FINDING THE CENTER OF THE DISASTER STORY by Loreen Nariari A project submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS IN ENGLISH WEBER STATE UNIVERSITY Ogden, Utah December, 2017 Approved Dr. Sian Gr Laura Stoti Ryan Ridge Nariari 1 Loreen Nariari Critical Introduction Dr. Griffiths 11/30/2017 Finding the Center of the Disaster Story If my critical introduction were to have an epigraph, it would be the following quotation from Lydia Davis' short story, "The Center of the Story": A woman has written a story that has a hurricane in it, and a hurricane usually promises to be interesting. But in this story the hurricane threatens the city without actually striking it. The story is flat and even, just as the earth seems flat and even when a hurricane is advancing over it, and if she were to show it to a friend, the friend would probably say that, unlike a hurricane, this story has no center (19). I came across the quotation during the research stage of my project when I was looking for short stories that featured natural disasters. The quotation, along with a description of Davis's story, was featured in a New Yorker article titled, "Six Shorts to Read during a Hurricane." My excitement at finding six potential disaster stories in one fell swoop was nothing compared to reading the quotation, or finding out that the entire story centered around a woman who was trying to write a story about a hurricane but failing to find its center. Up until then, I had struggled to put into words exactly what I found frustrating about the original draft of my story, but now through sheer luck, I found myself looking at a quote that articulated my frustration so perfectly it felt surreal. I felt Nariari 2 vindicated, but I also felt invigorated. If someone else, fictional or otherwise, had had a similar problem then maybe there was a way to find the center of my story. I wrote the first draff of my short story in a fiction class following a prompt we received to write a paragraph about a "bomb-level" disaster. This paragraph was to be followed by twenty sentences depicting a play-by-play of someone's life, with the option to place said someone within the disaster or somewhere else entirely. The third step of the prompt asked for a description of setting, preferably where the character was, and the final step instructed us to "smash them together," interlaying all three elements in whatever order we saw fit. I found this prompt immediately exciting on account of the "bomb-level disaster," because in my mind, it guaranteed my story an event, and a big one at that. There would be drama, a thrilling climax and characters that ran around and did things. I had big plans. I also felt that the disaster gave me a direction, in the sense that I could either write about the frantic moments leading up to it or I could write about the devastation when it was over. I set about researching disasters, both man-made and natural, and settled on locust invasions because it wasn't something I'd heard about as often as I had floods or hurricanes or earthquakes. My research into locust swarms led me to an article on an Egyptian news website about a recent locust invasion that had plagued the country, and how residents of a certain town had taken to setting fires to disperse the swarms. I was immediately drawn in by that image, but was struck more by the unfairness that a place that was practically desert would have to suffer through a locust swarm. Because of this, I chose to set my story in an arid area, and chose a farmer as my main character because it set him up to lose not Nariari 3 only his life's work, but his livelihood as well. According to the prompt's instructions, I had all three things I needed: a disaster, a person whose life I could depict and a setting. The initial draft of my locust story that resulted from the prompt was four double-spaced pages, and only had two characters: father and son. It opened with the two of them frantically setting up tires, and reached its climax with the arrival of the swarm and the setting of the tires on fire. It concluded shortly after with the father running into the fire to save his crops because a change in the direction of the wind had driven the flames towards the crops. The only reference made to the boy's mother was that she was dead. Although I had been excited to write a "bomb-level" event type of story, I was underwhelmed by what I had produced. It felt as though I had lifted the Egyptian news article about the locust swarm, added two characters and called it a day. What was even more frustrating was that I couldn't quite put my finger on what was missing. I had an interesting disaster, a character with much to lose, and a setting that served the story, but still it fell flat. No center in sight. My first attempt at revising the story was using Antony a Nelson's method, which she mentions in her Tin House craft essay, "Short Story." In the essay she lays out her process for creating a piece from beginning to polished end. I liked the idea of having a sort of recipe that instructed me on what to do at each point in the narrative process and my hope was that it would ultimately lead me to a better version of my disaster story. The other reason that drew me to Nelson's method was that the story she uses to illustrate her writing process was about her and her family being caught in a tornado when she was five. Because I already had a draft written, I found that some of the elements she called Nariari 4 for already existed in my story, such as attaching a window of time to the story. I did, however, add some new elements as per her prescription, such as introducing an object of importance to the story, and also playing up the story's opposing forces in order to create conflict. I also changed the point of view from the father to the son to open up the possibility for the story to take a new direction. The story that came out of that process was as follows: Father and son are setting up tires in anticipation of locust swarm; father lashes out at son in a moment of exasperation and son reacts by running away with father's radio (object of importwance) leaving no way of knowing when the swarm will arrive. Although I liked that there was now tension between father and son it didn't feel consequential and did nothing to make the impending disaster feel any more impactful. When I sat down to revise the story for a third time for my thesis project, I had an epiphany courtesy of Janet Burroway that shed some light onto what the source of my story's problem might be. In her book Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft, she says the following: "Only trouble is interesting ... but passages about such times by themselves make for dull reading; they can be used as lulls in an otherwise tense situation, as a resolution. Even as a hint that something awful is about to happen. They cannot be used as a whole plot" (232). From the beginning, what drew me to the writing prompt was the presence of a large-scale disaster, which for me spelled destruction, chaos, loss, etc. When I wrote my first and second drafts, my eye was always on the upcoming disaster or in Burroway's words, trouble. Every choice I made was about the swarm and its arrival. As such, I didn't know much about the father, for instance, except that he was a farmer whose wife had died. Nariari 5 The second epiphany I had regarding the problem at the heart of my story was that what I had was a story (by Burro way's definition this is a series of chronological events), and not a plot (the who, what and why of the story). I had an incoming locust swarm; father and son setting up tires; father and son lighting tires when swarm arrived, and a massive fire which father ran into to save his crops. Each of those things were successive events and I wrote them just like that, albeit with backstory and description peppered in along the way. According to Burroway, concurrent events like the ones I had written didn't move or illuminate. To illustrate this point in her book, she has this to say: "The emotional and dramatic significance of these ordinary events emerges in relation of cause to effect, and where such relation can be shown, a possible plot comes into existence (247). The problem with my original story was that it was all story and no plot. I had chronological events lined up with no investigation into why the characters' lives were the way they way were. I decided to look at different stories featuring large-scale disasters to find the major chronological scenes that made the story, but also look at how they had managed to make something meaningful. "Long Tom Lookout" by Nicole Cullen Story: A woman spirits away the autistic, out-of-wedlock child of her husband, who is working long-term on the gulf cleanup. This story is unique in the sense that it features two large-scale disasters, but I chose to focus on the one that did the most work for the narrative. The disaster in question is the British Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico where 140 million Nariari 6 gallons of crude oil were spilt along 423 miles of coastline. When the story begins, the oil spill has already happened and isn't mentioned much in the story. Story Events: Lauren is en route to Idaho from Texas with her husband's illegitimate child whom has been placed in her custody; she decides to stay in Idaho for the summer and find work; she goes to see her ex-boyfriend at the Forest Service for a job which she ultimately gets; Lauren begins her job as a fire lookout and brings the boy with her; Lauren gets to know the boy; Lauren takes the boy back to her mother's for a Fourth of July barbeque and there is a scare during a game of hide-and-seek where the boy seems to be lost; altercation with the boy's father over the phone; a series of lighting storms ignite two hundred foot spot fires; the boy disappears; a search for the boy commences. Cause and effect: Because of the oil spill, Lauren is left as the caretaker of her husband's child with another woman. The oil spill also continues to keep her husband at sea leaving her with no other option but to care for the child. "After the Flood" by Peter Cameron Story: An elderly couple agrees, at the behest of their pastor, to house a family left homeless by a flood. Story events: Reverend Judy asks the protagonist to host the Djukanovics who have been displaced by the flood; the protagonist prepares her daughter's old room for the Djukanovics to sleep in; protagonist and husband go out to dinner leaving their guests at home; the protagonist and her husband share bed for the first time because the spare bedroom is no longer available; the protagonist reveals to Mr. Djukanovic that her Nariari 7 daughter, Alice, died; the protagonist gives the Djukanovic's young daughter her granddaughter's old playhouse; the protagonist bids farewell to the Djukanovics who are moving to emergency trailers; Reverend Judy pays the protagonist a visit and offers to pray with her about her daughter's death, the protagonist declines and sends the Reverend away; the protagonist and her husband decide to stop going to church. Cause and effect: In the beginning, neither the protagonist nor her husband are particularly warm to the Djukanovics, but as the story unfolds, we discover that they too have experienced loss. Not only did their daughter die, but the daughter's husband and young daughter as well. "Waterwalkers" by Bret Anthony Johnston Story: An estranged couple are reunited during a Hurricane in Corpus Christi, Texas. Story events: A hurricane is on its way; Sonny happens upon his estranged wife, Nora, in the hardware store where he works. She needs help preparing her sister's house for the storm; they arrive at the home and Sonny helps board up her windows; they reminisce over how they met; they catch up about where Nora has been; the hurricane rages on outside making it so that Sonny can't leave; the storm eventually passes and Nora reveals that she had come into the hardware store because she had found out he worked there. Cause and effect: We learn that the reason Sonny and his wife are estranged is because the death of their son drove them apart. Nora was so overcome with grief that she left the state and went to start a new life elsewhere. When she finally returns and seeks out her Nariari 8 former husband, the hurricane doesn't just force to people together, it forces two people who really need to talk, together. "Rubiaux Rising" by Steve De Jarnatt Story: A detoxing paraplegic is trapped in an attic while Hurricane Katrina approaches. Story events: Rubiaux awakens in the attic after making it through a category 5 hurricane; water slowly starts to build in the attic; Rubiaux has no more food in the cooler and is growing hungrier by the minute; Rubiaux notices a tomato vine that has creeped up to the side of the house that he can reach for a tomato; the hurricane continues to batter the house and the attic slowly begins to fill with water; Rubiaux falls asleep and wakes up to the sight of snakes; Rubiaux stacks up suitcases and climbs on top of them but he is running out of headroom in the attic as well; Rubiaux decides to take his own life using a belt; he stops when he remembers his head plate and proceeds to take it out of his head; Rubiaux uses head plate to reflect sun and light tarpaper in attic on fire; a rescue pilot overhead sees the fire and rescues him. Cause and effect: We learn that Rubiaux is in the attic because his Aunt Cleoma is helping him detox on account of an addiction he has to prescription medication. He developed this addiction after sustaining his injuries in the Marine's, which he only joined in order to take his cousin's place, a "half-wit" who had been hoodwinked into joining by a zealous recruiter. Discovering this as you read along makes you more invested in his well-being amidst the hurricane. Nariari 9 After reading all the disaster stories listed above (plus Doris Lessing's "A Mild Attack of Locusts" and Stephen O'Connor's "Next to Nothing") I felt that there was much work that needed to be done in figuring out the who, what and why questions pertaining to the father and son's lives, especially regarding the boy's mother. In an effort to introduce causality and thereby, plot, into my story, I first had to figure out the biggest question I had which was why the father would run into the fire at the end. My original reasoning was that he had worked hard to build the life he had built, but that reason carried little emotional or dramatic significance. I decided to somehow tie it to his son, but even the fact that the farm was a source of food for father and son didn't feel weighty enough. I eventually arrived at my current explanation, which was that the farm allowed Karim and his son to live independently from the grandfather, who was the reason that Karim's wife was no longer alive. The story I borrowed the most from, especially in terms of structure, was Bret Anthony Johnston's, "Waterwalkers." In both my first and second drafts I found it difficult to generate conversation or confrontation between a grown man and a child, plus it didn't feel true to their relationship. I had toyed with the idea of introducing another character, but it wasn't until reading "Waterwalkers" that I saw how I might go about it. Another thing I liked about Johnston's story was that the death of Nora and Sonny's boy was revealed bit by bit until the climax when the entire thing was revealed. Likewise, in "After the Flood" it wasn't clear what exactly had happened to the protagonist's daughter and her family until the very end. The first of a list of things which I took away from the process of trying to write a disaster story was that the hardships or obstacles that the characters were dealing with Nariari 10 need not have anything to do with disaster itself. In "Long Tom Lookout" we only hear of the mention of the oil spill once but the protagonists immediate predicament is that of the boy. I came into this process thinking that to write about a large scale event was to write about the event itself and anything having to do with either preparation or recovery, but I found that that wasn't the case at all. I discovered that disaster stories weren't disaster stories in the way I envisioned they would be with the fronds whipping for pages and cows being swept away in frenzy. Instead the stories I did find were quiet and laser-focused in on their characters as opposed to the environment. All of the stories with the exception of "Rubiaux Rises" were set either before or after the disasters, which to me, went to show that the disasters were never focus of the story to begin with. The drama does not come from the disaster but from the significance of events. The center of the story was never the "bomb-level" disaster but the people. Benjamin Percy says much the same thing in his book. Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction. He refers to it as "giganticism" (68), which is the tendency he attributes to beginning writers of fetishizing the coolness of an idea to the detriment of character. I was so focused on the idea of a locust swarm and lighting of the tires on fire that I neglected to find out who the father, son and grandfather were and how their story helped me tell the locust story and vice versa. Nariari 11 Works Cited Burroway, Janet, et al. Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft. Pearson ,2015. Cameron, Peter. "After the Flood." The Best American Short Stories, edited by Jennifer Egan, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2014,43- 64. Cullen, Nicole. "Long Tom Lookout." The Best American Short Stories, edited by Jennifer Egan, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2014, 65-88. Jamatt, Steve De. "Rubiaux Rising ." The Best American Short Stories, edited by Heidi Pitlor, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2009, 32-40. Johnson, Adam. "Hurricanes Anonymous ." The Best American Short Stories, edited by Heidi Pitlor, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2009, 118-156. Johnston, Bret Anthony. "Waterwalkers." Corpus Christi: Stories 2005: 3-34. Lessing, Doris. "A Mild Attack of Locusts." The New Yorker 26 February 1955,20-29. Nelson, Antonya. "Short Story: A Process of Revision." The Writer's Notebook II: Craft Essays from Tin House 2012: 141-156. O'Connor, Stephen. "Next to Nothing ." The Best American Short Stories, edited by Jennifer Egan, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2014, 267-288. Percy, Benjamin. Thrill Me: Essay on Fiction. Minnesota: Gray wolf Press, 2016, 68. Nariari 1 Loreen Nariari Thesis Project Dr. Griffiths 11/26/2017 Hell Fire It all begun with a ten-foot high and sixteen-foot wide mountain of tires that had appeared overnight in the valley just beyond the Wadi. For weeks, the pile of black rubber had held such mystique that at any given moment you were guaranteed to find a group of three to five of the Wadi's men gathered around it. In fact, it didn't take long for a few to appoint themselves its guardians, shooing away children, and asking that the women please keep their distance. The speculation about the tires grew more elaborate, but the mystery was solved three weeks later when Jumo, staggering home at two in the morning, had observed a procession of dump trucks making their way down to the valley. The trucks had arranged themselves in a circle with their headlights shining outwards and lifted their beds to deposit hundreds of tires each. It would appear that McMillan Tires of 1638 Industrial Road, Dakar had found the perfect dumping ground for its cast-offs even if it meant driving into another country to do it. For years the trucks appeared very fortnight depositing one more mountain of tires into the valley so that by the time Karim was born, every inch of the valley had been filled to the brim with tires and the Wadi looked on it as a not-so- natural resource. For the children, it was a versatile playground that could be used for hide and seek one day, and an obstacle course the next. The adults on the other hand had Nariari 2 found innumerable ways to put the tires to use, chief among them being footwear. What they lacked in water they made up for in sandals. Everyone in the Wadi had at least three pairs, from open-toed thongs to platform sandals for the women. Finally, it acted like a natural wind-vane, you could always tell which way the wind was blowing based on the smell of rubber wafting through the air. ••• Never had a cloudless sky looked more sinister. In fact, as Karim took in the perfect day, he couldn't help but shiver, hot desert air be damned. The unwritten rule since the beginning of time was that when Mother Nature was on the warpath she sent word. It was common courtesy. Clouds would roil, branches would whip and children would get called in from the street. Provisions would be counted and re-counted, and hatches, whatever those were, would be battened down. As he looked up at the sky and down at the lizards luxuriating a foot away, it was clear there had been a violation of this courtesy. There was a swarm of five billion locusts headed their way and nothing in the air to signal their arrival. Had this been a storm or a hurricane or a flood, his adrenaline would be through the roof, although, he suspected that his brain no longer remembered what adrenaline was, let alone how to make any. The meticulous rows of millet and sorghum before him could attest to his routine-driven existence over the past sixteen years. Still, he couldn't help but fantasize about striding across his plot with purpose, pointing and yelling instructions out to his son. He would have given anything for the thrill of some urgency by way of a dark cloud or at the very least a light breeze. Nariari 3 The billow of dust that he had been waiting for materialized in the distance right on time. It sounded odd, but he would have recognized that cloud of dust anywhere, not to mention the truck that created it, even after all these years. There weren't many vehicles in the Sahel, let alone any of that size. In its former life it had been a Red Cross food aide truck, but now it belonged to Karim's father-in-law, or former father-in-law, he was no longer sure what the title was. His father-in-law had been in possession of the dilapidated Isuzu ever since the aide workers had left it in his possession twenty years ago. If you looked closely enough on the driver's side door you could see the eponymous Red Cross over whose barely visible outline the father-in-law had painted Jesus' face to match the declaration on the back of the truck that Christ was king. Karim watched as the truck drew closer, its headlights casting him a menacing glare. It came to a halt beside Karim and he watched as his father -in-law leapt out of the driver's side and walked to the back where he released the door. Tires of all shapes and sizes came bounding out. They hit the ground and veered in every direction. The outpouring sea of rubber looked like it would never end but the last one finally hit the ground and Karim's father-in-law turned and declared, "Here they are. Just like you asked." Karim and his wife had inherited an oasis, which was nowhere near as romantic as it sounded. They were nineteen and had just gotten married when Karim's family saw it fit to pass on the half-acre of land which no one had ever wanted. As the youngest of four boys, it fell to him, mostly because there wasn't anything else to give. It wasn't the oasis of the neighboring Sahara's brochures with a clear blue watering hole surrounded by palm trees and fine sand. There were no Nariari 4 five-star tents and boys in prayer caps who appeared with trays and little glasses of tea. There were no German or Swiss couples with whom you shared sunscreen and promised to keep in touch with when you left, and there was certainly no concierge into whose hand you pressed a ten dollar bill and wished well when it was all over. This particular oasis was half an acre all around with four date palm trees and two scrubby bushes. It had a five-foot watering hole that was browner than it would ever be blue. In the place of fine sand there was silty, cracked ground with crevices so large dung beetles would fall in whole. He had considered not accepting it and just letting it languish like it had for however many years. When you lived in a semi-desert there was never any reason to seek out greener pastures because there were none. You stayed put, especially, if you lived in a Wadi like Karim had all his life. However, when it did rain, the Wadi filled with water transforming into a river and providing everyone with water until it dried out again. Back then it had rained quite a lot, which was to say that it rained the exact calculated amount for the region and far too little for anyplace else. However, the people had learned to make do because it was all they knew. The rains would come and they would dig their planting pits ninety centimeters apart in each direction so that from a bird's eye view it looked like it had been done by machines as opposed to every one of the Wadi's men, each armed with a ruler, making meticulous measurements like their lives depended on it. They would place manure and seeds in each pit and position the excavated soil downslope of every pit so that when the rain hit the ground it was concentrated in the pits with not a drop going to waste. In three to four months, the Wadi's fields would burst green with life and the color was infectious. Children, it Nariari 5 seemed, could do no wrong, husbands barked less at their wives, and the few grasshoppers that turned up just to blend in with the leaves were considered idyllic. When Karim had first told his wife about the oasis, he had expected her to be resistant. He imagined that like most of the Wadi's women, she would have wanted nothing to do with the place and would take every opportunity to escape back to the Wadi every week like his brothers' wives had. She surprised him by being the one who was most excited to leave, something about exploring new horizons. Karim's father-in-law looked older than the he had the last time the two men had seen each other. He was (for all intents and purposes) still a tiny man. He came up to the average man's chest and towered only slightly over the most petite of women, and yet everyone bent to his will like plastic over an open flame. They simultaneously loathed him while wanting to be his very best friend, not that he held much in the way of warmth and true friendship. Even his closest acquaintances got charged his steep fee to ride in his truck. It was an open secret that he had conveniently found God twenty years prior just when the Red Cross was looking for a "good, Christian man" to drive around their truck delivering supplies all across the Sahel. His transformation had been instantaneous. His high-pitched voice which carried clear across the Wadi now developed the most somber tones and he adopted a few physical affectations such as when he would reach out, or up, in his case, and clasp people by the shoulder giving a tight squeeze in a gesture of Christian brotherhood. He also went and purchased a stack of Desiderata's "at great personal cost," that he made sure to pass around when there was a Red Cross envoy there to Nariari 6 see it He didn't know how to read but he could recognize the word 'God' anjnvhere and the Desiderata had it so he assumed that it was the type of gift that might go a long way with his higher ups. He had also changed his name to Paul. The effect of nine years had been such that they grey had caught up with his beard which now too was as speckled as his head. His moustache on the other hand remained as black as ever. Beads of sweat gathered in the lines of his forehead and he looked like a man who could use a drink or a few minutes in the cool house. Karim contemplated inviting him inside. "Well, I'm sure you'd like to get on your way so I'll let you go," he said instead. "It actually would be nice to sit for a little bit," his father-in-law said. "Shall we go inside?" Karim resented the "we", let alone the fact that he was being invited into his own home. As they walked into the cool interior of the house, Karim sought to establish the fact that this wouldn't be a long visit. His wife had always been the gracious one. "I wish 1 had something to offer you. I didn't anticipate you staying," Karim said. "No matter. Hot water is fine." Karim had forgotten the man's penchant for hot water, which he would always let cool to lukewarm, making it the most counterproductive exercise. Of course he didn't imagine that his father-in-law had ever considered this, seeing as it was always someone else who was sent on this fool's errand. Karim did a mental calculation of the time it would take for the water to boil, and then cool, not to Nariari 7 mention the little bird sips his father-in-law would take. He also imagined that there was a certain level of small talk that was expected when you hadn't seen someone in nine years. He glanced at the clock. He had planned to set up the tires for the locusts as soon as his father-in-law had left which should have been five minutes ago. It never occurred to him that he would want to talk, let alone sit down. What was there to say to each other. He walked over to the kerosene stove and shook it hoping not to hear the sound of liquid sloshing around inside but was disappointed for the second time that day. He looked out the window. The sky was still blue but even now he imagined that it would suddenly darken with the bodies of billions of little insects as he sat indoors being talked at. Karim towered over the little stove with his arms folded watching tiny bubbles form in the water as it began to heat up. He would have liked to have turned around and seen his father-in-law seated, preferably at the edge of the chair, the universal posture of a man who had places to be, but when he chanced a glance over his shoulder, that appeared to not be the case. His father-in-law had taken off his shoes and was pacing leisurely around the room with his hands in his pockets, stopping every so often to bounce on his heels and pretend to read the newspapers on the wall that had yellowed with age. He waited until Karim had turned around before speaking to his back: "I notice you don't have any pictures of her." "Do you?" Karim scoffed. "None from her adulthood. I imagine the boy looks like her?" This was Karim's invitation to share. "The boy" actually looked a lot like Karim. Nariari 8 "I suppose." "How would you feel about It if I stayed with you and helped you to set up the tires?" the father-in-law asked. Karim turned around to look at him. The man standing before him was in no position to help anyone with any kind of physical labor. The years hadn't been unkind to him so much as they had been fair. He looked exactly how a man of his age should look, complete with the slowly gnarling fingers. He wondered which of the Wadi's men he had enlisted to help load the tires up into the back of the truck. He imagined there had to have been some effort involved, perhaps a production line of some sort with two men on the ground lifting up the tires and another two in the back of the truck receiving them. Perhaps ingenuity had prevailed and they had made makeshift ramps, simply rolling the tires up into the vehicle. Either way he was sure it had been no small feat. He felt a small twinge in his chest that he refused to call gratitude. "Yes, and then maybe the three of us ..." his father-in-law continued. "Which three of us?" Karim asked, turning back around to watch the stove. "Yes. You, me and the boy ..." "He's not here right now, and I'm not sure when he'll be back," Karim said. "No matter. Maybe by the time we're done setting up the tires, he'll have returned." There was that "we" again. It appeared that the man would be staying after all. Nariari 9 The house Karim and his son lived in appeared to rise up from the ground in large part because its mud bricks had been built by the same earth that surrounded them for miles. The small pool in the oasis had been full when Karim and his wife had first gotten here and they spent their entire first week molding bricks and laying them out to dry. It quickly became clear at the end of each day which one of them was responsible for which bricks. While his, for the most part, were shapely and rectangular, hers ran the gamut from geometric to in some cases ovoid. They would joke that he would use his bricks on one side of the house and she would use hers on the other side so that in the likelihood that the home collapsed, it would only do so on her side. In the end they made enough bricks to build a small three-roomed house with one room in the center and the two other rooms flanking it on either side. His wife's misshapen bricks were concentrated on the facade of the house giving it a certain charm. Whereas his bricks fit together like puzzle pieces, hers left holes and gaps so that light would always stray in through them. Her solution for this was plastering newspaper over every inch of the front room. She was partial to the ones from the lifestyle section as they were brightly colored and had people in them: "Why do you want words when you can have pictures," she'd laugh, pasting a page with an American pop-star next to one with Boutros Boutrous Ghali. His father-in-law had been the last person he had wanted to contact for help with getting the tires for the locusts. Even before his wife's death, they had always had an abrasive relationship. They had not spoke since she died and Karim had intended for that silence to last a lifetime. Even now he felt as though he was nineteen and newly married all over again. A stronger man would have found Nariari 10 another way, but his father-in-law was the only one he knew with the capability to transport a truck full of tires all the way here. It was an hour's drive from the Wadi to Karim's home and half a day's trek on foot. Were he to have attempted to bring the tires over himself, it would have taken him two months. The reports on the radio had painted the locust situation as futile. There wasn't much that could be done except wait for the swarm to pass and be grateful that the only casualties were plants and not people. "It could be worse," was the refrain that accompanied each hourly update. He was certain that it could have been worse and yet the first-person accounts of those who had lived through the swarm made him itch all over as though they were already there, crawling up his body with their elbow-looking legs. In his youth, he had often chased many a Wadi girl with a grasshopper pinched between his fingers, amazed at how him and the other boys were able to scatter groups of shrieking girls with one puny insect. The accounts he heard now made him think that on some level maybe the girls had been able to intuit something of the grasshoppers' potential for horror. One man had described how he had watched a few locusts land on a stalk, kicking, shoving and pushing each other with their antennae, furious. They chomped at the stems with such frenzy that apparently you could hear their sound of their tiny jaws grinding. It supposedly sounded as though someone were scraping a carrot. Another woman, Karim recalled, had tried putting down blankets over her crops but apparently they chewed right through it, undeterred. This image of their blind determination stayed with Karim for days afterward. Nariari 11 Had they still lived down in the Wadi he would have been more than happy to wait it out. When you had little to lose, the swarm was nothing more than a spectacle to which you looked forward. Even now he was sure that the Wadi's women and children had concocted all manner of makeshift traps to catch as many locusts as they could. The women would want them for dinner and the children would want them as pets. He predicted that there would be frenzy when the swarm finally arrived. He had been a child once and he knew that all he would have wanted would have been to run through the swarm with a polythene bag trawling as many locusts as he could while enjoying the crunch of those he stomped underfoot. But he wasn't a child anymore. In fact, he had a child. When the reports had come back saying there had been people reporting success dispersing the locusts with smoke, he knew immediately whom he needed to speak with, though he had made sure to leave his son at home when he returned to the Wadi. The father-in-law finished sipping the last of his lukewarm "hot water" and the two men left the house, this time Karim making sure that he led the way out to the tires. Because he was already off schedule by an hour thanks to his father-in-law's protracted drinking, he had accepted his offer to help him set-up. "1 think it's remarkable what you have managed to do here," Karim's father-in- law said, stopping to spit out of the side of his mouth as he took in the field of green in front of him. With his wife gone and his son too young to fully appreciate the magnitude of what Karim had accomplished, the validation from a fellow adult was something he didn't know he needed to hear until he heard it. Exactly what Karim had managed Nariari 12 was what the people down in the Wadi had failed at over the years. With less and less rain each year, the tried and tested planting pit method that had worked for them for so long was no longer the miracle solution it had been, because it did, after all, depend on there being some rain of which there had been little. Over the years, people had picked up and left the Wadi, at first one by one, and then in droves. They moved closer to cities or villages where boreholes had been dug and you could at least be guaranteed drinking water. It had been drier than anything Karim remembered. The heat over the past few years had been unrelenting and the explanation for it even more fascinating, at least for Karim. It all has to do with the sea, you see, Karim had repeated to his son mostly because he needed to feel like he understood it despite the correlation feeling ludicrous to him. The drought, it turned out, had to do with the sea, he couldn't remember which one but it was one of the big ones that you could see from space. Apparently, its temperature was warmer now than it had ever been, and because of that, they somehow weren't getting rain. He would have been more skeptical, but the program he'd heard it on was the same one that had helped him accomplish the very feat his father-in-law was praising. Before them stood rows and rows of a shade of green that most Sahelians were unaccustomed. Unlike the defeated green of the desert scrub, Karim's plants were a green that burst with vigor and life. On the half-acre oasis Karim had over the years managed to grow different types of crops that had no business growing in the desert. It seemed that his father-in-law had brought more tires than would be required for the little plot, which he supposed was good thinking on his part, not Nariari 13 that he would ever admit it. The plan was to surround his crops with tires on all sides, douse them with kerosene and set them ablaze as the locusts descended. The smoke was supposed to disperse them and while he didn't know for a fact that this would help, he had a clear recollection of the choking smell of tire smoke from his childhood. A thief had been caught in the Wadi and draped in tires before being set ablaze. "1 suppose if you take that side, and 1 take this side we can make quick work of it," Karim said pointing to the opposite side of the farm. His father-in-law made a mock salute before stopping to take his shirt off. From the back, with his shirt on, his petite frame could almost pass as that of a young man, but once the shirt was off you could see just how many lines wrinkled his back. He was truly an old man. For minutes they worked in silence, each man making trips to the pile of tires and returning to the plot with a tire in each hand, or in the father-in-law's case, one tire which he rolled between his knees leaving behind a montage of tracks behind. He was the first to break the silence: "You know 1 was glad to hear from you." "1 suppose 1 should thank you," Karim offered. "That's not what 1 was getting at," said the father-in-law. Karim said nothing and instead picked up two smaller tires with a lot more strength than their size warranted. "You live so far out here on your own and never come down to the Wadi..." "You could just as easily have come to see me. You're the one with the vehicle. In fact, how long did it take you to get here today?" Nariari 14 "An hour," the father-in-law responded. "And the last time?" The father-in-law winced. "None of us thought you'd want to see us," he said. "Who is 'us'?" Karim asked. "Everyone in the Wadi. Or at least most people." "1 have nothing against 'everyone in the Wadi,"' Karim responded stalking off to the pile. The 'Christ is King' message on the back of the father-in-law's truck was underscored by a thorned wreath which he recognized as Ziziphus Spine-Christi also known as Christ's Thorn Jujube. It was supposedly the crown of thorns that was placed on Christ's head at crucifixion. There was one growing on the property and Karim considered using that as a way to break the tension when he returned back with his tire. If their relationship hadn't been so complicated it would been the type of thing he would have shared hoping to grasp at an opportunity to bond with his father-in-law. "I've seen them you know," the father-in-law said deciding they could no longer go on in silence. "In Mali," he continued when he was met by more silence. "I was just there a few days ago ferrying jerry cans of water." He reached into his pocket and the movement caught Karim's attention who thought he was about to flaunt a wad of cash. Instead, he pulled out a perfectly preserved dead locust. He held it out to Karim whom, in spite of himself, reached out and took it. So this was what he was up against. "They used to be grasshoppers you know ..." Nariari 15 Again, Karim didn't respond. He had been listening to the same broadcast as his father-in-law and millions of other people across the Sahel. He had been perched by the radio day and night and was willing to wager that he knew everything his father-in-law was about to tell him about the locusts. Their story had been quite interesting really and was just the kind of information his wife would tease him for getting excited about. It was, as she would say, a curiosity for curiosity's sake, which meant that it wasn't information that would ever serve any useful purpose other than being anecdotal, at least to her. The locusts, it turned out, hadn't always been locusts. They started out as solitary grasshoppers content to spend their days on their own, blending in with the greenery and not bothering anyone. Much like his son, Karim had first thought when he heard it. As it began to get drier and more plants died out, the lonesome grasshoppers were forced into closer proximity with each other in their search for food. The close proximity triggered the release of serotonin and consequently their transition into locusts. They called it the gregarious phase, which Karim had always found to be an overly aggressive sounding word for what it described. Whereas grasshoppers preferred to isolate themselves, those in the gregarious phase were suddenly attracted to each other hence the billion-strong swarm headed their way. They were also suddenly larger, faster and even more colorful. He thought about the white goats in the Wadi and how chilling it would be if one day they went from being docile grazers to larger, more aggressive, versions of themselves. The locust transformation was so drastic in fact, that until the 1920s, scientists considered grasshoppers and swarming locusts to be two different species as opposed to the Nariari 16 same animal. He couldn't help but feel a little bad for them; something happens in your brain and suddenly every aspect of your personality changes, including your physical appearance. As if that wasn't bad enough, it turned out that serotonin managed to cause similar behavioral changes in humans as well. "Did you hear those scientists talking?" the father-in-law laughed, still trying to make conversation. Karim had heard about the scientists. They were a group in Australia working to inhibit serotonin in grasshoppers, so that the insects would never have to go through the locust transformation at all and as a result, never swarm. "1 have. It's intriguing if they can manage it," he responded. "If they can manage it? You don't actually believe in that nonsense do you? How do they figure they're going to prevent an act of God?" Karim did in fact believe in that nonsense and his father-in-law would have noticed his upper body stiffen if he hadn't been doubled over laughing so hard. The father-in-law had been the first to notice the boy. They had continued to work in silence after their last discussion, but the former was taking more breaks and deeper sighs. The last tire he had pushed seemed to have belonged to an eighteen-wheeler and Karim was sure it would have been the thing that killed him. It was during one of these breaks that the father-in-law noticed the boy even though he was standing so still he defied detection. "Is that him?" the father-in-law asked. Nariari 17 Karim stopped mid-tire haul to look in the direction his father-in-law was pointing and sure enough there was the boy staring off. "I'd like to meet him/' the father-in law said suddenly, possessed of all the energy in the world. "He's not going anywhere," said Karim, trying his best to ignore the gravity of grandfather and grandson meeting for the first time. "I know, but we're due for a little break, wouldn't you say? Besides, I'd like to see what he's like." The father-in-law was now in the process of putting his shirt back on. "He's not like anything. He's a child." "Of course. 1 know that," the father-in-law responded. Karim followed his father-in-law closely as he cut through the plot, snaking through the millet and grass to get to the boy. Despite what Karim had thought about the old man, he was quite spry for his age, which he noticed as the old man's pace quickened to get to the boy. When he emerged into the clearing where the boy was looking, he came short of stepping right into the bo/s diorama. Karim thought he saw the old man's shoulders visibly relax as he took in the sprawling city at his feet. The boy's anthill was an elaborate masterpiece that was part Grecian labyrinth and part fagade of the Taj Mahal. There was a picture of the latter on one of the newspapers on the wall in the house that he had ripped off and would keep in his pocket as a reference when he was lying on his belly in the dirt making additions to the anthill. He had built on the ants' initial design and worked outwards adding minute tunnels here and a turret there, day by day. When Karim would set out for Nariari 18 the plot every morning, the boy would set out scavenging for little oddities with which to decorate his castle. He would return with feathers, thorns, snakeskin and little pebbles, all of which he would drape over his anthill. He would then step back to observe what would need to be done the next day. "1 like this. This is a nice hobby for a boy your age," the father-in-law said partly to himself and partly to the boy. "Will you say hello to me? I'm your grandfather." By this time the boy had returned to lying on his belly and was peering into one of the turrets. "Don't you want to say hello to me?" the father in-law pressed. It was as if he wasn't there despite his figure casting a shadow over the spot where the boy was peeking. The father-in-law turned around looking for Karim to intercede. "What's wrong with him?" he asked. "There's nothing wrong with him. He's a child and he doesn't know you." "He's withdrawn." "He's quiet," Karim gritted. If the boy didn't talk much it was only because father and son were each engaged in their own worlds. He was in the plot before the boy woke up and returned after he had gone to sleep. How could he explain to his father-in-law that despite what he saw before him, the boy was perfectly fine and that sometimes when he was in the field he could hear the boy belting out songs on the strength of a full blown horn. "You know his mother was just like this as a child too." Nariari 19 "That is not true," Karim responded. He was thinking of the girl to whom they all flocked to as children who could make any one of them do anything because they all sought her approval. "I know what I'm talking about. You can usually tell. It's in the eyes," the father-in-law squatted down to grab a hold of the boy's chin. "Up," Karim clapped his hands in an instant making his father-in-law's hand jerk back from the boy's face. "Into the house. Lock the door," Karim said to the boy. He had meant to say this calmly, but it came out in two barks. For a second, he was worried that the boy would not listen to him as was the case on most days, but something in the tone of his voice must have spelled trouble. The boy got up without dusting himself off and ran into the house. He looked back every so often worried that he might be missing something. "You know, I don't understand your hostility towards me today. You came to me remember? You asked me to come and get her," the father-in-law said once the boy was safely in the house. It was true. He had made the day-long trip down to the Wadi to fetch his father-in-law nine years ago when his wife had gone from lying in bed for days to refusing to eat, two things that had seemed manageable enough at first. What Karim hadn't been prepared for was the uptick in her mood that seemed to signal recovery, but was really just the foundation for incoherent ramblings about how the crops would dry out and they would all die of starvation. Unlike the grasshoppers, his wife's gregarious phase, had turned her inward as opposed to outward and it wasn't Nariari 20 marked by social, outgoing behavior as it was by erratic moods and incoherent ramblings. He was barely an adult and the only thing he knew to do was to race back to the Wadi and get her father. For the first time in his life, Karim had been allowed in the front of the truck and not asked to pay a fee. The trip up the bumpy hillside had taken half the time he suspected it normally took. The truck was generating so much dust it was coming from the inside of the air conditioning vents. His sweaty hand had kept slipping from the grab bar and he kept getting thrown around the inside of the car. They had arrived to find his wife in the most anxious state she'd ever been in, raving that she was about to die. A part of Karim was relieved that they had found her like this. It would have been embarrassing if he had raced his father-in-law over here only to find her contented. It had been decided that Karim would stay and look after the baby and the father-in-law promised that he would send word. True to his promise, he had sent an envoy in the form of one of the Wadi's young boys to inform Karim about his wife's progress. Each week a different child would arrive with specific details in regards to his wife's health which he appreciated: She had polished off a plate gruel by herself; she regained enough strength to play hide and seek with the neighbor's children; she had even inquired after her own child. This last message in particular had been the one Karim had been waiting to hear and he strapped their son to his back and trekked his way down to the Wadi to see his wife. Nariari 21 It was called St. Paul's Prayer Camp although it was unclear to which Paul exactly the name referred. The departure of the aid workers hadn't left Paul with much except for the vehicle and a reputation as the Wadi's next best direct line to God. The latter role came as somewhat of a surprise to him, but who was he to argue with what the world saw in him. Both of these things combined to create what Paul recognized as a potential lateral move for his career. He had initially supposed that now that the aid workers were gone, he could use the truck for a transportation business, but the idea of being a spiritual leader came with a certain cachet as well. For a few shillings every month, Paul would drive all across the Sahel to families he had come to know over the years promising restoration for their loved ones. He would load up the back of the truck with his new wards, promising that the prayers he offered from sun up to sun down would help bring them back. When Karim had first arrived at the Wadi with the baby in his arms, no one seemed to be able to tell him where he could find his father-in-law or his wife. Everyone seemed to be in a rush or suddenly unable to look him in the eye. It had been one of the one boys that had been set to the house to deliver updates who finally offered to take Karim to where he had seen his father-in-law, or rather where he would often see the truck. Grain sacks with different aid organization names stamped on them had been cut along the seams and sewn together with sisal before being propped up on poles to create a canopy under which knee-length stakes had been nailed to the ground. The stakes had been further reinforced by cement. Attached to each stake was a chain and attached to each chain was an ankle most of which were chaffed Nariari 22 white or sliced red. Some of the people were standing, some were seated, some were old, some were young, but all were disturbed. Each person had five feet of chain that allowed them a five-foot circumference in any direction. Those on their feet still looked to have some life behind their eyes and some even looked as though they were waiting for someone who would be arriving any minute to collect them. Those on the ground were another story entirely. His wife was one of them. She had her knees pulled up into her chest and her arms clasped firmly around her legs. Contrary to the word his father-in-law had been sending, she didn't look like she had been eating gruel or playing hide and seek with children, let alone that she remembered that she had one of her own. Her hair was matted in thick filthy clumps at the back of her head and her clothes looked like they were made from the dirt in which she sat. Hunched over the way she was, her ribs looked like a furrowed field through her dress. Meanwhile, her father was in the corner of the canopy muttering an earnest prayer over a chained man who was spitting and swiping at him. The boy was still locked in the house peering at father and grandfather from the window but Karim rounded on the little man standing before him, anyway. "Don't think 1 don't know why you're here," he snarled. "1 came to bring you tires like you asked me to," the father-in-law said reverting back to the small man he pretended to be. "Yes, but you stayed to see if the boy was like his mother, like all those people you have trapped in your prayer palace or whatever you call it." "1 won't deny being curious about the boy. He is my grandson after all." Nariari 23 "You didn't come looking for a grandson, you came looking for a patient." "Their families beg me to take them. To pray over them." "And what good has that done? Tell me one of them you helped?" "Well at least none of them have died while in my care!" Karim recoiled. He had brought his wife back from that hellish place with great effort and while she had eventually died in their home, it had been her father's doing. The four beeps from the radio seemed to come from another world entirely, and it was only on the last beep, long and drawn out, that Karim remembered he had a job to do, one that didn't involve a confrontation with his father-in-law, who should have been long gone by now. Perhaps the tires had come at too steep a price Karim thought, as a fire, much like the one he was getting ready to start, lit up his insides. He wheeled past his father-in-law wanting to shove him as he went by, but telling himself there would be time for all that when this was over. He got to the little radio perched on a rock by the tires and extended the antenna and turned up the volume dial. The news anchor wasted no time on pleasantries jumping right into the swarm update. He rattled down a list of places and the projected arrival times of the swarm. By this point, Karim had the radio directly on his ear where the voice from the speaker vibrated against his cheek. And then he heard the name he had been waiting to hear, along with the corresponding arrival time. There it was, adrenaline. Every pore in his body seemed to, in an instant, pucker and expel sweat so that he Nariari 24 was hotter than he'd ever been in his life. He knew what needed to be done having run through the scenario over and over in his head for the past few days, but yet he stood there, immobile. It seemed he had discovered a third, lesser-known option in addition to fight or flight: rooted to the spot. The hypothetical math problems from his childhood had always seemed so ridiculous, he thought, as the feeling of looking down at himself intensified: If a locust swarm of five billion, covering sixty square miles, is travelling at a speed ofX miles per hour, how long until it arrives to destroy the independent, secluded, existence Karim has worked to build, sending him and his son back to the Wadi where the latter will grow up under the watchful hawk-eye of his grandfather? Karim moved; at first in a daze, but soon in a determined jog to the side of the house where the cannisters of gasoline were lined up. He returned to the tires with a canister in each arm. Now that he thought about it, he wasn't exactly sure how tires burned. Was it a slow build that picked up with time or would they immediately go up in flames. He knew the fire needed to be at its peak, complete with acrid, towering, clouds when the swarm arrived but wasn't sure how long it would take to get to that moment. "I'm telling you that boy is just like his mother," the father-in-law yelled at Karim who was searching his pockets for his matchbox. For a few minutes Karim had forgotten all about his father-in-law who had nothing to do now except shout from the sidelines. Karim ignored him as he unscrewed the cap off the cannister. He still was unsure about when ex-actly to start the fire, but waiting meant idling and idling meant that he would be able to hear his father-in-law clearer than if he was Nariari 25 doing something. He tipped the canister over and jogged along the outside of one side of the tire boundary as the kerosene glugged out forming dark, wet spots where it hit the rubber. His father-in-law, intent on being heard, was now at his side, jogging along with Karim. "Just like his mother," Karim's father-in-law repeated. "He might be. He might not be. But there are medications. I'll be damned if 1 ever look to you again for help," Karim yelled in spite of himself. He had grabbed the other cannister of kerosene and was frantically running around the second and third border of tires "And what good does that do you? Did you not hear what you precious scientists said?" the father-in-law asked. He had gone from looking frail and harmless to baring his teeth like a dog. For the second time that hour, Karim's thoughts went towards violence and he wondered if it came to a fight whether he would be able to stop himself before doing serious damage to the old man. The scientists to whom his father-in-law was referring were the same team on the radio out of the research university in Australia. They had found that in a controlled environment, locusts could switch out of swarm mode though it took days rather than hours. It was rare that this happened in the wild, however, because the offspring of locusts that bred while swarming were often born swarmers. His son could very well be a swarmer. Karim struck a match and threw it on the tires which immediately leapt to flames. The smoke, which he had expected to build gradually was there in an instant He watched as the rubber melted into pools of black goo, but before long he couldn't Nariari 26 watch anything at all as the smoke obscured everything including the house where just a moment ago he could see the boy peering from the window. The smoke and the flames rose higher and the heat from the flames combined with the desert heat conspired to cook him alive. He held out his hand in front of him squinting to see it but could not make out a thing. He didn't know why he had assumed the smoke would be white, but it was as black as the tires and so thick that it obscured the flames themselves. His felt his eyes burning and knew they were watering but also knew that the tears dried the second they hit his cheeks. Through the smoke he could hear his father-in-law call out. He knew his property like the back of his hand and was able to orient himself and stagger out of the smoke. He made it out and crashed to his knees coughing a cough that scraped his insides. He could still hear his father-in-law's voice, in a distance, muffled by the smoke. No doubt he had turned himself around so many times just like Karim a few moments prior. It was unclear which way led out.