Aleksandar Hemon - Nowhere Man

“The what?”

“The none-of-his-goddamn-business the!” Rachel hissed.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Dallas slammed his hand against the dashboard — a puff of dust rose under the Kentucky-hill light.

“Nothing the fuck is wrong with me. I just can’t stand you.”

“Hey, hey, hey!” JFK said.

“I will read you the letter,” Pronek said. “I have it at the home.”

“At home,” Dallas said. “ At home. ”

They slept in the same tent, Pronek squeezed between Dallas and Rachel, JFK on the far end with Vince. They felt the chilly night pasting the frost on the tent, the moon scintillating through the walls. Pronek lay on his back, feeling the warmth of Rachel’s body through the sleeping bags. He heard her breathing, peaceful and deep. He inhaled the smell of her hair, her sweat, and her fatigue. Dallas was snoring, JFK was tossing and turning. Pronek turned toward Rachel and watched her face under the feeble, diffuse moonlight seeping through. Her forehead unwrinkled and her eyelids curved beautifully, her eyelashes still. Her lips were motionless, no word forming in her mouth. The sleeping-bag hood framed her face, as if holding it up for Pronek to see, a stray lock resting on her temple.

Then she opened her eyes.

Pronek was petrified. She gazed at him from her depths, she clearly knew he had been watching her. She blinked without fuss, comfortable with Pronek’s look stroking her face. She moved her head toward him, closed her eyes, and planted a kiss on his lips. Pronek was so frozen, the unreality of the moment stiffening the muscles in his back and neck, that he couldn’t respond, until he felt her tongue parting his lips and he let it in.

“If you press your dick against me one more time,” JFK said, “you’re going to have to sleep outside. How’s that?”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Dallas said, and turned toward Pronek. Pronek felt the heat of Dallas’s body on his back, but Rachel’s hand was moving across his face, and he closed his eyes, his lips burning.

They had a couple of hours before the protest, and JFK dropped them off at the American Museum of Science and Energy. Rachel made Pronek stand under an American flag, got down on her knees at his feet, and took a picture of his face, headed by his chin, the flag limp over him. Pronek had woken up that morning thinking that he might have dreamt it all. Rachel gave him no reassurance: she busied herself with excavating a toothbrush from her backpack. She’d look up at Pronek smilelessly, wearing the CONFUSION IS SEX shirt, which he could not help finding ominous. On their way to the museum, she sat in the front seat, and he was convinced that whatever peaks of love they had reached last night, whispering and softly kissing, they tumbled down to the bottom this morning. JFK drove them through the fields of forlorn malls, parking lots, and fast-food joints, like forts, on their edges. They went by a pond on which a couple of swans floated with their heads bowed, but Pronek could not tell whether they were plastic or real. The possibility that the world could never respond to his desires tortured him.

The museum was full of elderly women in floral jackets, their wrinkles made-up, their glasses magnifying their eyes. One of them said: “Well, if you want a chain reaction, you gotta have graphite,” with a thick Southern accent, and Pronek was afraid that they might address him in their general enthusiasm — his accent would sound even more foreign and conspicuous. He anchored himself to Rachel and followed her like a shadow, hoping all along that she would give him a signal that would make last night real. She paced slowly through The Secret City room, her hands in her back pockets.

There was a prophet, a panel on the wall said, whose name was John Hendricks. In the 1890s, the prophet had put his ear to the ground and heard a terrible voice saying that this valley would be flooded with strangers seeking salvation, arriving here to unleash the soul of the stars. Rachel frowned at the panel and walked on toward a poster of a red-haired forties beauty pouting her thick, gorgeous lips — WANTED! FOR MURDER! HER CARELESS TALK COSTS LIVES! the poster read. But Pronek wondered about the prophet, what had happened to him. Had they hung him? Had they rolled him in tar and feathers? Had he become their leader? Could he have known what would happen in the end? Rachel was standing in front of black-and-white pictures of mud fields and “Negro Hutments” in their middles. There were pictures of a herd of smiling white-clad nurses; of women happily smoking in a prefabricated house; of uniformed, unsmiling guards searching through Santa’s bag, his hands up. Pronek wanted to ask her about last night and kept rehearsing the question, but could not get it right. The question-forming addled his brain and he stood in front of the pictures uncomprehending. There were boys playing marbles and a theater marquee reading IS EVERYBODY HAPPY? There were Geiger counters and nylon hoses in glass cases. There were army officers standing next to a uranium cache. Pronek could smell Rachel: the wet-autumn-leaves scent of unchanged clothes and slumber sweat, the scent that had entered his nostrils last night and would not leave. There were two young women, with their legs prudently together, sitting in front of a wall of containers populated with lab mice. In the Big Boy room, there were nuclear mushrooms swelling in leaps in the desert. Rachel stopped in front of the mushroom pictures and rolled her eyes and shook her head, and Pronek feared that the old Southern ladies might see her, think it unpatriotic, and start admonishing her for her behavior, just as he was about to ask her about last night. He caught up and stepped in front of her. “The last night. .” he murmured. She rose on her toes and kissed the Y between his eyebrows, her hands still in her pockets, as the old ladies ambled and swerved around them, scoffing.

Pronek watched a couple of Greenpeace people chain themselves to the gate of the Laboratory, while bodies lay strewn on the driveway, eager to passively resist, Rachel’s body in the center, her arms at her sides, her palms pressing the concrete. He stood across the road with the sign saying WE WANT THE FUTURE! and feared for Rachel. He saw security climbing over the gates, moving swiftly and angrily, yelling at the chained people. A couple of guards started cutting the chains, the rest started picking up the bodies and telling them their rights as a Black Maria came from around the curve as if it had been hiding there all along. “One two three four we don’t want no nukes no more!” Pronek chanted, standing next to a midgety guy with pork-chop sideburns and heavy boots. He occasionally corrected the chant: “One two three four we don’t want any nukes any more!” and the midgety guy looked at him askance as if suspecting him to be an FBI spy. Two tough-looking security guards picked up Rachel, one grabbing her ankles (Pronek imagined them delicate and fragile), the other grabbing her armpits (Pronek knew the smell), and she slumped between them, her butt almost touching the ground. He closed his eyes, and mumbled to himself: “Bring her to me,” as if sending a telepathic message. But the men in uniform did not receive it and packed Rachel away into the Black Maria. Pronek envisioned himself in jail with Rachel, then getting away with her. They would drive across America together, and then sail across the Pacific.

The South Side factories still spewed fire and smoke. Pronek saw the Chicago skyline on the horizon, the boxy shapes alight against the navy-blue sky, cold and splendid.

“This is pretty,” he said, to no one in particular, as everybody except JFK was asleep: Vince put his Chip-and-Dale bag under his cheek and leaned against the window. Dallas drooled in the front seat. Rachel had her head on Pronek’s shoulder, her hand touching his thigh. Warm air was coming out of her nostrils down his arm, her hair tickling his cheek. His back was tight and it hurt, but he didn’t want to move.