Strawberry Fields

by Hilary Plum

  What do you want to know? the writer had asked me. We stood, not sobering, at the end of a pier, insipid guitar accompanying us from the surf-and-turf place one pier over. The noise drowned out the night birds and the sea pulsed against the barnacled pilings. No, that was later, we’d driven back to his cabin, inland by a lake—it’s too light here, he’d said, looking around at the harbor. Let’s go to the lake. We sat in his yard, grass damp through my skirt. There were so many stars. These could have been constellations. What do you want to know?

  Fish leaped and I listened. Across the lake for no occasion a firework detonated, a green whistle that briefly arched. That’s the sort of thing that interests me, he was saying, and it was then that I realized I hadn’t been listening. The crickets had reached a crescendo and though a military base was near we’d neither seen nor heard a single plane.

  Just wait, he was saying.

  I lay back in the grass.

  Alice

  I was sitting on the floor, laptop on lap, starting a new paragraph, when I received a text from Modigliani. At Xenith’s new border outpost, he wrote, wish you were here. Modigliani, who had neither called nor presented himself in weeks, and who when I saw him at a final press conference on the unsolved murders looked at me distantly, heavy eyebrows shifting once. Accusation or reprimand, as this note was: he had said nothing about the outpost nor told me he was going.

  Top 10 places to see before I die, I wrote back, and turned my phone to silent. I opened my file on Xenith.

  The new Xenith operation made its home in a charming southwestern hippy city an hour north of the border. Just the sort of town you’d think might protest the arrival of a private military contractor, but there had been little press about it, and although one-third of the state’s residents were Spanish-speaking its anti-immigration policies had become the most draconian in the nation. Xenith had been hired as supplemental border control, not federal, not state, not vigilante, none or all of the above. It was a pilot project, and if it proved successful here other units might be deployed all along the border, augmenting government efforts with their highly trained precision forces, etc. There’d been ripples upon the news getting out, a manageable outcry, ahead it went. Xenith’s own statement, which was hard to find, buried in a dull wasteland of PDFs on their website, noted that last year alone an estimated 400 people died attempting to make the crossing. Xenith is joining the effort to halt this dangerous and illegal practice, which threatens national security and American jobs, as well as the very lives of those who attempt this crime.

  This I texted verbatim to Modigliani, selecting the right emojis.

  A few months back twentysome border patrol agents had caught a man crossing illegally and tasered him on the street until his heart stopped. Passersby recorded everything on cell phones, pausing to delete their saved videos and free up memory. The man was hogtied, unarmed, father of five citizens.

  Of our five victims, I could still confirm only that Sergei and Jonathan had joined Xenith. Kareem, Diana, Frances—records established they’d spoken with Xenith employees, recruiters, more than once, but I had no payments, no contracts, no firm plans. Yet there were gaps in each record.

  Why? I asked each in turn, their faces blurring. The money. The only job they knew. Kareem, I said, why you, Kareem? But why did I hope differently for him—because we had once read of the same atrocity? What did he think would have prevented the death of Farzad Ahmad Muhammad? What did he think one could learn from a death?

  There were other PMCs they could have joined, PMCs with different records. In Iraq the three murdered journalists were only the first incident. The second got Xenith kicked out of the country. Unprovoked Xenith men opened fire on a traffic circle: seventeen civilians dead.

  But now, I thought, sign with them and you could work stateside. A step behind or ahead of border patrol, maybe of ICE. Visit the dreams of the children of the undocumented.

  On the outskirts of the city, the story could begin. A newcomer has staked his claim—pathetic. I didn’t even know what the Xenith office looked like. The second story of some adobe storefront, the other tenants lawyers and marriage counselors? Down the street the market would assemble once a week, turquoise jewelry, tie-dye as you saw it nowhere anymore, a stationary bike you could ride to blend your own smoothie, handmade leather wallets, tamales, solar energy pamphlets, sandalwood beads, every kind of incense. Xenith men would stroll through like anyone, amid tan women and tart fresh lemonade, babies in strollers wearing baby straw hats. They’d drive south through the desert to work, not to the closest crossing, wretched with tourists and children clamoring to sell any and everything, but out where no one lived and coyotes led groups across at night, people growing thirstier, some bearing drugs, paying whatever price. The Xenith men must have trained: imagine them, departing the flat plateau of the city for the mountains on each horizon, the red-tinged sand too vivid to picture, the rocks like no rocks you know, everywhere cactuses flowering. They’d move swift and silent through the landscape, hills and rock outcrops their cover. In the open desert, where every animal’s rustle or night call rang out, it would be harder to hide but easier to spot the small band of those whom they pursued. I see them, Sergei and Jonathan, flitting across the expanse, whatever sort of camo might suit in those gaudy hills, and on a further crest stands Modigliani. He knows their tactics, their weapons. He smells of sunscreen and keeps his bandana damp. He calls to them, he knows them by name. Or he watches from a distance, unacknowledged, unseen. When he looks back over his shoulder he’s not looking for me.

  I would keep writing each story, though I could almost see where I had gone wrong. I’d thought of the dead more than the killers. The two whose faces I had never known and may never. The seven shots with which they dispatched those five souls. The Qur’an was Kareem’s, we believe, what subterfuge it was to destroy it, its pages like leaves to cover the body, as though to rehearse its descent into earth. I believe he was holding it when you came upon him, with the shock of the bullet he wrenched its spine, its pages took to the violated air. The two of you paused by the window to remove the dust coverings from your shoes, then were outside and across the lawn, startled only by that one car, which braked for you, well trained by the deer in this region. I don’t know what you would think of me, a woman who has waited so long to be seen by you. I don’t know what words we would choose to speak.

  Modigliani, what can I say? I look at photographs and write little. My apartment smells of banana, which I have investigated and cannot account for. I go on long walks through what others would call bad neighborhoods. I’ve learned that the men who live under the nearest bridge are all sex offenders: they can’t live on most streets because they must maintain a distance from every school or park or playground, an almost impossible geometry. Boys on corners catcall or ignore me and go on with their business. On certain blocks where I walk I am the only white person I could see, if I could see myself, but this is not interesting enough to start a conversation, and I speak to few people, and other than panhandlers and junkies few speak to me. No one concerns themselves with me, including or especially Modigliani.

  I lost a week or two reading about a suicide, official reports pending, a man whose unit was stationed at a base in Afghanistan at the same time as Sergei. One night the man slipped out of bed and took his rifle to the guardhouse, which is where he was found. The incident was receiving attention because it came out that he had been hazed violently for months, and with unpleasant racial overtones, more than overtones. At the time of his death his back still bore the marks of one night’s dragging across the floor, he’d had to do pull-ups and push-ups ceaselessly with his mouth full of water, allowed neither to spit nor swallow, his comrades-in-arms close around him, shouting. They had made him speak in his parents’ language, which none of them understood, while they jeered. His letters home revealed nothing. But now that he was dead there was the testimony of othe
r soldiers; eight of the men in his unit had been charged.

  Sergei might have once stood in line behind this man—this kid—waiting for a meal or a shower. Both men were on the small side, though whether that would incline them to conversation I couldn’t say. To pass the time Sergei might make a joke, the kid would laugh. He was so funny, a comrade of Sergei’s had told me, chuckling in recollection. A real practical joker, he’d said—but not like you’re thinking, I mean, you wouldn’t believe the things he pulled off.

  Back on base the kid would turn to Sergei, smiling, to ask something, but since I don’t know what he might have wondered the scene fades out. And why conjure the dead for the least of their memories? Who may speak of the memories of the dead?

  I should leave, I thought again, poking through the trash with my foot, another hunt for the phantom banana. I should follow Modigliani to the Southwest, I should write about Xenith, not just a piece, but a book, the book we all needed. I had the beginning. More than a beginning.

  I would go. I would say nothing to him, and maybe then we’d be even.

  I had a lover who lived somewhere near where Modigliani was now, a man who had once been a lover. Back then we’d both lived in the city, I was a bundle of internships, he was plotting his escape from grad school: he’d head back home to where he’d grown up (though his people were from the East), work one of the farms, get into the local irrigation council, a traditional set-up run for centuries and mostly in Spanish, which he didn’t yet speak. How do you know they’ll want you? I asked and he never worried. In time he left and once I went out to visit him, though I remember little; in the mornings the room was cool until the sun hit and it was never cool again. He’d gotten work on an organic pecan farm. He was going to run for a position on the council he’d spoken of, head of the canal diggers, I forget the title, though the word was beautiful. I’m going to write a book about it, he said, and either aloud or silently I condemned him, how could he know before beginning what the book was about? He was not the only white man working the ditches, but one of them. He had gotten thinner. I suspected he had a girlfriend out there that he just avoided the week I visited, and neither of us were concerned, maybe she wasn’t either. I would leave soon enough. Did he ever wish otherwise? Once in the middle of the night I had stolen to the bathroom naked and on the way back had to hide under the kitchen table from his roommate, come home unexpectedly. I don’t know that I even told him this, we could have laughed about it. And now we never speak, though I believe he lives in the same place, something like the same life.

  Ariela

  The reporter was here to watch them build the wall, he said. But he showed up at the zoo every day. Every day I waved him through.

  No, no, he said, fingering the coins in his palm, his lips moving as he counted the currency.

  The animals are dying, I said, this is not a business.

  He’d drift left or right. Bat house or reptile kingdom. The path was, ultimately, a circle.

  Do you want to ask me about the wall? I said finally. Two weeks had gone by and he hadn’t mentioned it.

  What do you want to talk about? he said, sounding surprised, his surprise resembling happiness.

  Come, I said, and when we were in front of the buzzards I pointed: it will cross just beyond here. All the birds will be in shadow.

  Can they live in shadow? he said.

  We’ll see, I said.

  I had called the bird woman many times, but she no longer answered. She had emigrated a few months, no, a year ago. No one had missed her while Ephraim still lived. Most days you could find Ephraim standing by the cage of the scavengers, whistling, tickling a red wattle, his coveralls foul. The only lover of vultures, I said one day as I approached him, the bucket in my hands heavy and rank. He turned toward me, smiling, and the bird nearest him lurched, blood everywhere. The blood was mine. The birds were shrill but Ephraim was quick, sliding my finger into his mouth. My pinky nail has never grown back.

  I’m not carrion, I said then to Ephraim, as if I could win the argument.

  He only nodded, his tongue tight over the throb of the wound.

  It was Ephraim who guided us when the air raids began. The bat house, he said, and we followed him, descending the stairs. Below ground the sirens seemed no quieter, bats frantic against the glass. They’ll take out our eyes, I said.

  Close your eyes, said Ephraim.

  Wings hit and hit.

  I took the reporter past the cage of the lioness, walking very fast. These days she paced very fast. I think it was there that I realized he did not know the word wall. He knew the word for it in his own language but not the word we all used. I don’t know where our word came from, it was a strange one, but it’s what everyone said, from the day we learned the wall would divide our city. When I said this word to the reporter, raising my voice as the lioness brushed against the bars, her fur in the wrong direction, her nearly see-through skin, when I said this word he did not seem to recognize it. He did not seem to know how to respond. What had he been talking to people about? I wondered. What had he believed they were saying?

  Come, I said, and I don’t know why this was when I took his hand, took him to the tree above the snow leopard’s cage. In the twilight the snow leopard got whiter and whiter. If I dropped a leaf through the webbing her tail lashed again. The reporter and I made love there, in the crook, uncomfortably, doing a lot of work with our hands.

  She hardly moves, he said of the snow leopard. She lay in the dark, not quite sleeping.

  She is probably dying, I said. Or at least, she is starving.

  It would be kinder just to kill her, he said.

  Almost everyone says that, I said. I slid my flawed pinky into my mouth, a new habit.

  Ephraim had died just before the construction of the wall began, the air raids had found him in a Walmart parking lot. He’d been shopping to feed the snakes, whom he hated. I was the one who found him, I went to look when he failed to answer his phone. He looked small where he lay, and there was little blood. The live mice he’d bought had survived, it seemed, they were everywhere, one nestling into the pocket of his shorts, I removed it with a murmur. You don’t know what he had planned for you, I said. I carried Ephraim myself, I brought his body back with me. The mice, I thought, too late. On my watch the snakes starved.

  The reporter came early in the mornings now and walked the circle beside me. He photographed each empty cage.

  Would you like me to make them look more poignant? I said.

  How? he said, surprise transforming him.

  No, no, I said, I can’t, that was the point.

  You were making a joke, he said, trying to decipher the placard about the zebra’s natural habitat.

  We stopped a while by the lioness. He put his phone away.

  I said: You’re not great with languages.

  No, he said.

  It’s worse than that, he added. I didn’t study it. It’s a long story but I didn’t think I’d end up on your side of the city.

  You won’t, I said.

  What? he said. Then he nodded. She likes you, he said, meaning the lioness. Even though he was there she was licking my forearm with her dry tongue.

  She likes salt, I said, and she knows I like her.

  She is named for you, he said.

  No, I said, it is a very common name. You just only know the two of us.

  Later, days later, when we passed what had been the rhinoceros cage, he said, as if he had been waiting to say it: There was a rumor they were used. In the battle before construction began. Led charging into the fight. But they couldn’t distinguish between sides, people say, so it was a bloodbath.

  Yes, I said quietly, none of them survived.

  Don’t tell me that’s true, he said. That didn’t happen.

  Everything you’ve heard is true, I said. I said it in the langu
age he should have known.

  In the end he was the one I told about Ephraim’s body. What I’d done with it, whose cage I’d brought it to, what I had chosen to hear. It was not that I thought he would understand.

  Martin

  The epiphany came in the midst of shooting, so suddenly that I ruined a take.

  We were filming the penultimate episode in the fifth season. The murder had taken place in some sort of illicit pet depot, imports from South America, that sort of thing. I’d wanted to work with the animals, but in the end I had nothing to do with them, in the shot in which I caress a pale cockatoo breast the hand isn’t mine, belongs to some bird trainer, who seemed terrified to meet me, a phenomenon I’ve come truly to hate. I solved the crime too quickly, through some information that only I had and the audience couldn’t know about, dark backstory offered at the end kind of thing. I used to call bullshit on that move but I don’t anymore. People want you to know things, I get told, that’s your character. You’re riding the crest of a wave, secrets in its belly and you toss up the best of them. Detective Garsin, he comes and goes behind civilization’s shining façade. You know?

  I know.

  The show used to be great, is the problem. The detective was based on a real detective, or investigator of some kind, I was never clear on that. He had solved the murder that had brought down an entire software company—a kid had ended up dead for knowing too much, that had actually happened. The show’s first season was all stuff like that: political intrigue, one murder, no, I guess two, but a long slow gorgeous plot that spanned the whole twelve episodes, took down a clutch of white collars, a state senator, ended a whole internet spyware kind of deal, none of it predictable, no Manichean bullshit and square-jawed heroes, everything was a little fucked. It was an event, a real television event. But by season four it was a murder every episode, run-of-the-mill cop show and I was just some pale long-faced Columbo who crimesolved by means of his rarefied and highly convenient knowledge of the world’s dissolution.