Selai laughed. “It’s like you’re my agent, but I’m the only person you’re selling me to.”
“If I’m your agent, do I get to order you to stop beating around the bush before mine freezes off?”
“Okay, okay,” said Selai. She took a deep breath. “It starts, as all truly great stories do, on a dark and stormy night—better yet, it’s about why we can’t seem to make sense of how nights get all dark and stormy in the first place.”
+
7
+
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Zia León couldn’t repress a laugh as she opened the cardboard box to reveal a frozen deep-dish pizza wrapped in tin foil. It couldn’t be more out of place in the only cafe in the rural Chhattisgarhi village she called home—which itself couldn’t have been more different than the Swiss mountain hamlet in which she and Galang had last seen each other at the reunion ten days ago. “How did you get this on the plane? It must weigh twelve pounds.”
“Cut it in half, packed each half with icepacks in a thermal lining, and stuffed it all into my checked luggage,” said Galang with an extravagant eye-roll. “Duh.”
A lump rose in Zia’s throat. After months of muthia with a brief intermission of reunion finger food, pizza was a mythical creature from a parallel dimension, half-nostalgia and half-carbohydrates. Galang had even brought the box so it could be presented in its authentic packaging. “I would never—”
“I know you wouldn’t, you silly bitch,” said Galang as he took a prim sip from his cup of steaming chai. “Which is precisely why I brought it. I stopped in Oakland for a meeting on the way down here and I remembered the unadulterated joy on your face when I came out to visit you in college and you introduced me to this place. Manna from the gods, you said. Yes, exactly that look, but with less of the I’m about to break down and cry. For heaven’s sake, Zia, pull yourself together.”
Zia’s snort squeezed out a tear and Galang reached over to wipe it away with the pad of his thumb. People relied on her, which made it hard to let go. Rocks don’t cry, except, apparently, when a dear friend shows up bearing gifts from a past life.
“I hope your clothes don’t smell like pizza,” said Zia. “If you meet any cute boys on this trip, what will you tell them?”
“There is no sacrifice too large for Zachary’s,” said Galang like a captain going down with his ship. “And any boys that don’t appreciate the incomparable pheromones of tomato and basil don’t deserve my attention anyway.”
Zia looked up into Galang’s wide eyes. His chestnut irises were twin time machines that took her back two decades. Instead of Galang the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist, she saw Galang the gangly fourteen-year-old showing up with the rest of their privileged, abandoned cohort to run the petty, savage, searing gauntlet of boarding school.
“You,” Zia punched Galang’s shoulder, “are a very nice person.”
Galang batted her hand away.
“Oh, come on,” he said, but his eyes sparkled.
“So, what is it this time?”
Galang stretched luxuriously. “Gonna chill by the pool and get my tan on.”
Zia just raised her eyebrows.
“Okay, okay,” said Galang. “You know how the Maldives anchored their floating city to the submerged islands? Well, a few years back they decided that New Malé would never be anything more than a stopgap, so they started a resettlement program. The government signed treaties with other governments trading certain rights for special displacement visas. Buuuuuuuut, as you might have guessed, those visas haven’t been distributed as originally intended. A ring of officials has been accepting bribes for the prime spots and simultaneously siphoning off funds intended to make good on the treaties.” Galang waggled a finger. “Naughty, naughty. A steaming pile of blatantly selfish bullshit. Anyway, I’ve been tracking it for nine months now and Aafreen just hooked me up with some local sources, turns out one of the dickwad crooked officials is her second cousin, so I’m heading down to flooded paradise to rake some motherfucking muck.”
Zia shook her head. “I worked on the island evac.”
“I know,” said Galang quietly.
The sour tang of brine and flooded sewer. An old fisherman, skin a contour map of wrinkles, his arthritic claws latched onto the railing in front of his hut as storm surge lapped at his bony hips, fighting off Zia as she attempted to pull him aboard the Zodiac. Kneeling in front of a child in an oversized life jacket and telling the little girl with the scared eyes and the heart-shaped face to think of this as an adventure. Boat after boat disgorging blinking, confused refugees into the floating capital to face the arbitrary bureaucratic fate that lacked the clarity but retained the powerless terror of the natural disaster they had narrowly escaped. Zia’s frustration at the need to appeal for public support, the money flowing in from all over the world when she managed to pluck a few heartstrings. The late night sessions working with Aafreen to try to create a better process for getting people back on their feet, a process that didn’t suffer from the same mistakes that sabotaged so many well-intentioned programs, the over-caffeinated tumble of ideas reminding them both of rehearsing declensions for Latin exams.
“Give her a hug from me,” said Zia. “It was so good to see her in Switzerland.”
“I know, right?” said Galang. “We can’t depend on the odd high-school reunion. We need to get the old gang back together more often.”
“It’s hard. We’re all scattered around the world and everyone’s got their own jobs, worries, and even kids. Life, right?”
“Despite my fervent intention to avoid such a catastrophe at any cost, we are getting old.”
“I feel terrible for Kodjo,” said Zia. “The whole situation sounds like a shit show.”
“Phew! It’s about time,” said Galang. “Lucy was a devil in disguise. Did you know that she cheated on him with the agriculture minister and they colluded to have Kodjo thrown out of office?”
“Seriously? I mean, I knew she was a snake, but I didn’t know that.”
“And Vachan finally standing up to his ācci.” Galang let out a long, low whistle. “I never thought I’d see the day. Have you met her?”
Zia nodded. “They had me over for string hoppers when I was stationed in Trincomalee. She is a force of nature.”
“I just hope he doesn’t pull any punches. The way their family works, if he shows the slightest sign of weakness, she’ll build a coalition among the cousins to replace him. If fortune had played a different hand, that woman could have dominated the Kremlin. She’s a born autocrat.”
“Daniela is killing it though.”
“She played me a few tunes from their next batch of albums,” said Galang. “There were a few super trippy tracks, but for the most part, I didn’t quite grok it. Of course, that means less than nothing because I’ve never had an ear for cool. What I do know is that Daniela has such a finely tuned ear for cool that I can’t tell whether she’s identifying trends before they break out or whether it’s her blessing that makes them pop.”