Free The Journey Prize Stories 21 by Various Page A

children playing soccer. Twice I got off and bought food from street vendors. Christopher ate little. I didn’t ask how he was coping with the jarring ride. When we came to our destination, a town on the south shore of a long lake, Christopher began to rise from his seat and then fell back, and there was no smile then, no humour of even the most merciless kind to be found. He gasped loudly, and he started to cry for a moment before his anger and pride seized him. I was looking to see who might help me help him off the bus, but he stood then, and supporting himself with his arms on the backs of seats, made his way unassisted. I wanted so much to be able to help him but knew that I could not.
    My idea for a way to reach the source of his anger and soften it, to reach Christopher and soften him and make it so both of us could achieve peace, or something, God, something – this idea came to me from no particular place but seemed so right. That night I reached for him and just rested my hand on his hip, and as usual he did not roll away or even tense but was still, still and so furiously tolerant. I started to sing, softly, “Are the stars out tonight? I don’t know if it’s cloudy or bright,” and I knew that, as I continued, finally he would see that he was not alone after all, not so cut off and abandoned, and he would reach for me in the night when the pain came and not need me to pretend anymore. Even as I sang “cloudy or bright” I could hear the next line, “I only have eyes for you,” and I knew he would turn to me then, without speaking, but he did speak – before I had completed my breath and sung that line. He said, “No. Don’t do this,” and of course I saw that I had been stupid, and sentimental, and that nothing so false could do anything or help anything, and I was stunned that I had been so stupid and disrespectful.
    â€œI’m staying here till tonight. You go,” Christopher said to me in the morning. He had not gotten out of bed.
    â€œI’ll bring you breakfast,” I said.
    â€œPlease go.”
    I ate breakfast at a market stand near the hotel, lingering over my food forever, till finally, though no one showed the slightest displeasure with my occupying a table in the shade of the lean-to that sold the food, I felt too embarrassed to stay, and I set out into the town.
    The heat was dryer, less heavy than on the coast, more fiery – shocking and hostile. Buildings – shacks – sharpened intofocus and then shifted, their edges fuzzy, suddenly angling back, narrowing and rippling. I could see a large white structure down the dusty, rust-coloured road and made it my goal. It seemed near, perhaps a ten-minute walk. I looked at my wrists, half expecting to see my skin beginning to blister.
    The white building retreated as I advanced through the blazing air, and time seemed to pulse and bend in the heat along with the small shacks I passed and the green trees in the distance behind them. Was I getting closer? I couldn’t tell. No one was about – sane people hiding from the sun, I supposed.
    A young couple I passed walking in the opposite direction, the first people I’d seen on my walk, smiled at me, their eyes widening. I could tell that they stopped after I went by, and I imagined them looking back at me.
    In the yard before the white building, three men knelt on the ground, resting in the pose of the child, exactly like Christopher, and I pondered, amazed, the possibility of travelling all this way to find three afflicted as he was, suffering that way; perhaps this was a clinic, a rare medical outpost specializing in the treatment of his untreatable fate. Then they moved and I realized the absurdity of my heat-induced fantasy, remembered what I had read on the plane about the Muslim North and understood that these men were not practising yoga or coping with deathly pain: they were praying.
    Beyond the white building I