The Messenger (30 page)

But she will die. And it will be over.

After her second cup of thick and bitter coffee, she puts all her dishes and utensils in the proper bins and steps out onto the sidewalk. Monica comes out of the doctor’s, waves, climbs into her Cherokee and heads off on her rounds.

Brutus comes back. He’s got a whole grocery cart full of stuff, vegetables this time—Daria sees the green tufts sticking out of the bags. “I got honey, I got breakfast cereal, I got apple juice …” It’s enough for an army, and he needs her help to fit it all in his trunk.

“I’ve got to get glasses,” he says after he’s closed the lid and they are just standing there. “I’ve got some kind of thing going on in my vision.”

“That’s not good …”

“I only got eyes for foreign girls …”

“Oh … you are so full of shit.” And they are laughing there together for a few moments.

“Those Russian girls are hot, and those Italian girls are hot too,” he says under his eyelashes, not looking at her.

“You are just horny.”

“Mm-hmm. I admit it. It’s a sin.”

“Men are always in a hurry. You see what happened to Paulina …”

“It doesn’t have to be like that. You and me should go out sometime.”

“No … I’m still sick.”

“Well, I can fix you up. You should take the Brutus cure.”

She laughs. “Look, you’re a sweet guy. I’ll talk to Nadja. She doesn’t really have the HIV, she just says that.”

“I know. But she’s too busy,” he says, and turns toward the driver’s side of the car. “We’re all too busy. Everybody in the world is too busy …”

Just as they are getting in the car, there is an angry barking, and two dogs roar around the corner, tumbling end over end as they flail and snap at each other’s throats.

“Goddamn!” Brutus says and starts rolling his window up. Then he stops and they both watch. It’s the sound—the growling and the shrieks—that is so horrible. A third dog suddenly comes sprinting around the corner of the mall and joins in the frenzy. Together they make a tangled, tumbling ball of brown, gray, and black. One is a Doberman, or something like it, fighting with the two smaller heavy-shouldered dogs.

“People ain’t got the money to keep those dogs and they let ’em go and then they run loose out there,” Brutus says, and starts the rumbling engine of his Pontiac. “God
damn
,” he says again as they back out.

By then the dogs are gone.

They drive out of the mall and are starting down the broad street, so wide it would be considered a highway in any other culture—a sanctuary for the internal combustion engine, but a death zone for people and wildlife, and, on a day when the commute is high, completely devoid of oxygen. Mostly it’s a knife stabbed into the heart of the Brush Creek neighborhood. The street ascends gradually and from its heights she can see over the guardrails the curve of the real creek, the trees that border it, their branches mostly brown now. Without the city, it would be very beautiful.

“Shit on these motherfuckers … Be cool,” Brutus says. There is an electronic squawk from the police car that has come up behind them, and Brutus slows and lets the Pontiac drift over to the edge of the pavement.

Maybe this is it, she thinks, as she watches the police officer climb out of his cruiser. He is young, hyper-fit. A flat stomach, and she can see the muscles press out against the cloth of his shirt, into which creases have been pressed on either side, splitting the pockets perfectly.

“Good morning,” the cop calls out. His voice is tight. Sharp and pitched a little high.

She looks over and sees that Brutus has placed his hands where they can be clearly seen, right up at the top of the steering wheel. “Morning …” he answers.

“License and registration, please,” the cop says. Brutus does it all slow. The registration is in the glove compartment, and the cop crouches down so he can see across as Daria opens it, copying Brutus and moving slowly. The cop watches them, one hand on his gun the whole time. Inside the glove compartment there is a mound of paper, a spray of CDs. Brutus leans across and picks out the registration and hands it over to the cop.

“Just stay in the car,” the cop says, and goes back to his cruiser.

“They do this shit all the goddamn time,” Brutus mutters. “Fucking ice cream is going to be shit by the time we get back …”

“The police are not so bad here. Other places, it can be much worse,” she says, looking out the window. The cop has parked behind them in the right-hand lane, and all the traffic is now constricted into a slow parade of vehicles idling past, people shaking their heads and glaring at them. “Police are like that everywhere someone is different.”

“Italian cops are tough, huh?”

She settles back in his wide front seat. There is a breeze coming through the window and it seems that for once all the exhaust is blowing some other direction. The sun is boiling down through the windshield onto her sore chest, and she closes her eyes.

“There was a place … it was near the place where I grew up. Not where I was born, but close by. We knew people who still lived there. It was close to where there was always fighting.”

“Okay …” says Brutus.

“The police were having trouble there. People went back and forth that way, along that road, and they were having to pay to do it.”

“Sure they were.”

“So, the government put more police in that district. The first day, to let people know that they were on the job, the captain arrested six men. They said they were trying to escape, and they shot them all. Dead. Right in the street. So … it can get worse.”

“They do that shit in Italy?”

She shrugs. “In lots of places …”

“You’re some kind of refugee?”

“No … I’m supposed to be a journalist.”

She hears Brutus draw a breath, and opens her eyes enough to see the cop returning.

“Where are you headed today, Mr. Farnsworth?”

“We’re shopping for groceries. I got some frozen items in the trunk, Officer.”

“You do, huh?”

“I got some ice cream in there. It’s for a pregnant lady, to calm her down.”

“Well, let’s you and I take a look. It might not have melted all that bad. Young lady, why don’t you step out and wait up front of the car.”

She pulls herself out of the front seat and does as she’s been told; it’s the only way for prisoners or oppressed persons to get through such things. Simply do what you are told. You have to try and remember that they actually want you to get angry. That’s why they do it, so that you’ll attempt to hold on to your dignity and end up giving them the excuse they need to smack you down. That’s what makes them happy and proves their manhood.

She leans back against the hot metal hood of the huge car. The nose of the car cuts into her back right across where she’s been wrapped with tape. It’s soothing in a masochistic way, like a painful massage on her spine. She closes her eyes and turns her face up to the sun while Brutus undergoes his trials. There could be anything back there in the trunk. She doesn’t really know Brutus. This could
be it. Any moment she could hear the cop asking to see her ID. What a coup it would be for him; he’d be a superstar. The famous terrorist caught at a simple traffic stop. It is almost, but not quite, funny.

If it is, it is, she thinks.

She looks out at Kansas City sprawling all around her. From the road atlas she knows it’s a fractured place, with many municipalities. A node, a distribution hub and communications center. She is right in the heart of the heartland, in the core of the beast she has sworn to eradicate. But now … she is weakening. Since she has started to question, she has started to lose her focus, and to repudiate her commitment.

Now she is failing.

How much power does she still have? Can her touch still kill? Or is she merely a seed? Drifting. A germ. She had never wanted to be a germ, she wanted something else … something that seems absurd and out of reach now. Romantic, her childhood dream of an avenging sword … She was thrilled at Ra’id’s anger, his fatalism, thrilled that Amir would back him up and protect him. She’d believed in all of it. She should have been a boy. She’d wanted to be a boy, to go with them. You had to strike back, you had to fight. Jihad was the only way out.

What was it that they had been taught? Survival of the fittest. That was it. Darwin. Evolution. If the theory was real, now she was one of those “incidents”—a grain of sand, an accident, just a blip in the chronicle of a great epochal change. History from this point on would be written by different hands. The great American cities would die; either the Indians or the Pakistanis would triumph. Israel would fall or unleash a global war. China and Europe, the Russians and the Americans, might ally themselves and try to contain things, but it was equally possible that each would elect to join one side or the other.

Within days the hospitals will be overwhelmed. She has just happened to be in Saleem Atcha Khan’s first cohort of plague carriers. There will be others playing terrible parts, more direct and bloodstained, and far more important than hers.

The trunk lid closes with a low bass clump and she turns to see
Brutus heading back. They get in and he starts the engine and they roll slowly off ahead of the cop, careful to signal as they enter the traffic.

“Another day in paradise …” says Brutus as they get back on the road.

When they reach 3050, Brutus slams the ice cream into the freezer to try to reharden it, then they all congregate in Paula’s room to check up on her, with Daria hovering as far as possible in the background.

Nadja is upset about something, and she takes the conversation out into the kitchen, where they can talk privately and not trouble her sister: While they’ve been gone she’s seen someone outside.

“There’s people come around to all of these houses, there’s all kinds of desperate people out there looking for shit. Y’all need a gun around here. Who was it?” Brutus asks her.

“I don’t know, I told you,” Nadja spits. Daria goes to the sink and busies herself making another pot of tea, which the Russian girls drink by the gallon.

“What kind of car were they in?”

“No car.” Nadja looks up at him. “I was on the porch and I saw a guy over there, over there where they did the digging. Maybe he saw me, I don’t know, but then he walked away, back around. So I came back here and looked out through this window, and I saw him again. Going all the way in a circle, behind the yard, and then he kept on going. All the way. I couldn’t see him anymore through all the jungle, but then a minute later this van came by.”

“That’s crazy.”

“It was a white man too …”

“White man? And all he did was just walk around?” Brutus is standing there with one hand on his hip, frowning.

“All around. Then drove away …”

“That don’t make no sense. This property ain’t worth shit. You can’t even sell it if you wanted to.”

“I thought it was very suspicious,” Nadja says stubbornly, and stares out the kitchen window.

“It’s probably nothing. Some inspector from the city, some shit like that,” says Brutus, and he steps forward and gives Nadja a hug. To comfort her.

There is nothing Daria can do about getting out of helping with dinner. Every half hour or so, Paula begins having contractions, only one or two each time, and each time they fade away. She begins to complain about sitting down, that her back hurts. Monica comes rushing over to the house for the first false alarm, and then has to leave. There are two other women she is also taking care of, she explains.

Dinner is something digestible and nourishing that will pass right through Paula if it comes to that—chicken soup, a bean salad, bread and butter, and the inevitable tea. Daria washes her hands frequently, and ties a bandanna over her hair. Still, she worries if it is enough.

For television they watch a DVD of
Toy Story
that Brutus has brought. She begins to quietly assemble her duffel bag. She will escape in the night; she just can’t face them with the truth. They will beat her to death, she thinks. Brutus and his friends …

When the story of the toys reaches its emotional climax, she cries, and so does Nadja.

The idea is for everyone to get some rest, but Paula still doesn’t want to lie down, and instead begins to pace up and down the hall. The two Russians talk in little short sentences.

The DVD ends and Brutus packs it up. Nadja takes Paula back into her bedroom, where she has finally agreed to get in bed and get some rest. Brutus says he is going to walk around the house and just check on things. Still thinking about the white guy that Nadja saw traipsing through the vacant lots.

It is probably the CIA, Daria thinks … the FBI, some unit of Navy SEALs, or maybe the Kansas City PD, who have staked out the house and are now silently surrounding them. Even as she goes about the living room, gathering her things, they are watching.
Scanning her heat signature through these thin wooden walls, judging exactly where to punch a .50-caliber sniper’s bullet through the soft bricks of the chimney to kill only her, leaving everyone else in the house unscathed.

Without the DVD playing, the television has reverted to the news. It is all more of the same. The crisis has enveloped the world. Numbers grow larger by the minute: seventy-three cases in Kansas City, over two thousand in New York, two thousand in Los Angeles, nine hundred each in Seattle and Chicago. Another estimated fifteen hundred in Washington. Senator Frances Cheselso has succumbed to anthrax. So has the Secretary of the Treasury, M. Randolph Dodd. The fighting in India threatens to spread. China is sending armored troops to the border to ensure Pakistan’s territorial integrity. The president is returning from Brussels. Israel is angry and poised for one of its neighbors to do something foolish, its jets on constant alert.

There is nothing about the continued hunt for terrorists still at large. Nothing that might explain a white man walking around the house.

She goes out into the kitchen, and flips off the light, and looks out the back to see if she can see Brutus. In the darkness of the garage she thinks she sees a little spark, just a smoldering red dot. It flares up and then fades away. She watches for one more breath. This time it moves up, flares, and then is whisked away.