Rejoice, a Knife to the Heart Read online

  “Simon plays both fields. It’s probably time.” She paused to drink and then said, “He hit on me last night. Shocking. Johnny was on the roof stealing souls with his camera.”

  “He’s a bit old.”

  Viviana snorted. “You underestimate the value of experience, Steve.” She suddenly leaned forward. “So, running drugs? Blood diamonds?”

  “I sold guns.”

  “Ouch, that’s one fucking cesspit of amorality.”

  “Always a seller’s market. And remember, I’m just the man on the ground.”

  “Oh I know. Your suppliers all have their own flags and anthems and take seats in the Big Turtle.”

  “Big Turtle?”

  “UN.”

  “Ah.”

  “Mhmm, ‘ah’.” A new kind of challenge was lighting up her eyes as she studied him.

  He broke her gaze. “I probably wasn’t a nice man.”

  “Oh, I’ve seen the pointy end of your work, Steve.”

  “It’s Casper.”

  “But not a friendly ghost.” She paused, and then said, “I need an escort tomorrow. Out to the site.”

  “Ah.” Now I see.

  “‘Ah’ again.”

  “Well … who are you here for?”

  “Rolling Stone.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No, why would I be?”

  “I thought they were just into interviewing rock stars or something.”

  “No, we’re knife-wielders, Casper. Counter culture. In America, the voice of reason, hah hah. Besides, a lot of those rock stars are poets and they don’t blink.” She waggled her mostly empty glass. “We do other stuff besides, but I doubt you’re one of our readers.”

  “No, I imagine not.”

  “So do we have a deal then?”

  He finished his beer and rose. “Two months ago and I would have asked what’s in it for me. And I would have struck a hard bargain, getting something from you that you probably didn’t want to give away.”

  “And now?”

  “Now? How about six a.m. down in the lobby? To beat the heat.”

  “Deal. But I have a question. Related. Sort of.”

  “Go on.”

  “Would part of that bargain have included a fuck?”

  He nodded.

  “So this new life of yours has turned you into a monk?”

  Hesitating, he glanced away for a moment. More journalists were crowding in, sweaty and sun-flushed from a day spent tracking the migration flooding every thoroughfare in the city. A lot of pale skins from foreign places, foreign worlds. He faced her again. “I’m not sure. My past life … everything was a deal, everything saw money change hands.”

  “That’s … bleak.”

  “Yes, it was.”

  “I think you need to see an alternative to that. Room 634. But don’t wait too long. I’m bagged.”

  For a second time this night she moved past him. He stood by the table, contemplating one more beer. But then, making her wait was just another power play, the kind of game he would have played as a matter of course. Besides, at his age, another beer could—as his old man used to say—let the air out of the tires.

  So he gave her enough time to find her own ride up the lift, and then followed.

  There were all kinds of cancers. Ones in the body. Ones feeding on conflict and distress in all those confused, benighted places in the world. Now all starved and withering, inside and outside.

  ET might not be God, but the language being spoken here was all about rebirth.

  Simon Wensworth wasn’t alone with his disbelief, his tempered ambivalence.

  Nor am I.

  When they walked during the day, Kolo often thought about the small hand wrapped up in his. He might have had a sister once, long ago. Younger than him. This was before he’d been taken away. There was a vague memory, more a feeling than an image, of a small hand clutching his, on some dirt track somewhere. A grip like that spoke a thousand words without uttering a sound.

  He might have been impatient, pulling her along. He might have been frustrated, the little sister always in tow, always underfoot when all the world was calling out to him, begging him to fill the empty place that was his future.

  Or maybe he’d been protective. Maybe he’d loved her just as she did him, and they were inseparable, her with her adoring eyes and him with his small smile to let her know she was safe.

  Well, that hadn’t lasted. A little boy couldn’t make anything safe, couldn’t change the future either. That little girl was either dead or lost. If she was alive, somewhere, she probably had no memory of an older brother, and being an orphan there weren’t people around to tell her stories of how things had once been.

  The recruiting drive had left bodies in the village. Kolo didn’t remember much of that day, but he’d gone and made plenty of his own recruiting drives, coming out of the forest when the time was right. He knew all about leaving bodies in the village, and bawling children being dragged out from hiding places.

  Neela had been one of those. Maybe she’d had a bigger brother. Maybe his body was left lying on the ground, hacked or shot. Kolo might even have done the killing himself.

  If left alone, it could be that people got better, generation after generation. Their thinking changed ways. They took on wisdom and lived with it in their hearts. If left alone, people could rise up from what they’d once been. But that world didn’t exist. Instead, the people who never learned arrived, in blood and bullets, and made sure that nothing changed, that the old crimes repeated. They stoked the fires of hatred and made the darkness a place to be feared.

  He didn’t much like crowds, even ones that, on occasion, helped him push his cart of belongings over rocks and ruts, that made room for him and Neela at the cook-fires. No, crowds made him feel small and every now and then he felt that the hand in his was both larger and stronger than his own. Not a younger sister after all, but an older one. And maybe she’d tried to protect little Kolo on the day he was torn from her grasp. And for her efforts she’d been raped and murdered.

  On more than one night on this long, dusty pilgrimage, he’d felt tears on his cheeks, as he mourned his dead parents, his dead siblings, and the dead boy he’d once been and still was.

  Neela was touched, caressed by wise spirits. Her eyes were a thousand years old, and this in a body like sticks and twine with the old needle tracks fading but still there, the soles of her bare feet thick as hide and the memory of his hands on that body like stains only he could see, because memory was a glowing brand in the night.

  They were a day or two north of Zomba, the settlement of Namitete behind them. Surrounded by Muslims and Zoroastrians and Jews from Zimbabwe. Someone named the Laughing Imam was leading this pilgrimage and that was the only thing about this that made sense, since no one on this road was angry.

  He sat now with the sun gone from the sky and the African night loud with crickets and tree-frogs and the incessant murmur of people at other camps. A curious space had been made for him and Neela to make their own camp, enough room for the two ragged nylon pup-tents and the small fire fueled by dung and the strange not-wood so often found in bound bundles on the side of the road, along with packets of food in familiar shapes—although nothing tasted quite right, as if something medicinal hid in every mouthful.

  Neela had been given a bottle of gin, as if she was a priestess, since it was known that she liked the taste even if it never made her drunk or even thick-tongued. It was also known that she was spirit-blessed, the tiny girl who had led a giant by the hand all the way from the Congo. People were wary of Kolo, but they revered Neela.

  He didn’t mind the solitude. He suspected that maybe it was known who he’d been, what he’d done.

  She sat beside him now, humming a song sung by mothers in their homeland. Among the other gifts that often appeared in their camp come the morning there had been a pack of Winstons, giving Kolo something to do with his hands once the walking stopped and after t
he camp’s chores were done and besides, the smoke kept the biting insects away.

  She leaned against him occasionally and he’d learned to hide his flinch, but her humming broke his heart, as it did every night. Before too long, however, she moved away and crawled into her tent.

  He watched the fire slowly burn down, listened to her settling into slumber.

  Now it was safe to weep.

  Instead, he was startled as a figure moved into the firelight, a short, thin man, bald-headed but bearded, wearing old army trousers, combat boots—the American, nylon kind—and an off-white, filthy cardigan sweater. His hands were in the sweater’s bulging pockets as he moved to take Neela’s place beside the fire, dropping into a crouch.

  “Many stars this evening,” he said in English.

  Kolo shrugged. “I have looked too long into the flames to see them.”

  “Or know them,” the man said, nodding.

  Scowling, Kolo said, “There are other places to camp. They leave us space. It’s better that way.”

  “Because of the girl?”

  “I don’t know. No one needs protecting anymore.”

  The stranger drew out his hands to reveal a pack of cigarettes in one and a bottle of beer in the other. He proffered them to Kolo. “Will you name me guest?”

  “I don’t know you, but you know me.”

  “Kolo the giant who follows the girl, yes.”

  Kolo hesitated, and then accepted the gifts. He was startled to find the bottle cold. Twisting the cap off, he drank, and then sighed.

  “Now it’s just the taste,” the man said, nodding at the beer.

  “I like the taste.”

  “Do you ever wonder which came first, beer or wine?”

  “No.”

  “Probably beer. Nutritious, and the alcohol helped purify the water.”

  The accent was British, educated. Neither detail charmed Kolo. He drank some more beer. “It was always safer than water.”

  “But she prefers gin.”

  “It helped her when—when she needed help.”

  “Withdrawing from the heroin, yes, I suppose so.”

  Kolo said nothing. He wanted the man to leave. He wished he’d never accepted the gifts.

  “You owe her, I suspect.”

  “That is between me and her and if you keep talking you’ll wake her. We walked far today.”

  When the man spoke again his words were lower, softer. “Do you know where you are going?”

  “Malawi.”

  “And here you are. In Malawi. Now where?”

  Kolo said nothing. The crowds had surprised him. They’d begun this journey virtually alone on the roads and tracks. People spoke of a place ahead. Kolo thought it might be a mosque.

  The man said, “There is a complex south of here. I’ve seen it. And now I walk back up the line, to see for myself all who have come to see it. The camps surrounding the complex are growing, as you might imagine. Building materials have appeared. There will be neighborhoods, markets, schools even. A city grows there.”

  Kolo glanced at Neela’s tent. “She knows nothing of that,” he said.

  “Then what drew her here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What drew you?”

  He licked his lips, still reluctant to give answers to this stranger’s questions. “She insisted.”

  The man nodded. “And you owe her,” he said again.

  After a time, the man collected up a few chips of the not-wood and added them to the fire. “Do you mind? I’m old, easily chilled.”

  “There is food.”

  “No, thank you, I’ve eaten. Are you a religious man, Kolo?”

  “I was born a Christian. Protestant.” He hesitated, and then shook his head. “No, not religious. But I am not blind to the spirits, though most are gone, most have left us.”

  “Gone?”

  “We starved them, disappointed them.”

  “Not angered?”

  “Empty anger,” Kolo answered. “Empty as the forest.”

  “And the day all violence ended, Kolo, what of that?”

  “Satellites,” he pronounced.

  “Satellites?”

  “They wanted to take our guns away and so they did. To make us helpless and weak.”

  “Who is ‘they’?”

  “I thought, white men. At first. Now I don’t know. Maybe the Chinese.”

  “No, Kolo, none of them. You’ve been out of the loop. Aliens.” He nodded up at the night sky. “We have been shut down, by guests bringing gifts. And such gifts!”

  “Shh, you’ll wake her.”

  “Sorry.” He rummaged again in a pocket and came out with half a chocolate bar. He broke a piece off and offered it to Kolo, who shook his head. The man popped it into his mouth and chewed for a time.

  Kolo didn’t know whether to believe him. He thought about the crowds. “This new city you speak of—another refugee camp? These people—have their lands been taken then?”

  “No. The complex, it was created by the aliens. Built by itself, as if by magic, or a miracle.”

  “And you have seen it.”

  “Yes.” The man was eating more of his chocolate, pausing to swallow before adding, “I believe it has been built for us.”

  “What is inside this complex?”

  “We don’t know. We haven’t yet been allowed to enter. A force-field surrounds it.”

  Kolo looked away, remembering that terrifying wall of nothing that had driven him and his people from their camp.

  “Your upbringing would have you God-fearing. Are you God-fearing, Kolo?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think about it.”

  “All the religions,” the man said, now carefully folding up the empty wrapper before tucking it back into a pocket, “brought to us the voice of God. And the message was ever the same. It was a simple one, that we in our weakness made complicated. Do you know what that message was?”

  Kolo said nothing. He’d met a few fanatics in his time. All armed, all angry, all eager to deliver pain. All drunk on power. He was not in the mood to hear another impassioned exhortation, and though the man seemed harmless enough—and though no violence could occur—Kolo found himself frightened.

  “The message was this: be at peace. Too simple to mess up, you’d think. But then, the human capacity for mischief is infinite.”

  “I do not know peace,” Kolo said.

  “No. Nor I. Guns and bombs are finished. The stranger’s face is no longer the enemy. So we gather up our arsenal and carry it inside—” he tapped the side of his head. “And the war continues.”

  Kolo grunted. “There is truth in that.”

  “We have been made pointless,” the man said, smiling. “Our arguments win us no victories. Our fury is a small fire in the heart of the sun. It burns only its maker and to others it remains forever beneath notice. You, me, lost in the flames, the inferno so loud we can no longer hear God’s simple message.”

  “‘Be at peace.’”

  “Of course not just us, Kolo. But the world. All of humanity, writhing in the fire of its own making.” He paused for a time.

  They stared at the dying camp-fire, the not-wood burning without smoke, leaving black ash that was said to be most fertile. Local farmers would come to the camps in the morning, watching people pack up and set out on the road once more, and then they would scoop up the black remains of the fires to carry back to their land. Like mana.

  “So,” the man said, “you are not at peace. I am not at peace. But what of the girl? Is she at peace, Kolo?”

  He considered the question for a few moments, and then nodded. “I believe that she is.”

  “So do I,” the man whispered. He rose from his crouch. “And for that, Kolo, I envy you.”

  “I accepted you as guest and yet still you do not offer me your name.”

  “Abdul.”

  “Is Neela taking me to this complex, this alien place that made itself?”

 
“I think so.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. No one does. There are no promises. Only hope.”

  Kolo scowled. He kicked one foot into the fire, scattering sparks. “I learned many years ago to hate that word. Hope is an enemy to truth, an enemy to the world and how it is.”

  “How it was.”

  Kolo grunted again, not convinced, or not willing to be convinced, as too many old hurts had been awakened by that terrible word.

  “There are a thousand angry warriors fighting each other in my head,” Abdul said. “But one stands apart and that one is me. But so too are all the raging warriors. They are me as well. Still, the me who stands apart, he watches the battle. And watches, and watches. Until he can only do one thing.”

  “What thing?”

  Abdul smiled. “Why, laugh, of course.”

  After the man was gone, Kolo opened the new pack of cigarettes. He wasn’t tired, and it gave him something to do with his hands.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  “Some people will say that to accept things as they are amounts to weakness, but I think it has more to do with exhaustion. Physical. Spiritual. The system we are all trapped in is designed to wear us down, and it’s doing a good job of it. Calling people weak is an accusation that can only be made in the absence of compassion. Next time you want to call us all sheep, have a little heart. We’re doing the best we can.”

  SAMANTHA AUGUST

  “The forcefield dome is beginning to project upward,” Alison Pin-borough explained to the Prime Minister, leaning close to be heard above the chop of the helicopter’s rotor blades. Outside the night sky was black, seemingly starless although this was likely an effect of the tinted windows. The ground below was also black, without even a single island of light marking a farm or ranch since they were presently flying over the western block of the Grasslands National Park. “It’s forming a column,” she continued. “Our drones now measure it at four hundred meters. The rate of climb is about twenty meters per day, and not even birds can fly through this forcefield.”

  The Prime Minister simply nodded. It was now full summer and the air was hot—even the breeze that came through the vents which had been opened to the outside. There were thunderstorms far to the south, somewhere over Montana—or was that Minnesota?