God Is Dead (3 page)

Pause.

“Don't give me
delicate and complicated.
What am I, some bright-eyed Georgetown undergrad, gonna change the world? It's only delicate and complicated because we make it delicate and complicated.”

Pause.

“What happened to me? You want to know
what happened
to me?”

Pause.

“All right. Let me give you a hypothetical. Pay attention, because there will be a quiz at the end.”

Pause.

“Let's say you're a black kid growing up in the Bronx. Imagine it's the hottest summer you've seen in your eight years, and the war's over and everyone in the neighborhood has lost their job because all the white men have come back from Europe and the Pacific looking for work themselves. And so everyone's packed in on everyone else, every day, in the heat. Then say someone's had enough and they pick up a rock and break a window. Who knows why? Maybe they're anarchists; maybe they're union agitators; maybe they're just bored. For a week after that you smell tear gas every morning when you wake up. A third of the buildings on your block burn to the ground.

“Now imagine your mother, who saw much worse than this where she's from and maybe isn't as worried as she should be, sends you to the store. She sends you with an older boy named Keith who lives in your building. Keith is fourteen and supposed to keep you out of trouble. Except there's nothing but a scorched foundation where the store used to be, so you have to walk sixteen blocks north, all the way to Cab's Grocery. On your way back the milk and oranges are getting heavy and Keith wants to take a shortcut. So you duck down an alley and Keith tells you to climb this chain-link fence and he'll pass you the food and you'll cut through this backyard except you only get halfway up the fence before a cop grabs you by the seat of your pants and pulls you off.

“The cop slams you on the pavement and presses his boot on your neck. You smell dirt and mink oil. Pebbles bite the side of your face. You try to turn your head but the boot presses harder and the cop says,
Just take it easy, boyo.

“A second cop is talking to Keith.
What are you jigs up to? You going to break into this place?
And Keith, who is always getting into fights he can't win because his mouth is a lot tougher than his fists, says
Fuck you.
Then you hear a sound like someone hitting a side of beef with a baseball bat, over and over, and Keith is crying, then screaming, then silent.

“
Jesus Christ,
says the cop whose boot is on your neck.

“You're jerked to your feet and thrown face-first against the fence. The second cop presses against you from behind. His body is trembling. He hooks his fingers through the fence and leans close and whispers in your ear.
Not a word to anyone, you fucking niglet.
His breath is hot and moist on your cheek, and stinks like onions.

“They let you go. You run all the way home, and your mother wants to know what happened, what's wrong, where's Keith, where's the food. But you don't tell. Your father returns from work and asks you the same questions, and you don't tell. A few days later the police come and sit at the kitchen table and drink your mother's coffee and ask the same questions, but their voices are all too terribly familiar, and you don't tell.

“You keep this secret your whole life. You do such a good job of keeping it that after a while it seems like maybe it didn't happen at all, maybe it was a story someone else told you, or maybe just a dream.

“Half a century later, you're flying to Senegal on a diplomatic mission one night, and you can't sleep. You watch a movie. The movie gets you to thinking about how things haven't changed a bit, despite the fact that you're the most powerful black man in the history of the most powerful nation on earth. You haven't thought about Keith for years, but you do now, and it all comes back to you as real as if it happened yesterday—the wet smack of the nightstick on his skull, the smell of oranges crushed on hot pavement. Real. It happened. It was not a dream.

“And then you realize you're the only black person on this plane.”

Pause.

“How would you feel? How would you talk? How would you behave, you silver-spoon master-of-the-universe motherfucker?”

Pause.

“Hypothetically speaking?”

A motorcade of five army jeeps and one late-model Land Rover tore into the refugee camp at noon, kicking up dust and scattering children. Powell watched as the procession ground to a halt in front of the conference tent. Angry-looking men in dirty fatigues spilled from the jeeps, assault rifles in hand. Ismail emerged from the Land Rover, followed by his aide (who wore a clumsy makeshift splint on his right forearm), and finally a tall but crookbacked boy dressed only in tattered shorts and sandals.

The three approached Powell. Ismail motioned to the boy. “Introduce yourself,” he said.

“I am Thomas Mawien,” the boy said in belabored English. He looked at Ismail, then cast his eyes to the ground. “The brother of Sora.”

“I know who you are, son.” Powell hugged the boy, then turned to lead him into the tent.

“You are satisfied, Mr. Powell?” Ismail called after them.

“Just wait here,” Powell said.

Inside was dark and cool. Motes of sand drifted on the air, illuminated by a shaft of sunlight from the open entryway. A doctor stood beside God's cot, adjusting the flow of an IV drip.

“Sora,” Powell said. “Thomas is here.”

God opened his eyes, blinked a few times, coughed weakly.

Powell pulled the doctor aside. “How long will the treatment take?” he asked. “We have to leave as soon as we can. Today.”

“It is not possible,” the doctor told him. “She needs three or four rounds of antibiotics. Much too sick to travel. Maybe in a week or two, with improvement. But right now, no.”

God sat up and struggled to focus on the figure at the foot of the cot, thinking that his eyes, blurred by fever, were misleading him. He took a long look while the boy shifted from foot to foot, unsure what to do.

“You are not Thomas,” he said finally, in Arabic.

“I am,” the boy said without much conviction.

“No. Your face is similar, and you are tall like him. But you're not Thomas.”

The boy wrung his hands. “Please,” he said.

“The men who brought you here. Did they tell you to say you were my brother?”

“Yes.”

“But you're not. You're not Thomas.”

The boy looked toward Powell and the doctor. “No.”

“Did they threaten you? The soldiers?”

“Yes.”

God regarded him for a moment, then said, “Turn around slowly so I can look at you.”

The boy did as he was told. His wrists, ankles, and neck all bore the banded scars left by rawhide straps when they stay tied too tight for too long. His back, twisted by work and malnutrition, was crisscrossed with the rougher raised scars of the whip.

“Where do you come from?” God asked.

“Until this morning I tended goats for a man named Hamid.”

“And before that? Who were you before?”

“I don't know,” the boy said. “I've forgotten.”

Guilt gathered in God's throat and formed a lump there. He realized with sudden certainty that this boy, or any of the people in the camp—the men suddenly alone in their old age, the young women with disappeared husbands and hungry children—were as deserving as Thomas of his apology, would serve just as well as the altar for him to confess his sins of omission and beg forgiveness. God slid from the cot and stooped on his knees before the boy, like a Muslim at prayer. The unfamiliar twinge of tears stung his eyes, and he was about to speak when the boy crouched and put a hand on his shoulder.

“Please,” the boy said, “get on your feet.” He cast frightened glances around the tent, as if expecting Ismail and the soldiers to appear at any moment.

God looked up. “I'm sorry,” he said.

“Please,” the boy said again, tugging urgently at the shoulder of God's dress. “If you show weakness, it only makes them angry.”

Several hours after Powell departed, taking the boy with him and promising to return, God removed the IV from his arm and staggered outside to seek relief from the stale air inside the tent. He gazed out toward the eastern horizon and spotted the first plane, a tiny blemish on the sky. Soon it was joined by a dozen more, all drifting around one another in tight slow circles like a swarm of tsetse flies.

Most of the camp's inhabitants had taken shelter in their lean-tos or under tamarinds to wait out the hottest part of the day, but as news spread of the odd spots in the distance, people began to stir. Mothers looked at the sky as though checking the weather, then roused the children and gathered their belongings as an ominous wall of dust formed in the east and the planes drew nearer, flying now in attack formation.

God crouched on his haunches, pulled the blanket tight around his shoulders, and waited. The Dinka scrambled with mounting urgency. They rushed to the well for a last drink of water and untethered the few goats and donkeys in their possession. One woman lost a sandal in her haste, but rather than stop to remove the other she hobbled as fast as she could, clutching the wrist of her young daughter and pulling her along. Those who were late in rising simply got to their feet and ran, leaving behind everything they owned.

Sunlight glinted off the planes' wingtips. From the wall of dust, trailing slightly behind the planes, God heard the first faint bursts of automatic gunfire. The ground began to tremble minutely.

Time and again the people still in the camp, realizing they were now trapped, called to God in a hundred different dialects. He laughed and cried at once. He had so many names, yet could not answer to any of them.

The planes flashed overhead. They pitched forward and dropped their payloads. God did not look up. He watched the dust storm, where great black horses materialized like wraiths, their coats slick with foam, their nostrils angry and flared. The men astride these horses swung wicked blades and took aim with their rifles. Their faces were hidden in checked scarves. The bombs whistled down, down. The ground shook. God closed his eyes and wished for someone he could pray to.

 

Dani Kitchen drove the usual route home to her mother's, through the overgrown fields that stretched to the horizon on either side of Route 201. The sun rode fat and high even in late afternoon, and the two-lane blacktop in the distance shimmered like spilled gasoline. Tall grass, reeds, and cattails bowed in a mellow breeze, interspersed with strawberry patches and plots of juvenile corn, which was now only waist-high but by the end of August, when she was gone from here and starting school in Chapel Hill, would stand eight or ten feet tall.

For once Dani was not in a hurry, and actually stayed under the speed limit at a leisurely fifty miles per hour. Wind from the open window blew her hair into a tangled mess. A blond swatch lapped at her cheek, then found purchase in the moisture at the corner of her mouth and clung there. Rather than pull the strand out and tuck it behind her ear, Dani laughed and gathered the hair with her tongue, sucked on it, tasting the slight bitterness of shampoo that hadn't quite rinsed out of the ends that morning.

In the backseat of her Grand Am, in a crumpled pile, sat her shiny white graduation cap and gown. Her diploma had fallen to the floor and lay, already forgotten, among the Pepsi cans, an overdue movie rental, crusts of dirt left over from the previous winter.

She passed the Shores' farm, where she picked up meat for her mother twice a month—Carol, the old man, sold steaks and freezer pigs, white cheese and sandwich ham right out of his barn. All slaughtered, cut, cured, and decanted on the premises. He'd been at it since he was a boy, had inherited the farm from his father, and now was in his mid-seventies. Rumor was that he might be selling out to a developer who wanted to turn his pastures into a Wal-Mart. The place smelled like shit and murder, but Dani liked it there, liked Carol's slow, jokey personality, how he sort of was the farm instead of just the guy who ran it. Dani called hello to the cows, honked the car horn at them, but they took no notice of her, just went on with the slow, ponderous business of grazing.

She laughed again and drove on.

With one hand she tapped out a beat on the steering wheel. With the other she reached for the pack of cigarettes in the console between the bucket seats. She lit one and inhaled deeply and without guilt, for Dani was a girl (a woman, she reminded herself, she needed to begin thinking of herself as a woman, a college woman, and perhaps along the same line of thought it was time to consider referring to herself, and asking others to refer to her, by her full name) who believed, deep down where she held her strongest and most intuitive convictions, that nothing bad would ever happen to her. She was smart enough to know that this made her not terribly unlike every other eighteen-year-old who had ever driven too fast or taken up smoking. Still, there it was—she believed in her clear skin, her white teeth, her strong slender legs. The world hadn't yet given her reason to doubt them, and until it did she was invulnerable, and behaved accordingly, and didn't really give it a whole hell of a lot of thought one way or the other.

A week ago, for example, while in the damp and still somewhat awkward clutches of sex, she could feel Ben's shoulders tighten and tremble as he neared his orgasm, and he slowed down and held off and said in her ear, “I want to do it inside you.”

Dani shifted her body underneath him and said, as if she didn't know, “Do what?”

Embarrassed, bashful as always, Ben tucked his chin against his chest. “You know.”

“Yeah,” she said. She lifted his chin with one hand, forcing him to meet her eyes. “But I want to hear you say it.”

“No,” Ben said. “Never mind.”

Touched by the boy's shyness, Dani felt her heart swell with an affection that was more maternal than erotic, and she said, “Oh, Ben, you do whatever you want to, baby.”

And, thus encouraged, he did. Dani's mother would have called this
careless,
a word she often used to describe her daughter's behavior. But Dani didn't worry. She knew things, and she wasn't going to end up like her mother, saddled with a baby and on her own before her eighteenth birthday. Even in the midst of Ben's orgasm, she could feel the muscles inside her working, forcing him out, gently but firmly. When he finished and collapsed on top of her she pushed him off, her lips brushing his forehead, and stood to go to the bathroom, and before she even placed her hand on the toilet paper roll the fluid was running out of her and down the inside of her thigh, turning cold, impotent, harmless—just a little mess to wipe up and be done with.

When she came back she did not lie down, but instead sat on the edge of the bed and folded one leg up underneath her butt. Ben stroked her back with his fingertips. He mentioned something about a bonfire, a party up at the water tower, but Dani wasn't listening; her mind had wandered to thoughts of the coming fall, moving to North Carolina for college, her life beyond and after this place, and she could not think of a single thing here that she would cry for.

And while her girlfriends would have spent the next few days waiting for the worst, hoping for the twinge and flow that would let them know they had gotten away with their carelessness, Dani went about the business of the last week of high school without a moment's worry. She attended marching practice and the senior talent show. She filled out her last will and testament for the
Panther Press,
and got drunk and kissed someone who was not Ben at Matt Bouchard's senior campout. And when her period came she hardly noticed at all.

Dani turned off the pavement onto a fire access road, heading for the first of two stops she would make to cap off this day of ritualized symbolic transition. The gravel road wound along a downward slope toward McGrath Pond, made slightly steeper and more treacherous each year by the erosive flow of spring runoff. At several spots the road turned sharply, weaving between trees and rough-hewn granite boulders, and Dani pressed the brake most of the way down. After half a mile the trees parted and the pond came suddenly into view, its water the color of a propane flame. Modest whitecaps, kicked up by the breeze, dotted the pond's surface. Dani pulled into a turnoff near the public boat landing and put the car in park.

She got out, came around to the back, and unlocked the trunk. It sprang open with a pop, and she removed a plastic grocery bag, heavy with mementos, then closed the trunk again.

To the left of the boat landing, under a stand of slender white birches, was a makeshift and illegal fire pit ringed with blackened rocks. The rocks were piled on one another in a semicircle. In the pit were the remains of a fire from who knew how long ago—a bed of ash, sodden and muddy from the previous night's rain, on top of which lay half-burned sticks of wood, a few scorched beer cans, and the melted ruins of a pair of sneakers. Dani reached into the bag and removed a squeeze-tin of lighter fluid, then upended the bag and watched the bits and pieces of her life up to this point fall into the pit. Without hesitation or malice—without much feeling at all, really, except for the warm and constant sense of anticipation she'd felt all day long—she squirted half the tin onto the photographs and baby shoes and certificates of achievement, struck a match, and tossed it on the pile.

But this wasn't the movies; the match went out before it hit the fluid. Dani struck another. She cupped the delicate flame with one hand, kneeled, and touched the matchhead to the fur of a stuffed panda bear. The lighter fluid caught instantly, and she jumped back as the entire pile went up.

Dani lit a cigarette and watched her things burn, glancing occasionally out on the pond, where two loons swimming alongside one another dove in sync, disappearing seamlessly beneath the water. She was reminded of the time when, as a little kid, she'd seen a man in a speedboat chase a loon around this same pond. For some reason the bird had been unable to fly—perhaps she had a broken wing. But she'd seen the boat coming and ducked under the water, resurfacing a minute or two later fifty yards away. The man went after her again, and again the loon dove. Dani remembered the noise of the engine, how it idled with a predatory grumble as the man waited for the bird to surface, then roared when she came up for air, the sound carrying across the water to where Dani and her mother lay sunbathing. She remembered the glinting diamond of sunlight from the chrome light fixture on the bow of the boat, bearing down again and again on the harried bird. This went on for an hour, with the loon tiring, spending less and less time underwater, moving shorter and shorter distances from the boat before resurfacing, until finally she came up one last time, and the man gunned the outboard, and the bird was too tired to dive again, and that was the end of her.

It was the only time Dani could ever remember crying, as a kid.
Why, Mama?
she'd howled over and over, and her mother, gazing dry-eyed out at the man in his boat, shook her head a little and said,
I don't know, hon. Some men are just that way.
And Dani couldn't understand, still did not understand why her mother didn't shed even one tear for the bird, or for her daughter's grief.

This, though—the willful destruction of the keepsakes of her young life—her mother would shed a tear or two over this, Dani knew. The thought gave her no pleasure; it was something she had to do for herself, and how it might affect anyone else really didn't figure into it. Besides, her mother would never understand that for Dani, this was a joyous act, a sloughing off of things old and worn and useless—her way of giving the future a big welcoming hug.

But something was missing. She wanted to wake up tomorrow completely new and unfettered, and somehow the things she'd set ablaze, most of which were now burned down to embers and ash, weren't enough. So she walked back to the car and took the cap and gown and diploma from the backseat. Again without hesitation, she tossed them on the fire. The cap and gown disintegrated, casting off a tremendous chemical stench. The diploma, in its faux-leather binding, took longer to burn. Dani poked at it with a stick. She knew that her mother would do more than cry over her burning the diploma, would, in fact, curse her daughter for it, having been unable to finish high school herself after getting pregnant with Dani. Her mother considered the diploma an end in itself, while for Dani it was just a means to a greater end—that of college, and all the doors it would open. The piece of paper itself held no real meaning for her, although she did put great stock in symbols and symbolism, signs and premonitions.

This day, for example—this perfect, beautiful day. The bright sunlight and warm breeze, the cows and their lazy grazing, the matched pair of loons—all of it an unmistakable sign of something good. Dani rarely if ever needed cheering up, but she welcomed it all the same.

Just as the diploma burned down to flaky glowing ash, the loons emerged again from the pond's depths. Bobbing among the waves, they shook themselves dry, head to tail, then unfolded their wings and began to skim across the surface of the pond, picking up speed, lifting themselves until just their thin black feet still skittered through the water. They lifted their feet like the landing gear on a jetliner, tucking them into their downy underbellies, then rose steeply and made a wide turn overhead, disappearing over the tree line.

Watching the birds, Dani thought again about just leaving for North Carolina immediately. Why not? Why stick around here, working at the House of Pancakes all summer long, when she could leave right away and be in Chapel Hill, with a new apartment and new friends, well before the fall semester started? It was the sort of impulse, Dani knew, that would give her girlfriends hives, not to mention her mother. Just picking up and going, with only a few hundred dollars and no real plan? To a place she'd never been and where she knew no one? So much uncertainty and risk! Yet where uncertainty and risk gave others pause, they only excited Dani. Besides, were there no jobs in Chapel Hill slinging greasy breakfasts? Were there not people she could love, and who would love her?

It was another of her epiphanies, spurred by a sign: What in the world was keeping her from leaving this place tomorrow?

The answer, of course, was nothing. Not a thing.

And like that, Dani made her decision. So now her second stop, at Bob's Drive-In at the Benton bridge to meet the girls (which was what they were, still—God love them, but they were still just girls) would not be a casual post-commencement gathering, but a good-bye. Maybe Ben would be there too, with some of the guys, pretending to just hang out, playing it cool and casual but hoping to catch a glimpse of her and maybe, if he were lucky, talk to her some, even though he had to know it was over now, really over, with him having another year of high school left, and even if he hadn't had another year in this place it was over anyway, because as much as it saddened Dani to admit it to herself, let alone to Ben, she just didn't love him. Things really were that simple sometimes, despite all that people did and said to complicate matters.

She got into her car and drove back up the access road, spinning gravel under the tires, excited now about her decision to leave even though she didn't want to see Ben and have to tell him; it would be easier, she thought, if he just heard about it tomorrow or the next day from one of her girlfriends and had time to sort it out on his own. That kind of grieving was best done in private, Dani believed, away from friends and family, and especially from the person who caused the hurt. She knew Ben loved her, but she also knew what his love wanted to do to her—make her the wife of a millworker, with five kids and bad hair and nothing she could call her own except the blown-out veins in her legs. A small part of her hated Ben for that. And she knew that his suffering would be less and shorter-lived than her own would be if she gave in to his love, became what he wanted.