7. At the Marché
A few days later we went to the Marché en Fer to buy fruits and vegetables. The whole market had fallen down in the earthquake, but now an Irishman had rebuilt the clock tower and the minarets, restored the masonry, and reinforced the iron columns. The Irishman said the new walls were earthquake-proof, and the roof was covered with solar panels.
These were the days when it was hard to walk into a building and not be afraid the walls and the roof might fall on you and crush your head. You looked for a space beside a sturdy piece of furniture, and traced an invisible line at a forty-five degree angle, which you’d dive beneath for shelter at the first shake. Every so often, continuing to this day, another building would fall in an aftershock. All over the country we saw three-story buildings pancaked to one story, and lo these years later, the bodies still inside. They didn’t even stink anymore. Almost for certain, the bacteria and the worms and the rodents had picked them to bones.
But it wasn’t like the early days. People were moving. Children in uniforms walked to school in the mornings. The tap-taps were full of men carrying their work tools in canvas bags. In the city, the cell phone vendors walked the streets in their red smocks and carrying their red phones, selling rechoj cards, and soda and water vendors walked through the traffic jams, carrying on their heads cardboard boxes full of plastic sugar-and-caffeine concoctions and vacuum-sealed plastic bags of water.
In the Marché, I bought two bottles of Atomic Energy Drink, one for me and one for Sebastian, and he bought me a styrofoam container full of griot and fried plantains and pikliz. I bought him a pizza from a vendor billing herself as the Walt Disney Pizza Company. Famous mice and dogs and ducks decorated the sign behind her.
We took our food outside and crouched in the shade of the nearest wall. While we were eating, Sebastian said, “When you leave, will you come back?”
I stopped eating for a moment. An uncharacteristic sincerity was in his eyes. I didn’t trust it.
“You are my good friend,” he said.
But that’s what everyone said. Everyone who wanted something. I could see myself, in a few weeks, sitting on my couch in Florida, watching football. The job was over. There was no reason for me to stay. “What will you do,” I said, “after I leave.”
He patted his wallet, where he kept some of his walking-around money, and he patted his shoe, where he kept the rest. “I have met some important people,” he said. He pointed at every ten degrees of the sky around us. “I’m going to buy a new suit. The future is big.”
Already he had gathered ten of the best English speakers in Koulèv-Ville. He planned to drill them six days a week, in the mornings, when the mind is still fresh. He planned to lease them by the day, to journalists and tourists and aid organizations of every stripe, with special rates for weekly or monthly hires. He would take twenty percent, as his fee. No longer would he be the wage worker. Now he would be the collector of the real money, the wage-giver, the big boss.
“When you get home,” Sebastian said, “you will not remember me.”
Within six months, he would be dead. The rally at the Palace. The fires. The burning tires. The gunshots, two to the head.
That day at the Marché, he said, “It’s going to be the most beautiful suit. It’s going to be linen. It’s going to be chalk-striped, double-breasted. It’s going to have a notched lapel. I’m going to get it tailored.”
Q & A
Q: Do you think you can resurrect the dead?
A: I am the fiery angel. I can run time backward. I can speed it up and dance babies back into the womb.
Q: Do our thoughts betray us?
A: Scientists are perfecting a brain scanner that can already show distorted images of your dreams. Then they’ll just stick you in an MRI machine and ask the questions you don’t want to answer, and your thoughts will betray you. Until then, other people can only guess.
Q: On the cover of this book, it says “Fiction.”
A: That’s what people write when they want to get away with telling the truth. When they want to convince you of a lie, they dress up some facts and call it “Nonfiction.” Either way, people from the past send angry emails.
Q: Did the things in this book actually happen in the unvirtual world, what the kids call meat space?
A: It’s like Kazuo Ishiguro said: “I’m more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.”
Q: Don’t hide behind Kazuo Ishiguro.
A: I remember the bully who beat me up almost every day in junior high school. I remember the sweet odor of those red mesh equipment bags that held body armor and hung from meat hooks. I remember the puke-green walls of the locker room. I remember the special orange-brown of the rust on the edges of the lockers. I remember the shape of my own hairless testicles, how they seemed to retreat in fear when it was time to take a shower among a bunch of kids my own age or a little older who looked like full-grown men and had a foot or more of height on me. But were they as big as I remember, or was my idea of their height exaggerated because of my smallness and the smallness of my idea of myself and the bigness of my idea of them? And did they beat me up almost every day, or did they just beat me up a few times, but I responded so strongly and fearfully that in my memory it became almost every day? Why am I calling the football pads “body armor”? Had I ever seen a meat hook? Did I think of those red mesh bags as hanging from meat hooks back then, or is that something that I used later, to gild the story — or, no, to uglify the story. Because they’re conveniently dramatic words, aren’t they? Meat, and hook? They open up associations. The body as meat, the cheapness of meat, the animality of meat. The hook, which pierces and controls.
Q: Who sends the angry emails?
A: People from the Christian school. People from the churches where I was raised and where I worked as a pastor. They follow a form. The first thing the email writer does is to assure me that he or she is reaching out in love to offer correction. Correction is the price of love.
Q: Do you think that’s true?
A: If it is, then these awful stories I’m writing are also an expression of love.
Q: How?
A: Because I see them as a correction of the untruths I was told as a child about how the world works.
Q: Are you saying that the adults in your life were liars?
A: No. I think they were mostly good and decent people. I just think that it is inconvenient and possibly destructive, for some people, to closely examine your own life, or to have a reckoning with your past, your family history, your community of origin, your own choices.
Q: Unintentional liars, then?
A: I knew a woman, my teacher. A mentor in many ways. She said the most useful thing: Our job is to identify the distance between the story we’ve been telling ourselves about our lives — the received story, or the romantic story, or the wishful thinking — and replace it with the story that experience is revealing about our lives, the story that is more true.
Q: The facts are the same in both versions of the story.
A: It’s the reckoning that changes. The narrative itself is the reckoning. The choices you make about what is or isn’t significant, and what it all comes to mean.
Q: Why do you often tell the same story two or three different ways?
A: It’s not done with me yet. I forgot something important, or I hadn’t learned it yet.