by Dave Eggers
Four decided he would speak to Nine at lunch. Normally he would not take a full lunch on the second day of an assignment, but in this case he had to make an exception. With this man he needed to set parameters. To calm himself, he put his earphones in and pressed play.
* * *
—
The road presented no issues throughout the morning. Four passed more of the black garbage bags, more of the electrical poles ready to be erected and wired. He saw small settlements on either side and occasional evidence of homes that had been moved or disassembled to make way for the new highway. He had been warned that some of the forests had been mined during the war and saw, midmorning, warning signs nailed to trees, skulls and crossbones and plaintive words in the local tongue.
Ahead Four could see the next pod, a half kilometer away, and from this distance he could see that there appeared to be people sitting or standing on top of it. This, the clearing of locals from the road and particularly from the pods, was the work Nine was hired to do. But he was nowhere in sight.
When Four was close enough to make out the figures, he saw that it was a trio of boys playing on the pod. Four lowered his window and waved his arm, motioning the boys to get off. When they jumped down, they were immediately admonished by a pair of women, who grabbed the boys’ arms roughly and pulled them away from the road. When Four reached the pod, the RS-80 took it into its docking bay and drank from it without incident.
But when Four looked in the rearview mirror, he saw Nine had caught up with him, and now was surrounded by the same boys. They were touching the quad and Nine was allowing it. Nine produced a camera, and began taking pictures of the boys. One of the boys was wearing a purple scarf, though the temperature was soaring. Each time Nine took a picture, he would show the boys the photo on his viewscreen, and they would all laugh. It seemed the boys had not seen such a camera before, one that could show the image immediately after taking it. Four thought about retrieving Nine, but that would mean interrupting their party and being inevitably drawn into it.
Four stayed in the vehicle and started the engine, planning to eat his lunch in the moving cab. As the vehicle lurched forward, Nine looked up, perplexed. Four made no gesture to explain. He would have his discussion with Nine that night. He resolved then that it would be a more serious talk than the one he’d planned for lunch.
* * *
—
Nine did not appear again until the midafternoon, when he came hurtling up the shoulder, now shirtless and wearing the purple scarf that Four had seen on the boy. In company briefings, all transactions were discouraged, whether they involved barter or cash. The locals could easily claim that the scarf had been stolen, and this increased the likelihood of interaction with unreliable local authorities. Nine swerved up the embankment and rode parallel to the RS-80, smiling broadly, trying to catch Four’s eye. Four did not turn to him, and Nine rode on ahead, his hand in the air, waving to the world in his wake.
VII
BY LATE AFTERNOON, Four had paved twenty-eight kilometers and the machine needed rest. Four powered down and found a level spot near the road for his tent. He could hear the faint sounds of far-off singing—a group of voices rising and falling in harmony. The sky was a flat white.
Four set up his tent and sleeping bag and pillow, and laid his head upon it. The distant music was pleasant and he wondered about its provenance. It sounded like a chorus of some kind, perhaps religious, the voices all female, he guessed. He put his earphones in and pressed play, closing his eyes and making plans. He wanted to talk to Nine over dinner, but after waiting twenty minutes, he got up and began making his meal alone.
He ate a packet of crackers, two nutrition bars, a large bag of nuts and a handful of vitamins as the faraway music stopped and then began again, this time louder. What had been a shy chorus was now bolder, wilder. Four was curious about the music and where it was coming from. If he were at home, Four might seek out its source, but he couldn’t leave the RS-80 unattended. He finished his meal at 5:15.
He went into his tent to check on his tools. He unrolled his pack and removed the plastic pistol, briefly cleaning it. When he was finished he rolled the pack up again, and when he left the tent he saw a plume of red dust approaching from the unpaved road ahead. Nine began honking once he saw Four. He pulled up, grinning, his face red with sun and dirt.
“Hey, you bastard! Did I miss dinner?”
Four said nothing.
“You ate nutrition bars and water without me? And don’t tell me I missed the crackers!” Nine said, laughing. He got off the quad and did a quick jog in place, as if to free himself from the cramps in his legs. “I’m kidding. But listen, I saw a place up ahead that we can both get to, a real place to eat. Very clean food. Very safe. And I found a couple of boys who can come and watch our stuff while we’re gone. I thought of everything.”
“No,” Four said. “Now sit down.”
Nine’s smile faded. “Excuse me?”
“Sit down. I’m the primary here, so I insist you sit down. I’m your superior.”
“You’re the primary? You’re my superior?” Nine stared into Four’s eyes. “Those are fascinating statements.”
Four’s stomach tightened. He had not expected Nine to challenge his authority. This was, after all, Nine’s first assignment and Four’s sixty-third. Though the company didn’t assign hierarchy in their two-man crew, seniority should have been implicit and beyond debate.
“I need to talk to you about the job you’re doing,” Four said evenly.
Nine smiled again. “Listen, let’s go get some food and talk about it there. The second we get there, two boys will run back here and will guard the vehicles. I met them last night. These are good boys. I met their parents. Their moms run the food place where we’re going. Deal?”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Four said. “I’ve already eaten, and I’m staying with the vehicle because my contract requires me to. I don’t want local food, and you shouldn’t either. You’re acting like a child on holiday. I was in that cab for nine hours today and saw you twice.”
Four watched as Nine seemed to take this in, opening his mouth as if to respond but finally deciding against it. He walked away for a few steps, then returned, shaking his head in a show of theatrical contrition.
“Actually, I’m sorry,” Nine said. “You’re right. You do have a difficult job, and you’ve been doing it well. I’m grateful, and the people I’ve been meeting—they’re incredibly grateful, too. You should hear them talk! Earlier today a mother came to me carrying her kid, this boy who had some kind of terrible infection in his leg. It looked like elephantiasis. She said the moment the road’s finished, she can take him north to the capital and get it looked at. I met a shopkeeper who said that using the previous road system, during the rainy season, he had nothing to sell and his customers had nothing to buy. There was no way to get stuff this far south. But our highway eliminates all that. He’ll be able to get resupplied every week, every day even. You know what he said? ‘This is like being born again.’ You have no idea the isolation they’ve faced. Most of them have never seen a real doctor.”
“That’s all fine,” Four said. “But—”
“Listen,” Nine interrupted, “we don’t have to go eat together. But I want you to experience what I did last night. So I’ll watch the RS-80. You take the quad. Just go straight about a couple kilometers ahead and you’ll see a path heading west. Take that through the stand of trees and you’ll see a clearing, and that’s where the village is.”
“No,” Four said.
“You can meet the old man I met. He’ll be wearing a white hat with a wide brim, something like a fedora, and he’ll shake your hand and tell you thanks. He’ll feed you well. Oh, and he has these daughters, so coquettish—”
“No. No!” Four roared. He had been steadily losing his patience. Nine’s neck s
napped back, shocked by Four’s volume. Then he smiled, briefly, as if amused by this new display of emotion. “Fascinating,” he said.
Four looked into the forest behind Nine. He knew to pause now, before he said something regrettable. His wife had admonished him years ago about this, about thinking a solution could come through quick, blunt force.
“I didn’t mean to raise my voice,” Four said. “But the schedule is paramount in my mind. The government is paying for this road, and they have planned a parade. You’re aware of this?” Nine’s face was blank. “It’s set for the twentieth of this month,” Four continued. “We can’t miss this date. Hundreds of thousands of people are counting on this schedule. If you care about the people here, you’ll do everything you can to make sure we make the date.”
Nine took this in, and Four thought he saw a man becoming enlightened in real time. He seemed to finally square his actions with how they might affect the people he claimed to take so much pride in helping.
“I get it,” he said. “I do. We’ll make the date. I promise.” He squinted down the road, in the direction of the village he’d intended to take them to. “But you know what hospitality’s like in a place like this. I really should at least tell them we’re not coming. Otherwise they’ll be waiting all night for us.”
VIII
NINE DID NOT return that night. Four watched him drive up the road in the rust-colored dusk, ostensibly to cancel the dinner arrangement. Four crawled into his tent, installed his earphones and eventually fell asleep. Some hours later he woke to urinate, and when he stood on the roadside, a sliver of moon up and bright, he saw no sign of Nine or the quad. It was half past three. When he woke again at dawn, he unzipped his tent and found the quad parked neatly on the shoulder, and Nine packing up his tent.
“My superior awakens!” Nine said.
Four ducked back into his tent without answering. Over many years Four had nurtured the ability to mute all feeling about such a person or problem. He had been frustrated by Nine for almost three days, but now, knowing he could not change him or control him or convince him to be effective in any way, and knowing that Nine was not, in fact, impeding the work on the road—he was merely a distraction—Four could set Nine and his behavior aside. He could place him in a glass box behind which he could not be heard.
“You want to know what happened last night?” Nine asked.
Four decided he did want to know, if only because it would be helpful to the report he planned to write about Nine at the end of the job.
“You missed some good food. It was lamb. I hope you know what a big deal that is, to have lamb in a place like this right after a war. It must have been the only goddamned sheep for a hundred miles. Anyway, they really know what they’re doing with lamb. Have you had lamb in this part of the world?”
Four rolled up his sleeping bag and tied it tight. He pulled the poles from his tent and it collapsed like a doused flame. Nine did not move to help, but followed Four around the roadside as he got ready for the day.
“So I got more information about the parade. You know about the president and his wife?”
Four said nothing. Four dropped his tent in its sack and walked up the embankment to pack it into the exterior storage compartment of the RS-80. When he turned around, he almost bumped into Nine, who had followed him to the vehicle. Four began circling the machine, checking it for any irregularities. Nine trailed inches behind him.
“Apparently she was killed in a car accident during the war. She was the president’s first wife but he had some others, too, or some kind of arrangement with some other consorts, or what do you call them? Concubines? Concubines. Anyway this was his first wife, and they’d known each other since they were kids. He loved her and she was some kind of altruist, and during the war would visit victims of the fighting on both sides. I mean, the people who told me this last night were on the rebel side but even they had such respect for her, it was really moving.
“Then she was in this car accident which no one thinks was an accident. She was visiting injured soldiers—child soldiers, I should say—in a hospital run by some NGO. And she left the hospital and was driving to the airstrip when her truck got sideswiped by a personnel carrier. This huge truck crushed her truck like an accordion. They never found the driver of the other truck, but it had some rebel materials inside. You hear about this?”
Four had read something about the incident in the company’s preparatory materials but it held no particular interest. Who killed whom in a conflict like this was not his business, and whatever he might read in a primer was likely so far from the truth that it scarcely warranted his close attention.
“That’s what makes this whole truce and the parade such a hopeful thing,” Nine continued. “I mean, this president—they assumed he was just consumed by rage and revenge over his wife’s death or murder or whatever it was, but he submitted to the international…to the whole peace process, and the fighting ended. And the parade was his idea. He built the road, and planned this parade, in what I have to say was a pretty monumental and selfless gesture of reconciliation. Even down here among the former rebels, they see him as some kind of—well, not a saint, but as a statesman. Someone who has the vision and appetite for forgiveness that you need after such a heinous war. I think that’s why he got them to disarm so dramatically. I mean, the rebels gave up everything, more than I think they had to. Now it’s supposedly one big combined army, but shit, can you imagine? When ever has that worked out so well? Anyway, this was mostly told to me by this one woman. Wait, remember I mentioned the girl from the other night? The chaste story I was about to tell you? She danced a certain way?”
Four recalled Nine talking about such a woman, and acting out her way of moving. “No,” he said.
“Well, for some reason she wasn’t there last night. But there were so many others, and one of them was talking my ear off about this. We were all sitting around a fire they had going in a kind of sawed-off oil drum. And all around the fire there are these shining eyes, and they’re all looking at me while this one girl’s telling me the whole story about the president’s wife, but meanwhile I felt like a little bunny surrounded by wolves. These were all women, mind you, and they’re all drinking rice wine. There was a hunger in their eyes that just bores into you. I felt objectified, I have to say.” Nine manufactured a lascivious chuckle.
“I guess it’s my hair,” Nine continued. “They’re always touching it.” He ran his dirty fingers through the ends of his greasy hair. “They kept saying things about movie stars, how none of the men here wear their hair like this.”
Four stepped into the cab and started the engine. He scanned the diagnostics and made sure the first pod was warming. He had about ten minutes before the asphalt would be ready. He stared ahead at the unpaved road, thinking he could close the door to the vehicle and at least dull Nine’s incessant blather.
“So after dinner, there’s so much that happened,” Nine continued. “Everyone brings stuff to me. I don’t know what they’re giving me, what they’re just showing me. One older guy wants to show me a picture of some aid worker he knew twenty years ago. So I go to his house and we look at that, and he gives me some of his own homemade hooch. It’s putrid but fucking strong. It tasted like a rancid orange.”
Four counted the minutes till the RS-80 would be ready. About seven and a half.
“So in about twenty minutes we’d drunk all this booze and were playing dominoes but honestly I couldn’t see what the hell we were doing. It was too dark and my eyes weren’t working so well anymore. And I swear the guy’s cheating. It’s just him and me playing dominoes, no money on the line, and the guy is cheating. I mean, what would be the point? Pretty soon I wake up and I have my head on this guy’s little table, this little iron side table with a grating on top. I wake up and I’ve got a crosshatch on my face, right? And the guy laughs and laughs at me. He’s laug
hing so hard I actually wondered if I was in some kind of hell. And still I can barely see anything. I thought that hooch would make me blind, right? So we go back to the fire and now there aren’t as many people. Some of the girls are gone now, maybe taken home by their parents. But honestly, before I could get to the rest of the people at the fire, this hand comes out and grabs me.”
Four felt the sudden grip of Nine’s fingers. To illustrate his story, he’d reached up into the cab to take Four’s arm.
“Don’t do that,” Four said.
“That’s how strong this girl was. She yanked me away from the fire and she basically dragged me into the dark and toward the woods, and all the while I’m trying to see which one of the girls from the fire she is. I don’t even know, right? I can only see the side of her, the back of her, just vague shapes as she’s walking, with just a bit of moonlight. We go about two hundred meters from the center of town and she leads me into this building, which must have been a school. There was a chalkboard on one wall, and white paper strewn on the floor. Otherwise it was burned out—no roof, no glass in the windowframes, just a dirt floor. The dirt floor is important, because once we’re inside she points to the ground, where she’s got some kind of mattress or padding there in the corner. She wants me to lie down in basically a crackhead’s bed. This is where she wants us to get it on.”
Two minutes more, Four thought.
“So I sit down, but I’m not planning on taking off my clothes. She sits next to me, and then sort of leans against me like we’re on a picnic looking at a river or something. I start stroking her hair and she starts murmuring, and it’s like a cat purring but way too loud, you know what I mean? It just seems too loud on a quiet night in a village with no other sounds around—and we’re not all that far from the homes. So I stop stroking her hair and she sits up again and looks me in the eyes. Her face was about an inch from mine, so close that her two eyes looked like one. And that’s when I realized that her breath was fucking disgusting.” Nine laughed uproariously. He laughed a deep and genuine laugh that caused in Four a brief surge of rage.