Burning City

by Ariel Dorfman

  Heller nodded, put the tea bag back in his cup.

  He picked up the cream and started to pour.

  chapter Seven

  Heller’s grandmother, Florence, cooked that night.

  Reheated. Leftovers from the previous evening, Heller’s birthday. Jerk chicken with beans and rice. It was a recipe Heller’s mother had picked up when they were in Jamaica five or six years ago, and then passed on to Florence, who from that day always referred to the recipe as Chicken à la daughter-in-law.

  It had been Heller’s favorite meal for ages.

  The three of them sat in the kitchen with their dinner. Heller ate mechanically, could feel his grandparents’ silent questions. It was difficult. There was no easy way for him to tell them how his day had gone, and there was no easy way for them to respond to his silence. Conversation made out of the sound of silverware and chewing. It was toward the end of the meal when Florence finally said, “Your parents called today.”

  Heller looked up from his food, interested, worried.

  “They were sad to have missed you. . . . They say things are going fine, they said. The health community center is already up—not quite flourishing, but still. . . . The villagers can pay for the medicine, but it’s just not arriving on time. They have running water now, and the situation seems to be improving. . . .” She put down her fork and knife, looked to her husband.

  “I think they wanted you to know that,” Eric finished, wiping his mouth.

  Heller looked at the two of them, knew there was something expected of him. “I’m glad,” he said. “I’m glad they’ve managed to do what they’ve done.”

  After a moment of nothing, Florence stood, picked up the plates, and carried them over to the sink. Heller watched his grandfather take care of the glasses, and then he wiped the table.

  “There’s still cake left over from yesterday,” Florence said. “Would you like some, dear?”

  “Sure,” Heller answered, tossing the rag into the sink. “I just need to go to my room and take care of a few things.”

  His grandparents both nodded.

  “Okay,” Heller said.

  Heller closed the door behind him.

  His desk faced a wall. The only other furnishings in the room were his bed, a closet, a nightstand, and a pair of bookshelves. All along the wall were posters of bicycles and cyclists. His shelves were lined with model bikes, toy bikes, and photographs of bike races. The light was soft, and the decorations all blended together.

  Heller walked over to his closet, opened the door.

  His clothes greeted him, and nestled between a large box and a pile of laundry was a pair of Rollerblades. He stared them down, defiant, muttering threats under his breath. The Rollerblades did nothing, but their silence was enough to encourage Heller to slam the door, walk over to his desk.

  Heller sat himself down and pulled at one of the drawers. He took out a folder. Plain, manila, with the words GRAND TOUR scrawled on the cover in black marker. He opened it. Inside were pages and pages of printouts, detailed figures scrawled and summed to the decimal point.

  Heller checked to make sure his door was closed, remembered that it was, and pulled out his paycheck. He took a look at his earnings for the last two weeks, made a quick note on a slip of paper, and carefully marked the date for 07/05/01. He put the note aside, sifted through the sheets of paper. He stopped. Columns of numbers, addition after addition after addition, totaling up to a number in the early thousands . . .

  He made a final count of his estimates, closed the folder, returned it to its bed, closed the drawer. Heller stared into space for a while, another day gone by. He got up, walked to his bed, lay on his back, bathed in the glow of his posters and bedside lamp. “I’m coming to get you,” Heller whispered to the ceiling. “I’m coming to get you, Henri Cornet. . . .”

  Heller heard his grandmother calling from the kitchen—something about cake, something about dessert. He let the sound drain out of the world, arms behind his head, lost in other thoughts.

  “I’m coming to get you, Henri Cornet. . . .”

  Heller closed his eyes for a moment, only to find, moments later, that hours had passed, and it was now time to get back to work.

  chapter eight

  The morning rush was over and the office was losing steam.

  Heller stood at Iggy’s desk. A few of the other staff members wandered in and out, some already packing up for the day. News never fit any sort of pattern at Soft Tidings. It always seemed to be happening, waning, flaring up, fading, and never in any particular order. Events emerged, disappeared, and it was up to anybody within arm’s reach to make any sort of sense out of it.

  “We got one for you,” Iggy told Heller. “You listening?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Hold on.” Iggy picked up the phone on his desk, punched a button, and kicked his voice up an octave. “Soft Tidings, news with a personal touch . . . All right . . . Sam Myer . . . What . . . ? If he works for you, then where can we find him . . . ?” Iggy reached for a pen and began scribbling. “All right . . . of course . . . sure.”

  Iggy gave a silent nod into the phone, turned to Heller.

  “All right, you got two. The first one is for Salim Adasi, Lower East Side address. Turkish man, bad break from back home. It’s from his sister—not urgent, so you can take your time on this one, if that’s possible for you.”

  “Who was that on the phone?” Heller asked.

  “This is complicated.” Iggy scratched the back of his head with a pen. “I don’t think we’ve ever had anything quite like this before. In fact, I question whether or not we should even be doing it.”

  Heller’s pulse quickened. “What is it?”

  Iggy hesitated. He glanced behind him, toward Dimitri’s office. The door was closed, locked possibly. Iggy looked back up at Heller, sighed. “All right . . .”

  Heller leaned forward, curious, eager.

  “All right,” Iggy repeated. He glanced back to Dimitri’s office for one last time before looking Heller in the eye. “I guess you’re our guinea pig, Heller. You up for this?”

  Heller nodded.

  Iggy sighed. “His name is Sam Myer. You can find him at a discount store down on Canal. They told me it’s his second job. . . .”

  Iggy gave him the details.

  Heller leaned against the wall of the storage room. Sam Myer sat on a box among many, most stacked against the wall and up to the ceiling. A single fluorescent light lit the dirty walls. Neither of them had spoken for five minutes. Sam looked defeated. Elbows on his knees, head resting on his hands, staring at nothing. When he first saw him, Heller had pegged Sam at thirty-four, thirty-five. Over the course of their conversation he had aged, and Heller slowly noticed a gray hair in the forest of black, crow’s feet adorning tired eyes.

  “So this is how they tell me . . . ,” Sam murmured. He looked up, right at Heller. “After five years, they let me go with a telegram.”

  Heller shifted his position.

  “Foreign labor, that’s what it is,” Sam continued, anger barely held in check. “Cheap foreign labor—how the hell am I supposed to compete with that?”

  “You still have this job . . . ,” Heller ventured.

  “This is Christmas money!” Sam yelled, steadied himself. “I do this to earn that little extra so I can get my kids toys, good clothes so they don’t have to go to school looking like a thrift-store purchase. My kids eat, they eat food. They live in a cramped apartment, but at least there’s a ceiling and electricity so they can do their homework after dark. Christmas money’s not gonna give them any of that. . . .”

  Heller didn’t know what to say.

  “And they think telling me through a telegram makes it better.”

  “It’s not a telegram, it’s a personalized message,” Heller corrected.

  “It’s all the same to me—they still didn’t have the stones to say this to my face.” Sam shrugged, stood up. “What am I supposed to do now?”
>
  The door to the storage room opened. A boy of twenty-something with green highlights in his hair poked his head in. “Sam, you going to be much longer?” He wore a name tag reading: MANAGER.

  “I’ll be out in a bit,” Sam answered.

  The door closed. Heller was left alone with the man.

  Heller thought about it. Then began with, “Just yesterday, I delivered a message to a Chinese woman whose son had died in a reeducation camp. . . .”

  He relayed the story, the events of his visit with Mrs. Chiang. He described the apartment, the figurines, the wooden horse with the crippled butterfly carved into its belly. Heller told the story as it was—didn’t know why, but it was something he did when all else failed on his visits. Sometimes a connection could be made.

  When he was done, Heller gave Sam the chance to think about it.

  It didn’t take Sam very long: “Why did you tell me that?”

  “Perspective, I guess.”

  “Perspective?” Sam laughed, only it came out choked, a coughing sound that rattled in the barren room. “Perspective from a teenager. You know what? We sell those little wooden horses at this store. I get a minimum wage selling those little bastards, but at least it’s something. And now it looks like it’s all I have. So don’t talk to me about perspective, who makes what and for what wages. I have a wife and two kids, I don’t have time for perspective. I don’t have room for perspective in my life when some suit decides to fire me so he can hire someone for a few dollars less—”

  “You don’t know why you got fired.”

  “And neither do you.” Sam was trembling, his muscles taut. “You don’t know anything about me, so don’t tell me how I need to feel.”

  “You’re being unfair.”

  “So is everyone else.”

  The door to the storage room opened again, and the manager-boy made his second appearance.

  “Hey, Sam, you coming back?”

  “I’LL BE THERE!” Sam yelled.

  “Hey—” The manager’s voice sounded soothing under the glow of the light. “Take your time, man. Take your time.”

  Sam turned to Heller.

  “Anything else?”

  Heller recognized Sam’s expression. It was meant to make him feel young. Inexperienced. Ignorant. Heller was familiar with the look; most kids his age were. It was part of life, growing up, but it was also part of his job. And when he was on the job, that look never once found its mark.

  “Mr. Myer,” Heller began. “What’s your wife’s name?”

  “Angela.”

  “Been married long?”

  “Twelve years.”

  “First marriage?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s good. For the kids especially. Things are complicated enough.”

  Sam agreed silently.

  “Twelve years . . . ,” Heller mused. “You’ve been married to Angela since I was four. Since before I could make a sentence with my hands . . . You love her still?”

  “Of course.”

  “She still love you?”

  Sam sat back down, sank into a box marked FRAGILE. “She tells me every night.”

  “Well.” Heller chose his words carefully. “I’m only sixteen. So I don’t know what that’s like. . . . It sounds nice, Mr. Myer.”

  Sam kept his eyes to the floor.

  “Anything else?” Heller asked.

  Sam shook his head.

  Heller walked out of the room, through the metal door and into the store. Useless trinkets and tiny gadgets filling every corner. He walked down a few aisles, stopped at a basket filled with little wooden horses.

  Picked one up. Looked underneath, saw a half butterfly carved into its stomach.

  Picked up another one, looked underneath.

  The same.

  He repeated the process five or six times, each time resulting in the same conclusion. A customer walked past, picked up his own horse, examined it. Took it to the counter and paid his dollar.

  Heller thought about it, stared down at the horses, watched them stare back at him. All those eyes, those half-dead butterflies, countless messages of hope for Mrs. Chiang. There seemed to be little basis for it. It was either a message or a generic stamp. Half a butterfly, fifty-fifty. Not much of a bet. Not much to be sure of.

  Heller glanced to the back of the store.

  Sam was standing there, steadfast at the entrance to the storage room.

  Their eyes met.

  Sam nodded.

  Heller put down the horse and left the store as quickly as he could.

  chapter nine

  Heller knew at once that the two men who answered the door were recent immigrants to New York. From somewhere in the Middle East, he guessed, though he didn’t want to make any further assumption; Heller found it wasn’t good for his work. The two men seemed nervous, keeping the door open just enough to let their eyes peer out.

  “Is Mr. Salim Adasi in?” Heller asked.

  “No, no,” one of them said, a strong accent nearly drowning his words. “He works right now.”

  “Do you know where he works?”

  The two looked at each other quickly, then the second man answered, “He commutes.”

  “He will be back later,” the first man added.

  “In an hour, two hours,” the second specified.

  “All right,” Heller said. “I’ll be back later, then. Good—”

  They closed the door without so much as a nod in Heller’s direction. Heller glanced up and down the vacant hallway, its walls hotter than the outside world. He smacked his lips, heard the sound resonate in the space around him.

  He went down the warped steps and pressed warily against the front door.

  It swung open with ease.

  Held open by a man with a light dent in his left cheek, a mark resembling a soft scar.

  Heller gave a polite, automatic nod in the man’s direction and headed for his bike.

  The man went in, closed the door, and looked through the glass with familiar interest as Heller unchained his bike.

  Heller glanced back to the door of the apartment building, sensing something in the overbearing warmth around him. Sunlight refracted off the window in the door, a white, blinding glare. Heller squeezed his eyes shut, spots dancing from the bright beam of illumination.

  He opened them, shook his head.

  Heller had a few hours to kill, and though he really did not feel like having a cup of coffee, he knew just where he was going nonetheless.

  chapter ten

  Heller was watching her write out a bill when he noticed her hands begin to shake. He could tell even from across the room, and he paused, cup against his lips, coffee trickling slowly into his mouth.

  Silvia’s hands were shaking. It was slight, her pen paused in midarithmetic, unable to finish writing a three, or possibly an eight. Everyone else kept on with their books and unpublished manuscripts, same as any other day, while Heller kept watching Silvia’s throat contract slightly, eyes shimmering. She bit her lower lip. Heller watched a tear make its way down her cheek and into her mouth.

  Heller tried to bite his own lip, and coffee spilled down his chin and into his lap. He put down his cup, too quickly. It made a loud cracking sound against the table and a dozen heads shot up. Heller mumbled an apology to himself, still dribbling coffee. He searched for a napkin, came up short. From the table next to him an empathetic cough. A fat man with painted fingernails offered him a napkin. Heller accepted and mumbled a second apology.

  “Thank you,” the fat man said.

  Heller was unsure if he had heard correctly.

  “Thank you for your message last month,” the fat man said, voice so low it scraped the floor. “You helped me a lot....”

  Heller always had trouble recognizing his past customers outside their apartments and could never find words that suited any other situation. He mumbled again, wiped the coffee from his face, off his lap. Heller looked up to see if Silvia had noticed. />
  Silvia was gone.

  Heller blinked, then looked around. Through the window, he caught sight of her, rummaging through a small black purse. She was still in her work clothes: red shirt and black jeans, sandals on her feet. Heller watched her glance around as though getting her bearings. Strands of hair stuck to her face. She paused, thinking.

  Heller absently placed a five-dollar bill on the table, rose to his feet, walked to the door, wondering what might happen if he brushed her hair aside with his fingers, asked why she was crying. His steps were cautious, mind barely convinced of what he planned to do, breath short.

  If I asked you what was wrong and you told me, maybe I could let you know a few things about me. Maybe I could stop talkingto your name tag and form words beyond “coffee” and “check, please.” Maybe we both could . . .

  The world seemed to be going in slow motion. As it turned out, it was only Heller. By the time he made it out the door, Silvia was already halfway down Prince Street.

  The blast of heat almost knocked Heller over. Still determined to do something, though not entirely sure what, he freed his bike from its hitching post and followed on foot.

  Silvia turned north on Sixth Avenue. Heller remained twenty feet behind, watching her walk, his hands on the bike’s handlebars. The chain made barely audible clicking noises, and Heller glanced around nervously, wondering if people on the street would see what he was up to, grow suspicious of him. Petrified at the thought of his grandfather happening past, catching Heller in his lie.

  The day had turned gray. Overcast skies breathed life into the clouds. Not a gust of wind in the air. Thick humidity turned the streets into swamps. An A/C/E train passed below, underground, its rumble like thunder.

  Tired faces walked by, all lost to Heller in the movement of Silvia’s hips. He couldn’t even take the time to wander, take note of his surroundings, the gentle but abrupt change of traffic lights.

  The sudden screech of tires.

  “Watch it, IDIOT!”