The general fired one loud shot into the sky. Again the exclamations — fooled us two times! He turned his back on the youngster and leveled the weapon at the crowd, aiming in particular at Michael Adriko’s face.
Michael bared his teeth and wagged his head and played the clown. Nobody laughed. On either of his shoulders lay a black hand, but his guards seemed not to know who the general referred to when he cried in English: “That one!”
Or maybe they didn’t know the words. He said that one, that one, that one until the two men unslung their rifles and prodded Michael forward to the edge of the ditch. The general held out his hand and wiggled his fingers for one of the weapons, an AK, the kind with a folding stock and a pistol grip, and he swung it around and jabbed the barrel at Michael’s chest.
Michael stepped backward into the ditch and stood with the young recruit in a ball at his feet while the general put the barrel’s mouth against one of Michael’s eyeballs, and then the other, and then the first again. Michael dodged his head and clamped his mouth around the barrel and sucked and French-kissed it with his tongue, the whole time looking up into the general’s face as if wooing a woman. Oh, Michael. If one voice laughs … Perhaps the general would laugh. But the general had been carried beyond his instincts and had to wait for Michael to decide what happened next. Michael drew his head back and averted his gaze, and the general seized on that as a sign of surrender and returned the rifle to its owner and stooped, hooked a hand into Michael’s armpit, and helped him out of the ditch. He spoke softly to Michael, and Michael answered softly. I don’t know what they said.
Another minute, and the party was over, everyone dismissed, they were taking Michael back toward the smaller huts. Apparently they kept him separate from Davidia.
As he passed, he said to me, to Davidia, to the sky’s blank face—“We’ll be fine. I’m talking to these people. A few of them are Kakwa, like me.”
Somehow he’d not only cheated fate, but also coaxed it to lend him a cigarette, which one of his guards was lighting for him as they dragged him back to his prison. Puffing, squinting, he hopped along as if often in the habit of smoking with his hands tied behind his back.
I got close to Davidia. Before they separated us again, I said to her, “Are you all right?”
She said, “Yes. Yes. Are you?”
[OCT 16 1:30PM]
I’m back in the general’s quarters. “Coat of Many Colors”—“Coat of Many Colors”—“Coat of Many Colors”—
My pen’s got a fresh cartridge, but the ball keeps skipping. This encourages more deliberate penmanship.
Tina,—
Tina. I doubt you’ll see me again in the flesh. I may as well embrace candor. With every stroke of this pen I’ve wanted to say it: I’ve lost my heart to this woman. I’m in love with Davidia St. Claire. The sight of her blinds me. This morning, the nearness of her outshone everything going on among these violent men.
Right now I feel two ways. I’m grateful Davidia’s all right. I’m sorry that Michael isn’t dead.
FOUR
Online again — bathed and shaved and revived after eleven hours’ sleep, plus three cups of coffee brewed American style — I wrote to Tina:
You’ll be hearing from the boys in Sec 4, and I suspect you’ve been briefed to some extent already by your own bunch.
I regret your involvement, nothing else. But your involvement — deeply.
I don’t mean to be curt, just brief. I don’t know how long I have the machine.
They’ll intercept this communication, I suppose, and blackline half of it — but friends, please, let me tell her this much unredacted:
Listen, Tina, when the boys from Sec 4 come around, remember you work for the US, not NATO, not really. I’d urge you not to speak to them. In fact there’s no reason why you shouldn’t just go back right now to DC. Or even home to Michigan.
Thanks, chums. Thanks for letting me transmit that bit of advice.
I just want to be careful not to overstep with my hosts. Who are they? Well fuck, as we Yanks like to say, if I know. Friends of Intelligence. Meaning allies of stupidity.
That was snotty. They’ve been cordial. I should delete it.
— But I saw them coming for me and pressed SEND.
* * *
On the afternoon of the second day, my backpack, my own toiletries, and freshly laundered underwear — also my own — appeared on my bed. But not my watch.
And not my clothes. We still paraded around in red pajamas of cotton-polyester, the same material as the white sheets on our beds — not cots, but barracks beds. And we still possessed the olive socks, shorts, and undershirts they’d issued us. We’d been allowed to keep the shoes we’d arrived in.
“We” being myself and one tentmate, a Frenchman, Patrick Roux, not Patrice, a tiny man with a sparrow’s face and giant horn-rim spectacles, and a five-day beard and bitten fingernails and a personal odor like that of linseed oil … or was my sensitive nose merely sniffing out a fake, a plant, a snitch?
The Congolese Army couldn’t reach us here. I could sleep knowing I wouldn’t be prodded awake with a gun barrel and then shot; though I rather expected to be greeted one morning with some delicious coffee and informed of my arrest on a charge of espionage.
* * *
After supper on the second night, I wrote to Tina online:
I won’t outrage you with pleas for forgiveness. I hope you hate me, actually, as much as I hate myself. And no explanation — nothing you’d understand — only this: the other day Michael asked me if I really want to go back to that boring existence. I said No.
They’ve reviewed and returned some dozens of pages I filled by hand. None of it, apparently, impinges on their plans for world domination. If I somehow crawl free of this mess, I’ll transcribe and transmit those pages to you, and I may even take time one day to set down an account of things, everything, beginning—17 days ago? Really, only 17 days?
They’ve made a few things clear. I’ll get one hour’s online access per day, sending to NIIA recipient(s) only (including you), and I’d better be careful not to compromise in any serious way what they’re up to down here — or else what? They’ll take away my red pajamas?
Right now I can tell you I’m still in Africa. Behind loop-de-loops of razor concertina wire, shiny and new. Behind barricades four sandbags thick and nearly four meters high.
I suppose they’ll redact this too, but for what it’s worth: I’m here thanks, I’m sure, to Davidia St. Claire, thanks to her relation with the US Tenth Special Forces Group, in whose hands I now find myself. I believe yesterday I caught a glimpse of their fearless leader, Col. George Thiebes himself, out there on the grounds. Commander of the whole 10th. I’m pretty sure I was meant to.
This isn’t a prison. My tentmate and I are the only ones in red pajamas. The setup for the fifty or so African detainees (they wear white) seems makeshift and temporary — they’re rounded up and soon released.
Our pajamas say “Nair” and “Roux”—handwritten with textile markers — but none of the personnel wear name tags on their utilities or have names stenciled on their T-shirts.
Even during meals, Roux removes his glasses frequently and spends a lot of time breathing on the lenses and polishing them with his shirttail. He speaks to me only in French but rolls his r’s like a Spaniard. I gather he returned from business in Marseilles to find that his wife, a Congolese, had gone missing, and while running around looking for her he did something, he can’t guess what, to bring himself in conflict with the American dream.
Nobody stops me from having a walk around, but whenever I do, one or more large enlisted men go walking around the same places.