Streams of Babel (12 page)

I felt glad that Reverend McNaughton put his arm around me and shook hands with the boys. I figured he could talk to them and I could sit down. But when I looked beyond Owen's huge frame, other people had come into the church. Mr. Steckerman. He had Rain with him. A couple of my old English teachers were behind them. I grabbed hold of the pew and leaned against it. I had not wanted other people to be here. I had wanted my own space, my own little silences to say good-bye to Aleese, to tell her I was bitter about nothing, and to pray for her while an assuring man's voice droned on.

In came the Blumbergs, followed by Mr. Bennett, director of the marching band, and two of the girls I talked a lot to in the flute section.

I was sure the real story about Aleese was out by now, if it hadn't leaked out over time.
What are they doing here?

The first one to reach me was Mr. Steckerman. My eyes were filling up, so I couldn't see beyond him, but I could smell Rain. She had this head of blond hair that's always full of shampoo smells, and she's always tossing it carelessly like it's nothing more important than a dollar-store baseball cap. He touched my elbow, and I hoped to god I found the presence of mind to say, "Excuse me for a moment."

I went rushing into the choir room, and Reverend McNaughton followed.

"I didn't want this!" I cried after he shut the door.

"Didn't want what, Cora?" He looked confused, though the issue was plain to me.

"My mother was a ... a mess!" I tried to keep it low. We'd had this conversation on the phone. He, too, had known about Aleese's addiction and asked point-blank about whether it had gotten worse or better after Oma died. "All she ever did when I was at home was lie on the couch! She never even moved into bed at night! I didn't want all these people here. What are they doing here?"

"Cora, they're here for
you.
"

I looked for the silence to be filled with something ... a thought ... a revelation of how that could be true.

All I could think of was
Why?

I let him lead me out to so many people I couldn't count them—though I was suspicious that many of them were here in memory of Mrs. Eberman, as if my mother were somehow connected to her now in people's kindnesses. The fact was, the two of them had nothing in common except, perhaps, some terrible germ. I hugged people back until the skin on my arms tingled. The last time I'd been hugged by anyone was at Oma's funeral. The sensations were different now. At Oma's funeral, there had been no consoling me. Nothing could have put less distance between a hopeful thought and myself. Aleese had not
been there, hadn't come out of her stupor, and I had been glad, glad to speak in prayer with Oma, without having to worry about what Aleese might hallucinate or commentate at a public service. This time, as the service droned on, I felt kind of ... bruised ... limp and mushy, like an overly ripe pear.

"Let us pray."

I bowed my head automatically. This was the part of the service I had wanted. The part where I could sit quietly by myself and tell Aleese that I hoped she was happier now and that I was not the type to nurse a grudge.

But Mr. Steckerman was seated beside me. He was holding my hand, and it was making me feel stiffer, especially since he had his fingers laced through Rain's on the other side. It gave me a strange feeling of being joined with her. I didn't deserve it any more than my mother deserved an association with Mrs. Eberman, and Rain knew it as well as I did.

She was another one like Owen Eberman whom I admired from my little space in the school corridors, the sidelines of the cafeteria.

"Yeah, I lost my mom when I was three," she had said to me a few moments before the service started, like it was perfectly natural for the first lines of conversation between us in years to be preceded by a hug, in a church, and not preceded by a "hey" in school.

"That's a shame. I'm really sorry."

"You get used to it. It'll be different for you. You'll have memories, at least."

One hug, two lines based on misinformation, and now I was in some twisted way attached to her via her father's touchy-feely ways. She wanted to be sitting a few rows back with the Ebermans, "her buds," as I'd overheard her calling them in the corridors, as if they were just normal guys and not legends around here. Then again, she was a legend herself. But she was stuck with me, with my pretense of sadness that, fortunately, was supported by tears of dizziness over all this hugging, and by the fear of what the minister might say. The prayer was ending. I had missed my chance to tell Aleese anything fair, true, or even merciful. The best words to say about Aleese that I could think of came from the minister, not from me.

"From the dust of the earth we come, and to dust we return again. This is the will of the Lord..."

OWEN EBERMAN
MONDAY, MARCH 4, 2002
2:20
P.M.

"AMEN." I BLESSED myself, noticing that the teachers in the row in front of me didn't, and hoped that was okay. This wasn't my Episcopal church. I couldn't remember what was right, or anything except one fact that kept me going.

It was that Mom could have picked any of a thousand movies to watch on the last night of her life. Since one of the last things she saw was Joan of Arc taken away by Saint Stephen, it was like a sign from above that she, too, had been taken up by a white stallion and a saint in bright lights. It helped to think of Mom as someone who was sacrificed, who couldn't get better because she was too run-down from serving everyone else. The thought helped
me,
at any rate.

Scott was a different story. All he wanted to do was yell at doctors and dish out orders, and have them explain how two women from the same neighborhood can have brain aneurysms on the same night. He wasn't very impressed by their answers, which amounted to "We're working on it."

I looked up at the church rafters. I just wanted to see or hear something miraculous—a light, a flash, half a word from either Saint Catherine or Saint Stephen, Saint Joan, the Lord, or my mom. If it sounds crazy, I had no idea what I would wish for when my only hope would be seeing a miracle.

My brother's profile slumped forward and drew my gaze downward. Scott was bawling quietly again. He had enough tissues packed in his pocket for me and him. Problem was, I hadn't needed them yet. I felt like a wimp next to him. I would get to thinking about Mom too much, and it felt like a dam that's going to blow ... and it scared the hell out of me. It was easier to watch Cora Holman, watch the minister...

"...have two great pictures Aleese's mother, Natalie, gave me when Aleese first went overseas," the minister was saying. "I want to show you what's in the heart of a person who wants to use her talents to promote charity and world peace."

The first picture was poster-sized, mounted on something that made it stiff. I'm not a photo guy, but it looked like any number of pictures you'd see on a Feed the Children ad on television. Maybe a little better. She managed to click when this little black girl's eyes were perfect—full of hopelessness, confusion, and maybe acceptance. She had one of those bloated bellies and was wearing only an undershirt, sitting in mud or wet clay or something. The photo was black and white.

My eyes moved to Cora, whose shoulders were squared. Her posture was just as good as if she were sitting in English class. I figured that she must be so used to seeing her mom's
work that she could see it at a funeral and hold herself together.
So strong.
We'd all heard about her mother's addiction over the years, little dribs here and there that fell out of grown-ups' mouths. Her mother had been some awesome photographer who lost the use of her shooting arm after an accident, and she was too depressed about it to ever get off her pain medication.

I guessed we'd have felt sorry for Cora, but it's hard to feel sorry for someone who's always got her collective act together. My friends have nicknames for everybody, and we'd come up with a few for her—Audrey Hepburn, Miss State Senator, Little Miss Perfect. She never had anything to do with our crowd, probably more to do with the dorky crowds, though I couldn't call her a dork. Dorks looked kind of bad, and she never had a hair out of place. She wasn't shy, really. Just ... aloof. Above it all.

I watched her as the minister pointed at little details in this photo. Cora was as unmoving as marble—as if the perfect child would just expect to have a really talented mother. And don't all artistic geniuses end up addicted to something and reclusive? It was forgivable. I just wished I had Cora's ...
dignity.
Unless I thought about it, I spent every minute of the past three days slumped like an overgrown bear.

Rain was turning ever so slowly to look back at me. I could read her lips.
Are you okay?

I nodded.

I love you.

Love you, too.
I wished she were sitting back here so I could smell her hair and punch her knee, and she could punch mine, and maybe I wouldn't feel so ... detached ... numbed ... paralyzed.

"And this photo is a little harder to take, but it's a truth Aleese felt the need to share." The minister put down the black-and-white photo and held up a huge colored one. An audible groan lasted only a second, but a few disgusted gasps echoed.

This giant photo was of a black man. I didn't know what country it was taken in, but he was dressed in nothing but a pair of cheap pants without a belt, and lying on muddy ground. It reminded me of
Black Hawk Down,
this horrifying movie I'd seen about Mogadishu with Dobbins and Moran. The barrel of a rifle lay over the dead man's palm. He was riddled with bullet holes, but his eyes and mouth were wide open. A line of blood ran from his mouth into his ear. I didn't know which was worse, that an expression of horror had lingered after death, or that part of his intestine had popped through his pants and lay on top of his stomach.

I remembered the recruiter at school from West Point. My girlfriend Myra was pissed at me when I didn't fall all over the guy. My thought of him tied in so well with this picture:
What, you think I would ever want to pick up a gun and stick it in somebody's guts and fire? You got the wrong person, bud.
It was a disgusting picture, and I wondered if the minister hadn't pushed it way over the top by showing it here. But then again, it made me want to slap the photographer on the back and shout, "Good one!" I studied the dead man's eyes, and for whatever reason, wondered,
Did he see Saint Stephen?

I looked up at the rafters again. It was the wrong thing to do, because the picture boiled over inside of me, bringing me into that some-other-world I felt half in, and my head started pounding from the kind of garbage that could get me all upset, all screaming on the inside ...
No, no more wars, sickness, death...
no more poverty, burnings at the stake, tortures, murders, hate ... Why is this world so gross?
That's why I only let myself get half into things before wanting to chill out at home again. If you got too close, you didn't just feel the good stuff, you felt the bloody, fly-eaten leftovers of whatever violence made the news, and you ended up doing things like wanting to scream.

It just flew out of me. Bawling, not screaming, thank god, but it was loud, and it brought up flashes of standing in my mother's hospital room just after she died. They wiped the blood off before I got there, but they forgot to shut her eyes. Scott shut them.

He was passing me a tissue, then three. The minister stopped, and I was all,
Dude, will you shut up? How can you be selfish enough to stop a service? How can you come apart, and the lady's own daughter has more self-control?

A shadow moved from the front row, and Rain dropped beside me. Cora had not moved a muscle, not even deserted like that—humiliated, because I couldn't shut up.

The minister was speaking again, and I was trying to listen, but at first I could only hear Rain whispering.

"Hey, bud ... make it through this..." She had a hold of my face in that way Mom used to, pulling at my cheeks with both hands when she wanted to make a point.

Then I heard Scott whispering, "Get your face out of his. You got germs ... never good with that sort of photo."

This sick feeling in my stomach went a little crazy, turning hot, then cold, then sending icy streams to my head and down my arms. I wondered if Scott's lecture on germs had come too late. It felt like that twenty-four-hour flu thing you get maybe every couple of years, that hits you like a brick, flattens you for
a day, and then disappears again. But this one was more like three bricks.
You're not sick; your stomach is just upset over that sickening picture. It will go away. You don't have what Mom had.

I turned my face up to the rafters and repeated all that maybe five times, but when these chills broke like a waterfall, I stopped praying. The only words in my head were
Something's wrong. Something horrible.

SHAHZAD HAMDANI
TUESDAY, MARCH 5, 2002
2:45
A.M.
KARACHI TIME

THE NIGHT AIR is thick. I cannot sleep but only stare at the silhouetted clump of my packed bags. We leave for the airport at seven thirty. This thing is happening so very fast. I know the seriousness of USIC's need, and I don't begrudge them the desire to put someone very multilingual in the Trinitron café quickly. But I fear I will lose more than I will gain, ironically, if I make this trip.

Hodji has been lecturing me for three days on what it will be like. "In America, the intelligence agents play on a team. You stay on your base. You have to do as you're told and not ask questions. They will not share things with you like Roger and I sometimes do." Of course I understand the American baseball and playing your particular base. But I also wonder what will happen if I see leads that I could chase for them.... Will they let me do it? Will they tell someone else to do it, and I will never know the outcomes of my own accomplishments?

My time is all but gone for working freely. I get out of bed, tiptoe around my bags, and head silently across Aunt Hamera's garden over to the café. I can see my computer blinking in the dark as I put the key into the lock. I rarely shut down. For some reason, it makes my asthma worse to see my screen dark and not reaching out to the world at large. Hodji says it is a form of claustrophobia. He jokingly calls it in English "computero-phobia."