The Limits of the World

by Jennifer Acker

  But worse than his parents’ fighting were his mother’s confidences. While he ate dinner, instead of dreaming up schemes bound to be a hit in the Columbus marketplace (a samosa delivery service, self-cleaning water fountains), as they sometimes did together when his father was away, she listed his father’s faults: he was never home; he didn’t listen to her opinion; he was too cowardly to ask for a raise; he didn’t sleep in the same bed with her. Once Sunil had pressed his palms over his ears and said, “I’m not listening! I’m not listening!” She’d wrested his hands away and shouted back, “Life is not sunny and perfect! You have to learn this sometime.”

  Now Sunil was discovering that being with Mital Aunty and Bimal was not the balm it used to be—didn’t diffuse his mother’s concentrated power. Worse, he often felt that his mother and aunt were colluding against him, sharing secret meaningful looks. But Sunil was getting older, stronger, and he hoped this meant that his life would be different soon.

  Bimal called to Sunil, “Come fight with me! Show me your karate kicks!”

  Sunil shook his head, though his cousin probably couldn’t see him past the ocean glare. Through the palm leaves, his eyelids burned, and he didn’t feel like moving. His stomach rumbled. He hadn’t eaten more than a bag of chips and a mango. Yesterday his mother had spent most of the hours before dinner quizzing Bimal about his recent exams and saying to Sunil, “See, this is how a boy studies!” Sunil knew that Bimal’s exams consisted mostly of rote memorization, while his were five-page papers, but he hadn’t wanted to embarrass his cousin by pointing this out. So Sunil played along and humored both of them, even though his mother’s repeated comparisons abraded him more deeply than he cared to admit. There was something uncomfortably insistent in her tone that Mital Aunty also noticed, Sunil believed, based on the forcedly placid look on her face, the slight turn away of her head, but sometimes it was easier to simply let his mother rant on and not stand in her way.

  Bimal, still in the water, suddenly let out a scream. Sunil scrambled to his feet and ran down to the ocean.

  “Pick him up,” his mother said.

  “He’s way too heavy for me.” Sunil was broader and taller, but only by an inch and five pounds.

  “He is nothing but skin and bones!”

  The skin of Bimal’s foot was a raw reddish pink and there was a thick mess stuck on. “Jellyfish?” Bimal said.

  Sunil, gawking and repulsed, echoed his cousin. “You didn’t tell us there were jellyfish!”

  “They are everywhere! Don’t you know anything?” Urmila said.

  Mital Aunty turned Sunil around, and, with a surprising burst of strength, hefted Bimal onto his back. Sunil staggered forward. “Crap, you weigh a ton.”

  “Sorry,” Bimal said, clutching Sunil’s throat with salt-sticky monkey arms.

  When he set his cousin down in a chair, Bimal’s foot had puffed up like a red balloon. The front-desk man brought a bucket and a large jug of vinegar. Urmila hovered, ready to criticize the treatment. Sunil wanted his father. His father would know what to do. His father who treated death and injury clinically. Who insisted that Sunil, too, become an organ donor when he passed his driver’s test. And who had extracted from Sunil a solemn promise: “When it is my time, you will not pray over me. This is important. You are to keep your strength and remain rational, do not give in to hocus pocus.”

  In a small voice, Bimal asked, “Will you need to cut off the foot?”

  The hotel clerk laughed like a donkey. He could have been forty or seventy-five. He told them with pride that his great-grandmother had once cured the District Commissioner’s earache with a vial of urine. In Gujarati, he said, “You will be okay,” and gave Bimal an antihistamine.

  Urmila suddenly remembered their beach bag and sent Sunil to fetch it.

  No one had touched it, but when Sunil picked it up with the towels, a small boy popped out from behind a palm tree. His head was shaved to the scalp, and his only clothes were a pair of ragged shorts, the pockets torn away. He perched on one leg, like a flamingo. The skin on his ankles was torn and raw.

  The boy spoke in Swahili, and when Sunil didn’t answer, he said, “English?”

  Sunil smiled. He said gently, “What do you want?”

  The boys’ eyes popped wide as if he’d been waiting all week for the opportunity to speak. “Hello, my friend! My reward please, sir.”

  “Reward?”

  “Yes, sir. I stand here when you go away. No one steal.” He spoke the words without inflection, as if memorized. The boy shifted legs, and Sunil saw another patch of peeling skin on his calf.

  “Where did you learn English? Do you go to school?”

  “Yes, sir. English! My friend!”

  So this was the boy’s job. Sent out onto the beach to collect from tourists. The boy, or his handler, was smart to approach Sunil. His mother and aunt would’ve shooed him away. Inside his mother’s wallet were mostly shillings, and Sunil didn’t know what the exchange rate was. The denominations were large, in the thousands. He fingered through until he found dollars. He handed five singles to the boy, feeling both shy and important. “Here you go. Thanks a lot.”

  “Thanking you much, sir!” The boy took off across the sand, toward a row of tin shacks down near the juice stand. Sunil glanced back at the hotel. No one in the doorway, no one sweeping the tiny patio. No one watching. He withdrew the fistful of green bills and shoved them in his pocket, leaving only a few Kenyan shillings in the wallet. Then walked casually back to the lobby, depositing the load at the feet of his mother, who sat in a bamboo chair, her floppy hat on indoors, drinking out of a coconut.

  “How’s Bimal?”

  “Oh, he will survive.”

  That night, the street air pulsed with a distant reggae beat. An ice cream vendor sensed Sunil’s hunger and leapt on his hesitancy. “Something you like?” The tops of the metal tubs were askew, sticky-looking. The scoop immersed in a tub of creamy brown water. The man came closer.

  Sunil walked quickly away. He was not brave enough to go far, but he’d seen a shop where he could buy sodas and a snack. What he really craved was a hamburger with real Heinz, but the poverty of his options was soon clear. The snack shop was farther than he remembered, and by now he’d walked a long way from the bungalows. He fingered the money. He tried to appear relaxed, as if he knew where he was going.

  Passing an open doorway crowded with batteries and flashlights and tin-can lamps, he grew more aware of the darkness. His body hugged the shop walls, most of which were padlocked. Things scurried past his feet. His hunger battled his fear.

  Then a round, fleshy man draped in a smeared apron appeared in a gray halo. Sunil walked hopefully toward him, but the man frowned when Sunil stood in the doorway. The man’s black eyes bulged. “The night is late,” he said. Behind the man was a tiny food stall.

  “Are you open?”

  “I make you something before I close. You should not be walking around.”

  While his fear of unknown food welled up, and his hunger fought to push it down, the man told him he’d graduated from an American university with a math degree. His name was Tom. “You know this part? Alabama? All the African people live there.” He compared racism in the South to the way the Kikuyu in Kenya treated the other tribes. Sunil didn’t know who the Kikuyu were. “But over there you have so many peoples, the Asians and the Spanish.” He popped off the cap of a cold Coke and slid it down the counter to where Sunil perched on a metal stool.

  A sizzle on the grill. The air steamy, sweat formed at the man’s hairline, trickling down his forehead furrows. He was tall and bulky and serious-looking, like an African superhero. “I picked the name myself, after Tom Mboya. He was a big man in the Old Man’s government. You have heard of Kenyatta? Mboya was loyal, but still he was assassinated. In that year I took his name to honor him.”

  “Did you work for th
e government?”

  Tom shook his head, smiled. “In the old days, I did dream of it.” He turned the meat on the grill, and strands of primally delicious smoke swirled in the heat. “Who is your hero, boy? Aside from Mr. Ronald McDonald.” Tom laughed, a thin, sad laugh for a powerfully large man.

  Sunil didn’t have a ready answer.

  “I know, Mr. Magic Johnson. Big and tall but quick. You know Kenyans have always believed in magic, but it takes a black man from Los Angeles to make Americans know that it is real.” He laughed again.

  “You watch basketball?” Sunil couldn’t believe it. For a moment, he was thrilled, an electric hug. But Tom’s comment was also a jabbing reminder that Sunil was here, in miserable nowhere, instead of in his comfortable room at home watching the NBA playoffs. At home he didn’t need friends or family because he had TV. Right now Sunil was missing the Lakers play the Sixers. Magic against Dr. J: behind-the-back passes, jump hooks, and windmill dunks.

  Hungry, lonely, Sunil did believe in this moment that basketball was a kind of magic, because when he watched, he effortlessly disappeared.

  When the burger was ready, meat between squares of spongy bread, glaringly white, Sunil didn’t bother with condiments. In five wolfish bites he ate the whole thing, and when his plate was empty, he was embarrassed. Tom had gone to so much trouble. He couldn’t explain that if he hadn’t eaten so fast, he probably would have thrown up. “That was really good. Thank you.”

  “You would like some ice cream?” said Tom who had a degree from an American university and was here flipping burgers.

  But Sunil was tired now, from the sun, from walking, from unease; a sudden, hopeless fatigue. He was so far away from home. He asked how much he owed.

  “Do I look like a man running a business? This place belongs to my brother. He will never notice a little food given to a child.”

  “But I have all this money.” Another night Sunil would have rejected being called a child, but tonight he felt like a young stray.

  Tom chuckled, as if he knew where it had come from. “You spend that to take a taxi back to your bungalow. I find one. Someone I know, you understand.” Tom cocked his head and narrowed his eyes as if the two were partners, but Sunil was thinking about how he’d never imagined getting something for free could make him feel so bad. He wondered how Bimal was doing, if he was continuing to sleep. His cousin had been so terrified, and Sunil had felt such pity for him as they together looked at the grossly swollen foot. Bimal had always been a happy, confident kid—much more so than Sunil had ever felt. But there was also a fragility to him, a tragic, bewildered expression that sometimes took over in moments of conflict.

  Clouds rolled in from the ocean and suffocated the moon. If Sunil squinted, he could see the orange-yellow haze far off that could be the beginnings of the sun coming up, the lights of the Old Town, or something else, some flash of the future.

  There was a gasoline smell and a honk, and Tom pointed to a car so low to the ground Sunil expected Fred Flintstone to get out and pedal. He got in the car and rolled down the window to wave goodbye to Tom.

  Dark slips of people walked along the unlit road—women in short skirts and men carrying hefty sacks on their shoulders. The outlines of skittish dogs nosing the ground for trash. As they bumped along past everyone going somewhere, Sunil idled on the island of homesickness.

  He paid the driver twenty dollars for the five-minute ride and wished he’d spent even more. The money was slippery in his fingers. He tried to whistle walking toward the bungalow, but his lips couldn’t find the shape.

  He cracked open the door, surprised to see a light on. Sunil felt the air snap as his mother immediately scrambled to her feet. “Where? Where did you run?” She shook his shoulders, her eyes livid. The nutty smell. She was the closest—and only—reminder of home he had here, and for a second, the most fleeting instant, he considered letting himself fall into her embrace. To be bundled up in her arms, like when she used to stuff him into snowsuits in the winter.

  But instead of drawing him in, his mother pushed him away.

  “You smell like animal!”

  “Why did you take me here? Why do you hate Dad?”

  When the flat of her hand made contact with his cheek, he was not surprised. He was by now almost as tall as she, but she was not afraid of him. Her arms were stronger, her center of gravity lower. It was not clear who would win a true fight.

  Instead, he shouted, “I should have a job—my own money!” From his pocket he pulled out the leftover bills and flung them in her face. “And so should you! Without Dad, you’d have nothing.”

  She could drag him across the world, but she couldn’t watch him every second. She couldn’t make him want to be with her. She couldn’t make him respect her. Nor could he fix her problems. His relief, realizing this, was enormous.

  It was then Sunil understood something else, something profound and long-lasting. The fury he was capable of had grown in scope to match hers, and one day it would dominate. His fury would be more than force, more flexible and sophisticated. He would have reason and knowledge of the world on his side. Not only against her, but those like her who took advantage; he was old enough to know that they were everywhere. Tonight, though, he could do nothing to change her mind.

  While his mother sobbed on the bed whispering, “His son. His fault,” Mital Aunty comforted her with stiff back pats.

  Sunil was sent home early the next day. Though Bimal must have said goodbye, Sunil’s last memory of his cousin was his thin sleeping body splayed on their shared bed.

  Sunil had not flown internationally since that ruined trip. As they boarded the plane to Nairobi in the Frankfurt airport, he thought of Bimal’s tiny wrists and ankles sticking out from underneath the covers. He tried, too, to conjure the boy’s face, to scour it for familial resonance. Clues that would speak to their indelible connection. But he could not see his brother’s features clearly. Too much time had passed, and he could remember only his Karate Kid posture in the waves, his guile and innocence, and feel the way Bimal had clutched at him and pressed his tear-stained face to the back of his neck. Bimal, bashful and eager to please. No wonder their mother had openly worshiped this son, especially given Bimal’s recent success in business—he’d started his own company, Sunil remembered—and the birth of his daughter. It made painful, obliterating sense now, Bimal as the gold standard. Like a fool, a dupe, a pawn, Sunil had not known that this boy, half a world away, whom he had been compared to his whole life, was his brother. And he had to admit that, by any standard, Bimal had done so much more with what they both had been given.

  Amy clipped her seatbelt and gave them cough drops to clear their ears during takeoff. She’d insisted on bringing saltwater taffy from Boston and buying fancy German chocolates in the airport for his parents, aunts and uncles. Sunil was little help with the gifts. His mother had always brought suitcases brimming with clothes and small appliances to Kenya, but these were specific requests and sizes. Sweets would be fine. Though Sunil could not imagine handing them out in an open show of goodwill given the betrayal he felt, knowing that all of his relatives had kept to themselves a piece of knowledge so personal and important.

  Amy had been too stunned to believe him at first. She’d insisted that there must have been a good reason to keep him in the dark, perhaps to protect Bimal? Maybe there was some social stigma? But this was bullshit and she knew it.

  “I doubt anyone in Nairobi wanted them to keep quiet about it,” he said. “I was too far away to have any impact.”

  “It sounds like they were embarrassed,” Amy said. “Didn’t your mother say ‘It was a bad time’?”

  He nodded. “They were immigrants, given the chance for a blank slate. I can understand that—at first. But then what about later, when I’m old enough to do something with the information.”

  “What would you have done?”
>
  “Maybe nothing,” he admitted. “But I did always want a brother, and my parents knew that because I used to complain. At least I think it would have changed how I thought about my life. I would have felt less alone—just the idea of a brother, even if we didn’t have anything else in common.” He looked at Amy, whose eyeliner had smudged during her nap on the previous flight. In her lap were all the extra snacks she’d purloined from the flight attendant’s unattended basket. “You would have had a bake sale to raise the funds to fly over right away, if this had happened to you.”

  “Hah. No. I’d just have asked my grandparents for the money.” She looked at him with a soft smile. “You could have used some tough Russian Jews. To introduce you to vodka on your fifth birthday and teach you how to recycle rubber bands.” She sighed and squeezed his leg sympathetically. “But really the saving grace has been my sister. I can’t imagine my life without her. All the conversion crap with our parents—at least we always have each other.”

  Sunil nodded, his eyes full and stinging. He looked around at the other passengers while the flight attendant made them aware of all the things that could go wrong. Seated were several other Indians, and a small handful of whites, but mostly the plane was full of Africans. He laughed at the fact that he was so rarely surrounded by other brown and black people. He had long ago stopped noticing that he was the only minority in the room because it happened so often. Sunil took a deep breath and felt Amy’s hand on his knee, the press of her fingertips through his jeans. They wore nice clothes, Amy in a sweater and skirt longer than the usual minis and which gave her a lovely waist, because they’d go straight to a family dinner from the airport. His father would meet them. Sunil’s throat caught. His father was the easy one, relatively speaking, and yet he, too, had kept silent all these years. Sunil wrestled with the metal clip of his seatbelt, pounding it with his fist. Amy now made him promise to be civil, as relaxed as possible, until they knew more, which might take a few days.