All Our Names (8 page)

I went to campus daily, to see him but also simply to breathe easier, to walk, sit, and read without fear. I knew that this wouldn’t be true for much longer; the noose cast over the city would find its way up the hill, regardless of how many ministers’ children were at the university. I’m sure Isaac knew that, too, and why, in the days following the headlines, the number of students who gathered around him began to grow rapidly. The police who patrolled the campus had taken note of our numbers and begun to linger around the edge of our group. They looked nervous, suspicious as they circled us with their batons slung over their backs. Someone from inside our circle noted out loud for all to hear, including the guards standing near us: “There is nothing more restless than men in power.”

Our gathering was broken up on a Friday afternoon at the start of April, after all the classes had ended. Our numbers that
Friday were no larger than they had been the week before: we were twenty or thirty at most. The only difference was that we huddled closer together. When four campus guards in their shabby blue uniforms, wielding their worn wooden nightsticks, surrounded us, more than a minute must have passed before any of us thought to run. We felt safe the closer we were to one another, and each of us was reluctant to give that up.

The guards waited until they were certain they had our attention before they began to swing. To their credit, they aimed for the padded parts of our bodies, and all the women who were with us were left alone. Imagine four angry mothers trying to paddle a classroom of running children and you have a sense of what that afternoon looked like. We ran, but often enough circled back to pick up a book that had been left on the grass, or to grab someone’s arm to lead him away while a guard chased after him, swinging mildly at his back.

The only one among us who didn’t run was Isaac. When I looked for him, he was just standing up, his arms at his sides so his entire body was fully exposed. A few minutes passed before one of the guards noticed him. He was the perfect image of defiance, with his arms folded over his chest and his legs slightly spread apart. They’re going to bash his head in, I thought. Seconds later came the crack of wood meeting bone.

The guards left Isaac where he fell. When I came back, ten minutes later, he was already gone. I walked to the tree where I had last seen him and searched the grass for proof that he had been there—an impression of a body pressed into the grass, a few flecks of blood—but there was nothing. I waited for one hour, and then two, knowing he wouldn’t return, but hoping that perhaps he
might see me and know that this time I hadn’t abandoned him. I had tried my best to stand ground; failing that, I became a one-man vigil.

I waited each night for Isaac to knock on my window; I would have taken him in without hesitation, but I was afraid as well that he would ask. Every day, new checkpoints were erected in the city, and within days it was impossible to penetrate the cluster of shacks that ringed our neighborhood and the two surrounding it without showing your official ID. Every coming and going, except those through obscure back routes that wound through half-burnt piles of trash and open latrine pits, eventually had a checkpoint where young men logged into notebooks the names and occupations of everyone who passed. No bureaucracy in the country until then had ever worked properly. Years could be lost in search of a birth certificate, driver’s license, or passport. It was easy to be invisible in a city that had clearly stretched its limits and was bursting at its seams. The daily records of names, entries, and departures signaled the end of that.

I assumed Isaac had chosen to keep his distance. I imagined that, after recovering on a bed in a stranger’s apartment, he had walked to our neighborhood and taken note of the checkpoints and the blue-and-gray fatigues of the presidential guard. Then he would turn his head in the other direction, to hide the bruises that covered his face, and walk farther and farther north, past the last of the slums, until he reached a corner of the city that was barely inhabited and that until a few years earlier had been a village of a dozen thatch-roofed huts. If I wanted to believe that, then I could also just as easily imagine Isaac walking until he had
abandoned the city altogether, stopping after he had traveled well beyond the reach of the president’s powers, to a village that had been touched slightly by the British and not at all by the new government. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit this was exactly what I hoped Isaac had done, as much for his sake as mine. Each day I didn’t hear from him, I was more convinced he was lost to me. I didn’t have the heart or courage to imagine him in prison, much less dead; I thought of him simply as lost, one of the millions across the world who one day vanished and could therefore rise again.

When I returned to campus, after a week, it was obvious that the days of banners, posters, and speeches were over. I knew, as soon as I passed through the front gates of the university and saw at least a hundred students sitting shoulder to shoulder, back to back, on the same grounds where Isaac and I had often sat, that the only thing left of the campus I had known was the buildings. The students had conquered that piece of land, and their huddled mass was proof of the lengths to which they were willing to go to defend it. Something was smoldering along the edges of the circle, but it was impossible to tell what had been burned from my angle; there were too many soldiers and police for me to take in the entire scene. The best thing for me was to turn around and exit through the front gates; this was not my fight and not why I had come here. Had I left, though, I could never have confirmed the suspicion I had had from the moment I entered the campus that somewhere in that crowd, not on the edges but certainly in the very center, I’d find Isaac, smiling, looking happier than I had ever seen him before.

I didn’t know how long Isaac and I could continue to sleep together while barely speaking. Our silence had begun as the easiest way to avoid any further damage, and had turned into a source of pain in itself. If I asked Isaac how his day had been, he never responded with more than a six-word answer: “It was fine,” “It was nothing special,” “I read most of the day.” I filled in some of the empty spaces with trivial stories about my day—the gas-station attendant who took fifteen minutes to fill my tank, the ongoing feud between Denise and David in the office—when what I really wanted was to ask him, “What are you thinking? What goes through your mind when I show up at your apartment each evening?” I was too afraid of the answer to do that. Isaac was too kind to say anything cruel, but he wasn’t above remaining silent, and so I avoided the short but difficult questions I needed answers to. I saw our cowardice and didn’t know how to make it stop.

I did my best to avoid David at work: he would see the darkening half-circles under my eyes and without any effort extract a confession from me. I arrived at work later than normal, when I knew he was locked in his office, and left early in the afternoon for what I claimed to be home visits. I drove along the outskirts of
our town, close to where Isaac lived, and where many of my clients did as well. I parked near churches and playgrounds and slept with the windows rolled up and doors locked. I managed to keep that going for a week before David left a note on my desk that said, “I see you,” with an arrow pointing to his office. Sharon and Denise had already left for the day, and normally those were my favorite hours in the office. David would emerge from the back and, left to ourselves, we’d roll two chairs into the middle of the office and run through the increasingly diminishing parts of our lives that had nothing to do with work. David had come to our town for college from an even smaller town at the very southern tip of the state and, unlike most who moved here, never left. We bonded over our entrapment.

“This was the biggest city I had ever been in,” he had told me. “I was afraid of coming here: all those people, and hardly any cows. I didn’t think I would ever get used to it. And then I was afraid of what would happen to me if I left.” That was eighteen years ago. Since then, David had bought a house near the university. Every year, he made it a touch nicer. He stripped and repainted the exterior, added a large brass handle to the front door, new railings on the porch, and, finally, a hedge fence around what had been a barren front yard. Such attentions by a middle-aged single man didn’t go unnoticed. I knew the rumors, and David did as well. We joked occasionally about getting married.

“My mother would be happy,” I said.

“Mine would probably die from a heart attack. The relief would be too much for her.”

“I’d have to quit my job.”

David shook his head.

“No, no, no,” he said. “You can keep the job. That way we don’t have to talk to each other at home, like a real married couple.”

When I walked into David’s office, he was hanging up the
phone. In his college photos, he was skinny to the point of looking malnourished. The job had filled him in. Since he became the director, he rarely had to leave the office anymore. “I get fatter every day I come in here,” he said, and now he barely fit comfortably behind his desk, all his girth gathered around his midsection like an inner tube that I imagined him someday slipping out of.

“You wanted to see me,” I said.

He shrugged his shoulders. “What gave you that impression?”

I took the note he had taped to my desk and slapped it onto my forehead.

“Just a hunch,” I said.

He scratched his head. Looked up at the ceiling.

“I remember now,” he said. “I wanted to ask you if you were ever going to come back to work.”

“I’m here every day,” I said.

He looked down at his tie.

“I saw you sleeping in your car yesterday afternoon. You didn’t notice I was in my car when you left the office, so I followed you. I thought you were going to see your Dickens, but instead you just pulled onto the side of the road and fell asleep. I stayed parked behind you for over an hour. I was worried someone would rob you. That’s not the neighborhood for someone like you to fall asleep in.”

I was too ashamed to be angry. I was on the verge of apologizing, and once I did I imagined I would confess the entire story of my relationship with Isaac. I just had one question to ask him before doing so:

“Why did you follow me?”

“I told you,” he said.

“No. You said you thought I was going to see my Dickens. But that doesn’t explain why you followed me.”

He finally looked up. I had caught him in something better than a lie.

“Why I would follow you?”

He repeated the question, although this time he was posing it only to himself. I saw a smirk pass over his face as he tried to answer it.

“Why would I follow you? You of all people, Helen, should be able to guess an answer to that.”

David and I had that conversation on a Friday. Before leaving, I told him that I would try not to disappear from the office again. He kissed me goodbye on the forehead.

“Don’t try too hard,” he said.

I didn’t see Isaac that evening or over the weekend. On Monday, I came into the office early and spent four hours on the phone, checking in on old clients, and the next three hours writing reports on the conversations I’d just had. I left the office an hour early. Before doing so, I knocked on David’s door.

“Just in case you have any ideas in your head,” I told him, “I’m leaving early. I’m going to go have a talk with Mr. Dickens, if you want to follow me.”

“That sounds better than watching you sleep in your car,” he said.

I had a list of ultimatums and rules for Isaac, only one of which really mattered: we had to talk to each other and not just about small, petty things but a real conversation with depth and insight. Before I rang the doorbell, I told myself I was going to leave if we didn’t say something important. I rang the bell twice. I waited for several minutes before being convinced he wasn’t home. The same was true the next day. It took me one more day
to start worrying that he would never return. If that was true, as long as he wasn’t dead or seriously injured, then I also thought that maybe for once fate was doing me a favor.

I rarely called Isaac before coming over. I had my own key to the apartment in case he ever locked himself out, but I had never used it. When I arrived on Wednesday, it was a few minutes after 6 p.m. The streetlights had already come on. I didn’t expect Isaac to answer when I knocked—I knew he wasn’t home—but I did so anyway, out of a sense of decorum, because even if you had keys it was still rude just to walk into someone’s home. He didn’t answer, and I heard nothing when I pressed my ear to the door. I took the spare keys and pretended to struggle with the lock.

I followed the same routine after I entered. I couldn’t shake the idea that maybe Isaac was watching me from a corner to test my loyalty to the pattern we’d created. I poured myself a glass of water and drank it while standing in the kitchen. I moved to the bedroom, and though Isaac was gone, I still undressed, crawled into the bed, and quickly pulled the sheets over me. I had spent hours in that bed but had never slept in it. Once or twice I’d slipped into a semi–dream state, but without ever forgetting where I was or that Isaac was lying next to me. When completely exhausted, I’d fought off sleep by thinking of things to worry about. I’d imagine myself pregnant. I’d think of what would happen if someone I knew drove by and saw my car parked outside. I’d think, What if there was a fire in the building right now and I had to run out with hardly any clothes on? If anything kept me awake, it was the silly delight I took in imagining all the different ways my life, as I knew it, might crumble.

It was glorious lying in Isaac’s bed alone. The sheets smelled faintly like the baby oil he slathered on himself after each shower. I lay on my stomach, my arms outstretched, my finger caressing the carpet just a few inches beneath them. I wished it were always
like this. Isaac was so much easier to be with when only the ghost of him was around, and I remember thinking that if he were dead or never came back I’d probably learn to care for him more than if he were to walk through that door right then and never leave. I was tired. For two weeks I hadn’t slept more than five hours a night. I happily closed my eyes and slept.