Mascots Lenore Myka (bio) We came from many corners of the globe, though in truth they were corners found primarily in North America and the European Union, which is to say, the corners of the globe that mattered. We were employed by our governments or the big acronyms—IRC, UNESCO, USAID, ICRC, WHO—and like twins who create a language only they can understand, we discussed IFBs and RFPs, the OAU and OAS; the newest IO partnering with a local NGO. We’d come via other corners of the globe, but those corners were places that hardly mattered—Somalia and Bangladesh; Sudan and Afghanistan; all the many refugee camps scattered like bread crumbs, those purgatorial, in-between places. Hardship posts, though the more sanctimonious among us refused to call them by such a name, insisting that we’d never gone anywhere more beautiful (The mountains! The seaside!), more rich in cultural tradition and history (The pottery! The ruins!). Once, a Swede—a baby—declared that he loved Papua New Guinea. We sniggered. It had been his first post after graduate school; he’d only ever been there and here; it was too soon in his short career for him to realize that he was lying, most especially to himself. The rest of us understood that saying you loved Papua New Guinea was like saying you loved it here, in this country with its clay roads naked children ran about and shat in, its miles of tin shanties you averted your eyes from whenever you took an air-conditioned car to or from the airport. Saying you loved Papua New Guinea was like saying you loved this place where you couldn’t buy a decent loaf of bread much less a bottle of Bordeaux; where you lived and worked behind high walls and locked yourself behind bars, fastening them over the windows and doors of your home at night, and found yourself eyeing the guard at the gate, the gardener and housekeeper and cook, wondering if one of them hadn’t been responsible for the disappearance of the opal pendant you’d inherited from your grandmother or the fifty euros you’d sworn you left in your trousers last Saturday night when you’d come home from the disco drunk and reeking of other expatriates’ sweat. In the city’s main park, in the midst of an afternoon stroll from the British Embassy to the administrative offices of Médecins Sans Frontières, we’d all become accustomed to seeing the men with their tattered trousers puddled around their bare ankles, their hands as stiff and hard as the members they held, working out their frustrations in public. A national pastime, muttered Natalia. We wondered: did she mean the jerking off or the despair? For that’s what it [End Page 126] was—frustration, desperation, despair. Andres would laugh at the sight of them, wave his hand as if to join the club, but Natalia would bark at the men in a dialect the rest of us hadn’t bothered learning (We’re here two, three years tops, we rationalized. What would be the point of all that effort to learn a language we’ll never use again?). Whatever it was she said those men were quick to stop, pulling their trousers up and dashing off into the wild overgrowth that lined the sidewalks crumbling beneath our feet. Andres and Natalia were the only two locals among us. Our mascots, we called them, but behind their backs of course; we knew better than to say it to their faces. We invited them to our parties, the discotheque, the country club. We asked them questions about local culture and food, the history of ethnic tensions in the East, trying our best to appear concerned, united as we were in our humanitarian mission of making this corner of the globe a better place. Natalia had a PhD in microbiology from the National University, was a specialist in infectious diseases. She’d spent time in Washington at NIH and had been a post-doc in Marseille before returning home to, as she put it, Improve the situation on the ground. She worked too...