“No, no, you’re fine.” He sounds American.
Andy moves closer. “I didn’t expect to meet anyone out here.”
“I understand,” the man says. “It’s strange being surrounded by… this.” The man gestures with his chin, and the lines on his face darken.
Andy cocks his head. He’s here for a job. That’s not strange in the least. If anything is strange, it’s the fact that nothing is strange.
“Mind if I sit?” Andy asks.
The man pats the ground. “Be my guest.” He’s writing, a pen entwined in his fingers. “So who are you with?”
“UK Fire Services Search and Rescue,” Andy says. Saying it makes him puff his chest. He flexes his right bicep, a pleasant show of vanity.
“That’s great,” the man says.
“I had my first save today.” The story spills out, like he’s reliving a love affair. Just thinking about it, eagerness pulses through him, and his muscles twitch in anticipation. Tomorrow seems far away.
“What are you doing here?” Andy asks.
“I’m with DART — Disaster Assistance Response Team. From America.”
“And what are you doing?”
“Me? Helping as much as I can, I guess.”
“Cheers to us, then,” Andy says, and he raises the can. “Have some.”
The man laughs. “Leave it to the Brits to find a way to smuggle beer into a disaster.”
“Have a sip anyway,” Andy says. The liquid sloshes. The man swallows a token amount, as if not wanting to offend his host.
“You’re going to spoil me,” he says. The man sighs and takes another sip. “But I’ll take any little bit of happiness I can find.”
“You should, you should,” Andy says, and finally, he does feel strange. He and this stranger, sharing a drink amid death and destruction. It’s as the man described it. Any little bit of happiness. A woman is alive because of him, and all that she is — all that she will become — is because of him. The truth of it overwhelms him; it’s on his tongue, behind his teeth.
“You do good work,” the man says, in a tone of voice more apologetic than complimentary, and Andy says, “We both do.” Andy stands, holding out his hand, as if asking the man to dance. The man flips his notebook shut, takes Andy’s hand, and rises. Andy wraps him in a bear hug. It’s ridiculous and impulsive, but it’s all he can think of. The world is full of life, all around him. Even under compacted rubble, even injured and in pain, even in grief so deep that it suffocates: the life is there. He will discover it, and he will rescue it. The top of Andy’s head comes to the man’s chin, and the man’s body tenses, then relaxes, then relents.
And — he isn’t quite sure of when he first realizes its presence, but it’s as unmistakable as the nose on his face — Andy feels the man’s erection. This is a pleasant surprise. Andy feels himself growing hard and locks eyes with the man, who looks mortified.
“I’m so sorry,” he whispers. He tries to pull away.
But Andy won’t let him. In lieu of apology, Andy grasps the back of the man’s head, brings it to his, and kisses him. A strange embrace in a strange place. Their lips are chapped and rough, and Andy tastes dust and stout, but he knows that this is the breath of life: the air from his lungs fills the man’s, and oxygen revitalizes the blood. Synapses light up, like a row of matches laid end to end.
But this is not enough. The real secret to resuscitation, Andy knows, is returning life to the spirit as much as the body, and out there, out in the dark, are people waiting to be saved.
STETSLOVICH’S CONJECTURE
Piotr smells coffee in the predawn darkness, when the world should be silent, but isn’t. He has always prided himself on being first to rouse, but for the last two mornings, before he wakes, someone has prepared a communal stockpot of coffee. It hangs over an open fire as an incentive to join the day.
His Walkman has run all night. The plastic is hot and smells of ozone. The cassette, Chopin’s preludes and etudes, has played an endless loop and is stretched so thin that the sound emerges tinny, as if he’s listening through a long, hollow tube. He peels the Walkman off his chest. The inside of his ear canal is soaked, as if he’s been underwater.
No one sleeps soundly. It’s impossible. Ted snores lightly beneath a gray blanket with the consistency of fiberglass; Lorraine’s empty cot looks remarkably neat. But the team is lucky even to have cots: two tents down, Monika from the UNDP simply lies across plastic bins pushed end to end.
Piotr’s task is to know things, and either he can give answers or he can’t. It’s like being a pianist: one either plays the notes on the page or doesn’t. Playing the notes poorly or giving an incorrect answer — these are unacceptable.
But first: coffee.
The pot appears next to a hand-lettered sign in English warning not to scoop the grounds at the bottom. Others have appended translations: French, Swedish, German. As additional workers arrive, new translations appear, and the sign looks as though it’s grown a beard. People sip cupfuls of the black liquid and sit on their haunches. It’s a ritual, watching the fire flicker, stoking it, thinking about what lies outside camp. As the pot empties, someone adds more water, emptying bottle after bottle until the liquid browns again, and people resume drinking. By afternoon, someone sets the pot aside, and in the middle of the night, the process starts anew. Piotr does not know who the mysterious brewer is. Not yet, at least.
He hits the “Stop” button on his Walkman, and the day begins.
The Walkman was a gift from his former DART lead, Connor Gibbard. The infamous Connor Gibbard, who, at Christmas parties in his Georgetown home, greeted his guests wearing his lucky flak jacket. He bragged that it was tailor-made. He festooned it with ornamental bows, the red and green representing, he said, blood and gangrene. Good luck charms. In the foyer hung a gas mask stuffed with mistletoe. Beneath it, Piotr gave Connor’s wife, Beth, a peck on the cheek. “He has quite the morbid sense of humor,” Beth said. “Merry Christmas.” She suddenly looked concerned. “Oh, dear. You’re Jewish, aren’t you?” Technically, yes, but not practicing. “Well, I hope I didn’t offend you. If you’d like a beer—” She gestured toward a body bag laid across the kitchen table, bottle tops poking out of the zippered gash.
Connor was known in USAID circles as the “aid bully.” He rejected the image of the aid worker as a silent figure. No, Connor argued, the aid community should have a prominent role in shaping international policy. Aid workers were not merely deliverymen, he said; they were public advocates for the dispossessed. Connor insisted on placements in conflict areas, and in the ten years Piotr worked with Connor, they’d dispatched to Somalia, Rwanda, Colombia, Haiti, Chechnya, Tajikistan, and Bosnia. It was after Bosnia that Piotr left Connor’s DART.
When Piotr was first hired, Connor told him how everyone in the field needed a distraction. Knitting, books, whatever. Something to blot out the shells whistling overhead, the encroaching gloom, the screaming. Piotr told Connor that if he concentrated on his work, he could quell the voices around him.
“You’re wrong,” Connor said. “They only get louder.”
They were eating lunch at Eastern Market, in southeastern DC. Sweet smokes filled the air. Booths sold African masks and sticks of incense bundled in mason jars, and the vendors shouted and cajoled, outdoing each other.
“You can’t simply give things away,” Connor said. “Governments have to be coaxed — or coerced — into taking aid. Imagine that! They see aid, especially from the US, as an intrusion, as colonialism. First come the aid workers, then the governmental advisors, then the military.” Connor was in his fifties, magisterial and iconoclastic. “So we need to change the system into which we deliver help. Otherwise, it’s a black hole. A waste of money. We need to be part of the negotiations.”