The Illegal

by Lawrence Hill

  “The hernia might cause pain. But it doesn’t explain what you’re describing. What helps alleviate those symptoms?”

  “When I stop running, and drink lots of water, and rest.”

  “Let me run a little blood test on you.”

  Keita looked around. The room was not filthy, but it did not have the antiseptic quality of a proper hospital room. “I would rather not.”

  “It would just take a minute. And it might give us valuable information. In fact, I would like to take your blood, just a drop, five or six times at key moments over the next few days. What do you say?”

  Keita said, “Maybe later.”

  “As you wish. Housing, right? You’ve come for help finding a place to stay?”

  “Yes.”

  DeNorval offered Keita the use of his guest room.

  “That would be fabulous,” Keita said.

  The doctor cleared his throat. “Let me clear up some possible misconceptions,” he said. “I am gay. Indeed, I am in Freedom State because I was outed by a medical rival at the Yagwa Hospital. You know what our country does to gays, right? Torture? Execution? You are aware?”

  Keita nodded.

  “I had to leave fast after he outed me, and I paid seven thousand dollars for passage on a ship to Freedom State. By some miracle, I arrived alive and got here. I am gay, Keita, but I am not interested in jumping your bones. I have a deal with Ms. DiStefano. She refers to me people who need unofficial medical help and a place to stay. She has given me lodgings. Very decent, for AfricTown. I have a spare room, and the deal with Ms. DiStefano is that I share it, at my discretion and on a very short-term basis, with trustworthy people who are in a desperate situation. So. I cannot help you with the hernia, other than to tell you where to get treatment. I have a theory about your other problem, but for the time being, you do not wish to have your blood tested. For the next few days, I can offer you a clean single bed in a clean, simple room with access to a private, locked outhouse that is cleaner than just about any outhouse you will find anywhere in AfricTown.”

  DeNorval led Keita to a curtained-off section of the shipping container that formed the living quarters. It had two single beds, one for DeNorval and the other for Maria and her baby, pulled up against opposite walls. There was a small, circular table, a portable gas stove hooked up to a propane tank, and lights and a small refrigerator. From the refrigerator, DeNorval brought out a tuna salad, red peppers, apples, bread and water.

  “You like? Hope so, because it is all I have. That, plus milk for the child.”

  “I just ate,” Keita said, “but I’ll sit with you.”

  Maria came in then with her baby. She spread a cloth on her bed and changed Xenia quickly. Then she gave the baby to Keita, wordlessly, and he held the child as if he’d been doing it all his life. Xenia lay calm and smiling in his arms. Maria returned minutes later, shaking her wet hands. She smiled at Keita and took the baby back to offer her a bottle. Xenia pushed the bottle away to stare at Keita.

  “She likes you,” Maria said. “She doesn’t like everybody. She must know that you are good.”

  “I’ve not held a baby for years,” he said.

  Maria handed the baby back to him, along with the bottle. Keita offered it, and Xenia grasped it with her tiny hands and drank. For the first time in a month, Keita felt at home.

  Keita sat with DeNorval and Maria as they ate quickly and without ceremony. DeNorval said it was a long walk to Maria’s cleaning job in Clarkson. Since their kitchen was about to turn into the bedroom that he shared with mother and daughter, DeNorval offered to show Keita to his room.

  Keita felt grateful and safe as he settled onto the bed. But just as he was closing his eyes, he heard sirens and the sound of people shouting. He rose and tucked his bag under his arm, ready to run. At the front door of the shipping container, he encountered John Falconer. John was with a young black woman who said her name was Darlene.

  “Police raid,” John said. “You’d better get out of here.”

  “One moment, then.” Keita left his bag with John and Darlene and ran to the outhouse. He relieved himself and ran back again.

  “What about Maria, Xenia and DeNorval?” he asked.

  “They have gone into hiding,” John said, “but you have to make tracks. Afraid you have to go back to Clarkson. This is not a safe place tonight. Come. I’ll show you the way.”

  OUTSIDE DENORVAL’S HOME, JOHN WAITED UNTIL KEITA was visiting the outhouse before slipping a 100-gigabyte memory stick into the outside, zippered pocket of the runner’s knapsack. Darlene raised her eyebrows as if to say, I hope you know what you’re doing. The stick contained not just the footage of the minister’s encounter with Darlene that night, but also the visit by the prime minister to the Bombay Booty. It was an extra—just a private backup system in case anyone managed to separate John from his belongings.

  On the trail back to Clarkson, Keita walked so fast that John had to run two steps out of ten to keep up. He urged Keita to slow down so as not to overtake the tall man who was walking a hundred paces ahead of them, also away from the cacophony of police sirens and loudspeakers. John told Keita that the man was the minister of immigration, Rocco Calder.

  “What is he doing here?” Keita asked.

  “Not sure, but he’s in a hurry to leave,” John said.

  John did not feel he could offer Keita a full account of how Lula DiStefano had asked him back to the Bombay Booty to videotape the minister in the room with Darlene. “Insurance” was what Lula had called it. She wanted fifteen more water holes dug, a new school built and a reliable power line installed to feed electricity to AfricTown. What she didn’t want was police raids impeding her business, she said. And she wouldn’t stand for any more of her young protégés airlifted to Zantoroland and killed in prison there. Since John had footage of the prime minister and his immigration minister cavorting in AfricTown, and she had the PM’s citizenship card too, Lula said she might prevail. Indeed, her last point to John had been “Pressure without pain is pointless.”

  “Don’t you have school tomorrow?” Keita said.

  “What are you, my headmaster?”

  “It is late,” Keita said. “Don’t you need to sleep?”

  “I decide my own schedule.”

  Keita chuckled. “It is a very long walk to Clarkson, and when we get there it will be the middle of the night.”

  “I could stay with you and then just go to school.”

  “Thank you, brother,” Keita said. “But I can take care of myself. Go home now.”

  John had not been called “brother,” or any other gentle word, for a long time. His mother, when she was healthy and at home, called him Johnny. When she was curled up like an embryo in Wintergreen Psychiatric Institute, she didn’t call him anything at all.

  “I know the immigration minister, the dude up ahead,” John said. “I’ve been in his office. Maybe I could get him to issue a permit for your sister.”

  “You must not talk of this, to anyone,” Keita said, stopping abruptly. “Let me be clear. If this is done wrong, my sister could die.”

  “Okay, okay. I won’t say anything.”

  They walked in silence for a while.

  “So tell me about your father,” John said.

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Look,” John said, “my mother is in a crazy ward. Locked up. I don’t want to talk about it either, because I can’t fucking stand the image of her rolled up in a ball, unmoving and unable to talk. When I see her like that, I fear that I did that to her. But the wiser part of me knows that’s not true. Right?”

  “A child is not to blame for his mother’s health problems,” Keita said.

  “I told you something I never tell anyone. So now you can talk to me. Tell me about your father.”

  Keita felt the same grief well up in him that he had faced on the massage table after the Buttersby Marathon. That time, he had closed the door, gently but firmly, on his sadne
ss. This time, he held it open a crack to let his story seep out. He spoke. Reluctantly, at first. But he gathered steam as he went and soon found himself telling John everything.

  He was so absorbed in the telling that he had finished the story before he noticed that the boy had been holding his hand for several minutes.

  “I get nightmares,” John told him.

  “Me too,” Keita said.

  “It’s weird,” John said. “I can’t explain it. In my dreams, my mom and I are walking along the streets of Clarkson. I know it never snows here, but in this dream it’s very cold and the streets are full of snow. Outside one of the finest jewellery shops, my mother jumps onto a snowbank and tries to take off her clothes. I pull her off the snowbank and plead with her to let me take her, fully dressed, to the psychiatric hospital. ‘But they’ll only let me in if I’m crazy,’ she says, ‘and how will they know that unless I arrive naked on a winter day?’”

  “I hope your mother gets better soon,” Keita said.

  “Me too,” John said. “What’s your dream?”

  “In my dream,” Keita said, “I am a child. A boy, just your age. I am wandering around Yagwa, eating figs and cookies that have been sent to me by the president. I am looking to buy a wagon, while my father is being held in the Pink Palace. Wagon vendors refuse to take my money or sell to me, and they keep saying, ‘How could you dare think about amusing yourself with a wagon when your father is being tortured in the Pink Palace?’ They stand there smirking when I say, ‘They won’t stop hurting him until I come with a wagon.’ Like the president, they keep insisting that I eat more figs and cookies. I cannot ever get the wagon. I cannot stop what they are doing to my father. He is in the Pink Palace and I am in the market, and we are separated by only a kilometre, but in my dream it is much too far to run.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  KEITA STUDIED THE ENTRANCE TO THE CLARKSON Library. Such thought and money had gone into the creation of the building! Pools of water everywhere, huge plate-glass windows and vines crawling up the walls. It was a building that invited him to sit down and rest. Perhaps to sleep. After reaching Clarkson, he had spent the night in an all-night burger joint, where there were newspapers to read and tea cost only a dollar—but it had not been restful. Now, standing on the far side of the street, Keita watched every person who walked in or out the front doors of the library. He was terribly thirsty again, and a little dizzy. Perhaps it was only the lack of sleep. Still, this task was important, so he tried to focus. It appeared that people were allowed to enter the library freely. Some people had their bags checked on their way out, but that was just to determine if they were trying to steal books or newspapers. They were not asked to show ID.

  Keita walked up to the entrance and pushed through the turnstile. Nobody stopped him or questioned him or looked at him at all. A good sign. Up ahead, to the right, was a bank of fifty computers, each on its own desk. It looked like a huge classroom. He saw young people with odd rings looping through their lips and eyebrows, children who looked barely old enough to kick a football, people in business suits and even a nun in her habit. A boy of about sixteen got up from a computer and walked away. He owned a belt, but it did not appear to work properly. His pants were hanging below his buttocks, leaving his underwear partly exposed. He seemed to be aware of it, because he spread his legs wide and walked bow-legged. Was he right in the head? Keita also saw people who didn’t appear to have showered or changed clothes in days, and who looked like they were carrying their belongings in bags or carts. Homeless people. Some of them were white. This he found hard to believe.

  He slid into the chair vacated by the boy with the tumbling pants. He tapped the keyboard and saw that he needed a password to go online.

  He glanced around. To his right was a young black man with dreadlocks and rings on every finger. He poked furiously at a computer keyboard using only his thumbs and middle fingers. It looked like he was using both hands to pluck a mbira. Keita loved the thumb piano, and hadn’t seen one played since he left Zantoroland.

  “Excuse me, sir,” Keita said.

  “Peace,” the man said, continuing to type.

  “How do I get online?” Keita asked.

  “You got two choices, brother. Divine intervention or a library card.”

  “At this moment, I’m short on divine intervention,” Keita said.

  “I hear you, brother.”

  “So how about the library card?”

  Mbira Man pointed with his chin at the reference librarian. “Whatever you do, don’t go to that man.”

  “Isn’t he the librarian?” Keita asked.

  “Purebred Aryan! You could have five pieces of ID, but he would still turn you down. In this world, there are people who spend years learning how to not help a man. He is that sort of person. Set him loose from your mind, man. Set him loose like a bad dog. Okay, brother, retrain your mind. Swing around in your chair. Follow me.”

  Mbira Man pointed with the longest index finger Keita had ever seen. “See way back there, in the corner of the library? That there grandma?”

  Sitting at a simple desk was a grey-haired white woman. She was talking to a patron, while two others waited in line to see her.

  “That there woman is Missus Beech. Look like a little ol’ nothing. Don’t be fooled. Ain’t easy for a white person to be saintly, but she closing in. That there woman is your camel, passing through the eye of a needle. Yes, sir. She a friend of the people, brother, so make her your friend too.”

  “Thank you.”

  “That will be ten dollars.”

  “But I don’t have ten dollars to spare.”

  “Well then, give me ten the next time we meet. Meanwhile, take this—”

  It was a card with just a few words: “One Love, by VanderVann. Look for it. Buy it. Read it.”

  “What is One Love?” Keita asked.

  “My novel.”

  “You’re writing a novel?” Keita said.

  “All up here, man,” Mbira Man said, tapping his noggin.

  “And who is VanderVann?” Keita asked.

  “That’s me, brother.”

  Keita approached the desk at the back of the library. Mrs. Beech sat under a sign that said New Cards. Keita hadn’t seen many old people in Freedom State. In Zantoroland, old people could be found everywhere. Picking fruit or cooking spicy fish by the roadside or minding grandchildren or great-grandchildren. But in Zantoroland you would never find an old woman working in a public building.

  He waited for his turn to see Mrs. Beech. A sign said you required a national citizenship card and proof of residency to apply for a library card. But the woman seemed to welcome those who did not look like citizens. The people in line ahead of him were not white or well dressed, and in some cases, they did not even appear to speak much English, but she was kind to each one of them. She looked familiar.

  When Keita’s turn came, he sat down opposite the woman. He saw that her hands trembled. Blue veins wormed across the back of her palms, and brown spots made her hands appear freckled. Behind her, Keita noticed a purse with a book sticking out of it. He cocked his head to read the title: Dying for Dimwits. What a disturbing title. Did the people of Freedom State believe that people of low intelligence should commit suicide?

  “Are you here for a library card?” she asked.

  “Yes, but I don’t have . . .”

  “We won’t worry about what you don’t have,” she said. “Have a little faith, and all will go well.” She slid a piece of paper across the desk to him.

  “Fill in your name and sign at the bottom,” she said.

  The paper, which was typed, said, I hereby attest that I, _______, am a citizen of Freedom State and reside at _______.

  Keita left the address blank but printed and signed his name as Roger Bannister.

  She took the paper back, stared at him and said, “I thought so. You are the singing runner!”

  Keita was not sure what to say.

  “You
showed me such decency. I was in a scrape on Aberdeen Road.”

  “A scrape?” Keita asked.

  “Car accident. I dinged up two nice cars, quite badly. Some woman was screaming at me, and along you came, running and singing that country song.”

  “‘Ain’t Mine’?” Keita asked.

  “Yes! I hate that song. But never mind. You stopped to help me in a moment of need. You told me your name was Roger Bannister.”

  It was only two weeks, but Keita did not remember what the white woman who caused the accident had looked like, except that she was old and frail and seemed shocked by the mayhem she had caused.

  “My name is Ivernia Beech, and I am here to help you in any way possible.”

  The old woman dropped a pencil. As she bent over to retrieve it, her purse fell open and her book yawned. Keita couldn’t help reading: “There is really no reason to botch a suicide attempt if you go about it properly. If you have an IQ of 60 or less, just give up and close the book, because you have no hope of offing yourself properly. But if you passed Grade 5, you should be good. Keep reading if you would like to die at your own hands.”

  With clean water, roofs over their heads and every imaginable device to make their lives easier, why would white people in rich countries want to kill themselves? In Zantoroland, mothers died in childbirth and children were born with and died of HIV/AIDS. People died of diarrhea, typhus and malaria, and even from infections resulting from cuts. Others, like his father, were ordered killed by those who purported to lead the country. But he had never heard of people in his homeland killing themselves. Perhaps only those who did not fear a premature death sought to accelerate the process.

  “There you go,” Ivernia Beech told him. “You should be good now.”

  “Roger Bannister isn’t truly my name,” he said in a low voice.

  She gave him a knowing smile. “You may use the library card now to surf the Net. Or to borrow books. I’ve made out your address as 41 Moore Street. Is that okay?”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Heaven knows.” She laughed. “I made it up. Treat this like your library card for life,” she said. “Don’t lose it, because I won’t be here forever.”