David Shafer - Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

In the tea shop, Leila sat with her back to the wall. It annoyed her when aid workers acted like Army Rangers, but one eight-month stint in Afghanistan had drilled a few cautious habits into her. The waiter, who may have had a little crush on Leila, raced over to take her order, though by now he probably could have guessed: mint tea and a plate of Number Nines.

What was that smell? Was it cumin? Burlap? Chinese dish soap? Whatever, it was delicious, and it soothed her. That’s what she’d miss when she left this place: the smells. Leila smelled whatever came near her; not just food, but book pages and faces and phones. Her sniffing technique was discreet but effective. Certainly she never had to pass anything under her nose, sommelier-like, as her little brother, Dylan, had to do to match her skills. That’s what the Majnoun kids did on slow Saturdays back in the day: they played smelling games. Roxana might hide a Starburst candy behind her toes and wave her foot in the air in front of her siblings, who then had to guess the flavor. Leila could tell you who had been sitting in the red corduroy chair an hour ago. Dylan did not dare steal Leila’s stuff because once she had claimed she could smell his hands on her library books. Bluffing or no, she’d been right.

Leila’s particular sensitivities seemed to cycle between the wafty, closer smells — mainly food and human — that draped over a moment, and the dusty, distant smells that could be carried by coat sleeve or breeze. In the former category was the knapsack that still smelled of curry, the hairbrush left too near the stove, and the human hangover behind the counter at Kinko’s. In the latter category was the subway-tunnel vent mixed with newspaper that had snaked around her corner in Bushwick, and the tang of handrails, and the seep of wet gravel, but it also included the thinner smells that came from paper and paint and industrially produced hard surfaces. This cycling was in some way related to her mood. Only very rarely did her nose prove too powerful. She was usually able to shut it down or tune out the worst, as when a pair of dirty underpants sat down next to her on a bus. So it annoyed her when pregnant women went on and on about their powers of smell, about how they just had to leave the room because someone was eating a banana or whatever.

Her tea arrived, the little cup and pot and plate of biscuits arranged just so on the dinged aluminum tray. Her waiter practically bowed as he retreated.

No, she couldn’t ask Dah Alice for help. And she doubted Aung-Hla could help in this situation. He knew how to bribe traffic cops but this was probably out of his league. Though maybe he would know what bird people were. Then there was one American in Mandalay she’d spoken with a few times. Fred. Was it Fred? He was some sort of visiting fellow at the university, fluent in Burmese and Kachin and Shan. Maybe he knew something about how to get around crooked customs officials; he said he’d been in Mandalay for a few years. But despite his exotic multilingualism, he didn’t strike Leila as all that bright. Besides, she thought with a cringe, when they last spoke, she may have been a little snooty to him. He had asked would she like a tour of Mandalay Palace. But she’d just arrived and thought she had a lot to do, and she’d seen about a thousand palaces anyway and Fred didn’t look like someone she wanted to hear talk about fenestration or crenellation or whatever.

Leila stayed in that tea shop until three in the afternoon — more or less the end of the Burmese workday. For most of that time, she drafted an e-mail to Dylan. He had a correspondence-return rate of about one in three, but you really have to stay on kid brothers and she wanted to know about this girlfriend and was Mom drinking too much and who was Roxana’s fancy new employer.

Then she called Aung-Hla on her disposable Burmese phone. Comms were kind of a hot mess on this job. Though in fairness, that wasn’t due to Helping Hand; that was more due to working in a failed socialist-military autarky. Leila had a smartphone that could receive some but not all calls from abroad, plus the office landline she was legally required to keep, plus the satellite phone that Helping Hand was very proud of, plus her local cell. Foreigners were’t allowed to sign contracts, though, even for a cell phone, so Leila’s local cell was always a prepaid burner bought on the street. Eighty minutes for ten bucks. But she got a different number each time she bought a new phone. (Which was actually a used phone. Take that, first-world recyclers!) The constantly changing number meant that it was pretty much just an outgoing-calls device, as though she were carrying a little phone booth with her at all times.

She needed to reconfirm tomorrow’s trip with Aung-Hla. When she’d told him the destination — a town in Kachin State called Myo Thit, five hundred kilometers north — he had looked apprehensive. Leila knew that things got a bit extra-repressive up there, because of the separatists, but Myo Thit wasn’t the deep north, she thought, and it was right on the main highway. If they started early and turned around quick, maybe they could do it in one day.

When she got Aung-Hla on his phone — he shared it with another taximan — he said yes, he would meet her in the morning, but he said no way they could make it there and back in one day. He actually said, “No way this can be done.”

“We will find a hotel, then,” said Leila, “a place to stay in Myo Thit.” She could hear his hesitation over the line. Was he embarrassed? Should she not have said we? Or was it a question of his time, his fee? “I will pay you more. Double the usual rate.” She immediately regretted that. It probably seemed to Aung-Hla that money was a lever she could pull whenever she wanted to. She would like to explain to him about her student loans.

“The same rate,” he said, and she winced. “But the hotel. I think it will not be salubrious.”

She and Aung-Hla would find somewhere to stay, she told herself later that night. It was an important trip. There was a woman in Myo Thit she needed to meet.

The nursing students that Leila had so far identified as strong scholarship candidates were all from relatively prosperous Burmese households. These were women able to put themselves forward, and they were fine applicants. But Leila also wanted to find the women who usually missed these opportunities. Probably because of her sister, Roxana, because there had been someone who’d intervened in Roxana’s case when she was young, someone who had said to the Majnouns, Your daughter is disabled, but she is also a genius.

The woman in Myo Thit was called Ma Thiri. She was a twenty-eight-year-old nurse with a below-the-knee prosthetic who had single-handedly opened a medical clinic in a small village in a poor and dangerous region in a destitute and benighted country. The prenatal care that the clinic provided had demonstrably reduced infant mortality in the population. To Leila, this sounded like a woman who might seriously benefit from three years at an American nursing school.

Jeez, it was hot. Implausibly hot for midnight, Leila thought. Her upper arms stuck sweatily to the skin of her rib cage, except where her T-shirt blotted their meeting. There was a ceiling fan in her two-room flat; it was on now. But it whorled and kerchonked around at such an unstable and idiotic rate that what it gave in breeze it took back in worry. When she’d first arrived, the bed had been centered beneath the fan, but she couldn’t sleep a single night with that seizing squid above her, so she’d moved the bed, a steel beast, to the window, ten feet away. Even so, Leila found the clatter of the fan anathema to sleep, so she had developed a bedtime routine that involved shutting off all the lights, taking a cold, drippy shower, and then, last, killing the fan.