2006 - What is the What (32 page)

‘I think I have to go back to work,’ Achor Achor says.

I say nothing. I know he is just thinking through his options. I know he will come with me to the hospital but needs first to assess how difficult it will be to call his supervisor. He feels he could be fired any day for any reason, and taking an afternoon off is not a decision easily arrived upon.

‘I could tell them what happened,’ he says.

‘There’s no need,’ I say.

‘No, I’ll call them. Maybe they’ll let me work the weekend to make it up.’

He makes the call, though it does not go well. Achor Achor, and most of us, have learned various and conflicting rules of employment here. There is a strictness that is new, but it also seems shifting and inequitable. At my fabric-filing job, my coworker seemed to operate under vastly different rules than I. She arrived late each day and lied about her hours. She did not seem to work at all while I was present, allowing me—she called me her assistant, though I was no such thing—to do all the day’s work. Short of reporting her poor work ethic, I had no recourse but to work twice as hard as she, for two-thirds her pay.

‘I wonder if they turn on the sirens for something like this,’ Achor Achor mused.

‘I think so.’

‘Do you think they catch people like them?’

‘I bet they will. These two seemed like criminals. I’m sure the police have pictures of them.’

Thoughts of Tonya and Powder being pursued, being caught, fill me with great satisfaction. This country, I am sure, does not tolerate things like this. It occurs to me that this is the first time an officer will act on my behalf. The thought gives me a giddy strength.

Ten minutes pass, then twenty. We’ve made a list of the major items, but now, with more time than we expected to have, Achor Achor and I begin to catalog the lesser things stolen. We gather all of the user manuals for the missing appliances, in case the police need the model numbers. The information will likely help them recover the stolen items, and the insurance companies, too, will expect this information.

‘You’ll have to reprogram all the birthdays into your phone,’ Achor Achor notes.

He is one of my few friends who did not laugh when he knew I was recording the birthdays of everyone I knew. To him it seemed logical enough, providing as it did a string of stopping points along the path of a year, sites where you could appreciate who you knew, how many people called you friend.

Achor Achor is now righting the apartment—the table, the lamp, the couch cushions that are still on the floor. Achor Achor is exceedingly practical, and effortlessly organized. He finishes his homework one day before it’s due, because when he does, it affords him that extra day to recheck it. He brings his car in for an oil change every twenty-five hundred miles and drives as if his DMV tester were with him at all times. In the kitchen, he uses the proper equipment for each task. Anne and Gerald Newton, who spend a good deal of time cooking, watching television shows, and reading books about cooking, gave us a vast array of utensils and potholders and other kitchen objects. Achor Achor knows what each is for, keeps them well organized, and tries very hard to find occasion to use each one. Last week I found him cutting onions while wearing goggles, the strap of which said ONIONS ARE FOR WEEPERS.

After half an hour, Achor Achor has the idea that the police might have written the address down incorrectly. He opens the door to see if there is a squad car in the lot; perhaps an officer is checking the other apartments. I tell him about the officer that was there for forty minutes the day before, though I can tell that it is too strange a concept for him to begin to understand. Instead, Achor Achor calls the police again. The response is perfunctory; they tell him a car is on its way.

‘I’m cursed,’ I say. It is the thought on both of our minds. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say.

He doesn’t immediately relieve me of this burden.

‘No, I don’t think so,’ he lies. There can be no other explanation for the things that have happened to me since moving to the United States. Only forty-six refugees were scheduled to fly to New York on September 11, and one of them was me. I have lost my good friend Bobby Newmyer and Tabitha is gone and now this. It is the sort of thing that causes one to laugh, frankly. And at the instant this thought occurs to me, Achor Achor begins to laugh. I smile and we know what we’re smiling about.

‘They even took the clocks,’ he says.

Achor Achor chose poorly when he chose me. Yes, there are far worse men, young Sudanese who enjoyed themselves too much, who involved themselves in any mess a young man can find, and I am not that, and neither is Achor Achor. But I have not brought him much good fortune. As we sit, I find it difficult to look at him. We have known each other for too long, and being with him here is perhaps the saddest of all of the situations in which we have found ourselves. We are pathetic, I decide. He is still working in a furniture store, and I am attending three remedial classes at a community college. Are we the future of Sudan? This seems unlikely. Not with the way we attract trouble, not with how often we are victims of calamity. We bring it upon ourselves. Our peripheral vision is poor, I think; in the U.S., we do not see trouble coming.

It has been fifty-two minutes when there is a knock on the door.

I begin to stand but Achor Achor gestures me to sit. He grabs the knob and turns it.

‘Wait!’ I yell. He doesn’t hesitate; I believe for a moment it could be Tonya again. Instead he opens the door and finds a small Asian woman with a ponytail, dressed in half of a police uniform. She has no hat, and her pants do not match her shirt. Achor Achor invites her in, looking at her with unmasked curiosity.

‘I heard you had an incident here,’ she says.

Achor Achor invites her in and closes the door. She sweeps her eyes around the living room without seeing the blood stain. Her toes are touching its outline on the carpet. Achor Achor stares at the stain for a moment, and she follows his eyes.

‘Ha,’ she says. She steps back from the stain.

‘Which one of you is the victim?’ she asks, her hands on her waist. She looks at me and then Achor Achor. I am sitting four feet from her, dried blood on my mouth and temple. She returns her attention to me.

‘Are you the victim?’ she asks me.

Achor Achor and I say yes at the same time. Then he gets up and points to my face. ‘He has been wounded, officer.’

She smiles, tilts her head, and sighs loudly. She begins to ask me questions, about how many and when.

‘Did you know the perpetrator?’ she asks.

‘No,’ I say.

I recount the events of the night and morning. She writes a few words down in a leather-bound notebook. She is thin, miniature everywhere, with dark hair and high cheekbones, and the movements of her hands are the same—tidy, small.

‘You sure you didn’t know these people?’ she asks again.

‘No,’ I repeat.

‘But then why did you open the door?’

I explain again that the woman had needed to use my telephone. The officer shakes her head. This doesn’t seem to her a satisfactory answer.

‘But you didn’t know her.’

I tell her I did not.

‘You didn’t know the man, either?’

‘No,’ I say.

‘Never seen them before?’

I tell her that I saw the woman on the way up to my apartment. This is of interest to the officer. She writes something in her notebook.

‘Do you have insurance?’ she asks.

Achor Achor says he has insurance, and finds his card. She takes the card and frowns down at it. ‘No, no. Renter’s insurance,’ she says. ‘Something that covers theft like this.’

We have nothing of the kind, we realize. I tell her that the woman made at least one phone call from my cell phone.

‘That should be helpful, Mr. Achor,’ she says to me, but does not write this in her notebook.

‘I’m Achor Achor,’ Achor Achor says. ‘He is Valentine.’

She apologizes, pointing out how interesting our names are. She sees this as a segue into the inevitable question of our origin. She asks where we’re from, and we tell her Sudan. Her eyes come alive.

‘Wait. Darfur, right?’

It is a fact that Darfur is now better known than the country in which that region sits. We explain the geography briefly.

‘Sudan, wow,’ she says, half-heartedly inspecting the locks on our front door. ‘What are you doing here?’

We tell her that we’re working and trying to go to college.

‘So were you part of the genocide? Victims of that?’

I sit down, and Achor Achor tries to clarify things for her. I allow him to expound, thinking that perhaps she’ll open her notebook again and take down more information about the assault. Achor Achor explains where we came from, and our relationship with the Darfurians, and it’s only when he mentions that some from that region have come to Atlanta to live that she seems interested.

They arrived one day at our church in Clarkston, officer. Our priest, Father Kerachi Jangi, turned our attention to the guests at the back of the church, and when everyone turned, our eyes set upon eight newcomers, three men, three women, and two children under eight, most dressed in suits and other formal clothing. The young boy was in a Carolina Panthers jersey. We greeted them then and after church, surprised to see them among us, and curious to know what they had planned. It was not customary for Darfurians, most of whom were Muslim, to be mixing with Dinka, and unprecedented for them to be attending a Christian church on a Sunday. The Darfurians historically had identified more with the Arabs than with us, even though they resembled us far more closely than the ethnic Arabs. Our feelings about them had long been complicated, too, by the fact that many of the murahaleen raiders who terrorized our villages were from Darfur; it took us some time to know that those who were suffering in this new stage of the civil war were not our oppressors, but were victims like ourselves. And so we let them be, and they us. But all is different now, and alliances are changing.

When Achor Achor is finished, the officer sighs closes her notebook.

‘Well,’ she says, and looks once more at the stain.

She hands me a piece of paper the size of a business card. It says COMPLAINT CARD. Achor Achor takes it.

‘Does this mean that what happened to him is a complaint?’ Achor Achor asks.

‘Yes,’ she says, almost smiling. She then recognizes that he is taking issue with this way of naming the crime. ‘What do you mean?’

I tell her that having a gun pointed to my head seems more than a complaint.

‘This is the way we define a matter like this,’ she says, and closes her notebook. She has written no more than five words inside.

‘You guys take care now, okay?’

She is leaving, and I cannot bring myself to care. The sense of defeat I feel is complete. I had, for the fifty minutes while we waited for the officer’s arrival, mustered so much indignation and thirst for vengeance that now I have nowhere to put the emotions. I collapse on my bed and let everything flow through the sheets, the floor, the earth. I have nothing left. We refugees can be celebrated one day, helped and lifted up, and then utterly ignored by all when we prove to be a nuisance. When we find trouble here, it is invariably our own fault.

‘I’m sorry,’ Achor Achor says. He is sitting on my bed. ‘We should go to the hospital, right? How does it feel, your head?’

I tell him that the pain is severe, that it seems to be traveling throughout my body.

‘Then we’ll go,’ he says. ‘Let’s go.’

Achor Achor brings me to the hospital in Piedmont. He drives my car, and at his suggestion, I ride in the back seat. I lie down, hoping that doing so will ease the pain in my head. I watch the passing sky, bare trees spidering across the window, but the pain only grows.

I
have been to this hospital. Shortly after I arrived in Atlanta, Anne Newton brought me here to get a physical. It is the finest hospital in Atlanta, she told me. Her husband Gerald, who I do not know as well—he is a money manager of some kind and is not always home for dinner—came here for surgery on his shoulder after a water-skiing accident. It is the finest we have, Anne said, and I’m happy to be there. In hospitals I feel palpable comfort. I feel the competence, the expertise, so much education and money, all of the supplies sterile, everything packaged, sealed tight. My fears evaporate when the automatic doors shush open.

‘You can go home,’ I tell Achor Achor. ‘This might take a while.’

‘I’ll stay,’ he says. ‘I’ll wait till they treat you. Then you can call me when you need to be picked up. I might try to go back to work for an hour or so.’

It is four o’clock when we step into the reception area. An African-American man, about thirty years old and wearing short-sleeved blue scrubs, is at the receiving desk. He looks us over with great interest, a curious grin spreading under his thick mustache. As we approach, he seems to register the injuries to my face and head. He asks me what happened, and I relay a brief version of the story. He nods and seems sympathetic. I feel almost irrationally grateful to him.

‘We’ll get you fixed up quick,’ he says.

‘Thank you so much, sir,’ I say, reaching over the counter to shake his hand between my two hands. His skin is rough and dry.

He hands me a clipboard. ‘Just fill in the blanks and—‘ Here he cuts his hand horizontally through the air, from his stomach outward to me, closing his eyes and shaking his head, as if to say, This will be easy, this will be nothing.

Achor Achor and I sit and fill out the forms. Very quickly I arrive at the line asking for the name of my insurance company, and I pause. Achor Achor begins to think.

‘This is a problem,’ he says, and I know this is true.

I had insurance for about eighteen months, but have been without it since I started school. I am making $1,245 a month, and school fees are $450, rent $425, and then food, heat, so many things. Insurance was not an expense I could work into the equation.

I complete the form as best I can, and bring the clipboard back to the man. I notice his nametag: Julian.