Continental Drift (6 page)

“Well what?” Bob asks his wife. “Eddie’s doing all right in Florida, you know that. He has from the first down there. And he wants me to come down. You know that.”

“Yes, sure I know. It’s just … we’ve talked about all this before. The Florida business and Eddie’s offers, and you were the one … it was always you, you were the one who said Eddie would be hard to work for, and the idea of running a liquor store always seemed boring to you, I thought.”

She stands and walks to the TV and snaps it off, and the room suddenly seems vacant, as if they have wandered into it in search of someone not at home. “Let’s go to bed, Bob.”

“I’ll get the skates for Ruthie tomorrow,” he says. “First thing in the morning.”

“I know, honey. I know.” She extends her hand, and he leans forward in the chair, takes her hand in his and rises. Together, they switch off the lights and slowly walk up the stairs to bed.

Before Bob and Elaine Dubois sleep on this snowy night in December, they have one more conversation that is of significance to them both.

They are lying on their backs side by side in darkness, he in his underwear, she in her flannel nightgown. She has wrapped her curlers in a nylon net. When, in a familiar form of invitation, he lays one leg over hers at the thigh, she quickly slides her hip against his.

Bob speaks first. “You know something? Ever since we were kids, I was the big silent one and Eddie was the little guy who did all the talking. But actually, I was a lot smarter than Eddie. In school, I mean. I was even smarter than Ave Boone, but he just never tried, he didn’t give a shit then, just like now. But I
got
things faster than Eddie did. He was always just this side of flunking, and I did okay in school. And he knew I was smarter than he was, so he was kind of jealous of me and got a real kick whenever he could make me look stupid, which was easy for him when we were kids, because he was almost two years older than me, even though he was only a grade ahead of me in school. But I was jealous of him, too, because he could talk so good, and all I could do was stand there like a big dummy.

“The only time we were even, when we were really equals, was when we both skated for Bishop Grenier those three years before he graduated. He was a forward, and I was a defenseman, and we were the best combination in the state for three years running. The Dubois brothers. Remember? The Granite Skates, they called us in the Boston papers. That was the year I was a junior and we won the New England
Championship down in the old Boston Arena. If it was today instead of 1966, we’d both have gone to college on scholarship. UNH, probably. But hockey wasn’t such a big college sport in those days. Anyhow, we were a team then, me and Eddie. And we were real close then. You know? Real close.”

“You want to move to Florida, don’t you?”

He sighs heavily and says nothing for several seconds. “I didn’t before.”

“But you do now.”

“Naw, I just don’t want to buy Ruthie’s skates,” he says. “If we move to Florida, I won’t hafta buy her any skates for Christmas.”

“Be serious. You do want to move to Florida, don’t you?”

“Well … yes, I do.”

“Right away? Right after Christmas?”

“No. No, there’s something I want to do first.” He slides his leg down her thighs to her knees, then back again.

“There is? What?”

“You know what I want to do first. And I’m not moving to Florida till I do it.”

“Now?”

“Is it okay? You wanta check the calendar?”

“It’s okay.”

Bob turns, places one hand between her legs and kisses his wife on the mouth, gently, gently, then more intensely, and when she starts to move beneath his hand, he kisses her fiercely, until he can feel himself huge and stiff, and then he finds himself fucking her with marvelous, thrilling force, while she turns and writhes under him, pushes her pelvis back at him more and more rapidly, in their old, familiar, utterly natural rhythm, the rhythm it took them years to discover, a rhythm they’ll never lose, they know, because it belongs to them alone, Bob and Elaine, his body and hers, in the one clear linkage either body can make to the other. They push smoothly on, one against the other, until first she sighs, and then seconds later he feels himself spread warmly out from the center of his body, and they stop.

For a few moments, they lie face to face in silence together, she on her back with her nightgown around her waist and her legs snaked around his waist, he with his weight resting on his elbows, and she says in a tiny voice, “Don’t ever do it with anyone else.”

“I won’t.”

“I don’t think I could bear the idea. I could bear the reality, but not the idea. You know what I mean?”

“Yeah. I know. Me too. I couldn’t bear the idea. I don’t think I could even bear the reality,” he adds. “If I knew about it, I mean.”

“Good,” she says. “Me neither.” Then she brings her legs down, easing him from her.

It’s as if the creatures residing on this planet in these years, the human
creatures, millions of them traveling singly and in families, in clans and tribes, traveling sometimes as entire nations, were a subsystem inside the larger system of currents and tides, of winds and weather, of drifting continents and shifting, uplifting, grinding, cracking land masses. It’s as if the poor forked creatures who walk, sail and ride on donkeys and camels, in trucks, buses and trains from one spot on this earth to another were all responding to unseen, natural forces, as if it were gravity and not war, famine or flood that made them move in trickles from hillside villages to gather along the broad, muddy riverbanks lower down and wait for passage on rafts down the river to the sea and over the sea on leaky boats to where they collect in eddies, regather their lost families and few possessions, set down homes, raise
children and become fruitful once again. We map and measure jet streams, weather patterns, prevailing winds, tides and deep ocean currents; we track precisely scarps, fractures, trenches and ridges where the plates atop the earth’s mass drive against one another; we name and chart the Southeast and Northeast Trades and the Atlantic Westerlies, the tropical monsoons and the doldrums, the mistrals, the Santa Ana and the Canada High; we know the Humboldt, California and Kuroshio currents—so that, having traced and enumerated them, we can look on our planet and can see that all the way to its very core the sphere inhales and exhales, rises and falls, swirls and whirls in a lovely, disciplined dance in time. It ages and dies and is born again, constantly, through motion, creating and recreating its very self, like a uroborous, the snake that devours its tail.

Seen from above, then, the flight of a million and a half Somali men, women and children with their sick and dying beasts out of the drought- and war-shattered region of Ogaden in the Horn of Africa would resemble the movement of the Southwest Monsoon Current, for instance, which in the heat of July moves slowly, almost imperceptibly out of the Red Sea just north of Ethiopia and Somalia, across the Gulf of Aden to the Indian Ocean, where it joins the Northwest Monsoon Drift and dips southward along the subcontinent, by winter looping back again toward Kenya and Tanzania, bringing rain to Mombasa and Dar es Salaam and filling the great inland waterways and lakes. The movement of the Somalis would seem inevitable, unalterable and mindless; and because we would have watched it the way we watch weather, it would seem tragic. We could not argue over who was at fault or what should have been done; ideology would seem a form of vanity, a despicable self-indulgence. We would rise from our shaded seat in front of our hut alongside the dusty road that leads from the treeless Damisa hills in Ethiopia to our village near the trading town of Samaso in Somalia, and we would step forward onto the road with a cup of water and a small bowl of millet and whey for the family we have been watching approach for the last hour, a man, tall and gaunt, ageless, leading a half-blind camel with a pack of sticks tied
to its back, and, coming along behind, a woman with a scrawny child in her arms, and behind her yet another cadaverous child. We let them sleep under their thin blankets beside our hut, and in the morning, as the sun breaks across the brown plain, give them bread and water and point the way southeast to Samaso, another thirty kilometers, and say the name of the man who is said to own a truck for transporting to the coast and the refugee camps there the people who come down from the hills, the Somali-speaking nomads who have raised cattle in that wilderness for a thousand years and who now must flee famine, drought and the war, the endless war between the Ethiopians with their Russian guns and Cuban allies and the soldiers of the Western Somalia Liberation Front. The man, his black skin cut through almost to the bone of his face with worry and fatigue, nods and repeats the name of the man with the truck. He will take you to Kismayu, we say, just as we told the others, for nearly every day they come. The camps are there, on the coast. There is food and shelter there, and people who will know how to cure your children of their sores. The man asks if there will be a price for this transportation. We shrug, as if we don’t know. He nods. He understands. Perhaps he will be able to sell his wretched camel. If not, he knows that one night soon, on the cold ground outside the tiny crossroads village of Samaso, they will die. First the children will die, then probably the man, and then the woman. And tomorrow or the day after that, another family will come down from the hills and will cross the dry, hot plain along the rutted road, will stop for the night beside our hut and in the morning will move on to the same fate.

In these years, the early 1980s, most events and processes that have been occurring for millennia continue to occur, some of them silently, slowly, taking place an inch at a time miles below the surface of the earth, others noisily, with smoke and fire, revolution, war and invasion, taking place on the surface. We measure the geological change in millimeters per annum, feel nothing move beneath our feet and conclude, therefore, that nothing has happened. By the same token,
when we read in newspapers and hear from the evening news broadcasts that there is revolution in Iran, war in Iraq, foreign soldiers and tanks in Afghanistan, because each new day brings a surfeit of such news, blotting out the news of the day before, news of Israelis in Lebanon replacing accounts of Russians in Afghanistan, Americans in Grenada replacing Israelis in Lebanon, we conclude here, too, that nothing has happened.

The metabolic rate of history is too fast for us to observe it. It’s as if, attending to the day-long cycle of a single mayfly, we lose sight of the species and its fate. At the same time, the metabolic rate of geology is too slow for us to perceive it, so that, from birth to death, it seems to us who are caught in the beat of our own individual human hearts that everything happening on this planet is what happens to us, personally, privately, secretly. We can stand at night on a high, cold plain and look out toward the scrabbled, snow-covered mountains in the west, the same in the suburb of Denver as oustide a village in Baluchistan in Pakistan, and even though beneath our feet continent-sized chunks of earth grind inexorably against one another, go on driving one or the other continent down so as to rise up and over it, as if desiring to replace it on the map, we poke with our tongue for a piece of meat caught between two back teeth and think of sarcastic remarks we should have made to our brother-in-law at dinner.

While we stand and think of trivialities on the plain in Baluchistan, the crust of the earth, in plates, diverges, carves long, bottomless trenches beneath the sea between India and Antarctica and shoves the last, lost child of Gondwanaland north into Eurasia, attaches India and Pakistan to China, Afghanistan and Iran with such irresistible force that the subcontinent bends and dips down at the line of convergence, buckles and crumbles at the edges and heaps up, as if with the blade of a colossal shovel, the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush, a thousand miles of mountain peaks twenty and twenty-five thousand feet high, the very mountain peaks and passes we can see in the distance and have watched night after night all our brief, distracted lives.

And while we wait with one son, the eldest, and a brother-in-law
from Peshawar who has told us of the money to be made leading rich Afghans down from the passes to the refugee camps, we hope that he is right, we hope that the Afghans will indeed be wealthy and will be eager to pay us handsomely for escorting them down the mountain pathways, where thieves hide and wait. But at the same time, we know the brother-in-law is wrong, for we have heard for years that the Afghans who flee into Pakistan are poor. It is the Iranians, we have heard, who are rich, the merchants who, crossing their border at Ruhak, face the desert and then the mountains of the Makran Range and turn south, heading for Karachi and the sea and eventually to America. Those who live down there, near the Iranian border, they are the ones who grow fat from escorting refugees, while we risk our lives up here with the Afghans for nothing.

But the brother-in-law, an arrogant man who had played professional football in Lahore and therefore believes he knows what we do not, has insisted that we can make a year’s money from a few days’ work with little risk, and to convince him that he is wrong (or so we have said to him) we have agreed to come up here with the boy, who is old enough to carry a rifle and walks behind us. Bandits, murderers, madmen—they live up here near the snow year-round and prey on travelers without guns, so we, the boy, and even the brother-in-law, make a show of our weapons.