Radio Belly Page 8

  YOU ARE WALKING to school early on the Monday of your final week when you notice hundreds of footprints stretching out as far as you can see on either side of the road, as if every inch of ground has been danced upon. You are thinking about footprints, remembering your smart friend, when you notice thick grey columns rising up over the mountains. You are wondering if those columns are smoke or cloud and then something floats past your ear—a butterfly, not flying but falling sideways through the air to land softly at your feet. It’s your first butterfly since you arrived in this country. You bend to get a closer look and see that it’s burnt—its papery wings still smoking, its small black body crisp and hollow. You are just about to pick it up when another butterfly floats to the ground beside you, with one wing flaming blue. Soon they are landing—pat, pat, pat—all around. The sky is filled with them, burning butterflies tracing slow spirals through the air like maple keys. And then one is tilting toward you, still alive, burning and beating its wings. With each rush of air, the flames grow. Then, paralyzed, the butterfly coasts for a time, sinking lower and lower on shrinking wings. This struggle continues—the beating and the flaming, the coasting and the falling—until at last it hits dirt, wingless, with a body like a charred raisin. It is metamorphosis in reverse. And the smell is of burning shoes. And the silence is unbearable because this much death should make noise. In a moment it is you making the noise. You are shrieking, batting the air and running for the covered alley behind the market.

  And that’s when you see Nug, standing in the middle of the market, at the centre of a circle of men. You recognize some of them as the older brothers and young uncles of your students. Nug is looking up at the butterflies, hugging herself and whimpering, her face stretched into a silent scream. A butterfly flames past her nose and she wails and then the men close in on her. They push her back and forth, taunting, hissing, and their hands are all over her, on her breasts, her stomach, between her legs. They are raking at her clothes. Their fingers are on her face, in her mouth. And then her shirt is off and they are tossing it over her head, piggy-in-the-middle, and she is jumping, laughing with her sloppy, wide grin and the tears are fanning out across her cheeks. It is a game. She is laughing and crying, half-naked. And then they are pushing her to her knees, forcing her down.

  You step out of the alley, screeching, throwing rocks, old fruit, whatever you can find. The men scatter. They slip away through cracks in the market walls and then it is just you and Nug and a thousand burning butterflies—the ground has grown soft with them. She is shirtless and shaking so hard her head looks loose on her neck. All around you the hills are burning.

  AT SCHOOL, CLASSES have already started and Mr. Bruce is nowhere to be found. You get Nug settled in his office and then knock on Mrs. Diana’s door.

  “Mr. Bruce gone,” she says.

  “Gone where?” you demand. “What’s going on here?” You don’t mean to yell.

  She peers over her shoulder at her class, then steps a little farther into the hall, closing the door behind. “Trouble coming,” she says. “War coming.”

  You snort, more of a laugh really. You refuse to believe there could be a war approaching without your knowing anything about it!

  But she doesn’t laugh with you. Her eyes are deep and earnest, not black from this proximity but brown within brown within brown.

  You can’t, just now, remember home. You can’t remember being anywhere but here, in this hallway, smelling of burnt wings, talking about war, as if it’s a thing that can just sneak up on a person.

  Down the hall, Nug is lolling on Mr. Bruce’s desk, singing softly to herself.

  THE FIRST THING you do when you step back into the classroom is make a big show of putting your mask on. The second thing you do is tell your female students to do the same. Then you instruct them to take out pencils and paper. Today they will be taking notes, you tell them, lots of notes.

  You divide the board with two headings: Good and Bad and then you flip through the Speech book placing each topic on one side or the other. Bad = Poverty, Oppression, Childhood Obesity, Poor Credit Rating, Discrimination, Weapons of Mass Destruction. Good = Democracy, Education, Retirement Savings Plans, Freedom of Speech, Sunscreen, Mammograms. You dictate a short speech on each topic, going slowly, stopping often, so they can copy it all down. You will go through every topic this way. You will explain every last aspect of American life, telling them exactly what to think and why. You will keep them all night if you have to.

  THAT NIGHT, WALKING home through the moonless dark, you can feel people running all around you, making footprints, getting ready. Fire glows in the distance. Butterflies caught in the updraft are shooting up over the hills, raining down like sparks on this side. It looks almost festive, almost like the Fourth of July.

  IN THE MORNING, Mr. Bruce is back, sitting at a tilt on a bench in the school’s entrance, drunk. When he sees you, he pats the bench beside him, “Seat, seat.”

  So you seat. You have so many questions and demands, but before you can get to them, while his eyes are still swimming slow circles around your face, he hands you a letter, already opened.

  Dear Teacher,

  Numerous focus groups and independent consumer trials have demonstrated the relevance of our test product cross-culturally. The most up-to-date research confirms...

  You skip ahead.

  ... It is our understanding that the country you are stationed in is experiencing political upheaval. Studies have shown that our product may be less effective under such circumstance. May we suggest you visit the nearest American Embassy to ensure a safe passage home? Perhaps, once home, you would like to attend one of IELTA’s many teacher-training seminars held bimonthly in key American cities.

  You fold the letter and tuck it away. “So—war,” you say. It isn’t surprise you feel. It’s a kind of relief, like being caught in the mouth of a hungry thing at last.

  “Yuh, war,” Mr. Bruce says.

  “I’m not leaving,” you declare. “I will not abandon my students. Not now.”

  “No X Test. No Ha-vad,” he says. “Cancelled-cancelled.”

  “Can I still teach?” you ask.

  “Yuh,” he nods. “It can be so.”

  SO YOU TEACH even as your students disappear, one by one, boys and girls, to fight. You teach younger and younger students, first words, then phonics and eventually just the crude sounds of English. You teach because you can and because you’ve realized your mistakes, because you spent all that time on small talk when you should have been clearing the way to Big Talk, when you should have been talking to them about independence and freedom and the difference between right and wrong.

  You continue to teach, even as the bullets ricochet off the school’s tin armour, even after all the women and children are moved into the school basement, the room down there a cross between cellar and cave with its damp walls and its subterranean echo. When the pens and paper run out, you teach by grinding mosquitoes up into a paste to write on the cave walls. And when the mosquitoes run out, you scratch letters into the dirt. And then there is no need for writing anymore because the bodies have started to arrive—your students, returning to you again. Even those who are alive are changed, rearranged. Anything that was soft in them is now hard. Many are maimed and all of them have aged. Their eyes glint like hammered-down nails as they teach you, in perfect English, how to polish the bottle and soak the rag for a Molotov cocktail, how to stitch up a wound and set a bone. Patiently, they show you how to feel your way forward in a darkened cave and when to forget what you cannot save, and all the ways you do not belong to yourself.

  The Moustache Conspiracy

  IT’S A BAD IDEA to paddle into the open ocean with Stefan as he is, Mary knows that. It’s irresponsible, even reckless, but she’s had it with resort life. That tiny cabin—so much wood, so little light, like living inside a walnut shell.
The structured mealtimes—all those attempts to force friendship over slick buffet food. The whole place overrun with young hopeful moms in Lycra pants. Yes, she’s had it with land, with people, with seasons and gravity, and the business of mothering, which is why she flirts with the man who’s rented them the boats just long enough for Stefan to get a head start. Then she pushes off land herself. The man stands on shore, smiling and waving until he notices Stefan leaning dangerously in his kayak, looking like a rag doll stuffed into a toy boat. He walks briskly to the edge of the water and tries to call them back, but it’s too late. They’ve almost disappeared into the bright white fog. Pretty soon the resort, the past, their entire landlubbing lives will shrink to a small dark embarrassment in the distance.

  She saw the ad back in the spring. Stefan had been cooped up for months by then. Adventure tourism it said. Kayaks and canoes, fishing, a high-ropes course winding through old-growth treetops. Old growth: those words lit up in her mind. The website had shown groups of co-workers and juvenile delinquents dangling from harnesses in the cedar canopy, smiling despite themselves, as if all that looking down on the world had mended them. It wasn’t long before her plan took shape. She put the house on the market, started whittling Stefan’s pills with an x-acto knife and booked the cabin for the first two weeks of the off-season.

  Foolish to think a mother and her grown son could start again—she sees that now. But these past months, her hope got the best of her. As his pills shrunk week to week, he started walking and talking and asking for things again—apple juice, spaghetti, a new toothbrush—it didn’t matter what. It had been so long since he’d wanted anything at all. She found a suitable buyer for the house. She even found doctors who agreed with her plans. “Yes!” her alternative psychotherapist, Dr. Bertrand, said. “Burn your old life maps!” Once Stefan was completely off his meds, he said they should both come back for a guided LSD trip. “Your spirit guides are very optimistic about this life change,” said Lynne, her acupuncturist/psychic. Even her life coach agreed: The omens were good; it was time for action.

  It wasn’t until the drive up, though, that she realized how little he’d improved. He was lumped in the seat next to her and would speak only in single syllables, only in answer to her questions. Even then his voice was a growl, dredged up from some bottom she couldn’t imagine. And there was a smell coming off him, like syrup or overripe fruit. She’d had to keep her window cracked open, enduring the screech of wind in her ear the whole drive. Beside her, he was busy keeping a tally, counting moustaches she guessed. There is something about men with moustaches. Not just that he doesn’t trust them, but that moustaches are one of the ways the world is organized: some hierarchy or code—bushy versus thin, or dark versus light—she’d never understood it.

  SHE WATCHES HIS boat lurch left-right, left-right with each dip of the paddle and wonders what she was really hoping to find out here on the water. Escape? Miracle? A beautiful end? He looks squeezed in, and she can hear him breathing through his nose like a fat man. She wonders if he can still swim, if he would even have the will, and then she holds her breath against this thought, waits for the one-two punch of grief-guilt—but it doesn’t arrive. It seems the usual rules don’t apply out here. After all, they’re paddling into a fog so thick it’s as if the sky has fallen. It parts in front of them and draws behind them like damp drapery. Out here everything is secret. Everything is forgiven.

  WHEN THEY’D FIRST arrived, they were told the rest of the resort had been rented out for a “women’s retreat.” Those women were everywhere: in the dining room, in the kitchen, in the hallways, having such strange conversations, at such high volume.

  “It’s just—I feel as if my body is trying to tell me something,” a woman at the other end of the picnic table said to her friend at dinner the first night.

  “So dialogue with it,” said the friend. “Say: ‘Uterus, what exactly are you trying to tell me? I’m just not getting the message.’—Go on, try.”

  By the time Mary and Stefan had finished eating, the uterus had spoken and the woman had cried and her friend had suggested “supported headstands.” Mary was wondering if this is what young women were really like nowadays or if this was just a troupe of actresses rehearsing when she noticed Stefan getting that look on his face—his eyes darting around the room, trying to take in all four corners at once like a trapped animal. She led him back to the cabin and opted to smuggle their dinners out of the dining hall from then on.

  Stefan spent the first few days in bed, headphones on, sleeping or scribbling in his notebooks. She let him go, still hopeful, knowing he might feel worse before he felt better. He only got up to find food or use the bathroom. He’d return from the vending machines immediately, looking chased, with bags of chips and peanuts stuffed up under his shirt, but he’d stay in the bathroom for hours, doing who-knows-what with the door locked and the water running. That’s when she picked up his headphones and discovered it wasn’t music playing but static. She peeked in his notebooks and found page after page of strange math: egg + house = home; family = momdad + dinnerguilt. There were names of people they’d known, phone numbers, addresses, all laid out with lines and arrows between, as if to make a grand equation of their lives. She hoped for some wisdom or truth on those pages—Home is where the egghouse is?—but in the end they were incomprehensible. She closed the book. It was the engine room of a complicated mind—messy work best kept in the dark.

  THEY PADDLE FOR an hour, two, straight into the fog and then pull close to pass a water bottle between them. “I’m big out here,” Stefan mutters. They drift apart again. He’s been talking more since they left the house. These days entire sentences float up, and every time parts of her float up too—ridiculous, stale-air parts. But he is still mostly incoherent, scrambled, as in a dream.

  “He can’t perceive his own borders,” Dr. Wong told her once, just before he decided he would stop telling her these things. “He is everywhere at once.”

  “Foggy,” Stefan says, passing the water bottle back to her.

  “Yes,” she says.

  He is big and foggy. He is weather. He is wind. He is quantum, an exploded star, the pieces of him far and wide. This is how she’s come to understand it. Understanding = making peace. Making peace = making pieces, swallowing, forgetting.

  AT THE RESORT, Mary took long walks to get away from Stefan. It was a beautiful time of year, the last dry wheeze of summer, plus she enjoyed watching those women. She’d see them clutching their tummies and “visualizing abundance” in the forest, or lunging on the beach, stretching their abdomens, opening their fallopian tubes. It didn’t take long to figure out this was some sort of fertility workshop, and then it became clear who was who. The fertile were grey and exhausted looking and talked the loudest. About home-schooling and goat’s milk. About diapers, and how to save the world one person at a time. The infertile, meanwhile, were a little like babies themselves—wide-eyed and grabby—except they were always talking about their reproductive organs. No wonder Stefan was terrified.

  After about a week she decided it was time to air Stefan out. She prodded him up from bed and out the door each evening during the dinner hour, when she knew the women would be sequestered in the dining hall. He snarled and resisted her at first, but once they made it past the resort grounds and into the safety of the forest he seemed soothed. Standing in the middle of a mossy clearing lit up by a low golden sun, he looked as if finally the world was right with him. Her hope ballooned. Maybe he could always be this satisfied, she thought, if the rest of life weren’t so short on magic. Maybe this was progress, at last.

  Then, on their way back from last night’s walk, they rounded the corner of the dining hall and ran right into a gathering of women. They were kneeling in a circle, engaged in some form of toddler worship. At the centre of things, a child staggered after a dog, falling on it, trying to eat its tail while the kid’s mother talked a
bout hormone therapy, not to fear it, that it can produce a perfectly healthy child. The women were beaming after the child, and then all at once they aimed their smiles at Mary and Stefan.

  Mary tried to say hello but Stefan bumped into her back and it came out short. “Hu—,” she said. Stefan pressed his face into her hair, trying to hide behind her, the way he did as a child, only he was so much bigger than her now.

  Just then the toddler bent to pick a stray cracker off the ground. He raised it to his mouth and, as if they shared a single paranoia, the women moved to intercept. “Don’t!” the mother called them off. “I let him eat off the ground. It helps prevent—” she looked at Stefan and faltered—“illness down the road.” The women settled again, a bunch of ruffled ducks, and their eyes floated back to Stefan and Mary. Stefan snickered from deep within Mary’s hair and then, because laughter is contagious, because for a moment she saw the situation from the outside—an elephant-sized boy trying to wear his mother as a wig—Mary laughed too, an open-mouthed, rowdy laugh. The women looked at her with overblown horror, as if she were the spirit of infertility come to ridicule them, and then in another second she was the spirit of infertility and she was ridiculing them. These women! Their crooked uteruses! All this planning, as if it will save their boys and girls! She snorted and bent in half to contain herself. Stefan shuffled out from behind her then, exposed. Mary choked, felt her lungs fill with that particular kind of love that is inseparable from pity, inseparable from ache. It was too late to run. Those women stared.

  If Mary was the spirit of infertility, then Stefan was a thing worse than that. He was fertility gone wrong, an unnatural thing all grown up. Mary tugged on Stefan’s sleeve to lead him away, but he was watching the toddler and the dog share the soggy cracker—licking it, dropping it, licking it again. He was watching the women watching him. And then it was all too much. He clapped his hands to the sides of his head and let out a scream. It was monkey-high, pure animal. The dog barked. The women averted their eyes. Stefan ran and Mary followed.