Out There: a novel

OUT THERE

a novel

Sarah Stark

Leaf Storm Press

Santa Fe, New Mexico

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any semblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead is entirely coincidental.

Leaf Storm Press LLC

Santa Fe, New Mexico

LeafStormPress.com

Copyright © 2014 by Sarah Stark

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in parts in any form.

Kindle eBook edition

ISBN 978-0-9914105-1-4

Print Edition

ISBN 978-0-9914105-0-7

To my parents,

Susan and Richard Stark,

and for

Reuben Paul Santos (1982-2009)

I was too young to know t
hat I would go on living,

Human and nostalgic,

Remembering without bitterness,

Multiplying all that is good,

Softness in my heart.

—Jefferson Long Soldier

J
efferson
felt for the book at his chest—still there—and walked on his own two feet up the ramp and down the wide hall past the A gates, more fortunate than so many others. The New Mexican light was bright; he remembered his old friend now as it seared his dream state back into the present. All these tourists streaming past with their rolling suitcases. He remembered them as he put one foot in front of the other, these ladies from Dallas and Chicago and Atlanta in search of turquoise and silver and framed art for their foyers. These executives out west for their annual meeting in the desert, a chance to ride a horse and smell a mountain and taste the sky. Past the burrito stand he walked, almost skipping, his beautiful beaded high-tops honoring each new step. He paused now to adjust the headband he’d carefully finger-crocheted over the long days of his journey home, using the plastic bags that had held his sandwiches, his magazines, his gum.

It was not a matter of hoping it was safe out. It was not a matter of being careful or identifying the exit signs or saying his prayers or dodging bullets. There were most definitely snipers in the airport, explosive tumbleweeds on the highway, insurgents in stolen minivans, undercover extremists buying lattes in front of him and single mothers wired for explosives behind. A whole non-war-zone world on the brink of apocalypse.

He had thought a lot about reentry over the previous weeks, each time with less than satisfactory results. It seemed impossible that his return home could be how he’d imagined it. In the movies there always seemed to be white and black and Chinese little brothers and sisters standing beside their parents, wearing new clothes and waving flags. Happy tears, a small-town band playing “America the Beautiful.” The media behind the rope, with their cameras and lights and microphones, vying to interview the beaming soldier. Jefferson had replayed this little film clip in his head over and over, curled up into a ball on his bunk as he struggled to find a more realistic vision of what his return to the Albuquerque International Sunport might actually look like. Nothing had come to him.

He walked past that same old Navajo woman selling roasted piñons from her wooden cart. She’d been right there when he left, three and a half years before. She smiled at Jefferson now through those same tight lips, those same slanted eyes. Like that woman in the famous painting. The
 . . . the . . . what was it? Lisa. The Mona Lisa! Mona. What an angelic name that was. Mona Lisa. Jefferson thought of the old piñon woman as New Mexico’s own Grandmother Mona Lisa. He nodded at the unsmiling smiling old woman, and gave her his own version of the unsmiling smile, a smile meant to express how beautiful he thought her, how humble and good, and then he continued his light-footed walk to what he imagined to be the absolute midpoint of the atrium that stood at the intersection of Concourse A and Concourse B. He thumped his duffel and backpack onto the ground, checked the book at his chest again—still there. Then he turned to gaze down the straightaway with its moving sidewalk—about the length of a nice sprint, maybe a two-hundred-yard dash—that led to the security barrier, to the free world, to Esco and Cousin Nigel and home.

Here was his moment of reentry. Here was his moment—before all these good travelers, before God and the angels and the possible terrorists hiding behind plastic plants and the beautiful Grandmother Mona Lisa of New Mexico and the tired traveling families and the businessmen—to do it as close as he could to how it should be done. It was not meant to be a big moment, not in the sense of trumpets and snare drums. It was not meant to be loud. Jefferson felt that if it had a color, the moment would be white. From the sky would float thousands of tiny white flowers, and there would be soft flutes and clarinets, heard as if from far away. And the deep-rooted trees that had survived along with him would reach up into the blue sky and offer prayers of thanksgiving with their rustling branches. A quietness would accompany him. For here he was, Jefferson Long Soldier of Santa Fe, returning home unscathed.

He straightened his spine and his legs, swept his arms slowly out and over his head, stared at his outstretched fingers on each side, pointing to the heavens beyond the skylights. Hallelujah Jesus and Joseph and the Wise Men, he thought. Hallelujah O Blessed Lady of Guadalupe. Thanksgiving to God for this beautiful day. Thanksgiving to God for this moment of quiet before all these good people. Thanksgiving to God for all that is to come.

He prayed for inspiration and pulled up his sweatpants to just above his shins and took a deep breath. He smiled down at the beautiful beadwork at the top of his high-tops, giving thanks for the time he’d been granted, time to hand-stitch each of those tiny little beads to the tough canvas, and he adjusted his headband one last time. He unzipped his backpack and pulled out his harmonica—the closest thing he had to a flute—and latched his drumsticks to his belt. Closing his eyes, he blew a few chords, chords he was happy to hear, chords that vibrated with precisely the sad, scared, thankful way he was feeling. As he hummed through the harmonica, Jefferson tried to think of just the right line for this moment, something between a prayer and a declaration, something that would remind listeners where he had been, that would celebrate his return, that would mourn the losses. If he really focused, if he breathed deeply while he sang, perhaps his hands would stop shaking. The shaking was normal, he’d been told, but Jefferson was hoping for a reentry celebration without it.

But his mind was jumbling everything up, and his headband kept sliding over his right eye, making it very difficult, frankly, to concentrate, and the long straightaway before him was looking more and more like a football field’s length, or two or three, much, much more than a sprint. God, it was a long way down there to the outside world.

What had he been trying to remember?

Jefferson saw through the narrow slits of his eyes that a small crowd had formed around him as he played the harmonica. He thought of the notes he played as homecoming notes, notes that would express both celebration and sadness.

But what was he going to chant?

He felt for the book, considering whether he might take it out and consult it in plain view. This would be the easy answer, but he had vowed to keep the book safe and therefore secret for at least the first few days. He couldn’t risk exposing it to a world such as this, where danger and the possibility of misunderstanding lurked in the most unexpected places. So even though Jefferson could not remember the name of his favorite character, the man who had survived twenty years of war in García Márquez’s novel, even though every single word of the novel that had saved his life had fled, Jefferson refused to take the book out of its hiding place.

Something must have been wrong with his brain.

The crowd was medium-sized by then, and the faces turned upon him seemed concerned, sympathetic. So he finished the little melody and made his body still. Surely now was the perfect time to express what he needed to express. Maybe these people didn’t even know themselves why they had stopped, why they stepped closer to listen. That was fine. How could they understand how important it was that he tell them where he’d been?

Now that he’d had time to think, he knew the line he would chant. It was his own words mixed with García Márquez’s words, a chant in the spirit of García Márquez. Jefferson knew GGM would approve. And so he opened his mouth and began filling his lungs with air. In. And. Out. With the first big breath, he opened his eyes and saw that the crowd now numbered nearly fifty people. With the second breath he filled his gut and the back of his lower rib cage and began to bellow the words in the deepest voice he could summon up:

I am Jefferson Long Soldier, and I am returned from WA-AR.

He sang slowly, a whale underwater, desperate to reach the open sea. When he arrived at the word war, he divided it into two syllables, taking a quick intense breath between the first,
WA
, and the second,
AR
. He held the
AR
for as long as he had breath in his lungs. Then, seeing the crowd to be eager, he repeated the line, thinking of a follow-on line as he sang:

I am Jefferson Long Soldier, and I am returned from WA-AR.

The crowd forming around him tingled with compassion, and though there were no tiny white flowers yet, he imagined they might begin snowing down once he stepped out of the terminal.

The follow-on line was one he’d loved since the first time he came across it. It was what the guy in the novel said when he returned from twenty years of civil war and had to answer for himself. Jefferson was a little distracted because he could not remember the name of the soldier, the one about whom García Márquez had written so many beautiful lines. Where had the guy been? everyone wanted to know when he returned. He’d been “out there,” the guy in the novel had replied.
Out there
, an incomprehensible faraway place. As in,
You cannot understand where I have been
. Jefferson stared out into the sea of compassionate and confused faces and filled his lungs once more, hoping in this final breath for one last moment of quiet and reflection at the center of the crowd.

Where have I be-een? You say, where have I be-een?

And I tell you I have been out—there . . .

I have been out there
 . . .

As he sang, Jefferson divided been into two syllables—be-een—just as he had wa-ar, for it was like this, he imagined, that monks of long ago had chanted in windowless stone passages in Scotland and England and Spain, places he’d never seen but which he imagined as full of grit and sacrifice and darkness and faith. He imagined these ancient prayerful men to be his brothers, and he thought of them as he sang out to the onlookers at the airport, chanting as he imagined ancient men of God had done, men who chanted to believe in something large and bright. Closing his eyes and arching his spine and tilting his head back, Jefferson chanted louder, forcing the air out of him and up toward the high ceiling, trying to find some measure of peace.

I have been out there . . .

He breathed life into the end of the line, this time searching for hope.

Out there . . 
.

And once more, this time his breath a prayer for understanding.

Out . . . there . . 
.

When he had expelled all the air from his belly, and felt as if the meditation had come to its natural conclusion—announcing his solemn and yet, he hoped, gracious return to the not-at-war world—Jefferson hoisted his duffel and backpack onto his shoulders, scanned the crowd, and bowed his head to them. Deciding against playing the harmonica again, he returned it to his pocket and set off down the straightaway.

The onlookers watched the honey-eyed, brown-skinned young man go, wondering. Such lovely eyes. So young. Lucky to be alive, though. And they kept wondering long after that moment, in the sad, disconnected way in which we all try to imagine the tragedies of strangers.

Way
up there, at the end of the straightaway, Jefferson could make out the low, stocky shape of his grandmother, Esco, and, next to her, his mammoth cousin Nigel. Hazy both—but, he could tell, solid and hopeful as always. A lone red balloon bobbed between them, whooping silently, “Welcome home! Welcome home!” along with all the other things they meant to tell him—that they loved him, for instance, and that they’d feared this moment might never arrive. No Josephina, though. Maybe she would surprise him later.

Between him and them stood that crazy contraption that had always given him the shakes. A final test. Whose idea was it to create a spinning door, a door that denied passage to the uncoordinated, the slow, the anxious, the crippled? What deft entrepreneur had made millions over this faux piece of progress? Jefferson felt a familiar surge of frustration—hatred was too strong a word. Yes, he was able. Yes, he was alert. But did he really have to think so much about his footing, just to pass from one side to another?