My wife, she is beautiful, and even in the dark I can feel her frowning when she says, “Do not go today. You should not be working.” I touch the side of her face and she kisses my palm, holding my hand to her cheek. Perhaps I should stay. Already we can hear the bombs of the revolution. I take back my hand and I kiss her lips, but she does not kiss back and she does not say anything when I leave.
The city is drenched in gunpowder. My wife fills the house with the smoke of incense to try and mask the smell, but the smell is everywhere. Everywhere you look, there has been violence there. Overturned, burnt-out vehicles. Everywhere you step, empty bullet casings. A splash of blood. A half-burned rebel pamphlet. The stone walls of the city are scarred by shrapnel, windows shattered by stones, the beauty of the city pulled to the gutter and soaked in kerosene.
It is four blocks to my shop. I have the keys in my hand in case anyone attacks me. This is the tragedy: I spend every day worrying that this day will be the day I have to kill someone. I worry every day someone will kill my wife.
A half-dozen young men run around the corner and breeze past me, shouting in my ear and laughing. All of them have machine-guns. I don’t think any of them are old enough to grow a beard.
“Leave the city in ruins!” they holler. I want to ask them where their parents live. I want to ask them what they expect to do when all they know is reduced to rubble. Will they be proud of this?
There is a dead dog on the sidewalk in front of my shop. Someone shot the poor creature in the skull, leaving only one of its eyes to stare perplexed toward the gray sky. I cover it with a sheet of newspaper, then unlock the shop and go inside.
Some of the lamps have fallen off the shelves and shattered. I sweep up the mess and take note of the loss in the notebook, its leather spine now worn and stretched out over its growing contents. This notebook holds the history of this shop from the day my grandfather, the candle-maker, opened its doors to the day my father inherited the candle business and was the first in the city to start selling electric lamps and light bulbs. Now there are fewer candles and more lamps, but since the city hasn’t had electricity for three days, there is no demand for lamps. This notebook is the only thing in this store that is used on a daily basis anymore.
I light a dozen candles around the shop and soon the scent of lavender has replaced the stench of gunpowder. Only then do I display the OPEN sign in the window.
For breakfast, I eat stale crackers and drink warm water from a plastic jug, wondering when would be a good time to refill the jug from the well. Last time I checked, soldiers were guarding the well near my home and they were charging people for access. It wasn’t always like that. Three months ago, the soldiers were friendly and helpful. Now, if you don’t pay for water, they assume you are a rebel and they are likely to kill you where you stand. If you do, you must pay an exorbitant amount and they will only fill the jug halfway. And the soldiers are always laughing at you and shoving you, knowing they are above the law, that they are kings and we are nothing, and this is not how it used to be.
I wish the electricity would come back on. The rebels say it is the soldiers’ fault, the soldiers say it is the rebels’. I prefer not to get involved. The shop is purpose enough. At night it gets very dark and very cold and we do not use the fireplace anymore because it will attract the soldiers and the soldiers will think that we are signaling the rebels. A lamp can bring such warmth. People underestimate the power of light against the dark. This shop was a favorite of the locals before the revolution. Everyone knew my father and my grandfather and with customers I would sit, drink tea, smoke cigarettes and talk about the past.
I know most of the locals have fled the city. Many of my friends are gone; some of them were killed. My wife’s family was killed by a roadside bomb while fleeing after the government declared martial law. Not many stayed, like us. Our only option for leaving now is to bribe the soldiers at the city walls.
A military jeep rushes down the road, flinging dirt and pebbles at the window. My stomach rolls when I see through the clearing dust that the soldiers have run over the dead dog and smeared its guts across the asphalt. I pull shut the window blinds and move toward the back of the store.
An old staircase leads to the tiny attic where my grandfather lived and made candles before he met my grandmother, and together they lived in this attic until they could afford a new apartment. I don’t often spend time upstairs because I am taller than my grandparents and it’s uncomfortable for me, but today I find myself sitting in the nook where my grandfather must have sat while he was making candles, where he probably watched fishing boats bobbing along the coastline before the view was blocked over time by skyscrapers and billboards. The floorboards are still slick with melted wax.
Looking toward the coast, I see low-flying helicopters passing through plumes of smoke, leaving swirls of ash to float indefinitely in the lifeless breeze. The air used to smell so sweet here: spices, perfumes and the scent of the Mediterranean. I watch the helicopters circle around what is probably another rebel demonstration and I mumble, “Will they ever learn?” Somewhere, a bomb explodes. Downstairs, another lamp falls and crashes to the floor.
I can see the road below me. The dog, no longer recognizable, already being pecked by hungry crows. A pair of women scurry out of an alley and quickly disappear inside a dilapidated loft just as a fighter-jet rattles the windows as it tears across the sky and veers north toward the military base in the mountains. There is no one else on the road. A few months ago, this road would be congested with boisterous merchants selling goods from colorful tents stretching from Central Square to the city limits. Tourists, locals, thieves and beggars shared these streets. Now everyone but the rebellious and stubborn are gone, or dead.
When I finally come back downstairs, it is because the air in the attic is too thick with dust; it aggravates my lungs. The lamp I’d heard break was made of a red and gold striped vase--painted by hand, by my wife--and after I’ve swept up the mess and thrown away the debris, I start to cry. I’ve considered moving all the lamps to the bottom shelves, but I do not want to forfeit to the idea that this war will outlast me. I will not let the war change me like it has changed the city.
For dinner, my wife has prepared a plain-tasting stew with carrots, potatoes and salted water. The house smells like propane from the small portable burner we were lucky enough to find before the rioters cleared the shelves of all the hardware stores in the city. “We are almost out of propane,” she says when I kiss her neck, “and we are almost out of food.”
We sit opposite each other at the table in the kitchen and I don’t want to tell her about the broken lamp, the one she painted, but the topic slips out amidst our silence because I can think of nothing new to talk about. She does not respond at first. She sips her broth and then excuses herself to rinse the dishes with murky yellow tap water, unwilling to use our clean water for anything but drinking, cooking, and bathing. I move beside her and gently put my arm around her waist. She takes a step away from me and asks, “When is it enough for you? Will we wait until there is nothing left to break?”
I want to defend my stubbornness, but today the words are not my allies. My mouth opens to speak and releases little more than a whimper, which carries with it more weight than any argument I’ve concocted before. It is defeat. The time has come.
“Tomorrow,” I tell her. “Tomorrow I will take the money from the safe and I will close the shop. The money will be enough to purchase safe passage from the city.”
That night, there are gunshots outside of our window. In the morning, I wait for sunlight and find three dead teenagers in the street when I leave the house. All of them are wearing blue scarves tied around their waists. One of them is clutching a can of spray-paint. The rebel’s mark is still wet on the wall: RISE AND RIOT, splattered now with blood in matching red. I steer clear of the swarms of flies. I pass a malnourished street-dog a few yards away, licking its lips, contemplating food over loyalty to man. These are bad omens. Today will be a bad day.
The front door of the shop is busted open. Frozen in the middle of the road, I can’t decide if I should investigate or turn around. But we need the money for the military checkpoint, not only for toll, but for bribery. I must go in. I won’t stay long.
Everything is in fragments. Everything. The lamps are heaps of painted porcelain. Wooden shelves in splinters. Holes in the stone walls. Floorboards peeled back like the curled toes of a corpse. The cash register sits on the countertop with its empty drawer stuck out like a tongue and I’m thankful that I keep the money in the safe. This is the work of rebels, I’m sure.
As soon as I’ve decided there is no intruder hiding inside, I go to the window and pull open the blinds. The floor is a nauseatingly colorful quilt of the past ten years of my life. Lampshades are littered about like soldiers’ caps.
Upstairs, there is not as much to destroy, so the intruders did little more than shatter the window near my grandfather’s favorite candle-making spot. They did not find my safe behind the furnace pipes, and if they had, they would not have been able to guess that the combination was the birth date of my wife. As I turn the dial to enter the code, it dawns on me that I will never come back to this place. The town will destroy itself while we are away. The rebels will burn it to the ground. My wife and I will not raise our family here, as our parents and grandparents did before, when there was no war. The memories we created here will feel like dreams.
I hear the crunch of footsteps crossing the lamp graveyard downstairs just as I open the safe to find my money and my gun. My father’s revolver. This I grab, leaving the money and closing the safe, twisting the dial to lock it. The footsteps move cautiously across the shop, passing beneath me, heading toward the stairs.
“Don’t shoot,” he says to me, this teenage rebel with his blue scarf and a smirk. I’ve caught him at the top step with his hands in the air. “I’m on your side.”
“I’m not on anyone’s side,” I say. It’s hard to keep the aim steady when the boy in front of me is the same age as my son would’ve been. “I’m certainly not on the side that goes around breaking into shops and breaking all their merchandise.”
“You think I did this?” He puts his hands down. He’s fourteen and he lights a hand-rolled cigarette with a match. “They did this. This is what they do. They make you think it was us, but it’s them looking for us. Looking for spies.”
“Just please. Leave my shop.”
“I need a place to hide. It looked empty. I’m only looking for water.”
“There’s no water here. And it’s not empty.”
“I see that now.
“I don’t have anything for you.”
“I’m not asking for anything.”
“Then go. Please, just go.”
“I’m on your side.”
“I told you already: I’m not on any side.”
“You don’t believe in the fight?”
“I don’t believe in fighting.”
The boy laughs. “Says the man with the gun.”
“I won’t shoot you. But I want you to go. I’m asking you to go.”
“If I go out there, they will kill me.”
“If they find me with you, they will kill me, too.”
“Pretend you never saw me.”
My arm drops, the gun with it. The boy finishes his cigarette.
“Why haven’t you left the city?” he asks.
“You’re looking at it,” I reply, motioning to the place we’re in.
“Lamps?”
“More than that. I’m protecting the store. It’s my family’s business.”
“You can’t protect it from the soldiers.”
“Soldiers didn’t do this.”
“I’ve seen them do worse.”
“Why should I believe you?”
“Because I’m on your side.” The boy smiles.
“There’s nothing wrong with staying in the city,” I tell him.
“They’re forcing everyone out. They want to burn it down.”
“That’s not true.”
“We’re only trying to regain control of our city.”
“You’re just a kid. You don’t understand. You’ve got no purpose.”
“I’m fighting for purpose.”
“That’s not the way to achieve purpose.”
“It’s working, isn’t it?”
“From whose point of view? Do you see what’s going on outside?”
“Yeah. It’s called a revolution.”
“I call it a tantrum.”
The boy shrugs.
“You’re perpetuating the problem,” I say.
“I don’t even know what that means.”
“And you’re ignorant.”
“Shove off, old man. At least I’m doing something.”
“If my son were still alive today, he would never be like you.”
“Then your son would be a coward.”
At this, I lift my gun.
“I want you out of here. Now.”
“Fine. I’ll go.”
The boy turns and slowly descends the stairs, stomping his feet like a spoiled child who didn’t get his way. We move into the shop and crunch our way toward the front door. Here, the boy stops and lights a cigarette, silhouetted in the doorway by a gust of dust.
“You shouldn’t smoke,” I say.
“You had your chance to help me, old man.”
“There are plenty of empty buildings around here.”
“Plenty of soldiers, too.”
“I’m sure you’ll be fine.”
Then we hear the sound of a jeep from down the road. Soldiers. The boy calmly steps outside to look around and I move forward, hoping he doesn’t try to come back inside, but also worried about what will happen if the soldiers find him. I could easily hide the boy in one of the closets. But what if they stop? What if they find him? They will kill him and then kill me. What about my wife? I cannot risk it.
“You should start running,” I tell him.
“You’re no better than them.”
“I will shoot you if I have to.”
“Why? To prove that you’re on their side?”
“I’m not--”
“Shove off. Let’s find out, old man. Let’s find out whose side you’re on.”
The boy finishes his cigarette and moves to the middle of the road, then sits. I keep the sights of the gun trained on him until I see that he is serious. He crosses his legs and closes his eyes. He is going to be killed.
“Last chance.”
“Don’t do this!”
“Consider it my purpose.”
I don’t know what else to say. I step back into my shop and peek outside from below the windowsill. The jeep turns the corner and comes to a halt a few yards from the boy, who does not move. Three soldiers get out and begin laughing. One of them slices the boy’s throat and they kick him until he is covered in purple bruises. The sound I’ll never forget is the pop of his skull as they drive over his body.
Earlier, soldiers would sweep the dead from the streets like the pieces of my broken lamps and bury them in mass graves. Now they leave the bodies. After an hour, I leave the shop with my money and my gun, ignoring the rebel’s body in the street, and I wonder what ever happened to the dog.
When I get home, my wife is in the bathroom scrubbing clothes in the bathtub. I stand quietly for a while, watching her, unsure how to explain what it was that just happened to me. The slightest nod toward the memory flashes the sight of the boy’s body before my eyes. Eventually my wife says, “Spit it out. What happened?”
“We should leave. Soon. I have the money.”
“Did something happen?”
“Nothing. No.”
“I wish you wouldn’t lie to me.”
“If I talk about it now, I might be sick. That’s the truth.”
“Well, we can go. As soon as I finish this.”
“What’re you doing?”
“His clothes were dirty.”
“Whose clothes?”
“Don’t be angry.”
“Don’t be angry at what?”
“He’s in the attic.”
“Who is?”
“Renaldo.”
He is younger than the boy who’d come to my shop, no more than eight years old, and much filthier. He smells like he’d come from the sewers. I find him sitting on my father’s old rocking chair with a plate of rice in his hands, stuffing his chubby little face. When he sees my wife and I on the stairs, he stares back with wild, quivering eyes.
“Renaldo, this is my husband,” says my wife. The boy sets down the food and reaches out for a handshake.
“You gave him our food?”
“He had the rice with him, dear. It was his.”
“They’ll kill us if they find him here!”
“I know that. I know that. He snuck in and I couldn’t stand the thought of sending him back out there. I just couldn’t do it.” My wife begins to cry. This only makes me angrier and I grab the boy’s arm, dragging him toward the stairs. My wife grabs my other arm and tugs. “Let him eat. For God’s sake. Let him eat,” she cries.
“This is a terrible idea,” I say, shoving the boy away. He scurries back to his rice like a rat and resumes eating. All I see is a bright signal drawing the attention of all the soldiers in the city. “I’m going downstairs. If I hear soldiers coming...” I can’t finish the sentence.
Downstairs, I sulk at the kitchen table and listen to the sounds of them moving about in the attic. It sounds like my wife is building a room for the rebel. What happened to her want for leaving the city?
After some time, she comes downstairs and kisses the top of my head.
“We will leave the house to him,” she says. “When we’re gone.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“He’s looking for his brother. He’s all alone.”
“No. It’s not safe.”
“He’s not even ten years old.”
“I don’t care.”
“It will not be hard to pretend we did not see him.”
A sharp guilt slithers down my spine. “They could find him here. They will know we live here. They might think that we were protecting him all along.”
“It will only be for a few days. At most.”
“We need to leave here before nightfall. Are you ready?”
“I’m ready. But we need water.”
“What?”
“I used the water to wash Renaldo’s clothes. We need more.”
“We will go without water.”
“We will surely die without it.”
“Then we will die without it.”
She sits with me at the table and takes my hands.
Softly, she says, “You are so afraid of change, you refuse to acknowledge it when it is right before your face. You cannot stay neutral for your entire life. You do not see the flaws the rebels see because you are so reluctant for change.”
“I know.”
She kisses my hand and rubs my fingers on her cheek. I remember what it was like to feel her hair while we made love, months ago, when we last made love. She starts to cry and she says, “I’m sorry,” and I say, “Don’t be. You made a decision I wasn’t strong enough to make.”
“He looks so much like Simon,” she says. “I couldn’t send him away.”
I take the water jug from the bathroom and kiss my wife before I leave.
The temperature has risen in the early afternoon, leaving the city to bask in its putrid odors. I hurry up the street toward the well, hoping the soldiers might’ve moved somewhere else, but turn the corner to see them huddled just as they were last week. All of their hawk eyes turn on mine. I halt immediately, greeted by a dozen machine-guns.
“Well’s closed,” says the nearest guard, looking me up and down for rebel insignia.
“I only need a little. My wife and I are leaving the city. I can pay anything.”
“Well’s been poisoned.”
“Poisoned?”
“You heard me. The rebels did it.”
The boy’s voice echoes in my mind: They make you think it was us.
“Where can we get water?”
“Hell if I know.”
“I need your help.”
“That’s too bad, isn’t it?”
“But you’re… You’re the good guy,” I say, stuttering.
The guard finds this more amusing than I anticipated and his laughter spreads to the other soldiers around him. I stand there for a while, waiting for them to tell me that they’re joking, but they turn their backs to me.
They turn their backs to me.
These are the men who I’m trusting to return things to normal?
When I arrive home, my wife’s eyes go first to the empty water jug and the smile she greets me with vanishes in an instant.
“The guards say that the well was poisoned by the rebels.” I shrug. “He would not tell me where else I could go to find water.”
In response, she only stares, but I feel the weight of everything she isn’t saying, but hopefully she understands why I’ve got nothing else to say, either.
My wife goes upstairs to spend time with the rebel boy and I sit for a while in the living room, thinking about the poisoned well. How could the rebels have gotten close enough to the well to poison it? The soldiers had been guarding the well for weeks. That meant that I’d not only been laughed at, but I was lied to.
“Love?” my wife calls from the attic stairs.
“Yes?”
“Come talk to Renaldo. He wants to meet you properly.”
With some convincing, my wife leads me upstairs and we sit with Renaldo by candlelight, after she finds him a blanket to sleep with. His face is scrubbed clean and his clothes smell fresh.
I say, “Hello, Renaldo. I hope it’s not too cold up here.”
The boy shakes his head. “It’s good,” he says. “Thank you.”
“Where are your parents?”
“They left us.”
“You and your brother?”
“Michael.”
“Where is Michael?”
“He went to look for water.”
“Was he older than you?”
“Michael’s fourteen. I’m eight.”
“How long have you been by yourself?”
Renaldo shrugs and he starts to suck his thumb.
“Let’s let him sleep,” my wife says.
I blow out the candle and we leave the boy to sleep on a bed of spare clothing.
Downstairs, I tell my wife that I might’ve seen Renaldo’s brother, Michael, and I tell her about what happened to him. She shivers during the gruesome details. When she disappears to the kitchen for a minute, I think that she’s too disgusted to be in the same room as me, but she comes back with a bottle of whiskey.
“When else are we going to drink this?” she asks, passing me the open bottle. “A toast to escaping from this hell we once called home.”
We drink until we are drunk.
“Renaldo has green eyes like Simon’s,” she says, lying across my lap. “I always thought he had the most mesmerizing eyes. Like little jewels.”
I play with her hair and let my mind wander drunkenly. I see the hospital where our son was born. I think about the day I taught him to ride a bicycle. The pneumonia that took him.
“We can’t keep the boy.”
“I know. I know that.”
“He’ll have to survive on his own.”
“Do you think he will be okay?”
I can’t answer her. We change the subject.
That night, I lay restless for a while staring up at the ceiling, thinking about the boy from the shop, about this boy in the attic. It feels like sleeping beneath a time bomb. I turn to my wife and kiss her neck and she reaches back to touch my hair. I did not think she was awake. I kiss her again and she rolls over to face me and we make love. It’s been some time and she cries afterward and spends a few minutes alone in the bathroom before returning to bed.
“I am glad Simon did not live to see this world,” she says.
“If Simon were here, we would’ve left a long time ago.”
“No. I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“Because of the shop. You would’ve stayed and defended the shop.”
I know that she’s right.
“And Simon would’ve stayed to defend it by your side,” she says.
“And you?”
“I’m here, aren’t I?”
We kiss and fall silent and sink into sleep soon after.
In the morning, my wife brings Renaldo a bowl of rice. When she comes back to the bedroom, I’m already dressed and ready to leave. “I’ll go look for another well today,” I say, checking the revolver chamber, wishing I’d bought bullets for this gun. Never planned to really use it. I only kept it because it reminds me of my father. “I’ll be back before sundown.”
Today the helicopters are in a frenzy. I’ve never seen so many at once, swirling and swooping about like dragonflies. Heading toward Central Square, I can hear the rat-a-tat of automatic gunfire, the whiz-crack of bullets striking stone, a scream of agony. I can only think of one other well within walking distance. What are the chances that the soldiers haven’t already surrounded it? I wonder if I can expect better treatment from different guards. All I want is water. I haven’t done anything wrong. I’m a citizen of this city and I am not causing trouble.
A young girl exits the church across the street and pulls a young boy by the hand behind her. Their clothes are tattered and they look starved, but they are laughing when they hurry down the stairs and run past me, weaving between abandoned cars and bomb craters, as pretty and fleeting as a pair of butterflies.
Central Square is a graveyard of burnt-out cars and corpses. This was where the first shots were fired. The rebels blocked traffic with a demonstration. Fingers grew restless during the standoff with the soldiers. A lot of innocent lives were caught in the crossfire. I do my best to ignore the lingering smell of cooked flesh.
I can hear the guards before I can see the well. They’ve surrounded the courtyard with vehicles, funneling all arrivals through a space between two tanks. I hold up my empty water jug and approach the soldiers.
“Water, please?” I say softly, my mouth suddenly dry.
“How much money do you have on you?” asks the nearest guard.
“Enough.”
“Give me everything you have.”
I’ve left most of the money at home for this reason precisely. The guard takes the handful of cash and yanks the jug from my grip. When he moves to the well to fill the jug, two more soldiers move forward to block my path. At least these guards are cooperative. When I’m returned my jug, it’s halfway filled.
I say beneath my breath, “I deserve better than this.”
“What’s that?”
“Uh... I just think... I paid a lot of money and this isn’t a lot of water.”
“What do you need so much water for? Hiding rebels, are we?”
“No. No. Not at all. No.”
“Then be happy with whatcha got.”
“Hey. I’m on your side,” I say, feeling ill. “I’m not a rebel. I’m just like you. I just want to live my life in peace and stay out of your way. But my wife and I need water. Please, I can bring you more money. Just please. Can I have more water?”
The guard takes my water jug, unscrews the cap, and spits inside. All the other soldiers start to laugh. “There,” he says, handing it back. I accept it, dumbfounded, staring at the spit floating like oil on the surface. I can’t believe he actually did that to my water. I don’t even know how to react.
“Get along now,” says the soldier. “Unless you still want more?”
I turn around and leave.
It wasn’t always like this.
I look around these ravaged avenues where I used to play as a child, where I taught my son how to ride a bike, where I walked hand-in-hand with my wife before she was my wife. It wasn’t as though I could not see how the city had changed during the revolution. Of course I could see that. But my purpose had been to sell light to people in a darkening world, as my father and father’s father had done before me, only in the darkest hour I never actually looked beyond the shadows. I finally see that the city gave up hope long before I gave up hope on the city.
But it is too late. There are soldiers standing outside of my home with guns. When I drop the water and sprint toward them, they greet me with gunfire. The darkness finds me in the street. A cold, hungry darkness that creeps over my mind and whispers softly, “I’ve been waiting for you.”