The Laughing Monsters

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.

Davidia must still be here. I have no reason to believe they’ve taken her elsewhere.

Michael Adriko is elsewhere. He never got here. He’s gone. He got away.

* * *

After two days’ grilling, I got a break.

Off-line, I finished transcribing the handwritten letter to Tina. The notebook pages ended with this quick entry:

I’ve slept two hours with my face on the table and just woke up to find everything changed. The general returned my pack and clothes and even several hundred of my 4K dollars — all the twenties.

Michael’s sitting in the back of the general’s pickup — hands unbound. I saw Davidia getting in the front. The day has turned. Whether it turns upside down I

Much activity — time to go—

… All right, Tina, there you have it. My rise from terrified prisoner to confused detainee.

Michael or Davidia must have told the Congolese Army about her connection with the 10th Special Forces. And only about Davidia’s connection, surely, because when Michael disappeared, nobody cared.

Last time I saw Michael I was getting in the truck, up front, with the Congolese so-called general and Davidia. Michael leaned over the rail, nearly into my window, and handed me a pellet of chewing gum. “Here. Keep yourself busy.”

When we made our rendezvous that night, it was like a magic trick. During a rain, the men in the back of the general’s pickup had covered themselves with a dark plastic tarp. They whipped the tarp off. Michael had vanished.

Our escort were three US infantry Nissan pickups, just like our general’s, only olive rather than white.

As Davidia and I boarded, one of the youngsters who’d guarded us said to me, “Newada Mountain.”

“Yes?”

“I am from there. I am Kakwa.”

“Yes?”

“Your friend is there.”

“Michael? My African friend?”

“Yes. He left to Newada Mountain.”

“Oh!” I said — getting it for the first time—“New Water Mountain.”

As for lately, Tina: no activity to report. I’ve spent the day in idleness, in limbo, in hope. I’ve made a proposal, and wheels may be turning. We just might forge an arrangement. In any case, they haven’t said no, and they’ve given me a day off. I can use one — my head still spins, and I slept very little last night, and before that I had no appetite for dinner, as my lunch was interrupted when this American, wow, a genuine asshole — attached to NIIA I suppose, but he withheld identification — dropped out of the sky.

I was sitting at a table with Patrick Roux, my tentmate and alleged fellow detainee, when we heard what must have been this new man’s chopper landing but thought nothing of it, choppers come and go. Ten minutes later he entered and bumped across the cafeteria like a blimpy cartoon animal, I mean in a state of personal awkwardness, as if balancing a stack of plates, but he carried only his hands before him, at chest level. A blue checked shirt, khaki pants, brown loafers. “Come and talk to me.”—And I said, “No.” He had a fringe of brown hair with a big bald spot. He had fat cheeks and soulful, angry eyes. Reasonably young, mid-thirties.

He stood by my place leaning on the table and looking down at me until a sergeant and a private came and lifted me by either arm from behind. As they quick-marched me out, he went over to the serving line, apparently for some lunch.

Online, just before I pressed SEND, I added:

The soldiers took me to a tent, and the sergeant left, and the private stood at ease by the tent fly, and I sat on one half of the furniture, that is, on one of two folding chairs.

The sergeant returned with a chair of his own, unfolded it, and sat down and stared at me. Together we waited thirty minutes for my first interrogator.

I said nothing, and the sergeant said nothing.

He was present every minute of every session, and he always said nothing, and he never stopped staring.

* * *

My answers had to come fast. He who hesitates is lying.

“We’ve been getting a lot of NTRs from you.”

“We?”

“Your reports have been forwarded to us. They were all NTRs.”

“If there’s nothing to report, that’s what I report. Would you rather I make things up?”

“Why would you transmit two identical NTRs with a thirty-second interval between them?”

My stomach sank down to my groin. It irritated me that I couldn’t control my breath.

“On October second you sent two NTRs in a row from the Freetown facility, thirty seconds apart. Why is that?”

“It was my initial utilization of the equipment. I chose to double up.”

“But on October eleventh you sent an NTR from the Arua station. Weren’t you utilizing that equipment for the first time?”

“It didn’t seem necessary to be redundant. I had confidence in the equipment because the setup there seemed more robust — was obviously more robust.”

“Why don’t you go Danish if you’re working Danish?”

“Pardon?”

“If you’re working as a Dane, why don’t you travel as a Dane?”

“I thought I was working for NATO.”

“You’re an army captain.”

“Yes.”

“In whose army?”

“Denmark.”

“Flashing a US passport.”

“A Danish passport is something of a risk, because I hardly speak Danish at all. It makes me look bogus.”

“Two NTRs thirty seconds apart — isn’t that a pretty crude and obvious signal?”

He was right. I kept quiet.

“Who intercepted that crude and obvious signal? Who was it actually meant for?”

“This is boring. Can’t we just talk?”

“I see you’re in red.”

“You’re noticing only now?”

“White is for the grown-ups. Red is for the noncompliant. Gitmo protocol.”

“Guantánamo Bay?”

“Yes.”

“All those nifty short forms — I hate them.”

“Give us a location on Michael Adriko.”

Here I counted to five before admitting, “I’ve lost him.”

“General location. Uganda? Congo?”

“Congo.”

“East? West?”

“East.”

“Close to here?”

“I could only guess.”

“Then do so.”

“I believe he has reason to be in the area.”

“You had him, you lost him, he’s reachable. We should know that. Isn’t that something to report?”

“From what facility? We’ve been in the bush.”

“I’d call it something to report.”

I raised a middle finger. “Report this.”

“Believe me, I will.”

“Good.”

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” he said. “Do you smoke?”

“No.”

“Smoke pot? Opium?”

“Never.”

“Which one?”

“Cut it out.”

“What about alcohol?”

“Yes.”

“Correct. You were reported drunk in the restaurant of the Papa Leone there in Freetown on…” He consulted his notepad.

Fucking Horst. Old Bruno. “The evening of the sixth,” I said.

“So you agree.”

“I agree on the date. Not on my condition. I didn’t take a Breathalyzer.”

“What about when you sent the meltdown message, rockets up your ass and ‘go fuck yourselves’ and all that, were you drunk?”

“I’m sober now. Go fuck yourself.”

He said, “Captain Nair, in March of 2033 they’ll give me a gold watch, and I can retire. Till then I’ve got nothing to do but this.”

“I’m through answering questions.”

“As you wish. But you and I will stay right here.”

“When can I see an attorney?”

“As your legal status evolves, you’ll be afforded that opportunity.”

“And my legal status is — what?”

“Evolving. In accordance with the progress of this interview.”

“Well, the progress has stopped. When can I leave?”

“Right now you’re being detained without recourse to counsel under US antiterrorism laws.”

“Which law in particular?”

“You can expect to be informed of that as your status evolves.”

“Okay. Suppose this interview sails smoothly along. What can you offer me?”

“A good listener.”

“Then I’ll be the one to make the offer,” I said. “I’m going to tell you everything, and then I expect you to bring in somebody higher up. Somebody who can deal.”

“I’m not considering any offers.”

“Then I assume you’re not authorized.”

“I don’t recommend you make assumptions.”

“But surely you can send me up the chain.”

“Also an assumption.”

“Fine. Offer withdrawn. Let the silence begin.”

Our bodyguard, the sergeant, was one to emulate. On taking his seat he’d rested his hands on his knees, and he hadn’t disturbed them since.

Within half a minute I had to wipe sweat from my upper lip. Why had I begun this contest? And did it matter what I told them? They’re only digging for lies, and when they turn up the truth they brush it aside and go on digging, stupid as dogs.

The interrogator had the sense not to let it go on. He looked at his wristwatch, which might have been platinum. “Here’s an idea, Captain Nair. Why don’t you repeat your offer, and why don’t I accept it?”

* * *

Our tent had a good rubber roof without leaks. A strip of mosquito gauze running under the eaves let in the searing light all night, the disorienting yellow-ochre sunshine without shadows. Except for the microwave and satellite towers the base resembled an expanse of sacred aboriginal rubble, sandbag bunkers, Quonset huts emerging from mounds of earth bulldozed against them, and in the midst of it all two monumental generators that never stopped. No fuel or water reservoirs in evidence — they must have been buried. An acre of trucks and fighting vehicles, a hangar like a small mountain, a helicopter bull’s-eye. Mornings and evenings a live bugler, not a recording, blew reveille and taps.

Our sandbag perimeter could have accommodated three more tents, but ours stood alone. My tentmate liked to sit on the wall and stare across the way at the chain-link enclosure full of Africans, nearly fifty of them, Lord’s Resistance, I should think, or collaborators, women on the north side, men on the south. No children. The men spent their time right against the divider, fingers curled on the wire, laughing and talking, while the women formed a single clump on the other side, never looking at the men. Once in a while a downpour drove them all under blue plastic canopies strung up in the corners. Quarrels erupted often among the women. I never heard any voice that sounded like Davidia’s.

Patrick thought he might spot his wife among them, so he said. Still paying out this line. I didn’t buy it.

We took our meals with everyone else. Officers and enlisted men ate together in a large Quonset along with civilian guests and Special Ops helicopter crews and detainees from NATO countries, of which Patrick and I were the only ones, the only people modeling red pajamas.

The Special Activities Division sees some sort of advantage, I think, in starting the questions when your fork is halfway to your mouth. Just grab you up, goodbye hamburger sandwich, and it’s off to the interrogator.

This one was new. And that was good.

* * *

We met in a Quonset hut, in an office with a desk, two aluminum dining chairs, and some empty cardboard boxes and a cardboard barrel of MREs I could have stood in up to my neck. “Meal Rammed in an Envelope,” he said. “Care to suck one down?” I declined. He served me black coffee. I could have chosen tea and milk.

I said, “Where’s Sergeant Stone today?”

“Sergeant Stone?”

“I don’t know if his name was Stone, but he certainly seemed to be made of it.”

“No sergeants here.”

“He never introduced himself. Neither did the civilian.”

“Under current regulations, that’s not a requirement.”

“But under the circumstances, it might be courteous.”

“Sure. Agreed.”

“So — who are you?”

“Let’s skip over the courtesies for now. Can I suggest we do that, without irritating the shit out of you?”

I was too irritated to answer.

He used a lot of motions getting a bag of tea into a cup. He seemed older than the first one, but in a way he looked younger, looked barbered and tailored, in dark trousers, a nice white shirt — I wouldn’t know silk, but it might have been — and cuff links. He looked the way I try to look.

He sat down facing me with our knees nearly touching. We observed each other’s manner of drinking from a cup.

“Captain Nair, I’d like your opinion.”

“I’m full of opinions.”

“Good. Well. In the fullness of your opinion — does all this you’ve been telling us the last couple of days sound like a desperate, unbelievable lie?”

I counted to three. “Yes.” Counted again. “Now can I ask you a question?” Silence. “Where are you going?”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“Why not?”

He sipped his tea.

“In case I’m telling the truth.”

He drained his cup. “Or in case you stop lying. More coffee?”

“No, thanks.”

He stood and set our cups aside and pulled his chair behind his desk and sat down. “I’ve reviewed all your written material,” he said, opening a drawer and taking out a manila file folder.

“Yes.”

He laid it apart before him. Printed e-mails, and my long note to Tina. “The Congolese Army threw you quite a party.”

“Yes.”

“Stressful.”

“Yes.”

He spent a few minutes perusing the pages of the letter, pages crusty from sweat and tears. “Sometimes I wish I had the balls to say this stuff. I don’t even have the balls to think it.”

I didn’t reply.

“Another way of putting it is that we’re seeing a lot of anger, and that’s not characteristic of our expectations. No matter what the level of stress.”

“I don’t deny it — lately I’ve been out of sorts.”

“Sure, that’s another way to put it. If you think all this is funny.”

“Well, I was dispatched to this region on an assignment, and now two weeks later I’m being dealt with as some kind of terrorist.”

“I think you’re regarded as absent from your assignment.”

“But I’m not absent, I’m present. Here I am, waiting to get back to work.”

“A Special Forces attaché goes AWOL, starts making alarming noises about enriched uranium. You’re sent to make contact, deliver one report that you’ve done so, and you immediately go silent.” He raised a printed e-mail by two corners and faced it toward me. “Until this maniac salvo.”

“I’ve been pursuing my assignment according to my best judgment.”

“And this meltdown message? ‘Cunts’ and such?”

“Everybody likes to quote that one.”

“I know. It’s very compelling. But why did you send it?”

“Theater,” I said.

“Really.”

“I’m dealing with some rogue Mossad agents. I had to make it look good.”

“A rogue Mossad agent, you’re saying, was sitting beside you while you transmitted insults to your NATO colleagues.”

“Didn’t the last guy tape our interviews? Yes? Have you heard them?”

“I’ve read highlights of the transcript.”

“Then if you want the details, you can read the whole thing. Don’t ask me to rehash.”

“And all of this, the crazy transmission, tossing your commo equipment, getting rounded up by the Congolese Army, all of this was in fulfillment of your superiors’ request that you keep a close eye on this fellow. And you say your mission’s momentum has declined sharply. And you propose a strategy to reboot.”

“Yes.”

He sat back with an empty-handed shrug. Shaking his head. Smiling. “Hard to know what to make of all this.”

“I want to ask about Davidia St. Claire.”

“On that subject I’ve got nothing to share with you. I mean really — I just don’t know. But she’s not in any trouble. I’d be more concerned about the one you sent the notes to. Tina? Is that her name?”

“You can read the name right there. I can read it, upside down.”

“This would be Tina Huntington. Works for us in Amsterdam.”

“Who’s you?”

“Who — me?”

“You say us. Who’s us?”

We both laughed.

“We the Americans, from the USA,” he said.

“Right. She works for you. You’re NATO?”

“Nope. I’m a US naval attaché.”

“Rank?”

“I’m attached. Not in. Just attached.”

“So you don’t need an ocean.”

“I have an ocean. I’m actually assigned to a ship.”

“In the Indian Ocean? African Atlantic?”

“Well, it moves around. It has propellers.”

“A carrier?”

“Naw. A command ship. Floating office complex. Just about a luxury liner. USSOCOM.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“USSOCOM? US Special Operations Command. The ship is the regional command center.”

“For this region.”

“Yes.”

“Meaning — DR Congo? East Africa?”

“For AFRICOM. Africa. The whole continent.”

I felt, suddenly, in love. I leaned closer to study his face. “Who are you?”

“I’m the person who can deal.”

“You still don’t have a name?”

“The name I have is Susan Rice.”

“You’re not black enough to be Susan Rice.”

“Plus, she’s a woman.”

“I was getting round to that.”

“I’m the closest thing to Susan Rice.”

She was the current national security advisor in the White House. The queen, in other words, of the secrets and the dark.

He placed his hands on the desk before him. He liked this part. “Well, Captain Nair, you’ve rubbed the right lantern.”

* * *

Patrick Roux and I sat on our sandbag wall observing a gang of men creating more sandbags — not all men, actually. We often saw women wearing US uniforms. And of course we saw women among the white-garbed African prisoners. Never any kind of female civilian. Never Davidia.

In the motor lot I counted twenty-two Nissan pickups with canopy shells. One dozen Humvees. Four Stryker fighting vehicles, each worth millions. The helicopter hangar probably housed a chopper big enough to devour them all.

I said to Patrick, “This was more amusing when it was science fiction.”

He appeared not to comprehend.

The sandbag detail worked in three-person teams — the digger, the sacker, the stacker — filling bags from a heap of dirt and loading them onto a flatbed truck. I remembered reading, as a child, during the first Gulf War, that in order to supply such sacks for their emplacements the Yanks were shipping thousands of tons of American sand across the seas to the Arabian Desert.

Within our perimeter we had a chemical port-a-potty and a vestibule containing a proper shower that ran hot water up from under the ground. Always hot. You couldn’t run it out.

The mess served excellent fare. Real eggs, real potatoes, American meat. In the mornings we smelled the pastries baking.

We had two sets each of the red pajamas, underwear, bedsheets, and towels, and our laundry was collected by enlisted personnel and returned clean eight hours later. That we made our own beds began to seem unreasonable.

* * *

For nearly an hour I sat alone. When my host arrived he didn’t sit down, hardly entered his own office. “I’ve gone over the transcripts in detail.”

“Very good,” I said, but he’d already left the room again.

In five minutes he returned, shut the door, and occupied his desk. I waited for an offer of coffee. He plunged into a period of meditation in the manner of Sherlock Holmes, elbows on the table, fingertips on his temples.

“What makes you think we’d pay you off and let you stroll out of here?”

“You’ll have to help me figure that out.”

Silence.

“I’ll need a convincing story.”

Silence.

“But if I turn up with a good enough story, and if I’ve got a bag of money to vouch for it, then the thing is in motion again, and the direction of that motion is toward something that has to be taken extremely seriously. Don’t you think?”

“We’re taking it seriously. No matter how unlikely. This shit story from Michael Adriko — Adriko? Or Adriko.”

“Accent on the second syllable. Adriko.”

“A ton or more of HEU. You’re really alleging that?”

“I can only personally vouch for the existence of two kilos, approximately — judging by its weight in my hand.”

“You held it in your hand.”

“I did so. Yes.” He was silent. “I don’t know anything about nuclear devices or their manufacture.” Silent. “I’m wondering, though, if a couple of kilos wouldn’t go a long way.” I wished I’d stop talking, but his silence was working on me. “I mean in terms of explosive capability. I have no explosives training. But possible damage. Destructive potential.” Still silent. “So even if two kilos is all he’s got—”

“Would you submit to a polygraph?”

“Oh. Well. Where — here? When?”

“It wouldn’t be hard to arrange. Can I arrange it?”

“Of course. If it amuses you, fine, sure, but I mean — I can tell you now, you’ll get an Inconclusive. I mean to say — I’ve been telling so many lies and listening to so many lies until I don’t know what’s true and what’s false. And we’re in Africa, you realize”—shut up shut up, I told myself, shut up—“and you realize it’s all myths and legends here, and lies, and rumors. You realize that.” I bit down on my tongue, and that worked.

He waited, but I was done.

“All right. Excuse me for just a minute. Help yourself to coffee. Ten minutes max.” He left the door halfway open behind him.

The coffee urn waited within my reach. I drew myself a cup — yesterday’s, room temperature. I couldn’t form a useful thought. I kept tasting the coffee, expecting it to turn hot and fresh. Without a watch I could only guess, but it seemed rather closer to thirty minutes than ten.

When he came back in, he drew himself a cup too and sat behind his desk, sipped once, said, “Jesus,” and then went silent.

He interrupted his thoughts only once to say, “No polygraph.”

He got up and went to the door and called out, “Clyde?” and sat down behind his desk again. “Take these cups, will you?” he said to the private who arrived. “And bring us a fresh service. Not the whole bucket. Just a carafe or something, okay? Leave the door open.”

The silence resumed. I had the impression nothing in the world could happen until we had coffee.

“I’m authorized to tell you Davidia St. Claire is on her way home.”

“Oh…”

“You can assume she’s been debriefed. Queried. Meticulously.”

“You mean she’s already left?”

“Let’s concentrate on the people in this room.”

“Just tell me — is she gone?”

“If she’s not, she will be soon.” The private took a step into the room and paused. “Thank you, Clyde. Is it Clyde?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Thanks. Pull the door shut as you leave.” To me he said, “I want to hear you say it.” He let the carafe languish on his desk. Poured no coffee. “I want to hear exactly what you’re proposing.”

“Well, just what you said a few minutes ago, what you suggested.”

“Which is?”

“That you pay me off and let me stroll out of here. And I get back to what I was doing, and see if the deal is still in motion, or if the deal can be started up again, and see if we can bring the parties together as arranged.”

“The parties to this proposed, this alleged, this fucking unprecedented criminal conspiracy.”

“Yes. Those parties.”

“You, and these Israelis, and the people Sergeant Adriko represents. If such exist.”

“That would be the objective.”

“A sting operation.”

“That sounds,” I agreed, “like the applicable terminology.”

“I think we’ve already deployed the applicable terms, fairy tale, for instance, and bullshit, what else, God,” he said, “there’s not a shred of doubt in my mind. You are fucking with us.”

“And yet — here we are.”

“I can’t deny it. Since nine-eleven, chasing myths and fairy tales has turned into a serious business. An industry. A lucrative one.”

“Are we talking price now?”

“What a silly, silly man.”

“But if we were.”

“Then I suppose this would be the moment when you say a number.”

“They want two million.”

“Cash? Or account?”

“Gold.”

“They expect gold?”

“Would that be possible?”

“Gold. What’s the price of gold these days?”

“Around forty-five a kilo, US.”

“Forty-five thousand. So, forty-some kilos. Forty-four plus.”

“Call it forty-five.”

“Forty-five kilos of gold.”

“Could you do it?”

The look in his eyes made me sorry for him. “Do you want to hear the truth?”

“Yes.”

“We can do anything.”

* * *

Early afternoon. I lay on my bed. I heard the sound of a helicopter coming down.

The walls of the tent rippled. Then they convulsed. I determined to stay inside and avoid the dust, but I was visited with an intuition. I knew. I went outside.

I stood by the sandbag hedge and watched the man I still believe to have been Colonel Thiebes, now in officer’s dress, heading for the chopper as it swayed in its descent, a duffel grip in his left hand, his right hand cupping the elbow of Davidia St. Claire.

Davidia and her protector stopped and let the red cloud overwhelm them while the machine completed its landing. It was a utility helicopter, but not a Black Hawk, something smaller, I don’t know what kind. Davidia leaned toward its skis as they felt for the ground. She concentrated on that vision. No backward glance. The chopper had hardly touched down before they were in motion toward it.

I ran to overtake her. I called her name. She couldn’t hear me for the roar of the blades. I called again—“Davidia!” I screamed it many times over.

I gave up running and turned my back against the dust. In a few seconds the wind fell off and the noise got smaller. The craft must have been traveling low, because when I looked around again I could hear it, but I couldn’t find it in the sky.

I went back into the tent and closed and zipped the flap and sat on my bed, blinking my eyes and beating the dirt from my hair hand over hand.

* * *

I felt a touch on my shoulder, and I woke up frightened. It was dark, quiet — very late.

Patrick Roux said, “These are your clothes.”

He sat there in our only chair. I could see he held something in his lap. “It’s time to get dressed.”

He was speaking Danish.

“What?”

“It’s time to go. Right now the way is open.”

“Wait. Wait … what?”

“It’s time to go. Just take some items for grooming. What you can fit in your pockets. Here’s your wristwatch back.”

Great joy powered me out of bed. “You fucker,” I said. “I knew it.”

“You prefer English?” he said in English.

“Or German,” I said. “I went to Swiss schools. The truth is I hardly speak Danish at all. Is this my shirt? I went to English-speaking schools.”

“We have six more minutes.”

“They’ve shrunk my shirt.”

“Let’s be prompt.”

* * *

When I’d kicked my pajamas aside and dressed and was all ready to go, we delayed, I on my bed, Patrick in the chair, with nothing to do, it seemed, but listen to the rumble of the generators and the giant buzzing of the floodlights outside. He peered at his wristwatch. My own watch, the cheap dependable Timex, read 1:15 a.m.

After two minutes he said, “Now we’ll go.”

We stepped into the orange glare and a soft, glittering rain. Patrick zipped the tent’s fly behind us and we walked across the grounds and right through the open gateway, passing without a challenge between two gunnery emplacements, five soldiers on each, in their helmets and night goggles and armor. The gate rolled shut behind us and we entered the dark.

The rain let up, but still we had no moon. For thirty minutes we walked along the road without flashlights, going north, feeling with our feet for the ruts and the boggy soft spots. We didn’t talk. The din of the reptiles and insects, our steps and our breaths, that’s all we heard.

Headlights came up on the road far behind us. Shortly afterward, we heard the engine.

We stepped to the side, and the headlights stopped fifty feet short of us, and Patrick went to the vehicle, a Humvee, I thought, but I couldn’t really see, and in a minute his silhouette came toward me and then disappeared as the car turned around and accelerated back the way it had come.

Now Roux directed our steps with a small flashlight. I could make out a sizeable package dangling from his arm. He slung it over his shoulder. As we walked it gave out a kind of clicking and muttering.

For quite a while the vehicle’s aura remained visible behind us. I would have expected them to run blackout headlights, but they didn’t seem to care.

When they were well away, Roux said, “We’ll get off the road here, and take a rest.”

“Let’s not drown in a mudhole.”

“No, it’s good ground.”

He found a spot he liked, laid out a handkerchief, and sat with his back to a tree. Between his knees he set down the package, a canvas haversack. He unbelted the flap, and I knelt beside him while he unpacked the contents by the beam of his penlight — it showed eerily on his eyeglass lenses, like two sparks in his face.

On top, a large manila envelope, inside it a map of the Democratic Republic of Congo. And cash. US twenties. “This is my money.”

“Your funds when you arrived. It’s all there.”

No wallet, no cards of any kind. “Where’s my passport?”

“You don’t need it.”

Also, a manila folder — the one I’d seen on the desk of the man from USSOCOM — holding, as far as I could tell in the dark, printed copies of my e-mails, as well as my handwritten pages, and not copies, but the originals themselves. “They’re dusting their hands of me completely, aren’t they? I bet they’re burning my pajamas too.”

Roux made no answer while I looked at some items wrapped in a hand towel. A metal fork and a spoon. A folding knife with a single blade. A penlight. “But what about a cell phone? How will I stay in contact?”

“They’ll be able to locate you.”

“Of course they will.”

At the bottom of the sack rested two one-liter bottles of water, and at the very bottom, a cloth bag. Roux set the bag on the ground and opened it and trained his light on a lot of metallic lozenges, each wrapped in tissue paper.

I held my light in my teeth and unwrapped one. Considering its heft, it was small. Three fingers would have covered it.

A kilo of gold.

I said, “Goddamn! Goddamn!” and the light dropped from my mouth.

“Captain Nair, listen to me. In the first place, these are only twenty kilos.”

“That’s still a million dollars’ worth. Goddamn!”

“Stop saying Goddamn.” Roux set down his penlight and paused to polish his glasses on his shirttail. Squatting over my pile of riches. “In the second place, these are not genuine.”

“Well, then, fuck. Fuck and Goddamn. Not genuine?”

He unwrapped another, shone his light on it, turning it in his dirty fingers. “The plating is copper and nickel, with some gold. Inside it’s only lead.”

“Who’s going to fall for crap like this?”

“Nobody. It works only with complete amateurs — you know, drunken tourists lured in by pimps, that kind of thing. It’s not for serious ruses, it won’t pass any kind of knowledgeable inspection. It’s something you can flash, nothing more. It’s just for you to flash.”

“This is outrageous.”

Roux laughed and said, “I laugh because you’re entertaining. I’m going back now.” He scooped up the contents and fastened them inside the pack and stood up. He seemed in a rush. “Yours to carry.”

I donned the pack. The load was heavy, but it was good equipment. Thick straps. I could probably hike a long way without chafing my armpits.

Facing him I understood, only now, that he was perhaps as tall as I. But he had a tininess of personality, and a sparrow’s face, also tiny. So then even his size was an illusion. His Frenchness, his bag of gold, his lost wife — all fake.

“I’m instructed to tell you to get physically close to certain parties, keeping this material with you.”

“That was my understanding.”

“They’ll maintain a fix on your location at all times. Remember that.”

“Is this a drone operation?”

“I’m not aware of such a thing.”

“Sure.”

“I’m only a messenger, but I can assure you personally you won’t be harmed. We don’t fight like that, harming our own people.”

“Sure. Except when you do.”

He said, “Don’t worry. Never worry. And don’t drop your mission.”

“I wouldn’t consider it.”

“If you do,” Roux said, “if you drop out of contact — you’ll be in an unacceptable situation. A kind of hell. Always hunted. Never resting. Nobody who tries it can last very long. You know it, don’t you? Nobody ever lasts.”

* * *

The US Army kept their garrison well out of the way. I had the road entirely to myself. By the fragrance, I guessed it cut through a forest of eucalyptus. The sack’s contents clicked rhythmically and with every step I said yes, finally, yes, at last: I’m done with you all, done with your world, done with you all, done with your world.

Twenty kilos of nonsense on my shoulders. How many pounds? Better than forty. More like forty-five. How many stone? Something like three. Right around seven hundred ounces. Yet the pack felt weightless, until my giant excitement gave way to the question why I wasn’t getting rid of it. Some item among the contents called out uninterruptedly to a global positioning satellite, a chopper full of Special Ops, a Predator drone, a fleet of drones — called out, after all, to the people who would either bring order to my affairs in a prison or murder me and solve my life.

I trudged for five hours, covering in that interval only a few miles. The dawn had begun — as always this near the equator very gradually, and even doubtfully — before I spied any huts among the trees.

I reached a slick soft spot I couldn’t skirt unless I ranged far into the wood. I sidled left along its edge and came to a sucking, lethal-looking red-and-yellow mudhole sprouting dead limbs around its border. In such a pit anything might be drowned. I shrugged off the pack and opened it at my feet. I set aside my papers and cash, and the map, and the water. I gripped one strap and spun myself to get the pack whirling and let it fly ten meters. It slapped the surface, skidded, rolled slowly under.

My Timex said it was 6:17 on the twenty-sixth of October. Five days, nine hours left in which to find my way to Freetown. Plus an hour I’d pick up changing time zones. I unstrapped the watch from my wrist and pitched it underhanded into the muck.

Five thousand kilometers. One hundred thirty hours.

I drank down a liter of water as I stood there, tossed the bottle, kept the other, which wouldn’t stay with me much longer. While the pack sank with anything metal — penlight, camp knife, phony kilos, the lot — I removed my shirt and used it as a bindle for the rest. I thought about tossing away my belt with its suspicious metal buckle, considered also the buttons on my shirt and trousers, realized I might as well go naked — what certainty would it bring? There’s always something more to be rid of. Something inside.

* * *

I wondered about Michael. I expected him to turn up at my side having lingered in the area all this time, watching for some sign of me or of Davidia. As soon as I thought of him, there he was, Michael, crouched at the base of one of these tall trees just ahead — but it wasn’t Michael. Only a termite berm. As the day came on it revealed many more such berms feeding on the eucalyptus, and I thought I saw blurry figures or ghosts crouched in the grove, watching me, and soon the woods were full, indeed, of people moving among the trees and poking slender sticks into the mounds, harvesting the white ants. I was joined on the way now by dozens of mud-spattered, stately women balancing baskets on their heads, taking the insects to the market. None of them spoke. They had the manner of ghosts. Possibly one of them had sprung from the corpse of the woman we’d struck down in Uganda. But their feet padded on the clay. I heard them breathing.

I followed them out of the woods and into Darba, a town without electric light, without even useless wires, just old power poles broken at the tops like huge dead stalks. The place materialized around us in a haze of cook-smoke, a city of sturdy French colonial buildings without panes in the windows or doors in the doorways, concrete husks into which people had moved their animals while they made shanties of twig and adobe for themselves in the yards.

I stopped at a café, really a tent. I gave the barman a twenty-dollar bill and he left me sleeping on my face at his only table while his small daughter looked after the establishment.

I woke when a guy came in flying on what looked like the greatest drug ever made. He was speaking in tongues, his feet didn’t touch the floor, he was just being lugged around by his smile; it turned out he was merely drunk on a few baggies’ worth of “spirits” branded, in this case, as Elephant Train.

I bought him another and another, and as many for myself. When I asked him if he spoke English, he said, “Super English.”

“Where is Newada Mountain?”

“You need to go La Dolce.”

“How do I find La Dolce?”

“Go to Newada Mountain.”

“No. No. Ou est La Dolce?”

“La Dolce!” I heard the two Italian words, though he might have said Ladoolchee.

“Is La Dolce near Newada Mountain?”

“She is the mother of Newada Mountain.”

“A person? A woman? Une personne? Une femme?”

“Yes. The mother. Oui. La mère. Oui.”

Elephant Train. I spread out my Congo map, and together we searched for Newada Mountain as we bit into many packets and sucked down the contents, but the map got smaller and Congo grew larger, and soon we were lost.

The barman returned and presented me with a pair of slip-on jogging shoes, blue in color, a pair of black denims called El Gaucho, and a yellow T-shirt with a woman’s brown face on it. Who is the woman? I said, and he said, Très jolie! I said, Oui oui. He gave me my change in Ugandan shillings. I said, No Congo francs? and he said, Le franc? — c’est merde.

When I asked about Newada Mountain he said, It’s there, pointing north, but I don’t know how to get there. Go to the coffin maker. He’s going to Newada. He’s next to the church.

Yes, I see the church.

He’s going to Newada Mountain. Follow the coffin maker.

The clock on the post stretched its hands out sideways, nine-fifteen. I’d walked for five hours, slept for one. Spent another getting drunk. Out back of the café I found a dry spot of earth to stand on among the puddles, and got myself into the new wardrobe. The jeans and T-shirt sagged quite a lot; the blue shoes fit perfectly over my grimy socks.

* * *

Behind the Église du Christ I found a man, a very small one, perhaps of the Mbuti, one of the Pygmy groups, dressed in a sports shirt and clean trousers and shiny plastic sandals. He stood with his hands on a green bicycle, rolling it backward and forward as if to check its worthiness. I said, “Are you the coffin maker?” He didn’t understand. I tried to remember the French word for coffin but I never knew it in the first place. Somebody called to him, he abandoned me for a fool, and I followed him as he walked his bike along the crumbling tarmac street.

On sawhorses out front of his lean-to rested five bright purple coffins, two of them, I’m afraid, quite short. These were the two he was concerned with. He parked his bike’s rear tire on a notched block to steady it and mounted both coffins — equal in length, about a meter — sideways behind the seat and fastened them down with black rubber straps, which he tightened and yanked and tightened again.

He high-stepped over the bar of his conveyance and straddled it while he rolled it free of the block and set his feet on the pedals. For a moment he stood in the air, then descended as he produced a forward motion. He knew I was watching. I don’t think he liked it.

I followed some distance behind him, out of the town and into a small rain, then under a hot blue sky. The tarmac ended in a fog of red dust out of which the vast faces of speeding lorries exploded one after another, saying I AM LOST — TOUT AU BOUT — REGRETTE RIEN — coming within half an inch of touching us, as if some superstition required it. I lost him in the choking clouds until he left the highway for a sidetrack, and I glimpsed a bit of purple a quarter mile off to my right.

For some time I floated along like a marionette. I had no reason for believing these two small coffins were headed for Newada Mountain. We had the sun traveling toward our left, and therefore, it seemed, this track took us north, and north felt reason enough to be doing anything — that is, some particle of my memory put Newada to the north of where I’d first entered Congo with Michael and Davidia.

I had no problem keeping up, as he stopped often to get his strength. On the upward slopes he got off and walked his bike, and I pulled ahead of him. I never said hello or the like. My shoes held up, though my socks were falling to pieces. No blisters. The bottoms of my heels felt raw, but only slightly.

About three hours along, many kilometers from the highway, the green bike’s rear tire went flat — perhaps owing to some sabotage, as the puncture happened in front of an establishment consisting of a bench and a bicycle pump, open for business, which business was tire repair. The repairman pried the tire loose from its rim, pulled out the inner tube, and went about patching it with a remnant cut from another inner tube.

While this went on I had the sense to find a kiosk and buy a bag of breadrolls and some candles and matches and two liters of water and a yellow number-two pencil and a small kitchen knife wrapped, for safety’s sake, in newspaper. I paid with a five-thousand-shilling bill, and the proprietor and his wife shuttered their store and went to canvass their neighbors for the balance. They hadn’t returned before the coffin maker set out again.

As far as I know, during the rest of the journey, as much as fifteen kilometers, I believe, the bearer of the coffins took no water. I ate my bread and drank down my two liters and then started dying of the drunkard’s thirst.

I let him blaze the trail into another spell of rain and out again. We entered open farmland. In the mud, the tread-prints of goats and barefoot humans. The wet fields shone hard enough to burn my eyes. We passed boys as they stopped hoeing to throw themselves down in the corn rows with their arms flung wide and their chins in the dirt, praying toward Mecca, but they sounded like coyotes howling. Just afterward, the coffins disappeared over a rise, and when I’d climbed to the top I looked across a landscape of rolling hills and silhouettes — the lumps of huts, a few skeletal, solitary trees, and three cell phone towers with much the same lonely and distinguished aspect, one in the north, two others beyond it in the northwest.

The coffin maker, already free of his cargo, charged back down the way he’d come. I moved to block his way. He skidded to a stop and leaned on his handlebars, tipping his bike to the side with one short leg outstretched and a toe on the ground, and when I asked him if this was Newada Mountain, he spoke his first words to me, saying, “Oui, c’est Newada,” and kicked off again, gaining speed down the hill, and I gathered he’d reach the wider road before full dark. A bit along in his descent he turned his head and spoke once more, calling, “—le lieu du mal!” which I think means the bad or the wrong or the evil place.

* * *

ATTENDEZ EN ANGLAIS:

FINDER PLEASE DELIVER THIS MATERIAL TO

THE UNITED STATES MILITARY GARRISON

NEAR DARBA, CONGO

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN (US MILITARY PERSONNEL):

PLEASE FORWARD ATTACHED MATERIAL TO

DAVIDIA ST. CLAIRE

C/O GARRISON CMDR COL. MARCUS ST. CLAIRE

US 10TH SPEC FORCES, FT. CARSON, COLORADO, USA

WITH GRATITUDE — KAPTAJN ROLAND NAIR (CAPT.)

JYDSKE DRAGONREGIMENT, HRN (ROYAL DANISH ARMY)

[OCT 27 ca. 12AM]

Davidia,

I wish I could record this silence. It’s like the bottom of the sea. In silence like this, my head makes its own noise — I can hear the moon, I can hear the stars. Once in a while a sick child croaks in one of the huts.

(I started to write this a couple of hours ago. I lit a candle, but the flame drew the nocturnal insects, including a moth big as a sparrow that batted out the flame in its forays and then crashed at my feet with its paraffin-spattered wings on fire and lay there flailing and burning for several minutes — all because of its infatuation … And then I saw the half moon coming up, so I’ve waited for its light to write by, sitting in the doorway of this hut. I’m guessing as to time of day, but the moon’s been waxing fatter and rising later and I remember it rose around ten pm when last I owned a watch.)

I won’t bother catching you up. Someday I’ll attach this to a full account. I’ll wrap it all in brown paper and tie it with string and plunk it in a DHL pouch addressed to you, or to Tina Huntington. Which of you am I writing to?

To you, Davidia. Just letting you know (should only this fragment reach you) that as of the date above, I was still alive.

For the third time in ten days, I’m a captive — not held by others, but stuck, no option for movement. In my universe, time and space converge on 3 pm Nov 2nd at the Bawarchi Restaurant in Freetown — remember the Bawarchi? — 5000 kilometers and 112 hours from here and now. Not a clue how to get there.

I have some candles and matches, but as I say — the crashing bugs. I’ve got paper and pencils and a knife. The clothes on my back. 720 US dollars. 60K Ugandan shillings. No credit cards or plane tickets, no passport, no documented actuality. No pills against malaria. Every day, more African.

I think when the wind shifts I may be hearing the brook at the bottom of the hill, or people down there laughing, or weeping.

Several hours ago, Davidia, at dusk, I climbed this hill and arrived at the village of New Water Mountain. I stood among a couple dozen huts. No mountain visible. Hooves and feet had beaten the hilltop’s ground into a flat, muddy waste. The only splashes of color came from yellow twenty-liter water jugs — they lay all around. And two bright, child-size purple coffins. Beside the coffins, two old men scraped at the ground, one with a hoe, one with a spade, both men barefoot but wearing long sleeves and trousers.

Nearby, a man and a woman seemed to be taking apart one of the dwellings, removing its thatch, setting the materials aside. The woman stopped, laid her head back, and put her face to the sky — I expected a mournful howl, but she only trembled a bit, then settled her mind, it seemed, and returned to the work.

A giant leafless tree, an arthritic-looking horror, dominates the vicinity from the top of the rise (I can hear it creaking in the breeze right now as I write). Four people stood at the tree’s base, hallooing up toward the highest branches like hounds. One of them, a white woman, met me as I approached, and she said, “Are you wondering where the chickens went?”—I said I wasn’t—“And the goats? They’re all dead. And most of the children. Dead. Are you lost?”—I said a little—“You look disturbed.”—She meant drunk. I said I was.

She’d walked among several villages with these others, two women and a sturdy-looking man with a machete on his shoulder, all Africans. She alone was white — white and plump, probably in her thirties — and grimy from hiking, but hale and upright.

I said, “Jesus, I know you.”

“You know Jesus?”

“I saw you at the White Nile Hotel, didn’t I? You were swimming in the pool.”

“My husband Jim and I are from the North East Congo Mission of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.”

“I had the impression it was something like that.”

“It’s the Lord’s work,” she said, “but every day you want to kill somebody.”

The man with the machete said, “We must go, Mom.”

“I know. I just said so.”

She told me her husband had spent the day in Darba trying to find someone from the Ministry of Health so they could get some action up here. “Or the Red Cross or somebody. What a laugh. But we have to try.”

“What about Doctors Without Borders?”

“He’ll check with them too, but they like to stay close to Bunia for supplies. Close to the airfield. And the brothels. We call them Doctors Without Pants.”

The woman continually waved her hands and flicked her fingers as if battling with cobwebs, and I feared for her sanity as much as mine. She said, “We’ve looked at three other villages in the last two days. It’s the same thing for fifty kilometers around. The people are crazy, the water is poison, everybody’s dying. We’ve convinced them to evacuate — all but this bunch. They’ve got a queen who rules them from the treetop. Come over here and you can look.”

We joined the others. Several meters above us, between two large boughs, a chair was hanging. We could see the bottom of the chair, and a pair of feet, in white tennis shoes, dangling below it, and in the boughs above the chair were bunches of thatch, evidently to protect the owner of the feet.

“She won’t come down till morning, but we can’t wait for that. We’re meeting the reverend in Kananga. It’s two kilometers down that path. Or more.”

The feet up above seemed quite still. “Is she asleep?”

“I don’t know what she is. Are you gold, or hydrocarbons?”

“Pardon?”

“Are you with one of the companies? Which particular corporation?”

“None. I’m here looking for a friend of mine, but I haven’t spotted him. Or much of anybody, actually.”

We stood on a patch of brown earth littered with corn husks and cassava peelings. To the west I saw a couple of distant cell towers, lone trees, many huts — all in two dimensions, flat against the sunset. In the other direction, everything was bathed in a somber metallic light, and the two child coffins, ten steps away, seemed uniquely purple, a purple without precedent. Beside them, the two old diggers had nearly disappeared into the earth. I went over and looked. The margin between the twin graves had crumbled to make a single large hole. As they smoothed its sides with their tools, the men sloshed up to their ankles in muddy seepage, maybe the very stuff that had killed the poor tots.

She said, “Usually when somebody dies they do a big wake with a lot of howling and drumming, but they’ve had too many, and now it’s just a chore. The whole region is toxic, thanks to the lust for precious metals. This is the outworking of a spiritual travesty. Are you any kind of believer?”

“No.”

“We’re getting out of here day after tomorrow, and I am Goddamn glad.”

“How are you traveling?”

“Walking, for now. Jim has the Trooper. We’ll make one more swing through the villages, and then back to Lubumbashi. We’ll take a plane from Bunia.”

“Look,” I said, “if I find my friend, we’ll need a ride out of here. I don’t mind paying, and I don’t mind begging.”

“It depends on how many come in the car. Where are you going?”—I said I didn’t know—“Any decent hotel, am I right?”—I said yes — she recommended Bunia. “There’s quite a bit of UN activity there. Peacekeepers and such. It’s a UN town.”

“How far away is Bunia?”

“A couple hundred kilometers. It’s the nearest airstrip. The UN uses it, and some charters.”

“Please, ma’am. Please. We don’t need seats. Put us on the roof. Really. This is Africa.”

She thrilled me by saying, “We’ll probably come right through here day after tomorrow. We’ll do our best to take you aboard. Look for a blue Isuzu Trooper with the top painted white.”

“I’ll be looking for it, believe me.”

“In the meantime, you’ll meet the queen. Maybe they’ll elect you king.”

“Are you laughing at me?”

“After a while,” she said, “everything’s funny.” For one second — I think because of her bright anger — she seemed sexy. She turned to her friends. “Next is Kananga. Only a couple of miles, yes?”

They walked on, four abreast. I watched them get away. Toward the bottom of the hill a flashlight came on, and its spot trembled over the ground … I hadn’t learned the woman’s name or told her mine or even asked if she’d seen anybody like Michael.

The sun had set. The West turned a densely luminous terrifying aubergine. I stood alone beside the queen’s tree. I tried shouting Michael’s name and got no answer. As far as I could tell, the queen slept on undisturbed.

I looked into one or two huts. The people inside them ignored me, even when I called to them.

Then the night came down, and I found this hut empty and came in and sat inside, right here on the dirt floor, and this is where I’ve lived for the last few hours — maybe till I die — probably of thirst. I haven’t had water since noon. Soon I’ll go down and drink from the toxic creek.

[OCT 27 ca. 7AM]

When a woman’s screaming disturbed my dreams I thought nothing of it — there’s always some woman or infant or animal screaming — and I stayed under the darkness in my head as long as possible before I woke up thirsty and frightened in this hut. I’m crouched in a corner. The female screams go on. A sound of hammering or chopping too — not rhythmic, just violent. I have to piss. I need water. A man screams also.

This thirst is murdering me. Give me sewage — I’ll drink it. But I can’t look for the creek now. I’m afraid to leave this hut.

* * *

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.

“Michael. Lower your weapon. I need water.”

“I can’t help you. Do you see her crazy eyes?” La Dolce sat in her wooden chair like an enormous toddler, broadcasting happy rage. “This woman is calling for a sacrifice. She wants to bury someone alive. If I don’t keep an eye on her, she’ll throw one of these people into the grave.”

“Has she got more bottled water?”

“She’s got a whole commissary.”

“Where? — Please.”

“Die of thirst, Nair. You sold me to the machine.”

“I’ve got no time for your accusations.”

“You should be the one to go in the grave with those children.”

“Lower your weapon and help your friend.”

“Sacrifice for sacrifice.”

“Two things,” I said, backing away. “First, water. And then we get out of here.” I guess I looked stupid, stumbling off. And he looked stupid with his cutlass in the air, as if it was stuck there and he couldn’t get it down.

I poked my head into several huts and found one stacked with half a dozen cases of bottled water and boxes of cereal and canned goods, its entrance guarded by a man leaning on a hoe. He took it up like a cudgel when I got near. I tried to bribe him with all my Ugandan shillings, then with US dollars — twenty, a hundred, two hundred — but he wouldn’t share.

I experienced a sort of dislocation here. The next several minutes have gotten away from me, and I’m not sure I remember things in their actual order.

I saw the villagers all standing around the grave, shuffling their feet in place as they moaned and trembled. They were dancing. Singing.

La Dolce and Michael had resumed their own dance, circling the scene.

I didn’t notice that the purple coffins had gone until they reappeared on the shoulders of four men coming two-by-two from behind me. The dead children, I assumed, traveled inside them. The crowd made way, still chanting and moving in a zombie trance.

The diggers waited in their hole and each coffin was just shoved over into their double embrace and let down to the floor with a little sploosh, and then helping hands raised one of the men from his work, while the other simply stepped onto one of the coffins and clambered out on his own, leaving behind the smeary impression of his bare foot.

La Dolce screamed at some length, and Michael spoke briefly in a much lower tone, both in Lugbara, I supposed.

The mob circled the grave on their knees, shoving dirt into it with their hands. They tossed the piles back into the holes and then bowed their heads while their queen made a speech that included much repetition of “La Dolce, La Dolce.” When she got near me, she took up her theme in English: “What is that name? I am La Dolce Vita!! You know it means that life is sweet. That’s me. I bring life. Life is sweet. But first we must sacrifice. First God will take what he wants. He takes the babies into his jaws. Can we stop him?” She went among the crowd, looking into face after face, bending close: “Can you stop God? — Can you stop God? What about you? — Can you stop God? No!! You cannot!!! And now God is angry that you have not sacrificed. I know this because I am God!” I doubt they comprehended.

Michael said to her, “The Newada people are not animists and sacrificers like that. This village used to be Christian”—he pronounced it Chrishen. Then he shouted, still in English:

“Go home! The grave is full enough! Go home!”

Many of the mob stood up and wandered away. Some of them wept, nobody talked. A dozen or so stayed with their queen.

La Dolce watched the others go, and I got the sense that Michael had triumphed here.

The queen performed a kind of slow elephantine dance, singing ha-hah, ha-hah. She pointed at Michael’s crotch and said, “I’m going to my sleep now. When I dream, your parts will turn into a white stone!”

Michael laughed. It was false, but loud, from deep in his lungs. He said, “Woman! If I had diesel, I would soak you and burn you alive.”

“La Dolce is going up!” The queen lowered her butt into her throne with an ostentatious lot of wiggling. The two diggers hurried to help her.

Next to the tree stood a rough-hewn table with some items on it — a few liters of bottled water — empty — a whole cassava, some mangoes, and some of the green oranges they eat in this region. From nails hammered into the trunk hung plastic shopping bags by their knots, full of what I don’t know. Clothes, probably, food. A pole jutted from the earth nearby, and between it and the tree some bright things flapped on a length of twine — a scarf, a skirt, a T-shirt. A pair of white athletic socks. Stair treads had been hacked in a zigzag up the trunk, but La Dolce didn’t use them.

La Dolce raised one finger and made a winding motion with it and two stout women and a man took hold of her rope. She laughed and laughed while, by a system of pulleys anchored out of sight above, they hoisted her chair off the ground, and she ascended into the boughs.

We tilted back our heads to watch — the chair swaying, the rope rasping against the tree’s rough hide, the crowd’s murmurs and exclamations — ayeee ayeee — the wind coming across the expanse.

She pointed down at Michael. “Hees name shall rot!”

I remembered a spider I’d seen swinging in just such a manner from Michael Adriko’s toothbrush. I thought: Yes, everything’s coming together now.

I wouldn’t have thought that anything could distract me from my thirst, but now I heard the sound of an engine, and a burst of hope lifted me. “Is that a car?”

It was a cow. Another one also moaned.

I said, “Shit. We can’t ride out of here on cattle.”

Michael took a couple of strokes at the tree with his machete. He gave it up and seemed about to walk off somewhere.

“Michael — I need you to focus now. I talked to some missionaries. Tomorrow they can take us out of here to Bunia.”

“Good for them.”

“Don’t do this. Jesus, man — not now. I need to get to Freetown, and I’m out of ideas.”

“Leave me alone.”

“I need your help.”

“Leave me alone.”

When he’s like that, he’s like that. I left him alone.

I followed the path down the hill.

While a humpbacked Brahma cow was loosing a stream of piss two meters away, I sponged up creek water in a dirty sock and squeezed it into my mouth. No liquid so sweet has ever touched my lips, until perhaps five minutes later — because gathered around a stump quite near to where I’d fallen on my knees, three remnant herdsmen had convened. One of them offered me a gourd. I thought he meant it for a water glass, but in fact it was already swimming with a filmy yellow liquid, pungently alcoholic, and I knew I’d come among my tribe.

* * *

Three fine men: one younger, two older. I forget their names. They have the puffy look of corpses floating in formalin. And three stunted, starving cows and one bull who drags his chin across the ground because he can’t hold up his own horns.

As far as I make out through the language barrier, they’ve been trading off the last of their cattle for plantain and sugar cane, which they bury together in a formula that ferments and emerges as a remarkable beverage they call Mawa. I don’t think it’s good for the teeth — they’ve got none. But these dregs in the gourd, I’ll bet you, give strength to the bones.

I can’t say whether they’re from Michael’s clan or some neighboring society. They wear rope sandals. Long-sleeved shifts of coarse cloth, brown or gray, depending on the light.

I fell asleep by the creek, I woke from a long nap, and I’ve been sitting here writing away with no intention of leaving this spot because, if I take their meaning, a new batch of Mawa comes up from the earth around sundown, and I plan to be here for the resurrection. Prior to my nap, I only got a few swallows.

I’m not going back up that hill to deal with Michael. I’d sooner take my chances on the Tenth Spec Forces than hang my hopes on Michael Adriko, the lunatic comedian.

I should stay sober and alert for the sound of a blue-and-white Isuzu.

Really? Kiss off. What difference does it make? It’s been two weeks since we left Arua and I’ve come altogether about fifty kilometers.

[SAME-SAME, 6:30PM?]

Oh, Davidia! Or maybe I mean

Oh, Tina!

Whichever is your name, I call to you, oh woman of my heart.

The Mawa decants out of 2 five-liter jugs.

The gourd bowl goes round and round.

My flat black silhouette comrades. Right now they stand against the sunset. Behind them it looks like Dresden’s burning. I forget their names. I’ll ask again.

— Oudry

— Geslin

— Armand

Priests of the nectar, ministers to the flock, of whom I am one.

If I can’t buy or think my way out of this by tomorrow, I’ll go back to the Americans and say, Prison? Fine.

* * *

My handwriting may be illegible — let’s blame the dark.

Also my pencil must be dull, but come on, enough — it worries the mind and body to have to sharpen a utensil every half page.

Oudry, Geslin, and Armand have kindled a fire from dried dung on a bed of former thatch, and our laughter flies up into the blackness with its sparks.

Incidentally, Davidia, that’s why they’re tearing the huts apart around here. For firewood.

Davidia, I wish you could meet Tina.

Tina, I’m not sure I’d like you to meet Davidia.

Do I contradict myself? Not to worry. I’ll soon be transcribing these notes in a prison cell, with plenty of time to get my thoughts in order.

Let’s face it. I’ve got to go back to the Yanks.

I’ve improved the plan a bit: take the last of my cash to Bunia, lavish it on a finale of booze and prostitutes, then advise the UN to arrest me.

* * *

Fifty kilometers in 14 days. Per my calculations, a circus clown walking on his hands would have made better progress.

Tina.

You’re sexy, Tina. And smart. But not glamorous in the Michael’s-woman way. Still. You might have had dealings with Michael. I think you might have dealt with him. You know what I mean? I mean, did you fuck him, Tina? I always suspected you did but I never asked, so I’m asking. Did you fuck Michael?

[OCT 28 ca. 8AM]

When next I encountered Michael Adriko, I found him continuing in a wretched state. He looked like he’d been beaten about the face with a bat, but it was just sadness, only misery, it was nothing physical, it was all from the inside. That was last night.

A few words about remorse.

This remorse twists in me like seasickness.

If you’ve been seasick lately you know what I mean. This remorse is physically intolerable.

I climbed the hill last night after drinking with my fellow herdsmen. What are their names? God. I’ve lost their names — and the herdsmen as well, and their cattle. Where are they? I’m alone by the creek.

There’s a reason they call them spirits. They enter in, they take control, they speak and walk around. Wicked, wicked spirits.

Last night I thought I heard Michael chopping with his machete atop this hill. Striking at La Dolce’s tree and calling, Nair! with every stroke, Nair! Nair!

It must have been well past midnight, because the moon rode high and gave plenty of light to see by. I floated zigzag up the hill and now report I was hallucinating. Nobody was bothering the tree.

Michael sat against its base with his legs splayed before him and his machete sticking upright at the midpoint between his feet, his arms limp beside him, his chin on his chest — in Kandahar I once saw a man sitting exactly like that, and he was dead.

I said, “I don’t care if you’re awake, or dead, or what.”

“I’m defeated, that’s all.”

“We need to go, man. What’s keeping you here?”

“Something has to happen that hasn’t happened.”

“What could possibly happen?”

“Davidia might come.”

“Davidia’s not coming. She was disgusted right down through. She didn’t look back, Michael. Not one glance.”

“I put her to too harsh a test.”

“Did you think you’d be the king here, and Davidia would reign beside you as queen?”

“You’re making my experience sound shallow. You’re wrong. This is cutting me very deep. I never meant to keep her here. No, I only meant to bring my wedding to these people as a great gift, and then leave. I always meant for us to leave.”

“Leave how?”

“There’s always a plan for extraction. How many times have I told you that?”

“What plan? Who extracts us?”

“In this case, we extract ourselves.”

“Then let’s do it. For God’s sake, Michael.”

“What are you made of, Nair? Why did you betray us?”

“Will you leave it for another time? Let’s get out of here, if you know a way.”

“I’m not leaving.”

“Come and have some Mawa with these folks down the hill. Let’s relax, and talk this over.”

He wouldn’t respond. I walked away in the hope he’d hop up and follow me, as a dog might.

The truth was that we’d finished the Mawa to the last molecule and sopped up all the dregs. For this reason, if I had an errand in walking away, I forgot it.

My feet turned me around, and I stood over Michael once again. “Very good, sir. What’s happening?”

“You’re drunk.”

“Let’s talk a little bit about betrayal.”

“You’re an expert.”

“There’s betrayal, and there’s betrayal.”

“So far I can’t argue with you.”

“I need your help.”

“Go away.”

“Gladly.”

I repeated the same business — I had no control over my words or my deeds. The spirits possessed me. Down the hill became up the hill, and I’m back at him.

“Before I go, I just want to say goodbye to the biggest idiot I’ve ever known.”

“Goodbye then. You won’t get far.”

“I’m resigned to that. Let the Yanks play with me awhile. I’m headed for prison.”

“What do they care about you, really?”

“Do you think you’re the only idiot with criminal secrets and idiotic criminal scenarios, who does idiotic things?”

“You’re raving. If I had some rope, I’d tie you.”

“I’m going to the bottom of the hill and start waiting for these missionaries. They’ve got a car.”

“Excellent. Maybe you’ll pass out, and they’ll run you over.”

The spirits carried me down the hill once more. Demons. Vandals. Fiends. This time a sense of calm overcame me, a desperate counterfeit sobriety in which I realized I’d better talk clearly and persuasively to this stupid asshole.

Michael was actually on his feet when I returned.

“Hey. Where are you going?”

“Don’t follow me.”

“I forgot what I wanted to say before. It’s just this: there’s some business in Freetown I need to conclude in something of a hurry.”

“In a hurry? Where do you think you are?”

“I’ve negotiated the sale of some material,” I said, “and the handoff’s in Freetown with no fallback, and I’m afraid the deadline has gotten very tight. Thursday afternoon.”

“What’s got you so mad for it? Is there money in this?”

“Until the window closes. Can we get to Freetown?”

“There are UN flights out of Bunia.”

“How can we get on a flight?”

“Money and luck.”

“I think we’d better try. Otherwise I’m in a lot of trouble. Yesterday a fellow promised me hell.”

“The promise was true.”

“He meant I couldn’t last on the run, I’ll end up turning myself in, and you’re right about that much — the promise is true. What else can I do but give myself up? Help me.”

“Not now. Go sleep it off.”

“Goddamn it! You said you had a plan. Oh, well. I’d be a liar if I said I ever actually believed you — I’d be a liar.”

“That’s exactly what you are. A liar.”

“Wait. I’m sorry. Wait.”

“I said don’t follow me.”

I called him a cowardly little wog, and a black-ass nigger.

“Shall I knock you down?”

“I’ll get up, you nigger. I’ll get up, and I’ll keep coming.”

“You’re trying to hurt me. And that hurts me.”

And me. He was, after all, the only man in whose embrace I’d spent the night, more than once, on the cold desert ground outside Jalalabad one November, and in the strength of his arms I grew warm, I rested, I slept … I said, “Goddamn you for a fucking coon.”

“Fine. Go ahead. That’s fine.”

“I know every word for you. My mother’s people live in Georgia. They still fly the rebel flag over there.”

“Fine, fine. You forget I spent time in North Carolina.”

“Fort Bragg, that’s right. Fort Carson. Every American fort there ever was.”

“I’ve seen those Confederate flags.”

In the orange moonlight he looked down at his feet, really examined them, lifting one and then the other, and it occurred to me I could get in a couple of good blows while he let this pointless business distract him, I could pretty well box his ears. I must have tried it, because I found myself with the breath knocked out of me and white streaks rocketing around the corners of my head. Sucking at a vacuum, it felt like.

“Aren’t you going to get up? I heard you say you’d keep coming.”

My mouth and nose were in the mud. The demons made no reply.

He knelt beside me and stuck his blade in the ground one millimeter from my ear. I thought he might finish me off quietly with a chokehold.

“This is why you never got promoted beyond your captain rank. Your childish temper.”

[OCT 30 NOON]

Davidia, and Tina—

If this communication has come to you raw, before I’ve had a chance to transcribe these notes properly — or blend them with my someday semi-honest account — then you see the ink. No more pencils. You see my hand is sturdy. You’re looking at a fresh page.

You guess my fortunes have turned. In which direction, I’ll tell you in a minute. This much for now: I’ve had a meal or two, and a wash at a sink, and I’m wearing new clothes. Let me finish the story.

After the fight with Michael, I slept facedown on the ground.

In the morning, Michael woke me gently. He said, “How was the night?”

He seemed very different. He had a liter of delicious bottled water for me to drink. As soon as its mouth touched mine, I drained it away.

The sky was gray through and through. The air seemed soft. Nothing stirred. I wondered if the clan had all died in the night, all of them at once.

When I was able to stand, Michael led me to a part of the creek where I could bathe in it up to my chest with my clothes on, African style. It looked like a genuine creek — a rapids and small falls — a place where folks might come to cool off and to draw good water; but the water was bad, and nobody came.

The clouds blew off and the morning sky turned blue. I came back to life and noticed some gaunt cows and even a couple of young goats pushing their noses around on the earth nearby. I lay out on a warm flat rock in the sunshine. Michael sat beside me, smoking — how, I’d like to know, does he produce cigarettes out of thin air?

At this point I noticed that my head ached and that I felt, all around, unhappy. Here’s a confession: I’d puked while unconscious, and I’d lain all night facedown in my own sick. If I’d passed out while lying on my back I’d have drowned in it, and my labors would be done, but no such luck. Meanwhile Michael was saying:

“Life is short. But the time is long. I look back, I see so much, my childhood…”

While I lay in a woozy stew of crapulence — that is an actual word — Michael told me what he’d been doing since his escape from the Congolese Army: traveling without money, stumbling by the roadside, crawling through the fields like the Frankenstein beast. He spent two days camped near the US garrison, but couldn’t form a plan. I couldn’t help you, Michael said, I couldn’t help Davidia, I couldn’t help myself. There was nothing I could do. So I just came here — where again, there’s nothing I can do. My people are sick, insane, they’re burning their own huts, they don’t have any food. Not one of them can remember me. They know the names of my mother and father, my mother’s brother, my father’s two cousins who owned a business selling cloth and rope — but they don’t remember the children, not me, or my brother who died, or my two sisters who also died in the disturbances back then, when I left the clan. And poof, our existence is erased. And this woman, La Dolce. I’d like to kill her …

Michael went on to say:

“I believe I was nine years old the first time I killed someone. I’m not sure how old I was — I don’t know how old I am now, really.”

“Tell me it was a woman, or a child.”

“What’s the point of saying that?”

“I don’t know. I think you’re trying to be poignant, and I’m trying to undercut you.”

“There were two of them, and I don’t know who they were. It was during the reprisals. Our clan did nicely, you know, during the time of Idi Amin Dada, because he was Kakwa too. But when he ran away, the machetes came out against the Kakwa, and this creek ran with our blood. I returned here after the village was taken over … This is where it happened. I heard two people talking in a hut, only their voices, not the words, not even the kind of voice — man or woman or child — and I threw in a stick of dynamite. The hut was right over there. You walked through my first murders with your feet … Now I return once again, and everything is dead. Have I brought down a curse on my own clan? What have I done? Have I done something?”

I’d never known Michael to be afraid, not really. Certainly not terrified like this.

I lay there on my back, hanging on to my mind, or the equilibrium, let’s say, of my essence — then no longer hanging on, realizing there’s no point.

Michael said:

“And I was never with Tina. Even if I was with her before you came along, I would have told you.”

“I believe you. I was crazy. And there’s something I want to say as well. Are you listening?”

“I hear you.”

I sat up and looked straight at him and tried hard to make him believe this — because it’s true—“I’d never grass a friend. I might try and steal his girl and leave him to drown in shit while — well, while running off with his girl. But I’m not a snitch. Never.”

Michael tossed his machete into the pool and it sank.

“Holy shit, man. We might need that.”

“As God is my witness, and as long as I live, I shall never take another life. I shall never kill even one more person. I will die instead, if I have to.”

He’d stubbed out his cigarette half-smoked and rested it on the rock beside him. Now he straightened it out, took a matchbox from his pants pocket, and spent a couple of minutes lighting it and smoking it down to the filter and looking satisfied with himself. He tossed the butt at the water and stood up, offering me a hand. “Now it’s time to go. Where do we meet the missionaries?”

“At the road down the hill — the east side, where you come in.”

“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.

That’s where I sat for the next many hours — fifteen, I believe — until Michael returned around 11 that night.

He found me at the Teatime Kiosk at Kotoka, where I happened to be writing my last communication to you, Davidia, or to you, Tina, or to both of you … He laid out on the tabletop four Ghanaian documents, a pair of them for each of us — one a civilian passport, and the other a diplomatic, both stamped with visas for Sierra Leone, Uganda, and Liberia. “I started to come for you, to get your photo snapped — but there was a fellow there, an English, who looked just like you. A perfect double. He agreed to substitute.”

“This doesn’t look at all like me.”

“It looks like you exactly,” Michael insisted.

“Of course it does. To an African.”

I can’t tell you my name, Tina. But don’t ask for Roland Nair.

“I’m born in Kumasi, and you in Accra. Both of us on the same day, because we’re brothers.”

“But I didn’t give you any money.”

Apparently he’d paid none. “I told you — I saved the president’s life. I’ve told you many times.”

“I don’t remember any such lie. President who? Mahama? Is that his name?”

“No. It was in 2005. President John Kufuor. When we have privacy, I’ll open my pants for you.”

“What-what?”

“I took a bullet for him. I’ll show you the scar.”

* * *

At six the following morning, October 31st, we boarded a Kenya Airlines flight to Lungi International in Freetown.

The whole trip, from the sorrows of Newada Mountain to the comfort of the National Pride Suites, took 71 hours.

On the plane I said something which, though it came from my own mouth, I could scarcely believe: “Michael, if we don’t crash, I’ll make it on time. We’ll get to Freetown with five hours to spare.”

It didn’t matter that a swarm of unforeseeables waited ahead, that anything could sink us. To be back in the running felt like triumph.

“How much for your enterprise?”

“What?”

“How much will you profit, Nair, how much money?”

“One hundred K US. That’s the price for betraying absolutely everyone.”

“But, Nair — you didn’t betray me.”

“Not quite. Not yet.”

“The slate is clean between us.”

“I tried to steal your girl.”

“I take it as a compliment.”

* * *

When we landed here in Freetown, Michael took a car to the National and I took another, first to the Paradi Restaurant for the briefest and happiest of errands — retrieving a bit of computer equipment — and then to the Bawarchi, where I waited until my friend Hamid arrived with one hundred thousand dollars in a blue plastic pouch with a zipper. I held the money in my lap while he used his own computer to examine the goods, and then we parted ways. No handshake. But if the chance comes again, I think we’ll do business.

Late last night Michael and I met with some men in the bar downstairs and arranged to hire a boat, a big one. Experienced captain, plenty of fuel, and next stop — anywhere. Abidjan, perhaps. Though neither of us has much French.

Meanwhile we’ll confine ourselves to this building, because too many people know Michael by sight. We share a suite of two rooms. The air conditioner and TV seldom work — no generator at the National — so it’s hot, and it’s boring. This afternoon for entertainment I watched Michael cut the stitches in his arm with barber scissors and pull them out with his teeth.

We’ll wait till after midnight to break camp.

Maybe Liberia. Much is possible there. We’ll claim a patch of jungle and a strip of beach, and I’ll start my semi-honest account while Michael maps out a scheme or two for international conquest.

We don’t have to put down roots. Maybe we’ll keep moving. Michael and I both liked Uganda. Why not? The climate’s pleasant.

When I left him two hours ago, Michael was downstairs in the bar, bent over a bulky very out-of-date video game machine, saying to it, “Pchew! Pchew! Pchew! In yo face, outa space!”

For him, Davidia, you were simply Fiancée Number Five. But for me. Good Lord. For me.

* * *

Tina, you more than once predicted that the coldness of my heart would someday make you a bitter woman. I think you chose me for exactly that reason. You must have wanted it. If you’re bitter, you devised to become that way, and I think you chose me as your instrument. So stop it. Stop going on and on about it in my mind.

* * *

Maybe back to Ghana. Maybe Senegal. There’s always Cameroon.

Or we might leave this continent behind us and fly to Kuwait, where Michael counts on a most enthusiastic welcome, having once, he revealed to me this morning, spent several months reorganizing and polishing every aspect of personal security for that country’s emir, Sheikh Sabah IV Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah, “thus prolonging his joy for many years.”

I’m inclined to believe it.