American War

by Omar El Akkad

  Sarat was in the kitchen, shucking corn for dinner. Slowly she had begun to make more frequent appearances in the house—sometimes she would sit awhile with us in the living room watching television. A few times she even stayed for dinner. Whenever she did, my parents said very little, trying to pretend like it was no big deal. But every time I could see my father struggling to restrain a giddy little smile. For a while she must have been alien to him, even if he remembered her name and her relation, but I think now he was starting to connect the woman he saw with the girl he knew before. And in doing so I think he was able, in some small way, to connect as well with the boy he used to be.

  I watched her through the kitchen window. She worked in a monotone way, her eyes focused nowhere, lost in her own space. But then she looked up, and she saw me, and she came outside. Often she wandered around the property, walking among the greenhouses. But this was the first time I’d seen her come near the levee in the daytime. It was as though she was repelled in some invisible way by the river—not by the sight of it, which was hidden by the seawall, but by the sound of it, the sound of water moving.

  “How’s the arm?” she asked.

  “It’s fine,” I replied. “In two weeks it’ll be good as new.”

  “It’ll be better than that. Bones that set right grow back stronger.”

  It was an amazing thing to hear, and whether it was true or not, instantly I believed it.

  I stood up. “Do you wanna see something cool?” I asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Come on, then,” I said. Without thinking I took her hand and led her to a place near the levee protected by the shade of a hanging willow tree. It was there, in a small pen, that I kept my pet.

  “This is my turtle,” I said, pointing at the mounded, unmoving animal.

  She seemed to forget me for a moment. I watched as she knelt down until her face was almost in the pen, inspecting the yellow, symmetrical markings on the shell.

  “He’s real slow,” I said, embarrassed at my pet’s reluctance to even show its head. “Some days he doesn’t even move at all.”

  “She’s a girl,” Sarat said.

  I asked her how she knew, but she didn’t answer.

  Finally she broke from her trance and stood up. I wiped the dirt from the knees of her pants.

  “Is it true you were in prison?” I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Why?”

  “They never told me.”

  “How long were you there?”

  “Seven years.”

  The number was incomprehensible to me; a lifetime.

  “What are you gonna do when they get that cast off you?” she asked.

  “Play basketball,” I said. For weeks I’d thought about little else. “My team’s in first place, and if we win the rest of our games, we get to go to the championship in Atlanta. They have a water park there, got the biggest swimming pool in the whole country.”

  “You like swimming?” she asked.

  I nodded. “I go twice a week to the pool in Lincolnton. I’d be there today if I didn’t have the cast.”

  “What you doing in a pool in Lincolnton when you got the river right here?”

  I laughed. “You can’t swim in the river, silly.”

  She looked at me as though I’d come from some other planet, and then that vague confusion turned to pity. She walked past me to the levee, shuffling slowly in that way of hers, the frame hunched and the knees threatening to give.

  Where the seawall passed our backyard, my mother had painted a crude mural, the kind they have in kindergartens. It was of stick-figure children playing in the field among the apple trees, a smiling sun watching over them. She had given the children names and sometimes she’d talk to me about them as though they were real. I never understood why.

  Sarat stood by the side of the levee. She was tall enough to see past the wall and through the willows. She watched the river. It wasn’t until many years later that I understood the courage she was struggling to summon, the demon she had to bury before she could set foot once more into the moving water.

  She turned to me. “C’mon, then,” she said. “Let’s go swimming.”

  Instinctively, I turned to see if my parents were around. Going over the levee was the one thing I was forbidden to do above all else. Beyond the wall lay death by drowning and death by disease and all the monsters that populated my mother’s stern warnings. My feet froze to the soil.

  “I can’t swim with my cast on,” I said, but it was not the cast that scared me.

  “Yeah you can,” she said. “C’mon, I won’t let nothing bad happen to you.”

  Slowly she climbed down the other side of the levee, and soon she was walking among the willows to the riverbank. Suddenly the sight of her fading behind the braided leaves filled me with panic. I imagined she might step into the river and never return, taken by that green snake to the end of the world. My feet unfroze, a newfound courage took me, and I chased after her.

  From atop the levee I saw her walk into the water. She walked barefoot and fully clothed. I climbed down the wall and ran with my head to the ground, following her footsteps in the soft riverbank soil.

  And then I looked up, and the monster was upon me. For the first time in my life, I was at the river. Its sound and size astounded me, the banks wild and wide, the speed of the current readable in the branches and leaves that raced along its surface. I had never seen water move this way.

  She stood waist-high in the river, the water curling around her. I remember the way she looked in that moment, that violent euphoria barely sheathed behind the lips. The water curled around her wounded body and as it moved it did not heal her wounds, it cauterized.

  She was motionless. I waved at her to come closer to the riverbank, but she seemed not to see me at all. She was breathing hard though she had not run. She looked in that moment like a child, wide-eyed, uncertain. Then it dawned on me: she was afraid.

  And then she was gone, fully submerged as though weighted with anvils. When she surfaced, her baggy shirt held fast to her skin and pins of light glimmered on her shaven head.

  “Come here,” she said.

  I shook my head. “I’m scared.”

  “Good,” she said. “Now you have something you can kill. Come here.”

  I faced down the river. Everything I had known of the world suddenly felt very far away. I saw that beyond the river there was a high wall, lined with razor wire and manned by guards. And although I wouldn’t be able to articulate what I felt until much later, I knew then that the bulk of the world was just like this: wild, unvaccinated, malicious. I stepped into the river.

  It was only a few footsteps before the soft polished floor fell from beneath my feet, and I was taken by the current. I screamed, but her hands were quickly on me. She held me afloat and carried me in further. The sound of water was like a million invisible mouths all whispering at once. The water was alive; I knew it because the water was moving.

  I looked at her then, and I saw a thing I’d never seen before. My aunt was laughing.

  Excerpted from:

  THE CIVIL WAR ARCHIVE PROJECT—REUNIFICATION DAY CEREMONY INVITATION LETTER (CLEARED/UNCLASSIFIED)

  Governor Timothy Combs

  391 West Paces Ferry Road

  Atlanta, GA 30305

  Dear Governor Combs,

  At the direction of President Joseph Weiland Jr., it is my pleasure to formally extend to you an invitation to the National Reunification Summit in Columbus, Ohio, on Friday, July 3, 2095.

  As the President has previously stated, the Summit will turn the page on a dark chapter in our great nation’s history. Civic leaders, including yourself, from across the Union will gather in Columbus to declare what has been, since the dawn of this country, self-evident—that we are a nation forever indivisible.

  For security and logistical reasons, travel to Columbus from several states, including Georgia, will be restricted in the months preceding and immediately
following the Summit. As such, please respond at your earliest convenience with details of your travel party (maximum 4), so as to allow the Peace Office time to perform the necessary security checks and issue the required travel permits.

  This is a momentous day for our Union, Governor. A day to celebrate the courage of all Americans who fought so gallantly for what they believed in, but also a day to put years of heartache behind us and begin the difficult but vital work of healing. A day to rejoice and to rebuild. I look forward to meeting with you and all the other delegates from the great state of Georgia at the formal Reunification Ceremony and the grand parade to follow.

  Sincerely,

  Malcolm Kaysen

  Deputy Secretary to the Director of Southern Affairs

  Peace Office, Department of Defense

  One Columbus Commons

  Columbus, OH 43215

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  In late May, Scott came through and devastated Lincolnton. It was a small storm, but powerful, and although it just missed our home, it disrupted our daily routine. With the community center and the elementary school badly damaged, I found myself confined to the farm. I was thrilled with my good fortune—I had more time with Sarat.

  One day I found Sarat in the woodshed, hammering boards. The night before, my parents had gone to a party hosted by the fledgling Southern arm of the New Reunificationists, who in those days were among the first to speak of peace as though peace meant victory. My parents decided to spend the night in Atlanta; my aunt and I had the farm to ourselves.

  I found her kneeling by the place where once she had removed the floor to expose the earth. She had beside her a fresh stack of fake-cedar planks.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Putting the boards back in,” she said. “You take any more wood from this shed, the whole thing will come down.”

  “Can I help?”

  “Sure.” She waved me over. I sat between her knees and she put the hammer in my hand. She held the nail in place.

  “One soft one to set it, one hard one to drive it,” she said.

  I tried, but I couldn’t bring the hammer down hard enough, for fear I’d miss and hit her finger. Finally, I cracked the nail with enough force to move it, but at an angle; it splintered the wood.

  “Better, better,” my aunt said. “At least that did something.”

  She had me practice on the damaged plank until I perfected the motion. In half an hour, I’d hammered the board into the floor with so many nails, no force in the world could move it. I beamed at my handiwork.

  We covered half the hollow in the floor before the midday heat exhausted me. She suggested we go cool down in the river. With ease she picked me up and set me on her shoulders. We walked out to the eastern edge of the property and over the seawall and out to where the stunted trees met the water.

  We stopped in a place where a soft beach of soil separated the willows. We sat for a moment while my aunt recovered from the long walk. I dug my hands deep into the earth. I learned, on one of our earliest trips to the river, that she liked to swim naked. The first time she’d taken off her clothes, she did so in the water, fearful I’d be frightened by the sight of her scars. But it didn’t bother me—I’d seen them before, when I spied on her that night after she first arrived in our home. So I stripped down too, and from that day onward it seemed unimaginable that anyone should step into the water clothed.

  We swam under the shade of the willows and the quarantine wall. On one of our trips to the river I had asked her why the wall was there. She said the people on the other side had been infected with a sickness, and the wall was built to keep them from making others sick. I asked her what kind of sickness. She said the kind where you don’t ever get better, the kind you can’t help but pass on to your children, and they to theirs.

  To the east a guard looked on from the tower. I waved at him but he didn’t wave back. At first the guards scared me, but my aunt told me they were not human beings, just a pair of eyes unable to harm or help anyone or anything. I thought of them now in the same way I thought of the stick-figure children my mother had painted on the levee, and I was no longer scared.

  We dried ourselves in the sun, naked by the riverbank. Even now, her body astounded me: the strange rivulets of scarred skin that lined her upper arms and shoulders, dead-looking and paler than the rest of her; the way her breasts and stomach sagged; the smoothness of her shaved head. In her presence I could think of nothing strong enough to harm us. Not the river, nor the wall, nor whatever lay beyond the wall.

  “Is Dana your sister?” I asked. The question had been weighing on my mind for weeks, ever since I heard her say Dana’s name when she was talking to my father one night. I knew the woman in one of the pictures on our staircase wall was my other aunt, but my parents had never told me much about her.

  The question seemed to take her by surprise.

  “That’s right,” she said. “My sister and your father’s sister.”

  “Does she live in Atlanta?”

  “No. She’s dead.”

  “How did she die?” I asked.

  “You know the Birds that fly around here sometimes?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, they’re empty now; they just fly around doing nothing until their solar panels break down or their wings crack and they crash in a field somewhere. But before you were born, they used to be weapons. They use to drop bombs from their stomachs.”

  It seemed such a ridiculous thing—birds that drop bombs from their stomachs. But like the squiggly things in the soil or the fish with whiskers or the old coastal cities now buried underneath the sea, I believed it. I believed it because she said it.

  “You know, she lives right here now, my sister.” Sarat pointed at the water. “After she died, instead of burying her in the ground, I buried her in the river.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “I wanted her to never stop moving.”

  “If I die, will you bury me in the river?”

  My aunt chuckled. “It’ll be a good long while before you die,” she said. “I’ll be gone before then.”

  “How about if you die?” I said. “Do you want me to bury you in the river?”

  She was dumbstruck, as though she’d never considered it before. She smiled.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I’d be grateful if you did.”

  I leaned against her arm, and put my own arm around her. She was mine and I loved her.

  WHEN WE RETURNED from the river there was a man at the gate. He was a stranger to me, dressed in a fine prewar suit and a green tie. He stood just outside the gate, his car parked in the driveway, peering in. We walked up the road to meet him.

  It wasn’t until we were very close to the gate that my aunt’s damaged eyes finally made out the stranger. She stood a long time staring at him, her face empty.

  “Go on inside, Benjamin,” she said. “I’ll be in in a minute.”

  I asked her who the man was, but she ordered me inside again in a tone that let me know it was best not to ask any more questions.

  She opened the gate. She inspected the man who stood before her, the man she hadn’t seen in many years. He had aged, but he had aged well. The silver wings of hair and the thick black mustache, now also graying, were little changed from when she’d last seen him among the ruins of Lake Sinclair all those years ago.

  “Hello, Joe,” she said. “I thought you’d be long gone by now.”

  “Hello, Sarat,” said Joe. Instantly she recognized his faraway accent. “I’m sorry I didn’t visit sooner. I didn’t know they had set you free.”

  She ushered him to the woodshed. I watched them from my bedroom window, hoping to catch a snippet of their conversation, but they walked silently and shut the door behind them.

  I only learned what he said to her later, when I read it. By then it was too late.

  THEY SAT ON STOOLS by the workbench. She saw that he had not changed, his cool air of charm the same as it had
been in their old clandestine meetings.

  “He’s a cute boy,” said Joe, pointing in the direction of the house. “Is he…?”

  “He’s my nephew.”

  “I see— How are you, Sarat?” he asked.

  “Alive,” my aunt replied.

  “I want to say, first of all, that I didn’t know what Albert Gaines had done. A long time ago he’d sent his daughter and her mother to live in the Bouazizi Empire, so they would be safe during the war, and I’m told his interrogators told him they’d learned of their whereabouts, and used it as leverage against him. He was not a coward when I knew him, Sarat, and I…”

  “Don’t,” she said. “It doesn’t matter.”

  Joe nodded. She saw that he was doing now what everyone she’d known from before her time in prison had done—he was staring, trying to reconcile the shape and size and damage of her now with the recollected image of the lanky teenager he’d once known.

  Finally he said, “I know what they must have done to you in that place, Sarat, and I am truly sorry.”

  “You didn’t come here just to tell me that.”

  “That’s correct,” Joe said. “I understand that you were able to meet one of your old prison guards. I understand that you were able to exact some measure of revenge.”

  Sarat laughed. “Revenge,” she echoed. “Revenge, revenge. I hurt one man. Do you think it was just one man who hurt me?”

  “If you would like, I can ask my contacts to look for others,” Joe said. “Many of the guards who were stationed at Sugarloaf when you were there are back on the mainland now. Perhaps…”

  “Why stop there?” she said. “Why don’t you line them all up for me—can you do that, Joe?—you line up every man who made me what I am: the ones who killed my father, the ones who killed my sister, the ones who killed my mother, the ones who made it so my brother will never be whole again, the ones who drove us from our home, the ones who slaughtered all those people in Patience. You line up the whole lot of them for me, Joe. Then I’ll have my revenge.”