You risk losing your calling—because you might believe.
Finally, they take me to the person I had hoped to see. They take me into the medical tent to see a six- year-old girl.
She has her own air-conditioned section. It has a hospital bed, a holo-vid player (nothing new; only old downloads), several comfortable chairs, and a table covered with playing cards. Someone is teaching her poker, the international game.
An aide worker accompanies me. He whispers, “No one outside the family visits her. We’re not supposed to say she’s here.”
Until now, she has existed primarily as a rumor.
…
She lives in a corner of a medical tent in a refugee camp. Her face is crisscrossed with scars and the shiny tissue of a dozen different plastic surgeries. She has only one arm. You don’t realize until you come close, that half her torso is a kind of clear plastic, one designed for the medical interns to monitor the fake parts inside her, the miracles that keep her alive.
As I say hello, her eyes move toward me. She can see, then. She says hello in return, her accent upper-class British with a touch of India in it. She looks wary.
I don’t blame her.
No patent watches over her. Her mother committed suicide—the real kind, the kind that’s personal, and lonely, and takes no one else with it—when she heard the news. The blast killed her father.
She was an only child.
I sit next to her, on her right side so that I don’t have to see that clear torso, the workings of her rebuilt interior, that missing—and soon-to-be-replaced—arm.
She is being rebuilt as if she were a machine. Someone is paying for this, real money that keeps this medical tent, and hence the people in the camp, alive.
Someone who, no matter how hard I investigate, manages to remain anonymous.
“Do you know who I am?” I ask.
“Reporter lady,” she says, just like my driver, which makes me nervous. I will not stay here two days. I will leave tonight, maybe even on foot. There are too many connections, too many people who know what I’m doing. Not enough ways to make me safe.
“That’s right,” I say. “Reporter lady. Can I talk to you about your accident?”
She makes a face, but half of her skin does not move. “Not an accident,” she says. “I sploded.”
The words, said so flatly, as if it is a fact of life. And, if I think about it, it is. A fact of her life.
A fact of all the lives I’ve touched here today. Every single one of them knew someone who became a bomb.
“Do you know why you exploded?” I ask.
She nods, runs her remaining hand over her stomach. “Someone put something in me.”
So flat. Like a child discussing rape.
“Did your daddy know about this?” I ask. Her father took her to an open-air market that day almost one year ago.
She shakes her head.Those bright, inquisitive eyes have moved away from me. Despite the flat tone, she hates talking about this. Or maybe hates talking about her father, the man who decided she was going to be a weapon.
“What did he say when he took you to the market?” I ask.
“Mommy wasn’t feeling so good,” she says. “We had to get her some medicine and a flower.”
“Nothing else?” I ask.
She shrugs.
“Nothing about going to a better place?” I don’t know what euphemism to use. I don’t know enough about her or her past, being unable to research much of it. I don’t know if she was raised Christian or Muslim or Jewish, since that open-air market catered to all three. I don’t even know what nationality she is, something these camps like to keep as quiet as they can.
“No,” she says.
“He didn’t hug you extra hard? Tell you he loved you? Act strange in any way?”
“No,” she says.
“Did your mom?”
“No!”
“Did they ever tell you that you were special?” I ask.
She looks at me again. A frown creases her brow, creating a line between the scars. “Yes.”
My heart starts to pound. “What did they say?”
She shrugs.
“It’s all right to tell me,” I say.
She bites her lower lip. This is a question she clearly hasn’t been asked much. “Special,” she says, “because I’m the only one.”
“The only one what?” I ask.
“The only one they ever wanted.” Her voice shakes. “Everyone else, they have two, three, four.”
I blink for a moment, trying to find the context.
She sees my confusion. Color runs up her cheeks, and I wonder if I’ve made her angry.
That fear returns—that odd sensation. Afraid twice in one day, after years without it. Afraid, of a damaged six-year-old girl.
“My daddy said I was so perfect, they only wanted me. Only me.” Her voice rises, and she squeezes something in her hand.
The aide worker appears at the door. He looks sadly at me. I stand. My time is up.
As I walk out, he says, “She was an only child, in a culture that frowns on it. Her parents were trying to make her feel good about that.”
“Is that what you think?” I ask.
“You’re not the first she’s told that to,” he says. “Investigators, officials, everyone tries to find the two, three, and four others. You people never seem to remember that she’s a lonely little girl, in a lot of pain, who can’t understand why everyone thinks she’s evil.”
I look over my shoulder at her. Her lower lip trembles, but her eyes are dry.
I want to go back, ask her different questions, but the aide worker doesn’t let me.
I am done here. I had hoped I would find my proof. Instead, I found a child whose parents told her she was special—because she was an only child? Or because they had planted a time-release bomb-chip in her?
Or both?
9:15 PM Upload:
Suicide Squadron Part
5 by Martha Trumante
