IF NORMA were honest, she might remember Rey’s disappearance as what it was: a series of tiny flashes of light, a rising sense of danger, and then, in place of some plosive event, only this: a surreal, mystifying stillness. He leaves for a trip into the jungle—a trip like dozens he’s taken before. Then there is the cold, hard fact of his silence. No news, no word, and Norma’s life changing with each passing day, flattened beneath a crushing weight, bled of its color.
It had been ten years now.
The early days were torturous: a pain emanating outwards from each cell in her body, and the fact of his absence everywhere. She stopped strangers in the street, inspected the faces of people on buses and trains, their wrinkles, their smiles, the shapes of their tired eyes, even the shoes they wore. Each day her husband did not return, she felt herself losing her balance, the work of carrying on too much and too cruel. The ways she missed him were endless: his smell still pervaded their apartment, that mixture of sweat and cheap soap. She missed his dimpled cheeks, his kiss, and the affected way he read the newspaper, as if his sharp gaze could bore a hole in the text. He folded it into lengthwise thirds and was embarrassed to admit he indulged only in the sports section. She missed this, too: his body, his touch. His hands running up and down her back. Her own fingernails finding his spine, clawing, as if she could tear into him. She missed the face he made, always the same anguished expression, eyes flittering closed, deep concentration, and when he was behind her, she loved it, but she missed seeing him, seeing the blood rush to his face, the clouding of his features, the release. At night, she stayed awake and thought of him, too afraid to touch herself. Dread was everywhere. What if he never came back?
For ten years, he had existed in memory, in that netherworld between death and life—despicably, sadistically called missing—and she had lived with the specter of him, had carried on as normal, as if he were away on an extended vacation and not disappeared and likely dead. In the beginning, she had played detective, and in a sense, everything had been easier since she stopped. Not given up; simply stopped. In the first year of his absence, she had visited each of his colleagues at the university to ask for information. Where had he gone? It was a bent older gentleman who told her: he wasn’t sure, but he’d heard the number 1797. What was he researching? Medicinal plants, said another, but this much she knew. Had they heard anything? And here they all shook their heads and looked away.
One professor told her Rey’d had a taste for psychoactives, jungle juju, he said, but this wasn’t news, was it? Norma shook her head: of course not, of course not. It was a bright autumn day, and the war had been over for two months. The list of collaborators had been read on the radio a week before. The professor scratched his beard and looked distractedly out the window at a swatch of blue sky. His office and his person were in disarray. “Maybe he just lost it.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s just a thought. Took too much of something. Went native.” He smoothed the wrinkles of his suit. “Maybe he’ll snap out of it. Maybe he’ll wander back.”
Norma shook her head. It made no sense. “What about the list they read? What about the IL? Was Rey IL?”
Why did she ask? Did she even want to know? It was the same every time: a blank look, a stammered response, and then a pause as her husband’s colleagues took the measure of her. Doors were closed discreetly, blinds drawn, telephones unplugged—all this at the mere mention of the IL. But the war was over, wasn’t it?
This professor turned to face her. They had known each other socially—Christmas parties and birthdays, nothing more.
“Were you followed?” he asked.
It hadn’t occurred to her. “Who would follow me?”
The professor sighed. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I knew your husband well. We were at the Moon together. He wasn’t IL. He couldn’t have been.”
“What do you mean?”
“Everyone knows there was no such thing.”
Norma was silent. She hardly breathed.
“It was a government invention, a fraud. Something the Americans cooked up to scare us.”
“Oh,” she managed.
“You’d do well to be careful when asking questions such as these.” He paused and took a deep breath. “Someone might misinterpret.”
Norma thanked him for his time, gathered her things and left quickly.
She scoured the papers for any news, but there was so much to tell about the end of the war. Who had time for a missing professor? There were battles to write about and lists of casualties to collect. The country seemed to be collapsing on itself: a shootout between decommissioned soldiers erupted in an underground bar in The Thousands. A man in Asylum Downs was run out of the neighborhood, his house set ablaze after his name had been listed among the collaborators. It was the war in its death throes, every day something new, the violence sputtering to its anarchic conclusion.
Still, the city was becoming accustomed to the idea of peace. She knew by now what his absence meant, but when the war ended, there was euphoria, a sudden and unexpected reason to smile. Norma had expected Rey to come home, sunburned and smiling, haggard perhaps, but alive, shaking his head and telling the tale of another close call searching for medicinal plants at the edge of a war zone. He was a scientist, first and foremost, an ethnobotanist committed to the preservation of disappearing plant species. This is what he told her, and for a time, she believed him. She had always wanted to believe him. When they were newlyweds, she had asked him: what about that night we met, the dancing, the ID? Where did they take you?
“They cured me,” Rey told her. “They took me to the Moon and they fixed me right up. No more,” he said. “I’m not interested in politics. I’m interested in living.”
So he went into the jungle and returned with stories of insects the size of his hand, of dense, verdant valleys and their mysteries, of fluttering birds plumed in electric colors. And then he didn’t return, and Norma waited. Then word filtered around the radio of a battle fought near the town of 1797 in the eastern jungle, of men captured and some killed. The rumors said many were buried and would soon be lost in the impossibly thick forest. They said it had been a slaughter, a victory celebration in the form of mass graves and anonymous dead—what does the end of a war mean if not that one side ran out of men willing to die? Peace was coming, now it was here. The battle near 1797 was ignored. And there were others: the war’s coda, a string of killings in faraway places that were better left alone. In the city, there had been a battle as well, but now it was over; couldn’t the people be forgiven if they noticed the sky for the first time in years, mistook its opaline glaze for sunlight, and began to forget?
There were two kinds of lists in those days, official and unofficial, and each contained different tallies of dead and missing, of exiled and imprisoned. With the right connections, Norma thought, she might be able to see those other lists, the real ones, that grim accounting of the war and its yield. But she never did. The next months passed in a haze, Norma going through the motions of living. She appeared at work, read the news without understanding or even attempting to understand what she was reading. She asked for a break from her Sunday-night show. Her many fans called in, expressing concern: was Norma all right? She had made the rounds at the university, been told in a variety of ways that the IL was not real, that her husband would be coming home, that it was only a matter of time, that he was on a drug binge in the forest, that the stress had finally gotten to him. Many refused to see her at all, citing their busy schedules or family obligations, but she sensed they were afraid of her. She didn’t eat, spent a few nights a week at the station, afraid to go home and confront the empty apartment. When she returned to Lost City Radio, she was dispirited, her honey-voice weary, but the calls came anyway, by the dozens: with the fighting over, people were now asking, with sudden abandon, where their loved ones had wandered off to.
One day, when her condition could no longer be ignored, Elmer suggested they go to the prisons. Rey had been mistaken for an IL sympathizer, Elmer reasoned, which explained his name on the list that had been read on the air. He’d been found lost and wandering through the eastern jungle, and arrested. There, among the various half-dead in prison, she might find him, and, if he were there, strings could be pulled. Elmer was a friend then. He encouraged her. Papers were filed, permits granted, and the station, still currying favor with the newly victorious government, promised a positive report on conditions inside. The war had been over for a year.
Norma and Elmer drove to the prison in the station’s four-by-four, through neighborhoods of haphazard construction, past homes with street numbers scrawled in chalk on the outside walls, past shanties topped with metal sheeting. They presented their papers at various roadblocks, some manned by uniformed soldiers, some by neighborhood thugs, and everything was solved with a few coins and a deferential smile. Children chased the truck as it sped by, waving through the billows of dust. They drove through communities whose essential feature was their color: a burnt, dry shade of yellowish gray, everything bathed in murky sunlight. These were the areas that Norma could just make out from the station on a clear day, where the mountains first appeared and city seemed to end—only it didn’t. It never ended. More people arrived each day as the jungle and the sierra emptied of human life. The capital’s new residents made homes here, in the inhospitable folds of the lower mountains, in the city’s dry and teeming servants’ quarters.
The prison was a sprawling complex, its watchtowers rising high above the surrounding neighborhood in a district known as Collectors. There were crowds of people by the visitors’ door, women selling newspapers, sandwiches, and knickknacks to bribe the guards with: foreign coins, plastic key-chains, old comic books. Norma and Elmer waited in line with restless mothers, with anxious wives and girlfriends. They were all turned away.
Except Norma and Elmer, who passed through the first of a half-dozen locked doors: they stepped into a long corridor to another lock and another young man with a weapon. Each time, they were told to pull up their right sleeves, and the guard stamped their forearms. At the next gate, the guard would count the number of stamps, add his own, and wave them through. Eventually, they were ushered into a spare, windowless room with humming fluorescent light above. There were three metal folding chairs. They sat down to wait.
“Don’t be nervous,” Elmer said after a while. “It’s not so bad. Look at your arm.”
So she pulled back her sleeve once more and inspected the blurred purple markings. There was no state seal or a flag or code of any kind. She smiled. CITY’S BEST OFFICE SUPPLY, VETCHER BROTHERS CANNERY, A–1 WINDOW REPAIR, THE METROPOLE HOTEL, ELEGANCE WITHOUT COMPROMISE. This was her security clearance.
“I expected something more official,” said Norma.
“That’s because you haven’t been here before.”
Then a gruff man in a faded-olive uniform appeared and showed them to his office. He didn’t shake hands, or even look at them, but the name tag on his uniform said ROSQUELLES. He sat down at his desk and announced that no one had informed him of their visit. “How do I even know who you are?” he asked.
They had decided it would be best for Elmer to speak, so as not to offend the official. With a nod to Norma, Elmer pulled some papers from his inside pocket. “We have letters.”
But instead, Rosquelles stared at Norma, his gaze between menacing and dismissive. “Woman,” he said, “why would you want to go in there?”
The office was dank and disordered, crammed with file cabinets that seemed ready to vomit their contents all over the floor. A cheaply framed photograph of a Swedish mountain scene hung askew. This was popular then, a way of idealizing life in the country’s provinces: transforming the lost, war-ravaged hamlets into tidy Scandinavian villages with crystalline streams and quaint windmills, hills covered with bright swaths of green. Norma almost smiled. Our mountains are not like that.
She considered mentioning Rey, explaining that there had been some kind of mistake, but then she thought better of it. “We have approval, sir.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“I suppose I don’t understand your question then.”
Rosquelles sighed. “Inside we have the killers and the beasts and the assassins that we should have disposed of the moment we found them. These are the people you want to see?”
“I’m a journalist, sir.”
“I hate journalists,” Rosquelles said. “You make excuses for these killers.”
“No one is making excuses for them anymore,” Elmer said. “The war is over.”
“It’s not over in there,” the official said.
“Yes, sir.”
“How many prisoners are there?” Norma asked.
Rosquelles shrugged. “We quit counting years ago. It’s a steady population now. No more growth. We don’t take prisoners anymore.”
“I see,” said Norma.
“We kill them first.”
“I see,” she repeated.
He stood up. From a cabinet, Rosquelles removed a bottle of rubbing alcohol and a bag of cotton balls. He opened the bottle, soaked a cotton ball, and passed it to Norma. He pointed at her forearm. “You don’t need those anymore. You’re with me.”
She hesitated.
“Take it,” the official said. “You might as well clean it now. The kids outside will charge you fifty cents.”
When they had finished, Rosquelles led the way with a jangling of keys, out of the office, along a dark corridor, then up a spiral staircase into a system of fenced-in raised causeways above the prison proper. They walked above the yard, along its perimeter: from this height, Norma could see the ocher mountains dotted with shanties, and below her, the prisoners standing in the dusty yard, staring back at her. A group of men were being led in stretching exercises by a fellow prisoner, others seemed to be debating among themselves. Some looked up in disgust, others with calm disinterest. The sun was bright, and they squinted up at the visitors. There were whistles and catcalls at Norma; she was a woman, after all, in a community of caged men. Some followed her, swarming and clamoring in the yard below, kicking up clouds of yellow earth, laughing. “Baby,” they called, and they said other things as well: about her pussy and the taste of it, about what they would do to her. Norma reached instinctively for Elmer’s hand, and he gave it to her. She didn’t feel safe. The causeway groaned with each step, and she imagined the entire structure collapsing, depositing her on the prison yard to be devoured. No one could save her, not with a knife or a gun or an army. Rosquelles ran his keys against the chain-link sides of the causeway. His graying hair was oily, and the back of his neck glistened. Periodically, he spat through the fence on the prisoners.
There were others, Rosquelles explained, locked in cells below the ground in lightless, stiflingly hot tombs. “These,” he said, motioning over the yard, “these are the good ones.”
“Can we see them?” Elmer asked. “The others?”
Rosquelles shook his head. The others were the ones who had shaken the country to its core. Out here were the soldiers, the triggermen. The leaders were below the ground, held incommunicado, only dimly aware that the war had ended, that they had lost. “Are you looking for someone in particular?”
“Yes,” said Norma, at the exact moment that Elmer said, “No.”
Rosquelles smiled. “Well, which is it?”
“My husband,” Norma said. “There was a mistake.”
A steady group of men had tracked the visitors’ progress around the yard, but most had given up trying to elicit any response at all, had broken off. A few sat on their haunches, smoking and spitting. The sun glowed brightly, and Norma felt faint. She coiled her fingers around the chain-link fence, steadying herself.
A prisoner invited Norma to sit on his face.
“Animal!” Rosquelles shouted. He turned to Norma. “I’m sorry, madam. We don’t make mistakes.”
The prisoners responded with curses and laughter, and they called him by name. “Rosquelles!” they called. “Killer! Is that your girlfriend?”
He frowned. “You have fans,” Rosquelles said. “This is no place for a woman. Are you well?”
Norma nodded. “May we see the lists?”
“There are no lists,” he said.
They continued around the causeway above the yard. The men below were unshaven and dirty, shirtless and sunburned. The elevated metal corridor opened every fifty meters into a watchtower. Rosquelles greeted each guard the same way—“Friendlies behind!” Still, the young guards had fear in their eyes, and they kept their guns trained on Norma and Elmer until they had walked past.
Rosquelles led them to the observation tower, the highest one, two flights of stairs above the causeway. There were two soldiers inside and an imposing array of weapons trained on the prisoners below. Norma peered out: from this distance, the imprisoned men moved like ants, a dizzying and chaotic display. She studied them through binoculars: their faces, the lines of their jaws, their brows, and saw nothing and no one who could be her husband. He would recognize her, wouldn’t he? And he would call out to her? But he wasn’t there. She’d known it, of course, but hadn’t allowed herself to think too much. What options were there? He’d been near the battle. There were prisoners and there were dead: wouldn’t it be better to find him here, locked up among the warriors? Or was he a leader, entombed below?
No one had ever accused him of such a thing.
Maybe they saw her watching them. Maybe it was their way of mocking her interest. The buzzing crowd fell apart and regrouped in straight lines, row after row of thin, dark men. “Killers!” they chanted. They were fearless. Some smiled.
Norma turned away, stared into the mountains. Without the shanties, it could be a postcard.
Rosquelles shook his head. “They’re going to sing.”
Where before there was confusion, now there was order. Were these the same men who had chased them around the yard, the same feral pack of sun-scarred, hungry prisoners? A murmuring rose from below, a scratch of a melody, nothing more. There was a code at work, the men held their arms at their sides, statuesque and military. What could Rey be doing here, if he was? They were less than human, they puffed their chests and stood straight, and their faces were stern now. They were cogs of a machine. They sang.
“Is the IL real?” Norma asked. She could think of nothing else.
Rosquelles looked at her, disbelieving. He turned to Elmer. “Who is she?”
“I’m sorry,” Norma said. “It’s just that—”
“Why don’t you ask them?” Rosquelles said, waving his hand at the prisoners below.
“What about the Moon? Are there still people there?”
“Woman, are you mad?”
Norma said nothing. She closed her eyes and listened as Elmer apologized on her behalf. Her Rey wandered the jungle and inhaled the soggy odors of the forest, he loved birds and verdure and the smell of wood smoke. He was not IL, because he told her he wasn’t. He’d said those words, hadn’t he? He wasn’t IL, because the IL did not exist.
“Why are we here?” Norma whispered.
Elmer blinked his eyes. “You wanted to do this.”
“Fire a warning shot,” Rosquelles said to the guard.
The guard aimed at the ground in front of the prisoners and let off a few shots. Dust bloomed in tiny mushroom caps. The men kept singing. Norma looked over her shoulder at Elmer, and he shrugged when he met her gaze. The bullets kept coming at regular intervals, advancing toward the line of men. They sang, and Rosquelles cursed. There was something mechanical about them, something terrifyingly disciplined. The war planners hadn’t counted on that mania. It had been the key to their success. The country’s history was dotted with guerrilla episodes of varying intensities: here and there, a ragtag militia fired by an empty ideology or a provincial grievance, a lightly armed band led by a quixotic upper-crust dropout—it happened all the time, twice a generation, and ended the same way: the insurgents marched themselves to starvation, were felled by malarial fevers. They played at war on the fringes of the nation-state, then gave up as soon as the shooting began. The IL had been different. They didn’t give up. They began the war and never planned for a truce. They wanted everything.
The guard fired a few more shots that pierced the ground in front of the singing prisoners. Norma watched the young soldier, beads of sweat gathering on his hairline, the heavy kick of the weapon pushing against his shoulder. The bullets advanced, and the men sang in unbroken harmony, about the war and the future, their paeans to outdated dreams. Some closed their eyes. It was prison opera, replete with bullets and dust and scorching light. The young soldier fired steadily around the men. They didn’t flinch. “Sir,” the soldier asked, “may I?”
Rosquelles shook his head. “I’m not allowed to hit them,” he explained to the visitors.
Norma read disappointment on the young soldier’s face. Elmer took notes, studying the scene. The sun had bleached everything of its color. She might fall at any moment.
The bullets whizzed by, the prisoners singing in sonorous swells. Rey sang, too, he’d always sung to her in a comically bad voice, with off-key trills, a theatrical falsetto. He sang because it made her laugh. Sometimes he sang in the crowded streets, in the park by the Metropole, unperturbed by the weary frowns of passersby. Another crazy, what can you do? I’m crazy, he’d tell her later, I sing because I’m crazy about you; Norma turning red, embarrassed, heat in her face. At home, too, songs of love, saccharine tunes from the era of the troubadours. She could hear the urgency now in the shots, the young soldier’s longing to snipe one, just one, maybe wound him, a bullet to the shoulder, a slug in the meat of a prisoner’s thigh. To watch a man fall—what joy! It’s not possible Rey is dead. The singing forced Norma’s eyes closed, she could feel the sun burning against her eyelids. A minor chord, a sad melody, an image: her Rey in his underwear, crouched at the foot of the bed, singing. Something romantic, something sappy. You are my sunshine…or something even cheaper than that.
“He’s not here,” Norma whispered to Elmer.
The sun buried them in white light, and the shots continued steady, rhythmic. Melodies drifted skywards.
“Just one, sir?” the soldier said.
Rosquelles frowned wearily. He took Elmer’s notepad from his hands. “I’m going to have to hold on to this,” he said. “You understand.”
Elmer said nothing. He reached for Norma’s hand, and she let him hold it. She stepped closer to him.
“Show me the lists,” Norma said to Rosquelles. “Please.”
“What was the name? The one you’re looking for.”
She told him.
Rosquelles raised an eyebrow. “Never heard of him. Did he go by any other names?”
She bit her lip. “I don’t know.”
“How do you expect to find an answer if you don’t ask the right questions?” Rosquelles sighed. “It was a big war, madam. A very big war with many, many players.”
“Sir?” the soldier asked again.
The official nodded with a smile. “Oh, to be young and brainless again!”
Then there was a shot, and a man collapsed: third row, second from the back, so that most of the prisoners didn’t see him fall. They sang, looking straight ahead. The downed man had been hit in the stomach. He slumped to his knees and tumbled forward, prostrate in the dust. His burnt-copper back arched, his arms buried beneath him. He was praying. Norma was too: her fingers curled tightly around the chain links, her nails digging into her palms. Rey wasn’t coming back.
SHE SLEPT with the door open every night. At one time, when she was more hopeful, she had thought: if Rey were to come back tonight, he would see right away that I am sleeping alone. That had been the logic at first, but now it wouldn’t be truthful to say that she expected anything of the sort. It was habit, pure and simple, of the kind whose origin was vaguely recalled but which existed nonetheless, a constant and unchanging fact of life. Her door was open.
But this night, the boy had come. He was there, resting on the couch. The apartment was small: from the living room, one could see through to the kitchen and into the bedroom. It wasn’t exactly self-consciousness that Norma felt; it was an awareness, sudden and stark, of her solitude. It wasn’t the boy. Victor said little. He was a tangle of emotions and wide-eyed observations buried beneath a rigid silence. She didn’t know what he had seen, but it had rendered him nearly mute. He was small, thin-boned, and there was nothing at all imposing about him. She guessed he would be as content to sleep on the cool tiled floor of the kitchen as on the soft, pillowed couch. But he was there. She could have hidden his frail body in a cabinet under the sink, and still she would feel his presence. It wasn’t him: it was his breath, his humanness, so close to her in the apartment. In the space that had been hers and Rey’s, that had then been only hers. A sealed place, an impregnable store of memories where time had stopped for nearly a decade. Visitors? She could count them on her fingers. Without Rey, she had lived like this: spectacularly alone.
Victor slept on the couch, breathing softly in the humming blue light of the pharmacy. The blanket covered nearly all of him, except his feet, and these stuck out, his toes curling and straightening as he dreamed. The place was too small. They’d always meant to move to a bigger apartment when they had children, and they’d tried. She was thirty-two when Rey disappeared. They’d never stopped trying. On their last night together, they’d tried. The doctors had said there was nothing wrong with her, that he was in perfect shape, that these things took time. So time passed. When Norma and Rey were married, they’d daydreamed of a gaggle of children, a half dozen, each more beautiful than the last, each a more perfect representation of their love. His hazel eyes, his hair curling skywards. Her delicate hands, long, stately fingers. Her aquiline nose—not his that crooked slightly to the left—but Rey’s skin tone, more suited to the sunny places where they would vacation once the war ended. They built variations of themselves, portraits of their unborn children, unique amalgams of their best features. My voice, Norma said, for speaking. No, Rey said, laughing: mine, for singing.
They made love regularly and hopefully, just as the doctor prescribed. And nothing. Passionately and desperately—still nothing. When he didn’t return, Norma’s period didn’t come for ninety terrible days. She wrestled with the possibility of raising his child alone, almost allowing herself a glimmer of happiness—but it was only stress, her body as traumatized as her heart, shutting down, slowing very nearly to a standstill. She discovered in the mirror one day that she’d lost weight, that she was as spent, as ragged as the soldiers returning home from the countryside. All bone, gaunt and pale. She wasn’t pregnant: she was dying.
Now the boy slept with his face buried in the cushions of the couch. Norma turned on the radio: softly, a melody, strings, a wistful voice. The boy did not stir. She edged the door closed, the blue light vanished. She was alone again, in darkness. She undressed.