The Laughing Monsters

THREE

[OCT 15 11PM]

All right, Tina. The chief captor, the witch doctor, the general, the jailor or kidnapper or whatever he is, has just showed me my favorite thing in East Africa, a plastic baggie that would fit exactly in a shirt pocket, and shows me the label, “40 % Volume Cane Spirits 100ml,” before biting off the corner and sucking it dry, explaining, “It’s for the cold,” and tossing it aside, and I notice, right now, that the dirt floor of this big low hut we’re in is littered with similar packets sucked empty and tossed aside — paved with them—“Rider Vodka” and “ZAP Vodka” and the Cane Spirits. I’m familiar with these packets, in fact many of these empties were mine-all-mine as recently as one hour ago, when they stole them, yet I don’t perceive any gratitude in the black lacquer faces of these drunken soldiers all around us. What I do perceive is that this place smells powerfully of unwashed humans.

I just saw a single firefly flash upward. Or a capillary exploded in my brain. The truth is I’m a little drunk too. And this won’t be one of those pitiful attempts to explain “how I got into this mess,” because there’s no sense calling it a mess until we see how it all turns out. Sometimes you just get stuck. That’s Africa. Then you’re on your way again without any idea what happened, and that’s Africa too. And while you’re stuck, if they give you a pen and paper? — you might as well.

As to why I have no computer, it isn’t because they took mine away from me, but because as Michael and Davidia and I headed toward the Congo border in a Land Cruiser borrowed, now stolen, from Pyramid Environments, with our guide or abettor, a Congolese whose name I didn’t catch, Michael stopped the car on a bridge over some tributary of the White Nile River and said, Here we’ll toss our communications, and threw his phone out the window. Davidia chucked hers as well, and I was glad to get rid of everything (although my laptop and second keyboard were guaranteed GPS-untraceable, and my phone was already a replacement. I didn’t want the weight of them anymore, that’s all). It was sunset. Below us people washed their vehicles in muddy water up to the axles, the drivers splashing the red dirt off their rumpled pocked and sagging Subarus and such. Davidia said only one thing: “How long do you have the car for?”—“What?”—“When do you have to return this vehicle?”—“Oh — it’s flexible,” Michael said with a wide smile, as if describing his mouth, “it’s quite flexible.”

My friend and your friend Michael Adriko, that is, and his fiancée, Davidia St. Claire. You knew I went to Freetown on a hunt for Michael. I found him all right, with Davidia on his arm, and I’ll catch you up on all the rest as time allows. To put it in shorthand, Michael’s enthusiasms, let us say, had us leaving Uganda in a rush for DR Congo on Oct 13, just a couple of days ago. We’d jumped from Freetown to northwestern Uganda, a town called Arua, where I last heard from you by e-mail and where I last saw your breasts, and I wish I’d downloaded them … Earlier, at Kuluva Hospital in Arua, while getting his flesh stitched together after a fight it’s pointless to explain, Michael had enlisted a guide to show us a hole in the border, because none of us had Congo papers. When Davidia and I got to the hospital, Michael introduced this man, a skinny little guy in bright blue trousers and a T-shirt that said, I Did WHAT Last Night? and told me to give him one hundred dollars. — When he’s got us through to Congo, I said. — Fair enough, Michael said.

Daylight was almost gone as we got near the border, a good circumstance for people smuggling themselves, and we passed among groves of tall eucalyptus, Michael driving like an African, far too fast for the crumbling red-dirt surface, I mean fast, 90 or 95 KPH mostly, scaring the bikes to the side by means of constant beeping, using the horn much more than the brakes, oblivious to the children, goats, ducks, trucks coming at us, the overloaded busses appearing around road bends, leaning on two wheels, and women walking down the road balancing burdens on their heads, mostly basins full of “white ants”—centimeter-long termites they sell in the market as snacks. I’ve never tried them, but it’s a comfort to realize that every couple hundred meters or so across this land, a chest-high berm teems with nutrient morsels. One of these women crossed our path, her right hand raised to steady the pan on her head, blocking half her sight, she couldn’t have seen us, she kept walking into the road, Michael tried to veer, and we hit her, we struck her down, I heard her say “uh!” in a way I’ve never heard it said, never, and the jeep swerved, bounced, straightened, and kept on … I looked back, she was flung down on the clay pavement in the dusk, she looked lifeless. Davidia said, “Michael! Michael! She’s hurt!”—“She wasn’t watching!” he said angrily, going faster now. His shoulders hunched as he pushed the accelerator hard, and we were racing away from — what? A murder, perhaps. We’d never know. “Michael, Michael,” Davidia said, but Michael said nothing, and she said, “Go back, go back, go back, go back,” but we wouldn’t go back, we couldn’t — not in Africa, this hard, hard land where nobody could help that poor woman flopped probably dead in the road and where running away from this was not a mistake. The mistake was looking back at her in the first place.

No words among us now, just Davidia’s sobbing, and then her silence. Michael drove a bit more soberly as we skirted the border, heading north. If we didn’t find our hole soon we’d come to South Sudan. The surface got terrible. I’m not sure it was still a road. We came into a village, and the guide muttered in Michael’s ear, and we went quite slowly now. Michael switched off the headlamps — he was only using the parking lights anyway—“Let’s enjoy the moon!” It was just past half-full, with that lopsided swollen face, that smile at the corner of its mouth. People strolled around under its strange orange glow. Kids played tag as if it were daytime. We went slower than the pedestrians through this crowded twilight, this thickly human evening. Sudden laughter from a hut, like a soprano chorus. What have they got to laugh about? Bikes without headlights floating out of the dimness. A man leans against a shack, cupping the tiny light of a cell phone to his ear.

The guide said, “Stop.” He got out, shut the door, walked around to Michael’s window and spoke low.

Michael told me, “Give him fifty.”

“Not till we’re in Congo.”

“We’re here. This is Congo.”

“I thought you said one hundred.”

“He’s quitting early. Just fifty.”

I handed Michael a bill. The man folded it up small, then turned away and walked toward a hut, crying softly, “Hallooo.”

“Who’s coming up front — Nair?” Michael asked.

“I guess I am,” I said more or less to Davidia. Her face was invisible. For the last two hours she’d said not a word. We left the village behind and lurched along a half kilometer farther and stopped.

Michael said, “The main road’s over that way, but we’ll never find it till we have some daylight.” He fiddled with his watch. “Set your time backward one hour. We’ve crossed into another zone.”

We sat in the car saying nothing, thinking and feeling nothing, or trying not to, while the weather changed and the stars disappeared. The moon burned right through the overcast with a curious effect, seeming to hang just a few meters above us while the clouds lay behind it, much higher in the sky. Michael switched off the engine. We heard a multitude of insects ringing all around us like finger cymbals. The ringing stopped. Raindrops exploded on the roof and streaked down the dirty windshield.

Stupid, stupid Michael said, “Congo! Here, we’re not in any trouble.”

[OCT 16 2AM]

How much time do I have to catch you up? They won’t move us tonight, surely. The party’s over and everybody’s snoring, sleeping on top of their rifles. The only one awake with me is a radio somewhere — a DJ talking French full-speed and spinning American country music. And two or three mosquitoes making their rounds. Very few mosquitoes at these East African altitudes, though when Michael and Davidia and I came aground in the dark just inside the Congo border, he, Michael — to pick up the journey again — said, “Many voices on the air tonight,” and rolled up the windows against the insects, because as a child he suffered malaria and a mosquito is the only thing on earth, I believe, that scares him.

The car was stifling. I slept, or only suffocated — I saw the woman in the road in more detail, the wrap that covered all but her arms and shoulders in a pattern red or purple, in the dusk it could have been either, and her basin of ants rolling on its edge away from her like a toy, and she lay there as limp as her towel — the white cloth, that is, she’d rolled into a bun to cushion her head — stretched out straight beside her.

Sometime in the night came Michael’s voice: “I’m moving.”

We were both awake I’m sure, Davidia and I.

“It’s very subtle. But there is definitely movement.”

Davidia said, “Michael, quiet.”

“I’m sliding down. I’m sliding off.”

“Sshh.”

“I don’t know what I’m going to turn into once I’m on the floor.”

She: “To hell with this. To hell with you.”

“I itch all over.”

“Don’t start your scratching. Don’t scratch.”

He squirmed and clawed at his ribs, elbows knocking the steering wheel. “I’m in a cocoon. What will I be when I come out?”

Davidia said, “He’s going mad. We’ll be holding him down while he screams bloody murder before it’s over.”

“I’m coming out of my skin!” he screamed. Writhing. He bumped the horn and it honked and we all jumped, and then he got hold of himself and we got quiet again.

When daylight came we found ourselves parked behind a church in the middle of a field, a big crumbling adobe building, salmon-pink, its tin roof corroded red. Beyond it lay a proper dirt road and a collection of low buildings, dark inside, the wind blowing through. But pots steamed and fry pans sizzled on cookfires all around. Without talking about it the three of us got out of the car and made our way toward the possibility of breakfast. I watched Davidia walk. Her long African skirt swayed and the hem danced around her feet as she floated ahead of me. People wandered around, others were just waking up, crawling from under a couple of lorries, dragging their straw mats behind them. Nobody remarked on us. Michael found us some corn cakes and hot tea served in plastic water bottles. He said, “Last night I became a lizard. Now I know what we have to do.”

He went exploring, running his electric clippers over his scalp and his cheeks and his jaw as he walked around talking to folks.

Davidia and I sat on a bench outside a shack called The Best Lucky Saloon and she said, “Boomelay boomelay bommelay boom and all that.”—“What?”—“Vachel Lindsay. Or Edna St. Vincent Millay or somebody.”—“Oh.”—“It’s a poem about the Congo.”—“Oh.” We watched a woman sitting on a stool, working on the hairdo of a little girl sitting on the ground between her knees, while behind her, standing, another woman worked on her hair … The buildings and shacks were gray and brown, everything streaked with red mud. I recall three green power poles, one broken and leaning and held up apparently by the wires alone.

Michael came back with several bread rolls for each of us and said, “Some lizards can fly, so you pick up information if you become one,” and went away again.

Davidia said to me, “You haven’t seen this before?”

“What — seen him go through magical transformations, you mean, in the jungle night?”

“Well,” she said, “when you put it that way”—she was kicking at a rock—“then it sounds as troubling as it really is.”

“Maybe it’s a chemical problem. Are you taking something for malaria?”

“Once a day. It’s called Lariam.”

“Lariam causes nightmares. I take doxycycline.”

“You said ‘transformations in the jungle night’—but where’s the jungle?”

“The people cut it all down. They burned it to cook breakfast, mostly. And to make way for planting.”

A hundred years ago it would have taken an hour to hack through ten meters of undergrowth. Now huts and footpaths and small gardens cover the hills. By 9:00 a.m. we were passing among them, back on the road, driving on the right side now instead of the left. Within 20 minutes we had a flat tire.

Very briskly Michael raised the car on a jack and attacked the nuts with a tool and got on the spare — a different-colored wheel and a wrong-sized tire lacking any tread at all.

We saw very few motorized vehicles. An occasional motorcycle, an occasional SUV, always, it seemed, stenciled with a corporate or NGO acronym. Passenger busses coming like racecars, nearly capsizing as they careened around the curves toward us, slinging dust bombs from under the wheels. A few lorries bearing cargo, laboring slowly; other lorries with smashed faces dragged among the trees and abandoned. Many, many pedestrians strolling on the margin or crossing side to side, looking up from their daydreams only at the sound of a horn. It was the holiday of sacrifice, Eid al-Adha, and Muslims walked on both sides of the road, some of the women lugging prayer mats as big as house rugs.

The point is, our Land Cruiser stood out, and we couldn’t possibly face any officials. Before we reached any sizeable town, Michael drove off the road to detour, along little more than footpaths, down into gulleys, through patches of agriculture, knocking over stalks of corn and bushes of marijuana to get around the checkpoints and then back onto the real road, along which he sped as if he hadn’t only yesterday slammed this jeep into tragedy, again proceeding African style, all honking, no braking. A little boy ran right in front of the car, running at top speed as if hurrying to get killed. Michael swerved in time, mashing the horn and crying out the window in English to the boy’s family, “Beat that child, beat that child!” I watched to the side, keeping my eyes off the future. The fields were a light green, the color of springtime in the temperate zones, soft and even-looking, with here and there the slow white smoke of trash fires strung over them like mist. Late that day Michael pointed at the hazy distance and claimed he saw the hills of his childhood, the Happy Mountains, called by the missionary James Hannington, in frustration and disgust, the Laughing Monsters, and Michael told us of a forest in those mountains “where you’ll find pine trees about a dozen meters in their height, Nair. Bunches of ten evergreens, fifteen, twenty or more together. What do you call a bunch of trees — a copse? Copses of pines about a dozen meters in height, Nair. And these aren’t common evergreens, but their needles are actually made of precious gold. And you can gather all the needles you want, but if you get pricked by one, and it draws blood — you will lose your soul. A devil comes instantly at the smell of your blood, and snatches your soul right — out — of your heart. Remember,” he said, “when I told you never to have anything to do with the voodoo? Now you’re going to find out why.”

“Michael,” I said, “was it your people who martyred Hannington?” and he only said, “Hannington was stabbed in the side with a spear like Jesus Christ.”

The wedding would be blended into the Burning of the Blood, a weeklong ceremony, he said, “when we put away the bad blood of the war, and drink the new blood of peace. I tell you it is an orgy! Many babies are made. A boy conceived in that week will be a man of peace among his people. But only within wedlock. No bastard can be a man of peace.”

At one point, as the dusk fell on us, he said, “Any moment now we’ll reach Newada Mountain. Tear out my eyes, and I could find it by my heart.”

We turned onto a road that got muddier and muddier each kilometer until we were just mushing along through patches of gumbo separated by horrifyingly slick hard flats, but at least it wasn’t raining. “Fifteen kilometers more to Newada Mountain,” Michael announced, and after a couple dozen kilometers, three dozen, many more than fifteen, certainly, we took a shortcut, a footpath that delivered us into a wasteland, a stinking bog of red gumbo, the sort of mud you can’t stop in, even with four-wheel drive, or you’ll sink and never get going again. By full nightfall we’d determined that the stink came not from the bog, but from our vehicle. “I smell petrol,” Michael said, and the engine began to miss. “I’m not sure about the fuel pump,” Michael said, and the engine died. He cut the headlamps, and in the blackness quite vividly I perceived how an English missionary like James Hannington might have stood up to his buttocks in this sludge and wept, and heard the mountains laughing.

The dead engine gave out small noises as it cooled. With the headlamps switched off we could measure the darkness, which was deep and thick, without moon or stars. Every now and then the frogs started up all around, and then stopped. From far off came a wild, syncopating percussion.

Davidia said, “Are those jungle drums?”

“Probably someone’s idea of a disco,” Michael said.

“Well — let’s go,” she said, but we all three felt the impossibility of moving off on foot into the dark and the muck. Michael closed the windows and we slept the same suffocated sleep as the night before.

And woke at dawn in the foundered jeep, with no better plan than to get out of it and pee.

Michael and I stood on the driver’s side, Davidia squatted on the other. We’d arrived, we now realized, nearly at the limit of the red muddy lowland, at the feet of the mountains we’d seen by day, within sight of a place of twisted trees and lopsided shacks.

“Take your packs,” Michael said. “Walk soft.”

He meant us to understand that by a light tread on the superficial hard spots we might not break through into the gunk, although in many spots we broke through anyway. By tacking in search of better footing we spent half an hour making a few hundred meters.

The village lay between a field of corn and a banana grove. Michael had called it exactly right — the main shack, among squat huts and other shanties, was the Biggest Club Disco, with a generator on the ground outside, not running. Michael took a tour while Davidia and I sat on a bench and watched the village wake up, men and women fussing over cookfires beside the huts, children, chickens, goats, all going softly and talking low in the chilly dawn. Michael turned up with three Cokes and quite a few biscuits wrapped in a page of the Monitor, a Ugandan newspaper, and said, “Watch these people. We don’t know their hearts.”

“Why don’t you just say they’re not your tribe?”

“It’s more complicated than that.”

“No it isn’t,” I said. “Is this your clan, or not?”

“All right, the simple answer is yes — they’re speaking my dialect, but it’s not my close family. It’s not the right time to reveal myself.”

“Who do you think you are? Long-lost Ulysses?” Then I felt embarrassed for him. I could see by his look that he thought exactly that. “Michael, is this Newada Mountain?”

“By my reckoning, it’s very near.”

Davidia wasn’t suffering any of this. “Get us some real food,” she told him.

“Sit there,” he said, as if we weren’t already slumped side by side on the bench.

When he’d gone I moved close to her, hip touching hip. I said, “He’s using you for something. Something mystical, superstitious.”

“Like?”

“I don’t know. Kidnapping one of the gods and coercing the others to … rearrange the fate of us all.”

She made a sort of barking noise, with tears in her eyes. “You’re crazy.”

“As crazy as he is?”

“No. Once in a while.”

“It’s time I got you out of here.”

“You don’t have to say it twice.”

“Then let’s go.”

“Go how?”

“We’ll walk.”

“Where?”

“Uganda’s that way — east.”

“How far?”

“I don’t know. But it isn’t getting any closer while we sit here.”

“What will he do?”

“Nothing. He can’t hold us at gunpoint.”

“Why not?”

“Because he hasn’t got a gun.”

Something was happening, suddenly, to every person in the village — as if they choked on poisonous fumes — and their voices got loud, and we heard a vehicle in the distance. Davidia asked me what was wrong, who was coming, what kind of car. “I don’t know,” I said, “but I don’t give a shit — we’ll hitch a ride out of here or kill them and take the fucking thing.” Then we heard other engines, several vehicles, none of them visible yet. Somebody had a gun: one shot, two, three … then the rest of a clip. At that point our own jeep, three hundred meters away and to the right of us, burst into silent brightness — the boom of the explosion came a second later.

Davidia and I stood up simultaneously from the bench. We watched a white pickup truck scurrying across the landscape at a tangent to us, driving hysterical villagers before it, sparks of rifle fire bursting from the passenger window and soldiers standing up in the back and firing too, when they could manage it, as they bounced and swayed and hung on.

I turned toward the nearest copse of larger trees, and discovered that it was besieged by other vehicles. I felt relief when Michael came toward us in a hurry calling, “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go.”

The banana grove seemed a possibility. Anywhere, really. We proceeded in a sort of innocent, unprovoked manner, nothing wrong here, just walking.

We entered the grove. Behind us came a hush, then a man’s rapid voice, many gunshots, and the uninterrupted keening of a woman somewhere, and soon the whole village, it seemed, was crying out, some of them screeching like birds, some bawling, some moaning low. Every child sounded like every other child.

As soon as we’d put a little distance between us and the din of souls in the clearing, I sat on the edge of a pile of adobe bricks and wrapped my arms around my middle. “My stomach’s a sack of vomit.”

“I’ll give you ten seconds. Then double-time.”

“Where’s Davidia?”

“I’m right here.” She was behind me.

A woman burst onto the path ahead of us with eyes like headlights, running with her hands high in the air. Bullets tugged at the banana leaves around her.

I lost my head. I see that now. We’d moved a hundred meters along this path, breathing hard, our steps pounding, before I formed any clear intention of getting up and running. Of my panicked state I remember only others panicking, the faces of tiny children swollen into cartoon caricature, the long wet lashes and pouting lips and baby cheeks and the teardrops exploding like molten gobs in the air around their heads. I remember shoes left behind on the ground — flip-flops, slippers, whatever’s hard to run in.

Michael collided with my back, gripped each of my elbows from behind, and propelled me along. Davidia kept pace, clawed at our clothing, at the banana fronds too, and got in front of us, then away from us, and Michael steered me off the path and hugged me, stopped me.

“You can’t outrun bullets.”

“Yes I can!” I meant it.

He pointed amid the grove and said, “Go ten meters and get down.” He watched while I obeyed, then was gone.

Multiple guns now, and many fewer voices.

I lay on my belly. A few steps from my face the grove ceased, and to the right the gumbo bog took over, and for an unquantifiable period I watched a heap of something burning out there before I understood it was our vehicle. Part of the driveshaft remained, a wheel with its tire, and around these two things only the shell, still giving out small flames, and surrounding that, the red earth steaming and smoking.

Michael came along leading Davidia by the hand.

I stood and followed them along the edge of the grove and toward a cornfield. We stopped to watch the white pickup truck charging at us, plowing down the stalks until it slid to a stop almost in our faces, a spiffy little truck with fresh gold lettering across its front windshield: ALL EYEZ ON ME. Soldiers leapt from the back of it, and the three of us walked before their guns.

We waited in front of the disco while they wrapped up the looting. Most of the villagers had escaped — no more screams, only the soldiers’ whoops, their panting and shouting, and much laughter. The young recruit responsible for us drifted some distance away, dazzled by the excitement, but rather than running, Michael and I sat Davidia on the bench and stood in front of her as camouflage because we didn’t want anybody noticing us, noticing Davidia, raping Davidia — and they raped a couple of women behind the disco, a young one and her mother, who in their terror seemed almost apathetic, almost asleep, and who afterward walked away brushing the dirt from their bare arms and the fronts of their torn shifts. It took the commander a full hour to bring his troops to order. He mustered them in front of the disco, thirty or so young men in green cammy uniforms, and went from face to face lecturing bitterly, pointing often at the shreds of our Land Cruiser out in the wasteland. Apparently rape and looting were lesser crimes than blowing up a good machine.

Michael said, “Did you see the fireball? Petrol vapors. I told you the fuel pump was ruptured.”

[OCT 16 6AM]

I know Michael’s sleeping. He’ll sleep through a barrage. I don’t know where he’s being kept, or Davidia. I hope they’re together. I’m in the main hut with the commander, along with ten or twelve other men, the number changes, they come and go. It’s a spacious hut, an open-air corral, really, with low adobe walls under a thatched roof, a cafeteria table, a tattered couch, three broken chairs.

They’ve got my pack, my extra clothes, passport, cash—4K in US twenties, fifties, and hundreds. They left me my Timex watch, out of contempt for the brand or perhaps for the concept of time itself. They stole my penlight too, but they’ve lent it back so I can write by its tiny glow.

Why take everything but the watch and the light and my ballpoint pen, and then give me this lined paper torn from a schoolroom notebook, 42 sheets of it? I’ve sat up all night scrawling on them because I’m too terrified to sleep. The liquor’s worn off and I’m going mad. When I’ve filled these pages they’ll be included, I suspect, with some sort of ransom demand.

The roosters are calling. Nobody’s stirring yet but one person out by the latrines — a young woman in a dirty linen shift, barefoot, hardly more than a girl, hacking a trough in the earth with a vicious-looking short-handled hoe, a trough in the earth shaped, I’m afraid, quite like a grave.

[OCT 16 8AM]

The commander claims to be regular Army but could easily be lying, or just confused. His cammy uniform bears no insignia. Beneath his open tunic he wears a T-shirt with the faded emblem of a bottle on it, soda or beer. He calls himself a general, won’t say his name. Drives his own little cream-colored Nissan truck, the one that says EYEZ ON ME.

He takes me for the leader, because I’m the white one.

Last night, after discovering that my bad French and his own bad English render idle conversation impossible, he nodded toward the small cassette player on his table and punched a button, and it played a song called, I believe, “Coat of Many Colors,” by Dolly Parton, over and over. Just that one song, repeating. This wasn’t psychological warfare, but a sincere attempt at hospitality.

This morning he shared with me his general’s breakfast: strips of tripe in a broth smelling pretty much like kerosene. It took me a while to get it all down and set the bowl aside. The meal came with dessert, a sugary pudding sprinkled with the legs, if not more, of some sort of insect.

[OCT 16 12 NOON]

After breakfast, when I thought everybody was still sleeping off last night’s liquor, they all jumped up on the general’s shouted orders and mustered in the clearing among the huts for the very quick court martial of the recruit who blew up our Land Cruiser.

When they’d made a circle and wrestled themselves to attention, all thirty or more of them, the general’s aide-de-camp, his main henchman, dragged the youngster out of a hut barefoot and stripped down to ragged gray shorts and stood him up before the fresh-dug grave. His hands were tied behind him with a winding of black rubber. Perhaps from a tire’s inner tube.

I made up part of this audience of dazed, half-dressed soldiers. Davidia and Michael stood across from me. They were many feet apart. Davidia looked unhurt, unmolested. The magic of her US passport must be working.

Michael, with his Ghanaian document, enjoys no immunity. He caught my eye and turned sideways — his arms were bound behind him, but I couldn’t see his hands for the press of the crowd. He smiled and shrugged.

Our general faced us taking a similar posture, hands behind his back and feet apart, and addressed the whole group briefly — in a localized French, I think — before tearing off his sunglasses and turning on the malefactor and lecturing him in the face for five or more minutes, screaming into the kid’s open mouth, right down his throat. During this harangue the general’s henchman strutted back and forth in his mirrored sunglasses and helmet, slapping his pistol against his palm, until it was time to push the kid to his knees and put the gun to his head. The youth wept and bawled while the general shouted him down to silence. When all was quiet, he counted down from trois! — deux! — un! and the henchman’s hammer snapped on a empty chamber.

The general laughed. Then the troops all laughed too.

The general pushed his henchman aside and drew his own pistol and raised it high and pulled the slide back as if demonstrating how to cock this particular weapon and pushed the barrel hard against the kid’s neck and forced him down onto his face, and bent over him like that while he sobbed into the dirt. Some of the troops exclaimed — the general would get it done!.. He stared hard one by one at each face, saying nothing, until he’d forced them all into a state of pensive sobriety. He worked his shoulders. Shifted his stance. Planted his feet. Still playing, I felt sure of it. But the pistol was cocked, and one small mistake makes a murder, and in Africa, so the old hands assure me, the first one pops some kind of cork, and they don’t quit after that.

Ten seconds passed. Once more the boy spoke out — a pitiable, wrenching sound, his face like a newborn’s — trying to direct his words backward to the man about to dispatch him.

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.