Out There: a novel (26 page)

Several weeks later, Jefferson flew home to New Mexico after a ten-day stopover at Fort Drum. It was mid-spring
2009. When he arrived in Albuquerque, there were Esco and Nigel, just beyond the security doors with a red balloon.

He
made his way along Autopista 57, through the small towns of Pedro Escobedo, Palmillas, and Tepeji del Río, the December sky snowless and tepid and gray. Midday, early December: he could feel the pulsing capital up ahead. Gabriel was out there somewhere, along with nineteen or twenty or twenty-one million others.

Once he reached Mexico City, Jefferson planned to make his way to the part of the city in which García Márquez was known to live. He did not have any idea what the neighborhood was called or where it was located within the masses, but he figured that Gabriel was famous, and that he would ask around, like they did in the movies. Where did the rich artistic people live? Where were the bookstores and coffee shops? If it was anything like Santa Fe, the rich artistic people with their bookstores and coffee shops lived right in the middle of things.

As for his larger fears, Jefferson began to acknowledge the truth: he was not the only young soldier who, having avoided death, had found himself pacing the planet for answers to unknown questions. Answers to the question
Why?
The fact that García Márquez had been moved to write those scenes in the novel about senseless executions—those firing squads for one man, as well as the massacre of thousands of innocents in the town square—proved to Jefferson that this was not the first time survivors had had to go on living. It also proved that the writer was Jefferson’s dear friend—his hero and his friend, the man who had managed to reach out across the ocean and the sandy plains to scream at Jefferson to live despite the death all around him.

Jefferson stood up straight in the shaded ground under the poplar tree in the forlorn little plaza of Ciudad Satélite. He clipped a few unruly sprouts from the tree’s otherwise smooth trunk, feeling he’d made a contribution to the overall feel of the place, and he practiced a handstand for several minutes as a tribute to all the good care he had received so far on his journey, for all the specific blessings and, yes, miracles he had been able to witness. It wasn’t about luck, or being in the right place at the right time. What Jefferson knew was that he had somehow been equipped with just the right sort of eyes to see a miracle as it occurred. It was as if he had a special playback function in the back of his eye sockets, somewhere near his brain, that slowed real life down and helped him to see an overlay of very bright light on top of all the darkness. Sometimes the special eye function was joined by an added ear function, something that allowed him to hear a chorus of hallelujahs in his head. There were so many beautiful hallelujah songs in the world, and Jefferson had never heard one that failed to bring him to tears, so when his inner ears began to play hallelujah songs, he thought of it as a unique medley of all those songs that had come before. Usually he found himself humming wordless syllables until he got to the hallelujahs.

While upside down, he began to hear a beautiful melody and those simple syllables that went along with it, and he closed his eyes and sang.

Hallelujah!

Hallelujah!

Da, da-duh, da-duh, da-duh, da,

Da, da-duh.

Hallelujah.

Ha, lay.

Loo.

Yah!

Ha, lay, ay.

Looooo.

Yay!

Sometimes there were more words, but those were what came today.

He’d heard that song back behind his eye sockets many times in Iraq when something had exploded nearby. He knew not everyone had these special eye and ear functions, and he was thankful he did. They’d been important along the way, and they were still keeping him going, giving him sustenance. Jefferson wasn’t saying they were permanent, but he hoped he’d continue to have them at least until he made it to Gabriel’s house. They would help him have the courage to fulfill his larger plan, which he knew now was to say thank you.

Jefferson was in the process of inverting himself, getting his feet back on the ground and allowing the blood to level out within all the parts of his body, when he saw that a group of kids had joined him in the plaza around the base of the little tree. They appeared to range in age from ten to fourteen, and the youngest was missing several teeth and a leg.

“Where did you come from, guy?” the little one-legged one asked in clear English out of his dirty little mouth, his weight leaning into a single crutch.

“Yeah, guy. Where you from?” said another.

Because Jefferson had, in effect, just been musing on this question himself, he had a ready answer for the scruffy and truant and bright-eyed kids, who seemed more curious than threatening. Their question seemed, if nothing else, fair. Here he was, standing in their territory, considering their great capital city.

Who was he and where had he come from?

“Out there,” Jefferson said then, and allowed his eyes and arms to travel in a broad arc, indicating the whole of the universe. “I’ve come
 . . . from . . . out there.” He repeated it because it was true, and in the moment he felt the weight of his young audience. He was returning from his time as a soldier out in the world. It was less important that he had been a member of a particular army on soil known as Iraq, and more important that he’d journeyed to the birthplace of human civilization and witnessed great loss. Much like Colonel Aureliano Buendía, who had left home for many years, Jefferson was a man trying to find his way back. Trying to find his way back to the world as he had known it before war.

Out there
was where he’d been.

The kids shuffled a bit in their dirty shoes and scanned him from his black hair down to his beaded high-tops. The answer did not satisfy them, it seemed, and with their eyes they tried to ascertain more.

“Are you an American?” an older boy on a purple bike asked. And then, continuing as if he already knew the answer, “Are you a sucky American or a nice one?”

Jefferson laughed at the fairness of this question and at its humor. It traveled through his ears to his throat and down beyond his chest, where it burrowed into his rib cage and waited, musing and festering and insisting on a response.

A few quiet minutes passed as Jefferson stared southward toward Mexico City, dreaming of all that still lay ahead. The daydream gave him the voice and courage to say the words that followed, the best answer he could muster for these kids, the answer he believed was as close to the truth as any he could imagine.

“I am Jefferson Long Soldier, and I am doing my best to be a good American.”

As
he flew back home across the Atlantic, Jefferson had known it was the end for him, even though the war soldiered on. There would be no third tour. He had not been home in three and a half years, so long in such foreignness that he could not imagine his grandmother’s face. He remembered that his cousin was very large, with a good smile and an infectious laugh, but he couldn’t remember how Nigel spent his time. He was pretty sure his cousin didn’t have a job.

In the bulbous clouds surrounding the plane, Jefferson had tried to see if the rain hitting the wings and thickening in the sky was in fact a rain of yellow flowers, the welcome-home carpet that Jefferson half expected to accompany soldiers everywhere as they returned from war. For the soldiers in García Márquez’s world, the yellow flowers had followed the conclusion of twenty years of war, creating a carpet so thick that it had to be cleared with shovels and rakes. And though something told Jefferson there would be no yellow flowers on the ground in Santa Fe, still he looked for them out the window. He could hear that beautiful hallelujah song playing in his head, and the shafts of light through the dark clouds were particularly bright, like from movie camera lights. Colonel Aureliano Buendía had deserved a light-filled, flower-drowned sort of homecoming. He had, after all, devoted almost a quarter century to his cause, whereas soldiers like Jefferson had only missed a few years of what would have been college or a first real job. Maybe it was fair. There was the miraculous thing with his eyes and ears, and if he had to choose, he wouldn’t have traded that gift for flowers.

He had closed his eyes as the plane cruised on, 33,000 feet above the black water, trying to dream of the young man he guessed he was supposed to be, now that he was going home. He squeezed his eyelids tight and tried to think of a simple list of qualities about himself. The effort was immediately unsuccessful. He needed to recall the outline of his own face and the shape and color of his own eyes, Jefferson decided, before he could think about internal things. He was fairly certain he had a warm smile, like Esco’s, but were his eyes blue or brown?

He
rode all night through the city’s sprawl, on toward the core. The going was slow, for there was so much humanity to see, and he stopped a few times to rest, to drink some water, to witness the life of a stranger. Curious and full of questions he found himself, only some of them having to do with his search for GGM.

Have you ever been a soldier?

What is your mother like? Do you know your father?

What’s your idea of a miracle?

He made sure he was he headed toward downtown,
el centro.
And more specifically, he made sure he was headed toward Zócalo, the neighborhood a nice woman had mentioned as a possible good place to begin his search. The woman was a housekeeper, she told him, and had once been employed by a diplomat’s family there.

By four in the morning, through the growing light and mid-rises, he began to see patches of green grass. Here poverty was hardly visible, only an occasional lonely wanderer like himself, and there were no more cardboard shacks or free-roaming roosters. There were trees and lawns and buildings designed by architects. Bright umbrellas were being set upon street corners for lattes and, later, lunch.

By mid-morning, after several consultations with snack stand operators, he became fairly certain he’d arrived in either the place called Zócalo or the place called El Distrito Federal. He left the motorbike chained to a pole, whistled for the pup to follow, and together they continued on foot. Five-star hotels and shopping. Beautiful men and women walking with iPhones, parking BMW motorcycles, and getting out of dark sedans.

It was unexpected to him, and posh, and none of it seemed right. Try as he might, Jefferson could not imagine the old writer, that man with the famous wiry eyebrows from the back cover of his paperback, living near any of this hubbub. There were swanky residential side streets, to be sure, all stacked with high-rises. Maybe when García Márquez had been younger, he would have had an apartment in a high-rise to entertain his intellectual friends, but he was an old guy now, and—Jefferson couldn’t help it—he didn’t believe old guys who wrote novels lived in high-rises.

It was late morning when he came to the bookstore owned by an American named Fernanda, who was obsessed with Latin American literature and who had moved to Mexico City from Brooklyn after 9/11. Fifty-two years old with tight eyes, this Fernanda was nothing like Fernanda del Carpio, the most beautiful of the five thousand most beautiful women in the land, the woman conceived by García Márquez, the Fernanda Jefferson thought of as the real Fernanda. The Fernanda of the bookstore had hair of no true hue, and in the end she proved unable to guide him. She smirked and crossed her arms and warned Jefferson about disappointment. Didn’t he know? He’d be lucky to get within a city block of García Márquez. Didn’t he know? The old writer did not talk to anyone.

But Jefferson’s hope had reached a great height, for it was the hope that comes at the end of a long race. So he thanked the bookstore owner for listening to his story and left her with a smile, practicing a short handstand outside the front door to shake off any negativity that might have attached itself to him because of her lack of faith. Then he made his way to a bench in a nearby plaza. It was a Saturday, early December, and it was raining, and he could think of nothing better than to wait to see who might approach and offer to help him.

He spent the afternoon on the bench watching a photographer snap candids of nearby lovers. He saw a multitude of people pass by, and several times he thought he had identified a person who could help, each time asking the critical question, in his best mix of Spanish and English. “Perdón. Dónde vive el gran autor, Gabo? Mucho famoso?” He began with the name he now understood might be the writer’s most familiar nickname, Gabo, and only if that name received a shrug did he move on to the more formal “Dónde está Gabriel García Márquez?”—a sentence that Jefferson knew translated literally to “Where is Gabriel García Márquez?” If the names Gabo and García Márquez got no response, Jefferson did his best to ask where the rich people lived, and the artists. Several times he held out his street map to a kind-looking man or woman, raised his eyebrows, said, “Los ricos?” or “Los artistas?” and hoped for a miracle. After two hours and twenty-three minutes and a lot of sweating, the most common response he had received was still “Who?”

It was getting on toward evening, and he was sure he was as close as he had ever been to GGM. He walked on his hands for a while up and down the sidewalk, Remedios yipping at his side, trying as always to generate some good energy. He trimmed a few stray shoots off the trunks of several lime trees and then returned to his bench, a place he felt sure would eventually attract the right person.