The Messenger (23 page)

Daria thinks about Officer Preston and the unknown content of his radio conversations back in West Virginia. Only yesterday, yet an eternity ago. They will be looking for a woman alone. “I suppose it would be.”

“The first thing is to get some money, don’t you agree?”

“Yes, you can’t get anywhere in this country without money …” Daria says. It is the immutable truth, brought home in the most tactile way by the disinfected sheets at the Salvation Army shelter, by the groans of the women within their turbulent dreams, by the mirrors—not even mirrors really, but highly polished stainless steel, so that they can’t smash their fists into their reflections, hurt themselves, and make a mess.

“There’s an army base here,” says Daria. “Soldiers always have money.”

And Nadja looks at her for a long moment, and then smiles.

Instead they sell the laptop, getting a hundred and fifty dollars for it at the used-computer store. “Don’t worry, I’ll wipe it,” the guy says.

With what Daria’s got in her pockets and Nadja’s share, if they pool their money they have almost five hundred dollars.

Breakfast is taken at Starbucks. She sips her way through an espresso and then another while Nadja wolfs down muffins, breaks up pieces of chocolate croissants and pushes them at her while they make their plans. This is the last big meal, a celebration of their setting sail, so it’s permissible to splurge.

“I think it’s more than enough to get us there.”

“To Hollywood?” Daria says, remembering her cover story.

“No, to my sister’s place. Paulina. She lives in Kansas City … 
we can take a bus.” The road atlas shows them the route. “You didn’t want to do blow jobs with the soldiers really, did you?”

“No …” They both laugh. She winces from the pain. And Nadja sees it.

“Are you okay?”

“Mmmm … fine,” she says. Looking down onto the surface of the table in Starbucks.

“You can stay at her house for a few days, if you want. Maybe find a job and make some more money, maybe enough to get to L.A.,” Nadja says, waving her fine hands in circles around her head.

Daria’s face is hot. When she drinks the espresso there is a thickening at the back of her throat, and she strangles a cough. Everyone knows about the epidemic and she wouldn’t want to start a panic. “Here, eat this …” Nadja urges. It is a piece of cantaloupe on the end of her fork. “Eat …”

A friend, Daria thinks. Maybe that’s what she needs right now, a friend. And it would be better to travel together. And “they” will be looking for just one woman traveling alone.

“Kansas City. That sounds good, I guess,” she says. Glad to say it. Glad to give in to this beautiful blonde optimist. Together they could take on and poison battalions of American servicemen, but … with a bullet hole in her side, maybe this is not the best time.

Nadja smiles and nods. “O-kayyyy …” she purrs. And they laugh again.

Back at the bus station, they reject the idea of an express ticket. Nadja wants to take the local. Daria tries to breathe regularly and agrees, since she is dying, probably in at least two different ways, and guesses that by taking the slower, cheaper route, she’ll be making herself more and more invisible to the searching eyes of the Great Satan. Going among the underclass is better camouflage. She’ll be so poor and worthless that society will ignore her. And blow jobs with soldiers? What does it matter? She is a whore for God—she’ll paint on the lipstick, become the prostitute that brings death to the enemy, that’s no problem at all.

So … they take the slow way for forty-nine dollars per ticket. Nadja sees this as a way to economize, even though they will
have to eat out of vending machines and bus station cafés as they go. Whenever they can, they will buy groceries that are easily transportable—muffins, and apples, and chocolate bars to tide them over. Bottles of water, obviously, because every living thing needs it.

But the local doesn’t leave until later in the afternoon. To kill time they walk down the street and sit in a threadbare little park. The day is warm and Daria collapses on the dried-up grass.

Like everyone else living in or visiting the United States, Nadja has been captivated by the news of the bioterror strikes. She rolls up her sleeves, sits on a park bench, and reads to Daria from a newspaper she’s found.

Half the front page is taken up with an illustration of a typical American family, wide-eyed, with masks covering their faces. Looming behind their image is the biohazard symbol, like some alien spider about to strike.

“… says that ‘Israel will not ignore the attack on her security. Stability in the region has now been torn to shreds …’ Okay …”

Daria lies back and looks at the clouds, experimenting with her breathing to see if there is anything she can do to lessen the pain, which has now extended to her whole left side. Nadja turns the page, holds the paper out at arm’s length, shakes her head.

“Look at this—picture, advertisement, picture, picture, advertisement. Where is the new information that you are paying for …?” Ignoring the fact that she has reclaimed the paper from some previous reader who’d left it rolled up between the boards of the bench. A gift actually …

“They control all the information, they only give us what they can no longer hide, or feed us slowly what they want us to believe. Okay, ‘outbreaks in—’ Oh, my God … 
six
cities in the United States. Started in Berlin, and spread … to … various cities and towns in Germany. Also in
Paris
 …” Her brow is furrowed with concern.

What Daria would really like to know is if there is anything in the paper about a state trooper being run over in West Virginia, but there is no adroit way to find out.

“Shit …” says Nadja.

“What?”

“I don’t have all the newspaper … Some asshole stole it …”

It’s such a beautiful day for bad news. Daria’s view of the clouds is bordered by the leaves of plane trees. A bird flits by. Far over in the corner of her vision are parallel lines … electric wires that drape between buildings. She’s not cold. She’s warm, and for now her itching has stopped.

“… anthrax has to be inhaled to kill you …” Nadja mutters.

Daria only half listens. Closes her eyes and rubs them, marvels at the explosion of lights and colors behind her eyelids. A fever, she thinks. She has a fever.

“… more than a dozen jihadist groups have claimed responsibility for the multiple attacks …”

All that is to be learned from the newspaper is that there is a race to name a central villain. Even in death Osama bin Laden is the default choice, but the gang of six, among them Tété and Muhammad Saleem Atcha Khan, are named. There are very few biographical details given. And a certain amount of confusion. Bahar Wahid is first from Yemen, then from Syria.

After name-the-villain, the rest of the space is consumed by Israel. The Israelis have gone behind the high wall. All foreigners are being sent home. Everything is quarantined. Gas masks are being passed out and rechecked.

“Well … that’s the shit,” Daria hears Nadja saying.

“What?”

“They say there’s going to be a war … in Kashmir.”

“War …,”
she repeats quietly, staring up at the clouds. She imagines all the brave young men of India laboring across the snowy mountain passes. The sons and daughters of Pakistan shivering behind their rocket launchers.

“These fucking maniacs … who develop this shit …” Nadja says. “Of course there’s nothing written about that in this … 
bumaga
.” She closes the newspaper angrily.

“What about here? Or to wherever we’re going?”

“That’s a good idea … yah, yah …” Nadja says, and searches again through the pages. Chicago has reported cases of variola major; so have Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Seattle. Nadja reads the names of the cities, and sits there shaking her head. “Whether they say or not, it’s everywhere now.” Nadja hands her the paper, gets up from the bench, and begins to do stretching exercises.

Daria rolls over on her side, then on all fours, and gets to her feet, trying to move as little as possible. She eases up onto the bench and leans back and watches Nadja do her workout on the grass.

“I know all about that stuff.” Nadja lifts one leg and props it up on the back of the bench, arches over and lays her cheekbone against her knee. “We developed all that. Us, the Russians. Of course, not just us, but the Americans too. Probably the Italians; why not?”

“I don’t know.”

“They took animals … germs and little bugs and put them in the laboratories until they came out with poisons. We even saw it in the news in Russia. It was worse than Chernobyl,” she says, rotating her body and stretching out, laying her breastbone against her knee, reaching out and turning her wrists slowly as if conjuring a spell around her ankle.

“Why did they do it? They did it for money. Money. Greed. That’s what people don’t realize. They are so happy they brought capitalism into the world. They are so proud of themselves. But now they create a monster …” Now Nadja comes up straight, changes legs and begins again. Just looking at her makes Daria hurt.

“Of course, with money, it’s a universal desire. White people, black people. Jews. It doesn’t matter who. All of them will do whatever it takes if it gets them ahead. It’s like a circle—” Her waving arm draws it in the air between them.

“You are here, at the center. Your children are here, right next to you; your mother is here. Maybe if you had a good father, he is here. Then brothers, cousins, all your relatives … then your village, just a little further away. Then the boys from the village when they play football. Your region of the country. Go, Moldova! Go, Bratislava! Then above that, your country, the flag you root for at the Olympics or the World Cup. All human persons will willingly fight and die for your own tribe, yeah?”

“Yes …”

“If you are afraid, if you hate, if you have a chance to make money by using someone, treating them like an animal, it’s always going to begin with a person that’s outside your circle. They don’t look like you. Someone with eyes pointing like this, different skin, someone with big lips, someone different. And this difference is what is called ugliness. This is basic communist theory, and unfortunately it’s basic capitalist theory too, by the way.”

“I know, I know …”

“Yeah, sure. Good. Then you know that these people who created these germs, these terrorists, they will kill like blinking an eye. Without a thought.” They look at each other for a moment.

“Let’s hope it hasn’t hit Kansas City,” Daria says.

Nadja is standing now, head down, bouncing on her feet. She bends forward, arching her back, looking up to the sky. “Do you think you can make it?” Nadja asks her.

Daria looks at her as she assumes a new pose, bugging out her eyes and extending her tongue, hands twisted and locked behind
her. In the distance there is a siren that rises and falls, then stutters its way through the narrow streets of the inner city.

“I can make it,” she says.

When it’s time she hobbles onto the bus and they ride.

From the atlas, she knows they are crossing Indiana. A land of huge farms and pungent smells from the manure- and pesticide-laden fields that even the filtered air of the bus cannot keep out.

Above the traffic, Daria stares at the horizon. Cornfields extending to infinity. In the distance, kept separate from the highway by a strip of trees planted as a windbreak, the great feedlots process millions of drug-fattened cattle. All to satisfy the maw of America.

Indiana … land of the Indians. Not the same as the Indians who are now calibrating the fuses on their missiles, but ancient peoples who must have lived in this particular place. All replaced now by the unending laser-leveled fields. Here and there are the white traditional symbols of the oppressors, the steepled churches, the blue, white, and yellow troika of crosses that some fanatic has seeded about the landscape. Only in the ditches is naturalness: berries growing rampant, grasses uncontrolled, GMO seeds gone rogue.

There were buffalo here once, she imagines. And young braves on their ponies, proud with paint on their faces. Dancing their histories. Making war or making alliances with adjacent tribes. Now it’s agribusiness as far as the eye can see.

Pigs and Christians. All the uncleanliness you could want. This is the earth in chains that their bus is rushing through. At the intersections, gas malls and chain restaurants with gigantic plastic signage—it all gets too confusing, a blur of fast food and food-to-be through the thick windows that don’t open except in case of an emergency, and she closes her eyes. Falls asleep with a jacket and pillow wedged under her arm, and her forehead pressed cool against the glass.

Sam Watterman wakes with a definite hangover, even after having obeyed to the letter of the law the FBI bar’s cutoff hours. Life, he has learned over the years, is mostly about pain management, and this
morning’s pain is … bearable. Drink plenty of water and don’t mix your liquors. You’re your own best doctor, and with a little training anyone can self-medicate.

Ahead of him, Chamai bounds across the wide strada that runs along the spine of the factory. Every few hundred feet at the intersections the Gen X, Y, and Zs hang out on their breaks. He has never thought of sixty-four as very old. But his age brands him as a Boomer and slowly he has become aware of being one of the few elders allowed on the voyage.

At the circle Chamai accosts him. He is with a quartet of agents. They have all adopted increasingly casual attitudes over the hours. Ties have come adrift. Chamai is cursed with being a Mr. Big and Tall who will never be able buy clothes that fit, and now his shirttail balloons out. In old age, he might look best in sweatpants and a monster Hawaiian shirt. “We’re on a break because they’re really pushing on the pursuit,” he explains.