Above the Ether

by Eric Barnes

  Some part of the doctor wonders if they’re not better off here. In this camp.

  He knows this is wrong. He shuts down the thought. He thinks again that were his wife to hear him say such a thing, were she to know he’d ever thought this, she would be uncontained.

  He checks patients’ eyes. He listens to their lungs. He listens to their heartbeats. He looks over each of them for signs of any of the truly terrible diseases that could sweep across this camp. Cholera or dysentery. Measles. Some sort of flu.

  He’s paid in cash. There’s a price list. Some people can’t afford it. He takes what they can offer.

  Most everyone offers something.

  With the money they give him, he can buy extra supplies. Medicines beyond the allotment that the authorities who run this place give to him and the other doctors.

  Coldhearted, often violent, the men and women of the security firm officially in charge of this camp spend most of their time patrolling the high fence bordering this camp. They monitor the occupants with binoculars, with drones that buzz overhead around the clock. Periodically, they’ll drive through the camp in a long train of black SUVs.

  If security enters this place on foot, it is only in force, a group of forty of them in their dark uniforms, heavy helmets. They come in to arrest some former member of the drug trade or a gang.

  However, some of the security guards enter the camps late at night. Headed to the brothels. They’re given deep discounts. The best girls. New ones. Fresh.

  The doctor treats the prostitutes. For ailments professional and otherwise. He treats them in his office sometimes. But he also goes to them during the day, where they live. Some doctors won’t. But he will. Like the children who come to him without parents or family, the prostitutes he treats without charging them anything at all.

  “There’s so little I can do,” she says, on the television. “I’m a doctor to bodies. Not minds. And what most people have, what they are experiencing as pain, is a symptom of choices and illnesses that originate in their minds. Real illnesses, not imagined. But not ones I can ever possibly solve.”

  The security firm assures that the refugees are contained in the camp. But the camp itself was long ago taken over by the members of a gang. Extensions of the cartel, the various gangs almost immediately sent members to run the camps across the border.

  In many ways, though, the camps are more peaceful than the cities people fled. In the cities south of here, the gangs are at war over territory, shipping routes, shrinking cropland, limited water, labor to process the crops and drugs. But across the border, each camp is dominated by just one gang. By agreement, the gangs have split these places among themselves. Thus, there are no turf wars. No disputes that go unsettled.

  There’s a hierarchy to the gang’s control over the camp. Representatives from each area of the camp sit on a council that brings issues to the leadership. The council determines the fair distribution of water, food, and medicine and is especially concerned with the safety of families, women, and children. The gang tolerates no petty crime, no theft or fighting. Gambling is controlled and limited to specific tents in the camp. Alcohol and drugs are available, but open abuse is not allowed. The gang’s tax rates are quite reasonable, less than what most people paid to the corrupt governments they left behind.

  Some in the camps consider the gangs to be, at worst, benign. Still others view the gangs as the saviors of all these unwanted refugees.

  The doctor might think so too. Were it not for the women they keep in the very busy brothels.

  And the drugs and guns they transport across the border through the tunnels.

  And the young girls they traffic north, every week, through those same passageways.

  The doctor treats these girls as they are moved through the camp. Before they are transported north. Human packages, often sold by their parents or deceived into this choice with promises of jobs, visas, the freedom and safety of places to the north. Promises of relief from the hopelessness, the misery, the endless sorrow in which they lived back home.

  The doctor goes twice a week to the tents that hold these girls. The food for the girls is better. The tents clean and stocked with fresh clothes and bedding. The gangs make available any and all medicines the doctor might need. He checks the girls for disease. He gives them full batteries of tests, completes their vaccinations. He administers birth control, simple implants in their arms. That is required for them all.

  Some girls he sterilizes. A choice the gang lets the girls make on their own.

  The doctor sometimes feels he is only prepping these girls to be more efficiently abused. To assure the survival of these high-priced investments as they head north for a life of rape and torture. He’s a veterinarian to prized cattle, maximizing their health before they’re sent to a long and conscious slaughter.

  He pauses for a moment. Closes his eyes. After a minute, he pats the dark-haired girl on her slim shoulder. She smiles some. He smiles back.

  As he leaves the tent, the gang member at the door offers him money. As always, the doctor says no thank you.

  He walks back toward his tent. It is nearly a mile from one end of the camp to the other. It is hot today. And still. Probably more than one hundred and twenty degrees. In the two years he’s been in this camp, he’s treated hundreds, maybe a thousand, of the girls who are trafficked north. He declines the gang’s money. But the gang does treat him well. He has access to more medicine. He is given better food. His wife is safe. He is too.

  A bargain he made without wanting to be part of it.

  A thousand girls. Made healthier than they’ve ever been. Made infertile for a time. Or for their whole lives. Made ready for the work they’ll do.

  Made ready by him.

  They are shuttled through tunnels that head north, under the camp fence, emptying in fields near highways far from here. Met by buses that continue their transport.

  For some of them, he’s sure, his is the last kind face they’ll ever know.

  “Honestly?” she repeats, looking down for a moment. Pondering the question. “Well,” she says, looking up now, “honestly, I often leave my office feeling hopeless. That’s how I feel. That’s my answer to your question. Hopeless. I go to the clinic. I see patients. I prescribe drugs when that is best. But more and more often, I prescribe exercise, a change of lifestyle. ‘Get outside,’ I’ll write neatly on my small and stupid notepad. ‘Take a walk with family and friends.’ Then later, after I’ve left these patients to dress and leave, I’ll return to the room they occupied. And I’ll see that the prescriptions I have written are simply crumpled up and left behind.”

  By day he works among the lifeless bodies in the basement. He adorns their faces with rouge and lipstick. Dresses their upper bodies in clothing of his recommendation and the family’s choice.

  He does this day after day.

  There was a time when the act would have been profound.

  Now, though, it’s become just another routine.

  CHAPTER 9

  The Restaurant Manager

  Money made off the creation of life-saving medications.

  Money made off an understanding of institutional requirements so complex they can barely be deciphered.

  Money made in honor of the deaths of fallen soldiers.

  Money made off children. The elderly. The brilliant. The unreal.

  Sometimes, he says, it’s as if we linger in the world of the undead.

  His cousin stares at him. Fuck you, he says. Not smiling. Fuck you totally.

  The wind here blows hard. A dry, hot wind, coming from the west, sweeping down off the mountains and gusting thirty to forty miles an hour all day. It pushes hard enough that it sometimes shoves the trucks and cars three and four feet across the painted lines on the highway. It strips loose shingles from all the homes. It has rendered two runways at the airport unusable. It shapes the landscape, bending shrubs and trees and flowers, all arcing, bowed, their tops curling over, leaning far to th
e east.

  It’s been this way for years. Every day. The wind does not relent.

  It rains today, suddenly, but it won’t last long. It doesn’t rain much here, and when it does come, it’s always a short, near-violent outburst of a storm, the dark clouds rolling down from the mountains, pushed hard by the constant wind, so that a front of rain pouring sideways assaults the city. It hits the airport first, shutting down the one runway that can still be used. It hits the stadium next, that glass and steel wonder with the view of the mountains to the west. The wind already makes it a miserable place, but with the rainstorm, people must flee their seats. The rain then hits the highway, a barely winding ribbon drawn north to south, vehicles driving parallel to the wind and now the water pours sideways, shaking cars and trucks, and in the fray of the storm many cars pull over to the shoulder of the highway, hundreds of cars now parked on a freeway meant to link this city to all the world.

  Every few weeks a vehicle on the highway will begin to bounce, the car soon rocking side to side, and the driver will lose control, the car veering into the other lane and then onto the shoulder and eventually the car is blown from the highway, careening into the sunken dirt median.

  There was an eighty-car pileup here less than a year ago. A chain reaction of interrelated wrecks, all starting with a car that was blown hard enough to finally bounce off of a guardrail.

  There was a fifty-car pileup a year before that.

  A thirty-car pileup a year before that.

  The western side of the city is slowly fading into the same washed-out lack of color. The wind, combined with the dirt and dust from the plains beyond the highway, is methodically wearing down the western-facing surfaces of buildings and homes and plant life. Painted structures fading to a dull and weathered tan. Tree bark turning pale. Glass has lost its shine. Billboards that face west are quickly stripped of their printed surfaces; instead all of them now carry the distant, ghostlike images of people and places and slogans long since worn away.

  He is watching a documentary on a news channel. About the city north of here that was, years ago, eventually abandoned. He’s eating dinner. Reading on his phone. Glancing up at the documentary only intermittently.

  The wind rattles the windows on one side of his house, as if an animal were clawing at the glass.

  He glances at the plastic plants in his living room and small dining room. His mother’s once, now his.

  He’ll masturbate later. Eat ice cream before that. Do budget work on his laptop. Read a book. Then sleep.

  He is manager of a chain of hamburger restaurants. A national chain. He runs the five stores they have in this small city. Some nights, he meets his girlfriend for dinner. They don’t have sex yet; she wants to wait, and he’s said that’s fine.

  It is fine. He’s thirty. He’s had sex. Girlfriends who wanted that right away. It can wait.

  He knows it will be better if they wait.

  She texts him a photo while he sits working at his kitchen table. She’s in a pajama top. Nothing else. The top not fully buttoned. Her way of saying good night.

  He texts her back. She’s very pretty.

  You are very pretty.

  He turns on the game he’s been waiting to watch. He’s been recording it on his cable box, then waiting half an hour to start watching. This way he can skip the commercial breaks. Plus, the game doesn’t take as long. Friends will sometimes text him about a good play, a bad call, and he has to be careful not to read their messages, because the texts might give away the score or tell him what is about to happen.

  Time just slightly altered. For efficiency and convenience. He knows other people who watch games this way.

  In bed later, after the game, he’ll get his phone out. Bring up the picture his girlfriend sent. Others she’s texted recently. He moves through them with his thumb. It’s just a minute or two before he comes.

  We make money illegally, the CEO tells his cousin. What we sell will eventually break. We know this. That’s illegal.

  His cousin is his partner. The CEO watches him shake his head.

  No, his cousin says. We make money unethically. He takes a drink. There’s a difference.

  Most of the people working for him in the kitchens have come here illegally. The others have criminal records that they’ve tried to hide. He doesn’t care. If they work hard. If they show up on time. If they don’t bring trouble.

  Then they’re not criminals to him.

  A third of them are white. A third black. A third from below the border.

  He doesn’t plan for this. It’s just always so.

  “Quickly, people,” he says, smiling some, moving between the two sets of grills, “quickly.”

  He’s a tall man, fit. Black hair and olive skin. He eventually wants to open his own restaurant. But for now, he’s still learning. What it takes to manage cash flow. Hire well. Deal with suppliers. Sell specials to new customers.

  There’s plenty of time to start his own place.

  “Lunch hour soon,” he says to his people running the cash registers, women mostly. Some still adjust their uniforms, just off the bus or out of their mother’s car. “Offer the upgrades. Every order, please. Every order includes an offer to add an item. Yes? Please?”

  The front door crashes open, slamming against the outer glass wall. A customer stumbles, thrown off balance. The manager trots across the restaurant. Checking on the woman and her son.

  “The wind,” the woman says. “Damn it. Damn wind.”

  He helps her inside. Tells her son he can get a free ice cream. Sorry. The trouble with the door. He’s sorry.

  She smiles. The boy smiles brightly. They move to the counter to order.

  He’s had to convince the regional manager to move the entrances of some of the other restaurants from one side of the building to the other. The wind is that strong. People could not open or close the door. And those who did, sometimes the door would be shoved open so quickly, so hard, that the customers would be knocked down.

  Tonight, on his laptop, he’ll put in a recommendation to move this door as well. Already the emergency exit from the restaurant is pinned shut. The wind makes opening that door impossible.

  Now, he walks out into the parking lot.

  The two-story building next door to this restaurant is under construction. Someone recently tore down the old building that had been there. Which changed the landscape. Allowing the wind to hit the front door of this restaurant more directly than before.

  The wind is dry and hot, and he looks to the west. The bits of dirt and sand in the air sting his face. He squints his eyes.

  He’s not from here. He moved here for the job.

  Where he lived, there was constant rain.

  The plastic plants in his house, he’s never much thought about them.

  His mother had them. Now he does too.

  His cousin walks to the table near the window. Puts his drink down. Looks out across the city. Lit bright at night, avenues leading north and south, streets to the east and west, cars moving in a red yellow glow, like cells in an artery or vein.

  I fucking hate when you talk this way, his cousin says. Like I’m a fucking criminal.

  You’re not a criminal, the CEO says, now staring up at the high ceiling. It’s the middle of the night. Here in his office. His apartment is one floor above. Often, it seems he has chosen to live among the clouds.

  There’s a woman there. Waiting for him.

  You’re not the criminal, the CEO says again to his cousin. He takes a drink, gin, there’s a vapor to it, rising from his mouth, through and across his nose; it just barely waters his eyes. We both are.

  He wakes up early. Goes to the gym to exercise. Lifting weights. Running on a treadmill. He’s at the restaurant, the one downtown, near Fifty-Third Street, as the crew is opening for the day. He meets with each employee. But only for a minute.

  They have work to do. He knows this. Empty platitudes are not necessary.

  He just tel
ls them how good a job they do.

  What we do is allowed, his cousin says. Why can’t you see that?

  The CEO sips again from the gin. The woman upstairs, she’ll wait for him. He knows that. He can take as long as he wants. He says to his cousin, I wish we’d never started this.

  His cousin shakes his head. You’re the only person I’ve ever loved, he says. Ever cared for. Who ever cared for me.

  They both look out at the city. There’s a scope to the city that they can’t comprehend. The colors. The sound. Too many people to contemplate. More than anyone can ever catalog. Or quantify. Or relay.

  This, the CEO says to his cousin, has nothing to do with love.

  He wants very much to live a life of some substance. He can’t define it. This thing he wants.

  But he knows clearly what he feels.

  Below them, by day, five thousand people work for the two of them. They flood in from the city. Rising from subways and emerging from cabs and they make their way down these avenues. Coming here for the promise. A promise they’ve been made. That the work they do has meaning. That they themselves have purpose. That they work here not just for a salary. They work here because what they do might change the world.

  It’s just a fucking business, his cousin says.

  The CEO shakes his head. It’s not, he says.

  His cousin shrugs. Tell me we’re still family.

  He doesn’t hesitate. We are.

  Then that’s all I care about.

  The CEO closes his eyes. They live a lie. A lie he can’t find a way to unwind. So they continue. They work. People devote themselves. To a company. A job. Finding meaning in a place that’s empty at its core.