This Is Not Your City

In Tangier they were childless. At sea north of Algiers, the parents of a tuba prodigy. In Tunis, the parents of a daughter whose wedding featured a flock of ice sculptures: not only swans but cranes, herons, osprey. Geese mate for life, Lucinda and Wil told their fellow passengers on the Wavecrest, and the eagles cost as much as their double-occupancy stateroom on the cruise. As the ship sailed between Malta to the north and Tripoli to the south, the sea calm in between, the first formal dinner was scheduled with seatings at seven and eight. Wil and Lucinda unzipped their garment bags to find Wil’s dinner jacket had the unmistakable smell of storage, lines pressed stiff along the seams and a mothy cedar smell from the wooden chips tucked in the closets at home. They hooked the hanger on the railing of their private balcony and let the suit flap over the Mediterranean. By dinner, lamb rubbed with mint and rosemary, Wil smelled like salt and wind and a peach sunset over the straits of Gibraltar, and they told their tablemates that their son was a cryptography genius recruited by the NSA at the age of twelve.

Wilbur and Lucinda Voorhuis were both fifty-one, and while Wil’s round face carried the number better than his wife’s, Lucinda often wore sleeveless dresses that showed off the long, firm muscles of her arms. They were both indeterminate enough to claim a hedgefund manager, a sweet-smelling infant, America’s most promising young speed skater. At anchor in Port Said, at the northern edge of the Suez Canal, passengers on the inland river excursion were ferried on buses to Cairo, then on to Giza. The driver played a tape of educational commentary: the carving of the Sphinx in 2650 BC, the long solar boats that carried the Pharaohs into eternity. Wil asked Lucinda for a pen and notepad from her purse and drew a sideways Egyptian with the head of a jackal and a pleated skirt. “Anubis finds Lucinda worthy of paradise,” Will wrote in a speech bubble above the jackal’s snout. “Her heart is lighter than an osprey’s feather.” He was showing it to his wife when the elderly woman across the aisle asked if they’d had news yet from their eldest. Lucinda couldn’t remember which child the woman was asking about, whether she needed an update on an Olympic bid in handball or the identification of breakages in chromosome 17p13. She wondered, for a wild, fluttering moment, if her real child had in fact typed a note, penned a letter, called the front desk of the Cairo Hilton and asked to be connected to Mr. and Mrs. Voorhuis’ room.

Wil had once planned to be a doctor, but had transferred to dental school after one semester. “I decided I didn’t want that kind of responsibility,” he told Lucinda on their first date, drinks in the Plaza in downtown Kansas City. He did a lot of elective oral surgery procedures for which patients paid out of pocket. It was an excellent living, but it would still have been useful for their son to have a doctor for a father. There would have been a camaraderie in the hospitals, the sympathy textured with less condescension, more empathy. Wil had tried, sometimes, when Aaron was in the NICU. “I was in med school for a year,” he’d say. “Oral surgeon, now. I can tell you the tongue’s as finicky as a spine. Just a tangle of nerves.” It made the doctors trade looks over Aaron’s head. Lucinda had waited for Wil to catch on, to feel the blush of his own embarrassment, but eight months in, Aaron still in intensive care, Lucinda on an indefinite leave of absence from her job with an insurance firm, she finally asked him to stop. Over cheeseburgers in the hospital cafeteria, she tried to explain the vast distance between a pediatric neurologist and a man who extracted wisdom teeth twelve times per week, however much they might share in the materials of the body, the blood and the white solidity of skull or tooth or jaw.

Wil convinced Lucinda to take a camel ride on the Western Plateau and snapped picture after picture while she swayed uncertainly on the animal’s hump. The camel smelled warm and dusty, its hair faintly oily like sheep’s wool and full of grit. Lucinda wound her fingers around the tasseled reins and into its brown coat, squeezed her legs tighter. She was wearing white linen against a blue sky, the sand-colored pyramids of Giza ranged behind her. Wil paid the Egyptian photographer for two Polaroids, fitted into paper sleeves that framed the pictures with Camels!: An Egyptian Tradishon. “Lovely,” the camel-keeper said, as he helped Lucinda back to earth. “How many camels for your woman?” he asked Wil.

There was a second shore excursion to Alexandria and its new library, glass and steel built with UN money. The tour lasted two hours, which gave Wil time to come up with sixteen ways to burn the building down. “I shall incinerate the common heritage of man,” he whispered, as the tour guide ushered them past a bank of computers.

“Stop,” Lucinda said. Between the information about modern methods of moisture control, about the Greco-Roman heritage of El Iskandariya and the causeway that linked the Cape of Figs to the old Pharos Lighthouse, about their expanding multitude of brilliant children, it felt like more knowledge than she could handle. She kicked Wil in the shin when he spoke about their son, a boy with straw-colored hair like his mother’s and wide, shining eyes like no one they’d known. Lucinda apologized after dinner, because Wil had for once said no more than what was true.

It was the first real vacation they’d taken since the birth, and of course everyone had asked what they were doing with Aaron, what arrangements they’d made, as if he were mail to be picked up or a plant to be watered. There’s a good facility in Olathe, they said, wondering how to explain without feeling like they’d taken their son to be kenneled like a dog. They’d been looking at the facility anyway, worrying about a time they might no longer be able to care for him. Children with more awareness, they’d been told, should be eased into institutionalization. With Aaron, nobody knew. He followed things with his eyes, sometimes. He smiled at people who entered his field of vision. He had learned to swallow, eventually, and to roll over unassisted. He was ten years old, and no one had any idea how long he might live.

Sometimes Lucinda could spend an hour touching the soft bottoms of his feet, the distinct whorls of toe prints that walking had never rubbed away. His feet were beautiful and very wrong, marked with raised patterns never meant to last. Once a year she would ink his feet, press them to a piece of white posterboard. She hung the prints in a long line down the basement stairwell.

The afternoon the ship entered the Suez, the Voorhuises kept to themselves, took photographs of each other, singly, posed with the brown geometry of the canal, the tall, vertical walls. One of the leisure coordinators saw them and offered to take a picture of them both together. They put their arms around each other’s waist and smiled. At the moment the leisure coordinator snapped the picture, a maintenance crew appeared on the crest of the shore, on the Sinai side, above Lucinda’s left shoulder. The coordinator handed the digital camera back to them and watched them call up the shot. “Is it okay?” she asked. “Do you want me to try again? Are you enjoying yourselves?”

Out the other side of the Suez, skirting the Saudi peninsula, Lucinda imagined she could feel the spray of the Red Sea coating her skin with a layer of brine so salty a lick across her hand would make her lips purse with the bitterness. She could feel it crust along her hair, brackish and saline, and she showered morning, night, and midday. She and Wil spent two hours on a sunny afternoon inside the ship’s boutique arguing over souvenirs and postcards: who to send to, which pictures, how many, how much. They bought nearly fifty cards, and they knew they looked green, like people who never traveled sending mail to everyone they’d ever met because there might not be an opportunity like this again. This was essentially true, and Lucinda only had the energy for so much deception. That evening they ate room service, the sliding doors open and the table wedged halfway through. Wil ate on the balcony and Lucinda inside and the wind yelped through the open space. The evening after that, 120 kilometers off the northeastern tip of Somalia, in the Gulf of Aden, the ship was hijacked.

“Yes, please. Sit tight. The passengers may be ... mustered, later, in the dining room, according to demands. We will come and tell you if you need to leave. It might be good to be ready.” Kristina, the maid assigned to Ocean View Suite D147, was tall and blond, her English polished. Wil thought it was a mark of the quality of the cruise line that they employed such handsome, educated women, who wore lapel pins of the flags of countries whose languages they spoke. Kristina’s pins ran along the base of her white collar, just above her tailored black dress. Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany, France, the United Kingdom. Still, she used words like “muster” uncertainly, as if she’d recently been briefed, as if she heard herself now saying things she had never thought she’d need to know.

They had woken an hour earlier to a sound low and piercing, a painful boom that rattled the room. It sounded twice more and when the sound died away Lucinda and Wil were both sitting rigidly upright, startled out of sleep so quickly they each thought they could hear the other’s heart hammer. The ship was grinding beneath them, a thrum that increased in frequency until there was a strange vibration in the feel of the air, the floor beneath them, the walls and windows. The ship steered sharply portside, but was so large Lucinda and Wil could only mark the direction by poking their heads out the sliding doors and examining the shifting wake behind them. There was obviously something to be gotten away from, but it seemed impossible that the Wavecrest could be maneuverable enough, quick enough to do it. Between and after the booming noise was a lighter crackle, more familiar, the weaponry of video games or films. They tried to wonder in the quieter spaces if someone was simply watching a movie too loudly next door.

“An acoustic—bang. Bam. It is used as a deterrent,” Kristina had been able to tell them when they opened the door to her. They were wrapped in plush Wavecrest bathrobes over their pajamas, Lucinda rolling her bare feet backward and forward on her toes. “The ships in this area all carry them.”

Wil and Lucinda dressed with a faint sense of excitement. They pondered the appropriate footwear for a hostage situation. They turned on the bedside lamp, brushed their teeth in the bathroom, and were modestly surprised to find that their room functioned the way it always had. Wil sorted through the minibar, the gift basket that had been placed on their bed at the start of the cruise, and they shared an orange and a packet of cheese crackers. They were still hungry, but thought they should ration. They watched the water outside, the whisk of large speedboats skirting the side of the Wavecrest beneath them, the faint smell of smoke. They could see small people, clearly armed, porcupined with the slight black quills of weapons six decks below their balcony. But the pirates didn’t do anything, just patrolled around and around, and sooner than Wil and Lucinda expected, the novelty had worn off. “Would it be wrong to watch television?” Wil asked.

At noon they split a packet of cashews and turned on the wall-mounted television set. There was nothing but static, the first sign within the room that anything was amiss. Lucinda checked the telephone and heard no dial tone. Every so often there was the sound of footsteps moving quickly down the hall outside. The soft carpet made it impossible to tell whether they were Kristina’s sensible heels, the sandals of a wayward passenger, the heavy boots of a Somali pirate. Lucinda gathered all the cups and glasses in the room, the ice bucket, the flower vase, to fill them all with water from the bathroom sink. It was what you did during tornado season, or before a bad blizzard that might freeze the pipes. It might as well be done during a pirate attack. She lined up the plastic bathroom cups and wine glasses along the vanity counter in the main room, left the vase by the toilet so it could be used for flushing. Lucinda wondered if it would be rather cavalier to take a shower. They might still be mustered. They might still be killed.

Midafternoon they both took out books and started to read, Lucinda a mystery and Wil a historical novel about naval warfare. Lucinda opened the balcony door. “It’s too stuffy in here,” she said. “And the glass would hardly stop bullets anyway.” At dinner time they ate raisins and Oreos and went to bed immediately after sunset. “I’m going to shower tomorrow,” Lucinda said. “I don’t care. I need something to do.” They lay in bed and listened to the silence. The buzz of the speedboats had stopped, and Wil wondered how much fuel the small boats carried, how far offshore they all were and where they were headed. Lucinda thought she could hear the rustling of other passengers, imagined tapping out urgent messages room to room in Morse code. She wished she knew Morse code. She imagined the pirates dismantling the diving board at the swimming pool on deck eight, tying it down over the starboard railing like a seesaw and forcing all 316 passengers off it one by one. She waited for the splash of falling bodies.

A few days after Aaron’s first birthday, Wil had quietly suggested they might try for another child. He refrained from saying a better one. Aaron’s birth had taken three rounds of IVF, years of trying for a baby in every old-fashioned way they knew how. Adoption, Wil suggested, but Lucinda shook her head. “I’m tired,” she said. “I don’t think you understand how tired I am.” Any object as incapable as Aaron—stones, sticks, cinder blocks—needed nothing. Aaron had a body’s necessities, a blind kitten’s, a featherless bird’s, the naked pink jelly-bean of a marsupial baby. His needs were complex and his inability to meet them total.

Once, at work, Wil overheard his nurse anesthetist wondering aloud why Aaron hadn’t been aborted. “We didn’t know,” he explained to her. “There was no way to know until after he was born.” Later he wondered if he should have fired her, told her they would have kept Aaron either way, that he was their child and that was enough. He wondered if that was what Lucinda would have said, if she would have meant it. If he had known, he would not have wanted his son, this particular son. He knew this about himself, and thought that if he could ask Lucinda how she felt he would know a great deal more about her, about her long, mysterious days at home.

The next day Lucinda and Wil both showered, put their hostage outfits back on. They each drank a cup of tap water. They’d decided to husband their resources, the Perrier, the Evian in the mini-fridge. Everything in the room still worked except the television. Lucinda even blow-dried her hair. “We could write our postcards,” she suggested. “No sense putting it off.”

Aaron had been born with his brain unfurrowed, lissencephalic, as slick and smooth as the greasy inside of a shell. The MRI confirmed the lack of creases and ruts, troughs or ridges. Knowledge must live in the washes of the brain, Wil decided when the doctors told them that Aaron might or might not learn to swallow. They received printouts of the MRI, filed them away in an accordion folder penciled “Aaron, Medical,” in the basement. By six months the paperwork had exploded into a second folder and Wil, refiling, had taken one of the black-and-white pictures. He kept it folded in his wallet. Every day since Tangier he had imagined taking it out at dinner, over the appetizers, shrimp cocktail, mussels in a white wine curry. They cracked shells, pried the gray flesh out with narrow forks, and Wil imagined opening his wallet. This, he imagined saying, is my son. His name is Aaron. He has eyes the color of wonder and a brain as slack and damp as an oyster.

“Pyramid,” Wil answered, and wrote to his own sister. He picked a photo of the Biblioteca Alexandria and wrote: Dear Joan, The trip has been amazing. We’re currently being held hostage by pirates, but if you receive this it means the situation’s sorted itself out just fine. Hope you weren’t worried. He was almost out of room. The food’s been great. Love, Wil, he wrote, and looked up her address in the notebook Lucinda had brought.

Lucinda wrote doggedly, flipping over new cards long after Wil had finished with his. She kept putting the pen down, shaking her hand out, cracking her knuckles. It looked both theatrical and weary. The sun was dropping and Wil flipped on the overhead switch for his wife. Nothing happened. He tried the bedside lamps, the bulbs over the vanity mirror, the bathroom light. “I’ll finish these on the balcony, then,” Lucinda said, gripping her pen more tightly. “While there’s still a little sun.”

She sat on one of their two lounge chairs and Wil thought about joining her, wondered if he was welcome. The sea was quiet, the showy sparkle of the sunset giving way to darker blue and black, faint slashes of light on the swells rather than a field of sequins. There were walls on either side of the balcony, two thirds of the height to the deck above. Wil thought that could be a project for tomorrow, climbing over or around the partitions, sharing crackers with their neighbors and planning a resistance.

Lucinda slept late the next morning, the third of the lockdown, and Wil was restless. He ate a whole packet of gummy fruit snacks by himself, then felt guilty. He re-read the ship welcome magazine and the list of ship’s programming for February 11th, the day before the hijacking. There had been a lecture on the desert of Wadi Rum he had meant to attend and forgotten. The room was bright, but Lucinda simply rolled over, pushed her head farther into the pillow. Her postcards were stacked on the vanity, rubber-banded neatly. Wil flipped through them: her parents, her sisters, Aaron’s homecare aide and physical therapist. Twenty-one for Aaron.

Tangier was exciting, lots of palm and fruit trees, but a little hard to take. Crowds of people selling stuff on the docks, not wanting to take no for an answer. I got whistled at twice, though, which isn’t bad for your decrepit old mother. Guess I don’t mind. Wish you were here. Love, Mom.

Your brain is atrophic. You have a total lack of sulci and gyri in the coronal and transverse sections of your brain. The corpus callosum is absent. Your condition is the result of a de novo chromosomal aberration. You want to hear some more words you don’t know? How about these: fish, dog, sky, ice cream, sun, moon, mom, dad, child. Your dad and I were karyotyped and we were fine—no monosomy of the terminal segment of the short arm of the seventeenth chromosome, especially band 17p13. So no one knows what the hell happened to you. Love, Mom.

Wil put them all back in order, the corners squared and the rubber band tight. He waited for his wife to wake and when she did he gave her two snack-size bags of potato chips and told her they had more. They didn’t, but he’d appointed himself head of rations, and she didn’t have to know. He dug through their bags and found a squashed granola bar, a bag of something called Meganuts from a market stall in Cairo, a spare box of TicTacs in Lucinda’s toiletry bag, a long rope of beef jerky in his carry-on from the plane. He piled the new food into the gift basket and held the jerky up like a trophy. “A whole new food group,” he announced.

Lucinda, as she said she would, napped most of the afternoon, and after sunset could manage only a confused doze, slipping in and out of dreams. She woke up at one in the morning certain that she was going to die. She would perish 120 kilometers off the Cape of Guardafui in the Arabian Sea, and her body would never make it home. She swung her feet off the side of the bed and felt in the instant they touched the floor that it had to be true.

Wil exhaled, a burbling sigh that squeezed through the congestion in his nose. He turned away and did not wake up. His head tipped backward of its own accord, lengthening and baring his throat. The Adam’s apple was tight and round, pushing against the skin. He hadn’t shaved since the hijacking, and his throat bristled blond and white along and below his jawline, patches of rough scattering almost down to his collar. She had only ever known him meticulously clean-shaven. Lucinda looked down at her husband, asleep in the bed that was bolted solidly to the wall and floor. She wanted to ask him who he was. I’ve realized you’re a mystery, she wanted to say. I’ve lived ten years surrounded by strangers. My funny husband and my unknowable son.

Then she thought, the postcards. The postcards for Aaron. They were still sitting in a stack, neatly addressed to their house in Overland Park. If she and Wil had made it home, she thought, they probably would have beaten the postcards. They would have picked Aaron up from the Sunflower Home in Olathe and strapped him into the van and said, don’t worry, your presents are on the way. Postcards and magnets and a rubber model of the Sphinx and a plush camel and a plastic cruise ship. Baby toys, she would apologize. I know you’re ten but I don’t know what else to get for you. I don’t know what you want.

She picked up the cards on the vanity, separated out the ones to her son, and walked to the balcony. She ripped the postcards in half, one by one, and scattered them; they fluttered and fell, caught by the railings and walls of balconies below, by updrafts and breezes. They flew and sank and one by one they disappeared. She was going to die, after all, and did not want anyone to see these postcards, to read them or touch them or feel they knew then something about her, about the boy she meant to send them to.

If there was to be at some point a separation of sheep and lambs, wheat and chaff, the passengers who would be spared and those who would be executed, she thought she and Wil should volunteer themselves. They were qualified hostages, years of experience. They wouldn’t protest. They could be shuttled and shuffled and they would do it with, if not love, a numb contentment. In the language of her homecare support group, the cruise had had a special name, “respite care,” not for Aaron but for her, a term created to make the caregivers feel less guilty, to remind them that their own sanity was of importance. Sitting in another room and reading a magazine while someone else listened to your child scream was respite care. Going to a matinee while someone else suctioned out his aspirated saliva was respite care. Her support group had been jealous only of the money that allowed such an extravagant trip; they did not question the necessity of departure. Respite care, they knew, made you infinitely less likely to smother your own child, to hit them, hurt them, hasten them out of this world. Only Lucinda had looked askance at the idea, its implication of necessity, its acknowledgment of her darker desires.

Late the next afternoon, the fourth, the phone rang. Wil answered it, tried to steel himself for a piratical summons, for a foreign accent that would command his presence at a great slaughter of the rich and elderly. But it was only Kristina. “Arrangements have been made,” she said. “An agreement struck.” She came down hard, ringingly, on the “struck,” proud to know the word, to deliver such fine news to her huddled charges. “We are headed for the Seychelles, not Mombasa. A little farther east, perhaps thirteen hours. You will be able to disembark by tomorrow morning.”

Wil found Lucinda hunched over on the end of a balcony lounge chair where she’d spent most of the day, her hands wrapped under her elbows. He fit himself in behind her, his legs on either side, his chest pressed against her spine. “We’re headed for the Seychelles,” he said. “We’ll be off the boat by tomorrow morning.”

“We’ll be home day after tomorrow,” Wil said. “I’ll bet you anything. The cruiseline will be desperate to get us all back to our own countries before we can talk to the press. We’ll be in the Seychelles tomorrow morning, then a flight to London. A transfer to Newark, or a direct to St. Louis. A hop, skip and a jump to Kansas City.” Her silence pushed him on. “We’ll pick up the car at long-term parking, go get the kids. All eight of them. God, it’s amazing, the triplets—I have to say, I was none too excited about miming when they started it up, those glass boxes and invisible ropes, but by all accounts they’ve got real talent. Even in those little berets, striped shirts like a chain gang. And our youngest—”

That still seemed the wrong thing to say, and Wil eased out of the chair to bring them a feast of leftover food, gummy worms, pretzels, two green apples and a bag of chalky dinner mints. Night came on, but the electricity hummed back to life, and in ones and twos and twelves the dark water was lit with rectangles of yellow light, a grid of windows and doors in the sea, the outlines of 316 people living safely in the side of a leviathan. “We’ll all be home in a couple of days,” Wil said. “All of us.”