A City Made of Words

by Paul Park

  The camp was on the site of an old sports stadium in Stony Brook, ringed now with barbed wire. But the banks of xenon lights atop thirty-foot posts illuminated the whole space in a bluish glare. Even from the gate where he presented his identification booklet, he could hear the PA system making periodic sputtering announcements. “Please be careful of the artificial surface,” he heard now. “Do not sit on the equipment monitors.”

  Inside, however, all was chaos—men, women, and children in the stands and on the field or in any vacant space between the structures and fence, on blankets or on pieces of cardboard, surrounded by suitcases or plastic bags full of possessions. There were lines for the port-a-potties and a stinking miasma over the entire camp. Mike parked in the lot and pushed through the crowds waiting outside the old coaches’ offices, one of which he’d been assigned for the evening shift, a small, white-cinderblock room with a desk and a swivel-back chair. He was checking on immigration status under several exemptions and getting more and more frustrated until the last woman came in and shut the door, a Nigerian this time, so English-speaking, a Muslim, he guessed, with her hair wrapped up in blue cloth—he didn’t even know what she was doing here. She wasn’t on his list. She ignored the chair where she was supposed to sit and instead she got up in his grill: “You know I have a lawyer here, pro bono. She’s been giving me advice. And she tells me you’re a bad man, a very bad man. You don’t care about us. Instead you have disgusting thoughts about a woman young enough to be your daughter. You harass her and then you punish her with evil grades. Why do you have to be like that? I tell you we will not forgive this situation, none of us.”

  He’d gotten to his feet and she’d pressed him back against the wall. It was too much. It was too fucking much. Jesus, she had her finger in his face. At that moment she looked like his ex-wife to him.

  That was Wednesday night. On Thursday afternoon Taylor waited for him before class. “I know I promised, but I’m having some trouble with the rewrite,” she confessed. “Is it okay if I really exaggerate things?”

  “Well,” he said, not wanting to set her off. “Maybe a little. But you might want to keep the story in the realm of possibility.”

  “But who knows where that is anymore? Did I tell you my mom is an attorney? So I put her on the case! You know, for verisimilitude. I’m inventing a whole backstory. I’m thinking the guy must have left a paper trail. And it turns out he did! His ex-wife filed a battery complaint. There was a restraining order. So now he has to work two jobs. And you know what?”

  “What?” he murmured.

  “I’m thinking he might work as a debriefer in one of the displaced persons’ camps on the North Shore.”

  He held up his hands. “Okay, just remember. Keep it in the realm.”

  “Ooh, Mr. Pombo. What did you do to your knuckles? Did you cut yourself?”

  During class, striding back and forth at the end of the room, he tried to make the point that the creative aspect of the work had to serve the purpose of the nonfiction—that is, it did not consist of invention for its own sake but as a way to strengthen and clarify reality, which was the point of the entire exercise. But Taylor had her hand up. As he ignored her and took another question from someone else, she pulled her ponytail back and fixed it in a scrunchie. She held her pencil between her teeth, and when her hair was fixed she held it up again. Even from the front of the room he could see how she had scarred and nibbled it so that the middle wasn’t even yellow anymore.

  “Mr. Pombo, does it have to be like that? Does it have to be that you are trying to, like, strengthen and clarify reality? Couldn’t you, like, be trying to create a mood? Or maybe make a social argument? Or even just go on a journey somewhere, a crazy adventure?”

  After class he walked to his office above the library and shut the door. The phone rang. “Mike,” said a throaty voice he recognized. “Bad news. Apparently she’s pressing charges for intimidation. And not just her. Because there is some bitch of an attorney with a hard-on about this. I’m sorry. I’m telling you as a friend.”

  Considering his options, Mike Pombo sat back in his padded swivel chair. Time passed, marked by the recorded announcement that the library was closed. Hours later when it was dark he heard a sliding sound, some papers pushed under his door. He leapt up, took two steps, yanked at the knob. But there was no one in the dark hallway.

  He saw on the first page of the essay at his feet, in a careful line down the left-hand side, a trio of blue post-its. #1: “I just wanted to try something new. Let me know if it works!” #2: “PS, I really appreciate you taking the time. I told my mother about it.” #3: “You were right. It’s not about the girl’s problems, it’s about his. I feel so much better!”

  Her handwriting, which he had not seen before, was minuscule and exact. He allowed himself a groan. Yes, her mother could get him fired, but he’d be damned before he read any more of this tonight. And he had no desire to see how she had decided to humiliate Mr. Santelli, for whom he was beginning to feel not just sympathy but empathy, a distinction he felt sure Taylor was incapable of grasping. No, that was unfair. It was just the sort of thing she’d memorized for the SAT.

  But he leafed through the pages to see if she had made the page requirement. She hadn’t, and the text sprawled away into a curt, hopeful, parenthetical “to be continued.”

  Undecided, he hefted his briefcase in his right hand. Then he laid the essay on the metal surface of the desk and laid the briefcase over it, snapping it shut over the arming mechanism. Then he hurried out into the deserted parking lot. It was ten thirty at night. The school was at the top of a hill, and he took the long drive through the dark trees to Rte. 25A. There he turned left in his gray Subaru. In the dark interior, lit by red circle on the dashboard, he found himself contained in a bleak, grim, brooding mood, the kind that came up out of nowhere sometimes when he measured what he used to have against what he had now. At such moments—here along the straightaway—he often felt himself drift up out of the world and into a soft airless space, a non-alcoholic drunkenness that deadened his response to his own body or the evidence of his own senses. When he heard the police siren behind him and saw the flashing lights he thought immediately that he must have been speeding, and then immediately afterward that he’d be pulled over and arrested because of the Nigerian woman from Kano who had baited him the night before. But how could that be? He’d barely touched her. He skidded to a stop on the gravel shoulder but then the patrol car sped past him, and then another, and then another one while he sat back and tried to breathe. With his eyes closed he could still see for a moment, until it vanished up ahead, the rhythmic flash.

  During the riots in Cameroon he had seen a building blow out into the street. Head ringing, dizzy, he had dug through the concrete and shattered glass, looking for corpses and survivors. Now he wondered whether if some kind of deranged person attacked the school, he would feel a concussive blast even at this distance. With his eyes closed he imagined Taylor’s uncompleted essay atomize into burning mist, the window of his office bursting out, and maybe, if he was lucky, the roof collapsing on that entire section of the building. He imagined a plume of fire above the trees.

  Hands shaking, he started the car and pulled it out onto the road. He had part of an idea that if the police were to come for him because of some violation, he would pack some clothes from his apartment and drive away somewhere, maybe down to Florida, maybe to Key West or Daytona Beach, an idiotic plan, the kind of plan that might appeal not to an ex-SOF with two tours in Syria, but to an ignorant seventeen-year-old, say, specifically a seventeen-year-old girl who didn’t know fuck-all and didn’t have children of her own.

  Two miles ahead as he came into town, he saw the police barricade across the road and a dozen figures in hazmat suits, their faces hidden behind plastic shields. Blue light spread from some indefinite source. He stopped the car, rolled down the window. Behind him he could hear the whine of fire engines. One of the women pulled her mask to one si
de. She poked her long flashlight through the window and informed Mike that this whole area and much of the North Shore was under quarantine.

  “Can I go home?” With his chin, he motioned up ahead past the barricade.

  “License and registration.”

  While he waited, Mike thought about what might come up on the computer. He checked his phone. But the main story from the New York Times website was that the North Korean government had issued some kind of ultimatum in response to the blockade. This was in the context of a general diplomatic breakdown on the peninsula.

  The woman came back. “You’re on our list,” she said. “We’re sending you to a clinic in Port Washington to get checked out. There’s been an outbreak of a necrotizing virus from West Africa.” She mentioned the detention center where Mike worked.

  “Can I drive myself?”

  “I guess. It doesn’t really matter anymore.”

  Which is not what you want to hear from someone in hazmat gear. Maybe Daytona Beach wasn’t such a bad idea. The woman gave him the address to the clinic and he turned the car around. But where he should have gone left he went right, away from the coast toward the expressway. He glanced at his scraped knuckles. Something else to worry about. Not to mention the chance of nuclear war. His brother Raymond lived in Seattle, within range. He thought about putting in a call.

  Darkness on the little road in the scrub forest. Up ahead, a single streetlight and a telephone pole. And a girl there waiting. She knew he’d come. She wasn’t hitchhiking. But she stood out on the road with her hands up and he stopped the car.

  She looked different. She didn’t have any of that tight preppy look, not anymore. She was dressed in green cargo pants, for God’s sake, Doc Martens, and a hooded sweatshirt. Her hair was loose and wild. She was wearing eye make-up streaked with tears.

  She got in, and he drove south down the deserted road. He grunted. “How does it end?”

  “You didn’t read it?”

  “I skimmed. It looked unfinished.”

  “I know. It’s really hard.” She started to cry, an irritating sound because it seemed so unlike her, as weird as the pants and the makeup and the unbrushed hair. But what had he said to them just a few days ago? “Maybe show conflicting attributes in every scene.”

  She peered ahead into the moving cones of light. Her face was lumpy and slack. “You gave us options. I thought I’d just go crazy and extreme.”

  He’d been driving fast, but now he let the Subaru slow down as he crested the long straight hill. “But I’m sorry I didn’t make the page requirement,” she confessed, her head against the glass of the side window. “I hope it won’t affect my grade. I didn’t know how to end it. I mean I thought about him ending up in jail. Looking back, I guess, regretful. But still unable to claim responsibility. Always blaming other people.”

  “What had he done? Maybe let’s start there.”

  “Maybe it doesn’t matter. I’ll get my mother to defend him. Pro bono.”

  “Really? What if it’s for transporting a minor across state lines? You know, to Florida.”

  “I’m almost eighteen.” She had started to cry again—no sobs. Just tears on her face. “But I have to tell you. The craziest thing wasn’t even the new virus. It was more local.”

  Ahead of them the road curved to the right. He slowed to about ten miles an hour to make the turn. He’d seen movement through the trees. And when the road straightened out again he tapped the brake, rolled to a stop.

  “What about the bomb in the briefcase?” he asked.

  “My mom says not to judge him. He’s probably seen terrible things. She says PTSD is like a new kind of evolution. There doesn’t even have to be a war.”

  He nodded. “Oh, she does?” And then in a moment, “You know it’s the girl who has a problem with the school. He’s grateful just to have a job.”

  He peered out through the windshield. They were only a few miles from the crossroad to his ex’s house. But the way was blocked. “He was just embassy security in Yaoundé,” he lied. “Why would he know anything about explosives? There’s more tension if the bomb never goes off.”

  He watched her consider this. Maybe there were ways to manage the situation. He was the grownup, after all, the teacher. But what the fuck. “What am I looking at here?”

  She seemed calmer now, less weepy all of a sudden, almost proud of herself. “Trans-humans,” she said. “Runaways. The rest have come up from the swamps.”

  He turned around to back up. But others had come out of the trees, cast in red from the brake lights. One was very tall, very thin, and as Mike watched through the rear window, she put her hand on the car, a clicking sound.

  In the front seat, Taylor McLeef turned toward him. “Mr. Pombo,” she said, “don’t turn us loose. Unlock the doors.”

  “Please,” she added, after a moment.

  And as he complied, she murmured all in a rush, “It’s been so hard for me at school. Don’t judge me—I can’t even eat the food. The food in the dining commons, it literally makes me sick. Not enough engine oil or something. I have to cough it out—it doesn’t have the nutrients I need. But I can’t talk to my adviser about that. You’re the only one who understands.”

  Another girl climbed in the back, a second member of the field hockey team. He studied her face in the rear-view. Sometimes he had watched the home games from the sidelines, even the practices when he could get away with it. He liked the athleticism, the ponytails swishing back and forth.

  Outside the car, spectral figures shambled out of the glare of the headlights or moved into the woods. One of them collapsed down the embankment into a ditch, and even from inside the car Mike could hear the clatter. “So,” he said, making conversation. “Taylor can predict the future. What about you?”

  He didn’t expect an answer. But the girl in the back seat (pale, red-haired, faintly Goth) wrinkled her nose. “Reverse-stick drive from the top of the circle. I can hook the ball for thirty yards.”

  “And yet you lost to …” He mentioned the school’s archrivals.

  The girl shrugged. “Are you kidding me? Those freaks are more ceramic than meat. You should see them in the locker room. We have to flush the perchlorate out of the hypos when they’re done.”

  In the rear-view, Mike examined the glint of metal under her ear, the hinged, chiseled jaw. He couldn’t tell if it was makeup or else makeup scraped away. In the front seat, Taylor shook her head. “This is exactly the kind of bigotry we try to—”

  Mike interrupted her. “What else?”

  “I eat broken glass without hurting my mouth,” said the girl in the back seat. “It’s a family thing. My mother had it.”

  An air force jet ripped low over the trees above the car, headed toward New York. Mike waited for a moment till the noise had cleared. “That’s all?”

  She wouldn’t meet his eyes in the rear-view. Her voice was soft and whispery. “Hide things. Make people miss.”

  He put his hands back on the steering wheel, flexed his fingers, which were sore, the knuckles a purple color, the torn skin angry and inflamed. “Okay,” he said. “What now?”

  “Down here at the crossroads a few miles,” said Taylor. “Take a left. There’s a ranch-style house at the bottom of a culde-sac. You’ll see.” She rubbed her nose, examined her fingers. “I feel like Siri.”

  “Okay. Sure.”

  “Power’s out,” breathed the girl in the back seat.

  He put the car in gear. This stretch of road, he’d driven down it many times, back and forth without making the turn. Another plane passed overhead. He was creeping along, five or ten miles an hour. Small woods separated the houses. No light anywhere. At the crossroad, the streetlight flickered and went out.

  And when they got to Simone’s house a mile beyond the turn, her windows were dark too. But her car was there, a Subaru that matched his own. He pulled off next to it. Above them, when he turned off the engine and killed the lights, the night sky was full
of stars, which in this part of Suffolk County was a sign of the apocalypse.

  Bibliography

  Publications (novels and chapter book novellas, first English-language editions):

  Soldiers of Paradise (novel, Arbor House, 1987)

  Sugar Rain (novel, William Morrow, 1989)

  The Cult of Loving Kindness (novel, William Morrow, 1991)

  Coelestis (novel, Harper Collins UK, 1994)

  The Gospel of Corax (novel, Soho Books, 1996)

  Three Marys (novel, Cosmos Books, 2000)

  No Traveller Returns (novella, PS Publishing, 2004)

  A Princess of Roumania (novel, Tor Books, 2005)

  The Tourmaline (novel, Tor Books, 2006)

  The White Tyger (novel, Tor Books, 2007)

  The Hidden World (novel, Tor Books, 2008)

  The Rose of Sarifal (published under the pseudonym Paulina Claiborne, Wizards of the Coast, 2012)

  Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance (novella, PS Publishing, 2013)

  All Those Vanished Engines (novel, Tor Books, 2014)

  Story collections:

  If Lions Could Speak (Wildside Press, 2002)

  Other Stories (PS Publishing, 2015)

  A City Made of Words (PM Press, 2019)

  Short fiction:

  “Rangriver Fell” (1987)

  “Carbontown” (1989)

  “The Village in the Trees” (1991)

  “The Lost Sepulcher of Huáscar Capac” (1992)

  “A Man on Crutches” (1994)

  “The Tourist” (1994)

  “The Breakthrough” (1995)

  “The Last Homosexual” (1996)

  “Get a Grip” (1997)

  “Bukavu Dreams” (1999)

  “Untitled 4” (2000)

  “Self Portrait, with Melanoma, Final Draft” (2001)

  “Tachycardia” (2002)

  “If Lions Could Speak” (2002)

  “Christmas in Jaisalmer” (2002)