“You are misquoting,” Julia said. “What selfsame ancient sage said was, ‘The past can hurt. You can either run from it or learn from it.’”
“Oooh,” Carl said. “Your knowledge of ancient literature is deep and extensive. Getting a little personal, aren’t we? The residency was pediatrics, yes? And not psychiatry.”
“Residencies. Pediatrics and Emergency Medicine, if you please,” Julia said. “And you are still ducking the question.”
“You really don’t want the details. I just don’t go there anymore,” Carl said, and he rolled on his side and began to caress the small of Julia’s back, her butt, then he ran his hand deep inside her inner thigh.
“That’s good,” Julia said. “Very good. But it doesn’t get you off the hook. So you were born in Rhode Island?”
“I was born in Rhode Island. In Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in a neighborhood called Fairlawn, which had no people of color then, other than in the housing projects closer to downtown. It gets pretty messy after that.”
“You have siblings? Sisters and brothers?”
“One sister. Eighteen months younger. She’s still in Rhode Island.”
“And?”
“No ifs, ands, or buts, other than the very nice butt in my hand as we speak. That’s all there is. More than enough.”
“And your parents?”
“I had a mother and a father. My mother was from Martinique. Very Creole. Very dark and very beautiful. You just don’t want to know all this. We have better things to talk about and better things to do,” Carl said, and he pulled her to him.
“Ummm,” Julia said. “Sweet. Very sweet. Tempting to be sure. Exceptionally tempting. But it still doesn’t get you off the hook. What about your father?”
“Look, can you let it alone? I like fucking you. I like you. But my life is my life. Do what you want with my cock. Just leave my family out of it,” Carl said.
“No push,” Julia said. “I’m just interested. Sounds like your father wasn’t easy.”
“My father was a Jewish guy from Boston, all right? Very political. Pretty isolated. He got weird after we moved to West Virginia. This is all pretty messy. You just don’t want to know,” Carl said.
“I do want to know,” Julia said. “How old were you when you moved to West Virginia?”
“I was five. My sister was three. We lived there for seven years. Then we came back to Pawtucket. Satisfied?” Carl said.
“What brought you all to West Virginia?” Julia said.
“The car. It was a Chevy. I don’t know,” Carl said. “My father was trying a back-to-the-land thing. He bought a cabin on a dirt road in the mountains. We grew our own food. He went hunting for meat, and he thought he could make living writing articles for left-wing newspapers and magazines about life off the grid. He had a little family money. My mother was a speech pathologist. She worked in the schools. We lived off her income.”
“Sounds nice,” Julia said.
“It wasn’t nice,” Carl said. “I was a black kid from the North in a white place, and I had a family that didn’t get being black in America. So I looked a little black, but for sure black enough to make me black in West Virginia, and I thought white, which meant I didn’t get how to go along and get along. And my father was convinced that the John Birch Society and the Ku Klux Klan were about to take over America, and that we had to be ready, so we could hold out until the Russians came. Crazy stuff. Crazy-crazy. He was probably schizophrenic. We were alone, back in the woods, where no one could see or hear.”
“Yikes. What kept you sane?” Julia said.
“Who says I’m sane?” Carl said. “I found a black church, or they found me. Little place by the side of the road. Weirton, West Virginia. We lived about five miles out of town on a dirt road in the woods. Old steel town. There were a couple of old steelworkers, the guys who worked the coke ovens. Their families prayed together. I started hanging out there on Sundays. Rode my bike. I told my father I was fishing.”
“And?” Julia said.
“No and …” Carl said. “My cover got blown in the weirdest way. There was also a little synagogue in Weirton. A couple of the store-owners and some of the doctors were Jewish, but by the time I was growing up, that community was in decline. Most of the families had come as immigrant peddlers a generation before. Their kids all moved to Pittsburgh, New York, Boston, Cleveland, or DC. My father, crazy as he was, would take us to that synagogue on the Jewish Holidays, and as much as we felt like outcasts every day, we felt really weird in that place. Anyway, the synagogue caretaker went to Bethel AME. I started talking to him at the synagogue, and my father got suspicious. My old man followed me the next Sunday. That was that. I got grounded for Sundays. We moved away about six months later.”
“Where are your parents now?”
“My mother died before we left West Virginia. My father’s in jail in Massachusetts. Long story.”
“Your sister?”
“She’s okay. She lives in Rhode Island. She went to Princeton, and she could have lived anywhere, but she’s back home now. We talk. We’re close. She’s okay.”
“Sounds complicated.”
“It is complicated. Was complicated. Not complicated anymore.”
“You want to talk about it?” Julia said, and she reached over and put her hand on Carl’s cheek.
“I’ve talked way too much,” Carl said. He took Julia’s hand off his cheek and put it on the bed, away from him. He rolled over onto his side, his back to her.
He’s angry, Julia thought.
He turned around again. “It’s okay. You’re okay,” Carl said. “I haven’t talked this much about myself in years. Pretty boring. Sorry I rambled on.”
She’s even smarter than she looks, Carl thought. Why am I talking so much? Got to be careful now.
“I’m sorry,” Julia said.
“Nothing to be sorry about. The past is just the past.” Then he fell asleep.
Julia lay quiet for a few minutes. I shouldn’t have gone there, she thought. I fucked up again. Who is this guy? What the hell has happened in his life? Why do I like being here so much? Why does wanting hurt, every time? The ache in her shoulders, the strange sensation that was part pain, part rapid heartbeat returned.
Julia stood, went to pee, turned off the light, and came back to bed. She lay on her back, her eyes open.
The air-conditioner hummed. There was no light from behind the blinds yet. The nurses would be making middle of the night rounds at the hospital.
She woke just after dawn. Carl was gone.
A hard left turn. The lean of the truck shifted the gun barrel that was jammed into Julia’s side, and she took a quick breath while she had the chance. The radio was pounding so loud she couldn’t hear or think, so loud it hurt. Julia was sweating, but she couldn’t wipe the sweat from her brow. It dripped into her eyes, and she had to squint so she could see. Sweat, not tears. They could all go fuck themselves. They might make her scream, but they wouldn’t make her cry. The oily sweat of the man-boys on both sides of her smelled like spoiled butter and old leather, and she felt the grit on their slippery skin as the pickup swayed and jolted, taking them deeper into the middle of nowhere.
Yellow Bandanna yelled something in Kpelle, and the two others in the cab whooped. Julia jammed her elbows into the ribs of the driver and Yellow Bandanna. She twisted her wrists inside the cloth that bound them, but she couldn’t tear free. The driver whooped and jabbed her with his elbow, hard and deep under her ribs. Yellow Bandanna let go of the stock of the gun, grabbed Julia’s wrists in his hand, and twisted them, hard. They were young boys, but they were strong, and Yellow Bandanna’s hand was big enough to hold both Julia’s wrists at once.
“Fuck you,” Julia said.
Yellow Bandanna laughed and said something in Kpelle. The boy next to the passenger door said something, and then the driver said something. Yellow Bandanna humped the air, rocking his pelvis in time with the blaring radio beat, jamming the g
un barrel into Julia’s ribs with each thrust.
“Goddamn it,” Julia said. “Please go fuck yourself.”
Yellow Bandanna looked at Julia for the first time.
“Stink-mouh! Na focked,” he said. “Ya plenty-plenty fock-o,” Listen to the mouth on the woman! I’m not fucked. You are completely fucked, though.
The pickup turned right, and the lean drove the gun barrel into Julia’s chest. When the truck evened out, Julia saw the plantation sign and the guardhouse. She recognized the road. She knew where they were. It was the road to the clubhouse. They were going to The Club.
The Club sat on a hill from which you could see for miles; all the way, it seemed, to Sierra Leone, to Ivory Coast and Guinea, to the borders where there were iron and diamond mines and a railroad that in quiet times brought iron ore to a huge smelter that was perched on a harbor near the sea. Once Julia even saw a train.
Toward the end of day while the sun was still strong and bright and the hills were green and blue, you could see the clouds forming below the mountains, and you could see the thunderstorms in the distance—purple blue patches against the green of the mountainsides. As evening came, you could see the sky flaming orange and red. The wise deep light of the end of the day.
There was a TV over the bar, and the men at the bar cheered whenever someone on the television scored a goal—black men and white men cheering together, something Julia never saw anywhere else in Africa. But women never sat at the bar.
The expats gathered at The Club on Sunday afternoons. The hospital people came after brief work rounds. The NGO people came earlier and stayed later than the hospital people and spent most of their time talking politics. Julia wasn’t sure that any of them did real work. The hospital people, on the other hand, worked. They worked hard—endlessly, incredibly hard. The hospital people were there to get a break from seeing people who were sicker than it was possible for human beings to be sick, and from losing little kids and young women, day in and day out, to get a break from living through hell and heartbreak all day long, every single day of the year.
The hustlers who usually hung out at the bar at the Sparks Hotel came to sit at the bar of The Club on Sundays. They never looked at the view. They watched soccer on the television and made a big noise when a goal was scored. The NGO people and hospital people sat together on the porch behind the club near a swimming pool with pale blue water, and together they watched the evening storms roll in. They watched the weaver birds making their colonies, which looked like apartment houses in the ironwood trees. The surgeons from the hospital who came from Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Slovenia played ping-pong, while the others drank beer and talked about the news from America, Europe, and the Middle East. About poverty. About social class and social chaos and the great divide between rich and poor. About the abundance they had left behind. And about Africa, where you see what happens to the lives of the poor in a world where everyone lives off his neighbor, and the poor and rich are always at war.
Looking out like that, sitting in a place that seemed like it was at the top of the world, with waiters to bring you drinks and a swimming pool at your feet and being with smart accomplished people, in a place and in a way where there was nothing pressing, no immediate anxiety, you could understand how colonists lived. You were living on someone else’s land, living on someone else’s back, the pain and the fear of the lives of others invisible to you, and yet while you were sitting in The Club it felt like you owned all of the known world, which existed only because you had built it and was real only because you were looking at it.
One Sunday in early April, late in the afternoon and soon after she had arrived in Liberia from Rwanda, Julia sat in that circle of people, in lawn chairs, watching the red sun setting over Sierra Leone.
Julia kept to herself. She had just lost another eighteen-month-old to meningitis—kid sick three days, the easiest spinal tap she had ever done; just roll the kid on his side, find the space between two vertebrae, insert the needle, and then pop, right into the spinal canal, and the beautiful clear fluid flowed freely from the hub of the needle, crystal clear drop after crystal clear drop. They had a good vein and had the antibiotic they needed and they got it started right away, but the kiddo died anyway in the middle of the night. No one called her. There was just an empty basinet in the morning when she made rounds. At home, the kid would have been in the PICU, and a whole team would have worked on him all night long. The whole bit. Here, just an empty basinet in the morning. Didn’t matter now. What’s done is done. Water under bridge.
Zig, the Ethiopian surgeon was there. So was Katy from Hampstead Heath who ran the Buchanan branch of Merlin. Sister Martha was there, and so was Grace, the Rwandan hydrologist who brought a new guy, a tall, tan-skinned American. The American sat next to Julia. He had just arrived from Sierra Leone.
Julia turned to talk to the new guy, who told her his name was Carl, and then turned away before she could introduce herself. He was more interested in listening to the others. The United States had just invaded Iraq after the shock and awe bombing of Baghdad. They were talking about Iraq, which was a continent away—but there was nothing any of them could do about Iraq. Bill Levin was probably worked up about it, and he was probably right, but he got worked up about every world crisis, real or imagined, and none of his demonstrations ever stopped even one little war. Julia was sitting in Liberia where there were people dying in the bush from preventable diseases all day long. These people just liked hearing themselves talk.
A bunch of white Irish and Zimbabwean guys were clustered around a football match on the television over the bar, and you could hear them shouting from time to time at a reversal or a goal. It was hard for Julia to listen to any of it.
The new guy signaled a waiter for a drink. He had a New England accent, hardly black at all. “That’s the paradox of development,” he was saying. “You do have to live to love. But to live you have to want, and have, and be willing to work to have, and compete to have, and separate yourself in the interest of having. And then you can’t love. Families and the communities here create a place, a context in which people can love. Our job is to help families and communities change or to try to keep individuals alive while communities change. Good stuff, but few of us have that much unselfishness in us. And then look at what happens. Development brings more stuff, more goods, and more guns. More wanting. Wanting brings war. War is the triumph of having over loving. Our work gives people the tools they need to go to war with one another.”
Huh? Julia didn’t know what to say or think. I’m a lightweight, she thought—one more white woman doctor, one more idealist, head in the sky, feet in Africa, doesn’t stay in one place for more than a year or two. This new guy Carl was apparently not so new after all. Julia heard something she liked in that voice—energy, intelligence, experience, pain, and recovery. The substance I don’t have, she thought.
The talk moved on to other topics. Keynesian economics. Phenomenology. The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. The new guy seemed to know about all of it, and even so he was quiet when others were talking and always kept something in reserve. All Julia knew was how to match three medicines to four diseases and hope for the best.
The calling of the birds became louder, and there were now long whistles, interspaced between the calls. Carl, the new guy, spoke well. He knew who he was. I’d take a little of that, she thought. Not that he even noticed her. Julia was nothing. Nobody.
And then there was a long cheer from the bar, and the others went inside for the television and a beer, and Carl and Julia were left alone.
“Game?” Julia said, for the surgeons had abandoned the ping-pong table for soccer and beer with the rest. It was a weak hope.
“Sure,” Carl said.
The daylight was fading. Julia put on the electric lights.
Carl had a strong forehand and an unstoppable slam, but no backhand and almost no serve. They traded points at first, feeling out each other’s strengths and weaknesses.
Julia changed pace. She fed a simple but slow shot into Carl’s backhand that he easily reached, and his return put a slow looping ball exactly where Julia wanted it, about three-quarters of the way down the table, with a moderately high bounce, right in her sweet spot. He couldn’t know about her slam, which she had kept hidden from him.
She hit the ball hard. She nailed it. She barely looked as the ball flew across the table, fast and hard enough to be barely visible and bouncing far back on the table, landing at the very last moment, exactly where she wanted it to go.
But somehow Carl reached it, and the ball came back high and slow and so long it looked like the ball would certainly miss Julia’s end of the table. But somehow the ball came down, and touched the table’s edge.
The game was over. And Carl came around the table like a good sportsman, prepared to shake her hand. Then Julia did something she had never done before. She reached up and touched the cheek of this man she had just met. Then, on tiptoes, she kissed his cheek.
“I’m Julia,” she said.
There was a dead black man in a green uniform that was too big for him slumped over the desk of the plantation guardhouse. His neck was red with blood, his silly policeman’s hat lying at a strange angle on the table in front of him, leaning against his chest.
The guardhouse windows had been smashed, and there were jagged edges of glass hanging from the window frames, distorting the reflected light. The glass was spattered and streaked red, as if someone had started to paint the inside and then shook the excess paint off the brush.
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