The Girl in the Road by Monica Byrne Page B

her bed. Lucia is calling my name and asking me what’s happening and I can tell she’s fighting to stay calm, to be reasonable, to assume the best of me. But I can’t pay attention to her now. The barefoot girl is hugging her elbows and swinging them back and forth.
    â€œWho are you?” I say.
    She stops swinging and says a single word. My glotti says:
    LANGUAGE UNKNOWN
    I’ve never seen that error message before.
    â€œSpeak fucking Hindi. English. Anything else. Why are you following me?”
    She seems scared. She shrinks back. But again she whispers just one word and this time I can hear it, it sounds like sa’a, but my glotti reads again:
    LANGUAGE UNKNOWN
    â€œDurga,” says Lucia, “who are you talking to?”
    â€œThe girl standing right fucking there, Lucia.”
    Lucia gathers up the sheets around her body and goes to look out the window.
    â€œThat’s not funny, Lucia.”
    â€œWhat’s not funny? I’m just—I don’t understand—who are you talking to?” Her voice is breaking now and she’s near tears.
    And I realize that Lucia is part of it.
    She is such a good actor. She’s part of it, and so was Anwar, and now they have me.
    I address myself to the barefoot girl.
    â€œSo who sent you? Semena Werk? The police? If I walk out this door, I walk into a dragnet, right?”
    The girl squeezes her eyes shut and takes a deep breath and opens them again and says saha .
    I’m fucking done with this. I take up my satchel and make for the door and fumble with the locks and wrench open the door, all while Lucia is yelling that I’m naked, but I don’t care, I’ll walk into a dragnet naked and make the morning news all over India. I slam the door behind me. There’s no police in the hallway. Okay, so they’re outside. I reconsider the nakedness bit and find an empty stairwell where I can put my clothes back on. My bandage has come loose, so my snakebites are bleeding again. I press the tape back in place for now.
    I go outside. There’s no dragnet, no police. Just hovercarts gliding down the street with breakfast, roti and vada and chai. I start walking toward the sea because I don’t want to be still in any one place for too long. I look behind me and no one is following. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe the barefoot girl is acting alone, or just she and Lucia, or maybe a bigger force is arriving soon. I need to go somewhere no one will expect and ideally where no one can follow. Not Mumbai, a city every square inch of which is filmed all day and night.
    Not even India.
    I start walking north on Marine Drive, on the seawall. I pass men in dhotis promenading up and down, hands clasped behind their backs, and businesspeople standing still, talking to the air. There’s a yoga class on one platform and a tai chi class on the next. Young women are drinking cups of coffee in the pearly orange morning mist. I could be one of them, but I’m a human scanner, back and forth, looking for the barefoot girl, looking for any other sign of being followed. I have to get out of the country and make my way to Africa. I’ve been lazy about the journey so far and now I need to be serious. But how will I go so that I won’t be followed? I don’t know my enemy’s resources. I don’t even know my fucking enemy.
    Then I see two little girls spread a sarong on the seawall overlooking drowned Chowpatty Beach. They’re wearing school uniforms of navy and cream. The younger one sits with her legs folded, and the older one takes a place behind her, and begins to braid her hair.
    The elder notices me looking. “Namaste,” she says.
    â€œNamaste,” I say.
    â€œThe Trail is very pretty at dawn.”
    â€œYes, it is.” I feel strange around children. I’ve never had much occasion to interact with them. I don’t know whether to address them as small adults or as intelligent