Ten Little Indians

by Sherman Alexie

  She’d been knocked unconscious by the explosion and woke crushed by the terrible weight of dead bodies. Pushing and crawling through anonymous body parts and building debris, she rescued herself. Bloody and bruised but not seriously hurt, not really hurt at all when compared to all of the other survivors, she emerged from the wreckage. People were screaming and dying all around her. They looked up at the skyscrapers and expected them to come crashing down. They expected airplanes to fall out of the sky and catch the city on fire. But this disaster was not that disaster; this explosion was small and real, while that other explosion was larger and distant and existed only on film and video and in memory. Here, in the aftermath, real sirens wailed. Real fire trucks and police cars arrived from all directions. News helicopters filled the sky. Rescuers pulled the bodies of the dead and living from the tangle of cement and metal and wood, from a building reduced to its basic elements. As if she were an innocent bystander, an objective journalist, she watched all of it happen and took mental notes. Six pairs of paramedics performed CPR on two men and four women. A horribly burned man, his skin peeling off his hands and arms in long, bloody strips, wailed for his wife. A little black girl and a little white boy hugged each other in the back of an ambulance. Wearing a soldier’s combat bucket hat, a homeless black man pushed his shopping cart in circles and sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.” On the ground around her were plates and forks and spoons and bowls and salt and paper shakers and chairs and tables and aprons and napkins and one baked potato half wrapped in aluminum foil. A white man in a tattered gray suit wept over the mutilated body of another white man wearing another tattered gray suit. Somewhere in the distance, she heard a radio playing the Latin Playboys. She didn’t know which song, but she recognized the harmonies. Across the street, in a sixth-floor window, a white woman leaned out and filmed it all with a video camera.

  “Are you okay?” a man asked her.

  She turned to look at him. He was a short forty-something Caucasian in a black leather coat. Handsome, with kind eyes and a stupid mustache, he was maybe twenty pounds overweight and would certainly carry thirty extra pounds in ten more years and forty in twenty and so on and so on. The inevitable obesity of the American male! But for now, he looked like the sexy bass player for a bad garage band. Maybe his belly was soft, but his art was rock-hard! In another place or time, she would have smiled at him, flirted, and possibly thought of him the next time she made love with her awful husband. Why was she thinking about sex at a time like this? Worse, why was she thinking about adulterous sex? The world, or at least a small part of the world, was coming to an end, and she was thinking about another man’s naked body. How perverse! Or was it a reflexive and natural reaction? With so much death and pain around her, wouldn’t it be good to throw this man down in the middle of the rubble and make love to him? Wouldn’t it be good to create life, to conceive it? After all, didn’t these self-martyring terrorists believe they would be rewarded with seventy-two virgins in heaven? Political posturing aside, didn’t a few thousand stupid men believe terrorism was another way to get laid? What would happen if the United States offered seventy-three virgins to each terrorist if he would abstain from violence? Instead of deploying an army of pissed-off U.S. soldiers to Afghanistan and Iraq, we could send a mercy team of patriotic virgins. Oh, God, what is happening to me, she thought, I’m losing my mind. She was in shock, of course, but she wondered if her brain had been more seriously damaged by the blast than she’d thought. Maybe her skull had been ripped open and her brain was exposed for all to see. Wouldn’t that be the most extreme form of public nudity? Wouldn’t that be the greatest shame? My brains are leaking out of my head, she thought, and I don’t even know it. She touched the top of her head and expected to feel soft tissue but felt only her strong and bony skull. She was going crazy, and she welcomed it. She wanted to be crazy.

  “Were you in there?” the chubby bass player asked her and pointed at the destroyed restaurant. He was strangely calm, she thought. What kind of man can calmly point at an exploded building? Maybe he’d gone crazy along with her. Maybe everybody had gone crazy.

  “I wasn’t in there,” she said. She lied, and it felt good to lie. “I saw it. I just saw it.”

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “A bomb guy ran into the restaurant,” she said. “With a bomb. He opened up his coat, and there was a bomb, and he screamed something. I don’t know what language it was. After he screamed, he blew up the bomb.”

  “Were you in there?” he asked again. Of course, she thought, of course I was in there, you idiot! How could she know exactly what had happened if she hadn’t been inside to witness it? He knew something was wrong with her story but was too confused and frightened to figure it out.

  “No, I wasn’t in there,” she said. “I was standing right here when it happened.”

  “Are you okay?” he asked. He was close to her. She could smell the cigarettes on his breath. Or maybe everybody smelled of fire and smoke. Maybe everybody would always smell of fire and smoke.

  “No,” she said. Given the opportunity to tell the truth, she kept lying. “I was just walking by.”

  “I saw you coming out of there,” he said. He was interrogating her. How dare he question her at a time like this?

  “I was looking for people,” she said. “I was trying to save them, but there’s nobody. There’s just pieces of people.”

  She realized she was shouting to be heard over the din.

  “Are you hurt?” he shouted back at her. What kind of conversation was this? What kind of madness were they sharing? “Are you hurt?” he asked. He kept asking her the same question. She had to stop him from asking it again.

  “No, no,” she said. “Just get me out of here. I don’t want to be here. Help me get out of here.”

  He took her hand and led her away from the crime scene. For ten blocks, he pushed through the advancing crowds of would-be rescuers, media saints, journalistic vultures, emergency workers, and the curiously morbid. Everywhere there were still and video cameras. She wondered how many thousands of photographs would be taken, how many films would be made. How many of those photographs and films might include her image? Had somebody captured the very moment when she emerged Jesus-like from her exploded tomb? After all, she thought, Jesus is still here because Jesus was once here and parts of Jesus are still floating in the air. Jesus’ DNA is part of the collective DNA. We’re all part of Jesus; we’re all Jesus in part. If you breathe deep during the storm, you can sometimes taste Jesus in a good hard rain. Maybe pieces of Jesus have burned into skin and bone and cement and wood. Maybe you can see the face of Jesus in every bloodstain. Maybe you can see Jesus in my bloody face, she thought, maybe I look like Jesus. Or maybe I’m not Jesus-like, maybe I’m Jesus himself. Maybe I’m a resurrection of the resurrected.

  “Where do you live?” he asked. “Do you want me to take you home?”

  “No,” she said. “Take me where you live.”

  He hesitated. He didn’t understand what was happening. He wanted to be logical. He wanted to make it make sense. He lived at the end of the next block. It was close and safe, and therefore he decided it was logical to take this stranger, this strange woman, to his apartment. He wondered if they were going to have sex. He knew it happened. He’d read of strangers who fell into each other’s arms during earthquakes and tornadoes and hurricanes and wars. His uncle Ernie, a Vietnam War veteran, had rescued a young Vietnamese woman and her infant son in 1967, married her, adopted the kid, and brought them back to Seattle. They were still married, somewhat unhappily, but stayed together. Who can explain these things? Maybe I’m supposed to take this woman home, he thought, maybe we’re supposed to fall in love. Okay, maybe it’s not logical, maybe it’s nonsensical. But what makes any sense in a world where a man can run into a crowded restaurant and explode a bomb? He looked at this woman with her long black hair and brown skin and brown eyes, and wondered if she was Iraqi or Saudi Arabian or Afghani. Maybe s
he was a Muslim terrorist who’d exploded the restaurant and was using him to make her escape. God, he thought, I’ve watched too many action movies and too much FOX News, and worse, I’m a racist who has watched too many Stallone flicks and too much Bill O’Reilly.

  “I don’t know what to do,” he said. He was being honest. He wondered if his honesty was real.

  “Just take me where you live,” she said again. “And then we’ll figure it out.”

  He led her to his apartment building in Pioneer Square and three flights up to his place. He unlocked the door, followed her inside, closed the door behind them, and sat her down on his living room couch.

  “Do you want something to drink?” he asked. How basic and inane! Why hadn’t he offered her something important, like world peace or spiritual redemption? He couldn’t have delivered either of those wonderful abstractions, but his offer would have been solid.

  “I’d love some water,” she said.

  “Water is important,” he said. “Whenever I’m depressed or lonely or whatever, I drink a glass of water, and I usually feel better.”

  What the hell was he talking about? What kind of fool was he? He walked into the kitchen to get the water. He was happy to step away from her. He wondered if his charity was not really charity at all. Perhaps he’d helped her, a smallish act of human goodness, as a way of dealing with a larger fear. What if this one explosion was only the first? How many more terrorists were walking the streets of Seattle? How many more suicide bombers were building bombs? There was no way of knowing. That information would be forever unknowable. He would sooner know if God were real.

  While he was gone, she stood and looked around the apartment. What a strange time for a self-guided tour! The front room was large, with exposed brick walls. Tasteful and anonymous two-sided prints hung suspended from the ceiling. Forming a sort of art curtain, they cut the room in half. Odd and beautiful, she thought. The bedroom was large enough for only an unmade bed and an end table stacked high with books. The bathroom was small as well, with a clean white sink, a toilet, and a shower. She’d never be able to live without a tub. But there were no guitars, no musical instruments of any kind. So maybe this chubby guy wasn’t a bass player. She walked into the small kitchen where he stood quietly and stared out the window.

  “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “I can see the smoke,” he said.

  She heard the sirens and the helicopters and the other human and machine noise. If anything, it was louder than it had been before. Nobody would sleep tonight.

  “Here’s your water,” he said and handed her a full glass.

  She drank it all in one swallow.

  “You drink water like a man,” he said.

  “What does that mean?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said and laughed. She laughed with him. They were flirting. How could they flirt at a time like this? She’s beautiful, he thought, and then he was ashamed of himself for noticing.

  “I’m married,” she said.

  “Do you want to call him?” he asked, relieved that she’d established her barriers.

  “No,” she said. “I hate him.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I have children, too,” she said. “Two sons.”

  Oh, man, he thought, maybe she was covered with her children’s blood.

  “They weren’t in the restaurant with you, were they?” he asked.

  “No, they’re in school. And I told you, I wasn’t in the restaurant when it happened.”

  “You’re lying. I don’t know why you’re lying. But you are lying.”

  “If you think I’m a liar, then why did you bring me home?”

  “I don’t know. I thought you needed help.”

  “You thought you might help by getting me in bed, right?”

  “No.”

  “Now who’s lying?” she asked and walked back into the living room.

  He followed her. “Listen,” he said. “I think you might have hit your head or something. You’re not talking right. I think you need to see a doctor.”

  “Maybe I talked like this before the bomb,” she said. “Maybe I’ve always talked like this.”

  “But what about your husband and kids? Won’t they be worried about you?”

  “I told you, I hate my husband.”

  “But you can’t hate him.”

  “A wife can’t hate her husband? You can’t be that naive, can you?”

  “No, I was married.”

  She laughed. “You’re funny,” she said.

  “I’m not trying to be funny,” he said.

  “Funny people don’t have to try.”

  “Listen, forget all that. What about your kids?”

  “They hate me more than I hate them.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “You don’t think a mother can hate her kids?”

  “No, it’s not that. Mothers aren’t supposed to hate their kids.”

  “What kind of jerk are you?”

  She threw her empty glass against the brick wall, and this second explosion was stronger for him than the first one. He was afraid of this woman and her possibilities.

  “I don’t want you to be here anymore,” he said.

  “I don’t want to be anywhere,” she said.

  “No, really, I want you to leave now. If you don’t leave, I’ll call the cops.”

  “Yeah, and I’m sure they’ll be here right away. I’m sure you’ll be really high on their priority list.”

  “All right, I’ll throw you out myself.”

  “Oh, aren’t you the tough guy? Just like my husband. All you want to do is fight. All right, I fight him, I’ll fight you.”

  She balled her hands into fists, but she stuck her thumbs inside. If she landed a punch, she’d break a thumb. He knew she’d never thrown a real punch in her life. She looked pathetic.

  “Why are you smiling?” she asked.

  “You’re scared,” he said. “I’m scared, too. I haven’t been in a fight since third grade. And she beat me up. Her name was Susan. She broke my nose with her Snoopy lunch box.”

  Yes, she thought, this man is funny and smiles like a fragile little boy, as if he’s slightly ashamed of his crooked teeth and crooked sense of humor. She dropped her fists and paced around the room. She felt an ineffable anxiety. She knew she needed to make plans, but she couldn’t figure out what to do first.

  “Listen,” she said, “I’m sorry about being such a bitch.”

  “It’s okay,” he said. “Considering the circumstances, I think we’re probably doing all right.”

  “Okay, okay, you’re a good man. We need more good men in the world. How about we start over? How about we introduce ourselves and pretend like we just met?”

  How could she say something so banal? What was wrong with her?

  “Look at yourself,” he said. “I don’t think it’s possible to start over.”

  She was covered with blood and dirt. She was surprised. How had she forgotten that? And why was she worried about this stranger’s feelings? Again she wondered if she was crazy, if she was dreaming this whole day, if this man and his apartment were illusions.

  “Hey,” he said, “I’ve got a clean robe in the bathroom and clean towels. Why don’t you take a shower, wash all that stuff away. How does that sound?”

  Now he sounded trivial: Hey, the city is burning, but you’ll feel so much better if you floss your teeth.

  “You just want to get me naked,” she said.

  “You’re very pretty, and I will admit I thought briefly about sex. But mass murder and suicide bombs sort of shrink the wonder wand, you know?”

  She laughed again. She sat on the couch and laughed. She covered her face with a pillow and laughed. She threw the pillow at him and laughed. “You’re so funny,” she said.

  “Come on,” he said. “I was not trying to be funny. I was trying to tell you how I feel.”

  “Maybe everything you feel is fun
ny,” she said and wiped tears from her eyes.

  “Maybe everything is funny to you,” he said. “But you’re crazy pussy, and I was married to crazy pussy before, and I have no real interest in getting near it again.”

  “Crazy pussy!” she shouted and laughed. She rolled off the couch onto the floor and laughed. “Nobody has ever called me crazy pussy!”

  She lay facedown on the floor and laughed into the carpet. She cried and wailed and kicked and punched. She convulsed. He rolled her onto her side and held her head while she seized. When it was over, she inhaled deeply and fell asleep. He knew about seizures. When she woke, she’d feel like a buffalo had kicked her in the skull. He sat on the couch and stared down at her. God, he thought, I hope she doesn’t die on my carpet. How would I explain that? He picked up the telephone and dialed 911, but all he heard was a busy signal. He tried again and again, ten, eleven, twelve times, but heard only that same awful busy signal each time. After looking up the general numbers for the police and fire departments in the Yellow Pages, he dialed them and heard more busy signals. He called individual precincts and firehouses, but nobody answered. He called hospitals and clinics and churches but couldn’t get past the computerized answering machines. God, he thought, what a fragile world I live in. One building explodes, and the whole system falls apart. He was more afraid than he’d been before, but then he dialed another number he knew by rote.

  “Domino’s Pizza, how can I help you?”

  How many times had this young man answered the telephone that way? Did he know how the tone of his voice completely changed the meaning of the words?

  “Domino’s Pizza, how can I help you?”

  If the pizza guy repeated the question enough times, it might become a prayer.

  “Domino’s Pizza, how can I help you?”

  “I can’t believe you’re open.”

  “Well, it’s just me. Everybody else left. I stayed. I didn’t know what else to do.”

  “You’re not really going to deliver pizzas, are you?”

  “I don’t know. You’re the first person to call since it happened.”