This Is Not Your City

by Caitlin Horrocks

  “It’s quite an accomplishment,” the woman said. “I’d never even heard of the condition, and here’s a young man who’s got it all worked out.”

  “It’s not very common,” Wil said.

  “Small mercy to those that have it.”

  “True enough. We’re very proud of him.”

  Wil had once planned to be a doctor, but had transferred to dental school after one semester. “I decided I didn’t want that kind of responsibility,” he told Lucinda on their first date, drinks in the Plaza in downtown Kansas City. He did a lot of elective oral surgery procedures for which patients paid out of pocket. It was an excellent living, but it would still have been useful for their son to have a doctor for a father. There would have been a camaraderie in the hospitals, the sympathy textured with less condescension, more empathy. Wil had tried, sometimes, when Aaron was in the NICU. “I was in med school for a year,” he’d say. “Oral surgeon, now. I can tell you the tongue’s as finicky as a spine. Just a tangle of nerves.” It made the doctors trade looks over Aaron’s head. Lucinda had waited for Wil to catch on, to feel the blush of his own embarrassment, but eight months in, Aaron still in intensive care, Lucinda on an indefinite leave of absence from her job with an insurance firm, she finally asked him to stop. Over cheeseburgers in the hospital cafeteria, she tried to explain the vast distance between a pediatric neurologist and a man who extracted wisdom teeth twelve times per week, however much they might share in the materials of the body, the blood and the white solidity of skull or tooth or jaw.

  Wil convinced Lucinda to take a camel ride on the Western Plateau and snapped picture after picture while she swayed uncertainly on the animal’s hump. The camel smelled warm and dusty, its hair faintly oily like sheep’s wool and full of grit. Lucinda wound her fingers around the tasseled reins and into its brown coat, squeezed her legs tighter. She was wearing white linen against a blue sky, the sand-colored pyramids of Giza ranged behind her. Wil paid the Egyptian photographer for two Polaroids, fitted into paper sleeves that framed the pictures with Camels!: An Egyptian Tradishon. “Lovely,” the camel-keeper said, as he helped Lucinda back to earth. “How many camels for your woman?” he asked Wil.

  “Twenty,” Wil said. “You can have her for twenty.”

  The camel-keeper frowned. “It was a joke. You are supposed to be offended.”

  There was a second shore excursion to Alexandria and its new library, glass and steel built with UN money. The tour lasted two hours, which gave Wil time to come up with sixteen ways to burn the building down. “I shall incinerate the common heritage of man,” he whispered, as the tour guide ushered them past a bank of computers.

  “Stop,” Lucinda said. Between the information about modern methods of moisture control, about the Greco-Roman heritage of El Iskandariya and the causeway that linked the Cape of Figs to the old Pharos Lighthouse, about their expanding multitude of brilliant children, it felt like more knowledge than she could handle. She kicked Wil in the shin when he spoke about their son, a boy with straw-colored hair like his mother’s and wide, shining eyes like no one they’d known. Lucinda apologized after dinner, because Wil had for once said no more than what was true.

  It was the first real vacation they’d taken since the birth, and of course everyone had asked what they were doing with Aaron, what arrangements they’d made, as if he were mail to be picked up or a plant to be watered. There’s a good facility in Olathe, they said, wondering how to explain without feeling like they’d taken their son to be kenneled like a dog. They’d been looking at the facility anyway, worrying about a time they might no longer be able to care for him. Children with more awareness, they’d been told, should be eased into institutionalization. With Aaron, nobody knew. He followed things with his eyes, sometimes. He smiled at people who entered his field of vision. He had learned to swallow, eventually, and to roll over unassisted. He was ten years old, and no one had any idea how long he might live.

  Sometimes Lucinda could spend an hour touching the soft bottoms of his feet, the distinct whorls of toe prints that walking had never rubbed away. His feet were beautiful and very wrong, marked with raised patterns never meant to last. Once a year she would ink his feet, press them to a piece of white posterboard. She hung the prints in a long line down the basement stairwell.

  The afternoon the ship entered the Suez, the Voorhuises kept to themselves, took photographs of each other, singly, posed with the brown geometry of the canal, the tall, vertical walls. One of the leisure coordinators saw them and offered to take a picture of them both together. They put their arms around each other’s waist and smiled. At the moment the leisure coordinator snapped the picture, a maintenance crew appeared on the crest of the shore, on the Sinai side, above Lucinda’s left shoulder. The coordinator handed the digital camera back to them and watched them call up the shot. “Is it okay?” she asked. “Do you want me to try again? Are you enjoying yourselves?”

  “Yes. No. Immensely,” Wil answered, and the leisure coordinator left them alone.

  Out the other side of the Suez, skirting the Saudi peninsula, Lucinda imagined she could feel the spray of the Red Sea coating her skin with a layer of brine so salty a lick across her hand would make her lips purse with the bitterness. She could feel it crust along her hair, brackish and saline, and she showered morning, night, and midday. She and Wil spent two hours on a sunny afternoon inside the ship’s boutique arguing over souvenirs and postcards: who to send to, which pictures, how many, how much. They bought nearly fifty cards, and they knew they looked green, like people who never traveled sending mail to everyone they’d ever met because there might not be an opportunity like this again. This was essentially true, and Lucinda only had the energy for so much deception. That evening they ate room service, the sliding doors open and the table wedged halfway through. Wil ate on the balcony and Lucinda inside and the wind yelped through the open space. The evening after that, 120 kilometers off the northeastern tip of Somalia, in the Gulf of Aden, the ship was hijacked.

  “Pirates,” the chambermaid told them. “We’re asking everyone to stay in their staterooms until the matter is resolved.”

  Wil laughed and the chambermaid stared. “Wait,” Wil said. “Really?”

  “The nonessential staff has been assembled in the main dining room, and we’re asking everyone else to stay in their quarters.”

  “We’ll just sit tight then,” Lucinda said.

  “Yes, please. Sit tight. The passengers may be ... mustered, later, in the dining room, according to demands. We will come and tell you if you need to leave. It might be good to be ready.” Kristina, the maid assigned to Ocean View Suite D147, was tall and blond, her English polished. Wil thought it was a mark of the quality of the cruise line that they employed such handsome, educated women, who wore lapel pins of the flags of countries whose languages they spoke. Kristina’s pins ran along the base of her white collar, just above her tailored black dress. Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany, France, the United Kingdom. Still, she used words like “muster” uncertainly, as if she’d recently been briefed, as if she heard herself now saying things she had never thought she’d need to know.

  “We’ll bring you more details as we have them,” Kristina said. “Do you need anything?”

  “No, we’re fine,” Lucinda said, and when Kristina was gone Wil started to laugh again.

  “It isn’t funny.”

  “Of course it is. Pirates. This’ll be something for the Christmas letter. ‘Lucy mouthed off to one of their parrots and got beaten with a peg leg.’”

  “Wil.”

  “Pirates, Lucy. What else are we supposed to do?”

  They had woken an hour earlier to a sound low and piercing, a painful boom that rattled the room. It sounded twice more and when the sound died away Lucinda and Wil were both sitting rigidly upright, startled out of sleep so quickly they each thought they could hear the other’s heart hammer. The ship was grinding beneath them, a thrum that increased in frequency un
til there was a strange vibration in the feel of the air, the floor beneath them, the walls and windows. The ship steered sharply portside, but was so large Lucinda and Wil could only mark the direction by poking their heads out the sliding doors and examining the shifting wake behind them. There was obviously something to be gotten away from, but it seemed impossible that the Wavecrest could be maneuverable enough, quick enough to do it. Between and after the booming noise was a lighter crackle, more familiar, the weaponry of video games or films. They tried to wonder in the quieter spaces if someone was simply watching a movie too loudly next door.

  “An acoustic—bang. Bam. It is used as a deterrent,” Kristina had been able to tell them when they opened the door to her. They were wrapped in plush Wavecrest bathrobes over their pajamas, Lucinda rolling her bare feet backward and forward on her toes. “The ships in this area all carry them.”

  “But what does it do? The booming noise?”

  “It is loud. That’s what it does.”

  “It’s not a real weapon.”

  “Not a weapon, no. A deterrent only.”

  “And it hasn’t deterred them.”

  “Please remain calm.”

  “They have weapons? Real ones?”

  “It is a temporary situation, madam. They are only pirates. Somalis. They have been hijacking UN relief ships for rice. There has been a lot of food coming through this region, after the tsunami.”

  “But we’re not carrying rice.”

  “No. This is a new thing for the pirates. We assume they want money. Please don’t worry.”

  Wil and Lucinda dressed with a faint sense of excitement. They pondered the appropriate footwear for a hostage situation. They turned on the bedside lamp, brushed their teeth in the bathroom, and were modestly surprised to find that their room functioned the way it always had. Wil sorted through the minibar, the gift basket that had been placed on their bed at the start of the cruise, and they shared an orange and a packet of cheese crackers. They were still hungry, but thought they should ration. They watched the water outside, the whisk of large speedboats skirting the side of the Wavecrest beneath them, the faint smell of smoke. They could see small people, clearly armed, porcupined with the slight black quills of weapons six decks below their balcony. But the pirates didn’t do anything, just patrolled around and around, and sooner than Wil and Lucinda expected, the novelty had worn off. “Would it be wrong to watch television?” Wil asked.

  At noon they split a packet of cashews and turned on the wall-mounted television set. There was nothing but static, the first sign within the room that anything was amiss. Lucinda checked the telephone and heard no dial tone. Every so often there was the sound of footsteps moving quickly down the hall outside. The soft carpet made it impossible to tell whether they were Kristina’s sensible heels, the sandals of a wayward passenger, the heavy boots of a Somali pirate. Lucinda gathered all the cups and glasses in the room, the ice bucket, the flower vase, to fill them all with water from the bathroom sink. It was what you did during tornado season, or before a bad blizzard that might freeze the pipes. It might as well be done during a pirate attack. She lined up the plastic bathroom cups and wine glasses along the vanity counter in the main room, left the vase by the toilet so it could be used for flushing. Lucinda wondered if it would be rather cavalier to take a shower. They might still be mustered. They might still be killed.

  Midafternoon they both took out books and started to read, Lucinda a mystery and Wil a historical novel about naval warfare. Lucinda opened the balcony door. “It’s too stuffy in here,” she said. “And the glass would hardly stop bullets anyway.” At dinner time they ate raisins and Oreos and went to bed immediately after sunset. “I’m going to shower tomorrow,” Lucinda said. “I don’t care. I need something to do.” They lay in bed and listened to the silence. The buzz of the speedboats had stopped, and Wil wondered how much fuel the small boats carried, how far offshore they all were and where they were headed. Lucinda thought she could hear the rustling of other passengers, imagined tapping out urgent messages room to room in Morse code. She wished she knew Morse code. She imagined the pirates dismantling the diving board at the swimming pool on deck eight, tying it down over the starboard railing like a seesaw and forcing all 316 passengers off it one by one. She waited for the splash of falling bodies.

  A few days after Aaron’s first birthday, Wil had quietly suggested they might try for another child. He refrained from saying a better one. Aaron’s birth had taken three rounds of IVF, years of trying for a baby in every old-fashioned way they knew how. Adoption, Wil suggested, but Lucinda shook her head. “I’m tired,” she said. “I don’t think you understand how tired I am.” Any object as incapable as Aaron—stones, sticks, cinder blocks—needed nothing. Aaron had a body’s necessities, a blind kitten’s, a featherless bird’s, the naked pink jelly-bean of a marsupial baby. His needs were complex and his inability to meet them total.

  Once, at work, Wil overheard his nurse anesthetist wondering aloud why Aaron hadn’t been aborted. “We didn’t know,” he explained to her. “There was no way to know until after he was born.” Later he wondered if he should have fired her, told her they would have kept Aaron either way, that he was their child and that was enough. He wondered if that was what Lucinda would have said, if she would have meant it. If he had known, he would not have wanted his son, this particular son. He knew this about himself, and thought that if he could ask Lucinda how she felt he would know a great deal more about her, about her long, mysterious days at home.

  The next day Lucinda and Wil both showered, put their hostage outfits back on. They each drank a cup of tap water. They’d decided to husband their resources, the Perrier, the Evian in the mini-fridge. Everything in the room still worked except the television. Lucinda even blow-dried her hair. “We could write our postcards,” she suggested. “No sense putting it off.”

  “Because we’ve got nothing else to do, or because we’re going to die?”

  Lucinda threw a pillow at his head.

  “Are we really doing twenty-one for Aaron?” he asked.

  “I said I would. One for every day of the trip.”

  “You know he won’t—”

  “I know. I said I would.”

  Aaron had been born with his brain unfurrowed, lissencephalic, as slick and smooth as the greasy inside of a shell. The MRI confirmed the lack of creases and ruts, troughs or ridges. Knowledge must live in the washes of the brain, Wil decided when the doctors told them that Aaron might or might not learn to swallow. They received printouts of the MRI, filed them away in an accordion folder penciled “Aaron, Medical,” in the basement. By six months the paperwork had exploded into a second folder and Wil, refiling, had taken one of the black-and-white pictures. He kept it folded in his wallet. Every day since Tangier he had imagined taking it out at dinner, over the appetizers, shrimp cocktail, mussels in a white wine curry. They cracked shells, pried the gray flesh out with narrow forks, and Wil imagined opening his wallet. This, he imagined saying, is my son. His name is Aaron. He has eyes the color of wonder and a brain as slack and damp as an oyster.

  They divided the postcards into stacks, enough for Wil to write to his staff, the dental hygienists and the front office, to his relatives and to a handful of mutual friends. Lucinda took enough for her family, a few neighbors, twenty-one for their son.

  “Which do you think for my sister?” Lucinda asked. “A pyramid or a Sphinx?”

  “Pyramid,” Wil answered, and wrote to his own sister. He picked a photo of the Biblioteca Alexandria and wrote: Dear Joan, The trip has been amazing. We’re currently being held hostage by pirates, but if you receive this it means the situation’s sorted itself out just fine. Hope you weren’t worried. He was almost out of room. The food’s been great. Love, Wil, he wrote, and looked up her address in the notebook Lucinda had brought.

  Lucinda wrote doggedly, flipping over new cards long after Wil had finished with his. She kept putting the pen down, shaking
her hand out, cracking her knuckles. It looked both theatrical and weary. The sun was dropping and Wil flipped on the overhead switch for his wife. Nothing happened. He tried the bedside lamps, the bulbs over the vanity mirror, the bathroom light. “I’ll finish these on the balcony, then,” Lucinda said, gripping her pen more tightly. “While there’s still a little sun.”

  She sat on one of their two lounge chairs and Wil thought about joining her, wondered if he was welcome. The sea was quiet, the showy sparkle of the sunset giving way to darker blue and black, faint slashes of light on the swells rather than a field of sequins. There were walls on either side of the balcony, two thirds of the height to the deck above. Wil thought that could be a project for tomorrow, climbing over or around the partitions, sharing crackers with their neighbors and planning a resistance.

  The room was hot and Wil kicked the comforter to the floor. He heard Lucinda trip on it as she came to bed, late, the night nearly moonless outside. He heard her start to pull the drapes, and asked her to leave the doors cracked open. “We need some air in here,” he said.

  Lucinda slept late the next morning, the third of the lockdown, and Wil was restless. He ate a whole packet of gummy fruit snacks by himself, then felt guilty. He re-read the ship welcome magazine and the list of ship’s programming for February 11th, the day before the hijacking. There had been a lecture on the desert of Wadi Rum he had meant to attend and forgotten. The room was bright, but Lucinda simply rolled over, pushed her head farther into the pillow. Her postcards were stacked on the vanity, rubber-banded neatly. Wil flipped through them: her parents, her sisters, Aaron’s homecare aide and physical therapist. Twenty-one for Aaron.

  Dear Aaron,

  Tangier was exciting, lots of palm and fruit trees, but a little hard to take. Crowds of people selling stuff on the docks, not wanting to take no for an answer. I got whistled at twice, though, which isn’t bad for your decrepit old mother. Guess I don’t mind. Wish you were here. Love, Mom.