“Do you need water?” Ted asks.
One man holds up his hands, palms out, and shakes them. His fingers are callused and white at the knuckles, like rings of alabaster. He points at the tank.
“We don’t have concrete. We can’t fix the tank. Rice,” Ted says. “We can bring you rice.” Six huts, Ted notes. Six households. Six food packets. Ted looks at the soldier, hoping that he will translate. But that’s not in his job description. Maybe everyone else is searching for food and water and whatever else they need to survive.
How do they survive here? They are on the very edge of desolation itself: the Great Rann, the unforgiving desert, which, even now, Ted feels caked onto his skin. These people have made peace with the Rann, eked out an existence the earthquake could not decimate. They have retrieved their belongings from the rubble. Already, they have patched cracks in the standing huts with dried patties of cow dung. One is missing its thatch roof, but the hot season is still months away. Bamboo poles mark where a new hut will stand.
“If anyone is injured,” Ted says, “we can transport them.” One man has a long scrape down the length of his arm, but it has already scabbed over. Ted sees bruises, dark inkblots beneath the skin, but no broken limbs, no gaping wounds. Mud hurts, but does not maim; mud injures, but does not kill; mud crushes, but does not obliterate.
“I’ll be back,” Ted says. “I promise.” He sees himself returning with food and water and building materials. He sees the gratitude on their faces, these old men who will remember him, recognize what he is delivering. He makes promises because he wants the pleasure of fulfilling them. You’re not doing it right, he hears Lorraine say. You’re being selfish, John says. But this is all Ted knows how to do. He doesn’t know the name of this place. He doesn’t even know where he is.
Ted hadn’t taken this job in order to impress John, though John had been impressed. You’re actually doing something less evil? Ted had taken the job because — because he wanted a change, he supposes — though anyone could have said the same. One woman he trained with had been the VP for finance at an international bank. Another had dropped out of his anthropology PhD. They were all running away.
But those two knew what they were doing. The woman wanted to work specifically in development, the failed PhD in the preservation of cultural heritages. When someone asked Ted what his focus would be, he answered, “Everything.” This was part of his new life, after all. More willingness to fight. For what? For everything.
Maybe that’s why Lorraine had taken him onto her team. DART members, she said, need to be jacks-of-all-trades. One minute you’re restoring the power grid, the next you’re negotiating food aid. Oh, sure, she and Piotr had their specialties — his was logistics, hers volunteer coordination — but flexibility was more important.
“I don’t have any specialties,” Ted told her.
“You will,” she said.
And why did he choose aid work as his new career, his new life? Oh, that’s right — the sins. According to some Eastern religions, the good acts you perform in this life determine how you will be reborn in your next life. Bad deeds in past life need to be reconciled in your current life. Based on that metric, Ted’s way behind. He hasn’t even begun to atone for the things he’s done in this life. People always claim to have been Napoléon, Genghis Khan, and Cleopatra in past lives, but no one wants to have been the chambermaid, the stable hand, the street whore. No one wants to be the drug rep, the Chelsea boy, the yuppie. But everyone wants to be reborn.
Lodai lies up ahead, an outcropping of concrete homes, or, at least, objects in the shape of homes. Who knows what they are now. As Ted leans forward to look, a jolt shakes him, and he smacks his forehead against the windshield. The car swerves, and from beneath them, there’s a thrumming sound. The soldier curses. He turns the wheel, but the car doesn’t respond. They veer across the road, off it, and toward a shallow ditch, and although Ted knows that he’ll be OK, that the car won’t flip over, seeing the cleft in the ground, his breath hiccups, and he puts his arms out to brace himself. His legs tense.
The car eases into the ditch, pauses, and rolls backward, like it’s rocking Ted to sleep.
The front passenger-side tire is flat. No surprise: it’s almost bald, a flat loop of rubber. The soldier curses in a tone that transcends language. “Is there a spare?” Ted asks. But the trunk is empty, nothing in the indentation where the spare belongs. He wonders if it was sold long ago by its owner, or if the army appropriated it. Not that it matters. He takes the CB from the car and pats the hood, as if thanking it for its service, and when the soldier looks at him oddly, he kicks the flat, because he doesn’t want to look like he’s not angry. But in the catalog of things that have gone wrong in his life, this is minor.
Back about a hundred feet, Ted finds the culprit: a crack in the road. One edge of the blacktop rises three inches higher than the other. The split spans the width of the roadway and into the landscape itself. Is this how much the earth has moved? Three inches along a vertical plane: enough to explode a tire, enough to flatten a house, enough to kill thousands. Such a small distance. An index finger. He’s always imagined earthquakes to be huge things — the ground opens up and swallows people whole, the land cracks like arctic ice, and, in between the floes, one can stare straight into the center of the earth. But it’s a tiny thing. And Ted, himself, is a tiny thing. One tiny thing responds to another.
The road into Lodai serpentines up an incline, a treeless route into a treeless town, as if the land is too dry for anything green. At its base, where the town starts, piles of stones rise. This must be where the residents dump their debris. Scraps of cloth and broken chunks of plastic peek from between the rocks. Wires, twigs. The piles look like cairns, ritualistic.
Ted walks to the sandy center of town. A concrete water tank sits there, half-full. The water is cool on his fingertips, and he dabs a few drops on the back of his neck. Most of the one-story houses are intact. More, actually, than he had expected.
Two children watch from a doorway, a boy and a girl in white pajamas with sleeves that extend to their knuckles. They’re bleary, in that half space after a nap. Farther in the house, he sees a floor mat, upon which ten other people sleep. Everyone escapes the hot part of the day. Only the foolish are up and about — mad dogs and Americans.
He kneels. “Hi,” he says. “I’m here to help.” The children giggle and run away.
The noon sun fills the air with static and silence. Ted runs through the CB channels, a squawk as he switches from one to another. “Hello? Hello?” He doesn’t expect an answer. Lorraine and Piotr have surely forgotten him for now. In a few hours, they may start to worry, but at this moment, no one thinks about him, no one remembers him.
The road ends in a klatch of homes at the top of the hill, along with a pea-green mosque. Turmeric dots speckle the mosque’s side, but on closer inspection, they’re handprints — fingers spread as if climbing up the wall. Just past the mosque, the road he came in on comes into view, a black line bisecting the desert’s body, the occasional vehicle creeping across it like an insect through fur. Maybe CB reception is better here.