After America (14 page)

Conveyed upriver at something considerably quicker than a walking pace, Yusuf was soon so far from the scene of the battle that he could no longer make out any details at all. He contented himself with watching the ruins of the city go by. He had been in Manhattan for only three weeks after arriving from the training camp in Morocco, his ship unharmed by the threat of British submarines or warships. They were known to fire on vessels within the so-called exclusion zone that extended many hundreds of miles out from the U.S. coastline. He still marveled at the scale of the metropolis. What a seat of power it must have been when the city still lived. And to think it was just one of many cities across this continent. Perhaps the greatest of them, to be certain, but still only one of hundreds according to their teachers in camp. He wondered how God could have allowed wickedness to be raised so high before finally striking it down. But then, maybe that was the point, he thought, a lesson to the righteous and the evildoer alike, as he floated past what looked like the ruins of some sort of little harbor on the mainland side of the river. For a wonder, a number of sailboats still lay at anchor there. Some others had been thrown up out of the water, presumably by a storm, and lay broken-backed on the docks, which were strewn with debris and rubbish. Other boats were half submerged, their masts broken like matchsticks. These observations were interrupted by a painful bump on the side of his head.

Yusuf found himself at the edge of what appeared to be a huge floating mass of trash. Some of it had originated in the natural world. Large tree branches and even one or two whole trees that looked like they had been knocked over at their very roots were entangled with rotting bulrushes and great accumulated clumps of smaller twig and leaf matter. Caught up with them were car and truck tires, all manner of ruined furniture, and a seemingly infinite number of plastic bags, some of them empty and some of them bulging with unknown contents. His nose wrinkled and he gagged in disgust as he realized that some of the floating island was composed of dead bodies, many but not all of them human. A large, clear plastic bag full of small white balls floated by within easy reach. Yusuf tested it and found it not only more buoyant than his sadly deflated basketball but much easier and more comfortable to rest on. He abandoned the ball and moved across to the bag, on which faded red lettering spelled out
BEANBAG
STUFFING
.

He did not wish to get caught up in the island of floating wreckage and thought it prudent to get as far away from the rotting bodies as possible. He shuddered with loathing when he recognized the bloated corpse of a wild pig not more than a few yards away. The drifting atoll was large enough that it took him a long time to swim around it and, with some added effort, to break free of the slow but significant whirlpool in which it seemed to be spinning.

It seemed that he frog kicked upriver for a long time after that. He was very worried, and his anxiety grew with the distance from Ellis Island. He knew parts of Manhattan quite well from having studied tactical maps on the ship, but his instructors had bidden him to concentrate on learning the street grid in those areas where it was most likely he would have to fight. Down here, on the river, disoriented by the battle, he had trouble placing himself. Other than knowing he was floating up one of the rivers that ran on either side of Manhattan, Yusuf had no idea where he was or how he might get back to the emir’s camp. He needed to find a landmark he could recognize and use to orient himself. The boy lay his head on the bag of beans and examined the blank wall of high-rise buildings past which he was sailing. Many of them looked like ruined shells, fire-scorched and even teetering on the edge of collapse in some cases. At one point, floating past a series of jetties, he saw the amazing sight of an enormous skyscraper that had toppled to one side and now leaned precariously against another, forming a giant inverted V. You would certainly not walk under it if you had half a mind. But Yusuf would not be walking through that part of the city, anyway. His incomplete but workable understanding of the island led him to believe that he was passing the territory claimed by a number of competing criminal gangs from Eastern Europe, mostly Russians and Serbs. He had heard many stories of both peoples and their wars against the faithful. It said a lot, he thought, that the emir had chosen to drive the Americans from their own city before turning on the intruders who had come to ransack it. Their time would surely come, but he had to wonder why they had not been dealt with first. Surely they were not that formidable and fierce an opponent. Well, it was not his role to question the strategies of his superiors.

He could not help thinking about it, however, and, in doing so, dwelling on the fighting in which he had really played no part, Yusuf allowed a gnawing sense of shame to come over him, just as the chill of the river seeped into his bones the longer he remained immersed. When he examined his actions devoid of the rush of adrenaline and emotion that had carried him through the fighting, he saw that he had bolted like a terrified horse attacked by fearsome dragons. He had gone into the fight so proud and tall and—looking back on it—with such unbridled arrogance, but now he had to face the unpleasant fact that his manhood had vanished altogether at the very first sight of the Americans. They had robbed him of courage like Satan’s imps, and he had run from them as if they were pitiless machines, not mortal men with their own fears and weaknesses.

Yusuf shuddered with the shame of it, as though the emir himself was somehow looking directly at him, knowing of his failure. It felt as though he were wallowing in the water directly in front of the maw of a giant shark. A small groan escaped from his throat, and he closed his eyes, horrified, as though waiting to be eaten.

What had he done?

Nothing. He had done nothing but disgrace himself from the very first moment of the battle. A terrible understanding came to him. There was no great shark, of course, nor was it the emir whose gaze he had felt upon him with such weight and significance. It was God’s eye. Allah himself had looked down from heaven and judged Yusuf Mohammed as unworthy.

“Oh, no, please …”

He experienced the same debilitating feeling he recalled from the opening moments of combat a few hours before, the feeling that he had somehow become detached from his body and was free-falling through time and space. He felt dizzy, and his head wobbled before dropping onto the bag of beans in despair. Darkness bloomed in his vision as evil memories arose from the past, unwanted and unbidden.

He remembered a dusty road outside of Moroto in Uganda, not long after Captain Kono had come to his village and changed the course of his life. It was so long ago, long enough that he thought of those days as detached from the world in which he now lived, as belonging to a different world altogether. In that world he was not Yusuf Mohammed. He was not a sinner. He was just a child who had come to know that the greatest cruelties in the world could be the work of other children, or at least other children who had been raised by the likes of Captain Kono. The children of the Lord’s Resistance Army who had taken him from his village and killed everyone there often competed with one another in games of great brutality and violence. In one awful memory they were walking along the dusty road, and there came an old man on a bicycle. All of Kono’s children began shrieking and yelping as soon as they saw him. Captain Kono hated cyclists and had declared that the punishment for riding a bike in his presence was amputation of at least one leg. Two of the grown men who fought with Kono pulled the old man on the bike over to the side of the road. He was shaking with fear but grinning and laughing nervously as if to encourage the idea that this was all some sort of practical joke. Kono appeared, towering over Yusuf. He, too, was grinning, but unlike the old man, his amusement was genuine. He explained to the boy that if he wished to prove himself to his comrades, he would have to chew through the man’s leg, right down to the bone. Like a tiger. Kono smiled.
Imitate the actions of a tiger, boy.

It all came back in diabolical recall. The hot, sweet, coppery taste of arterial blood. The stringy, almost gristly muscle and meat caught between his teeth. The way his throat locked up as though a chain mail fist were choking it off. As a sort of perverse mercy Kono had allowed him to finish the task with the machete, but it took many blows, and when it was done, the little boy Yusuf had once been was screaming louder than the old man whose leg he had taken off.

Moaning pitiably, he kicked for the shoreline, not caring if anybody looking down upon the water saw him thrashing and splashing away. All he knew was that he had to get out of this river, get to shore and somehow to make his way to the camp of the emir to seek forgiveness or at the very least the just punishment of God. The current was very strong, however, and it bore him upstream for at least another mile or two before he had swung close enough to the riverbank to be able to contemplate climbing out. By that point an unexpected sight had presented itself, one that made his heart lurch in momentary fright. One of the great warships of the Americans, one of those from which their planes and bombers used to fly to enforce their will around the world, lay ahead of him. For a few seconds he feared he had swum right into their midst and would soon be captured. The surprise of it, and the renewed feeling of burning shame, all but eclipsed him before he attended to what he was actually seeing rather than what he thought he had seen.

The aircraft-carrying ship was rusting and listed over to one side, so much so that he doubted anyone could have walked safely on its giant flat deck. Some of the planes had apparently broken whatever chains once had held them down and slid to the edge of the deck, where they had tumbled onto a barge far below. A small mountain of twisted metal wreckage had built up there: jet fighters and helicopters and possibly even a spaceship of some sort to judge by its weird twisted form, like a giant white plate … a flying saucer, he believed they were called. This one was bent out of shape like a cheap plastic or even a paper plate.

He thought he remembered this ship from his map lessons. It had been a museum of jihad for the Americans, and although it was a long way from the camp of the emir, he was pretty sure that if he cut across the island from this point, he might have a good chance of finding his way back to friendly ground. Kicking harder to maneuver himself around the many items of floating rubbish that clogged up much of the water, Yusuf set a course for a slightly newer-looking concrete jetty south of the warship. He was not surprised to find that his legs were so weak that they could barely carry his weight when he dragged himself hand over hand out of the water. He was lucky, because either the pier had sunk down into the bed of the river or the waters had risen over the last few years to lap over its edge. Hauling himself out was much less trouble than actually standing and beginning the long, hazardous journey across the city.

Seattle

She loved Pike Place Market because it was so busy, so full of life, that you could lose yourself in it and forget for just a moment that the world had gone to hell. A strong aroma of spices and coffee mingled with the unmistakable briny odor of fresh fish and crabs from the sea. Some of the reopened fishing areas off the coast of California were starting to produce again. Each time Barbara Kipper came to the market, a little more produce appeared from the formerly deserted parts of the United States, starting with a bounty of potatoes from Idaho. Stopping before a stall to inspect a batch of Vidalia onions from Missouri, Barb thought it was almost possible to convince yourself that the Wave was a bad dream and that the hungry times had never really happened. It was all a straight-to-video stinker with horrible computer graphics and bad acting. She popped four of the best-looking onions into her string bag before handing over a two-dollar note that looked even fresher than the vegetables. The stall owner handed her a few coins in change, and she passed on to Abe Frellman’s Sausage Hut, where she wanted to pick up a string of the deliciously fat pork and porcini chipolatas Kip liked so much.

“Came out of the smokehouse this morning, Mrs. Kipper,” Frellman said, when he saw her eyeing them. “Three newbies a pound.”

Barbara smiled. “You can do better than that, Abe. How about two-fifty?”

As they haggled back and forth over the inflated prices, Barbara realized that it was truly impossible to lose herself in the market or the past. The four Secret Service men trailing her as she tried to shop for fruit and vegetables would never allow that to happen. And even though the stallholders and many of the regular customers had grown accustomed to the First Lady buying and carrying her own groceries, Barbara Kipper was still the center of a buzzing circle of gawkers, admirers, and occasional crazy people wherever she went.

“Missus Kipper! Missus Kipper. Over here. Freshest Dungeness crabs on all the West Coast over heeeyah!”

Barb smiled and waved at Sammy Portuni as he held aloft two giant orange-backed specimens, their pincers snapping angrily in the air as a rival seller cried across the heads of the crowd.

“Hell, no, Ms. Kipper. Over here is where you want to be for the finest damn crabs and lobsters and fresh Canadian salmon anywhere.”

She turned and waved at Jon Daniels from the Old City Fish Shop, who waved back at her with an enormous shining silver fish that looked bigger than her daughter.

Suzie jerked her mother’s hand. “Can we get the big fish, Mommy? The big fish for Daddy?”

“Suzie, I can’t carry a big fish like that all the way home, darling,” she protested. “And I came here for fresh fruit and vegetables. We have plenty of meat and fish at home in the freezers.”

“Oh veg-e-tables,” Suzie moaned. “They’re no fun at all. And we’ve got heaps of them in the garden at home. And you’re getting sausages, and sausages are meat.”

Thankfully, before Suzie could really get going on her antivegetable stump speech, a three-piece band started up: a fiddler, a double bass, and a guitarist banging out some jaunty little Cajun number from the sound of it. Barb forged on through the crowd toward her favorite produce store, reminding herself to stop at the cheese shop for some of the stinky blue stuff Kipper liked on his toast in the morning. She had just noticed a new stall selling handblown glass jewelry when one of the Secret Service men appeared at her side. Momentarily distracted—she hadn’t seen a craft store in the markets for years; they were all about fresh food nowadays—she missed whatever he muttered in her ear. She really did want to see that jewelry. It had been so long since anyone had the time or freedom to indulge in such things.