“I was speaking metaphorically, Mr. Kampa, but we do feel certain Dr. Kaprow is dead. Eight years ago he failed to return from a mission undertaken at Dachau in West Germany. The mission was supposedly a test for certain improvements to the temporal-transfer machinery, but it now seems that Dr.
Kaprow insisted upon this dropback out of… call it ‘racial guilt.’ He went to join the martyrs.”
“And never came back?”
“No, sir. We think he purposely rejected that option.”
I scrutinized the young man’s face. “‘We’?”
“Like you, Mr. Kampa, I have dual citizenship. I am the assistant project director for the new incarnation of White Sphinx. My association with Dr. Kaprow began three years after yours ended.”
“You dream,” I said under my breath. “You spirit-travel.”
“I hallucinate, sir. It began when I was a seven-year-old child in a relief center in Karamoja, slowly starving to death.” He paused. “Does my story interest you? I would be happy to tell it.”
“Let’s get out of the sun.”
I led Dirk Akuj down from the ridge and along the lakeshore to the fence surrounding the protectorate.
Here I fumbled with my keys, unlocked the gate, and found a second key to admit us to Blair’s mud-and-wattle shack, now a sort of makeshift museum. Inside, we sat down at a rickety wooden table before a large cabinet containing mastodon tusks, suid teeth, and the skull and horn cores of a medium-sized buffalo, Homioceras nilssoni. Each item was tagged, but a visitor would search in vain for any hominid fossil other than a few jigsaw-puzzle skull fragments. At the cash register postcards featuring the bottomless grin of “Homo zarakalensis” were on sale. I moved to turn on the air-conditioning, for the hut was oppressive with heat and dust motes, but the Ugandan held up his hand.
“I will make my story brief, Mr. Kampa.”
Dirk Akuj explained that in the crowded relief center, after better than a month of watching skeletal children die of malnutrition, disease, and, sometimes, lovelessness, the night turned to plastic for him—here, illustratively, he tapped his scarab tie pin—and out of the melting indigo of his vision a delicate, almond-eyed savior took shape. This unlikely being swallowed Dirk Akuj with a laugh. The boy’s essence flowed into the blue tubing of the stranger’s esophagus, belly, and intestines. Then these organs turned themselves inside-out and unraveled a vast membrane of sky above the desert. Like a cloud, the boy was pulsed across this luminous membrane to a place where he dissolved into rain.
“Endless torrents of nonexistence,” to use my contact’s own words. He did not extract himself from this state—nor did he want to, ever again—until a merciless dawn in Karamoja awakened him to the clamor, dirt, and pathos of the relief center.
Three days later a slender Oriental male closely resembling the “savior” in Dirk Akuj’s dream, or hallucination, arrived in camp. This unusual-looking man, an anomaly among the bearded European photographers, whey-faced nuns, and unsympathetic black soldiers from Kampala, selected five children, seemingly at random, and spirited them out of the camp, out of Uganda, out of Africa.
“To the United States,” the man concluded.
“How?”
“It’s difficult to recall. With many official-looking papers and a persuasive manner. He was soft-spoken but very insistent and direct. He did not permit himself to be hassled, you see.”
“But what was his motive?”
Despite a Do Not Touch placard, Dirk Akuj lifted the tooth of an ancient warthog from the display cabinet and turned it between his fingers like a jewel. His only response to my question was a half-mocking, half-saintly smile.
“Only five?” I asked the Ugandan.
“He did what he could. I was raised in the family of a wealthy real-estate broker in Southern California. I continued to hallucinate my future. One such hallucination prophesied my meeting with Dr. Kaprow on a high school R.O.T.C. trip from San Bernadino, where we lived, to Edwards Air Force Base. And…” He let his voice trail off.
“And what?”
“And it came to pass.” He returned the suid tooth to the cabinet. “It is hot in here, isn’t it?”
“Why did you want to talk to me, Mr. Akuj?”
“Why don’t we resume our discussion in a more comfortable setting? This, sir, was just a get-acquainted session. I am also Uganda’s representative to the official opening of the Sambusai Sands. We’ll see each other this evening in the cabaret.” Before I could raise a protest, he glided to the door and out into the glare of late afternoon. “Wait a few minutes before following me back to the hotel, Mr. Kampa. I can let myself out.”
Annoyed, suspicious, perplexed, I stood on the porch watching my pantherine visitor retrace his path to the metal gate. Here he pivoted and waved, his plastic scarab glowing almost incandescently.
“I can scarcely wait to meet your daughter,” he called. He pushed through the gate and strode nimbly toward the butt end of the retaining-wall walkway back to the hotel. I wished that a lion would fall upon him, a crocodile leap from the water to seize him.
Monicah and her regal galley slaves were no longer on the lake. Why had Dirk Akuj brought her into our little talk so frequently? This question frightened me because I thought I knew the answer.
In the cabaret—more accurately, the grand entertainment hall of the Sambusai Sands, a multitiered dining floor with an orchestra pit and an immense stage hung with zebra-striped foil curtains—a thousand or more people had gathered for the official grand opening of our billion-dollar Convention and Recreational Centre. Portions of the complex had been operating for nearly three months, but tonight marked the culmination of our labors, a new beginning on the road to economic independence. At tables scattered like islands in the electric dark sat many African dignitaries, residually wealthy Arabs, American service personnel, and casino-hopping European playpeople. On each side of the hall, at balcony level, leopards stalked back and forth in lifelike dioramas of the Pleistocene.
Nearest the orchestra pit (from which the strains of “Born Free” had been emanating for twenty minutes) were the tables reserved for Zarakali cabinet ministers, the commanding officers of the bases at Bravanumbi and Russell-Tharaka, and the representatives of every country in the East African Confederation. Monicah and I shared our table with Vice Admiral Cuomo and the Tanzanian representative, a handsome Arusha woman who clearly disapproved of the festivities.
A table away sat Dirk Akuj, vaguely sinister in a phosphorescent lime-green tuxedo jacket. His name, I had discovered after returning to my suite, did indeed appear on the official guest list, but I had never supposed that any African invited to our grand opening would also be a shill for White Sphinx. I tried to avoid the man’s glance, but he kept ogling Monicah and giving me enigmatic smiles, and I was hard pressed to ignore him.
Admiral Cuomo was something of a help because he had engaged the Arusha woman and me in animated small talk about his favorite subject, ice hockey, about which he supposed us intensely curious because of our lack of exposure to the sport. Monicah sat silent, encouraged in her moroseness by the chilly attitude of Rochelle Mutasingwa, the Tanzanian. She was unaware of Dirk Akuj’s interest in her, and I was grateful for her failure to notice the man. As Admiral Cuomo faithfully recounted the high points of last year’s Stanley Cup finals, the evening seemed to stretch out before us like a deathwatch.
The dying strains of “Born Free” at last fell captive to silence, and the Marakoi Pops struck up a fanfare.
The expectant nattering of the crowd faded away, the stage was brilliantly spotlighted, and the American singer-composer Manny Barrelo emerged from the wings beside the self-propelled wheelchair of President Mutesa Tharaka.