American War(109)

Joe nodded. She saw that he was doing now what everyone she’d known from before her time in prison had done—he was staring, trying to reconcile the shape and size and damage of her now with the recollected image of the lanky teenager he’d once known.

Finally he said, “I know what they must have done to you in that place, Sarat, and I am truly sorry.”

“You didn’t come here just to tell me that.”

“That’s correct,” Joe said. “I understand that you were able to meet one of your old prison guards. I understand that you were able to exact some measure of revenge.”

Sarat laughed. “Revenge,” she echoed. “Revenge, revenge. I hurt one man. Do you think it was just one man who hurt me?”

“If you would like, I can ask my contacts to look for others,” Joe said. “Many of the guards who were stationed at Sugarloaf when you were there are back on the mainland now. Perhaps…”

“Why stop there?” she said. “Why don’t you line them all up for me—can you do that, Joe?—you line up every man who made me what I am: the ones who killed my father, the ones who killed my sister, the ones who killed my mother, the ones who made it so my brother will never be whole again, the ones who drove us from our home, the ones who slaughtered all those people in Patience. You line up the whole lot of them for me, Joe. Then I’ll have my revenge.”

“And supposing I could?” Joe asked.

A grimace of light shone through the cracks in the boards.

“Say what you mean,” my aunt replied.

“For several years, I cultivated a relationship with a young man in the North,” said Joe. “A man named Tusk, a scientist who has dedicated his life to finding a cure for the disease the Blue government once used to silence the people of South Carolina. But even though he spent many years trying, he failed, and in the process he created something far worse—another disease of sorts, capable of wiping out entire cities, entire nations. He is in many ways a broken man, Sarat. And last year I arranged a deal with him—in exchange for the thing he created, I have offered him refuge in my home country, away from the war and everything he has had to endure.

“The Reunification Ceremony is coming up in a few months. The war will be over, and no matter what your new Southern politicians say, it will have been won by the North. But if someone were to go to Columbus and release this disease, it would change the tide of the war, change the victor, change everything. I want to know if you wish to be the one to do it, Sarat.”

A silence shrouded the room. Light turned to heat on the still uncovered soil. He waited on her answer.

“You don’t need me to do it,” she said.

“That’s right. I could have one of my contacts in the North do it. It would be much easier to do it that way, I suspect. The Blues have thousands of new guards on patrol at the border crossings, and the ones I used to have some influence with are gone. But I wanted to offer it to you first, because I know how much you have fought and how much you have suffered. You want something the size of your vengeance, Sarat? This, I believe, is the size of your vengeance.”

They heard a fleeting sound outside. A laborer wheeling fresh soil to the greenhouses. Then it was quiet again.

“Tell me your real name,” my aunt said.

“My real name is Yousef Bin Rashid. I am seventy-one years old. I work for the government of the Bouazizi Empire.”

“Yousef,” Sarat repeated, letting her tongue whip every syllable. “You-sef.”

“It doesn’t really matter to you, does it,” she asked, “who wins this war?”

“No. It does not.”

“Then why? Why be a part of it?”

“I come from a new place, Sarat,” Yousef said. “My people have created an empire. It is young now, but we intend it to be the most powerful empire in the world. For that to happen, other empires must fail. I think by now you understand that, if it were the other way around—if the South was on the verge of winning—perhaps I would be having this conversation in Pittsburgh or Columbus. I don’t want to lie to you, Sarat: this is a matter of self-interest, nothing more.”

Sarat smiled at the thought. “You couldn’t just let us kill ourselves in peace, could you?”

“Come now,” said Yousef. “Everyone fights an American war.”

They were both quiet, and in the silence Sarat was reminded of something Albert Gaines had told her. He asked her once if she knew how the word Red came to be shorthand for the South. She said it was politics, something to do with who voted for the old Republican Party back when it was all still one country.

But Gaines said it was older than all that, older than the country itself. He said it was about the dirt: in the South there’s a mineral in the ground that turns the dirt red. He said when you’ve leached all the good from the earth, all the nutrients that a seedling needs to grow, the last thing left is the stuff that turns the dirt red.

She wondered now if maybe that was the only honest thing he’d ever told her.

“It’ll kill everyone it touches, this sickness you have?” she asked Yousef.

“You have my word,” Yousef replied.

“I’m never going back to that prison. No matter what happens, I’m never going back.”

“You have my word.”