by Dave Eggers
“I don’t know if she knew that,” Nine continued. “And I was thinking, Fuck me, I can’t kiss this mouth. And that’s when she just hops on top of me, straddling me like I’m a tree and she’s planning to shimmy her way up to the top. I mean, I couldn’t breathe for a second, she was holding so tight. She had me inside her in seconds. I had assumed she was a virgin but there was no way. She knew where to find me and where to put me, and I have to say, she played me like a harp. I mean, she strummed every string, she made a symphony of me. I’m still vibrating.”
The RS-80 was ready. Four closed the door, put it in gear and began moving. Nine, his eyes wounded and surprised, stepped away from the machine and watched it pass.
* * *
—
The day’s work was steady and, just as with the day before, Four decided to press on through lunch, eating in the RS-80 cab. Nine had gone up ahead and Four hadn’t seen him in an hour. After being momentarily distracted by the black charred carcass of a jeep, Four turned back to the road to find a small boy standing directly in his path, twenty meters ahead.
Four hit the RS-80’s alert, a spiraling sound, more like an ambulance siren than a traditional vehicle horn. He expected the boy to leap aside, as most people would in the face of an enormous yellow machine. But this boy did not move. He was no more than four feet tall, and Four guessed him to be about eight years old. He was barefoot and naked but for a ragged shirt and gray underwear, once white.
Four thought about stopping, but knew that pausing the RS-80 here could cause a number of issues—including a rib in the asphalt that was impossible to avoid even with the new machine’s improvements. The paver was built to slowly taper off the asphalt release, and sudden stops caused imperfections. So he continued. He sounded the siren again and turned on the lights. But still the boy did not move. The sensors indicated he was seven meters away, which meant he had less than ten seconds to convince the boy to leave the path.
Four opened the cockpit door and waved to the boy. “Move!” he yelled, and swung his arm wildly. The boy turned to him, and for a moment Four was relieved. There seemed to be a certain new recognition in the boy’s eyes, as if startled from a reverie. Four ducked back into the cab, but when he looked at the road again, the boy still had not moved.
Four increased the volume of the siren and set the lights to a rhythmic flashing. But the boy stayed in place.
Four slowed and stopped the paver, set the engine to idle, and the screen began to count down from forty-five, after which Four would have to begin moving again or deal with a full reset.
As the vehicle stood still and hummed, Four jumped down from the cab. He walked toward the boy, sweeping his arms in the direction of the forest on the side of the road. But the boy, who had turned his attention to Four, would not stir.
Four had no choice but to do what he knew the company strictly prohibited him from doing. He had to move the boy. As Four moved toward him, he did not expect the boy to react in any way, but the boy surprised him by raising up his arms and allowing himself to be lifted.
The boy weighed nothing at all. From a distance he had seemed exceptionally thin, like most of the children of the region, but that did not prepare Four for the strange feeling of holding a human being who seemed hollow. He had the heft of a marionette. Four, conscious of the time he had left, perhaps twenty seconds, hurried the boy to the side of the road, set him firmly there, and rushed back into the cab.
When he sat down, he saw the counter at three seconds. He’d made it in time, and recommenced forward movement. When he looked up, he feared and half expected that the boy would be there again, standing in his previous spot in the center of the road. But he was not. He had not moved from the new spot where Four had placed him. And as the machine moved past him, Four felt tremendous relief that the boy was safe, that the machine needed no resetting, and he would keep his schedule. As he passed the boy, Four waved, stupidly hoping to confirm that whatever they had just done was now finished, but the boy did not wave back. He only stood, looking with the same curious intensity as before.
* * *
—
The last hour of the day was without further anomalies. But he did not see Nine. When Four had reached the next day’s first pod, he powered down the RS-80. He took the tent out of the storage compartment, found a suitable spot on the road and assembled it. He unrolled his sleeping bag and placed his knife and gun inside. He left the tent and looked down the road for sign of Nine, and saw none. It was still an hour till sunset.
Four returned to the tent and lay down his head, thinking he might nap before dinner. But when he closed his eyes, he could only think of the boy. A strange feeling came over him, a nagging sense that there was something wrong with the child, or wrong with the child’s circumstances. Four had a sense, in fact, that the boy was still standing where he had left him. And all at once it occurred to Four that the boy had been lost. He had expected Four to help him reunite with his family. Instead, Four had simply carried him to the side of the road and continued on.
Four reminded himself it was not within his mandate to carry boys at all, let alone reunite them with their parents. And yet it was only five o’clock, and Four had at least ninety minutes of light. He had already interacted with the boy once, so doing so again would not involve any greater risk. He could leave for a few minutes and keep the RS-80 in sight.
He dissassembled his tent, locked it into the vehicle and walked back in the direction of the boy. The asphalt underfoot was still warm, the oatmeal smell faint but everywhere around him. As he made his way up the incline he inspected his work, finding it flawless. It was the first inspection of the road he’d performed since he’d begun this job—the inspection was supposed to be done by the secondary, on the quad—but Four found it enormously useful to see the road now, to see how the bitumen was settling and cooling. As he walked, Four reminded himself that the company encouraged regular physical activity. He was accomplishing two of his directives—inspection and exercise—while walking briskly back toward the boy, a distance he guessed to be about two kilometers.
Soon he saw the boy. He was no longer standing but was sitting on the side of the road, not far from where Four had left him. The boy watched Four approach but did not move. He only watched Four with his intelligent eyes until Four, who was out of breath and who had soaked his jumpsuit with sweat, was upon him.
“Where do you live?” Four asked.
The boy made no attempt to answer. He couldn’t understand Four’s language. Four made a series of gestures—a mother, a father, a home, a bed, food, the act of eating. The boy paid attention, and seemed in every way alert and even willing to understand. But he said nothing and did not stand up and seemed almost incapable of movement.
Four checked his watch. It was 5:40. He had just under one hour to help this boy and to get back to the RS-80 and set up his tent again before dark. He had no flashlight with him.
“This way?” he asked the boy, pointing into the forest lining one side of the road. The boy nodded.
“Okay,” Four said, and scanned the dense trees. He planned to carry the boy through the forest and to his home, with the boy guiding the way. He lifted the boy, astonished again by the boy’s weightlessness, and walked down the embankment to where the trees began.
“Through here?” Four asked, pointing.
The boy nodded again.
“Good,” Four said, now feeling more confident. It seemed only a matter of time before this was resolved. The boy had heard the machine, had wandered away from home to see it, had gotten lost, and now Four was bringing him back to his family. The schedule was not compromised, and this action might even reflect positively on the company.
When they were through the first few trees, though, Four saw another of the ominous signs, the skull and crossbones rendered yellow on black. The forest was mined. Four stopped in m
idstride, one foot in the air. He scanned down, looking for a trigger. The ground was covered in needles and leaves. If there was a mine here, he would not see it.
It was madness to thread his way through a mined forest while carrying a child. He decided to return the way he came, and knew he would have to mind every step, landing each one precisely where he had before. Seven steps. He turned and stepped slowly on the outside edges of his feet, trying to place as little of his weight on the ground as possible, expecting at any moment to hear the click of a mine being activated, to feel the obliterating shrapnel and fire.
Another step, and another. The boy was preternaturally calm, his hand gently resting on Four’s shoulder. Four stopped to breathe, and could smell the boy’s salty skin and dusty hair. He adjusted the boy in his arms, moving him from one side to the other, careful not to change the weight of his body, and then made the final few steps out into the light.
Four knew he had no recourse but to return the boy to the spot where he found him. Perhaps his parents expect him there, he thought. Perhaps they saw him walk to the road and would be looking for him there. So Four conveyed the boy awkwardly, his arm serving as a sort of throne for the child. He carried him back to the road and up the embankment. He placed the boy’s tiny feet, light as a newborn deer’s, on the new asphalt, and stepped back. The boy looked around, as if orienting himself, and then he looked to Four, as if knowing Four would be leaving. He made no complaint.
Freed from the boy’s weight, Four doubled over and gagged. He knelt, his breath short. He stood and paced and punched his thighs. The closeness to death, to his death and the boy’s, affected him more than he expected or desired. Harness, he demanded of himself. Harness this, he thought. Harness, harness. He turned one last time to the boy, waved and strode back to the RS-80.
He retrieved his tent and set it up, ate two nutrition bars and a bag of nuts and waited for Nine, mulling what he would say to him when he arrived. He pictured himself yelling but decided on an even, urgent tone punctuated with caustic words.
When he was finished assembling his tent and had arranged his bedding, he stepped out into the cooling night air and only then did he notice that he’d set up his tent in the shadow of an enormous boulder. He couldn’t understand how he’d missed it earlier. There were no other such rocks anywhere near this, a landscape that so far had been flat and uninterrupted by any outcropping—hundreds of miles from even a foothill. The boulder clearly had not moved in millennia, but it had a tilted disposition that implied it could begin rolling at any moment, crushing Four first.
He wanted to move his tent but he knew it was irrational to do so. He could not give in to superstition or weak-minded fears, so he left the tent where it stood. Inside, he unrolled his pack, inspected his knife and pistol and placed them under his pillow and in his sleeping bag. All the while he cursed Nine. It was Nine’s responsibility to deal with anomalies like the boy on the road. Nine spoke the language, and would have been far more adept at knowing whence the boy came and what he needed. But Nine was nowhere to be found, and had left it to Four, which risked the schedule, and risked the boy’s life and Four’s.
Beyond his irresponsibility and shirking of all duty, Nine had been leaving Four alone at night, which was expressly against company protocol and any rational notion of security. There was at least some chance that the interaction with the child had come to the attention of the locals, who might be angered by it. This was a primary reason for the company’s policy of nonengagement with local populations. All words, gestures and actions could be misinterpreted and lead to delays, debates or, worse, to reprisals and violence. Four was seldom frightened, but now he conjured the image of a group of men arriving, angry about his handling of the boy. They could be genuinely enraged or they could use it as pretext for a shakedown. If men were to come, they would come that night, he was certain. He was so close to where he’d encountered and carried the boy that Four could easily be found. If Nine were here, they would have some degree of safety in numbers. But Nine was not here.
Impossible to work with, Four would write in his report. He had resolved that a report made after this assignment would be necessary. He would not alert the company to any of the present difficulties, but after the fact, when he was home, he would elucidate it all. Lacking all maturity and seriousness. He would be sure that Nine never worked for the company again. Incapable of maintaining attention to the work at hand. Four installed his headphones and pressed play.
IX
AT FIRST LIGHT, Four woke to an unnatural quiet and realized he hadn’t heard Nine return the night before. He rose, left the tent and saw no sign of him. The quad was gone.
Normally this would be alarming but Four knew it likely meant nothing. Nine was not in danger; he had simply stayed elsewhere. Standing outside the tent, Four poured a protein packet into a cup of water, stirred and drank. As he was finishing, he saw a burst of dust come from a rocky slope ahead. Nine descended the hill and joined the road, riding the quad recklessly and still wearing the purple scarf. His helmet was gone.
“Did I miss breakfast?” he asked.
Four could muster nothing to say.
“Sorry I wasn’t back last night,” Nine said. “I was up ahead, around that corner actually, yesterday afternoon, when I came across the most incredible thing. There was a group of men and even some women trying to move the husk of an old airplane. I think it was from the 1950s. Do you know anything about planes?”
Four turned to begin disassembling his tent. He couldn’t look at Nine.
“This looked like an old bomber,” Nine continued. “It must have been shot down during the war. It was on this precarious outcropping, and the whole village was trying to move it down to flat ground. They planned to use it for a shelter. The thing was big enough to sleep thirty. So I was cruising by and saw what was happening, and volunteered to help. I had no choice, right?”
Four packed his tent into the RS-80’s storage compartment and locked it.
“So we tied the quad to the fuselage and about twenty guys pushed, and I gunned the quad, and pretty soon it started moving. It was incredible! We dragged the thing a hundred meters to the middle of town. Now it’s like the centerpiece of the village. The kids were playing in it, and we found a parachute, so the women started cutting that up for clothes and blankets. Fucking extraordinary.”
Four was counting the number of infractions Nine had committed already and lost count at ten. Engaging with the local population. Misappropriating company property. Using a quad, which the company had flown five thousand miles, to haul a fallen bomber? If anything had happened to the quad, Nine would have had to walk to the capital. And his helmet was gone. This man was a vortex—all rationality was devoured within him.
“And then of course they had to have a big party to celebrate the whole deal. There was fresh meat. They never tell you what kind of meat. And more wine. I know it’s technically illegal but everywhere you go they have wine. This was different than the wine from the other night. But incredibly strong. And I was offered someone’s daughter again! But she was too young. Maybe fifteen. Beautiful and tall, and they insisted she was a virgin, but I couldn’t do it. Was I wrong? I felt bad, so I gave her father my helmet. I gave them everything I could.”
Four unlocked the door to the cab. Nine was still talking.
“Man, that was tempting. I mean, why not? She’d be getting married any day now anyway, right? I’d definitely be a better husband than some old man, right? After the war, all the younger men around here are dead.”
X
AGAIN FOUR ATE his lunch without stopping. He had not seen Nine all morning and had had no impediments. The day had been steady and meditative, the roadside unpopulated and bare. As he finished the last drops of his bottled water he saw on the screen that the road was approaching the only bridge on the route to the capital. He squinted into the distance, and so
on could make out the faint outline of a steel bridge traversing what looked to be a forty-meter river span. A different division of the company had designed and built this bridge, Four knew, so he had no qualms about crossing it with a thirty-four-ton machine. In other countries, on other assignments, he had crossed locally made bridges and overpasses and did so with great trepidation. There was only so much engineering expertise in the world.
As he drew closer, the bright glimmer of the river’s slowly moving water emerged. The depth was no more than four feet at its center, with rocky embankments on either side, where women squatted, using aluminum washboards to scrub their clothes clean. As the RS-80 met the bridge’s beginning, Four could see a group of boys wading in the river’s shallows. They were splashing, kicking, the droplets of riverwater shimmering and falling like fireworks.
Four thought of typhoid. This was an area of high risk and he didn’t want to think of the probability that one of those children would contract something from playing in water like this, carelessly splashing it into one another’s mouths. If infected, what recourse would any of them have? There were no doctors from here to the capital.
One of the boys, taller than the others, began waving in the direction of the bridge. Four looked closer and saw that it was not a boy but a man who was waving. A lean man with long hair. It was Nine. Nine was frolicking in the water with the local boys. Four looked up and down the river, and saw the quad on the opposite bank, parked precariously on a steep incline. Nine continued to wave, as if needing confirmation from Four that he had been seen.
