It has been fifty-two minutes when there is a knock on the door.
I begin to stand but Achor Achor gestures me to sit. He grabs the knob and turns it.
'Wait!' I yell. He doesn't hesitate; I believe for a moment it could be Tonya again. Instead he opens the door and finds a small Asian woman with a ponytail, dressed in half of a police uniform. She has no hat, and her pants do not match her shirt. Achor Achor invites her in, looking at her with unmasked curiosity.
'I heard you had an incident here,' she says.
Achor Achor invites her in and closes the door. She sweeps her eyes around the living room without seeing the blood stain. Her toes are touching its outline on the carpet. Achor Achor stares at the stain for a moment, and she follows his eyes.
'Ha,' she says. She steps back from the stain.
'Which one of you is the victim?' she asks, her hands on her waist. She looks at me and then Achor Achor. I am sitting four feet from her, dried blood on my mouth and temple. She returns her attention to me.
'Are you the victim?' she asks me.
Achor Achor and I say yes at the same time. Then he gets up and points to my face. 'He has been wounded, officer.'
She smiles, tilts her head, and sighs loudly. She begins to ask me questions, about how many and when.
'Did you know the perpetrator?' she asks.
'No,' I say.
I recount the events of the night and morning. She writes a few words down in a leather-bound notebook. She is thin, miniature everywhere, with dark hair and high cheekbones, and the movements of her hands are the same-tidy, small.
'You sure you didn't know these people?' she asks again.
'No,' I repeat.
'But then why did you open the door?'
I explain again that the woman had needed to use my telephone. The officer shakes her head. This doesn't seem to her a satisfactory answer.
'But you didn't know her.'
I tell her I did not.
'You didn't know the man, either?'
'No,' I say.
'Never seen them before?'
I tell her that I saw the woman on the way up to my apartment. This is of interest to the officer. She writes something in her notebook.
'Do you have insurance?' she asks.
Achor Achor says he has insurance, and finds his card. She takes the card and frowns down at it. 'No, no. Renter's insurance,' she says. 'Something that covers theft like this.'
We have nothing of the kind, we realize. I tell her that the woman made at least one phone call from my cell phone.
'That should be helpful, Mr. Achor,' she says to me, but does not write this in her notebook.
'I'm Achor Achor,' Achor Achor says. 'He is Valentine.'
She apologizes, pointing out how interesting our names are. She sees this as a segue into the inevitable question of our origin. She asks where we're from, and we tell her Sudan. Her eyes come alive.
'Wait. Darfur, right?'
It is a fact that Darfur is now better known than the country in which that region sits. We explain the geography briefly.
'Sudan, wow,' she says, half-heartedly inspecting the locks on our front door. 'What are you doing here?'
We tell her that we're working and trying to go to college.
'So were you part of the genocide? Victims of that?'
I sit down, and Achor Achor tries to clarify things for her. I allow him to expound, thinking that perhaps she'll open her notebook again and take down more information about the assault. Achor Achor explains where we came from, and our relationship with the Darfurians, and it's only when he mentions that some from that region have come to Atlanta to live that she seems interested.
They arrived one day at our church in Clarkston, officer. Our priest, Father Kerachi Jangi, turned our attention to the guests at the back of the church, and when everyone turned, our eyes set upon eight newcomers, three men, three women, and two children under eight, most dressed in suits and other formal clothing. The young boy was in a Carolina Panthers jersey. We greeted them then and after church, surprised to see them among us, and curious to know what they had planned. It was not customary for Darfurians, most of whom were Muslim, to be mixing with Dinka, and unprecedented for them to be attending a Christian church on a Sunday. The Darfurians historically had identified more with the Arabs than with us, even though they resembled us far more closely than the ethnic Arabs. Our feelings about them had long been complicated, too, by the fact that many of the murahaleen raiders who terrorized our villages were from Darfur; it took us some time to know that those who were suffering in this new stage of the civil war were not our oppressors, but were victims like ourselves. And so we let them be, and they us. But all is different now, and alliances are changing.
When Achor Achor is finished, the officer sighs closes her notebook.
'Well,' she says, and looks once more at the stain.
She hands me a piece of paper the size of a business card. It says COMPLAINT CARD. Achor Achor takes it.
'Does this mean that what happened to him is a complaint?' Achor Achor asks.
'Yes,' she says, almost smiling. She then recognizes that he is taking issue with this way of naming the crime. 'What do you mean?'
I tell her that having a gun pointed to my head seems more than a complaint.
'This is the way we define a matter like this,' she says, and closes her notebook. She has written no more than five words inside.
'You guys take care now, okay?'
She is leaving, and I cannot bring myself to care. The sense of defeat I feel is complete. I had, for the fifty minutes while we waited for the officer's arrival, mustered so much indignation and thirst for vengeance that now I have nowhere to put the emotions. I collapse on my bed and let everything flow through the sheets, the floor, the earth. I have nothing left. We refugees can be celebrated one day, helped and lifted up, and then utterly ignored by all when we prove to be a nuisance. When we find trouble here, it is invariably our own fault.
'I'm sorry,' Achor Achor says. He is sitting on my bed. 'We should go to the hospital, right? How does it feel, your head?'
I tell him that the pain is severe, that it seems to be traveling throughout my body.
'Then we'll go,' he says. 'Let's go.'
Achor Achor brings me to the hospital in Piedmont. He drives my car, and at his suggestion, I ride in the back seat. I lie down, hoping that doing so will ease the pain in my head. I watch the passing sky, bare trees spidering across the window, but the pain only grows.
CHAPTER 16
I have been to this hospital. Shortly after I arrived in Atlanta, Anne Newton brought me here to get a physical. It is the finest hospital in Atlanta, she told me. Her husband Gerald, who I do not know as well-he is a money manager of some kind and is not always home for dinner-came here for surgery on his shoulder after a water-skiing accident. It is the finest we have, Anne said, and I'm happy to be there. In hospitals I feel palpable comfort. I feel the competence, the expertise, so much education and money, all of the supplies sterile, everything packaged, sealed tight. My fears evaporate when the automatic doors shush open.