The Kabyle woman isn’t there. Russell Stone wilts, sure that he said something last time to make her drop the course. She has disappeared, like a nighttime life-changing insight he has forgotten to jot down. Confidence failing, Stone asks for volunteers to read their first entry. One thing worth telling a total stranger. Adam Tovar demurs. “Mine isn’t ready yet. The story part is done; I just have to go back and put in the symbols.” John Thornell launches into a clinical account of two policemen chasing a screaming teenager into the courtyard of John’s apartment building. The tasers are just coming out when Thassa Amzwar appears in the doorway.
She’s shorter than Stone thought. She’s wearing a kind of needlework, coral-colored shift. She could be from southern Italy. But her round face shines with precisely the light he remembers, the flushed look announcing that the most remarkable thing has happened to her, just now, down this hall, outside this building, on the streets of this improbable city. A thing that redeems everyone, for years to come. No apology in her eyes for being late; just a rash smile for her assembled, long-lost friends. She takes a seat, her silver-bangled wrist grazing Sue’s shoulder, her lilac fingernails curling around Charlotte’s elbow in greeting.
All eight of them grow an inch more alert. John stumbles through another half a sentence then backs off, claiming the rest of the entry is too rough to share. “Roughness is the only thing worth sharing,” Russell claims. The others flip through their pages, eyes down, stripped of their art-student élan.
No volunteers. Maybe it’s suburban diffidence, the Islands of the Blessed deferring to the edge of the scorched Sahara. Or maybe they’re just soaking in the glow of this woman, her eerie contentment. They shuffle their journals, glancing sidelong, checking to see if they’ve made her up.
“We’re reading out loud?” Thassa asks. Her glee confers with everyone. “May I go next?”
Before Stone can wonder how she learned her modal verbs better than the native speakers, she starts her entry. Her voice is one of those mountain flutes, somehow able to weave a second melody around the one it plays. Russell misses the gist of the words, he’s so wrapped up in the cadence of the sentences. It’s something out of the dawn of myth, set in a Chicago all but animist. One thing worth telling a total stranger, and the thing is this: an ancient woman, hoisting her aluminum walker up the Grand Staircase of the Cultural Center at the rate of one step a minute.
The ascent is glacial, the staircase infinite, the climber a Wednesday-afternoon Sisyphus mounting toward the world’s largest Tiffany dome. The worn marble steps droop like cloth under the feet of a century of ghosts. But every word of Thassa’s description lifts the climber toward the light. By the third step, Russell realizes he’s never looked hard at anyone. By the top of the stairs, a sharp blue filament of need makes him want to see what will happen to the species, long after he’s dead.
“Shit,” Sue Weston says, when Thassa is done. “Girlfriend? You expect me to read mine, after that?”
They all laugh, and laughing, Russell remembers to breathe. Roberto Muñoz shudders in his loose flak jacket, rubs his shaved, plum-colored head with one cupped palm. “Thank you for that,” he murmurs. “Serious thanks. Makes me look forward to getting decrepit.” He shoots Thassa a look. “How old are you, anyway?”
She’s twenty-three, it turns out, give or take an era.
The others read, while the air is still jazzed with the colors of that ascent. They compete for approval, each of them fueled by Thassa’s encouraging nods. Affection threatens to replace all other texts. Algeria is nowhere, and Chicago a place just now become visible.
The night ends before they get a chance to take a look at the assignment from Make Your Writing Come Alive. Russell scrambles to summarize Frederick P. Harmon’s thesis:
Unless you care for the people in your story the way you want your reader to, all the description in the world will arrive stillborn.
Nobody cares. They’re all too busy grooming and teasing one another. As the group packs up, Mason assigns them all nicknames. Kiyoshi becomes Invisiboy. There’s Artgrrl Weston and Princess Heavy Hullinger. John Thornell makes a born Spock. Adam becomes the Joker and Roberto, the Thief. Mason christens himself Counterstrike and declares that Russell Stone will hereafter be known as Teacherman. Only Thassadit gives him pause. He studies her, timid in her amused return gaze. “Hello, Dalai!” Then he corrects himself: “No, no. I know who you are. Miss Generosity.”
Teacherman has to wave the grade book to get their attention. “Remember to e-mail your new pieces by midnight tomorrow.” The Joker and Artgrrl moan like cartoon characters caught in an ambush. Russell assigns the next topic as if he hasn’t been thinking about it for the last twenty-four hours, arranging and rearranging the words like a carpet of forest leaves hiding a pit trap. Convince someone that they wouldn’t want to grow up in your hometown.
Des Plaines, Terre Haute, Buffalo Grove: the perils of home are many, and the rewards slim. Stone reads all about the top hazards, tedium chief among them. “If Wheaton were a reality show,” says Mason’s piece, “the sponsors would have crashed it halfway through the pilot.” Close behind come isolation, bigotry, aimlessness, crushing homogeny, commercial blight, crimes against every known aesthetic, and the terminal malaise of abundance. Charlotte Hullinger writes, “I spent my childhood simmering in a satellite dish.” You know the place. A hometown now opening in a development near you.
Now come by train, a five-year-old from Sétif, into the swarming Agha Station, Algiers. Grow up in a sprawling suburban maze uphill from the port, in the sun-disintegrating, low-bid, postwar high-rises of that repeatedly despoiled recumbent odalisque, Alger la blanche. Postwar? Prewar. Midwar, now and always. Holy war. La sale guerre. Half a century of war that has emptied the country of a third of its people. The zeal of recent independence has turned on itself, and the state manufactures new enemies everywhere. The Islamic backlash against kleptocrat tyrants escalates into a mass movement. The separatist Berber Spring comes and goes, not so much suppressed as deferred into a simmering Berber Summer. Reculer pour mieux sauter
The world’s most promising new state has gone stillborn. The girl knows the problem. Her parents map it out, every night, in hushed voices over dinner. A century and a half of the colonized mind has spewed out tribalism with a vengeance, but without any noble cause this time. Dress, words, facial hair: every trait declares allegiance, intended or not. A generation into the country’s third major linguectomy, words are again a capital offense. When her father slips into French while lecturing to his university engineering students-et donc, voilà-he’s publicly censured. Her mother, a document translator for the national oil company Sonatrach, gets hissed at one afternoon by a small chorus on a Bab el-Oued bus for her neckline and bare hair, and when she complains to a patrolling policeman, he fines her for rabble-rousing.
Yes, the girl has her music lessons, her family seaside picnics, even her horse riding on holidays with cousins in Little Kabylia. Some days, the city still rises up like a dream of jumbled white from the azure Mediterranean. But destiny runs mostly backward, in Algiers. Birth rates soar and housing collapses. Corruption outpaces every industry; just walking down the street requires a payoff. Education starts to gutter, and as the girl enters second grade, the entire cobbledup system reaches the brink. The Islamic Salvation Front threatens to sweep into power. Then the Pouvoir cancels all elections.