Michael McKerley grew up in Galveston County, Texas. He later attended Vanderbilt University as a Harold Sterling Vanderbilt scholar, studying under Walter Sullivan, the last of the Agrarians. In 1997, he received a master’s of fine arts from the University of Montana but tabled fiction temporarily to work for a database company in California. “It was the height of the Internet boom; if I was sentient and knew how to turn on a computer, people would pay me,” he says.

McKerley moved back to Nashville at the end of 1999 to work on a book set here; a section of that novel won third place in the Nashville Scene short fiction contest in 2001. Today McKerley is a senior systems engineer for a local Internet service provider. He lives with his wife and children in East Nashville and is back to writing again in earnest.

Fiction judge Marc Smirnoff writes that “the author’s daring in putting this story onto foreign land and giving us a glimpse of what life could be like elsewhere has to be acknowledged. Sometimes writers don’t stretch out enough; this one does. The story isn’t just a one-note exercise but actually builds up to an epiphany.”

The world has mostly forgotten about us, what with everything else going on, but we’re still here and I’m still sitting in front of this old computer in this old office without any windows to look out over the river. We used to have better offices and better computers, but they were lost when the building we shared with a Swedish manufacturing concern burned to the ground. The hard drive is clicking again. That’s not a good sign. I can’t find the right cables or connectors for the tape drive I’ve scrounged up. Yesterday two Serbian children in Gorzdevac were shot and killed under our protection.

I have two databases, one for information given to us by people looking for their relatives, and another to catalogue the remains. Everyday, sometimes twice or three times a day, I run queries based on the information in one against the data in the other. Whenever there’s an approximate match, someone who speaks Serbian or Albanian, depending, is dispatched to visit the family and takes them to see the body, wherever it’s stored. Nowadays we have fewer and fewer matches, not because we don’t have bodies, God no, but because—I think—people have started to lose interest in saying goodbye to the dead.

When I first arrived here, I took a while organizing the data. The human body is such a beautiful and complex thing, and there are so many ways to break it. I pored over the information we had already, most of it in spreadsheets so cumbersome they crashed, and started working on the datatypes, the tables, the columns, the planes of information, growing, intersecting. Some of the categories I used, like for hair color, turned out to be practically useless, because everyone here has black hair, Serb or Albanian, alive or dead. I have columns for sex, approximate age, location when found, location where believed to be killed, position of entrance and exit wounds, if any, a table for clothes, if any, and gunshot residue (GSR), if any. I was—in the beginning—against cataloguing religious or ethnic consideration. I mean, come on, they’re dead, how do you know what they believed, or in which language they were sung lullabies as they fell asleep next to the window. But that was my naïveté. We find 46 middle-aged men lined up in neat rows inside a mosque, each with a bullet hole through the left eye, and you know, you know. I have a whole table of information regarding people’s teeth.

The interviews with relatives take place at the table to my left. The relatives are almost always women, grandmothers with their white scarves and long black dresses, sisters, girlfriends, wives, mothers. Some of them have been shot themselves, and many of them have children, whom they drag along behind. At the table are four wooden chairs with ladder backs. Helena, she of the scientific mind and long legs, sits in one of them. Often more than three people come in at a time, entire extended families will arrive, having made the trip from the country, but Helena never gives up her seat, so some who have come have to stand in their wet boots next to the radiator as they shake their heads slowly and try to speak. Helena thinks it’s important to exude a certain amount of compassion, but a certain amount of authority too. She’s a forensics specialist, and often acts like a doctor when confronted with people who are still living. “Who knows,” she says in her lilting English, “the baba there, she might have shot with bullets a few people herself, you don’t know.”

There was a time when there were so many women, so many mothers and daughters, they lined up outside the building in the pre-dawn chill, and by 8:30 in the morning, when I showed up, the anteroom was teeming with new faces, people were spilling out the doors and shouting at me. I had to shove my way through them to get to the backroom. I opened the door and slammed it shut behind me. Helena always had a suit. The pale blue flag draped the wall behind her. “You Americans,” she would greet me, “always late.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I said, “I’ve heard it before,” because I would have heard it before, I would have heard it every day we worked together. She was Slovenian, but her father was German, and she was like clockwork that way.

After I’d slammed close the door, we’d take one deep, synchronized breath, and then we’d open it again and start screaming in English and Slovenian and Serbian and Albanian and Spanish. Absolutely no one there spoke Spanish, but it was the only language besides English I knew. “We’re taking one family at a time, only one family at a time, stay back, stop, quítate, if everyone would be patient, this would go frigging kaq quicker.” That’s what we’d say.

One family, finally, would be extracted from the others. Helena would sit down in one of the chairs. I’d stand at the computer. Mostly I typed gibberish as they spoke, and would have to wait for Helena’s written reports, because I didn’t understand anything they said. I was typing simply because they wanted to see activity, they wanted action, they wanted to know something would happen and that they weren’t, once again, reciting their story to a bunch of foreigners who would listen quickly, trying to display the right mixture of shock and empathy in their faces, before they went on. I did learn some words quickly, and I was able to enter those real-time. In Albanian I could translate musliman (Muslim), tatuazh (tattoo), flokë me kaçurrela (curly hair), and lately, in Serbian too, my vocabulary is beginning to grow: srbin (Serbian), tamni (dark), dobovanje (tattoo). Tattoos, even if they aren’t that common, especially among the Muslims, are something Helena always asks about. Though a body might be badly burned, she can often tell if the skin itself has once been colored.

It was Helena who led the UNMIK Forensics Team in Racak, and what she found there didn’t fit very well within my database code. I kept on trying to enter her findings into the form I’d built, and the forms kept on beeping obscenely back at me. The table with the information about heads, I finally remembered, was constrained to the table about bodies, meaning that for every entry in one there needed to be a matching entry in the other, but, of course, the bodies in Racak were decapitated and we still haven’t found the skulls. Why did I make the constraint? Because you expect bodies to have heads. But I guess it was, in retrospect, a gross architectural error. There were so many reports coming in then, so much information to organize, I didn’t have time to redesign everything, so I just added another column in the one table, called it “Present?” and for thirty-five lines entered

NO

NO

NO....

UNMIK, by the way, is the United Nations Interim Mission in Kosovo. It should be UNIMIK, I know, but they didn’t ask me.

When we’re doing the interviews, and I look at Helena, all I think about is her legs. There’s something about being here that makes my mind croon, “Let’s pro-create, let’s pro-create, let’s pro-create!” I’m not sure she feels the same way. We did sleep with each other once, in Zagreb. We hadn’t traveled there together, really. We weren’t like that. I’d already lined up a three-day leave, and Helena, suddenly, had been forced to take a vacation. She took me out to the cafes she remembered from her youth, when Croatia and Slovenia, and Kosovo, for that matter, were all the same country. We smoked our duran (tobacco) and drank our tamno pivo (dark beer), and her glittery stockings were gliding up and down her unshaven calves as we walked up the steps to her hotel. When we got to her door, I did something very unusual for me (and for most database administrators, I imagine), I started stroking the back of her neck as she fiddled with her keys, and when she turned around, she pulled me in.

That was after she’d been missing for a few days, and the UNMIK police were searching everywhere for her. In Pristina, she found the body of a woman and of an infant boy she presumed to be—and later proved—was the woman’s son. It’s not an unusual occurrence here, and Helena is no bleeding heart. But what was unusual about this woman and this son was that Helena put the time of death of the child at least a week after that of the mother. She got to the bodies quickly. She felt she was accurate in her estimations. Yet there’s no way an infant can survive that long without nourishment or water, much less with a punctured thigh. Someone had bandaged the wound, someone was feeding the child, but whoever it was was not a doctor, and had not brought the boy to see one either. Helena fell out of communication with the team. She didn’t answer her cell phone. One of the jeeps went missing. She was searching for kilometers around Pristina to find the person, to ask her, or him, what had happened, why the child had been brought back, probably in the dead of night, to be placed, cold, in the collapsed house next to the body of his mother. No one she asked would acknowledge they knew anything, but surely the child must have made noise. We were here, is what she wanted to say. UNMIK was here. We have doctors, why wasn’t the boy brought to us?

It is a question, I’m afraid, we won’t be asking just once.

That was February of last year. We’re still at it, interviewing, cataloguing. I did, just this afternoon, get a call saying more hard drives have been shipped. I will back up the database to log, and then ship the drives to Geneva, where someone else can rebuild it, if required. The office is not as hectic as it used to be. The emergency’s over, but there’s a still a lot of work to do. We will in fact remain indefinitely.

I hope Helena gets reassigned back to one of the forensics teams. More remains have been uncovered outside Cuska. She’s an incredible investigator, if you ask me, and I read everyone’s reports. She’s not a very good interviewer. Sometimes the mothers begin to cry and Helena just sits there forgetting that there’s such a thing as tissue. That’s when I take the kids over to the computer. The kids, they live in refugee camps mostly, but they know about the Internet. I don’t tell them we’re not connected. I just open a blank page and let them type. “HelO?” they write. “Hallo. HOw are you? Whos out ther?”

Maybe I will take Helena to the place outside Mitrovica where the river forks and the meadows of scarlet poppies roll away in every direction, as far as you can see. She will roll in the dirt and laugh. Perhaps I will say something like, “In Galveston, when I was a kid, I used to sit on the seawall and watch the shrimp boats come in.” We’ll run through the flowers, our arms outstretched, our hands stained from the crushed petals, we’ll fall to the ground. I will be smiling, smiling, I won’t be able to curtail my grin. The hairs on the back of my neck will all be standing up. But as I go down, bravely, to kiss her, will her eyes look away, will I know what she’ll be thinking? Her hands will be in the soil, her mind on the flowering hills. She could walk those meadows for days, and who knows what she would find?