Old forgotten words

I’ve started to forget how my life was before I came here to South Africa. At Duke I used to go to bed at 3 a.m. every night, and here I cannot sleep in later than 6:30 a.m. My company consists of the same 27 people. It has been weeks since I’ve introduced myself to anyone, and last Monday was the first I could freely use the internet (though “freely” still entails walking from my fenced-in camp to the fenced-in offices, in a group of no fewer than three, before 5:30 p.m., when it gets dark and the leopards come out).

When I came to Duke and started going to sleep late at night, I began forgetting my life at home. I became aware of this during one incident when I was back in Michigan and went to Wal-Mart. The boy at the register was tall and bulky, and as he scanned the Jif jar across the laser I noticed that his right forearm had been sliced open with something jagged.

It was quite grotesque, really—swollen pink scars wiggled from wrist to elbow and the skin beneath them looked grated. The gouged arm had two-thirds the volume of its counterpart; he had lost a lot of blood and the stitches, if any, had been sloppy. What had happened? At this point I felt I’d stared too long at the wound and switched my gaze to his face. Then I realized I knew exactly what had happened. I had been there.

Abbie and I were 14 and waiting for her sister to pick us up from school. We were in the cafeteria, with chatty Coleton, who had long hair then, and a girl who was in love with him called Raggedy-Ann. Coleton talked and Raggedy-Ann beamed and listened. Then she left. A boy who loved Raggedy-Ann ran up—quite suddenly—grabbed Coleton around the neck mid-sentence and pushed him to the ground.

“You talk so much crap!” he shouted. His eyes had tears in them; Coleton wasn’t fighting back. In fact, his face looked a bit gleeful. Abbie and I had our hands to our mouths.

“Break it up!” said the senior class clown with whom my brother used to be friends. They broke it up. Coleton sat up and laughed and the boy left. We went back to talking. But moments later, there was another fight. Pushed by his attacker, the register boy, gray around the eyes, in a long jersey, put his arm through the double-sided glass cafeteria wall. We gasped and saw the hole he’d made. Glass and blood were on the floor. There was flesh in the hole.

Register Boy clutched his arm and made a dopey smile. His eyes lost some focus and his lips, bright and fat, opened and slipped out of composure. His teeth were crooked. Eventually an ambulance came and the glass got swept up, but it was a while before they fixed the window.

At Wal-Mart, he bagged my peanut butter and we smiled at each other. I wondered if he remembered I’d seen the fight or if he recognized me at all, and I felt strange for having forgotten that bit of my own history.