Only the ape impersonating me remained in view, sheltering its baby doll from the myriad swirling tatters of crepe paper. The other chimps had hurried off stage-left when projectors mounted all about the hall threw holographic images of several spotted hyenas into their midst. To the oohing and ahing of the audience these hallucinatory creatures advanced on my pongid counterpart, their eyes scintillating like topazes. Lisa Chagula, on the apron of the stage, pantomimed her sympathetic horror, covering her eyes with her forearm and crouching away to one side. At which point a gaudy mock-up of a lunar module descended from on high—on wires—to rescue Monicah and me. This contraption contained a pair of chimpanzees in show-business spacesuits, who jumped from their craft and began pulling bright yellow fire hoses out its hatch.
“I can’t stand this!” Monicah exclaimed, loud enough to be heard over the clamorous music.
“Do you feel your dignity is being assailed?” asked Rochelle Mutasingwa, as if it were rather late to worry about the matter.
“Not mine, the chimpanzees’.”
“Lisa Chagula and the Gombe Stream Chimps have been Tanzania’s good-will ambassadors for years.
Their dignity has never been questioned.”
“Maybe not,” Monicah replied. “But this is a vulgar exploitation of the little chaps.”
“Exploitation!”
“You heard me. Those chimps are your niggers, Miss Mutasingwa, and the late President Nyerere would never have approved anything so mean and disgusting.”
“Ladies,” said Admiral Cuomo. “Ladies.”
“Your daughter’s remarks go beyond the bounds of adolescent irresponsibility,” Rochelle Mutasingwa told me angrily. “I wonder if they have your approval.”
“No, of course not. Monicah hasn’t been—”
“For God’s sake, Daddy!”
On stage, the Grub and I were climbing into the lunar module with the chimps in the sequin-covered pressure suits. Doused, the crepe-paper streamers lay flat on the floor, while ancient Mount Tharaka, delicately backlit, continued to mutter and spew. Monicah did likewise, using vivid American expressions that I would have thought alien to the vocabularies of her affluent classmates. The lunar module, meantime, ascended on paper flames—and wires—into a canvas empyrean.
When Lisa Chagula and all seven chimps returned from the wings to exult in their triumph, Monicah abruptly stood up and swept her champagne glass to the floor. More monkey business appeared to be in the works, and she was going to have none of it. Fortunately, the darkness cloaking the hall concealed her distress from everyone but those in our immediate vicinity.
“Daddy, I don’t feel well. I’ve got to get out of here.”
I was torn. To desert my guests would be inhospitable, almost a breach of diplomatic etiquette.
However, if Monicah were genuinely ill, I owed it to her to escort her back to our suite. During the entertainment to follow, my absence would be of small consequence to these people.
As the Gombe Stream Chimps initiated a tumbling exhibition, Dirk Akuj pushed back his chair and made a tactful half bow. “At your service, Mr. Kampa. Allow me the honor.”
Alarmed, I tried to protest.
“He’ll do fine, Daddy. Spiffy jacket, polished shoes, a credit to his tribe, whatever it may be.”
“Karamojong, Miss Kampa.”
“Right. A survivor. He’s got to be okay, Daddy. Ta ta. We’ll see you whenever you can tear yourself away.”
Arm in arm, they disappeared together into the multitiered dark. Tim Njeri and another security man would intercept them at the door and accompany them upstairs, but I still did not appreciate the turn that events had taken. Dirk Akuj was a stranger with admitted ulterior motives, and his interest in my daughter, just fifteen today, struck me as ominous, something other than the tardy fibrillations of a young man’s fancy. After all, the Ugandan was not that much younger than I.
Carrying congratulatory birthday telegrams from Jeannette Monegal and the Whitcombs, I stumbled off the elevator onto the fourteenth floor. It was two-thirty in the morning, and Tim Njeri and Daniel Eunoto were standing sentinel at the door to my suite. Actually, Daniel was in a kind of upright trance while Timothy crouched doggo behind a potted eucalyptus. They might have been ilmoran in the bushveldt rather than security agents in the corridor of a resort hotel.
“She’s feeling better, I think,” Timothy told me.
“What about Mr. Akuj from Uganda?”
Tim nodded at the door.
“He’s still with her?” I was incredulous.
“Unless he jumped from the balcony, sir. There’s no place else for him to go.” Tim correctly read my disapproving look. “Miss Monicah insisted, Mr. Kampa, and today is certainly her birthday.”
“Yesterday was certainly her birthday.”
I went inside and found to my relief that Dirk Akuj was boiling water in a small ceramic kettle on my hotplate, a pair of piddling WaBenzi luxuries about which I never suffered any guilt pangs, not even in establishments prohibiting their use. He had shed his phosphorescent tuxedo jacket but was otherwise fully attired. Although that meant nothing five hours after my last sight of him, I pretended that it did.
Lying on the colorful cloak she had worn around her shoulders that evening, Monicah was snoozing in her Sambusai maiden’s outfit. Her tiny breasts were exposed, and her shaven skull gleamed like an obsidian egg. A twenty-year-old photograph of President Tharaka kept watch over her from the wall above the bedstead. I put my daughter’s telegrams down next to her outstretched hand and turned to face the intruder.
Dirk Akuj toasted me with a demitasse cup of tea and asked me if I would care to join him. I declined.
“Why are you still here?” An astringent medicinal scent pervaded the room, probably from his tea.
“I wanted to talk to you in a more hospitable setting than the protectorate, sir.”
I took off my coat and shoes and slumped into the chair. I hoped that my posture would convey my weariness.
Dirk Akuj said, “You never spirit-travel anymore, do you?”
“The flesh is willing, but the spirit’s weak.”
“Have you ever wondered why, sir?”
“Why the spirit’s weak?”
“Why you’ve been ‘cured’ of the dreams that set you apart from your fellows as a child.”
“Because Woody Kaprow and White Sphinx used my attunement to make me live those dreams, that’s why. I got them out of my system, and for the past fourteen years I’ve been an ordinary person.”
“Ordinary celebrity, sir.”
I conceded this stickling emendation with a grimace.
“Have you ever considered that your spirit-traveling, your dreamfaring, was predictive?”
“Of what?”
“Of what happened to you during one long month in the late summer of 1987. Your dreams were premonitions of the time-travel experience that finally took place through the agency of White Sphinx. You had been seeing the future as well as the past. Do you understand?”
“It’s too late for this, Mr. Akuj.”
“Has none of this ever occurred to you, sir?”
“No, none of it ever has. My spirit-traveling episodes didn’t correspond to what happened to me once I’d been physically displaced into the past. So they weren’t predictive, you see.”