The Chief of Naval Operations asked the obvious question. "Is young Mr. Chinma able to answer questions from the media? Because the European media are going to claim that he's part of an American scam."
"Like the moon landing," murmured the NSA.
"We all know how America is constantly searching for opportunities to expend American lives and money in pursuit of highhanded imperialism," said Torrent. "Naturally, it is to be assumed that we are really seizing Nigerian oil."
Everyone chuckled, but Cole thought that it wasn't really wise to say such things. Even if Torrent was quoted accurately, irony disappears in print and these words would be taken at face value, as a rare moment of candor from an American president.
Torrent had not forgotten the original question. "Chinma speaks English quite well," said the President. "Though it's his fourth language."
"English is my favorite language," said Chinma.
His voice—high, not yet changed, but clear and firm—brought surprised laughter, and the boy looked confused.
"No problem, son," said Torrent. "They're laughing because they're happy and relieved you speak English better than the average American college freshman."
The President went on telling the story of how Chinma happened to have a camera and notebook, and how he and half his tribe had survived the nictovirus, only to be massacred. It was a sad story, but Cole could see the gleam in the President's eye. This boy's heroism was accomplishing more than making public the crime committed against his people.
He was a survivor, first of the terrifying disease, and then of an equally terrifying act of genocide. Then, grimly determined to get justice for his murdered family, he brought his story to Americans, and Americans got him out of Nigeria and brought him here to safety. Americans loved stories in which Americans are the good guys.
President Torrent had obviously used this meeting as a dry run for the press conference, and it looked like a slam dunk. Suddenly this disease was not about masses of people in far-off Africa—it was about this sad but engaging boy, his suffering, his terrible losses, and his heroism. It helped that the bad guys in this story were Muslims, though Torrent was careful not to make a big point of it. The American people were used to hearing of Muslims doing unspeakable things, but now they had unforgettable pictures.
There would certainly be international protests when Cole started taking special ops teams into Nigeria to bring the fear of God into the hearts of these heartless murderers, but American support for the actions would be almost unanimous.
Cole tuned out the continuing questions and comments, most of which boiled down to praise for Chinma, which, since there were no cameras in the meeting, meant that they were sucking up to the President and not to the public.
Left to his own thoughts, Cole could not help but remind himself: I'm a general. Not permanently, and it won't count when I retire, but right now I have the President behind me and everybody has to salute me or at least answer my emails. If only Dad could have fought off the cancer long enough to see me get here.
Cole was immediately ashamed of his momentary glee. His "battlefield promotion" had only happened because hundreds of thousands of people, probably millions, were dying, and the Nigerian government was killing the survivors.
I'm going to have to take men into combat and lay our lives on the line again and again—in danger from both enemy action and a deadly epidemic. And I'm thrilled about it?
But such conflicted feelings were common. Everyone knew that it was in wartime that military careers were made. In peacetime, the climbers always rise to the top of the military bureaucracy, and then when war broke out, you had the devil's own time trying to get rid of them and put good field generals in their place.
Bureaucratic generals always hated successful field commanders because they were pretty much opposite personality types, and the ascendancy of one meant the total eclipse of the other. Torrent hadn't put Cole in the Joint Chiefs, but they all by damn knew his face and his name, and he had enormous clout because of the President's obvious trust in him.
Let's not screw this up, Cole told himself. You never thought you'd get anywhere near this kind of position. Being assigned to Reuben Malich looked like the death of your career, and now, three years later, you're in a place other soldiers only dream of.
The meeting ended and everyone left—except the President, Chinma, Babe, and Cole.
Torrent's private words to them were brief. "This boy has spent his first days in America getting stuck with needles and constantly watched, waking and sleeping, while adults forced him to figure out what he wrote with a pencil in the jungle on the day his family was murdered. I want your advice on something. I'm thinking that Chinma needs a good American home. One where they understand something about the pain of having a family member murdered."
Cole's first reaction was: You can't do that to Cecily Malich. And his second reaction was: If Cecily was the first person I thought of, she's probably the right choice.
"Do you think she'll do it?" asked the President.
"If you ask her, sir," said Babe.
"Well, no," said President Torrent. "At the moment I'm not sure she's speaking to me. She didn't like my speech last night."
"Sir," said Cole, "she won't do it for you, and she won't do it for me, and she won't do it for Babe. But she'll do it for Chinma."
"No," said Torrent with a smile, "she'll do it for God."
It was good to know that Torrent was aware that Cecily took her faith seriously. But it was not so reassuring that Torrent thought it was amusing.
"So the two of you will take him to Cessy?" asked Torrent.
"Maybe," said Cole, "we ought to ask Chinma."
Torrent's eyebrows rose in a my-bad expression. "It is a free country, isn't it," said Torrent. "Go ahead and ask."
Babe looked at Cole with amusement, as if to say, You opened your mouth, you do the asking.
"We know a family," Cole said to Chinma. "A good American family. Their father, Reuben Malich, was a great soldier. Mr. Austin and I both served under him. Reuben tried to save the life of the President who was killed a few years ago. But then he was murdered by someone he trusted. His wife and children miss him every day. They're good people. They're Christians—Catholics—I don't know what that means to you."
"My family was Christian," said Chinma. "Not Catholic, though."
"It won't matter, I promise you. They might have a place for you while you're living here in America. Do you want to come stay with them? Because if you'd rather go back to where you've been sleeping the past few days, you can do that instead."
"Soldier family, please, sir," said Chinma.
"Good choice," said Babe. "The woman can cook."
Chinma's face lit up. "Really? Food in America is very bad. No fire!"
Ah, thought Cole, Chinma isn't saying American food is raw, he's saying it's bland. I'll have to warn Cecily. Use pepper!
The boy was too old to hold anybody's hand, but Cole would have expected him to stay close to Babe; after all, it was Babe who got him out of Nigeria and put his pictures on the web. But no. Chinma walked by himself. As if he didn't quite trust anybody—which would be understandable.
But maybe he knew how alone he was in the world, and he was determined to act like a man.
BRRUE BOVS
People know many things, and half of them are wrong. If only we knew which half, we'd have reason to be proud of our intelligence.
What is knowledge? A belief that is shared by all the respectable people in a community, whether there is any real evidence for it or not.
What is faith? A belief we hold so strongly that we act as if it is true, even though we know there are many who do not believe it.
What is opinion? A belief that we expect other people to argue with.
What is scientific fact? An oxymoron. Science does not deal in facts. It deals in hypotheses, which are never fully and finally correct.
Cecily was in the kitchen, fix
ing dinner. Nick was upstairs, playing videogames. Lettie and Annie were out on bicycles, probably going on busier roads than Cecily officially permitted them to use, but they would at least be wearing their helmets. John Paul was alternating between coming into the kitchen and complaining that he was bored, and going into Nick's room to offer unwelcome advice on whatever game Nick was playing.
Mark was in the back yard, looking up into the tallest oak in the neighborhood. And the Nigerian boy, Chinma, was somewhere up in that tree. Judging from the angle of Mark's neck as he looked up, Chinma was very high in the tree.
Chinma had asked for permission before climbing the tree. He was such a polite boy. But so quiet, so inscrutable. Babe had taken her aside to warn her that Chinma showed almost nothing in his face. "It's an African thing. Particularly a Nigerian thing. You don't want to let anyone see any emotion, except, when you feel threatened, a cheerful smile."
"So a smile isn't a good thing?" asked Cecily.
"A real smile is. Believe me, you'll know the difference."
Of course she had taken in the boy, but Cecily couldn't help resenting the fact that somehow the President and Cole and Babe had decided her life wasn't complicated enough, so she of all the people in the D.C. area needed to take this boy into her care.
At the same time, it was flattering, too. When they wanted the boy to have a good, safe home, they thought of her.
Unless they somehow thought they were doing her and her kids a favor, giving them a wonderful new brother, someone to take their minds off their troubles. Men sometimes thought that way, because few of them had any calendar sense. Her husband had been dead for three years. Any comfort she might have derived from having a pet child added to her family in the aftermath of Reuben's death, the need for it had long since passed.
None of them would have guessed the real reason she felt comfort at Chinma's presence in her home. To Cecily, it was a sign that God still knew where she lived.
She would never say this to anyone outside of church, because it was such an unintellectual idea. To think that God bent events to bring certain people together would simply be scoffed at by hard-minded men like Torrent or Cole or any of the people who knew her only as a policy wonk. But Cecily lived in a world where, when someone had suffered enough, God would assign some person or family to be angels in their life, to bless them. Clearly Chinma was on the suffered-enough list, and it felt good to Cecily that she and her family had been chosen as the angels of comfort.
Even if Torrent or one of Reuben's soldiers believed they had thought of it, Cecily knew that God could make anybody think of anything, and make it seem like a good idea. It didn't take away any of their freedom, for God to use them as an instrument of his will. To them, it was something they did in passing. To Chinma and Cecily, it was a potentially transformative connection.
And if Chinma's coming to their home was only temporary, and it accomplished nothing more than this, Chinma had finally arrived in America. Until now he had been in institutional custody, surrounded by walls, breathing air-conditioned air, and dealing only with soldiers and doctors and scholars and politicians.
Now, though, Chinma was high up in an American tree, looking out over an American landscape, with an American boy at the bottom of the tree looking up at him with … what, awe? Consternation? Hard to read Mark's expression in profile.
And now she wouldn't have to. He was trudging toward the house.
Cecily had taken Cole's and Babe's warnings about the food seriously. She had never thought of American food as bland and flavorless, but as Babe said, "They have to do something with a diet consisting mostly of flavorless yams, so they spice everything to the limits of human endurance. The more subde flavors we appreciate are indistinguishable to them."
"What are you saying, they can't tell a tuna sandwich from peanut butter?"
"They could probably tell the difference, they just wouldn't care," said Babe. "Like the difference between Sprite, Seven-Up, and Sierra Mist."
"I can tell the difference," said Cecily.
"But compared to the difference between them and champagne … "
"I'll spice things up a little," said Cecily.
"No, you don't get it," said Babe. "Chinma won't notice you spiced it unless it's so hot it makes your children cry. So get him some pepper sauces and let him add it to his own food."
So Cecily had made a run to Wegmans and come back with a dozen tall narrow bottles of sauces that bragged about how impossibly hot they were. She had also bought a dozen jalapeh***os and a few habaneros, and handling them both with rubber gloves, and leaving all the seeds intact, she had made two different sauces that had not been attuned to American tastes at the factory.
Tonight would be angel-hair pasta with a choice of tomato and alfredo sauces. The tomato sauce was Newman's Own Sockarooni, which was too spicy for Mark and Annie, though Lettie and Nick were fine with it.
Mark came into the kitchen. "I can't believe how high he climbs," he said.
"Well, he can't climb higher than the tree."
"Close, though," said Mark. "He's on branches so tiny they swayed five feet when he put his weight on them. Every breeze swings him around like a tetherball. And he doesn't even look nervous."
"If he weren't a climber," said Cecily, "he'd be dead now."
"If he weren't a climber," said Mark, "he wouldn't have been sneezed on by a sick monkey."
"Are you brave enough to try one of these hot sauces for me?" asked Cecily.
He looked at her like she was insane. "No," he said. "Are you trying to poison me by burning through my mouth? I saw those peppers you bought."
"I'm afraid he'll think I'm playing a really cruel prank on him," said Cecily.
"Tell him you think it's too hot for human consumption, but he's free to try it if he wants. He's my age, he can decide what he wants."
"I keep forgetting he's your age, he's so much smaller."
"I had the benefit of American nutrition, Mom. All those nitrates and monosodium glutamate and high-fructose corn syrup make a boy grow tall and namby-pamby."
"Nobody called you namby—"
"I like alfredo sauce on my noodles, Mom. And when you dare me to eat death-by-pepper sauce, I don't take it as a challenge, I take it as attempted murder."
"That doesn't make you a wimp."
"I take pride in my wimphood, Mom. I'm not a man like Dad was—I'm not a soldier in the making."
"Your father never expected or even wanted his sons to be soldiers."
"I know that, Mom. You think he didn't tell me? But I knew that he wished I were a different kind of boy. Worse grammar and more bugs in my hair."
"Your father was so proud of you, Mark, that it made him cry sometimes. For heaven's sake, don't invent a version of your father that you can't live up to!"
"If I had lived in Chinma's village, I wouldn't have been up in a tree, taking pictures of the slaughter of my family so I could testify against the murderers later. I would have been one of the people running around screaming till they shot me."
"So Chinma was the right kind of hero for the job God chose him to do," said Cecily.
"Yep," said Mark. "Didn't you ever wonder if Elijah or Peter had an older brother who just didn't amount to much?"
"Didn't you ever wonder if any of those prophets had sisters?"
"Nobody expected girls to do great things in those days—and they still had Deborah and Esther and Ruth."
"Yeah," said Cecily, "like lying down at a cousin's feet was anything like challenging the priests of Baal."
"It took courage all the same," said Mark.
"Ha! I got you to say it! Bravery doesn't take the same form every time."
"You don't get it. I'm not brave, but I also don't want to be brave. I don't want to climb a tall tree. Or a short one. I don't want to eat that death-by-pepper sauce, or even Newman's Own Sockarooni stuff. And I'm happy that way. I just recognize that God isn't going to have any particular use for me because I'
m not the kind of kid who does anything spectacular."
"You don't know what you can do until it's time to do it," said Cecily.
"If men with guns came into my village, I'd think, Oh, I guess this is how I die. I wonder if it will hurt. I hope not. I don't like to hurt. And I'd still be thinking that when they came in and shot me and everybody else."
"I can see that you've played through this whole script in your mind."
"Several times," said Mark. "And the only difference between the versions is whether I die screaming and begging for my life, or just sitting there waiting patiently for the end to come."
"All these years I've known you," said Cecily, "and I had no idea you were suffering from chronic clinical depression."
"Mom, I'm happy being who and what I am. I imagine all kinds of lives I might lead, and the only ones that look good to me are the quiet, safe, boring ones. Finding a wife and never looking at another woman. Raising my kids and being happy as long as they don't actually become drug addicts or criminals. Going to a job every workday and taking two weeks of vacation every year. All the things that everybody says are boring, that's what would make me happy. I never ever wanted to be like Dad. I never wanted to do his job."
"He certainly never knew that."
"Why would I tell him?" asked Mark. "Besides, I couldn't have put it into words then. When he was still alive. I just knew."
A thought occurred to Cecily. "Are you trying to tell me something?"
Mark thought for a moment, then laughed. "I'm trying to tell you what I told you," he said. "And no, I'm not gay. It's girls I have disturbing dreams about."
"Disturbing?"
"Wow, you're in a creepy mood," said Mark. "I'm not doing anything weird in my dreams. It's just disturbing to be committing the sin of fornication every night. Father Thaddeus tries to convince me that it's perfectly normal and he won't even assign me penance for it beyond the prayers I already say, but I can't help but think that I'm awfully eager to commit mortal sins with any bimbo who happens to show up in a dream."
Cecily couldn't help laughing. "You say you're not brave, but do you know how many boys would die of embarrassment before saying anything like this to their mother?"