Light at New Latitude

She was on her back under a stiff sheet in a bed with metal side rails too low for her to pull herself up by. With her shoulder weight on one elbow and slowly onto both she was able to boost herself upright with only slender flashes deep in her head that did not ignite. Through a slow-pitched hum and taupe blinds she saw steel and glass upper floors-city buildings tinting out of afternoon, and fir and spring-colored hills beyond them. The hills and buildings passed through many shades of gold until she realized they were red.

*          *          *

The Americans had provided a Land Rover. She had sat in the back with the American supervisor. He was tall, slumped, over-spilling his belt. Under blonde, silvering stubble his face was pale and freckled, lava red beneath.

“Peter.” He held out his hand.

“Marie.” She felt ridiculous, shaking on it.

“Lucky for us the pavement stops, or else we’d have a Chevy,” he said.

The pavement stopped after an hour. Three hours after that the Land Rover was still churning up a deeply water-rutted track under steep red banks and brown roots like long, reaching carrots.

“This is lucky?” She had to remind him what he’d said.

He pointed up the track to a thin line beaten through the grass. Bicycle. When the fish-farm project had started, there had been concern that the villagers lacked necessary education.

“No one asked if they liked fish.” His tongue, flattened against the bottom of his open mouth, reminded her of rattlesnakes or asps, pictures of them, or of some other snake that was endangered and only bit when threatened. He wore a ring, a plain gold band.

*          *          *

Her room had no clock. On her wrist where her watch had been was an orange plastic bracelet with her name half-faded. The hum was on all sides of her, under her scalp. Her head was switched onto a single tone with no one to switch it off.

*          *          *

In the village he asked whether the farmers needed replenishment-roe? Food? Was the company that had built the tanks satisfactory? Gas for the pump-no problem? He walked surprisingly quickly. Tall clouds tacked close over the treetops. Marie’s trousers flapped wet and heavy. The fish tanks, as deep as bathtubs, each as long as a double kayak, bubbled dark under grass roofs. The headman kept getting calls on his mobile. Marie felt her feet rooting through the matted grass to soil.

Back down the crooks and turns of the descending track, the beating forest hid the lowlands, and shadows filled with surf of leaves. Peter asked the questions everyone always did. He sounded amused, and she found her answers rising to meet him.

“Oh, I was doomed to this work,” she said, and it seemed she had always thought this. “My grandfather was an officer in the Congo and my mother always spoke of it. I really do not know what I am doing.”

She knew the estimated drop in GDP during the colonial era, which names controlled the government afterward. She knew how to write a report making grant funds seem well spent.

“All I know of fish is how to cook it,” she said.

“Congratulations,” Peter said. “You’re qualified.”

She decided his jokes were his way of putting her, or himself, at ease, of waiting together without silence. But only an act.

He had the driver take them both back to the embassy. Better for Marie to call a moped or even to walk than for her neighborhood to know she was working with Americans.

“You know everything,” she said.

“I’d better, by now,” he said.

They were standing in the courtyard, floodlit but cool in the night breeze. He seemed to be studying his shoes.

“This was fun,” he said. “Saturday I usually cook something from the market, if you’re free.”

Of course she was free. She was only two weeks in the country.

*          *          *

A man with Doctor Rabineau in script letters on the breast pocket of his white coat visited her. He had curly black hair, chipmunk cheeks. He asked if she could say his name, if she knew her own. He held up two fingers and asked how many. Then four fingers, three, and two. The hum left as they were talking. She was going to tell him.

“You’re doing very well.” He patted her leg.

After he left, the hum rose. She realized the bed’s side rails were not there to lift herself by. They were to keep her from falling.

*          *          *

She hired a moped and swung her feet into the night from its back seat to a call box by a barred gate. Peter sounded so glad in the small speaker. His house smelled of sandalwood. The interior walls were butter. She had wondered about the hill neighborhoods. She pictured where servants would stand starched for her whim.

“You get used to it,” Peter said. “It makes it harder to remember this is a hardship post when I call home.”

“Your wife?” Marie’s face was too square to be pretty. But she knew what made it dimple.

Peter’s wife had stayed in the States with the children, ages five and seven. “But I think she’d rather-”

“What?”

“I shouldn’t bore you,” he said.

“You’re not boring.”

She felt movies in her inflection and wondered if she was up to the next scene.

After dinner, he offered to make a bed for her on the couch. The city had few streetlights. Marie traced down the hill in her head and out the four lanes to a cramped morning flight over the lake. On a cul-de-sac outside Washington, D.C., Peter’s wife would be watering flowers.

“You are such a grown up,” Marie said.

“Don’t say that,” he said.

She put one hand on his shoulder and held it there on the lip of the glass she was about to tip into. She was becoming a cool curve. She leaned into his stomach and felt it give. She slid her hands down his arms.

She awoke in daylight with her slacks still fastened, legs pushed up around her knees. Peter was wrapped in the covers. His bed was too tall to stand up from; she had to let her feet drop. She buttoned her blouse, fluffed her hair, smoothed her front and wriggled into good posture. She had brought no change of clothes.

*          *          *

Under her scalp was the crackling of fresh bread. Doctor Rabineau had not heard of such sounds.

“After you take it from the oven, the loaf is still expanding,” she said. “You can hear the pops. The crust cracking.”

“You don’t have a fracture,” Doctor Rabineau said.

“So what is it?” she said. If not bone, then air between the bone-

“There’s no space between anything,” he said.

He was smiling. He had a surprise for her. A visitor.

A woman took his place at the side of her bed. The woman panned across Marie and down and back the way women in supermarkets study ingredients on packages. Pink lipstick, no other makeup. A dark blue sweatshirt with NAVY in white. Hair fluffed and frosted around her face.

“Can she understand me?” the woman said.

“Carol,” Marie said.

Carol quivered and stilled, even her hair.

“I saw pictures,” Marie said.

Carol laid her hand on her wrist.

“You poor girl,” she said. “Poor, poor girl.”

*          *          *

Joking after they’d had some wine had been the only way Peter would discuss Carol. Their situation was his fault. She wasn’t cut out for the demands of his profession, guarded houses, hired drivers, no-go zones. He didn’t blame her. She’d wanted children.

“I imagine it would be hard over here, being a housewife, no one to talk to,” he said.

“You just called her a housewife.” Marie jumped down from the counter where she had been sitting, swinging her legs. The candle trees over the garden wall were flushed. Down the hill, tiled roofs were orange, the central city grey against a red boil of cloud.

“What if she comes over?” Marie said. “There are flights. She could just show up.”

“Stop.” Peter touched her shoulder. His hand was wet.

“I’m sorry,” Marie said. “Sometimes I don’t know when. I’ve never done this.”

“Well, neither have I.” He turned back to his chopping board. He was fast with a chef’s knife, rocking it under one hand, pushing a pepper under with the other. She stood behind him, wrapped her arms around his torso, held him in. The end of his assignment seeped toward them. In a year they would have separate problems in other places. She did not know her next assignment, but she felt the air of a great dive under her as she eased herself back up onto his countertop. He poured her more wine.

“Do people in America still like Woody Allen?” she said.

“I think so,” Peter said. “But I wouldn’t know.”

*          *          *

Carol pulled up the blinds and pulled the plastic chair close to the side of Marie’s bed and carried small apple slices to Marie’s mouth so Marie did not have to lift her arms. The fruit would be good for her.

“He felt responsible for you, you know,” Carol said.

“I would not have wanted that,” Marie said.

It was difficult now to distinguish wanting Peter from simply wanting someone, from wanting to be with him. She could summon the sweaty afternoon feel of walking to his car (he would be texting, not looking) but she could not slip from her heavy head back into the body she had imagined someone in the car watching.

“He needed someone other than himself to think about,” Carol said. “He only saw the kids at Christmas, and he hadn’t made friends there the way he had at other postings.”

Up close she was older than Marie had thought, probably Peter’s age. She smelled artificially sweet and after they had finished an apple Marie saw her apply strawberry lip balm.

“You know I suspected the worst about you when Peter first told me,” Carol said.

“Oh, my God, no.”

“It’s only natural. But then I heard the way he talked about you and he said how young you were. In a way it’s a blessing, if you’re going to have an accident, to have it young. You don’t bounce back when you’re older.”

*          *          *

Marie wanted to confess into the hum after Carol left. She had feared begging forgiveness, but it was something else to tell what Carol did not know. Carol would not dress her house up at Christmas for a long time. Marie would not be able to tell anyone how Peter was always a weight, how after dinner he passed gas and since he did not mention it she felt she could not, either, though it was a like a door creaking; and how every time they turned the lights off he began by sliding his hands down her sides.

But really it was not telling that she wanted.

*          *          *

Carol asked to know everything Marie remembered.

“Don’t tire yourself,” she said. “But if you can.”

“I want you to know,” Marie said. “I just need to pause for breath.”

She had it worked out, what had happened.

“The light there,” she said. “Some days it hurt to look at nothing.”

Peter had picked her up as usual, early, as new shadows ran long across the streets. In the night, rain had passed and water flashed on leaves and hoods and windshields. Around the traffic circle, their driver’s horn split schools of mopeds. Oil rainbows trailed across the pavement. Women walked alongside balancing sacks and fabric on their heads, and on the backs of mopeds sat women in slacks and sleeveless tops with leather handbags. Men leaned out of honking minivans, shirttails flapping. At the end of a long warehouse, a box truck was backing across three lanes. Kintale Market, its side was painted, in red script above a cornucopia. Up front a thin man paddled out its window. Peter’s driver braced his palms against the horn and his head against his headrest.

Marie was shaking.

“It’s all right,” Carol said.

“There’s time,” Peter said.

It was a minivan that struck them, crushing him between his door and the seat in front. Marie had always imagined brakes, horns, but a cymbal crash she could not imitate was the first and last sound and still waited to clang inside her.

“If he hadn’t picked me up,” she said.

“You can’t foresee,” Carol said.

She reached and held her and Marie felt sobs rising. Marie pushed a blue fold of sweatshirt against her eyelids. She pushed her face into it and puffed it warm with her breath, and she thought how crying for one thing felt the same as crying for another.

That was still true in the humming twilight after Carol left.