The Foreign Service Journal, June 2005

It took him the rest of the day to bury the boy, and the exertion wearied him tremendously. The chimeres returned at night in his dreams as he slept. They stood in a group, leaned on each other and mocked him with silent laughter, startling his eyes open in the darkness. The dreams continued for the rest of the week. “Each time they seem more pale,” he told his wife. “As if their bones cover their flesh.” He did not tell her the things the chimeres spoke in his dreams, or of how they spent time shooting at each other, amused as the wounds appeared one by one on their bodies. Jean-Philippe had known fear before, but this crept into his bed with him. The chimeres began to follow him during the day, looking over his shoulder as he scrubbed the aging rifle he had received during his for- mal training. Sometimes he heard them singing, par- ticularly when he caught himself staring at the earth at the base of the tree where Titide was buried. A week later, a young man arrived on a motorbike on the path from Desmoulins. He said he was an offi- cial of the American embassy. He treated him like an equal, saluting as he approached, and paused until Jean-Philippe nodded that he could come forward and talk. The man stayed the night, sometimes writing in a small book as he spoke. He asked about many things, strange and often irrelevant, and from the dirt on his clothes it was clear that he had been traveling for some time. The children giggled at the man’s Creole, which sometimes turned words into other words unintended. It sounded like a corruption of the way the Dominicans spoke near the border, in Quaniminthe, but its lack of grammatical correctness prevented the tone of superi- ority that the Dominicans took with him. Jean-Philippe had to keep himself from smiling on occasion. The man’s speech was often interrupted by static coming from a radio attached to his belt. He continued talking while lowering the volume with his fingers, which played with the radio’s knobs as if they were prayer beads. Jean-Philippe found his eyes following the movements of the man’s fingers, and he had to F O C U S J U N E 2 0 0 5 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 35