Out There: a novel

by Sarah Stark

  Over the course of those several days and many hours, driving those Mexican hills and plains, Jefferson whittled away at his hundred favorite quotes so that it was now a compact Forty-One All-Time Best Quotes, at which point it seemed impossible to eliminate a single one. This was the list from which he’d begun creating the collage. Much of the work he did in his head as he drove the Kawasaki, humming and chanting and singing pairs of phrases, moving this phrase in front and that phrase behind until he had what seemed perfect rhythm and syncopation and meaning. Whenever he took a break on the roadside—when he wasn’t climbing trees or practicing a handstand or pruning a bush gone wild—he recorded his progress. Using extra paper he’d brought along and scissors and tape, Jefferson cut out the lines or portions of lines or words and rearranged them on the page.

  Out there. This had to be the starting place, the opening phrase for the collage. It was followed by the line about all that rain—four years and eleven months and some days, in the novel—and that was followed in turn by a radiant Wednesday.

  These three lines worked together in sequence, but he needed some words to connect them, some words to make them take on a larger shape. He did not want to call it poetry, or writing, even. In his mind his work was sculptural. He thought of it as trimming an overgrown branch here and encouraging extra growth there. He thought of it as creating in the tradition of carving wood and trimming trees and pruning bushes, only with paper and words. When he referred to it, it was as his collage, but really it was just a poem. He didn’t call it a poem, though. He’d never really understood poetry, and had always thought that people who talked about this or that poet were just trying to sound smart.

  Jefferson wanted to be able to share the collage with Gabriel once he got to his house, so he had to focus. It needed to be great. It needed to show how much he loved the writer’s words and how they had saved so many lives.

  On the sixth afternoon of his journey, as Jefferson rested under a broad-leafed bush just outside one of those little towns in the lineup to Mexico City, he worked with those three simple lines—the out there line, the one about all that rain, and the one about the radiant Wednesday. He worked to make the lines his own. He struggled with the part about how long the rain had lasted. He’d been in Iraq almost exactly three years, but the truth was, the rain had not stopped the day he came home. If he was honest, he would have to say it was still raining some days. How many years, months, and days was that?

  He added a had and an and then and a brought, and he changed crossed to crossing and went to running, because each of these changes helped create the connections and the flow that made sense to him. Finally, he worked in the line that had haunted him for so long, the one about the trickle of blood running under the door and out the street, until he felt the unit of four lines worked together like a song.

  And then he took a deep breath and connected those four lines with the few additional ones that followed, the ones he’d been working on since he’d left Santa Fe, and he tried it out loud for the first time. He thought of the singing of his collage as a gift to all the birds and the dogs and the donkeys and the children, for all the teachers and painters and contortionists and soldiers and bandits and seamstresses and herbalists and plumbers and massage therapists and tamale makers who might by some small miracle be listening at that moment—any good creature who might reach out and accept a few good words to lighten her load, or perhaps just to help her feel less lonely as she traveled through the day. It went like this:

  Out there.

  It rained for more than three years and many months and two days.

  And then, a radiant Wednesday brought

  A trickle of blood out under the door, crossing the living room, running out into the street.

  My heart’s memory stopped then, replaced by

  A viscous and bitter substance,

  Someone dead under the ground,

  Dark bedrooms, captured towns, a scorpion in the sheets.

  The smell of dry blood,

  The bandages of the wounded,

  All of it a silent storm,

  Me left,

  Out there,

  Dying of hunger and of love.

  Admittedly, it ended on a dark note and was therefore not complete. He had lots of lines left to go. Ultimately, he would overwhelm the darkness with a blast of strong light.

  37

  Jefferson didn’t know if this was a common experience for soldiers, but for him—despite his faith, despite his sense of a higher calling—there had come a day when he knew it was time to go home.

  He was near the end of his second tour, and he’d been thinking of signing up for a third—life in Santa Fe seemed far away and intangible, and besides, he’d begun to think he’d found his calling as a bard of important words among the troops—not a healer or a minister, but a recognizer of helpful words. He had his book, and he knew to expect the unexpected, to expect miracles amidst the loss. Leaving all that seemed the riskiest move he could make, the one most likely to unmoor him.

  He didn’t remember the details of where or when, but he’d been there, and there had been lots of blood, and the brilliant screaming had quickly turned to a somber solitary moan. A heavy weight had preyed upon him, and the air turned quiet and slow and gently percussive. Above him a thin translucent presence hovered. He took this to be the barrier between life and death, which though suffocating was not scary. Jefferson had been this close to the barrier many times, and so far he’d suffered nothing more than a few scratches, and gained the insights of light and wonder.

  On that day Jefferson had seen a human mass flying through the air at him, propelled by some unseen explosive force. The flying body of a soldier—as Jefferson learned later, a guy named Lincoln from Missouri—pinned Jefferson to the ground, thereby becoming a human shield for Jefferson against any further harm. Jefferson had remained under Lincoln’s body as his last blood and breath rushed out.

  And he had pulled together the words that seemed to be swirling about in the air, and he had sung,

  One Friday at two in the afternoon the world lighted up with a crazed carmine sun, as thirsty as brick dust and almost as cool as water.

  Jefferson had gasped to fill his lungs and tried to move his right foot out from under Lincoln’s ankles, searching to gain purchase between the hard earth and the dying body, and he filled his lungs and bellowed in search of hope, singing,

  A sun as thirsty as brick dust, and

  almost as cool as water.

  A sun as thirsty as brick dust, and

  almost as cool as water.

  Jefferson had chanted until the dying Lincoln breathed his last breath, and then he’d been able to slide himself out from under the body to find himself inside a small home of windowless concrete block. The dirt floor had become a great pulsing river of blood. He stood on his own two feet and allowed his eyes to adjust to the darkness, his nose identifying a horrific smoldering, his ears capturing the transition between somber moaning and a symphonic weeping dirge. And then he saw them. The bodies piled up, draped in tragic, grotesque beauty.

  He hadn’t needed to open the book’s cover, even though he stroked it at his chest. He had known precisely the idea called for in that moment. He had sat back down in the dirt and the blood, all quiet, and nestled into the nest of bodies, his arms wrapped around his chest and his chin raised to whoever might be listening in the heavens above, and he had whispered the words inspired by the famous writer who knew exactly what it felt like to go on living in a war-torn world. It rained for many years and many months and many days. It rained. It rained. It rained and rained and rained.

  Later he learned that in addition to Lincoln, five soldiers had died instantaneously in the blast, and five more had suffered injuries that eventually led them to a slower death or lost limbs. It took a long time for help to arrive, for rescue workers to discover Jefferson alive, though he had no memory of the drive back to Anaconda or what must have been a number of people carr
ying all those bodies. Later he thought of it as a blessing, all that waiting time, those hours he had hovered in solitude so near to the barrier between life and death.

  It was dinnertime several days later when Jefferson took the opportunity to stand at the front of the dining hall and offer his tribute to all that loss in the concrete windowless home. Looking back on it, perhaps it had all been too fresh. Perhaps he should have waited a week or more. But he’d felt a need that evening to express his deepest emotions, the intimacy he’d felt with those young men as death approached and overtook them. He’d thought his fellow soldiers would benefit from just the right words, sung in the holiest of spirits.

  He had decided upon a phrase he had recited many times to various members of the Tenth Mountain Division, one of his favorite adaptations. He stood up on the table nearest to him, clapped his hands, and began:

  An explosion ricocheted across the land . . .

  He was drawing out the one-syllable land into multiple syllables in what he felt was an inspired marriage of melody and verse when a soldier from across the room began yelling obscenities as he raced toward the front of the room, toward Jefferson.

  It had taken Jefferson several moments to register the other soldier’s voice, but when he finally stopped his singing, Jefferson saw the guy and heard him say, “Stop with the blood traveling over the curbs and avoiding the friggin’ dining room tables’!”

  It was a soldier who did not know Jefferson’s name but who had observed him several times in the preceding months and who had studied One Hundred Years of Solitude in his freshman English class. The guy’s best friend had been among those killed in the windowless concrete home.

  He stood ten feet from Jefferson and screamed. “What is your problem, man? You think you’re some kind of prophet? You think we want to hear about a pistol shot echoing through the house right now?”

  Jefferson, still standing on the table, was trying to figure if the hostility he was sensing in the guy’s voice was real. Was he angry? Was the guy going to break down and start crying any minute and apologize to Jefferson, explain that he was just stressed out and sad and confused? Jefferson felt certain the guy did not mean that stuff about pretending to be a prophet. Like Jefferson was crazy or something. The guy hadn’t meant that.

  Hadn’t it been a help all this time, his reading of García Márquez’s lifesaving words at just the right time? Hadn’t the other guys realized that Jefferson wasn’t much of a soldier, and that his role as a chanter, a singer, a recognizer of important words was so much more important? Jefferson had assumed the other soldiers knew this about him, that he was sort of like a chaplain but with a different Bible.

  The angry soldier’s words stung him from across the dining room, the closest thing to a mortal injury Jefferson had suffered. He lifted his eyes to stare into the guy’s angry eyes before scanning the faces across the room, searching for at least one person who understood. Up and down the rows of faces he scanned, finding nothing. Nothing but fatigue and sadness and confusion and anger.

  “Sit down, you lunatic!” someone else yelled from across the room.

  “Yeah, shut the fuck up!” came another.

  They might as well have been improvised explosive devices, stinging through the air, killing him anonymously from across the room. He stared at his feet, jumped down to the floor, and found his way out of the building. It was the last time he chanted in the war zone, though his lips continued to move incessantly and to breathe and whisper the words that Jefferson now knew were for his salvation alone.

  Several weeks later, Jefferson flew home to New Mexico after a ten-day stopover at Fort Drum. It was mid-spring 2009. When he arrived in Albuquerque, there were Esco and Nigel, just beyond the security doors with a red balloon.

  38

  He made his way along Autopista 57, through the small towns of Pedro Escobedo, Palmillas, and Tepeji del Río, the December sky snowless and tepid and gray. Midday, early December: he could feel the pulsing capital up ahead. Gabriel was out there somewhere, along with nineteen or twenty or twenty-one million others.

  Once he reached Mexico City, Jefferson planned to make his way to the part of the city in which García Márquez was known to live. He did not have any idea what the neighborhood was called or where it was located within the masses, but he figured that Gabriel was famous, and that he would ask around, like they did in the movies. Where did the rich artistic people live? Where were the bookstores and coffee shops? If it was anything like Santa Fe, the rich artistic people with their bookstores and coffee shops lived right in the middle of things.

  As for his larger fears, Jefferson began to acknowledge the truth: he was not the only young soldier who, having avoided death, had found himself pacing the planet for answers to unknown questions. Answers to the question Why? The fact that García Márquez had been moved to write those scenes in the novel about senseless executions—those firing squads for one man, as well as the massacre of thousands of innocents in the town square—proved to Jefferson that this was not the first time survivors had had to go on living. It also proved that the writer was Jefferson’s dear friend—his hero and his friend, the man who had managed to reach out across the ocean and the sandy plains to scream at Jefferson to live despite the death all around him.

  Jefferson stood up straight in the shaded ground under the poplar tree in the forlorn little plaza of Ciudad Satélite. He clipped a few unruly sprouts from the tree’s otherwise smooth trunk, feeling he’d made a contribution to the overall feel of the place, and he practiced a handstand for several minutes as a tribute to all the good care he had received so far on his journey, for all the specific blessings and, yes, miracles he had been able to witness. It wasn’t about luck, or being in the right place at the right time. What Jefferson knew was that he had somehow been equipped with just the right sort of eyes to see a miracle as it occurred. It was as if he had a special playback function in the back of his eye sockets, somewhere near his brain, that slowed real life down and helped him to see an overlay of very bright light on top of all the darkness. Sometimes the special eye function was joined by an added ear function, something that allowed him to hear a chorus of hallelujahs in his head. There were so many beautiful hallelujah songs in the world, and Jefferson had never heard one that failed to bring him to tears, so when his inner ears began to play hallelujah songs, he thought of it as a unique medley of all those songs that had come before. Usually he found himself humming wordless syllables until he got to the hallelujahs.

  While upside down, he began to hear a beautiful melody and those simple syllables that went along with it, and he closed his eyes and sang.

  Hallelujah!

  Hallelujah!

  Da, da-duh, da-duh, da-duh, da,

  Da, da-duh.

  Hallelujah.

  Ha, lay.

  Loo.

  Yah!

  Ha, lay, ay.

  Looooo.

  Yay!

  Sometimes there were more words, but those were what came today.

  He’d heard that song back behind his eye sockets many times in Iraq when something had exploded nearby. He knew not everyone had these special eye and ear functions, and he was thankful he did. They’d been important along the way, and they were still keeping him going, giving him sustenance. Jefferson wasn’t saying they were permanent, but he hoped he’d continue to have them at least until he made it to Gabriel’s house. They would help him have the courage to fulfill his larger plan, which he knew now was to say thank you.

  Jefferson was in the process of inverting himself, getting his feet back on the ground and allowing the blood to level out within all the parts of his body, when he saw that a group of kids had joined him in the plaza around the base of the little tree. They appeared to range in age from ten to fourteen, and the youngest was missing several teeth and a leg.

  “Where did you come from, guy?” the little one-legged one asked in clear English out of his dirty little mouth, his weight leaning
into a single crutch.

  “Yeah, guy. Where you from?” said another.

  Because Jefferson had, in effect, just been musing on this question himself, he had a ready answer for the scruffy and truant and bright-eyed kids, who seemed more curious than threatening. Their question seemed, if nothing else, fair. Here he was, standing in their territory, considering their great capital city.

  Who was he and where had he come from?

  “Out there,” Jefferson said then, and allowed his eyes and arms to travel in a broad arc, indicating the whole of the universe. “I’ve come . . . from . . . out there.” He repeated it because it was true, and in the moment he felt the weight of his young audience. He was returning from his time as a soldier out in the world. It was less important that he had been a member of a particular army on soil known as Iraq, and more important that he’d journeyed to the birthplace of human civilization and witnessed great loss. Much like Colonel Aureliano Buendía, who had left home for many years, Jefferson was a man trying to find his way back. Trying to find his way back to the world as he had known it before war.

  Out there was where he’d been.

  The kids shuffled a bit in their dirty shoes and scanned him from his black hair down to his beaded high-tops. The answer did not satisfy them, it seemed, and with their eyes they tried to ascertain more.

  “Are you an American?” an older boy on a purple bike asked. And then, continuing as if he already knew the answer, “Are you a sucky American or a nice one?”

  Jefferson laughed at the fairness of this question and at its humor. It traveled through his ears to his throat and down beyond his chest, where it burrowed into his rib cage and waited, musing and festering and insisting on a response.

  A few quiet minutes passed as Jefferson stared southward toward Mexico City, dreaming of all that still lay ahead. The daydream gave him the voice and courage to say the words that followed, the best answer he could muster for these kids, the answer he believed was as close to the truth as any he could imagine.