Reckoning

Kevin J. Binder

I meet Tara once and only once, on my last trip to Rose Isle, two days before Hurricane Zeta hits. The Category 4 storm is still spinning somewhere beyond the southern horizon, hundreds of miles offshore, as my crew and I reach the bridge from the mainland. Out the windshield, I can see the occasional cloud pushing past, and if I try hard enough, I can convince myself that each one’s isolated, with no connection to the others.

We’re crammed three to a cab in our F-650, me and the boys, a dozen yards of sand and polypropylene bags tarped down in back. The boys want to hightail it as soon as we drop off the sandbagging supplies, but I made up my mind well before we left Texas. So long as volunteers are out preparing for Zeta’s arrival, I plan on being one of them. The boys seem to think this goodwill of mine is just some PR stunt, me angling for the next deal. I’ve never pulled this kind of shit before, they say, so why now? And I’m trying to tell them: I feel like I’ve got unfinished business here, like I owe this place something, though I’m not sure what.

To say we’re swimming against the current would be an understatement. Every other car is headed off the island, practically bursting with suitcases and valuables. Beyond them, the island’s stilted structures—houses, restaurants, and hotels—line up like dominoes. In five days, when the first helicopter news crews can make it out to survey Zeta’s aftermath, I’ll see for myself how few of them remain standing, the rest strewn as splintered wood across an island torn in two. But for now, Rose Isle’s still whole, its buildings intact.

We keep arguing, my crew and I, until they begrudgingly drop me off at a volunteer tent halfway down the island. As they unload supplies—having long ago learned to swallow their gripes within earshot of clients—I hop out to introduce myself to the on-site coordinators. And that’s when I see Tara.

Of course, I don’t know her name just yet. Right now, she’s merely the woman fiddling with a shovel outside the volunteer station, watching my crew dump sand onto the bluff above the seaward beach. And though I can only see a sliver of her face, angled away from me as she is, I can tell at first glance that she’s got this effortless grace to her, like she could be running on two hours of sleep and still look this poised. I try ignoring this thought—having as little time as I do for casual courtship—but by the time I’m done convincing myself I’m not attracted to her, I realize one of the volunteer coordinators is leading me her way.

“Hope you don’t mind working with the other out-of-towner,” he says, “All the locals got started at dawn, so y’all seemed the logical pair.”

I hope the shake of my head isn’t too enthusiastic in communicating that no, I don’t mind. She seems not to notice as we approach, but I offer her my right hand all the same.

“Hey there,” I say. “Name’s Randy Kirk. Guess we’ll be sandbagging together.”

The moment she turns my way, her brows flash with what I interpret as interest. But the look’s gone in a second, replaced by a blank stare that considers my outstretched hand before she shakes it. In the wind, strands of jet-black hair stream diagonally across her face. She seems a couple years younger than me—perhaps just shy of thirty—and has one of the weaker handshakes I’ve ever encountered, the type that goes dead in your hand. No ring. And her eyes are dark, cheerless, like they’ve already ceded victory to the hurricane.

She gives her first name in reply, but beyond that she’s silent. Says nothing as the coordinator leads us to our workstation on the bluff, and once we’re there, it’s he who does the talking.

“As y’all can see, we’re doing whatever we can to protect the levee hidden in this bluff.” He points one arm to the ground beneath his feet and sweeps the other along the beach, where volunteers are lining the bluff’s southern flank with sandbags. Throughout the day, I’ll learn that the island’s “burrito levee” is essentially a long sandbag, fifteen feet thick, hidden in the man-made bluff and spanning most of the barrier island’s eight-mile length. At times, I’ll spot it peeking out where its cover has eroded away, and it’ll remind me of a dead, black snake. The coordinator continues, “Add as much as y’all can to what’s already there. Pack the bags in real good, so the surf can’t sweep them away. General evac’s in four hours—we’ll come get y’all then.”

Then he’s off. I try catching Tara’s gaze, but it’s fixed on the supplies my guys dumped here. She toes an empty bag, half scowling at the thing like it wronged her in a past life.

“He said you weren’t from around here either.” I jerk my head at the departing man.

She tosses me the husk of a sandbag. “Drove down from New Orleans.”

“Didn’t expect to meet another out-of-towner today,” I say, confused by her gesture but willing to let it slide. “You got family here or something?”

“Work used to take me down here.” She jabs her shovel into our sandpile and swings a spadeful of it in my direction. It takes me a second to understand what she’s doing, but then I fuss with the bag to get it open. She drops the sand inside before digging in again.

I wait for her to return the question, but we’re wordless for two, three shovel-and-fill cycles. “I’m from Dallas, by the way,” I say. “Here on business a lot—this here’s my sand, actually.”

“Your sand?” she repeats, cocking an eyebrow as a breath of wind crescendos.

“What I mean is, I’m in sales. I sell sand, gravel, and related accessories.” I give the bag I’m holding a shake. “Like these durable rascals.” From there, I tell her the whole story: how the mayor of Rose Isle called me up two days ago, desperate for supplies when Zeta’s path changed. How my crew and I managed to round up a few truckloads of material from West Texas and cart it here just in time. How I decided to help with the readiness efforts along the way. I expect at least a lick of positivity in response, but as Tara shovels, I notice she’s glancing now and again at the beach below.

“See, we don’t recommend using local materials in these situations,” I add. “The erosion’ll be bad enough as is.”

“Better to burden more than one ecosystem.”

“That’s what I’m saying. Speaking of, I’ve got quite the history with this place. A couple years back, after the last storm, this beach had pretty much eroded away, so my team helped restore it. Desert sand’s no good for beaches, of course—too fine—but I brought in the arm of our business that does dredging services, and they scooped up sand from beneath the Gulf to fashion a new beach out of. Pretty neat, huh?”

“Neat indeed.” She gives me a once-over. “I imagine that was fairly complex to pull together. You must be quite the smooth talker.”

“I suppose,” I answer, my words tentative. In any other situation, I’d think she was flirting, but there’s no playfulness to her, the face before me as stony and unreadable as one of those carved ancient glyphs. “I mean, there were limited funds and a competing project someone else was trying to push through. But when you’ve been at this for years, building relationships on the coastal protection authority and town council, you learn how to grease wheels and dance around the typical proposal process. So, in the end, we got the contract, and the town got its beach back. Win-win.”

It’s here I finally get a reaction from her besides the typical deadpan, a single-syllable cackle escaping her lips. Stunned to silence, I question her with a look, and she says, “No such thing as a win-win. Someone’s always losing out.”

I consider contesting the point but don’t feel like picking an argument so soon. “Fair enough,” I say instead. “I mean, that’s life, isn’t it? For better or worse, I’ve got a long history of disappointing competitors and those Greenpeace types.” We’re silent a few beats, and then something clicks. “Is that you? One of those bleeding-heart conservationists? If you were competition, I’d sure as Hell remember.”

“Sure, a conservationist.” She stabs the shovel deep into our sand. “Isn’t that what we’re doing today? Conserving?”

“I knew it,” I reply. “There’s always one of you lurking about, trying to gum things up before my projects even get started. All for the sake of the birds and turtles. But come on, let’s take the example of this island’s beach restoration: what were we supposed to do? Let the shoreline disappear? Towns like this live and breathe tourism, and money buys answers. Once you’ve got the local economy up and running, you’ll have tax revenues enough for your whole eco-friendly wish list. But we had to fix the beach first.”

“So you offered them a stop-gap solution.”

“Exactly. You get it. That’s what I’m always telling my clients: I’m a solutions guy. Got a gap in need of stopping? I’m your man.”

She says nothing further, the slightest smile creeping onto her lips, and this time I let the conversation ebb. A couple seconds later, though, she stops working, forehead creased with thought. I watch her study the waves, sandbag still cradled between my hands, and say, “What’s the matter? You want to lecture me about the birds and turtles?”

“No.” She resumes shoveling. “I’m just wondering how much of this beach will be gone again once Zeta’s had her say.”

I have no answer, reluctant to admit I hadn’t yet connected those dots. At least, not consciously. But the more I churn through her words, the closer they’ll ring to that feeling of indebtedness that drove me onto this bluff today. And thirty-six hours later, I’ll obsess anew over that connection while watching coverage of the storm from my hotel room a couple hundred miles inland. By then, news networks will have just received word of Rose Isle’s destruction. Reports will be fuzzy at that point, cobbled together from whatever details will have trickled out from beneath the oppressive blanket of a raging cyclone, so the channel I’ll be tuned into will illustrate the devastation using a hastily prepared, computer-generated image.

The animation will show the island from above, as a sliver of brown—only 3,000 feet at its thickest—amid a menacing field of blue, with the burrito levee appearing as a thin red line running along its seaward side. As the reporter yammers on about a breach, a gap will appear in the line, near its middle. He’ll note that once the levee’s synthetic exterior is compromised, the sand inside does nothing to stop the storm. He’ll compare the emptying levee to a packet of sugar poured into swirling water. And then, we’ll all watch the gap grow wider and the brown give way to the blue, begging me to imagine the island’s silty soil eroding into the furious Gulf, wave by wave.

I’ve never seen a town come together as it does on the brink of disaster. The entire island buzzes with frantic energy: trucks shuttle-running the length of it to top off supplies, volunteers carrying sandbags every which way. I’m admittedly worried by the sheer number of people who haven’t yet evacuated but remind myself that hurricanes are a part of life here. Some of the older residents have probably ridden out several, through choice or necessity. They’ll be okay, I tell myself. They’ll all be okay.

Tara and I get into a decent rhythm, too, filling bags at a healthy clip once we’ve worked past our initial friction. Along the way, I manage to coax some halting conversation from her, and before I know it, she’s even volunteering information unprompted: about her life in New Orleans, about the city planning job she started a year back, about how she lives with “roommates” (and, therefore, not a boyfriend). And sure, she’s still hard-to-please as ever, but I don’t mind. Compared to all the fake personalities I deal with in sales, her frankness strikes me as refreshing.

After an hour, we’ve built up a decent reserve of ready-to-deploy sandbags, and I start hauling them to the beach. It’s there I come to understand what the coordinator meant by “pack them in.” At the base of the bluff lies a tightly set row of 3,000-pound bags, from a contract that isn’t ours, put there by the National Guard and its heavy machinery. Wedged between them and the bluff’s steep, seven-foot incline are piles of sixty-pounders, like mine and Tara’s, but this backup layer’s a complete mess, each bag evidently flung there. People have even taken to throwing large rocks into the gap, apparently unaware that their sharp edges can tear into sandbags and render them useless.

I tell Tara about the stones on one of my trips back up the bluff. “There aren’t enough to make a huge difference. I just wish it was something people knew not to do.”

But she only shrugs, looking out to the ever-roughening seas. “Doubt it’ll matter. Hurricane-force waves can exert what, over 4,000 pounds per square foot, pressure-wise? And these bags are—” she kicks a full one “—fifty pounds each?”

I blink at her, a silent correction the first thing that comes to mind: Sixty, actually. But then the meaning of her words sinks into my brain folds, and I feel this sickening warmth rising inside me, like shame and nausea had a baby. “But I’m packing them in,” I stammer. “Like the coordinator said. Behind the wall of 3,000-pounders.”

“Yeah, and once the waves get past that, these little things will be as good as useless.” Her gaze flits to our supplies, and her face furrows just like before, back when she first looked them over.

“You knew as soon as we started working, didn’t you?” I ask. “The second you saw what I brought, you thought all this was pointless.”

I take her silence as confirmation.

“What about them?” I add, pointing to the townsfolk scurrying to and from the beach. “Do they know? When the mayor called, I told him what I was bringing. Said I sure as Hell couldn’t get an excavator for more of those 3,000-pounders. You think he—”

“I’m sure he knows. He’s probably desperate and working with the best he’s got. Same with the volunteer coordinators. As for the rest of the locals, well—” she pauses to watch them work “—why bother with security theater if the audience doesn’t believe?”

I turn to the town as well. At the next sandbagging station over, two middle-aged women swap jokes as they shovel. “Look,” I tell Tara, “I sold all this stuff at cost. Paid for the shipping out of pocket, too. So, it’s not like I’m profiting off—”

“I never said I blame you. Not for today. Not for these.” She lifts an empty bag with her shovel and drops it. Midway through its descent, a gust grabs it, opens it like a sail, and sends it cartwheeling into town. We watch it go in a private vigil that ends when it disappears beneath a stilted home. And I worry our partnership’s over then, that there’s nothing to do but pack up, but when I turn back, Tara’s nosing her shovel into our sandpile. “Well,” she says, “here’s to the illusion of control.”

So I, too, resume my work. And though I no longer have the same spring in my step, in time I find a whisper of hope still inside me, claiming she’s nothing but a doomsayer. As today bleeds into tomorrow, that voice will stay with me. Even as I watch Zeta’s news coverage, rife with those cheaply rendered graphics, I’ll cling to the possibility that the early reports are overblown. But in the days following the storm, videos of it captured by survivors will surface online, and my last strands of optimism will snap. Each clip will be dark, shaky, and horrific, illustrating the carnage in a way death tolls and property damage estimates never can. From one, I’ll even learn what it looks like when soil slips out from beneath a home. At the beginning of the video, the house’s stilts will have already started their slide. The whole structure will remind me of an alien creature, maybe some long-lost relative of the giraffe, learning to walk as it meanders gulfward. There will be a certain grace to it, even, and for a moment you’ll think everything will be all right: it’ll find its sea legs and root down somewhere new. But then the stilts will hit something solid beneath the storm surge and break row by row, sending the whole structure tumbling into the waves. From there, its remains will keep skating, keep sliding, as the current pulls it to sea. And all throughout, you’ll hear someone screaming over the sound of wind and water, “My God, that’s the Landreaus’! They’re still in there! They’re still in there!”

But this will be before I’ve memorized the exact count of Zeta’s victims: twenty-seven on that island alone. Their names and faces will not yet be seared into my brain—Ally Landreau, 7 years old with a gap-toothed grin; Ellison Chambers, 72, chess FIDE master; Karleigh King, 33, bank manager, pregnant with twins. No, this video will be posted only days after my trip to the island, and at that moment, though my grief will be guilt-tipped, I’ll still be shielding myself with a warm cloak of good intentions.

After our heart-to-heart, conversation comes easier to Tara and me. It’s not all smooth sailing, of course; her answers are cryptic whenever I ask about her work on the island or how a city planner knows so much about hurricane waves. I don’t force the issue, though, and she, in turn, uses a lighter tone when she disagrees with me, so the push and pull to our relationship feels healthier, necessary even.

We keep working for three hours more, and then, once the thicker bands of clouds have reached us and waves have almost swallowed the beaches, coordinators in pickup trucks swing by to relay the final evacuation order. By this point, I’ve become the embodiment of my profession: sand in my socks and shoes, sand coating every inch of my clothes, sand gritted between my teeth. Tara’s in the same position, though, and not making a show of it, just picking the gloves off her fingers as she gazes to the horizon. So, I stand shoulder to shoulder with her and do the same.

“You know,” I say, “I was thinking about everything you said, what little we could do today, and it reminds me of a joke we tell on my crew. We always say we should offer our clients unlimited time. Then, all we’d have to do is take one of those old-fashioned hourglasses and jerry-rig a contraption that automatically takes sand from the bottom and puts it back up at the top. Boom, unlimited time.” I sigh. “If only we had something like that now.”

“And then, let me guess,” she replies, “your solution would be more sandbags?”

“Why not? Big ones, this time. Enough to cover the whole island.”

This draws a chuckle. “You’re a model salesman, Randy. A sandbagger through and through.”

At this, she makes like she’s about to go, grabbing the day pack she left a few paces away. And though I’m not sure what she meant by that comment, or where things stand between us, I choose then to forge ahead with an idea I’ve been considering all day: the only way I’ve thought of to continue unspooling this absolute riddle of a person.

“So, hey,” I say.

She turns to me, a twist of confusion on her face. “You need something?”

“Look, I know we didn’t get off to the best start. And I certainly don’t get the impression you’d ever need a few yards of sand or related accessories. All the same, I was wondering if you might consider giving me your number. I’m by New Orleans a lot and can be quite the gentleman in more everyday circumstances.”

She doesn’t speak for a few seconds. She seems to be smiling, which I interpret as positive. But when I look into her eyes, they remind me of burning coals, and if there are patterns to read in their smoldering, I don’t consider myself oracle enough to try.

“You already have it,” she says, patting me on the shoulder as she walks past. “Nice working with you this time.”

I have no response, confused as I am, but I’ll do a lot of thinking about that line in the coming weeks. That night in my hotel room, I’ll check every pocket of my sand-covered clothes for some stray note she might’ve slipped in there. The whole time, I’ll be thinking about what a fantastic story it’ll be when I find her number among all that sand, the kind worthy of a Hollywood romcom.

But there won’t be anything there. I won’t figure out what she means until weeks later, when restoration work has already started on the half-sunken island. One morning, I’ll be sitting in my Dallas apartment, cleaning up my inbox before work. There’ll be an email from my manager sitting there, and I’ll discover—to my annoyance—that it’s about Rose Isle, about Zeta. His first on the subject because, to him, my only connection to this place boils down to a few figures on a quarterly spreadsheet. And sure enough, the email will say, “really sad to see,” and “makes you stop and think,” but also, “might be good to reach out, when the time feels right, and see if our services might be of value.”

But the article he’ll link to will pique my interest, and as I read it, I’ll remember my boss’s habit of skimming past important facts. Because below its report on Zeta’s havoc, the article will detail a “series of missteps” committed by the state Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority in the lead-up to the storm. Its author will allege that an internal memo from within the Authority, written three years ago, acknowledged that the island’s levee wasn’t strong enough to withstand anything harsher than a Category 2 storm. The article will describe an ambitious project the Authority considered as a result, to revamp the island’s defenses by reinforcing the burrito levee and installing breakwaters offshore. It’ll note that the plan gained traction early on but was ultimately shelved in favor of what the author will call “vanity projects and patchwork repairs.”

As I read on, one other aspect of the column will catch my eye: a last name I’ll be positive I’ll have seen before. Overland. She’ll be the article’s main source, someone who worked closely on the levee revamp project. Someone who resigned in protest when her brainchild was scrapped. And when I scroll back up to find her full name, there it is: Tara Overland.

By this point, with my mind connecting dots it would rather leave disparate, I’ll search my inbox for her and unearth an email from two and a half years ago, one confirming all the dark possibilities sprouting in my brain. In some ways, its tone will be unfamiliar, belonging to a less jaded woman than the Tara I met, but the voice will be unmistakably hers:

 

Hi Randy,

You don’t know me, and I feel like a fool writing this, but my superiors seem to value your opinion quite highly. So, here we are.

I know you’re trying to build momentum around a beach restoration project on Rose Isle, and I’m sorry to say we’re on opposite sides there. There’s some important, potentially life-saving work that needs doing on that island concerning its hurricane defenses, which likely won’t go through if your beach deal does.

I understand you’re a businessman, with your own priorities, but I imagine we can reach a win-win arrangement here. So, please give me a call. I’d appreciate the chance to work together.

Best,

Tara Overland

Project Manager, Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority

O: (504) 555-9230 C: (504) 555-3422

 

For the first few reads, I won’t believe it’s real. I mean, sure, it’ll look familiar, but the implication behind her tactfully chosen words—that she would’ve brought me in as a supplier if I’d endorsed her project—will be so clear I’ll have difficulty accepting that I could’ve just ignored her plea. The evidence in front of me will leave no other possibility, yet that logical conclusion will be so repulsive, so contrary to everything I’ve thought myself to be, that I’ll reread her message seven, eight times in search of some complication or catch within it to explain away my actions. But no. I’ll find no such salvation. Instead, the more I stare at the email, the more I’ll realize just how easy it would’ve been to see it appear in my inbox, skim it over, and pay it no mind. How logical it would’ve been, then, to ignore her number whenever she called to follow up. How inevitable that this entire episode would slip from my memory in time.

I’ll consider calling her then. To apologize. I’ll think about it a good long while, in fact, dialing half her number several times. Eventually, though, I’ll realize I’d be doing so for my sake, not hers. So, instead, I’ll head to my apartment’s second-story balcony. It’ll be raining that day—another of those isolated thunderstorms we’ve been getting more of—and I’ll stand out there for hours, missing work entirely, searching for a rainbow that’ll never appear.

But right now, I’m on the bluff above the levee, stretching out my final moments on this doomed island to watch the Gulf dance. Behind me, some locals congratulate each other on a job well done, and my boys are yelling for me to get in the truck, but for all intents and purposes I’m alone. I find myself thinking about my hourglass joke, and I know it’s stupid, but I wish more than ever I had something like that. Because then, I could keep sandbagging as long as I need. I could fix just enough of our mistakes to help the island’s defenses hold. And maybe, if I do it all correctly, the storm would keep spinning beyond the horizon, a monstrous force forever held at bay.

Jamie McGhee

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.