The first scene showed a young Evan Massey, wearing shoulder-length hair, walking side by side with a village elder.
The problem was this:
The people in the village of Krupal in northern India were starving. Every year, the monsoons brought crops and plenty for a short time. Then the dry weather arrived and there was no water for months. They watched their children wither away and die. They saw their own flesh desiccate on their bodies. By tradition, they put their dead on rooftops where the birds picked at the remains, so in dry weather, the roofs were thatched with bones. Every year as the Krupalis starved, the loan sharks came around and lent them money, which was owed for generations and which they had no hope of repaying. The people had lived like this, they said, for two thousand years.
Evan Massey told them that there was a way out, but the work required would be so hard that probably a quarter of them would die from it. But he promised them that if they succeeded, the rest would live. The people were willing to make this sacrifice.
“I’m an engineer,” he told them.
“Actually,” corrected the voice-over, “I had a two-year degree with an interest in civil engineering and a year of experience doing construction work.”
“In those hills,” resumed the younger Massey, “there’s limestone and iron-rich soil that we’ll use to make mortar that’s twenty times stronger than concrete. These stones you see all around you―these millions of stones―all these stones will be gone when we’ve finished.” They had five months.
The plan was to build an immense reservoir in the earth, twelve-feet deep and two acres in area, reinforced with stone and mortar. This would catch the monsoon rains and keep the crops alive during the dry season via irrigation ditches scored into the rock-hard soil. For tools, there were shovels, pick axes, baskets, and bare hands.
He chose a site that was in a depression, but still above the fields so that the water could be diverted downward toward the crops. Here the soil was so compacted that it could break a pick ax. Two thousand women, men, and children were organized into teams that mined the limestone, hauled it and gathered the stones that would line the wall of the basin. Another team of women gathered what little food they could. The footage showed Massey taking a soil sample, planting marker stakes, helping an old woman carry a basket of rocks. The people who had started out so dark became white as specters from the limestone they crushed. Where there were no tools; other stones were used to crush stones. Temperatures reached one hundred twenty degrees, but there was no respite. The monsoons wouldn’t wait, and if the rains came with the construction unfinished, months would pass before they could try again.
Each day two or three died from heat, thirst, and exhaustion. There was horrific footage of vultures eating the bodies as they awaited burial at the end of the day. Massey forbade them to put their dead on rooftops. He told them that they had learned to dig and from now on would bury their dead in the ground. The idea was simply to change them in any way, to get them to break the mindset of the last two thousand years that had led them to this state of abject misery.
The lens tended to dwell on Massey. Massey surveying, swinging a pick, waving his hand over an expanse of land with drawings under his arm. Massey tending the sick and injured. Massey with the multitude gathered around him as he spoke in Hindi.
Three days before the first rains arrived, the last stone was put in place.
The next scene was shot many months later. The skies were clear as the camera panned across the stoneless landscape. The lens finally turned toward the reservoir and there were men looking across it as people do when they behold the sea for the first time.
The villagers now addressed Evan Massey as Baba, a term of respect meaning “father.” Great celebrations were held as, for the first time, crops were harvested in the dry season.
In voice-over, Massey said that the people were able to sell their crops to surrounding villages. They prospered and brought in medicines and vaccinated their children against polio for the first time. The usurers were paid off, then run out of town when they returned. There was shot after shot of smiling faces, children laughing and playing in a small pool of water that had been set aside for just that purpose. Water, which had forever been their brutal master, had become their playmate. Self-esteem and self-empowerment had replaced slavery and death. One couldn’t help coming away from the film awed at what one man can do.
The lights came on and the moment was ripe for comment.
“I’m Brother Kenneth,” said a young man of nineteen, who had been watching from the back of the room. “You’ve seen an extraordinary film. What do you think is the point of showing you this―Latisha?”
“Well, he say in the beginning that it’s to make us realize that our problems aren’t that bad,” said a black girl.
“Has it done that for you?”
“It makes you feel good for a few minutes, but when five minutes pass, my life is still fucked up.”
“We don’t use those words here. I’ll let that go this time. What were those people willing to give in order to change their lives? You―Rachel?”
“Their lives.”
“That’s right. They decided that life wasn’t worth living the way they were living it, and that life itself is worth sacrificing in order to regain their dignity and the right to determine their own destiny. My question is, what are you willing to do to solve your problems? You can answer that, go ahead,” he said to Rachel.
“I would do anything.”
In the rec room, Rachel sat opposite a black boy who had given testimony after dinner. His name was Brother Horace. He was fifteen and his personal mission in life was to go to every major disaster in the country and assist. He was in the Midwest during the great floods, in North Carolina when Edward hit, setting up tents and feeding people. He dug people out of rubble during Katrina. He was eight, then, and it was his own house.
“You didn’t say how you ended up in New York,” she said to him.
“My family got wiped out. Lost my grandmother and cousins I lived with. After the disaster, people from New Orleans scattered all over the country. I was sent here to stay with a family. But doing a kindness loses its shine like everything else. It cost money to keep people around. I ain’t much of a conversationist. I’m workin’ on that. That’s why I’m talkin’ to you. I ended up in foster care and these folks got tired of me, too. I don’t like bein’ a burden. So I left. Walked the streets for a couple of months and ended up here. I’m a man now. I can take care of myself. I’m training for electronics technician, but I already told them that when disaster strikes, I’m out the door.”
“So you sit here waiting for a disaster?”
“And I’m on the road.” His eyes shifted back to the pawns on the chessboard.
Rachel considered whether Brother Horace dealt with lesser crises.
“Brother Horace, I need your help.”
“Listening.”
She sat next to him.
“I had a close friend who used to counsel here―Olivia Wallen. Did you know her?”
“I knew her good. She taught me computers. But what kind of help do you mean―I don’t give the holding hands kind.” He cut a diagonal across the board with a bishop.
“Did Olivia have a falling out with Father Massey?”
“That I don’t know.”
“Why did she stop counseling here?”
“She just stopped coming.”
“Do you know of anyone who would want to hurt her?”
The boy’s brows furrowed again. “Sometimes we find ways of hurting ourselves.” He castled for white.
“Was she―hurting herself?”
“I know she was,” he said without looking up.
“How?”
Now he faced her again. “She had a bad flaw with all she had going for her.”
“And what was that?”
“Sometimes you end up becoming the people you’re tryin’ to help. I mean, she changed while s
he was here, before our very eyes.”
“How?” said Rachel, lowering her voice.
“Not to speak ill of anyone―but she was makin’ porn flicks.”
“Huh?” Rachel knew she had heard him right and braced herself for Horace’s next sentence.
“I ain’t lyin’ to you. She turned into a stone ho.”
he next day, Rachel left Transcendence House after morning services and returned home to East Northport. She passed the flyers she and her neighbors had put up, pictures of Olivia with the caption, MISSING, with a description of the clothes she was last seen wearing―jeans, cowboy boots, and a plaid shirt. She also had a blue fanny pack with Thermofax insulation which contained her glucose tabs, Sunny Delight orange drink, granola snacks, and insulin and syringe wrapped in a plastic bag full of ice. Olivia had Type I diabetes and needed insulin injections every few hours. She always carried enough with her for one day. That would have run out four days ago.
Rachel’s high school graduation present was parked in the driveway. The two-year-old midnight blue Mustang now seemed ostentatious.
Rachel’s parents were huddled in the living room listening to the news for anything. This was just a distraction as Detective McKenna had promised to inform them of any breaks in the case before the media got hold of it. But the critical first forty-eight hours had passed with nothing to report.
At forty-four, Elizabeth Wallen had aged beyond her years, despite having more joys than the average parent. It was her nature to worry. She went through life inventing things to keep her awake at night. Since last week, she no longer had to manufacture reasons to worry. Ed Wallen was more positive, and at fifty, was looking forward to a quiet retirement, free of mortgage and college tuitions. Rachel didn’t want to repeat the mediocrity of their lives.
“Anything?” Rachel said, knowing the answer.
“They put her in the database for Missing and Exploited Children,” her mother said.
That’s pathetic, thought Rachel.
“ABC News will be here later,” said Ed Wallen. “We have to keep her face on TV.”
They didn’t ask her about her college orientation, and that was just as well. Rachel was supposed to have spent the night at the Columbia dorm where she would be starting classes this fall.
Since Olivia’s disappearance, Rachel’s friend, Joules, had created a website called OliviaAlert.org with pictures of Olivia and contact numbers. Rachel had called 48 Hours, Dateline, and Inside Edition, asking them to run a story on Olivia and sent them the press kit she had prepared containing photos of Olivia playing cello and receiving fencing awards. She hoped the media would broadcast it endlessly as they did with Elizabeth Smart playing the harp. So far, only 48 Hours had shown an interest.
The search team had set up its headquarters in the First Methodist Church and Waldbaum’s had donated food and paper plates to help feed them. They had combed the area but found nothing. They didn’t expect to; Olivia’s last phone call was from Manhattan.
Rachel had read about all the other things families of missing children did to get the attention of the public: get bumper stickers printed, buttons made, run/walk events, cake sales. But all this seemed so futile.
Rachel got a glass of water and sat down.
“I heard back from 48 Hours,” said Rachel. “They’re willing to run a one-minute spot on her on next week’s show, but want to wait another couple of days for police to confirm that she’s not a runaway. They don’t do runaways.”
“I was expecting to see her picture nonstop on TV like when the Smart girl vanished,” said her father. “There’s nothing.”
“She was kidnapped from her bed,” said Rachel. “That makes a difference. She was also fourteen. The younger, the more coverage―that seems to be the way it works. At sixteen, Olivia is near the cutoff.”
“But how can we prove that to anyone―that she didn’t run away?” he said. “This isn’t right. It isn’t right.”
“We were lucky to get an Amber Alert out for her, only because she’s diabetic,” said Rachel.
“I leave the light on for her every night,” said her mother. “And make her a toasted cheese sandwich.” She put her face in her hands. “We’re powerless.”
“We’re not powerless,” said Rachel.
“But what can we do?” the mother sobbed.
“We’re not powerless.”
Rachel went upstairs and started looking online for the porn video of Olivia. Brother Horace said it was on slutload.com. There were thousands of sex scenes and no index or means of narrowing it down to a particular one, short of looking at them all. Each page consisted of twenty-four thumbnails, and there were over eleven-hundred pages going back two years. This was going to be a first for her. She clicked on a scene and, without ceremony, two people were screwing on a bed. There was a progress indicator on the bottom of the screen which she used to advance the video. No Olivia in this one. Next. So it went for three hours. Why did she believe him? This was sickening. She couldn’t believe the things girls did on camera for money. By afternoon, Rachel collapsed in bed and slept.
When Rachel’s parents adopted Olivia from an orphanage in Thailand, they took it as a sign that her birthday fell on the same day as Rachel’s. She was raised Catholic, though in the last few years, Olivia had started investigating her roots. Her family was Buddhist, and she came from a village so poor that parents often sold their children to feed the rest of the family.
Olivia brought only joy and pride to her new parents. She skipped the third grade, was the salutatorian in middle school, a fencing champion in high school. At sixteen, Harvard had accepted her for the fall. She had always been gregarious and popular, in contrast to Rachel’s quiet and reserved demeanor. Rachel had even been a little jealous of the way Olivia could enter a room and immediately become the center of attention. She was beautiful, true, with long black hair and tall figure. She had only to flash that smile and things would begin to gravitate her way. She fended off boys throughout her freshman and sophomore years in high school until the junior prom, which she attended. Rachel didn’t get asked.
Olivia could have made a career out of at least four talents. Making friends was another of her gifts. Over the last year, she had acquired forty-seven chat mates in her Yahoo Messenger. Rachel didn’t know forty-seven people in this world, let alone forty-seven she’d want to talk to. Before the police took Olivia’s PC, Rachel had cloned the hard drive onto the second drive of her own computer in order to comb through her emails for some clue to her whereabouts and state of mind. Several of these friends had struck up online conversations with her over the last four days, and Rachel had had to inform them that Olivia had disappeared.
Olivia’s Yahoo Messenger was up and someone was now trying to contact her online.
U there? said the screen.
Rachel was in no mood to get into another conversation. It was three in the morning, and she was tired, but couldn’t sleep any more. Over the last few hours, Rachel had chatted with at least twelve friends on Olivia’s Messenger list and was tired of being the bearer of bad news. The ID said, Acharavaypor.
Hi, Rachel typed.
Sorry late.
OK.
Cam? requested Acharavaypor.
Sorry, no cam, answered Rachel. Dropped it last night and need a new one. It was an effort just to type, let alone go looking for the web-cam. Plus, she looked like a mess.
OK. You have news?
No news yet. Rachel couldn’t remember if she had already chatted with this one.
What you mean?
Just that, typed Rachel.
What about your promise? What about passport and money?
Now Rachel was wide awake.
You promised me. And now you forget.
I didn’t forget. I’m still working on it. Rachel wrote. This was someone new and not a native speaker.
OK.
Cam? asked Rachel.
Let me change PC. This has no cam. BRB.
/> Ok.
Rachel quickly combed through her sister’s emails for some sign of this person. And why did she apologize for being late? Did her sister chat regularly at three in the morning?
I’m back.
[email protected] sent Rachel the invite to her webcam. Rachel accepted and waited for the face to materialize.
The image appeared and the person at the other end tousled with the camera to point it.
When it stabilized, Rachel was looking into her sister’s face.
achel was dumbstruck. It looked like Olivia, but with a threadbare T-shirt and an expression of ineffable sadness.
Fix cam for next time, the girl typed. Your face gives me joy.
You look beautiful, wrote Rachel.
Terrible. Terrible here. We have to hurry. They plan to take me to new place soon. And more men than ever.
Rachel quickly assessed what she was looking at. This girl thought she was talking to Olivia. Behind the girl was a clock showing the same time as here in New York―3:09 a.m.―but there was daylight streaming in through the window. This girl was on the other side of the world.
More men? asked Rachel.
Now more men. Ten, fifteen men a day. And harder to come to Internet café.
Rachel was slowly constructing the life of the person opposite her. Yet all she could say was, okay.
You say it takes four weeks to get passport. Already six weeks pass.
Rachel scrambled to reply. I’m still waiting. Where is the new place they are taking you to?
Outside of Chiang Mai. Fifty kilometer I think. I don’t know if there is an Internet there. I don’t know if I will see you again. Last night one girl try to escape. They beat her, then make her work today. She charge half price now. You have to help me. U r my sister.
I will help you, said Rachel.
Why passport is late?
There are new rules now. Terrorism.
We have much planning and not much time. Tong, he get more drunk now and beat everyone. If he find out my plan, he will kill me.
Don’t say that. Let’s go over the plan again.
The Schwarzschild Radius Page 2