JON MALLORY LAY CURLED up on the hard earth, wrapped in a tattered cloth blanket, breathing the scents of pepper trees and burning wood smoke. He was sheltered in a cave-like opening on the hillside. A thick growth of trees blocked most of the sky. He gazed at the light from Sandra Oku’s candles in the chinks of the mud walls until the candles went out. Heard a whispering and realized it was her. Kneeling in the entranceway. Saying a prayer.
Later, it felt much cooler and he could not sleep. The groundnut stew had been delicious and should have made him sleepy, but it didn’t. Sandra Oku had talked with Jon some more after dinner, and all night he sorted through what she had told him—about Paul and Kip and what was coming, the “ill wind” and “the October project.” Charlie had told her that Paul had been killed and had informed her that Jon would be coming soon to “be a witness.” But she was reluctant to tell him more. To speculate on where Charlie might be now.
His skin still felt cold from the river water, and his thoughts raced much of the night. For a while, he thought about Melanie Cross, and the elusive pleasures of being with her. He wondered what she had written in her blog the night before. It was late afternoon now in Washington. She was getting off work. He listened to the regular splash of the river water, the stirring of night creatures in the brush, the calls of birds and monkeys, the human sounds from the lean-tos and mud shacks: music, voices, distant moaning, snoring. The sounds of life, after dark. Jon Mallory stared into the trees, which dimly glowed with the moonlight, remembering how he had loved to look at the stars as a kid, way up above the tops of the oak trees on Marianna Drive, marveling at how big everything was. Remembering his brother, his father, his mother. For a while, safe.
HE WAS AWAKENED by the sun—a sharp glare through the scrub bush and banana leaves. He turned over in the dirt and closed his eyes. The blanket was wet with dew. When he opened his eyes again, he sensed the presence of someone else. A wide-shouldered, shirtless man was standing above him, barefoot, on the rise.
“Come on now to breakfast,” he said, and turned.
Kip.
Jon sat up, blinking. Cool angles of shadow and light gave the trees and shanties of Larkin Farm a fresh, innocent look. He pulled on the straw hat, went around a clump of bushes to urinate, then walked toward the space where Sandra Oku lived. She was cooking benne cakes on the iron grill, moving with an easy grace. She wore a rust-colored dress and a matching scarf on her head. Kip stood beside her. The boy sat on a rock with a plate of food.
“Good morning.”
“Did you sleep?” she said.
“I’ve done better.”
“You met Kip.”
“Yeah.” Mallory turned. Kip was watching him. A serious-looking man in his late thirties, maybe younger, wearing wrinkled dirt-colored shorts. A man who’d done lots of manual labor, Jon guessed, or else put in hours lifting weights. His face was strong and boyish, almost child-like except for the frown lines around his eyes and on his forehead.
“What’s the plan for this morning?”
“We have a journey,” Kip said. “We leave in a few minutes.”
“Here.” Sandra Oku handed him a warm plate of food. “Eat first,” she said.
“Where?” he asked, taking the plate.
“We drive twenty-three kilometers to a work site,” Kip said. “If work is available, we stay there. Work until five or six. If not, we come back.”
Kip was still watching him. It made Jon uneasy.
They ate the benne cakes and bread with jam and butter and beans and drank warm Diet Pepsi from twelve-ounce cans, gazing out at the misty countryside beyond the shanties, not speaking for a long time. The air tasted of breakfast rolls and wood smoke. In the distance, he saw, spouts of rain slanted over the jungle.
“We’re going to fix you up now,” Kip said, once he finished.
“Fix me up? …”
“Yes. Then we go.”
For the first time, Kip seemed about to smile. Like the woman, he struck Jon as someone stripped of artifice, with an instinctive understanding of the value of time, a quality most people didn’t have. He reminded Jon in that way of his brother. And his father.
“Before you finish your soda, take this,” Sandra Oku said. She handed both men pills. Jon ingested his with the last of his drink.
Kip led him down the trail, then, to a small clearing, where they sat on rocks. He held an oval tin in his hand—something Sandra Oku had taken from the refrigerator—and an old, oversized white shirt. “Sit still,” he said. He opened the tin; inside was a circle of dark brown make-up. Kip swiped the forefinger and middle finger of his left hand through the make-up, scooped it out, and touched it to Jon’s face. It was cool and smelled like shoe polish.
“What are you doing?”
Kip said nothing. His brow was creased with concentration. Over the next several minutes, he applied the paint to Jon’s face with a slow and even hand, stepping back several times to study his work, as an artist might with a painting.
“Okay,” he said when he finished. There was no mirror, only the expression on Kip’s face. “Now, wear this,” he said. He handed Mallory what he’d been carrying: a dirty old white long-sleeved shirt. “We can go now.”
Jon pulled on the shirt and hat and followed him along the path to another clearing, where a vehicle was partially covered by a sheet of black plastic, the kind used to ferment cocoa beans on the cocoa farms. Next to it were four other, older vehicles, one of them without tires. Kip yanked off the tarp, revealing a two-seat military Jeep. A CJ-3B, probably from the 1970s. Kip climbed in, started the engine. Jon got in the passenger seat. The whole vehicle rattled as they drove away into the misty morning, west toward new hills.
The roads were dirt and gravel, as they had been to the east. But the land soon turned to jungle, the leaves and vines glistening with dew. As the sun rose higher, the air felt dry, and sometimes the breeze carried a stale stench of standing water. Kip drove a little too fast at times, the Jeep bouncing on the uneven terrain. He took his foot off the accelerator each time he started to speak.
“I grew up in Buttata,” he said. “It’s a lot like this.” And then he told Jon the story about the first time he had gone hunting. Told him how, as a boy of seven, he had shot a deer through the chest with a wooden arrow and the men who were with him had congratulated him. But the deer was still alive when they reached it, its legs struggling to stand, the arrow all the way through its upper torso. The animal had raised its head and looked at him as the men stood beside it, grinning; and for days afterward, Kip Nagame wanted nothing more than for that deer to come back to life. The feeling haunted him, he said, for days and nights. He had gone hunting again, once, twice, dozens, and eventually hundreds of times. That was how a boy became a man, the elders had said; it was what everyone did. “But they were wrong,” Kip said, “it was really something else: It was the way we lost our feelings. It was how we began to arrive in darkness. I knew that, even then. But I didn’t know how to say it.”
“All of this is very simple,” he added a moment later, suddenly talking about something else. “What you see, remember. Take photographs in your head. Keep them. Okay? Once we get there, we don’t speak to one another. We aren’t seen with each other or even look at each other. Okay?”
“Why?”
“You’ll see.”
“Okay,” John said. “But tell me how this worked. How did you get inside?”
“Paul,” he said. “Paul got me inside. I worked for the central planning office, in Nyamejye. I helped facilitate government land deals. Seizing of properties. Re-sales and leases. They’re being purchased on a ‘predication’ basis now, all over the country. Big money in it.”
“ ‘Predication.’ ”
“Yes.”
“By whom?”
“Mostly by foreign companies. Some of which didn’t exist a few months ago. They sell them to Western investors, or in some cases Chinese investors, for a premium, with a guarantee that the sites will be vacant once they assume ownership. Some represent wealthy countries that are short on arable land. Some of them are so-called charitable foundations. That’s the ‘predication arrangement.’ It’s just the term they’re using. It means nothing. Soft words to mask harsh action. Where we’re going has all been recently purchased. The contractors will move in within a few weeks.
“I lived in the city,” he went on, his eyes watching the road. “I rented a nice apartment. But every day was a risk. I walked away to help Sandra. I’m just a witness now. To them, I mean. Nothing else, not even a human being. Just a witness.”
The road changed back from gravel to dirt, and for a while the vegetation gave way to scrub fields. Red hills and rocky bluffs appeared in the distance. They passed long, tin-roofed farm houses and seemingly abandoned shambas, family farms. For a while, Jon noticed small clusters of white rocks and shells in a bleached, dry riverbed alongside the road, although as he kept looking he began to see what they really were: vertebrae and hollow-eyed skulls, stacked two or three feet high in places. Kip kept his eyes on the road, as if he didn’t notice.
“Sandra Oku said there were three witnesses,” Jon said.
“Three that we know of.”
“Paul was one. You’re one.”
“Yes.”
“Who’s the third?”
“A woman called Anna Vostrak,” he said. “A scientist, who worked on this project.”
“ ‘Project.’ ”
“The flu. She used to work for the government. Your government. Your brother knows her very well.” Kip turned his eyes to Jon for a moment, looking him up and down. His face and bare chest glistened with a trace of sweat. “The story is what you see, though. That’s all. That’s what you need to tell. As I say, it’s very simple. Don’t lose sight of that.”
What you need to tell. Jon Mallory stared at the passing landscape. He saw a dark patch in the distance, what might have been cloud shadow or forest. The story is what you see. This was his brother talking to him, Jon realized. Talking through Kip. What you see. As they came closer, the dark patch became a dense stand of trees, which gradually engulfed the narrowing road. But Kip downshifted and he kept driving, more slowly. He stopped in front of a rusted iron gate barrier; Jon watched him swipe a metallic card across a sensor, causing the gate to open inward. On the other side, the road twisted through another tunnel of trees, ending at a basketball-court-sized dirt clearing—a parking lot, with dozens of old cars and pick-up trucks.
“This is the work site?”
“This is where we report. They take us from here to wherever we are needed,” Kip said, in his matter-of-fact way. “There are three sites right now. They may keep us until this evening, they may just want us a few hours. You’ll need your badge. When you’re done, return to the Jeep. Wait for me or I’ll wait for you. And from the moment we get out of this vehicle, we’re no longer together, okay? Don’t speak to me, don’t look at me.”
“Aren’t the workers witnesses, too?”
“Temporarily,” he said, lowering his voice. “This job site is only good for another day or two. There are no witnesses after that. The ones we see today: Four days ago they were just like us, doing the same work. Remember that.”
“How do you mean?”
“You’ll understand when you see it,” he said. “And remember this: People get shot for talking. Or for paying too much attention. Occasionally, they get shot for no reason at all. Get this out there, to the people who can do something about it.”
Kip dropped the keys on the floor mat and stepped out. He began walking toward a cinderblock building at the end of the parking lot, shirtless and barefoot, seeming assured and cautious at the same time. The air was warm, buzzing with gnats and mosquitoes and blue flies. Jon followed at a distance, joining the loose queue of men waiting to enter, his heart beating faster as he tried to blend in, surprised that no one seemed to look at him, or at anyone else.
Dozens of them pushed toward the three turnstiles that allowed entrance. The cinderblock was recently painted white and shone with the morning sun. The men shuffled, keeping their eyes down, or looking at the country or up at the sky. Never at one another. They were in their twenties and thirties, some older, wearing stained T-shirts and trousers with rope belts. Most were barefoot. Jon smelled their dirty hair and soiled clothes as he moved with them. When it was his turn, he swiped his badge and the turnstile gave. Two guards watched as the men filed in, M14 semi-automatic rifles strapped to their shoulders. Jon stepped into the crowded building—a holding pen of some sort—smelling the stink of dirty bodies. Standing there in the dark room, he started noticing things, without trying to: that many of the men were coughing, but no one spoke; and that a few of the men were actually women. Everyone shuffled slowly forward, through an X-ray scanner and toward another station, the base of a dirt road, where they waited to board pick-up trucks to the work sites.
As they passed out of the concrete building, the workers were each handed a cloth face mask, thin rubber gloves, paper towels, and a pill capsule. Jon climbed into the back of a pick-up with seven other men. Kip was already gone, two trucks ahead of him.
Several of the men tore off pieces of paper towel, crumpled them into wads, and stuffed the paper into their nostrils. The trip to the work site took another ten minutes or so, over a rocky hill trail. Jon watched the scenery, pretending not to notice things—the man coughing with a deep rattle in his lungs, or the skinny boy-man on the floor who held his arms against himself and shivered incessantly even though the air was warm now. The road climbed to a rise and then twisted downhill into a beautiful valley, where a wide-banked river wound among the maize fields.
It was as they approached the water that he began to understand what they were here to do and a shiver of revulsion raced up and down his back. God, no! This was why they had been handed the masks, and the gloves. Why some of them had shoved wads of paper towel into their nostrils. The gently sloping hillside across the water was covered with piles of dark-colored bundles. Trash bags, he had thought at first, but coming closer, Jon began to notice the body parts—awkwardly splayed arms and legs—and the picture came into focus. Piles of bodies, most of them unclothed, many of them bloated.
Jon looked back, behind them. To the east, giant sheets of mosquito netting had been draped over tall bamboo poles to form what resembled a circus tent. At the far end of the tent, a bulldozer was lifting and unloading bodies into fresh piles, and the workers were gathering them, dragging and carrying them, two men to a body, to the backs of delivery trucks. The delivery trucks, presumably, were taking them to a burial ground or crematorium.
Jon froze. He saw Kip for an instant among them, in the crush of men by the tent, shuffling forward, his shoulders glistening with sweat. Then he couldn’t see him anymore. Four days ago they were just like us, doing the same work. Remember that. Dozens of vultures circled the tent: that was the purpose of the netting. Of course.
As the men moved along the road, they were divided by the military guards, steered—somewhat randomly, it seemed—either toward the tent and the burial grounds or else to a wooden plank bridge across the river. Jon lowered his head and forced himself to move. He fell in with a group of men who were directed to cross the river, over the plank bridge to a dirt road. The water was shallow and clean, reflecting the blue of the sky and the bright, billowy morning clouds. Loudspeakers had been set up at intervals along the river and played a crude, tinny-sounding reggae music. At several points in the distance, he noticed, the water was clogged with naked or half-naked corpses.
Jon held his breath as he walked alongside the river with the others, but the putrid smell was there whether he breathed it or not. Another shiver of revulsion raced through him. In all directions, it was the same. So he kept his gaze lowered, staring at the dirt and trying to just move forward, a step at a time. But suddenly he felt overwhelmed. His legs buckled, he fell to his knees, and he threw up. And momentarily blacked out. When he stood, he expected to see a guard watching him, gun raised. But no one even seemed to notice.
The men were divided again. Some were marched along the river to a clearing, where, working in twos, they loaded bodies into the backs of delivery trucks—a bakery van, old postal trucks—hoisting the men and women and children until they were piled five or six high. The other group was led to a row of five pick-ups, idling on the red hard-dirt road, and driven to the top of the hill. There was a way to do this, Jon thought as he sat in the back of another pick-up, tasting the stew from the night before. He began to concentrate on staying numb, trying not to think about what was in front of him, on just doing the physical work that he was asked to do. But he was angry, too. Why hadn’t Kip told him about this? Why had his brother sent him to see this?
The pick-up climbed the hill, following the bodies. Farther east, bulldozers and earthmovers filled a long trough with what the trucks had delivered. Burial grounds.
His detail was different. He was taken to the top of the hillside, in the bed of a pick-up with seven other men, none of whom acknowledged one another. One of them had vomit on his shirt, another could not seem to catch his breath. At the top, they went to work pulling cargo from the delivery trucks and laying the bodies out on a rocky outcrop—belly-down, in rows of five, spreading their limbs so that they would be easy prey. Then they returned to the trucks and waited for the birds to sail in from the trees.
At first, it was hard not to watch: the immense wings kiting to the ground; the loping steps; five or six enormous birds covering a corpse at once, perching on its back, their crook-necked pecking, the squabbling for pieces, their heads turning red with blood. The bodies seemed to jerk up and down as if they were still alive. Within minutes, ribs appeared, the beginning of a skull, a column of vertebrae.
When the birds at last lost interest and moved to another corpse, or returned to the trees, the workers broke apart the rest of the body with hammers and tossed the pieces to the vultures to finish.
That was his job—the work that was required, the business that these men were willing to do, presumably because of the rewards they would receive at the end of the day. Jon willed himself to do it because there was no other choice. In the monotonous, mindless rhythm of his labor, he occasionally saw clearly how this had been worked out. There was too much death here even for birds of prey, so the burials had been split: the sky burials that fed the vultures; the burials underground, in pits deep enough to keep predators from digging up the earth; and perhaps others by fire.
This was the work that Kip had taken him to witness, and that was his real job today: to be a witness. It was necessary work: Disposing of the victims of the flu, so that something else could take their place. It was all very simple, just as Kip had said.