the mortis

by Miller, Jonathan R.

  It’s strange, the things you think of. Sitting there, waiting, Park thinks about the last mistake he made involving another person—in the end, that’s what comes down to: the lapses. This particular one happened with his wife. It feels like longer, but it must have been about two weeks ago that he touched her on the shoulders for too long, far too long, and he knew it was wrong even as it was happening. He lingered, and it was wrong of him to do that. The way in which he did it was wrong, the thoughts in his head were wrong, the timing, all of it.

  They had been together in a shaded clearing, and he was standing behind her as she knelt beside a saline streambed to wash the blades of both their knives. She was rinsing blood and gore from stainless steel, of all things, and his job was to watch the surroundings but instead he was watching the small of her back. The strength of her brown legs. It was midday and the sun was in the tree canopy, and he approached her and he placed a hand on each shoulder in the same, married way he had over the nearly two decades of their shared life.

  He remembers the way her body stiffened wholly. She tried to shrug him off. The blades were poised, winnowing under the running water like silver fish, one of them gripped in each of her dark hands.

  The memory passes, giving way to others that pass also, and he stays where he is on the shoreline. After a short time the wait mercifully ends, and he becomes aware of an approaching set of footfalls across the stretch of loose berm behind him—he can hear the blessed sound even over the wash of surf. A shuffling cadence, a kicking of sand on each shallow lift. He doesn’t turn to look back. There’s no need to look. Most of his pursuers were brought to the ground by the fossa pack, but he knew not all of them would be—that would be an awful lot to ask of the wild, far too much—and he knew better than to expect it. He knew that some would make it through, and he knew that the ones who made it through would come for him. It was only the timing he couldn’t be certain of.

  chapter eleven

  Lee stays clear of the murram for nearly all of the fifty-mile trek toward Cãlo. She keeps herself hidden in the thick vegetation of La Sielve, only occasionally venturing near the roadway to verify its direction, to get her bearings. There have been too many bad rumors—the lawless patrols made up of marauders from the township who drive up and down the murram looking for anyone, sick or well, and then net them and bind their limbs with chain. Take them god-knows-where in the beds of their re-purposed 4Runners. You can’t ignore the things you hear, especially when those things are repeated. Especially out here. You can only parse everything for its truth, and then you do the best you can with it, and in the end, she decided to follow the road as a guide, but when she moves, she moves through the hard country. The steaming jungle, burring with the sound of thick-tailed scorpions and dropwings, swallowtail moths and golden orb weavers and the fossa.

  At this pace, it takes her almost three days to reach the township outskirts. Once she arrives she finds a six-vehicle barricade assembled, ramshackle, across the width of the murram, with dark Mirasai men draped casually over the rusted-out hoods and windshields. Two are lying in the lazy shade of a roadside liana palm. Their revolver-style handguns. Their many rifles. The kind of rifles that mix tawny, polished wood and matte-black metal, the kind with a long magazine that curves crescent-like away from the rear handle.

  Lee watches them for a while from a protective cover of vegetation. She’s slept a total of four hours since she left the culvert. Her hands are shaking, and she can barely keep herself upright.

  After a time Lee steps out of the brake, climbs the steep ditch to the murram and stands, unsteady, near the graveled shoulder. The men respond quickly, to their credit—they are on their feet almost immediately, pointing weapons, bristling. One of them begins slowly walking toward her, and as he walks he scopes his rifle barrel left-to-right and back again. Sweeping the area, that’s what it’s called, she remembers. The man is worried that maybe she isn’t alone, but she is, and she wants to tell him so but she decides against it. She raises her hands above her shoulders, high.

  The man says words to her in an unknown language, and he says them sharply. Then he uses Spanish. Then he tries French, then English.

  “Drop it down,” he says. “Quick now.”

  She tries answering but she hasn’t used her words in days. She clears her throat.

  “What?”

  The man stops walking. “Drop it down. The hand,” he says. He points high with the barrel. “Quick, quick.”

  She looks up at her raised right hand: the cleaver is gripped tightly in her fist. She bends down, rests the cleaver on the hardpack, and then straightens.

  The man questions Lee for a long time—also to his credit—and then two of the smaller men are instructed to drive her to Cãlo. They point her toward a blue Fiat behind the barricade, and the car looks like it’s been on a forced march up and down the murram for decades. Equal parts dust and metal. As she makes her way to the car, she is aware of the other men watching her closely from all angles.

  One of the escorts guides her to the passenger side and lifts the bag strap from her shoulder without asking, and the other man opens the passenger door for her before walking around the front of the car and getting behind the wheel. The other man throws her bag into the trunk. He sits in the back seat, directly behind the driver, and there are smiles exchanged through the rearview mirror that she can’t interpret. The guns are put away.

  As they drive toward the town, both men start to smoke a kind of cigarette she’s never seen or smelled before now. The man in front offers her water, and she wants desperately to say yes but she declines politely; she has indebted herself enough already. She has begged these men for entry into the township boundary, and she has accepted this ride from them, and that is enough. It’s probably too much, in fact.

  They drive, and at some point the man in the back seat rolls down his window—she thinks that he flicks the tan filter stub outside but she can’t be certain. Her eyes are kept forward.

  The man rolls up the window with the hand-crank. “Where you origin,” he asks.

  Lee hesitates. She hesitates for too long.

  “Montreal,” she says.

  “You no Canada,” the man says, laughing. “That a boldface you say, ma. No need, no need.”

  Lee doesn’t respond.

  “C’mon, ma. Where you origin tell. Truth of where.”

  “California,” she says.

  “See?” says the man. “No problem. It’s okay, California. Merika is okay to me.”

  Lee can’t think of anything to say in response. She stays silent, staring straight ahead.

  “Ma. Look here,” he says after a time.

  She turns around in the seat far enough to make eye contact. He is missing his front teeth, three of them.

  “Where you man is,” he asks her.

  “Sorry?”

  “Man.” He makes a masturbatory gesture at crotch level. “Where he is? At golden gate still?”

  “There’s no man,” she says.

  “No man? C’mon. How no man, look you,” he says. He stares at her up and down. “You a go-girl kind?”

  “He’s dead,” she says.

  The man straightens in the seat. The casual tone falls away quickly. “Sick dead?”

  “No.” She is ready for this question. “Not sick. He was killed. It was an accident.”

  The man is silent for a few minutes, and she can feel him studying her.

  She decides to fill the silence. “They never got to me,” she says. “I’m not sick.”

  “You boldfacing again, ma,” he says.

  “No. I’m not.”

  “You hold sick, I think.”

  “You don’t think that,” Lee says. She says it without considering it fully, without modulating. “You know I’m not. I wouldn’t be here if you thought I was.”

  The man snorts at that. “Not afraid the sick I. See sick plenty,” he says. “See the sick, smell the sick, breathe the sick.” He tap
s his chest once with a fist. “Healthy still. This kind of sick no catch. No. You hold this sick in.” He pauses and touches his chest again, this time even more lightly, with the fingertips. “In you or not in you,” he says. Then the man stops talking and starts to stare out the window.

  Lee doesn’t respond to him. She faces forward, and there’s quiet between them after that. They keep driving on. The blur of passing trees and the dust cloud in their wake and the rattletrap chassis.

  She is taken to a medical complex; she only knows what the place is because the man in the back seat tells her. Medicine, doctor, the man says—except he says dokotera—and then he points.

  The complex is on the eastern edge of the township, off an unpaved byroad. A nondescript set of six beige and dark brown portables, like the temporary classrooms they sometimes used for elementary school students back home. The parking lot is a muddy expanse, and the deep wheel tracks of a trailer bed are still visible; the portables haven’t been in this location for very long. Behind the roofline she can see part of a chainlink fence with razor wire spiraling along the top. It looks like a dog run or some kind of pen.

  There are no signs or markers. The driver picks a spot for the car seemingly at random; he brakes and drops the transmission down into neutral, idling. The man from the back seat comes around and opens the door for her. He escorts her to the center portable, carrying her shoulder bag, while the driver waits with the engine still running.

  Lee takes the three metal stairs up to the metal door, and the man opens it for her. He sets a hand on her lower back to usher her through. She wipes the mud from her feet on a stiff coir doormat.

  Inside the portable are little more than a thin carpet and a squat brown desk. Fluorescent tube lighting overhead. Honest to goodness vapor lamps, the real thing, switched on. She looks up at the long bulbs set in their fixtures, just staring stupidly toward the ceiling. She can’t remember the last time she laid eyes on any form of artificial light; she’d never understood how beautifully simple it is, how necessary, until now. She listens for a generator motor, and she can hear a droning mechanical sound coming from outside, behind the portables somewhere.

  Two large Mirasai men dressed as orderlies enter the room. White cotton smocks and white scrub-style pants and blue latex gloves. The man from the back seat speaks to them in their shared language. They look at her but don’t approach, and when he finishes speaking, the man drops her bag and turns and leaves the portable without a word to her.

  Once the man is gone, one of the orderlies also leaves—he exits through a door into the next room. It looks like it has an exam table inside, some medical instruments. The door closes behind him.

  The remaining orderly asks Lee if she wants to sit, and she does want to sit but she says no, no thank you, and the man nods and then goes behind the desk and opens the door of a compact refrigerator. He pulls out a tin foil packet and a clear plastic bottle of water with no label. He passes them over to her, and in spite of her better judgment she doesn’t hesitate; she tears open the foil. Cold shredded chicken and ginger slices and peppered rice. She devours everything inside with her fingers, and she can feel the tears coming but she blinks them back. She shouldn’t be doing this; she shouldn’t let anyone see her this desperate, and she knows it. She unscrews the plastic cap and drains the bottle dry.

  “Slow,” says the man.

  She chews a few times and then swallows hard. She backhands both eyes, right then left. “I’m not sick,” she says.

  “Don’t talk now. Just eat.”

  “I don’t need to be here,” she says, looking around. “I’m not sick.”

  The man smiles and it looks kind, genuinely so. “It’s okay. We will worry this later. Have your fill now.”

  Lee finishes the contents of the foil packet and when the orderly brings her another, she finishes that also. He asks if she needs more water and she says yes. He brings her another cold bottle with the cap already loosened and then sits on the desk edge and watches her.

  “What more are you needing,” he asks after a time. He gestures to a chair. “Maybe change your mind on the sit.”

  Lee wipes her mouth. She swallows. “Nothing. Thank you.”

  “The loo?”

  “I’m fine, but thank you,” she says. “I appreciate it.”

  “Okay,” the orderly says. He stands up and goes back behind the desk and sits down. He opens a drawer and takes out a pen and a paper form, and then he looks up at her—the expression on his rounded face is still gentle. She can see the dark curve of a wedding band on his left ring finger through the blue latex.

  “I will ask you some things,” he says. “Just talk with what you want to say. Don’t be worried.”

  Lee nods. “Okay.”

  “Good.” The pen tip is poised over the form. “How did you come to here?” he asks.

  “By car,” she says. She says it without thinking.

  The orderly smiles. He nods a few times. He jots down some unreadable notes with the pen, and as she watches him she understands right away that the man isn’t interested at all in her actual responses—the man is simply observing her, and that’s all this is. He is recording his own impressions, noting her behaviors; the factual content of her words is secondary to him.

  The orderly stops writing. “Tell me about the travel. When you leave from Lavelha to the time when the soldalanos take you from the murram,” he says. “Tell what you can about it.”

  Lee shrugs. “It was long,” she says. And after that, there is a protracted pause and the man spends the time staring at her. She decides that she has no choice but to go on. “It was difficult, the whole thing,” she says. “Hunger, thirst, terrain, wildlife. Everything. It was hard.”

  The orderly doesn’t use the pen this time. He just watches her.

  “It won’t make my Torluna highlight list,” she adds.

  The man still doesn’t respond. He is looking down at her body now; she can’t tell from his eyes exactly which part, but somewhere below the neck. The man asks, “Was it the wildlife done this to you,” and then he points at her.

  Lee looks down at herself. “Did what to me.”

  “The arms there,” he says, still pointing.

  She raises both arms and sees the raw, red welts running from wrist to elbow. Straight lines, symmetrical. Maybe six in a row on each arm. She stares for a while, too long, and then she lowers them.

  “Has another been putting teeth against you, love,” he asks. His voice is gentle about it.

  “No,” she says.

  The orderly pens a brief note. “Do you remember how?”

  “How what.”

  “How this happen to you,” he says. “It’s okay. Just talk with what you want to tell. Try remembering.”

  Lee doesn’t answer. She looks down at herself, shaking her head—it’s obvious now where this interview is going, the end result. The man has already made the decision that she’s not well, and he’s going to try and take her forcibly into that back room and strap her down and run god-knows-what kinds of tests, and she can’t allow any of that. She can’t stay here.

  Without thinking it through, Lee turns and bolts. She swoops down for the strap of her bag, tears open the door, and throws herself through, and then she vaults the stairs to the parking lot and runs full tilt.

  The mud in the lot is up to her insteps, and as she nears the periphery she stumbles and falls to her hands and knees in the mire. She quickly stands. She looks back. The orderly is descending the steps rapidly and shouting out an alarm in Mirasai. There is the sound of a dog baying, maybe more than one.

  Lee casts herself into the woods at the nearest treeline and plunges down a steep grade until it levels into a small floodplain. Loose soil cascades down behind her. The dogs are already at her back, gaining, and she pushes through the shallows of a slow-winding stream, crashing through the thick sedge and bulrush and thatching reeds on the other side. The sound of slavering and panting. The dogs are wing
ing through this godforsaken terrain like it’s a game. She tries climbing the opposite hillside, scrabbling for purchase, but they are on her in moments. One of them takes her wrist hard in its jaws.

  Lee opens her eyes, and she is back inside, laid out on the floor of the same center portable. The orderly is kneeling next to her, close enough that she hears his breathing. He has her wrist in his hand, and two of his fingers are feeling for a pulse. His face shows the same kind, concerned expression.

  The orderly lets go of her wrist and helps her to a sitting position. She looks down at herself, her unsoiled hands and shoes. Her bone-dry clothes. The bag is in the same place it was dropped by the man from the car when she arrived. You fainted, says the orderly. Everything is okay now.

  The two orderlies deliver her into the exam room—she doesn’t struggle. They lay her down on a crackle-paper table and run their battery of tests on her body. The evaluation of her reflexes, her eyesight, her muscle flexibility and her cognitive skills. The range of motion of her joints, the degrees of freedom. They draw vials of blood from a vein in the top of her hand. The dokotera is away on a trip to town for her vaccination clinic, the orderly tells her. She will come in two days and she will see you then.

  “I’m not sick,” Lee says quietly.

  The man shakes his head. “It will be assessed. I’m sorry.”

  “Assessed?”

  “The sickness marks you. We know the mark. Dokotera can see it.”

  She lifts up her hands. “Look at me,” she says. “I’m not one of them.”