Before, During, After Read online

  The moon of any night on earth.

  She kept her arms wrapped tightly around herself, sobbing, coughing, hacking. The tide seemed to be rising, the waves growing stronger. She let the waves come over her. The beach was empty, and she could see her clothes lying there—the jeans, with the panties tangled in them.

  She did not know how long she stayed there, afraid that he might return. The moon went away and then came back again. She could not stop the crying or the gasping for air. A few hundred yards up the beach, a couple walked to the water’s edge and in. She knew the tide would carry them this way. And she felt fear of them. Gathering all her strength, she rose and left the water and made her way to the little sad pile of clothes. She managed to get into her jeans, still feeling where he had pushed into her, the pain there and across her lower back and along her jaw. She kept looking down the beach where he had gone, but there were only the looming palms.

  Faltering in the loose sand, she walked, tottering, back to the resort, and in, toward the elevators. A few people still lingered in the bar. At the elevators, she pressed the button and waited. Smoothing her hair, she kept back a scream, looking to one side and then the other, fearing the sight of anyone, wanting more than she had ever wanted anything to get to her room and be quiet there, safe, door locked, all the lights on. She heard a man shouting in one of the first-floor rooms. The words were not distinguishable, but the tone could not be mistaken: someone was being mocked and belittled. She thought of men beating up their wives.

  The elevator door opened, and she stepped in, and as it began to close, the fingers of a brown hand grasped the door and pulled it back. Nicholas Duego got on, looking soiled and ill, his shirt open, his hair wild and full of sand. He simply looked at her, where she had backed to the corner away from him, arms crossed over her chest. He would kill her here. Yet she wanted to fly at him, too, wanted to find the force within herself to obliterate him. She was crying. “Please,” she said. “Don’t. Don’t.”

  “I am a nice man,” he said. “You will know that about me.”

  “I’ll scream. I swear I’ll fucking scream.”

  “I have never—” He stopped. There were actually tears in his eyes.

  Suddenly she felt power, unreasoning strength. Some part of her knew that it was the last thing she would do or say. “Keep away from me, you fuck.”

  “My unhappiness and anger made me cruel.” He lifted one hand.

  She pressed against the railing, turning from him. “No.”

  “I am not unkind. I would not take what was not given.”

  The elevator door opened. He had pushed no button. “Keep away,” she managed, backing out. “I swear to God I’ll scream.”

  He followed. There was an aluminum trash can with an ashtray full of sand by the elevator door. She picked it up—it was surprisingly light—and backed away from him, down the hall. He kept coming, but he was holding his hands out in a pleading way. When she got to her door she held the thing up level with her shoulders, as if to throw it. “I’ll hit you with this,” she said. “Get the fuck away from me. Goddamn you.”

  “I did not mean to hurt you.” He seemed incredulous. “It made me mad when you kicked me. We were together on the beautiful beach, you and me.” He turned and looked behind him and then moved to the next door down—Constance’s room.

  Natasha got her door open, scrabbled inside, and closed it. She set the ashtray trash can down with a loud metallic thud, and fumbled with the chain lock. She couldn’t get it, couldn’t make it work, but a moment later, just in time it seemed, she got the dead bolt to click into its socket.

  His voice came, too loud, from the other side. “I do not take what is not given. It was ours.”

  She put her ear to the wood, listening for a moment, and when she peered through the peephole she saw that he was still there, head down, one hand out leaning on the frame of the door. “Oh, please go,” she said, with a loud whimpering cry. “Please. I won’t say anything. Just please. Please leave me alone.”

  Nothing. She waited, afraid to look. The nausea was returning. She went to the window and looked out at the light on the water. Back at the door, she put her eye to the peephole, and, seeing the long prospect of the empty hallway, turned around and sank slowly to a sitting position, knees up, crying and retching drily while the night breezes came in. The air itself felt dirty, stained. Time went away while she half lay there. It might have been hours. The hands of the clock were dead. Finally she made her way into the bathroom and ran the water, all the water—hot and cold, in the sink and in the bathtub. She tore the clothes off herself and threw them to the floor, shuddering, but then gathered them and put them in a plastic bag and stuffed the bag into the trash can that was still by the door. In the bathroom, avoiding the sight of herself in the mirror, she got into the tub and plugged it with the shiny metal lever, then sat down in the hot water and watched the swirls of it, blood streaked, at her ankles. When the water was near the middle of her calves, she turned the spigot off and unplugged the tub and let it all run out. Then she reseated the plug, adjusting the water so that it was even hotter. She soaked a washrag and put soap on it and went over herself, crying and scrubbing, hurting.

  All this time the spigot in the sink was running, too. The room was steaming up. She stood up in the soapy water of the tub and turned the shower on. The shower water was losing its heat, but she remained under it, letting the stream of it run down her body. There was so much sand in her hair. She washed it, stood, head back, under the flow. The mirror and the window were a blank fog. The steam rose and curled about her. She turned the water off, thinking of fire and death. The attacks in the far-off cities of home.

  Oh, yes. That.

  She could not get clean. There was not enough water in the world.

  After

  Natasha and Michael

  1

  He might’ve slept. He had a moment of believing himself to be home, then realized that this trip was not taking him home. It had felt like mind wandering, but he understood now that it had been dreaming and that he had been asleep. He sat forward and looked out into the moving-by of the houses and streets and fields. The train was coming into what he thought was Washington, but it was Baltimore. It slowed and rocked and clanked, and now the platform came into view, the light there making a wide white bell shape in the dark. When the train stopped, through the rising steam and dust from the wheels, he saw the Asian boy get off. The boy went by the window and glanced at him and hesitated, then tentatively held up one hand for a few seconds. All his heartbreak was in the gesture, and he was someone moving through the most terrible hours of his young life, being determinedly decent, going on away.

  Michael Faulk looked at the station platform. The light sputtered, threatened to go out, some momentary drain of power. A lone figure, a man in a hooded sweatshirt, wandered out of the dimness and took a seat on a bench by the wall, arms folded, face in the deep gloom of the hood he wore. The man’s shadow went out from him. Faulk thought of the people of his country, personified in the Asian boy’s last gesture and in this image of a man sitting alone in unsteady light. The train had come, as trains do, into the station. Things would go on. And yet it all felt broken. He had left the priesthood.

  Finally the train rocked into motion. He sat back in the seat and tried to sleep, and couldn’t. He thought of Natasha, so young and so far away. He hoped that somehow she had got in touch with Aunt Clara. He did not want to think of her worrying about him.

  Washington looked unchanged. He tried to peer into it as the train neared Union Station. He did not know what he might find, but it felt important to watch for some essential difference, whatever that might be: cordoned-off streets or police flashes, more light in the neighborhoods. But there wasn’t much to see except the other rails with their dull strand of sheen, paralleling the track he was on, and, beyond that, the city’s businesses and the monuments, the neighborhoods, flickers of brightness in many windows, and then small vist
as of avenues and the darker shadows of trees in the streetlamps. The angle wasn’t right to see the Washington Monument, but the Capitol dome was visible, glowing somehow with greater dignity in soft white light. When the train stopped it seemed to give a last shudder, as though sighing with weariness. He hurried out of the car and up the stairs to the main level. All the lights were on, and a few passengers walked behind and in front of him. It was very quiet. No one was saying anything to anyone else. Every sound carried hollowly—footsteps, baggage being pulled along, the small clatter of the cleaning and restocking of shelves by quiet workers. It all reverberated in the cavernous height of the ceiling. A few men and women were lined up at the ticket counter. No one seemed to be with anyone. Most of the restaurants and shops were barred and closed. Several people—it looked like a family—were ranged among the benches at one gate, amid suitcases and cartons of food and blankets they’d obviously retrieved from their bags. The man and his wife and a young boy were asleep. A girl in her early teens slouched on the shoulder of the sleeping woman, reading a book. She stared glumly, almost warily, at Faulk as he crossed in front of her, headed for the front entrance.

  Out in the circular road at the front, the flags were at half-staff. He had never really looked at them before. A warm breeze blew. It was a humid night. Cabs were parked along the curb. He got into the first one and gave the driver Aunt Clara’s address.

  The driver was a young man with large black eyes under thick black brows in a narrow, bony face—he looked like someone who had spent all day studying and whose mind was elsewhere.

  He pulled out in traffic, and for a little space Faulk gazed at the back of his head, watching him negotiate the crowded lanes with a measure of aggressiveness, muttering low at other cars, attending to everything as if he were alone. At length, Faulk sat back, determined to ignore him. He saw the shifting views of the street and the other people in the cars they passed. Massachusetts Avenue. A couple in one car was laughing at something, the woman gesturing and nodding, the man holding up one hand as if in surrender.

  How could anyone find a way back to lightheartedness?

  This abysmal day had brought everything of normal life into question. What could be left of banter, jokes, silliness? He knew that this thought was irrational and that people would go on being people. Long ago he had learned to cultivate a healthy distrust of his own thinking when he was in the grip of anxiety.

  He endeavored to concentrate on the ride, the streets and sporadic lights sweeping across the windows. He thought of Natasha in Jamaica. He looked at the night outside the car window, trying to picture her warm and asleep. And there her image was, clear and true, and his heart ached.

  “Washington is your home?” the young man said suddenly.

  Startled by the sound of the voice, Faulk took a few seconds, then said, “No.”

  “You’re visiting.”

  “Yes.”

  “I have lived here twelve years.”

  He searched his mind for something neutral to say.

  The other spoke first. “Twelve years. I love America.”

  “Me, too.”

  “I’m a citizen, and some men wanted to beat me up today. Me. An American. They wanted to take my life.”

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  The young man seemed about to cry. “I’m not a Muslim.” He was looking in the rearview mirror, waiting for Faulk to respond.

  “Well, in any case you’re not a terrorist—”

  “My family—they—we’re Palestinian Christians, and I’ve lived twelve years in this city, and I’m an American citizen.”

  “It’s been a bad day for everybody. Some people don’t know how to handle it.”

  “They wanted to do me harm. For the way I look. An American citizen.”

  “Hysteria.” Faulk shook his head at the inadequacy of his own expression, staring out at the city in the sparkling dark, the houses set back from the street with their warm lights and open windows. He saw some people sitting on a porch in the light from a doorway.

  “My driver friends, they helped. They protected me.”

  He did not want to talk now. He let a moment pass, watched the traffic coming the other way. Out the window to his left was Dupont Circle, with its little knots of people smoking and talking and drinking. He saw litter on the grass under a tree with a broken branch drooping onto the sidewalk. The streets feeding into the circle were full of glittery light. All the cafés and bars were closed, but there were people on the sidewalks, standing in the false brightness, talking. He saw two women embracing. The cabbie had grown quiet, and now Faulk worried that there was something hurtful about not taking the man’s part more.

  He said, “People get scared and it makes them stupid.”

  But the cabbie drove on quietly, having expressed his outrage. Someone called on the dispatch, and he spoke in another language into the little microphone. Then he turned his music up.

  The rest of the ride was silent, but for the low music and the occasional sputter on the dispatch speaker. Faulk looked at the streets of his second home, and at the back of the cabbie’s head.

  When they pulled up in front of Aunt Clara’s house, the cabbie tipped his cap back on his forehead and said, “You’re a kind person.” Then he smiled—there was something dimly hangdog about it.

  Faulk paid him, smiling, and nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “You, too. Keep the change.” He got out of the car, pulling his bag, and pushed the door shut with his hip. It didn’t close all the way. Putting the bag down, he opened the door and slammed it, then leaned down and waved. The taxi pulled away. Michael Faulk watched it go down to the end of the street and turn, on out of sight. The bag had never felt heavier. He strode across to the porch and up the steps to the door. Aunt Clara opened it and pushed the screen toward him. She was in her nightgown. “God,” she said. “You scared me to death.”

  “I’ve never been on a longer ride.”

  “It’s three-thirty in the morning.”

  He put the bag down in the living room. She came to him and put her hands on his shoulders. “You all right?”

  “Have you spoken to Natasha?”

  “The lines are all jammed from here out of the country. I tried. Believe me.”

  “I’ve got to call Iris.”

  “I spoke to her. She knows you’re all right. She had another little fall. But she’s all right, she says. The hurt knee was unscathed. That’s how she put it.”

  “She wouldn’t say anything if it wasn’t unscathed.”

  “Well, she says she’s fine. She doesn’t sound fine, I have to say. But she says she is. And who can be fine after a day like this. What am I talking about?”

  “I’m not thinking straight, either,” Faulk said to her.

  “Greta’s upstairs in her old room. Her hubby’s in meetings or something with Congress and Senate people.”

  Faulk nodded and sighed, and felt his exhaustion like a form of failure.

  “Somebody said the Pennsylvania one was headed for the Capitol Building or the White House.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Can I fix you something to eat or drink?”

  “I think I just want a glass of water.”

  They went together into the kitchen, and she put ice in a glass and poured the water. “Jack went to bed at nine. He hasn’t been feeling all that well. He’s been fighting the first cold of the year. And then this business has really upset him.”

  “Still can’t quite believe it,” he told her. “The whole thing.”

  “Nobody can believe it. Everybody’s in shock.”

  Then Jack was there, leaning on the frame of the doorway. “I’m feeling all right,” he said. You could hear the congestion in his voice. “Don’t get up, son,” he said as Faulk started to rise. He shuffled over to the refrigerator and got a beer. “Do you believe this shit?”

  “That’s exactly what my father said,” Faulk told him.

  “We were just saying—” said Clara.
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  “I heard you.” Jack opened the beer. “And I still end up saying: do you believe this shit?”

  “I remember being so appalled at the bombing there in ’93. At what they were trying to do.”

  “The cabbie who brought me here got attacked this morning,” Faulk told them. “Poor guy only looks the part. A Palestinian Christian, for God’s sake.”

  “What will happen next, I wonder,” Clara said. “I mean we’re at war with somebody. Maybe the whole rest of the world.”

  Greta came to the doorway now, wrapped in a light blue robe, looking at each of them. She walked over and hugged Faulk. “Hello, Cuz.”

  “Hi.”

  She looked at Jack. “Can I have a little of that in a glass?”

  Jack got a glass out of the cabinet and poured some of the beer. Greta sat down across from Faulk. “I can’t do this at home unless there’s a big gathering.” She shook her head and smiled, turning to Faulk. “Have you got in touch with Natasha? And congratulations, by the way.”

  “Thanks. And no.”

  “Imagine. Stranded in paradise.”

  “How are you?”

  “We were sitting outside eating breakfast and watching the rowing crews on the river. We heard the explosion. It shook the water glasses on the table. And then we saw the smoke. Tom knew immediately it was a plane.”

  Jack stood leaning on the stove and drank the beer. He said, “I heard tonight on the news that the bastard who did it, the mastermind, is a guest of the Taliban. In Afghanistan.”

  “I can’t remember the name,” Faulk said.

  Greta said the name. “Tom’s been talking about him for years.”

  “Clinton tried to get him,” Jack put in. “A goddamned rich kid from Saudi Arabia. Big oil family.”