“The army. They see everything and do nothing. Soldiers come by, poke in their heads, and move on. They wait so that they can loot this place themselves. If it weren’t for Karsan, I would have starved to death.”
Ted imagines Prasant’s corpse propped against the doorway, withered in the sun. A guardian even after death.
“Prasant, this place is unstable. If there’s another strong aftershock, it could come down on your head. It’s not worth your life.”
“The food you brought,” he says. “It will keep me.”
“What about Karsan?”
“Where can he go? He is my son now,” Prasant says, and Karsan, as if understanding, smiles.
And Ted remembers, once again, the fair: burning machine grease and boiled hot dogs and the flattened grass underfoot. He remembers his father pulling him aside after he had filled up on funnel cakes and boardwalk fries, how he felt as though he himself had been deep-fried. He remembers how night had just fallen, and the lights on the rides came on, the bulbs streaking the sky like fireworks. His mother stood against a metal fence, smoothing out her dress, and his father bent to one knee. “There’s something we’d like to tell you,” he said. Ted was old enough to know that something important was happening, but not old enough to guess what it could have been. “Your mother and I, we love you very much,” his father said, “and we will always love you. We love you enough so’s to not keep secrets from you, and we hope that you won’t keep secrets from us.” His father looked at his mother, who nodded, and Ted felt the oil from the funnel cake creep into his esophagus, burning its way up. “We’ve both decided that you’re old enough now to understand,” his father continued, “and you deserve to know.” His father grasped his hands, as if to hold him in place. “You’re adopted,” he said.
His mother chimed in, “We love you, and we’ll always be your parents, no matter what,” and his father nodded, and Ted knew enough to hug them both, and afterward, he pointed to the Ferris wheel, the unblinking, neon eye, and said, “I want to go.” Ted endured the slow, silent revolutions. The wheel convulsed, disgorging passengers in a clatter of metal. As their car dangled at the apex and a new family far below them entered, Ted tugged the sleeve of his mother’s dress and cried into it, and by the time it was their turn to exit, he had finished.
Ted unfolds the map and shows it to Prasant. “Here are some camps. They’re close by.” He taps the Swaminarayan temple, the Ram Dhun temple — both aid hubs. Prasant looks at Ted: You’re telling me where the temples in my city are?
“If you keep ants away from food,” Prasant says, “they never find it. But once they discover it, they descend like a swarm.”
Ted sucks his lips inside his mouth and bites them closed. He can’t win this battle. “You don’t have to be alone,” he says.
Prasant replies, “I’m not alone.” He crosses the gun across his chest. His eyes focus on the horizon. “This is why I must stay.”
Ted makes his way back, reading the street names painted on the sides of still-standing houses. He makes good headway until he hits a section of town where no houses stand.
This must be Soniwad.
Everything here seems removed from its original context: a tire inside a bathtub, a motorcycle under a heap of bricks, a green plastic pail filled with dust. North, he knows, is the direction to the police grounds. But he needs to hurry — the sun has almost set. Shadows grow teeth. Soniwad almost looks too dense to pass through, a field of stones overgrown onto the streets. Two men on the side of the road scavenge wood. They carry table legs and window frames. When they see him, they eye him, as if gauging whether or not they could take him in a fight. After he passes, they root around again, shifting rock, breaking glass.
Farther ahead, two other men rummage through the rubble. They’ve got metal detectors strapped around their waists. Rescue workers with newly arrived high-tech equipment, maybe. Ted waves — maybe Andy is with them — when he notices that they’re dressed in civilian clothes. No protective gear, no reflective stripes. One of the men registers something, and they dig. The man holds up the discovery, and it glints in the light. He tosses it aside.
Strange.
They parse the land. Finally, one uncovers something that excites them both. They tug at it. It’s stuck in the ground like a tree stump. Ted shivers.
“Hey—” he says. “Hey!”
They can’t hear him through their headphones. Ted stumbles toward them, and once they catch sight of him, they run in the other direction. He’ll never catch them. Metal bars poke out like thorny tetanus-tipped weeds. The men split up and disappear.
Ted huffs, out of breath. His ankles ache. He stands, bowlegged, on two chunks of stone. Metal detectors? The ground is disturbed with their footprints, and he searches for what they were tampering with.
It’s an arm.
A woman’s arm, white with dust. It juts from beneath the large slab of stone. Around the woman’s wrist are gold bangles as thin as hairs.
“Bastards,” he yells. He hurls a rock in the direction they ran. “You fucking bastards!” But what can he do? As soon as he leaves, they’ll come back. The metal detectors will sniff out the scent of the gold. It will be weeks before the bulldozers arrive to shift her into a final, indigent burial. And he’s not Prasant. He can’t sit here indefinitely to guard this woman’s arm.
The bracelets cut into her skin. Her skin is bloated and splotched. He can smell her — probably not her alone. This is a neighborhood of baked, rotting flesh.
How long have those men been looting, corpse-robbing? They looked well fed, well equipped. Probably aren’t even from this area. He stares at the woman’s arm, the fine black hairs, the purpling beneath her fingernails. She’s been forgotten. Maybe her whole family’s dead. Maybe they’re waiting for her to show up.
What was that Prasant said? Karsan’s father was lost. This woman is lost. Like so many others. He doesn’t know what street he’s on, what address this could have been. This street is lost; this neighborhood is lost. Does it matter, then, if she has jewelry or not? Why intervene now? Why stop these men and not the two from twenty minutes earlier? Better to live and let live than be lost.
Still. They can’t get away with this.
He wants to pelt them with stones. He wants to dig a deep trap and cover it with twigs so that they tumble in when they approach. All the fancy locating equipment in the world wouldn’t be able to find them.
He wants, he wants, he wants. But all he does is delay the inevitable.
No sign of them. Of anyone.
The woman’s skin is cool to the touch, taut and malleable like a water balloon. He holds the bracelets with two fingers of his right hand and, with his left, squeezes her skin enough to inch them forward. They catch the knuckle of her middle finger, but he coaxes the metal over, and the bracelets slide off.
There are seven altogether, and — what did he just do? He’s just as bad as they are. Worse, even. He did it to thwart them. An act of pettiness to what end? The woman’s arm is bare and dark. It lies on the ground like the cut end of a worm.
He slips the bangles into his pocket. He breaks into a run. When he’s far enough, he fishes them out and hurls them into the ruins of Soniwad. They spin and shine in the air, like pieces of the sun falling to the earth, and when they land, they hardly make a noise, a tink, tink, tink you’d only hear if you were listening — and then they’re gone.
When he arrives back at camp, Lorraine asks, “How was your adventure?”