The Recent East

by Thomas Grattan

  “What did we do when this happened before?” Justine asked.

  Michael answered, “Udo.” He wished his cousin had thought of him as he landed in the water, then hoped he thought of nothing, the ache of him gone a hand on his throat.

  “Guess I’ll have to bulk up,” Michael said.

  Justine stacked stools. Michael opened the office to find Peter on the sofa, turning the volume up and down on the computer. He watched a video on New Guinea. Men with barely covered cocks next to a muddy river. Michael’s phone buzzed. It was the teacher, awake, interested.

  Just need to drop something off, Michael wrote back.

  He hoped Ingo’s dinner was over, but knew he could get Mutti to call it a night even if it wasn’t. She’d be happy to see Peter. She’d likely missed him. If Michael told her that Peter had bitten him, her expression would suggest he was exaggerating, would ask how Michael deserved it. Peter pouted. Michael wanted to tell him he was acting like an asshole, that he had somewhere better to be, but said, “We’re leaving.” Peter ignored him. He asked his nephew if he wanted to climb onto the bar to blow out candles. “Not my job,” the boy answered, and turned up the volume again.

  Michael slid money into the safe and flicked out the lights.

  “You sleeping here?” Michael asked.

  Peter came out, a glint of fear in his eyes. Michael locked the front door and thought about the teacher’s chest. The teacher might see Michael’s reddened shoulder and ask what happened. Kids can be assholes, Michael could say. Or he’d tell the teacher that he could bite him if he wanted to.

  Peter swished into the booster seat and buckled himself in. Michael’s phone pinged. First came a message from Mutti, saying, yes, she’d meet him at home. Next was a picture of the teacher in the smallest slip of underwear. Michael walked toward the driver’s-side door when he heard noise and felt the hit across his back, the window stinging his forehead. The next hit landed on his neck. The third burned across his cheek. “Faggot,” one of the drunks said. Another kicked Michael’s knees. Michael put up his hands, hoping they’d accept a truce, only to have his arms yanked behind him. He felt his shoulders tear. That pain turned to nothing as his face was flung against the car’s side-view mirror.

  Inside the car, Peter didn’t move. Michael knocked on the window, realizing his mistake right after. A drunk lifted his head as if he’d been rudely awoken. He squinted at the car. But as he moved toward its doors, Michael heard the car’s locks catch, saw Peter’s hand move away from the locks and cover his ears. One of the men banged the window, another threw Michael to the ground. Michael’s mouth turned wet and salty. As a foot stamped down on his fingers, as he let out a hiss of pain and spat blood onto the front of his shirt, Michael suddenly heard the wail of his car’s horn. He wished he could see Peter pressing on it. Another kick, and Michael turned short of breath. He squinted through the swelling on his face. His mouth and ribs burned and the horn kept sounding. As Michael hacked more blood onto the pavement, he realized that a car was coming toward them. Peter must have seen, too. Another kick, this time to his face, and Michael closed his eyes. The horn’s blaring continued. And as the car got closer and slowed, as its driver shouted and another car slowed behind it, Michael thanked god that Peter had his mother’s brain.

  18

  When Taro grew keen on an idea, he’d point, an ink-blotched finger rising, his eyes lifting beyond those he was talking to. Adela noticed this first. Then his forearms. When she reached his face, she realized he was beautiful. She tried to stare at her notes or a scuff on the wall. But her need to look at him won—childlike in its insistence, adult in its attention to detail. Taro was a TA in her American foreign policy seminar. He spoke with an earnest smartness that left others in the class following at a far distance. He made complicated points about economic violence and Adela felt the same restless excitement that captured her years before when she’d taken off from Frankfurt by herself. When he poked holes in a person’s points, Adela spent the rest of the afternoon thinking about a phrase he’d pulled from the air, how what had seemed certain a moment before was revealed as rickety.

  Adela read everything off the syllabus, found syllabi for graduate classes and read that material, too. She listened to him so carefully that she had to take deep breaths not to get stuck on a word, or his finger jabbing the air. Adela jotted down his phrases word for word. She read them late at night and thought of the quiet deepness of his voice. Taro wore the same button-down each day. Adela found out a month later that he had three identical shirts, three pairs of the same pants; an apartment with only a bed, table, and chair. “People usually ask,” Taro said on one of their first nights together, “why I don’t have anything.”

  “You have enough,” Adela answered, and he told her she was the most beautiful.

  “I find that hard to believe,” she answered.

  “Don’t do that,” Taro said. Adela turned ashamed. Of his directness, or because being called beautiful felt like a sham.

  Sex with him carried the same quiet confidence with which he spoke. Halfway through, that night, she’d come unexpectedly. Adela grabbed his forearms, kissed Taro’s shoulder, and whispered for him to keep going.

  Taro dropped out of his Ph.D. program just as Adela finished her senior year. The two of them stayed in a rented room in Oakland so small that it only fit a twin bed. They slept pressed against each other, planted tomatoes on their fire escape that they pulled off the vine, biting into them as if they were apples. Adela found work at a nonprofit. Taro got a job selling Christmas trees. He came home with a reject tree that filled the little space left in their room. They had no ornaments, so Adela decorated it with old postcards, and Taro’s smile grew wide. He had a beautiful, wide face, a mouth that always wanted to kiss Adela’s neck and stomach. He spoke about her breasts as if they were a best-loved poem. Taro never slipped into slang. He told her about the childhood summers he’d spent reading the dictionary, about the day he’d tried to memorize the X section. “Xanthate is a salt or ester,” he said as he fiddled with the tree’s branches. “Xeric: requiring a small amount of moisture.” His head rested on her rib cage. He defined xiphoid and xylose, told her he’d never had a Christmas tree before. At work the next morning, Adela found sap stuck in her hair.

  Then he came home one day with news of a diplomatic job he’d been offered in South Africa. Adela hadn’t known he’d applied for it. She tried to gird herself for what she was sure came next: news that he was leaving her. When he said instead that he wanted her to go with him, Adela’s face flushed, and she remembered Udo’s dream of the two of them together at university, how she’d felt something for him until it abruptly ended. But Udo felt far away, in distance, also importance. It shocked her how long she hadn’t thought of him, after years in Modesto where she sometimes talked to his imagined version, sometimes pictured him pressed against her. She and Taro lay in their bed. “I hadn’t said anything about the job,” he said—traffic outside rose and fell—“because I didn’t imagine I’d get it.” He went on that he wanted it, wanted her more. “So you would go or stay based on my answer,” Adela said, half in jest. Taro nodded. A voice on the street called out the name Ricky. Taro’s look of need floored her, then lifted her. Adela said yes.

  Arriving in Johannesburg, Adela saw sick people everywhere. Some lived in shantytowns. But they also cleaned public restrooms and worked the front desk at the apartment complex where the embassy staff lived. Watching a woman who sold newspapers go from young to old to gone in one summer, Adela remembered Miri, thought of the world’s indifference she’d witnessed even at Berkeley. When classmates had talked about a problem, they’d spoken of the past or a theory. Or they sloughed off a difficult discussion for a cigarette or a story of a roommate they hated more than they had a right to.

  Outside a tourist shop, a woman asked for money. Adela saw sickness in her face and gave it to her. When she watched an ambulance pull slowly away from a building, her heart sp
ed up. Some days, Taro came home and she couldn’t talk to him. Or she asked him why he chose this part of the world, then felt ashamed at her selfishness. After a day when she cried as she hadn’t in years, holding on to the collar of Taro’s T-shirt with a bully’s fervor, she found a clinic and began to volunteer there. She took patients’ information. Kept children occupied as mothers went in for appointments. Sat with young women reeling from test results. One from an affluent family had come to the clinic because of its anonymity. “I’m going to die,” she kept saying. She wore the uniform from her private school. Her hair was plaited in a way that made her look younger than seventeen.

  “There are options now,” Adela said.

  “But I won’t get better,” the young woman answered.

  Afterward, Adela went behind the clinic. A nurse gave her a cigarette. She smoked half of it, threw up, and said she felt better.

  Patients at the clinic started to recognize her. An older man—whom she later found out had infected his wife and girlfriend—called her Yoyo. A mother of three called her Sefate, which meant tree. Others called her Gorra Ou, which she learned was slang for asshole white person. “Look at Gorra Ou playing doctor,” a woman said when she found out Adela had no medical training. “Gorra Ou must feel really good about herself,” a man answered when she told him that his appointment wasn’t until the next day. She tried to explain herself; the man walked away.

  But there were other patients who sought her out, young women in particular, whom she talked to after their appointments were done, about the boyfriends who’d gotten them sick but claimed they hadn’t, jobs they’d lost, or problems with their insurance. And each time a patient looked for her, Adela felt the distance between them and her shortening, and worked past her shift or offered patients rides home. Some asked about Adela, grew incredulous when she told them of her life in Germany and California. Some of them even learned German phrases, wishing her “Guten Tag,” or calling her Fräulein. “The Fräulein is here,” one woman said each time she came in. Another patient told her of his love of The Sound of Music. When a patient died, she went to the funeral—often the only white person there. And if she got to talk to a family member, they often knew who she was. One time, a relative said, “Yes, you’re the German Lady.”

  Then one night Taro talked about a promotion in Pretoria and Adela became terrified. She thought of the patients expecting her at their next visit, how on days the clinic was closed she burrowed into medical textbooks to understand how antiretrovirals worked, and why.

  “Since when do you care about a promotion?” Adela asked. Taro wore a tie. The clothes he once taught in were now reserved for weekends.

  “You’re not the only one trying to do good,” he said, and went on about the community health services he’d found funding for, his finger jabbing at the sky. Adela said no.

  “You said you wouldn’t go without me,” she answered.

  “But you’re not making money,” Taro said. “And,” he added, pausing again before he went on, “there are plenty of sick people in Pretoria, too.”

  Adela didn’t have enough of her own money to stay. She walked through Braamfontein and chided herself for the pretend-certainty she’d watered and weeded. Felt a hate for Taro as fierce as the love that had struck her when he’d been her TA. She stayed at the clinic until the cleaning staff told her she was in their way. Slept on the sofa of a doctor friend. After three days of this, Taro showed up at the clinic. He wouldn’t leave until she talked to him. When she finally came out to the waiting room, he told her he’d go wherever.

  “Cleveland?” she asked.

  “What’s in Cleveland?” he asked back.

  Adela answered, “Nothing.”

  They went to their apartment, and the sex they had wound back to their first months in Berkeley, when it was hard for her not to look at him.

  “I’ve applied to nursing school,” Adela said. “In Pretoria.”

  They lay naked on their bed. Taro moved his fingers through her pubic hair.

  “Where I’ve been offered a job?” he asked.

  “Unless there’s another Pretoria,” she answered, and lay on top of him. They had sex again, though her heart hadn’t slowed from their previous round.

  For years Adela had focused on ideas with the steadfastness of a bird sitting on an egg. Now she wanted action. Not debates or theories but needles in veins so sick people could sleep. As she went through nursing school and started her first job, she thought of Mutti’s stories of the Pflegeheim residents. A year into her job, Adela found herself pregnant, which made her happy in a way she didn’t understand. Taro became euphoric, too. She worried about working in the clinic as her pregnancy grew conspicuous, but patients touched her stomach and told her stories of their children, of their mothers living hundreds of miles away. Taro kissed her stomach each morning. He thrummed her belly button when it started to stick out. Adela worked until Peter left her too breathless to get up a set of stairs.

  * * *

  “I don’t think it’s good for Peter,” Taro said one night when Adela came home late. He sat on the sofa, their child asleep next to them. Peter was a month from five.

  “I was talking about you working all the time,” Taro added when she didn’t answer.

  “And you working all the time?”

  “Both of us, then,” Taro relented. But his tone, the points he seemed ready to make but didn’t, made it clear that he saw her job as the lesser. Taro asked if she was hungry. She said yes but went to lie down. She remembered him years before reminding her that he made all the money. Both of them kept working.

  One night, though, things felt different, easy. They had a lovely dinner. Peter told them stories about a boy in his class who always talked about Jesus. “And I asked him why he never brought Jesus to the playground,” Peter said. They laughed. Peter looked relieved. In bed that night, Adela slipped out of her T-shirt and underwear. Taro did the same.

  When they finished, Taro said: “That felt strange.” She answered that he was an asshole.

  “I don’t think I’m an asshole,” he said. Naked, he went to sleep on the couch. Adela spent the night mumbling at the ceiling. Each time she got close to sleep, she sensed she was falling off the bed, grabbed the headboard or moved her fingers to the floor and pressed against it.

  The next morning, she found Taro asleep on the couch still. His ass glowed in the sun. Peter walked into the room, looking from one parent to the other as if his father weren’t sleeping but injured. When his regular look of annoyance surfaced, her son summoned up a “What’s wrong with him?” before shaking Taro awake.

  A month later Taro told her of a director position he’d been offered in Ghana. Adela had a stethoscope around her neck. She kept taking it off and on.

  “I’m guessing you’re not coming,” he said.

  “What a way to ask,” Adela answered, though he wasn’t asking. At work that day a man who’d been a model patient looked exhausted. After his blood work came back, she saw a drop in T-cells so large that she had to go to the bathroom and wash her face. As she did, Adela left the water running, though it was expensive. And a year after that, the job in Pretoria having worn her down to a frayed nerve, Taro called and told her that he’d finally gotten the position in Washington he’d been waiting for. Taro of their Berkeley days had spoken of the government as a dour foster parent. Now he went on about working from within the system. Being a single mother had flattened Adela. Peter wanted her close just so he could ignore her. When she was tired, he was awake. When work was its busiest, Peter claimed that he was sick, that she needed to be the nurse for him. So, when Taro emailed about a friend’s clinic in D.C. that was a perfect fit, she said nothing for a week, then yes. I’m going to visit my family first, she wrote. Because it was on the way. Because Udo’s death left Germany suddenly open to her, as Kritzhagen must have been for Mutti after the wall switched to past tense. California? Taro had written. The other ones, Adela answered.
/>   * * *

  The rain didn’t let up. Gert lay next to Adela, unobtrusive even in sleep. As she slid downstairs to check her email, she saw another message from Dad. Emails from Taro that told her he’d registered Peter for school. Figuring out flights, Adela wrote him back, though she was figuring out whether to go or stay. The plan had been a visit. But within weeks of arriving in Kritzhagen, the version of Michael as selfish and disinterested molted into the younger one that used to wake Adela up to tell her when he’d had a terrible or fantastic dream. Each time she’d thought to tell him what her plan had been, what the new plan could be, she switched subjects. Because being back was easy. Adela rarely saw things as easy. And she worried that, on telling Michael they were staying, he’d lose interest in her. So, when she’d start to talk about D.C., she said something about the clinic instead. When she thought to admit that she’d fallen for Kritzhagen, Adela asked Michael about a man he slept with.

  Dunes behind the house genuflected. The day before, she and Gert had biked to the end of the island. The wind pushed so hard it felt as if they’d been pedaling in place. When she’d called Kritzhagen, Peter told her he’d learned to play spades and asked when she was coming back. “I just left,” she’d answered.

  Gert came downstairs—tall and shirtless, thin apart from the smallest spread of stomach. He moved his tongue into her mouth though neither of them had brushed their teeth. Adela pressed her hips against his.

  Twenty minutes later, Gert said: “What if we stay an extra day?” Adela didn’t have to be at the bar until Friday. Taro had written back immediately: How long does arranging flights take? Thirty seconds after: I mean, I can arrange them, if that’s what’s holding up the show. Taro from a decade before would never have used a phrase like holding up the show, would have pointed at nothing if he’d heard those words, deconstructing the problems with that metaphor.