Inside Etienne’s apartment there was no trace of anyone, just a bad smell he couldn’t locate the source of. He stood there sweating, thinking only that he would soon go back to work doling out medicine, salt and sugar solution, water-purification tablets. Then he heard a shuffling noise and braced himself, expecting one of the huge rats he’d seen poking through the piles of garbage. Instead, a bloody heap he had thought was trash shifted itself and came toward him. He took a backward step, then he heard his name.
It was the boy, Yozefu, and Tug was so happy that he embraced him. The boy tried to hug him back, but couldn’t. He smelled terrible, wrapped in torn, dirty blankets, and the light in the room was so dim that it wasn’t until they were outside in the sunny courtyard that Tug realized Yozefu had only one arm.
He had seen a doctor, and a family down the road had been feeding him occasional scraps, but his bandages were dirty and his skin red hot to the touch. Tug took him straight to the hospital for antibiotics. He was due at the camps but stayed on as a doctor cleaned the boy’s wounds and put him on an IV drip. As the fever came down, Yozefu told him what had happened.
His own uncle, his mother’s brother, had come in the night. He said he would hide them in his own house, but this was a lie to get his squad of three into their house. They killed his parents, then raped his sister. Yozefu didn’t use that word, just said they had stuck things into her, including a branch, a bottle. When he yelled at them to stop, they said, “Then you kill her.” Esmeralda looked at him, crying, begging. So he did. He used the machete they’d given him. Then his uncle took it back, hacked off his arm at the elbow, and left him to die.
He stayed in the house with the bodies of his family until another uncle found him and brought him to the doctor. But they had to move the medical facility because of the bombing and he was on his own again, so he went back to the house. In the time he’d been gone the bodies had been dragged into the courtyard and burned. He cleaned the house and courtyard and hid himself away.
He never once told Tug how he felt, or used a single emotional word. He spoke only of actions and facts.
Tug spent two days and nights at the hospital with Yozefu, but the boy had a septic infection that the doctors couldn’t stop. It was three in the morning when he died. He was eleven years old.
And that was it. Tug became a zombie, useless in the field, and his supervisors ordered him first to Nairobi, then to Entebbe, then to London, and finally he landed in Montreal. At the airport, Marcie crushed him in her arms. Once at home, he took a shower and changed into his clean old clothes. It was August and children were playing on the street outside, shouting and laughing. His sister and her children came to see him, as did various friends. At night, in bed, Marcie caressed his shoulder with the tips of her fingers, a touch that didn’t ask for anything, that only sought to assure him that he wasn’t alone.
He went to therapy, which was what you were supposed to do when something bad happened. Everybody said so. His therapist was a professorial type, bearded, cardigan wearing, with an office full of books. In the first session, Tug told him a little bit about what he’d seen, what brought him here, and they talked about control — what he could have done then, what he could do now. The therapist suggested he keep a journal, or write a book, or a song. He was a big believer in making things.
Tug didn’t mention Yozefu, but a couple of sessions later he told him about the bodies in the river, the wailing of babies. He explained how you treat a corpse infected with cholera, stuffing wadding down its throat and into its anus, then disinfecting it with chlorine and wrapping it in plastic, to keep the disease from spreading, whereas in Kigali the bodies had been left to putrefy in the streets, and only eventually got burned. He didn’t mean to be graphic or shocking. He was simply trying to make a point about the importance of dealing with the dead. But he found that he was drawn to concrete details, and after talking for forty-five minutes without interruption, he felt marginally better. Emptier. Afterward he went down the hall to the washroom and sat in a stall, not thinking about anything at all. He heard the door open and someone came in; from the professorial shoes, he knew it was the therapist. The man hurried into the stall next to him and threw up in the toilet.
Tug canceled the next appointment, wanting to give the therapist a respite from the terrible details; then he decided to cancel the next one too, and after that it was just easier not to go anymore.
Marcie encouraged him to stay home and relax — no one deserved a vacation more than he did, she said — but it made him feel fidgety, restless. She had holiday time coming up herself and wanted to go somewhere, maybe the beach, but he told her he didn’t want to travel. No planes, no highways, no vistas, no sensation of touching down somewhere new. He wanted the opposite of adrenaline, with none of the energy that had so animated his days in the field. He was most comfortable tiring himself out by walking around the city, appreciating the wide-open streets, the uncrowded avenues, the scentless air. Even the most hectic neighborhoods felt blanketed with calm.
The therapist had told him to write down his nightmares when he couldn’t sleep. So one day he was in a stationery store, browsing for a notebook, when the clerk and the manager got into an escalating argument about scheduling and overtime. Suddenly the clerk pushed a pen display off the counter, announced she was quitting, and stormed out. The pens scattered everywhere, rattling like pebbles. Tug spent the next ten minutes helping the manager clean up the mess and listening to her complain about her flighty help, and before he knew it he had a job.
He liked working at the paper store. There was always something that needed to be arranged, inventory to be checked, questions to answer, money to handle, all joyfully inessential tasks. If someone didn’t like their notebook, they could exchange it. It made him laugh to think that anyone would spend three hundred dollars on a pen. He learned more than he thought there was to know about acid-free paper. Eight hours would pass without his noticing, and by the time he walked home that was almost an entire day that he could live with.
Marcie didn’t really understand the stationery-store thing, but she was supportive. That was her nature. She wanted to be there, always offering hugs and solicitude. She tried to pay attention to him when he needed her and not to bother him when he didn’t. In other words, she was trying to do the impossible, and therefore she failed.
Upon his return, Tug took up drinking. It seemed like the best way to get through the hours between leaving the store and going to bed; otherwise, there was just too much time. Marcie stopped inviting friends over, for fear he would pass out at the table or throw up in the sink. Once, he took her sister’s hand, raised it to his mouth, and licked her fingers, an act for which he later had no explanation. In fact, he could hardly remember it happening. When they talked about the things he did while drinking, it seemed to him that they were discussing someone else entirely; he shared Marcie’s concern and disgust, and he shook his head right along with her, wishing that this man, this other Tug, would shape up and get his act together.
As things got worse, he stopped talking to Marcie without noticing that he had. Indeed he rarely thought about her at all, even when she was in the same room. Late one night, he was watching hockey and drinking Canadian Club when she came downstairs to ask him to lower the volume. He didn’t ignore her on purpose; he just didn’t register her presence until she picked up the remote and turned off the television.
“I need to sleep,” she said, her voice trembling. “I have a huge meeting at eight. Can you please just turn it down?”