Out There: a novel

by Sarah Stark

  He flipped through the pages, back and forth with his thumbs, just like in high school, and the pages fell open naturally, and a particular spot on the page called to him, and he would read.

  Jefferson would remember forever the feeling the sentence his finger had found that very first night gave him. It was the sentence about new gypsies and oily skins and parrots painted many colors and a hen laying a hundred golden eggs. It was the sentence about a monkey who could read minds and a device that could both sew on buttons and reduce fevers. It was the line that mentioned the machine that could take away one’s bad memories. How could anyone ever forget the feeling brought on by a sentence like that? When Jefferson had read the last bit, the muscles of his face had formed into a smile, and a feeling of measured joy had entered his heart. He had imagined on that night what Gabriel García Márquez might have meant by an “uproarious joy,” and how the writer had envisioned a machine that could eliminate bad memories. What an idea. Jefferson needed that machine, he thought as he sat on his bunk that night, and he began to imagine all the other soldiers who needed it as well.

  He kept his eyes closed a bit longer, picturing the great writer in the barracks with him, that unforgettable face from the back cover. This was Gabriel, the angelic writer who had brought tears to Ms. Tolan’s eyes, a man who seemed both human and otherworldly and who, in that moment, was right there in Jefferson’s head with him, laughing. It was if the old man had known Jefferson and the entirety of his life long before any of it had begun. And for the moment, on that first of many nights, the writer reached out and grabbed Jefferson, telling him it would all be okay.

  Jefferson knew that the novel had not literally been written for him. He was not stupid. He remembered enough from English class to know that One Hundred Years of Solitude did not take place in Iraq, and that it was not about a young soldier from Santa Fe. It was a South American story. It was about several generations of a large family—two brothers with similar names, and all their descendants, one of them, a soldier, though not a soldier like Jefferson. More like a commanding officer, a general.

  Still, Jefferson had slept that night with a little less nervousness in his stomach, just knowing the writer was out there somewhere, living and breathing, and most likely aware of the war in Iraq. In that intangible but very real way, Jefferson felt Gabriel was with him, and that he was a little less alone. Jefferson began to call him GGM on that night, and sometimes simply Gabriel, because the whole thing—Gabriel García Márquez—took too much energy. Besides, that was what everyone else in the world called him. Gabriel García Márquez—yes, that was his name. But to Jefferson he became GGM, his very own Gabriel.

  The next night Jefferson did it again. He flipped through the novel with his thumbs until a group of words caught his eye. He memorized the words. He adapted the words. He made them his own. And he repeated the practice the following night. Again and again, night after night, until it became his religion. And like any true faith, it began to help. In the restless hours between midnight and dawn, Gabriel’s words resurrected Jefferson’s hope.

  Not too long after that, Jefferson began reciting aloud. If you had asked him, he would have given an upbeat explanation, would have cast himself as a morale builder among the troops. Would have said that he memorized and recited not just for himself, but for anyone with ears to hear. That these words, these beautifully insightful words, by the great writer from across the ocean, were life buoys cast out to save soldiers adrift on the raw ocean of war. He would not have used the term chaplain or healer, yet he arrived promptly on the scene of any crisis, providing aid and comfort. He had a quote for any circumstance, for any man or woman who cried out in pain, for any miracle or tragedy. Often he spoke of Colonel Aureliano Buendía as if he was a figure from pop culture: “Well, you know what Colonel Aureliano Buendía would say about this, don’t you?” And for this, the men and women of the Tenth Mountain Division as well as many others based on Anaconda came both to love and pity Jefferson. Most had no idea what the dark young soldier from Santa Fe was talking about, so they just nodded and let him share his lovely, incomprehensible chants.

  24

  Jefferson was always bemused by people who thought they could protect themselves from trouble, people who told themselves they were living safe lives out of harm’s way. Bottled water in the basement. Travel insurance. A book on surviving bird flu. Jefferson understood that about tragedy: that at any time it can find you, enter your life through a door you didn’t know was there. There was no denying it when it came for you.

  But could you identify a miracle? Were you in tune with the possibility of something very good coming out of something very bad? Of grace in tragedy? Of life kicking death into the stratosphere? This, Jefferson felt, was far more important—or in any case, it was how his brain worked. He tended to see light rather than dark.

  Jefferson was thinking about miracles on that second day of riding through Mexico when he heard what he thought was a distant helicopter. The sky had turned a mesmerizing shade of turquoise, white voile wisps strewn across it. He was on his way to Torreón, a good bit past Chihuahua, where he’d begun that morning, but still at an unknown point between the two, somewhere in the middle of the high Sonoran Desert. And there were rocks—giant boulders, really—flanking the highway as he rode.

  He was chanting an upbeat Torreón! Torreón! Olé! Torreón! Olé!—a chant he thought might be appropriate for the upcoming city, even though, in truth, Jefferson didn’t know a single thing about Torreón. The sound of the name reminded him of bullfighting, a tradition he guessed existed in Mexico, though he knew it was really a Spanish thing. He knew the difference between Mexico and Spain, but still. Part of the reason for the upbeat chant was his need to flush out all negative thoughts from his mind. Though he was trying to focus on the possibility of miracles—as he usually did—he had sensed in the last ten miles a change in the landscape. It felt as if the light on the rocks, the light of the beautiful sky, had suddenly turned stark, dissonant. Despite his efforts to resist them, stories of Mexican violence—a series of beheadings he’d heard about near San Miguel, clippings Auntie had passed along about child abductions—began to crowd into his mind.

  But god, those beautiful rocks, lining the road for miles—so immense he found himself shaking his head at their size. They seemed like guardians of life, anchored so deeply to the earth that they made small human worries seem trivial. He rode on long enough to think about the people who tried to capture such beauty, all those artists, and to remember the name of that really old woman—Georgia O’Keeffe—and her paintings of bones. An English teacher he’d had in ninth grade—Jefferson couldn’t remember his name—had been crazy about Georgia O’Keeffe and the fact that she could spend so much time and energy perfecting the painting of a single bone or a single flower. The teacher related it to being a careful writer. Be like O’Keeffe! he’d shout from the front of the classroom. Don’t do a goddamn-nother thing until you’ve written the best freakin’ sentence you can possibly write! Jefferson was thinking that the teacher might have been a little more right than he’d thought at the time, and he still trying to remember his name as he sailed along, when suddenly he saw that the sky had unmistakably darkened all around him.

  Still, he pushed the implications of this darkening away. It was better to think of the history of these great rocks. What sort of events had formed them, exactly? He thought of the lava and the water and the ice that he knew must each have covered this place at some time in history, and of the whole generations of rocks that lay below these noble boulders, and below his own feet, the sand and the pebbles and the common stones, when the thundering became so loud above him that Jefferson had to look up. Remedios was barking and baring her teeth.

  But oh, what a beautiful surprise awaited him up there. A giant swarm of swallows and crows and ravens filled the sky, swooping in great loops, following what seemed to him an orchestrated pattern, arabesques and curlicues and leaps and dive
s, all of it at high speed and close together, so that he had to wonder when they had learned the choreography, how they had practiced. Their songs rose above the whir of his Kawasaki, above what he had initially thought might have been a helicopter, in a dense symphony, filling him with wonder and delight—sopranos and mezzo-sopranos, altos and tenors and basses. Jefferson pulled over to the roadside, shut off the engine, and stood looking up at the show. All around him birds descended, making gentle contact with the earth, touching down like skirted acrobats from parachutes, like jellyfish floating in the air.

  And then there was a voice—a distinctly human, female voice, speaking, possibly yelling, in harsh tones. It sounded very close, but because he’d been looking up at the birds, the sun had blinded him, and he could see nothing more than blurred dark shapes hovering above him. The birds seemed to have vanished, though, as had the beautiful songs they had been singing. Remedios was still snarling, and Jefferson looked back at her to check that she was okay before he returned his gaze to the dark forms surrounding him. Suddenly they resolved themselves into solid objects, large men with angry faces.

  And then they seemed to be rushing toward him from all sides and angles, in such a surge of manpower and sports utility vehicles and horses that though Jefferson was scared, he could also see that this ambush possessed an undeniable beauty of orchestration—worthy of the big screen, larger than life. In his almost four years at war, nothing he’d seen approached this restrained and, yes, truly beautiful violence.

  When you find yourself on a motorbike near Torreón, surrounded by fifteen angry men, he thought, there’s no room for doubt. There was no need to wonder about the identity or occupation of men like these, in their leather jackets and somber T-shirts and sturdy jeans, their lips and eyelids a purplish ochre despite the heat of the day. He did not for an instant think they were cattle ranchers protecting their livestock.

  They flung dust in his eyes; their breath stank of stale coffee and nicotine. A guy pointed a handgun at Jefferson’s right temple, his face inches from Jefferson’s own, while the rest wielded their rifles like skateboards. A woman was shouting at him, rattling her words off so rapidly that her Spanish could as easily have been Chinese. Reflexively Jefferson raised his hands up to his face and shouted back, “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!”

  Suddenly he thought of the old Iraqi man and his goats. It had happened near the sad trees, the trees that had reminded him of the tired piñons along the dry bed of the Santa Fe River. Jefferson saw those sad trees, leafless and forlorn, saw the old man on his knees, begging RT not to slaughter his goats, saw the old man’s good eyes in the face of very bad luck.

  The images pressed in on Jefferson, even as he tried to focus on the very real situation that was developing around him. Three of the bikers were on top of him now, patting him down to make sure that he was unarmed, speaking now in a broken but comprehensible English. He took the switch to English as a good sign, a sign that they might be persuaded toward pity. His experience told him that nothing he did or did not do, nothing he said or did not say, would make a difference. These men and this woman were on a mission more complicated than Jefferson could comprehend, a mission that had nothing to do with him.

  “What you doing? CIA? DEA?” This one held the tip of what looked like an M9 at his cheekbone. Jefferson shook his head, only saying, “No . . . no!” There was no point in rhetoric. Rhetoric had not helped the poor old Iraqi man. Even the old man’s prayerful pose had not been enough to convince RT that he was a real and harmless goat farmer.

  Even Jefferson knew that the story of how he came to be on the highway to Torreón would be difficult for anyone else to believe. That he was on a borrowed motorbike on his way to find Gabriel García Márquez; that he, a graduate of Santa Fe High, a veteran of Iraq, believed that the famous writer had reached across the ocean and desert to save him; that One Hundred Years had been written for that purpose—it was the truth, but Jefferson did not want to tell it to these complete strangers, who would most likely kill him anyway. The story was worth more than that to him.

  His cheek was pressed against the hard-packed earth; he could feel the barrel of a gun at the back of his head, a heel under his left shoulder blade. An ant trail came into focus at the far right of his field of vision, winding up and down and around the contours of the pebbles and rocks. The ants go marching one by one, hurrah, hurrah. If he lived, he’d become a painter, he’d paint ants and their lovely little trails. Someone was pulling his thin wallet out of his pocket. He hoped Remedios was okay.

  “Jefferson Long Soldier,” a voice said, reading. “Santa Fe, New Mexico. Six-seventy-five in cash.”

  After a short pause Jefferson detected a measured approach from somewhere in the middle of the group. Someone was nearby, bending into his space. Warm breath on his left earlobe. “Why are you here?” A coarse whisper. The woman. English as quick and clear as anyone from north of the border.

  Jefferson kept his eyes trained on the ants, lifting his chin just enough so that he could speak. “I’m a soldier returned from war, and I’m on my way to Mexico City to see a writer.” He stopped, feeling that this was as much time as he was allowed.

  The men had long since stopped yelling. In what seemed to be a well-rehearsed ritual, the woman became the director of the scene. She held Jefferson’s small head in a tight grip and waited a moment before whispering, “You’re a fool if you think I believe that story.” Malicious sniggering broke out from several among the group, the sound of encroaching death.

  A weighted pause. The pause, as Jefferson had experienced it, before the rifle cracks the skull. Before the automatic gunfire guts the spinal column. Before the two or three quick shots slice the throat. It was the pause in which the killer grits his teeth and reminds himself that he has bigger problems than the dumbass who’s foolishly crossed his path. Jefferson had no interest in considering the details of how they would do it, so he prayed that they would kill him quickly and give his mind a rest. He prayed that they would spare the dog. He’d seen so much death, he’d been so close so many times, that he knew there was not all that much to dying. He feared the few intense moments of pain—he’d certainly seen that—but the dying never lasted long, and it always ended. That much was certain. The worst part, Jefferson believed, was the anxiety that came right beforehand. In war, with mortars coming unannounced from all directions, there was often no time for this anxiety. He wouldn’t claim that he’d change places with any of the soldiers he’d watched die, but now, as his own fear was building, he was thinking that most of those soldiers had not had to endure a prolonged period of anxiety preceding death.

  On the dirt, below the guns, the pause continued. Too long.

  His mind, instead of doing what he wanted it to do, what he had hoped it would do—surfing peaceably through lovely memories—became anxious. And in that sharpest of all anxieties in the face of death, it clenched down on the memory of the old man and his goats.

  RT, the platoon leader, had decided too soon that the old guy was an insurgent. So many things had been wrong about the decision, and Jefferson guessed that it had more to do with RT being at war too long, and less to do with the old man who they’d happened upon that dusty afternoon in the washed-out town near the sad trees. RT must have had a lot more go wrong in his life, Jefferson guessed, than a mother and father deserting him at birth. But the blessing was that when RT had decided to act, he was fast. The time when the old man knew beyond any doubt that he would be shot was very short, probably less than two minutes. That’s the only real credit Jefferson could give RT: he didn’t torture his captives by making them wait.

  But now Jefferson was waiting, considering what possible coincidence might intervene to spare him yet one more time. Might the woman have detected a familiar scent on the back of his neck as she straddled him? Could his tattered backpack remind her of her life as a student? Did the very straightness of his hair sweep up nostalgia for her mother? Was it possible that his long-l
ost father could be among those in the group? Might he have recognized Jefferson?

  Anything was possible.

  Though he had come so close so often, as a mortar man with the Tenth Mountain Division in Iraq, he had escaped death every time. He had not been killed in the first day and a half of driving a motorbike in Mexico. So now, once again facing the prospect of death, Jefferson set his mind on the possibility of life. He thought of his desire to live. He thought of the fact that he was on his way to GGM’s very house. The fact that he was still so young, and that he wanted to live. The fact that he had a long list of things he still wanted to do.

  Finally the woman seemed to prepare to whisper in his ear, even as he imagined her directing the assassins with her eyes. She smelled faintly of bergamot, and because Esco had a thing for Earl Grey tea—it cleared the mind and prevented headaches, she said; it was the scent of knowledge—Jefferson took this as a hopeful sign. If only she knew the reason for his journey, he told himself, the bergamot woman might spare him, and he clung to this possibility even as he began to calculate the shuffling steps of five or six men in the circle. It sounded as if they were lining up about ten feet from where he knelt, in perfect firing-squad formation.

  There must have been a lot of nonverbal communication going on; no one had said a word, yet suddenly the group shifted into action. Jefferson was forced to his knees by one man as another tied his hands behind his back and yet another began the process of blindfolding. Before completing his task, this last one must have been distracted, leaving the kerchief down around his neck like a collar. This interested Jefferson; he had actually thought a lot about the blindfold theory. If old photographs and some seemingly realistic historical films were anything to go by, blindfolds seemed to be part of the dress code for firing squads. Still, he failed to understand their purpose. Was it so the man being shot would not witness the bullet’s approach? Was it so the murderers did not have to look into the victim’s eyes? RT had not made members of his platoon use blindfolds.