by Susan Choi
The exposed stretch of dust, the shadow of the bed they’d removed, stirred and began to disperse in gray clumps when she opened the single window to let in the breeze. The sun was high now, and the cramped room was hot. She’d begun pouring huge beads of sweat. She was tired, she realized. She hadn’t slept in a day, not since she’d risen early to go to Poughkeepsie and come back to find Frazer at the train station, waiting for her.
She climbed onto the bed, which stank faintly of mildew. For a moment her loneliness swept her and she thought she would never descend into sleep. But she was so tired that the next time she opened her eyes it was dusk. Now the bare room was softened and blue, with cool air pulsing in through the window. Outside she could see the dark form of the barn, and closer, the texture of a huge maple fading with the last of the light. Even the insect symphony had grown smaller and simpler; single crickets creaking tentative up-notes, and something else, a soft whirr. The best time was dusk, she realized. The sharp baring light bled away but the night hadn’t come. That was the fugitive’s hour, when the darkening air felt like shelter, yet you still had your eyes.
Downstairs the front room was as shadowy as it had been when she’d first seen it that morning; the one door was still shut. She tiptoed into the bathroom and peed without turning the light on. She put her hand on the chain, then thought again and simply put down the lid. In the doorway from the front room to the kitchen were her duffel and accordion file; she’d forgotten about them. Frazer seemed to have brought her here, left her here, eons ago. Passing through the kitchen and pulling open the screen door she caught her breath and stood still. Someone was sitting on the step, a hunched form in a blanket facing away from her in the direction of the hill climbing up to the barn, and beyond, to the woods; and then the dark ridge giving way to the sky, strangely pale from the afterglow. After a long moment the form didn’t turn to her so much as it twitched aside slightly, shifted in the most minimal, barely animate way while still giving her room to step out.
It was the man—Juan—as she’d sensed it would be, from the wideness of the hunched, shrouded back. But nothing else about him was familiar. The photos she’d seen in the papers had shown a grinning boy with curly hair and a blunt nose and round cheeks, a midwestern farm kid, robust; because the pictures only ever showed his head and shoulders she’d had to extrapolate the rest of the body, and she’d imagined him tallish and tapered. But he was small and compact, like a barrel with legs. And though the face was the part she had seen, in the flesh it was equally startling and strange. Beneath a globe of wild hair and a beard and a small pair of wire-rimmed glasses his face was dull, its lines muddied. His eyes were obscured in dark hollows but she could feel him staring at her from what seemed to be deep, inert shock, as if she were an apparition, a supernatural event thrust upon him that jammed all his modes of response. A crumpled pack of cigarettes lay in the grass by his feet. He seemed to have carried them outside and then let them fall from his fingers, forgetting about them. “Hi,” she said, because it was the only syllable that seemed appropriate for utterance by itself, and she couldn’t imagine uttering more than one syllable now that the air felt so fragile and tense, with this motionless man staring at her. It was strange to hear her voice, smaller amid the noises of insects and leaves than she’d thought it would be.
“You’re not Carol,” he managed, and his voice did no better than hers, rattling out through what sounded like a quagmire of phlegm and fatigue and smoked cigarettes.
“I’m Jenny. Carol and Frazer’s friend.”
Juan nodded without interest; he’d been told about her. “Where is he?” he asked after a minute.
“They’ve both gone back to the city already.”
“I don’t remember him coming.”
“It was early this morning. He’ll be back soon,” she added, although nothing about Juan’s tone suggested he cared if he ever saw Frazer again. “And I’m here, to take care of the day-to-day things. To help you, with whatever you need.”
But Juan—if it really was Juan, if it really was one of the former notorious twelve when you counted their captive; the impetuous brandisher of shotguns; the now-leader of the two that remained of his three-quarters-slaughtered army—had tipped his forehead down onto his fist, as if the weight of his head was too much. The darkness deepened around them, and so many minutes went by she thought he might be asleep. Guiltily, she felt her appetite stirring. She hadn’t eaten since a quick roadside burger she and Frazer had gotten on the way out of Rhinecliff the previous night, but being hungry right now seemed perverse. She’d finally located the source of the dread she’d been feeling since dawn. It was death. It didn’t hang about Juan like a shroud, or sit at the back of his eyes like a nightmare he’d had. It was nowhere that she could pinpoint, since she didn’t know what to look for, but she still had the sense it had dusted his skin with its ash. In the end his nine comrades had been burned, so the previous day’s papers had said, so completely each charred bone had to be picked from the ash, one by one. They’d been found wearing army gas masks that had melted and fused to their skulls. She felt her stomach flip. Juan’s form still hadn’t moved. She could barely tell him apart from the house now. The stars had grown bright in the sky.
“I’ll make something for us to eat,” she said, although now her appetite truly was gone. She took a step toward him, back toward the door, and again he twitched aside. So he was still awake.
She squeezed back through the door. When she found the kitchen light and turned it on her reflection in the window over the sink spooked her. For an instant she thought someone else was outside, peering in. “Juan?” cried a voice. And then edging into the doorway from the front room with a hand over her eyes was Pauline, or the person who must be Pauline. Jenny felt as if she were watching the sort of old movie in which the lead character is surprisingly revealed to have a dark twin; that the twin is played by the same actor only deepens the strange sense of oppositeness. The gold-haired debutante of the newspaper and magazine photos seemed not even coincidentally linked to this girl. Pauline’s hair was ragged and dyed a ghastly dark red, between fresh blood and beets. Jenny had imagined her tall as well but she was tiny, not just short but reduced drastically to her bones. Her skin was so pale it seemed bluish, except for purple stains under her eyes, which were vast in her face. Her filthy T-shirt and blue jeans hung around her like sackcloth. She stared at Jenny with shock, as Juan had. “Why’s the light on?” she said.
Outside Juan had risen and opened the door. “Doesn’t matter,” he said, coming in. Pauline turned to Juan and seemed to forget Jenny was there.
“I woke up and you were gone,” Pauline said.
Juan, upright but slumped, as if he’d been hung from a hook, gazed back at Pauline, and even through his deathly fatigue Jenny thought she saw a movement of habitual surprise, as if he still couldn’t believe that he saw Pauline standing in front of him. “Where’s Y?” he asked.
“Sleeping.”
“You should sleep too.”
“I can’t.”
After a moment Juan brushed past Jenny, as if he had also forgotten her, and with an effort rooted into the grocery bags on the table. She went to help him, to see what there was, but it was only a bag of potato chips and a box of cornflakes, a soup can, a banana—castoffs from Carol’s pantry. All the rest of the bags contained nothing but huge jugs of wine. One was already open and practically empty. Juan pawed into a cupboard and came up with a tall, dusty glass which he filled from the jug to its rim. He handed the glass to Pauline and poured one for himself. Pauline stared into it for a minute, took a small sip, and then began to drink it off steadily, as if the glass contained water.
“Our Code forbids drugs,” Juan began, leaning heavily on the counter as he recorked the jug, and it was a beat before Jenny realized he was talking to her. “But our leader drank wine, when his worries were clouding his thoughts. Wine’s a natural thing, wine and grass . . .” Juan seemed to decide that the
lesson was not worth the trouble. A door opened at the back of the house and suddenly the third of them, Yvonne, was approaching the doorway, her matted blond curls standing out from her head. She was wearing a thin cotton halter that clung to her breasts, and thin panties, and nothing else. Jenny could see her large nipples, the dark hair curling out at the tops of her thighs. She was vital and tall, with grainy peach skin and an elfin nose covered with freckles. Whatever storm they had endured, she seemed to have stood it the best, or perhaps she’d once been even taller and stronger, an Amazon. She stared at Jenny impassively.
“The comrade Frazer told us about,” Juan said to Yvonne. “Jenny.”
Yvonne nodded.
“You want some wine, baby?” Juan said after a minute.
Yvonne nodded again.
Juan had his own wine in one hand. With the other he hooked a finger through the loop on the jug and a finger into a third dusty glass in the cupboard. Then without another word or glance in her direction they melted away again, out of the kitchen. She heard them bumping through the darkened front room, through their bedroom doorway. The door slowly scraped shut.
DRIVING WEST from the farmhouse the road threaded between forested hills without a lot or a dirt track cut into them, and through gold agricultural valleys that never held more than one fatigued pile of wooden farm buildings, or one sprinkling of lying-down cows. Every few miles there was a sign for a town, but Jenny could not even see where these towns were. Only once did she descend into the heart of a settlement, something called Ferndale that consisted of a post office, Agway, and church, and she didn’t dare stop; she sank deep in her seat and slid past, a pair of eyes and a cap of black hair above the wheel of a rusting red Bug. She had always thought of Rhinebeck and Rhinecliff, with their fences and farms and their view of the Hudson with its barges and tugs, as the country, but they were really outposts of New York, strung along New York’s river. This felt like a lost land, connected to nothing.
She was twenty minutes past Ferndale and forty minutes away from the farm when she finally came on a junction of the small local road with a four-lane state highway. There were newspaper boxes at the curb here instead of inside a quaint general store. She bought the Times and something called the Monticello Examiner, and set out to explore what must be Monticello. It was a largish small town, down-at-heels, with a blacker and shabbier side, and three grocery stores. She cased all three, although she knew as soon as she found it she’d go back to the black one, where there wasn’t a single new car in the lot. When she did she parked in the confusion of rusting cars and empty shopping carts and did the shopping as fast as she could, arriving at the register with a tonnage of cans—canned soup, chili, spaghetti, beans, corn, tuna fish, and even something that claimed to be bread in a can. “You digging in,” the cashier commented. She yelled across the store suddenly and Jenny’s palms began to tingle with prickly heat, but it was only a summons to a long, lanky boy with a comb in his hair to load the groceries into boxes and get them out to her car. The boy’s hair was a fluffy brown corona; after he’d put the groceries into the boxes and the boxes in a cart he paused to pull the comb free and give his hair a bunch of expert little yanks, as if he thought it was sagging.
“You from Vietnam?” he asked Jenny as they crossed the parking lot.
“No!” she said, startled. She realized she’d forgotten to come up with a story. She couldn’t be “Iris Wong, Chinese, from San Francisco” anymore. She stared at the boy with alarm.
“Sorry!” he said. “Not from Nam. Okay, not-from-Nam, where you from? I’m just asking a question.”
“New York,” she said finally.
“City?”
She nodded.
“Aw,” said the boy in admiration. “Some real bad luck must have landed you in Monticello.” They had reached the Bug by now and she began to struggle with the handle that opened the hood. “My brother went to Vietnam,” the boy went on, taking out his comb again while he waited. She finally got the hood open, and the boy began to heft in the boxes of cans. There were five boxes and only two of them fit. He opened the car’s door to put the other three on the backseat.
“What happened to him?” She started scooping out her change bag for a tip as the boy shoved the last box into place, and eased his upper body carefully free of the car, without marring his hairdo.
“They got him,” the boy said. He grinned, as if embarrassed. “He was fast but they was faster.” He held out his hand for the tip with a goofy flourish. “I am not supposed to take gratuities, but those boxes were heavy. Good luck,” he added, and his gaze seemed suddenly penetrating when he trained it on her. Her heart jumped.
“Thanks,” she said.
Back on the state highway she tried a new road and after fifteen minutes was in a town much larger than Ferndale but smaller than Monticello, called Liberty. She found the post office quickly, a surprisingly grand marble building. There were a few other cars in the small lot, a few other people on the sidewalk, mailing letters in the outside mailboxes and going on with their days. No one looked particularly at her. Inside the post office was cool and cavernous; it seemed to have been built for a town that expected to be larger and more consequential. Only one window was open. The woman behind it did not say anything as she approached, merely cast a cold, impassive look in her direction, and remained motionless.
“I need a post office box,” she said, her heart racing in a riot of fear and also excitement, just as it had the first time she had done this, in Red Hook.
She filled the form out swiftly. Now the whole story had come to her. Alice Chan, from New York. Landscape painter. “I travel,” she said casually, as she wrote, “but I pass by here often.”
“You can’t be leaving your mail in the box for weeks on end, and letting the box get clogged up. We don’t allow that. You can’t just be letting junk mail pile up in your box. You’ve got to empty it regularly or we’ll empty it for you. Right into the trash.”
When she had her key she moved around a corner and out of the woman’s view, to the long wall of tiny bronze doors. The new box had a bronze eagle on it. She didn’t much care for the symbol, but it was beautifully done in relief. Old, like the rest of the building. She ran a finger over it, then tested the key to make sure that it worked. The box was like a miniature of the lobby she stood in: cool, dim and empty. She peered into it, but only saw a blank wall opposite, no sorting area, no canvas bins piled with letters. She closed the box, pocketed the key.
After the post office she found a good phone booth in the parking lot of a boarded-up diner and called Frazer at home. It was early enough in the morning that she knew he would be there. Carol answered, her voice hoarse from a late night; in the background Jenny could hear the intimate squeak of the bed-springs, the rustling of sheets. “Hi,” she said.
“Hang on,” Carol said sharply.
There was a flurry of muffling sounds and tense murmurs; then Frazer came on. “I’m just on my way to the store,” he said. “To pick up some milk.”
She hung up and checked her watch; then she hugged herself, waiting. Just past ten A.M. Fifteen minutes seemed unendurably long. She wondered if she should go sit in the car, or pull the car around the back of the building where it couldn’t be seen from the road. It looked incongruous, parked alone in the diner’s empty lot. Almost no one was driving by on the road, but as one car passed, and then, long ticks later, another, she could swear that they slowed down a little. She had her back to the road, a hip canted in the attitude of casual waiting, but in the quiet she’d begun to imagine police cars pouring up the long hill toward the house, the blurred wheel of a helicopter blade rising over the ridge. Blackclad SWAT team snipers creeping down through the grass on their stomachs. Somehow the druggy-seeming, dead-eyed indifference of the three fugitives to their new situation had quadrupled her usually manageable paranoia, as if each of them had a soldier’s freight of it they’d unstrapped and shrugged onto her. The previous morning, her second
morning in the house, she had awoken with the dawn light, starving, after eating a bowl of dry cereal for her dinner. Feeling her way into the kitchen, she’d found Juan there, hunched under his blanket again. He seemed to have worked open the second jug of wine with the use of a penknife, but now he was dragging the blade through the flesh of his arm. “Don’t,” she gasped, and when he looked up at her he might have thought she was either Yvonne or Pauline, he seemed so unsurprised. “I don’t feel it,” he said. Then he stood up wonkily and she thought he would pitch past her onto the floor. “This is only a dream,” he slurred, clutching the jug with the unbloodied arm and weaving back toward his room.
When she called the street phone Frazer answered immediately. “What is it,” he said. She was only supposed to call him this way in the case of a dire emergency, and now she wondered how she could convince him, without his having been in the deathly still house. She tried to explain, but of course he did not understand. “Are they writing?” he asked.
“Rob, they’re not eating.”
“They weren’t so bad off before. I saw them eat in California.”
“That was in California. California’s their home. Here they’re like—fish out of water. Lying there.” She didn’t want to say dying.
