Camp zero a novel, p.21
Camp Zero: a Novel, page 21
a painting in a museum of a woman’s back that looked like she was carved out of marble
sitting in a subway car, hurtling through a dark tunnel while millions of strangers walked aboveground
the taste of chilis and citrus
chocolate ice cream
our mothers’ faces, cast in morning light
The visitations from our past lives came to us at night. We could see that sun, hear that bass, taste that heat, and we would close our eyes tighter, hoping the images would stay a moment longer before burning away.
“What if we take Aurora south,” the cartographer asked one night, “when she’s old enough?”
Her question, while casually phrased, held a line of intensity through it. We had all thought it already—what would happen when our daughter reached puberty? Would we be able to justify keeping her with us when she noticed her body and desires changing?
Sal looked down at the table for a moment and breathed deeply before looking back up at us. “I didn’t want to burden you with this unless I thought it was absolutely necessary.”
We leaned forward, and there, at the table, she finally told us about her son.
One night, after working late, she came home to find her apartment dark. She unlocked the front door and flicked on the lights in the hall and called out to her husband. After hearing no response, she rushed to her son’s bedroom to find his crib empty. She frantically searched every room in the apartment, but neither her husband nor her son could be found.
The call from the hospital simply stated that her husband and son had been admitted to the ER. When she arrived at the hospital, her husband was, in fact, sitting in the waiting room with a bandaged cut on his forehead. She rushed over to him, but she immediately knew something was wrong when he wouldn’t look her in the eyes.
The report later stated that her husband had been drinking heavily and had run out of milk for their son’s bottle. He was drunk enough to justify that it was acceptable to take their baby in the back of the car and drive to the grocery store. It was a short drive, he reasoned, and the baby wouldn’t go to sleep without a warm bottle. It was dark and rainy, and he misjudged a left turn onto a side street and collided into oncoming traffic. A truck T-boned the car. Both the truck’s driver and her husband climbed out of the wreckage unscathed, but the back of the car was totaled.
Her husband was a well-respected lawyer who defended affluent criminals on trial for tax evasion. During the trial, he adamantly denied responsibility for his son’s death, and said that Sal was to blame for working late, yet again, and not leaving enough milk at home. Like his clients, he too was white, wealthy, and without a criminal record. He donated to charities, attended fundraising galas for well-liked senators, kept in shape by running half-marathons for medical research. He was handsome and educated and had developed a reputation as a methodical and clear thinker. Most crucially, he had attended law school at Walden, where many of the judges who sat on local and state courts were also Walden alumni. The favor of the system was his, he reasoned, and if he could prove that this had been a momentary lapse of judgment driven by a neglectful wife, then perhaps he would be spared the Box.
It turned out, the Box was the furthest punishment from the jury’s verdict. As he suspected, his sympathetic face worked in his favor, particularly in contrast with Sal. The defense portrayed Sal as a negligent mother whose commitment to her job superseded her love of her family. Why else did she work such late nights and neglect to leave enough milk for her son? Why else had she driven her husband to drink? The defense argued that her husband feared that if she came home from work and found the baby still awake, she’d explode with anger at him and their child. What he did was merely a coping mechanism.
All of this was bullshit, of course. She had been the one who worked a series of temp jobs to pay the bills while her husband attended law school. And she had been the one who cared for their son during the first year of his life, watching her husband’s career grow and evolve, while she remained stalled in place. But the jury didn’t see this. All they saw was her rage. During Sal’s testimony, she often deviated from the line of questioning and spat epithets of hate at him. The electric shock she received when her son died had rewired her brain and her heart. Now she was aflame, and she didn’t give a fuck whether she followed the script or not.
“When we were first married, I never suspected he was capable of such neglect,” Sal said. “He seemed good, upright, even moral. He was gentle with animals and never raised his voice or spoke in harsh terms. And yet…”
Her voice trailed off, but we knew exactly what she was thinking. We knew it so intimately that we felt it in our bodies, our bones.
“You see,” Sal said, “his face was his alibi. He was sentenced to manslaughter and received a ten-year prison term with mandatory mental rehabilitation. Next year he’ll walk free. Do you understand now why that world can never be redeemed?”
That night, during our evening drills, the rivulets of sweat that slicked our bodies felt like a baptism. We ran around the radar and looked up at the greenish haze of the northern lights that seemed to pulse with an alien premonition. At that precise moment, men had set their sights on other planets, hurling satellites into the reaches of space, scanning for their next destination to conquer.
Sal was right.
Even the vastness of the universe was still governed by the will of men.
CHAPTER ELEVEN ROSE
At midnight, Rose walks down the hallway past the Blooms’ silent rooms, carrying her parka and boots. The doorways are dark. Everyone is asleep, but still she treads lightly through the hallway. A single misstep could send the dogs streaking after her.
At the front door of the mall, she quickly pulls on her winter clothes, then pauses. It’s not too late to slink back to her cold, dark room, spend the night rereading one of Meyer’s books, fall asleep and dream of packing her suitcase with the meager possessions plucked from Damien’s suite in the Loop. Staying in line and finishing the job she is being paid to do.
“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” she had told her mother. They were sitting side-by-side on her cot in the Dispossession Estates. The next day, Rose would leave for camp.
“Don’t worry about me,” her mother had said. “I’ll be fine.” She touched Rose’s cheek with the back of her hand. “A mother should worry about her daughter, not the other way around.”
“I know.” Rose tried to smile. “I want you to have what you deserve.”
“I have you. That’s all I need. So try to take care of yourself,” her mother said. “You only have this one life.”
She thinks of her mother’s words now as she steps outside the building. This one life. It takes a moment for her eyes to adjust as the outdoors fuzz into focus. It’s a clear night. The moon is full and streaks the snowy lot with its cold blue light, allowing her to hazily divine the dark hedge of trees.
When she reaches the north boundary of the lot, the Barber is already waiting. He doesn’t speak as he shows her where to shimmy through the narrow opening in the metal fence. On the other side, he takes her hand and leads her through the trees. When they arrive at a black snowmobile parked behind a dumpster, he finally asks, “You sure about this?”
She can feel her heart thrumming in her chest as she slides onto the seat behind him. “Yes. Let’s go.”
He starts the snowmobile, and it picks up speed as they weave in and out of the trees. The Millennium shrinks in the distance. She presses her cheek against his wool coat as the wind whips past their bodies. The wilderness streaks by her, the wind howling in her ears.
They drive for half an hour before the Barber turns onto a road barred by a wooden fence. He jumps off the snowmobile to unlatch the gate, moving with exaggerated steps in the deep snow, working quickly to tether the fence open. In the headlights, Rose can see his breath form soft white billows. His fingers fumble with the kerosene lamp until it glows yellow. He holds the lamp up and guides her through the snow to the front door of a small wooden house.
The house is a modest structure, with wooden walls and wide plank floors. It’s at least a hundred years old, judging by the antique floral wallpaper peeling in the hallway. A well-worn rug lies in the foyer, and the air smells like the Barber: spruce, kindling, and smoke.
The Barber seems more at ease in this house than he did in the church. He takes off his jacket and hangs it on a peg. He’s dressed formally this evening in a soft button-up shirt and a pair of suspenders. “I’ll start a fire,” he says, and brushes past her, so close that she can feel the coldness of the outdoors seep off his body.
She looks around the house as he tends to the fireplace in the front room. The hall is sparely decorated except for a group of framed photos on the wall, illuminated by the soft light of the lamp. The oldest image is a black-and-white photo of a family of twelve, posed around a wooden plow in a field. The men stand stiffly in coveralls with their hair matted to one side, their unsmiling sisters or wives sitting in the long grass with their hands folded over blotchy aprons, while the children cluster around.
She tracks the photos down the hallway as each generation morphs sharply into the next. Here the family wears horn-rimmed glasses and hoop skirts, grinning as they pose in front of a wing-tipped station wagon. Here the family wears bell-bottoms and crocheted shawls, their hair long and parted in the middle, the youngest mischievously flashing the peace sign. Here the family is in neon parkas, perched on snowmobiles, the expanse of the frosted forest behind them. A clear lineage. A family intact.
The only portrait that she’s seen of her family was taken the month before her father drowned. In the photo, she is held by her mother as her father looms half a foot above them, grinning lopsidedly with one arm thrown over her mother’s slender shoulders. Her mother looks shy, even nervous, her hair is pulled back into a ponytail, and she is wearing an ill-fitting paisley blouse with a Peter Pan collar, scavenged from her mother-in-law’s attic. Her father wears a rumpled shirt with a grease stain on the breast pocket. His face is pure bliss. Here is my wife and child. Here is what I have created.
“You have your father’s height,” her mother often said, “but your face is mine.”
It’s true that she has her mother’s black hair and coppery skin, her downturned mouth and sparse eyebrows, but the portrait proves that her eyes are her father’s—a light hazel that burns orange in the sun.
Looking at the photos on the wall, Rose feels herself fracturing. She has no sense of her family’s history, her mother’s birth country, the language and culture that she never felt the right to claim as her own. Home existed within the boundary of her mother. When Rose is away from her, she feels rootless and free. But she also feels unbalanced, as if she can never find her true center.
The final photo in the hallway is the family at its most compact: a father, a mother, a boy. She recognizes the features that have repeated through the decades—a strong nose, wide-set eyes, and a flop of dark hair. The boy’s features are the most pronounced. “It’s you,” she realizes with satisfaction. “This is you.”
The Barber illuminates the boy’s face with the lamp. “I was wondering if you’d notice. That was taken a day after my tenth birthday.”
She looks around the hallway. “Is this the house you grew up in?”
“It is,” he says, “but no one has lived here for a long time.” He presses his finger against the face of the woman in the photo, who holds the boy’s hand. “My mom’s hands were always warm, even in the middle of winter.” He pauses for a moment, and Rose can tell a memory is washing over him, a remnant long buried in the dirt. He touches her wrist gently and says, “I’ll get us some drinks.”
The Barber leads her down the hallway to the back of the house. The kitchen is neat and tidy, brightly painted in yellow with faded gingham curtains in the windows. The wooden floor has been covered with linoleum, thinned and faded by the sink.
She watches him as he works, liking the care he takes as he unwraps a loaf of bread bundled in cloth and uncorks a bottle of whiskey. He hums a little as he cleans two glasses and pours an inch of whiskey into each. After, he cuts two thick slices of bread, and serves them on a wooden platter with a hunk of cheese and slices of cured sausage.
They take the whiskey and food to the front parlor, a sparse room scrubbed clean, with lace curtains in the window. The Barber gestures for Rose to sit in one of the coral velvet armchairs. The smoke and crackle of the fire is warm and pleasing.
“My parents ate their meals in front of this fireplace,” the Barber says, and sits down in the other armchair. “So that’s why I prefer to sit here whenever I visit the house. In respect to how they lived out their last happy days.”
He tells her that his parents had been born in Dominion Lake, as had his grandparents and great-grandparents, stretching back to the first settlers who moved north when news of the oil strike spread. He was raised to believe his life would extend forward in such a manner that he too would work on the rigs, making enough money to buy his own house and yard big enough to throw a few kids into. His children would grow older and eventually take his place out on the rigs, drilling the bounty they believed would never end. Decades and decades stretched forward, all bound together by oil, and his father promised him that his own children would receive all that lay under the soil. This was the lie he had been taught to believe by his father, who had been taught by his own father. Never question what you are born to do. Just keep your head down and work hard.
He was twelve when the oil ban was mandated. By sixteen, everyone he knew had been laid off from work, their houses foreclosed. He was too young to understand the politics of what made people lose their jobs and their homes. All he knew was that people were leaving Dominion Lake, especially anyone under the age of forty. The town’s population had been halved and halved again, reflected in the customers who shopped for their groceries. No longer were they young riggers buying lotto tickets and a two-six of vodka with a hundred-dollar bill. Now the shoppers were elderly and feeble, plunking a loaf of white bread and a can of tuna on the conveyor belt. They, too, would soon be dead, and there would be nothing left in Dominion Lake. At eighteen, he decided to leave town.
It was only after he left Dominion Lake that he reflected more on what really happened. How his country had been created by taking from the land and the Indigenous peoples who lived there. That this desire for dominion was what established the colony as a fur-trading post, what later brought industry to its borders and powered the economy. A cold, sparsely populated country with the longest border on earth, rich with minerals, timber, and oil.
“I was wrong to think of myself as an outsider, as somehow different or better than my family,” the Barber says. “My family has always profited off of the land’s exploitation, and I have too. We needed energy, food, a plot of land to make a home. And we did what we needed to get it. Still, I was surprised when Meyer set up camp. Why would Americans want to come up here now? It’s only since working in camp I’ve realized that he’s just repeating what’s already happened. He wants to make this place his own.”
The Barber is only partially correct, but it’s still too risky for Rose to tell him what the camp is really for. Instead, she looks around the room and asks, “How does it feel to be here now?”
“Eerie,” he says. “Like I’ve stepped back in time, but no one is around to remind me why I left.”
The fire spits red embers threatening to burn out. The Barber unsheathes the small hatchet attached to his leather belt and splits a branch of white birch for kindling. He tosses the pieces into the fire. They watch the flames catch the splintered wood. “Have you ever felt like the life you’re living isn’t yours?”
His question takes her by surprise. “What do you mean?”
“That what you’re doing feels preordained.”
She thinks for a moment. “No,” she says. “Not exactly. But I do wonder if I’ll ever get what I want.”
He looks over at her. “What do you want?”
Whenever a client asked her this question, she usually responded with an answer that would please him—that she wanted new experiences and to meet interesting people like him. Whenever a hostess asked her, she said she wanted money and shelter. But the Barber isn’t asking her what she desires. He’s asking her to describe the shape of her desire.
What does it mean that she has forsaken love for so long? That she rejected it before it even arrived? She had sensed, once or twice, that a client was in love with her, or had decided that he wanted to be. The client felt that love was as simple as stating it. And if it wasn’t so, then money and champagne and cold fruit platters and soiled sheets would create it. That love was an arrangement that could be crafted and planned, right down to the way one feels when they see their beloved walk into a room. That quickening of the pulse. A feeling of being outside of one’s body. The room recedes and there is only that radiating person.
This is probably why her relationship with Damien worked so well. There were no expectations of love between them. At first, she thought he avoided love because he wanted to avoid despair. A messy breakup. A punitive divorce. But now, she realizes he wasn’t so sentimental. He was calculating. Damien viewed love as a commodity, and if he didn’t love anyone, then nothing could be taken from him.
“I want to love in return,” she says. She feels her face flush with the unadorned truth of her admission. It sounds so quotidian. So obvious.
The Barber’s voice softens. “But how can anyone love in a place like this?”
She stands and walks to the window to look out at the snowy field. In the window’s reflection, she can see him looking at her. For a moment, his face looks like the boy in the photo. Soft. Searching.
“Because we have no other choice.” She turns to him. “This is where we are.” She reaches for his hand and says, “Show me upstairs.”
