Sakal wouldn’t say a word. He turned around, cut in line, and entered the station. I stood still, trying not to think. I started to wander aimlessly outside the station. So many thoughts were racing through my head that I almost stepped on a kitten. I tripped. The kitten crossed the road, almost getting run over twice. I sat down on the curb and took my cell phone out of my pocket. I stared for a few moments at the name I’d given her in my contacts, “Girl from the north.” Then I tried calling her again. She didn’t answer.

9.

IT WASN’T UNTIL SUNDAY, when I returned to Neptune, that I had heard about Korczak’s disappearance. The last person to have seen him was the ordnance guy who slept in the same room; he said that before he fell asleep he saw Korczak reading in his bunk. When he woke up, Korczak was gone. Six other soldiers heard the shot. They spent the entire Saturday looking for him. The only evidence they found was a cartridge near the canteen and a few feet away, a puddle of blood soaked into the sand.

They didn’t find Korczak. Neither his body nor his weapon. Soldiers from the criminal investigation division arrived, investigated, and came up empty-handed; they declared him a missing person. I told them about the rookie trial, said it might have had something to do with that, but they didn’t seem too interested. Rumors began to spread. A soldier who was on guard in the watchtower that night claimed he saw a tall figure hitchhiking from the bus station, and Bejo said that a friend of his from the adjutancy couldn’t find Korczak’s records on any computer. In a matter of days, a strange Neptunian thought started creeping in that maybe Korczak was simply a figment of our imaginations. An outpost apparition.

If it hadn’t been for his mother, I would probably have filed these events under my long list of bizarre military experiences. But two weeks after he disappeared, his mother showed up—a shriveled woman wrapped in a scarf and red coat, who walked through the gate one morning dragging a suitcase almost as big as herself. She approached each and every soldier on the base, asking in her heavy British accent if anyone had seen her son. She spent the whole day under the blazing winter sun, moving frenziedly from room to room, locker to locker, searching with trembling hands for the precise point in time and space in which her child had disappeared.