The Effort

by Claire Holroyde

  Welcome.

  The Humvee crept past the checkpoint’s sliding metal gate and barbed wire after the soldier waved them through. It was a short drive to the nearest building, which had a sign that read SÉCURITÉ. The peacekeeper riding in the passenger seat turned around.

  “Sorry,” he said, pointing to the crumpled-up poncho. “You’ll need that today.”

  But Love had already taken a step outside. Getting soaked was no trouble if it allowed her to escape cramped quarters. Rubbing warm rain over her shaved scalp, Love hoped for a shower and a clean toilet at the end of this long journey. She shouldered her duffel bag and pulled her rolling suitcase along the flooded asphalt. Six gendarme soldiers stood by the front exterior of the security building with their helmets dripping. Two peeled away to escort Love into the building. A woman wearing a suit was waiting just inside.

  “Welcome. I’m Marielena Acosta with the United Nations,” she said, with the same accented English as the peacekeepers. “We’ve been expecting you.”

  Love introduced herself with a perfectly casual, flat, and nasal American accent.

  “From New York City,” she added, standing very tall and very wet.

  Acosta removed her tailored blazer and offered it as a towel. Love told her the clothing was too nice to wrinkle, but Acosta reached up to gently pat Love’s wet cheeks. The gesture was tender, but there was no forgoing procedure.

  “Please empty your pockets,” Acosta said, pointing to a nearby plastic bin.

  Love did as she was told. When the soldiers unzipped her luggage and carefully inspected all her things, she gave them the stink eye.

  “Is this all necessary?”

  Acosta plucked Love’s cellphone out of the bin, dropped it into a Ziploc bag, and handed it to one of eight workers seated with laptops.

  “Hey, I need that!”

  “Sorry,” Acosta said. “But the Effort will require your full focus.”

  “Then how am I supposed to let someone know I’m safe?”

  Acosta shook her head, no answer for her question, and beckoned Love to follow her toward a long desk against the back wall. Love insisted on dragging her luggage along.

  “Look up, please.”

  Love heard a click and saw a printer spit out her photo. Acosta slid it into a plastic holder at the end of a lanyard she placed over Love’s bowed head. Acosta instructed her to wear the security badge at all times. As an interpreter, Love had general access to the premises but was only allowed into cleanrooms, labs, and hangars when accompanying an engineer.

  “I thought it was a terrorist attack,” Love muttered, inspecting her new security badge.

  “Pardon?”

  “You know, when I got an urgent call from the UN’s New York headquarters, I thought Al-Shabaab had gone and beheaded an American journalist or aid worker, or something.”

  It was the explanation that made the most sense: Love spoke all the Kenyan regional dialects, she had no living relatives in the country to endanger, and there was leverage with Love’s request for American citizenship hanging in the balance.

  “I thought I had it all figured out until they told me there was a natural disaster coming, something unexpected,” Love said. She laughed with her white teeth and their front gap bared.

  It was only on the flight to French Guiana that Love was finally briefed in full.

  “They got the ‘unexpected’ part right. I mean, a comet, of all things…”

  Love rubbed her dry and heavy eyes. It had been thirty-two hours since she was awakened in the middle of the night with a summons.

  “Were you able to sleep on the plane?” Acosta asked.

  Love shook her head. She couldn’t understand how anyone could sleep in a crowd of people, so exposed and defenseless.

  “My colleague can take you to camp if you must sleep,” Acosta said with visible disappointment. “You’ll have four hours of rest before he takes you to Janus.”

  Love didn’t bother to ask what or who Janus was. No one explained anything. Acosta pulled a large plastic bag out from behind her desk and handed it to Love.

  “Your Effort kit,” she said, already hustling Love out the back door. “Please review the materials as soon as possible.”

  The UN civilian personnel from Love’s flight had arrived for processing. One by one, they filed into the security building and emptied their pockets.

  “Should you need anything,” Acosta added, “don’t hesitate to ask. You’ll find my business card in your kit.”

  She held open the door to the exit with the parting words, “Welcome to the Effort.”

  To Love’s dismay, there was a Humvee parked in the back lot ready to take her on yet another leg of the journey. A small man in a trench coat emerged from the passenger side and introduced himself as Bradley without clarifying if it was his first or last name. Love quickly surmised that he was an American but not a New Yorker.

  “You’re not from headquarters.”

  “Washington, DC,” he said, scrambling to open an umbrella. “Georgetown alum.”

  He grabbed the handle of Love’s rolling suitcase. Love lunged and pulled against his grasp. It was instinct, but she didn’t let go.

  “Thank you, but I handle my own bags,” Love said firmly.

  Bradley was too taken aback to reply. On closer look, the man wasn’t as young as he first appeared; just short and stout with a close-cropped haircut that made his big ears look bigger. As they walked to the Humvee, Bradley sheltered Love with his own umbrella. She didn’t have the heart to refuse his help a second time.

  In the passenger seat, Bradley paused to listen to his earpiece.

  “We’re taking you to the engineers’ camp?” he asked.

  Love nodded and said that she needed sleep. Bradley’s mouth grew pinched, but he nodded to their driver. As the Humvee accelerated, Love inspected the contents of her Effort kit. Pawing through, she saw a glossy folder thick with documents, a digital watch, a box of antimalarial tablets, a protein bar, a bottle of spring water, and a hygiene kit.

  Love pulled out the folder and started reading documents, but she nearly fell asleep. Instead, she opened her window and leaned her face into the wind and rain. Blinking rapidly, Love saw a huge museum styled to look futuristic only in the eyes of architects from the past. The effect was clunky and kitschy. Love’s Humvee pulled up to the front entryway, and Bradley darted out to open her passenger door.

  “The engineers are camped out in a space museum?” Love asked.

  Bradley sounded defensive when he told her that it was a logical space with perfect proximity. Love followed him across a concrete walkway and under a large overhang that was spilling rain. The two doorways on either side of the ticket office had been repurposed into a security checkpoint.

  “Can I borrow four euro for a ticket?” Love asked.

  Bradley ignored both her joke and the soldiers manning the office. They ignored him in return but eyed Love carefully as she rolled her suitcase inside. The museum’s air-conditioning puckered her wet, shiny skin. Bradley disappeared into the gift shop entrance and returned with a towel and rolled-up sleeping bag.

  “The gift shop now stores dry goods,” he explained, handing her the towel, “and medication. Are you taking any?”

  Love shook her head but nodded gratefully at the towel. She was shivering.

  “May I at least carry a sleeping bag for you?” Bradley asked.

  There was no edge of sarcasm that she could detect, but it wouldn’t have mattered. Love would not apologize for who or how she was. It drove Rivka mad with frustration.

  Bradley led her across the lobby and through an entrance to a vast and cavernous exhibit hall. The smell of human bodies was unmistakable despite the industrial fans that could be heard, if not always seen, against black walls. Back-lit displays were turned off, but small lights running along the floors, stairways, and balcony railings illuminated a floor cluttered with suitcases, sleeping bags, and horizontal bodies. Love ba
rely made out silhouettes of mockup satellites suspended from the forty-foot ceiling with their planar extensions and gold-foil bodies.

  “I gotta be dreaming,” she said softly. “This has to be a nightmare that will end by morning.”

  Bradley touched his index finger to his lips with respect for the sleepers. Then he whispered back, “You won’t be the first to wonder. Or the last.”

  He pointed ahead. Love squinted and saw a man sleeping with a piece of fabric draped over his eyes, a black dress sock. To his right was a clear space on the floor where Love’s body and bags might fit.

  “No,” Love insisted. “This won’t work.”

  Bradley tried to shush her, but she only raised her voice.

  “I need a room with a lock.”

  A nearby body pulled up and out of a sleeping bag, a shapely female body. The young woman stepped lightly around luggage and limbs while lifting her arms to yawn. Love watched her T-shirt lift to expose a taut stomach with a delicate, whorled dimple at its center.

  “Who’s that?” Love whispered.

  “Amy,” Bradley grunted. “The girlfriend.”

  Love appraised “the girlfriend” as she sauntered over: early thirties, Caucasian, attractive, and self-aware with movements that carried the grace and calculation of a gray-eyed lioness. Amy was less subtle in her own appraisal of Love, who kept her cool and stood her ground.

  “You don’t exactly blend in,” Amy said with a wide smile.

  Before anyone could be left to wonder, she nodded to bureaucratic Bradley and added, “That’s a compliment.”

  Amy licked her fingers and used them to smooth the part in her ice blond hair.

  “So, your whole look,” she said. “What is it? Like, Afrofuturist?”

  Love shrugged.

  “So cool,” Amy gushed.

  Love couldn’t help smiling. She was an adjunct professor at Columbia University, where she had a devoted fan club of undergraduates—or so Rivka always claimed. Love supposed it was true.

  “There’s a broom closet, or whatever, on the second floor,” Amy continued. “It’s locked now, so you just need Bradley here to go find a key.”

  Here she leveled her gaze at the short man while still speaking to Love.

  “Because if you weren’t important, you wouldn’t be here.”

  Bradley tried to pointedly stare back, implying Amy was a glaring exception to that rule, but the young woman was already headed for a glowing exit sign. When Amy glanced back and caught Love staring, she winked.

  SEVEN

  Fortune-Teller

  exactly four hours later

  BRADLEY HAD TO knock and then bang on the door of the locked utility closet to wake Love. She had no idea if it was still day or night without her phone. Love continued to burrow into her sleeping bag cocoon until Bradley could entice her with a hot shower.

  The dress code for UN interpreters was business professional with no flags or crests from one’s homeland. Love removed all her jewelry and pulled on a short-sleeved blouse, skirt, and ballet flats but also draped a cotton scarf around her neck and shoulders: a royal blue, black, tan, and canary yellow repeating pattern she bought from a Nairobi market on the few occasions she could afford the airline tickets back to Kenya.

  Love left her luggage in the utility closet and relocked it. Bradley was on the verge of impatience, but as she moved closer, he must have noticed that Love’s nose was slightly skewed from a past fracture. The sandpaper pattern of her shaved scalp was interrupted with keloid scars, and one of her dark pupils was permanently dilated. His mouth shut with a snap.

  Bradley would never know what it was like to be a single woman, an orphan defending herself for thirty-seven years, sometimes keeping a large piece of herself secret—but he could see the body of evidence: her body. As for Love, it was easier to pretend she was an undamaged person with a spotless past, a rooted person living among family, someone who belonged. When Love concentrated, she could speak American English with all its slang like a true native. It made her pretending all the more believable.

  Bradley led Love outside to the museum’s water-logged parking lot. In drizzle and dusky twilight, Love saw queues of people waiting for heated showers inside parked Red Cross vans. Bradley complained that they were wasting precious time, but Love said that Dr. Benjamin Schwartz and Professor Ochsenfeld (whoever the hell they were) could wait. Bradley finally pulled rank and waved her to the front of a line.

  Love emerged from a van fifteen minutes later, still bleary-eyed and exhausted but clean, at least. Amy stood waiting with breakfast from the museum’s cafeteria.

  “Don’t worry,” she said with a sideways smile. “I got rid of Bradley.”

  Love gladly accepted a paper cup of steaming hot coffee.

  “I didn’t know how you take it,” Amy added, and handed her a brown paper bag. “Next to the muffin, there’s sweeteners and creamers. They didn’t have soymilk. Are you lactose intolerant?”

  Love snorted a laugh. How charming to be mistaken for the picky bourgeoisie. It was a credit to her pretending.

  “Your CV is very exciting,” Amy said. “You’ve worked with the UN all over the world.”

  In Love’s experience, excitement was an appetite for the rich, free world. Stability was the luxury she craved.

  “I’ve stopped working as an interpreter,” Love replied, “for the most part.”

  She taught at Columbia’s Institute for Comparative Literature and Society and freelanced on the side, providing literary translation for the big publishing houses.

  “I only continue to work with the UN on an emergency basis,” Love explained. “This is an emergency—”

  “This is the emergency,” Amy corrected, suddenly sober.

  The two women reached an idling jeep on the perimeter of the parking lot. Instead of joining the driver in the front, Amy sat with Love in the back. Love tried to eat her blueberry muffin while returning the other woman’s flattering attention. It was unnerving to have a total stranger know so much about her.

  “And you are…someone’s girlfriend?” Love asked.

  “Who said that? Bradley?” Amy asked, curling her thin lip. “Look, as a self-made woman, I’ve had my share of haters that hate. I’ve learned to ignore them and let my results speak for themselves.”

  After Love nodded in understanding, Amy took the opportunity to pitch.

  “I’ve always understood the value of human capital, but it wasn’t until I became a tech recruiter that I really found my professional calling.”

  Amy described her placements with top tech firms—Google, Lyft, Slack, Automattic—and the aerospace industry—Boeing and Raytheon. Love nodded here and there, sucking sweet muffin paste from her back molars. The jeep turned around the familiar roundabout (Welcome!) and continued along the manned security gates. Love muttered that, for once, the UN response had been quick in sending thousands of peacekeepers.

  “Oh, this was a Brazilian mission stationed in Haiti,” Amy said, dismissing their numbers with a wave of fashionable blue nail polish. “They’re nothing next to what’s already mobilized. The Professor has a lot of clout.”

  “That’s who I’m supposed to meet,” Love interjected. “Who is he? The Professor?”

  Amy was more than happy to prove her research and said the Professor was an academic who had published preeminent work in the field of astrophysics while mentoring younger generations of theorists, engineers, and astronauts for the past sixty years.

  “And Ben, well, he warned everyone about all this,” she said, gesturing up beyond the jeep’s ceiling to hints of stars growing brighter as the sky grew darker.

  Their driver spoke into his headset to clear them past the security checkpoint. He drove to a cluster of large administration buildings and parked in front of the one labeled Janus. Love hopped out as a military jet streaked low in the sky overhead. Amy reached for the front door of the Janus building and held it open. As soon as it shut behind both women—th
e first time Love could catch any of these Effort people alone—she rounded in front of Amy and got in her face.

  “Where’s it gonna hit?”

  Amy stuttered. Her cheeks and ears flushed. When Amy stepped back, Love stepped forward and continued her interrogation.

  “The comet. Where’s it gonna hit us?”

  “We don’t know if or where,” Amy said, jutting her pointy chin upward. “We don’t have an accurate trajectory, just approximations.”

  Their faces were less than six inches apart; bodies almost touching.

  “We just know it’s big and fast,” Amy said.

  Love heard a noise, a sharp rap of a cane followed by the soft drag of orthopedic shoes. Someone was slowly approaching from the corridor. As Love turned, Amy ducked out of reach and sprinted down the corridor out of sight. She reemerged, grinning and arm-in-arm with a very old man. It was as if she and Love were playing a game of tag and Amy had narrowly escaped to safe base.

  “Love Mwangi!” the ancient called out, after catching his raspy breath.

  If his voice were a wine, it would carry notes of both Central and Western Europe aged in several decades of tobacco smoke. The man made no moves to introduce himself but could be none other than the Professor.

  “Renowned translator, interpreter, and polyglot,” he marveled, disentangling his arm from Amy’s so he could wave Love closer. “We’ll soon be in desperate need of your linguistic talents.”

  Not only did the Professor move like a tortoise, but he seemed to embody one as well. Small and stooped, his neck had to extend out and up toward her height, pulling on its pendulous flap of skin. Love, on the other hand, stood straight and proud with ropy muscle and taut skin. Her long neck, sharp jaw, sculpted lips, high cheekbones, broad forehead, and slightly flared nostrils gave her a regal bearing.

  They inspected one another with the curiosity of opposites.

  “Love,” the Professor repeated. “I couldn’t forget a name like that. Not even in my decrepitude.”

  The nuns at Love’s orphanage fed her, clothed her, and gave her a formal education. They taught her their languages and lent her their books. Those strict but decent and devoted women instilled the idea of purpose very early, a purpose outside of marriage and childbirth. This purpose had a name: Love.