ANOTHER GENERATION COMES

By Adam McFarlane

It was October in Minnesota . The Gophers were losing their way out of a bowl bid, the fountain outside Orchestra Hall had dried up and leaves littered gutters. The September anniversary of the destruction of the World Trade Center had come and gone. The Star Tribune and the Pioneer Press had started noticing candidates for the state's 2006 Senate race. It was a work day in the life of Cain Foster.

A file folder labeled “THEO MBATHA” sat atop my desk. As soon as I saw it, I picked up the phone.

“Hello?”

“Chuck? This is Cain. Did you assign me a new case?”

“Yeah. Funny name, foreign-sounding?”

“Theo Mbatha.”

“Yeah.”

“But today is my last day,” I protested.

“Yeah, I know. Just do the initial interview. Hand the file off to Howard before you leave.”

It was supposed to be my last day to wake up and dress in a tie that strangled me and a jacket that made me sweat. It was supposed to be my last day at the firm that hired me out of college and qualified me for my own license. I had graduated from the Minnesota Office for Private Investigators and Protective Agents and I was leaving to start my own business.

I sighed at the thought of another case. “Is the client here yet?”

“No.”

“Interview room's all ready?” The firm sets out a sideboard of goodies for interviews involving corporate clients. Even initial interviews with the investigations section got the amenities. This morning's spread was caramel rolls, fresh fruit, juice, and coffee.

“Yeah.”

“All right; I'll be waiting.” I'd skipped breakfast and my stomach growled in anticipation of food.

I would realize much later that the Mbatha file would become my biggest case at the firm. On that morning it was just an irritating case and all I knew was that the client was ten minutes late. Stomach grumbling, I loaded up a paper plate, pulled a Mountain Dew from the mini-fridge and sat down at the conference table. Monet reprints on the walls offset cold halogen lights.

As soon as the case folder, my plate, and the plastic bottle were aligned on the table, the door opened. In walked a man wearing a maize polo shirt, khakis, and cordovan loafers; a wide, six-foot plus frame supported two hundred pounds of lineman material. His skin was black-brown and silver strands grew like weeds in his trimmed, curly hair. He looked me over.

What he saw was a white guy with a receding hair line contrasting my expanding waistline and making me look older than my twenty-nine years. The client took in my green sweater, jeans, and sandals in a once over glance and no change of expression.

“You must be Theo Mbatha. Good morning. My name is Cain Foster.”

His right hand swallowed mine, but the grip was weak. His accent sounded faintly British. “Jambo. A pleasure to meet you.”

I gestured toward the food spread and he moved to the sideboard. While his back was turned, I tried to scarf down the evidence of my gluttony.

He returned to the table with a single cup of black coffee and an apology. “Sorry I'm late.”

I waved it off and opened the case folder. It held a single sheet of paper; a profile of Theo Mbatha, former interior minister of Gunaya and now attaché to its U.S. consulate. My firm handled a variety of specialties, including international law, immigration, and intellectual property. The success of those ventures generated independent spin-off services for immigrants and foreign companies doing business in the Midwest .

The Gunayan consulate was a corporate client and its Twin Cities office worked with thousands of immigrants.

“How can we help you, Mr. Mbatha?”

“This is of personal interest. Rock Shandy, my son, was a student at Saint Lucia College here. I've had to consider formally dropping him from enrollment. When he missed many classes, the college notified my office in Gunaya.”

I nodded back. “I graduated from Saint Lucia myself. Unfortunately, student drop-out is not uncommon when almost everyone there can get a college education without being exemplary.”

He nodded. “But… my son's problems are a little larger, as he was an alien visiting under a student visa.”

“His name is Rock, you said?” The name didn't match anything listed in the file.

Mbatha shook his head, sadly. “Rock Shandy is his Americanized name. A rock shandy is a drink with lemonade, tonic and a dash of bitters. When he started making them, he told me, it became his nickname. Besides, people here couldn't pronounce his real name.”

“How do you say his real name?”

“Americans can't pronounce it,” he said, a trifle impatiently.

“Try me.”

He said it.

He was right and I was slightly embarrassed. I couldn't pronounce it.

“He was named for a river in Gunaya but here he liked to use his nickname. It is a tradition when an African child is born that parents name the child with a noun, the name of something tangible. For instance, Malaika—it means ‘angel.' Or the word for gift, would be Sipho for a boy, Siphiwe for a girl.”

Getting back to the case at hand, I asked, “Do you know if he was having trouble at school?”

He shook his head again. “My son would never skip class intentionally. He is a good...”

I waited for him to continue. Instead, he looked through the wall of plate glass window onto downtown Minneapolis . The Déjà Vu strip club caught attention with its pink bricks and Pepto-Bismol awning. A view down Nicollet Avenue 's pedestrian mall included the public library, a new corporate headquarters for Target, and a rooftop bowling game on the artificial turf of Brit's Pub. Mbatha's lips, like his hands, closed tightly together.

I broke the silence. “Do you know where your son is right now?”

He shook his head and looked up, tears glossing his deep, dark eyes. “I need somebody to tell me what happened to him.”

I drove down Highway 52. The drive was an hour across rolling farmlands broken up by gas stations and convenience stores. Saint Lucia was a private, liberal arts undergraduate college.

Minnesota was the “Land of 10,000 Lakes” but it also had 10,000 colleges and universities. St. Lucy was getting press because Ed Mikkelson had taught there before his election to the U.S. Senate in 1998. Mikkelson, now up for re-election, acted like a lone wolf in the Senate, voting against the Patriot Act and against authorizing the President's order to invade Iraq .

St. Lucy's is a fine institution, I thought, but second-tier for the son of a foreign dignitary. Why had he picked it? Another forty-five minutes down the highway was Rochester , home to the international Mayo Clinic. Had his family visited the clinic? Did he know anyone being treated at the clinic?

A blue-green copper statue of Saint Lucia , patron saint of Sweden , stood at the entrance of the college. The statue of a young woman bearing food in her arms and wearing a crown of rays stood as a reminder of the college's Scandinavian roots as a school for Swedish immigrants.

I waved to attendants pulling weeds from among the flowers at Lucy's feet and then drove around to park the car. The campus security office was housed in the basement of a nearby dormitory. Familiar with the campus, I signed in with the student at the front desk and found the stairwell.

Gus Davis was head of campus security; a new hire last year. We'd met before when I worked the Elle McGarrity file. Elle McGarrity was a seventeen year old freshman when she became pregnant. The child's father, a starter for the varsity football team, approached his coach about what to do. The coach posed as McGarrity's father and took her to a clinic for an abortion. Shortly after the procedure, she broke up with her boyfriend and confessed to her parents. When the parents hired my firm to sue the college, the investigations section called me up from the bull pen.

People there will remember you. They'll trust you. It's the perfect case to start with , I was told.

Nobody these days knew or cared about McGarrity; she was a liability now. She had cost the school a fortune in legal fees. The football player was expelled, the coach was fired, and the boy's fraternity closed ranks against me, yanking the welcome mat from under my feet.

I was alienated from my alma mater and felt aged ten years before closing the file, yet here I was again.

In the basement, the chug of washing machines echoed through the hallway. The door marked “SAFETY & SECURITY” was open and the office was little more than a carpeted room with cement walls and a large plywood desk. Books sat in stacks along the walls. Milky clouds thickened in a window high on the wall.

Davis was a short man. Shaggy bangs compensated for a receding hairline and he wore an olive shirt and burgundy tie. His skin smelled as if well-scrubbed with soap.

“Mr. Davis? I'm Cain Foster. We talked on the phone? Thanks for meeting me on such a short notice.”

“It's good to see you again.” Putting his fingers on his desk, he looked away and fidgeted. He didn't even try covering that lie.

“Good to be back on the hill.”

Shaking, he handed me a photograph of a human greyhound; long, thin face and a twitchy readiness to run were frozen in a snapshot. The whites of his eyes glowed against a chocolate complexion.

“The kid is, for lack of a better word, un-American; in politics I mean. Y'know Cindy Sheehan? He chartered buses to take students down to her rally in Crawford , Texas .”

“So he's not off with a girlfriend or taking a vacation … it's some sort of political thing?”

“I hope not. The student weekly ran a couple articles about his group, the Progressive Party. They have an office in the union.”

“Have you had any trouble with him on campus? Anything related to him or this club?”

Davis shook his head. “Never met the kid. None of my people knew him, either. I got you his transcript and dorm assignment, though.”

He slid computer printouts across the table.

“Good. This is a start. A directory would be good, too—faces and names of everybody on campus.” I paused a moment and said, “This could really hurt you. I mean you, personally, and the whole college.”

“You're talking about what happened with Elle McGarrity.”

I nodded.

Davis looked down at his fingers before nodding. “It could be a problem, but I'll help you any way I can.”

Old Main 's clock tower chimed ten o'clock . An organ prelude wafted from the chapel's open doors, competing with the buzzing of John Deere ride-along mowers on the green spaces.

I snuck into the chapel and sat in a back pew. Rays of sunlight colored the congregation in a kaleidoscope of stained glass. While students filled most of the main sections, the side pews were empty except for faculty with gray or thinning hair.

Most of the brief service didn't catch my attention except for the rumbling organ and hymns. My focus was drawn to the scripture reading; a girl stepped up to the pulpit and read Ecclesiastes from a gilt-edged Bible.

The words of the Preacher, the Son of David, King in Jerusalem :
"Vanity of vanities," says the Preacher; "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity."
What does man gain from all his labor in which he labors under the sun?
One generation goes, and another generation comes; but the earth remains forever.

The girl's blonde hair tumbled over her pristine white surplice and gave her an innocent and angelic look; she reminded me of Elle McGarrity. I'd spent hundreds of hours in chapel as a student, then going off to classes with no care larger than the next exam or paper. Taking on the McGarrity case and meeting Elle had wrecked the carefree nostalgia of my youthful college memories. Why did someone so young have to deal with an unwanted pregnancy, the decision to violate state abortion laws and then the guilt and shame over having made that decision? Maybe I was too innocent, too naïve during my college years. Leading the McGarrity investigation had shattered my Pollyanna outlook on life.

I lingered a little after the service, pondering forgiveness and redemption.

The dorm where Rock Shandy lived was an industrial-strength people-holder of brick, cement, and glass, appearing defiant, as if ugliness underscored utility. Inside, residents resisted the institutional depersonalization by decorating with Christmas lights, signs of colored markers and construction paper, scents of incense and candle wax and music emanating from radios and video games.

When I found the door to Shandy's room, it was open. Mismatched throw rugs carpeted the floor and the room was empty except for two cots, a half-sized refrigerator, and a bookcase- desk. A tall, dark-skinned man sat at the computer and sipped a can of guava juice.

“Hello?” His voice carried a British-like accent.

“Hi, I'm looking for Rock Shandy.”

From his chair, he shook my extended hand with little grip. “My name is Mpimpi Tjereyo. Ag , Shandy? Nobody knows where he is. Nobody cares. Whole racial, nine-eleven thing. Been that way ever since he transferred in. We got put together ‘cause I'm from Namibia and he's from Gunaya. We play football. He ran cross country but put on pads, tried a couple scrimmages, and wow, that guy can flat out run!”

“Did he ever talk about trouble? Did you notice anything unusual about his behavior?”

He shrugged. “Shandy would ride the team bus to away games, but wouldn't ride it back. Some kids, they have parents who meet them afterward for dinner and they drive back to campus together. But Shandy, he was different. He'd visit liberal groups after away games and get rides back. Coach told him it was okay if he made all the practices.”

The dorm room felt like home to me; small and messy. An assortment of Jazz Age novels rested on the desktop and the Victoria Secrets catalog peeked from under his bed. My own current reading consisted of The Great Gatsby and the latest issue of Paper Doll.

“Can you tell me about some of his friends? Anyone he hung out with?”

He thumped his chest. “Me, bru. We were this close. He was more into the Progressive Party, neo-wannabe-hippies and dating Julie Schwartz, the president. Then he dumped her.”

A breeze wafted through the window and teased the blinds. Smiling, Mpimpi closed his eyes and felt the cool air rush over him. “But Rock didn't care about dumping Julie. There're lots of lekker girls in the Progressive Party. He loves American women ‘cause they shave their armpits. He liked a lot about America , but most Africans hate it. Do you remember when the World Trade Center fell?”

“Yeah?”

“The bars in my hometown, where people come to watch football and drink beer, everyone stood up and cheered when they saw the destruction on TV.”

“But you're living in America right now.”

He shook his head and rolled his eyes. “I know. Me, I love it here. I never want to go back. When I make enough money, I want to send for my parents. We can all live here together.”

“What did Rock think of that?”

“He comes from a totally different background, you know? When he was born, Gunaya had finished a violent coup. That violence is far from the farmlands of America , and I see no black squatters, no farm cooperatives, and no European machinery. That's one thing Shandy and I agreed on—this is one weird country.”

He raised his can. “And guava juice. Everything else, we completely disagreed about. I'm Muslim, he's Christian; he likes pop and classical, I'm rap. He's political science; I'm computer science.”

A bell rang out from the Old Main clock.

“Sorry, bru, but if you'll excuse me … I'm late for class.”

“Wait, I forgot to ask you, what does your name mean?” Theo Mbatha had said African names have meaning.

He looked at me with a crooked smile. “Mpimpi means spy.”

Te Progressive Party office had a door inside the student union. Inside, the odor of burned incense soaked into beanbag chairs. Posters of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Che Guevara stared at each other from opposite ends of the room. Lights were dimmed low.

A girl poured tea from an electric tea pot. She had blue-grey eyes and long blonde hair and edges of high cheekbones and a sharp jaw line defined her face.

“Sorry, I already have a boyfriend,” she said, glaring at me.

I shook my head. “Sorry if I was staring. I'm looking for someone who knew Rock Shandy.”

“Yeah, you and the rest of the world. I'm Julie Schwartz. Shandy officially ‘dropped out' but he's really missing. The FBI or the police or someone got him.”

“FBI?”

“Because he wrote letters to Ed Mikkelson—“

“Mikkelson…the senator who used to teach here?”

As she sat down, a bean bag blob attempted to swallow her. “Yeah, he wrote to Mikkelson about the war on terror. We're all probably on some terrorist watch list.”

“Has anyone else from your group been missing?”

She shook her head and sipped her tea.

I sunk into the grainy softness of a beanbag. “Did anything out of the ordinary happen? Spending more money than usual? Talking to anyone you didn't know? Did he talk about any upcoming plans?”

“No, nothing like that. We're all college students; we don't have money. Especially Shandy, since his only cash came wired from Gunaya.”

“How well did you know him?”

“We dated almost a whole semester. People say that he dumped me, but I …” she tapped her collarbone, “dumped him . He thought of me as a bonus, like the mint you get on the pillow of a hotel room. I was just a piece of American ass. People say that I liked Rock because he was black? ‘Cause he was an international student? Exotic… ” A tear came to her eye. “But it's because he believed in what he said. He understood things.”

“Like what?”

“Like how everything worked. Everything could be political. Like the joke about the American in the airplane. Have you heard it?”

I raised an eyebrow.

“Three men are flying in an airplane without parachutes; a Frenchman, an American, and a Russian. The pilot announces, ‘The plane is too heavy; one person must sacrifice himself or the plane will crash. The Frenchman rises and declares, ‘I do this for my country!' He opens the hatch and jumps.”

She giggled. The portraits of Che and Dr. King stared down at us silently.

“So, there's just the American and Russian and the pilot announces another one must die or the plane will crash. So the American stands up, says ‘I do this for my country!'—and flings the Russian through the hatch!”

She giggled again, looking for a response.

I smiled politely while smelling the air's marijuana-tinged odor of incense. “Did anyone ever get upset with Shandy or your group? Angry enough to want to hurt one of you?”

“Are we leftist rabble rousers? What do you expect? It's terrible because Shandy is gifted. If he were pushed in the right direction, he could easily get into the diplomatic corps or be the first Lucy grad to go Yale Law. He should be at a bigger school, a more prominent program. He was offered an internship in Chicago , working with the Gunayan consulate but he didn't want to leave campus.”

“Sounds like he preferred academia?”

“Shandy's brilliant. He wrote a thirty pager on political climates in Muslim-oriented nations as compared to Christian-oriented nations in sub-Saharan Africa . We think of sub-Sarahan colonization as French and English but they're affected by religious colonization, too. European empires are Christendom's empires, aren't they?”

Excitement flickered in her eyes. She maneuvered over to a mini-fridge stuck in a corner and pulled out two glass bottles of Woodchuck cider.

“They let you drink in here?”

“Does it really matter? They don't let us smoke in here but I keep my stash here. I'm sure you burned weed back in your day, right?”

“You mean smoke pot?”

“Yeah, the whole hippie thing; pot, LSD, ‘shrooms. The good ol' days of Black Panthers, Weathermen, SLA . Back when protest made a difference--more cops were killed in 'seventy-four than in any year since. Look it up.”

I shook my head. “No, in my day we organized voter registration for Ralph Nader and we picketed Wal-Mart. I wasn't even born until after Vietnam .”

She shrugged nervously. “Either way, that was a long time ago.”

“Not really.”

“Did you have airplanes crashing into skyscrapers?”

I blinked. “No, I guess not.”

“Then it was a long time ago.”

* * *

“I'm sure they called you, but I thought I should visit.” I stood uncertainly at Mbatha's doorstep.

His house in the Kenwood neighborhood stood blocks away from the new Walker Art Center . Light from a window passed through a stone exterior wall, warming the study's wood paneling. It was 9:30 at night. Mbatha wore a burgundy turtleneck, corduroy trousers and a closed expression.

“Here, you better look at this,” I said.

I handed him the Redwood County medical examiner's report to the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and thought about how it had come to me earlier.

The BCA would have preferred to start getting evidence where the body was found; stuck in the river. Instead, the sheriff's deputies sent it to the Linnaeus County medical examiner's office for an autopsy, assuming accidental drowning. Linnaeus' ME shipped it to Redwood County 's medical examiner, who had more expertise with stab wounds. The bloated and waterlogged body hid multiple stab wounds. Not a drowning, for sure.

The BCA investigated every homicide in the state, often taking charge over rural police departments. From the Twin Cities or their northern Bemidji offices, crime lab vans met bodies where they lay, collecting evidence and documenting the scene. Because the county khakis assumed Shandy was a drowning victim, the body had left the scene.

At the hospital, an ME removed skin from the body's damaged fingertips, attached them to her own fingers and then rolled them over an inkpad and onto fingerprint cards. The completed kit was fed into fingerprint databases. The most likely match came from an INS printing; a foreigner visiting on a student visa at St. Lucia College in Linnaeus County .

“The body couldn't be identified at first.” Davis ' voice had come over my cell phone. “Too bloated, plus some fingers and chucks of tissue missing; probably eaten by fish. Talk about your finger food. Notes say that parts exposed to the sun were really sunburned, so he was there all day, if not longer. Didn't know black people could get sunburned…”

“Just fax it over to me,” I told him. I gave him the fax number for the investigations section, then left.

Shortly after receiving the fax, I arranged to meet Theo Mbatha at his home. Now, he peered through his reading glasses, carefully reading the report. Finally he nodded.

I said, “The state's authorities are conducting an investigation. I'm sure the FBI will be in contact with you shortly—“

He sighed a deeply as though weighed down by the world and waved a hand at me. “I know who did this. I know what happened. I just …” He looked away. “I just don't want to believe it happened. The soldier who killed my son is back in Gunaya. He's already confessed to the crime, and there's nothing I can do.”

I sat there, speechless, uncomprehending.

“Perhaps I should explain. The president of Gunaya was an army general twenty years ago and after he was voted into office, everything went from bad to worse. Violence on the streets.”

“What does that mean?”

“Militias, gangs, rampant crime. This year, political leaders agreed to arbitration; a committee of reconciliation formed to hear complaints and accept admissions of guilt. Any man who confesses completely to violating election laws or participating in organized violence receives amnesty. Many go unpunished for their crimes, but unsolved murders and decades-old questions finally get put to rest.”

“And that's how you found out your son was killed? From this confession committee?”

He nodded. “A National Defense Force captain, suspected of another crime, told the committee. He was here visiting a Muslim cleric being treated at the Mayo Clinic.”

Just a short drive away from St. Lucy's, I remembered.

“Shortly before his departure, he traveled to a nearby town; a small college town. The captain said he came across a student organization meeting in a bar and one of the meeting's speakers was an African criticizing American involvement in the Middle East .”

“This was your son, Rock?”

Mbatha nodded. “Rock talked about his homeland, how they'd received military support from the U.S. ; how Gunaya was a whore for accepting Uncle Sam's dollars.”

“So, the officer killed him.”

He said, “And nobody would know what had happened if the officer did not confess the crime to the reconciliation committee. It doesn't matter that the reconciliation committee was intended for old crimes, from the time of the coup. This, too, was politically motivated murder. Now, nobody can be punished.”

He'd known his son was already dead already. I realized that now. He hadn't come to the U.S. to find his missing son. Theo Mbatha came here to put his son to rest.

I shook my head. “This officer could be extradited, the State Department—“

“No, no, no. If this captain is punished then the whole purpose of the reconciliation committee would be undermined. I can't let that happen to my country.”

His words smacked me across the face. I can't let that happen to my country. Years after this encounter, whenever I saw Africa in the news; bloody rebellion in Liberia , coup d'etat in Togo , genocide in Sudan …I would remember tonight. I would keep the memory of Theo Mbatha's dark, aging face behind wire-rimmed glasses; a man willing to fight, willing to sacrifice for his country.

“But there is something I need to do. I need to be sure; to find evidence that the captain actually did murder my son.”

I said, “I don't understand how you would do that.”

“The captain had to give evidence to the reconciliation committee. Otherwise, he could be assuming responsibility for another person's crime. In the reconciliation committee's record, he provided directions to the place where he buried evidence.”

“So you plan to find what this man buried? You want to dig up the weapon or whatever's there?”

He nodded.

“Do you want me to drive you?”

“Please. Is tomorrow morning convenient?”

I nodded.

“I'll meet you at eight-thirty—no wait, let's make it ten and avoid the morning rush.”

* * *

The next morning a chocolate-saturated latte tried to fill gaps in my sleep and calories. Mbatha silently watched the sights along the snail's pace drive; the Metrodome, the Milwaukee Depot ice rink and the Mill City Museum .

We passed miles marked by blue Adopt-A-Highway signs on Highway 52. Somehow, the telephone poles switched to the other side of the road without me noticing. The highway bisected fields that stretched to the horizon. Occasionally, several hundred feet off the highway, a farmhouse stood beside a line of windbreak trees, with a red barn hiding and peeking out from behind them.

Once we saw the college on the horizon, we crossed the Redwood River .

The car slowed down as we passed by the century-old beige brick buildings of Karlsford, the river town. Small towns scare me; they're too isolated. All the stories of kids falling in wells, screaming their heads off with nobody hearing them had gotten to me. Gas stations closed up at night and re-opened in the morning. No “Open 24 Hrs.” Don't run out of gas after sundown; when you're out, you're trapped. No thanks.

Division Street intersected the highway at a T. I pulled over and pulled two shovels from the back seat. Half a mile away, the metal frame of a grain elevator stood against the sky. A dealership's farm equipment blurred green in the distance.

“Five meters from the corner of Division and the state highway,” Mbatha said

We walked to the edge of a field. Mbatha sighed and jammed his shovel into soil, weeds ripping apart with the first overturned scoop. We stood across from each other and started digging. Two holes soon merged into a widened gap. Sweat slicked my back and shoulders and blisters would appear later on my palms. For over an hour and a half, we dug. Finally, Mbatha unearthed a small black pouch in the hole.

He picked it up. “Do you think this is it? Is this what the soldier buried?”

“I don't know.”

“It's some kind of covering, maybe a torn up trash bag?” He unraveled the plastic wrap. The layers finally pulled apart and we saw the evidence. It looked like a thickly segmented worm, four inches long and covered by mold. It tapered to an end covered by a flat oblong disk.

“It's his finger,” he said.

A chill started in my chest and spread through my arms. I suppressed a shudder.

Mbatha re-wrapped the finger slowly. We both stood silently in the afternoon sun as sweat soaked into our skin.

Finally he said, “We better go.”

In the car, Mbatha kept the pouch with the wrapped finger on his lap, one hand resting on it gingerly. He seemed to drift into his own thoughts and remembrances of his son.

In the silence, I thought about what people had said about Shandy. It didn't make sense; why would he be so hostile that one of his own countrymen killed him? His roommate said the liked America —but he didn't act like it. Why would a bright foreigner transfer to a second-tier Midwestern college?

When Mbatha eventually spoke up, I said, “Nothing makes any sense. How could Shandy be seen as a terrorist sympathizer?”

His fingers drummed against the door. “Shandy was part of the intelligence branch of Gunaya's National Defense Force.”

“A spy?”

He nodded. “Thinking about the September eleventh attacks, the Gunayan government ran him as a mock agent provocateur.”

I shook my head. “Huh?”

“There was a secret program for Gunayan nationals studying in the U.S. Students were instructed to advocate anti-American sentiments. My son tried to show Gunaya was sympathetic to terrorists. It needed strong American aid to remain an ally to democracy and free trade. It needed American politicians to vote for millions of dollars in foreign aid every year.”

“I don't understand. Why here? Why go to a small school in a small state? Why not someplace bigger like Berkeley or Florida ?” I questioned.

“They needed someone here, especially at Saint Lucia College . Senator Mikkelson taught there before running for office. He chairs the Sub-Saharan Committee on the U.S. Senate Foreign Affairs committee.”

“So,” I said, “your son targeted Mikkelson.”

Mbatha agreed. “This was something that Gunayans had started doing in the 1980s. Only then, it was alleging communist sympathy.”

When we passed through downtown Minneapolis , I said, “The year I graduated from high school, the Soviet Union fell. That flag came down at Red Square on Christmas and I remember seeing it on TV. I thought America was safe for the first time in my life. I thought we could actually do some good in the world—bringing food to Somalia , the whole Middle East .”

Mbatha watched the limestone and glass federal courthouse pass by his window as I continued.

“Then September eleventh happened. It was Chicken Little and the sky falling. The sky fell on that day and we're back in paranoia again. In the nineties, I thought we were at peace but it turns out we were just between cold wars.”

We didn't speak again until we reached his house.

“I wish I had never met you but I thank you. I wish my son were still alive. We're just trying to make the best of a terrible situation.” He stepped out and softly closed the door behind him.

* * *

The body of the young man with the unpronounceable name had eventually returned to Gunaya through regular diplomatic channels.

Every day in the newspaper, articles report the number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq and about political unrest in former Soviet republics. On TV, politicians wear red and blue ties against white shirts, flag pins stuck to their lapels, toothy smiles telling us everything is all right.

Back in my apartment, rain throws itself against the window and I find shelter from the harsh realities of life. I think about Saint Lucia College . I wonder about the thousands of students who are reservists overseas. How many teenagers enlist rather than opting for school? How many go to school to fight a different war?

The building across the street from my window displays a faded metal sign; “FALLOUT SHELTER, spelled out under the segmented circle of a radiation symbol.

A rerun of Conan O'Brien's spoof interviewing Saddam Hussein plays on TV. As the Saddam image's lips moved, the audience laughed in response.

A recording of Kennedy's inaugural address runs through my mind—the fragment of a history class or a civics lesson from decades ago— the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans …, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace…

Turning off the TV, I close my eyes and say to no one, “Another generation comes, but the earth abides forever.”