“I thought you two were dead,” he said.
“No, not yet,” Isaac said.
Joseph turned his attention to me.
“You are very lucky,” he said. “You didn’t have any problems?”
“None,” I told him.
I felt almost equal to him as long as I knew we were both lying.
“We have to leave this evening,” he said. He pointed to me. “That includes you as well.”
I nodded my head, but only because I didn’t know what else to do.
Joseph spent the rest of the afternoon sequestered in the living room; Isaac and I retreated to our familiar spot in the courtyard.
“Do you know where we’re going?” I asked him.
“To his father’s village,” he said. “He wants to liberate that first and then work his way back to the capital. They’re waiting for him already.”
“There’s too many of us.”
Isaac shook his head. “Most of them are going to stay,” he said. “They’re not from here. They would look like a foreign army if they went into a village. Here in the capital, they can hide until we’re ready to come back. When it’s over, Joseph will give them more money and guns, and they’ll go back into the bush.”
“I could stay with them,” I said.
Isaac laughed. “And what would you do?” he said. “There’s already a cook.”
He didn’t say that to hurt me, or maybe he did. It was impossible to know for certain anymore.
We sat under our tree. Isaac leaned back and stretched out his legs. All he was missing was the uniform and sunglasses. After a few minutes of silence, I spoke.
“Joseph tells you everything.”
He didn’t respond.
“No one finds that odd.”
He turned his back to me. He was offering me a chance to stop. I saw that and refused.
“You haven’t known him that long. You’ve never been in any army. You’re a poor kid from a little village. You have nothing he needs, and yet he treats you like—”
I wanted Isaac to see me. I wanted him to feel threatened and afraid as I had, and still did. Knowing where he went at night was my only weapon. Before I knew what I was going to say next, he broke my nose with his elbow. He spent several minutes after that drumming the right side of my face with his fist. I felt the pain; I didn’t mind it, however. I didn’t cry or ask him to stop. I could hear the men in the courtyard cheering him on, and I felt closer to them than I did to my own body. When Isaac stood up, he had his black snub-nosed pistol in his hand. He walked away without pointing it at me, but I knew he had thought of using it. Another man came over and kicked me playfully in the back and in the ribs. I didn’t mind that, either. For once, I thought, someone was speaking to me honestly.
I tried to sit up but failed. My right arm collapsed under me. I looked up and saw Joseph’s blurred form in the doorway, speaking calmly to Isaac. When they finished, Joseph made his way to me. It was hard for me to see if he had anything in his hands.
He squatted next to me so I could hear him.
“Isaac wants to know if you’re okay.”
“I’m fine,” I told him.
“Good,” he said. “Go clean yourself up. We’re leaving in a few hours. What you do after that is up to you.”
Joseph’s last act of compassion toward me was to have one of his bodyguards bring me a wet towel to wash my face, and to have two others lay me down in a corner of the house, where I passed out, as much from the beating as from exhaustion, thirst, and hunger. I didn’t fully come to until it was time for us to leave. I was helped into the back corner of a large open-air convoy truck. At least a dozen soldiers filed in after me; I had just enough room to curl into a ball. I drifted in and out of sleep until we were miles away from the capital, on the way to what would be Joseph’s first liberated village.
HELEN
I came back to bed just as Isaac was telling me about the last time he saw his father. I wasn’t sure if the distance between us hadn’t grown larger the more he told me, and I hoped I could find the opposite was true if I lay next to him. When he told me how he’d felt once he arrived in Kampala, all I could think of was how small my life must have looked in comparison. My relationship with him was the greatest trip I had taken so far, and all it had required was that I spend my nights in another part of town, with a man whom no one would have approved of.
Just as I had wanted him to talk, I needed him to stop. I didn’t know it earlier, but this was what had governed our silence — not that we couldn’t understand each other but that we could lay ourselves bare and in the end each find a stranger sitting on the other side.
I asked him bluntly not to tell me more.
“I think you’ve told me all I can handle for one night,” I said. “Maybe it’s best if we go to sleep now.”
“I’m sorry if I upset you,” he said. “That was what I was afraid of.”
“You haven’t upset me. I just have a lot to think about.”
• • •
We both slept poorly. It was hard to be in the same bed and feel incapable of reaching over, and so every time we drew close one of us pulled away, partly out of fear that the other would do so.
I woke up before sunrise. I picked up my clothes and dressed in the bathroom, and before leaving whispered in Isaac’s ear that I had a lot of work to get to. Only when I was in my car did I remember it was Saturday; even though I had a key to the office, I knew I didn’t want to be there alone. I drove to Bill’s diner, which was the only place open so early on a weekend morning. From across the street, I sat and watched two older men who owned farms just outside of the town center. Many of the best memories I had of my father took place in there, which was the only reason why I returned so often. I knew it was unlikely that I would ever go back now, but this was marginally related to how they had treated Isaac. I would never return because I knew I would be remembered for having brought that man there with me. If Isaac stayed longer, or if we stopped being so private, I wondered what else would die because of him. There was only so much space in a town the size of Laurel; it wouldn’t take long to ruin it.
Once the sun was fully up, I drove to David’s house. I had been there many times before but never unannounced, even though he insisted that all of us in the office were welcome to drop by anytime, especially if we had something work-related that we needed to talk about. Other than myself, I doubted anyone in our town ever visited David.
He was on his porch, picking up that morning’s paper, when I arrived. I took it as a sign that I had done the right thing, since the odds were that I would have lost the courage to ring his doorbell. He saw my car approaching; before I parked, he was using his newspaper to wave for me to come in.
“I won’t ask what brought you here,” he said. “You can tell me as little or as much as you want.”
Everyone in the office had a similar line, which we used on new clients. It was David who had taught us its possible value. “It leaves the speakers in control of their story,” he said, “and it shows them that our job is to listen, not to judge.”
He led me into his kitchen; he poured us coffee.
“You look like you haven’t slept,” he said.
“I don’t think I did. I woke up very early.”
“Can I ask what happened?”
“Nothing happened. We had dinner. We talked.”
“Let me rephrase that. If I asked you what happened, would you tell me?”
“I would.”
“Denise asked me a few weeks ago why you spent so much time with one of your clients. She wouldn’t say who, but of course I knew what she meant. We’re not that different. She says ‘that client.’ I ask you, ‘How’s your friend Dickens?’ You say ‘we’ as much as possible.”