Those Who Knew

by Idra Novey

  Yanking the sheet up to her face, she curled closer to Oscar’s long, pale arm. Olga had to be right about the zigzag sweater, about her failing to notice the cashier tucking it back into her tote bag. The bra, too, could have ended up in her drawer from some mix-up while doing laundry at her parents’ house last summer. Either of her sisters-in-law could be the owner of a lacy white push-up bra like that.

  Yes, Lena decided, rolling onto her back again, there were explanations for all of it. And if Maria wanted to haunt someone with the truth, why would she pick someone with such an abhorrent family history that would cancel out anything Lena might try to reveal?

  Or was it the shock last night of Victor’s grip again on her wrist that had rendered her suddenly this passive and limp? She had not even asked Oscar to put on a condom.

  Clenching her jaw, Lena launched herself out of bed and pulled some leggings from the heap of clothes on her desk chair.

  The phone rang again. To avoid waking Oscar, she answered, assuming it must be her mother, eager for more details about the northerner her brother had seen on the porch.

  It’s too early, Mother, she said.

  It’s me, her brother said. Is your boyfriend watching the attack? Where’s he from there? It’s crazy.

  What attack? Lena shuffled into the living room in her slippers to look for the remote. Her TV had belonged to her parents. They’d replaced it with a larger one and she mostly used it for watching movies. It took a minute to find a working channel with the news, and even then it was a fuzzy feed of an immense, distant building, the upper half of it in flames. Beside it, another structure was engulfed in smoke.

  The image switched to a street full of screaming, fleeing people, zooming in on a man half carrying a woman in ripped stockings to the curb. Lena turned up the volume and waited to hear the creak of her bed planks on the other side of the wall. But she heard no sound from the next room as she went on watching the smoke billow and darken above the buildings.

  Oscar, she called and shook her head, surprised that he could sleep on this soundly in the home of someone he barely knew. She called again a little louder and heard a yawn—her long, freckled guest finally stirring in her sheets.

  * * *

  Oscar sucked in his breath and leaned forward. How was this possible? This sort of incomprehensible thing didn’t happen in his country. Lena called to him from the kitchen about coffee but he didn’t answer. His mouth had begun to feel as numb as his legs from kneeling too long in front of the TV. But it felt wrong to extract himself from the position to be more comfortable. He knew the exact corner the newscaster was standing on, had stood at the top of the tower that had just collapsed. One summer, before dropping out of college, he’d done a culinary program just one street down from where a fleet of grim-faced emergency workers were strapping a motionless, bloodied man in a dark suit onto a gurney.

  He shivered and leaned closer. He’d only pulled on his boxers before rushing out to watch the TV, and Lena’s living room was as poorly insulated and drafty as her bedroom.

  A different newscaster came on. In a thin, bewildered voice, she reported that the second tower was expected to collapse as well, and a moment later, smoke plumed from it as if from the mouth of a volcano. Oscar let out an anguished cry.

  Here. Lena arrived with his mug of coffee in one hand, one of his cheddar scones in the other. He heard her crunch into the scone and a current of disgust jolted through him. How can you eat with this happening? he asked.

  Are you serious? I’ve been standing here watching since before you woke up. Just take your mug, she said, it’s heavy.

  Lena thrust the coffee at him. All her mugs were large, heavy ceramic things, and her fingers looked too thin and delicate for such a determined gesture. In bed he had found her surprisingly meek—even passive—and he felt disoriented now, kneeling beneath her on the thin wool rug in his paisley boxers, the mug still hovering between them, the blare of sirens taking over the living room.

  A river of people was now pouring from the corner where he’d turned to reach the culinary school. It’s incomprehensible, he murmured.

  Is it, though? Lena slammed his coffee down on top of the TV and Oscar glanced up at her, disturbed to find his gaze drawn even now to her breasts, loose under the worn cotton of her pajama shirt.

  What are you doing? She crossed her arms. You can stare at my chest while your country’s being attacked, but I can’t eat a bite of breakfast?

  Lena, don’t be ridiculous, he said. I wasn’t staring that way.

  Oh come on, Mr. Poetry and Pastry Man. You were. I can’t eat because your city is the one on fire for once but you can stare at my chest because you’re the northerner and you get to set the rules for everyone. That’s how it’s always gone, right? Just admit it, she said, moving in front of the TV, blocking his view.

  Please, I’m sorry, Lena. Just let me see what’s happening. Still on his knees, he tilted his head to see around her.

  I’ll move when you admit it, she said. If those people were dying anywhere but in your country, would you have cared if I went on eating your scone? I bet you wouldn’t.

  On the TV screen, an older blond man bleeding through his ripped oxford shirt looked so eerily like his father that Oscar shot up from the floor. He heard Lena repeat her question, her voice furious now, but he rushed past her toward the open door of her bedroom. Lena followed close behind him, still clutching her mug, demanding to know if his parents stopped drinking their coffee for even a second when his government supplied the trucks to round up Olga and thousands of others. To shoot them down on the street.

  I know what my government did here, Lena. He yanked his pants on, his legs still tingling. I know I can only guess how horrific it was, but that was in part why I wanted to come here, to understand.

  Oh, is that so? Lena clenched her face and stepped closer. And is this part of your understanding, screwing women who are supposed to feel grateful and lucky when you show up with dinner for them? Well, guess what? I don’t need your fucking scone! Lena hurled it to the floor.

  Oscar lowered his head, too winded to respond or do up the buttons on his pants. He wanted to tell her she was the only person he’d been with in over a year, nearly two. But he could barely maintain enough composure to reach for his sneakers. He had felt radiant falling asleep beside her. Well after midnight, they’d gotten hungry and made crêpes in their underwear, had sung along together to a rock song from his country that everyone in the hemisphere knew. By the last chorus, they were half dancing through the flour on the floor, and he’d felt a joy so delicate it felt invented, some new kind of twenty-first-century joy, so unexpected it was breathtaking, causing the very air in the kitchen to shimmer.

  Leaving Lena’s bedroom now, he didn’t stop to tie the laces of his sneakers. He just fumbled toward the hall, open-shoed, dumbstruck, cupping his hands over his ears as he had as a child during fire drills. But he heard Lena behind him anyhow, yelling that his kind of willful imperialist ignorance was the worst, the most unforgivable.

  In the living room, he heard people on the TV crying and shouting. As he passed the screen, he felt as if he were fleeing with them, wailing with them even if he was in another hemisphere, even if all that awaited him at the end of Lena’s narrow hall was the steep, winding curve of her road. For a moment, in her drafty room last night, he had imagined what it would be like to move in, to wake over and over next to Lena, to come to know her books stacked in the corners, to belong to her.

  When her door slammed behind him, he felt incapable of starting up the hill. At the curb, he came to a stop, unable to do anything but fixate on a crushed soda can in the closest pothole, all the terrified people in the city he loved, with their bloody arms and ash-streaked faces, still running in every direction through his mind.

  From down the hill came the moan of an engine. A moment later, a rusted blue Volks
wagen Beetle labored around the curve. The woman coaxing her ancient vehicle up the hill was young and humming along with the radio as if it were any day at all in human history. As she passed him, she flicked a tissue out the window.

  * * *

  Olga was rolling her morning joint and listening to the radio report on humanity’s latest destruction of itself when her door jangled. Wild-eyed, wet-haired, Lena entered the bookstore. Olga never rose to greet anyone who entered but she pushed herself up now from the sunken seat of her velvet chair. The abruptness of the rise left her dizzy. She motioned for her friend to come around the register, and Lena stepped past the edge of it without a word.

  Olga held out her arms and for the first time in what felt like centuries she pulled someone into her embrace tightly enough to feel Lena’s body press against her own. She felt Lena’s breath against her ear. She kissed the top of her friend’s head and it felt maternal, sensual—that fragile, erotic overlap that can happen in an embrace between two people who have gradually become essential to one another but have yet to speak of it, and who will likely never speak of all the shoved-down wadded-up things they have come to silently glimpse inside each other.

  She pressed her lips against her friend’s wet hair and knew this would likely be the last time she held someone this way. She had not realized she had come to feel protective enough of Lena to include her among the few people for whom she would place herself in the line of fire. For whom she would extract her knife if things came to that. At all times, since returning to the island, she had maintained a formidable knife under her armchair in the likelihood that someday things would come to that.

  SCENES FROM THE PRUNING OF A FUTURE PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE

  (WORK IN PROGRESS BY FMG)

  In the last months of the Cato years.

  SET

  A picnic table.

  A cardboard moon hangs from a string to indicate the time is evening.

  If possible, dangle a few aluminum foil stars to accompany the moon.

  A college-age girl sits at the table next to her boyfriend.

  They are facing the audience.

  On the other side, his back to the public,

  sits the boyfriend’s younger, chubby brother.

  They are playing dominoes.

  Among the domino chips, there could be a few bottles of beer.

  GIRL

  Hey, stop looking at my dominoes!

  FUTURE CANDIDATE

  I’m not looking. I don’t need to. I’m going to win anyway.

  GIRL

  You don’t know that.

  FUTURE CANDIDATE

  I do know, I always beat you both.

  Neither of you is ruthless enough.

  LITTLE BROTHER

  I am!

  I’m ruthless enough.

  GIRL

  Do you see how you’re corrupting his soul?

  FUTURE CANDIDATE

  His soul is corrupted already.

  Everybody who grew up under Cato has soul damage.

  GIRL

  But being damaged doesn’t mean you have an excuse for ruthlessness.

  LITTLE BROTHER

  I just want to win for once!

  The future candidate laughs.

  He pats his little brother on the head as if he were a small, harmless dog.

  The little brother barks.

  The girlfriend lets out a melancholy howl.

  The future candidate does not acknowledge the sounds they are making.

  Head bent over the table, he rearranges his dominoes.

  FUTURE CANDIDATE

  Okay, pets, take some notes.

  Check out that double six.

  See, I knew neither of you had any sixes left.

  Only me.

  To win, you have to hide what you have more of than anyone else.

  Whether you like it or not, that’s how the ruthless win.

  II

  Four years later

  in the most dominant city

  of the most dominant country

  * * *

  Four years after the death of Maria P. was declared an accident, Lena was living abroad, pushing her son on the swings, when she heard someone speaking her language with a familiar cadence. She had come for a doctorate at one of the most renowned universities in the hemisphere and rarely ran into anyone from the island whom she didn’t already know.

  But she didn’t recognize this woman with dark hair in a loose braid on the next row of swings. The woman was pushing a blond little boy and nodded at Lena’s son Cosmo, who was even blonder. She asked in their language how long Lena had been his babysitter.

  Oh no, he’s my son, Lena said. She’d become accustomed to strangers making this assumption and turned the conversation away from her with her usual onslaught of questions. The woman with the braid responded to each inquiry in an eerily steady voice, as if she’d been waiting for them. Across the three swings that hung empty between them, she told Lena she’d come after dropping out of college. She was taller, with long, elegant arms and a sharp, knowing gaze, which she kept fixed on Lena with an unnerving boldness. Lena felt the woman taking in every aspect of her, not just her mouth and eyes, but the width of her hips beneath her baggy, unflattering pants, the air of resigned sexlessness she had about her since she’d become a mother.

  The blond boy in the other swing kicked his legs and urged the woman with the braid to push him higher, and the woman did with the same transfixing steadiness, telling Lena as she pushed him that she had studied engineering on the island but was thinking about going for a bachelor’s here in something else. But first she needed to save up more money and improve her comprehension of the language. I keep meaning to take a class, she told Lena, but I come home so tired.

  The woman jutted her chin in the direction of the little boy in the swing, and Lena nodded, confessing she had vastly underestimated the amount of rereading she’d have to do to get through grad school in another language—and on her own with a child. She told the woman with the braid that she had come with her son for a PhD in education but felt delirious at night, trying to write papers after getting Cosmo into bed and finishing the dishes. I know it will look like an act of defeat, but I’m thinking of heading back to the island after completing the master’s, she admitted, and see if I can get a job with the Ministry of Education. It was a confession she’d yet to make aloud to anyone.

  The last of the summer humidity still had not lifted, and in the languid air of the playground Lena began to feel sweat forming under her arms as the other woman replied that she, too, hoped to go back to the island—eventually. She told Lena that before she dropped out of college, she’d gotten caught up in the protests against rising tuition and the outrageous salaries the university deans were taking. I stopped handing in assignments, and then other things got complicated, the woman added, a hardness taking over her face.

  In the swing, Cosmo wailed for Lena to push him again. She thrust her hands out without looking, scraping her knuckles against the plastic back of the seat. She swore at the sting and then about her constant exhaustion. If you ever need help on the weekends, the woman offered, I could give you my number.

  A faint breeze moved through the playground then, trembling the leaves in the tall row of trees behind them. The breeze carried the colder air of autumn, and Lena felt the brisk press of it against the back of her legs and neck as she pulled out her cell phone. The woman recited her number in the same commanding, steady voice and Lena punched it into her phone, a metal clamp closing over her chest as she waited for the name.

  I’m Maria, the woman said at last. And you?

  * * *

  Freddy peered down at the bundled-up northerners hustling along the sidewalk below with their dogs and groceries. His friend’s street looked just like the one from a comedy about this neighborho
od that everyone on the island had watched when he was a child. The family in the comedy had lived on a posh street lined with the same leafy trees, the same cement staircases leading up to the imposing wooden doors of each building.

  He still couldn’t quite grasp that a play of his was actually going to open in four days in this most revered city in the hemisphere. It was astounding how much one’s prospects could change with proximity to a serious cash flow. All it had taken was for a close friend to marry a banker here and he was no longer a provincial playwright stuck in the same crumbling port city where he was born.

  At last, he was more than just fat old Freddy with the sparkle scarf at the Zodiac. More than the younger gay brother the senator rarely mentioned. He was international now. His friend had hired a translator and professional actors. She had scheduled a premier date in October because she believed good things happened for shows that opened in October.

  Standing across from him, next to the hum of her gleaming state-of-the-art dishwasher, his friend was washing some grapes to eat with the overpriced cheese she’d bought with her banker husband’s endless influx of money. Freddy clicked on the electric kettle for their tea and looked out the window again, still astounded that he was actually here, on a classy street just like the one on the comedy they’d all watched as if it were a myth.

  I know there are more people from the island we could invite, his friend said from the sink. Oh, you know who else lives here now? Ugh, I can’t remember her name. Her family owns Sunny Juice and she had a kid with a tourist. You know who I’m talking about, right? Don’t you know her from something?

  Freddy lifted his hand above the now steaming spout of the kettle. Yes, he said, Lena. He let the wet burn of the steam spread over his open palm and waited for the heat to reveal where the first blister might begin.