Interior Design

Martin sits on the couch and stares at the papers scattered over the coffee table—it still feels strange writing under a roof instead of the sky in an open African courtyard. Barbara has long since gone off to bed, and maybe now he should take out his secret maps of the Isono farms, examine them. Instead he listens to the faint, familiar mysteries he hadn’t known he’d missed: little snaps and disembodied groans from the wooden floors, a sudden whir in the refrigerator, a rush of water down the pipes from another apartment.

He picks up one of his pages and reads: “An Isono can’t be given a field to farm until marriage, and one can’t be married until initiated and ritually scarred.” Martin is certain it’s too soon to make sense of this, even if his dissertation advisor did say to charge right in. The loops and curves of his handwriting might as well be abstract designs.

In the kitchen the dirty dishes in the sink lose some precarious balance and settle with a quick clatter. My job, Martin thinks, and he walks in and starts washing the evidence of Barbara’s attempt at an African dinner. She’d even set a candle on the floor, its flicker evoking village firelight. The okra sauce had really hit the spot, but those balls of Bisquick were poor substitutes for white yams. Still, he’d eaten what he could without complaining, even though each bite made him think of Kwamla, lying wasted on that straw pallet in the village and waving away whatever food his wife, Yani, offered.

Sighing, Martin sets the last dish in the drainer. Outside, an occasional car passes with a soft growl through the sprawling university town. He’s restless in these cramped rooms, and hungry. There’s an all-night convenience store nearby, so he steps out the door and down the stairs.

Summer is really ending—instead of his body’s sticky sweat he feels the unfamiliar rise of goosebumps. Enjoying the strange sensation, he steps quickly down the street, though soon he wishes he’d gone back for a jacket—rain is on the way, and the bare branches above him twist in the cold wind. A few homeless people—poor souls!—huddle under flapping newspapers in the dark alcove of a tobacco shop. They stare through him as he hurries by.

He’s thoroughly chilled by the time he pushes open the glass door, the bell chiming behind him, and he walks down fluorescent-lit aisles, past dog food and canned ravioli, past chips of all persuasions. Stopping at the percussive purr of the coffee machine, he pours himself a cup, then slips a plastic-wrapped burger and a pouch of fries in the microwave—anything warm will do.

The oven beeps and he pulls the irradiated things out. Martin forces himself to eat the tough meat, the tasteless dry fries, and he scans the racks of tabloids. Gossip about the dead seems to be a theme this week: Elvis has married Natalie Wood, Ari and Jack have been fighting over Jackie since her arrival, Janis Joplin begs John to forget Yoko. Okay, Martin thinks, so what’s an anthropologist to make of all this? The afterlife must be an unexpected hothouse: no rest for the dead, eternal job security for sleazy reporters.

Outside it’s drizzling and even colder than before. Martin heads for home in a half-trot. Cars pass by on the wet pavement with a hissing glide, and he begins to run, hoping no patrol car will drive by to see a young man dashing away from a convenience store at night.

Back at the apartment the radiator squeals and grunts as if alive. Martin gently spreads an extra wool blanket over Barbara and slips into bed. She turns in her sleep, and Martin drapes an arm over her waist before drifting into a strange mixture of sleepy images: Kwamla, his face still round and healthy, sits in his mud house before a television, its screen hissing and crackling from bad reception. Martin is beside him, turning the dial for a clear channel, when a phone rings—the distant sound must come from the forest. Kwamla turns his worried face to Martin. “I’ll be right back,” Martin promises. He runs to the edge of the thick brush and pushes his way through, because it’s somehow very important that he find that phone before the ringing stops.

Barbara stirs against Martin, her legs snug against his, and she opens her eyes to a ceiling of white plaster, not thatch. Outside there’s the whoosh of morning traffic instead of the pounding of wooden mortars and pestles. She breathes in the dry, heated air, closes her eyes again, and catches the last bit of her dream: Yani’s dark face leaning so close and whispering a secret, though Barbara can’t hear her, and as Yani’s face fades Barbara wishes it had been Martin’s—she still hasn’t met him in any of her dreams since their return.

She pushes away the blankets. Martin moans sleepily and turns to her, his hair flattened against his head, eyes half open. He smiles and tickles the rise of her ribs.

“Not too late. I jotted down some notes until I almost fell asleep in the chair.” His hand slinks up slowly to her breasts.

Martin closes his eyes, appears to concentrate. “I can’t remember.” He puts his fingers to his lips and whispers, “Hush.” Then he’s above her, his face looming over hers, and Barbara imagines she’s still asleep and dreaming his gentle motions.

For breakfast Martin serves an array of cereal, bacon, buttery waffles, more than she can eat. Watching him gobble down his eggs, Barbara marvels at how easily he’s become an American again. She’d prefer sweetened corn porridge but keeps this to herself, knowing that last night’s dinner wasn’t a success. Maybe this morning would be a good time to write about Isono food taboos.

But at her cluttered desk she can barely concentrate on her list of culinary dos and don’ts—a pregnant woman cannot eat forest snails, palm nut sauce must be prepared on rest days. She stares at the blank computer screen—how is she ever going to translate the complexities of the last year and a half into chapters, footnotes, and references?

Behind her, as if roaming the winding mud alleyways of the village, Martin takes yet another distracting tour of their small apartment. He returns and writes a sentence or two, then wanders the rooms again. Finally he says, “I’m going out for a minute. We’re out of coffee.”

Barbara looks out the window at Martin walking down the sidewalk and imagines him setting off for the farming fields, leaving her alone again in the village. She and Martin had thought they were so clever, dividing the Isono between them; but as an outsider Martin—to his great frustration—wasn’t allowed to enter the fields, and during the planting season there was almost no one left in the village during the day for Barbara to speak to. She often wandered among the compounds, but those irregular networks of mud houses and courtyards were eerily empty: no women pounding yams, no men lazing in the shade gulping palm wine, no shifting groups of playful children.

She was so happy when she finally met Yani. With a newborn, Yani could rest in the village and take care of her infant for months. Wait, Barbara thinks—she turns from the computer screen and pages through a notebook until she finds that first conversation and remembers sitting in Yani’s compound. The dark plaits of Yani’s hair had glistened in the sun, and she bent her soft face over her daughter Amwe while Barbara administered drops in the red, crusty eyes of the whimpering infant. Yani sang a few lines of a song in a sweet, high-pitched voice, and Barbara asked Yani what the song was about, a question she had to repeat in her imperfect Isono.

Yani lifted her eyes and said, “Do you see the clear sky? It’s a song to ward off drought.” She spoke slowly, so Barbara could translate and write the words down:

The smooth stones of the empty river bed

Are the flat bellies of our hungry children

May it rain, rain and never stop!

Yani looked with amusement at the frantic movement of Barbara’s hand, then cradled her suddenly restless, wailing baby, and Barbara ventured to make her first joke in Isono: “Maybe that’s not Amwe’s favorite song.”

“No,” Yani murmured, loosening her cloth wrapper. She fit a breast to her baby’s wide mouth. “She’s crying over some mistake she made in her last life.”

“Yes, all babies can remember their past lives,” Yani replied, again speaking slowly enough for Barbara to follow. “When they cry, they’re remembering a sadness; when they laugh, an old happiness.” She looked down at her quietly nursing daughter. “When they’re silent, no one knows what they’re thinking.”

“Could she tell you when she grows up?” Barbara asked, scribbling more notes, delighted with this talkative young woman.

Yani swatted a fly away from her baby’s face and continued. “When babies finally speak their first word, they make their choice for this life. They forget the past.”

Yani paused, seemingly entranced at the depths of ignorance revealed by Barbara’s question, and then she said, “If I could remember my past life, I wouldn’t have made the mistakes I’ve made in this one. If my eyes are open, why should I stumble?”

Now Barbara turns back to the blank screen. Why indeed? she thinks, and types, “The Isono’s chain of lives is divided by an unbridgeable gap of memory.” Barbara pauses, wonders what her friend might make of this sentence, and as she continues to write she worries whether she’s moving closer to or farther away from the Isono.

Martin chews his pen and stares at the latest version of his latest sentence: “The Isono practice an agricultural expressionism at odds with their usual social constraints.” Where should he go from here? Barbara’s swift clacking at the computer behind him sounds like the collective scraping of hand hoes against the ground, and when he closes his eyes he could still be sitting at the edge of those clearings in the forest, unable to enter, watching lines of men and women scraping and piling soil into small pyramids where yams would soon grow.

Occasionally Martin had touched a sandaled toe to a tiny corn stalk for a secret thrill when no one was looking. Why couldn’t that have been enough for him—when he did manage to sneak into those fields, what good had it done him?

If only someone had answered his questions! “Why plant corn here, yams over there?” he once called out to Busu, a frail- looking elder who somehow worked harder than anyone else. But the old man merely said, “You would only understand if you were an Isono,” adding with a wry smile, “and then there would be no need to speak.”

Martin tried Kwamla, hoping he would be as talkative as his wife, Yani. “Why do you arrange your fields differently from Goli and Aia?” he asked. Kwamla averted his eyes, staring down at the soil, and said, “That’s our custom.”

At Martin’s exasperated frown Kwamla grinned and put down his hoe. The elaborate scarification marks on his stomach were dark sweaty beads, and he looked so healthy then. He mimicked holding a notebook and wagged a finger across an invisible page. “Why do you always make marks on paper?”

Martin laughs quietly now, as he did then. He picks up his pen, murmurs, “It’s our custom,” and tries another sentence: “The crop organization of the farming fields is an unusual form of individual expression in a society of such tight social constraints.” But wait, he thinks, didn’t I just write something like that?

He looks over to Barbara. Her head is bent toward the computer, all those little green words shining back at her on the dark screen—how easy it is for her to write.

He wears a jacket this time, zipped up tight before he hits the sidewalk. Intent on walking nowhere in particular, Martin continues block after block, past clusters of shops and apartments. Down a side street, he stops: near the back of a restaurant an old man in a frayed, dark coat is poking through a dumpster, dropping who knows what into a plastic garbage bag. What will happen to him when it’s really cold—isn’t there a shelter to go to?

Martin backs up, turns down another street, and sees a shining movie marquee. He realizes with some surprise that he and Barbara still haven’t been to a movie since their return. But no one’s in the ticket booth, and he can see through the glass door that the concession stand is deserted, too. The last show must be ending and the employees are puttering around in the office. He slips inside and can just make out muffled car squeals and gunshots, a pulsating soundtrack. Why not take a quick peek? He hurries through the empty lobby, glancing back and forth nervously.

“Hey, you!” someone shouts behind him. Martin pushes through swinging doors into the darkened theater and a spectacular, technicolor car crash. Half stumbling down the aisle, he ducks into the first empty seat.

As his eyes adjust to the darkness he watches an usher pace halfheartedly with a flashlight. The minimum wage certainly isn’t worth any possible trouble from finding me, Martin thinks, and anyway, for all he knows I’m just a homeless guy looking for a little warmth. All around him faces are turned up to the giant screen. Martin can’t imagine what an Isono villager might make of the swift pace of images: cars give chase, cars collide, cars overturn. Martin eases into his chair and breathes in the salty essence of popcorn.

Still awake in bed, Barbara listens to the click of the front door, then Martin’s footsteps to the edge of the bed—he’s back from wherever. She’s insulted that he assumes she’s asleep: it would be nice if he said Hello, or at least whisper Good Night. But when he lies down beside her his palm cups a shoulder blade, squeezes. His fingers slip along the smooth bumps down the ridge of her spine, and this reminds her of the Isono scarification marks: those little raised knobs of flesh forming unpredictable swirling patterns, interwoven arcs and circles. Martin traces patterns against the tight muscles of her back and she stirs, slowly pressing her ankle up the length of his leg.

In the morning Barbara pages through her folder of the Isono scarification designs, laughing when she thinks that at first she and Martin called them beauty marks, a kind of jewelry that lasted a lifetime. How lucky she’d been one morning, when during her route of greetings she came upon a tense village meeting. The elders sat upright in a semicircle of wooden stools, wearing colored robes slung over the shoulder, facing two young men she had never seen before, dressed in sleek, well-tailored shirts and pants.

Something secret was up, because just as one of the young men began speaking rapidly to the elders—the cigarette dangling from his mouth obviously an act of bravado—an old woman came up to Barbara and offered to show her a stash of traditional cloth. To refuse an invitation was extremely impolite, so Barbara pretended she misheard. “Tomorrow? Yes, I’ll come, then. Many thanks,” she said. But before she could ease away, a thin, firm hand was on her shoulder: the old woman spoke slowly and clearly, determined to be understood.

When Yani came by later that day for more medicine—her frail daughter was ill again—she sat down by the desk under the palm frond veranda and anxiously watched Barbara spread cream over Amwe’s rash. “I’m afraid that my cousin is bewitching my child. Her own child was born breech and died—she’s surely jealous…”

Yani recounted her fears while Barbara made careful notes on what types of relatives could bewitch each other. Yet when Yani was done, Barbara couldn’t help asking, “Who were those two men at the trial this morning?”

Yani was silent. She cradled her child and stared off at the huge wall of trees surrounding the village, until finally Barbara said, “Yani, we’re friends. How can I truly understand you if I don’t understand your people?”

Yani stood up. “I don’t think I can talk with you any more,” she said sadly. “Our farm isn’t strong this season, and I need to work in the fields more.”

It was true that the sporadic rains might not produce the best harvest, but Barbara would not let herself lose Yani. She took a handful of bills from her pocket, blushing at her own bravado. “This won’t make the rains come, but it can help pay for medicines and divinations for your daughter’s illness. Take these,” she pleaded. “In my country, words are valuable.”

Yani hesitated, glancing about her, and then, with perhaps an admiring smile at Barbara’s argument, took the money and slipped it under the waistband of her skirt. She sat back down on her stool.

“Who were those men?” Barbara asked again, but still Yani sat mute, though now she fixed her eyes carefully on the battered manual typewriter on the desk. Barbara understood: the Isono considered the clatter of typing ugly—the noise kept most villagers from the courtyard. She slipped a piece of paper in the typewriter and began pounding away Yani’s name, the date, and the question she had just asked, and then she tapped comma after comma across the page while she waited.

Yani flinched at the sound, but it was her protection. “They were born in this village, and their families worked hard to send them to the university.” Yani spat, one of those marvelous arcs the villagers were so good at. “Now, because they live in the city and work in a government office, they think they aren’t Isono.”

Yani looked away, tucked her baby closer to her breast. “They have told the elders they won’t allow themselves to be scarred in this year’s ritual.”

Yani hesitated. Marking time, Barbara banged away plus and minus signs until Yani said, “They won’t be able to marry an Isono girl.”

“Why?” Barbara asked again. She pressed the space bar until the bell pinged and Yani finally said, “Every Isono has a spirit living within.” Avoiding Barbara’s startled gaze, Yani looked away. Then she said, so slowly, so quietly, “When I feel an itch, it’s the spirit rubbing against me inside. Our scarification designs reveal our spirits’ paths.”

Exhilarated, Barbara typed out Yani’s answer and then a barrage of exclamation points. Listening to the happy squeals of children running down the convoluted alleyways of a nearby compound, she wanted to join them, hooting with pleasure.

“A spirit travels everywhere in the body, but its true home is here,” Yani said, gesturing from her chest to her waist. “It wants to be born, just as a baby kicks in the womb.”

“The diviner sees, from the points that itch, the hidden design. But why ask any more questions? You can see the women’s initiation tomorrow.”

Now Barbara regards the pages of this interview: a typed crazy quilt of oddly spaced questions and answers and repeated punctuation marks of all assortments. How different this looks from her sparse notes on the ritual.

She had stood among the silent crowd and watched the young girls of the village lying on their backs, eyes tightly closed, waiting. The diviner was Mokla—the same old woman who had led Barbara away from the trial—and she was dressed in white, kneeling before an animal skin and arranging a knife, small chunks of charcoal, a pile of ash. When she noticed Barbara she scowled. Barbara set her notebook and pen down on the ground and stepped back a few paces, until Mokla turned away from her.

Then the diviner moved among the initiates, murmuring words Barbara couldn’t make out. Slowly, the girls began pointing with trembling hands to this itching spot, that one, and Mokla marked the points with a piece of charcoal. When those asymmetrical, elegant patterns were done, Mokla pinched the first girl’s skin between thumb and forefinger, slit it, and applied ash to make the wound pucker and darken. None of the girls screamed despite the pain on their faces, the blood dribbling down their sides, and soon Mokla’s white gown was stained with red streaks. Without her notebook Barbara had to watch carefully, but it was hard, so hard.

After the ritual, Barbara stayed in their hut for days, dizzy at the thought of that bloodletting. Martin sweetly stayed with her and claimed she had malaria, thanking all the villagers who wished her good health. But she knew her husband was anxious to return to the fields. He wanted to puzzle out a recent mystery: even though the corn crop had suddenly become infested with caterpillars, the elders declared that no one could kill them.

Finally one morning Martin said, “The Isono may not have a word for privacy, but I’ll bet before long they’ll have one because of us.”

Ashamed of her weakness, she told herself the ritual wasn’t mutilation—no, not at all—it was art. In a culture where the women improvised patterns on manioc cakes before baking them, and even children sliced designs into orange rinds, the diviners were the supreme artists. When Barbara finally left the hut, determined to overcome her squeamishness, she began to ask villagers if she could draw their scarred designs.

Now Barbara leans back from the computer and peers out the window, hoping to see Martin. He’s left her alone again, off on another errand. Why don’t I go out? she wonders—It’s not as if I’m confined to an Isono compound. Sighing, she rests her hands on the keys, then types, “The scars are maps of the interior: the body is a spirit’s abode, and a spirit is a guest each Isono must accommodate.” She glances down at her drawing of one of the designs, can almost see blood flow out from the scarred points.

Martin sets the bags of groceries down on the counter. Barbara’s sketches of Isono body decorations are everywhere, littering the walls, the refrigerator, the kitchen cabinets—they’re even taped up on the backs of the chairs. I suppose I deserve this, he thinks. Pulling cheese and packaged tomatoes from a bag, he wishes that he had the luxury of using his maps of the Isono farm plots. But how could he ever explain to Barbara why he’s kept them from her?

She walks in and without a word helps carry bottles of juice to the refrigerator. Martin approaches one of her sketches threateningly. “Where’s my pen?” he asks. “I have a sudden urge to play connect-the-dots.”

“Oh really? Are you thinking about starting up an Isono beauty parlor?” And now he just can’t help himself, he searches through a drawer and says, “Let me get the knife sharpener….

Frustrated that he can’t use what he’s not supposed to know, Martin pushes pork cutlets into the oven, chops away at vegetables, and then stirs and stirs them in a pan. If only he hadn’t lingered behind at the end of that workday, at the edge of the already damaged fields. Because of the sparse rain the corn was barely waist high, the yam vines were just beginning to poke up from the dirt mounds, and everywhere were signs of the caterpillars’ hunger. Martin watched one of those voracious creatures efficiently chew a path through a corn leaf. Fascinated, he drew closer, and the caterpillar, at the end of the leaf, reared up briefly. Along its pale underbelly were dark, convoluted patterns, and then Martin finally knew why no Isono would dare touch one.

“You’re lucky you were born with those beauty marks, bub,” he whispered. He took out his notebook, listened to the distant cries of a flock of birds, the flutter of corn leaves in the wind—no, it sounded like something was creeping through the stalks. Martin crouched down: maybe this was some foraging animal he should warn the Isono about. He peered in.

Kwamla, hunched down, was crawling along with a sharpened stick. He flicked a caterpillar from a corn leaf and then impaled it against the ground. When he turned to slip the crushed insect into a cloth bag he saw Martin.

Kwamla sat up, the broad green leaves waving in the wind around his shoulders, his face filled with something like terror. “No one must know,” he said, “no one must know.”

Martin almost whispered back, “No one will,” but instead he waited, curious how Kwamla would react to his silence.

A few long moments passed, and then quietly, with a resigned gesture of his hand, Kwamla said, “Come.” He motioned to his fields, to those private, winding paths, and Martin understood this was a gift for his silence.

Martin hesitated, accepted. He took out his notebook and, carefully counting the number of steps he took along each little trail, quickly roughed out the arrangement of crops. But he needed two, maybe three more maps for a decent comparative study. So when he finished his map he stared off at Goli’s neighboring farm, turned to Kwamla and said, “No one will know.” Kwamla winced at this echo of his words, then took a few steps into Goli’s field, and Martin followed, his shame rising.

“What’s that burning?” Barbara shouts from the living room. Martin looks down—the vegetables are scorched in the pan. He hurries the mess over to the sink, leaving a trail of smoke behind him.

They eat what’s left of dinner in silence—Barbara must still be annoyed at him for his nasty little joke. By way of apology, knowing she hasn’t been out of the apartment for days, he asks, “Hey, you want to catch a movie tonight?”

“No,” she says, barely looking up, “I have to work. I’m in the middle of something right now.” And you’re not, he imagines her thinking.

While she washes the dishes he slips out for another of his nightly tours. He walks faster now through the cold air, ranging from street to street, but when he skirts a small lot he stops, surprised to see two bundled figures—a man, a woman—crouching against a fence, beside a shopping cart stuffed with clothes. Why aren’t they at the shelter? He imagines a large room, rows and rows of cots: maybe it’s not quite cold enough to venture to the common misery, the lack of privacy.

Martin would like to talk to them, even offer some help, but he’s also afraid somehow, and he marches off in another direction. Curious to see if he can actually become lost, he wanders down one street after another, through neighborhoods he’s never seen, until he approaches a busy bar, a line of motorcycles parked beneath the neon signs advertising different brands of beer. A rough crowd lounges by the door: leather jackets with sewn patches of skulls, sharks, lightning. Interesting iconography, Martin thinks, but such a limited repertoire of acceptable images. He slowly passes by a man with long dark hair framing a pockmarked face: on his leather jacket are pictures of two bloody fists, and there’s a tattoo on one of his wrists—the end of a snake’s tail, perhaps, or a dragon’s.

Martin runs away from the sudden laughter behind him and turns swiftly down one side-street, then another. But he’s not sure if the steps he hears are merely the echoes of his own. Looking back, Martin sees nothing, but it’s dark—Who can tell, he thinks, who can tell? He stops short and crouches beside a mailbox, waiting for the sound of pursuing footsteps.

Barbara listens to Martin close the door behind him, his faint steps down the stairs—every night now he goes out, sometimes for hours. Why won’t he tell her where he’s off to, why can’t she simply ask him? Maybe she should follow along, take a break and not work so hard. But Barbara hesitates, remembering ruefully the Isono’s two phrases for marriage that Yani taught her: the men’s phrase, “To offer a road,” and the women’s, “To follow behind.”

Yani’s soft face had been pinched that day with anxiety over Kwamla. “What can I do?” she said. “He eats almost nothing, he refuses to see a diviner. I know he’s being bewitched, because our farm has done so well while others have done so poorly.”

Barbara murmured sympathy—the poor man looked so thin and haunted. Suddenly there arose in a nearby compound the usual angry hubbub of Yao and Sunu, a newly married couple.

Yani clicked her tongue, continued nursing Amwe. “Those two—their scars don’t match. The paths of their spirits rarely touch.” Barbara slipped a piece of paper into the typewriter and tapped away while Yani said, “In the best marriages the scarification designs become full during lovemaking, when the scars rub and fit together.” As if ashamed of her words, Yani stopped.

“But you,” she said suddenly, staring hard at Barbara’s face, “how can you know your husband if you don’t know the movements of his spirit?”

“Good question,” Barbara says now to the empty room. She rubs her back against the chair, imagining an Isono couple making love with those curving ridges of skin: their dark bodies elaborate mazes leading to each other, nipples rubbing against chest scars, fingers following the raised marks, the patterns channels for sweat.

Barbara pushes away from the computer and stands up: after burrowing for so long into their culture, now the Isono are burrowing into her. Her back itches, just beneath her left shoulder blade where she can’t reach. She grabs a pen, bends her arm back awkwardly, and rubs until the tingling is satisfied.

There’s a slight tickle just below her ribs, and before she scratches that too she imagines a design of ridges tingling her entire body—smooth, hairless nobs of skin hidden beneath her clothes. Why not turn the pen’s felt tip around and mark the itch? Barbara laughs nervously, but she pulls up her blouse and draws a nice, dark dot. Another itch rises up, just below her left breast, and she marks that spot with a deft touch of the pen. Then she strips off her blouse and bra and continues a careful catalogue of sudden itches that seem to have no relation to thought or intention.

Barbara stares down at her torso, foolishly inked all over. Beauty marks indeed. The points scattered below her breasts and the wavering line leading across her stomach aren’t beautiful at all—merely signs of a lopsided and aimless spirit. What if we returned to the Isono with our bodies speckled with pen marks? We could tell them that in our country initiations are performed after marriage, that we only draw our spirits’ travels and then chart new paths once the old ones wear off. But Barbara imagines an elder asking, “Why do your spirits change their paths so often—why are they so restless?”

The radiator begins to clank—it’s cold outside, and Martin could come home any moment. What would he say if he saw her like this? She pads to the bathroom and takes a shower. Dark inky stains slip down her body like bloody trails, and Barbara shudders. She scrubs and scrubs until it hurts.

Martin makes himself sit at his damned desk and tries to rework another sentence: “Isono farms are exclusionary space that admit no strangers. Here, apparently, is where one truly becomes Isono.” He puts down the pen. Kwamla would have felt guilty whether I found him killing those bugs or not, Martin tells himself, and I did keep my promise—I didn’t tell anyone, not even my wife. What more could I have done? On his last day in the village Martin spent hours at Kwamla’s compound. Sitting beside his friend and trying not to stare at his wasted body, Martin waited for a brief moment when they would be alone. “Please don’t die, please,” he’d finally whispered. “I’ll never tell anyone.” Stretched out on a palm frond chair, Kwamla merely offered a wan smile, his thin face a mask Martin couldn’t read.

He stirs his coffee until it’s tepid. Behind him, Barbara clatters away at the computer—all day she’s been stuck to the chair. Martin sighs and puts on his heavy coat, though he doesn’t want to go out, afraid of where he’ll find himself this time. He walks to the door, sure that Barbara is watching him.

His hand grips the doorknob but he doesn’t turn around. “Nowhere in particular—just a walk.”

He hears her press the Save button. The computer’s contented grunting starts up.

Though Martin doesn’t reply, he doesn’t move either. “Do you want to come along?”

He turns and strides toward her, anger rising up from who knows where. “Just what makes you think I’m not working when I walk?”

Barbara hesitates. “Your desk. When you’re gone I don’t see any writing being done.”

“Oh, very good.” Barbara mimics his gesture and taps at her forehead. “Is this what you’ll do at your thesis defense? Think you’ll pass?”

“Shut up. Worry about yourself. Keep pecking, pecking, pecking away!” His rage is a thing that must be shaken loose, and he sweeps stacks of papers from his desk. They scatter on the floor and Martin, so embarrassed, wants to escape the apartment even more. He slams the door behind him.

It’s so cold outside—he can’t take these walks much longer, and he paces himself as if trying to hurry away from his unfairness to Barbara, breath fanning out and dissipating before him as he huffs down avenues and short alleys. No homeless people out tonight, thank God.

Passing through a neighborhood of single-story boxes he hears the distant blare of a bell, an alarm, perhaps. Martin crosses a main road and follows the noise down a long stretch of small stores to a hat shop at the end of the block. It is an alarm—someone tried to break in.

The window display is bathed in a gray sheen from the street lamps. Martin draws closer, looks inside. The dim light in the back of the store casts odd shadows, and those clusters of hat racks could be a forest found nowhere else: stunted trees weighted with strange, bulbous fruit. Watching his reflection in the window, Martin moves as if he’s actually skulking in there—he raises an arm and his shadowy fingers try to pluck a fruit from a branch. He stops. There he is—the thief in the field. He leans closer, presses his hand against its image, feels the plate glass vibrating from the alarm.

A police car roars down the avenue, its light flashing. For a moment Martin stands there before the store as if exposed, caught, and then he dashes off, the siren wailing behind him. What am I doing to myself? he thinks, but he doesn’t slow down, racing into the shadows of a side street, then cutting across a dark yard.

He crouches behind the shrubs along a darkened house and waits. Through the branches, eerie streaks of light and dark are cast by the police car’s cherry top as it passes. Then the lights go on in the window above him and Martin tears off, crossing an empty street. Another police car passes by the intersection and stops. He rushes away from its siren, across another backyard. Hopping a fence, he hurtles through the dark, down a line of trees—a sort of alley between backyards. I’m only guilty if I’m caught, he thinks, stray branches scratching his face. I have to get back home, back home. His chest aching from the cold, Martin stops at the thought of facing Barbara: how much longer can he keep his secret from her? I should just rip up those maps, just rip them up!

Then Martin continues to run down that alley of trees until he comes to the dead end of a brick garage. Somewhere behind him a dog growls and barks. Kneeling in the dark, he grabs a smooth, oval stone, vaguely remembers an Isono song Barbara once mentioned to him—something about a drought—and waits for the sound of swift, padding feet. But when he hears the dog straining against a chain fence he cuts through a garden, a playground, and then an unlit parking lot.

The sirens now seem closer, and Martin stops at the edge of the street, at first afraid to cross the open space. At the other side is a blanketed figure, curled up on the sidewalk over a library’s heating grate. The perfect place to hide, Martin thinks, sprinting across the street. He lies down on the steel grid and slips under an edge of the blanket.

He smells stale breath and looks at the sleeping man beside him: his mouth is half open, a dark space where his front teeth should be. Trying not to move, Martin rests his face against the steel grid of the grate and feels the welcome heat rising up, his face tingling as he lies still, minute after minute slowly passing.

The interlocking sirens suddenly sound louder, and the man beside him stirs and turns. Martin can see traces of the grate’s pattern marked on the man’s stubbly cheek: little squares echoing along the jaw line. Martin traces his fingers against the slight imprints on his own cheek, tries to imagine the design—his own beauty marks. Well, well, he thinks, this has been one hell of an initiation.

A siren wails nearby and the man stirs again, his brow crinkled from troubles Martin can’t imagine: on a night like this he must have nowhere to go. Or perhaps this grate is his last, tiny spot of territory. Ah, trespassing again. Suddenly, desperately, he needs to confess to someone, anyone, he needs this stranger’s forgiveness. And if I do confess, Martin thinks, if he’d even listen to my story, would he let me stay here and hide? Martin has to know. The man smacks his cracked lips in half-sleep—he might wake at any moment—and Martin reaches out under the blanket, certain that a gentle nudge is all that’s needed.

Barbara stares mournfully at Martin’s pages scattered at her feet and wishes she hadn’t been so cruel. But did he have to leave? She’s so afraid she’ll mark herself up again while he’s gone. Barbara bends down, about to busy herself with picking up the batches of pages, when she notices rough diagrams of some sort: she reads measurements, the names of crops.

They’re maps of the Isono farms. Somehow Martin managed to sneak in and draw these… and he hid them from her, she realizes, he hid them. Yet Barbara manages to check her anger—one of the maps lying next to her looks oddly familiar, though she has to turn it upside-down in order to read Martin’s angular scrawl in the corner that identifies Yani and Kwamla’s farm. Strange—now it doesn’t look familiar. Flipping it back again, Barbara leans over, peers closely until it seems her hands can feel the individual nubs of the carpet, and she shivers: it’s as if Yani is before her.

To make sure, Barbara scrambles to the desk, searches through a folder for her own sketches, finds Yani’s scarifications, and compares them with the farm: detail by detail, they’re almost certainly the same design! She sits down, nearly breathless, and then, wondering if this pattern repeats elsewhere, she jumps up and quickly pages through one of her notebooks. She’d once mapped out Yani’s compound—would that match too?

Her crude map doesn’t look anything like the other two, no matter which way she turns it. But there’s more, she knows there must be more. She pulls out her picture of Kwamla’s scarifications and places it beside the compound. Again, no match. But on a hunch Barbara turns the compound sketch upside-down, and the asymmetrical arrangement of courtyards and mud huts match the clusters of beaded scars: they’re virtually identical.

Feeling as if secret paths are being cleared inside her, Barbara recalls the ritual for a new compound, when the entire village would walk through it, following the head of the household and his wife. And then the Isono, so far away, rear up to engulf Barbara and her faltering understanding: to walk down those convoluted alleyways, she thinks, must be like a spirit tracing the same paths inside the body. The Isono were making familiar landscapes for their spirits!

But why upside-down? She arranges the designs on the coffee table and stares and stares. Nothing comes to her, but her own strange tracery of paths within makes Barbara willing to attempt anything now, and she picks up her sketch of Yani’s scars and places it against her own stomach. Trying to imagine Yani planning the arrangement of crops, she looks down, and there is the design of the farm. Of course—hadn’t Yani said that a spirit wishes to be born? So its paths should face down, like an infant in the womb. From an Isono’s perspective, this must be the true way to view the scars. Barbara walks back and forth across the room, anxious, shamed. My god, I drew all the designs the wrong way. Why didn’t anyone tell me?

Because we were outsiders, strangers, she realizes with a rush of sadness. But now I know, now I know! Barbara flips on the computer and types every interpretation she can think of until her fingers begin to tingle, until she’s even sure she understands why outsiders aren’t allowed to enter the fields: the farms must be a kind of sacred space, where the spirits are reborn each year when the crops rise.

The sudden wail of distant police sirens breaks Barbara’s concentration, and she stops and scans row after electronic row. She’s come up with speculation, nothing more. The wall of bright green words facing her on the dark screen looks like the forest that surrounded and locked the village into its own curious energies, but now suddenly lit up and phosphorescent in the night. Even the howling of those sirens outside sounds like some nocturnal forest animal.

If only I’d known enough to ask the right questions, she thinks, would Yani have shared these secrets with someone who wasn’t Isono, or had our intimacy really been false, a joke? Imagining Yani in the room with her, just out of sight, Barbara asks, “Were we friends?” There’s no answer.

And what about Martin’s betrayal? They were supposed to share all their data. How could he have possibly kept these maps from her, how can he leave her alone night after night in this apartment? He’s as much a stranger as Yani, Barbara thinks, yet he’s not here to answer questions either—who knows where he is or when he’ll return. She stares at the screen, as if those words might help her understand the mystery of her husband. She sighs, turns off the computer.

Her eyes hurt. It’s time to sleep. Slowly Barbara prepares for bed. Again and again, as she brushes her teeth, washes her tired face and then undresses, she pauses, thinking she hears a key turning in the door.

But even when she’s lying in the dark under the thick covers Martin still hasn’t returned. And then, as though she hasn’t wearily closed her eyes, Barbara is back in an Isono compound, but she’s not sure which one. The sky is black, moonless: on such a night, with just a few steps the village could suddenly become a dark maze. She’s lost.

Or perhaps Martin is lost and she’s searching for him. Barbara feels her way forward cautiously in the dark by touching the rough edges of the cool mud walls. A piece breaks off, but she can’t hear it fall. Barbara listens to the strange silence—no baby’s wail or distant laughter, no insistent insect hum from the forest. She hears Martin now—a sharp cough, almost like a door clicking open. She’s certain he’s looking for her too—there are his footsteps—but where are the compound’s corridors leading him? Barbara feels her way forward slowly, hoping that Martin is doing the same. At any moment he could be just around the next turn. And then, through the darkness, there’s his hand on her shoulder, gently shaking her as if she’s been asleep.