by C. E. Smith
‘I brought some of Owen’s things,’ Lorie says, placing a wrinkled paper bag on the table.
Burkett glances inside: a stethoscope, sunglasses, a pharmacopeia, two novels, a deck of cards, and a photo album. A picture in a frame: the two of them in the days of college wrestling. It’s getting to the point that he might need another suitcase for his brother’s effects.
‘Did he not have a phone?’ Burkett asks. ‘Or a laptop?’
‘Taken,’ Nick says. ‘Along with the car he was driving.’
‘He used to wear a Celtic-style ring on his index finger. It had an inscription inside.’
‘I remember it. It must have been stolen as well.’
‘I never thought of Islamic militants as thieves.’
Nick’s gaze lingers on Burkett’s teacup. Perhaps he’s a teetotaler like Owen. Bourbon could easily pass for tea, especially in this dim light, but the cup seems to make Nick uncomfortable. Perhaps he fears someone might see it and mistake him for a drinker. Burkett pulls it closer to himself.
‘How was your flight?’ Nick says. ‘You came through Frankfurt, right?’
‘And New York before that,’ Burkett says. ‘I got in yesterday.’
Nick speaks to the waiter in Arabic. Burkett finds this impressive, but Nick insists that anyone would know a language after ten years. Besides, the dialect isn’t much use anywhere else.
‘Ten years is a long time,’ Burkett says.
‘We love it here,’ he replies with a shrug. ‘This is our home now.’
He and his wife Beth hadn’t planned on staying this long. It was meant to be a one-month trip, a temporary medical clinic, but they decided to stay.
‘The Lord wanted us here.’
These words are jarring to Burkett. It’s the kind of language he might expect from his brother’s journal, but not in conversation with a stranger. Could this be the way he spoke with Owen? They were close friends, after all. Perhaps Nick has to remind himself, moment to moment, that this man with Owen’s face is in fact someone else.
Nick looks at the duffels as if noticing them for the first time.
‘Supplies for the clinic,’ Burkett says. ‘Antibiotics, mosquito netting – some of the things Owen said you needed.’
He’d carried the drugs for months in the trunk of his car, planning to send them to his brother by mail. They were given to him by a sales representative from the pharmaceutical company, a woman he used to sleep with. The mosquito netting he bought the day before his flight at an army surplus store.
‘We’re always in need,’ Nick says. ‘I can’t thank you enough.’
‘I’m happy to send more,’ he says.
‘Why don’t you stay on and work with us?’ Nick says, and off Burkett’s smile adds, ‘I’m serious. We pay for a mobile operating room twice a week, but without Owen it’s sitting empty. If you had the slightest inclination . . .’
‘I don’t share my brother’s religious convictions,’ Burkett says.
‘You’d be working as a surgeon, not a missionary. International Medical Outreach would pay you a stipend, along with your travel expenses. You’d have free room and board.’
‘After what happened to Owen . . .’
‘Look, it’s obviously dangerous, but Owen – that was a fluke.’
‘Aren’t you worried about the political situation?’
‘If things get hairy, my friend Mark Rich, an American army officer, has guaranteed seats for us on the first helicopter out.’
‘I didn’t think there were American troops here.’
‘He’s an advisor for Djohar’s drone program,’ Nick says.
Burkett shakes his head, smiling to soften what he says next: ‘I could never live in this place.’
‘I can’t begin to describe the difference you’d make.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he says.
But there’s a certain appeal in the idea of walking away from his life in the States: his medical school debt, the latest drunk-driving conviction, and his embarrassing dismissal from the fellowship program at Emory. Would it even be possible? He can’t help but wonder if the clinic stocks benzodiazepines. He could stretch the supply in his shaving kit two weeks. He has an arrangement with another physician in Atlanta, a kind of prescription exchange, but that wouldn’t do him much good overseas. How long would he stay? A month, a year? But the question is moot: he’s already signed a contract with a surgical practice in Atlanta.
‘Let me show you the clinic,’ Nick says, opening his laptop. He uses Burkett’s room number to access the hotel’s wireless service. He pulls up the IMO website and clicks past the memorial to Owen – the short biography that neither confirms nor denies the real nature of his work here – to a map that fills his screen: an island shaped like a dagger, with its blade-like flatlands to the north, and the southern half whose mountainous topography suggests the nubs of a grip. He zooms in on the north, prompting an overlay of colored roads and labeled towns.
‘Here’s Mejidi-al-Alam,’ he says, pointing and then expanding the image till the scant buildings and roads are visible as tiny squares and lines. Colored graphics highlight a cluster of buildings, the medical clinic.
‘How far are you from the coast?’ Burkett asks.
‘About an hour’s drive.’
He shakes his head. It seems fitting that his brother would travel halfway around the world only to deny himself an ocean view.
A couple sits down at the next table – an Arab in western garb, and a white woman who speaks English with a French accent. He gathers from their tone that they’re colleagues. A purely professional relationship, he thinks, as he steals another glance at the woman. From the Arab’s camera bag, Burkett decides they must be journalists.
Nick magnifies the vicinity of the clinic. He points out the nearby military outpost, separated from the clinic by a tributary of some kind.
‘Show me where they found him,’ Burkett says.
The cartoon hand follows an unnamed road till there is nothing on the map except for the road. And when Nick switches to the satellite view, the background wrinkles into a brownish landscape of rock and shadow. The last thing Owen saw must have been stone and sand. Some desert hell.
‘He was on his way home,’ Nick says.
‘Was he set up?’ Burkett says. ‘Was it the patient he visited?’
Nick doesn’t know much more than Burkett – only what he’s gleaned from the newspaper accounts. The national police have repeatedly emphasized their commitment to the case by specifying the number of officers involved at each stage: three interviewed Owen’s last patient, ten scoured the scene for clues.
What kind of clues? What would a clue possibly signify? He pictures some functionary crawling around with a magnifying glass. What are the odds of an arrest or punishment? The culprits are known already – they’ve taken credit, claimed responsibility. Heroes of Jihad, they call themselves. Does it even matter which of them pulled the trigger? Of course Burkett would like to find him. He’s probably young, educated in some madrassa, if at all.
When he gets back to his room, he empties the brown paper bag on the bed. The deck of cards, creased and dogeared, is held together by a rubber band. He should have recognized it sooner, what with the swimsuit models on the backs of the cards. He flips to the ten of hearts, the one they liked best, the one they called Lydia – a beautiful brunette with her back to the camera, her face in profile. The inflated 1980s hairstyle dates the picture as much as the sepia tint. At Penn State, Burkett and his brother used these cards to guide their push-ups. They would shuffle the deck and work their way through, counting the face cards and aces as twenty each.
The framed photograph shows the two of them at the NCAA wrestling tournament – Owen’s arm in a sling, the first-place medal dangling from his neck. Burkett’s expression in the picture conceals his own anger at no
t placing. How he’d hated his brother that night – not just for winning, but for the injury, which only enhanced his glory. Why would Owen have kept this particular photograph? Perhaps it summarizes their relationship: Owen with the championship medal, Burkett with nothing but bitterness. He rubs his thumb against the glass, as if to palpate a barrier he imagines between the two wrestlers.
Still annoyed by the confiscation of his bourbon, Burkett negotiates with the concierge for another bottle from the hotel’s stock. The concierge demands fifty dollars – added expense to cover the risk of losing his job or running afoul of the Ministry of Vice. Burkett takes out his wallet. At this rate, his supply of cash won’t last the weekend.
‘If you like,’ says the concierge, ‘I can give you something stronger.’
He conducts Burkett through a large kitchen, down a back stairwell and into the basement. The man looks both ways before unlocking a closet and pulling the cord inside to light a bare bulb. He kneels and slides out a cooler and opens the lid to reveal stacks of clear plastic bottles. He glances up at Burkett.
‘Siddique, my friend.’
‘How do I know this won’t make me blind?’
‘Please,’ he says, ‘this is the highest quality.’
To prove it he unscrews one of the caps and sips. He winces at the taste.
‘See, no problem.’
‘How much?’
‘For you, ten dollars per bottle.’
‘I’ll take five,’ he says. ‘And the bottle of bourbon, too.’
Back in his room he tastes the siddique – a burning pleasure, but without the sweetness of bourbon. A useful substitute, he thinks, for drinking when already drunk, when his taste buds are numb. He unscrews the new bottle of bourbon and fills his two flasks, catching the run-off in a plastic cup. He takes two Xanax and lies down with the cup and bottle.
He wonders if he has grieved enough for his brother. Does he owe it to him to shed tears? If there were some kind of duty to grieve, surely Burkett would fall short of the obligation. What he feels more than grief is guilt for his grief’s inadequacy.
Another pill to help him sleep, to help him stop thinking like this. Perhaps this is the very character of grief, that it can’t be separated from its shadow, that the aggrieved must also ponder the idea of grief. How much simpler grief would be if left alone – if he could experience it without thinking about it. Are other emotions like this? Does happiness demand an account of itself?
He calls it grief, but grief was what he felt as a boy of ten when his mother died. His brother has left him with an emptiness – a piece of himself gone. No, not a piece. This is not the same as an amputated limb. The loss is more diffuse, more complete, but at the same time more subtle. As if the absence represented a tiny portion not of himself but of every cell, every atom in his body.
‘Owen.’ He mumbles the name as if speaking directly to his brother – as if his brother were a casual presence here in the room. But the name seems out of place – like a familiar word in the wrong context. Names are words whose meanings can suddenly change. It was rare that he and his brother actually called each other by name. He turns on the bedside lamp and opens his brother’s notepad to a random page. The jagged, minuscule handwriting is so similar to his own – perhaps indistinguishable. The medical notes could easily have been written by either of them, but then there are the strange religious jottings:
For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a short time and then vanishes away.
Probably a Bible verse, it brings to mind yet again the question of an afterlife. Beliefs that came so easily as a child now seem absurd.
He thinks of that quirk of physics, where particles once linked but now separated continue acting as though linked no matter the distance between them. Strange interaction at a distance. What is the distance between him and his brother? If one particle is annihilated, shouldn’t the other one be annihilated as well?
There is no afterlife, he tells himself, as much as he might wish otherwise. But if a single particle can exist in two places at once, or if two can be linked across any distance, then perhaps life and death represent flickering states in a more permanent scheme. Perhaps somewhere else, in some kind of parallel universe, it is Burkett rather than his brother who is dead.
The body lies in a cardboard box and wears a white gown provided by the morgue. A Catholic priest lends an element of religious formality, but it’s Nick Lorie who prays and utters words of remembrance. Burkett and his brother were brought up Catholic – non-practicing, as they liked to say. The family’s religious affiliation only seemed to have relevance on holidays.
The way Burkett remembers it, he and his brother were alike in every way till Owen’s religious conversion. They were fifteen, at a Christian sports camp. Burkett was amazed when his brother responded to the altar call. Had they not heard the exact same sermon? Did they not have the same DNA, almost identical brains? God, if he existed, seemed to have chosen one brother over the other. How could his brother believe in a God who would make such a distinction?
He sees the conversion as the beginning of their separation – and also when Owen first chose the path that would culminate in his own death. If Owen had ignored that altar call perhaps the two of them would have ended up doing residency together and joining the same practice.
Burkett’s anger is large enough for Muslims and Christians alike. The pastor at the sports camp, Nick Lorie, and any other Christian who inspired Owen to risk his life. He could write a treatise on the evils of religion.
‘We thank you,’ Lorie says, ‘for the promise of eternal peace. Amen.’
The priest makes the sign of the cross. The orderly covers the box and pushes it on rollers into a stone furnace and bolts the cast iron door.
Burkett waits while the body burns. There is no smoke from the grate, no odor of burning flesh. The only evidence of fire is the heat radiating from the furnace. A barrier seems to surround him, a barrier composed of nothing but heat. He is cut off from the others, sealed in a thermal pocket all his own. They are separated from him by only a few feet, but it could be miles.
For the remains he’s given a cylindrical plastic container with a screw-on cap. Like Tupperware, he thinks, as he scoops ashes and bits of bone from the furnace. He wishes he’d thought to bring some kind of urn.
The wood-handled garden shovel seems clean enough, but he can’t help wondering how often it has been used for this very purpose. Are his brother’s ashes mingling with those of others? Does it even matter? He can taste the floating dust as he fills the container. The orderly is no doubt breathing it as well. To collect the last of it, the orderly produces a small broom and dustpan.
3
Burkett takes a shower and puts on fresh clothes and goes down to the bistro for another drink. He has no good reason for bringing his brother’s ashes with him. It just seems like a bad idea to leave them unattended. What if a housekeeper poured them down the drain? He sets the canister on the table and lifts his teacup. My brother the martyr.
He listens to the only other customers, a group of older men, Germans and Italians as far as he can tell, but speaking English. They are probably journalists. He counts six empty wine bottles, one for each man. He is sitting on the opposite side of the room, but they speak loud enough for him to hear.
‘Djohar is right,’ an Italian says, jabbing his smokeless pipe in the imagined direction of the Khandarian president. ‘Why should terrorists be appeased with a country of their own?’
The man beside him nods. ‘My question is this: if you give it to them, who can guarantee that the bombings would even stop?’
‘You rebuild the Khandarian Wall,’ says one of the Germans, his sarcasm clear despite the thick accent. ‘Simple, no problem.’
‘I agree, this is ridiculous,’ says the man with the pipe. ‘The separatists in parliament are al
ways talking about the wall but none of them have any idea how to pay for it.’
The French woman he saw before enters the bistro and removes her coat. She wears a headscarf, but her sleeveless blouse and knee-length skirt are wildly audacious by local standards. The journalists, suddenly silent, acknowledge her with glances or outright stares. She takes a seat at a table near Burkett. She meets his eyes, quickly looks away, and after a moment looks again. It is the second glance that justifies his approach.
He senses malevolence in the journalists’ refusal to look at him. He resists gloating. After all, he’s the youngest man here by at least twenty years. He might look old for his age, now thirty-four, but he’s a picture of youth next to them.
The circumstances aren’t well suited to his usual strategy of sitting next to a woman without speaking.
‘Mind if I sit here?’
With her foot she slides out the closest chair. He sits down and places the canister of ashes in the chair beside him.
She asks, ‘Do you always bring Tupperware when you drink?’
‘Only on special occasions.’
‘Is this a special occasion?’
‘Maybe,’ he says. ‘Ask me again in ten minutes.’
It is the sort of idiotic banter he only uses with women in bars. Tonight he is more conscious of it, almost wincingly so, perhaps because of the presence of Owen. He can see his brother shaking his head and rolling his eyes – his brother who as far as he knows never drank a sip of alcohol, much less seduced a woman in a bar.
Does this actually work for you? Owen is asking. How can anyone take you seriously?
Véronique is her name. A journalist in her mid-thirties, she’s covered militant Islamic groups for more than a decade. It turns out she’s heard about what happened to Owen. She has a particular interest in the Heroes of Jihad, whom she sees as much more of a threat than the typical fanatics. It is because of the Heroes and their organized campaign of bombings that the public and many in parliament are seriously considering a referendum on the secession of South Khandaros.