A fragile, tenuous lie; not that it hurt any less. Even now it made her angry, though it hadn’t at the time. It had shocked her. Left her speechless. She remembered now that moment of stark humiliation. She had imagined this meeting for months, had carried the missing man’s identification card in her purse at no small risk to herself—what if someone were to find it? And then to be dismissed so completely?
Later, he apologized; later, he explained: “I was nervous, I was afraid.” Later, he told her what he had lived through, but that day, it was all opaque, and she had to try very hard not to be disappointed, or not to let that disappointment show. He was not the man she’d met thirteen months before, certainly not the one she had recalled so fondly for so many nights, not the one she had daydreamed of while her parents fought like animals. He was quieter, thinner, less confident. His wool hat was pulled down nearly to his eyebrows, and he seemed to be wearing clothes that were not quite clean. There was nothing at all attractive about him that day they met again. What if she had walked away then? If she had handed him his ID and been done with it?
But that’s not what happened: instead, he lied, sadly, clumsily, and she stumbled on with her prepared speech. “I have something of yours.”
“Oh.”
She fished through her purse for it, and here, the moment she’d envisioned fell apart. The day had grown unexpectedly bright, and they were surrounded by students, strangers, noise. What was it her mother always said about Norma’s purse? “You could hide a small child in there. ” It was less a purse than an overflowing bag. A group of musicians across the way tuned up their instruments, preparing to play. Already a crowd was forming. Where was the fucking ID? Norma stammered an apology, and Rey just stood there, a bit uneasy, biting his lip.
“Are you waiting for someone?” she asked.
“No. Why?”
“Because you keep looking over my shoulder.”
“Am I?”
She saw him gulp.
“I’m sorry,” Rey said.
She laughed nervously. It was March, a week before her birthday, and maybe she felt entitled to his time. Later, she would wonder, but now she dragged him by the arm to a bench, away from the crowd, from the musicians. There she unceremoniously tipped her bag over, spilling its contents: pens that had run out of ink, scraps of paper, a tiny address book, some tissues, a neglected tube of lipstick she’d used only once—she wasn’t that kind of girl—a pair of sunglasses, some coins. “It’s in here somewhere, I know it is. You remember me now, don’t you?”
She rummaged through the detritus, and he admitted he did.
“Why did you say you didn’t?”
But when he began to answer, Norma cut him off. “Oh, here it is,” she said. She held it up to his face, squinting against the hard light. She had meant it playfully, but she saw now, as color rushed to his cheeks, how embarrassed he was. There were new lines on his face and dark bags under his eyes. His skin had yellowed, and she could see the sharp outline of his cheekbones. Rey must have lost fifteen pounds.
“I’m not what you expected?” Of course, he knew better than anyone how this last year had aged him.
She pretended not to understand. “What do you mean?”
“Nothing.”
She handed him the identification card, and he held it for a moment. He rubbed the picture with his thumb. “Thank you,” he said, and started to get up.
“Wait. I’m Norma.” She held her hand out. “I wondered what happened to you.”
Rey smiled weakly and shook her outstretched hand. He nodded at the ID. “I guess you know who I am.”
“Well…”
“Right.”
“Where did they take you?”
“Nowhere really,” he said and, when she frowned, he added, “You don’t believe me?”
Norma shook her head. “Sit down. Please. You’re running away.” He sat, and it made her smile. “Should I call you Rey?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Because I like you,” Norma said, and he didn’t answer. But he didn’t leave either. The student musicians were playing now, native music with native instruments, appropriately political lyrics. Nothing had yet changed at the university: banners still hung from the lampposts, walls were still adorned with ominous slogans. The war had begun only weeks before, in a faraway corner of the nation, and many of the students still thought of it with excitement, as if it were a party they would soon be invited to attend.
“You should have thrown it away, you know,” Rey said. “Or burned it.”
“I didn’t know. I thought maybe you might need it. I’m sorry.”
They were quiet for a spell, watching the students, listening to the band. “I was afraid something was going to happen to you,” said Rey.
“I have better luck than that.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m alive, aren’t I?” She turned to him. “And you are too. So you must not be as unlucky as you think.”
He gave her a weak smile and seemed to hesitate. Then he took off his wool hat. It was too hot for something like that anyway. He had gone white at the temples, shocking streaks of it on otherwise black hair. Or had she not noticed it that night, one year before? How could she not have?
He scratched his head. “Very lucky, I know,” he murmured. “It’s what everyone says.”
THINGS WERE unquestionably bad. The curfew had been tightened, the IL raids on police stations had increased; at the edge of the city, control of the Central Highway was fought over each night after dark. These were days of fear on all sides. For sympathizers, when it was over, it would seem that victory had been tantalizingly close, but this was a misreading of the situation. The IL was desperate for a decisive military victory; recruitment was down, and many thousands had been killed. The apparatus of the state had proved, after a decade of war, to be more resilient than anyone had expected. In this, the final year of the war, the IL had all but lost control of its far-flung fighters. Actions in the provinces were highly decentralized, tactically dubious, and often brazen to the point of being ill-conceived. Heavy losses were inflicted on increasingly isolated bands of fighters. Some platoons responded by retreating deeper into the jungle, no longer warriors and true believers but seminomadic tribes of armed and desperate boys. When the war ended suddenly, they refused to put down their weapons. They continued fighting, because they could think of nothing else to do.
Meanwhile, the IL leadership focused on what it could control directly: the urban war, the central front of which was the embattled district of Tamoé, at the northeastern edge of the city, a slum of one million bordering the Central Highway. The idea was to use Tamoé as staging ground from which to choke off the city: attack food convoys from the fertile Central Valley, starve the city, spark food riots, and then glory in the chaos. They very nearly succeeded. For the six months before the government offensive on Tamoé, the bluffs overlooking the Central Highway were the backdrop for great and violent confrontations. The insurgents laid bombs along the roadside and disappeared into the overcrowded neighborhoods of Tamoé. Truck drivers were kidnapped, their cargo set ablaze. Police checkpoints were attacked with stolen grenades. The army responded by increasing patrols in the area, and were greeted by snipers hidden in the hills or on rooftops.
In May of that year, a girl of five was killed in Tamoé, by a bullet of indeterminate origin. There were soldiers in the area, searching for a sniper. An angry mob gathered around the soldiers. More shots were fired, and the crowd grew. A soldier was killed. The Battle of Tamoé had begun. When this uprising was quelled, the war would be over.
But all of this happened after Rey left the city for the last time. If it weren’t for the boy, his son, Rey might not have returned to the jungle at all. His contact had disappeared, left him without any further direction, and it amounted to a welcome vacation. But he went anyway, because he couldn’t get the boy out of his mind. When he heard of the battle, he was in the jungle, far en
ough away to suppose he was safe. He spent an evening with the rest of the village, listening to the radio for news, and was surprised to find that the IL’s defeat did not surprise him. It was an all-or-nothing proposition, and it always had been: so now there was nothing. The tanks that ran through the narrow streets, the blocks and blocks burned to the ground, the fighting that raged for four days house to house—in their hearts, hadn’t everyone known this was coming? In the aftermath of the battle, while the government proclaimed victory and the rest of the city celebrated, the dry, dusty lots of the district became home to thousands of displaced families, all with sons and fathers missing: a city of women and children. The army kept them corralled together for weeks in a makeshift tent city while the government decided what to do with them. Rey would have recognized many of them, from his work there so many years before.
These are facts: had he postponed his trip by a month, he might have survived the war. If he hadn’t returned to see his son, a hundred young men and the handful of women camped a day’s travel from 1797 might have lived as well.
Rey arrived in the village only six weeks after Blas had left. 1797 was still abuzz with excitement, and now there were dozens of portraits that no one knew quite what to do with. Many were hidden away, others were displayed prominently in people’s homes. He found it strange, as if the village had doubled in size while he was gone. Everyone he spoke to had had a portrait drawn of someone, and all seemed eager to talk about it. The village had collectively decided to address the fact of its own disappearance. He was at the canteen one afternoon when an older woman stormed in, walked directly toward him. Rey was sitting with Adela and their boy. The woman didn’t waste time: after apologizing for interrupting their meal, she unrolled her drawings all at once and begged Rey to look at them. They were of her husband and her son, whom she hadn’t seen in five years. She spoke so loudly that the baby looked up and began to cry.
“Madam,” Adela said sternly.
Again the woman apologized, but she didn’t stop. She was pleading now. “Take these. Take them back to the city and show them to the newspapers.”
He coughed. “They wouldn’t survive the trip,” he said. It was the first thing that occurred to him, the first excuse, and it came out all wrong. “The drawings,” Rey added, but it was too late: the woman was not quite old, not yet, but in that instant, her face fell, and she aged a decade. She broke into a furious stream of words, berating Rey in the old language for his selfishness before walking off.
Rey and Adela finished their meal in silence. They walked back through the tiny village to Adela’s hut. He asked to carry the boy, happily observing that Victor had gained weight and grown in all directions. Adela was pensive, but he chose not to notice, focusing instead on his son, this magical boy who made faces and drooled with beautiful confidence.
“Are you going to take him from me?” Adela asked when they were nearly home.
If you listened carefully, no matter where you stood in the village, you could hear the river. Rey heard it now, a lazy gurgling, not that far off. He remembered the night he had spent, drugged, wading in the cool waters. The rainy season had passed, and now the showers that came were furious but brief. The sun, when it came out, was unforgiving. Adela stared at him. He had a difficult time remembering why he had ever come to this place.
“Why would you say something like that?” Rey said. He passed the boy to one arm and reached out to touch her, but Adela pulled back.
“You’ll take the boy one day and you’ll never come back.”
“I won’t.”
Adela sat down on the step, and Rey moved in beside her, careful not to sit too close. “Did you have me drawn?”
She nodded. “You’re going to leave me.”
“You have to destroy it,” Rey said. “I’m not joking. You have to.”
“I’m not leaving. You’re not going to take me to the city and put me in a little house and make me your mistress.”
The thought had not occurred to him, but it flashed now, instantaneously, as a way out. He turned to her hopefully, but saw immediately, in the set of her jaw, that she was serious.
“Of course not.”
“Play with him now,” Adela said, pointing to the boy, “because he’s mine.” She stood angrily and disappeared into the hut.
He didn’t want a mistress. For all her charms, he didn’t, in fact, want Adela. He was a bad man, he was sure, a man of convenient morals in inconvenient circumstances. Still, he could be honest with himself, couldn’t he? Rey wanted the boy and Norma and his life back in the city, and that was all. He didn’t want the jungle or the war or this woman and the combined weight of his many bad decisions.
He wanted to live to be old.
Rey sat the boy up on his knee so that Victor could look out. His eyes were always open, and this was what Rey admired most about his son. He was a hardworking baby: colors and lights and faces, he took them in with deep concentration. Rey tickled his son playfully on the stomach, and noted proudly how quickly Victor reached for his finger, and how strongly he held on to it. Rey pulled, and Victor pulled back.
The following day, Zahir returned from the provincial capital with his radio, telling everyone in town that the war was over.
NORMA HELD Rey’s hand when they checked into the hotel. It was a late afternoon of slanting orange light. Night was still an hour away. This was the first time, and they wore wedding bands Rey had borrowed from a friend. They carried dinner in a basket, as if they had come from the provinces. Norma covered her hair with a shawl.
“Yes, sir,” Rey said to the receptionist. “We’re married.”
“Where do you come from?”
“The south.” It wasn’t a lie, Norma thought, not exactly: it’s a direction, not a place.
“Girl, is this your husband?”
“Don’t talk to my wife that way,” Rey snapped. “You need to show more respect.”
“I don’t have to let you stay here, you know.”
Rey sighed. “We’ve been traveling all day,” he said. “We just want a place to sleep.”
Norma took it all in, saying nothing. The receptionist frowned, not believing a word of it. But he took the money Rey handed him, held the bills up to the light, and mumbled something under his breath. He handed Rey a key, and there was a moment of electricity right there, as it dawned on Norma what this meant and where she was headed. Her mother would not approve. Rey never let go of Norma’s hand. She was afraid he would.
It was an old building, where even the floorboards of the stairs creaked naughtily. Norma blushed at the sound: maybe she even said something about it—who could remember now?—and Rey laughed slyly and told her not to worry. “We’re here now. No one’s going to hear us.”
And no one did, because they were alone in the hotel that night. It was midweek. They might as well have been alone in the city. They went up early and came out late, when the sun was already up and blazing red in the sky. And it didn’t hurt, not the way she had expected it to, the way she had feared it might. And then afterwards, the most wonderful thing was being naked next to him, and the most surprising thing was how easy it was to fall asleep with him by her side. It felt safe.
It was dark, and Norma was drifting toward sleep, when Rey said, “I have nightmares.”
“About what?”
“About the Moon.” He breathed heavily—she heard it and felt it, because her hand was resting on his chest. “They tell me it’s normal. But sometimes I shout in my sleep. Don’t be scared if I do.”
“What happened?”
He would tell her, Rey said, but not then. He made her promise not to be frightened.
“I won’t be,” she whispered. She was stroking his face, his eyes were closed, and he was nearly asleep. “I won’t. I won’t ever be afraid.”
“Are you awake?” Manau asked.
Norma opened her eyes. The boy was still there. She was in the same strange house. A light was on by the front door, e
verything tinged yellow. It had grown cold, and she wondered what time it was. She thought of closing her eyes, of retreating again into dreams. Had she ever been happy? “I’m awake,” she said, but even this was a guess. Norma felt he was near—her Rey—she felt traces of him all around, even as her eyes adjusted to this half-light.
She hadn’t thought of her husband as alive in many, many years. Not quite dead, either, but certainly not alive. Not part of the world. If he had lived—and Norma had concocted all kinds of scenarios that allowed this—what difference, in the end, had it made to her? He’d never contacted her. He’d wandered the jungle, or escaped the country and fled to a more hospitable place. Perhaps he’d remarried, learned a new language, and forgotten with great effort all that he had previously survived? These were all possibilities, if she accepted that he had made it somehow. But it was unthinkable: how could he have lived without her?
The boy snored lightly.
Rey was gone, of course. And she was alone. The rest of her life spread out before her, vast and blank, without guideposts or markers or the heat of human love to steer her in one direction or another. What remained were flashes, memories, attempts at happiness. For years, she had imagined him as not-quite-dead, and organized her life around this: finding him, waiting for him.
“What are we going to do?” Manau asked.
She had spent all the Great Blackouts with Rey, each and every one, in a room just like this, darker even, telling secrets while the city burned.
“Some people call every Sunday. I’ve learned to recognize their voices. They’re impostors. They pretend to be whoever the previous caller just described: from whatever village in the mountains or the jungle.”
“That’s cruel,” Manau said.
“I thought so too.”
“But?”
“But the longer the show has gone on, the more I understand it. There are people out there who think of themselves as belonging to someone. To a person who, for whatever reason, has gone. And they wait years: they don’t look for their missing, they are the missing.”
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