FOR NORMA, the war began fourteen years earlier, the day she was sent to cover a fire in Tamoé. She was just a copy editor at the radio station then, and had never been on the air, her voice an undiscovered treasure. She and Rey had been married for more than two years, but she still thought of herself as a newlywed. He was due to return from the jungle that afternoon. It was October, nearing the sixth anniversary of the beginning of the war, though no one kept time that way in those days.
Norma arrived on the scene to find the firemen watching as the house burned. A few men with guns and masks stood in front of the fire. A polite crowd had gathered around the house, arms crossed, blinking away the acrid smoke. Norma could still make out the word TRAITOR painted in black on the burning wall. The terrorists didn’t move or make threats—they didn’t have to. The firemen were volunteers. They wouldn’t take a bullet for a fire. It was late afternoon at the edge of the city, and soon it would be dark. There were no streetlights in this part of the district. Norma’s eyes stung. The firemen had given up. One of them sat on his hard plastic helmet, smoking a cigarette. “Are you going to do anything?” Norma asked.
The man shook his head. His face was dotted with whitish stubble. “Are you?”
“I’m just a reporter.”
“So report. Why don’t you start with this: there’s a man inside. He’s tied to a wooden chair.”
The fireman blew smoke from his nose in dragon bursts.
And for the duration of the war, more than the firefights in the Old Plaza, more than the barricaded streets of The Cantonment or even the apocalyptic Battle of Tamoé—this is what Norma remembered: this man inside, this stranger, tied to a chair. For the rest of that long night and into the early morning, as the news came from a dozen remote points in the city, news of an offensive, news of an attack, as the first of the Great Blackouts spread across the capital—Norma took it all in with the drugged indifference of a sleepwalker. Cruelty was something she couldn’t process that day. On another day, perhaps, she might have done better. She looked the fireman in the eye, hoping to find a hint of untruth, but there was none. The people watched the flames dispassionately. The fire crackled, the house fell in on itself, and Norma listened for him. Surely, he was dead already. Surely his lungs were full of smoke and his heart still. For Norma, there was only a light-headed feeling, like being hollowed out. She felt incapable of writing anything down, of asking a single question. At the edge of the crowd, a girl of thirteen or fourteen sucked on a lollipop. Her mother rang the tiny bell on her juice cart, and it clinked brightly.
WHEN REY returned from the Moon to live on his father’s couch, it was Trini who made certain he didn’t give up. It was Trini who told him stories and reminded him of better, happier times. On the evenings Rey’s father taught at the institute, Trini would come to look for his nephew, and convince him with persistent good cheer to leave the cluttered apartment, to see what the city had to offer. “The streets are full of beautiful women!” he would say. So they took long evening walks through the district of Idorú, toward Regent Park and through The Aqueduct, often making it as far as the Old Plaza—known simply as the Plaza in those days. Once there, they gave themselves over to the noise of the street musicians and the comedians, to the crowds of people seated around the dry fountain, all smoke and talk and laughter, and Rey, because he loved his uncle, made every attempt to be happy, or more precisely, to appear so.
It’s true that his days were oppressively lonely, that he slept poorly, that the same nightmares kept coming back. Rey spent his time pacing his father’s apartment, rearranging scattered papers or reading his old man’s dictionaries. During the morning hours, he prepared mentally for his midday excursion out to the corner for a bite to eat. It was pure torment. He was afraid that no one would speak to him, and equally terrified that they might. He postponed lunch as long as he could, until three or even four in the afternoon. Once it was taken care of, Rey could sleep, sometimes for as long as an hour.
But on these night strolls beneath the city’s yellow streetlights, everything was softer, simpler. The shoeshine boys and pickpockets gathered at one end of the Plaza, counting their day’s take. Along the alley on the north side of the cathedral, a half-dozen women set up their stalls, selling fresh bread and old magazines, bottle caps and matchbooks from the city’s finer hotels. A crew of jugglers might be preparing for a show, and everywhere, the industrious city seemed poised to relax.
One night in June, Trini and Rey arrived in the Plaza in time to see the flag being lowered. It took fifteen soldiers to fold it. A cornet played a martial melody, and some tourists took photos. Rey kept his hands in his pockets. He felt nothing. In a week, he would start his work in Tamoé, become a representative of that flag. He and his uncle had been talking about it, how strange it was to be tortured by the state and then employed by it, all in a matter of months. The government, after all, was a blind machine: now its soldiers stood at attention, and the flag was folded and passed from one to the next, down the line, until all that remained was a meter square of blood-red fabric and a set of hands at each corner. The cornet blew a last, wailing note. Rey was going to say something, when he turned and noticed that Trini had stopped, was standing still with his back straight and his hands together. Then Trini saluted. He caught Rey looking and smiled sheepishly.
Trini had started a new job a few months before Rey was taken to the Moon, as a prison guard in a district known as Venice because it flooded almost every year. In fact, it was by petitioning Trini’s supervisor that Rey had been released. The prison in Venice was dangerous and sprawling, with multiple pavilions for the nation’s various undesirables. Six days a week, he was in charge of terror suspects. The war hadn’t officially begun yet, and there weren’t many of these men, but their numbers were growing, and their demeanor was unlike that of any prisoners Trini had previously encountered. They were not cowed by any show of force, and their swagger was not a put-on: it came from a very honest and confident place. Some had the look of students, others came from the mountains. They felt they owned the prison, and of course, they were right. If it was trouble Trini had wanted, here it was: violent and unremitting. It could boil over at any time.
Rey and Trini walked through the Plaza, past costumed men selling jungle medicine, past hunched-over typists at work on love letters or government forms, to a side street where Trini knew a woman who sold excellent pork kebabs. “Special recipe,” he said, “my treat.” Sure enough, there were a dozen people waiting. They got in line. Down the street, a city work crew painted over a graffitied wall. “A guard was killed today,” Trini said to Rey. “An execution. The IL.”
“Did you know him?”
Trini nodded. “We’re in for trouble. Lots of it. Those little boy soldiers folding the flag—they have no idea.”
The line inched forward. The smoke made Rey’s eyes water. He inhaled the scent of charcoal and burning meat. One night at the Moon, he had smelled something like this. It had gutted him: the realization that these soldiers were going to burn him alive, that they were going to eat him. He’d decided very early on that these torturers were capable of anything, and he’d never expected to leave that place alive—why not let himself be eaten?
Of course, they were only celebrating a birthday.
“Are you all right?” Trini said.
Rey nodded. A moment passed. Trini hummed the melancholy tune of an old song.
“How come no one’s ever asked me what happened?”
“What?”
Rey looked up and down the line. He felt something sudden and hot within him. “At the Moon,” he said, and a few heads turned. “What they did to me. How come no one’s ever asked. Don’t you want to know?”
Trini gave his nephew a blank stare. He blinked a few times, and the edges of his mouth curled downwards. “I work in a prison.” He coughed and waved away the smoke. “I know exactly what they did to you.”
A few people fell out of line. Rey stood there, silent and seething. His jaw hurt. He remembered everything, every detail of every moment. At night, he had been surrounded by other broken men whom he could not see. They sobbed alone, and no one comforted anyone else. They were afraid.
“They were going to eat me.”
Trini raised an eyebrow. “Keep your voice down.”
“Go to hell.”
“I do, boy. Six days a week.”
Half the line had cleared out by now, abandoned their places. Too much talking, too much indiscretion. A breeze blew, momentarily clearing the smoke from the street. A man in a knit cap sat on the curb, rolling a cigarette. Rey stepped out of line. Trini followed and caught him at the corner. They walked together—or rather, not together at all, but in the same direction. Finally, at a busy intersection, Rey and Trini waited side by side to cross.
“Talking doesn’t help,” Trini said. “I’ve learned that. It’s why I never ask.” The light changed, and they crossed the street toward home.
THE TELECENTER was crowded at this hour. A pale, unhealthy-looking man with greasy hair gave Norma a number: it entitled her to booth number fourteen. Then he gave her a form and motioned for her to sit. “You write the numbers here,” he explained, “and I dial them for you.”
Norma nodded. “How long is the wait?”
“Thirty minutes. Maybe more,” the man said, scanning his list. He looked up with a smile. “But you must have a phone at home, madam. Why are you here with us?”
Norma blushed. She did, of course, have a phone, but what difference did that make? It never rang. Is that what the man wanted to hear? That she, too, was alone? She ignored his questions and asked him for a directory.
“A local call, madam?” the man said, then shrugged and pulled the tattered book from beneath his desk. Norma thanked him in a whisper.
The end of a working day—all over the city, it was the same. Evening in America, past midnight in Europe, already tomorrow morning in Asia. Time to call and check in, to reassure those who had left that you were on your way, that you were surviving, that you hadn’t forgotten them. To reassure yourself that they hadn’t forgotten you. Norma sighed. There were twenty-five phones in twenty-five cubicles, each with its overflowing ashtray, and each, she could see, occupied. Men and women hunched over, cradling the receivers tenderly, straining to hear the voices on the other end. Most had their backs to the waiting area, but she knew them even without seeing them: these were the voices she heard every Sunday. She knew them from the needy murmur that rose in the room—always that sound. The phone collapsed distances, just as the radio did, and, like the radio, it relied on the miracle of imagination: one had to concentrate deeply, plunge headlong into it. Where were they calling? That voice, where was it coming from? The whole world had scattered, but there they were, so close you could feel them. So close you could smell them. You had only to close your eyes, to listen, and there they were. They respected the telephone, these people. They handled it as if it were fine china: for special occasions only. The radio was the same. It was even more. Norma hoped no one would recognize her.
She had sent Victor to sit, and she found him now, seated beside a young man with a shaved head and a tattoo that ran diagonally across the side of his neck. Victor had saved her a place, no small accomplishment in this crowded room.
“Manau,” she said when she sat down.
Victor nodded.
It was not a common surname; at the very least, Norma could be grateful for that. She had already decided they would not go home that night. Elmer might have sent someone there, to wait for her to arrive, to bring her and the boy in. Elmer was afraid, of course, and this wasn’t irrational: ten years on, and still the government took no chances with the war. No, going home wasn’t safe. Instead they would find this teacher, this Manau. They would ambush him: squeeze it out of him, whatever he knew. She felt she might strike this man when she saw him. That was the kind of anger she felt: how many times in her life had she hit someone? Once, twice, never? She thumbed through the phone book and found it: twelve different Manau households, in nine different districts. No Elijahs or E. Manaus. He lived with his parents then. Of course. Two could be discarded by the fancy addresses. Rich families don’t send their young to places like 1797 to teach.
She carefully wrote the ten numbers on the form the greasy-haired man had given her.
“What will we do when we find him?” Victor asked.
“We’ll ask him what he knows,” said Norma. “What else can we do?”
“Okay.”
Norma closed the phone book. “Why?”
“What if he won’t talk to us?”
She hadn’t considered that. Not really. By what right would this Manau, this spineless creature, withhold anything from her? Norma was about to answer when her number was called. “Come with me,” she said to Victor, and they stepped through the people to the front desk. She gave the greasy-haired man her form, and took Victor by the hand to their booth. “He’ll talk,” she said to Victor, to herself.
It was hot, and there was barely enough room for the two of them. They pressed in. There was only one chair and a small table with a phone, a timer, and an ashtray. Victor stood. The phone had a green light that blinked when the call was patched through. They waited in the airless booth, and the boy said nothing. The man at the counter dialed their way down the list of numbers. Norma picked up the phone, each time seized by an expectant, implausibly optimistic feeling. Six times she asked for Elijah Manau, and six times she was told there was no such person. She was beginning to suspect he didn’t have a phone, that it was all a waste, when on the seventh call, a woman with a tired voice said, “Wait, wait. Yes, he’s here.” Norma wanted to shout. The woman cleared her throat, then yelled, “Elijah, you have a call!”
Norma could hear a voice, a man’s voice, still far away. “Yes, mother,” it said, “I’m coming. Tell them to wait.” If he was surprised, Norma couldn’t hear it. It was as if he’d been expecting their call all along.
IN THE weeks that followed, whenever Trini came over to visit, he would tell Rey of the latest IL transgression, the latest threat. It was only a matter of time, he said. We’re in for trouble. Rey began his own work in Tamoé, and together they shared stories about the teetering ship of the state as seen from the inside: its myopic bureaucracy, its radical incompetence made manifest in Tamoé or in the prison’s dark terrors. Rey’s father chimed in, that it had always been that way, that everything was always getting worse. He could be counted on for a dose of pessimism. A half a year passed, Rey met Marden, he returned to the university. Trini filed reports and made official complaints, but nothing came of it. Another guard was killed today, he told them one evening, looking distraught, and Rey told his uncle to be careful. Quit, Rey’s father said, but there weren’t many other jobs available. Bodyguard, security guard—and were either of those really a step up? Safer?
Just before the war was declared, ten months after Rey was released from the Moon, the prison officials made a tactical retreat, ceding an entire pavilion to the IL. It was a truce of sorts, and it held for longer than anyone had expected it to: for a year, and most of another. Trini continued to work at the prison, and no one entered the IL’s pavilion. The IL taught classes there, held trainings, and the prison officials preferred not to think of it. Every now and then, an operative was caught and tossed in with his comrades. They clothed and fed him: he had survived the Moon to be nursed to health within the prison’s liberated territory.
It was in November, nearing the war’s second official anniversary, when the inevitable happened: the prison break that marked one of the IL’s first successes in the city. A tunnel the length of four city blocks had been dug beneath the prison walls into an adjacent neighborhood, rising out of the earth in the living room of a rented and then abandoned home. The press went crazy, and a scapegoat was urgently needed. Those in charge wanted a peon, a single man with no family to make a fuss. They found Trini.
When he was arrested, Trini was living with Rey’s father. They came on a Sunday afternoon, kicked in the door, and threw everyone against the walls: Rey, his father, Norma, Trini. They would’ve taken them all if Norma hadn’t threatened them: I work at the radio, she said. I’ll make a big fuss. She was only an intern then, but the soldiers weren’t going to take any chances. They took Trini. He didn’t resist. They took Rey, too, but only as far as the street, and then they let him go. The woman wouldn’t stop yelling.
“I warned you!” she screamed. “Murderers! Killers! Thieves!”
The soldiers fired shots in the air to disperse the gathered crowd. Idorú was that kind of neighborhood: where everyone spied on everyone else, where police were not welcome. Because his hands were cuffed, he couldn’t wave good-bye, but with great effort, Trini did manage a nod to his family—his brother, his nephew—before he was pushed into the back of an army truck.
WHEN REY disappeared, Norma returned to that night in Tamoé, that night when the war became real. It shook her, it fed her nightmares. She imagined it had been Rey bound to that chair all along; that all the years they had spent together were a lie, that her husband had always been imprisoned by the war. The accusations that he had been IL were, for Norma, irrelevant; the war had long ago ceased to be a conflict between distinct antagonists. The IL blew up a bank or a police station; the army ran its tanks over a dozen homes in the dark of night. In either case, people died. Rey went off to the jungle, the IL made its last stand in Tamoé and lost. Most of the district was razed. Then the killing flared and burned out in the jungle, and then it was over. Just like that, the lights came on. And where was Rey? The war had been for many years a single, implacably violent entity. And it had swallowed him. An engine, a machine, and the men with guns—they were simply its factotums. When enough of them died, it was finished.
That night of the fire, the long bus ride back to the station gave her time to consider her options. Norma felt an animal fear churning in her gut, and suspected she wasn’t cut out for journalism. Perhaps she could leave the country, board a plane bound for Europe, and become a nanny, a surrogate mother to a gaggle of wealthy children. She could learn a new language—and seeing the world, wasn’t that her right? She was twenty-eight, too old to go back to the university and pursue some other profession. It was too late to do what her father had always asked of her: learn secretarial skills and marry an executive, a man with a driver and a house bunkered somewhere in the hills where problems would not intrude. She had married Rey. He studied plants and was not an executive. He went off into the forest for weeks at a time. They had survived the tadek episode, but she knew enough to recognize that with Rey, problems would always intrude.
So lost in thought was Norma that she didn’t notice the soldiers lining the sidewalks in front of government buildings, or the driver pushing the bus faster and faster through the streets, or the unusually light traffic. It was late when Norma arrived, nearly ten, but the station was busy. She turned in her unused tape recorder, put her untouched notepad in the file cabinet, and was prepared, had she been asked, to resign. She felt sick with shame, with fear, but no one seemed to notice her. Norma shared a desk with another reporter, a pudgy-faced young man named Elmer. He worked long hours, even sleeping at the station some nights, and so, she wasn’t surprised to find him at the desk, rubbing his temples and looking happily beleaguered. A green pen poked out from between his teeth. He gave her a smile and said, “This world is going to shit.”
Norma didn’t know what to say. Elmer took the green pen from his mouth and twirled it between his fingers. He passed her the text he was working on. “Assassinations,” he said. “A half dozen all over the city. All the same, Norma, my dear. Men burned in their own homes.”
Norma sank heavily into her chair. “Where?”
“Venice, Monument, The Metropole. A few in Collectors. One in Ciencin and one in Tamoé. Weren’t you there?”
A phone rang at the next desk. Norma nodded. “I didn’t see anything,” she said. “It was already over when I showed up.”
“Didn’t you get anything?”
“There was a woman. She was selling juice.”
The phone kept ringing.
Elmer gave her an incredulous look, but Norma didn’t turn away. Something in him alarmed her. He was red-faced and excitable, too young for the deep creases on his forehead. He would be old soon. He was a mama’s boy, and he would grow wings before striking another man in anger, but on this night, this splendidly violent city night, he was enjoying himself.
“What?” Elmer asked.
How perverse: this adrenaline, these dead men.
“It’s awful.”
Elmer nodded and said, “It is,” but he couldn’t mean it. She was sure of that: he said the words, but they meant something altogether different when he did. He was a voyeur. He wanted to see how bad things could get. If pressed, it was something he might admit. Perhaps he was even proud of it.
“Rey called for you.”
Norma looked up. “He’s back?”
Elmer handed her a note where he had scrawled the name of a bar not far from the station. “But you should stay, Norma. Tonight, you should stay.”
“Tell them I was sick.” The phone had stopped ringing. She stood to go. “Please.”
It wasn’t a long walk to the bar, but the empty streets made it seem so. She saw only one person on her way: a hunchbacked old man pushing a shopping cart piled high with clothes down the middle of an alley. There was scarcely any traffic, and the air was still. Winter had ended, spring hadn’t yet come. Norma liked this time of year, this time of night. Why weren’t more people out to enjoy it? A streetlight flickered, dimmed, then glowed brightly. She was alone in the city, and she knew, however vaguely, that something terrible had happened. In fact, many terrible things had happened all at once. She heard the clink of the juice-cart bell, still echoing blithely in her mind. She never saw the dead man: how could she be sure he was real? As long as she didn’t know, there was an innocence to the evening, and it didn’t seem forced to her. It seemed sane.
The bar was quiet. The radio was on, and everyone listened. Norma scanned the room for Rey and found him, sharing a corner table with a few men she didn’t recognize. No one seemed to be looking at anyone else; instead, they watched the radio, a dented and scuffed black box sitting atop the refrigerator. A red-haired man chewed his fingernails. An olive-skinned woman with braided hair sat at the bar, tapping her foot nervously. There was an air of worry throughout the bar, and the waiters moved through the crowd with the grace and silence of mimes. The announcer was describing the evening’s events: dozens of dead, a shootout in the Monument district, sections of Regent Park on fire. Armed gangs had taken to the streets: there were reports of looting downtown, and burning cars in Collectors. The city was under attack. The president would be speaking soon.
Normally, the people would have jeered at the mention of the man, but on this night, there was no response.
Was it so long ago that the IL had been a joke? A straw man?
“Rey,” Norma said across the silent room. He saw her and held his finger to his lips. He got up and wove through the chastened, hushed drinkers to where she stood by the door. He looked tired and sunburned. He took Norma by the arm and pulled her out into the street. There, beneath the washed-out light of a street lamp, Rey kissed her.
“What a way to come home, no?”
“Let me see you,” Norma said, but it was dark, and she couldn’t make out the details of him.
He’d arrived at the train station just after the first fire, at four in the afternoon, around the time she’d been leaving the station for Tamoé. The buses had stopped running from the station, and so Rey had walked three hours, until he was tired of carrying his bag. He’d been stopped twice at checkpoints. Then, when he felt his legs were about to give out, he found himself in front of this bar, realized he was near the radio, and decided it was best to stay put.
“How will we make it home?” Norma asked.
Rey smiled. “Maybe we’ll stay here.”
And, in fact, they did. Norma had just asked him about his trip, and Rey was telling her about a town in the eastern forest where the Indians still knew the old language, where he’d met an old man who had walked him deep into the forest and showed him a dozen new medicinal plants. Norma could sense the excitement, the curiosity in her husband’s voice. The town sounded like a lovely place. “I’d like to see it myself,” she said, then there was a distant rumble. They fell silent. It was somewhere off in the hills, and for a moment, nothing happened. For a moment, they both thought they had imagined this unexplained sound. Then there was another, and then another, a deep shaking, a call and response in the hills. An earthquake? The lights along the street flickered again, and this time, they did not recover. There was a shout from inside the bar. The president had been about to address the nation. He had just cleared his throat when the radio went dead. Inside and outside, the darkness was complete.
LISTEN TO me, youngster. It’s how Trini began all his letters. This was his last one, and Rey kept it with him always. By his bedside, in his wallet, in his briefcase—it migrated among his things, but was always near. Sometimes Rey woke in the middle of the night, took it to the kitchen, and read it there. He pulled it out on the bus, or between classes, or as he waited for his contact in some dingy bar in Miamiville. Trini had missed their June wedding. Rey and Norma left an empty chair for him at the table of honor. Rey’s father read the toast Trini sent from prison. He had missed the tadek mess, though he never would have known who was behind it. He had missed the beginning of Rey’s work at his alma mater, the first steps in his career. He’d missed all of this, and the war’s rude beginnings as well. Of course, there had been other prison breaks since, and other scapegoats, too.
Trini did not cultivate anger. It never appeared in the letters, and yet, for Rey, it was the essential message of the text. Trini wrote with a single fear: that he had accomplished nothing in his life, that he would never have the chance to make up for the wasted time. Nothing notable, exceptional, or even brave. He tended to list his disappointments, and this last letter was no different: the woman who wouldn’t speak to him again, the son who would never visit him. In this last letter, he mentioned the boy by name—something he’d never done before—and wondered if the boy’s mother had changed it. It came down to this: everywhere else, he was forgettable—everywhere except here, in this prison full of men he’d mistreated, men he’d arrested, men who never forgot a slight. In his last letter, Trini told stories. About getting drunk with a bicycle thief in Ciencin. About waking up in the arms of a wealthy heiress in La Julieta. He had almost beat a man to death in The Thousands, and claimed not to remember anything about the incident, except that they’d only just met, and that minutes before, they had been laughing together. None of it mattered, Trini wrote. It was a long letter, four pages of cramped handwriting, full of implied good-byes, confessions, and retractions. But Trini had only one thought, repeated on every page: to survive. To live long enough to walk out of the prison. If he were to pull this off, he wrote, it would redeem a life of mediocrity, a life without substance. It would be an accomplishment.
Trini was serving his second year when he was killed in a prison brawl. When Rey’s grieving was over, he met his contact. “I’m ready,” he said, and took his first trip into the jungle not as a scientist but as a messenger.
IN PREPARATION for his guests, Manau showered and shaved. It was the first time he had done so since his arrival in the capital. He’d spent the previous day and a half shuttling listlessly between his bed and the kitchen table, where his mother sat watch over him, making sure he ate. He did, three times that day with little enthusiasm, then returned to his room, where in his absence, Manau’s father had set up an office to organize his extensive stamp collection. The room was crowded with envelopes, laminating books, and tin boxes of small, obscure tools. A magnifying glass hung from a hook on the wall above his bed. There had been no regular mail ser vice in 1797, and his father’s obsession now struck Manau as absurd. He had received only two letters during his year in the jungle, neither from his father. The old man wouldn’t waste stamps on him. Manau’s life scarcely seemed believable to him. He hadn’t yet unpacked his bag.
Manau put on a fresh shirt and a pair of pants that he’d left behind when he moved to 1797 a year before. The crease had kept, and he found this admirable. In the jungle, nothing lasted, no condition was permanent: the heat and the soggy air and the light degraded everything. The weather changed a dozen times in a single day. It was the earth in flux, as changeable as the ocean, as terrifying, as beautiful.
Since arriving in the city, he had found that his hours did not need filling. Nearly two days had passed in and of themselves. It was only a matter of time until Victor found him, and Manau neither dreaded nor looked forward to it. Norma would do her job. She would come. And he would tell her what she wanted to know, the secrets Adela had whispered to him on those dark, hot evenings not so long ago. Manau sighed. Or rather, so very long ago. Time had never been his friend. He had awoken one day to learn he was thirty years old, his life half-finished. Now he was thirty-one, and he could sense that the details of this past year wouldn’t stay with him very long. Can you remember the forest, the feel of it and smell of it, the people you’d known there—can you really recall any of it without actually being there?
His hair combed, his pants pressed, his body as clean as it had been in twelve months, Manau went to the front room. He was idly rearranging the family pictures when his mother came from the kitchen. Even with his back to her, he could tell she was waiting. She made no sound. Manau let her stand there for a minute. “Who are these people who are coming?” she asked finally.
There were photos here that could not be real. That was not him, and these were not his parents. He squinted at himself. A thin film of dust covered the glass, and with his index finger, he brushed it clean. Still, he couldn’t recognize the face in the picture.
“Elijah?”
He turned to his mother and realized, with a shock, that she might cry. Manau frowned; these people and their obscure emotions! She had aged, even in these last two days. He gave her a smile—what question had she asked him? Oh, yes. “They’re people I knew from the jungle,” he said. “They won’t be here long.”
“Well then, I’ll make tea,” she said, and this seemed to satisfy her. But still she wouldn’t stop looking at him. Manau held her gaze for as long as he could manage, then turned away.
“Thank you, Mother,” he said.
They came within the hour. Manau himself opened the door. “Good evening,” he said to the woman he supposed to be Norma. “Victor,” he said to the boy, and then another word appeared in his brain and had slipped out before he himself could have known what it meant. It was from the old language: we that includes you. The boy smiled. They embraced for a moment, long enough for Manau to feel the weight of what he had done when he left the boy at the station. He wanted to say more, but was afraid his voice might break. Instead, Manau invited them both in with the wave of an arm. “Please,” he managed, “please, sit.”
Norma had not expected to see such an old-looking young man. This Manau was ragged and thin, surprisingly pale for someone who had lived in the tropics for a year. He was dressed neatly, but moved with the languor of a man who spent the entire day in his pajamas. She felt sorry for him. Manau’s mother, a woman a decade older than Norma, entered the room with a tray of tea, smiling with the exaggerated glow of a theater marquee. She cast worried glances at her son, she rubbed the boy’s head. Victor’s hair had grown just a bit in the previous two days, into a fine, black stubble. Norma smiled politely when she was introduced, grateful that Manau didn’t explain everything about who she was.
This Manau: he began with apologies that made Norma uncomfortable. She focused on the room to avoid staring as the man began to break down. It was decorated in pastels, or in once-vivid colors that had been allowed to fade. She couldn’t tell. “I made a mistake,” Manau said. He was hoarse, color bloomed in his cheeks. “I’m sorry,” he said, and it seemed he didn’t know whom exactly to apologize to. It seemed, in fact, that he might choke, that he might expire before them. Norma let him talk. Her anger had dissipated completely, but she felt he owed this to them, to the boy. He babbled about promises made and broken, and looked pleadingly at Norma when he described Victor’s mother and her drowning. Before long, Victor had moved to his teacher’s couch, was comforting this grown man with words that Norma couldn’t make out. The old language perhaps, but she doubted that Manau could understand them, either.
She let some time pass, a minute or more, but could hardly contain the impatience she felt. Her Rey was on this list—alive or dead, here was someone who might be able to tell her more. It was all she had ever wanted: more of Rey’s time, of his heart, of his body. If she had been honest, she would have admitted it years before: that she’d always wanted more from Rey than he was willing to give. The night of the fire in Tamoé, the night of the first Great Blackout, she and Rey had gone back into the bar, had huddled inside the tense room full of strangers while someone went in search of a car battery to power the radio. A few candles were lit and, as they waited, people began talking. “I live in Tamoé,” someone said. “I knew this was coming. These people have no scruples.” Another: “The police do nothing.” Another: “They torture the innocent, they disappeared my brother!” Someone said, “Fuck the IL!” and someone—not Rey—answered, “Fuck the president!”
And so on it went, a civilized shouting match in the flickering yellow light. The room had grown unbearably smoky, and someone opened a window. Norma recalled it now in such fine detail: the way the cool night air filled the room, the yelling that continued, the waves of words, exhortations, of confessions and condemnations. It was impossible to make out who was speaking, only the barest facts that their accents exposed: this one, from the mountains; that one, from the city. This man and that woman, and the varying shades of their anger, spreading, that evening, in all directions. It was a knife edge they walked: they might gather in a giant, tearful embrace; or a dozen weapons might be pulled, and they could kill each other blindly in this suddenly dark, suddenly cold room.
Then someone mentioned the Moon, and Norma felt Rey tense. Whoever the state kills deserved it, someone yelled. Trini had been dead for almost a year, murdered, Rey always said, by the state that had betrayed him. She pushed her body into Rey’s, and realized in that moment what she’d been afraid of: that he might say something. That he might say the wrong thing, because how can you read the mood of an anonymous crowd in a poorly lit room? She held him tightly, wrapped her arms around his chest. She ran her hands under his shirt and locked her fingers. There, in his shirt pocket, was Trini’s letter. She felt it. He’d read it to her one night, and they had cried together. Trini had been such a nice man. But be quiet now, Rey, she thought, stay quiet, my husband.
“Hush,” she whispered.
“Have you seen the list?” Norma asked Manau when he’d finished apologizing. She didn’t wait for an answer; after all, she knew that he had. She said slowly, “I need to know about the list.” Norma touched her own forehead; she was sweating. Had she begun to lose him that night?
Manau nodded. He knew why they had come. Why she had come. He rose and excused himself. “I have something to show you.”
Norma sat with her memories. The boy wandered the room, scrutinizing the photographs in their dusty frames. “It’s Manau,” he said, pointing, but Norma couldn’t do more than smile at him.
Back in his room, Manau opened the bag he’d brought from 1797. He rummaged through it without turning on the light. He didn’t need to: there was only one thing he had for Norma, and he found it right away. It was a piece of parchment, rolled up, wrapped in bark, and tied with a string. Adela had given it to him for safekeeping. It smelled of the jungle, and he was seized by the urge to lie down, to sleep and dream until these visitors had gone away, but he didn’t. There were murmurs from the front room. They were waiting. Manau shut the bag and then the door behind him.
“I’ve been to the Moon,” Rey said that night the war began, and Norma pinched him, but it came louder the next time: “I’ve been to the Moon!”
She bit his ear, she put her hand over his mouth: was it too late?
“Fuck you, IL dog!” came the first shout.
“What’s this?” Norma said when Manau gave her the parchment.
Then the boy had joined them. “What is it?” he asked. Norma untied the string, unrolled the bark, and spread the parchment on the table. Victor held the edges with his little fingers. Manau helped him. That night fourteen years before, the night the war came to the city, what saved Rey was darkness. Someone yelled, “You IL piece of shit!” and there was a stir, but what more could they or anybody do? It was the first Great Blackout, the war had arrived in the city, and they all were strangers to one another, people stranded on their way to other places, crowded now into this dreary bar. They were squatters. “Quiet!” someone else called, a man’s voice, heavy with authority. “The radio!” A crackle from the speaker, a blue spark from the battery. On that night in Tamoé, an angry crowd marched on one of the police stations, carrying torches and throwing stones with the zeal of true believers. The first shots were fired in warning. These were followed by shots fired in anger, and then hundreds of people were running, scattering through the dark night, doubling back to retrieve their wounded, their fallen. The next day, the first funerals were held: slow, dismal processions along Avenue F–10, to the hills where the district ended, where the houses ended. Caskets sized for children were carried to the tops of the low mountains and burned in accordance with the traditions of those who had settled the place. That night in Asylum Downs, many were too afraid to leave their homes, and those who owned radios and batteries listened for news with the volume humming almost inaudibly. Men gathered their guns in case the looters came, and they locked their frightened wives and sleepy children in the most hidden rooms, the ones farthest from the street. Shots were heard into the early morning, the last casualty of that long night coming just after dawn, when an old man, a beggar, was killed next to his shopping cart piled high with clothes, in an alleyway not even ten blocks from the bar where Norma and Rey stayed but did not sleep. All night, the radio spat news that was progressively worse, and sometime after midnight, the decision was made to padlock the door of the bar. The windows were closed as well, and again the room grew thick with smoke. Some people managed to sleep. In the middle of the night, someone called for water, and suddenly everyone was thirsty and hot. Outside, bandits scurried along the streets, but no one paid any attention, because the news held them all rapt: tanks, it was announced, had moved into the Plaza, were patrolling the main arteries of their city. Looting was widespread. A couple had been seen jumping hand in hand from the balcony of their burning apartment building. Inside the bar, a woman fainted and was revived. Two times in the night there was an urgent knocking at the door, followed by a thin, high-pitched plea for help, but the candles had burned out, and inside it was dark, and no one could look anyone in the eye. There was no obligation to do anything except stay quiet and wait. Norma held Rey, and they rested with their backs against the door, and eventually the knocking stopped, and the pleading ended, and the sounds of footsteps could be heard, now fading, as the supplicant moved elsewhere in search of refuge.
“Hush, Rey,” Norma said.
It was then that Manau’s mother stepped back into the room. She’d been watching through the cracked kitchen door, listening to her son and his visitors for the last half hour, unable to discern who was what to whom in this strange trio. Something was not quite right with the woman named Norma and her own son: what had happened to her Elijah? She carried a tray and a thermos with hot water. “Does anyone want more tea?” she said, with all the innocence she could muster. Her son, the woman, and the boy were looking over the parchment, no one saying a thing. “Oh,” Manau’s mother said, because silence had always, always troubled her, “what a fine drawing! What a handsome young man!”
“It’s Rey,” Norma said.
“It’s your father,” said Manau to the boy.
Understanding neither comment, Manau’s mother returned quickly to the kitchen, where she stood by the door and listened for many minutes, but heard nothing.
In the morning, when the door was unbarred and the windows opened, Norma kissed Rey good-bye and walked back to the radio station. She had washed her face with a splash of water from a communal basin. “How will you make it home?” she asked her husband. She felt an acute exhaustion, a soreness that ran the length of her legs. Rey smiled and said he would walk. The air still smelled of smoke, and the sky was stained sepia. Many buildings had burned the previous night, and some, at that hour, were still burning.