* * *
Davidia. I’ve had a look. It’s Michael out there. Adriko. Our Michael.
* * *
I’m not going out. I’m glad to see him — I came here looking for him — but I won’t make myself known until I have an idea what’s happening.
* * *
I see a lot of villagers sitting on the ground around the coffins and the grave and the dirt piles. Michael argues — battles — with a large woman. He and this screamer are the only ones standing, stalking one another in a circle ten meters wide, keeping the people and the coffins and the double grave between them.
* * *
I’m able to count twenty-nine sitting on the ground. Women wearing long skirts and tops with bold patterns and colors, men in sweaters or large T-shirts with washed-out logos, all of them looking as if they’d rolled in the mud and didn’t care. Two women with children laid across their laps. Both kids naked and bony and sick, eyes open and staring at another world. One woman in a brilliant but filthy wrap and headscarf sits on top of a dirt pile, her legs out straight.
* * *
Michael holds a machete two-handed. Sometimes he raises it above his head as if he means to chop the sun out of the sky. He and the woman scream in some kind of Creole or Lugbara unintelligible to me.
* * *
My guess: the woman is the village queen, La Dolce, down from her tree — I recognize her tennis shoes — and these people have gathered for the funeral of the two dead children, and Michael must have stopped it with his screams and his machete. He and La Dolce howl at each other to the point of strangling on their hatred, but not both at once — it’s back and forth — that is, it seems to proceed as a debate while they orbit around the others.
* * *
She wears a long black skirt and a man’s sleeveless undershirt torn off just below her breasts, which, by their outlines, are narrow and pendulous.
She’s got a buzz-cut Afro on her hippopotamus head, eyes leaping from the sockets and eyelids like birds’ beaks closing over them — her mouth is tiny and round, but it opens to shocking hugeness, displaying many square white teeth. A broad nose like a triangle biscuit smashed onto her face. She’s fat and laughing, hips banging as she struts around, keeping the people and the coffins and the grave between her and Michael.
The hair on Michael’s head is growing back. He tromps around in rubber sandals, blue jeans, a gray hooded sweatshirt, waving the machete with his left hand, slapping his right hand against his chest, where it says HARVARD.
Mainly throughout all this I feel thirsty. I’ve had nothing to drink since yesterday afternoon, and all this drama — and the whole sky, and the earth — and the oceans — seem tiny beside my thirst.
* * *
One minute ago Michael started chopping away with his machete at the woman’s chair, which rests on the ground beside her tree, and she shimmied toward him majestically and plopped herself right down in it, daring him to keep up the destruction and split her in pieces as well.
He’s speaking English—“I’ll destroy this place!”
Now she doesn’t howl, but rather sings of her power, I think, sitting on her throne, and cries out I think Bring me food! Bring me food! until a woman delivers something on a plastic plate and backs away apologizing. La Dolce flings grain into her mouth, it spills all over her bare belly, which even from here I can see is covered with stretch marks. Water now! Bring me water! They hurry to bring her a liter of bottled water — bottled Goddamn water. She anoints her own head from it and sprinkles her face. The drops remain while she says to Michael in English:
“I am El Olam — the Everlasting God!”
They’ve stopped everything. He’s catching his breath. Listen, Davidia — his face frightens me. The blade is twitching in his hands.
She laughs at him.
I need water and I’m going out now before Michael kills her.
[OCT 27 ca. 5:30PM]
The sun is low and very red and mean. I can’t look west.
Down to double digits: 94 hours to go. Plus 30 minutes. Still 5000 KM to cover.
I’ve drunk my fill at the creek. No matter. The toxins work slowly. Thirst would have killed me by tomorrow. I’m resting beside the creek among some new associates, that is, four skeletal sad-eyed Brahma cattle and the three herdsmen who tend them. Later I’ll tell you all about these guys. I don’t intend to move from this haven, I’m at my leisure to write and also to drink, and not just water, and I’ll tell you all about that too, but first — as to this morning’s romp—
When I came out of my hiding-hut, Michael was declaring again:
“I’ll destroy this place!” With a sweep of his machete he said, “You people are crazy!”
I stood by my doorway till Michael noticed. At first he didn’t, but the villagers watched me. Without the usual smiling and laughing, their mouths took up no room in their faces and their eyes seemed abnormally huge.
The sight of me slapped Michael awake. His recognition of me seemed to travel up from his feet and when it got to his face I came closer, but not in reach of the machete.
He looked around himself: a dozen or so huts; the one tree — deceased; two piles of red dirt; two purple coffins, and a hole; also his clansmen huddling together on the ground like survivors of a shipwreck.
He said: “Where is she?” He meant you, Davidia.
“The Americans had us,” I said. “Your outfit, the Tenth.”
“Where is she, Nair?”
“She’s gone. She got on a chopper and didn’t look back.”
His spine withered. The weapon dangled at his side. “Sometime during Arua, she took her heart away from me. I felt it. In Arua, something happened.”
I wanted to take him away from this scene and talk about that other scene, about you, Davidia, and the colonel and the prop-wash and the noisy cloud that ate you up.
However: the Dolce woman strode up to my face and gave out a hearty, phony laugh and cried, “God knocked backwards!”
Michael said, “This woman is insane.”
I said, “You must be La Dolce.”
She yelped, “You’ve got an English for us!!??” (I punctuate excessively because her manner came straight out of comic books. She communicated in yelps, whoops — what else — guffaws, huzzahs, preachments, manifestos — and I had to agree instantly with Michael that she was insane.) “You are right, because I am!!! — I AM LA DOLCE!!!”
“What a stupid name to call yourself,” Michael said.
She raised her face to Heaven and sang ha-hah.
“I understand she’s the village queen or something.”
“More than that. She’s a priestess of genocide.”
La Dolce addressed her brethren, pointing at Michael’s head. “Do you hear the Devil talking in his mouth?”
“She calls me her prisoner,” Michael said. “She tells them I’m being kept here by her power.”
“She speaks good English.”
“She’s from Uganda. She’s the cousin of my uncle.”
La Dolce pointed at me now, almost touching my nose: “This one’s clan is called Bong-ko. Their lies make you laugh!!!”
Michael said, “They know the truth about you.” I said What? — he said, “Aren’t you a liar? Why are you here without Davidia? If the Tenth got hold of you, how did you get away? Did you sell me for your freedom? How long before they come for me?” He raised high the machete. “I feel like cutting the lies right out of you!”
The blade didn’t scare me so much — only the look of him. His beard was growing out in streaks and whorls. Nappy head, red eyes, fat parched lips. He’d plastered the laceration on his forearm with red mud. His greasy black face, his mangled sweatshirt, his mistreated jeans — all dabbed and smeared with it. His sandals and feet were tainted with the same African muck.