Africa. Jesus.
She poured another shot.
The journey was grueling, a hop over the Atlantic to England and then an interminable overnighter south across Europe, the Mediterranean, and the dense heart of Africa.
She flew into Harare, Zimbabwe. Then she had to take a short internal flight to Victoria Falls, the small tourist-choked town on the Zimbabwe side of the Falls themselves.
At her hotel, she slept for twelve hours.
The next morning a Bootstrap driver took her across the Falls, through a comic-opera immigration checkpoint, and into Zambia.
The man she had come to meet was waiting at the checkpoint. He was the teacher who had reported the boy to the Milton Foundation. He came forward hesitantly, holding out his hand. “Ms. Stoney, I’m Stef Younger.” He was small, portly, dressed in a kind of loose safari style: baggy shirt and shorts fitted with deep, bulging pockets. He couldn’t have been older than thirty; he was prematurely balding, and his scalp, burned pink by the winter sun, was speckled with sweat.
He was obviously southern African, probably from Zimbabwe or South Africa itself. His elaborate accent, forever linked to a nightmare past, made her skin prickle. But there were blue chalk-dust stains on his shirt, she noticed, the badge of the teacher since time immemorial, and she warmed to him, just a little.
They got back in the car and drove away from the Falls.
Africa was flat and still and dusty, eroded smooth by time, apparently untouched by the twenty-first century. The only verticals were the trees and the skinny people, moving slowly through the
harsh light.
They reached the town of Livingstone. She could discern the remnants of Art Deco style in the closed-up banks and factories and even a cinema, now sun-bleached and washed out to a uniform sand color, all of it marred by ubiquitous Shit Cola ads.
Younger gave her a little tourist grounding.
This remained a place of grinding poverty. Misguided aid efforts had flooded the area with cheap Western clothes, and local crooks had used them to undercut and wipe out the textile factories that had once kept everyone employed.
Now the unemployment here ran at 80 percent of adults. And there was no kind of welfare safety net. If you didn’t have a relative who worked somewhere, you found some other way to live.
Younger pointed. “Look at that.”
At the side of the road, there was a baboon squatting on the rim of a rusty trash can. He held himself there effortlessly with his back feet while he dug with his forearms into the trash.
Emma was stunned. She’d never been so close to a nonhuman primate before — not outside a zoo, anyhow. The baboon was the size of a ten-year-old boy, lean and gray and obviously ferociously strong, eyes sharp and intelligent. So much more human than she might have thought.
Younger grinned. “He’s looking for plastic bags. He knows that’s where he will find food. Tourists think he’s cute. But give him food and he’ll be back tomorrow. Smart, see. Smart as a human. But he doesn’t think.”
“What does that mean?”
“He doesn’t understand death. You see the females carrying around dead infants, sometimes for days, trying to feed them.”
“Maybe they’re grieving.”
“Nah.” Younger wound down his window and raised his fist.
The baboon’s head snapped around, sizing up Younger with a sharp, tense glance. Then he leapt off the trash can rim and loped away.
Away from the town the road stretched, black and unmarked, across a flat, dry landscape. The trees were sparse, and in many instances smashed over, as if by some great storm. There was little scrub growing between the trees. But everywhere the land was shaped by tracks, the footsteps of animals and birds overlaid in the white Kalahari sands. The tracks of elephants were great craters bigger than dinner plates, and where the ground was firm she could see the print left by the tough, cracked skin of an elephant’s sole, a spidery map as distinctive as a fingerprint.
Emma was a city girl, and she was struck by the self-evident organization of the landscape here, the way the various species — in some cases separated genetically by hundreds of millions of years — worked together to maintain a stable environment for them all. Control, stability, organization — all without an organizing mind, without a proboscidean Reid Malenfant to plan the future for them.
But this, she thought, was the past, for better or worse. Now mind was here, and had taken control; it was mind, not blind evolution, that would shape this landscape, and the whole of the planet, in the future.
Maybe there is a lesson here for us all, she thought. Damned if I know what it is.
At length, driving through the bush, she saw elephants.
They moved through the trees, liquid graceful and silent, like dark clouds gliding over the Earth, shapers of this landscape. With untrained eyes she saw only impressionistic flashes: a gleam of tusks, a curling trunk, an unmistakable morphology. The elephants were myths of childhood and picture books and zoo visits, miraculously preserved in a world growing over with concrete and plastic and waste.
They came, at last, to a village.
The car stopped, and they climbed out. Younger spread his hands. “Welcome to Nakatindi.” Huts of dirt and grass clustered to either side of the road and spread away to the flat distance.
Nervous — and embarrassed at herself for feeling so — Emma glanced back at the car. The driver had wound up and opaqued the windows. She could see him lying back, insulated from Africa in his air-conditioned bubble, his eyes closed, synth music playing.
As soon as she walked off the dusty hardtop road she was surrounded by kids, stick thin and bright as buttons. They were dressed in ancient Western clothes — T-shirts and shorts, mostly too big, indescribably worn and dirty, evidently handed down through grubby generations. The kids pushed at each other, tangles of flashing limbs, competing for her attention, miming cameras. “Snap me. Snap me alone.” They thought she was a
tourist.
The dominant color, as she walked into the village, was a kind of golden brown. The village was constructed on the flat Kalahari sand that covered the area for a hundred miles around. But the sand here was marked only by human footprints, and was pitted with debris, scraps of metal and wood.
The sky was a washed-out blue dome, huge and empty, and the sun was directly overhead, beating at her scalp. There were no shadows here, little contrast. She had a renewed sense of age, of everything worn flat by time.
There were pieces of car, scattered everywhere. She saw busted-off car doors used like garden gates, hubcaps beaten crudely into bowls. Two of the kids were playing with a kind of skateboard, just a strip of wood towed along by a wire loop. The “wheels” of the board were, she recognized with a shock, sawn-off lengths of car exhaust. Younger explained that a few years ago some wrecks had been abandoned a mile or so away. The villagers had towed them into town and scavenged them until there was nothing left.
“You’ll mostly see men here today, men and boys. It’s Sunday so some of the men will be drunk. The women and girls are off in the bush. They gather wild fruit, nuts, berries, that kind of stuff.”
There was no sanitation here, no sewage system. The people — women and girls — carried their water from a communal standpipe in yellowed plastic bowls and bottles. For their toilet they went into the bush. There was nothing made of metal, as far as she could see, save for the scavenged automobile parts and a few tools.
Not even any education, save for the underfunded efforts of gone-tomorrow volunteers like Younger.
Younger eyed her. “These people are basically hunter-gatherers. A hundred and fifty years ago they were living late Stone Age lives in the bush. Now, hunting is illegal. And so, this.”
“Why don’t they return to the bush?”
“Would you?”
They reached Younger’s hut. He grinned, self-deprecating. “Home sweet home.”
The hut was built to the same standard as the rest, but Emma could see within it an inflatable mattress, what looked like a water purifier, a softscreen with a modem and an inflatable satellite dish, a few toiletries. “I allow myself a few luxuries,” Younger said. “It’s not just indulgence. It’s a question of status.”