by Idra Novey
* * *
On the runway in the capital, Freddy clicked his seat belt and slipped a piece of gum to Alex beside him before unwrapping his own. He relished their daily gestures to each other, the intimacy of them. Belonging to someone other than his brother had been like flicking the lid off an airless box he had not realized he’d been hiding in. He was not a fan of spearmint gum, but he’d gotten Alex’s favorite spearmint brand for them to chew during takeoff. Symbolic acts of selflessness came so easily to Alex. Freddy found he had to make a more deliberate effort and hoped the reason was simply his unfamiliarity with the art of such gestures. His parents had never indulged each other’s preferences without resentment. With Alex, it had become plainer to him how little grace there had been in his childhood when it came to kindness.
And in no segment of his life had there ever been a moment like this, sitting beside someone he loved on a red-eye to Paris. Beyond the illuminated tarmac of the runway, only a few lights from the capital showed through the darkness. Every time he left the country, Freddy had an intimation of the island’s edges drawing closer, its size diminishing with each flight he took away from it. A small French company was producing Where He Danced While We Lay Dreaming. Freddy had tried to encourage the company to produce Even You Are Socrates Now instead. He was so tired of going abroad and endlessly rehashing the Cato years for strangers to sigh over. But it was the only play foreign directors wanted. It was what had gotten him and Alex on this flight to Paris, the first for both of them.
On his lap, Freddy’s phone began to vibrate, the screen pulsing with his brother’s name. He had never assigned an image to Victor’s number. All that pulsed when his brother called was the name. Victor. Victor.
Victor.
Victor.
Victor.
Maybe something’s happened, Alex said beside him.
Maybe. Freddy chewed faster, the spearmint reaching its peak sharpness, tingling his tongue.
The phone pulsed again and he felt excruciatingly aware of Alex beside him witnessing his inaction, the rising number of calls from Victor he could not bear to answer.
I thought we would’ve taken off by now. Freddy chewed even faster, looking toward the front of the plane to see if the stewardesses were seated yet, but they were still circulating. The phone vibrated another time and he thought of the police station, the pulpy gash on his brother’s forehead, his father’s terrifying rage on Victor’s face.
Departure music, Alex said, passing one of the earbuds from his phone for them to listen together. Freddy pushed the bud into his ear and sank into the exquisitely unpredictable chords of Claude Debussy. The performance of some yearning person who’d gradually mastered the notes of Rêverie. Louder, please, he murmured to Alex as his phone pulsed again against his leg.
* * *
Victor extracted his flask and found it empty.
But how could that be, when the sound of his steps was still so firm?
Thump. Thump.
Thump.
Or no, those were not his steps, were they, and now he saw whose.
Another man in the gulping shadows of the foreign ships.
In the faint mist moving up through the planks.
Some dockworker, hands jammed in his pockets, drawing closer.
An awful peppery odor on the man’s breath.
An odd smell, and Victor couldn’t make out the man’s face either.
Mind ablur, he heard the man murmur what sounded like sinister.
Or was it sister.
He heard I know you and did it.
The words spit out like the man had something hidden in his mouth.
* * *
Hold on, I don’t want to wake Edgar, Cristina whispered to her father, hurrying in her nightgown down the staircase to the living room. Yet on the edge of the last step, she found she could not descend any further, could do nothing but grip the railing as her father described the video. A foreign dockworker who’d been in the country for only a few days who’d been choked and dragged unconscious to the end of the dock.
It’s definitely Victor. I watched it several times, her father said before describing a second video his contact in the police force had sent to him as well, taken from the same shipping company’s security camera a few nights before. Her ex-husband drunk and urinating all over the gate of the same foreign ship. The dockworker, they presumed, had come out to ask Victor not to urinate on their gate again.
They’re going to make both videos public, her father said. There’s nothing I can do about something this horrific, Cristina, and you shouldn’t see it. Victor just . . . chokes the life out of the man. There’s no pleading self-defense. You and Edgar should really leave the island by early tomorrow.
Leave for where? she asked, her throat closing, her tongue feeling thick and strange as she noticed someone out on the road in front of her house.
It doesn’t matter where. I’ll arrange something. Just get your things together and be ready to go straight to the airport in the morning. Why you married this monster is beyond me.
And without a word of reassurance, her father was gone. She was alone descending the last step to the bottom of her stairs. Outside, the figure appeared to have drawn closer. Cristina had not been able to find any curtains that felt right for their new life here in the valley and so there was nothing to pull shut now, no curtain to stop her from registering the tall, long-haired woman just past the curb, the woman’s sudden jerking movement as if struck from behind.
Cristina closed her eyes to make the figure vanish. But when she opened her eyes the woman was still there, illogically upright after being struck that hard, a silhouette in the dim glow of the streetlight, the dewy tips of the grass blades glistening in the lawn in front of her.
You no longer exist, she said at once to the silhouette at the edge of her lawn and to her own faint reflection in the glass.
* * *
Freddy entered the café for his interview with Le Monde half an hour early. He wanted to be well into a cappuccino he’d bought himself when the journalist arrived. He felt more in control when he played against the expectation of the impoverished playwright from the island nation grateful for a free drink. He could buy his own damn latte, and he liked arriving early enough to pick the table and skim through a few emails on his phone before an interview began.
But what was this sudden onslaught of new messages? Maybe, at last, he was a finalist for the OGD International Theater Award. The finalists were always announced at the beginning of May. And why not? Structurally, Even You Are Socrates Now was his most inventive play, except perhaps for the mounting pile of scenes in his drawer. Maybe he was finally about to have his moment. Lucrative prize news while sipping a latte in Paris, about to speak with a theater critic from Le Monde.
But the new messages were not in the language of the country that oversaw the prize. The messages were all in his own language. At the sight of Cristina’s name, he felt the shriveling immediately begin within him.
By the time he clicked on the video and saw Victor on the misty dock, he felt nauseous. He watched his brother stagger and wanted to turn away but forced himself to keep watching as Victor dragged some stranger’s limp body along the planks. The video was soundless and had the smeary quality of security cameras, but the stiff, determined movements were indisputably Victor’s. That was his brother pushing a man off the dock into the water.
You must be Freddy, a voice said with a French accent and Freddy sent his phone clattering to the floor.
* * *
The morning was humid and smelled of rain. On the front porch, Lena was gathering up the wine bottles from the night before while Cosmo finished his toast on the front steps. She’d brought him outside to avoid waking Simon on the living room couch, or Sara in the guest room off the kitchen. In the morning, Cosmo was at his most talkative and i
nquisitive. Today he was intent on hearing why Olga needed a slogan, and why children weren’t allowed to vote, and what exactly happened with Oscar’s sperm when he came to the island.
We’ve gone over the sperm question quite a few times now, Lena said as she bagged the last of the wine bottles and grabbed a broom to sweep the popcorn off the porch onto the grass. Do you want to make your own slogan for Olga? I bet she’d love to wake up to a poster from you. Still holding the broom handle, Lena reached for her phone where she’d left it on the banister to see what was happening in the world.
At the top headline, she pressed the broom against her chest. She lowered her finger to the arrow to play the video. Behind her, she heard Cosmo asking something in his high, chirpy voice but it was as if his voice were on a radio in another home and all that was close was the deafening silence of her passive role in the homicide playing out on her phone screen. Some mother’s twenty-year-old son. The very age Victor had been when she met him. Nearly the age his Uncle Edgar had been when he’d been caught in the roundups, his body dumped in the very interior she was living in now.
She pressed the arrow of the video again, pressed the broom handle harder against her chest until it hurt. At the sound of her own child shouting the name Edgar behind her, she felt disoriented until she saw the silver Land Rover slowing at the end of their drive, heard its thick tires crunching over the stones of their unfinished road.
* * *
By the time the boys darted into the field, drops of rain had begun to plink audibly against the grass. Both Cristina and Lena stuck to the subject of Olga’s campaign until the boys pleaded to run together through the field one more time before Edgar left for the airport. It’s the only morning flight, Cristina explained after the children raced off. And I don’t want Edgar to overhear what’s on the news.
He’ll find out eventually, Lena said.
But not yet. Cristina clutched her bag.
They were standing at the edge of the field, under the cover of the trees. The drops were coming faster and harder, falling through the leaves and branches to dampen their arms and faces, Lena still in her pajamas, Cristina with the heavy makeup she’d put on before leaving for the airport. She’d been so relieved to go through the familiar sequence of motions in front of the mirror that she’d kept repeating them and now felt her foundation caking from the humidity.
Please let me know how it goes for Olga, she said. If she doesn’t win a spot on the council, I could help her get some other municipal position. My father knows the mayor here. They might even be able to invent some kind of literacy-related position for her—if she’d like that. There’s more money coming in now, with all the families moving out from the capital.
Lena thanked her for the offer and Cristina nodded, too exhausted to say any more, and Lena didn’t ask her to. They just watched the boys’ wheeling arms growing smaller off at the opposite end of the field. Abruptly, their two small bodies slipped out of sight. When a minute passed without any sign of them, Cristina called for them to come back. Then another minute passed, containing within it a whole millennium of sons who’d raced off and never returned.
In the meantime, the rain went on quickening, the leaves providing no cover at all by the time they spotted two little figures bobbing up from a dip in the grass. In silence, they stood and shared the relief of it, the sight of their sons running toward them, returning over the land of the island where they were born.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Idra Novey is the award-winning author of the novel Ways to Disappear. Her work has been translated into ten languages and she's translated numerous authors from Spanish and Portuguese, most recently Clarice Lispector. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.
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