20
One night while riding over the rail bridge after the dinner shift, Hai noticed the house was completely dark. It was not like Grazina to leave the lights off, not even when sleeping, and for the first time 16 Hubbard looked like the other disemboweled buildings on the block. He let his bike fall in the front yard and rushed inside. The living room was lit by slivers of streetlight, and it was so cold his breath hovered before him as he stood, listening for movement. If someone had broken in, and was still hiding, calling out would be a bad idea.
Slowly, he made his way to the kitchen, careful to avoid the creaky spots on the floor, his fingertips tracing the walls as he went. He took the pocketknife from his backpack. At the bottom of the stairs, he tapped the handrail with the knife’s handle and waited for the air to change. Still nothing. He could hear the river from an opened window in the bathroom, but after climbing the stairs, he found the room empty. Everything steeped in blue. Curtains fluttered here and there in the hall. He checked her room, which was vacant and horribly quiet. The bed unmade, sheets bundled in knots, the row of wooden owls on the dresser waiting mute and undeterred by their owner’s absence. His room, too, was untouched.
“Grazina,” he called, slipping the knife in his back pocket. When there was no reply, he flipped on the lights. Sometimes, when she was deep in a spell, a change of light would jolt her out of the past. He ran back downstairs and turned on every light, calling her name, panicking now. Images of her roaming the streets, or by the riverbank, over the bridge, flashed in his head. Having checked the basement, he went back to the front door and found her shoes, an old pair of sun-faded loafers, untouched on the rack.
Before long he was back on the bike, riding up and down the empty streets, the houses with their ransacked doorways gaping like open mouths as he shouted her name into their black hollows. He rode until the pavement became mud before finally turning back. He twisted his head about, undone, scanning the trees, then up to the mountain with its radio tower blinking red.
Back in the kitchen, he picked up her rotary phone. Calling Lucas would be risky. If he knew Hai had lost his mother, it would all be over—kaput. His hand on the receiver, he shouted her name one more time. When only the river replied, he turned the dial.
“What do you mean ‘where is she’?” Lucas spat.
Hai could feel a vein pulsing in his temple. “Well, she’s not…I don’t, I don’t…”
“You’re calling from my mother’s phone and you don’t know where the hell she is.” He sounded like he had just stood up and was breathing hard.
“No.”
“And you’re her nurse. What kind of racket is this, huh? How much are they paying you? Am I paying you? She’s in the hospital, for Chrissakes. How do you not know that?”
For some reason he looked over his shoulder. “How? I mean, what?”
“She fell this morning and called me in her maniac mental state. Missed all her damn pills. Where the hell were you anyway?”
“At work. I mean, at the…clinic, where my boss was picking up supplies. Uh—a new walker—I had no idea. She was fine when I left, I promise.”
Lucas was thinking, calculating, his breaths fast over the receiver. “I found her in the pantry with her chin bleeding,” he said. “She kept asking for you, calling you Dr. Pepper or whatever. Look…” He sighed the way people do in movies when they’re about to say something hopeless. “She doesn’t have long. This brain thing, I’m sure you know, is fast. In a year she won’t know who anyone is. Six months after that she’ll be dead weight in a wheelchair. I’m trying to keep my distance, to protect myself, but I’m still her son. Look, how ’bout this—just make her comfortable until I work out putting her at the Hamilton Home, alright? Can you do that for me, my man?”
“Yeah,” he nodded. “I’ll make sure she won’t fall again.”
“Oh, she’ll fall again. That’s bound to happen. Just make sure she’s in one piece for me. For now, just tidy up the place and call me, you have my number, call if you see any leaks. The house isn’t worth squat if it’s mold-infested. Not that it’s worth much now,” he mumbled. He told Hai that Grazina would be ambulanced back from the rehabilitation center in a couple of days. Hai could hear Clara in the background asking if “that’s the boy” and hung up before they could say anything stupid.
He stood in the unlit kitchen, the faces—humans in family portraits, and owls—all staring at him like an audience in a carnival. Then he opened Grazina’s medical bag on the dining table, put on the seafoam nurse’s jacket, zipped up his UPS coat, and headed out. The night, with its sinister neon and greenish lights of bars and loading bays, empty car washes, smeared by as he rode. Dollar General, Burger King, Super 8, the water tower with its gleaming satellite dishes, and the power plant, its flares winking like monstrous eyes.
If it’s your turn, and you never want it to be your turn, you’ll be wheeled in, always wheeled in, by people young as your children, maybe even grandchildren. You will slide through the Cloroxed halls, whose walls are painted with placid teal or dishwater grey to induce a sense of sedation. The linoleum, too, though warped and shiny to the point of seeing the twisted faces reflected above it, mouths open in soundless half screams, is blue. So blue you’ll have the feeling of being swept away, because you are, into a current of corridors intentionally too narrow to turn around in. Only the beige floor moldings reveal how long this place has stood, how many gurneys, wheelchairs, EKG machines, IV stands, stretchers have passed through, holding both the living and the newly stiffened, moving through these halls at all speeds, streaking the corners black, the marking of time’s passage here. You will see those shriveled into their eighth or ninth decade bent in chairs or beds, left in the hallways for hours to stare, baffled, at the ceiling fan or a spot on the wall, some heads swiveling at each passing shadow, calling the name they once gave to a son or daughter, faces they haven’t seen in months, years.
There are even doctors among them, lawyers, custodians, minor politicians, bureaucratic functionaries, pilots, bakers, and barkeeps, varied stations of life now equalized in the only true egalitarian wing of the American dream: the nursing home, where the past is nothing but what it’s done to you. Where “a home,” like this one, is often a place to hide the aging body, the crepe-paper skin, the wounds weeping with yellow sap, anemic bruises that stay for weeks, bloodshot brown eyes. How is it that we have become so certain that the sight of years, the summation of decades, should inflict such violence on the viewer—including family—that we have built entire fortresses to keep such bodies out of sight?
As he passed the halls, Hai became aware of how far he had strayed from the “outside world,” like a shade passing through a circle in the nether realm. The TV room lit white from the shadows, commercials flickering over half-empty pudding cups and plastic pink tumblers of water, a few runny noses or dewy eyes gleaming silver. Same with the mess hall, where wheelchairs were parked around small tables, some with hushed chatter, others seated with stopped faces. And one, a man in an Air Force cap, talking energetically at the air. All this while the greenish uniforms floated about, mechanically repositioning limbs, as if rearranging furniture, under the constant drone of four TVs, each running CNN except for the one airing a dog show, much to the delight of the woman clapping beneath it. This “facility,” state-run and underfunded like many others, wasn’t even the worst of them.
He only had to approach the front desk, ask for Grazina, flashing his scrub jacket, and the lady with a perm simply nodded down the hall, her jaw working a piece of gum. “It’s 217. Follow the signs to physical rehab. Just make sure you’re out by nine. Janitor’s coming.”
The rehab ward was mostly empty. Unlike regular hospitals, with ERs, trauma docs wheeling bodies with open wounds through double doors, families huddled around coffee machines in step-down units, it was eerily quiet here, the same quiet, strangely, of living rooms of people who live alone, though everyone’s here together.
On his way he found a woman who must’ve been in her eighties lying on a gurney in fetal position, her arm under her head, as if waking from a nap. “You wanna come to the party?” she said as he approached, her eyes tracking him. Hai looked around the half-lit hall, certain that there was no party and most likely hadn’t been one for months. He passed two nurses sitting outside a patient’s room, keeping vigil over who knows what. They stopped their hushed Spanish to stare at him. He kept on and turned into room 217. With a single step, it was dark everywhere and he had to pause at the entrance to let his eyes adjust. Soon the green blips on the machines came to view. He approached the bed where an arrangement of bones was twisted in its sheets.
“Grazina?” he whispered, reaching toward what appeared to be an arm. He touched it and knew something was wrong. You bathe somebody enough times, hold their hand as they climb into beds, tubs, chairs, scooters, and you know every crease and fold marking their body. He gave the hand a light squeeze and knew it belonged to a man—who didn’t even notice his presence—and let go. That’s when he saw the curtain. He pushed it aside and stepped through.
There she was, lit dimly by whatever light was coming through the window. She looked a petalish thing, her limbs lost in a swaddle of sheets and towels. Her puffed white hair now matted around her temples and forehead. The rise and fall of her stomach told him she was asleep.
Hai knelt and touched her forehead with the back of his hand.
“Hey,” he whispered, wiping a few strands out of her eyebrows. “Grazina, you there?”
At first only her fingers stirred, then the winced-shut face relaxed, its eyes opened and blinked out the window. He said her name again, leaning closer. She turned and looked at him with an expression so plain, open, and unwritten, he almost thought he had entered the wrong room altogether.
“Grazina? You with us?” He waved his hand before her face, but she stared past it.
He could tell right away that something was different—her pupils at once dilated and glazed with a milky film. He had of course seen her dim before, but this time she seemed fully opaque. When he touched her arm she pulled back and hissed something in Lithuanian.
“It’s Sergeant Pepper,” he tried. “You gotta use English with me, okay? Listen.” He managed to hold her thumb. “London’s only a day away. We’re so close. I told you I was gonna get you to America and we’re doin’ it. You believe me, don’t you?”
She glanced around, her mouth open. “Who are you?”
“I’m a specialist,” he said without thinking.
“In what?”
“Human relations.”
He thought he saw her nod. “Willem.”
“No, my name is Hai Sergeant Pepper. US Army, Second Division, remember?”
“I saw him last night.” Her eyes finally fixed on the boy’s face, but there was not much behind them. “What’d you do with his dustpan?”
“What about his dustpan? Do I even know this guy?”
“He was on fire. From chest up.” She gestured at her heart. “I saw him run into a house to burn up. He burned up in Sigi’s house while I was down here.”
“Down where? Here?”
“This basement. Tell his mother, will you? She’s with group D.”
“Okay, group D. I’ll tell her when I go back up.”
She looked to her right, where the curtain was drawn, and reached for it. “How do we open this door? Can we go out this way?”
Hai pulled her hand toward him. “There’s no way out. You have to stay put for now.”
“Am I in the upper rooms yet? It still hurts, even up here.”
“You’re on the first floor of a hospital.”
“I’m not in heaven? I’m still downstairs?”
“You’re still downstairs. We all are.”
“Why does God kill us?” Her face threatened to break.
He was surprised by the suddenness of her anger.
“Why would the weatherman lie to us like this?”
“What did he lie about?”
“I took everyone to Missouri, you know.”
“Yeah? Okay, for what?” he said, his voice tender and affording, trying his best to follow.
“When I worked at Woolworth’s. My biggest achievement was organizing a trip to Missouri. We wanted to see the big arch. St. Louis.”
The bones in the next bed coughed, then repositioned himself on the mattress.
“Hey…You tell me a story now, Sergeant Pepper. Tell me something about you, brave soldier.” She turned to him with glassy eyes.
“I don’t got a story.”
“When the bomb siren went off, we ran to the shelters. Sometimes we stayed many nights with oil lamps and candles. The people down there, they passed the night telling stories.” She smiled at this memory, a streak of clarity in her voice. “You know so much about me, but I don’t know about you. Tell me about your life. About America. What state do you come from, Officer? They have many states, yes?”
He thought for a moment. Then remembered the pair of ceramic owl salt and pepper shakers he grabbed from the kitchen table to cheer her up. He took them from his coat pocket and stood them on her blanket. Two owls on a field of snow.
“I had a friend once,” he said, so soft it came out as a whisper. He waited a long while, then, “We can call him Noah.” He listened to the name leaving his mouth. “Like Noah’s ark.”
“Like Noah’s ark,” Grazina nodded.
“Here’s Noah,” he said, shaking one of the owls. “And here’s a younger Sergeant Pepper. They lived in a place with lots of snow.”
Grazina’s eyes followed the owls as he moved them along the blanket.
“So on summer evenings, when summer finally came, and the full moon lit the fields so silver, you could squint and it would still look just like it did after snowfall. On those nights, Noah and I would run together through the tobacco, like this. And there was this mighty clear sky full of stars that made you stop and look up, your head empty as a ladle as you tried to locate yourself inside an immeasurable universe. And no one knows where you are and you feel, for a tiny second, that you have no parents, that they never existed at all, which is impossible and shameful to love, but I did. I loved that feeling.”
He told her of their friendship, of the days driving aimlessly in a truck through a town far, far away from Europe, from Germany, called East Gladness. How they’d walk for hours through the pines, the back lots of that rusted strip of earth, singing in adolescent voices that crackled like wartime radios. About the pools of clear water that rose over the cattails and sweetgrass in the junkyards after a storm, how once they swam in a shallow tub made from rainwater collected in a dent on the roof of an old school bus. And the water was so clear, so sweet, your skin looked truer than it did on the surface, warped and magnified by the tiny current they made from their scavenged laughter. He told of Noah’s barn, where they knew the wrong inside them was the only thing that made sense of where they grew up, where the gods, after flipping the table from losing their bets, left them alone to make a fugitive life. That a boy beside a boy could form an island called “okayness.” “With him,” he said, “it wasn’t that I was happy—but that I was okay. And okay was even better than happy because I thought it had a better chance of lasting.” He turned and was startled to find her staring right at him. “Okay is underrated. You know what underrated means, right?”
“More than what the Lord planned,” she said.
“Yes. And we were very underrated. But we were also very okay.”
He stood the owls back-to-back. “We’d sit for hours like this under a metal slide in the park and talk.” The boys had this way of knowing what the other was thinking without ever using words. “Because it’s like that when you’re fourteen,” he said. The superpower of being young is that you’re closest to being nothing—which is also the same as being very old. “You can ride a thought in and out of somebody, and it’ll do so little damage, you think anything’s possible. You can say things like I want to be a gay father with a wife and kids, or When I’m high enough I start to feel sorry for straight people, they always seem trapped on front lawns, or When I’m sixty-five, I’ll be happier than my dad.”
Grazina looked fondly at the two owls, the faint light touching their heads.
“Do you ever think you’ll have kids?” he mimed the right owl’s voice.
No one in his life knew he had such a friend until now, until Sergeant Pepper told her. Somebody goes ahead and dies and all of a sudden you become a box for them, he thought, you store these things that no one has ever seen and you go on living like that, your head a coffin to keep memories of the dead alive. But what do you do with that kind of box? Where do you put it down?
“I’ll have a daughter,” the left owl said.
“A daughter?” The right owl leaned to one side. “Hmm. I always thought you would want a son for some reason. But it’d be cool to see you teaching her to shoot bottles with one of those pink rifles from Walmart. I’d watch you both and be that worried gay uncle.” The right owl laughed.
“But I don’t want her to be shooting anything,” the left owl said.
“You wouldn’t? Really?” Hai looked over his shoulder, as if to find Noah’s back pressed against his. “Maybe she’ll be a painter. Didn’t you always want to be a painter?”
He looked down at his hands. The owls were both lying down now, separated by a circle of air.
“Where’s Noah now, Sergeant?”
Hai dipped his head. “He was storming Normandy, like J. D. Salinger did, and was wounded. We enlisted together. To be heroes of East Gladness. Then he took medicine to make his wounds go away. He wanted too much of one feeling—and I guess his heart gave out because of it. I don’t think we’re made to hold too much of any one thing.” Hai regarded the dead owls in his hands.
“Of course not.”
He wiped his nose with the sleeve of the nurse jacket as he thought about that time, a time he barely remembered. He had dropped out of school in New York not because he was getting headaches from reading too much, as his mother had thought, but because one day Noah stopped breathing and a week after that was lowered in the cold November ground. What could he have said to his mother about a boy she’d never met? To even tell of it would reveal how he had chosen his sadness over her joy, over her pride in him making it to college after everything, after the war, the refugee camp, the abusive husband, the dead mother and estranged sister. But he had come home—he had given up—only because he wanted to be near her, New York being unbearable in grief, its massive and unending throb of human magnetism making the vacant parts in him more vacuous than he could bear.
“I’m sorry,” Grazina said from the depths of the medical bed.
“Don’t be.”
“I’m sorry they sent you to war. Nobody should go to war. Boys should be owls running in snow fields. I’m sorry you had to find me.” She touched his arm, her grip warm and stern. “So you’re a liggabit then,” she said, sniffling.
He looked at her hand on his sleeve. “What?”
“You’re—” she gestured at him, “a liggabit. Boy and boy, girl and girl. I see them in newspapers. Liggabit community.”
“Oh—oh, you mean LGBT?” He wiped his eyes and let out a single disbelieving laugh.
She shrugged.
“Yeah, I’m a liggabit.”
“A liggabit soldier,” she said, her head slipping to the side. “Must be rare.”
“Sure.”
A brightness had pooled at the corner of her eyes as they started tracing something on the ceiling. She was fading again. He didn’t know what to say, so he took her cold hands in his and said the only thing that came to him. “Tu esi mano draugas.”
She blinked.
“Hey, Grazina. Hey.” He leaned forward. “Tu esi mano draugas…Please.” He patted her cheek. “You are my friend. Right? Did I say it right? Am I doing it right?”
She turned to him as if following a sound in the room. Then, deep under her breath, she started singing “Silent Night.” Her lips so still it was like a music box was playing inside her.
“Wait a minute. Who are you again?” She started to reach for something in her lap, then seemed baffled at her hand.
“I’m Labas. It’s—”
“And who am I?”
“Grazina. You’re Grazina Vitkus.”
“I don’t know who I am. Wait a minute. How can that…” And like that the world was falling away in slabs, rinsed and pooling at the periphery.
“You’re you, okay. You’ve always been you.” He was starting to shake.
“But am I still me if I don’t remember who I was?”
“I don’t know!”
“I can still hear the river from here,” she said. “It’s saying I did a good job. It said I did good.”
“But I’m not good.” He said this to the back of his wrist to steady himself. “I’m a horrible son, do you know that? I was never a good son.”
He tried to will her back to the present, but when her eyes grew blank and unseeing, he couldn’t take it anymore and got up. He floated through the halls, the porcelain owls clutched in each fist, her voice thinning behind him. The nurses, busy on their phones, didn’t even notice. By the time he got to the parking lot, he had a delirious urge to scream. He made a snowball and threw it far as he could and watched it hit a parked car with a silent white puff. He wanted to touch something until its color changed. Only when he tasted the salty snot did he realize he had fallen to his knees and was crying. “Please leave me alone. I’m sorry, okay?” he shouted at the ground. “Noah, Grandma, I’m sorry you had to die when everybody else fucking lived! But it’s not that great here, okay? It’s as shitty as it was before. Trust me.”
The metal door behind him clacked open. Footsteps in the powder. “Hey, man, you gotta get out of here, you hear me? Get the hell up.” It was a security guard. He looked genuinely sorry for the boy curled in the snow. “There’s people sick inside, man, and people who gotta work. So whatever you got going on, it can’t be here.”
Hai rose and brushed himself off. “Sorry,” he blurted, without looking at the guard, and made a beeline toward his bike. Fingers shaking, he zipped up his UPS jacket, the same jacket he had found hanging from a nail in Noah’s barn the day of his funeral, having ridden his bike through mud-frosted roads to get there. Because Hai was not invited to see the coffin. Because to Noah’s family he never existed. He was locked inside the head of the cold boy in the pine box.
He glanced at his hand and saw that he had dialed Sony’s number on his cell. He put the ringing phone to his ear as he picked up the bike. “Sony, that you?”
“Hey, you okay? You never call after five p.m.”
“I’m good, man. I’m real good. Listen,” he said as the guard went back inside, the snowed-in quiet spreading around him. “You wanna watch Gettysburg?”
“Now? It’s almost nine and I…I have work tomorrow—”
“C’mon. Please? I wanna see it with you. I wanna see Pickett’s Charge again. I—I think I know why they did it. Why they crossed that big-ass field.”
He could hear Sony thinking. “Alright, fine. Can you get here in a half hour?”
Since it was after hours and visitors weren’t allowed, Hai and Sony sat on the floor in the lobby of the Meyer’s Center, their backs against the wall, staring at the corner-mounted TV playing the warped VHS of Gettysburg, a box of Goldfish between them. It was the scene when Colonel Chamberlain’s Twentieth Maine was about to make its famed stand on the Union’s far left at Little Round Top. “Chamberlain was a professor before the war, with no military experience,” Sony explained. Hai had downed three painkillers on the ride over and was hardly following, but had made it to that juncture in the high where everything sounded unassailably true. “But he had the wits to judge the Confederate volleys. That’s because he was a rhetorician. It means ‘the strategy of words’—I looked it up. Rhetoric is like a battlefield, but in the mind. About positions and counterattacks. Isn’t that right?” He cupped a handful of Goldfish to his mouth and chewed.
“That’s right,” Hai said as Colonel Chamberlain unsheathed his saber, its flash lighting across the faces of the men he was sending forth to die. “The sentence is the end of the line,” Hai said. “And there are no other flanks. It is naturally vulnerable on the right side. Because that side must be open in order for the other sentences to continue. But the left margin is closed.”
“That’s right,” Sony said, turning to him as Hai watched the Twentieth Maine pour down a forested hill. “Napoleon would use rivers and mountains to protect one of his flanks so he only had to defend the one.” He placed a Goldfish in Hai’s half-opened mouth. “But tell me more about the battle line of the sentence,” Sony said. “It’s interesting.”
But Hai had already lost the idea, the line broken, and just shook his head real slow until they were lulled back into the movie, their faces sick with the Union blue glowing from the screen.
Hai was actually there the day Sony first became enamored of the Civil War. It was like witnessing Larry Bird pick up a basketball for the first time, he thought. Hai must have been eight or nine. Each year, on Memorial Day, a marathon of war movies would be shown on one of the four channels picked up by the tinfoiled antennae on their Sony Trinitron, transmitting an endless loop of carnage, the wars occurring often out of chronology, the bodies interrupted only by brief credit rolls and commercials for vacuum cleaners and used car lots.
The film depicted, from both sides, the three days in July 1863 when the pivotal battle took place on the outskirts of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. As soon as the movie started, Sony was hooked. He left his bowl of Kraft Mac & Cheese untouched, scooting closer and closer to the TV until his face was inches away. He sat running his finger down the scar in his head, back and forth, so oddly quiet Aunt Kim had to come to check on him, once, twice. She walked up and was about to tap him on the shoulder, but then stopped and regarded her boy, who was finally doing a normal-boy thing—watching a war movie with such devotion, it was the closest he came to peace.
The other film often shown on Memorial Day was The Green Berets, where an aging John Wayne is seen emptying his M16 into hundreds of North Vietnamese rushing to overtake an American firebase during another civil war. Hai didn’t know it then, but with not enough Asians to fill the number of corpses the film demanded, white actors wore black makeup as yellowface during night battles, the crude paint streaked with sweat shimmering across the screen as they died, in comically exaggerated throes, piling in heaps around sandbags stacked about the base, shot from a distance that would hide their whiteness but not far enough to frame the three million dead Vietnamese throughout the war. The film was released in 1968, before the war even ended, the deaths on-screen predicting the deaths in life.
Hai stared as The Green Berets played on, Sony beside him searching the corpses for a face. “Is that us?” Sony said, his seven-year-old finger pointing at a mangle of limbs. “Is that us?”
What does it do to your mind to see “your people” die so vastly that you can’t even tell that they are not, in fact, your people at all? Hai thought, looking back. How easily a face is disfigured in the abstraction a pile of bodies so naturally makes. After a while, it was not the dead but merely death itself that Hai saw folded into this scene of American triumph. Was this why, watching Gettysburg for the first time, Sony sympathized with the Confederacy? With the butternut- and grey-clad men who were, like the “Vietnamese,” dying in hundreds, mowed down in scene after scene by cannon and musket fire, their uniforms, like the Vietcong’s, made mostly from civilian clothes worn to rags, their bodies turned, it seemed, to laundry? And yet, unlike the “Vietnamese” in The Green Berets, the faces of Confederate soldiers in Gettysburg are clear, the camera lingering on their agonized expressions, casting their human deaths as felt losses, full of pathos. The illusion was made possible by the very fact that the “Vietcong” bodies were captured in passing, transient, blurring themselves toward death—and not, like Robert E. Lee or Joshua Chamberlain in Gettysburg, zoomed in and fixed to a distinguishable lived life.
“Is that us?” Hai heard his voice say, back now in the group home lobby. “Is that us, buddy?” He nodded at the white men crumbling in the 1863 scene from the 1993 film.
Sony searched the screen long and hard.
Hai thought of that time they visited Stonewall Jackson’s house. How no one told them during their tour that in 1909 the house was bought by the Daughters of the Confederacy, the organization that helped erect Confederate statues all over the South. And although it was the general who was featured in the tour, his face repeating throughout the halls, it was the unseen presence that was most felt. Inside each room, from the fancy set table to the kitchen counter, the knife left on the cutting board beside a sprig of green onion, through the spotless banisters and dressers, the commodes that must be emptied, underwear washed and dried, and then, outside, among the verdant vegetable and flower beds around the property, the carriage that must be driven and tended to, its wheels oiled, horses fed, was the unmarked presence of Jackson’s six slaves, who Hai later learned were Albert, Amy, Emma, and Hetty, along with her two sons, Cyrus and George. Like the fake Vietnamese in The Green Berets, they were everywhere yet nowhere to be found.
The pills were blurring his edges, making his skin feel permeable and possible. He was sitting with his cousin watching his favorite movie, which was fast becoming Hai’s as well. Is that us?
But who was us if everything, in the end, as Maureen pointed out, was corn cake, even when they insist, rhetoricians that they are, that it’s bread?
“So why did they cross the field? Didn’t you say you had a theory?” Sony’s face was open and expectant.
Hai watched the technicolor ruins smoldering before them. “You know what? I totally forgot, buddy. I had the answer in my head the whole way here, and now it’s all gone.”
“Oh yeah…” Sony nodded knowingly. “That happens in war all the time.”
