You

Tasha will not realize until far on the other side of life how the morning of the bikes will dismember everything.

Starting horribly, the day only gets worse. The job Tash set herself in the refugee camp: she goes about getting everyone’s stories so she can write strong letters for people to use at important agencies.

The idea: simple as equality and just as difficult. Her wishy-washy degree and what this island has taught her is that the illusion of mobility is the gift she can offer. Offer up this national birthright, a vision of freedom, by using the alphabet, that’s what she can do, write letters of advocacy to all the acronym agencies that decide people’s fate.

She gets the people here.

Everyone needs myths.

Everyone believes, for instance, in the fable of a particular nation deep in snowy tundra that will magically grant all seekers asylum. Who cares if winters are endless? Air conditioning is a great luxury. Being in the camp makes sense more than the States, more than college or home, and after long days, each time, heading back north, tired, half-feral, she eats a pita dripping tahini down her wrist at the busstop on the way back up north, squatted by a dumpster.

While the face she shows the shipworn souls is that she believes in order and will act as a conduit toward whatever civilization looks like in the twenty-first century.

On this hottest of days Tash finds herself outside the library. A compatriot volunteer, Sarita, had been dealing not very well with a blubbering boy, and finally shows true rudeness, choosing to kick out the boy and Tash as if they were both to blame for her overwhelm. ‘I don’t have time for this!’

The boy chats cheerfully, free of Sarita, and then Tash makes a mistake, leaning against the wall outside and onto the red button outside the library marked

DO NOT PRES

which happens to make the classroom everyone calls, in a great euphemism, the library start broadcasting with one giant burp and squawk.

The houses from across the way startle. Sarita’s voice from the loudspeakers so sure of itself, booming out the teaching: ‘Visualize your destiny! In this way we create our futures!’

The button won’t turn off.

In some other realm, Tash would burst into the library and fiddle with whatever mistakenly broadcasts Sarita’s feel-good truisms but instead goes passive. The two of them could have bonded but Sarita had stayed righteous, bloated with virtue, on the warpath, seeking the next target of wrath.

Now the campdwellers start laughing at Sarita’s voice. ‘Choose your destiny!’

Even Dalina laughs, one of Tasha’s favorite little girls.

I like us, we are friends, she always tells Tash, touching her hair, calling her a word which may mean boingy, the girl now sitting in a finger of shade, inserting a dead flower stem into a glass bottle marked ear medicine.

Then she makes a show of placing each pale petal in a halo around. ‘Look,’ Dalina says, pulling out a small black book from her spattered pocket, a beautiful object of a kind you don’t find everywhere. ‘Look what I found out back!’

‘Sorry,’ says Tash, ‘can’t read the language.’ Runic codes, a circle and dotted lines, a series of symbols.

‘Not language, silly! The basketball court!’

Because Tash loves her, she follows the girl who skips ahead as if she swallowed a motor. So many games they’ve played: this becomes one more, using the book’s map. The girl asks for help, dislodging the mortar block so they find an ancient red British cookie tin.

Inside: a sum of old dollars carefully bound with twine, the likes of which Tash has not seen since she fled scorched earth aka her past.

Her senior year of college, only because her mentor understood the messages that had started coming into her phone – HELP, repeatedly – she had been sent to this island caught in its wars and ceasefire.

The book and tin of money seem just as improbable as what got her here to volunteer, as improbable as the idea of a camp containing people from many countries sent to an inhospitable spot of land to await the purgatory of being granted asylum and citizenship elsewhere.

At the packet of bills, Dalina’s eyes grow large. ‘Fairy blankets?'

'You! You! -' Tasha stutters. 'Your power! Unbelievable.'

The loudspeaker summons them to the front of the camp where mail call usually takes place. They pass Sarita, talking from inside the library, her voice scraping the road. ‘We create our reality!’

Tash usually avoids mail call, the camp’s invisible hierarchies made cruelly clear. Near the mouth of the gate, the crowd presses in. The guards shine light at only one campdweller: at Khedry who is the only one who strafes through the camp with his narrow shoulders and smile, his intelligent charm, the camp’s secret mayor, indirectly helping each in some way.

Only the day earlier, Tasha realized she may have never admired someone as much as she does Khedry, a divine realist. You can tell he has no ticker inside about a virtue or a favor bank, a man just offering and then hunching back into a crowd. Not a gladhander. Even the guards know it: Khedry usually ends up translating into at least four languages whatever the guards wish to command over the PA system. On the wall, he is surveying the bike crowd.

‘You okay?’

Ridiculously, she shows him the little black book, and he nods.

‘Hullo, a beautiful object,’ Khedry says, stepping beside, modesty cool as a breeze. A substitute guard rules over mail call today, face rumpled disdain. These camp guards seem plucked from a singularly sadistic plot of islanders. ‘Maybe they brought him out of retirement?’

The PA garbles some official syllables, and Dalina elbows her. ‘Today the bicycles!’ Overpromise and underdelivery rule these kids’ lives, Tash knows but says nothing.

Hope here can behave as madness. On this day, however, handholding, even the more jaded teens stand awestruck. Outside the gate, a quick attack arrives. A slew of luxury cars, a parade of consumption Tash has seen only in the capital. Women with hair the color of crayons exit cars, and Tash is being tugged by Dalina to where, before the gate, a giant truck marked Pilgrim’s Progress pulls up.

Two workmen leap to open its maw, boxcutters used to free the bikes, making Dalina jump up and down, whistling. Those who know the geography of fake promise stay still, impassive, but the younger children trust, rushing to the spot flushed with faith.

Because with a bike you get to the nearby village; you can rove up and down the camp’s hill. A bike kills time. Yet the blonde lady’s cohort gains control of the public address system. After a garbled comment, they ask kids not to run onto the patio where the bikes lie -

‘ . . .to be respectful . . . ’

‘all children wishing disbursement of a special gift to the camp . . . the origins of this non-profit . . . the holy . . . ’

Ending on some kind of note of triumph: ‘The volunteering!’

The PA system spits and crackles.

Tash exchanges a glance with Khedry: best to translate nothing. The radioactive heap of bikes lie: folded wheelchairs, fallen skeletons. Apparently, a mistake has been made: the bikes will not be disbursed, not yet.

First must come bouquets: the organizers congratulate themselves. Tasha laughs out loud: can this really be happening?

‘. . . the premier donor . . . the embassy who… organizer of …’

Who devised this special torture? That kids should crowd close, watching foreigners put on reading glasses or remove them, hearing speeches read while standing under a wreathed trellis? Bouquets, tasteful applause, the bikes potent bombs.

Who determines the quota of torture, who is boss here? Just plain colonial habit, the way things have always been done?

Tash sees the world tilt for a second, but no bike will change the camp’s time stamp, the only thing a bike can make clear is how the pure joy of motion does nothing.

Lunch pulls everyone away.

Later, Tasha trips back to the arcade where, at the top, crowd mostly dispersed, that blonde woman in pearls speaks to the truckdriver, a man whose English emerges in puffs, someone with a radical burn crawling up one arm until where it disappears under his sleeve.

‘Listen, M,’ she says. ‘There’s really little choice.’

He throws down his keys into the dust. ‘I’m done! Not driving your rig anymore!’

His helpers, the boxcutters, look on in shock, their apostle of the paycheck gone down in flames. Loaded down by gewgaws, the blonde woman seems similarly struck. ‘Go on,’ she says, hugging her bare arms. ‘You can’t get to the capital from here.’

‘You keep your stinking rig.’

In silent negotiation, his helpers lock gazes and decide to choose the known tyrant. The older one scuffs his heel and turns to follow the truckdriver M at arm’s-length, his mate imitating him.

‘People follow bread,’ Khedry says, having sidled up next to Tash and she nods, breath stolen, watching the trio descend the snaking path. The truck sits as if embalmed, partly blocking the camp entry. ‘Human nature.’ He shakes his head, heading off. ‘Anger always needs a target.’

Only Tash and the woman are left. The guard stares back at her: let him stare all he wants, his gaze well understood by the people in the camp.

They disperse, the moment gone, life returns to its one truth: the only moment that will count is a new passport slapped into their hand when, in some future, they get to cross some last border and become citizens again.

‘The keys?’ To her assistant, the blonde woman stays high in disdain.

A search is mounted; no one can find the keys in the chaste scrubgrass. Some kind of temporary government forms, helpful women whom Tash won’t join. A few women bend, making their hands Geiger counters, scarves splaying out.

Still the keys are not found.

‘Don’t worry. We’ll get that rig back,’ the woman says at the guard in a voice so stale, no one would guess she lacks the upper hand, or that the abandoned truck will sit next to the beached boat until the night Tash and Khedry mount the plan.

Using the lost keys and that packet from the cookie tin, they find the good day come. At night, the guard pretends his emergency, and they get to drive all through the gates, how astounding, and finally north of the border as if those campdwellers are happy religious pilgrims.

Finally they settle on an isthmus.

No one will have created their destiny, yet something in the black book had let a mysterious portal open. Who left it? Why the tin? And do luck and love always travel together?

When years later she and Dalina remember the day, they will talk about the good fortune of the black book, the magic of a few fairy blankets. And also how all could sleep so much better in a freer land.

'You! You!' Dalina will say, echoing her words that day. Yet the whole while, the river beneath their words will roll with something greater, more to do with how they had paid attention, how attention alone let the two dare into existence a most foolish and necessary journey, the dream of a world in which love lives as no stranger.