American War(117)

COL. SINGER: Neither of these boys knew that millions of lives were at stake, Senator. At the time, the Tennessee line had been quiet for the better part of a year. The Reunification Ceremony was just a couple of days away. All those two boys would have seen on that day was a busful of sick people headed north for treatment.

SEN. AIKENS: A busful of Southerners.

COL. SINGER: Maybe so, Senator. But I don’t think it would be unreasonable to expect that, in some circumstances, even someone hell-bent on revenge might find a temporary capacity for kindness.

SEN. AIKENS: No, Colonel. I suppose it wouldn’t.





CHAPTER SIXTEEN


Five times in the first four years, I tried to escape. I tried to bribe the same smuggler who’d brought me here to take me back, to leave me anywhere along the western coast. When that failed I tried to go by land, and when the border guards brought me back to the orphanage for the third time, they said child or not, the next time they’d shoot me.

I knew my parents were dead. But that didn’t stop me from inventing soothing fantasies—maybe they’d survived, maybe the plague never came to our home, maybe she’d done for them what she’d done for me. I tried to believe it, though I knew it wasn’t true.



BY THE TIME I was sixteen, I was working as a dockhand in New Anchorage. There was plenty of money to be had working alongside especially reckless captains on salvage trips to the barrier reefs.

Sometimes on my days off I stood at the same docks alongside the mob, cursing the newest refugees. By then the plague was starting to subside on the mainland, and most of the smugglers refused to ferry any more survivors northward, for fear of contracting the illness themselves. But a couple still ran quarantine houses near the California coast; anyone who lived a week in isolation without showing symptoms was deemed safe enough to travel.

Nativism being a pyramid scheme, I found myself contemptuous of the refugees’ presence in a city already overburdened. At the foot of the docks, we yelled at them to go home, even though we knew home to be a pestilence field. We carried signs calling them terrorists and criminals and we vandalized the homes that would take them in. It made me feel good to do it, it made me feel rooted; their unbelonging was proof of my belonging.

On my eighteenth birthday, I came back to the dockhands’ dorm to find an envelope passed underneath my door. The paper inside was old and yellowing. It was a letter.

Dear Benjamin,

There are things I want you to know, things that are your right to know.

When I first came to your home, I was empty. I believed there was nothing good in the world. Then I met you, and I learned I was wrong. The time we spent in the river together made me remember what it was like to feel joy.

I told you once that a well-set bone grows stronger. The opposite is also true.

I wish we could have met each other when we were both still children. I think we would have been best friends. I wish you could have seen my old home, our big brown sea, and the pirate ship your father built from clapboard. I wish you could have met your grandparents, who were good and honest people and would have loved you very much. You come from a long line of good hearts.

More than anything, I hope you have a good life in your new home, and that despite how I wronged you, you find happiness. I loved you.

Sarat

30727-83161



I tossed the letter into an old shoebox. I didn’t look at it again for almost forty years.



TIME PASSED. I went to school and earned a degree in history. It seemed preordained that I should spend my professional life studying the civil war. By the time the plague ended, the country was in a ruinous state, and so many of the source materials on which a historian might rely to piece together the past were lost forever. But that did not dissuade me, and I pursued with rabid stubbornness every document, every long-forgotten archive, the testimony of every survivor. My colleagues, who knew nothing about my past, never found my tenacity particularly unusual; it seemed a natural part of scholarly life to go chasing after questions for which no truly satisfying answers exist.

One day I was traveling back from a speaking engagement in Georgia. The passengers boarded the airplane and we sat waiting in our seats on the tarmac as the panels on the wings soaked up a little more energy from the sun. I was watching the monitor on the seat in front of me. It showed a map of the continent, the plane’s flight path, and the numbered coordinates that marked our location on the earth.

Suddenly I realized the meaning of the numbers at the end of Sarat’s letter.

As soon as I arrived back home, I rummaged through the storage boxes in the garage until I found it. The next day I flew back south. I went to the place they marked.

It was the destitute southernmost country, near the shore of the Florida Sea. Even with the car’s air conditioner on high, the heat was overpowering. I drove past dust farms and shack-towns, places riddled with postwar poverty and the occasional three-star flag hanging limp from trailer-side posts—reminders that in so much of the Red, the war stopped but the war never ended.

I arrived at a small farmhouse with no farm, only a large dirt parcel out front and a barren lake bed out back. There was a man on the front porch, cleaning sand from the gutters. He was younger than me, I was sure of it, but years of unmerciful sun had aged his skin considerably.

“What can I do for you?” he asked as I walked up the driveway.