On their way through Arlit, people sank into the sand. They sought Algeria.
Davies Tuch sat on a boulder—like a lizard—outside the city born from uranium mines. Davies appeared more vigorous, then. His hair gleamed blonde and his features were cut—almost chiseled around the cheek areas. Even with that vigor, he withered out there on his rock. A clogged rifle stuck in the ground beside him, reaching up out of the sand. A man’s shadow cast over Davies.
“Frenchman,” it said. Davies didn’t open his eyes. The man said it again.
“I’m not exactly a Frenchman,” Davies said. “They cut me loose here.” Worries over any attack on the mines or cargo had subsided enough that they didn’t need him along for the shipment south.
The man laughed—just one large sound. “And me, I’m not exactly African. I was cut loose here, too.”
Davies opened his eyes and gave the man a needless once-over. “And what’s your name?”
The man picked up Davies’s rifle. He checked it over like he knew what he was doing, pulling springs and removing bullets.
“Ayedole,” the man said with a wide smile. His skull glistened. He nodded his head for a moment and said, “Okay, so I am African. I was hoping to bond with you over our mutual expatriatism. You understand.”
Davies understood. Next Ayedole might make an offer to him. A job. Something dangerous enough to be off the Arlit books if they had books. He hadn’t done much sightseeing around the place just yet. He aided in the loading of a shipment, a job he took from the true French people before they left him there to burn. He wasn’t great at making lasting connections.
Ayedole stuck Davies’s rifle back into the ground. “Sir, do you just want to cook to death out here, or would you like some work?”
Davies was just guessing about the offer, to be honest. That is how his life usually went, though. Lose something, get something in return. An equal exchange of fortune. Lose a hat, find a better one. If he broke something in the house when he was a boy, his younger sister would take the blame for him. Free of charge. If he got blood on his hands—in Venezuela, Chicago, or Haiti—he could wipe it off on someone else’s pants or leave it behind in the dirt or as a stain on the walls. The past could not haunt Davies Tuch. His past wasn’t on him. Sure, it was related to him by some fleeting extension, but it was not on him.
Davies sat up. He shook Ayedole’s calloused hand, their fingers grinding against each other like scraping stone when they pulled away. Davies stood, and the Saharan wind kicked up a cloud in between them.
“Don’t you want specifics?” Ayedole said. “I don’t want you to make a mistake—we aren’t doing right work here.”
Davies kept his mouth closed. His lips, jagged with dying skin, didn’t open.
Ayedole crossed his arms and chuckled. “You don’t care. Look at you, you steely Frenchman mercenary.”
“I didn’t say I didn’t care,” Davies said.
“And you won’t say that you do either, will you?” Ayedole turned away. He put his hand above his eyes as if peering out into the grand unknown. “It’s hard to spot in the sand sometimes, isn’t it?” he said. Ayedole pointed west. “Aha.”
The city of Arlit didn’t loom over them. It couldn’t. It was too short. The sound of mining processes echoed from the uranium pit, which mixed into the heated wind. Ayedole found something more to say. “Where do you sit, then? On the moral divide?”
“It’s a quandary,” Davies said in a light husk, following the man and leaving the rifle in the sand.
Ayedole turned back around and continued walking toward the city. He said it wasn’t a quandary—that Davies sat inside the divide with him and the rest of the world.
*
Ayedole told him to keep the dying people hidden. And to mark them, too. These people were stuck like Davies. They were cut loose or ran out of money before reaching Algeria. The mines took the stuck in, down into their depths. Arlit took them into its furnace, forty kilometers away from the city’s center. They extracted uranium, not knowing what it was—never knowing what it was. Not exactly, at least.
Yellow, cake-like when refined. It had to be torn from the earth with explosions, like the earth didn’t want to give that power up to them.
Davies kept them in the dark. He had mastery of the language but pretended he was an amateur. Just an ignorant European man, sent by France to make sure the processes went smoothly. He was there to listen, but Ayedole’s pesky phantom bosses always tied his poor helping hands.
He had an office—the first and only time in his life that he ever did or would. It lay bare, but it was an office. Every day, the stuck rolled in and complained to him. He shook their hands, covered in cancerous dirt and smelling of chemicals.
“The Dr. says my liver can’t function proper.”
“My friend dropped today because of you.”
“Where are the higher wages, Tuch?”
“Where are they?”
Davies Tuch listened with knitted eyebrows and wet eyes. The sympathetic European man.
He said to one woman many times or many women one time, “Your husband’s liver is withered from the smoking and the drinking. Our onsite doctors have examined him and there is no evidence to suggest that the work here caused his illness.” He had her empty her pockets onto his desk. He confiscated her cigarettes.
“We should quit,” she said. They all said.
“We really should.” His tone was light when he spoke to them; sometimes he touched their stone skin with his. “Fucking Phillip Morris.”
Everyone smoked. It was that decade and that kind of place. Most of the stuck people removed their cartons and put them on Tuch’s desk. A week later they had another carton and another complaint. The European man filled his empty file cabinet with the cigarettes.
Ayedole visited often, for a smoke and a chat. He worked on his American English with Tuch. He said it wasn’t that far off from the British English, just crasser and more in line with the “reprobate republic” rather than the “impotent imperialists.” His words, not Tuch’s.
“Co-worker!” he said once, entering the room two months after Tuch started. “Employee evaluations!” He always gave that reason for their interactions, then chuckled. He reared his head back when he laughed like a howling wolf. Tuch called him out on that quirk, so Ayedole did it more often.
Tuch’s office was newer than most—nice. Freshly painted. It had fluorescent lights that hummed like angels above his chair.
“You need to put some pictures up,” Ayedole said.
“Of whom, exactly?” Tuch asked. “I don’t have a family.” He did have a family, just not one that wanted anything to do with him. He picked up a pen and held it as if he had an urgent thought fit to pour out of him. The company—the city—didn’t give him any paper when he started. It was best not to document the work if it could be helped.
Ayedole removed a picture of himself from his pocket; it was a profile, taken professionally by all appearances. “I’m glad you asked.” He pinned it to the empty bulletin board over Tuch’s head with a yellow tack. “We’re family here. All of us.” He put his hand on Tuch’s left shoulder. Tuch sweat from the man’s touch. “You, me—the men and the women. The stuck. All of us.”
“We’re letting people die, Ayedole. I wouldn’t let my family die.” He looked up at Ayedole, backlit by fluorescent lighting. The smoke from their cigarettes mingled.
“Your family could be dead right now, Tuch,” Ayedole laughed. “Back where? Back in Chicago?”
Tuch gave him that. “But traditionally, people don’t let their family members die.”
“I suppose Arlit bucks tradition.” Ayedole stood back from the bulletin board. He smiled. “I’ll bring you more pictures. This will be quite the collage.”
Davies checked his schedule, which was a thin scrap of trash in his pocket. “I have another appointment in an hour.”
Many days went on like this. The collection of photos grew to include candids of the stuck entering the offices—Tuch’s co-workers, the dying miners, and officials. Together they could pass for a loosely defined family. An eclectic group of commiserates.
Tuch and Ayedole lived in the building next door to their offices, on a modern business campus just to the east of Arlit’s center. They didn’t leave the campus, only hopping back and forth between living quarters and work. Food and water were flown in and they had their pick of groceries. Tuch was partial to caramel pops. Free caramel pops.
Tuch didn’t see or explore the mines until six months after he started work. He should have been bored by then—bored enough to head through Arlit and out towards the mines to see them. This job was cushy—the first of this kind he’d ever taken. He knew Ayedole kept doors closed to him since that was the nature of this kind of work. Davies didn’t mind that, but he liked to know the certain breadth of a job before ever even starting it.
He’d become complacent for once.
“I’ve never been complacent,” he said to his empty office on the morning of his expedition to the mines, a caramel pop dangling out of his mouth. He lounged back in his cushioned chair, listening to the low hum of the lights and the breeze of the air conditioning from the vents.
Ayedole popped his head in through the always-open door. “What was that?”
The office had thin walls and Ayedole tended to linger. Davies wasn’t even sure what he did there besides recruit him. They had the same title.
“Nothing,” Tuch said. He had no more meetings that day. The only thing left to do until quitting was to sit and watch the clock with Ayedole and a glass of whiskey.
“You look ill, Davies Tuch,” Ayedole said. “Very pale. European pale. Actual European pale, almost.” He said it like a joke but didn’t lean back in laughter.
“Yeah, I think I’ll head home.” Tuch ran with Ayedole’s observation and hung his head a little lower. He breathed a little deeper and played like his eyes felt heavier than they did.
“Wise. I’ll drink alone tonight.” He took Tuch’s chair—spun around in it a few times before pulling the bottle of whiskey from the European’s desk. He sat back, putting his loafers up on the metal. He pulled a cigarette out of the file cabinet next. “Do what you need to do, Tuch. We want you healthy and of an eased mind.”
Davies coughed as he went out the office door and then the building’s front door, pressing his fist to his mouth both times. Ayedole saw it. The receptionist at the front desk did too.
*
A map and a flashlight. Davies Tuch needed both. A woman ran a tin shack general store just off the business campus. She’d come in one Thursday—was it Monday? —telling Tuch of her plight. Her husband, like all those other husbands, was dying, and her store served no purpose without traffic. Without people with the means to pay for wares. He made his way out to her first.
The night hadn’t grown cold yet. Earlier evenings in Arlit were like a crisp fall midnight back in Chicago. Every street was a straight shot to the mines. Even in the case of ones that went in the opposite direction, Arlit’s buildings would force a traveler toward the mines. Tuch could have just walked in no direction in particular and he would have wound up in a winding way at the mines regardless.
“The European?” the shopkeeper said. She sat at the counter, her hands folded on top of it. “Gracing me with his presence.” She fanned her face.
The shelves stood bare. What little she was able to get from suppliers and farmers had been sold for the day.
Tuch took a second to look around. No map, no flashlight anywhere. He walked up to the counter and said, “I need some supplies.” He moved in close to her sardonic face and lowered his eyebrows like what he was saying was a secret meant for no ears. “I’m going into the mines.”
The shopkeeper feigned surprise, then settled back into her spot. “I have a flashlight.” She did and she grabbed it from the back.
“I have euros,” Tuch said, flicking the flashlight on and off towards the ceiling to check its power. It flickered if left on for more than a minute.
“I’ll need francs,” the shopkeeper said. She lit a cigarette and took a drag.
Tuch didn’t have any francs. The vending machines at work only took euros.
An idea. “I can get you cigarettes. I have at least a thousand.” She was interested, he could tell. They must be her bestseller, he thought.
“You told me my husband was dying of these sticks.” She took another drag.
“And I’ll say it again,” Tuch said. “He is. You all are.”
“And that alone?”
“What else could there be, Miss—?” He tried to remember her name and failed. The faces of the stuck sometimes lingered, but names never did.
“Ayedole,” she said with a slash of a smile. She let Tuch’s fear wash across his face before continuing. “You’re afraid of him—the ‘villain.’”
He was. Ayedole tended to linger, after all. He could pop in the door at any moment at work or home. Tuch looked back to the front door, to the backdoor, and back to the shopkeeper.
“He’s not a villain,” he said, his voice lower. “He’s no more of one than I am.”
The shopkeeper nodded. “A slight more, but not much.” She put a beige and stained jacket over her muted blue dress. She adjusted the turquoise headband holding her hair back.
Tuch put the flashlight in his pocket, handle down. “Closing up? I still need a map.” He whispered, “Of the mines.”
“I am your map, your guide, your ‘Sherpa,’ Mr. European.” She walked to the front door, with her own flashlight in hand. “For as many cigarettes as you have.”
“For as many as I have.”
“Eniola.”
“Davies Tuch.”
*
The uranium pit, entwined in the desert wind, howled up at the two of them. It was vast and open; it smelled like the core of an engine. Even this early into the evening, with the work lights all shut off and the stuck people all in their homes the pit looked deeper than it was—like it would pull them down by the ankles into its maw if they got too close. Davies expected Eniola to lead him into a trap of some kind—a group of the stuck fit to kill him with bats and other blunt instruments. He wouldn’t have blamed her, and he wouldn’t have fought back. But they arrived at the pit with no incident other than some ferocious looks seeping out of lit apartment windows and alleyways with no vacancies. They drove there in the shopkeeper’s truck, shattering the city’s evening silence with its plucky emissions.
“Don’t mind the looks,” Eniola said, speaking over the automotive beast under them. “You villains have struck plenty of fear into them—or is it disease you have struck into them?”
“Both, I’d imagine.”
Eniola might have been seeking remorse in Davies Tuch, but she wouldn’t find it. He spoke with a level voice and a steady tongue. She grumbled at him, but Davies heard it as nothing but a kick of the engine.
The truck quieted down when they reached the open desert, as if it prowled out in its natural habitat Eniola cracked a grin. The tires kicked sand into the cabin that pelted them.
The night grew icy, and the wind chilled Tuch. He hadn’t been outside Arlit’s main city since he met Ayedole. The Saharan stars were always a treat—even for the stuck, he figured. It was the most of the universe that they or he would ever see.
He first imagined Ayedole back at the office sipping whiskey, then imagined him jamming a knife through his spine from the backseat and laughing as he did. Both seemed like equally plausible events at the time.
When the truck died just in front of the pit, Tuch shivered. He looked around in a full circle twice. Eniola patted the dashboard, a leather one that had torn with age and had sand embedded in its frayed stitching.
“Just the radiator. She’ll recover by the time we’re done,” Eniola said, unbuckling her seat belt. She unbuckled Tuch, too. “I like this unease around you, Mr. Tuch. Your air isn’t so sickly when you’re like this. I bet you could have been a good man, once.”
“Is this where I die?” Tuch said. “Here, at the edge of this pit?”
“Shouldn’t it be?”
Security made their rounds of the pit like they always did: slow and without much care for what was or wasn’t happening. Tuch might technically have been their boss. He wasn’t all that certain of the chain of command but knew that security was a part of the company’s portfolio. Ayedole had said something about it.
“Eniola, do you want the cigarettes or not?”
“Shouldn’t you just end your tawdry life here, Mister Tuch—?”
“Eniola.” Tuch gripped the back of his neck, annoyed. He enunciated plenty. “Do you want the cigarettes or not?”
She fell quiet, then. Her lower lip twitched. She bit the flesh to stop it. Then she pointed down into the pit,
“It is not a matter of want, Tuch, but need.”
“I need to live, just like you do,” Tuch said.
“You need to live like you do, Tuch.”
Davies laughed and nudged the woman with his elbow, in part as a genuine gesture of amusement, but mostly as a way to force her to exit the truck first—to make sure she was his guide and wouldn’t push him down into a suffocating tunnel from which he could never escape.
“I’m going,” she said. “I’m going.” She flicked on her flashlight and stood on the edge of the pit. A breeze whipped the ends of her dress around. “There’s a path here.” She shone her light on Tuch. “To my right.”
Eniola stepped to her side and descended a winding path littered with blasted rocks. From Davies’s point of view, she looked to be miming stairs behind a couch. He moved forward a shuffle and took in the path. It ended at the opening of a tunnel from which some light emanated. The rail was wood and twine. The air held a bouquet of burst metal and stone.
Tuch scratched at his chin. He had a scraggly sand-blonde beard now. There was no policy against it, as the office was business casual on its best day.
Tuch flicked on his flashlight. He cast the beam out into the pit, where the dark swallowed it up. He turned it to Eniola, down a ways to his right. Her body shifted to the sides with each step. She stopped and turned around—a sizable rock tumbled past her. It startled her.
“Did you drop that stone towards me, Mister Tuch?” She joked, and it was obvious. “Getting a little proactive with your murders now, aren’t you—?”
Tuch stayed silent. Do you want the cigarettes or not, Eniola. Do you want the cigarettes or not.
The path narrowed as they moved closer to the tunnel. Then the rail fell away and the walls encroached on the two. A patchwork of lanterns hung along the rock walls, some lit, some not. Tuch coughed out a breath, then couldn’t get it back. He gasped for it, but it wouldn’t come. He thought about the stuck people, and it felt like his throat closed. He collapsed to his knees and Eniola had to bring him out of it.
“Tuch,” she said, hitting him in the chest. “The air gets thin—I know it well. My lungs have adapted. I am like a fish down here in this dark ocean, whereas you are still human.” She thought about that for a moment. “Then again, fish won’t die from all the water they take in, will they? Unless it’s poison.”
Tuch slouched forward through the tunnel. Men and women worked in the shadows around him where it began to expand again. He knew it without even having to point his light or look in their direction. They were digging, setting charges—mining in the dark with only a few lamps strung against the walls to shine some light on their work. The scraping filled the tunnel. Every several minutes someone would wheeze a warning about a charge set to go off and the scraping would stop. The tunnel would erupt in sound and shake a beat later. Eniola didn’t mind it. Neither did the workers. They stood in the exploding dust washing over them. Then they would get back to work.
Tuch took cover. He scrambled each time, and everyone around him laughed.
“You’re afraid of these,” Eniola said. “The stuck live in this atmosphere—these explosions are their music, the fumes their whiskey.”
“You’re a dramatic,” Tuch said. “They don’t live here, Eniola. They have homes to go back to at night.”
“We might as well, Tuch. Arlit is the pit and the pit is Arlit—one and the same. Dead without the other.”
Eniola’s voice echoed. The tunnel expanded into a cavern. Freestanding lamps erected in the center of it made the flashlights unnecessary, so the two clicked them off. The air turned wet. The stuck dwindled; they shuffled past Tuch and Eniola in a line, out through the tunnel. They worked as they went. Tuch grabbed one by the arm, a young man around nineteen or twenty.
“You’re going home, aren’t you?” Tuch said.
Eniola translated. She flicked her flashlight back on and directed it the man’s way. His skin was sandpaper. Now visible, the man looked nervous and swallowed hard. “We’ll work on the way out, though. Get more pay—maybe get to Algeria in only a few years.”
Tuch let him go, and the man set another charge in another tunnel out to the far right, one smaller and snake-like. The young man contorted his body in a trickster way and slid inside. Tuch wondered how they calculate all this time spent working with such a bizarre and haphazard schedule. He wondered about payroll. There was a man named Mark—Ayedole called him “Mark,” at least—in payroll. No one knew what he did all day, but it didn’t look like payroll.
The cavern was the size of a ballroom, the kind one might see in a genuine Victorian setting. Eniola urged him to come out into the center, among the construction lamps. The walls of the place separated as they neared the ceiling, forming tall and rectangular structures. They looked like skyscrapers from a certain distance. When Tuch reached Eniola, he felt like he was in a city square—a bustling metropolis of uranium and blasted stone surrounding him. Divots in the stone looked like windows, almost inverted.
“We’re in Arlit now,” Eniola said.
“That doesn’t quite follow,” Davies said. “We haven’t walked nearly enough to be under it.” He picked up a stone from the ground and put it in his right pocket.
“Not under it—in it. What did I just say about the pit?”
“I wasn’t listening,” Davies said. He stood in some awe of the view from the center. He spotted another rock—this one seemed to shine. He knelt for it.
Eniola removed a knife from her dress next. She stood beneath a humming lamp, casting light over her frame when Tuch turned, and she plunged it into his arm. He wasn’t surprised by the blade piercing his bicep, but his body reacted. It made snarls and guttural sounds and shoved the woman away. It knocked her to the ground, then backed away and sweat against a wall, stabilizing the blade in its skin by the hilt. A thin line of blood trickled down from the wound.
Eniola scraped her elbows on the ground, but that’s all. She stood.
“I should have checked you for knives,” Tuch said, regaining some composure.
“I don’t think you wanted to,” Eniola said. She sat in a chair-shaped rock to her left. “I watched my husband’s best friend die here once. He just collapsed, his lungs overgrown with unruly cells.”
“And?” He took the seat beside her. The formation looked like a park bench or a bus stop.
“And you killed him. And you’ll kill my husband.”
“Is he a good man?” Tuch asked. He thought about pulling the knife from his flesh, and how much that might hurt. He winced at the idea.
“Since I have been stuck here, I have learned there is no such thing as good men—or good people,” Eniola said. “Whether you die today or not, Mr. Tuch, I will take your cigarettes and I will market them as a kindness and salve to my friends and my family. I will let them come here into this pit and earn their wages to pay mine.” She looked at him with her wet eyes, aglow from the construction lights. She put her hand on the handle of the knife, then let it go.
Tuch pulled a cigarette and lighter from his left pocket, fumbling with them until they were in the right position, then sparked the cig alight. Taking a drag, he said, “You’re no better than me.”
Eniola’s eyes turned sharp. “I should die today, too, but I am much better than you, Davies Tuch.”
“Then do it—”
“Is that what you want? You won’t fight me?”
“It isn’t what I want.”
Eniola mused for a few seconds, her face tensing. “I think you should do it yourself.”
That was an intriguing prospect, and Tuch snuffed out his smoke to ponder on it. “Stab myself to death?”
Eniola nodded. “Yes, please. The world would be much better off without you.”
“And you?” Tuch said, grinning a bit, a bead of sweat dripping off his nose onto the ground.
“I would follow you.” Eniola crossed her legs and sat back. She rested her head and patted Tuch’s shoulder before sighing. “I think you want to. I think that’s why you’re here.”
Davies Tuch did come out here when he could have stayed inside. He went out looking for something when he could have stayed with what he had—four walls, a friend, security, sanctuary, air conditioning, and caramel pops. He couldn’t be sure if he was looking for death out here.
“Maybe a part of me would like to,” he said, standing. A charge went off out in a tunnel somewhere. Another, and another after. “I’m not going to do it, Eniola.”
Eniola’s face widened. She was surprised. She gripped his bloody wrist.
“The world,” Tuch said, “would be a much better place without people like us or places like this, but that’s an impossible task for me.”
He found his way out of the tunnel. Eniola followed him. She drove him back, a little dour now, but there was a relief in her breathing, too. Like him, she was at work the next day, with a stack of full cigarette boxes that reached the ceiling of her tiny shop.
Tuch and Ayedole bought a couple of packs after work. Tuch came by alone sometimes—once or twice a week—and he and Eniola shared some drags of a cigarette. As they smoked, they sat in lawn chairs outside the shop and watched the stuck returning home.
