The wine he had drunk in the heat of the day had not made Joshua receptive to syllogistic argument. He felt that he had fallen into an intricate web. Now he was creeping along a filament leading deeper inward rather than out. What multi-eyed predator awaited him at the heart of this pattern?
Distracted, he muttered, “Persephone.”
“I beg your pardon.”
“He wants Monicah to spend a portion of each year in the underworld and a portion on earth with the living—like Persephone.”
Blair laughed. “Ah, yes. But which is which?”
“I’ve brought her out of the land of the dead, Dr. Blair.” He gestured at the crowd in the restaurant, at a strip of sky visible through a gap in the awning. “Everything up here is both. Not just in Marakoi. All over. Everywhere. There, too; even in the underworld.”
“You’re a trifle tipsy, aren’t you?”
“You’ve influenced President Tharaka in this. You want Monicah in Zarakal a part of each year so that you can prod and poke and measure and compare. Am I right?”
“That would be helpful. And no more harmful to the Grub, I would think, than a yearly physical examination.”
“She’s not one of your goddamn fossils!” Joshua was conscious of heads turning to track this outburst.
He lowered his voice: “Not one of your goddamn fossils. A human being. Helen’s daughter.”
Blair put his glass aside, scraped his chair back, and stood. “Of course. And your daughter, too. The medical people at the base have confirmed as much. So she’s yours, and Mzee Tharaka has interceded to insure that no one disputes your claim to her. His intercession warrants a little gratitude, don’t you think? Please consider this, Joshua, when the time comes to make a real decision.” After paying for his share of the wine with several notes engraved with portraits of the President in his hominid-skull crown and leopard-skin cloak, the Great Man gave Joshua an affectionate pat on the shoulder and headed off down Tharaka Boulevard toward the National Museum, from which he had apparently come for his midday break.
Joshua gave the African wine steward and the Indian waiter extravagant tips. Then he toddled uncertainly into the sunlight. The brightness of the buildings and the paving squares stunned him.
Peacocks strutted in a small emerald plaza beyond the nearest intersection. He walked about aimlessly for nearly an hour. Engine noise made him look up. Over the city a jet arrowed north-northwest into a wilderness of achingly empty sky. It was his mother’s flight to Rome, the first stop on her journey back to the States.
“Ciao,” he told the aircraft, saluting. “Ciao.” The other word he left unspoken, reverberating in his memory.
A chapter in his life—an era, rather—had come to a close. The slide show had finally ended. The early Pleistocene was no longer accessible to him in dreams, and the White Sphinx program was over, probably for good. Here he was, not quite twenty-five years old, and he was going to have to make a new life for himself. A host of options lay before him, but, tipsy with Chablis and sunshine, at the moment all he could truly feel was a powerful sense of loss and uncertainty. All the routes to his previous self—the self that had tried to survive as a loner in Fort Walton Beach—were blocked, and he did not know which new path to choose.
“Ciao,” he said again, and this time he was not talking to his mother.
Coda
With my mother’s blessing I entitled my book about my adventures in prehistoric East Africa Eden in My Dreams. It was not published in the United States until 1994, seven years after my return from the distant past, when the American government grudgingly lifted the lid on the White Sphinx Project and acknowledged officially that my cockamamie stories about visiting the Pleistocene as an Air Force chrononaut were not cockamamie after all. In the interval, however, I had become a Zarakali citizen and cabinet minister. Indeed Eden in My Dreams had first been published in 1993 in English and Swahili editions by Gatheru & Sons Publishing Company of Marakoi. The American press had been quick to report the appearance of my book and to accuse both the administration and the Pentagon of sullying my name and appropriating millions upon millions of tax dollars without Congressional approval, an eerie recapitulation of the flap that had attended my departure from the States in 1990. By this time, though, I was too busy taking care of my daughter and serving as Zarakal’s Minister of Tourism and Intercultural Affairs to worry about the fuss and flutter in Washington, D.C.
Time, as it always does, passed.
On the fifteenth anniversary of my return from my stay among the habilines (the very date in August that Monicah, a.k.a. the Grub, had at the ripe old age of six chosen as her “official birthday”), I took my daughter to the spanking-new Sambusai Sands Convention and Recreational Centre on the shores of scenic Lake Kiboko. This was my birthday gift to her. She would soon be off to the States to resume her education at a private school in Kent, Connecticut, and I was hoping that a few days of paddleboating, Ping-Pong, shuffleboard, swimming, crocodile watching, and casino games would erase her melancholy mood.
Although White Sphinx had long ago purged me of my spirit-traveling episodes, I knew what Monicah was suffering. She dreamed as I had once dreamed. Not of her mother’s cat-eat-chalicothere grasslands, however, but of a vivid utopian tomorrow whose inaccessibility sometimes frustrated her beyond bearing.
I, the past; she, the future. By nature Monicah was a cheerful child, whom both Jeannette and Anna had come to know and like, but in the wake of recent sociopolitical catastrophes (from which Zarakal, by means of a friendship treaty with the Pan-Arabian League and a strong leadership role in the East African Confederation Movement, had partly insulated itself) her dreams had increased in number, duration, and intensity. She was a tormented young woman, my Monicah. If this holiday did not rub the rust from the rose, I could not in good conscience send her off to school in Connecticut.
I had then served in Zarakal’s cabinet for nearly a decade. At thirty-nine I was still the youngest member of the National Assembly with an appointment to the President’s cabinet, and it was one of my duties to be on hand for the gala Grand Opening of the Sambusai Sands Hotel and Cabaret. Not merely by chance, this event coincided with the anniversary of my deliverance from the Pleistocene and with Monicah’s birthday.
My position had its perks. When Monicah and I arrived at the newly completed Alistair Patrick Blair Airport, a group of Sambusai ilmoran, or warriors, met our private jet and escorted us into the terminal—where two of their number, apparently the winners of a lot drawing, attached themselves to us as additional bodyguards. Imposing in their ceremonial cloaks and ornate beaded headbands, they were soft-spoken fellows who had attended a Catholic mission school at a nearby frontier outpost. They towered over my daughter and me.
Monicah, despite my protests in Marakoi, had shaved her head and donned elegant African garb as (her own words, I swear) “prophylactics against the corrupting influence of the resort.” Now she would have to wear a wig to her classes at Kent School. Our Sambusai bodyguards did not mind. They turned their deep brown eyes on Monicah with respectful admiration. Good. I had begun to fear that all my plans on her behalf were going to be thwarted by her own intransigent attitude. Maybe the casual closeness of a pair of innocently virile males would improve her disposition. I sent her down to the paddleboat marina with the Sambusai warriors and one well-armed security agent while my aide and I checked in at the hotel’s main desk and rode upstairs to scrutinize our V.I.P. suite.