But then his tone turns formal. Looking at me, only me, he speaks more quietly. “The only exception is for religious beliefs. If you object to handling the specimen on religious grounds, please come see me right away.”
At first I’m confused. Up until that moment, I had been thinking the same thoughts as probably every other student in the class: Ew. Gross. Cool. Religion had never entered my mind. Are Muslims not allowed to dissect pigs? I had no idea. What about Jewish students? It’s an interesting question—one I can take my time to ponder, since no one has chosen me for their lab group.
Something about it—about the question, about the day, about my life here—makes me laugh out loud. It’s not a healthy sound. At first it’s a hitching snort, but it quickly grows into a donkey’s bray tinged with a hint of shriek, and I can’t seem to stop. Soon the entire class is staring wordlessly at me.
I can’t catch my breath.
Mr. Farleigh looks disgusted. He clearly thinks I’m just some stupid, squeamish girl hysterical at the thought of touching a pickled pig. But that’s not it.
It’s not the assignment—it’s the moment. It’s the quiet, pale faces clustered around me. It’s the body on the tray, trussed and flayed. It’s not having a lab partner. It’s looking around, wondering who woke up yesterday morning in their peaceful suburban bedroom, picked up a phone, and called to report a bomb just for fun. It’s me. Here. I stand up and race out the door.
Because I cannot even flee a room without complications, I bump into someone in the process. “I’m sorry. Excuse me. Sorry.” I should help him pick up the books I knocked out of his arms, but I don’t. I don’t know his name, this human obstacle standing between me and escape, and there’s no point in learning it. There’s nothing for me here, and I don’t feel like pretending otherwise. My energy is gone, my strength nonexistent, and it’s all I can do to just get out.
“Pardon me, young lady. You are not excused from class!” I ignore the teacher as he leans out his door to shout at me. There’s no point answering him, no point turning back. I do not belong here. There is nothing for me here. This becomes my mantra as I escape.
The hallways feel foreign to me, stranger even than on my first day here. I’m running now, passing so many rooms I’ll never enter filled with so many people I’ll never speak to. I pass dusty trophy cases and endless rows of dented lockers. I’m almost at the big double doors, almost free, when I bump into the second person in as many minutes.
“Laila, stop. Are you okay?”
It’s Ian of all people—a slap of a coincidence. Or perhaps no coincidence at all, since he always seems to be everywhere I am. “I’m leaving.” I’m dizzy, gasping for air, but I manage to wheeze out what’s already obvious: “I can’t breathe.”
He steers me to a stairwell and then helps me sit down. “Do you have asthma?” And then when I shake my head, “Are you maybe having a panic attack? I’m only asking because my mom gets them sometimes, and you look exactly like she does when she’s having one. Your eyes, especially.” He brushes a tear from the corner of my eye with a barely there touch as he says this.
I laugh the braying donkey’s laugh again; the harsh sound echoes in the stairwell, making me clamp my mouth shut. A panic attack? What a luxurious problem to have. To be attacked by one’s own panic rather than shot at, bombed, or gassed.
And yet, I am panicked. I am panicking.
Ian is talking to me in a low voice, telling me about some printing problem with this week’s school paper. It’s a boring, pointless story, but its value is in the telling, in the murmuring. I should be annoyed; he’s trying to calm me the way you would a wild animal—a growling dog or a rearing horse. But I’m not annoyed, since it seems to be working. My galloping heart slows to a trot, and my fists unclench, my fingernails leaving purple-red grooves on my palms.
I hold up one hand. “Stop. It’s okay, Ian. Stop. I’m okay now.”
“Are you sure? Do you want me to get someone for you? The nurse? Wait, scratch that. I don’t think we even have a school nurse. Do we?”
The tension snaps and fades, and I give him a tepid smile. “No, I’m really okay. Embarrassed maybe, but I’m fine.” I feel watery-limbed and light-headed, but he doesn’t need to know that.
“Has that ever happened to you before?”
“No,” I lie. But it has happened. At the football game. At the school dance. Any time my past has collided with my present. Sounds and smells and memories from home might as well be bullets.
“Because I could talk to my mom about it, if you want. Find out how she deals with it. She does yoga and meditates sometimes, stuff like that, and she might have some other ideas.”
“No. Please, just drop it.” I know he’s trying to help, but I’m so far beyond yoga, or scented candles, or whatever feel-good methods people use to calm their suburban anxieties. What tidy little pill could remove the fear of my entire family being killed? What amount of meditation could erase the memory of being hunted, a screaming mob outside the gates? How many long bubble baths would I have to take to forget the image of my mother staggering out of my father’s study, covered in his blood?
No, my panic is real. It won’t be erased or cured for all the yoga poses in the world. I must simply learn to absorb it better so that it doesn’t leak out the way it has today.
“I need to go, Ian. But thank you. Really.” I push myself up from the steps.
“Laila, you have people who care about you here. We want to help you, if you’ll let us.”
Those eyes. The way he looks at me, the way he is, I almost wish I could … I don’t know what. I wish I could be the kind of person who could be with the kind of person he is. But I’m not. I shake my head once and then walk away from him one last time. He belongs to a different world now.
TIMING
The aftermath of a hurricane greets me when I get home. Mother has been busy.
Her box of secrets is open and scattered around the living room. Documents and maps are strewn across the coffee table, and confetti shreds of paper cling to the rug. My laptop sits on the kitchen counter, open to my email account. This surprises me—I didn’t know Mother could turn on a computer, much less use one. I wonder briefly if she is spying on me just as I’m spying on her, but the thought is laughable. My life is not interesting enough to warrant her snooping. The most she’d see, if she cared to look, would be a few funny forwards from Ian and a handful of emails from Emmy complaining about teachers.
I have depressingly little to hide. Unlike her.
She has a guilty look on her face when I walk through the door. She too casually turns over the piece of paper nearest her and slips it to the bottom of a messy pile. “You’re supposed to be in school.” Her eyes are red.
“Yes.” I look straight at her, silently daring her to ask more. Instead, her eyes skip over to the scene on the muted television behind me.
I try not to look, but I can’t resist for long. There are more images from home dancing across the screen; boldface captions tell yet another gruesome tale. This time a lakeside resort has been attacked. The scene is familiar, both for the death and destruction I’ve grown accustomed to seeing and because I recognize the resort.
I’ve been there.
My grandmother—my mother’s mother—took me there, perhaps three years ago, for One Last Vacation. I wasn’t told about her cancer until the final day of the trip. “Three generations of women,” my grandmother bragged to anyone who would listen. The resort was one of few destinations in my country for three women traveling alone. We weren’t actually alone, of course—we had drivers and security guards, as always. But there was still something liberating about being in a place that was too exotic and too expensive for most people in our country. It was part of a Swiss chain, safe for its neutrality but considered scandalous because of the foreign journalists who kept the hotel booked year-round, along with a smattering of particularly adventurous German and Australian tourists. In their alien presenc
e we allowed ourselves small acts of rebellion: a glass of sherry for Grandmother each afternoon, a leisurely, unveiled stroll for Mother, and a raucous game of badminton, played with a long-haired Dutch couple, for me. Such bliss!
And now it all lies in shambles—yet another blackened crater where there was once a peaceful refuge.
I raise the volume. Retaliation for earlier attacks on the capital, says the newscaster. Government forces asserting control. A campaign to rid the country of foreign influence and illicit activities. Tidy sound bites and anemic explanations blend together, while on-screen a stoop-shouldered man splashes bucket after bucket of water onto the red stains on the concrete veranda.
I silence the television again. I’ve heard enough.
Mother is still not dressed; her hair is still uncombed. She seems to compose herself later and later every day now. This, more than the scattered papers or the hijacked laptop or the medicinal-sweet smell of liquor that clings to her, worries me. My mother is many things, but sloppy is not one of them.
She’s slipping, too.
“What are you doing?”
“I need to make a phone call.” She sounds vague, as if the thought had just occurred to her. “What time is it?” She glances at her wrist, realizes she’s not wearing a watch, and searches the walls for a clock. There are none. Not in this room, anyway, so she goes into the kitchen to check the display on the microwave. I know without looking that the numbers have been blinking, unset and ignored, since we moved in. Aside from the tiny alarm that sits at my bedside to wake me for school, none of us has much need for clocks. Our lives are divided into Before and After, and any further breakdown seems pointless.
Spotting my computer, Mother taps impatiently at the space bar until the screen saver vanishes, then nods at the clock in the corner of the screen, satisfied. “Good. Not too late,” she says under her breath, and then walks into her bedroom, cordless phone in hand, and shuts the door.
“Nice to see you too, Mother,” I tell the door. “My day wasn’t so great, but thank you for asking. Oh, and feel free to borrow my computer anytime.”
I wait in the silence for one, two minutes before I creep over and nestle my ear against the door.
She’s not using the speakerphone this time, but her curt familiarity gives her away and I know that it’s my uncle on the other end. Again.
“That was a foolish mistake. Now is not the time to make the world your enemy—” There’s a long pause before she continues. “It doesn’t matter. How many foreigners died today? Ten? Twenty? It might as well be a thousand. The second you started attacking foreigners, you also started losing support. In fact, it might already be too late. Why would they give weapons to someone who is just going to turn on them—” She stops abruptly again, and I can practically hear him yelling through the receiver.
I trace question marks into the wall with my finger as I listen. Curving left to right, as the symbol appears in English, and then mirrored, right to left, a question from home. Even our punctuation marks are opposites—no wonder I can’t fit comfortably here. I’m an Invisible Queen asking backward questions. The visual almost makes me smile: I’m a character who would do Lewis Carroll proud.
“The point is that it’s now or never. If you wait any longer, the deal will be off the table.” I can hear her footsteps on the other side of the door, pacing. Her voice grows louder. “No. It has to be you. I told you this already. I’m having enough trouble convincing him that you deserve the support; there is no way he’s going to hand over this much money, this much equipment, to a stranger. There is too much at stake. It has to be you.”
Another long pause. I hear her drumming her fingers on a hard surface, waiting her turn. “It’s enough. More than enough. They think they’re buying a new world order, after all. That doesn’t come cheap.” Her laugh is like sandpaper. “Two days. Maybe three. I’ll send you the details, the way we discussed.… No, not now.… Because some things shouldn’t be discussed over the phone. You of all people ought to know that.” She’s losing the battle to keep the impatience out of her voice, and after another pause she finally gives in to her anger. “How could I ever forget? You’ve made sure of that. But don’t you forget your end of the deal, either.”
A faint beep tells me she’s hung up, so I scurry into the bathroom and lock the door. I need a reason not to be in the same room as her right now, so I turn on the shower and let the water run. It’s loud enough, I hope, to cover the sound of my sobs as I mourn the complete loss of the woman I believed my mother to be.
DESCENT
I feel polluted. Tainted. Like one of those birds you see in photos every time there’s a big oil spill. Scrawny-necked, limp-winged creatures smothering under blankets of thick black tar, always with that same hopeless look in their shock-deadened eyes—that What the hell am I supposed to do now? look.
I suspect I have the very same look. But in place of oil, I’m coated with greasy, suffocating layers of shame. Sticky self-loathing glues me in place as I stand outside the school. Across the street. As far away as I can be and still watch, still see the bouncy steps of everyone who isn’t me entering the building.
From here they look like nondescript human-shaped bubbles: shiny and fragile and totally without substance. It’s a mean, childish thought, I know, but watching them turns me spiteful. They’re only bubbles when compared to tar-streaked, grief-tangled me. They live in a world in which there are no bloodstains upon the pavement and no gift-bearing spies. I would also float and glisten in such a world.
I hold in my hand as heavy a paper as ever existed. The numbers and letters on it might as well already be bodies. I’m holding a pen-and-ink graveyard.
I fold it carefully and tuck it into my pocket.
One full day has passed. Two are left. Two days to do nothing, or two days to do something.
I see Emmy approach, but she doesn’t see me. I’m not hiding, but she’s not looking. She’s walking fast, a brisk, stiff-legged shuffle, less buoyant than usual. In her delicate bubble world, she has lost much. Her parents are divorcing. The charmed, photo-op love life she’s created on her walls doesn’t exist in real time, and her best friend has abandoned her. I am sorry for my role in this. I am sorry for her pain. But still I don’t wave or call to her. I don’t think of myself as superstitious, but it does seem as if my bad fortune has rubbed off on her. It’s better for everyone if I keep my distance.
I don’t see Ian. I’m not here to see him anyway, but a quick sighting would have been nice—a glimpse of something that almost was.
In a way, I’m saying goodbye. To my friends, to the school, to my life here. This was not my intention, but after the confrontation I had with Mother last night, it seems inevitable.
“I know what you’re doing, Mother. I know what you’re planning, and I think it’s disgusting.”
She’d stared at me for a long time before responding. “You know about your uncle, then.” She sounded neither angry nor surprised. She went back to stirring the soup reheating on the stove before continuing. “There’s nothing to worry about. We have to start somewhere, and we might as well start at the top. Someone has to be in power if we’re ever going to move forward.”
As usual, her answer just made everything more confusing. “You’re playing with people’s lives.”
“I’m not ‘playing’ anything. I’m taking charge of our lives. Of our future. It has to be done if we’re to survive. Dammit, ouch!” She jumped away from the stove and ran her scalded finger under cold water from the sink. “Please, Laila, I can’t talk about this right now. Just set the table and tell your brother that dinner is almost ready.”
After that she seemed to shut off. Her face was a stiff mask, and over dinner we barely spoke. Even Bastien was quieter than usual, shrugging when I asked him if anything was wrong. He sensed something. He must have.
Sitting there in our tensely silent home, I decided to follow in my mother’s footsteps. I decided to take charge.
I found her message later that night. Mother may know how to send an email, but she doesn’t know enough to erase her tracks. Either that or she simply didn’t care if I discovered her treachery.
It was there in my Sent folder—a message made up entirely of numbers, impersonal and ominous. Three strings of digits in three different configurations had been sent to a nameless recipient at an address also comprised of numbers: [email protected].
I studied the numbers, staring at them until they made sense. There was a date. There was a time. And there was a place. I recognized the geocoordinate format right away, but I plugged the sequence into Google Earth to be certain. I braced myself as I used shaky fingers to type in the numbers and then hit Enter, but the swooping results still turned my stomach. The image on the monitor pulled away from almost–Washington, D.C., zipped me into a satellite’s view of the earth from outer space, and then plummeted down to a fuzzy new image that took too long to become clear, as if even the pixels were reluctant visitors to the place on the screen.
It was the location underlined in red in my mother’s notes—the small turnoff from a twisty mountain road, probably two hours from the capital. It’s isolated—a good spot for a secret meeting. I imagine that Mr. Darren Gansler is skilled at choosing just such places.
The fact that Mother had sent the message from my email account, with my name attached to it, made me queasy with anger. My stomach danced an oily revolt, and for a moment I thought I might vomit. I closed my eyes and took long, deep breaths until the feeling passed. I couldn’t be sick. I had work to do.
I knew the when and the where. The why was still a mystery. I steeled myself, then sat down to use my blood-money computer and a wifi signal stolen from my neighbor to give me the answers that my mother would not.
During the night I became an expert in terrible, evil things.
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