Vestal Review

Maria. Not yet noon here. There’s no air anymore. Just fumes, the complaints from helicopters and troop transports made solid. Walking through the plazas has become like wading through clotting blood.

Yet at night there’s still the sky. Stars like pinpricks exposing the face of God.

I think about the trip we took to my parents’ farm. Two summers ago, the last time we were both in the states. The quiet that fell like a blanket after dark, even the insects respectful and still.

At night now there’s shattering glass. A thousand pianists hammering out Satie miniatures in triple-time. The crack of rifles and the shouts that reliably answer a few moments later.

They let us see the bodies yesterday. Piled three or four deep, each set of hands removed. The teeth are like chips of bone jammed into their gums, smashed to avoid identification.

At least Jerry is honest, snapping evidence as the government’s rigging comes loose. A documentarian to the last. The moral imperative to intervene is voided by the space between lens and eye. His go-to line over runny eggs in the hotel cafe.

The silent pleading in the streets is easier to take than the contempt you get across the desks. The paper-pushing lieutenants with faces like carved idols. The officials checking their airlift timetables as they humor us, wanting to know why we’ve remained, so long after our grant was terminated.

The private who led us through the stacked bodies. Sucking his teeth and cleaning his fingernails with a toothpick and wondering what all the fuss was about. His bemusement as Jerry’s flash burst and I scribbled shorthand on yellow legal paper.

There’s a plane leaving for the states tomorrow. We traded our tickets to two BBC reporters. Only the academics and radicals are foolish enough to stay. And whatever we are, academics stripped of purpose, still gawking at whim and chaos. You can still get a hamburger with American currency.

You feel the concrete of the basement below the stadium because you might be able to translate what it’s soaked up. You examine the nubs of bone and gristle poking from the wrists. String a narrative between the bodies and start counting your humanitarian prize money. Tilling the dead for fear of disturbing the living.

They are like the trees late in the season, starved and dry and susceptible to strong winds. Brittle limbs twisted like the fingers of the grieving. Can you trespass into the remains of their lives to gather your evidence? When the stories of the mute dead can only be your invention? Which is the greater affront?

There’s no protection here on the hotel’s veranda. We’re outside with the insects. We sit and drink and sweat and get eaten. We list in the heat, and feel our blood being drawn in tiny amounts.

An Interval Between Regimes