Hi Necessary Fictionites—

Thanks for having me on as the writer-in-res this month! I’m off to Kenya for a month as of Wednesday, so this is my finale post. I’m sharing a short glimpse of the novel-in-progress, A Life in Men, that I’ll be working on revising while in Kenya, with a goal of getting it in to my agent by the end of the winter… wish me luck, since I’m not sure how much writing time I’ll have (or want) while on holiday in Africa!

Meanwhile, apologies for not completing my mission of “Dzanc Week” here, Thanksgiving week. As I mentioned, I left for my father-in-law’s house in Ohio without remembering to pack the books I wanted to cover, and then while I was away I got slammed with bronchitis, for which I’m now on antibiotics hoping to recover by Wednesday’s flights, and it just didn’t happen. But please check out Dzanc’s fabulous website for more information on this season’s titles, both from Dzanc Books and its various imprints.

And so, farewell for now, with this excerpt from A Life in Men… and happy New Year, everyone!

xx,

Gina

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This Is the President’s Son

Diane has missing lights down to a science. When Eli is here in Bogotá with her, he always drives, and Diane is stuck in the passenger’s seat watching her husband drive like a Midwestern American Pussy. Diane, though, who is from New York and never drove a car until she started living overseas, drives native. She runs red lights to avoid stopping, since the area around the airport is famous for car-jackings, robberies and kidnappings. She was born to drive this way, and in that sense as in many others, Bogotá brings out the essence of a person: the stripped down version of who you were meant to be if placed in some godforsaken Lord of the Flies battleground where anything is permitted.

Even as Diane swings up to let Mary in the car, she doesn’t collect any dust. Mary, her fresh-faced American colleague at Colegia Nuevo; Mary who vomited aguardiente the first night Diana and Eli partied with her at the onset of the school year and they had to hold her overly full, yellow hair over their rusty toilet; Mary, now just back from a Christmas trip to Mexico where she apparently took ill and so needed her ass fetched from El Dorado to be shuttled to some Colombian hospital where surely a shittiest-shift-of-the-year doctor will do his best to kill her, tonight being New Year’s Eve, and Diane will have to ring in the New Year standing guard. Diane pulls up to arrivals and barks at Mary, “Get in!,” not stopping long enough to help Mary, whose skin looks waxy and slick, with her luggage or someone is sure to come over and try to scam them out of something. At best, some cop pretending they’ve committed a parking infraction and wanting a bribe, which if they could pay it right there on the street wouldn’t be so bad. Diane’s Colombian friends have told her never to go anywhere near a police station. Her friend Maya’s husband’s sister was gang raped at the District 1 station, according to Maya, who teaches at San Bartolome, the antithesis of the posh Colegia Nuevo.

Bogotá is a web of complex negotiations, the rules varying enormously depending on the street on which you happen to find yourself. Up on the hill where Colegia Nuevo is located, teachers have maids, cooks—are not intended to worry themselves about issues like “security,” which is the concern of those lower on the social hierarchy; at the Colegia, it is bad form, a social violation, to fear for one’s safety even though in private, in the crappy, living-room-sized tienda Diane and her fellow teachers have dubbed “The Club,” she and Eli jokingly coach new teachers to point at whatever kid happens to be standing next to them and proclaim, “Este es el hijo del Presidente!“—this is the President’s son!—should FARC rush the classroom. Even FARC, though, is something of an “elite” concern; when Diane goes to visit Maya, she has to drive down 5th Avenue, in one of the crappiest neighborhoods in the city, and the traffic always sucks on 5th, so if you don’t want to be stuck waiting at lights forever just begging to get carjacked, you have to take all these circuitous routes through the run-down, vaguely Eastern-European-looking squat gray buildings, some painted that hideous concrete pink, through the shanties, down the trash and shit-littered street (on streets like this, it’s not just dog feces you’re likely to find either, Diane knows), just to get wherever the hell you’re going. FARC doesn’t care about you here, but still you have to drive fast and not stop for anything until you see what you came for: the place or person you know.

Once upon a time, Diane found all of South America glamorous. Lately, though, her forty-sixth birthday passing without fanfare and the new teachers at the Colegia young enough to be her and Eli’s children, Bogotá increasingly seems just one volatile minefield of shit, stretching out between the places you need to be or the people who keep you sane when you get there.

Mary slams the car door, desperate and gasping like a fugitive, not meeting Diane’s eyes. They are not close, and Diane takes her for (rightfully) embarrassed for calling in a fellow-American favor on a holiday, though in truth she’s glad enough to have something to do on New Year’s Eve, Eli gone and the other, younger teachers probably out trolling for local action tonight. Still, a trip to the ER isn’t anyone’s idea of a good time. Plus, Mary looks like hell. It’s all Diane can manage not to do a double-take as Mary sits there hacking into her elbow. Typhoid Mary, Diane thinks, and cracks the window a little for fresh air. Generally, Mary is a cute girl, barely twenty-five—hell, even girls who aren’t that attractive are pretty when they’re twenty-five, though you can’t convince them of it at the time. But today. Wow. Mary has that watery, red-faced look of a sickly baby, one with scabies or a perpetually crusty nose. Her hair, which is usually full and curly, looks limp and frizzled out. Diane pats her knee. “Geez,” she says. “There’s nothing worse than being sick far from home.” Then she laughs. “Not that this is home, exactly . . .”

Mary murmurs, “When we get to the hospital, do you think you could—” then coughs like a motherfucker—Diane feels herself gaping in horror—“can you stay with me for awhile?”

“Nah, I was planning to ditch you so I can go buy some slutty outfit for tonight,” she says sarcastically. “Eli’s out of town—he’s visiting his sociopathic mother in Florida—so I’ve got my eye on some local stud for midnight.”

Mary giggles a little, which makes Diane feel slightly better. Diane is never sick. Eli does sick sometimes, but not her. Her ancestors are from Russia and Poland—peasant women who probably worked in the fields until the minute they squatted down and pushed out a kid. She may not do the kid part, but that’s her to a T: hale and hearty. Sick people make her nervous. Like the kind of morbidly obese people you see on morning talk shows in the States, Diane cannot help thinking the sickly are somehow to blame for their own fate.

They are stuck at a stop sign. Diane doesn’t do stop signs, but some dolt in front of them has halted, so there they are, waiting. Diane says, “Did you have a good holiday at least before you got sick?” and the obvious effort Mary puts in to her inhale and the beginning of her answer makes Diane wish she’d just kept her mouth shut. (Diane doesn’t do quiet, either.) Mary is saying something, but Diane is no longer listening . . .

Four youths, maybe between the ages of twelve and fourteen, have surrounded the car. Diane barely has time to cry out Mary’s name in warning before one of them smashes the passenger’s side window with a pipe—glass flies everywhere, straight at Mary’s face, scattering and sticking in her hair. Mary screams; she seems to have ducked fast enough that the pipe didn’t actually hit her—Diane can’t see any blood. She tries to get the car in gear and take off, but the kid who smashed the window has his arm inside the car, has Mary by the hair—the one on Diane’s side is trying to open the driver’s side door but Diane always locks her door. Mary’s door is open, though, and they’ve pulled her out—dear God are they going to kidnap her? Rape her?—Diane thinks for a minute about slamming on the gas and shooting the hell out of there but her foot won’t obey, won’t leave Mary there on the street, and in the less than twenty seconds she spends trying to decide what to do, her own window has been smashed too and she’s let go of the wheel, is belly down on the seat and screaming, but two of the boys reach in and drag her from the car, fling her body right into the middle of the road.

A passing car drives around her as though she were a pothole.

The boys—they are dressed almost identically in gray or black T-shirts with jeans—have already lost interest in Mary, too. One has Mary and Diane’s purses clutched to his body and another has Mary’s suitcase open and is looking through it, tossing useless items out the open car door. It occurs to Diane that they must not know how to drive—they don’t actually know how to steal the fucking car or they’d already have taken off. Un-freaking-believable. After all this time in Colombia, worrying about FARC kidnappings, she’s being held up by four pimply pre-teens who can’t work a bloody stick shift! Priceless. Diane walks around to the sidewalk and takes Mary by the arm, says in disgust, “They’ll be gone in a second—just hang tight.”

She expects Mary to nod, maybe whimper or cower a little in her pneumoniac, hair-grabbed state. Shards of glass still hang in Mary’s hair, and Diane sees a long slash on her shoulder and another on her upper arm, where some of the pieces must have hit with some impact after Mary has already ducked. Blood leaks right through Mary’s shirt, dribbles down her uncovered elbow below where her sleeve has been pushed up, drips off the fingers of her right hand. Diane tries to get a better look, assess the bleeding (though of course they’re headed to a hospital already), but Mary yanks her arm away, and for a second Diane thinks she’s hurt her—then blinks hard.

Mary is gone! She’s bolted—not in the opposite direction of the boys, rather straight at them, grabbing one by the hair and pulling him out of the car, kicking him in the stomach. Holy shit. This is not happening. This cannot be happening. Skinny little Mary, coughing her skinny little lungs out, has jumped inside the car and is shouting at the remaining three boys in Spanish, hitting them in the faces with her bloody hand, trying to grab her suitcase. Immediately one pulls out a knife—Diane can see the glint of it through the unbroken windshield, Mary and the three other boys frozen in its thrall. They are ordering Mary out of the car, shouting “hembra rica!“ The boy Mary threw to the ground and kicked begins to rise—Diane dashes over and kicks him again, this time in the face, feels blood gush onto her shoe. Oh God! The kid is down again, his body hidden by the open car door—his buddies don’t seem to have even noticed.

Then it is over. They push Mary out of the back seat by barreling her own suitcase into her chest—she catapults out backwards, landing on her ass. The boy clutching the purses has already taken off, and the other two hold the knife out in front of them while they help up their bloody mouthed friend, cursing Mary and Diane. They sprint off in the same direction as the purse-wielder, laughing like hyenas. Mary and Diane stand, relatively unscathed, staring at the wreckage. Throughout the entire ordeal, Diane has counted at least eight cars that passed by, not one stopping to help or—she bets—even call the police. On the street, there are a good ten people milling about, a few of whom have even stopped to watch the action from across the street, the rest ignoring the situation entirely, literally averting their eyes as they pass bloody Mary, stepping over the car’s broken glass and the spilled entrails of her luggage.

Diane squats and begins retrieving Mary’s discarded belongings. The kids threw out most of what they didn’t want: Mary’s girl-clothing, her make-up. Diane doesn’t know what they were looking for in the suitcase—something of value they probably didn’t find, though no doubt Mary’s passport, Colombian ID and all of her cash were in the purse, so now she’ll be fucked, with no identification, when they get to the hospital. Mary is sitting on the pavement, clutching the body of a broken doll—the doll’s head, apparently made of glass, was smashed by the running foot of one of the boys. She clutches the doll, sobbing inconsolably; it must be her favorite childhood toy, Diane thinks, though it seems a weird toy for a little girl to play with, being made of glass. Still, Diane feels bad for her. She lost her own childhood teddy bear in a youth hostel in Paris more than a decade ago, and the memory of the loss still smarts—she and Eli even went back to the hostel all the way from Switzerland, but the thing was gone, probably not even stolen but thrown away. Diane contemplates going to Mary to comfort her, but the way the girl is bleeding and coughing she needs to get to the hospital more than she needs emotional support, so Diane needs to get the clothes and open suitcase back in the car, needs to brush the seats free of glass, needs to get Mary’s bawling ass back inside so she can take off. She bends again, gathers more clothing in her arms.

That is when she sees it.

Eli’s sweater.

Eli’s sweater, strewn onto the pavement with the rest of Mary’s belongings.

It is Eli’s airplane sweater. The sweater he always wears to travel, so he won’t have to use one of the scratchy, probably unsanitary airplane blankets.

He had it on. He had it on his body when he left for Florida.

Now, here it is, on the ground.

Mary, oblivious, keens for her broken doll. She is lying on the concrete now, tapped of all energy, her face flushed red, eyes mad with some grief or fever. It occurs to Diane for the first time that the girl is sicker than a person ought to be. That maybe she will die right there, on the shitty Colombian pavement. Maybe the shattered glass hit something major. Maybe the pneumonia is actually something worse. Maybe Diane just wishes these things, clutching Eli’s sweater in her aging hands.

“¿Qué mira usted? ¡Anos!” She shouts at the residual crowd, gawking from their doorways, their windows. In their oppositional grief, she and Mary have both become spectacle, and Diane can only think of getting them out of here as soon as possible. “¡Le blasfemo!” She throws the remainder of the clothing into the car, onto the back seat or the floor, rushing with purpose. Eli’s sweater, though, she tosses under the car, where Mary will not see it—where no one will see it until they drive away.

She imagines then, the neighbors coming out one by one. She envisions them—though she knows it will not happen this way—in a line, a procession, each trying on Eli’s cable-knit, taupe-colored Irish sweater, bought in Dublin during his junior year abroad, before Mary was even born. Before Diane ended their accidental pregnancy that would, had she kept the baby, have set her life on an entirely different course so that, wherever she might be in that alternate life, she would not be here, with Mary, with Eli’s empty sweater, right now. And so she imagines a neighborhood matriarch, stocky and strong, rolling up its sleeves and claiming the sweater for herself. She imagines Eli—wherever he is that his lovers’ tryst with this sick little girl could have ended badly enough for him not to accompany her home—unable to ever board an airplane again without his Irish flying sweater, and therefore stranded, lost to her now. Wherever he is, there he will remain, unable to ever clarify how his most treasured item of clothing ended up in the suitcase of another woman—unable to ever be confronted, to affirm or deny. For twenty years, after all, Diane has been living in Limbo, without family, without a home. It only makes sense that Eli should be part of the Limbo too—that in this Limbo of dichotomies, Mary is both her enemy and her charge to save.

There is no time, though, to think of this for long. Even to Diane, the air of Bogotá suddenly feels dangerously thin. On the street, Mary is still bleeding. In the windows and the doorways, the locals have all heeded her witch’s warning and are gone.