As he walked down the rows of cots, perspiration and rot plump in the air, people mistook him for a doctor. “I’m sorry,” he repeated again and again. He remembered the story of the Agence France-Presse journalist who, during the Rwandan atrocities, strode into a trauma center and announced, “Is there anyone here who has been raped and speaks French?” The injured thought he was there to help, and if he hadn’t come to help, then why was he there?
Nalini, age twenty-four: My daughter, Anjali, went to school early. It was Republic Day, and her school was putting on a parade. They do it every year, and she left without breakfast. She was so excited. She would not even take an orange. I was about to scold her, but my husband said, “Nah, leave her be.” She is the sun and moon to him. To the both of us. She met her friends, and the three of them skipped off toward school. I could hear them singing “Jana Gana Mana.” I must have started singing myself, because Ramesh smiled as he ate his jalub, dipping it into his tea, a bad habit he’s had for as long as we’ve been wed. I slapped his hand and returned to boiling the day’s water. That’s when it happened. I lit the stove, and the earth moved. I thought a bomb had gone off. I fell and felt my wrist crack beneath me. The food from the cupboards spilled out, and the windows shattered. I slid on the floor, and Ramesh shouted, “Get out! Get out!” So I ran. Others were running as well, pushing and shoving for the door. The old woman who lives down the hall, I saw her fall in the rush, and she did not rise. Seven of us made it out. We all lived on the first floor. The upper part of our building had caved in. I called out for Ramesh, but Ramesh never answered. I ran toward the school. I could not see anything. It was like running through a cloud. I heard screams and the sounds of buildings still falling. When I reached the school, I could not see it. I saw jumbled shoes outside where the door should have been. Shoes for tiny feet. I thought I saw Anjali’s among them, her black slippers with a single flower stitched on top. But the school was no longer there. The earth moved again, and something struck me on the back of the head, and I woke here.
Nalini took a deep breath and shuddered. Her head was a globe of white cloth, wrapped diagonally across her face, one eye exposed. In the middle of her statement, she closed her eye, and Ted could not tell if she had paused or lost consciousness. She was so skinny. Her skin recited the poetry of her bones. He wanted to tuck the blanket around her to keep her from blowing away. Nurses swept down the aisle, bearing syringes. The ground upon which they walked was mottled and damp with bodily fluids. The tent seemed unfathomably deep, beds extending to the horizon, past the vanishing point. The pages of his notebook warped. The paper swallowed the tip of his pen.
But the truth is, the woman’s name is not Nalini. She didn’t give her name, or else she ignored his question, as if her name were unimportant. All the women to whom Ted has spoken could be Nalini — and in a way, all of them are. He could interview thousands of women, but no one cares about thousands. Even the word itself—thousands—is abstract. Too many zeros to be real. What does it mean, thousands dead, thousands injured? What does it mean to him, to anyone? But if there’s one woman, a mother named Nalini — people can maybe understand that. And so what if Nalini — the woman he calls Nalini — never existed? Does this negate what Ted has written? Does this make her story any less potent?
One person’s misery is not the world’s, but the world’s misery can be one person’s.
The woman Ted called Nalini tugged his hand. “Will you find my daughter?” she asked. “Will you come back tomorrow? Promise me that you’ll return.”
He knew that he might never find her again. As patients recover, find loved ones, die, they disappear into the throng. He will look for her tonight — her head half swathed in gauze, the curve of her nose, the brown of her eyelids — but even if he fails, he will try to keep her alive in the pages of his notebook.
And he said to her, “I promise,” as if keeping promises were the easiest thing in the world.
The uninjured live out in the open. The aftershocks have abated, but no one wants to sleep inside, no matter how sound it may be. Privacy is a quaint notion. Latrines are segregated by sex, and the women have erected a tattered set of curtains around theirs. Men urinate where they please, and it’s not uncommon to see a line of them at a wall, braced against it as if holding it up. The aid camp has a tent to conceal its pit latrine, and everyone dutifully waits his turn outside. The tent flaps lash at the middle, but the breeze of a passing car sometimes spreads them apart, exuding equal parts stench and embarrassment.
Ted knows better than to breathe too deeply anywhere he goes. He carries a roll of toilet paper in his pack and a packet of tissues in his pocket. He’s prepared for anything.
“You look rough around the edges,” Lorraine says. The tips of her oxford shirt are tied in a knot. A clipboard full of crises juts against her hip. Random volunteer workers have begun arriving on scene, and she has her hands full trying to keep them from getting in the way and being where they shouldn’t. Sometimes, she says, she just wants to slap them all.
“It usually takes me three hours just to look mediocre,” Ted says. “A little rough is a blessing.” What does Andy see in him? Grit and stubble. The past two nights with Andy around the fire, they’ve talked, mostly, but when the temperature drops low enough for his skin to prickle, Andy touches him, and it’s an electric shock. The shock lingers as he tries to sleep, and sometimes in the middle of the night, while Piotr and Lorraine and he lie in their cots, Ted listens to them breathe. Lorraine reads with a tiny blue penlight; Piotr reclines with hands behind his head, glasses on his chest. Every now and then, they inhale and exhale all at the same time, an instant of synchronicity, and neither Piotr nor Lorraine notices, but in that moment, they share one body, one pneuma, one purpose.
“Is there something I can do?” he asks Lorraine. He understands why he’s on observer status — this is his first time, he needs to get a feel for disaster work, watch how Lorraine and Piotr operate — but… But what? It’s too easy to shrink, hide behind his notebook, his observer status. That’s the old Ted, the one who got washed away on the Ganges nearly two years ago.
“As a matter of fact,” she says, “you remember the incident with Piotr yesterday? The World Food Programme could use extra help. The military is now sending armed escorts with delivery trucks. We’re not entirely happy about this — people get antsy when they see soldiers.”
Stefan from UNDAC comes up to them. He taps Lorraine’s forearm and kisses her cheeks. His features seem to have been passed down through German aristocracy. He hands her a sheaf of papers, whispers in her ear, then strides off. His khakis seem immune to wrinkles. He walks as if he owns the ground before him.
“He’s got a great ass,” Lorraine says.
Ted coughs.
“Don’t pretend you weren’t looking. You’d think for a guy in his fifties, it’d be saggy, but it’s amazingly firm.”
“Amazingly?”
“Like cantaloupes.”
“I don’t remember reading this in the annual report.”
“This is a high-stress job, and when people work in close proximity — what do you expect? It’s emergency sex. All the aid workers sleep with one another.”
“Even Catholic Charities?”