Why Visit America

by Matthew Baker

  For a moment she closed her eyes, trying to sense the separate components of her soul and her body. Trying to imagine what it would feel like for her soul to separate from her body. Trying to imagine the course that her soul might have taken through human history. The lives it had lived in wealth, and the lives it had lived in poverty. The lives it had lived in war, and the lives it had lived in peace. The lives it had lived in health, and the lives it had lived in affliction. The lives it had lived in slavery, and the lives it had lived in freedom. She caught the sweet scent of the tanning oil again, which was her body that sensed that, though the awareness came from her soul. She wondered if she had a soulmate somewhere. And then she opened her eyes again, and heat lightning was flickering in the distance, and she remembered her baby, and that after all of the time that she had spent at the compound the child might still be born empty.

  Naomi still hadn’t decided whether or not just to go home when she went back into the compound. She emerged from the stairwell lost in thought, but then paused at the sound of a faint hum in the altar room. Electrocardiographs and electroencephalographs. The tone of a flatline. With the skylight dark, the only light in the altar room came from the glow of the candles flickering between the cots, and she could see the monitors from where she stood. Every last screen showed a flatline, as if all of the patients had died at once. Naomi frowned, thinking that the monitors must be malfunctioning, that maybe a power surge had fried the circuits, but then as she walked through the massive arched doorway of the altar room she realized that the monitors were functioning perfectly. All of the patients were dead. The bodies were mangled. The sheets were drenched. Blood was dripping from the cots onto the floor. The concrete suddenly felt cold under the soles of her feet. Frightened, she glanced toward the stone altar and saw that the ceremonial dagger was gone. Shadows flickered across the room with the flames of the candles. Naomi froze in place, watching the shadows carefully, afraid that whoever had stabbed the patients might be hiding somewhere in the room, behind or beneath the cots. The decrepit statues along the circumference of the room were silhouettes in the dim light, and she desperately tried to remember each of the poses that the statues held, paranoid that one of the silhouettes might be the killer posing as a statue. The flatlines kept humming. The statues were motionless. Naomi stood there in the doorway with her heart beating wildly until she finally believed that she was alone, that nobody was hiding in the room, and still she was afraid to move, but she forced her body to move, to go get help, and she padded off down the hallway with sweat trickling down the nape of her neck and a hot flash spreading across her skin. She felt sick. The walk to the security office seemed impossibly long, like minutes, entire minutes, and she felt a rush of relief when she saw light streaming from the doorway, the salt lamp that stood on the desk where the guards sat, but instead of sitting behind the desk the guard who was on duty was sprawled across the floor, stabbed so many times his uniform was shredded, with tinny music still playing over his earbuds, a chorus of trilling violins. Light was streaming from the doorway of the medical office too, the salt lamp that stood on the desk where the doctors sat, and instead of sitting behind the desk the doctor who was on duty was sprawled across the floor, stabbed through the thick fabric of her uniform, while a classic sitcom streamed across her tablet, accompanied by a laugh track. In the manager’s office, Jane lay on the cement in a mound of silk, her neck slashed, her face rigid, her features contorted into a grotesque expression, surrounded by aspirin tablets that had spilled from a bottle onto the floor. Naomi felt a ripple of terror. There were no other staff at the compound that time of night. She and the other residents were alone. She had to warn the other residents. Tad. Annabelle. Spencer. There would be safety in numbers. She wasn’t going to die. Her hands were trembling. She followed the hallway deeper into the compound, glancing behind her once, but nobody was behind her. Nobody was there. The bathrooms were dark. As she passed the bathrooms she caught the scent of the diffusers, jasmine and lemongrass, heard dripping water, and then she came to the residential section of the compound, where the rough wooden doors to the bedchambers stood at regular intervals in the hallway. At that time of night all of the doors were always shut, but all of the doors were open, as if each of the residents had been summoned from sleep by a soft knock or a familiar voice. Naomi stared down the hallway with a sense of horror. Madeline, a real estate heir with a brown bob cut and vintage spectacles, lay in a heap in the doorway of the first bedchamber, wearing madras pajamas soaked with blood. Limbs of other bodies extended from doorways farther down the hallway, hands and feet and shiny coils of hair. In the soft light of the salt lamps glowing in the bedchambers, the puddles of blood spreading from the doorways shimmered on the floor, forming an archipelago of black pools that extended off down the hallway, into the darkness. A ventilator came to life with a thump. Air creaked through a duct on the ceiling. Naomi padded cautiously down the hallway, stepping around the blood, with the nausea growing in her stomach with every body that she passed. The women had all been stabbed repeatedly in the throat and the belly. Spencer had fallen onto the floor with his hand stiffened around a bottle of absinthe, nude, bleeding from his chest and his throat. Annabelle had fallen to the floor in a bright kimono, bleeding from her neck and her belly, with her eyes wide with fear. Naomi was hyperventilating. As she walked toward the darkness at the end of the hallway she was crying now, silently, trying not to make any noise. Her bedchamber was the last one in the hallway. The salt lamp in her bedchamber was glowing too. Nobody was following her. Hesitantly, she stepped into the room. The satin cat bed was empty. Geometry books had been spilled across the floor. Metallic shapes glimmered on the covers. Silver grids of lines. The charcoal sketch of the impossible object was still taped above the desk. Tad was sprawled across the concrete in a horrible rag-doll posture, his mouth wide open, still wearing his retainer. Naomi spun away. Stars twinkled across her vision. She felt dizzy. The nausea rose in a stomach-churning surge of acid, and she squatted to vomit in the wastebasket by the desk. Afterward she sat panting on the floor by the wastebasket, catching her breath. She spat, trying to get the taste of acid out of her mouth. Nobody was in the doorway. She was shaking. She tried to think. She didn’t have keys to any of the cars in the lot. She didn’t have time to search all of the rooms for keys. She just had to run. She needed to run. Nobody was in the doorway. Still wearing her nightshirt, she knelt on the floor to put on her sneakers, but her hands were trembling so badly that she couldn’t tie the laces. She swore. She fumbled. She knotted the laces. She wobbled as she stood. Nobody was in the doorway. Cupping her hands protectively around her stomach, she slipped back into the hallway, glancing in both directions, but the hallway was still empty. She was going to have to walk through the desert. She was going to need water before fleeing the compound. A canteen. Taking the quickest route to the kitchen, she cut through the greenhouse, through the shadowy jungle of flowers and vines and hissing misters, and then back out into the hallway, hurrying past the darkened doorways of the yoga room and the meditation room, the orderly stacks of mats and cushions. She could hear the distant humming of the machines in the kitchen now, the ice dispenser, the soda dispenser, the fridges and freezers, and her mouth was dry, and her palms were sweating, and the soles of her sneakers squeaked quietly on the floor, and then she came to the massive arched doorway of the birthing room, and her heart leapt as she saw a silhouette in the doorway, a living person, backlit by the glowing crystals on the shelves in the birthing room, the dazzling array of amethyst and topaz and citrine and quartz. Naomi froze, petrified. The figure stood with the eerie trancelike posture of a sleepwalker, gazing in at the stones, draped in an elegant gown. The figure shifted slightly. Then the figure turned. The dagger was clutched in a limp hand. She was cradling the empty body of a lifeless newborn.

  Naomi took a step back.

  “He still needs a soul,” Emily said.

  “Emily,” Naomi said.

&nbs
p; “All he needs is a soul,” Emily said.

  “Emily,” Naomi begged.

  “It’s not too late,” Emily said, and she was crying and smiling as she stepped from the shadows into the light.

  * * *

  Out in the desert, as the sun rose over the mountains, a dust devil spun in whirling circles, a twisting column of soil and pebbles. The desert was quiet. A jackrabbit with a dark tail sat chewing a thistle near a cactus, staring at the sun. A roadrunner sat on a cluster of eggs in a nest of twigs, looking at the sun. Flies hovered in a gorge. A flock of sparrows shot over the compound, soaring out across the desert, over the sand and shrubs, diving and fluttering through the brisk pure air above the land.

  * * *

  Lupe had fallen back asleep around dawn, and she was woken at noon by the baby moving, pushing and kicking in her stomach, and she got out of bed finally, slipping on her bathrobe. She washed her face. She brushed her teeth. She put on her glasses. Sparrows were chirping in the yard. Joaquin had left a dirty plate in the sink, and while she was scrubbing the plate she heard sirens, a caravan of ambulances tearing down the highway, and she imagined that there must have been some accident at the military base, where he had used to work before he had taken the job running the kitchen at the Oasis. Joaquin didn’t like for her to do housework that late in the pregnancy, but she needed to do something to keep her mind off of the discomfort and the monotony, so she dusted the house, and she swept the house, and she plunged some hair from the drain in the bathtub, and by then she was exhausted, so she went into the living room to do some sudoku. When she got tired of the silence she got off of the couch and went over to the television to turn on the news for some background noise. She froze when she saw the image on the screen, realizing that she recognized the building. Joaquin had taken her there once, proudly touring her through the kitchen, showing off the industrial mixers and ranges. The maternity center. There had been a massacre at the maternity center early that morning. The worst mass killing in the country in over a month, and the murderer hadn’t even had a gun. Over a hundred people had been stabbed to death, every last soul in the compound, before the murderer had phoned in an incoherent plea to an emergency hotline and then swallowed a bottle of meds. The only living creature that had survived the massacre was a cat. Footage of a firefighter holding the cat played across the screen, and then there was a clip from within the compound, a body lying on the floor of the dining hall, and the face had been blurred out, but she saw the hairnet, and she saw the apron, and she saw the colorful tie-dye t-shirt that he had been wearing when he had brought a glass of water into the bedroom for her before leaving for work early that morning, and then the screen cut to a shot of the compound surrounded by emergency vehicles with flashing sirens. Lupe had dropped the sudoku puzzles. She sank to the floor. She didn’t weep or scream. She just stared at the television, in shock, as the same cycle of clips continued to play across the screen. A great wind blew through the yard, like a mass of spirits rushing across the desert toward the city, disturbing the chimes hanging over the stoop, agitating the laundry hanging from the clothesline, and a faint breeze escaped from the gust to slip into the house through the screen in the window, twisting gently around her body, sending chills across her skin. Advertising jingles rang out from the television, singsongy voices, peddling insurance and vacuums during commercial breaks. The phone in the kitchen rang and rang and rang and then eventually fell silent. Later, when the bright gold sunlight streaming through the windows had dimmed to the burning red of early evening, she curled up in a fetal position on the rug, staring at an empty power outlet in the corner as political pundits argued back and forth on a talk show.

  “We should be grateful. We should be celebrating. It’s solved the greatest problem of our time. I’m not talking about climate change. Climate change was just a symptom of the root problem. Pollution, famine, water shortages, those were all just symptoms too. The root problem has always been overpopulation. But we don’t have to worry about the population growing anymore. Now the number is fixed.”

  “How can you expect people to be happy when children are dying?”

  “If the religious community is right, and these babies are being born without souls, then technically there’s nothing to mourn.”

  “But how can you ignore the lost potential of these empty bodies?”

  Lupe was still lying on the rug later that night when the presidential debate came onto the television.

  “We’re in a time of crisis. Our scientists can’t stop what’s happening, and our prayers are going unanswered. God is sending us a message. It’s up to us to act. God’s chosen nation. A vote for me is a vote for your future. There’s thirteen and a half billion people on this planet, and only half of a billion people in this country. America’s children come first. We’ve got a military strong enough to carpet-bomb the rest of the world into oblivion. And that’s exactly what we’re going to do. We’re going to release thirteen billion souls back into the ether all at once. A vote for me is a vote for your children. No more children are going to be born without souls in this land.”

  Lupe got up off of the floor finally and went into the bedroom, falling back asleep clutching his pajamas, which still smelled like his scent, as cicadas sang in the yard.

  Her water broke early the next morning, and she drove through the desert alone, into Las Vegas, where she gave birth in a hospital with peaceful pastel colors painted across the walls of the maternity ward. Her child was born healthy and angry, shrieking and wailing at the sight of the world. Lupe raised the child back out in the desert. The child was angsty and listless and selfish, grumbling moodily about homework, complaining of boredom constantly, throwing blood-curdling tantrums in the parking lots of gas stations. He had the same hazel eyes as her, with that starburst pattern of brown and green, and the same bulbous earlobes as her father, and the same tilted snaggletooth as her mother, but more than anybody in the world the child looked like Joaquin. That exact same face, round and attractive. That exact same hair. That exact same smile. And yet in terms of temperament, the child bore absolutely no resemblance whatsoever to her, or her parents, or her husband. She tried to teach the child to work hard, to take pride in a job done with care and integrity, and instead the child did chores sloppily, shrugging indifferently when confronted with a poorly made bed or messily folded laundry. She tried to teach the child to be kind to animals, to find joy in petting and feeding other creatures, and instead the child threw rocks at chained dogs, laughing with satisfaction as the dogs yelped or whimpered in pain. She tried to teach the child about materialism and humility, to find contentment in the simple pleasures of life, to be grateful and appreciative for what life provided, and the child screamed and kicked on the floor of a supermarket, shrieking with fury, overcome with rage at being denied a new toy. Lupe had always believed in souls, even before the phenomenon with the empty bodies had started, and that was why. There was no explaining how different that a child could be from its parents otherwise. A child born to bookish parents, raised by bookish parents, who took no interest in learning whatsoever. A child born to outdoorsy parents, raised by outdoorsy parents, who loathed doing activities in the wilderness. A child born to frugal parents, raised by frugal parents, who wasted money on idiotically frivolous expenses. There was no explaining that by nature or nurture. Only by chance. The particular quality of a soul. Watching the child swinging on the playset in the yard, Lupe wondered about the soul that inhabited that body. She knew the theories that the staff at the compound had promoted. That a freshly departed soul would attach to the nearest available embryo or fetus. Lupe had been less than a dozen miles from the compound on the night of the massacre. The child might be inhabited by the soul of any of the people who had died. Even by the soul of the murderer. The person who had killed her husband. When she thought about it, when she honestly considered it, she was almost certain that that must be the soul that inhabited the child. Yet she loved him anyway. Lupe had
always been taught that she should judge a person by what was inside, not outside. That she shouldn’t judge a person based on physical appearances. That she should judge a person based on spiritual character. The child had a cruel, greedy, miserable soul. He pulled the wings from moths and butterflies for amusement. He spilled milk onto the floor deliberately. He hammered nails into the heirloom credenza. He called her horrible names. He screamed that he hated her. He stole earrings from her jewelry box, coveting the shiny nubs of silver and gold. He lied for fun. And yet she loved him, for no other reason than that the child had come out of her body, and vaguely resembled her, and resembled her parents, and resembled her husband. Because the child happened to look like other people she had loved. Lupe stood at the window in the kitchen, watching the child run around the yard. Maybe he would grow out of it. Maybe he wouldn’t. The child might grow up to be an asshole, or a chauvinist, or a racist, or a killer. It didn’t matter. It just didn’t. She already knew that she would love him until the day she died.

  The Tour

  Professionally she worked under the name of The Master, but he knew her birth name from monitoring fan sites online. Born under the name of Zoe Abbott, The Master had been raised in Georgia, where she was rumored to have taken her first gig at a backwater brothel in the mountains, the type of enterprise with musty sheets flung over bare mattresses and empty light sockets in the halls, where she had soon developed a cult following, due partly to the hype surrounding her quirk of insisting that only paying customers be allowed to see her face. After working there exactly two years, she had disappeared, just straight-up vanished, without a trace. Two years later she had reappeared with scarred hands and a hooded cloak at a harbor on the coast, claiming to have mastered all of the arts of touch: massage, chiropractic, shiatsu, ashiatsu, and the manifold genres of sex. She had done her first indie gigs for journalists and bloggers, who had quickly spread the word that she was, as claimed, a master. Since then she’d been on one long never-ending tour of the country. She appeared only in continental cities, one town per week, one gig per town. There were no known photos of her face. When spotted in public, she always wore that same black hooded cloak, identified only by the scars on her hands and the presence of her bodyguards, a pair of bald giants who accompanied her everywhere. Her abilities were legendary.