What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us

the rain season

From the only window in my concrete one-room house, I watch a woman drag a pointed stick through the black dirt. I know what she is drawing — the same thing the villagers have been sketching in the ground for the past week, when rumors of disappearances in the forest began to spread. In the mornings, I go out to buy fish and yams and step over their creations: creatures shaped like elephants or hippopotamuses with long tails and claws. Sometimes a horn juts out of the forehead, sometimes not. The month is May, the peak of the rain season. Every afternoon, water rushes over the drawings. Still the woman outside continues, kneeling and hunched, opening the earth with the tip of her stick. She is drawing a legend.

There are only two seasons in the Congo: the dry season and the wet season. The heat is constant, the humidity unrelenting. I never slept naked before coming here, not even with my husband, but now I undress every night before burrowing underneath the white sheets. I sleep little and when I do, I dream of ash, gray mountains that collapse into rivers and flood the streets and seep underneath my door, filling my house with a dark fog. I am sure this has something to do with the fire.

The parish sent me to Africa in December. Father Hughes was reluctant at first, as I had no prior missionary experience and rarely attended Mass with my husband, but, as it would turn out, he was unable to enlist another volunteer for this part of the world. I taught children English and basic arithmetic until the school closed two weeks ago because of the riots and fighting. Elections are approaching, rebel groups wrestling for power. In a recent demonstration, a UN worker and two civilians were killed. I have not been in touch with Father Hughes, despite his requests for updates. I do not know how much longer the parish will continue to send money.

The woman rises, her knees caked with dirt. She strides away, gripping the stick like a spear, her arm flexed as though she’s preparing to hurl it into the distance. When she’s gone, I go outside and examine the drawing, my shadow long and flat against the ground. Her creature is larger than the other renderings I’ve seen, although it lacks the horn. The villagers call it mokele-mbembe, or “one who stops the flow of rivers.” Drawing the monster is supposed to keep it from leaving Lake Tele, which lies several miles beyond the lush perimeter of the jungle.

Expeditions to Lake Tele have unearthed little in the way of evidence. Many years ago, a biologist and an animal trader discovered massive footprints and broad paths of flattened grass. They even photographed mokele-mbembe emerging from the lake, or so the story goes. But after leaving the forest, they boarded a train bound for the southern part of the region and there was an accident. The biologist and animal trader were killed when their car overturned, and the camera was destroyed. The other passengers survived. The cause of the crash was never determined. This is the story the locals tell me when I ask questions about the monster.

I crouch in the dirt and use my index finger to draw a horn just above the snout. I am several feet away from the edge of the jungle; the border is vivid green and heavy with vines and leaves. I reach into my pocket and feel my husband’s coin, round and slick, a smooth silver circle. He brought it back from Spain, where, in his youth, he taught English at an American School. He found it on the floor of the Segovia Cathedral and considered it a sign of good fortune.

The air thickens, a hot wind blows through. I look up at the low, swollen clouds. As I stand and start towards the house, fat raindrops splatter against my arms and fill the indentations in the earth, rubbing away the image.

In the evening, after the rain eases, Oji visits. The knock on my door startles me. While eating dinner, boiled yams straight from the pot, I heard a faraway blast of gunfire. I dropped the spoon and pushed away the pot, stood at the window and tugged on my ponytail. My hair, once thick and long, is thinning; pale strands cling to the shoulders of my shirt.

I find Oji leaning against the wall, dressed in torn khaki shorts and a faded red T-shirt, water dripping from his earlobes and chin. After inviting him inside, I get a towel from the bathroom and mop his face and wiry hair. He is twelve years old, a student of mine. He lives on the outskirts of the village, in the scattering of houses beyond the school and the markets. Both his parents are ill, far beyond recovery.

“Catherine,” he says. “You wear it.”

I pinch the tiny, carved bird hanging from my neck. Oji gave me the necklace after a demonstration in the village square. The carving has been blessed by his grandfather, a medicine man. It is supposed to keep me safe.

“Yes,” I say. “I wear it always.”

He holds a guava to his chest. I offer my palm and he hands it to me.

“Shall we cut it?”

He nods.

I take a knife from the drawer and press the guava against the counter; juice oozes from the split skin. I cut his half into slivers and push them aside. He eats his portion in two wet bites.

“My uncle said mokele-mbembe killed a farmer yesterday and drug him into the forest.”

“I thought mokele-mbembe was an herbivore.” I turn on the faucet and rinse my hands in the sink.

He wipes his mouth on the back of his hand. “Same as a dinosaur?”

Some believe the creature is a sauropod dinosaur, a survivor from the pre-historic age. I read a description of the monster in a book once: inky eyes, skin the color of rust, a body thick with muscle and scales. “No.” I turn off the water and dry my hands on my jeans. “It means an animal that only eats plants.”

He circles the room, stopping at the foot of my bed and staring at the empty space over the headboard, his feet near a metal pan where water has been collecting from a leak in the roof. He points to the nail sticking out of the wall. “Where did it go?”

A clay cross, the color of a sunset, used to hang over the bed. Father Hughes gave it to me before I left for Africa. Send pictures, he said, folding my hand around the cross. He told me the congregation would want to track my progress. Seeing the cross above my bed always reminded me of my husband’s stories from Catholic school, the prayers he recited, his scapular and rosary, the crucifixes that hung at the front of every classroom.

“I took it down. I was worried it was going to fall on my head while I was sleeping.” At first, I blamed the images of smoke and ash that kept invading my sleep on my proximity to the cross, an emblem of how a life of goodness failed my husband. A few days ago, I loaded pamphlets from the parish, a stack of bibles, and the cross into a box and pushed it into a corner, but my dreams were unchanged.

His mouth droops. “I liked the color.”

I squeeze his shoulder; his skin is still damp. Once I saw his mother waiting for him outside the school, emaciated and wet-eyed, purple and red lesions molting across her forehead. It was the last time she left the house, Oji says when I ask how she’s doing. His father is even farther along, barely able to raise a hand from the bed. My husband and I never had children, never thought we were suited for it, so I am surprised to find myself enjoying having a child in my care. Sometimes we do arithmetic or reading lessons when he visits, or he tells me stories about the jungle. I worry about what would happen to him if I were to leave.

“I’ll look for another cross the next time I go to the market.”

He grins, his teeth small and white. “Like the one you had?”

I nod, surprised he prefers the rough, orange-red surface of the cross to something bright and glazed. I look outside; the rain has stopped and dusk is drawing color from the sky.

I take three potatoes from the glass jar sitting on the counter and drop them into a paper bag. Every week I fill the jar with potatoes and yams, but lately there has been less food at the market; some of the farmers have joined the rebels and others are frightened to be near the forest, where their crops grow. I pass Oji the bag. “Go before it gets dark.”

He nods and clutches the neck of the sack. He thanks me, asks me to visit him soon. I promise that I will. After the school closed and a rebel group vandalized a government building in a nearby town, Susannah, a missionary I taught with, came to my house. She had arranged to fly back to California and urged me to contact the US Embassy, to return to my home in Chicago. I don’t know what you’ve left, but it can’t be worse than what’s coming here, she said, handing me a slip of paper with her phone number. Last week, I bought a plane ticket and the flight is three days away and I still don’t know if I want to take it. From the window, I watch Oji leave, cradling the bag in his arms, his small footprints lingering in the wet dirt.

I wake from a dream curled and hugging my knees, my body slippery with sweat. I hear a dull roar, as though a seashell is pressed against my ear. Even before the fire, I had apocalyptic dreams. Collapsing bridges, falling buildings — all a precursor, I now believe, to the disaster preparing to overtake my life. I would describe them to my husband in the mornings, standing behind him in the bathroom while he shaved. Silly girl, he would say before tapping his razor against the side of the sink and rinsing his face. We met at Northwestern, and we were married for eleven years. The friends from college that I kept in touch with would, later in their marriages, complain about their husbands changing: he used to like going to movies on weekends, but now he spends Saturdays at the office or he painted my walls when we were dating, but now I can’t get him to take out the trash or he used to tell me everything, but now he acts like our conversations are causing him pain. My husband, however, stayed exactly the same, as though his traits were fossilized: practical, ingenious with crossword puzzles, bad at small talk, stubborn, quietly devout, capable of being both surprisingly pitiless and surprisingly kind. In all our years together, he was never frightened by his dreams, which was how I knew he kept believing in God.

Susannah’s number is in the woven basket I keep next to the bed. I take out the slip of paper and go to the phone affixed to the wall; the black cord is frayed and dangling. The dial tone ripples with static. It’s late afternoon in California. I call the number.

“I’ve been seeing the news,” Susannah says after se answers. “Everything is going crazy.”

“It’s nothing prayers can help.” Before the mail service was disrupted, the cheerful postcards from friends and relatives turned into worried letters about when I would be coming home. Last week, I gathered the letters and burned them in a garbage can behind my house. I ask Susannah what it’s like to be back in California.

“Strange at first,” she says. “The heat is different. Lighter.” When she starts talking about her husband’s ballpoint pen company and making pies for church potlucks, her words grow thick with static and I lose my way in the growl of her voice. I realize I can’t follow regular conversations anymore, as though the life Susannah describes is now as foreign to me as monsoons and jungles and legends of monsters once were.

The line goes quiet and she asks if I’m all right.

“Listen,” I tell her. “I might not take that flight. I’m thinking of changing my ticket, of staying a little longer.”

“Catherine.” The line clears momentarily and her voice rings through my body like a bell. “There is no ‘later.’ There is only leaving now, or not at all.”

I tell her about the schoolchildren. I see them roaming the streets, restless and unmoored as boats in a storm, or crouched beneath the overhangs of buildings, playing with half-deflated bicycle tires. I see their parents, so many of them sick or preparing to fight. I repeat the stories I ’ve heard about people in other villages who fled and, so they could move faster, left behind their youngest children to be killed or forced to carry guns for the enemy.

“We’ve done all we can for them,” she says. “You’re not going to change anything by staying.”

I tell her that I can’t explain it, but I feel like I belong here, and then the line bursts with static and goes dead.

I reach underneath the bed, drag out a small radio, and turn it on. The Department of State warns U.S. Citizens against travel. Fighting continues in Brazzaville, Kinshasa, and Liranga. The plan to implement national elections raises the possibility of civil disturbance. Unofficial armed groups known to—

I click off the radio. It’s raining again; water hammers the tin roof. Last year, summer rains submerged crops and uprooted houses. I heard stories of villagers wading through waist-deep water, of drowned animals and fallen trees.

A heat wave washed over Chicago last summer. The temperature hovered at one hundred degrees for days, train rails warped, the water levels in the lakes dropped, the city opened cooling centers. I tried staying inside and working on my latest batch of freelance articles — on everything from growing pepper plants on apartment balconies for The Urban Gardener to outdoor jazz concerts in Grant Park for The Chicago Traveler—but it was too hot to concentrate. When our air conditioner gave out, my husband and I found our own shadowed corners in the house, and it felt like I went days without hearing his voice. One night we fought, the same sort of argument that rose from the insurmountable differences in our own natures, to which there was never a solution. In bed, he turned from me and fell asleep quickly. I stared out the window for a while, at the moonlight shifting on the scorched lawn, then went downstairs to watch television.

I fell asleep on the couch, to the drone of a reporter talking about the latest in heat-related deaths, and woke with smoke in my lungs. The haze was so thick, I couldn’t see the four walls of the room; I heard the cracking of flames. Before I realized I was moving forward, I was running out of the house, into the driveway, to the neighbor next door. Running in a cotton nightgown that fell to my knees, coughing furiously, the asphalt blurring and glistening under the streetlights. After seeing the thick curls of smoke unfurling in the air, the neighbor called the fire department. I went back and circled the house, shouting for my husband when I saw smoke billowing from an upstairs window. I pushed the front door open and stumbled into the hallway; smoke had spread across the ceiling like a thundercloud. I heard footsteps behind me and knocked into two firemen; they draped a blanket over my shoulders and pulled me into the street. I remember the wail of the trucks and water disappearing into huge orange plumes, an oxygen mask against my face and the bloody soles of my feet.

The house melted into a heap of charred beams. I later learned the fire was electrical, caused by an overloaded circuit in our study. Earlier in the summer, my husband complained about an outlet sparking when he plugged in his computer. I suggested having someone check the outlets, but neither of us ever got around to making the call. After the funeral, I went to a motel. Family — my sister-in-law in Wyoming, my aunt and cousins on the East Coast, my brother and his Canadian wife in Montreal — and friends called and left sympathy cards at the front desk after I told the manager I didn’t want to be disturbed. Their messages were the same, all so painfully insufficient. You’re always welcome at our house for dinner and I can’t imagine what it’s like to be you right now and At least you’re still young and it’s not too late to start over. I unplugged the phone and closed the blinds. I listened to the noises seeping from other rooms. The boom of televisions. Arguments. The slamming of doors. Fucking. After a few nights, the sounds converged into a constant, lonely hum. I took long baths, sometimes staying in the tub after I had drained the water, time slipping forward, into the late night, without my awareness. I thought endlessly about what might have happened if I’d only thought, only been awake enough, to shout my husband’s name up the stairs before running from the house, wondering, if God really existed, why he didn’t reach into my chest and force the words out.

I tried going to Mass because I thought my husband would have wanted me to, but the prayers and the singing made the hollow feeling inside me worse, and the incense reminded me of the smoke that had consumed our house. During the Lord’s Prayer, I didn’t kneel, just sat upright in the pew, my hands flat against my thighs. After the service, I went to see Father Hughes, whom my husband had liked, and noticed the call for missionaries posted on the parish bulletin board, wedged between flyers for youth groups and daycare. I tore the flyer from the board and walked into Father Hughes’s office. Send me, I said, waving the paper. He shook his head and took the flyer from me; he said I would be going for the wrong reasons, not because I had something to give, but because I had nothing left. And then, two weeks later, I got a call from Father Hughes and within a month, I was boarding a plane for Africa. When I walked into the heavy air for the first time, I knew I’d found a place as strange as the world I’d come to occupy in my mind.

Before leaving for Africa, I hired a crew to clear the debris. When I went to the lot to pay the workers, they gave me a shoebox. I opened it after they left and found — amongst brass cabinet knobs, a silver cuff link, and a small copper dish — the coin my husband kept in his desk drawer, a shield engraved on one side, a lion’s head on the other. It was the one he found in Spain, on the mosaic floor of a cathedral, the lion’s head facing the stained glass sky. I sat on the curb, facing away from the flat, black square in the center of the yard, and watched cars pass on the street. After a while, I put the coin in my pocket and left the box sitting on the lawn.

The low-hanging Iroko tree branches scrape the roof. I dress, pausing to reach into the basket and feel the rough bottom until my fingers touch the coin. Outside the rain is light but steady. Water has pooled around my doorway. The roads are turning to mud. There are no streetlights. I cannot see the stars or moon. The darkness is vast.

I stop walking when I reach out and my hand brushes against bark and vines, thick and firm like the body of a snake. I think about what this jungle might be like in another month and promise myself to begin packing in the morning. I want to remember the quiet of this place, the unbroken darkness. Through the branches, I can’t see anything beyond the rows of trees. I step inside the forest and listen.

I hear nothing but rain. I walk until I can no longer see the silhouette of my house when I glance over my shoulder. Snakes, hippopotamuses, and crocodiles live in the forest. And, if you believe the legend, mokele-mbembe. The villagers say the monster is noiseless, that it never roars or groans, that when it moves through the forest, the sound of branches being snapped or water parted fails to echo. If nothing else, I believe this. The worst things in life stalk in silence.

I hear a rustling, followed by a chirp, and look up, at the dark form that has landed on a branch. From the rounded shape and short wing span, it’s probably a tinkerbird or a mousebird, although I can’t be certain without seeing the color. When I first came to the village, I found a book, Birds of the Congo, at a market. The cover was creased and faded; some pages had been torn out or folded down, different types of birds circled in green ink. As I stepped away from the crowd and opened the book, I wondered where it came from and who left it behind. From my reading, I learned over two hundred and fifty species of birds exist in the Congo, and government officials estimate eighty percent of the lakes and forests in the region are unexplored.

The bird reminds me of the afternoon in February we took the schoolchildren on a field trip to Brazzaville to see the Basilique Sainte-Anne and the Municipal Gardens, where small green birds perched on the tree branches. Before we climbed back into the vans that would carry us home, we let the children play tag in a square outside the gardens. I stood apart from the other teachers and watched the students run in ziz-zags, ducking and lunging, the girls shrieking whenever one of them was tagged. Oji was the fastest. He might have won the game if he hadn’t fallen and cut his knee. I sat with him on a bench, pressing a Kleenex against his wound, until it was time to leave. After we returned to our village, I offered to walk him home. It was then he told me the first story about mokele-mbembe. He said an American scientist and his assistant were paddling up the Congo River when the boat shuddered and a giant lizard-shaped head emerged. The monster craned its neck and stared at the men, then plunged back into the water. After the creature vanished, the river began to bubble and waves knocked the boat onto the bank. The men fled Africa and told other explorers to stay away from the Congo. When we reached his house, we went around the back and he showed me his drawings in the dirt, surrounded by sisal plants and flat, white rocks. He makes a new drawing at every dawn and dusk, some underneath the pointed sisal leaves, so they won’t be washed away by the daily rains.

A twig snaps as I turn and move toward the road. Winds press against my back, guiding me out of the trees. My heart, my breath, is quiet. I am beyond fear, beyond any recognizable emotion, as though all my chest contains is a bundle of short-circuited wires. I’m only thirty-three and yet I feel like I’ve been walking the earth for hundreds of years. While crossing the street, I step in puddles that swallow my feet and ankles. The rain has slowed, but I still cannot see stars or the moon. Everything resembles a shadow.

My hair is damp when I boil water for tea in the morning. I run a hand through it and lose several strands. The creases in my hands are lined with dirt. I scrub them, but the black veins in my knuckles remain. I start packing, loading the bibles and church pamphlets into my duffel bag, then stop when I realize I’m only taking the things I would want to leave behind. On the radio, I listen to a report on the riot that has broken out in Kinshasa. Two police officers have been killed, stores and homes looted. Today I am going to the market.

I dress in a white shirt and tan pants, a belt pulled tight around my waist. I slip on sandals, knot my hair into a ponytail, and tie the carved bird around my neck. The string that it dangles from is weakening. Outside the air is damp and heavy, the sky edged with gray. I carry the bibles and the church pamphlets behind my house, and dump them into the same garbage can I used to burn the letters. I don’t burn these, though; the can is too wet and I’m out of matches. I just look down at them, at the soot smeared across the white pamphlet paper. I imagine them getting soaked by rains; I imagine leaving them to rot.

Beyond my house, images of mokele-mbembe are already scattered across the ground, the lines wavy and imprecise in the wet earth. I see five drawings on my way to the market. The village center is quiet. The school is empty, the windows boarded with planks to deter looters. I don’t stop to stare at the shuttered school, to touch the covered windows. The day Susannah came to see me, I nodded solemnly as she spoke, but her voice moved over me like a wave, her words somehow never hitting my ears, as though she was speaking to me through a thick sheet of glass. Who are we helping? she said, pointing out that we hadn’t even seen most of the children since the school closed. We were standing outside; the sun was so bright, the sky looked ablaze. I wondered about my burned house, if the last of the ash had finally been carried away by rain and new growth. I didn’t see how I could stay in the Congo much longer. The violence was increasing; the parish would eventually stop sending money. And yet I couldn’t imagine leaving, couldn’t imagine looking outside and not seeing the sprawl of green, not feeling the weight of the air.

I buy three yams from the produce stall, then wander through the cluster of stands, shaded by umbrellas that cast circular shadows. A man is selling dugout canoes carved from the tropical trees that grow in the forest. Another stall offers banana stalks and posho, a paste made from ground corn meal and sweet potatoes. People speak in various dialects, their words quick and sharp. I smell spices and sweat and rotten eggs. Two boys pass on bicycles, nearly brushing against me. The fish stall is closed, the owner’s stool knocked to the ground. I ask a woman carrying a sack of peanuts, and she says he left to join the protestors in Kinshasa.

I stop at a stall that sells clay ornaments and carved animals. I run my fingertips over wooden elephants, glazed tigers, their mouths agape, and stacks of clay bowls. The owner asks if I want to buy something, but I shake my head and begin walking toward the outskirts of the village, the plastic bag filled with yams bumping against my leg.

I navigate around two young girls squatting and drawing mokele-mbembe with strips of metal, their dark hair braided. The sky is flat and purple. I hear thunder. Oji’s house is in worse condition than the last time I saw it — white paint peeling, walls leaning inwards, tarnished window panes.

I stop when I see a man backing out of the house, gripping a pair of ankles. Another man emerges, holding elbows. The face is covered with a black sheet, but I can tell it’s a woman’s body from the length of the hair, which grazes the ground. Her hands are limp, her wrists thin as wire. Oji stands in the doorway. I am too far away to see if he is crying. The men carrying his mother are probably his uncles. I wonder where she will be buried. They load the body into the backseat of a truck and drive away, the taillights red smudges in the distance. Oji shouts and chases after them, momentarily disappearing from sight.

He returns with his head bowed, his arms twisted around his ribcage.

In the Congo, the dead are buried quickly, to keep them from returning as traveling ghosts. Later, carved masks will be placed by the grave, but her name will not be spoken again. The villagers fear the dead, blame them for nightmares and droughts, pray to them for healthy crops and solace.

I drop the bag of produce and run toward Oji. I call his name. He turns, stares at me for a moment, then reaches for my hand. We sit in the dirt. I have no words to offer, like my silence after the fire when friends and relatives called with their condolences, for what is a condolence but an attempt to bridge the unbridgeable. I cup my hand around the point of his shoulder. I wait for him to speak.

“Mokele-mbembe left the forest last night. My uncle found footprints close to his house,” he finally says, spreading his fingers. “They were the size of an elephant’s.” A misty rain falls for several minutes, then passes. Oji suddenly appears older, the tightness in his jaw and the heaviness of his gaze. He grinds the base of his palm into the soil.

“Does it rain in America?” he asks. “Where you are from?”

“Sometimes.”

“What did you leave there?”

“Not much,” I reply. “I was married once.” The night after the fire, I went back to the house and walked through the ash and burned wood and unidentifiable metal shapes. The heat wave had started to pass and the air was thin.

“Did you like each other?”

“Yes, we did. Sometimes we did.” I remember the way the ash spread, across my hands and face and clothing; back in the motel, I rinsed it from my hair. I searched for something I could identify, something we had used or loved, but it all looked as though it had come from another world.

“My parents did not,” he says. “Not really.”

I take Oji’s fist and uncurl his fingers, concentrating on the shapes of his knuckles. I reach into my pocket and place my husband’s coin on his palm.

“For you,” I say.

He rubs his thumb against the silver lion’s head. “Where is it from?”

“From far away. A place I’ve never been.” I tell Oji about my husband finding the coin on the floor of a holy place, that the coin traveled through many people to reach him. I tell him the coin holds secrets, pieces of lives.

Oji drops the coin into the square pocket on his T-shirt and flattens a hand against his chest. I’ve lost the desire to hold onto that last physical artifact of the life I once had, as though I was buried and re-emerged as a person who doesn’t believe in anything except the way existence rages on, furiously unconscious of when one life ends and another begins. Lightning cracks across the sky and the rain begins, slanted by winds. I tilt my head back; the falling drops resemble millions of clear marbles.

“Go inside,” I tell him. “Bad weather is coming.”

He grabs my arm and holds on for a moment, his hand sliding from my wrist to my fingers. It’s the first touch I’ve felt since my husband died that caused a pulse of feeling in my chest, the last spark of a live wire before it goes dead. Oji squeezes my fingertips, then lets go. He stands and walks to the house, pausing by the door and touching his chest before going inside.

I rise and find shelter underneath a broad canopy of umbrella tree leaves. I watch several of Oji’s drawings blur into smooth patches of mud. The dirt surrounding the knotted roots is dry. I kneel and pick up an oval rock, the tip worn to a dull point. I push the rock into the ground and begin shaping the earth. I draw my monster with a great sharpened horn and peaked flames flowing from its mouth.

Lately I’ve been thinking of winter in Chicago. I can no longer remember the exact color of the snow — pure white or flecked with gray? I can only recall my husband and me moving inside a warm, low-lit house — the details of the house are gone from me too; I see a maze of bare walls and smooth floors that glow a pale blue — and the hushed sound of snow falling and banking along the sidewalk.

When I’m finished, I bend my fingers and look at my hands; my nails are packed with soil. The rain intensifies. Oji’s house becomes vague, a long shadow. Winds shake the leaves and for a moment I smell smoke. I concentrate on the scent, but it vanishes into the aroma of rain and tree bark, the way one life can collapse into another and different people can stir within the same body, like bats thrashing inside a secret hollow.