Don't Cry Stories Part 10

Two days later we were on a plane to Arba Minch. The weather was turbulent and the small jet bucked like an open boat on choppy water. Katya clutched her armrests and for the dozenth time went over the details of her conversation with Kebede. She had been too sick to her stomach to eat for several days, and her thinness made the taut, tense nature of her will more visible.

The plane banged around; a woman gasped so loudly it was nearly a scream. I stood slighdy and looked at the c.o.c.kpit; it was open and I could see the pilots. They were leaning back in their seats, laughing and talking as if they were sharing a very good joke.

I said, "The pilots look drunk."

"Oh, sit down," said Katya.

I sat down and looked out the window; the wing was vibrating ferociously. I began to sweat.

"I loved Thomas," I said. "I loved him right up until the end."

"I know," said Katya. "I know you did."

The plane dropped suddenly, then steadied, then rose above the clouds. The sun hit the wing with piercing brilliance.

"I loved him," I said.

"Yes," said Katya.

"But I was unfaithful."

Katya turned to face me, her fear interrupted by her surprise.

"It was only once. One person, once. A student. Not even technically a student-he had just graduated." I spoke rapidly, almost pattering. The plane jerked quickly to the side, then righted itself. "How did it happen?"

"He was someone I really disliked-rude in cla.s.s, so arrogant that it made him stupid. It was clear that he disliked me, too, I was gjad to be getting rid of him. Then we saw each other at the graduation party and he came over to talk to me. I was surprised at first Then I realized after about two minutes that it wasn't exactly dislike he felt for me. And I didn't dislike him, either. And Thomas wouldn't be surprised if I came home late."

"Was Thomas sick by then?"

It was a blow, but I could not be angry at her for striking it. "Yes," I said, "but I didn't know it yet. He had become very bad-tempered and strange-he was always starting fights and yelling at me-cursing at me, which he'd never done before. I was really mad at him. That partly explains why I did it, but not fully. I can't explain it fully. I wanted s.e.x and I wanted it to hurt. Not physically but..."

"I know," said Katya. She said it quickly, as though to stop me from saying any more. "That was there, in the situation.*

I looked out the window Below us was a forest of textured green, a still ma.s.s of depth and roughness, of mesmerizing sameness. I looked at it and my thoughts dissolved like foam on an ocean. Again came the image of my face and spread knees on the floor. Unthinking darkness rose inside me, darkness and numb-ness. The plane steadied.

"I didn't know that he was sick," I said. "But I could tell that something was changing, that he was leaving me. The parts of Thomas that I knew as Thomas were leaving."

Katya put her hand on my arm and stroked it. Beneath us the forest fell away. We flew over bare ocher earth. I sat on the bed next to Thomas and tried to coax a spoon of soup into his mouth. He would not take it. I closed my eyes. On one side of me was the dark image of my grief. On the other side was bright sky, a rattling plastic window, and the torn edge of my seat cus.h.i.+on. How strange the contrast. How strange that I wished I could return to that moment of sitting on the bed, trying to get Thomas to take a spoon of soup.

We began our descent. I turned away from the window and saw Katya sitting very erect and tense; I was struck by the intensity of her thinness and paleness, the swollen darkness under her eyes.

Her face said, Don't desert me. Link with me. Link your will with mine. With a mental side step, I did. The plane hit the ground with an exuberant thud; a woman burst into laughter.

Kebede was waiting for us in an old pickup truck He was a small fine-boned man with a high-bridged nose, unsmiling, his eyes quick and clear. He asked whether we wanted to see the baby now, or go to the hotel first. Katya said, "The baby, please."

I had wanted Kevin to hurt me. I also feared it terribly We went to a hotel. I was so afraid, I couldn't walk without trembling. If he had not taken my hand at the threshold of our rented room, I might have stopped and walked away-but he did take my hand.

I looked at him and saw that his eyes were wide and determined, which made me understand that he was actually uncertain and possibly a little afraid himself. I put my arm around him and leaned my head against his shoulder. We went into the room.

As we neared the town, the vegetation became more lush. We glimpsed a great blue body of water between the trees and rich greenery. We turned down a street of stone houses mostly hidden behind walls and gates; we saw courtyards through the gates; we saw somebody's garage painted with flamboyant brown spots, like the hide of a cow.

Kebede's house was small but elegantly constructed of big smooth stones, contrasted by a door made of rough wooden planks. His young daughter greeted us and led us into a long, narrow, vaguely furnished room. A woman in a vermilion dress emerged from a side room with a crying baby in her arms. "This is Sofia, my wife," said Kebede. Smiling, Sofia handed the baby to Katya. The baby stopped crying. Cradling him, Katya looked at us, grinning as if she had given birth.

The baby was beautiful, fragile and small for his age, with a severe mouth, a high forehead, almond-shaped eyes, and slightly pointed ears that made his gaze seem radically attuned. When you held him, you felt the pure unprotected tenderness of an infant, but in those eyes there also was something uncanny and strong, nascent and vibrating with the desire to take form. He had come to the hospital half-starved from pneumonia and parasites, and although he was now healthy, he was still undernourished and weak. I thought, It matters who this child is, specifically. Sofia made us all a pasta dish with spicy onion, puree, so spicy that I could barely eat it, so spicy that Katya didn't dare eat it. I wouldn't have expected even a robust baby to eat something so strong, but this baby ate it. He ate and conveyed with each bite, I intend to thrive. "Son," said Katya. "Sonny. I'm going to name him Sonny." When we were done eating, we took Sonny back to the hotel. Sofia and her other daughter, an eleven-year-old in braids, whose name was Mekdes, went with us. Mekdes was amazed at the hotel s plumbing; she kept turning the water on and off. Katya was itching to buy baby food and clothes-what Sonny had on was filthy-and so Sofia made Mekdes calm down and instructed her to watch the baby while we went shopping.

"Can she do that?" asked Katya. "At her age?"

"Of course she can," said Sofia. "She's cared for children younger than this one."

The clothing store was a dark little hole stuffed with boxes of ridiculously ugly baby clothes from Eastern Europe; Katya loaded her arms with them. Sofia's phone rang and she turned her back to us to answer it. A small girl capered as she walked in behind her mother; the mother frowned, planted herself in front of a box, and started digging. Still capering, the child made a beautiful gesture with her head, nuzzling the air the way a kitten might rub against its mother. Smiling, Katya held up an orange corduroy jumper with a lavender collar. Sofia turned to us. "Stop," she said. "You have to stop. This is my husband. The mother just came back to the hospital. She is very angry. She wants her baby back."

Kebede drove us to the hospital. Sofia held Sonny; Katya didn't want to. She had pulled into herself and become very contained. Kebede told us that the hospital staff was very upset with the mother for showing up after leaving the child for so long.

"Why?" said Katya tonelessly. "It's her right."

"She's a day laborer," said Kebede. "She lives outdoors; she lives from hand to mouth. The hospital staff say she's r.e.t.a.r.ded. The baby will die with her."

There was a crowd of hospital staff gathered in front of the hospital, and they came forward to meet us when we got out of the car. They were all talking loudly, but my eyes went to the only silent one among them: a small beaten-looking woman with long dirty hair and flat b.r.e.a.s.t.s hanging way down her body. She was dressed in filthy ragged clothes and the earrings had been torn from her ears. Her eyes were small and hot and I could not read their expression; it came from too far back in her head. I looked at her and thought, This woman is not r.e.t.a.r.ded. Her eyes went past me and fell on Katya; her deep expression came forward slightly. Katya steadily returned the look; I could not read her expression, either. Sofia went forward and put the baby in his mother's arms. Every' one fell silent. The mother glanced at Sofia, went toward Katya, and tried to hand the baby to her. Everybody burst out talking. Katya automatically reached for the baby, but before she could take him, Kebede stepped in and took him. The baby screamed and reached for his mother. Looking meaningfully at the mother, Kebede gave the sobbing baby to a female hospital staffer. The staffer handed the child back to his mother. The mother took the child, walked around the staffer, and tried to approach Katya again. Everybody was yelling then. Kebede moved in front of the mother, blocking her. The baby screamed. Katya hung her head and turned back to the car, both hands pressed against her chest.

It was over in less than five minutes. After the mother walked away with the baby, Sofia went to the car to comfort Katya I was too stunned by the scene to leave it that quickly Kebede stood for a while talking with the hospital people, but I could not understand what they were saying.

When we got back to the hotel, Katya lay down in bed. It was getting dark, but I did not turn on the lights. The room was stifling, but I made no move to open the windows. Katya spoke with her back to me.

"This was a mistake," she said. "An arrogant mistake. People told me that, and they were right. I have been lazy and selfish all my life and I think I can just come and buy a kid after living in a world that stole the ground out from under their parents and their grandparents and sucked the blood out of them and-"

I said, "Don't start with that. You aren't buying a kid; you're not giving anyone money. Even as a metaphor, it doesn't work; Ethiopia never sold slaves."

"Don't give me that s.h.i.+t. This isn't an English cla.s.s. You know there's, truth in what I say. And anyway, I am sick of everything always being wrong. With every relations.h.i.+p I've ever had, there's been some reason it can't work. Even with s.e.x half the time, there's something in the way; somebody is scared or married, or you touched him the wrong way, or he said the wrong thing and it's gone. Or it's there for six weeks and then it's gone. And now this. Maybe I deserve it."

"Katya," I said. "That mother wants you to have her baby. I saw it. You saw it. Wait and see what happens."

She turned to face me. Her lips and eyelids were swollen pitifully. Unable to breathe, I got up to open the windows and saw there were no screens. The air was thick with mosquitoes; it was malaria season and we had not brought any antimalarial drugs with us. I closed the window. Katya reminded me that she had packed a mosquito net, but when she got up to help me with it, we discovered that there was no way to put it up over the bed.

We lay in the darkness and heat and talked about the baby and the mother and how the mother had looked when she had seen Katya; we tried to understand what her expression had meant. Soon it was too hot to talk, too hot to think. The few mosquitoes that had gotten in when I opened the window bit us, and we itched. We sweated so, we soaked our sheets. Again and again, we got up for water. Then we got up to p.i.s.s and it came out scalding. The dark and heat became a private maze we wandered, in and out of a delirium that pa.s.sed as sleep. Far away, I stood in front of a cla.s.sroom, talking about a girl carrying her dead baby through a dark forest. There were a dozen students in that cla.s.s, but Kevin was the only one whose face I saw before me. He had been right to despise me-I who had no child lecturing on this experience, like I knew. Tours is not the worst of sorrows.

But it was. I had wanted him to hurt me and he had. Or at least I thought he had. In fact, the real shock and pain came later, along with something worse: Weeks after I went into the hotel room, Thomas was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. Now he was hurt and I had done it to him. Or at least it felt as if I had.

I touched the rings on the chain around my neck; I felt Thomas there, and his presence was not reproachful. But it was painful anyway. It was painful to know that even if my mind saw him, he wasn't there, that my mind was at odds with reality, and that my mind could do nothing to change reality. I could see him. He wasn't there. The emptiness between the two states was pitiless.

Katya stirred and talked in her sleep. I felt protective tenderness, a feeling that could not fill the emptiness, but softened it. I thought of the little girl I had seen in the store, the touching movement she had made with her head, and a single word came to me: faith. This is not a word I use often or hear used often except lightly, ignorantly or manipulatively. But there it was, standing singly in my head. This word has meaning, I thought. Whatever it has faithlessly been made to mean, it has actual meaning. But it was very little to hold on to: the image of a graceful girl in a dirty store in a hungering, wounded country-so small, so light, so surrounded by darkness.

In the morning, I opened the windows a crack. We showered; the fixtures in the shower were heavy bra.s.s, the tiles were thick with mold, and the loofah in the soapless soap dish was worn and moldy, too. Wordless, we went down to the dining room for breakfast. I ate fruit and a little plastic container of vanilla pudding; Katya had coffee and a piece of bread. There were some Italians talking about the election a few tables over; we heard them say something about getting out of the country. Then they glanced at us and fell silent. I thought, The world is tipping over, like a table, and everything on it is falling off. It doesn't matter if it's round; it's tipping and we're falling. We took our coffee and went outside on the terrace. The air was warm, thriving and dense with the smell of earth and minerals. We sat quietly for a bit. A car drove by, blaring pop music. Two boys walked by, driving two skinny cows, l.u.s.tily slapping their bony haunches with whiplike branches.

Katya said, "Being here is like being in biblical times and modern times at the same time. Like all times are happening at once, and people are just walking back and forth between them."

Not walking, I thought, falling.

I said, "Did I ever tell you that Thomas was the first man I came with?"

"No," said Katya. "I didn't know that."

"It's true. Not immediately, but yeah. First time for me."

"The first time I came-I mean with a person, not myself-it was with a stranger," said Katya.

"A total stranger?"

"Almost- I'd known him a day and a half. It was when I was sixteen. He was, like, twenty-five. He was probably more skilled than I was used to, or maybe he wasn't. I've no idea why it happened. We were doing it and-this huge feeling came and grabbed me up. Like a wave picked me up and put me on top of a building, and before I had a chance to look and see where I was, it took me back down. He was looking at me and smiling, because I'm sure my face was saying, What did you just do> And then the next day, he was gone. If that had happened with somebody I loved, I would've thought I came because I was in love. s.e.x would've been all about love in my mind. But as it was, it was impossible to make that mis> take. I fell in love after that, and I came with people I loved. But I didn't think I was coming because of love."

"It wasn't always about love with Thomas," I said.

She started to respond, but her cell phone rang in her lap. Irritated, she picked it up. She listened; her attention went taut like a bow. She dropped the phone and shouted, "The mother brought the baby back!" and she grabbed the phone up again. It was Kebede. The mother had slept outside the hospital all night with the baby. She wanted to put him up for adoption, and she wanted Katya to have him.

It took a few days for the mother to do the paperwork but we got Sonny right away. We went back to the store of ugly clothes and bought a little suitcaseful. We bathed Sonny and dressed him. But he would not stop screaming. It seemed to Katya that the baby screamed most when she tried to hold him. Sofia came to help us. She brought more of the spicy pasta dish that Sonny had devoured on the day we had met him, but the baby refused it with a frown that was deep and imperial. He refused to eat at all. "Maybe he wants to go back to his mother," Katya said. "Do you think that's what he's saying?" "Nonsense," said Sofia. "Don't even think it They were sleeping outside during malaria season. Do you know what that means? The baby is already weak; if he stayed with that woman, he would die."

"And besides, he's bossy like you," I said. "Did you see the frown on him?"

And so we came before the judge. We took Sonny back to Addis Ababa. He screamed the whole flight. But Katya was unfazed; the strength of her doubt was now transformed and feeding her deter-mination. We had fully entered our endeavor, and now, exhausted but almost mechanically activated, we were carried forward on a current of will that we had initiated, but which had become a force of its own.

We met Yonas at the airport and he took us to a bed-arid-breakfast exclusively for people who were in Addis to adopt. The place was a compound with barbed wire and shards of gla.s.s atop its high walls. The ma.s.sive gate was opened by a wizened man with clawlike hands and eyes like clouded marbles, a single twist of opaque expression coloring their center. The house was a weird combination of spa.r.s.e and luxurious; it resembled a brick two-story you might find in Queens, but the oversized door was polished mahogany and, inside, the floors were made of large marble tiles. The owners were a haughty upper-cla.s.s Ethiopian woman and a neurasthenic Italian man who had written several unpublished children's books; his mother, an opinionated lady with a pug dog, was also there, visiting from Rome.

Because Sonny tended to get carsick, I stayed at the B and B with him while Yonas drove Katya around the city to get letters proving who she was and who Sonny was, translations of these letters into English and/or Amharic, a birth certificate, a pa.s.sport, and a visa for Sonny. Katya mounted a daily a.s.sault on the Head, from whom she needed to get a letter of approval for an orphanage to sponsor the adoption. Each of these tasks was, of course, impossible. When I tell the story to people, I make it sound as if Katya flowed through the city, coursing around the obstacles in her path with the smooth determination of water. But she was not water and she came home bruised and furious from b.u.mping her head against every d.a.m.n thing. She paced around, telling great tales of wild, shape-s.h.i.+fting bureaucracy, of crawling through its narrow mazes, up endless stairs and down fun-house chutes, confronting at every turn hydras made of obdurate, obfuscating, lecturing, lying, malicious, misshapen Ethiopian heads, plus some idiotic American heads thrown in. The Head was a pig and a b.i.t.c.h, and sometimes, so was I. When Katya came home tired out, still too sick to have an appet.i.te, I would be desperate to leave the compound for something to eat, and she would not want to go. We quarreled about it until we were exhausted, breaking to feed, change, or walk the child, who, when he didn't sleep through it, watched the drama with interest. Then Katya would get up the next day and leave the house to do it all again.

My time alone was a different sort of maze: dreamlike and lullingly dull, the surreal darkness of grief blended with the bright reality of caring for a frail child. Sonny was not only frail; he was underdeveloped from his early life of illness and malnourishment. We had not seen the extent to which this was true, possibly because his spirit had stood out to us with such force. But our first day at the B and B we saw him with another child close in age, and, in comparison, his movements were weak, uncoordinated, some-low partial. He couldn't walk more than a few steps and his gaze was intense but not quite focused, as if he was suffering from a mild psychic fever. He didn't walk well, and at first he didn't want to walk at all. He just wanted to be carried around the house, out into the yard and back, again and again.

The first day, I carried him until I couldn't take any more; then I lay on the floor and rolled back and forth with him as he clung to me weakly, but with a hint of triumph in his raised head. I rocked him and crooned to him and dreamed of Thomas: of rocking him and crooning, of being rocked by him. Of straddling rtiy husband and kissing him, bending to touch my b.r.e.a.s.t.s against him; of straddling him and struggling to reposition him on the bed, Thomas cursing me with strange half words because he could no longer position himself.

Sonny put his hand on my face and it came away wet. I kissed his tiny palm and held it. Thomas had lost motor control and could only get into bed by taking a sitting position over it and then letting himself flop backward. I had to let him do it that way-it was important for him to do what he could. But 1 had to reposition him, because if I left him as he fell, he woke in pain. It made Thomas furious to be straddled and positioned, and it hurt me to feel that. Yet I treasured it; I treasured his anger as a vestige of his pride, treasured that it could still make me angry, make me feel once more like a normal wife with a strong husband to quarrel with. I gave Sonny my finger; he squeezed it and I rolled into a seated position, cradling him.

I wondered if the baby wanted so much to be carried because his mother, a day laborer, had carried him strapped to her body Or if it was something even more basic-that he was like a plant and I a random patch of earth from which he wanted to draw all the nurture he could get lest he be uprooted again. I looked into his eyes and remembered Thomas's eyes: restless, strangely shapeless. At the end, he still had the childish pleasure of sweet tastes, of touching the soft fur of Zuni, the cat; to see that pleasure was a kind of sadness I had never felt before. Sonny fluttered his lids, then half-opened them-checking one more time-then slept, his dear soft fist against my chest.

Friends ask me when I suspected that something was wrong with Thomas. I don't know how to answer; I think I knew before 1 > knew. There were indications, most of them disguised as age and its eccentricity. But at least once the disease paraded itself garishly before me, and I didn't see it because I couldn't categorize it. Four years before he was diagnosed, we went to Spain for three weeks. We got back home in the evening, left our bags in the front hall, and went to bed. The next morning, I found him sitting in the kitchen, visibly afraid. He had no memory of our trip, yet he realized when he saw our bags in the hall that we had been somewhere. I made breakfast; I described for him everything we had done on the trip. He said he remembered, and I made myself forget it. Because nothing quite like that happened again, I could.

After a few days, Sonny began to eat in earnest-mashed bananas, cereal, formula, pasta, all of it. He built pyramids of empty fib*1 containers and prescription bottles and then knocked them down. He unscrewed and screwed the top on the milk bottle over and over. He discovered he wanted to walk and then-as if a bomb had gone off in his brain-he discovered that he might walk up and down the stairs. I pa.s.sed through a sad and enchanted mirror: I walked Sonny like I had walked Thomas, his hands in mine, giving him a footstep pattern to follow, holding his eyes with encouragement. Everything depended on the slow movements of his blunt feet, of their exact position, trusting it, finding it again.

Everything depended on it: I pulled my husband out of bed to a standing position and led him backward, holding hands. I smiled at him and he smiled back at me. I got him on the john, waited for him to finish, and wiped him. I bathed him in the marble shower, which was so big, it made the whole room a shower where we could be naked together. We sat on the fancy marble floor and played, pa.s.sing the hose back and forth, spraying, laughing- And Sonny, with his little forehead blazing, several times nearly falling, climbed the stairs, leaning heavily into my hands. His hands radiated into my hands, imparting his being and sampling mine. "Look," I said aloud. Look, my husband, my father, my lover, my child: Look at this little boy and bless him.

When Katya came home, she would jealously take the baby from me-of course jealously. Every day, she walked in and saw me having intimacy she couldn't have because she was out doing the s.h.i.+t. What she didn't see: It didn't matter. Sonny knew that Katya was his mother and that I was his nurse; the uncanny gleam we had seen the first day had found mental form quickly. But still Katya grabbed him jealously and fed him and talked angrily about the Head while I ate dried fruit and nuts. I half-listened. I looked at the spoon going in and out of the baby's mouth. I thought, If I am the nurse and Katya is the mother, who or what is the birth mother to him? Is she the earth of Sonny, the sky? The unseeable place the child walks when he sleeps? When I asked Thomas what he remembered about the birth mother who had abandoned him, he just said he liked her. He said he liked to picture her getting on the bus with a battered suitcase, in a long coat and flat shoes, her large eyes bold and intense, her hair like a movie star's. She was an adventurer, he thought, and he didn't blame her for leaving.

On our seventh day in Addis, Katya succeeded; she came back with a letter from the Head and another letter from an orphanage (run by a friend of the Head) that said they would sponsor the adoption. Out of fighting mode, she was dazed and unsure of how this had happened. "We were going at it as usual," she said. "I told him I would be back in his office every day until I got permission, and he said, 'Fine.' And then a stomach cramp doubled me over; my head went between my legs, my teeth were gritted, and my intestines made this indescribable sound-I thought I was going to have diarrhea right there. The only reason I didn't leave was that I was worried about what might happen if I got up suddenly. He didn't say anything. He just looked at me-almost like he felt sorry for me! Then he got a piece of paper and wrote the letter and pushed it across the desk."

That nigjit, we finally went out for dinner. We wore the dresses we had brought to celebrate in; Sonny wore his orange jumper. I chose an Italian restaurant we'd walked past several times, because the people in it always looked lively. But it wasn't lively this time. On the way there, the streets were nearly empty, and the few people who were out seemed angry and tense. We were the only people in the restaurant. Katya didn't feel well enough to eat more than a few bites of pasta anil she was too tired to talk much.

The next day, Katya and Sonny went to the American emba.s.sy in the morning and returned early in the afternoon. Sonny was tired and cranky so Katya wanted to rest before going to the travel agency to arrange our flight out the next day. They napped together while I went to the laundry room and washed our clothes. While I was in the dining area, waiting for the clothes to come out of the washer, I met our host's Italian mom. She was feeding her pug dog sliced fruit from a dish in her lap. I told her we were about to leave; she said it was a shame that we hadn't gotten to Lalibela "I hope you can get out," she said. "You choose a terrible time to come. You didn't know about the election?" I pointed out that she was here. She shrugged and meticulously peeled the skin off a fig. "I grew up here," she said. "I know the place. You don't."

I woke Katya and we tried to call Yonas. We couldn't reach him. This was unusual. We waited an hour and tried again; nothing. We waited another hour. We heard the huge gate open; people came in, talking loudly Someone ran up the stairs, past our door. Katya and I stared at each other. Sonny stirred. It wasn't right then that we heard gunfire, but maybe ten minutes later. It wasn't close by But close enough to hear. Not steadily, but off and on, during the afternoon and into the night.

Much closer than the gunshots was the machine of my body, buzzing inside me. It came from inside me and also enclosed me like the darkness and the warmth of the night. It said, It doesn't matter if you die here. It might be better if you die here. But Katya and Sonny have to get home. It won't be better if they die.

The next day, Yanas came in his uncle's car instead of his taxi.

We saw him pull into the driveway, and we ran out to meet him.

From the car, he held up a hand to indicate he was talking on the phone. We stopped; he had never signaled for us to wait before, and this signal scared me more than anything so far. But he didn't keep us waiting long. He put the phone down and got out to tell us: There had been a demonstration about the election. Twenty-five people had been killed. The city was under martial law. He could not take us anywhere. He would be in touch. He had to get home as quickly as he could.

We played with Sonny all day, both of us, going up and down the stairs, knocking the film containers all over the stairs, then picking them up again. When we heard shots, we looked up and then went' back to what we were doing. The buzzing said, Your parents are dead; your husband is dead. You should be dead. But Katya and Sonny don't deserve to die.

In the early evening, Katya said, "We have to get something to eat. We haven't eaten for almost twelve hours."

"We can't go out," I said. "It isn't safe."

"Sonny is out of food. He hasn't eaten for eight hours."

"Katya, nothing is open; you heard Yonas."

"The fruit stand will be open. There's no way they'll close, They're just down the street."

"We're hearing guns."

"The shots aren't close. I have to go out. If you won't go, I'll go alone."

We took Sonny; I carried him because Katya was too weak. Outside on the street, people and animals were walking around like normal. Who were these people? I felt half-scared of them, half-linked with them, and didn't know which feeling was most real. I reached inside my s.h.i.+rt and held the rings for a moment in my cupped hand. Thomas's face, flat and beautifully misshapen, rippled in me like a reflection in water. There was a boy at my side, trying to push a cow out of the yay Thomas's face stretched unrecognizably on the moving water. The boy came suddenly around the cow and tore my chain off my neck. I screamed; the boy flashed down the street. I was after him. My legs are long and I almost had him, but I couldn't grab him because Sonny was screaming, forgotten, in my arms. I darted back to Katya, who was standing motionless, and thrust Sonny at her. The boy was a quick pixilation of limbs, disappearing. Katya shouted, "Janice!" and I ran. The boy was bright movement that I chased like an animal with a single instinct. I turned a corner, stumbled into a pothole full of warm brown water, and nearly fell. I staggered and bent to catch myself with my hands. I looked up; he was gone. I whipped my head around, looking, my instinct trying to leap in every direction-but it had nothing to leap at. I panted raggedly, sweat running in my eyes, my instinct exiting through my eyes as I stared around, wild. Women holding children stared back at me. Faces peered from the broken hole of a window. Skeleton dogs, fierce and cringing watched with starving eyes. My instinct felt them all as it felt itself: quick force in slow mammal bodies; soft brain in hard bone; a machine of thoughts; a machine of s.e.x. The dark radiance of emotions; the personality; eyes, nose, mouth. You, specifically. A little boy with a large round head pointed at me and said words I couldn't understand. My instinct broke; everything that had been joined was now in pieces again. I put my face in my hands and cried like an animal.

I came out of the alley to find my way back to Katya. I tried to stop making noise. I couldn't. I felt people following me. I understood. The current had reversed. As I had chased the boy. they would follow me. They would kill me. I heard myself sobbing. Thomas was dead. I had let him die. They would kill me. It was right.

"Miss? Miss?" A small voice was at my side, gently tugging me without touching me. "Miss? What's wrong miss?"

I looked at the voice. There were two young girls, maybe thirteen years old, tagging at my side. They were dressed in school uniforms. Their faces were soft but intensely focused. I wiped my face; I glanced behind me. There was a small crowd following me, made up mostly of teenage girls and a few boys with curious faces. I turned to face them. "My husband died," I said. "He died and somebody stole our wedding rings. Now I don't have anything." Tears ran down my face-human tears now. "I have to find my friend and her baby. Thank you."

The girls nodded gravely. I continued to walk. One girl followed me. "It will be all right," she said. "G.o.d will help you."

I said, "Thank you, honey." Machine-gun fire sounded in the distance. The girl dropped away.

"Janice!" It was Katya, rounding a corner, Sonny in her arms. She said, "What happened? Why did you do that?"

"I was robbed. That boy took my wedding rings. I couldn't catch him."

"Then we need to call the police."

If she hadn't been holding Sonny, I would've slapped her. Do you know how stupid you sound?" I said. "Call the police?" "Janice-"