Chapter I In the morning's platinum light he raised his leaden head. He was lying on a plastic mattress, in a converted shipping container, below a tiny fan that circulated the room's tepid air. He washed himself with packaged towelettes and put on his uniform, a black jumpsuit of synthetic fiber. Under a quickly rising sun he walked across the hotel's gravel courtyard to his partner's room. They had never met. He knocked on the corrugated steel door. There was no answer. He knocked louder. After some shuffling from within, a lithesome man answered, naked but for a pair of white boxers. He had dark eyes, a cleft chin and a wide mouth ringed with full, womanly lips. A swirl of black hair rakishly obscured his left eye. "Pick a number." "Nine," the man at the door said, smiling slyly. "Okay. You know how the company handles names. I don't know yours, you don't know mine. For the next two weeks, you're Nine. Call me Four." "You're Four?" "You will call me Four. I'll call you Nine. Got it?" For reasons of security, the company insisted on simple pseudonyms, usually numerical. "Got it," Nine said, and swept his hair from his face and threw it back. They had arrived without passports. Passports were complications and liabilities in such a place, a nation recovering from years of civil war, riddled with corruption and burdened now by a new and lawless government. Four and Nine had been flown in under assumed names on a private charter. In the past, in other nations, the company's employees had been ransomed and killed. The kidnappers went first for their quarry's company, then family, then nation. But without passports or names, men like Four and Nine were anonymous and of little value. Their machine, the RS-80, was almost impossible to trace. It bore no company name, no serial number and had no national registry. No one but their clients, the northern government in the capital, would know anything about them, their origins or employer. "You ready to eat?" Four asked. "We have forty minutes till we begin. The crew is making a final check on the machine." "Soon," Nine said, a smile overtaking his expansive mouth. Nine stepped out of the doorway and tilted his head toward the bed behind him. Beyond Nine's naked torso Four could see the furrowed sheets of an unmade bed, and woven within them the muscular legs of a sleeping woman. Nine made no effort to hide her. Instead he smiled conspiratorially. Four had never met this man, and did not think himself capable of prophecy, but in an instant he knew Nine was an agent of chaos and would make the difficult work ahead far more so. Now Nine yawned. "Can I meet you in a few minutes?" Four closed the door and made his way across the courtyard, now baking in the day's young heat, to the cafeteria. The room was humid with men bent over their food--men in suits, men in faded military uniforms, men in traditional dress. All spoke in low voices over the clacking of cheap tin silverware on plastic plates. There were only a few foreigners in the makeshift dining hall attached to this new hotel, comprising two dozen shipping containers arranged in an untidy semicircle. After waiting half an hour in the breakfast room, Four went to Nine's room again and knocked on the door. "Coming!" Nine yelled, and the room burst with laughter. Four returned to the cafeteria and drank bottled water. Ten minutes later Nine entered the room, having showered and dressed in his company-issued black jumpsuit. He had, though, declined to insert himself into the suit's upper half. He wore a white V-neck undershirt, the jumpsuit's sleeves dangling limply by his side, petting the other men's shoulders as he slipped around the tables on his way to Four. "I didn't expect you here today," Nine said. "The planes in these parts aren't so punctual. That's why I had company last night. You married?" "No," Four lied. "You're not eating?" Nine asked. "I already ate," Four said. In his room, he had finished a packet of dry oatmeal and powdered milk, a bag of almonds and a length of venison jerky--all of which he had brought with him. He had packed enough food for the twelve days the job was expected to take. "You ate in your room?" Nine said, offended. "You can't do that. The food here's so good. Well, it's not so good, but it's intriguing." His hair had fallen over his left eye and he flung it back with a flourish of his hand. "I'll get to it," Nine said, and went to the buffet and chose half a grapefruit, a tall glass of mango juice, three boiled eggs and a few shards of animal bone covered in purple meat. On his way back to the table, Nine's lifeless sleeves again flailed amid the other diners. Four looked around the room to see if any of the local men, a mix of former rebel commanders and recent profiteers, had taken an interest in Four or Nine. None had. He and his new partner were obviously foreigners in a place where most visitors were aid workers and arms inspectors, and it was better if they remained unmemorable. Nine set his plate down and allowed his hair to fall from his forehead like the tendrils of a willow. Eschewing the tin utensils, Nine used his fingers to bring the gamey bones to his mouth for gnawing and washed the meat down with sun-colored juice. The company had advised against eating regional fruit in whole or liquid form, and strongly suggested that eggs or meat could contain E. coli, salmonella or ringworm. But Nine was devouring it all with abandon, his greasy hair groping his plate obscenely. Four could not discern what the company saw in this man. He was a liability. "You know what she cost?" Nine asked, his mouth full. He did not wait for Four to answer. "Less than what we're paying for breakfast. And she was fresher than this," he said, jabbing his fork at the wet grapefruit before him. "The machine's waiting," Four said. "The first pod is in place. How long until you're ready?" Nine looked at him, grinning. "Now I know why they call you the Clock." Four stood. "Be ready in ten minutes," he said. "You're not serious. I just got in yesterday," Nine said. "The schedule's padded. This is a great town. Let's spend a day here. Another night, more importantly." He raised an eyebrow lewdly. "I'll loan you my girl." Four pushed in his chair. "I'll meet you out front in ten minutes. Bring all your gear." II "Get in," Four said. He was sitting in a taxi, waiting in the hotel roundabout. Nine had just left the lobby, carrying his duffel bag and wearing sandals, looking like a tourist embarking on a day's excursion. He got in and the taxi took off. "You'll have to change your shoes," Four said. Nine opened his mouth, tilted his head like an animal and then smiled, as if deciding among many witty things he might say. He said nothing. Again he flung the hair back from his forehead. Four knew this sort of man, a man amused by everything, most of all himself. He had grown his hair in such a way that it impeded his vision and had to be pushed out of the way a hundred times a day. It was nonsense. For a man so disposed, this job was an adventure, a lark. But Four did not want to be here any longer than was necessary. The humidity, even on the drive from the airport to the city, was an affliction. He knew that while suffering in this kind of heat he would be alternately catatonic and quick to anger. But inside the cab of the RS-80, there would be air-conditioning, and the assignment was simple. They were to pave and paint 230 kilometers of a two-lane roadway, uniting the country's rural south to the country's capital in the urban north. The corridor had been cleared and the road had been graded and compacted. But the rainy season would come soon, and if the road went unpaved, all that work would quickly wash away. Four had studied the plans and had seen the road on the satellite pictures. He had never worked on a road so straight. It cut through scrub and desert and forests and villages, but all along there were no hills or mountains or cities. It was almost entirely unimpeded. "So you've worked a lot of jobs," Nine said. He'd adopted a respectful, earnest tone, but the guise was ill fitting. Again the beginnings of a smile overtook his feminine mouth. "This is my sixty-third assignment," Four said. He left it there. In eight years he had paved over seventy-five hundred kilometers on four continents. "You seen any trouble?" Nine asked. Four had been held at gunpoint only twice. Work like his often took place near the time and place of violence and atrocities without actually intersecting with either. On previous jobs, Four had seen what he later learned was a passenger plane falling from the sky, shot down by a surface-to-air missile. He had passed wells poisoned with corpses. He once missed by minutes the scene of a crucifixion. "No," he answered. "You've used this machine before?" Nine asked. "I have," Four said. This was not strictly true. This was his first field assignment with this particular vehicle. It was only the second time the company had used the RS-80, a significant improvement over its previous incarnation, the RS-50. Among other changes, the cockpit of the new model accommodated only one person. The RS-50 had room for two, and sharing the small cockpit had driven Four to distraction. Only one person was necessary inside and the new model rightfully recognized this. For this assignment, the company determined that the second crew member would drive a quad, a four-wheeled all-terrain vehicle, to scout ahead for obstructions and to ensure that the pods were not tampered with. That would be Nine's purview. "Check it out," Nine said, and pointed to the side of the muddy road. Four wasn't sure what Nine had found interesting. None of this was new. Everything around them was standard for a developing country after a war. The soda bottles full of diesel, lined up on the roadside and sold by shrunken grandmothers. The stray dogs and children holding babies. The diagonal plumes of faraway fires. The spent rifle shells. The teenagers wearing mirrored sunglasses and carrying unloaded AKs. The trucks delivering glittering things unseen for years in the region--air conditioners, file cabinets, undefiled windows, even stained glass for some foreign-funded church. The white trucks full of aid workers fretful or debauched. All around were scenes of reconstruction. On a rickety scaffolding made of gnarled sticks, a dozen masons were repairing a municipal building with a cloud-shaped hole in its façade. Next door a middle-aged woman, wearing a fur-lined winter coat, sat under a striped beach umbrella, next to an office copier that she'd somehow wheeled out onto the roadside. A line of men and women in business attire waited to avail themselves of her services. The high-pitched whine of a diesel scooter overtook them, and Nine laughed. "Whole clan," he said. Four glanced over to see that a family of five had arranged themselves on one small scooter, and soon passed them and swung into their lane. Two of the children were standing on the runner in front of their father, whose wife clung tight to him with a baby strapped to her back. The baby, fast asleep and its face cloudy with diesel fumes, wore a stocking cap covered with jewels and bells. This was a burgeoning city awake and alive after a civil war its residents assumed would have no end. All the glass had been shattered, all the roofs caved in, there were legless men and clinics full of the dying and destitute. There were a million displaced, a million in exile, ten thousand orphans. And yet everyone was jubilant amid the construction, amid the unmanaged garbage, the waste dumped into local streams, the sweeping shoals of bright plastic bottles everywhere. Amid the chaos there was joy and frenetic enterprise. There was a rush of foreign aid, reconstruction funds, foreigners coming to assess and consult, to hand out grants and bribes and collect fees. Homes became hotels; kitchens became restaurants. The visitors needed bottled water, soda, whiskey, chicken, candy, beef. Land a meal for six aid workers and pay your family's way for a month. Or buy a scooter to carry your family away. "We'll work a long day today," Four said. "Get ahead of the schedule while we can." As he spoke the words, he knew Nine would suppress a private smile, and indeed he did. Four looked away from him and caught sight of a pair of men unloading a new dishwasher from an oxcart that also contained an elderly woman on a gurney, an IV rigged above her via duct tape and a cricket bat. The two of them had twelve days to complete the work. The RS-80 had been designed to pave 25 kilometers a day, but could be pushed to 30. Four expected the 230 kilometers to be finished in ten days. Still, the company had built in a small cushion, two days, for any eventualities. The company would receive a bonus from the government if the schedule was kept, so every extra day threatened the schedule, which threatened the company's bonus, which threatened Four's compensation. Most crucial, the road had to be finished in time for the parade. The president, known for political theater, had planned for the parade to begin the moment the road was completed. The procession would leave the capital and travel south, symbolizing an end to decades of war and the beginning of the peace and prosperity the road would make possible. The RS-80 reduced any doubt about meeting such a compressed schedule. Given they were paving during the dry season, no rain was plausible, and outside of rain, there were virtually no variables. When there were no variables and no distractions, Four could be counted on to complete any job on time or early. Beyond sleep and an occasional meal, Four did not rest while on assignment. He did not take breaks unless they were unavoidable. "You been here before?" Nine asked. "No," Four said. He watched as Nine flung his hair from his eyes again and ran his hand over the totality of his skull. Soon the hair he'd just moved out of the way impeded his vision again. Preposterous, Four thought. "This is your first assignment," Four said. "Yes," Nine said. "You understand your role?" "Yes. Clear the road, mitigate obstacles." Nine uttered the last two words with a tone of mock formality. Excerpted from The Parade: A Novel by Dave Eggers All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
