Out There: a novel (17 page)

Finally the woman seemed to prepare to whisper in his ear, even as he imagined her directing the assassins with her eyes. She smelled faintly of bergamot, and because Esco had a thing for Earl Grey tea—it cleared the mind and prevented headaches, she said; it was the scent of knowledge—Jefferson took this as a hopeful sign. If only she knew the reason for his journey, he told himself, the bergamot woman might spare him, and he clung to this possibility even as he began to calculate the shuffling steps of five or six men in the circle. It sounded as if they were lining up about ten feet from where he knelt, in perfect firing-squad formation.

There must have been a lot of nonverbal communication going on; no one had said a word, yet suddenly the group shifted into action. Jefferson was forced to his knees by one man as another tied his hands behind his back and yet another began the process of blindfolding. Before completing his task, this last one must have been distracted, leaving the kerchief down around his neck like a collar. This interested Jefferson; he had actually thought a lot about the blindfold theory. If old photographs and some seemingly realistic historical films were anything to go by, blindfolds seemed to be part of the dress code for firing squads. Still, he failed to understand their purpose. Was it so the man being shot would not witness the bullet’s approach? Was it so the murderers did not have to look into the victim’s eyes? RT had not made members of his platoon use blindfolds.

This could be the beginning of the end, kneeling on the hard ground, hands bound tight, able to see death coming. Jefferson began to reckon with the idea, forcing himself to think that he might never meet Gabriel. What if all the things undone were to be left undone?

The men found their places and shuffled their feet. Jefferson knew, but he didn’t know. Was it wrong to assume that their preparations mirrored his own nauseated participation in several makeshift firing squads? He wanted to believe that at least one of those guys did not want to shoot. Though RT had insisted upon a certain brisk efficiency in killing, it had never been quick enough for Jefferson to avoid the sinking feeling. Once he’d realized that RT would spare no one, that the circumstances did not matter, Jefferson’s preference would have been for quick shots to the back of the head, like in old movies about the Nazis or the Khmer Rouge or American gangsters. But despite his insistence on speed, RT never gave up the formality of the firing squad. Old man down on his knees, his goats huddled nearby. Five young men—three or four years older than Jefferson at the time—down on their knees. Always the hands tied at the wrists. Always the uncovered eyes.

“Can’t we get on with it?” he said finally to the woman, who still stood close to him. “I’m impatient for death.” And with this most honest assertion he felt a slight breeze across his face. “If you insist on killing me, an innocent lover of books, then you should be kind enough to do it quickly. Otherwise, let me be on my way.” He paused and considered the truth of his statement. It was entirely true. He was innocent, and as much as it would have surprised Ms. Tolan, he had become quite a bit more than a guy who got A’s on his in-class essays. He had, in fact, become a lover of
One Hundred Years of Solitude
by GGM. And though Jefferson’s passion was concentrated in that one book by that one writer at the moment, the adrenaline in his veins encouraged him to exaggerate. He had become, in these few desperate moments, a young man destined to be a great lover of books. If he survived, he would live to read. Not knowing whether these would be the words that saved his life, or the words that annoyed the woman into moving ahead with a quick slice of his throat, Jefferson spoke again. “There are few things worse than the anxiety preceding death, don’t you agree?”

“Who are you?” the woman asked him again. “And stop trying to play mind games. You’re a dead man.”

And because Jefferson believed her, he turned philosophical even as his blood turned cold. He did not want to die.

“I’d like to quote a man I love from a book that is very important to me.” He didn’t want to sound uppity and use the words
writer
or
novel
. “If these are to be my last words, I’d like them to be important ones. I would also like you to call my grandmother after you shoot me, and tell her what happened.” And then he proceeded to ask for a piece of paper to write down Esco’s name and number. “It’s the humane thing to do,” he said, staring straight into those bergamot eyes. And then, because it felt final, he prepared to recite his favorite excerpt from
One Hundred Years of Solitude
,
the bit about Colonel Aureliano Buendía and his miraculous failure to die.

But his mind was a jumble. What was the line? Why couldn’t he remember it?

So many inexplicable things happened in a life.

All those good people who helped when you were having a rough time. All those near misses. All those misunderstandings and explanations and worries and apologies. All that hurt and healing. All that anger and scowling. All those smiles.

“Are you going to say these last words, or aren’t you? Get on with it,” the woman said, though she too seemed distracted.

He searched through the lists of quotes he held in his mind, so many lines he’d chanted and sung so many times, but the one about Colonel Aureliano Buendía was hidden in the scrubland of his memory. Instead, he found his mind lighting on that last day before he’d returned to the recruitment office and signed the papers. He’d taken a really tough geography class, and he knew that Iraq was part of the Middle East and of course he knew about Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, but he didn’t comprehend the seriousness of it all. Vietnam was a jungle in war movies from many lifetimes ago. And none of these had anything to do with his real life. He knew that terrorists had hijacked planes and flown them into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon when he was a ninth-grader, but that seemed so long ago.

In that midmorning moment outside  Torreón, as Jefferson knelt on the hard earth, he still could not remember that favorite line, that mantra from his metal bunk, but he could see clearly that recruiter’s office, the yellowed walls, the guy’s broad smile across the desk.

Had the words abandoned him in this final moment?

The men made the gun-clicking, foot-shuffling noises he knew so well, the sounds that meant they were both anxious and prepared. Jefferson had a picture of RT in his head the moment before he commanded the shooting of the old man and each of his bleating goats, clenching his jaw as the old man kept trying to explain his life situation in his garbled yet intelligible Arabic-English gobbledygook.

The bergamot woman’s boot pinched Jefferson’s left calf as it rested on the gritty ground, and she told him to say his last prayers to whichever god he called his own, and go ahead with the quote, already, if he must, because he was out of time.

Jefferson thought of Esco, her keen intuition sensing something wrong. And of Nigel, weeping for the loss of both his cousin and his motorbike. This was to be the last scene in his rather short life. It seemed almost too perfect, though, like an absurd portion of GGM’s own brain that hadn’t made the final cut of his novel. Ex-Soldier Traveling to Meet Hero Writer Killed by Angry Men. Wouldn’t this have made a great scene? In that moment, he vowed to the gods of literature that if his life was somehow spared, he would do his best to write a story capturing the absurdity of it all. Or, better yet, to pass the material on to his hero so he could write it. He’d know how to do the story justice.

“On your marks!” shouted the bergamot woman against the nervous whimperings of Remedios the Pup, and Jefferson was thinking how this piece of dialogue would fit nicely into a GGM-style story when the line, the one that had alluded him moments previously, returned to him. Each perfect word of what he thought of as a perfect scene. The one in which Colonel Aureliano Buendía skirts death. And then, the entire quote in all its simple perfection flashed in his mind. A miracle.

Jefferson saw the slow-motion bullet, the one intended by Colonel Buendía to end his own life, as it entered his chest on its miraculously unscathing journey through his body, and exited out his back, failing to kill him. Because time was short, he began reciting his version of Gabriel’s mind without permission from his captors.

Buendía was out of danger!

The bullet did not hurt him!

It went straight through his body and out the other side without touching any vital organs!

A miracle.

Straight through his body and out the other side without touching any vital organs!

Jefferson completed the recitation just as the rifles marked him. There were no goats to worry about in this scene, but he was aware that someone had forgotten after all to pull the blindfold up over his eyes, and so Jefferson stared into the eyes of his killers. They did not want to proceed. He understood their conundrum.

There was a pause, and perhaps because they were trying to make sense of his odd chanting, and because Jefferson was in no mood to wait silently, he repeated the recitation, his eyes closed this time in tribute to his hero, the great writer, the man who really was more to him than he imagined even an angel could have been if she had flown down from the clouds at that moment and rescued him. Jefferson raised his hands over his head and looked to the then cerulean sky and sang.

I said, the bullet did not hurt him!

A miracle.

Straight through his body and out the other side without touching any vital organs!

The caliber of his chanting in that moment, his voice somehow rounder and more committed than usual, surprised him.

But nothing happened with the guns and their bullets. He didn’t know why. If he had been the old man with the goats, he’d have bled dry by this time, all pain erased. He had lost track of the bergamot woman, but it was clear that her boot was no longer digging into his left calf. He imagined she was smart enough to have moved out of harm’s way.

But then his mind shifted and he began to believe, again, that life was possible.

Buendía was out of danger!  Out of danger.  A miracle.

He kept his eyes shut tight, and tried to eliminate from his mind all thoughts of impending execution. The chanting, he now felt, had brought him into ethereal contact with GGM and all he had ever intended in his novel. It was as if Jefferson had become part of the fictional Buendía household, sitting there in the kitchen as Colonel Aureliano Buendía, returning from many years of war, shared a meal with his mother, Úrsula Iguarán. As he sat at their table, Jefferson observed the tired profile of that former soldier, the one who was said to be taller than when he had left, paler and bonier, and who, according to his mother, showed the first symptoms of resistance to nostalgia. The colonel turned to Jefferson and tipped his heavy head ever so slightly in what Jefferson took as an acknowledgment of all his pain and loss and sin. It was only a moment, and nothing but a daydream, but it was also real, requiring him to gasp at the sharp air around him.

But now the bergamot woman was yelling—
halt! halt! halt! no shot! no shot
!—and running between Jefferson and the rifles. In a simplified Spanish he now understood, she told the men to put down their weapons, move back and give her some space, put down their goddamn weapons! She sent them away to sit under the shade of a large rock, explaining that she needed time to think. And then she came up beside Jefferson and asked in a gruff whisper if he was serious. Was he shitting her? Was he really on his way to meet Gabriel García Márquez? Gabo?

“Of course,” said Jefferson. “Why would I lie about something like that?”

“You’d be surprised,” she said, but the lilt in her voice told him he had made a connection with her. The shift was barometric; like a summer thunderstorm that’s blown over, the murderous energy was now gone. As surely as he had understood that they would execute him, Jefferson now knew that his life would be spared, that this was one more in the long string of near misses from which he had emerged unharmed. He squeezed his hands together and acknowledged the gift with a broad smile and a kick of his sneaker against the hard earth.

The bergamot woman shook as she untied his wrists and sat down on the ground next to Jefferson, a sudden peer. Even though he could feel the closeness of her body, her spirit was nostalgic and faraway. All breezes ceased in that moment, and from somewhere nearby Remedios loped up to him, whining and licking his hands.

“I’d forgotten about that part,” she said finally. “What a hero, that Colonel Aureliano Buendía, no? What a man!” And she shook her head even as a tear formed in the corner of her eye, a tear that looked quite like those Jefferson remembered Ms. Tolan shedding on a number of occasions in the classroom at Santa Fe High. And then, as if from a deep reservoir, she looked off toward one of those giant stones, the ones that had mesmerized him in the first place, and began speaking in a singsong fashion not unlike Jefferson’s own chanting.

“
The air was so full of wetness, the fishes danced around in the courtyard and in and out the window
Can you imagine it?” she continued to him, but also to no one in particular.  Jefferson couldn’t say he remembered that line though he loved the idea of it, and wondered if she too had taken liberties with the famous words.  “If only… The air could be so full of wetness that…
fish could dance in the courtyard
! Wouldn’t that be lovely. Oh, if only it would rain,” she said, looking to the sky as if the drought was to blame for all her present ills.