Where is he?
“I don’t know,” she repeats.
I don’t know.
“What do you know?” His fingers grab at her arm.
There’s a cave made of red, she could say. But if she did, she would have to imagine how its agitated occupant got there, and if she did, she would have to start with Wuoth Ogik, and if she tried, she would hear both Odidi and her old I swear. The silence.
She says, “I must go home.”
He suddenly asks, “Bernardo?”
She swivels her body, eyes wide. Startled.
He says, “You called out to him in your sleep — he makes you cry.”
“Cry?” she asks.
Isaiah leans forward to wipe tears from Ajany’s face. He shows them to her, the glistening on his fingers.
She sinks to the floor, legs crossed. Her stammer is so bad she has to pause to breathe in.
“Who is he?” Isaiah asks.
Choose.
“A man,” she says.
“He makes you afraid.”
Silence.
She looks to the floor.
“A hungry man I made God.” And now there’s a blank. She thinks.
Isaiah stares down at her. “Is he ‘home’ for you?”
“No.” She shivers. “Oh no.”
“Where is he?”
“Bahia. Where I live … lived … We were together. Four years. More.”
“Not long.”
“Long enough.”
“For what?”
“To get lost.” Her face is pinched.
“You’re here.”
“I cut myself out.”
“Cut?”
An empty-eyed look, speaking with reluctance. “From him. His ghost.” A wry twist of mouth. “Blood. Butterfly shaped. Like an oryx mask.” She gestures.
“Oryx mask?” Isaiah rubs his face.
She nods. “Had to cut myself away. Had to.”
Isaiah leans toward Ajany. “Meaning?”
She looks up at him, mute.
“What?”
“Was tied up inside him. Had to cut free.”
“From Bernardo?”
“Yes.”
“So? How?”
“I … uh … the knife … uhm …” No other way to put it. And there was an odd relief in speaking the truth aloud. “… stabbed him.”
Isaiah jars his spine when he sits on the floor.
Long exhale.
Churning deep-inside turbulence. Aware of fragility, its sometimes-madness. The woman hugging her knees beside him.
He asks, “Why?”
The question he asked his warlord-photography subjects.
She repeats the same answer they gave him: “I don’t know.”
Quiet.
Somewhere outside; an early-evening cicada vibrates a song.
“When?” Isaiah asks.
Christmas Eve.
A woman in a turquoise dress with a flower in her hair, hips swaying in the night. No doors open for stragglers desiring explanations for why stars twinkle when the world had fallen apart. Kormamaddo the sky camel should have fled. The song of stars became still. She would call Odidi. He always knew what to do.
“Onde Bernardo, Arabel?” Good-natured laughter, the tangle of a web made of other people’s expectations.
Find Bernardo.
She would beseech him to keep her. She had taken off her shoes to return to the party that much faster, had stepped out of the lift.
Isaiah says, “You were afraid.”
“No.”
“Why stab?”
She says, “The knife was there. Next to the big-boobed woman’s golden thong. My replacement.”
“Anger,” Isaiah says.
“No.”
“Why stab?”
She squirms. “To loosen myself.”
“You could have gone.”
“He always finds … found me.”
“What was so awful that you couldn’t speak it?” He addresses other ghosts. He remembers how he fell from lofty power’s altitudes.
Ajany’s lips tremble.
Silence.
Isaiah smells words, hears smells, and tastes sounds. Inhales blood and sea and salt and the sound of waves that once swept away huge portions of his life.
Now.
Chin dropping to chest, refuge in the mundane. “Meet for dinner in thirty?” He gets up. No reply sought.
The room is stifling.
He slams her door in error.
Retreating footsteps. A wondering. What if every human is born with a volume of madness to resolve? Isaiah hunts for and retrieves his keys. Some seize and drive those forces into an inner corral. He enters his room. Others are overwhelmed; they submerge and quietly drown. He locks the door behind him.
Good evening, Jos.
Evening, ma’am.
He is there, head bowed, as though in prayer.
She will color absence green.
Like grass and life.
His shirt.
Black skies outside.
Rain scatters on the red brick ledge.
Ajany studies raindrops. That way she can postpone meeting Isaiah. There, the salve: washing blood from jagged wounds. Here, the waterfalclass="underline" tumbling into fire, becoming steam, and returning as rain again. Suddenly, next to her, a pointy-nosed waiter says, “Madam, Calisto the chef recommends chicken tikka masala with a choice of potatoes, ugali, chapati, or rice.” The waiter escorts her to a chair opposite Isaiah.
Not a green shirt, more like a shade of teal.
Eyes lowered, Isaiah suggests, “Chicken?”
A nod.
She counts the bamboo-wood strips of her place mat. Outside, quiet rain. He lifts his head. Between them, magnetic tension, and Isaiah’s contemplation of Ajany becomes an incendiary thing. Drawn to look, she finds his voracious, restive longing. Its confusion. Blinded, she allows his hunger, revealing her own, breathing through half-open lips. Suspended seconds, soft fall of rain. On the table with its plain white cloth, fingertips touch. Stillness. Clanking plates on a tray. Footsteps. Curried steam. The food is served.
31
TWO NIGHTS AGO, HE MADE THE DECISION. NYIPIR HOVERED outside Galgalu’s boma, carrying a huge empty gunnysack. He needed Galgalu’s company. Bandaged and balmed, Galgalu had returned from the medical center the night before.
Nyipir told Galgalu, “There’s something in the red cave.”
“It’s forbidden,” Galgalu replied.
Nyipir said, “For that reason, we go.…”
Galgalu said, “It’s time?”
All the while, Galgalu had known.
They ventured into the twisted darkness, crawled on the ground until they reached a sliver of light. They paused before entering into the chamber of images, stories, and bones, on their knees like penitents. When they re-emerged, they were burdened and changed. Nyipir insisted on carrying Hugh’s bones alone.
Three white-tailed honeyguides listen to human songs of unraveling oaths. Galgalu still prays over an Englishman’s ghost, pleading for a truce, since they are all so far from home.
Nyipir completes a new cairn within forty-eight hours. In that time, he has talked, mostly to human bones in a gunnysack, until his tongue is swollen. Galgalu hears some of those words, their plea for mercy.
Nyipir spoke of an almost-teenage boy running from a psychotic uncle whose head he had split with a flying hoe, a teenage gravedigger with plans to head out to Burma to retrieve family ghosts.
He spoke to the bones and Galgalu, of Hugh. “I used to be a child.” Nyipir says, “Before I met a man who walked with power.”
“He took me for police training. ‘Can’t work with “bleddy” civilians,’ he said — remember? I fed and washed a grown man who could kill if he wanted to — and he did. But he showed me how not to be afraid. And work, always work with Bolton. Driving. Washing dishes, clothes. Polishing brass and boots. Fetch, carry, hunt, cook, guard, light fires, set plates, boil bathwater, and set up a safari camp, walk, hunt, talk, fight, listen. And tea. At ten and at four.