The Leveling

“I’m sorry,” he said. He glanced out the rear windshield. They’d left the guard who’d been running after them behind. But that guard would have sounded the alarm.

“Where do you come from?” The driver spoke in heavily accented English. A tape cassette of a woman singing a plaintive song in Farsi played on the stereo.

“Canada.”

“I never go to Canada.”

“I was robbed.” It was hard for Decker to speak. All his words came out so raspy that he didn’t even recognize his own voice. “I was hitchhiking and they beat me and robbed me.”

“Maybe because you show the thumb. Here, that is like, how do you say? F-U-C-K you. Some of the people in the mountains are not so smart, maybe they think you insult them. For hitchhiking you must wave the hand. I hitchhiked once in California. You need a doctor.”

“No.” Decker shook his head. “No doctor. I’m OK.”

After an uncomfortable silence, the driver said, “Maybe the police can find these people who beat you. We will take you to the police.”

Decker looked out the rear window. They passed a roadside kebab restaurant. A few modest houses lined the steep banks on either side of the road. He wished the guy would drive faster, but when he looked he saw the gas pedal was already pushed to the floor. At the next cluster of houses he’d have them stop, he thought. Maybe he could steal a car. He thought of trying to steal the car he was in, but didn’t feel up to overpowering its current occupants.

“No. No police. Do you have anything to drink?”

The driver lifted up a ski jacket from the space on the front seat between him and the woman, revealing a six-pack of Coke. The woman handed Decker one, but when he tried to open it, his swollen fingers couldn’t do it. The woman’s eyes widened when she saw Decker’s mutilated hands. Decker looked back right at her, thinking, let it go.

He handed her the Coke. “Could you open this for me?”

His voice trembled. She popped the can open and handed it back to him. He tried to take a big gulp, but the liquid was cold. His throat convulsed and he spit it up into his hands.

He felt like an alien.

“I’ll go soon.” He looked out the rear window again. A street sign said Fasten your seat belt in English. Between the Coke and the sign in English, Decker wondered whether he was going crazy.

“Doctor,” said the girlfriend.

“No.” Decker took another sip of the Coke, and this time the liquid went down, so he took another sip, and then another until he’d finished the can.

The girlfriend opened another and handed it to him. Decker finished that one too. The car came to a long ridge, and Decker turned to look behind him. He could see the better part of a mile or so of the road they’d just climbed. Two lanes wide, it wound down through the steep brown hills. An electric power line, with gray metal towers spaced every few hundred feet, paralleled the road.

A green Peugeot was about a half mile behind them and gaining fast, accelerating through the curves.

At the end of the ridge, at a spot where there was a ravine not unlike the one from which he’d escaped, Decker said, “Stop.”

“A town,” said the driver. “Three kilometers. We’ll take you. We’ll stop there.”

“Here,” said Decker. He should have gotten out at the cluster of houses he’d seen back down the road. He wasn’t thinking clearly.

“Three kilometers. The town will be better.”

By then the green Peugeot would have caught up. Decker gripped the driver’s shoulder with his wounded hand and gave a violent squeeze. “Here, goddammit! Here!”

The car slowed to a stop and backfired.

“I’m sorry,” said Decker.

“American?” said the woman.

“I need the rest of the soda!”

“Get out,” said the driver.

The girlfriend quickly handed Decker four more cans of Coke, along with a large bag of sugared almonds. Decker mumbled his thanks and opened the door. As he was stumbling out of the car, she pulled out a half-full bottle of Smirnoff vodka from underneath the passenger seat.

“Na!” said the driver to his girlfriend. The look on his face said no way in hell are we giving him that.

“For face,” said the girlfriend, looking at Decker. “For clean.” She touched her face, as if swabbing it with a cotton ball, and pushed the bottle of vodka into his hands.





36


Ashgabat, Turkmenistan



WHEN MARK REGAINED consciousness, he was in the front seat of the Lada, his face mashed up against the dashboard and surrounded by shattered glass. A police car, its hood reduced to an accordion-like crumple, lay a couple of feet in front of him.

A strange silence persisted, as though time had stopped. For a moment Mark wondered if he’d been rendered deaf.