The Running War

by E. L. Carter

  The airport road, which many know as the most dangerous stretch of highway in the world, I only know as the place where my brother got hit. I lay my hand on the toy butterfly, as if to steady it in my lap. At a place where mature date palms line both sides like a royal driveway, Raed suddenly slams on the brakes, careening up behind a traffic jam. I see the back of an army truck far ahead of us. Raed says, “People love to hide behind the trees and pull the trigger when the tanks go by.”

  “Is there a way around them?”

  “They hang a sign on the back that says don’t approach within 100 meters or deadly force will be used against us. Do you still want to try?”

  I peer ahead, disbelieving. I can see a white sign with red letters in English, but I can’t make out what it says. The cars directly behind the convoy are at least 100 meters back.

  “So they make us into accidental targets when they get bombed.”

  “No American soldier will tell you that. And they will condone shooting people who drive too close because they say they have to be careful.”

  “My brother would have told you that. He was an American soldier.”

  “And he’s dead, right?”

  I don’t answer. He’s not trying to be cruel. He’s just seen too many dead people to bother with delicacy. Still, it stings, his death reduced to this. Another stupid bleeding heart.

  I can see the soldiers in desert camos poking their machine guns out the back of the last truck, and I know already, a half hour inside the border, that it’s a good thing I’m completely fucking nuts because I kind of have to be. Nuts is the modus operandi in Iraq. Which tree did someone crouch behind with a patchwork trigger, waiting for my brother to drive by? Was it that one with the notch in it, or that one, that one? The bland faceless wood creeps by us, holding its secrets inside.

  NEW JERSEY—MAY 2005

  When I walk down the streets of my hometown, I hold my head high and keep my eyes straight ahead. I want to look like an ordinary person on an ordinary day. Like someone free, someone intact. I hold the pieces of myself together so no one will know me.

  I’m wandering down the street away from my parents’ house. I stop in front of Kris’s old apartment and peer up the stairs. The new tenant has hung a woven wreath on the door, a sign of both welcome and territoriality. I keep walking. Soon I leave the road, slide past the gate and into the woods. Now I am at the field’s edge, sprouting with timothy hay. Near me I see a small row of milkweed plants. They look like a miracle.

  I stand for a moment staring at them, little gangly stalks with a leaf or two on each one. Their fragile, almost forgettable will strikes me as heroic. Suddenly something is pressing against my gut, so hard I’m out of breath. Is it hunger? Yes and no. Following the pressure, I begin to circle back on where I’ve come. Down the trail again. Through the gate. This time I head up the road toward Mom and Dad’s. My steps come faster and faster.

  Two months ago, I traveled off this same thin road with the brisk March wind stinging the tips of my ears. Past the gate and the No Trespassing sign, onto the trail where Kris had walked only two weeks before me. I clutched a bag of milkweed seeds tight in both hands and turned from the trail to face the edge of the fallow field. The dirt buckled into faint rows where last year’s crop was ploughed under. A few weeds had emerged here and there. The wind pushed them into limbo then back again, on track toward the sun.

  I had already dismembered Kris’s butterfly made out of milk crates, dissected it in the name of science. Wings had lain in disarray around Kris’s room. The thorax and the abdomen no longer fit together. Guts removed, oozing at the edges in piles. I had gathered up bundles of letters from me, and released them, like a power shovel releasing dirt, into the recycle bin. They belonged to some other person in some other life, a woman who had naively believed that everything and everyone lasts forever. That things can wait. That there is time to waste. Maybe she had even thought that was what time was for.

  I had pulled Kris’s note out of my pocket and folded it so many times it became a solid—nothing flimsy and two-dimensional—almost a stone. Then I had shoved it inside his old stash box: a soda can with a false lid and a secret compartment inside.

  One crate full of crapola had gone in my parents’ attic. Books. Ribbons. Knickknacks. It would get hot and the pages of the books would dry up and yellow. The crate would sit somewhere between my old stuffed animals and Mom’s wedding dress, another piece of lost life that couldn’t quite be let go.

  The rest of the crap I took to a musty church donation bin in the next town over. My grand plan had had something to do with Kris’s clothes walking away in three days on someone else’s body, like Jesus did. I wasn’t prepared for their dissolution in a puff of mold spores.

  That spring day, somewhere between the creation of the world and its demise, I sat down on the threshold of the donation bin and stared at the sacrificial belongings. I was not a cartographer of wild hopes. I had this musty church store before me, a heart full of grief, and a tiny speck of something bright at the edge of my vision, like sun spots.

  Later, in the butterfly field, I knelt down on the ploughed-up dirt. It was cold and wet where my knees pushed down and it stained my pants. I thrust my hand inside the paper bag I held and ran my fingers over the silk inside. Each seed could sprout into fresh life, or an answer, or even a question. With my fingers, I ran a small trench, right at the edge of the ploughed earth where the harvester wouldn’t cut. I pulled the fluff out of the bag and laid down a row of white tufts, dotted with tiny black specks of hope. I made a deeper hole right next to this promise, a hopeless hole that forced half-thawed mud under my fingernails. There I laid the stash can to rest, his note hidden inside.

  And then I did what I always do. I went on Expedia, put the ticket on my credit card, and was gone. At O’Hare, CNN was on without sound, and I could see the bored eyes of passengers flicking up at the screen and back down to magazines and iPods. Who wants to bear an abstraction like the Middle East when reality is here, open on your lap singing to you, telling you to relax and love your honey, and maybe buy a thing or two? Who wants horror if they don’t have to have it? I got on another plane, then another, until I could go no farther without circling back on where I’d come from.

  She is real. As Kris’s note had left my hands and nested into its hiding place, those words stayed behind—stuck to my hands, trapped behind my eyes. I had no one to run into the woods with anymore. I didn’t even know what I was fighting.

  She is real. If I ran fast enough would the answer spell itself out on the roaring of the wind? Then one drizzly King County morning, it came to me all in a flash. Grandma had stolen the gift. My Gypsy Grandma was my enemy. She had done just what Mom said she would do, she’d stolen the china off our table, or something more. Something no one would know about unless they had lived in our house, had been privy to the clutter of the back closets. Maybe Mom didn’t even know we had owned it.

  I traveled down to Tacoma because Google said I would find a lot of Gypsies there. I landed a job at an organic café frequented by college kids and aging granolas, and dedicated myself to searching during my off hours.

  It was like grabbing handfuls of water and shoving them in my pockets. Maybe a lot of people had told the United States Census Bureau that they were Gypsies, but they weren’t telling anyone else. Invisible like water. I was sure she was here.

  It didn’t help that I knew nothing. I was looking for an ancestor who was not my ancestor. She was a foreigner. And to the Gypsy people I had met in my life, I was always a foreigner too. When I had come across a family on a ferry in Greece, or a woman selling dresses at a market in Spain, they had always turned off, or away, as soon as I opened my mouth.

  What would I find? Would it be like in Europe, stained brown paperboard and a fire, children playing games in the dirt? This time it was nothing, and then a trailer by a suburban railroad station.

  The trailer said “Fortune Teller” above the door
in black letters, the stick-on kind you get for your mailbox. A smaller sign on the window read “Open, Please Come In” so I stepped toward the white door. I had worn a calf-length skirt and a sleeved shirt to be polite, and they stuck to me like masking tape in the rain.

  An older woman answered the door dressed in a long skirt, a billowing top, and layers of jewelry. She had her hair in a scarf. Was she in costume, or would she wear this out to dinner with friends? I forgot to say hello and she said something sharp, a reprimand maybe, in another language and at the same time took my hand.

  I said, “Sorry, I just wondered if you could tell my fortune.”

  She stepped back a little, dramatic, still holding my hand, and said, “Don’t you play games with me, little Sintisa. What do you want?”

  “No. Really.” I looked her full in the face and saw the mockery there, ready to find me out. “I just want my fortune.”

  She waved me in, a hand on my waist now, and closed the door behind us. We were in the main room of the trailer, which was furnished with chairs around a plastic table covered with red and yellow oilcloth, and on the wall a picture of the crucifixion. The fortune teller looked me over for a while. Nylon sandals. Unshaven lower legs. Thrift store skirt. Waitress shirt. My face. Finally she said, with assurance, “I know you’re Romani. So what?”

  I shook my head. “No. My grandma was. Someone I never knew. But I’m not.”

  She snorted. “What do you want, little Sintisa?” Then she took me through a little door into the cramped kitchen, where she washed her hands and put a kettle on the stove to boil.

  “I don’t know,” I fumbled. “Maybe you could help me find her.”

  “Oh, you mean like, I’m Romani, she’s Romani, and so …”

  I flushed, then blustered on. “Back in Europe I think she was adopted but I don’t know who either family was. There was something having to do with horses.”

  “Lowara.”

  “Lowara? She came here from France with my grandfather after World War II. To New Jersey. Then she left again. I don’t even know if she was French.”

  “Oh, little one.” She turned toward me from the stove. “Does the man across the street pumping gas know more than you, you think?”

  I shrugged. “She must be from somewhere.”

  “Or a little bit of everywhere. Or maybe here. I don’t know. That’s how it’s always been.” She poured two cups of Lipton tea, the Brisk Tea, bobbed the bags for a minute, and pulled them out. She handed me a mug that said “Amtrak” on it, and ushered me back out into the fortune-telling room.

  She pulled out a chair for me and I sat, still holding my tea. She sat kitty-corner from me and took a sip, and said, “Okay, Lowara Sintisa, I will tell your fortune.”

  With that she went to a little door inset in the wall and pulled out a deck of cards wrapped in cloth and a candle. She lit the candle, shuffled the cards, and handed them to me. “Now ask your question. Not out loud, please.”

  Where is Kris’s gift to me? She took the cards back, shuffled them some more, and asked me to cut the deck. She laid them out in the pattern of a cross with a vertical line on the right-hand side. I saw a naked woman kneeling over a pool holding jugs, stars behind her in the sky. Behind another design made from pentagrams, a family stood by an archway—on the other side, an old man in an ornate cloak. Dead people rose out of coffins on an ocean while an angel blew a trumpet.

  The woman studied them for a moment, looked at me, then back at the cards again. She laughed. “You’re very musical.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means you should play music.”

  “How do you know?” I clutched my teacup with both hands, then released it and put my hands on my knees.

  “You come to me, little Lowara Sintisa, and you ask me to tell your fortune. So I tell your fortune and now you argue with me? I know because I tell fortunes.” She continued with the cards. “Let me see. Oh. You want to run too. Enough of that. You have to run toward something, not away from it. It has to do with a broken heart. The most important thing is a girl who has lost her mother. She will answer your question.”

  I stood up, startling us both. “How much do I owe you?”

  She began to pile the cards back up slowly, one on top of the other, in the reverse order from how she’d laid them out. She said, “We love our stories. But a story is only as good as what it does for you. Don’t let your past be written for you. Or your future. My treat, OK?”

  I shook my head. Dug in my pocket and pulled out the thirty dollars I’d brought for the occasion. Laid it on the table between us.

  “Okay, Lowara Sintisa Gadji. Fine.” She picked up the bills with her thumb and index finger, as if they were dirty tissues.

  “Thanks for the tea,” I said.

  I wanted only to be out the door, back on the street, belonging to no ancestor at all.

  I’VE BEEN running.

  I told myself the person they sent home on the airplane from Iraq, that sad shadow of a person, was just the army’s poorly solved puzzle—jigsaw pieces shoved into place without regard for angles or color. Kris had still smelled of hospital disinfectant, his brain burned like his arms from the bomb blast but invisible. His vacant eyes had mocked the truth, which is absence.

  “Hey, brother,” I had joked, trying to find his old self somewhere. “When you going to be ready to shoot some hoops? I’m going to kick your butt, you know.”

  Silence. Kris had sat stiff and awkward in his wheelchair. “

  Kris, do you want to talk?”

  Silence.

  “Kris. You can tell me anything. I’m strong, see?” I’d made a muscle for him.

  He’d looked up then. “What do you love more? The inside of an airport or the sound of your heart when you’re in your own house at night?”

  I’d laughed at that. Morphine, I thought. It makes poets out of scientists.

  But he hadn’t laughed at himself. He had tried again, his face earnest as if he were trying to channel Rilke. “You’re always here. Do you see? You can’t run fast enough.”

  Oh, great. Now he was turning into a Zen master too.

  I had hoped the real him would call out. Call me. That sarcastic, passionate, logical man who was never out of words. I’d kept my ringer on all night not sleeping in the bedroom we had shared as children. Instead of cooking a meal for Mom or holding Kris’s hand, I had fiddled with my wireless. And then as soon as I could I had run, because I didn’t know what else to do and my cell service didn’t charge for roaming. I had waited for Kris to return to himself through hot Florida nights at a restaurant where retirees paid too much for industrial grade food and expected the service to make up for it. What was I waiting for this time? The Tacoma rain poured down and made funny patterns in the streetlights outside.

  Some questions have no answer—they spit up pills, hold their ears in therapy—but they refuse to be ignored. I’ve always stayed one step ahead of those kinds of questions. Florida-Alaska-Quebec-Athens-La Ceiba-Istanbul—and when exactly is this war going to be over? And why are you calling me out now, little brother? Why do you want me to go home, the one thing I find impossible?

  You’re the only one who knows I can’t go home. You knew. This was my battle, my own petty war against pain.

  After seeing the fortune teller, I just worked and slept, worked and slept. I donned my armor, faced the army of cute college grads and tattooed dreamers armored with a dyke haircut and baggy thrift-store fleece. Kris used to say my life was like a dry Kerouac novel. I’d retort, what’s Kerouac without his bottle?

  This was a different kind of dry. I never knew that a flock of seagulls spinning over Puget Sound, or a hummingbird free diving, or a group of humans walking in unison across a city crosswalk, bright colors in stride, could leave me feeling flat. Is this why people drink? Because nothing else disrupts the monochromatic tones of the day, like beating relentlessly on a single piano key.

  Over all this time, over
the days and weeks and months of carrying large platters of food to people, of sitting on a beach or a bench by the water, of falling asleep in some strange room with a ceiling fan that went clunk-clunk-clunk-clunk—over those days and weeks and months the realization has grown that I have wasted the art of denial down to nothing.

  One night about a week ago, the manager of the café in Tacoma pulled me aside. “Maybe it’s none of my business,” he said, his dark eyes solemn. “But you look awfully skinny, Maddy. People are worried about you.”

  Awfully skinny. Right then I knew—standing behind a swinging door with a plastic tub of baby greens in my hand, with grease hanging on the walls instead of artwork and the smell of it in my hair, with a Filipino man just my height who I’d never caught frowning now looking me straight in the eyes and not smiling a bit. I knew I was no longer one step ahead. I was running one step behind and had been for about a decade, best I could tell, but undoubtedly for the two months since Kris had died.

  I looked straight back into his eyes and thanked him.

  I went home after that shift at the restaurant and sat on my camp mattress in my nearly vacant apartment, and knew it was time to make a choice. I wonder if those milkweed seeds ever sprouted, I thought. If I’m going to stay alive, I thought, I’ll have to do what Kris wants of me. I’ll have to go where I can’t go, and live for both of us.

  Today, back in New Jersey, I have just run all the way up the road from the milkweed field. I reach my parents’ driveway. I tear up the hill and burst through the door. In the ceiling above the spare bedroom hangs the pull-cord for the attic.