Eight months after Linus Corea’s disappearance, his wife was alone in the house with their two children when a man came to the door and handed her a letter from her husband. The man stepped inside. The note was simple. It said: If you wish to see me again, come with the children. If you do not wish to, I will understand.
She moved to the phone, and the man produced a gun. She stood there. To her left was a pool where some flowers floated in shallow water. All her valuables were upstairs. She stood there, the children busy in their rooms. It had not been a joyous marriage. Comfortable but not happy. Affections on the thin scale of things. But the letter, while it held his terseness, had a quality she would never have expected. It gave her a choice. It was laconically stated but it was there, graciously, with no strings. Later she thought that if it had not been for that she would not have gone. She muttered to the man. He spoke back to her in an invented language that she did not understand. Some of the news reports at the time of her husband’s disappearance had spoken of UFO kidnappings, and this strangely came to her mind now, there in her front hall.
“We’ll come with you,” she said again, out loud, and this time the man came towards her and gave her another letter.
This one was just as abrupt and said: Please bring these books. A list followed, eight titles. He told her where they could be found in his office. She told her sons to get a few extra clothes and shoes, but she packed nothing for herself. She carried only the books, and once they were outside the man directed them to an already humming car.
Linus Corea made his way to the tent in the dark and lay down on the cot. It was nine at night, and if they came they would be there in about five hours. He had told the men when it was most likely for her to be home alone. He needed to sleep. He had been working in the triage tent for close to six hours, so even with the brief nap after lunch he was exhausted.
He had been at the camp of the insurgents ever since they had picked him up in Colombo. They had got him a little after two in the afternoon and by seven he was in the southern hills. No one had spoken to him in the car, just the idiot language, a joke of theirs. What good it did he wasn’t sure. When he reached the camp they explained in Sinhala what they wanted him to do, which was to work as a doctor for them. Nothing more. It was not an intense conversation, he wasn’t threatened. They told him he could see his family in a few months. They said he could sleep now but in the morning he would have to work. A few hours later they woke him and said there was an emergency, and led him into the triage tent with a lantern and hung it on a hook above a half-dead body and asked him to operate on the skull in lamplight. The man was too far gone, still they asked him to operate. He himself was uncomfortable with his broken rib and whenever he leaned forward pain tore through him. Half an hour later the man died and they carried the lantern to another bed, where someone else who had been shot had been waiting in silence. He had to remove the leg above the knee, but the man lived. Linus Corea went back to sleep at two-thirty. At six a.m. they woke him again to begin work.
After a few days he asked them to get some smocks for him, some rubber gloves, some morphine. He gave them a list of things he needed, and that night they attacked a hospital near Gurutulawa and got the medical essentials and kidnapped a nurse for him. She too, strangely, did not complain about her fate, just as he hadn’t. Privately he was irritated, and tired of a world that necessitated this, but the device of courtesy that had been false in his other life continued. He thanked people for nothing much and he didn’t ask for anything unless it was badly needed. He became accustomed to this lack of need, was rather proud of it. If he wanted something—syringes, bandages, a book—he would write out a list and give it to them. Maybe a week later, maybe six weeks, he’d get them. The first hospital attack was the only one they planned just for him.
He did not know how long they would keep him so he began to teach the nurse everything he could about surgery. Rosalyn was about forty, very smart under her seeming complacency. He had her operating alongside him when they were overrun with wounded.
After the first month he admitted to himself that he didn’t miss his children or wife anymore, even that much of Colombo. Not that he was happy here, but being busy he was preoccupied.
There was no energy in him to be angry or insulted. Six till noon. Two hours off for lunch and sleep. Then he worked six more hours. If there was a crisis he worked longer. The nurse was always beside him. She wore one of the smocks that he had requested and was very proud of it, washing it out every evening so it would be clean in the morning.
He was asleep when his family arrived. The nurse tried to wake him, but he was dead to the world. She suggested that the wife come into her tent with the two boys so he could sleep undisturbed, he had to be up in a few hours to work. At what? the wife said. He’s a doctor, the nurse said.
It was just as well. The drive had been arduous and she and the children were tired themselves. This was not the time to greet and talk. When they woke the next morning it was ten, and her husband had already been working for four hours. Had walked into their tent carrying his mug of tea, looked at them, and then had gone to work with the nurse. The nurse had told him she was surprised his wife was that young, and the doctor had laughed. In Colombo he would have reddened or become angry. He was aware this nurse could say anything to him.
So when his wife and children woke they were ignored. The nurse was gone, the soldiers they saw went their own way. The mother insisted they stay together, and they went searching around the compound like lost tourists till they found the nurse washing bandages outside a dirty tent.
Rosalyn came up to him and said something he did not catch and she repeated it, that his wife and children were by the tent entrance. He looked up, then asked her if she could take over, and she nodded. He walked away from the close focus of the tent work, passed people lying on the ground, towards his wife and the children. The nurse could see him almost bouncing with pleasure. When he came closer his wife saw the blood on his smock and she hesitated. “It doesn’t matter,” he said, lifting her into an embrace. She touched his beard, which he had forgotten he had grown. There were no mirrors and he hadn’t seen it.
“You met Rosalyn?”
“Yes. She helped us last night. You of course wouldn’t wake up.”
“Mmm.” Linus Corea laughed. “They keep me going.” He paused, then said, “It’s my life.”
Anil
Anil had come out of her first class at Guy’s Hospital in London with just one sentence in her exercise book: The bone of choice would be the femur.
She loved the way the lecturer had stated it, offhand, but with the air of a pompatus. As if this piece of information were the first rule needed before they could progress to greater principles. Forensic studies began with that one thighbone.
What surprised Anil as the teacher delineated the curriculum and the field of study was the quietness of the English classroom. In Colombo there was always a racket. Birds, lorries, fighting dogs, a kindergarten’s lessons of rote, street salesmen—all their sounds entered through open windows. There was no chance of an ivory tower existing in the tropics. Anil wrote Dr. Endicott’s sentence down and a few minutes later underlined it with her ballpoint in the hushed quiet. For the rest of the hour she just listened and watched the lecturer’s mannerisms.
It was while studying at Guy’s that Anil found herself in the smoke of one bad marriage. She was in her early twenties and was to hide this episode from everyone she met later in life. Even now she wouldn’t replay it and consider the level of damage. She saw it more as some contemporary fable of warning.
He too was from Sri Lanka, and in retrospect she could see that she had begun loving him because of her loneliness. She could cook a curry with him. She could refer to a specific barber in Bambalapitiya, could whisper her desire for jaggery or jakfruit and be understood. That made a difference in the new, too brittle country. Perhaps she herself was too tense with uncertainty and shyness. She had exp
ected to feel alien in England only for a few weeks. Uncles who had made the same journey a generation earlier had spoken romantically of their time abroad. They suggested that the right remark or gesture would open all doors. Her father’s friend Dr. P. R. C. Peterson had told the story of being sent to school in England as an eleven-year-old. On the first day he was called a “native” by a classmate. He stood up at once and announced to the teacher, “I’m sorry to say this, sir, but Roxborough doesn’t know who I am. He called me a ‘native.’ That’s the wrong thing to do. He is the native and I’m the visitor to the country.”
But acceptance was harder than that. Having been a mild celebrity in Colombo because of her swimming, Anil was shy without the presence of her talent, and found it difficult to enter conversations. Later, when she developed her gift for forensic work, she knew one of the advantages was that her skill signalled her existence—like a neutral herald.
In her first month in London she’d been constantly confused by the geography around her. (What she kept noticing about Guy’s Hospital was the number of doors!) She missed two classes in her first week, unable to find the lecture room. So for a while she began arriving early each morning and waited on the front steps for Dr. Endicott, following him through the swing doors, stairways, grey-and-pink corridors, to the unmarked classroom. (She once followed him and startled him and others in the men’s bathroom.)
She seemed timid even to herself. She felt lost and emotional. She murmured to herself the way one of her spinster aunts did. She didn’t eat much for a week and saved enough money to phone Colombo. Her father was out and her mother was unable to come to the phone. It was about one in the morning and she had woken her ayah, Lalitha. They talked for a few minutes, until they were both weeping, it felt, at the far ends of the world. A month later she fell within the spell of her future, and soon-to-be, and eventually ex-, husband.
It seemed to her he had turned up from Sri Lanka in bangles and on stilts. He too was a medical student. He was not shy. Within days of their meeting he focussed his wits entirely on Anil—a many-armed seducer and note writer and flower bringer and telephone-message leaver (he had quickly charmed her landlady). His organized passion surrounded her. She had the sense that he had never been lonely or alone before meeting her. He had panache in the way he could entice and choreograph the other medical students. He was funny. He had cigarettes. She saw how he mythologized their rugby positions and included such things in the fabric of their conversations until they were familiar touchstones—a trick that never left any of them at a loss for words. A team, a gang, that was in fact only two weeks deep. They each had an epithet. Lawrence who had thrown up once on the Underground, the siblings Sandra and Percy Lewis whose family scandals were acknowledged and forgiven, Jackman of the wide brows.
He and Anil were married quickly. She briefly suspected that for him it was another excuse for a party that would bond them all. He was a fervent lover, even with his public life to choreograph. He certainly opened up the geography of the bedroom, insisting on lovemaking in their non-soundproof living room, on the wobbly sink in the shared bathroom down the hall, on the boundary line quite near the long-stop during a county cricket match. These private acts in an almost public sphere echoed his social nature. There seemed to be no difference for him between privacy and friendship with acquaintances. Later she would read that this was the central quality of a monster. Still, there was considerable pleasure on both their parts during this early period. Though she realized it was going to be crucial for her to come back to earth, to continue her academic studies.
When her father-in-law visited England he swept them up and took them out to dinner. The son was for once quiet, and the father attempted to persuade them to return to Colombo and have his grandchildren. He kept referring to himself as a philanthropist, which appeared to give him a belief that he was always on higher moral ground. As the dinner progressed she felt that every trick in the Colombo Seven social book was being used against her. He objected to her having a full-time career, keeping her own name, was annoyed at her talking back. When she described classroom autopsies during the trifle, the father had been outraged. “Is there nothing you won’t do?” And she had replied, “I won’t go to crap games with barons and earls.”
The next day the father lunched alone with his son, then flew back to Colombo.
At home the two of them fought now over everything. She was suspicious of his insights and understanding. He appeared to spend all his spare energy on empathy. When she wept, he would weep. She never trusted weepers after that. (Later, in the American Southwest, she would avoid those television shows with weeping cowboys and weeping priests.) During this time of claustrophobia and marital warfare, sex was the only mutual constant. She insisted on it as much as he. She assumed it gave the relationship some normality. Days of battle and fuck.
The disintegration of the relationship was so certain on her part that she would never replay any of their days together. She had been fooled by energy and charm; he had wept and burrowed under her intelligence until she felt she had none left. Venus, as Sarath would say, had been in her head, when it should have been the time of Jupiter.
She would return from the lab in the evenings and be met by his jealousy. At first this presented itself as sexual jealousy, then she saw it was an attempt to limit her research and studies. It was the first handcuff of marriage, and it almost buried her in their small flat in Ladbroke Grove. After she escaped him she would never say his name out loud. If she saw his handwriting on a letter she never opened it, fear and claustrophobia rising within her. In fact, the only reference to the era of her marriage she allowed into her life was Van Morrison’s “Slim Slow Slider” with its mention of Ladbroke Grove. Only the song survived. And only because it referred to separation.
Saw you early this morning
With your brand-new boy and your Cadillac . . .
She would sing along hoping that he did not also join in with his sentimental heart, wherever he was.
You’ve gone for something,
And I know you won’t be back.
Otherwise the whole marriage and divorce, the hello and good-bye, she treated as something illicit that deeply embarrassed her. She left him as soon as their term at Guy’s Hospital was over, so he could not locate her. She had plotted her departure for the end of term to avoid the harassment he was fully capable of; he was one of those men with time on his hands. Cease and desist! she had scrawled formally on his last little whining billet-doux before mailing it back to him.
She emerged with no partner. Cloudless at last. She was unable to bear the free months before she could begin classes again, before she could draw her studies close to her, more intimately and seriously than she had imagined possible. When she did return she fell in love with working at night, and sometimes she couldn’t bear to leave the lab, just rested her happily tired dark head on the table. There was no curfew or compromise with a lover anymore. She got home at midnight, was up at eight, every casebook and experiment and investigation alive in her head and reachable.
Eventually she heard he’d returned to Colombo. And with his departure there was no longer any need to remember favourite barbers and restaurants along the Galle Road. Her last conversation in Sinhala was the distressed chat she’d had with Lalitha that ended with her crying about missing egg rulang and curd with jaggery. She no longer spoke Sinhala to anyone. She turned fully to the place she found herself in, focussing on anatomical pathology and other branches of forensics, practically memorizing Spitz and Fisher. Later she won a scholarship to study in the United States, and in Oklahoma became caught up in the application of the forensic sciences to human rights. Two years later, in Arizona, she was studying the physical and chemical changes that occurred in bones not only during life but also after death and burial.
She was now alongside the language of science. The femur was the bone of choice.
It was in the Arizona labs that Anil met and worked with a woma
n named Leaf. A few years older, Leaf became Anil’s closest friend and constant companion. They worked side by side and they talked continually on the phone to each other when one was on assignment elsewhere. Leaf Niedecker—what kind of name is that, Anil had demanded to know—introduced Anil to the finer arts of ten-pin bowling, raucous hooting in bars, and high-speed driving in the desert, swerving back and forth in the night. “Tenga cuidado con los armadillos, señorita.”
Leaf loved movies and remained in depression about the disappearance of drive-ins and their al fresco quality. “All our shoes off, all our shirts off, rolling against Chevy leather—there has been nothing like it since.” So two or three times a week Anil would buy a barbequed chicken and arrive at Leaf’s rented house. The television had already been carried into the yard and sat baldly beside a yucca tree. They’d rent The Searchers or any other John Ford or Fred Zinnemann movie. They watched The Nun’s Story, From Here to Eternity, Five Days One Summer, sitting in Leaf’s lawn chairs, or curled up beside each other in the double hammock, watching the calm, carefully sexual black-and-white walk of Montgomery Clift.
Nights in Leaf’s backyard, once upon a time in the West. The heat still in the air at midnight. They would pause the movie, take a break and cool off under the garden hose. In three months they managed to see the complete oeuvres of Angie Dickinson and Warren Oates. “I’m asthmatic,” Leaf said. “I need to become a cowboy.”
They shared a joint and disappeared into the intricacies of Red River, theorizing on the strangely casual shooting of John Ireland before the final fight between Montgomery Clift and John Wayne. They rewound the video and watched it once more. Wayne swirling around gracefully, hardly interrupting his walk, to shoot a neutral friend who was trying to stop a fight. On their knees in the parched grass by the television screen they looked at the scene frame by frame for any sign of outrage at this unfairness on the victim’s face. There seemed to be none. It was a minor act directed towards a minor character that may or may not have ended the man’s life, and no one said anything about it during the remaining five minutes of the film. One of those Jacobean happy endings.