So, after many months of that, after years of that, he went back to India.
He needed to try it to see if it would help. Until he tried it, he wouldn’t know. It would be something like aversion therapy, or rather immersion therapy. Go right back to the scene of the crime. Plus he had an idea that had begun to obsess him. He had a plan.
He landed at Delhi, took the train to Lucknow, got off at the station and got on a crowded bus out to his town. The sights and smells, the heat and humidity— they were all triggers, yes. But since consciousness was the real trigger, he steeled himself and looked out the bus’s dusty window and felt the sweat pouring out of his skin, felt the air pulsing in and out of his lungs, felt his heart pound inside him like a child trying to escape. Take it! Live on!
He got off at the bus stop in the town’s central square. He stood there looking around. People were everywhere, all ages, Hindu and Muslim as before, the differences subtle and sometimes not there at all, but his eye had been trained to note the signs— a tikka, a particular rounded cap. The usual mix that this town had always had, back to Akbar and before. All appeared to him as it had been four years earlier. There was no sign that what had happened had ever happened.
Surely there must be a memorial at least. He walked toward the lake, feeling his heart hammer, his skin burn. His clothes were soaked with his sweat, he drank from the water bottle he had in his daypack, just a sip each time, and yet soon it was empty. Everything pulsed, his eyes stung with sweat, behind his wrap-around sunglasses he was weeping furiously. The polarization of the glasses was not enough to keep bursts of light from shattering in his retinas. Sights incoming like needles in the eyeball, everywhere he looked.
The lake was the same. How could it be the same, how could they not have drained it, built over the site with some mausoleum or temple or just an apartment block or a bazaar?
Then again, who was there to remember what had happened here, or what it had been like that week? There were no survivors to be haunted by this place. As for those who had come in and cleaned it up, disposed of the bodies, well, it had been just one town of many, all of them the same. There was no reason to fixate on this one. No— he was the sole survivor. No one else had seen what he had seen and survived to remember it. For all the people walking on this crowded narrow sidewalk, this sad little pastiche of a corniche, it was only what it was today. No sign of a plaque, much less a memorial in the old martial style.
He walked back to the bus station. After some thought, and a trip to an open-walled store to buy more bottled water, he walked to his old offices. The building was still there. The offices were occupied by lawyers and accountants, and a dentist. Next door was a Nepali restaurant that hadn’t been there before. It was just a building. What had happened up there in those rooms—
He sat on the curb, suddenly too weak to stand. He was quivering, he put his head in his hands. It was all there in his head— every hour of it, every minute of it. The water tank in that closet.
He got up and walked back to the bus station and took the next bus back to Lucknow. There he called a number he had been given. A man answered in Hindi. In his bad Hindi he asked if he could speak in English, then switched over when the man said, “Yes, what?”
“I was there,” Frank said. “I was here, during the heat wave. I’m an American, I was with an aid group, here doing development work. I saw what happened. Now I’m back.”
“Why?”
“I have a friend who told me about your group.”
“What group?”
“I was told it’s called Never Again. Devoted to various kinds of direct action?”
Silence from the other end.
“I want to help,” Frank said. “I need to do something.”
More silence. Finally the man said, “Tell me where you are.”
He sat outside the train station for an hour, miserably hot. When it seemed he would wilt and fall, a car drove up to the curb and two young men jumped out and stood before him. “You are the firangi who called?”
“Yes.”
One of them waved a wand over him while the one who had spoken patted him down.
“All right, get in.”
When he was in the front seat passenger side, the driver took off with a squeal. The men behind him blindfolded him. “We don’t want you to know where we are taking you. We won’t harm you, not if you are what you say you are.”
“I am,” Frank said, accepting the blindfold. “I wish I weren’t, but I am.”
No replies. The car made several turns, fast enough to throw Frank against the door or the restraint of his seatbelt. A little electric car, quietly humming, and quick to speed up or slow down.
Then the car stopped and he was led out and up some steps. Into a building. His blindfold was removed; he was standing in a room filled with young men. There was a woman there too, he saw, alone among a dozen men. All of them regarded him curiously.
He told them his story. They nodded grimly from time to time, their gleaming eyes fixed on him. Never had he been looked at so intently.
When he was done they glanced at each other. Finally the woman spoke:
“What do you want now?”
“I want to join you. I want to do something.”
They spoke in Hindi among themselves, more quickly than he could follow. Possibly it was another language, like Bengali or Marathi. He didn’t recognize a single word.
“You can’t join us,” the woman told him after they were done conferring. “We don’t want you. And if you knew about everything that we did, you might not want us. We are the Children of Kali, and you can’t be one of us, even if you were here during the catastrophe. But you can do something. You can carry a message from us to the world. Maybe that can even help, we don’t know. But you can try. You can tell them that they must change their ways. If they don’t, we will kill them. That’s what they need to know. You can figure out ways to tell them that.”
“I’ll do that,” Frank said. “But I want to do more.”
“Do more then. Just not with us.”
Frank nodded, looked at the floor. He would never be able to explain. Not to these people, not to anyone.
“All right then. I’ll do what I can.”
14
We had to leave. It was too dangerous to stay.
I was a doctor, I ran a small clinic with an assistant and three nurses and a couple who ran the office. My wife taught piano and my children went to school. Then rebels from our area began fighting the government and troops moved into town, and people were being killed right on the street. Even some kids from the school my children went to. And one day our clinic was blown up. When I went to it and saw the wreckage, looked from the street right into my examination room, I knew we had to leave. Somehow we were on the wrong side.
I went to a friend who had been a journalist before the war and asked him if he could put me in touch with a smuggler who would get us on the way to someplace safe. I did not have any particular idea about where that might be. Anyplace was going to be safer than where we were. When my friend understood what I was asking him, he rounded the table and gave me a hug. I’m sorry it’s come to this, he said. I will miss you. This stuck me like a knife in the heart. He knew what it meant, this move. I didn’t know, but he did. And when I saw this, saw what he knew in his face, I sat down on my chair as if shot. My knees buckled. People say this as a figure of speech, but really it is a very accurate account of what happens when you get a big shock. It’s something in the body, a physiological thing, although I can’t explain the mechanism.