After James (23 page)

Amanda's brother and my parents had died in accidents that weren't accidents. But imagining the accidental as a principle removed from intention overlooks the role of design inside chance. The degree of accident isn't the same in every
crash or chance occurrence. Whatever killed my parents, their last weeks and days were shaped by thousands of intentions, their own, their agency's, those of refugees, agitators, soldiers, rogue leaders, and all the rest. My parents had only wanted to establish a small spot of order amid chaos. I knew a version of the feeling.

My detective work, conducted to solve an unknown crime, if there'd been a crime, had pointed me toward atrocities, in Guatemala and Turkey, so distant from each other that the discovery of a link between them, if that's what it was, promised a dark sudden knowledge. Since learning of the disappearance of Durant's daughter I feared I'd find in the poems evidence of a murder. Now I was facing murder itself. The social constant of it, the standing condition. Murder in history, murder in nature, not in art. Never until now had I admitted that murder, the real thing, might know me personally. It had known my parents even before they died. They struggled for others against murder and neglect, starvation, hopelessness. There was murder inside their convictions, murder in their eyes and hearts. Murder is with all who, by circumstance or choice, have their feet in the real world. My parents died for the hearts of, and maybe at the hands of, desperate souls.

Pigeons wheeled through the sky. The world, ongoing, verified nothing. It wasn't even something to look at. I felt a small breeze, felt a shiver on my thigh, and the breeze died and the shiver returned and I realized it was my phone. Amanda had said she'd call me again as soon as she arranged to have someone take her shift, but I didn't want to talk to
her or anyone now. I didn't want to hear my own voice. Wrapped up in words, I had failed the people I most loved.

I felt at the beginning of a long period of self-recrimination and raging decline, when I might become a danger to myself. Somehow knowing what was to come, placing myself on my personal timeline, allowed me to feel need. Though I still didn't want to hear my voice, I now needed quiet connection. I checked the phone for a message, found none, checked my email, which suddenly made me feel not at all alone, given that someone else might be reading it, too, if not now, then in the future.

The only message was from Dominic.

“I don't know where you are—are you here in Montreal?—but you should know I have to sell the house. I need daily care, and you and the others need to live your lives. Think about books/furniture you might want.”

One by one, or two at a time, people leave. I put the phone away and stood with my hands in my pockets, looking off at the colours and planes, not seeing a thing, and this interior blankness was clarity. The paradox, that clarity can strike us into confusion at the yawning gulf between what we thought and what we've learned, between seeming and being, the long then and now. The powerful asymmetry of
as
and
was
,
was
and
is.
Then the pigeons shot overhead and turned, seemed to stall for a moment, and came rushing back toward me.

I
woke to a voice, singing. The call to prayer through the open window, desert air at dawn. Şanliurfa, southern Turkey. Day one.

I'd landed at night, found a bus. Unlit, isolate buildings rose up out of the desert. Four boys on bicycles, riding no hands, flew down a steep on-ramp to the highway. The end of the line was a turnout near a shut-down gas station, still on the outskirts of town. I got off in the dark with an old couple. A car was waiting for them but they saw I was stranded and talked to their driver, their son, I think, and he took me with them farther into the city. No one spoke English. When I said “Canada” they each said it in turn. They dropped me at another gas station and the son walked me to an intersection and began chopping the air with his hand, and said the name of my hotel, and I walked a long time, my bag slung over my shoulder, staying on the only lighted street even as it turned until finally other lit streets ran across it or joined it or led off and away. Then I was
walking past people in doorways and dim recesses, walked with others walking. Now and then a man would come alongside for a few steps, always with the same words, “Hello what is your name?” in a hurried, movie English, and I gave it and he smiled and said goodbye, expending the last foreign word, falling back, falling in with others. One of these, a boy who said my name over and over but wouldn't say his own, led me to the hotel.

The night clerk was still on the desk in the morning, the same polite, unsmiling man who'd photocopied my passport and pushed it back to me with a coupon for free tea in the courtyard. His face shone and I wondered if he'd shaved in the night. He asked if my “people” had arranged a “fixer” and I said I'd arranged my own. The assumption I let stand was that I was another journalist covering the refugee crisis, the Syrian war, or the infiltrations into the local population of jihadists, or the Turkish gangsters I'd just read about looking for Westerners to kidnap and sell to internet executioners at the border. On a map of the city I had the clerk circle the police headquarters. Unprompted, he also circled the market, the castle, the sacred sites. He said it was best to eat at the hotel. I thanked him, started away, and then stepped back and showed him a picture of my parents on my cellphone. I said they'd once stayed there and did he recognize them. The impression, I think, was that this question was unrelated to whatever I was in town for. He hesitated over the possibility, seemed to want to help, but shook his head.

I took breakfast in the courtyard, with the free tea and wealthy Turks. I was the lone white Westerner. Before I left
Rome a police official in Urfa named Erkin had assured me over the phone that I'd hear from the investigator in charge of my parents' case. Someone called twice from an unknown number and hung up at the sound of my voice. Only when I was on the flight did Erkin leave the message that the file was closed. “It was accident. No more investigation.” I called him now, but someone else answered, a man with no English, and this time I was the one hanging up. Before my bread and tea were finished I emailed Erkin, asking if he himself was the officer in charge. I didn't say that I was in his town. I hoped to gather a few facts locally, before anyone knew I was there, and present them to him in person.

After I told Durant that I had to “leave his employ” to learn about my parents' deaths, that though I had little hope of finding anything I needed to be on the ground in the place where they died, he said such a trip would be “pointless and perilous.” When I wouldn't be dissuaded, he offered to accompany me. “I won't have it,” I told him, forcing a smile. “Much too dangerous. And I've already arranged for help in Urfa.” To justify paying for the flight, Durant would declare it part of the Three Sheets investigation. He and Amanda saw me off at the airport, and I tried to voice my affection but could say nothing, couldn't touch them—I wasn't equal to the moment—and just nodded and walked off to the security gate.

I was making up my leverages on the fly. I knew next to nothing about this part of the world in the here and now. The analyses in the press were contradictory and alarming and changed daily. The Canadian government warned off all travel to the region. I fell back on my more comfortably confused
sense of the deep past of the over-recorded Tigris-Euphrates basin. The earliest stories extend an Old Testament time that corresponds not at all with the historical record. I'd left my laptop with Pierluigi to scrub clean so back in my room I studied sources on my phone. I learned that the whole fiction of the city's most famous local son, the prophet Abraham, born in a cave only steps from my hotel, was invented to provide grounds for land claims. And even the fiction itself, half-familiar, failed to interest me, though I tried to brush up on my patriarchs and kings. Here was Nimrod ordering the construction of the Tower of Babel, destruction and languages scattered, etcetera. Here was Abraham on the point of sacrificing Isaac and so on. There was Nimrod sacrificing Abraham in a burning pyre and God interceding, turning the fire to water and the embers to fish and there it was outside my room window, Abraham's Pool, with its pilgrims feeding the sacred carp.

Amanda and Durant wanted twice-daily updates. I wrote that I was meeting with a former colleague of my parents' who'd offered to guide me around for a day. Gail van Wyk was the South African who first told me about the accident and arranged for the paperwork and body transport. When I called her from Rome she said she remembered me, of course, and thought of me and my parents often. I asked for help. She would drive in from Gaziantep, arriving at noon, and stay in a house near the museum where my mother had written her last note to me. We'd arranged to meet at the cuneiform tablet.

From a cab I watched the city pass in scenes of small gatherings. Spice vendors with carts, stacks of aluminum pots, a chicken-wire pen full of pigeons overseen by a boy
hammering a copper dish. Old men on low folding prop stools, absently rubbing prayer beads. It was this motion, the beads shaken and rubbed in the hand of a moustached, middle-aged man on the sidewalk beside me as the cab waited for the traffic to clear, that announced an impenetrability. As the street curved up a slight elevation the city of half a million looked more like a town, its sure limits on all sides ending abruptly at empty desert plain. The world out there offered no recognitions, only the sense that I was unequal to it. My father would be surprised that I'd come. He'd expect me to fail. To fail and then write full-heartedly and to no effect about the failure.

The museum's ticket taker doubled as a guard. I showed him the picture of my parents—it was a shot my mother had asked someone to snap of them, standing outside the gate at the camp, and one of the rare recent photos of them together—but he didn't speak English and we were unable to get past his idea that I was asking if these people were in the museum now. He gestured with an open hand and shook his head. What was I expecting him to tell me? The museum was a part of their last hours. Maybe I wanted to know if their picture set off a memory or reaction.

It turned out I was the only visitor. I couldn't muster an interest in the statues of wild boars, early Bronze figurines, Iron Age adornments, human remains in cramped exposed graves, six-thousand-year-old pottery, obsidian tools and seals, all of it found locally. These pieces struck me not as artifacts but as facts, hard, stark pieces broken off from a dead reality. Some of the explanatory texts included English, some
didn't. My father would have read one or two, discovered his boredom, and given up. Likely he'd have taken a seat on the concrete bench, stared at the late Hittite relief in 2-D of an archer, God of Nature, standing beside or on the back of a stag, and waited for my mother to finish. It was strange to picture them here but for some reason wasn't hard to feel their presence, and because of it, the only item I really took in was the cuneiform tablet. It was larger than I'd imagined, the size of a sidewalk restaurant placard advertising lunch specials, which for all I knew it could have been, and the letters in their neat rows were alien beautiful, notched into their tight rectangular fields. My mother had found it beautiful, too. The moment I realized I couldn't stand the beauty, Gail van Wyk walked into the room and said my name.

“We came here when the refugee camps started. The usual agencies were on the ground early but the Turks wanted to run everything, pay for most of it, and they did a good job at first. Our role was limited. Your father's strengths were organizational, with him in command. That wasn't an option here, and maybe he overstepped.”

She was driving me to Çodhir, the camp where my parents had helped with the delivery and distribution of food and school supplies. The camp administrator had agreed to meet us. Gail was in her fifties, I guessed, with black hair, a sun-damaged complexion, a habit of lifting her chin slightly as she spoke, as if steadying herself. She lived alone in Gaziantep and would soon fly back to South Africa.

From her bag she produced a computer hard drive and handed it to me.

“What you asked for. I couldn't get into your father's email account. There's a password. I don't know why the police never asked for this.”

“Maybe they already know the real story. Or maybe they don't want to.”

“Or maybe they don't care. The Turks can afford to choose their friends, and a Christian aid group, they think they don't really need us. This country is hard to understand. People in the know can't believe what's happening in Turkey these days. But not even Turks in the know can believe what's happening in Iraq and Syria. And here, Urfa and the southern towns, now they're crawling with ISIS. The Westerners are getting out.”

Almost an hour out of the city she asked if I wanted to see the accident scene.

“Is the road somewhere near?”

“We're on it.” The spot was unmarked, of course, and unmarkable. There'd been no other cars for miles. Stony desert, a sky white with dust. “Somewhere on this stretch.”

I asked her to pull over. I got out and she waited for me. In the car I'd begun to sweat but the heat and wind dried me, it seemed, instantly. I walked into a field of burnt grass and stone that ran in every direction to the horizon. It was no place for an ambush. They must have been followed by car, forced to stop, or maybe someone pretended to have broken down and they stopped to help. I took a short panoramic film with my phone, put it away, stood still awhile, trying to feel
what it meant to be here, where they ended, but the feeling wouldn't come and I didn't know how to look for it.

Of the camp, nothing can be written. Nothing so sure as a city struck onto a desert, behind armoured trucks and razor wire. Nothing as straight as long rows of eleven-by-thirteen tents with blankets strung between them for shade. Nothing as present as a woman with wide-set eyes and blunt fingernails across the table in the operations trailer, asking me to call her Didem. No textures so grainless as the voiced summaries of paperwork detailing delivery schedules and costs, originals and duplicates, signed by my father. No place to linger, though that is all that happens there. The camp defeats description as it defeats everything, no other side to the stopgap. The camp is there full stop.

“Meaning what?” Amanda asked.

“Meaning we found nothing. I met no one who knew them and as far as Gail could tell, the paperwork contained no clues. I've got nothing to present to the police but lines from their own accident report.”

The word was
prolepsis
, a prefiguring of a future knowledge that arrives suddenly, without conscious reflection. The idea was that Three Sheets knew us and we were on the verge of understanding how. But the idea was false.

“Maybe ideas aren't real,” I said. “And what we mean by reality isn't an idea at all. Not an idea, not a hunch. Reality just shows up all at once.” She indulged me by saying nothing in response. “What about you, anything to report there?”

She told me that Durant couldn't let go of his search. He'd hired Pierluigi to hack Three Sheets. I tried to tell her that here, in southern Turkey, the thought of these internet mysteries, emptily timeless and placeless, seemed to belong to so small a sense of the human that, if they would only become material for a second or two—a gnat weaving the air—I would extinguish them, smudge them out in my palm, restore nature to reality, and release us all back into the wild.

“I say, respect the gnat. Gnats are people, too.”

“I didn't mean to disrespect them,” I said.

“And thank god for molluscs while we're at it. They're funding the good fight.”

“In this corner, the vast and shadowy complex. In the other corner, clams.”

“I hope you're being careful.”

“I hope so, too. And I send you a semi-chaste hug, Amanda. But I really don't wish you were here.”

In the courtyard I had just started into my lamb dish and was taking some comfort in the thought that I was not of little consequence in the world, but of zero consequence, when two policemen walked in and spotted me. One was in uniform, one in jeans and a bulletproof vest. The other diners, couples at three tables, stopped talking and watched. There was a long moment before the men crossed and stood at my table and the uniformed one said my name. I nodded. He was tall. His face was narrow and pockmarked, so that he seemed to be assessing me from over a rough terrain. He handed me
a blank envelope and they left. Inside was a typed note signed by Erkin.

You gave no indication of a visit to Urfa. Since the deaths of your parents the only new informations are missing funds from their Christian organization. There are presently no reasons to open the case. You serve your mother and father by not pursuing questions.

You will understand I am too busy to see you. You will understand that you are not safe here. This letter is my courtesy.