The Schwarzschild Radius (3 page)

“We’ll be watching a short film now,” said Sister Karen as Rachel exited the priest’s office.

She was led to a room at the end of the hall where other newcomers were already seated in front of a fifty inch TV. The screen came to life with a film entitled, “The Infinite Reservoir.”

“I’m Evan Massey,” said the narrator, “and this is the record of my mission to India in 1995. I was a twenty-two-year-old graduate with a vague idea that I wanted to do something for the world and I was in a hurry to do it. It’s a visual journal, a rough record of the events that occurred over a period of about eighteen months, so there isn’t much continuity, but I’ll try to tie it together with hindsight. Some of the scenes are hard to watch―they’re the kind of images that would require a warning about viewer discretion were they on TV. But look at the problems of these people and then ask yourself honestly if your world is really as bad as you think.”

The first scene showed a young Evan Massey, wearing shoulder-length hair, walking side by side with a village elder.

The problem was this:

The people in the village of Krupal in northern India were starving. Every year, the monsoons brought crops and plenty for a short time. Then the dry weather arrived and there was no water for months. They watched their children wither away and die. They saw their own flesh desiccate on their bodies. By tradition, they put their dead on rooftops where the birds picked at the remains, so in dry weather, the roofs were thatched with bones. Every year as the Krupalis starved, the loan sharks came around and lent them money, which was owed for generations and which they had no hope of repaying. The people had lived like this, they said, for two thousand years.

Evan Massey told them that there was a way out, but the work required would be so hard that probably a quarter of them would die from it. But he promised them that if they succeeded, the rest would live. The people were willing to make this sacrifice.

“I’m an engineer,” he told them.

“Actually,” corrected the voice-over, “I had a two-year degree with an interest in civil engineering and a year of experience doing construction work.”

“In those hills,” resumed the younger Massey, “there’s limestone and iron-rich soil that we’ll use to make mortar that’s twenty times stronger than concrete. These stones you see all around you―these millions of stones―all these stones will be gone when we’ve finished.” They had five months.

The plan was to build an immense reservoir in the earth, twelve-feet deep and two acres in area, reinforced with stone and mortar. This would catch the monsoon rains and keep the crops alive during the dry season via irrigation ditches scored into the rock-hard soil. For tools, there were shovels, pick axes, baskets, and bare hands.

He chose a site that was in a depression, but still above the fields so that the water could be diverted downward toward the crops. Here the soil was so compacted that it could break a pick ax. Two thousand women, men, and children were organized into teams that mined the limestone, hauled it and gathered the stones that would line the wall of the basin. Another team of women gathered what little food they could. The footage showed Massey taking a soil sample, planting marker stakes, helping an old woman carry a basket of rocks. The people who had started out so dark became white as specters from the limestone they crushed. Where there were no tools; other stones were used to crush stones. Temperatures reached one hundred twenty degrees, but there was no respite. The monsoons wouldn’t wait, and if the rains came with the construction unfinished, months would pass before they could try again.

Each day two or three died from heat, thirst, and exhaustion. There was horrific footage of vultures eating the bodies as they awaited burial at the end of the day. Massey forbade them to put their dead on rooftops. He told them that they had learned to dig and from now on would bury their dead in the ground. The idea was simply to change them in any way, to get them to break the mindset of the last two thousand years that had led them to this state of abject misery.

The lens tended to dwell on Massey. Massey surveying, swinging a pick, waving his hand over an expanse of land with drawings under his arm. Massey tending the sick and injured. Massey with the multitude gathered around him as he spoke in Hindi.

Three days before the first rains arrived, the last stone was put in place.

The next scene was shot many months later. The skies were clear as the camera panned across the stoneless landscape. The lens finally turned toward the reservoir and there were men looking across it as people do when they behold the sea for the first time.

The villagers now addressed Evan Massey as Baba, a term of respect meaning “father.” Great celebrations were held as, for the first time, crops were harvested in the dry season.

In voice-over, Massey said that the people were able to sell their crops to surrounding villages. They prospered and brought in medicines and vaccinated their children against polio for the first time. The usurers were paid off, then run out of town when they returned. There was shot after shot of smiling faces, children laughing and playing in a small pool of water that had been set aside for just that purpose. Water, which had forever been their brutal master, had become their playmate. Self-esteem and self-empowerment had replaced slavery and death. One couldn’t help coming away from the film awed at what one man can do.

The lights came on and the moment was ripe for comment.

“I’m Brother Kenneth,” said a young man of nineteen, who had been watching from the back of the room. “You’ve seen an extraordinary film. What do you think is the point of showing you this―Latisha?”

“Well, he say in the beginning that it’s to make us realize that our problems aren’t that bad,” said a black girl.

“Has it done that for you?”

“It makes you feel good for a few minutes, but when five minutes pass, my life is still fucked up.”

“We don’t use those words here. I’ll let that go this time. What were those people willing to give in order to change their lives? You―Rachel?”

“Their lives.”

“That’s right. They decided that life wasn’t worth living the way they were living it, and that life itself is worth sacrificing in order to regain their dignity and the right to determine their own destiny. My question is, what are you willing to do to solve your problems? You can answer that, go ahead,” he said to Rachel.

“I would do anything.”

In the rec room, Rachel sat opposite a black boy who had given testimony after dinner. His name was Brother Horace. He was fifteen and his personal mission in life was to go to every major disaster in the country and assist. He was in the Midwest during the great floods, in North Carolina when Edward hit, setting up tents and feeding people. He dug people out of rubble during Katrina. He was eight, then, and it was his own house.

“You didn’t say how you ended up in New York,” she said to him.

“My family got wiped out. Lost my grandmother and cousins I lived with. After the disaster, people from New Orleans scattered all over the country. I was sent here to stay with a family. But doing a kindness loses its shine like everything else. It cost money to keep people around. I ain’t much of a conversationist. I’m workin’ on that. That’s why I’m talkin’ to you. I ended up in foster care and these folks got tired of me, too. I don’t like bein’ a burden. So I left. Walked the streets for a couple of months and ended up here. I’m a man now. I can take care of myself. I’m training for electronics technician, but I already told them that when disaster strikes, I’m out the door.”

“So you sit here waiting for a disaster?”

“And I’m on the road.” His eyes shifted back to the pawns on the chessboard.

Rachel considered whether Brother Horace dealt with lesser crises.

“Brother Horace, I need your help.”

“Listening.”

She sat next to him.

“I had a close friend who used to counsel here―Olivia Wallen. Did you know her?”

“I knew her good. She taught me computers. But what kind of help do you mean―I don’t give the holding hands kind.” He cut a diagonal across the board with a bishop.

“Did Olivia have a falling out with Father Massey?”

“That I don’t know.”

“Why did she stop counseling here?”

“She just stopped coming.”

“Do you know of anyone who would want to hurt her?”

The boy’s brows furrowed again. “Sometimes we find ways of hurting ourselves.” He castled for white.

“Was she―hurting herself?”

“I know she was,” he said without looking up.

“How?”

Now he faced her again. “She had a bad flaw with all she had going for her.”

“And what was that?”

“Sometimes you end up becoming the people you’re tryin’ to help. I mean, she changed while she was here, before our very eyes.”

“How?” said Rachel, lowering her voice.

“Not to speak ill of anyone―but she was makin’ porn flicks.”

“Huh?” Rachel knew she had heard him right and braced herself for Horace’s next sentence.

“I ain’t lyin’ to you. She turned into a stone ho.”

he next day, Rachel left Transcendence House after morning services and returned home to East Northport. She passed the flyers she and her neighbors had put up, pictures of Olivia with the caption,
MISSING
, with a description of the clothes she was last seen wearing―jeans, cowboy boots, and a plaid shirt. She also had a blue fanny pack with Thermofax insulation which contained her glucose tabs, Sunny Delight orange drink, granola snacks, and insulin and syringe wrapped in a plastic bag full of ice. Olivia had Type I diabetes and needed insulin injections every few hours. She always carried enough with her for one day. That would have run out four days ago.