On a Clear Day (6 page)

From the same hut, a black woman emerged. She was taller than Anja and glanced at her with interest. Anja, without looking at the taller woman, slipped her arm around the slender waist and left it there as she continued.

“The modeling didn’t particularly work out and the funding dried up. So everyone went home, and later me and two workmen came to reclaim the copy machines and fertilizer, but mostly we didn’t want to leave anything behind that would embarrass the NGO.

“So we got here and one of the guys I came with got sick
and had to leave right away. He took a minibus up M-3, which is really just a dirt road, and then hooked up with some other people to get back to wherever he could get a plane to Egypt. That left me and a guy named John to gather up everything.

“It didn’t look like we were making a lot of progress at first but the people helped us. Mostly, the kids helped us. Then one day John was gone. He just split. I knew he was going. I could feel it, so it didn’t upset me too much. Some of the women told me that they could arrange for me to leave on a bus that came the following Thursday. My friend here, Cheza, let me move in with her instead of sleeping by myself in the school building. I didn’t much know what to do, so I thought I would help her with the cooking. That amused her, and she called all her women friends over to watch me cook. They started teaching me to cook. Cassava, sweet potatoes, lots of rice, and sometimes chicken.”

“She cooks like an English girl, but she sees like an African,” Cheza said. “She sees with her heart.”

“Then I started helping out at the primary school. The books are old and they don’t have many, but the children want to learn. The children taught me ring games.

“Half of why I was doing this was because the place is so beautiful. You don’t ever expect to be in a place this beautiful. You look into the distance and it gets hard to breathe. You look around you, at the people’s faces, and you want to touch them because they are so sweet. That is a good word for the people in Zomba, sweet. Isn’t that right, Cheza?”

Cheza shrugged and kind of grunted.

“What I don’t like is the outhouses,” Anja went on.
“Nasty. That’s what they need—more than organizational help. Some indoor plumbing would make this the best place in the world. Or at least okay. When I get back to the States, I’m going to recommend just sending plumbing supplies. If the men don’t know how to fix up toilets, the women will learn and teach them.”

“You have to be good to her because she sees right through you!” Cheza said. “Maybe she was born with a veil over her eyes. They say some people born that way can see mysterious things.”

The next profile started oddly. There was an Indian-looking man sitting and staring down. I couldn’t see what he was staring at because the camera just stayed on his face. Every once in a while there would be a movement, an eyebrow would go up, or there would be a twitch in the corner of his mouth. It went on for a long time before I looked at the clock in the corner of the screen. The camera stayed on the guy for another two minutes as I wondered who he was.

He looked up and quickly down again, then shook his head, and the camera followed his hand down to a chessboard. He took one brown finger and knocked over a piece. Then he stood up and walked quickly away.

The camera moved around to the other side of the board. There was a young girl who sat there. It was the Asian girl from the meeting, Mei-Mei, the one who sat next to the black guy, Drego. Someone was pushing a microphone in front of her face and asking her questions.

“This is the third tournament you have won this year,”
the interviewer said as a caption in Chinese scrolled across the bottom of the screen. “How does it make you feel to win a tournament of this magnitude?”

“All tournaments have their interesting aspects,” Mei-Mei said.

“Your rating is 2515, which is phenomenal in the chess world. How old are you?”

“Fourteen.”

“Do you have ambitions to become the top female player in the world?”

No answer. Just the dark eyes looking at the interviewer, boring into him.

“Do you think you can compete with men on an international level?” The interviewer was trying to back off.

Mei-Mei didn’t let him. She stared at him until the camera went away and the screen was full of Chinese characters. I wished I could read Chinese.

I thought her profile was finished, but the screen lit up again and it was Mei-Mei from the waist up. She looked about the same as she had at the meeting. This time she was sitting at what looked like a teak desk. On the desk there was a green box. Either jade or plastic.

“I’m called Mei-Mei Lum. My real name is Lum Mei Lan. I play chess and go. I like games because I like to win. That is about all that you need to know about me.”

Then she opened the box and took out three black rings and put them on the fingers of her left hand. She held them briefly up for the camera to see, and then the screen went dark.

What the hell was that about?

The screen was dark for twenty seconds, perhaps a minute. Then it lit up and there was a bunch of kids sitting in what looked like an auditorium. The camera panned the kids, lifted to some more kids on the stage, and then stopped at a little girl. The same hair, the same face, but my eyes looked like pasted-on doll’s eyes. They were so big. Where did they get the tape? It had been made over six years ago, when I was in the sixth grade.

It was funny, in a way, but it also made me want to cry. I was explaining to the kids, and the judges, how to go about measuring the height of a pyramid. It was simple triangles-and-shadows stuff, but I looked so earnest. I watched myself, the child me, and the tears started coming. I had believed that math was the key to everything. Just get the right numbers and the world made sense.

My nails looked awful, chipped and uneven from staying up all night chewing on them. My dress had a stiffly starched collar that flared out and made my face look pointy. I wanted the video to go on forever, to show how I felt when I was given the gold certificate laminated on a dark mahogany board. It didn’t, of course. Little Dahlia faded to black. Gone. Forever.

I was lying on the bed, sniffling myself to sleep. In my mind, a little girl sat at home in a corner doing math problems from a workbook. When she was finished with each problem, she carefully checked the answer in the back of the book. She was so pleased when her answers were correct. She felt so safe, so secure. Nothing was wrong in her
life. She had figured there were answers to everything, and knew she could find those answers.

There was a knock on the door.
Go away
.

Another knock. I wiped my eyes, looked at myself in the mirror, and then ran a wet cloth over my face. My smile felt lopsided as I opened the door.

“Is everything okay?” Michael.

“Sure, why not?”

He took a step backward, started to turn.

“Michael, why are you here?” I asked, keeping my voice to barely above a whisper.

“I live here,” he said.

“You know what I mean,” I answered. “Why are you
here
, in this place, in this time, in this fight?”

Standing in the doorway, his shoulders at an angle to the wood-framed rectangle, he seemed bigger. His eyes moved around the room as I moved away from the door. He didn’t come in.

“Short version,” he said. He was uncomfortable. “While I was out fronting the band, my folks were doing their thing. My dad ran a business, maybe two or three. He was making sportswear for a number of labels. They were making the clothes in Bangladesh. There were some headlines, a disturbance, and my father decided to close one of the businesses for a while. My mother wanted to go see the factory, to see if it really used kids to make the clothes.”

He shifted his position.

“Come in,” I said.

“No.” He shook his head. “Anyway, against my father’s wishes, she booked a trip to Bangladesh and went to see the factory. There was a street protest—she texted me; the
New York Times
called it a riot—and she was killed. The State Department hushed it up. My father lost it. I had never thought of them as being close, but I guess they were. He lasted three months and then killed himself. Over her, not the factory. Not the kids.

“I thought about who my mother had been, and who I was. She was somebody who
wanted
to see truth wherever it was. Who insisted on seeing even when she knew it was dangerous. I was somebody who hadn’t seen or even known about the factory, who wasn’t concerned about it, who didn’t give a damn about anything except the brilliance of the stage lights. For the first time in my life, I was alone, with tons of cash, and this place, and stocks and accounts I haven’t even added up yet, but I was alone. Onstage I’m usually alone in my head, but I always had a band, and crews and roadies and agents behind me. I swore there would never be another time when I would ever walk around in the daylight and not see. I want to see everything, Dahlia. I want to be responsible for everything I see.”

“That’s kind of heavy,” I said.

“It’s all light if you don’t follow it up,” Michael said, backing away.

I couldn’t think of anything cool to say, so I just smiled and waved.

W
e packed for London. Michael told us not to
forget to take the patches off our chips.

In 2016, the government had started a program in which every parent with a
child born in America had the option of having a passport chip implanted in the
child’s right hip at birth. They said it would enhance national security and
speed us through airports. It had seemed controversial at the time, but a lot of people
went along with it. Then it got to be even more controversial when police departments
started using the chips to track suspects. Some companies came out with chip covers,
little screens that covered the area where your chip was implanted so it couldn’t
be traced by satellite. Some people had their chips taken out.

I had mine covered with two patches—one was the
conventional blocking patch and the other was a titanium diffuser just in case somebody
hacked the block. It was a little paranoid, but I didn’t want people in my
business.

I was excited about going to London. The computer had a lot of cool apps,
and I was going to transfer them to my laptop, but then I saw that the computer also had
a holographic projector switch. Right away, it came to me that if I could do computer
projections in holographic mode, I could get a faster read than in flat mode. I packed
both computers and told Michael what I was doing.

“You take what you need,” he said. “If you need more
stuff, we’ll get it for you.”

He smiled. I couldn’t get a smile going because I was thinking
really hard. When my brain is in gear, the smile doesn’t get out too easily. Some
people think I’m hard. I’m not. Maybe a little too intense at times, but
not really hard.

Breakfast: eggs, juice, tea, coffee, cereal, fruit, toast, sausages, and
something that looked like creamed spinach. Mei-Mei was sitting next to Drego again. She
kind of leaned toward him, claiming part of his space.

Tristan was at the end of the table. He was eating the fruit and the
spinach-looking stuff and staring down at his plate as Javier talked.

“It’s a three-hour-and-fifteen-minute flight from Newark to
Heathrow,” he said. “So we should be there by seven at the latest. The
British group is going to meet us and transport us to our hotel. From what we
feel—feel more than know—the Eton Group doesn’t really trust
anyone.
They’re talking about Anglo-American ties, but
they’ve been burned in the past. Two years ago, they organized an Occupy rally in
Parliament Square and there were more police than occupiers. Then all the leaders of the
group were singled out and photographed. The police knew when they were coming, and who
the leaders were.”

“In England, they have those cameras everywhere.” Tristan
spoke without looking up. “You can’t take a crap in London without being
photographed.”

“We aren’t doing anything illegal,” Javier went on.
“We’re just gathering information. We’ll be photographed, but most
likely, any information they gather will stay in Britain. They just gather so much of
it.”