“When do we meet them?”
“I don’t even know if they’re actually coming. But the lady said sometime today.”
“Let’s go and wait for them. We need to get to Bunia.”
“Michael,” I said, “you can make it here, but I can’t. I’m no African. I’m like Davidia that way.”
“So where do you think you’re going?”
“I suppose it’s prison.”
“Do you think I’d let them put you in prison?”
“Is there any other way?”
“Haven’t I told you from the beginning? There’s always a plan for extraction.” He made a sound like a pig at a trough — sucking back tears. His pride in himself, at this moment, had brought on a seizure of sentiment. “After everything, it’s still the two of us.”
* * *
Davidia: As we walked out of the village, the hippopotamus-woman La Dolce roused her clan and harried them after us partway down the hill. She cried, “Laugh at them, laugh at them!” and then “Riez! Riez!”
She said: “Don’t touch them, don’t talk to them, do you see the Devil in their eyes? Riez! Riez!”
I didn’t think them capable of it, but one or two coughed up shreds of laughter and spit them at us. Soon the whole mob was yammering like dogs. Michael bowed his back. His head hung low. “Riez! Riez!” Like hens, like terrified geese. I followed behind him as he was driven from his family.
[NOV 1 6PM]
Dear Tina, Dear Davidia—
Again I’m writing to you by candlelight, but only because the power’s blinked out in our corner of Freetown.
We’re staying, now, at the National Pride Suites, which have nothing to be proud of. Out the window, West Africa: a lane like a sewer. Cockeyed shanties. Inexplicable laughter.
Downstairs there’s a bar, intermittently air-conditioned, fragrant with liquor and lime and the cologne of prostitutes, but I’m not a patron — I’m on an indefinite drinks moratorium, thanks to a bargain I’ve made with Michael. And without the drinks, the women seem stripped of their appeal.
In any case, I’m not one hundred percent. Nursing a bit of a belly — that Goddamn Newada creek. Apparently certain microbes thrive on heavy metals.
However, the small percent of me that feels all right feels absolutely wonderful.
I don’t need booze, or sex. I’ve spent the last two hours napping with my head on a sack full of cash. One hundred thousand US dollars. Minus recent expenses. Not a substantial cushion, just one thousand pieces of paper zipped up in a plastic carrier pouch, but oh how comfortable, and how sweet my dreams.
* * *
Tina, I hope you got out of Amsterdam. Hope you got away. Hope you didn’t sit there waiting for the poisonous fallout from my ruin.
Hah. “Fallout.”
But Tina, I’m serious: someday I’ll put it all down in words and send it to you, and I’ll enclose this last note on top. I don’t know what a thorough confession might do for you, or what it might do to ease this combination of dread and anger working at my insides … For whatever it’s worth, someday — the story from beginning to end.
And the end will be spectacular: Michael and I riding to Bunia in an Isuzu Trooper all heavenly blue and purified white packed with Seventh-day Adventists, and our intrepid machine rockets us through storms, crashes, earthquakes, I don’t know what, really — I slept the entire two hundred kilometers, except for a couple of times when the man on my left, a Congolese youth named Max, woke me to complain I was drooling on his shoulder. The trip ended at the mission’s church in Bunia, where those of us with religion went inside, and the two lost souls, Michael and I, stood under the awning of a cycle shop, trying to carve a plan out of the rain.
You have to remember, Tina, that the end wasn’t yet, that all I had was Michael Adriko, meaning all I had was bitterness and doubt — and 68 hours to make the next 4800 kilometers.
Michael said, “Let’s wear collars, you and I.”
“Dog collars? Do I look like a dog?”
“Clerical collars.”
“Do I look like a clerk?”
“I think it would help with questions.”
“It’s a lousy cover. Everyone wants to approach you.”
“Who approached those Adventist people? We moved right through the checkpoints.”
“I wouldn’t know,” I admitted. “I was asleep. But are you serious?”
“It’s a joke. Come on, smile.”
“I hate it when people tell me to smile. People like that disgust me.”
“Nair, I have a bit of news: tomorrow afternoon we’ll board a plane for Accra. We’ll land in Kotoka International by next day’s dawning.”
“I don’t believe you. Is that a surprise?”
“You’ll believe me before too much longer. And then when I tell you to smile, you’ll smile.”
We passed the night at Le Citizen Hôtel, mostly in the café, where we sent out for fresh clothes, and where Michael got me drunk enough to promise I’d drink no more if we reached Freetown in time to make my rendezvous — still about sixty hours distant, and still no closer on the map. Therefore, I gave him my promise … The room we took came with its own sink. I vomited in it.
The next morning I lay in bed resting, or dying, while Michael went out to trip a lever, or touch a magic eye — in retrospect it looks that simple, the work of a finger — to set going his plan for extraction.
Even now, as I write this, with everything, or a good bit of everything, having turned out all right, I feel irritated with Michael’s coy dramatics. I’m forced to give him credit, I admit that gratefully. We’ve crawled from the wreck, we’ve walked away, and all of that is Michael’s doing. I’d just sort of rather it weren’t.
At noon on Oct 29, with 52 hours to go, we hired a car with one of my twenty-dollar bills, and in thirty minutes we reached the checkpoint outside Bunia’s airfield.
A guard in khaki peered inside the car, had us step out a minute, waved his wand at us, ignored its squeaks, then prodded aside a couple of goats with his boot and unhooked a rope to let us through.
Three flagpoles, two drooping flags, a red dirt runway. A concrete kiosk. In front of it some men in uniform loitered, laughing. Nothing else but a sort of restaurant with a wooden porch. I said, “I don’t see any planes.”
“Do you see those Ghanaian uniforms?”
“I see uniforms.”
“Ghanaian. Wait here. But first give me money.”
“How much?”
“Everything. If we want to get out of here, we have to pay.”
He left me in the café. I found nobody inside. There were some tables and a cold-box full of drinks — unplugged — but nothing zestier than Coke. I guzzled a warm one. Michael joined me after ten minutes. He sat down without a drink and said, “When we get to Accra, I’ll leave you at the airport terminal while I get the Ghanaian passports.”
“Wonderful.”
“You want diplomatic, or private?”
“One of each. And while you’re about it, get me a medical diploma.”
“I’m glad you don’t believe me. It heightens the enjoyment later.”
“Care to reveal how we get there?”
“Where?”
“Accra, Goddamn it.”
“Ghanaian Air Force, flying for the UN.”
“The UN? Their planes are never on time.”
“You’re very negative. Here’s one hundred eighty dollars back. The pilots were reasonable in their requirements.”
At Kotoka International in Accra, he handed me a cube of Big G Original Gum in a red wrapper and said, “Here, keep yourself busy,” and next he went into the city and accomplished the unthinkable — although by then I was allowing myself to think it, because he’d gotten us this far, and because two Ghanaian thugs wearing dark business suits came in a Mercedes to collect him at the terminal.