It was an eyesore, the scar, a small lumpy tumescence above my friend’s left eyebrow, like an overgrown pimple. It was ugly. If he could’ve he would’ve hidden it, but his hair stuck straight up from his forehead like a wiry brush reaching for the clouds. So he tried to hide his entire self instead. Sitting at his desk he’d tuck his long limbs toward his body, knees to chest and calves clutched in tight, as though he were trying to pull himself shut. And he never spoke. At the beginning of the day, when the teacher called his name, he put his hand up wordlessly, raising it over his face so that it concealed not just his forehead, but most of his features, disappearing even as he admitted that he was, yes, here.
The boys in our class—a terror of eight-year-olds, myself among them—followed him during recess, goading him to speak. What is that? we’d say, pointing at his forehead. Is it a bug bite? A volcano? He’d cover the scar and look away, saying nothing.
The following spring he began to mete out single words, then sentences. He spoke an accented and scholarly English. He and I, the two fastest runners on the football pitch, became friends. He was always over at my house. His aunt worked late and my parents were happy to have him around: Such a polite and quiet boy; he could teach you a thing or two.
One afternoon we were sitting on the old blue duvet, eating fried potatoes wrapped in paper saturated with so much grease it was translucent. I was talking about my epileptic cousin, who I had recently witnessed having a seizure. He nearly died, I said dramatically, although it wasn’t exactly true.
My friend touched his scar and said, Ah, me as well. Then he began to tell the story.
In the country where he’d grown up, my friend explained, his father had served as the Minister of Wildlife and Game. It was a minor role but carried responsibility and prestige. My friend was proud to be the Minister’s son. Then the coup happened. The new regime made a list of every person who served in the old cabinet, and not just them, but their spouses, their children, their parents. Soldiers ambushed my friend’s mother and brothers on their way to school. But my friend wasn’t with them. He was home with a fever. Home with his father. A soldier found them there.
The first shot missed, my friend said. The second hit here. The third went into my father’s brain.
The fried potatoes had grown cold. Outside someone was kicking a ball into a wall in a hollow pulselike rhythm.
Then my questions came bursting out. How could people let this happen? Why didn’t the police stop it? Why didn’t they vote the old regime out and put them in jail?
Patiently, my friend explained: others would’ve been killed if they had protected my friend and his family. The police, the court, and the judges belonged to the new government. And there were no more elections.
Finally I burst out, But that can’t happen!
It can’t, he said, but it did. Now there is nothing else to be done.
That shocked me into silence, his resignation: There is nothing else to be done.
I don’t know whether we ever talked about it again. Certainly it changed my view of my friend. The way he curled into himself seemed less like a girding and more like an attempt to contain the horror safely inside. I wondered how a person survived that. We remained friends until we were teenagers, when he went to a different sixth form. But even as time moved us further from one another, the thing he’d said came back to me again and again: There is nothing else to be done. It gnawed at me when I received my exam results and realized that because of several low marks, I wouldn’t be able to attend university. When I got a stultifying job at the local council: There is nothing else to be done. And when I was made redundant: nothing else. A few years ago, when cancer bloomed in my wife, caught too late for treatment, the words became a comfort. I thought then I understood what my friend had meant. My wife wasted away and really, there was nothing else to be done.
Recently someone I knew from school sent me a news article. At first I didn’t understand why. It was one of those things that seems to happen all the time now, though you don’t like to think about it: a young man with a machete attacked a children’s music recital. Five children and two adults were injured before one of the fathers disarmed the attacker. I had to read the article twice to understand that the hero of this story was my old friend.
A video was embedded. In it, my friend was older, with parentheses on either side of his mouth, his hair receding as though to emphasize the keloid on his brow, which had neither shrunken nor softened as he’d aged.
A towheaded reporter tilted a microphone toward him and asked him if he had been afraid.
Everyone is afraid with a weapon pointed at them.
The reporter was unsatisfied. People are calling you a hero. How did you know what to do?
My friend raised his hand, then lowered it, like he was waving away or thought, or had reached to touch his scar but thought better of it.
No one knows what to do, he said. My child was in danger. Her friends. And we are all already dead too soon. So that man could not be allowed to keep his weapon. There was nothing else to be done.
