Radio Belly (8 page)

One day out of desperation, you tie a T-shirt over your nose and mouth to walk home. On the way, old men and women, the same ones you've passed every day since your arrival, look up from their chores for the first time. Their eyes lock onto yours, something like warmth passing between you. By the time you get home, you've cried clean trails across your cheeks. You find bugs pooled in your ears. You hadn't realized how invisible you've felt, how faceless and lonely. You quickly fashion your own mask from the sleeve of an old shirt. You will wear it everywhere but inside the classroom.

ONCE YOU START wearing the mask, and with just a month until the test, your students trickle back. The ones who have the farthest to walk stop going home between classes. At night they sleep huddled together at the bottom of the stairs. Many of their mothers have joined them there. After school, the women gather at the top of the stairs as usual, only now they are friendly. Now when you step over the threshold to go home, they come forward, clutching your arms and fingers. Their hands are cracked like leather. Their masks puff in and out with their chatter.

Whitney is the first to translate: “My mom wants to have you for dinner.”

“Over for dinner?”

“Yes, over.”

And so Whitney's mom is the first to pull you down the dusty road toward her home.

IN THE YARD, the men are sitting around a fire, telling jokes. They are spitting and polishing empty glass bottles.

“Not for Mrs. Teacher,” Whitney says, leading you to the outdoor kitchen where you are introduced to the women and children. You help the children dish pickles and powders into an array of tiny bowls and then hand them off to Nug, a woman who looks about thirty, but acts about six. “Her brain never grew up,” Whitney explains. Nug is the only woman not wearing a mask and she acts as a messenger between the men and women. Everywhere she goes her feet slap the ground, sending up dust clouds. Something about her broad, relentless smile makes you uneasy.

When it's time to eat, the men push a pile of branches aside to reveal a deep cooking hole. Fat sizzles off the rocks below as they hoist the meat up on long sticks. Nug squeals and claps her hands. For a moment, propped upright, the goat looks alive. It still has hide and bones, eyes and ears. It looks surprised, mid-stride, like it accidentally fell into a cooking hole.

When the men have finished serving themselves, Nug brings the remaining meat over to where the women are seated on the ground. You have already untied your mask and taken your first bite by the time you realize your mistake. Looking around, you see the other women have loosened the bottoms of their masks to create a kind of curtain. They smuggle their food up and under, up and under, like secret cargo. You quickly retie your mask, but you can feel the men looking at you across the distance.

AFTER DINNER, THE men go back to their bottle-polishing and the women tuck in close. They are trying to tell you something, speaking softly,
shush, shush, shush.
Their hands are in your hair. The youngest ones cradle your curls delicately as if each one is a daisy chain. You feel protected, forgiven. And you feel something else too, an absence of desire, the sensation of being just exactly who and where you are.

You watch the men fill those bottles with a murky liquid. They are pushing rags into the bottles, sealing them off, and then Whitney's mom is next to you, reaching for your face.

“She wants a name, too,” Whitney translates. “A Hollywood one.”

You shake your palm in the air, the universal decline, but the women shake their palms back at you, mistaking it for a kind of wave.

“Please. It is great honour,” Whitney says.

When you finally name her Farrah, Whitney's mom folds at the waist, weeping with joy. The women press against you, running their cold fingers up and down your arms. In a moment small hands are wiggling the earrings out of your ears. They are lifting the bracelets off your wrists, loosening the buckles on your sandals, tickling your skin. You catch a faint whiff of gasoline and your scalp hums. The women are all around you, shushing and clucking,
ooh
ing and
aah
ing. They are slipping your shoes off, sliding their own cracked and dusty feet over the smooth leather soles.

AFTER THE FIRST dinner invitation, the rest of the mothers want you to visit, too. They wait for you at the top of the stairs, arguing over whose turn it is. This is how you spend your last weeks. You eat, and then name your hostess Raquel or Loni or Olivia or Goldie. You give all of your belongings away and then float home barefoot under a blood-red sunset, wearing someone else's dress.

Lying in bed at night, smelling like meat and fire, you can barely remember how you used to fill your days at home. You try to picture your last apartment, but you can't even get as far as the four pastel walls. Was there a window? A door? In your mind's eye you try to picture yourself living that life, but the different parts of you—arms, legs, feet, head—always drift away from each other, like oil on water.

YOU ARE WALKING to school early on the Monday of your final week when you notice hundreds of footprints stretching out as far as you can see on either side of the road, as if every inch of ground has been danced upon. You are thinking about footprints, remembering your smart friend, when you notice thick grey columns rising up over the mountains. You are wondering if those columns are smoke or cloud and then something floats past your ear—a butterfly, not flying but falling sideways through the air to land softly at your feet. It's your first butterfly since you arrived in this country. You bend to get a closer look and see that it's burnt—its papery wings still smoking, its small black body crisp and hollow. You are just about to pick it up when another butterfly floats to the ground beside you, with one wing flaming blue. Soon they are landing—
pat, pat, pat
—all around. The sky is filled with them, burning butterflies tracing slow spirals through the air like maple keys. And then one is tilting toward you, still alive, burning and beating its wings. With each rush of air, the flames grow. Then, paralyzed, the butterfly coasts for a time, sinking lower and lower on shrinking wings. This struggle continues—the beating and the flaming, the coasting and the falling—until at last it hits dirt, wingless, with a body like a charred raisin. It is metamorphosis in reverse. And the smell is of burning shoes. And the silence is unbearable because this much death should make noise. In a moment it is you making the noise. You are shrieking, batting the air and running for the covered alley behind the market.

And that's when you see Nug, standing in the middle of the market, at the centre of a circle of men. You recognize some of them as the older brothers and young uncles of your students. Nug is looking up at the butterflies, hugging herself and whimpering, her face stretched into a silent scream. A butterfly flames past her nose and she wails and then the men close in on her. They push her back and forth, taunting, hissing, and their hands are all over her, on her breasts, her stomach, between her legs. They are raking at her clothes. Their fingers are on her face, in her mouth. And then her shirt is off and they are tossing it over her head, piggy-in-the-middle, and she is jumping, laughing with her sloppy, wide grin and the tears are fanning out across her cheeks. It is a game. She is laughing and crying, half-naked. And then they are pushing her to her knees, forcing her down.

You step out of the alley, screeching, throwing rocks, old fruit, whatever you can find. The men scatter. They slip away through cracks in the market walls and then it is just you and Nug and a thousand burning butterflies—the ground has grown soft with them. She is shirtless and shaking so hard her head looks loose on her neck. All around you the hills are burning.

AT SCHOOL, CLASSES have already started and Mr. Bruce is nowhere to be found. You get Nug settled in his office and then knock on Mrs. Diana's door.

“Mr. Bruce gone,” she says.

“Gone where?” you demand. “What's going on here?” You don't mean to yell.

She peers over her shoulder at her class, then steps a little farther into the hall, closing the door behind. “Trouble coming,” she says. “War coming.”

You snort, more of a laugh really. You refuse to believe there could be a war approaching without your knowing anything about it!

But she doesn't laugh with you. Her eyes are deep and earnest, not black from this proximity but brown within brown within brown.

You can't, just now, remember home. You can't remember being anywhere but here, in this hallway, smelling of burnt wings, talking about war, as if it's a thing that can just sneak up on a person.

Down the hall, Nug is lolling on Mr. Bruce's desk, singing softly to herself.

THE FIRST THING you do when you step back into the classroom is make a big show of putting your mask on. The second thing you do is tell your female students to do the same. Then you instruct them to take out pencils and paper. Today they will be taking notes, you tell them, lots of notes.

You divide the board with two headings:
Good
and
Bad
and then you flip through the Speech book placing each topic on one side or the other.
Bad = Poverty, Oppression, Childhood Obesity, Poor Credit Rating, Discrimination, Weapons of Mass Destruction. Good = Democracy, Education, Retirement Savings Plans, Freedom of Speech, Sunscreen, Mammograms.
You dictate a short speech on each topic, going slowly, stopping often, so they can copy it all down. You will go through every topic this way. You will explain every last aspect of American life, telling them exactly what to think and why. You will keep them all night if you have to.

THAT NIGHT, WALKING home through the moonless dark, you can feel people running all around you, making footprints, getting ready. Fire glows in the distance. Butterflies caught in the updraft are shooting up over the hills, raining down like sparks on this side. It looks almost festive, almost like the Fourth of July.

IN THE MORNING, Mr. Bruce is back, sitting at a tilt on a bench in the school's entrance, drunk. When he sees you, he pats the bench beside him, “Seat, seat.”

So you seat. You have so many questions and demands, but before you can get to them, while his eyes are still swimming slow circles around your face, he hands you a letter, already opened.

Dear Teacher,

Numerous focus groups and independent consumer trials have demonstrated the relevance of our test product cross-culturally. The most up-to-date research confirms...

You skip ahead.

... It is our understanding that the country you are stationed in is experiencing political upheaval. Studies have shown that our product may be less effective under such circumstance. May we suggest you visit the nearest American Embassy to ensure a safe passage home? Perhaps, once home, you would like to attend one of
IELTA
's many teacher-training seminars held bimonthly in key American cities.

You fold the letter and tuck it away. “So—war,” you say. It isn't surprise you feel. It's a kind of relief, like being caught in the mouth of a hungry thing at last.

“Yuh, war,” Mr. Bruce says.

“I'm not leaving,” you declare. “I will not abandon my students. Not now.”

“No X Test. No Ha-vad,” he says. “Cancelled-cancelled.”

“Can I still teach?” you ask.

“Yuh,” he nods. “It can be so.”

SO YOU TEACH even as your students disappear, one by one, boys and girls, to fight. You teach younger and younger students, first words, then phonics and eventually just the crude sounds of English. You teach because you can and because you've realized your mistakes, because you spent all that time on small talk when you should have been clearing the way to Big Talk, when you should have been talking to them about independence and freedom and the difference between right and wrong.

You continue to teach, even as the bullets ricochet off the school's tin armour, even after all the women and children are moved into the school basement, the room down there a cross between cellar and cave with its damp walls and its subterranean echo. When the pens and paper run out, you teach by grinding mosquitoes up into a paste to write on the cave walls. And when the mosquitoes run out, you scratch letters into the dirt. And then there is no need for writing anymore because the bodies have started to arrive—your students, returning to you again. Even those who are alive are changed, rearranged. Anything that was soft in them is now hard. Many are maimed and all of them have aged. Their eyes glint like hammered-down nails as they teach you, in perfect English, how to polish the bottle and soak the rag for a Molotov cocktail, how to stitch up a wound and set a bone. Patiently, they show you how to feel your way forward in a darkened cave and when to forget what you cannot save, and all the ways you do not belong to yourself.

I
T'S A BAD IDEA to paddle into the open ocean with Stefan as he is, Mary knows that. It's irresponsible, even reckless, but she's had it with resort life. That tiny cabin—so much wood, so little light, like living inside a walnut shell. The structured mealtimes—all those attempts to force friendship over slick buffet food. The whole place overrun with young hopeful moms in Lycra pants. Yes, she's had it with land, with people, with seasons and gravity, and the business of mothering, which is why she flirts with the man who's rented them the boats just long enough for Stefan to get a head start. Then she pushes off land herself. The man stands on shore, smiling and waving until he notices Stefan leaning dangerously in his kayak, looking like a rag doll stuffed into a toy boat. He walks briskly to the edge of the water and tries to call them back, but it's too late. They've almost disappeared into the bright white fog. Pretty soon the resort, the past, their entire landlubbing lives will shrink to a small dark embarrassment in the distance.

She saw the ad back in the spring. Stefan had been cooped up for months by then.
Adventure tourism
it said. Kayaks and canoes, fishing, a high-ropes course winding through old-growth treetops.
Old growth:
those words lit up in her mind. The website had shown groups of co-workers and juvenile delinquents dangling from harnesses in the cedar canopy, smiling despite themselves, as if all that looking down on the world had mended them. It wasn't long before her plan took shape. She put the house on the market, started whittling Stefan's pills with an x-acto knife and booked the cabin for the first two weeks of the off-season.

Foolish to think a mother and her grown son could start again—she sees that now. But these past months, her hope got the best of her. As his pills shrunk week to week, he started walking and talking and asking for things again—apple juice, spaghetti, a new toothbrush—it didn't matter what. It had been so long since he'd wanted anything at all. She found a suitable buyer for the house. She even found doctors who agreed with her plans. “Yes!” her alternative psychotherapist, Dr. Bertrand, said. “Burn your old life maps!” Once Stefan was completely off his meds, he said they should both come back for a guided LSD trip. “Your spirit guides are very optimistic about this life change,” said Lynne, her acupuncturist/psychic. Even her life coach agreed: The omens were good; it was time for action.

It wasn't until the drive up, though, that she realized how little he'd improved. He was lumped in the seat next to her and would speak only in single syllables, only in answer to her questions. Even then his voice was a growl, dredged up from some bottom she couldn't imagine. And there was a smell coming off him, like syrup or overripe fruit. She'd had to keep her window cracked open, enduring the screech of wind in her ear the whole drive. Beside her, he was busy keeping a tally, counting moustaches she guessed. There is something about men with moustaches. Not just that he doesn't trust them, but that moustaches are one of the ways the world is organized: some hierarchy or code—bushy versus thin, or dark versus light—she'd never understood it.

SHE WATCHES HIS boat lurch left-right, left-right with each dip of the paddle and wonders what she was really hoping to find out here on the water. Escape? Miracle? A beautiful end? He looks squeezed in, and she can hear him breathing through his nose like a fat man. She wonders if he can still swim, if he would even have the will, and then she holds her breath against this thought, waits for the one-two punch of grief-guilt—but it doesn't arrive. It seems the usual rules don't apply out here. After all, they're paddling into a fog so thick it's as if the sky has fallen. It parts in front of them and draws behind them like damp drapery. Out here everything is secret. Everything is forgiven.

WHEN THEY'D FIRST arrived, they were told the rest of the resort had been rented out for a “women's retreat.” Those women were everywhere: in the dining room, in the kitchen, in the hallways, having such strange conversations, at such high volume.

“It's just—I feel as if my body is trying to tell me something,” a woman at the other end of the picnic table said to her friend at dinner the first night.

“So dialogue with it,” said the friend. “Say: ‘Uterus, what
exactly
are you trying to tell me? I'm
just
not getting the message.'—Go on, try.”

By the time Mary and Stefan had finished eating, the uterus had spoken and the woman had cried and her friend had suggested “supported headstands.” Mary was wondering if this is what young women were really like nowadays or if this was just a troupe of actresses rehearsing when she noticed Stefan getting that look on his face—his eyes darting around the room, trying to take in all four corners at once like a trapped animal. She led him back to the cabin and opted to smuggle their dinners out of the dining hall from then on.

Stefan spent the first few days in bed, headphones on, sleeping or scribbling in his notebooks. She let him go, still hopeful, knowing he might feel worse before he felt better. He only got up to find food or use the bathroom. He'd return from the vending machines immediately, looking chased, with bags of chips and peanuts stuffed up under his shirt, but he'd stay in the bathroom for hours, doing who-knows-what with the door locked and the water running. That's when she picked up his headphones and discovered it wasn't music playing but static. She peeked in his notebooks and found page after page of strange math:
egg + house = home; family = momdad + dinnerguilt.
There were names of people they'd known, phone numbers, addresses, all laid out with lines and arrows between, as if to make a grand equation of their lives. She hoped for some wisdom or truth on those pages—
Home is where the egghouse is?
—but in the end they were incomprehensible. She closed the book. It was the engine room of a complicated mind—messy work best kept in the dark.

THEY PADDLE FOR an hour, two, straight into the fog and then pull close to pass a water bottle between them. “I'm big out here,” Stefan mutters. They drift apart again. He's been talking more since they left the house. These days entire sentences float up, and every time parts of her float up too—ridiculous, stale-air parts. But he is still mostly incoherent, scrambled, as in a dream.

“He can't perceive his own borders,” Dr. Wong told her once, just before he decided he would stop telling her these things. “He is everywhere at once.”

“Foggy,” Stefan says, passing the water bottle back to her.

“Yes,” she says.

He is big and foggy. He is weather. He is wind. He is quantum, an exploded star, the pieces of him far and wide. This is how she's come to understand it. Understanding = making peace. Making peace = making pieces, swallowing, forgetting.

AT THE RESORT, Mary took long walks to get away from Stefan. It was a beautiful time of year, the last dry wheeze of summer, plus she enjoyed watching those women. She'd see them clutching their tummies and “visualizing abundance” in the forest, or lunging on the beach, str
e
tching their abdomens,
o
pening their fallopian tubes. It didn't take long to figure out this was some sort of fertility workshop, and then it became clear who was who. The fertile were grey and exhausted looking and talked the loudest. About home-schooling and goat's milk. About diapers, and how to save the world one person at a time. The infertile, meanwhile, were a little like babies themselves—wide-eyed and grabby—except they were always talking about their reproductive organs. No wonder Stefan was terrified.

After about a week she decided it was time to air Stefan out. She prodded him up from bed and out the door each evening during the dinner hour, when she knew the women would be sequestered in the dining hall. He snarled and resisted her at first, but once they made it past the resort grounds and into the safety of the forest he seemed soothed. Standing in the middle of a mossy clearing lit up by a low golden sun, he looked as if finally the world was right with him. Her hope ballooned. Maybe he could always be this satisfied, she thought, if the rest of life weren't so short on magic. Maybe this was progress, at last.

Then, on their way back from last night's walk, they rounded the corner of the dining hall and ran right into a gathering of women. They were kneeling in a circle, engaged in some form of toddler worship. At the centre of things, a child staggered after a dog, falling on it, trying to eat its tail while the kid's mother talked about hormone therapy, not to fear it, that it can produce a perfectly healthy child. The women were beaming after the child, and then all at once they aimed their smiles at Mary and Stefan.

Mary tried to say hello but Stefan bumped into her back and it came out short. “Hu—,” she said. Stefan pressed his face into her hair, trying to hide behind her, the way he did as a child, only he was so much bigger than her now.

Just then the toddler bent to pick a stray cracker off the ground. He raised it to his mouth and, as if they shared a single paranoia, the women moved to intercept. “Don't!” the mother called them off. “I let him eat off the ground. It helps prevent—” she looked at Stefan and faltered—“illness down the road.” The women settled again, a bunch of ruffled ducks, and their eyes floated back to Stefan and Mary. Stefan snickered from deep within Mary's hair and then, because laughter is contagious, because for a moment she saw the situation from the outside—an elephant-sized boy trying to wear his mother as a wig—Mary laughed too, an open-mouthed, rowdy laugh. The women looked at her with overblown horror, as if she were the spirit of infertility come to ridicule them, and then in another second she
was
the spirit of infertility and she
was
ridiculing them.
These women! Their crooked uteruses! All this planning, as if it will save their boys and girls!
She snorted and bent in half to contain herself. Stefan shuffled out from behind her then, exposed. Mary choked, felt her lungs fill with that particular kind of love that is inseparable from pity, inseparable from ache. It was too late to run. Those women stared.

If Mary was the spirit of infertility, then Stefan was a thing worse than that. He was fertility gone wrong, an unnatural thing all grown up. Mary tugged on Stefan's sleeve to lead him away, but he was watching the toddler and the dog share the soggy cracker—licking it, dropping it, licking it again. He was watching the women watching him. And then it was all too much. He clapped his hands to the sides of his head and let out a scream. It was monkey-high, pure animal. The dog barked. The women averted their eyes. Stefan ran and Mary followed.

HER SON IS a spectacle—no more getting around that fact.
If a spectacle kayaks off the map, is he still a spectacle?
she wonders and then realizes he's paddling so hard she can barely keep up. She calls out for a break, feeling like a child and an old lady at the same time. He senses what she's thinking, she reasons, and he's trying to get away from her. She thinks of that game they used to play when he was young, “What am I?” where one of them would think of something to be—a flower, a rock, an ocean—act it out and then get the other to guess. But after a while they were too quick for it to be any fun. “Dog!” Mary would shout before Stefan could get down on all fours, “sun” before his arms were halfway above his head. It became a kind of party trick, everyone convinced they'd rehearsed it.

Dr. Wong calls it their “capacity for sympathetic transfer.” The people in her parent group call it codependency. The neighbours call it unhealthy. Everyone tries to frame it as his illness or her weakness, but Stefan and Mary have always lived this way, with their antennae out. She had tried to explain this to the doctors at intake but they weren't interested.

She had brought Stefan in because he was hiding in the basement for days at a time, because his life was more of a struggle than it needed to be, because the neighbours had found him standing in their gardens, listening to the flowers at odd hours of the night. Still, she had the feeling she could just as easily have decided not to bring him in. In those days she could still lure him upstairs with a grilled cheese sandwich. He would sit across from her, answering her questions, acting his old self for a time. It was on one of these days that he first tried to explain his moustache conspiracy to her—he was trying to warn her about the “new ironic moustache,” that it was not at all what it seemed. He was panicked and ranting. She heard him out, but kept waiting for him to say he was just joking, it was all an act.

It was at intake that she met Dr. Wong. First came his questions—an interrogation that went on all night. She had the feeling she was betraying Stefan, helping the doctor catalogue his every oddity as the first signs of illness:

How he could suddenly be overcome with empathy for inanimate objects. That, on more than one occasion, he had run away with the ball in the middle of a soccer game because he couldn't bear to watch it be kicked any- more. Same with chess—he would get teary and start to pro-tect the other pawns. She'd find them tucked into his bed days later.

His strange requests for Halloween costumes. A jellyfish one year. Forty-something rolls of Saran wrap. Another year, a doll's leg. Not the whole doll, just the leg. That, for several years, he slept with Band-Aids over his belly button, afraid his skin would come undone and slip off in his sleep.

That when his teachers wrote “So bright!” and “Imaginative!” on his report cards; they meant “bright” as in too much light, like a mirror stealing it from all around. They meant a Van Gogh imagination—the dangerous kind.

After hours of questioning, Dr. Wong finally made his judgment. “Schizophrenia,” he announced. He was as grim as he was sure of himself. Schizophrenia: the too-tight sweater Stefan would have to wear the rest of his life. “Sorry,” he whispered, and then he handed Mary a brochure for one of the parent support groups downstairs.