I came awake again on a lower rung of reality, still lying on my back, but now in my hotel room, wrapped in a shroud, shivering. Michael sat beside me on the bed.
I said, or tried to say, “You spat in my mouth.”
“What happened to you, Nair?”
“Somebody drugged me.”
“You didn’t drug yourself?”
“I had one whiskey and one martini. Maybe the olive was bad.”
“Bad? You mean evil?”
“What? Stop talking to me.”
“Davidia is here,” he said.
“Where?”
“Where? Here!”
“I’m not there,” her voice said, “I’m here, on the verandah. Can you hear the crickets? Are those crickets?”
All around the music, like little bells. “Some sort of insect, yes,” Michael said.
“Spaulding did this to me. Was it Spaulding, do you think?”
“It could be anything. A virus, a bite from a spider, or even a spell, a curse — people have such powers. I’ve seen too much to laugh at it.”
“That fucking towel-head dosed my martini.”
Michael laughed with such vigor that Davidia came in and looked at his face and said, “Are you all right?”
“You should have seen Fred’s expression!” He meant the bartender. “Like the aliens were landing in his pool! Seriously,” he said, “he must have dragged you from the pool himself. He was wet to the waist. His shoes are ruined.”
“I’ll give him some money,” I said.
The rain had stopped, and Davidia was correct — the creatures had resumed, the bugs that chimed like porcelain, frogs that belched like drunkards, and now more frogs, snorting like pigs. A suffocating sleep fell over my face. I came under its shadow convinced that Spaulding had poisoned me.
* * *
The next morning I asked for Spaulding, and Emmanuel, the manager, said he’d settled his account and left in a taxi for Arua’s small airfield. Flying where? No commercial planes this morning, according to Emmanuel. Only the UN plane to Yei, in South Sudan.
I continued on to the restaurant for my appointment with Michael Adriko. I’d promised to meet him there and tell him my decision.
There he was, near the blaring television, doing nothing, not even watching it. “Well?”
“I haven’t decided.”
“Take your time. Up to ten more minutes. Don’t sit down. Walk with me,” he said, already moving, “I’ve got to see about the gas.”
“Is it a long drive?”
“Just into town, over by the market, but you know the rule — half a tank is empty. You remember the rule.”
I remembered.
When we came to the parking lot, he paused. “As of right now, the process is halted. You see how easy it is?”
“I get uncomfortable when you stop in the middle of walking to make a point.”
“At any moment in the procedure, we can say ‘enough.’”
“I understood the point.”
“Then understand this one: Do you really want to go back to that boring existence?”
“Never.”
This much was true, the only true thing between us.
By now we’d reached his borrowed Land Cruiser. We both got in. The engine caught quickly, first try.
The guard held the gate wide open for us.
It was a years-old model, much like the blue-and-white Land Cruisers we’d often borrowed from the UN in Jalalabad, sometimes Kabul. Too much like. It even smelled the same inside, like spilt gas and dirty clothes.
“Are you ready?”
“No. For this? No.”
* * *
We stopped at a filling station where a woman topped off our tank, and we waited.
“Near the market, you said?”
“That’s all I know. They’ll call me with the meeting place. What time is it? — eleven-thirty-three,” he informed himself. “They’ll call me in the next half hour.” We sat side by side on the vehicle’s rear bumper, Michael studiously smoking, blowing white puffs upward through the brown fumes and the red dust, under the yellow Shell insignia. After the call, he pocketed his phone and threw down his cigarette and stomped it like an insect. “We’re off.”
We left the SUV in front of a place called Gracious Good Hotel, under care of the taxi drivers loitering there. Michael, a bright red zippered daypack slung over his arm, guided me across the street toward the market by way of a narrow alley with light at the far end, its crevices roiling with crippled beggars — many were blind, and as for the others, they seemed to look through your own eyes and down your throat. Ahead of me Michael was a bent silhouette, handing over a crumpled bill. “My name is Michael,” I heard him say, “pray for me.” An old woman caught the money between her leprous paws and turned her sightless eyes up toward him and her lips moved below the noseless hole in her face, praying, “Michael, Michael,” not for him, but rather to him, to the deity Michael … And crash, back into the daylight — it never happened …
I caught up with Michael at a clothier’s stall. He was looking at a coat of fake black leather too hot for this region. He set his mirrors on his scalp, gripped the sleeve, touched the fabric with one finger. I didn’t know if he was trying to buy something or just delaying, looking out for a tail.
The latter. When we left the market square he led the way into a dry goods store across the street. Inside we made our way directly down the center aisle to the back of the store, where a woman napped in a collapsible chair, and we asked her for another entrance. She pointed through a curtain, we passed through it and out into a side lane, then up to the left — and I recognized the street, and saw our Land Cruiser parked just a block away.
He handed me his daypack. “Take charge of the little morsel.”
“Of course.” Lethargy and nausea overtook me. It felt like it weighed fifty pounds.
Michael said, “I go first. Wait until you see me come out again, then you’ll come and join me. It may take a few minutes.”
“What’s going to happen in there?”
“Before I bring you on the stage, I’ll say I want to see the cash. They’ll say no, but this way I get to review the environment.”
“And then what?”
“It’s two South African guys — Kruger is one, you saw him. You’ll verify everything I tell them, right? Then I’ll go with them. You can stay there — it’s that café there, you see it? I’ll go with them, we’ll sit in their car or something with the sample and their equipment, and we’ll make the exchange. And I’ll come back in and collect you, and then back to Nile Palace.”
“Where’s their equipment, do you know?”
“Ah — you’re thinking smart now. If it’s not in their car or somewhere we can walk, I’ll make them go get it. I’m not driving off with them.”
On this sunny street, where earth-moving machines worked over piles of red dirt, improving the surface, and generators clattered in front of the shops and schoolchildren in green-and-white uniforms walked home for lunch, all this sounded reasonable.
“Stop breathing so fast,” Michael said.
“I’m fucking nervous.”
“Good. It helps you look the part. Just don’t faint.” He left me standing there and in order to keep my mind off itself I studied the nearby billboard exhorting the use of condoms and followed the progress of a small car over the ruts and small boulders from one end of the block to the other, its horn playing the first six notes of the “Happy Birthday” song. Looking around for something else, I spied Michael already back outside, standing in his own spotlight in his aviator sun shades as if in support of the warning stenciled beside him: DO NOT URINE ON THIS WALL 30,000 FINE. And he wore the fake black leather duster from the market. I was nervous to the point that I hadn’t even seen him make the purchase.