The Filter Game

Kimberly got the call at four in the afternoon on a Tuesday, standing in the back of the bar she worked at with a crate of limes on the counter and a box cutter in her hand, and she almost cut her thumb when Wade said the words two extra days.

"Two extra days? They just handed you two extra days?"

"The hood went down. The HEPA filter's clogged, the whole lab's on hold until the replacement comes in on a truck from the coast, and apparently nobody can touch anything until it does," Wade said, and she could hear him grinning through the phone, that particular tone he got when the army's incompetence worked in his favor. "So I report back Friday morning instead of Wednesday morning. Forty-eight more hours."

"Forty-eight hours," Kimberly repeated, twenty-nine years old and smiling at a crate of limes like an idiot. She had married this man three years ago, met him when he wandered into her bar off the base road looking for something that wasn't the base bar, and in all that time she had never once been mad about his job, but tonight she felt like sending the lab a fruit basket. "Well. We're not spending forty-eight hours watching television, that's for sure."

"What did you have in mind?"

"You'll see. Wear the gray shirt. Be at the market by seven tomorrow."

"The seashell market? Kim, what are you..."

"Seven, Wade. Gray shirt."

She hung up before he could ask twice, which was the whole point of a game, that the other person doesn't get the rules until they're already playing. She finished the limes, told her manager she wasn't coming in tomorrow because her husband got surprise leave and she intended to use every minute of it, and walked home in the cool evening thinking about what she was going to do to him.

They had played games before, small ones, private ones, the kind of games married people invent when they like each other's company more than television. But this one had been sitting in the back of her head for weeks, ever since a slow night when a tourist had come through the bar in a dress with no back to it and a soldier at the next table had made some comment and Kimberly had thought, not for the first time, that she liked being looked at, and she liked being looked at by her husband most of all, and maybe she wanted to find out how much looking he could stand before he cracked.

So she planned it the way she planned everything, which was thoroughly and then all at once. She picked the dress herself, the rust-colored one with the thin straps, and she decided she would not tell him what the game was until they were standing at the entrance, where he couldn't back out without looking like a coward, which he was not.

The market in Timgad ran three long aisles under strung bulbs, tables of cowries and conches and abalone stacked in sloppy towers, the whole place smelling of brine and dust and diesel from the generators. Off-duty soldiers came through in twos and threes buying shells to mail home, and the vendors knew Kimberly by sight because she bought abalone there when she could afford it. Wednesday evening was quiet. She had checked.

Wade was at the entrance at seven exactly, in the gray shirt, looking as though he had been told to show up somewhere and had wisely not asked questions. He was thirty-two, tall, hands in his pockets, and when he saw her in the rust dress his eyebrows went up and stayed up.

"Okay," he said. "Okay, I'm here. What's the game?"

Kimberly took his arm and walked him a few steps toward the first aisle, then stopped and turned so they were face to face under the first bare bulb, and she kept her voice low, almost a murmur, the way you talk when you're telling somebody a secret in a public place.

"The game is this. You follow me. Three stalls back, no closer, the whole way through the market. You don't talk to me, you don't touch me, you don't let anybody see you following me, because from out here we're just two people who came to the market separately."

"And inside the market?"

"Inside the market I'm going to do things, Wade. Little things. And you're going to watch, and you're going to keep your hands in your pockets and your mouth shut." She watched him process that, watched his jaw work. "You win if I'm completely exposed before we reach the far end. Completely, and on purpose, where somebody could see if they were looking. If we walk out the far side and I'm still covered, you lose, which costs you nothing but your pride, and that's the part I want. Either of us says stop, even once, and it's over with no questions, and nothing in here is a bet we owe each other."

"That's... Kim, that is not a game, that is a trap."

"It's a game with a trap in it. Yes or no?"

He looked past her shoulder at the aisles, at the soldiers and the grandmothers and the bare bulbs, and then back at her, and she could see him doing the arithmetic, the risk of it against the prize of it, whatever he imagined the prize was. He was wrong about the prize, which was going to make it better.

"Yes," he said. "God help me. Yes!"

"Three stalls back. Go."

She left him standing at the entrance and walked into the first aisle alone, and it took maybe ten steps before she felt it, the specific feeling of being followed by someone who was trying not to follow, and it went through her like a warm current. She had expected to be nervous. She was not nervous. She was something else entirely.

The first table was spiny murex, a whole row of them laid out with their long brittle spines sticking up like something out of a doctor's office, and Kimberly stopped and bent over them the way you bend over a table when you're genuinely interested, weight on her elbows, and she let the left strap slide down her arm as she did it. She didn't yank it back. She let it sit there, down around her bicep, the dress loose against her, and she picked up a murex and turned it over and pretended to consider the price, and she did not look back, but she knew exactly where he was, three stalls back, and she knew what he was seeing.

She bought nothing and moved on.

The next stretch was scallop shells, big ribbed ones and little pink ones stacked in a tower that came up to her hip, and there was a bench near the stack where a vendor's mother sat shelling fava beans into a bowl, not looking at anybody, occupied with her thumbs. Kimberly stopped, turned her back to the aisle, and lifted her hem with one hand, just enough, and scratched her thigh where the heat of the day had made her itch, and she took her time about it, fingers on bare skin well above the knee, and the hem rose with her hand and stayed risen.

Behind her, three stalls back, Wade stopped walking entirely.

She heard it, actually heard it, the small scuff of his shoes going quiet on the concrete, and she could picture him standing there among the conches with his breath caught somewhere in his chest, hands jammed in his pockets like she'd told him, doing what he could not do in the bar or the kitchen or any of the ordinary rooms of their life, which was watch her, in public, openly, while she pretended he didn't exist.

The vendor's mother glanced up once at the tall woman scratching her leg and went back to her beans.

Kimberly let the hem fall, straightened, and walked on, and she was smiling so hard she had to press her lips together, because this was already working, this was working better than she had planned, and they had barely started. Two more aisles stretched out ahead of her, lit by bulbs on wires, full of shells and strangers and one man in a gray shirt trying to breathe.

At the next table she found a cowrie the size of her palm, smooth and heavy, and she picked it up and asked the vendor the price just to have a reason to stand there, and while she haggled in her terrible Arabic she reached up with her free hand and pulled the right strap off her shoulder to join the left, so that both of them hung at her elbows and the whole top of the dress was being held up by nothing but her own decision.

The vendor said a number. Kimberly heard it and said something back, and behind her, three stalls back, she heard nothing at all, which told her everything.

The cowrie vendor, a heavy man named Rafik who had sold her abalone back when she could still afford abalone, called out across his table before she could put the shell down. "Kimberly! The American wife! You are buying tonight, or just warming my air with your hands?" and he laughed at his own joke the way he did every time, a big chesty laugh that turned two heads down the aisle. "Buying, Rafik," she said, and she heard her own voice come out steady, which surprised her, because both straps were off her shoulders and her dress was one deep breath away from sliding to the concrete. "Show me something good and I will buy it, and then stop telling customers my business." He waved a hand at her and disappeared under his table and came up with a box of odds and ends, the stuff vendors keep for people who want a souvenir and don't want a shell, and in the box, sitting on top of a coil of wire, was a metal desk organizer, an old brass one with a row of separated compartments, the long kind that sits on a desk and holds pens in one slot and paperclips in another and whatever else in the rest, each compartment its own little walled room.

She had not expected to see a thing like that in a seashell market and it caught her eye and held it, the way the compartments were divided so cleanly, one thing in each place, everything in its own slot and nothing touching anything else. "What is this doing here?" she asked, picking it up. "Somebody's husband sold everything when he left the base," Rafik said, shrugging. "I took it for the weight. Two hundred dinar and it is yours and I am happy." She paid him two hundred and fifty, because it was worth it, and tucked the organizer under her arm against her ribs, and the cold of the brass came right through the thin fabric of the dress and touched her skin and stayed there, and she walked on with the thing pressed against her side like a secret she was carrying for someone.

The aisle bent at the far corner, where a dead bulb had left a gap in the string of lights, and the two stalls on either side of the bend had piled their crates high with conch shells so that the corner itself sat in a pocket of shadow, and it was the quietest spot in the whole market, shielded from the aisle on both sides by shell towers taller than a man. Kimberly walked into that shadow and stopped, and she stood there for a moment