Dark Matter

by Sheree R. Thomas

  He walked to the doorway and examined it in the oblique firelight. The workmanship was exquisite, she knew—she had created it herself, modeled the little wolf’s head after a Kotsebue Indian design she and Mitchell had admired in Alaska, a lifetime ago. That had been for… what? Their third book together?

  Damn.

  Juta dropped the earring into a breast pocket and grinned at her. “Sure, lady. You talk all you want. Maybe two, three day.”

  Shawna Littleton sat in the high-backed chair Juta provided her, back straight, face composed, fingers folded carefully in her lap. She had washed her hair in harsh, hard water and had scraped what dirt she could from her clothes.

  Juta stood next to a desk at which a small, dark wrinkled man struggled with a stack of papers. An ancient fan revolved in creaking overhead circuits. Shawna waited. Outside the window, camp inmates wandered in their endless rounds, speaking in indecipherable tongue, lost in a living purgatory. She pressed at her pants with her hands, imagining that she was smoothing away wrinkles.

  Finally the little man looked up at her. He smiled warmly, but with a deep sense of fatigue. Something inside her relaxed. He spoke in rapid fire for a minute.

  “This is Webi Shebeli Relocation Camp. Camp Number Seven,” Juta translated. “We give you… good quarters as soon as possible.”

  She swallowed hard. “Many of the people here are diseased. I am worried about my health, and the health of my… daughter. There hasn’t been much food, and the water is bad. She is getting sick.”

  Juta spoke harshly. She wasn’t certain why, but a brief, sharp chill brushed the back of her scalp.

  The commandant replied. Juta translated. “We are a poor country. We fight to save our country. We sorry we cannot offer more.”

  She wiped her face, nerves screaming that the interview was going wrong somehow, even if she wasn’t certain how or why. “I am American. My husband and I traveled around the world, learning the art of different indigenous…” She paused, and rephrased. “Native peoples. Our plane’s engine died. We had to land. The soldiers brought us here. My husband was killed four days ago.” Against her best efforts, a bright bubble of pain wormed its way to the surface. “You have to help us. If you could just get word to my father. He has money, and many friends. He could help you in your struggle, and would, to help us. Please.”

  Juta spoke. The commandant spoke. Juta turned to her. “We do everything we can. Please accept our hospitality.”

  She looked at the commandant’s bland, weary expression. And suddenly, horrifically, she understood. Juta had only translated a portion of her message. The commandant would never know of her father unless it served Juta’s purpose. Unless it served the giant’s ends.

  Juta grinned at her.

  “English,” she said over and over again to the inmates as she passed them. Lizzie clung pitifully to her side. She was afraid to leave the child alone now. “Isn’t there someone who speaks English?”

  One of the grinning faces broke into a kind of smile. “Français?” one said.

  She struggled. “Tu parles anglais.”

  The last produced a flurry of bastard French. Shawna was lost again.

  A small man approached them. He was cocooned in filthy, oil-stained rags. Tufts of hair grew from his cheeks like clumps of cactus. He seemed animated by a kind of twitchy, jumpy energy. “English?” he said. “American?”

  She was almost dizzy with gratitude. “Yes! Is there someone who speaks it?”

  He spoke his own language again, then stopped, screwed his face and made a little hopping step, and said, “The King.”

  Lizzie looked up at her stepmother and whispered, “He’s like a monkey.”

  “That’s not nice,” Shawna said. Shawna kept her own image to herself: The little man looked like a jester wrapped in a mummy’s shroud.

  “The King,” Jester said again. He made a scrabbling motion with his arm, asking her to follow. “The King.”

  Jester led them past the wall. Shawna had seen it from a distance, had walked past it once, but had never slowed to really see it. There were so many different images, so densely packed, that it deserved a close-range appreciation. But the wall’s association with Mitchell’s death made her want to blot the damned thing from her mind.

  It was Lizzie who tugged at her arm, slowing them down.

  For the first four days in the camp, except for several outbursts of tears and accusations, the child had been almost catatonic. But now something had snared her attention for the first time since entering Camp Seven. “Look, Shawna,” she said. “A mural. Like the one you and Daddy painted?”

  “Something like that.” She could distinguish bestial forms, most of them highly abstracted. “How many animals can you name?”

  Lizzie’s lips twitched as the child attempted to smile. “ ‘A,’ my name is antelope. ‘B,’ my name is… bear?”

  “I think it’s an anteater.” Shawna peered closer at a long-nosed beast carved from dark wood. “Hard to say.” For a moment, she studied it, noted the careful knife strokes, and the way the artist had found a way to blend with the gnarled wood grain. Then she recoiled, almost ashamed of herself that she had forgotten, even for a moment, the danger they were in, and the loss they had suffered.

  Then she saw Lizzie’s face, so small and round, and the almost desperate way she had focused on the carving, and knew that the girl was struggling for some kind of balance, some tiny place to stand emotionally. Good girl, Lizzie, she thought, and pressed her stepdaughter’s hand.

  “Bears eat ants,” Lizzie said defensively. “ ‘C,’ my name is cat. It is some kind of cat, isn’t it?”

  Shawna nodded, trying desperately to get into the game, just a little. She found the right angle, and the third object was indeed a cat, rendered in bunches of string.

  There were dozens of animals in the wall, but also tiny automobiles, and trees, and human faces by the hundreds. Lizzie’s fingers traced one especially striking image, a laughing man, an Ashanti-style mask rendered in what might have once been a plastic canopy. The planes and facial curves were burned in, so that the image was expressed in the concavity. She had never seen anything quite like it—the negative-image aspect immediately set her creative mind buzzing.

  If she got out of here… (she corrected herself. She couldn’t allow herself to think like that. When she got out) she would try the technique, maybe finish one of the jobs she and Mitchell had begun together.…

  Her thoughts wound to a halt.

  A hollow-eyed woman knelt in the dirt before the wall. Her fingers bled. At first Shawna wasn’t certain what the woman was doing. Then Shawna focused on the woman’s papooska backpack, and the dead infant cradled within. The woman’s face was streaked with dust and tears. With her own blood, she was finger-painting a screaming child on a ragged piece of plywood. An oval within an oval. Smudges for eyes. Just a bare few lines, Sum-i style, a somber minimalism, almost impossibly eloquent.

  In that instant, Shawna knew what the wall was. It was a tapestry of loss, a mosaic of human pain. Memories of freedoms and childhood wonders, a collage of dead dreams. She wondered how many human souls had passed through Camp Seven. How many of them knew they would never leave alive, were making a last desperate attempt to leave something, anything, of themselves of the wall.

  I was here, each disjointed effort said. I lived. I saw living things, and shared their world for a time. And then I died.

  The woman knelt there, consumed by her pain and memories. Shawna felt almost voyeuristic to witness her moment of revelation and anguish, but was too hypnotized even to blink as Jester led them away.

  The little man guided Shawna and Lizzie through the camp’s twisting, narrow byways. As they walked the perimeter clockwise from the northern gate, the cramped confines shifted in perspective, seemed more like the spaces defined by the spokes of a wheel. Everything radiated from a central hub. Here, there seemed to be some kind of order, and even a quality of organic design.r />
  Here, they saw more female prisoners, women wasted into wraiths. The refugees extended hands, begged for food and water, too weak and sick to crawl out to the food trucks.

  This inner area was a hospice, a storage facility for the dying. Lizzie was wrong: Their guide wasn’t a Jester, he was Charon, their personal escort on a visit to the underworld.

  A dwelling in the very center was more than a mere tent, but less than a formal structure, as if over the months someone had cobbled together a makeshift palace from truck parts and scrap lumber.

  Jester stood in the doorway, sweeping a fall of carpet aside with his arm.

  “King,” the little man said.

  The ceilings and walls were covered with rugs and statues and carvings. Some were capped with silver and what might have been very weathered gold.

  An elaborate bed dominated the center of the room, propped up on truck tires to make a kind of throne. On three sides it was veiled by a barely translucent white curtain.

  “Approach.” The voice was thickly accented but cultured, and heavy with self-amusement.

  Shawna pushed her stepdaughter behind her, then cautiously stepped forward. The man on the bed had once been large, muscular. Now he was all but wasted away, a whisper of his former self.

  “Do you… speak English?” she asked.

  “And French. And Portuguese.” He puffed on a hookah pipe, then exhaled a sweet languid cloud of hashish. She was shocked to feel the depth of her response, the sudden strong desire for intoxication. Hashish, yes. Cannabis. Or alcohol. God, yes, a drink. Anything.

  “Your plane crashed.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “I hear many things,” he said calmly. “The whole camp has heard of the black American artist. Your husband tried to defend you. The soldiers shot him.”

  Lizzie shuffled her feet. “We don’t belong here.”

  “Where do you belong, Shawna Littleton? I read one of your books once. A to Z with primitive art of the world? A I am an Abo. B I am a Bantu. C I am Ceremese. A very funny book.”

  “Funny?” She tamped down her automatic flare of anger.

  “Funny. With your American wealth, you travel the world searching for other people’s souls. Where is yours?”

  “I meant no disrespect. But I… I need help. Please. My presence here is a mistake.”

  “Yes,” he said. “A mistake. I, of course, belong here.”

  “I didn’t mean it like that.”

  He exhaled a long, sweet stream of smoke, but said nothing.

  “Who are you?” Shawna asked.

  From the bed he bowed to them without a trace of irony. “My name is Kampala. I owned the largest trading empire in Central Africa.”

  “How did you end here?”

  He shrugged. “Bad timing. Arranging for local goods to be sold and converted to hard currencies. It was then that the rebels tried to overthrow the remnants of the Republic’s colonial government. Alas, I am afraid that, while most of my goods are safe, I myself am not.” He chuckled, pleased with his own sense of humor. “Poor sanitation, tribal scarring, and anal sex spread this contagion across this continent, and no one spoke the truth in time to save my people. These camps are a final, desperate attempt to stop the death. In the end, my life, your life, the girl’s life do not matter. The continent must survive.”

  “The child is sick,” Shawna said.

  “She is your daughter.”

  “Stepdaughter,” Lizzie said. “She married my daddy.”

  “Your father died in her defense,” Kampala said. “How do you feel about that?”

  I feel like I’m dying, Shawna thought. Please, God, don’t let me die.

  Lizzie said nothing.

  After almost a minute, he said, “What do you wish of me?”

  “You seem to have resources.” Shawna despised the weakness in her voice, the way she rushed the words out. “Do you know a way out of here?”

  “Do you think I would have remained here if I did?” He leaned forward until his mouth was against the curtain. His face was as rutted as a storm-washed dirt road. “If you find a way to take your stepdaughter from this place, do it. And quickly. No, I cannot help you. I have access to a few simple conveniences. My money can buy courtesies. But I cannot escape.” He pointed to his mouth, around which a thin, skin-tight blue collar was affixed. “So you see the necklace? It cannot be cut. It contains a radio device. They track the sick ones with these.”

  He laughed bitterly. “So! After so many years of making the rules play my game, I am caught. And if you do not find a way out, you will be caught. But if you stay…” His ruined lips twisted into a smile. “In many ways a woman like you could ease her life here.”

  The breath thickened in her throat. “What do you mean?”

  “You wish for better food for your child? Medicine? And believe me, you will need medicine. Perhaps I can help.”

  The room darkened, contracted. “Oh, God.”

  “Why not? You are the most beautiful woman in Camp Seven. I am still a man. Such favors would not go unrewarded.”

  Although she stood still, the room revolved around her. She backed out of the room, pulling Lizzie with her, her eyes on Kampala. He rose and stepped through the curtain, and for the first time she saw him clearly. He was deeply wrinkled. Most of his hair was gone, and his eyes glistened with mucus. His fingers were mere sticks, his belly protuberant beneath rich robes. His lips pulled back in a fleshy smile. Half of his teeth were gone.

  Then she was out of the tent, fleeing toward the main camp.

  She pulled Lizzie onto the bed. The child trembled, her skin damp and sticky.

  “Shawna,” Lizzie whispered, the first word she had spoken since Kampala’s tent. Shawna pulled her face so close that their noses touched. She could smell her stepdaughter’s breath, a sour, fearful scent. Lizzie’s eyes were huge. “I’m sorry for the things I said. I don’t hate you. Shawna?”

  “Yes, Lizzie?”

  “Don’t leave me.” She shivered uncontrollably. “Don’t leave me here. Shawna… don’t…” Lizzie buried her face against Shawna’s chest, muffling the rest of her words.

  Shawna stared into the darkness, seeing nothing. Imagining everything.

  Shawna promised herself that it wouldn’t happen. That somehow, they would survive without… without having to…

  Such favors would not go unrewarded.

  Twice a day, cans of food and water were trucked into Camp Seven. The camp bosses, men like Juta with arms the size of legs, managed the lines. They barked in high, fast, indecipherable strings of words, decided via arcane formulae those who would eat, drink, or die.

  At night she dreamed of running sores, broken skulls, and stolen food wrenched from twitching, bloodied hands. During the day she waited six hours in the sun for a cup of brown, brackish water.

  Without enough food to fill the child’s aching belly, Lizzie began to weaken. Shawna boiled their water, then strained the stinking stuff through her shirt to produce something decent for Lizzie to drink.

  Camp Seven seethed with flies, with the constant low sounds of misery, with a repellent, low-level sexual tension. In shadowed alcoves between the huts, thin, fierce-eyed boys traded five minutes with rump or mouth for a cup of thin soup. From those nooks fire-eyed, grizzled dark men grabbed at her, waving packs of cigarettes or pieces of maggoty beef.

  Shawna waited from dawn to dusk, standing in the sun to get a can of tinned meat. Lizzie was too weak to wait with her, and wandered away to sit in a patch of shadow, watching as Shawna inched toward the back of the food truck.

  Three people remained ahead of her when the man on the back of the truck threw the tarp down. Without a word, he drove away.

  Shawna stood in the middle of the camp grounds, dumbfounded, speechless, and unmoving. Finally she scooped Lizzie into her arms and staggered away. The child burned with fever and moaned softly. “I hurt everywhere,” she whispered. Shawna counted the steps until they we
re safe in the stinking heat of their hut.

  As gently as she could, Shawna laid the child on her bed, doing what little she could to make Lizzie comfortable. In a sliver of moonlight through a slit of window above them, Lizzie was silvered with perspiration. Another finger of panic pried at Shawna’s control. The girl was sweating too much. There wasn’t enough drinking water to replace the fluid.

  Medusa clucked. The grotesque woman sat in the darkness on the edge of her cot, sighing as her sister massaged her calves. While the flesh hung loose on her upper body, her legs were as swollen as rotten sausages. She watched them both, and then barked out in French, “Your man die for you! What you do for his child, American, hey?”

  Shawna fled the shack. She pressed her face against the barbed-wire fence, arms outstretched to the strutting, khaki-clad black soldiers, their carbines slung across brawny shoulders, and she begged them:

  “Food,” she screamed. “Just a little food. My daughter.” They ignored her.

  “My daughter.” She sank to her knees, lost.

  The guards laughed at her.

  She cried, and struggled to find a prayer that would not catch in her throat, to a God she was more tempted to curse than implore.

  * * *

  Shawna spent three hours kneeling at the fence, and four more at Lizzie’s bedside. Praying for food, praying for water, praying for the strength to pray, to believe in anything except the inevitability of death.

  The sun was still below the horizon. Oily fires flickered in metal drums, bathing the entire camp in a dank, yellowish glow, broken only by the steady, gliding searchlights.

  Shivering in the cold, Shawna hauled debris to the north gate, under the guard tower. Next to the wall.

  All day and into the night she worked. Refugees shambled past her, nattering in their singsong as the pieces of metal and rubber evolved. She could identify at least five distinctly different languages, but spoke none of them. It seemed every human being in the camp had someone so share their misery with, to touch, perhaps to share a grim and desperate joke.

  She felt utterly alone.

  That night it rained, a hot, slick downpour. She set a pot out to catch water as she huddled in the downpour, continuing to bend and twist metal and plastic. Her fingers slipped, slashed themselves on bits of wire.