by Dave Eggers
“Shut up,” Siju said in a normal voice. “Mr. Subbu! Appa! You think I care? Come with us or stay here and shut up. Your decision.”
He climbed into the high cab of the lorry. He reached over and held a hand out for Manju, who held it indifferently, as if she were being asked to hold a piece of wood. He let me struggle in by myself. When I had shut the door, he inserted the shining key into the ignition.
“They’re going to hear us,” I said.
“No, they’re not,” he said grimly. He turned the key and started the engine.
It sounded like thunder rolling across the plain. I closed my eyes and waited for a shout, a light shining in our faces, the relief of discovery. But no one came. The city of tents stayed dark, except for the glimmer of burning coals. The sky answered with thunder of its own.
Siju did not turn on the headlights, and the lorry drifted out of the yard, past the weighing station, past the permit yard, rounding the perimeter, the camp turning silently on its axis like a black globe, the dirt road invisible.
“On your marks,” I heard Siju say. He sounded calm. “Get set. Go.”
And then I felt the pressure release, the lorry pick up speed, and we were driving downhill, and there was wind rushing in through the windows, filling my lungs. I could feel Manju’s shoulder against mine, and there were Siju’s hands curled on the wheel, and the floorboard thrummed under my feet, and I was suddenly awake, wide awake, filled with the cold night air.
Siju flipped on the headlights, and I saw that we were no longer within the boundaries of the mine, we had left it behind, and trees flashed by, their lowest branches scraping the sides of the lorry. There was no time to feel anything. All I could do was keep my balance, keep my shoulder from slamming against the door. We hurtled past rocks that were big enough to jump off. Siju drove leaning forward, without slowing for anything, and the lorry bounced and jostled, and its springs screeched, and in the yellow beam of the headlights I saw the ground jump sharply into focus for an instant before we swallowed it. The hills in the distance were getting closer, and I wondered if Siju intended to drive to the top of them, or even beyond. I wanted him to. I wanted him to drive forever. As long as he kept driving, we would be safe.
But then he stopped, let the engine idle fall into silence. We were in the middle of the plains, far enough away from the mine to seem like a different country. The ground stretched away on every side. The trees provided no orientation. They simply carved out darker shapes in the darkness. Siju took his hands off the wheel and ran them through his hair. Manju’s chest rose and fell under the uni form. She stared straight ahead, through the grimy windshield, even after we had been sitting there in silence for minutes.
“Gold medal,” I heard Siju whisper.
I opened and closed my mouth, each time to say something that crumbled and became a confused tangle of words.
“You shouldn’t have brought Guna,” Manju said. The sound of my name made me shiver, as if by naming me she had made me responsible. For this, for the three of us, here. As if whatever happened here would be because of me.
“Why not?” Siju said. “He deserves to come, no? You know, he even went to Subbu today and asked if he could be a lorry driver. All because of you. Sweet, no? Bastard said no, of course. I could have told him not to waste his time; Subbu has his fat hands filled with your—”
“You think I like this?” she said. She spoke to the windshield, to the open plain. “Begging for money? Sir, please give money for medicine. Sir, please give money for surgery. Sir, Mummy’s coughing again. Doctor says her lungs are weak. Sir, please give money for doctor’s fees. You think it’s nice to stand still and let him do whatever he wants? And he gives too little money, so every time I have to go back. You think it’s a big game?”
I could tell that Siju was taken aback. “You could work—”
“Fifty rupees per day!” Manju said. “Even if I work all day and night, it would not even be enough for food. Sometimes you’re so stupid. Even Guna is smarter than you.” After she said this, she seemed to collapse. I could feel her shoulder sag against mine.
“Manju,” I said. For no reason other than to say her name.
Siju sat in silence for a while. Then he made a strangled sound in his throat, like he was coming to a decision he already hated himself for. He opened his door and jumped out.
“Come on,” he said to Manju.
I made a move to get out.
“No, you stay here,” Siju said.
“But—” I started to say.
“Guna, just stay here,” Manju said. She sounded tired.
I bit down on my lip. Manju put her arm around my shoulders and pulled me close. I could smell metal in her hair. It was the most vivid thing I had ever smelled. It was a smell that had a shape, edges as solid as a building. And then for no reason I thought of our neighbor’s wife, the one who survived after her husband tried to burn them all. She lived in the temple courtyard after that, and the priests fed her. Sometime she would take dried pats of cow dung and put them on her head like a hat and stare at passersby, the skin of her cheek rippled pink. I don’t know why I thought of that woman just then, but I did. And while I was remembering her, Manju was sliding away from me, into the driver’s seat, her legs stretching to the ground. She dropped with a little grunt.
I heard them walk around the lorry, heard the clink of the chain and the rusted creak as the back panel was lowered. I felt the vibrations of their movements come to me through the empty lorry bed. A scraping noise, and I knew Siju was spreading a tarpaulin sheet across the back. Through the metal, through the fake leather of the seat, through the cogs and gears and machinery, I could feel their movements, the positioning of one body over another. I heard Siju say something in a low voice. I don’t remember hearing Manju reply.
And then I didn’t want to hear any more, so I listened instead to the whirring of insects in the bushes, the nighttime howls of dogs from the villages whose fires hung suspended in the distance, the wind that traveled close to the ground, scraping dry leaves into piles. The darkness made it vast, vaster than the mine, which in the daytime seemed so large to me. It was different in every way from the camp, where the sounds were either machine sounds, lifting and loading and dumping and digging, or people sounds, eating or snoring or crying or swearing at someone to shut up so they could sleep.
A light wind brushed my face, carried the smell of rain. Tomorrow the work would be impossible, the ground too wet to dig, the ore slippery and slick, the puddles swollen to ponds. The men would slide around, knee-deep, and curse. The children would push each other, making it into a rough game. The lorries would get stuck, their wheels spinning, flinging mud in all directions, and we would have to spend an extra hour digging them out. There would be red mud in the crooks of our elbows, in our fingernails, in our ears. The coals, in the evening, would refuse to light.
For a second I couldn’t move, as if the coming days and weeks and months and years were piling on top of me like a load of ore, pinning me against the darkness, and then I found myself slipping into the driver’s seat and taking hold of the shining key, which stuck out of the ignition like a small cold hand asking to be grasped. I tried to remember what to do, what I had seen others do. I carefully pressed the clutch. I needed to slide forward to the edge of the seat to do it. I turned the key, and the lorry rumbled to life. I waited for a second, holding my breath, and then in a rush I released the clutch and stomped on the accelerator. The lorry bucked, then jumped a couple of feet, and my temple hit the half-rolled driver’s-door window. I put my finger to my skin, and it came away wet with blood. The engine stammered and died, and everything went back to silence.
Siju wrenched open the door and dragged me out of the cab. He grasped two handfuls of my shirt and shook me.
“What’s wrong with you?” he said. “What kind of idiot are you?”
When I didn’t answer, he let go of my shirt. His pants were unzipped, and I looked at the V-shap
ed flap that was hanging open. He saw me looking and said, “What?”
“Nothing.”
“Just say it, Guna.”
“Nothing,” I said.
He zipped his pants.
“Then get inside,” he said. “We’re going home.”
“What about Manju?” I asked.
“She wants to sit in the back.”
“It’s going to rain,” I said. “She’ll get wet.”
“Just get inside the bloody lorry, Guna,” Siju said. “Don’t argue.”
Inside the cab I hugged my body and tried to stay awake. The cold air was still coming in, and I wanted to roll up my window, but Siju had his open, his elbow resting on it, head leaning on that hand, the other guiding the lorry. He was driving slowly now, taking care to avoid the bumps and dips in the uneven ground. We passed a rock, ghostly white, that I didn’t remember from the journey out. From the corner of my eye, I looked at him, my sullen brother. Not a raja but a fourteen-year-old lorry driver in a Bellary mine.
“What’s going to happen now?” I asked.
He drew his hand inside. “What’s going to happen to what?”
To everything, I wanted to say. But I said, “Manju’s mother.”
He let a few moments go by before answering. And when he did, what he said was, “Come on, Guna. You’re smart. You know.”
“We could have given her the money from my school fees,” I said.
“For what?” He sounded like an old man. “So she can die in three months instead of two?”
After that we didn’t talk. The trees fell away, and the ground became smoother. The camp came into view, almost completely dark, just a few remaining fires that would burn throughout the night. Siju parked in the lorry yard and jumped out. I stayed sitting in the cab. A few drops of rain fell on the windshield and created long glossy streaks as they traveled down. The camp would wake to find itself afloat. The rats would come looking for dry ground. Munna would need to be nursed. Amma would put her hand behind his soft downy head to soothe him. Appa would bail out the water that pooled in the roof of our tent. Amma would tie an old lungi of Appa’s to two of the bamboo poles to create a hammock for Munna that would keep him above the reach of the rats. Manju’s mother would shift to a more comfortable position and wait for the rain to stop. There didn’t seem to be a reason for any of it, a logic that I could see. There was repetition and routine and the inevitability of accident. Tomorrow Mr. Subbu would drink a Pepsi, and we would dig for iron.
I heard Siju say my name, and I heard the panic in his voice. It was raining in earnest now, the windshield a silver wash. I pushed open the door and nearly fell out. My feet sank into the soft mud. Siju was standing at the back of the truck, the back panel open. His hair hung draggled around his face, and drops of water clung to the tips. He pointed wordlessly to the lorry bed. I forced my eyes to scan the entire space for Manju, but she wasn’t there.
We stood there for what seemed like an hour, though I knew it was less than a minute. I pictured her walking across the plains, her face directed to some anonymous town. She would walk for hours, I knew, and when she got tired, she would sleep exactly where she stopped walking, her arms shielding her face from the rain. I imagined her curled up on the ground. I imagined that her hair would plaster her cheek. I imagined that her uniform would be washed back into white, a beacon for anyone watching, except no one would be.
Over the following months Siju began sucking diesel out of the lorries and selling it back to the drivers at 20 percent below pump prices, and by the time the monsoons ended, he had earned enough money for one year of school fees for me. He gave it to Amma without telling me, and I never thanked him directly. We had spoken very little since the night of the lorry ride. I watched him closely for a while, worried that he would disappear too, but he came back night after night, sometimes after we had all fallen asleep, never smiling, never saying much. I knew he took the lorry out sometimes, but he never took me with him again. He stopped swaggering, and the lorry cleaners seemed disappointed. I went to school in the mornings and returned to the mine afterward.
The next August, after the flooded pits were starting to dry out again, Mr. Subbu arrived at the mine late one afternoon and announced that he was giving everyone the rest of the day off. He smiled at the responding cheer. Then from his Esteem he brought out a small color television and a white satellite dish and hooked them up to the generator, setting them on a rickety table with the help of the one of the laborers. He fiddled with the antenna until a picture flickered on the screen.
We all gathered around to watch the magnificent round stadium in China fill with color and light and music and movement. We watched graceful acrobats and women with feathers and children with brightly painted faces. We watched glittering fireworks and slender athletes in shiny tracksuits and flapping flags with all the shades of the world. We watched as the stadium slowly filled with red light, and thousands of people arranged themselves into gracious, shifting shapes in the center. Thousands more gathered in the seats, their faces reflecting the same awe we felt. We watched, all of us, in silence, stunned by the beauty of what we had created.
Contributor’s Notes
Sherman Alexie is the author of twenty-two books, including The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, winner of the 2007 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature; War Dances, winner of the 2010 PEN/Faulkner Award; and Face, a book of poetry. His latest collection of stories is Blasphemy.
Ana Arana is a reporter for Fundación MEPI. Prior to that, she was a Knight International Journalism Fellow who trained investigative reporters in Mexico. Her work has appeared in Foreign Affairs, Marie Claire, Newsweek, Salon, the Columbia Journalism Review, Business Week, and the Village Voice. Arana is a graduate of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and San Francisco State University.
Lynda Barry has worked as a painter, cartoonist, writer, illustrator, playwright, editor, commentator, and teacher, and found they are very much alike. She is the author of 100 Demons, The Freddie Stories, Blabber Blabber Blabber, and the creative how-tos What It Is and Picture This. She lives in Wisconsin.
Sibylla Brodzinsky is a journalist who has spent more than twenty years writing about Latin American politics, human rights, and social issues in publications including the Economist, the Christian Science Monitor, and the Guardian.
Pamela Colloff is an executive editor at Texas Monthly, where she writes primarily about criminal justice. Her work has also appeared in The New Yorker and has been anthologized in three editions of Best American Crime Reporting as well as the e-book collection, Next Wave: America’s New Generation of Great Literary Journalists. She was raised in New York City and attended Brown University. She now lives in Austin with her husband and their two children.
Jennifer Egan is the author of A Visit from the Goon Squad, The Keep, Look at Me, The Invisible Circus, and the story collection Emerald City. Her stories have been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s, GQ, Zoetrope, and Ploughshares, and her nonfiction appears frequently in the New York Times Magazine. She lives with her husband and sons in Brooklyn.
Isaac Fitzgerald has been a firefighter, worked on a boat, and has been given a sword by a king, thereby accomplishing three out of five of his childhood goals. He has also written for the Bold Italic, McSweeney’s, Mother Jones, and the San Francisco Chronicle. He is a coowner of the Rumpus and co-founder, with Wendy MacNaughton, of the Tumblr Pen & Ink, which will be published as a book in 2014. He can be found at isaacfitzgerald.net.
Jim Gavin’s fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, the Paris Review, Esquire, the Mississippi Review, ZYZZYVA, and Slice. He lives in Los Angeles.
Josh Gondelman is a writer and comedian who incubated in Boston before moving to New York City. Josh’s writing has appeared on McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, New York magazine’s The Cut blog, and in Esquire. He is the co-creator of @Seinfeldtoday, and his own Twitter feed was named one of 2012’s best by Paste magazi
ne.
Cynthia Gorney, a contributing writer for National Geographic, is also on the faculty of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley. A former national features writer and South America bureau chief for the Washington Post, she is the author of Articles of Faith: A Front line History of the Abortion Wars, and has also written for the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Harper’s, Sports Illustrated, and many other magazines. She and her husband, Bill Sokol, live in Oakland, California.
Peter Hessler is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he served as the Beijing correspondent from 2000 to 2007, and is also a contributing writer for National Geographic. He is the author of River Town, which won the Kiriyama Prize; Oracle Bones, which was a finalist for the National Book Award; Country Driving; and Strange Stones, a collection of shorter work. He won the 2008 National Magazine Award for excellence in reporting, and he was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2011. He lives in Cairo.
Nick Hornby is the author of the memoir Fever Pitch and six novels, the most recent of which is Juliet, Naked. He is also the author of Songbook, a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. His screenplay for An Education was nominated for an Academy Award. He lives in North London.
Katharyn Howd Machan is the author of thirty published collections, and her poems have appeared in numerous magazines, anthologies, and textbooks, including The Bedford Introduction to Literature and Sound and Sense. She is a full professor in the Department of Writing at Ithaca College in central New York State. In 2012 she edited Adrienne Rich: A Tribute Anthology.