Authors: Nick Cole
T
H
E NIGHT AIR
felt cool and dried the sweat on the Boy’s face as he was led back from the meeting beyond the gate. The wind had picked up from off the bay. It would be a long, cold night. The shantytown was quiet and only a single candle burned in the odd window they passed along its lanes.
In the shack it was warm from the heat given off by the brazier, its glow a dull orange. Inside, Horse raised a sleepy eye then returned to his rest and dreams. The troop leader left and came back with more hay. He said something in Chinese, a farewell perhaps, then closed the door to the shack behind him as he left.
The Boy took off the sweaty gear they had given him and went out the back door.
He walked to the end of the narrow two-plank dock and lowered himself into the freezing dark water of the bay.
It was cold.
Maybe the coldest water he’d ever felt.
He thought of the girl as he floated in the darkness.
Back inside the shack he put his clothes on and, as though he had known all along what he would do next, he took up the carved piece of charcoal once more.
He made a line. The outline of her hair. Long and straight. A curve over the top of her head.
Then another line for her delicate chin.
And a line falling away from the chin for her neck.
They’ll see this.
He put the charcoal back in its pouch and sat by the glowing coals of the brazier, watching the simple lines he had drawn.
The lines were enough to remember her by.
I
N THE
MORNING
it was the troop leader who appeared once more. They both took Horse out into the mist and walked him along the bay’s edge, following a winding muddy street. Fishing boats lay motionless in the calm waters of the fog-shrouded bay.
They crossed into a ruined section of the shantytown.
Ruins from Before.
Buildings with chunks of concrete and whole sections missing. Buildings where the plaster facade had fallen away long ago. Buildings from which metal girders twisted wickedly upward. Buildings that had fallen into little more than piles from which rusty strands of rebar sprung like wild hair.
A work crew hovered over the ruins of a building, testing it with their crowbars and the occasional shovel. Other men moved piles of rubble in wheelbarrows.
They are removing the town that was here Before, Sergeant.
They came to a building. It was in better shape than most.
Inside they found the Chinese general.
He hobbled forward, his big frame leaning heavily on a bent cane.
“I have studied the map you gave me.” After a pause the general continued breathily, “Can you tell me about all those places? What is there now? That’s what we wish to know. Our outpost was our farthest settlement. We cannot go south due to the nature of contamination in that area, so it seems we must know what lies to the east. If we could go over the map together, you might tell me a little bit about each place. If that would be acceptable to you?”
The Boy thought of the girl.
He thought of leaving this place.
He had left every place he had ever been.
He wondered if he might see her here.
If he left he would never see her again.
“Yes.”
“Good,” said the general and led him to a large desk. The map lay spread out across its expanse. The floor that surrounded the desk was a sea upon which books rose like sudden and angry waves. Leaning against the walls were all manner of things. Tools, ancient rifles from Before, many things the Boy had no name for.
“So we know you came through Reno. What were your experiences there?”
The Boy thought for a moment. How did one describe the fear of an unknown mad animal lying in wait in the dark? How did one describe that laughing terror and the single leering face seen as a shadow through dirty glass for even just the part of a moment?
“Reno is like a hole where an animal lives.” He thought of the bear cave. “Where something that isn’t human makes its home now.”
The general laid his finger on the map over Reno.
“Colonel Juk was their commander. I have always wondered, over the years, what became of his unit and the men we sent there. Their last report told of being dug in and facing American armor coming out of the desert to the southeast.”
The Boy watched the map and all the places Sergeant Presley had been.
“How is it like a wild animal in a cave?” asked the general.
The Boy thought for a moment. He approached a wall and moved aside a heavy machine gun, dusty and untouched. He cleared a space along the wall.
He took out his charcoal.
He began to draw.
He drew the blind window-eyes of a corpse that was once a city. In his mind the angles were somehow distorted and maniacal. The buildings took on a surreal aspect, as if sanity hadn’t been a requirement for their architect. As if the years since, and the madmen within, had somehow turned the buildings “wrong.” He drew the bridge they’d passed under. The Boy, Horse, and Escondido. It was an open mouth, full of smashed teeth. He drew a high window, a long window twisting to the side, almost bending away from the perspective of the viewer. A window among a hundred other lunatic windows in shadow. In it the Boy placed the shadow of a man seen for just a moment. With a few quick lines he began the face, the jaw, the hair, and before he could add more to those few scribbled, hesitant, unfinished lines, the lunatic seemed complete.
When the Boy turned back, the general, watching him, nodded.
The old soldier turned to the map, his finger still resting above the word “Reno.”
“I understand.”
After a moment of looking again at the map, the Chinese general cleared his throat.
“Tell me about Salt Lake City.”
And then . . .
She entered, carrying a tray of teacups and a pot.
A
T THE END
of the week General Song sat in his patched leather chair from Before. Shoulders slumped. Eyes wide. Staring.
On the walls that surrounded him were many charcoal markings formed into drawings.
At Des Moines, two figures, a small boy, eyes wide with terror, and a black man, his face an angry curse—heavy oversized packs on each of their backs—ran across a field of sickly grass. Above them, crows—all the crows in the world—swarmed, diving and attacking them. In the foreground, a crow swooped away from the boy and the man. The crow’s eyes were two black oblongs of animal indifference. The wings seemed to rise in triumph. Its beak was open as if the
cawww!
that must come from it was a mighty roar. All the birds were rendered with such malevolence.
Beaks open.
Claws reaching.
Wings spreading.
One could almost hear a sonic sea of victory caws as each bird swooped and dived, wheeling overhead.
Herding their prey.
Carnivorous now.
Finally, after the end of the world and an ocean of wild, genetically powerful corn that had broken and overtaken the lands of middle America—surviving what civilization, mankind, had not, in Des Moines, Iowa —crows ruled the land.
Outside Madison, Wisconsin, powerful dogs with short necks like bulls and wide mouths full of canine teeth surged forward. Real hatred could be found in their snarling muzzles as opposed to the crows’ mere soullessness. The black man leaned hard on a door. His face was twisted in rage, his eyes focused. Next to him was the Boy, even though long hair covers his face, which was swept back toward the approaching pack of wild dogs. A long hallway trailed off to the horizon. Someplace abandoned. An old shopping center. They were trapped. The fierce dogs bounded toward them. In the lead dog, every muscle was perfectly and beautifully rendered like taut cables of charcoal-driven power. There is an urgency the viewer feels when looking at the black man, who must open the door if he and the Boy are to survive. It was the kind of picture one looked at then turned away from, praying that such a thing will never happen to them.
Or to their loved ones.
“Who is the black man?” he’d asked the Boy.
“Sergeant Lyman Julius Presley.”
At Detroit, sailboats were piled high against a beach of black rocks and garbage. The sky was overcast and gray. The lake struck the shore hard, almost angrily. One could hear, thought the general, the damaged spinnakers and tangled tackle clanging compulsively in the wind while occasional ancient spars groaned in torment.
“Were you with Sergeant Presley when you made it to Detroit?”
“I was always with him.”
“What is your earliest memory of him?”
“We were walking on the road. He was carrying all our things and I kept falling behind him because I was still little. He was singing one of his marching songs about Captain Jack and he said to me, “Keep up, or I might leave you behind.”
At Cincinnati there was a river. There were no buildings. No trees. Only a dark hill on the horizon. A road sign, unreadable, bent forever away from the place.
“Why did this Sergeant Presley keep going, even though all the evidence seemed to indicate that his country was destroyed?” asked the general.
The Boy simply looked at the picture and then, when the general felt as if the Boy would not answer, the Boy spoke.
“He told me one time that he couldn’t quit. That to quit was to die. That he’d quit once, before I met him, and a lot of people got killed.”
And.
“I’ve always thought that those people getting killed had something to do with where I came from.”
At Pittsburgh was the American bomber. The nose and cockpit were in the foreground as the fuselage stretched away, cracked in the middle. The only wing visible lay collapsed. A car lay trapped under the nose. Rusting cars dotted the landscape of the freeway.
“How come you never asked Sergeant Presley about where you came from?” asked the general.
“I did and he told me that the past wasn’t important anymore because it was just wreckage and junk and not worth going over. He told me that the only thing that was important now was the future.”
“And yet he was still looking for his country under all this wreckage, like that of the bomber on the wall?”
Silence.
“He said America was more than just the things we’d seen: the rubble of the cities, the broken highways, the burned up tanks. He said America was a good idea. And that as long as he was alive, the good that was in the idea was still alive.”
At Baltimore, a shaven-headed man with malevolent eyes held a shovel. A twisted farmhouse, windows out of perspective, rose toward the ceiling of the room where the general sat. A woman, scrawny and underfed, looked at the ground with bruised and blackened eyes. She stood behind the malevolent man, in his shadow. In an orchard in the background, under a crescent moon, wild figures leapt about a fire as something man-like lay atop a grill, its legs splayed, its arms akimbo.
“Who are they?” he asked the Boy.
“They are the Cotter family and they’re evil.”
And there were other pictures . . .
The general leaned back in his chair.
This was what happened after war.
I remember, he thought. Before it all, before the bombs even, I remember walking down a boulevard in Beijing; the cherry blossoms were just beginning to fall. I remember the posters, and the songs about bravery and our country that we thought we loved so much. I remember I was very proud of my uniform and that when the time came I would earn its inherent respect. I remember thinking I would do anything for my country.
We all thought that way.
Anything.
We had no idea.
We were wrong.
T
HE
B
OY HAD
drawn a story wherever the Chinese general had placed his finger on Sergeant Presley’s map. If the Boy had been there or knew something about the place, he had rendered it in charcoal across the walls of the general’s study.
“One day,” said the general, “we must go to these places and find what is left there. Not to conquer as our current leaders wish and which will only bring the wrath of the barbarians down on us as it has already. But we must go to these places in order that we might make something new. What you tell me in your drawings may one day make a difference to those that must go to these places on the wall.”
And each day she had brought them tea in the afternoon.
And one day . . .
After she set the tea down and while the general stood close to the wall studying a picture of Little Rock, Arkansas, in which the Boy skinned a deer with trembling hands, the girl moved next to the Boy.
In the picture, the Boy was laying out the heart and liver on a crumbling table inside a large building, a library perhaps, by the look of the collapsed bookshelves. There was a river passing outside shattered and dirty windows. Among the collapsed shelves of books, the black man built a fire from fallen volumes. There was hunger on both of their faces.
The general said little once the picture was finished and as he studied it. He stood silently before it, consuming its every detail. Today, the girl did not leave as she usually did once she placed the tray of tea on the large and very old desk.
The Boy, because the day was cold and his withered side was stiff, reached for the tea, already inhaling its hot jasmine aroma. And she caught his hand just before he grasped the cup.
He looked into her eyes.
She squeezed his hand.
He was frozen.
His heart did not beat.
He was sweating.
And he squeezed back. Hard. Almost too hard.
“Jin,” she whispered.
The general called her Jin. He had learned that much.
She squeezed his hand once more and took a cup of tea to the general.
After that, she left and did not look at him, as the general had turned from the picture and was now talking to the Boy. Words in the English. Words the Boy did not understand because he could not concentrate on anything other than the moment of her touch. His face felt as though it were on fire.
“Is there no place that survived in some part beyond a mere day-to-day existence?” asked the general.
The Boy was watching the girl named Jin, though she had already left the room.
“She is the only one who believes in my work,” said the general, watching the Boy’s eyes. “She is the only one who, like me, wants to know what happened out there. She is not afraid of it. She is not bothered by the harsh reality of these times like so many of our people, who simply wish to live behind their gates and keep themselves from the ‘contamination’ as they call it, of the world as it is now. They require only that their lives be beautiful and a reminder of a homeland that is gone. They willingly live a lie, simply because it is fragrant.”
The general paused and sipped at the tea he had taken up in his two liver-spotted hands.
“Jin and I seek the truth because the truth holds its own beauty. In my opinion, it is the lies of our past that have brought about the current state of destruction. Late in my life, I vowed never to live another lie. My only sadness is that I made the vow after the world had been burned and poisoned by a rain of nuclear radiation.”
The Boy watched the general.
“Sometimes I think she merely humors an old man,” said the general, lost in the map again. “But she is a good granddaughter and I feel that she can look past the damage and the rubble and the warmongering of our collective past, both China and America, and find what was noble and beautiful about us.”
He fell to mumbling when his eyes found some new, previously unconsidered mark on the map, “I was saying . . .”
T
HAT
NIGHT THE
Boy lay on the floor of the shack near the brazier. It was exceptionally cold outside. His side ached. His hand was cramped and black from the charcoal he used to draw pictures on the walls of the general’s study.
Horse stirred as the fire popped.
The Boy was watching the lines.
He was watching Jin.
Horse complains for a moment as if sensing an animal outside in the cold wind and the dark night.
There was a moment of quiet that threatened to go on forever.
And then . . .
There was a knock at the back door that led out to the two-plank dock.
The Boy opened the door.
Jin pressed her mouth into his and he could feel her cold, soft cheeks grow warm. Her slender body melted into his arms, alive and living within his grasp. He felt her arms about him, clutching at his shoulders. And for a moment one hand slipped down to his withered arm, caressing him there.
“I am Jin,” she said haltingly. “I do not . . . speak American”—she said something in Chinese—“very well.” Then, “But I am learning.”
He closed the door and brought her to the fire. She stood warming herself while he got the bearskin and wrapped it around her.
“What is your . . . name?” she asked.
The Boy looked at her.
In the light from the glowing brazier, wrapped in the skin of the bear, she was even more beautiful. She looked at him expectantly, her eyes shining in the firelight.
“What do they call me? What do your people call me?”
“They call . . . you . . . the Messenger.”
“Why?”
“You brought . . . the news of the Barbarians. I do not want . . . I do not want to call . . . you the Messenger.”
“Why?”
She kissed him again and again until their intensity threatened to consume them. Breathlessly she broke from his hungry embrace, panting, “It . . . cannot be.”
Later, they sat staring into the fire, she reclining against him, the two of them almost sleeping, dreaming.
“Why?” asked the Boy.
She drew her fingers along his powerful arm.
He liked that.
Later she said, “You know that this is . . . not done?”
He held her hands, resting them on her belly.
“If you were my woman, then it would be all right.”
“No, that can never . . . be.”
“Why?”
She took up his withered hand. She turned to face him. Her dark eyes caught the firelight.
“I . . . can know . . . can tell. I can tell . . . you are brave. To me you are very . . . pretty . . . no . . . handsome. You are . . . clean. ‘Whole’ is the word? To me. But our leaders will not let those who live inside the gate . . . I do not like this word . . . it’s . . . is their . . . but they say ‘sully’ . . . you know . . . to be unclean? With the barbarians.”
She sighed deeply, her eyes searching the darkened rafters for the right words. For the story. For the explanation.
“Even before we came . . . to here. To this place, America. We were separate and apart from others. Mandarin and Cantonese. Government and peasant. Not the same, do you understand? But after the war . . . even more so, there were many . . . defects. Many of the survivors from other places . . . Americans . . . were like you.”
He understood. She was perfectly formed. Perfectly beautiful, and he was not. It would be wrong of him to make her his woman. It would be wrong in this place.
“Even our people . . . were affected by the radiation from . . . bombs. But those children . . . how do you say . . .” She searched the room, her eyes casting about and finding nothing. “Never existed?”
The Boy nodded, understanding.
“They made them disappear. They made . . . rules, laws, I mean. No intermarrying with those who are sick . . . unclean. Now, they cannot even stand . . . to have them inside . . . the gate.”
She watched his eyes, searching to find the wound her words, the truth, had caused him.
But he remained steady, his gaze never wavering from her deep brown eyes.
“To me you . . . it does not matter, you are whole, to me,” she said again.
The Boy looked at her for a long time.
In his eyes she saw the question.
“Is that why I had to wear the suit beyond the gate?”
“Yes . . . they fear you will contaminate . . . them. They understand little and are afraid . . . much.” Then, “It is not wise of them. They do not have . . . wisdom.”
“Wisdom changes things. I knew a man who was very wise. But he is gone now . . . I need wisdom.”
“We . . . all . . . do,” she whispered.
An hour before dawn he led her to the dock. A slender boat, tied to the wooden planks, bobbed atop choppy wavelets.
As he helped her down into the tiny boat, he felt a sudden moment of terror, as if he were casting something valuable, something precious—his tomahawk, his best blanket, food even—down into a pit. Or an ocean. Or an abyss.
And I am hoping it will come back to me.
And.
She is more valuable than my tomahawk or a blanket or even food.
Why?
“Will you be safe?” he asked her.
Why was she valuable?
“Yes. I’ll use the boat to . . . go around . . . the point and then come close to the wall. I know my way over . . . and our home is just . . . just on the other side.”
He leaned down to untie the boat.
“When you stood . . .” she began, “in front of our leaders . . . in your mask . . . and at the wall . . . you were not afraid to tell them . . . the truth. They are . . . always . . . have been . . . afraid of truth.” She looked at him. She shook her head slightly. “You are not afraid . . . of anything . . . even of the truth.”
And.
“I also . . . am not afraid,” she said finally, and turned the boat toward open water.
She looked small and helpless in the boat and he watched as she paddled out and away from him, rounding the point and finally disappearing. He watched the water for a long time, until he almost felt frozen inside. Within the shack he lay down on the bearskin in front of the fire.
Why?
Because she saw me when she looked at me.
Without horror.
Without fear.
Without pity.
And because she did not look away when she let me see that she was beautiful.
Thinking he was still awake, he slept. When he awoke with a start, wondering what was real and what was not, he smelled jasmine.