“In Tamoé, the foundation will be laid. Is being laid, I should say, at this very moment. Tell me, do you enjoy your work?”
What was there to like? It was a slum like any other. Rey coughed into his hand.
“We have people there,” the man continued. He nodded slowly, the edges of his mouth creeping toward a smile. “I would like you to meet them.” He reached into an inside pocket and pulled out an envelope. “I can’t visit them with you. It wouldn’t be safe.”
Rey looked at the man and then around him at the busy avenue. From a distance, they were simply two men—strangers, acquaintances—chatting. Was anyone watching them? Listening? They could be speaking of the weather, or the weekend scores, or anything. The man placed the envelope on the bench between them. “Why me?” Rey asked.
“Because I know your name,” the man said. “Not the one you were born with. The other one.”
The name, the ID. For an instant, an image flashed before him: the woman he hadn’t seen since the night his misfortunes began. Norma was her name. Norma. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Rey said, but the words had a disappointing lack of weight to them: they sounded weak, tenuous.
“I see they succeeded in frightening you at the Moon. There are other things you can do for us. Quiet things. Clean things. You needn’t be public anymore to be useful.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Of course. There aren’t many of us who really know you.” The man eyed him and didn’t blink. “Shall I say your other name? Shall I prove it?”
Rey felt suddenly that his youth was a decade in the past, that he had become, seemingly overnight, old and decrepit, a man with nothing to lose. He was dying. He shook his head. He hadn’t seen Norma again, hadn’t thought of her until that exact moment. Would he even recognize her? He had spent six months confined by the unsettling substance of his own dreams. Rey took the envelope without looking at it, slipped it into his inside coat pocket. It was thin and waxy. He knew instinctively the envelope was empty. It was a test.
The man smiled. “Avenue F–10. Lot 128. Ask for Marden.”
They’ll lock me up again, Rey thought, and this time no one will see me. This time they won’t spare me. If he went to the police, what would he say? What would he have for them? An empty envelope and vague descriptions of a man with a thin beard and an ill-fitting suit. And where did you meet this man, the police would ask—oh, here it is, where I give myself away: when I was a prisoner, sir, at the Moon.
The man scratched his brow. “You have questions I can’t answer,” he said. “In the meantime, I’ll ask you one: those soldiers. The ones who kept us company when we last met. Do you hate them?”
The bus was a half-block away. Hate was a word Rey never used. It meant nothing to him. The soldiers had pissed on him joylessly, with the detachment of scientists performing an experiment. When Rey was a boy, he and his friends captured beetles, placed them in plastic tins, and set them on fire, blissfully cruel: a group of boys, charmed by this collaborative act of malice. Why did this memory fill him with such nostalgia, and why were the soldiers so dispassionate in their cruelty? They had tortured him with the same conviction with which he wandered around Tamoé. That is to say, they had done so listlessly, by rote. How could he hate them? It was their job. If they had so much as snickered, Rey felt certain, he could. Loathe them. Absolutely. Without that, they seemed strangely innocent.
The bus jerked to a stop before them, and Rey made as if to rise, but the man in the wrinkled suit held him back. “You’ll wait for the next one,” he said. He got on the bus and didn’t look back.
HE KEPT on to the envelope for two weeks. That first night, after Trini had come and gone, after his father had gone off to sleep, Rey held it up to the light and verified it was empty. There was a script letter M in the upper right-hand corner. The envelope was sealed, thin, and insubstantial.
Rey returned to Tamoé all that week, expecting each morning to see the man with the thin beard. He never did. He walked around the neighborhood as he always had, taking notes, drawing his crude maps, filling out forms with illiterate men who insisted on looking everything over before signing an X to the bottom of the page. He studiously avoided Avenue F–10, never crossing it on foot: if he was to work on the north side of F–10, he took the bus a few stops past and spent the entire day there. On other days, he confined himself to the south side, never nearing this new, artificial border.
It took him two weeks, but when Rey finally decided to see Marden, he did it right away. Later he would wonder why he went at all, and decide it was curiosity—a natural curiosity—and tell himself that a healthy interest in the unknown would always be useful. In his career as a scientist, and in his life, if he were allowed to live it. It was not the hate that the man in the wrinkled suit wanted him to feel: Rey felt proud of that somehow. Still, he was afraid. He dressed that day as he normally would, washed his face under the cold-water tap of his father’s apartment, and folded the empty envelope into his front pocket. When he pulled the door shut behind him, Rey felt a heaviness in the act.
Avenue F–10 ran roughly east-west through Tamoé, a potholed four-lane road divided by a gravel median, dotted with the occasional withering shrub. The avenue was lined with squat apartment houses, crowded repair shops, and a few restaurants of questionable cleanliness and limited menus. If a place like Tamoé could be said to possess a center, F–10 was it: one of two avenues with streetlights in the newly colonized district. On his north-side days, Rey’s bus ride home crossed the avenue: he could sense its glow, its energy from blocks away. After dark, groups of boys congregated beneath F–10’s streetlights: laughing, alive, they squatted around these totems, bathing in the pale orange glow. Rey found it perplexing: it seemed the youth of the district never left Tamoé; instead, they came here, to this avenue, just to stand in the light.
That morning, Rey got off in the heart of F–10 and walked east. Even by day, it was crowded with young people. Women sold tea from wooden carts, emollients of pungent odors, syrups that promised to cure any cough. Moto-taxis clustered on the corner, ferrying vendors to the market a few blocks away. But ten blocks on, the avenue regained the provincial air that defined the rest of the district. The asphalt disappeared abruptly, and the four-and five-story apartment houses, Tamoé’s most solidly constructed buildings, were replaced by shanties, of the kind that concerned Rey and his work most directly: ad hoc homes of considerable ingenuity, homes built of material scavenged from the city. Illegal, ubiquitous, inevitable, the city would grow and grow and no one could imagine it ever stopping. The avenue itself petered out at the base of a crumbling, yellow hill, a dusty lane running headlong into a mound of scree. Here, a shirtless child had planted a red flag in the pile of rock. A half-dozen children ran around it, ignoring Rey, now and then clambering up, only to be repelled by a hail of stones. They played war. A thin, black dog sat at a safe distance from the children, chewing nervously on a piece of Styrofoam.
Lot 128 was set just off the dusty edge of the street, to the left of the pile of rocks. It was a house like any other on the block, mud brick with small, paneless windows on either side of the door, and lined with a knee-high fence of woven reeds. Rey stepped over it. The number was painted neatly in the center of the door. Rey resisted the urge to peek through the windows. He knocked twice and waited.
“Marden,” Rey said when the door opened. “I have a message for Marden.”
The man in the doorway was large and pale, wearing an undershirt and dark drawstring pants patched at the knees. He was older than fifty, perhaps much older. His hair was the color of a used cigarette filter, and his face, jowly and slack, had that same exhausted, yellow-gray pallor. If he was Marden, the name seemed to have no effect on him, or rather not precisely the effect Rey had been expecting: a look of recognition, even camaraderie. The man looked down the street suspiciously, then waved Rey in. He pointed to a chair in the center of the room, and squatted in front
of a tiny gas burner resting on the dirt floor. With a bent fork, he tended to a single egg. It bobbed and sank in a pot of boiling water.
“Breakfast,” the man said. He apologized for having nothing to offer his visitor, but he did so in a tone Rey could not mistake for warmth.
“I ate, thank you,” Rey said. The man shrugged and tapped his egg.
The room was dark, the air full of dust and smoke and steam. Besides the chair, there was a twin bed and a radio on the nightstand. In the generally colorless room, there was one grand splash of reddish orange: a finely knit bedspread, fiery and bright and out of place.
The man must have caught him looking. “My mother made it,” he said. “Years ago.”
Old men have mothers, too. Subversives, too, even those who live Spartan lives. Rey tried to smile. The man turned off the burner and flipped the egg into a bowl. The water settled in the pot, steaming. He tapped some instant coffee into a cup, then filled it with the same water he’d used to boil the egg. He stirred with a fork and handed the cup to Rey. “When you finish,” he said, “I’ll have some.”
Rey nodded and took the cup. Sugar? he almost asked, then thought better of it. He held the cup to his lips. It smelled like coffee, at least.
“This message?” the man said, without looking up. He sat with his legs crossed and peeled his egg carefully, gathering the tiny bits of eggshell in his lap. “Who gave it to you?”
“Are you Marden?”
The man glanced at Rey, then brushed off his fingers and took the egg into his mouth whole. He chewed for a minute or more, nodding. Rey drank his coffee, for lack of anything else to do. It burned his tongue. Then he sat forward, with his elbows on his knees and his chin resting in his palm. He watched the man eat. The loose skin of the man’s cheeks puffed and stretched. He swallowed with an exaggerated expression of satisfaction and rubbed his belly. “I’m Marden,” he said. “Where’d you get this message?”
Rey put down his coffee and joined the man on the floor. He pulled the envelope from his back pocket. “I don’t know his name.”
Marden looked the envelope over, squinted at the M, and broke into a grin. “Very nice,” he said. He tore the envelope in half, then into quarters, then into eighths. He handed the bits and pieces back to Rey. “Where is he finding people these days?” he said, amused.
Rey held the scraps of the envelope in his cupped hands. “What do I do with this?” he asked.
Marden shrugged. “Smoke them. Bury them. Confetti at your wedding. It doesn’t matter, kid.”
“I don’t understand.”
“When he asks, tell him there were eight pieces. When we need you, the professor will find you. He’ll tell you where to leave a message for me and you’ll do it.” Marden coughed dryly into his hand. “You work in Tamoé?”
Rey nodded.
“Avoid this part of the district. Wait for us. It could be months. It could be a year, or even two. No one knows.”
“No one?”
“I don’t. You don’t. Not even the professor does. We do as we’re told. You’ll be a messenger. Your job is to wait.”
Rey put the pieces of the envelope back into his pocket. His coffee had cooled a bit, enough for the bitter liquid to go down without too much trouble. He finished it and passed the cup to Marden. Was this all? Had he waited two weeks to have an empty envelope torn to pieces before him by a jowly, yellow-haired old man? It didn’t seem right.
“Were you at the Moon?” Rey asked.
Marden frowned. “I’ve been there,” he said after a moment. “You have as well?”
“Yes.”
“Keep it to yourself.” Marden sighed. “You won’t be coming back here. We have people all over the district. Things are happening.”
The meeting was over. There were no good-byes, no handshakes. The door opened, and the small room released him.
Outside, the children ran in frantic circles, raising a film of fine dust, a low, sandy fog over the street. He could feel it in his nostrils, he could taste it. The day was just beginning. The children paid him no attention. Rey walked away from the hill, down the avenue, absentmindedly scattering remains of the envelope along the way.
WHEN REY returned to the university that year, just before his twenty-fifth birthday, he still hadn’t seen the man in the wrinkled suit, or been to the eastern end of F–10. He’d worked, documenting scores of Indian families and the exact addresses of their ramshackle homes. He interpreted hand gestures and forged signatures for people he thought might benefit. He learned a bit of the Indian dialect, enough to say “good day” and “thank you” and “you’re welcome.” A half year in Tamoé, and the dust became a part of him: in the evenings, his clothes shook off clouds of it, his skin felt heavy with it. He was going to be buried alive if he stayed much longer. Every Friday, he made his way to the central office of the district, a blandly decorated room with a single desk and a sun-faded flag, on the district’s other lighted avenue. He turned in his paperwork, wondering only briefly what became of these maps and forms and records. Once settled, Rey knew, nothing would move these people. They didn’t need his help for anything beyond peace of mind: only a cataclysm would clear the area. He thought now and then of the man in the wrinkled suit, but on these rare occasions, the entire episode was cloaked in absurdity. There was no war of subversion in the making: where were the soldiers? The young men of the district seemed content to spend their evenings leaning against lampposts, posturing for the girls that passed by. The man in the wrinkled suit had invoked the future of the nation when he spoke of Tamoé, but who was the mysterious contact in this vanguard district? A terse, phlegmatic man with an unhealthy pallor, peeling eggs, alone. Marden, with his faraway look and peripheral existence, hardly seemed capable of leaving his home—to say nothing of instigating a general revolt.
Rey arranged to work part-time and resumed his studies. Despite all the talk, the president’s warnings, and the bellicose editorials, life at the university had not yet changed. There were no soldiers inside its gates. Students still gathered in the main courtyard and discussed the coming conflict as they had before, with that strange mix of awe and anxiety. It made Rey nervous to return: there were more than a few people who might remember one or another of the speeches he’d made, his brief and intoxicating turn at the university as an outspoken critic of the government. The prospect of meeting these people made his heart quicken. He’d been on committees that planned trips to the mountains. He’d met in dark rooms to plan protests. Most significant, he’d acquired another name, and with it came responsibilities. But then he had disappeared. His old friends would have questions: Where have you been? What did they do to you? Are you all right? Every so often, in the months of his recovery, Rey’s father handed him a note that some concerned young man had brought by the apartment. They were always polite but insistent: that he contact them, because they were waiting. Rey never responded: what could he say? There were people at the university who had looked up to him. He hadn’t seen anyone in nearly a year; he had fled to Tamoé. By now, they must consider him a traitor. They had surely interpreted his silence this way, and if they asked, he would have no answers.
Do you hate them? It tormented him, this question. At the university, Rey slipped into class just as the professor began lecturing, and left before the hour ended. He wore hooded sweatshirts even on sunny days, and walked quickly through campus, careful to keep his gaze fixed on the ground before him. All the things he would say to Norma years later were true. He was afraid of politics. He was afraid of dying. He was afraid of finding himself a broken man of fifty, living in a slum at the edge of the city, waiting for the arrival of obscure messages from the great brain of subversion. When Rey met her again, when he saw her and saw that she had seen him as well—he felt a shiver: even at a distance, she recalled for him, in all its immediacy, the terror of what he had done, of Marden and the man in the wrinkled suit and the blank horrors that still penetrated his dreams. He had risked to
o much. He had come so far from that night of dancing, that night of bombast and boasting. He’d only wanted to impress her. Because she was beautiful. Because she didn’t seem to mind looking at him either. And now she was walking toward him. The IL had found him at a bus stop; why did he believe, even for a moment, that they would forget him now? That he could just walk away? It was a cold, cloudy day—the malaise of winter.
Norma smiled at him, and she looked like sunshine. She hadn’t forgotten him, either. Rey panicked.
It was true. It was always true: you could believe one thing and its opposite simultaneously, be afraid and reckless all at once. You could write dangerous articles under an assumed name and believe yourself to be an impartial scholar. You could become a messenger for the IL and fall in love with a woman who believed you were not. You could pretend that the nation at war was a tragedy and not the work of your own hand. You could proclaim yourself a humanist and hate with steely resolve.
When, after the conflict, the displaced thousands returned to the site of the Battle of Tamoé, they found their homes burned, their avenues cratered, their hills littered with unexploded ordnance. Tanks had run through their streets, bulldozers had razed entire blocks of houses. Their beloved streetlights had fallen too, but in any case, there were few young people left to gather around them. The entire district would be rebuilt. Without a monument to the dead, without so much as a plaque to commemorate what had been there before. It was announced that the families who had their paperwork in order would be permitted to return, would be forgiven. If they could find their old plot, it was theirs, regardless of their role in the battle or their sympathies for the IL. An office was set up on a burned-out block of F–10 to process the petitions. A line gathered there each morning before dawn. For months, they came, heads bowed like penitents, carrying the forms Rey had written for them or the maps he had drawn, and it was all they owned in the world.
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