Awayland

by Ramona Ausubel

  Lucy said to her, “Sometimes I just wish I could eat ham and eggs for breakfast.”

  “Mary can’t speak,” the man said. “She’s a mute.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Nothing to apologize for. God works in mysterious ways,” he said. “She is our family’s pillar. I don’t need her to speak to know I can lean on her.”

  Two snarl-faced monkeys hung from the tree branches above, impatient for scraps. They had long black arm hair and gray-leathered feet. Lucy noticed a baby on one of their backs, clinging. Little eyes, little mouth, long fingers. Lucy tore her bread in half and pretended to drop it on the ground. “Oops,” she said to the mama monkey, who let go of her branch, her mouth opening wild and red, and fell the fifteen feet, her hair rising, her baby clinging. Lucy waited for the fall, the crack of bones. The monkey landed on her feet, soundless. She grabbed the bread and swung from railing to branch to branch in no seconds. Lucy watched as the monkey ate the bread, tear by tear. She did not feed even one piece to her baby.

  The missionary told the African about his plan to buy a bush plane so he could reach the most needy tribes, so remote that they might otherwise go completely unsaved. His voice cracked with excitement and Lucy could practically see the picture behind his eyes: him in the rumble of his own propellers, his mute wife at his side, hovering like a tiny God over a patch of savage earth.

  No one asked if Lucy and the African needed salvation that morning. Maybe their skin color meant it was assumed that they already had the right god in their hearts, or maybe their skin color made it impolite to ask.

  Above, the monkeys shook the branches, hungry for more.

  * * *

  —

  TOURISTS WOULD HAVE SEEN the animals in their own private safari vans, but the couple took a local bus to the game park because that’s what Africans did. It was a minibus, ten seats, and Lucy and the African took two seats in the middle. She swung her bag around to the front so she could hold it, and left it strapped around her back. She thought she was managing not to look nervous. The driver, a giant man, stayed outside, hustling for fares even after all ten seats were full. In the dirt parking lot, women carried trays of fruit on their heads, sliced and in plastic bags. Others had watches, others orange-colored breads, others chewing gum. Men on the bus—Lucy was the only woman, she noticed—slipped their windows open and threw money onto the trays, snapped the tabs on soda cans and drank the contents in one sip.

  “Where we’re going is a private reserve,” the African said. “No predators, so we can walk around instead of being in one of those horrid safari trucks. Just have to watch for hippos.”

  Lucy snorted when she laughed and some of the men in the truck turned to look at her.

  “I’m serious,” he said. “The hippopotamus is the most dangerous animal in the jungle. They are easily startled and their jaws are very strong.” He snapped his hand shut. Lucy could not tell if he was torturing or teasing her.

  “What if I had gone outside last night when they were grazing?” she asked. “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

  “But you didn’t.”

  It got hot on the bus. Lucy felt as if she was breathing other people’s air, direct from their muggy lungs. She put her face to the crack in the window. A woman got on, finally another woman, and she had a canvas sack that was wriggling. Lucy thought: snakes. Then: children. She scolded herself. Do not mistrust these people. They are black, and black is beautiful. This phrase, a stowaway from the cover of a glossy magazine in the airport someplace, kept echoing in her brain. She was constantly afraid that she would say it aloud by accident. It felt like a small landmine in the rocky earth of her head.

  The African, all this time, was reading a newspaper, as comfortable as if he were sitting in the lobby of a big hotel in Nairobi, someplace designed to make white people feel good about this continent, where the desk was staffed with polite, good-looking blacks, the bar made of wood from endangered trees, ringed with the sweat of highball glasses.

  The canvas sack crowed and Lucy almost laughed with relief. “Buy me a drink?” she said to the African. He found a bill in his pocket and handed it to her without taking his eyes off the paper. No, she wanted to say, you do it. The soda woman was not far away, but Lucy did not want to call to her. She put her long white arm out into the bright sky and all the eyes went to it, took a step away like it was a deformity. Then a man with a plastic bucket took the bill and replaced it with a small plastic bag. “Peanuts for the lady,” he said. Lucy looked at the bag. “Thank you,” she told him.

  “I thought you were thirsty,” the African said.

  * * *

  —

  THE BUS DRIVER GOT ON, finally, and began to drive. He steered and shifted with one hand, while, with the other, he held a bouquet of barbecued chicken skewers from which he took large bites. In a minute, they stopped and picked up three more women who sat on the laps of men in the back. A minute after that, there were two men, two small boys and a woman with a baby standing by the road. Lucy waited for the driver to explain that another bus was on its way, but instead, his helper opened the door and let them all in. The woman with the baby pressed her butt into the African’s face and Lucy tried to make herself small. Air was less and less available.

  Then the bus came to a short stop in the middle of the road and everybody started to talk at once. Young men and old, thick as a swarm, fell against the bus with their fists, yelled into the windshield and windows. The men and boys surrounded them completely. The African looked up from his paper. “Fuck,” he said. Lucy held her bag tighter. A man with a moon-flat face spit on her window. Her heart felt like a bicycle wheel, turning over and over. She wanted to be small, but she was big. She was big and bright. She felt like a star. Someone had seen her get on, phoned his cousins, she thought. White people, rich people, traveling slowly over land, their pockets fat with the cash necessary to see exotic vegetarian animals. The African said something in Swahili to the woman with the baby. Lucy leaned into him. “What?” she asked. The men and boys outside began to shake the bus back and forth. It rocked so easily. It rocked like it had been designed to do just that. The people on the bus yelled back to those outside the bus. The driver threw the last of his chicken skewers out the window. Everything was noise.

  Any town, anywhere on earth had a ditch to dump a girl’s body into. Lucy’s mother’s ghost was either omniscient and would not need to be told about her daughter’s murder, or she was nothing more than rotted bones. Lucy thought of the call to her father made by some local policeman. So this was how he would find out about his grandchild. She imagined him and her sister, the two left, alone together. Maybe, she thought, trying to create a little pool of hope, I am worth more alive than dead. Ransom. The baby might be valuable. She was grateful for the baby; it was the first time she had felt that way.

  When Lucy was a child she had been taken to a therapist after admitting to her mother that she dreamed constantly of drowning. The therapist had instructed her to imagine a safe place, say a quiet meadow in the mountains, wildflowers and small rabbits and a warm, cloudless sky. She had understood the idea, but the meadow never worked on her. There were bears there, there were wolves, the ground was full of stinging bugs and briars and she was very far from home.

  As the bus shook and the men yelled, Lucy knew she was going to die. She closed her eyes and she wished she could go home. What she pictured, what home turned out to be, was the westbound 10 freeway slithering above Los Angeles. There was traffic in her fantasy, medium-heavy but the cars were still moving. It was three p.m. traffic, the worst still to come. This was the reason everyone who had ever left LA gave for their departure—the gray rivers, no one ever where they wanted to be. Lucy could hear her tires bump over the freeway’s ridges, she could hear the public radio news theme song, she could see the white license plates with two palm trees. She could see the pale sky and
knew the shock of the ocean was ahead, sudden and blue at the edge of the city. Her blood slowed down, her breathing.

  The African grabbed Lucy’s hand and began to stand up. She wanted to tuck deeper into the corner, if anything. Not to expose more of her colorless, overbright body, not to move through the crowd. She resisted but he tugged and got her to stand. They pushed through the men and women, the sweat and breath of them, their arms and necks and elbows. The bus shook. The men and boys outside yelled and the open door was not a welcome light but a pathway into the fury. The African descended the steps and Lucy imagined the fists on their faces, in their stomachs. She imagined the baby being pummeled.

  The men and boys who were thin and fat, wearing T-shirts and jeans, plastic sandals, continued to yell and they continued to throw their bodies at the bus and to pull at its windows, but they did not fall upon Lucy and the African. They moved aside for the couple to pass through. Lucy was the only thing she had not considered: meaningless. There was so much air. Lucy sucked it back. The African smiled at her like they had not been about to die.

  “I don’t understand what’s going on,” she said.

  “Oh, sorry, I forget you don’t speak the language. It was a protest. A fisherman died in the lake and they want the government to dredge the body up. So they blocked the road, but the driver wanted the fares. It’s no problem. We can walk the rest of the way.”

  A huge lake appeared for the first time in front of them. It was wide and silver. Lucy had imagined her body being thrown into the trench, but now she knew it would have been the lake. Of course it would have.

  While she tried to slow her breathing, to re-believe that no one here had ever wanted to harm her, that they hardly even registered her existence, Lucy thought of a fisherman, carp-pecked and coming apart in the silt. It was too early to be feeling the baby kick. Probably it was indigestion, but Lucy put her hands on her belly and held them there. The traveler was quiet. What stranger world was there than inside this body, what more alien landscape? A foreigner inside a foreigner. The hills on one side of them were bright red and the acacia trees looked like they belonged in a diorama of Africa. There were stocky gray horses in the distance.

  The African said, “Don’t worry, I’ll tell you when to be afraid.”

  If the baby was to be born here, as she would be, mother and child would not share a home. California would still exist and Lucy would take the child back and show her where her mother had grown up and they would keep watch for famous people and ride the Ferris wheel on the pier and dig their feet into the hot sand until they reached the cool, sea-wet layers beneath. But the girl would want to go home because the Pacific would not be her ocean. Because she would be hungry for her own earth and her own sky. Lucy, faraway Lucy, carried in her exact middle a creature who already belonged here, a whole watershed of veins that ran with this place.

  “If we had gone someplace where both of us were strangers we would always have been far away together,” she said. It could have been Ecuador, an island chain in Asia. She imagined walking down a dirt track just like this one, only there would be bamboo forests and rice paddies and whole families on a single bicycle and Lucy and the African would both misunderstand the culture together. They would be the same kind of outsider.

  “I need to tell my sister about the baby. I need to tell my father,” she said.

  “Why haven’t you?”

  “I don’t know. My parents were immigrants and my dad spent his life trying to be American. I felt guilty that he would have a foreign grandchild.”

  “All babies are foreigners,” the African said. “None of us knows what we’re going to get. Isn’t that the beauty?”

  They came to the park’s gate and paid their money and the three of them, the family, set out into the wild together. There were huge red cliffs ahead of them and a green savanna. The horses were not horses, Lucy realized. Now she saw the stripes. “Zebras?” she said, disbelieving. The black-and-white of them was right there. No fence, no boundary. There was no separation between human and animal. All any of them were was skin and fur, muscle and oxygen, the ability to eat, to run, to raise their young.

  “Lion food,” the African said. “Their color is their only defense. A group of zebras,” he told her, pleased to know the rules, “is called a dazzle.”

  Departure Lounge

  We lived in a bubble on a crater on a mountain on an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, but where we imagined we lived was Mars. The top of Mauna Loa in Hawaii was the closest place on earth to that distant red planet so that was where we moved through a domed world with airlocks and decontamination zones and wore space suits whenever we went outside. I was just the chef, there to provide nourishment to the astronauts-in-training. A glorified cafeteria lady.

  A few miles below were thousands of families who had hauled their winter-pale bodies across the sea and stripped down to bathing suits, their skin shy and prickly in the first waves. These vacationers ordered the umbrella drink, ate the papaya, flayed themselves out on the beach and joyfully let the sun burn them.

  That was not my Hawaii. I cooked the meals and looked out at the horizon and imagined that I was a year’s journey from my own planet, 249 million miles from everything I knew. That the only lives were those of my crewmates. That what we had to eat, our water, our habitat, was the only place left to us. That we would die here.

  * * *

  —

  THE REST OF MY CREWMATES were astronauts-in-training. They had entered and won a contest to be the first people to live on Mars. They were young and could run forty miles and had science degrees and high IQs and good temperaments and in interview after interview they had each expressed their willingness to give up all the pleasures of Earth to die in outer space. Theirs was a one-way mission. If they made it to Mars at all, and they might well not, they would live the rest of their days on a planet inhospitable to human life. They would have to hope that the food that scientists believed would grow on Mars really did grow on Mars. They would have to hope that nothing went wrong with the water supply. They would be radiated by a too-close sun and there would be no hospital to treat their cancers.

  Theirs would be names children would memorize in school. John, who had run in the Olympics; Marcy, who had been to MIT; Brit, the brilliant immigrant from a war-torn country in Central Africa; Sherman, whose grandfather had been a famous physicist; Jack, an artist who had shown at the Whitney; and Sunshine, who had lived in the Amazon rain forest canopy for a year studying frogs and who told me late one night after more wine than we were supposed to drink that she had tried to break off her engagement with the person she had loved since she was fourteen when she learned she had been chosen, but he had insisted they get married anyway, that he would be faithful even after she left for the outer reaches of their solar system. She told me that she was looking forward to being alone.

  “What about you?” she had asked. “Tell me your story.”

  Mine was the most unremarkable story: I was a girl from a tiny town in Minnesota who’d followed the sun to California and now Hawaii. I had just been through an unremarkable divorce with no heroism involved—my ex and I were two earthlings who were no longer good together. “I’m just here to cook,” I had said. “You are the mission; I am the sustenance.”

  Did the food make the day’s work possible? Was it heavy in the heart or the gut? That was my job. This freeze-dried broccoli warmed in a pool of fake cheese and pasta. This glass of Tang, the only bright color left.

  * * *

  —

  AS IT TURNED OUT, living in fake space was no less tiring than living on Earth. The astronauts were too cheerful, too serious, too invested. They critiqued every single thing I cooked, examined my attempt at an approximation of Kung Pao Chicken and found the texture depressing. “Yes,” I said, “because freeze-dried meat is terrible and Kung Pao is not even a real Chinese dish, but I’m sup
posed to give you American comfort.”

  Six weeks into a five-month stay and I was already a bad Martian. If I were on the real mission, I would be the person who drove her rover into the red dust of a storm and never returned. I would be the first death in the colony.

  One night I found Peter, whom I had briefly dated in college, on the internet. We typed our lives back and forth. Happy, happy, happy, we both wrote at first. I’m doing great! I’m living in a simulated Martian landscape! My job is to make the least depressing dishes with the most depressing ingredients!

  He said: I bought a house and this really soft rug from Iran! My sister is getting married and says hello! Wait, did I ever tell you that I’m gay?!

  I said: Yes, love, I think we all knew that, though I hadn’t.

  And then the notes began to include more: his mother’s death, my divorce. Finally, he wrote: I wish I had a child. That was the whole letter. One of ten trillion truths. Not, I wish I lived in a nicer house. I wish my father was alive. I wish my neighbors upstairs would stop rocking in their rocking chairs. I wish for a vacation. I wish I had a child.

  It sounded like a project. It sounded like a reason. It sounded like a better escape than the one in which I currently found myself. In the morning, I found another note: I’m coming to Hawaii for a few days. I’ll wave up at the mountain at you.

  I looked out the porthole-shaped window at Sunshine in her space suit, kneeling in the dust of a perfectly good planet, spooning samples into a vial. I thought of the dozens of pounds of dried cheese I was supposed to turn into sustenance and the weeks ahead of me in my tiny bunk with these other lives as they prepared to hurtle themselves into space and I prepared for the continuation of my plain life. Before noon, I had done the calculations and figured out I would be ovulating on about day four of Peter’s visit.