Page 4

Now only men were in the room and in reverse motion they untied the ropes, and unwound the shroud, and revealed a body. The boy was heavy and dark-skinned. And he had a bullet hole in his chest, another in his neck, a third in his arm that had very nearly severed it so that just above the elbow was nothing but strings of gristle still attached to the lower part.

A fourth bullet in his face had removed half of his head.

I had never seen anything like that wound. It was . . . what word would suffice? How can I describe the damage? How am I to explain without resorting to horror movie clichés?

His face, from the hairline, down to the bridge of his nose, down to the place on his mouth where the lips dimple a little in the middle, and from there down to the bare white bone of his jaw, was no longer there.

It was all too easy to see what he must have looked like if I simply duplicated and reversed the remainder of his face. But no sane person can see such a thing and calmly reconstitute what is no longer there. The outrage is too great. The anger that wells up inside you is too powerful. There is no looking at such a thing and reasoning, there is only the most profound sense of wrongness, of an unspeakable sin.

Tears filled my eyes. Not because I knew the boy, I didn’t, not even because I could see the pain and sadness on the faces of those who had undertaken the heartrending job of wrapping him for burial, though I could. I cried because it was wrong. I cried because it should not be, should never be.

Messenger did not cry, neither did his female counterpart. They both looked on with the clenched, stony resolve of those who are past crying but not yet past feeling.

“What was his name?”

“Aimal,” the female answered. “His name was Aimal.”

The reality around me had slowed to a stop. Now all the men were as frozen as the boy on the table. His shroud was gone and the men were held motionless in the act of cleaning the body with damp rags.

Motionless tears hung on the cheeks of a man I took to be Aimal’s father. But as if he had read my mind—and he may well have—Messenger said, “That is not the father, that is Aimal’s uncle. The father is in America. As are those we must deal with.”

“The ones who killed Aimal?”

Messenger shook his head. “The men who killed Aimal are not our concern.”

“Then why are we here?” I asked. Was this soul-searing display unnecessary? Had I been burdened with yet another gruesome memory for no good reason?

“The wickedness we pursue is not murder, but murder’s source,” Messenger said. “It is hatred we pursue. Hatred.”

2

WE DID NOT BID THE FEMALE MESSENGER GOOD-BYE. One second she was there and the next she was gone. And a second after that, we, too, were gone.

There was a brick marker that read Theodore Roosevelt on a limestone banner and beneath it the words High School. I somehow knew we were in Iowa.

The same combination of red brick and limestone comprised the school itself. The central portion was three stories tall, three generous stories, so that the structure was taller and more impressive than the simple number of floors might indicate. The wings extended to left and right and were of just two floors each. There were architectural details rendered in stone—window framing, a stone railing across the roofline—that gave the school a slightly ornate look, an almost Old World look. It very nearly evoked Downton Abbey.

Just before the front door was a tall flagpole. The Stars and Stripes snapped in a breeze stiff enough to ruffle the mature hardwood and fir trees that flanked the entrance and which were dotted haphazardly across the lawn.

It looked like the very model of a high school—what a traditional high school ought to be.

As usual, I had questions. As usual, I didn’t ask. It’s not that Messenger will never answer a question, but he prefers not to, and for whatever reason, I don’t want to nag at him. He’s the master, I’m the apprentice. I’ve accepted that. More or less. And as the teacher he gets to choose how and when to tell me things.

Frustrating? Extremely.

We walked at a normal pace across the lawn. Kids were pouring from buses that had pulled up in the parking lot. At the same time freshmen and sophomores and juniors were piling from their parents’ cars, and the luckier seniors were pulling up in cars of their own.

The familiar morning rush. And we joined it, invisible to the crowd as it filled the main hallway. How did we squeeze through dense-packed bodies without touching anyone around us? I don’t know. It’s something I’ve now seen happen many times, and even when I pay the closest attention it’s hard to explain. It’s as if reality bends to get out of our way. Like we’re a force field that no one feels. Limbs and heads and torsos all seem to warp, like some kind photo booth effect.

Testing it, I deliberately passed my arm through a girl. Her body appeared to split in two at the waist, upper half and lower half seemingly completely disconnected, yet she chatted glumly to a friend all the while and her legs kept moving her forward.

Messenger noticed my experiment, raised one eyebrow slightly and said nothing.

We walked in this way until we arrived at a narrower hallway leading into one of the wings. There Messenger’s focus seemed to settle on one particular group of three boys walking together in that bouncy, playfully shoving way that boys sometimes have. There was nothing particularly noteworthy, just three boys, probably sophomores or juniors, all three of them white, all three dressed in jeans and T-shirts with logos of bands or defiant slogans.

Here the crowd had thinned a bit and I took notice of a particular girl moving in the opposite direction from the boys. She was wearing a hijab of sky blue over her head and neck. Other than that she was dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved white blouse. I liked her shoes.

It was the hijab that one of the boys grabbed as she went by. Grabbed it from behind and yanked it back off her head.