THE LUSTRON HOME by Les Myers
Her name is Aitan. She’s a freshman from Mt. Prospect, allergic to cats and dogs but wants to be a veterinarian, an original Caucasian, born in Baku shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Mom is Armenian, Dad is Azeri. I don’t know much about the conflict there, but I’m crazy about the name of the place, Azerbaijan, which becomes the working title of a little fantasy I put together as I sip watery beer—a spacious tent, Silk Road camels parked outside, a lantern, a munificent genie, then a thousand and one nights of a shy but surprisingly frisky Aitan and me rolling around on a flying carpet.
She’s a little quiet for my taste, perhaps overwhelmed by all this masculine attention, but clearly enjoying herself. We don’t know much about her yet. Is she Christian? Muslim? Something else altogether? Not that it matters. I’m just wondering if she and I have anything in common, other than the whole refugee experience.
I’m the only black guy at the table, the only black guy in the bar, a low-ceilinged, wood-paneled outpost just a few steps from Wright Street, the Urbana-Champaign frontier. It’s a sports bar and a big hangout for Greeks on the weekend, but Thursday happy hour is an ecumenical affair. Even dorm rats, some of us with fake IDs, are welcome here. Pitchers of Old Style are four dollars.
I’m with Aitan and a dozen guys from my floor. It’s her first time here. She’s turned what used to be an easy-going hour of boasts and lies and darts into a Chauceresque story-telling contest; my floor mates and fellow pilgrims, these shallow suburban white boys, lumpy and pasty in the vaporous light, Bizarro World Scheherazades, all trying to talk their way into her heart. Somebody is going to win her eventually. Why not me?
Spencer from Carol Stream, a student of mechanical engineering, wraps up a ridiculous tale of alcohol-lowered inhibition and risky sex, using an idiom unfamiliar to some of us. “Coyote night,” he explains. “You wake up in a strange bed, an ugly girl asleep on your arm. You can’t move . . .” Aitan’s dark eyes flash. She knows now what the rest of us know: Spencer is a dissolute fool.
Somebody else picks up the fallen baton. The stories continue. The weeks fly by. Now it’s December, the week before finals. At last Aitan turns to me. “So, Augustine, what’s your story?”
I’ve been waiting for this moment, rehearsing sometimes when I should be studying, but as I look around and watch my floor mates put down their drinks and lean forward, I realize I’ve stepped into a trap. These endless happy hours—it was never about Aitan. She was just bait. These guys are here to watch me gnaw off my foot. They want to hear about Africa. They want to hear about atrocities. They want to hear about the day the Interahamwe passed through our little village in the hills west of Goma, in what was then called Zaire. Fine, I’ll give them my testimony, unembellished, what I know, what I saw myself, nothing more, nothing less. But I’m already wondering if this is the story Aitan wants to hear.
“A few months after my little brother was murdered,” I begin, “I helped a man kill himself.”
* * *
My father, who I never met, was a Catholic priest, a fancy guy, a Kinois, from Kinshasa. My mother was a country orphan, brought to our village by that same priest when she was six or seven, born in the corner of Katanga Province where the minerals pop out of the ground in veins so rich they can be seen from space, where even in times of peace half the children die before they are three.
Her first language, Memtu, the one I attended to in the womb but never learned to speak properly, is unique among the Bantu languages in having a quality called evidentiality. There’s this ubiquitous prefix, mem-, also one of the hundred names for the Creator. In front of a verb, it means Swear to God. Mem is for things you saw yourself. Mem-shatal uuvaa. Swear to God, I saw the sun rise this morning. Shatal uuvaa is different. It means I assume the sun rose this morning, or it’s widely believed the sun rose this morning, or someone told me the sun rose this morning, but I didn’t actually see it myself. Mem- changes the way you think about the world. It puts God and truth at the center of all discourse. It compels you to choose words carefully and keep your story straight. It’s a habit of mind I’ve never lost even as Memtu slipped away, replaced by godless languages—Swahili, French, and then English. It’s why my story begins and ends here, in the United States of America, in Missouri, where my family was resettled fourteen years ago, where just last year I discovered something called the Lustron Home, which, in a most surprising turn of events, has become my home.
* * *
I was broke, living with my mother, attending the community college to save money, working fast-food, looking for something better, when one morning I see something promising online. I call. The guy seems really glad to hear from me. He describes himself as an old bachelor who needs someone to drive him to appointments three times a week. He lives in Warson Oaks, a wealthy enclave west of the city, a place I’ve never been to, but I’ve heard so much about. He wants me to describe myself. How old am I, how tall am I, how much do I weigh? This is all very strange, but I answer the questions and he seems satisfied. Then I ask about wages. He asks what I’m looking for. I throw out a large number. No problem, he says. What am I to think? He’s a pervert, right? But given the kind of money we’re talking about, I have to check this out.
“You can’t miss it,” he says, giving me directions. “It’s the lust strong home.” Which strikes me as funny, though I know it can’t be right. I’m thinking it’s something like Le Strong or Le Strawn, something vaguely French, like so many place names in the pleasant suburbs of my adopted city, this erstwhile colonial trading station, St. Louis. He says we’ll be using his vehicle, which is fine with me, because I don’t have one. He tells me I can start immediately if things check out. What exactly he wants to check out, I’m not sure, but I’m thrilled, doing a little dance as I head out for the interview, as my mother flings me a version of her favorite English aphorism, which, I’m sorry to say, is pretty much her take on her new country: If it’s too good to be true, it’s too good to be true.
* * *
My elation fades as my mother’s words sink in, as I leave the city and pedal west through the first ring of older suburbs, passing one crowded cemetery after another, my eyes stung by wind and cold rain, and then, all at once, memories, like a shower of needles, heart-piercing memories of my little brother, in the grave just a few months, having traveled so far to be safe, having suffered so much to get here.
I struggle to push these thoughts aside as the rain becomes snow, as the narrow wheels of my ten-speed wobble and slide on the treacherous pavement, as I realize how late I’m going to be, having told the guy—who, by the way, thinks I’m white—that I have reliable transportation, that I’d be there within the hour, over-promising and under-delivering, proving myself to be, yet it again it seems, unreliable and black. What am I thinking? I don’t have a prayer here. I can’t be the only candidate. For fifteen bucks an hour, he’s probably got people lined up around the block.
But then I find what might be a shortcut. I’m slaloming down this slush-covered bike trail, catching glimpses of palatial homes through the trees, getting close now, but the roads aren’t marked where they cross the bike path. I’m wondering if I’ve gone too far. I’ll have to call the guy, get directions, buy some time. I reach for my phone. No phone. It’s fallen out of my pocket. I look down and guess what? A flat tire. And no way to fix it. I don’t even have bus fare in my pocket.
I’m pushing the bike now, cold and wet and about to give up, turn around and go back, pushing the bike now, when finally I see someone, a woman, in a jaunty pink stocking cap and matching scarf, jogging toward me. I greet her politely. Can she give me directions? Is she by any chance familiar with the Lustron Home? She veers around me and hurries on.
I fight down a murderous impulse to run after the snooty bitch and strangle her with that pink scarf, but I push on and . . . I have no idea where I am. I’m just about to turn around and start the long walk back to the city when . . . The trail ends in a little picnic area.
I crest a small hill and then the trail ends at a picnic shelter. A car is parked near the trees, headlights on, nobody in it, or so it seems. Apparently, the pink-hatted jogger has forgotten her lights. Perhaps she’s also forgotten to lock her doors. There might be a purse inside, credit cards, cash, a phone. If nothing else, some loose change between the seats. I’m no thief, but you do what you have to do.
Admiring the sleek lines of the late-model Buick crossover, I fail to notice the fogged-up windows as I walk up, and I am unprepared for what I witness next: an illicit late-morning vehicular sex act, as unexpected as it is disgusting. I mean, this is not some ghetto with addicts turning tricks in gangways. This is Warson Oaks, and it’s not even noon yet, and these people are old, decrepit. I’m just standing there, aghast.
Senior Citizen Number One looks up and screams. She’s trying to cram these enormous breasts back in her shirt as Senior Citizen Number Two tumbles out of the vehicle, yanking his pants up, fumbling under the seat. Now the old goat has a weapon in his hand. He’s pointing it at me. What the fuck are you doing?
Good question. What am I doing out here? Warson Oaks and everything it represents, the dangled promise, the glistening affluence to which I’ve aspired for so long, this gleaming place on the hill of my imagination—I don’t belong here, and right now I’m not sure I want to belong. What I’d really like to do at the moment is to smack this foolish old man around and shove that little gun up his ruttish ass, but no, I’m apologizing, telling him about the job interview, the lost phone, the flat tire, asking if he can help me find the Lustron Home. Something cruel flickers in his rheumy eyes. His mouth quirks. He raises his free hand, pointing to the woods behind me. I back away, grab the bike and push it down an embankment and over a rickety footbridge. Moments later I’m standing in front of the house.
* * *
It’s a disappointment, to say the least. My patron-to-be lives on a short street of a dozen single-story bungalows, squarish little Monopoly-game houses on soggy lots not much higher than the creek I just crossed, a rough sliver of dead-end proletarian existence jammed into a damp edge of this opulent suburb. Battered pickup trucks crowd the curbs. Ugly dogs pace behind chain-link fences. I’ve landed on Baltic Avenue, not Boardwalk.
Set farther back from the street than its more conventional neighbors, the Lustron Home looks like a tooth—low, stuck, compacted—a stumpy yellow molar, almost hidden behind bare willow branches. It’s a pre-fab, metal on slab, porcelain-enameled steel inside and outside, everything built in at the factory—plumbing, wiring, bathroom fixtures, cabinets, even some appliances. The whole thing arrived on a single tractor-trailer. A couple guys could put one together in a week.
Four thousand were built in the middle of the last century, mostly in the Midwest, a post-war housing policy boondoggle that quickly collapsed in scandal, the company forced into bankruptcy by the same politicians who put it in business. Yet the Lustron Home lasts and lasts: durable, affordable, efficient; a time capsule, an artifact of the future, cozy and tight, snug as a fallout shelter; a mass-produced refuge for the Atomic Age; a monument to technology and American know-how; Progress and Prosperity marching hand in hand towards an impervious, streamlined future . . .
Yes, that’s the kind of hyperbole that gets tossed around when historians talk about the Lustron Home. Good luck trying to sell one in a down market. Chained between decks, the pensioners and wage slaves who live in these things won’t tell you about the leaky windows, the cold floors. They won’t tell you how noisy, dark, and claustrophobic these things are, or even admit that they do, in fact, rust. This one has streaks, like toilet bowl stains, running down the gable ends.
Despite the flat tire, I’ve arrived more or less on time, but I’m not thinking about the job anymore. Hesitating on the little notch of a front porch, I’ve got the oddest feeling I’ve been here before. It’s this dream I have. I’m constantly drawn to a place like this in my dreams: I hear my little brother crying inside a house; I open the door; it’s somebody’s wake. I shoulder my way to the front of the room. Sometimes it’s me in the coffin, sometimes it’s him.
* * *
The guy’s name is Bryan. He’s in his mid-sixties but looks younger. His bloated features give him a smooth, disturbingly womanish look. There’s a loop of clear plastic draped over his ears and under his nose. He’s on oxygen most of the time. He looks swollen, ready to pop. Bryan’s in bad shape. Diabetes, bad kidneys, bad heart—he’s a pinprick of bad luck away from disaster, a burst-balloon spiral of failing organs that at any moment could land him in the hospital a last time. Despite all this, he’s remarkably cheerful, no doubt as surprised by my appearance as I am by his. He spins back with equanimity in his double-wide wheelchair, pulling the door open, beckoning me inside.
He’s wearing a stained sweatshirt and a pair of khaki cargo shorts. Both legs are missing, massive stumps wrapped in elastic bandages and cantilevered over the edge of the chair. Even without legs, he must weigh three hundred pounds. Most disturbing, though, is the thing on his head: a glistening ledge of a hairpiece that doesn’t match the rest of his hair. It looks like something that got lost in the refrigerator, a Saran-wrapped wedge of carbonized meat.
He wants to take my coat. I wave him off, taking up a position on the edge of the couch, my eyes adjusting to the meager light. The TV’s on, muted. A fluorescent coil buzzes under a cobwebbed lampshade. There’s a fanned deck of travel magazines on the coffee table; on the wall behind me, a sofa-sized landscape, hung, I find out later, with industrial-size magnets. Bookshelves, populated with animal figurines and a beer stein collection, have been stamped into the steel of the opposite wall. Carpet, thin as the felt on a billiard table, covers the slab foundation. The ceiling is low and gets lower the longer I sit there. The heat is cranked up. I smell bleach and blackening bananas and stale cigarettes. Yes, Bryan still sneaks a couple puffs every day.
There’s this strange intermittent ticking sound coming from the ceiling, like a car engine cooling, like popcorn starting to pop. Turns out, it’s just wind knocking stuff out of the trees, acorns and oak galls banging against the steel roof. But the noise makes me queasy. I’m trying not to look at him, as he prattles on about the weather and this and that. Finally he asks to see my ID. He comments on my January 1st birthday. I nod. I tell him it’s my mother’s birthday, my brother’s too. I don’t explain the coincidence.
He has some questions about my schedule and that’s it. I’ve got the job if I want it. I can start immediately. We’ll go for a drive, but first he needs to change. There’s something he needs me to do for him. You can imagine what I’m thinking. I’m ready to bolt, looking around for something to grab on the way out.
I follow warily as he swivels into the bedroom, barely clearing the door. There’s another, larger TV, also muted; an unmade hospital bed, an oxygen tank on wheels in the corner, pill bottles and a stainless-steel urinal on the nightstand; on the dresser, framed pictures of a plain-looking woman wearing an orchid corsage and a guy in a military uniform. The guy could be a younger Bryan. Did he lose his legs in some war? No, nothing so heroic. Bryan has the chips and soda disease.
I turn around and he’s got the sweatshirt stuck on his head. He works it down over his torso, the hairpiece thrusting in an entirely new direction. He’s asking about my family, asking if I have a girlfriend. I am staring at this legless bag of jelly with his enormous boobs and flabby mouth and I can hardly speak of the loathing I feel for him and myself, too, for how disgustingly superior he makes me feel.
It turns out all he wants right now is for me to pull some boxes down from a shelf in the closet. Trying to get organized, he says. There’s nothing of value in the first two, which I have a chance to look through later, just papers, copies of expense reports submitted to an irrigation company he used to work for. But then I put my hand on something worth having—a third box, almost forgotten, at the back of the shelf.
* * *
It’s an ammo box, a battered green sepulcher that at some point contained two hundred rounds of 7.62mm ammunition. Now it’s full of rocks. It rattles when I pick it up. It’s not big, six inches high, a few inches deep, but it’s unspeakably heavy. Yes, most of the weight is in my imagination, but it’s almost more than I can bear. I’m sweating, feeling really disoriented all of a sudden. Open it, Bryan says. I raise the hinged lid. It’s full of bones, shattered bones. No, Bryan says, they’re arrowheads, plowed up over many years on some farm in Illinois. How old are they? He has no idea. What’s he’s going to do with them? Maybe donate them to a school, he says.
I don’t know that I’ve ever met an indigenous American. They’ve always seemed part of something mythic and distant, but when I pick up one of the flat fish-shaped stones everything changes. All of a sudden the past is very close and I am aware of how recently man stood upright and harnessed the latent energy of the bow, how practically yesterday Holocene primitives roamed the flood plain right outside this house, chasing down bush meat.
I can’t begin to describe the effect this stone has on me. It’s like I’ve ingested a drug. I’m salivating, my head is spinning. It feels like my brain is swelling against my skull, and I’m remembering things, all kinds of things. Bryan is watching me, waiting for me to put the arrowhead back in the box. Instead, holding his gaze, I slide it in my pocket. He looks away, pretending he didn’t see this.
That night I fall asleep with the stone point in my hand. I’m having crazy dreams. Something is chasing me. I’m running through a cemetery, all the headstones pushed over by some terrible wind. I run and run and finally arrive at a shore. Two little boys are throwing rocks into an African lake, pallid rotting fish piled up all around them. The lake is red, fizzy with volcanic gas, choked with clumps of tissue and bone. One of the boys is me. The other, the one with the hump in his back, is my little brother, Ambrose.
* * *
Scheuermann’s kyphosis is the medical term for the condition, which usually becomes apparent at adolescence, but in my brother’s case was obvious earlier. He’d pretty much stopped growing by the time he got to middle school, except for the hump, which became more and more noticeable as time went by, bending him over and bending him over, as if he were shouldering a little more of the weight of the world each day.
A lot of the older Africans think touching a hunchback is lucky. Ambrose, as you can imagine, hated all the poking and prodding, hiding the hump under a capacious hoodie even when it was a hundred degrees outside. Still, he came to believe all that talk about being lucky, and he was lucky, until he wasn’t—twenty-one years old and not quite five feet tall in his Timberland Originals when he was murdered last year. Which is why I refer to him as my little brother, when in fact he was older. Exactly how much I can’t say. There aren’t any records, our January 1st birthdays assigned to us by some official in one of the refugee camps. Birthdays don’t mean much where we come from, my mother will tell you. The day you die, that’s what people should remember.
* * *
Weeks go by before Bryan and I have a real conversation. He’s not real talkative on dialysis days. I arrive at noon and drive him to the clinic, where I sit and wait while they filter his blood. All the while the pilfered arrowhead is in my hand, working its magic on me, digging relentlessly into the part of my body that seems to belong to someone else, the whitest part, the grasping part.
I wake up one morning and I have vertigo. My hand is throbbing, my palm is bleeding. The ancient DNA that clings to the edge of the stone has seeped into my bloodstream. Some kind of weird interspecific miscegenation has occurred, and I feel like I’m being pressed backwards, backwards in time, devolving. Whose hand is this? Mine, but not yet mine. It’s the hand that first nocked the arrow, the hand first pierced by it. I draw back the bowstring. Even as I release it I can feel the pain, eons of pain, the pain of every living thing that’s ever crawled off to die alone in some hole.
* * *
There’s hardly ever anyone in the waiting room. They hustle people straight in and hook them up to a machine as soon as they arrive. They’re running people through there all day, three shifts. The backroom is packed, a dozen patients at a time, sitting at their stations, dozing, watching TV. It’s all very sad, the wheelchairs, the catheters, the colostomy bags. Bryan says he tries to sleep, but you really can’t. If you move, an alarm goes off, the machine shuts down, a technician has to come over and start things up again.
The first day we’re there, one of the techs, a young black woman who doubles as receptionist, comes out. She’s on break. She wants to know what I’m reading. I show her the cover of a statistics textbook. She laughs. I got a statistic for you, she says. One in five of them poor fucks back there gonna be dead in a year if they don’t get themselves a kidney.
A kidney. Of course. How could I have been so obtuse? Why wasn’t this obvious to me? It’s not my ass Bryan wants, it’s a kidney. Yes, trafficking in human organs is illegal here, but there are places you can go where it’s not. How desperate is he? Is he near the front or the back of the line? What kind of price does he have in mind? I mean, there is a price—I’m not sure what it is, but I’ll know it when I hear it. But then a month goes by, two months. Why hasn’t he asked?
Here comes that receptionist again. She sits down next to me, scrubs rustling. Ain’t you finished that book yet? She nudges my foot with hers. Where you from, child?
I bristle at the question as I always do, having lived in this country since I was seven. How does she know? How do they always know? What is this shibboleth I’ve never been able to get my mouth around? She leans closer and puts her hand on my knee. You African, right?
She’s a big girl, not bad looking, fat in all the right places, but I’m not even tempted. I have to confess that, like most of the Africans I know, I’m deeply suspicious of American blacks. The problems begin as soon as we arrive. The agencies resettle us where rent is cheap and life is even cheaper. Terrible things happen. We’re living under a tarp in some godforsaken camp in east Africa, and then a couple days later we’re cowering on the floor of an unfurnished apartment in north St. Louis, stray bullets flying through the windows. Welcome to the promised land. We don’t know what to think, but we try to adjust. We rearrange our clannish allegiances. Somali kids hang with Ethiopians, Ethiopians with Eritreans. If we were back in Africa we’d all be throwing bombs at each other. Here, we huddle and move in herds—to the school, to the store—keeping our distance from the natives.
Every African I know has some story of persecution at the hand of American blacks. In my experience it’s the women who are most dangerous, always with a lot of bitter baggage and a couple babies and an incarcerated boyfriend in tow—who you won’t know about until suddenly he’s out of prison, standing in the bedroom, pointing a gun at your head. I’ve been down this road. I don’t want anything to do with this woman, and I know how to get rid of her. I give her a crazy grin, slap my hand on her breast and ask her for five dollars. She jumps up and looks at me like I’ve got a load in my pants.
I have to laugh, remembering this. It’s a farcical, upside-down version of what goes so wrong during those first few years in America. Your English isn’t good. Misunderstanding dogs your every step. A stranger makes a request. You’ve been formed by a culture which has complicated protocols for such requests, which must be honored if at all possible. You take up someone’s burden for a few miles, there are expectations, there is reciprocation. Not here. There’s only one rule here—grab it and run.
Kids stop you on the street. Hey, lemme see that bike, lemme see them shoes, lemme see that phone. You’re going to get your teeth kicked in and your shit stolen no matter what you say or do. Things escalate. Soon, someone is dead. There was a kid at my high school, also from the DRC, killed over a bag of potato chips.
The receptionist leaves me alone for a while. Then one day she comes out and plops down again, a smug look on her face. She knows something I don’t. One of the other techs just told her something. You know about him, don’t you? She’s talking about Bryan. What about him? He used to be a cop in the city, she says. Okay, this surprises me, so what?
He murdered someone, she says. Another cop, a black cop.
* * *
My job has expanded. I’m driving Bryan around on Saturdays now. We go to the grocery store, to the drug store. I do the shopping while he waits in the car. Sometimes we just go for a drive. As I said, he’s not real talkative on dialysis days, but on Saturdays you can’t shut him up. He goes on and on, asking me all kinds of questions, very interested in Africa. What’s the religion, what’s the language, what crops do they grow, what food do they eat? What do they think about Obama there? I finally lose it. How the hell should I know? Tell me about your brother, he says. Tell me about that cop you killed, I answer back. This shuts him up.
I can see he’s unhappy with me, and now I’m wondering if my impertinence has cost me my job. He starts giving me directions: turn here, turn there. Now we’re in the city, headed north on Kingshighway. He has me pull over on a short street south of Fairground Park. Gangbangers jostle on the corner. They don’t know what to make of us. One of them ambles over. Bryan opens the glove box and sets a 9mm on the dash. The scout backs away, the corner clears.
Over there, Bryan says, pointing to a gangway between two derelict four-families. Twenty years ago in November, a warm night, a carjacking downtown, a high-speed pursuit, a foot chase, confusion, shots fired, the kid gets away, a cop is dead. It’s a mess. There’s this towing-company scandal going on at the time. A bunch of cops have been indicted. This sergeant I follow into the alley, he’s going to testify.
Except there’s an accident.
Yeah, Bryan says, there’s an accident.
Okay, I get it. We’re swapping atrocity stories. So I’ve got one for him. We head west on Natural Bridge, then south on Goodfellow. I pull into an alley near Etzel and Hodiamont. This is where Ambrose’s luck ran out. I get out and walk around. It’s the end of May, hot, midday sun beating down. I stand in the thready shade of a mimosa, trying to imagine the last moments of his life, his last thought, the last image to register in his brain. I take it all in: alley bricks slick with mulberries; honeysuckle growing through the springs of a couch; trash piled up against dumpsters stripped of their hooks by scrap-metal thieves. There’s a vinyl downspout on one of the garages facing the alley. Somebody has scrubbed away the bloody handprint there. Ambrose grabbed it trying to get up. It took them awhile to beat him to death. He had a hundred dollars in his wallet. They didn’t touch it.
It’s a game, I explain, back in the car. Find someone weak, walk up behind them, put them down with one punch, if you’re good. Do it enough times, you’re the Knockout King.
What happened to the King?
He’ll be out in a few years.
And then?
I’ve got the stone point in my hand, as I do all the time now. I squeeze it until the blood comes and show it to him. He finds this amusing.
* * *
The following Friday he announces he won’t be doing dialysis anymore. Is this good news, bad news? Did they locate a kidney? Am I out of a job? He doesn’t say much as he directs me onto the highway and over the bridge to East St. Louis.
The lot at the Casino Queen is full, but with the handicapped tag we park right next to the door. I roll him inside and leave him in front of a video poker machine and wander around for a while. When I come back, he’s chewing on an unlit cigarette. A cocktail waitress is swapping him a full highball glass for an empty one. He stuffs some money in her shirt. I ask for a rum and Coke. She asks me if I’m playing. He’s a player, Bryan says with a laugh. She comes back with my drink. He stuffs more money in her shirt. I ask him if he’s winning or losing. He says he’s up six grand.
I’m a little drunk when we get back in the van. Bryan chain-smokes now as we head north into Brooklyn, passing the strip clubs on Route 3, cruising the forlorn streets behind them. He has me pull over next to what looks like a poultry shed. There’s a fenced lot around back. We pull up to the gate and wait while a camera looks us over. Then the gate slides open and I suddenly understand what this is: it’s a whorehouse, a whorehouse with a wheelchair ramp.
Inside, Mamma-san is eating soup behind ballistic glass. Two girls, also Asian, come out. One of them, the older one, plops down in Bryan’s lap and shoves her tongue in his ear, knocking the hairpiece askew. I just about throw up. The three of them make a deal. The older one rolls Bryan away. The younger one looks at me with obvious relief. In brothel-pidgin she explains that Bryan has paid for both of us, whatever I want. No, thank you. I’ll wait outside. Now she’s jabbering in her language, looking at me like I’m crazy. Where you from? And she doesn’t mean what country, she means what planet. Mamma-san watches unhappily from her cage. The girl pleads and pleads and at last I understand: Bryan has promised a large gratuity for giving me satisfaction. Okay, okay. She can give me a backrub, but I don’t want anything fancy.
She leads me to a curtained stall. She turns on some music and lights some candles as I undress. Then I hear a gasp and I know she’s looking at the scars on my legs. Some of you have seen them. Not pretty. It looks like pieces of a flayed white man have been grafted to my loins. She wants to know what happened.
Until recently, I could only give the sketchiest of answers to that question, but a lot has heaved to the surface in the short time I have had the stone point in my possession. She starts working on me. It’s very pleasant. After a while I relax the unremitting grip I have kept on that freakish piece of sharpened flint, and even though she has no idea what I’m talking about, I tell her a little of what I remember.
* * *
It’s the beginning of the rainy season, March 1995. In a few hours just about everybody in our village will be dead. But right now the sun is shining, the day full of promise, the air heavy with anticipation. The soldiers are gone. The men are gone too, taken away yesterday. The women are buzzing. Something big is happening, but for me, five going on six, probably closer to six, it’s a day like any other, except for this: my brother has left the house. Ambrose—who has spent so much of his childhood curled up on a pallet in a corner of our sturdy one-room home, fighting one ailment after another, his precarious existence delimited by cinderblock walls, an earthen floor, a tin roof—today he has freed himself from his dark bed. Today he is outside with me.
We’re playing a game called bille: a circle drawn with a stick; around it, a ring of boys shoulder to shoulder, down on their knees, knuckles in the dust. The clacking glass spheres, little planets, pass back and forth among us. We play like our lives depend on it, but you can’t trade marbles for food.
We’re hungry. At some point, Ambrose and I leave the game and come up with a plan to put some meat in Momma’s soup: a snare, a cardboard box on a stick, a string tied to the stick, some broken pieces of corn under the box. This is hunting the hard way but miraculously it happens—we catch a sparrow. The birds are hungrier than we are.
Sliding something under the carton, we carry our tiny captive into the house, but Ambrose trips on the threshold and we drop it. The bird is out, flapping around, banging into walls. I stun it with a broom and grab it. It pecks at me viciously. Bright red spots bead up on the back of my hand, the first time I recall seeing my own blood. I fling the bird away, dashing it to the floor. Ambrose makes a grab for it, knocking Momma’s soup over, dumping it into my lap. I’m scalded, screaming.
Momma comes running. But instead of comforting me, she does something terrifying. She’s got something in her hand—a belt, a man’s belt, thick and long. Whose? I don’t know. I’ve never seen it before. She lays into Ambrose with it, beating him mercilessly across the back. Even through my pain I’m outraged by the injustice of it. Beat me, not him. I am strong, he is weak. It’s my fault as much as his. But the beating goes on and on. She’s going to kill him. Who is this crazy woman? Ambrose finds the door at last. He takes off and disappears the rest of the day, a move that probably saved his life but complicated our eventual escape.
* * *
Bryan gives the girls five hundred each. Out in the car he hands the rest to me, almost five thousand dollars. What’s this? It’s yours, he says. For what? He doesn’t say.
I drive aimlessly, following the river for a while, waiting for directions from him. We pass a huge landfill, the compacted, smoldering midden of our young city. We pass train yards and freight terminals and stranded lakes, and corn—corn everywhere, eight feet high, thick as grass. At last we come to Fairmont, a settlement I have heard about but never visited, where throngs of illegals camp in trailer parks off Collinsville Road. A sign says the horse track is just ahead, but we never get there. A broad meadow opens on either side of the highway. We have unexpectedly arrived at the great lost city of Cahokia.
* * *
Seven hundred years ago it was the largest city in the world, more populous than London at the time, thirty square miles, maybe twenty-five thousand people living right here, a great trading center, the original Midwest mercantile exchange, commodity swapped for commodity—corn that sprang from the deep alluvial soil of the American Bottom, copper and iron from the Great Lakes, Ozark chert, shells from the Gulf. Then suddenly it collapsed and was forgotten. Lewis and Clark spent a winter just a few miles from here, unaware of its existence. Even today, the modern city is just minutes away, but not a lot of people know about this place. I’ve never been here before. Neither has Bryan. Truthfully, there’s not much to look at—a grassy mound, maybe a hundred feet high, rising from a meadow with a few scattered trees. You can see it from the interstate. I thought it was a golf course.
I pull into the empty parking lot, turn off the engine and roll down the windows. We just sit for a while. Insects buzz, traffic on I-70 hums. We’re going to get some rain before the end of the day, Bryan says finally. I look at him. What’s that supposed to mean? Run up there, he says. Tell me what you see. Okay, boss, whatever you say.
I climb the stairs to the ceremonial platform, expecting to hear a gunshot any moment. At the top I catch my breath and look around. There’s the Arch and downtown, looking insignificant under a turbid sky. The priest kings lived up here, closer to their gods. The rich guys always get the best view. Always have, always will. But maybe you’re wondering, as I did, how exactly did they pull it off? What kind of charismatic personality concentrated the masses here? What grand ideology bound these nipple-ringed virgin-sacrificing savages together?
The whole thing was built around a game, as it turns out. Cahokia was a giant outdoor casino. There’s an archaeologist here on campus who says it was like Las Vegas and the Super Bowl and the World Series every day, the players rolling clay pucks and throwing spears at them, the crowd wagering feverishly, a weird combination of darts and roulette, played as a contact sport. The games went on for hundreds of years.
I close my eyes and squeeze the stone point, trying to see the old city. I can almost smell the wood smoke and hear the drums. The wound is open, my hand bleeding freely, but I can’t quite bring the scene into focus. The stone is losing some of its power. Maybe it’s been out of the ground too long.
I stick it into the grass and press it down with my foot and almost instantly my head spins and my body throbs with something, an anticipation I can only describe as sexual. How different my life will be from now on. Some part of what I see below me, this terrifying new country, it’s mine. For the first time ever, I feel like I belong here. I am home at last. All that separates me from my destiny is the twitch of a bloated finger on a trigger.
* * *
But nothing happens. What’s he waiting for? Do it, you old fool! I move to the edge of the mound and look down at the van. He looks slumped over. Maybe he has done it and I didn’t hear it.
Across the road at the visitors center a school bus is loading, kids milling and shrieking. It’s the wrung-out culmination of a summer day-camp outing. Now the bus is moving, trundling toward the highway, lurching through gears. Which way is it headed? Back to town? No, it’s coming here.
It pulls into the lot. The door flies open. Small sweaty bodies swarm through it. Chaperones herd the clamoring pilgrims into an unstable line, which falls apart immediately. One of the kids makes a break for it, running, running for the hill. They’re all running now. The screaming horde divides and flows around the van without slowing. Bryan, who is not dead, leans on the horn, urging them on.
The kids charge up the mound, not bothering with the stairs. All of a sudden I remember the stone point. Where is it? I’m down on my hands and knees, scratching around in the grass. Can’t find it. How could this happen? How could I have been so careless? The sticky-faced usurpers are cresting the hill now, coming to take the magic stone away from me. Go back, you little monsters. Go back where you came from.
* * *
I never do find it, but it’s not the end of the world. There’s a box full back at the house, right? Which is where Bryan intended all along to end his life. We get home just as the storm hits. I help him into bed. He opens a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue, starts swallowing pills, and reveals at last what he wants from me: he just wants somebody there to call 911 when it’s over. The guy just put five grand in my pocket. How can I not do this for him?
But I’m sure as hell not going to watch. I sit out in the living room. All the while the storm bangs on the steel roof, like somebody threw a handful of change in the dryer. Ten minutes go by. I’m having second thoughts. I look in on him. The bottle’s half empty. There’s a dry-cleaning bag over his head, duct-taped around his neck. His eyes are closed but he’s still breathing. I come back a few minutes later. He’s vomited inside the bag. Now I’m having serious misgivings. What am I doing here? I don’t want to be implicated in this. You can’t trust the police. What might they accuse me of? How will I explain the money in my pocket? The storm is letting up. I’m going to grab the other arrowheads and get the hell out of here.
But the box is gone. I run my hand over the shelf again and again. Then I tear the closet apart. Where is it? I turn around. His eyes are open. He’s watching me through the vomit-smeared bag. He’s got this infuriating smile on his face. Where are the stones? What did you do with them? He puts his hand out, fingertips furled, then opens them all at once. Poof. Gone. He’s given them away, apparently. It never occurred to him to offer them to me. To hell with him. Fuck this. I leave and never do call the paramedics. I have no idea how long he lay there.
* * *
Only Spencer and Aitan remain at the table. The rest have drifted off to the library or back to the dorms to catch a late dinner. Spencer lingers, clearly disappointed with my tale. I have over-promised, under-delivered, and yet I have won. It’s time for him to withdraw from the field. He sees this at last. He stands up unsteadily, drawing a cross in the air in ironic benediction before lurching to the door.
Aitan leans close, searching my face. She’s mine, all mine now. But what exactly have I won? Way back in my brain, a voice warns: too good to be true, too good to be true.
“You remembered something, didn’t you?” She covers my hand with hers. “There in the Lustron Home, watching him die.”
“Yes, I remembered something, something all of us had forgotten.”
* * *
They’re taunting us. They say we are Banyamulenge—that is, outsiders, interlopers, intruders, foreign Tutsi scum—apparently having reached this conclusion by counting our cows. We have too many cows. The ratio of cows to people is highly suspect. It marks us as herders rather than settled agriculturists, which is what the people of our village have been for as long as anyone can remember. The only outsider in the village, in fact, is my mother, who as I said was born in the south, but she’s no Banyamulenge. These ignorant child soldiers couldn’t have picked out a Tutsi in a crowd of pygmies. They have no idea what they’re doing. It’s just madness—sexed-up dissolute youth playing with guns.
They take the cows, then the men, and finally they herd the rest of us out to the road. They say they’re going to escort us to a place where we’ll be safe. Instead, they march us just a few hundred yards down the hill to the Methodist school, where we sit and wait, while they post some of the younger soldiers as guards and start taking the girls up to the school, two or three at a time. For French lessons, they say.
Meanwhile, storm clouds are spilling over the mountain. It starts raining. Some of the soldiers run to take shelter in the portico of the school. Then the rain changes. It’s a crazy rain, like I’ve never seen before, rocks falling out of the sky. Everybody’s in a panic, the soldiers too, but they’re disciplined enough not to waste bullets on us at first. They’re hitting people with clubs and shovels. People are running. Now guns are going off. They’re shooting from up at the school. Suddenly I’m facedown in the ditch, my nose full of water. Mom falls on top of me, others pile in on top of on her. I can’t breathe. Through the writhing layers of flesh and bone, I feel the impact of the bullets. Somehow I manage to wriggle into a place where I can breathe. The one tiny blessing in all this is the icy water running through the clogged ditch, which momentarily soothes my legs, scalded hours earlier when Ambrose knocked the soup over on me.
Then I’m hearing gunshots again—short, purposeful bursts. The bodies we lie under go still. The soldiers are back, finishing what they started. The storm must be over. Time passes. My legs are really starting to hurt. I’m cold, miserable, but I don’t remember being afraid. Someone’s holding my hand, squeezing intermittently. I’m pretty sure it’s my mother.
It’s not quite dark when we dig ourselves out, but I can’t see a thing. What’s wrong with me? Have I gone blind? No, the clouds are so full of water they have fallen to the ground. My mother is talking to me but her voice is distant, unfamiliar. She doesn’t call me by name. Suddenly I’m not even sure it’s her. Stay here, she says, don’t move. What can I do but obey? I can’t feel my feet. I can’t even see them. They’ve been hacked away by the fog.
She leaves. I’m waiting for her, hopping around on pins and needles as feeling returns to my feet, panicking now for the first time. Where is she? The crazy woman who beat Ambrose so viciously, what’s she doing? She’s gone for what seems like hours. Has she abandoned me? Is it possible? Yes, suddenly I know it’s possible. I’m wandering around, too scared to cry, looking for her, when someone yanks on my arm so hard it almost pops out of the socket. I can’t tell you how good this felt.
So where was she all this time? She can’t say. She doesn’t remember any of this. I’m thinking she went to get something, some tiny portable treasure, maybe a few particles of gold left behind by the priest who abandoned us, or maybe just some coins plucked from the pockets of the dead. Who knows? But when she comes back, she’s got something she didn’t have before. On the travels that follow, if there is someone to barter with, we don’t go hungry. Curiously, my mother swears that Ambrose was with us the entire time, that she was holding our hands, in the ditch and afterwards, and never let go, not once. But that’s not how it happened. Ambrose wasn’t there.
We’re stumbling down the road, my mother and me. She’s dragging me along, towards what I don’t know, and we pass what must be the last house in the village when I hear something, a mewling sound. Momma doesn’t hear it, or pretends not to hear it. She just wants to get down that mountain as fast as she can.
What’s wrong with her? How can she not recognize that cry? I break free and run back to this house, which is a twin of our own. Maybe it is our own. I don’t know. Inside, I trip on something heavy, a cauldron, or a washtub. I push it over and what do I find underneath? A lucky little misshapen turtle—Ambrose, who pulled his head in at just the right moment, who cried out at the last possible second. We came that close to leaving him behind.
We start the long walk down to the lake and the camps, where my burns and the incipient hump in Ambrose’s back catch the eyes of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and a Belgian doctor. We’re lucky at every turn. Ambrose is our lucky charm. Suddenly we have papers, suddenly we’re on a plane—to Nairobi, Brussels, Chicago and finally St. Louis. My mother never beat either of us again, convinced God put that hump in Ambrose’s back to punish her for the beating she gave him that day, but she has yet to acknowledge how close she came to leaving him behind, to leaving both of us behind.
* * *
Aitan looks away. “It was hail, wasn’t it? The crazy rain . . .”
“Yes,” I answer. “Huge, softball-size hail. The hail put us in the ditch and the hail saved us. But somehow this crucial detail was lost to us, all of us, for a long time, and it’s what came back to me. It’s what I remembered, there in the Lustron home, waiting for the old man to die.”
“And the house?”
“Mine, all mine now. He left it to me.”
She doesn’t say anything for a moment, then her eyes narrow and her hand lashes out, squeezing my hand now like she wants to break it. “Augustine, what part of this is true?”
What? What is she saying?
I pry her fingers away and show her the wound from the stone point, which has yet to heal, which may never heal. “All of it, every word. Mem-shatal. Swear to God.”
Les Meyers has published short stories in Quarterly West, Ascent, The Chariton Review, West Branch, and The O. Henry Prize Stories.