Amateur Barbarians

by Robert Cohen

  “Come on.” She grabbed the Chinese guy by the hand. “My friends and I will hide you.”

  “Friends?”

  “It’s cool. You can trust us, I promise.”

  He seemed to consider her offer. “You friends?”

  “Yeah, we’re friends.”

  But he didn’t seem to believe her. His eyes went large and cartoon-round, fixing on some phantom panic-point over her shoulder. She turned to find Jeremy bearing down on them at full speed, the sand exploding up behind him in spasmodic bursts like the discharge of an automatic weapon.

  “Me me! Me me! Me me!”

  Between the red lights strafing the lakeshore and Jeremy charging down the beach in lacrosse-attack mode and the feds in blue windbreakers jumping awkwardly into the water, the little levee of calm Mimi had tried to erect was breached: the aliens took off in every direction and disappeared into the woods. The beach lay empty. Two INS boats circled in the shallows. Men were pointing flashlights, barking through bullhorns. Mimi stood alone, clutching herself for comfort, mindful even now of the extra layer of flab that adhered around her elbows.

  Then Jeremy was beside her and, as if by some amazing good-boyfriend instinct, enfolding her in his strong, hairless arms. “It’s cool, Mimi,” he murmured, his lips warm against her neck. “Everything’s cool.”

  She closed her eyes. It was one of those moments she knew she’d look back on someday with wonder and satisfaction. This guy I went with junior year, she’d tell the daughter she would probably come to think of it never have, he just had this way of standing by me that was so unbelievably great.

  But Jeremy was not standing by her, actually: he was leading her away. Or not away exactly, but out, in the direction of the parking lot, where the patrol car was idling, and two guys in ugly blue blazers were talking through bullhorns, barking terse, crackling instructions. Hands up. Walk slow. Stay together. Get in.

  “Wait,” she said, “where are they taking us?”

  “Not us,” he said. “Them.”

  “But why?” Something about the way he said them really turned her off. “What did they do that was so bad?”

  “Look,” Jeremy said, in a tired, calm, exasperated voice that she found both scary and impressive, “these guys mean business, okay? Check out those boats. They’ve got infrared, heat sensors. These guys can track you down, Mimi, from the fillings in your teeth. This Homeland Security thing is no joke.”

  “So what’s a few Chinese guys more or less? It’s not like they’re terrorists. They’ll probably just open a laundry or something.”

  Jeremy shook his head in that superior, condescending way of his. He was still red-cheeked from his psychotic charge down the beach, which made the wispy hairs where his beard would grow in someday, if he let it, that much more prominent. “It’s the law. You can’t just let everybody in. The whole system’ll fall apart. It’ll be like back to the Stone Age.”

  Good, she wanted to say.

  But he was already trudging dutifully toward the parking lot, never turning, not even once, to see if she was still following him. Either he assumed she was, or he assumed just the opposite, or else he was no longer thinking of her at all. She could see the bulge in his shorts where he carried his cell phone. Had he been the one to call in the feds? She looked down at the sand, where the aliens had dropped their stuff—gum, cigarettes, photographs—when they ran away. There was an address book with a plastic cover. Packets of nuts and dried fruit. A damp Polaroid of a Chinese woman and a teenage girl. The girl was a lot prettier than she was, Mimi thought, more somber and substantial, more mature. And now that girl had lost her father to another country, which would make her even more somber and substantial and mature, to say nothing of totally miserable probably. And he hadn’t even made it in. They’d put him away for a while, then send him back. And that too would be miserable for her, Mimi thought. Not just the wait, but the return.

  “Come forward, please,” a guy barked through one of the bullhorns. “We’re asking that you please come forward at once.”

  A crew from the local TV station pulled into the lot. The back door slid open. Two guys came running out with a camera and a boom mike, both of which homed in on her at once, before she could turn away.

  “What’s that?” they called. “What’s that in your hand?”

  And that’s how she looked that night, on the local news—alone, frozen in the light, dangling that soggy Polaroid in the air like a flag.

  6

  Sympathy for the Devil

  Though God knew it wasn’t something he’d have sought out for himself, spending July 4th weekend in the Carthage County lockup had to be ranked, on Teddy’s rapidly growing list of traumatic experiences, somewhere in the middle. He’d almost have preferred it worse.

  Down the hall, like a low-amperage current, flowed the melancholy Esperanto of his fellow inmates, swapping hard-luck stories through the bars of their cells. Justice was not being served in the proper amounts to anyone: that was the consensus. Guilt, it seemed, had no place at the table. Innocence flourished underground, in the dankness and poor light, as mushrooms do: top-heavy, dubiously shaped.

  Teddy for his part felt no guilt at all. Why should he? He was not the transgressor in the family. He was not the one who’d managed, in the course of a single night, to break half a dozen local, state, and federal laws. Oh, Mimi and her friends had stuck it to them all right. Stuck It to the Man. Teddy, having grown up in the golden age of Sticking It to the Man, might have been inclined that way himself, but after fourteen years as a principal—fourteen years of being the man—his allegiances had tilted and he no longer quite saw the appeal. Neither in his experience did most authority figures, especially the men. They didn’t like being stuck to, and they had a number of cold, hard strategies for letting you know. Fortunately Mimi and her friends were middle-class children: to be insulated from cold, hard realities was their fate.

  The Chinese aliens, being neither children nor middle-class, and having no mothers who were lawyers at their disposal, were another story. First they’d been forced to brave the terrors of a night journey through woods and water. Then when they arrived, they had to contend with that unholy welcome wagon, Mimi and her crew of feckless stoners. Then they’d been rounded up by the feds and tossed into some moldy, underfunded county jail in which to languish away the summer. And meanwhile all they wanted from this country was what Teddy and his neighbors already had: a house, a yard, a garden, a minivan with sliding doors in which to drive the kids to soccer. Soon of course everyone in China would have these things, but apparently these guys had not been willing to wait. Now they would be punished for that impatience. Now they’d have to wait, wait for all the legal-jurisdictional issues to be worked out, for the state and federal authorities to weigh in, for asylums to be granted or more likely denied. And all the while so far from their families.

  Though conceivably, when you’re stuck in jail with no prospect of asylum, a little distance from one’s family was not a bad idea.

  So it seemed to Teddy, and from the evidence to Gail as well, for she never did visit him in prison. He supposed she had her hands full, logging all those nonbillable hours on Mimi’s behalf; probably no slots were left in her appointment book for that other pro bono project—that other rogue relative—her husband. Well, he wouldn’t complain. He had his books for company: Burton, Thesiger, a life of Rimbaud. From these restless madmen he hoped to learn a little patience. God knew patience was a virtue at times like these.

  Of course patience would have been a virtue in times just before these too. Say like in dealing with Mimi, whose own legal journey had proved highly taxing all around. Even after they’d gotten her released, after they’d taken the girl home and finished brow-beating her into sullen, slack-faced silence at the kitchen table, the smog of willful criminality still hung over the house.

  “The legal charges aren’t the issue,” Gail had said later, grim-faced in bed. “Obviously they’re onl
y symptoms.”

  “Symptoms of what?”

  “You tell me.”

  “I have no idea. I’m assuming you do, though, which is why you’re so upset.”

  “I’m upset because you have no idea.”

  “Do you?”

  She’d sighed, the sheets bunched against her chest, as if all questions engendered by Mimi at this point were too weighty and imponderable to answer. Teddy turned to the window. The bright bulb of the reading lamp blazed in the glass. Somewhere beyond it, in the dark woods, they’d lost sight of the girl. His fault too. Ever since that party at the Dunns’ he’d been a sad case, stumbling blindly through the panic fields. Lab tests, biopsies, radiology reports: his head was crammed with numbers and probabilities; there was no free space. Darkness found him at his desk, revving up the search engines, graphing intricate night journeys of his own. No wonder Mimi had slipped between the cracks.

  A dumb expression, Teddy thought. You don’t slip between the cracks; you slip through them. He was beginning to feel a bit cracked these days himself. But enough. He resolved to stop coddling himself at once and start paying his daughter better attention from this moment forward.

  And indeed, he did. So much better attention did Teddy pay her, and of such a charged and singular kind, that he wound up brushing against the law himself. Then the law, taking exception, brushed back. Which was how he came to spend the three-day holiday weekend here in the Carthage County lockup, with only old books for company.

  The real prisons are the hospitals, and the real hospitals are the prisons. Teddy had found this out the hard way: by visiting both.

  Naturally it had been something of a shock, the sight of his own blood parachuting into the depths of the Dunns’ toilet. But he hadn’t panicked. Teddy Hastings was a man with deep strategic reserves of denial and displacement, and he’d tapped these reserves at once. The whole ride home with Gail he hadn’t said a word. The next day they’d gone boating on the lake with friends, and that had been pleasant; the day after that, he’d recaulked the shower; and after that he was busy at school. So it was not until the following Friday, after the last bell had rung and he’d gone into the administrator’s bathroom, locked the door of the stall behind him, and found blood there too that the drill rigs of denial went quiet, the wells of repression ran dry.

  Then he did panic. He panicked for real. His forehead went slick; his heart spun and creaked. He could hear, down the hall, the swoosh of the custodian’s wax-and-buff machine making slow, somnolent circles of erasure, like some inexorable mechanism of fate. He held his breath, waiting for it to pass. When it did he felt better.

  But later at home the panic returned. Then receded. Then returned. This went on for some days. Finally, when his body politic had grown too riotous and incendiary for sleep, when he was at his most wrought up, calmed down, done in, and worn-out, he’d called up the new internist in town, Scott Wainwright, and scheduled an appointment.

  Wainwright was a crew-cut, no-nonsense young man with a swimmer’s sloping shoulders and a thirty-inch waist. Teddy disliked him immediately. His office was cold but bright, still littered with Field and Streams and National Geographics addressed to his predecessor, kindly old Doc Englehorn, who’d retired to Arizona. Englehorn had been the soporific, sit-back-and-chat type. Wainwright was more hands-on. He nodded officiously while Teddy ran through the family history, connecting the black dots, rattling the old skeletons. Christ, there were a lot of them. His was the only one left with any flesh and blood in it. And now the blood was taking leave of him too.

  Wainwright frowned, tapping his pen against the clipboard, not bothering to write much down. “I wouldn’t worry,” he said. “A little minor colonic bleeding. It’s in no way unusual at your age.”

  Teddy nodded hopefully, though the last clause depressed him. He had arrived at the age where no calamities of the body were unusual.

  “On the other hand,” the doctor said, “it’s not entirely common either. So we better go ahead and get started.”

  “Started on what?”

  Wainwright looked appalled. “We have tests for these things, Mr. Hastings. Surely you’ve had a colonoscopy before.”

  “Actually I’d been meaning to get one. I was thinking maybe in a year or two. But I guess you’re thinking earlier, huh?”

  The doctor stared at him blandly.

  “Okay fine,” Teddy said. “Let the games begin.”

  The tests turned out to be exactly as he’d feared: multiple, invasive, painful, protracted. What got him through was the phrase Wainwright had employed, that bit about how a little colonic bleeding was not unusual. Teddy kept this in mind as he weathered the indignities in his blue clip-on smock. He gave away his blood, his urine, his stool, everything they wanted, and all the while he kept shuffling those words in his head like a pack of cards from which only winning hands could be dealt. He was still engaged in this merry mental blackjack when Wainwright called him into his office on a hot day in June and informed him rather casually of the three small, adenomatous polyps they’d found in the lining of his colon.

  “How small is small?” Teddy asked.

  “Minuscule. Less than a centimeter. I’m not concerned in the least.”

  “Why would you be? I’m the one with the tumors.”

  “They’re polyps, Mr. Hastings. At your age, a few colorectal polyps of this nature are hardly unusual.”

  “Which is what you said about the bleeding.”

  “Come now, don’t be frightened. In all likelihood they’re benign. There’s very little doubt in my mind. But we’ll just send them to the lab and make sure. Should we call you when the results are in?”

  “No.”

  “Sorry?”

  “I mean I’d rather get it in person, if it’s all the same to you.”

  Wainright frowned; clearly it wasn’t all the same to him. “Okay. Go ahead and make an appointment.”

  About the next two weeks there was little to be said. He went about his business, at school and at home. His mind was an unpocked moon, bright but remote; no landing crafts of thought or expectancy adhered to its surface. In a sense he was happier than he’d been in some time. He could not have begun to say why.

  Then he went in for his appointment.

  The verdict, when it came, affected him strangely. He’d steeled himself for the other. It was difficult to reverse course, to unsteel himself now. Other things that proved difficult at that moment: moving, breathing, speaking, and letting go of Gail’s cool, familiar hand, which he clutched to his chest like a buoy as he blinked back hot tears. Benign, malignant—how easy it was, slumped in a chair in the waiting lounge, with the sun shooting at you like a ray gun through the floor-to-ceiling windows, to mistake one fraternal twin for the other. He gazed mistily around the room, that pastel purgatory with the all-weather carpet. He’d spent forty-five minutes here already. Forty-five minutes of colorless furniture, and odorless plants, and back issues of travel magazines advertising deals no longer available for hotels he couldn’t afford. And the people too, the hunched and sickly, the elderly and infirm, settled deep in their chairs, staring glassily ahead. As if stupefied by waiting. Made sick by waiting. Teddy hoped his own face did not look like theirs, but he supposed in time it would. All he had to do was wait.

  On the wall was a Kurdish poem, elegantly framed, courtesy of the state council for the arts. Dutifully he scanned the lines.

  We should not blame the stones

  For their silence, their dignity.

  We should not blame the swift rivers

  For their impatience, their madness.

  We should not forget to console the mountain

  Which laments after a deserting cloud.

  We must learn to love the different hearts.

  The usual maddening bullshit, in short, funded by his own tax dollars. And yet he kind of liked that line about the rivers, about not blaming them for anything. This struck him as wise. He wondered if the Kurdish poe
t knew his work was being displayed in American hospitals, and whether he’d receive royalties for it, and what sort of life he lived over in Kurdistan or whatever it was now called. An embattled people, the Kurds. But then who wasn’t? He liked the line about the mountain too.

  He was sufficiently absorbed in the strange landscape of the poem that he almost failed to notice Scott Wainwright, a rather grim-faced young man even, Teddy imagined, under the most lighthearted circumstances, plodding down the corridor in his direction. His white coat, as it approached the double doors, was mirrored in the glass, so that for a moment it was unclear where doctor left off and patients began.

  Then he pushed his way through.

  “Mr. Hastings?”

  Calmly Teddy rose from his chair. Now that the moment had arrived, the parade of apprehension in his chest—anxiety’s rattling snares, fear’s bellowing woodwinds—went mute. His mind was a blank field. He stood swaying in the doorway, heavy and dumb as an animal. His file was in the doctor’s hands, already splayed open. There was writing on all the pages.

  “Okay, so let’s sit down, shall we?”

  Teddy nodded. His limbs were frozen. He didn’t move. Steam from some internal grate clouded his eyes. He was not a believer in God but it was in its way a religious instant. He felt himself under a beam of pure light. Someone had glimpsed the things inside him, taken their measure; his flawed body had been seen and understood. Now he would hear the report.

  The doctor cleared his throat. There appeared to be some blockage.

  And then after that Teddy must have checked out for a while, or rather in, for he now discovered himself to be the sole inhabitant of a quiet, tucked-away little hotel, which by virtue of his no longer being conscious (for abruptly, as if a plug had been pulled, all the blood had whooshed from his head) seemed his own natural home in which to lie around and rest for as long as he liked. His ears hummed a pleasant tune. He was aware of some guy in a uniform, a porter no doubt, calling out loudly for room service, but he hadn’t ordered room service so he paid no attention. He was fine where he was. True, the room smelled a bit smoky, but he doubted the place was on fire. Next time he’d request a nonsmoking. He liked this place; he was comfortable here; he had no wish to leave. All he wanted was to go on lying where he was, watching the sunlight stream through the cracks in the blinds, the dust motes riding their fickle currents, the updrafts and downdrafts no one could see.