No Land's Man

by Aasif Mandvi

  As the night deepened around me, I took in my surroundings. Snow blanketed the ground below and the dark gothic stone buildings of the school, built during Queen Victoria’s reign, were silhouetted perfectly against the navy blue sky like the cover of a cheap horror novel. The moon was a perfectly tilted crescent playing a casual game of peekaboo as she floated in and out of view behind the clouds.

  I was glad to see the moon again. She had been a constant source of comfort for me over the last six months since my father had hugged me in the school parking lot and said, “Don’t worry, soon you will make lots of great friends, beta,” and my mother had tearfully kissed me, reminding me to say my nightly prayers. A few nights after that during prep, my homesickness merged with claustrophobia as I stared at the pale concrete walls of my classroom. I felt my chest tighten as tears began to rise up into my throat. Terrified they would seep out of my eyes and be seen by the other boys, I stared up at the moon and tried to breathe. As I stared I was reassured by the thought that if I could see the moon, so could my mother, and perhaps the moon could relay messages back and forth. The panic attack subsided.

  However, the moon seemed silent tonight, offering no advice. Ever-present as I stood on the ledge, like a mother teaching her child independence, she floated in the cold night sky, just watching. I stared at her in return, closely examining her pockmarked face to keep myself from falling into fear and anxiety or worse still, sleep.

  The window was locked from the inside. I pushed on it, a little too hard perhaps, and almost lost my balance. My foot slipped as I clutched onto the window handle with all my might. I knew someone would have to let me back in eventually. I just didn’t know how long that would be.

  All of this had happened because Rob’s parents had sent him food, which he had decided to share with me, since our beds were next to each other.

  There were two things that would keep us up after lights-out, risking the wrath of the prefects: food and naked lady pictures. I’m not sure this ever changes in a man’s life, but it’s particularly enticing when you are thirteen. If someone’s mother had sent him food, we would risk our very lives when the prefects weren’t looking by running from bed to bed passing baked goods and pastries back and forth like skilled drug runners. If someone’s older brother had sent him a back issue of Penthouse or Hustler, however, there was no group sharing. We would wait all night for the images of breasts and pubic hair to be passed to us after each boy had spent an adequate amount of time with it. Since everything in school was dictated by the law of the jungle, those like me at the bottom of the food chain always went without. As it was with the cereal milk, it also was with the naked lady pictures, and I spent many nights fantasizing about both.

  Rob and I were whispering about whether the chocolate or the lemon cake was better when Rob saw the creeping shadow of a prefect in the doorway behind me. In an instant, Rob vanished, as he and the cake tins were swallowed under white sheets, leaving me in mid-discussion with my torso leaning out of bed and my hands and mouth covered in cake crumbs.

  Smithy shone his flashlight in my face.

  “Get out of bed,” he ordered.

  No sooner did I stand up than I felt a fast fist to my abdomen that made me double over with pain.

  “I’ve told you about talking after lights out, Mandi-wala,” he said, pulling me up by my pajama collar. He walked over to the window and opened it. “You want to talk? Talk out here.”

  “What do you mean, Smithy?” I asked, facing the open sky and billowing curtains.

  “Get out there!” he hissed, and shoved me out the window.

  The next thing I knew I was on the ledge with the window locked behind me, convinced that this prank could only last for a few minutes before I would surely have to be let back in. However, it had been almost half an hour and no one had come to rescue me.

  It was a fraction warmer now that the wind was gone. The moon had disappeared behind a giant blanket of clouds and the air was still and silent. Something else had changed and it took a moment for me to realize what it was. Until now I had been kept hopeful by the signs of life inside. I could sense the general tossing and turning, the whispering of my dorm mates, the flashlights, and occasional laughter of the prefects. But now the lights were out. The sounds had ceased. Every last person, it seemed, had gone to sleep. I was alone.

  My heart began to pound as I felt the bony hand of panic around my throat. I yelled and banged on the window to be let back in, tightly holding the handle to keep my balance. A flashlight came on and a shadow from inside filled the frosted glass windowpane. I felt a huge sense of relief. Smithy must have heard the house master coming down the hallway and needed to get me off the ledge and in bed before he entered the dorm to do a headcount. To my dismay, however, he did not turn the lock on the window. Instead he shone his flashlight full in my face again, blinding me. His words came through the glass low and slow.

  “Shut. Your. Fucking. Mouth,” he said, then disappeared.

  I turned around to face the night. All I could hear was my breathing. It grew louder and shallower as I confronted the terrifying reality that I might be left out here all night. No one could save me from this, not my parents, not the teachers, not the other boys, no one.

  I managed to sit down on the cold, slightly damp ledge and was able to balance by resting my feet on a pair of bricks jutting out just below me. I peered down between my feet. The ground seemed to rush up at me as I leaned forward. I jerked back with my breath caught in my throat. I needed to secure myself, somehow, but the only thing I could do was get as much of my hand as I could wedged into the space between the handle and the window frame and hold on for support. I leaned forward again. The ground didn’t seem quite as far away as it had a moment before. There was a large mound of snow that the plows had pushed directly beneath the ledge where I perched. I had begun to shiver. My fingers felt like ice on the cold metal handle and the tips of my ears burned from the frigid night air. I had to get down. There was no way I could last out here until morning. I would either freeze or fall asleep and either one meant I’d likely slip from the ledge. Why not jump and at least control my landing as much as possible?

  I thought about it for some time, wondering if the giant mound of snow was enough to cushion my fall. Perhaps it was an illusion and the snow was simply blanketing an old wheelbarrow or a stack of milk crates left there by the gardener or the kitchen staff. There was no way for me to know. I needed to get a closer look. I shifted some of my weight to my feet and leaned out further from the ledge. My foot slipped on the brick and I scrambled back, holding on to the metal handle as tightly as I could. It was clearly too dangerous. I had to get down! But I was too scared. Shivering again, I huddled as far back toward the window as I could get. I squeezed my eyes shut and began to cry. I was tired and it was late but I had to keep my mind occupied and so I did the only thing I could think to do: I began to say my prayers.

  I opened my mouth, but instead of Koranic verses, I heard a very different sound—laughter. Why was I laughing? I was deadly afraid and I was laughing? The prefects would hear me laughing and I would be beaten for sure, I thought.

  “Stop laughing!” I told myself sternly. “Have you lost your mind?”

  But the laughter continued, and as it got louder and louder, bouncing off the stone buildings and reverberating through the courtyard below, I realized it was not my laughter at all. Someone else was out here.

  I looked down into the courtyard to identify the culprit, but all was still in the darkness below. I looked up toward the rooftops of the other buildings to see if one of the prefects had decided to step out onto another ledge to taunt me all night long. Finally I spotted him: a man sitting on a ledge just like mine two windows over. But this man was no prefect. This was an older man, sitting with his right leg dangling down toward the courtyard and his arms resting on his left knee as he sipped from a canteen of some sort. As I looked closer, I could make out that he was dressed in a costume,
like that of a knight or a medieval king. A large red cross adorned the front of his tunic and a dark cloak fell over one shoulder. With long stringy hair and a beard, he resembled a drunken actor who, while in the middle of a play, had perhaps grown tired of his part and just decided to wander off. Either that or he was a cat burglar wearing the most impractical disguise ever made. Regardless of who he was, I was not frightened to see him. On the contrary, I was overjoyed, because, if an old drunk wearing a cape could climb up to the fourth floor, then there must be a way for a very sober thirteen-year-old in his pajamas to climb down.

  “Hello,” I called. “Hello!”

  As I looked closer, I realized that the stranger did not need to be made aware of my presence. He already was. In fact he was staring right at me and laughing! He raised his canteen to me and took another slug, laughing uproariously as if he were toasting me across the table at a medieval feast. For the first time since I’d been pushed through the window, I forgot my fear. I was furious. Of all the people who could rescue me, what were the odds that it would be either a drunk or a fool?

  “Excuse me,” I shouted, trying to remain civil. “I’m glad you find this so amusing, but would you mind helping me get off this ledge? You would think that seeing a cold scared child out here in his pajamas would be somewhat alarming to you, so could you stop laughing at me, sober up for a moment, and actually do something?”

  To my surprise, my speech seemed to have an effect. The stranger stopped laughing, gathered up his cape, put away his canteen, stood up and stretched. Then he looked down into the darkness below and stepped toward the edge.

  “Umm . . . be careful,” I called. He was behaving far too cavalierly and I was annoyed that I seemed to be more worried for his safety than he was for mine.

  “Look, if you are indeed a burglar, I promise I won’t tell,” I continued. “Mum’s the word. I never met you. I won’t tell the police. I won’t even mention it to anyone at school, if you just help me get down.”

  The stranger turned to me and stared. In the next second, without any hesitation he stepped out into thin air and leapt! He fell fast, like an arrow down into the darkness of the courtyard below. I gasped and felt my lungs freeze with the sudden influx of ice-cold air. I could not believe what had just happened. He had jumped! He’d actually jumped! I’d hoped he would save me and instead he had killed himself. I had just witnessed the suicide of a drunken, mad, medieval knight-type person.

  “Fuck these fucking people,” I shouted to the moon, to the empty night and the silent dorms. “Fuck that fucking fuck-head Smithy who thought leaving me out here to die was funny. Fuck that guy for jumping like that right in front of me. Fuck this fucking school, fuck the teachers, fuck my parents, fuck the moon, and fuck you, God!”

  In the next moment I almost jumped out of my skin as the mad costumed stranger appeared in front of me again. He flew up from the courtyard atop a galloping horse that lifted him effortlessly through the air. He came thundering toward me. His laughter was now a bloodcurdling scream, as the horse’s hooves pounded the air and its nostrils flared.

  “Die, infidel!” he screamed as he swung what I initially thought was a sword, but upon closer inspection I realized was a very long television antenna.

  I ducked not a moment too soon, still clinging tight to the window handle. The antenna came at me again from the other direction and this time it did the trick. I tried to avoid the blow, but it sliced me across my backside and I lost my grip. My hand slipped from the window latch, my knees buckled, and both feet slipped off their perch as I hurtled toward the darkness below, the wind whipping though my hair and ears.

  Suddenly, and much sooner than I thought possible, I landed hard, splayed out on a rock—a warm, cushiony, satiny rock that seemed to have muscles and breath within it. The minute I landed on it, the rock lunged back. I heard a powerful whinny as the creature jumped, caught the wind under its belly, and leapt up out of the darkness like a full-speed locomotive. I gripped the reins of what I could now see was a beautiful white stallion! As we rose above the buildings, for a moment I could see all the way to the snow-covered rugby fields and the moonlit steeple of the chapel where we attended Sunday services.

  The next moment we landed full gallop on the rooftop of Southern House dormitory. My head felt strangely heavy as I looked around wondering what on earth was happening. I put my hand to my hair and realized that it was covered in an intricately arranged turban. A coat of fine chainmail covered my neck and torso beneath a brightly colored robe. I reached up to my face and found myself caressing a long, thin black beard.

  I looked up and saw that the strange knight was again galloping toward me with his trusty TV antenna raised high above his helmet.

  “Come and get one in the yarbles, if ya have any yarble, ya eunuch jelly thou,” he screamed.

  As he got closer, I could see his face more clearly. Even though it was dirty and hairy and his hair was long and unkempt, there was no denying the voice, the eyes, the laugh. It was Smithy.

  Instead of being afraid, however, I was overcome with exhilaration and adrenaline. I grabbed at my belt—this costume had to come with a sword! As I reached down into the folds of cloth, my hand fell into a satchel hanging from the horse saddle underneath me. Inside was an object I was all too familiar with. I smiled as I ran my hand across its round circumference. I held a cricket ball, hard and smooth, with stitches that pressed into my palm. The saddlebag was full of them.

  I pulled one out and threw it as hard as I could at Smithy’s head. He ducked as it flew past him, but I had another and another and another. I threw back my arm and sent them hurling at him at lightning speed. Some hit their target and others did not. Pretty good, I thought, since I had never been very good at cricket. As Smithy and I charged toward each other it didn’t seem to matter how many balls I threw, for more knights appeared behind him, dressed identically, one after the other as if my audacity to fight back was the very thing that gave them life. Above their heads they carried large billowing banners. At first they looked like Woodhouse Grove school banners, with the green and red colors of our school shield, but as they got closer it was clear they were in fact giant pairs of dirty underwear, jock straps, and rugby kits.

  Below the banners were the faces of the soldiers. I recognized them all; they were the prefects. I could hear a chant rising among their ranks, a monotone, soulless, football hooligan type–chant that I had heard many times before. I had heard it all my life, as long as I could remember.

  “Let’s go Paki bashing, let’s go Paki bashing, let’s go Paki bashing . . .”

  Those words sent a chill down my spine, taking me back to a bus stop. A locker room. A playground. An alley behind my house. I instinctively began to run away. I longed to return to my cold hard ledge, now a seeming bastion of safety. I wondered what had become of me, if I had fallen and died, or fallen asleep and was suffering from hypothermia. Was I lying at the bottom of the dark courtyard in a wheelbarrow with a broken collarbone? What state would I find myself in if I ever returned?

  I had to wake myself up, so I decided I would begin to sing, loudly and triumphantly, creating so much sound that I was sure to awaken.

  The only song that I could think of, strangely, was the classically heroic, chest-expanding, high-flying, symphonic theme to the 1978 movie Superman.

  This was doubly strange since I had no idea that I even remembered the theme. I had only seen the movie once. But as the knights barreled toward me, their horses galloping and the chant of “Let’s go Paki bashing” getting louder and louder, I sang out the theme as defiantly as I could: dum da da dum dum da da dum, and when I got the bit where the music crescendos and Superman begins to fly, dum da daa da dum da da daa! I charged into the fray.

  The knights leapt through the air and landed on all sides of me. As they did, they turned into giant snarling dogs, with gnashing teeth and saliva dripping from their mouths. I had tried to defeat them but they were far too powerful. As they
closed in toward me the chant became guttural and even more terrifying, slow and low like Smithy at the window. “Kill the Paki, kill the nigger. Allah walla ding dong! Allah walla ding dong!”

  Surrounded and alone, I did the only thing I could do. I looked up at the moon. I wanted to scream to her for not saving me, for leaving me here to die. But what came out of my lungs was primitive. It came from the deepest depths of my fear and confusion.

  “Moooon,” I cried. “Moooon!”

  The snarling dogs stopped and tilted their heads skyward, and as if they had done it a thousand times before, they began to howl. Howling at the moon. The more we howled, the brighter the moon became as she hurtled across the clear night sky. The more we called out her name, the more I saw that the dogs lost their ferocity and their fangs and slowly returned to their true shape. They were schoolboys with neatly pressed hair and smartly polished shoes, in blazers and ties, standing alone and together under a vast cold sky. We were all the same under the moonlight: just a bunch of abandoned children in a world where only the strongest and most vicious survived, with no idea how to return home.

  We all hunkered down as the wind grew stronger and began to envelop us. The cold night air wrapped around us and soon became white cotton sheets and rough blankets of wool. I awoke to find myself being tucked into my dorm room bed. As I looked up the window was open, and the cold winter air blew the curtains inward. The prefect turned to me as he shut the window behind him. I didn’t know his name, but I had seen him around.

  “Go to sleep,” he said. “And don’t you ever tell Smithy that I let you back in.”

  “I won’t. Thanks,” I whispered.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said, surprised at his concern. “I’m frozen stiff but I’m okay.”