I say, “But I have a math exam.”
“And I have drama practice. But I don’t think that matters now.” She was right. We learned that none of the normal cadences of life were important. We learned to go home, close the gates and the windows, and stay inside the house. In these days that sometimes slid into weeks, there was nothing to do but wait. The waiting itself was a sort of occupation we all shared. The shops were closed, the university was shut and then open and then shut and then open until everyone involved lost their bearings. Whole generations of students were blown off their life courses, rendered jobless, unmoored by direction or occupation. My father raged about the incessant closing of the university. “How are we supposed to work like this?” he asked us over and over and took refuge in his ever-present glass of arrack. But beyond this, we knew we had it easy, since elsewhere in the country, blood was flowing. I never witnessed a bus bombing, I never lost a friend or a relative, and so to me the war in our country seemed far away.
We saw the reports nightly on television, of course. We saw the rising body counts, the footage of bloody mayhem caused by suicide bombs, the maps showing the Tigers or the army always moving back and forth over the landscape of the North and the East like voracious enemy locust tribes. But mostly it was happening to people we did not know.
The war was just something we lived with. There was no other choice. We even made jokes about it because that was the only way to survive. And because of this, I laugh at the doctors and lawyers now when they tell me I have PTSD. If I have PTSD, then the entire island must have it. The only ones who don’t have it are the lucky dead. So the war is not my excuse. The war happened to other people. I leave the story of that other, bigger war for some other teller.
But there is something else. There was a war, just not the one they are thinking of. In the shadow of that greater war, there was another smaller one. It was enacted within my body and between my bones. It took the small, delicate creation that I was, smashed it with a hammer, and set it upside down. All my pieces fell in the wrong order. I was separated from myself, and empty, echoing spaces were opened in me for a darker inhabitant. No one knew, no one suspected. And yet even this smaller war is not my excuse. My sin is only and ever my own.
Five
Our books and sheets of homework are spread across the living room table when Puime looks at me from under her lashes. I can tell she wants to say something, so I say, “What?”
She shrugs, then says, “I don’t know … I shouldn’t say. But why does he look at you like that?”
“Who?” My heart is jumping in my throat. I keep my eyes on the page.
“You know who.”
“Like what?”
“Just strange.”
“Strange like what?” I grip my pencil to keep my fingers steady.
She says, “Just strange, you know. Strange.” And then she looks away and is asking me if the five needs to be carried or if the ellipsis means it will be divided later, and I attend to her question. Later that night just before I fall asleep, I remember this moment. It is startling because someone else has sensed the other and impossible world I live in. Someone else has sensed what is happening to me. But how can I tell her? I have no words.
Sometimes nothing happens for months. I do not have to start at each sound; I do not have to run for cover if I hear him behind me. Some mysterious cease-fire and he is just my old friend Samson. I am diligent, but in these times he is nice, gathering guavas and avocados for me, pointing out the fishing birds in the trees. These kinds of things do not happen to girls like me. I am from a good family. I go to a good school. I have an Amma. So how can this be happening in my own home? It is unimaginable.