On the island, there is too much blood and not enough rain.
That’s because the wetleaf is gone. The soldiers told us to kill it: to slice and strangle the emerald vines as they flowed over our hills, those rivulets of paradise, seafoam soft. So we sliced and we strangled and we killed. And now we cradle the wetleaf in our palms, sitting with each plant as it dies.
The soldiers pry the wetleaf from our mourning fingers and command us to replace it with something better. Indigo, they say. Grow indigo for the mainland, for de metropool.
But without the wetleaf roots, the soil can’t hold; it lets go of its water, releasing it to evaporate into the sky and seep back into sea, and when the water goes, the indigo withers, and when we surrender piles of mangled indigo leaves at the boots of the soldiers—sir, there’s nothing we can do—they turn their rifles and they aim at us.
I recoil from my reflection in the steel of their guns. My eyes are bloated yellow moons in a flat black face, terror refracted back unto itself.
One day, in the searing summer swelt, two soldiers drag a sobbing farmer behind a packing-barn and grind his nose into the soil. They harvest bullets out of an ammo pouch and plant one in the back of his neck—in the juncture where the occipital bone meets the atlas, I will later learn—soaking the earth with his own red water. The metropool’s emblem glints in Dutch orange and cobalt blue as the trigger draws back again. When blood splatters, it looks like flecks of misplaced rain.
The next month, another farmer. Then a teacher. Then a boy. I stumble over a friend of a friend, and discover a colony of fly eggs ripening in his dead, swelling flesh.
The soldiers are homesick. They tell us that. They look earnest when they ask why we are making their lives so hard. As they talk, flies weave and wobble near their open mouths as if they might swim inside to find shade from the heat.
Okay,
I say.
I am the first to learn their language. Ja, meneer. Nee, meneer. Yes, sir. No. Instead of naming plants, I say gewassen and winsten, crops and profits.
We tear out more plants to make room for more profits.
Grab the wetleaf by the stomach, by the root, by the throat. Twist.
I am eleven when I hear her dying. My classmate. She groans beneath my kitchen window, body contorted into a heaving, panting tumbleweed, a tangle of blood and limbs. She groans for her mother. She groans for her mother, and she moves her arms as if to crawl, but she goes nowhere.
I witness her, vinegar bile crawling up my throat and into my mouth. I’m trying not to faint. I tell myself,
Do something.
Can I overpower the soldier for his rifle? Can I scream loud enough on the island for the mainland to hear?
I tear my sleeping shirt into a bandage and run with arms extended to carry her. My sister holds me back in the doorway.
She says,
Don’t touch her.
I say—
But my sister stops me again.
She says,
That bullet is lodged in the girl’s spine.
She means,
Touching the girl will only break her more.
She means,
If a soldier sees you, you’ll join her.
My mother runs for the girl’s family. My brother calls for the priest.
I am the only one who doesn’t understand, foolish enough to think we can still piece her back together. I ask,
How do we get the bullet out?
as if it were so simple.
My sister fixes her mouth into a grim line, a pressed and unsmiling stripe of flesh.
Doctors live on our island, but those doctors are not for us. We used to have our own doctors: bonesetters and soothers who could distill wetleaf into salves and balms, who could turn its seeds into a healing thing, who prayed to the earth as they foraged its clovers and passed those blessings onto the people they touched.
But our bonesetters uprooted themselves when the soldiers arrived. They dug themselves out and took to the winds, scattered themselves to the other islands that still had wetleaf hills.
The doctors who live on our island now live over the mountain, where you need a car to go.
They live by the signatuurleer, the doctrine of signatures. Their white hands only treat white bodies.
When I worry,
So who will treat the girl?
the question is too large and misshapen to fit all the way inside my mouth.
Outside and beneath the window, the girl curls into her final knotted form. Her parents arrive just in time to watch her spirit leave, soaking back into the earth. A soldier tries and fails to keep them five paces away from her. They run forward. The soldier fumbles for his ammo pouch again.
A different question works its way out of my throat:
And those white hands—
where did they learn their medicine?
Wherever the white doctors came from, I will go there.
When I finish school, my family pools their savings, and it is not enough. And my mother sells her jewelry, and it is not enough. And the entire island collects money, and it is not enough, not nearly enough. And I sign myself over to the metropolitan colonial bank for a loan that is more than my family has seen across three generations, and when I am terrified and the ink is dry and my body is no longer my own, the university bursar says that it will do.
“The metropool produces all doctors because the metropool produces all knowledge. In the metropool, knowledge is free and fair, balanced and polite, given to all who ask.”
How do I know? Because a professor says so. She stands at the front of the lecture hall and assures us that this is true.
It is my first day at the medisch instituut van de metropool. I nod and nod. I write this down. I do not have time to think about whether I believe it. It does not matter whether I believe it. I bury it deep in the furrows of my brain, to root out later, on the test.
My sister packed me ginger yucca, dried into long salted stripes. I eat them slowly, letting each crumb dissolve down into nothing before I swallow, disappear slowly down the creeks of my throat. I will try to make a week’s worth of home last all six years.
The island and the metropool have spoken the same language since the soldiers came, but in the metropool, they insist I am speaking it wrong.
A lecturer halts my first oral exam. “Stop. Just—stop.”
He rubs his forehead and he waves me out of the room. I stand, and I wait, and I wait before I leave, as if he might change his mind. He doesn’t. My shoulders stoop under a sudden weight, but I drag myself into the hallway and manage to stay standing. I tell myself,
It’s okay.
I will try harder. I am in classes eight hours a day, and working eight hours a day, and studying eight hours a day, but I will find a magical twenty-fifth hour, and I will use it to practice speech in the mirror, practice working my tongue around the same words I’ve been saying since childhood, but this time in a new direction.
As I leave the examination hall, the student-assistent catches my arm. Her nails are coral crescent moons and she squeezes sympathy into the crook of my elbow.
She says, “What they’re doing to you is unfair.”
She says, “It’s violent and it’s not right.”
I think she means the exam, but then she mentions tobacco and colonies, soldiers and children. She says that she will fight for us.
I nod, wondering if this student-assistent—this fighter—is grading our conversation.
So when I say,
Dank u wel,
I try to scrub the words free of my accent before handing them over.
The night before I left, my sister shook me awake.
She did not say,
Good luck,
or,
I will miss you.
Instead, she wrapped me in a tight and tendriled hug, refusing to let go:
If you need to come home, just find the ocean. Please remember how to swim.
Instead, I drown. My list of failures grows. After Academische Vorming it is Scheikunde; it is Organische Chemie, Klinische Methodologie, Structurele Biologie. The lecturers tell me,
You should have mastered this material already.
One laughs about the island, attempting a joke about our magic flowers.
I want to tell them,
When I was a child, before the soldiers, I dug my knowledge out of the earth. If you give me a molecule I can crack it open in my hands like a pomegranate; I can point out all its pieces and show you how they vibrate inside seeds and stems. Why do you keep asking me to write it down? Can’t you feel the vibrations too?
I want to tell them this, but I don’t. I just study harder. I start to sleep in the university library, tucking my arms into myself as if I’m folding in my leaves.
One night, the fighter shakes my shoulder. “You’re not allowed to sleep here.”
My eyes ache as I repack my bag. But instead of kicking me out, the fighter passes a thermos of tea beneath my nose, white steam climbing up the air like vines, and she smiles at the shock on my face when I smell it. Wetleaf. Where did she get—
“I bought my own plant a few years ago,” she says. Hesitates. Lowers her eyes. “But now it’s a bit sick.”
Dried tendrils break off in my fist.
Exhausted leaves, stretching for a certain sunlight they will never find here, so far from home.
As the fighter watches, I cradle the wetleaf pot and shift it to her western window, in the direction of the ocean.
People are talking about liberation.
Who?
I bark into the receiver. The call costs three guilder a minute, but I have to know.
Who’s talking about treason?
My sister says,
Just people.
I clutch her through the payphone.
Don’t go near people like that.
Do you think I’m crazy? Of course I won’t.
Listen to me.
Why are you yelling?
Because people like that get executed. People like that get shot in the back of the head—
In the juncture where the occipital bone meets the atlas, waar het os occipitale het atlas ontmoet. I know those words now.
No,
says my sister.
They get shot in the chest now.
What?
The soldiers like to see their eyes.
As she speaks, she pulls away. I feel it through the phone. Her voice dims, and she becomes a ganzania flower curling away its petals, retreating into the dark.
But,
she says softly, further away,
sometimes people survive getting shot in the chest. It’s not the spine. Sometimes people survive.
While I am resitting the failed exams, the loan runs dry. I have to stop studying so that I can work. Because I have to stop studying, the metropool takes my visa. The university alerts immigration as soon as I don’t register for classes, and a letter arrives in the mail, grim black lettering on despondent dead trees. They give me seven days.
All I can do is drag out my suitcase and open it. I hug my knees and stare down into the empty, beaten plastic.
I make a call.
The fighter lets herself into my apartment. She sits on the edge of my bed. I take her hand and she knots her fingers around mine, tangling our roots.
We cannot get married in the metropool. There’s too much paperwork, too many regulations; the metropool knows its citizens marry not for love but for guilt, marry the unwanted people the metropool built brick borders to keep out. So we take a ferry to the next country east, which promises fast ceremonies and few questions.
I pay for the marriage license, and I pay the visa application fee, and I pay the visa processing fee, and I work under the table in the village of Løgumkloster, tending shrubs for a church that takes pity while we wait for the approval, and when the paperwork gets lost I pay it all again. And in between, I study. And the fighter and I cook chervil soup with the herbs that we forage from the consecrated soil.
The marriage certificate is a foreign object in my fists. If I ever thought I would be married, it was never like this. When the fighter smiles at me, I smile back wider, vinehooks stretching up the corners of my mouth.
After eight weeks, we are allowed to return to the metropool. At the border, a hundred people form two lines inside an airless white room. One soldier drains his water bottle and tugs at the soaked cotton of his shirt, surveying the onslaught of sweaty black skin. “It’s a jungle in here.”
I think he means the heat. The fighter insists he means the people. She snaps at him before I can beg her to wait.
No!
I say.
She didn’t mean—
Soldiers confiscate our bags. Inspection, they claim, and empty my rucksack onto the floor. A Dutch Shepherd sniffs my books, her clothes, my books again.
The lock us in a room without windows. Sterile in its lack of oxygen.
I surrender my head onto my crossed arms on the table. The hot day exhales long into night as thirst crusts along my tongue. I remind myself that the fighter will always fight.
They return our passports at sunrise. By then, there is another fight.
The entire island is under attack.
I press my face to the hissing television screen. Soldiers storm across the island, spraying alien clouds of toxic gas. Crops lie mangled and half-formed in ravaged fields, torn up like naked corpses robbed from their graves. The sky bends and seethes overhead. In the trees, there are snipers where there should be birds. More gas unfurls in Dutch orange and cobalt blue. A cancerous yellow dust descends onto plants and outstretched palms.
Pesticide spray hits the camera lens. I taste it on my teeth. I swallow hard, and even though I am an ocean away, the gas finds my lips and blisters its way down.
My sister doesn’t pick up the phone.
I call again. I call again.
The silence that grows between us is large enough to fit bodies in.
I press a hand to the leaded television glass as if I could grab the soldiers by stomach, by the root, by the throat.
I call again.
The fighter and I buy a newspaper for the journey home. Berooking. That is the word the metropool selects to describe what they’re doing: de berooking, covering the island in smoke. In foreign papers, they translate it exsufflation.
Berooking is an old word, a lost word, a blank word that conjures up no pictures. It is a word no one has used in a hundred years and a word that no one understands now. So it is a word no one can oppose. It is perfect for the metropool.
I look up a better translation. Fumigation.
They claim they are chasing off pests.
“We have to do something,” the fighter tells me.
I unlock the apartment for the first time in eight weeks. I set down our suitcases. I linger over the metal clasps and think of everything but my sister, but the smoke.
Fumigation.
The fighter craters her fist into her palm. “We have a duty to protest,” she says, because she has been waiting for this moment. “We have a duty to stop this.”
A duty. I seal our marriage certificate into a heavy envelope. I unload the bills from the mailbox and stack university enrollment forms on the table. My fingers are a violent tremor and I curl them into the safety of fists until they stop shaking. I remind myself of why I am here, and the people who need me to study until I become useful. This room smells stale with dust and I’ve already wasted too much time.
I have other duties,
I say. I spread a hand across the papers.
I have other duties first.
Why does it sound like an apology?
Why does she look at me in disappointment?
That night, to pay for it all, I scrub tiles. And the night after that, and the night after that. I scour linoleum on my hands and knees in the universitair psychiatrisch centrum for six guilders an hour, scraping away black dirt tracked in by white shoes. In the metropool, knowledge is freely given, so I’m given the knowledge of how to remove mildew with sodium hypochlorite.
When the fumes leave me dizzy, I drop the mop too freely back into the bucket; industrial bleach splashes out, hits my arms, and burns, and burns, and I imagine my family on the island and feel them burning too.
I sprint to the payphone before I’m allowed a break. A coworker advances me a guilder, and this time, my sister picks up on the second ring.
Hey.
From seven thousand kilometers away, I plant kisses in the angry ridges of her frowning forehead. I plant them like neat little rows of indigo.
Between shifts, I study for the courses I will have to retake. The medisch instituut van de metropool rejects my re-enrollment, but I tell myself another school will accept me. Some school, somewhere, if I just learn how to learn. So I practice flattening organisms onto paper, practice labeling them, practice seeing humans as diagrams and not living things.
One morning, the fighter snaps my textbook shut. “I’m protesting the berooking in front of parliament.” She grips the table. “Come with me.”
I tell her,
Maybe when I’m done.
But I know that I shouldn’t.
Yet by nightfall, the guilt sets in. I leave my second shift the minute it’s over and follow a stream of protestors to the plein-square outside parliament. Police have blocked and barricaded every entrance, cutting off the tributary streets pooling people inward. Police dogs snarl, twisting on the leash. I stand one block away to refuse them my scent.
I cannot see the protest but I can hear it: the crack of police batons, the pop of fists, the brief spray of water from a canon. Later, breathless and pansy-pink with adrenaline, the fighter will show me photographs of dislodged teeth scattered like white flower petals in pools of red.
I did not think that violence could ever breach this side of the ocean. I realize that perhaps it started here.
One week later, police find my front door. They bang.
I freeze at the kitchen table. They scream a word I don’t know and threaten to tear the whole wall down. When I don’t respond, they scream louder. The word is a name.
I open the door.
That name isn’t mine.
They barge inside anyway, mud on their boots. “Your neighbors swear he lives here.”
But that name is not even from my island. That name is from another hemisphere, occupied on the other side of the world; the metropool has tentacles in every ocean.
Those tentacles are why they chose my island to fumigate first. People are talking about liberation. We’d fallen out of line. Now the metropool has made us the example. We earn them no money anyway, because on my island there is blood but no rain and no indigo. Being the example is what we are good for.
This is both the history and the truth, but police care about neither. One photographs my passport. The other searches the corners of my apartment. Clipped to their hips, nine-millimeter pistols catch the light. I retreat behind the counter and knuckle it discreetly, remembering the girl and the soldiers, thinking of all the soft parts of my body the officers could shoot me in.
What did the man do?
I ask.
The woman makes sharp eye contact. “He’s being charged with oproer.”
Oproer. The word is familiar but I look it up again once they leave. Uproar. They mean that he was dark and foreign at a protest. They mean that he left his apartment wearing the wrong shade of skin.
“Police are just trying to scare you,” the fighter says. “Come to the protest this time. Cover your face and you’ll be fine.”
But I need her to understand:
It’s not that simple.
The night that the police finally track down the man, a pile of trash appears outside the apartment block. No, not trash. His belongings. Tank tops and spectacles. A box of old magazines, a handful of loose and boardless chess pieces, a potted hibiscus. And a law textbook. I wonder who on his island was counting on him here.
I rescue the hibiscus when it starts to rain. Only when it sits inside on my shelf, contained beside the dying wetleaf, both plants facing the window and watching the fresh water wash down, do I wonder whether it may have preferred to stay outside.
That same night, the fighter stays outside too. Four a.m, five a.m., six a.m., and she still is not home. By the time she stumbles in after sunrise, I’m getting ready for work.
I ask her where she was. I promise myself that I don’t mind. I just want to know where. I want to know who.
She met a man at the protest. She calls him her new friend. “We painted something near the parliament building,” she says, proud. “You’ll see it on the news.”
I tell her I’ve stopped following local news.
The downward slit of her mouth tells me this was the wrong answer. She sits. Fidgets. “You know, he’s from your island too, but he’s protesting anyway.”
She wants me to feel impressed, I think, or guilty. Instead, I ask,
Oh? Which side of the mountain?
I could just as well ask:
What color are his parents’ hands?
She recoils. “I meant, his father is from the island.”
I ask,
So your new friend grew up here?
She says, “He did.”
I ask,
He’s a citizen here?
She says, “He is.”
I say,
So it’s different.
Silence ripens and then spoils in the air between us. I say again,
It’s different. Isn’t it?
She is quiet. Shifts. “I guess it could be.”
She folds her palm over mine, smothering my skin in her shadows. Her body blocks the sunlight that was just starting to reach me through the window.
Later, I sit with an immigration officer.
If my wife is arrested, I won’t get deported, will I?
I will be able to keep studying?
He says, “It’s not that simple.”
The medisch instituut van de metropool rejects my final appeal, but the institut médical de la métropole invites me to an entrance exam, one country over. When the invitation letter arrives, giddiness and terror split my heart in equal measure. It has to be different this time.
I tell the fighter I’ll be gone for a week. After a stiff hug, she asks if she can open our apartment to her friends while I’m gone, asks if other protestors can use it as a den. If people can come over. If people can spend the night.
I’d rather you didn’t,
I say.
But when I return, I find a belt under the bed. It’s not my belt. I stare at it. I am dizzy. Then I strip the sheets. And I lie on the mattress and look up at the ceiling and I imagine her new friend rolling all over my bed, grunting, sweating, rutting, snarling like a brute, howling like a monkey, the way they say all people from my island are apes, are creatures, are senseless and barking sacks of blackened flesh.
The soldiers claim they have successfully exsufflated every field on the island. That means the crops are dead or dying. When desperate people scrounge in the dirt for irradiated scraps, the soldiers spray them like weeds, first with gas, then with bullets, claiming it’s for their own protection.
I beg my sister not to risk foraging in the hills. I say,
Stay inside.
She says,
And eat what?
I swear to her that I will figure something out. But horror builds in the base of my throat and I can’t choke it down. When I eat, I throw up, as if that will do them any good.
At the kitchen table, I am sitting and staring into an empty bowl when the fighter comes home, a newspaper crooked beneath her arm. She’s been gone for three days.
She slides it to me. I slide it back. I don’t need pictures to understand that they are starving.
She asks, “How can you study like nothing has changed? Doesn’t it bother you at all?”
I pause. What is there to say? I extend my hand and she cups her cheek into it, kisses my wrist. Her mouth is a foreign thing. I pull away.
How do I explain that I have to study because nothing has changed?
In her sleep, the fighter groans. She groans, and she moves her arms as if to crawl, but she goes nowhere. Perhaps, in her dreams, she meets my classmate.
My mother needs money but doesn’t know how to ask. I feel it in the pauses between her words. But I am confused, because I’ve been wiring money to my sister for months.
My mother goes quiet.
That means:
My family needs a lot of it all at once.
That means:
It’s an emergency.
I sway on my feet. I don’t want to know, but I need to know. Somehow, I find the question and force it out:
Who?
Another pause, and I know it was my sister.
She was foraging for wetleaf and—
I take a third job cleaning at another hospital. When a letter from the institut médical de la métropole arrives, a fat letter, a congratulations, I glance inside and I toss it into a box. I let it lie fallow beside a growing stack of bills. I need to send more money home. Medical school can wait, has to wait, always has to wait one more semester.
Besides, the island has doctors now.
Doctors, now.
On the island, the metropool has set up a humanitarian clinic for the people that they gassed. They made sure it made big headlines in big newspapers because it makes the metropool look good. Benevolent. Like a bougainvillea flower that blooms into such a violent and vibrant shade of magenta that its petals distract from its thorns.
Inside the clinic, my sister is still alive, but only just. And the clinic charges by the day.
The fighter has started sleeping at home again, instead of disappearing every night. She is careful never to notice me out loud: she doesn’t mention my closed medical textbooks gathering dust, or my clothes smelling like industrial bleach, or my first streaks of grey sprouting at one temple.
One evening, she sits down. And I sit down. And I realize we have nothing to talk about.
“I’m hunger-striking in solidarity,” she says finally. She peels open her lips and rot curls out. She tells me that is how hunger smells, the body dissolving itself.
But no one else is striking. Since the clinic opened, people have stopped caring about the island. They think the problem is solved.
She explains this now as if I do not know. And I let her, because at least it isn’t silence. If she ever asks me, I will tell her about the seafoam softness of our hills and how it felt to kill the vines.
She pauses to wince. “Hey, can you help me with—”
When she lifts one pant leg, blood seeps shyly from a cut along her calf. It’s deeper than the cuts that came before. By now, she knows the policemen by name. She could point out the one who did this, but it wouldn’t make a difference. She sighs. It is a different pain than mine, but I recognize that we sigh on the same frequency.
I open the first aid kit. It’s almost empty, so I dab the wound with alcohol and study it, trying to decide what to do. Finally, I fetch the potted wetleaf. It has been sickly for years, but sickly is not dead. The hibiscus is long dead. But the wetleaf, somehow, is still thrumming. I stroke a few leaves and before I pluck them, I thank the plant for sharing itself with me.
I work the leaves into a mortar and pestle with two drops of sunflower oil and a pinch of salt: the oil to sooth, the salt to disinfect, the wetleaf to draw the skin back together. For the first time in a long time, my hands work without thinking. Soon they smell like my sister’s hands did when I was a child, a little like lemon, a little like mint, when she’d layer wetleaf into bandages over my scraped knees. She told me my mother had once done the same for her. Perhaps my sister should be here studying medicine instead of me. Or perhaps I should be there studying plants. I drop a fistful of withered petals into a mug and let them steep.
I kneel to paint the poultice onto the fighter’s wound. She jerks away in pain, hissing. She says, “Are you sure that—”
I press the mug of tea into her hands. White steam climbs up the air like vines. It has been so long since we drank this together. Her face settles into something like serenity. Something like, but not quite. Serenity requires a certain sunlight that doesn’t exist on this side of the sea.
I finish wrapping her leg. She lets me work. Then I go to my room. I open my suitcase, close it. Open my rucksack instead. In the end, I take only my passport, and break off more three small leaves from the plant.
“Where are you going?” The fighter stops me at the door. “When will you be back?”
I shade my eyes and blink out toward the evening sun. It’s starting to dip in the direction I want to walk. And I don’t know if I’ll make it, but I know I want to go; I know I need to swallow a fistful of the sea. So I step into the light and say,
To the ocean.