the terrible face of intense suffering knowing full well that you are completely unable to end the suffering, that you barely even know where to begin.

  But, today, I had a humanitarian moment.

  “I don’t do it just for the humanitarian moments,” Mike said. “I don’t think you can do this just for the humanitarian moments. They’re beautiful when they come, but they’re not enough, and there are not enough of them. I do my work now as best I can because I still feel more passionate about this than anything else, and I still believe it does more good than harm. What about you? Why do you keep working to support humanitarian workers? Why do you keep choosing this? The last essay I read before I emailed you that first time was the one you wrote about alternate lives. I loved that essay.”

  Then he quoted my own writing to me: “Few of us who live in the Western world must do exactly what we do to feed and clothe ourselves. Many times our career choices are really more influenced by a cocktail of duty, fear, apathy, talent, priorities, and passion. Alternate lives, at least one or two of them, often lie within reach.”

  I stared out to sea again, through the haze hanging over the cane fields below us and into all that luxurious, promising space beyond.

  “I don’t have one good answer to this,” I said. “I still often sit on planes wondering what I can possibly say in the workshops that I am going to give that would make it worth the time, the money, the energy and the risk to get there – for me and for them.” Then I told him a story. “When we had to postpone the last set of Kenya workshops last year until October because of the violence, we ran some online discussion groups for counselors and humanitarian workers in Nairobi. One person, a child advocate, talked about how overwhelmed and powerless she felt. Stray bullets from the police had killed two of their students that week.

  “We ended up talking a lot that session about that issue of feeling overwhelmed and powerless, and about what can anchor us in the midst of situations that provoke those feelings. What do we really have to offer as helpers, as counselors or humanitarian workers, when people are being killed on your neighborhood streets? What weapons do we really have to fight against feeling powerless?

  “Someone in that session said that being there was critica
l, even if you didn’t know what to say, that your mere presence was hope. They said that the fact that we were alive, and walking and talking and present, all sent a message that there was life and hope somewhere and that a different kind of future was possible. They said that we tend to focus only on the miracles that Jesus performed but that he must have spent most of his time simply walking among the people and that that, in itself, must have brought hope.

  “This theme of the power of presence stuck with me. Presence can seem like such a small offering. I want to believe that sometimes when I show up I sow some seeds of hope in fields of violence and despair, but I’m not sure. When I stop to think about it, I am rarely completely sure of anything anymore.”

  I looked again at the dozen horizons glued to Mike’s wine glass.

  “I quoted Tolle in that alternate-lives essay,” I said. “‘Live every moment as if you had chosen it.’ But perhaps I should also have quoted Rilke: ‘Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.’”

  I cannot now remember what Mike said next, because as he said it he also reached up and slid his hand over mine, pulling my arm down around his shoulders and anchoring it against the living warmth of his chest.

  I closed my eyes, blocking out the expanse of there for just a second, and felt his heartbeat against my palm.

  *

  On day ten Mike sent out a mass email to his Melbourne friends inviting them to come and meet his Aussie girlfriend during a drinks gathering down there in a couple of days. By this time I’d already figured out that Mike and I were on. That didn’t stop me from teasing him about his presumption when the email landed in my inbox.