B000FC0U8A EBOK (27 page)

Again there were phone calls: we saw your wife squatting by a dead dog, Ward, taking
pictures
of it. She took pictures of our trash cans. She stood on the hood of your car for an hour, Ward, staring at the sky.

He tried talking to her. So Naima, he’d try, how’s class? Or: Are you being careful out there? He had been promoted again and
spent nearly all of his time at benefits, on the phone, walking the museum with donors in tow. By then he and Naima were miles apart—their trails had diverged and were unrolling through different continents. She’d show Ward the exposures and he’d nod. You’re doing so great, he’d say and touch her on the back. I like this one, and he’d hold up a print she disliked, a patch of iridescence in a cirrus cloud drifting past the moon. She didn’t mind; the kindling of her soul had caught fire. Nothing could slow her. Let Ward and his neighbors turn their eyes down, she would turn her eyes to the skies. She alone would witness these orange and purple and blue and white world-travelers, these bossed and gilded shape-shifters that came scudding overhead. Each morning, stepping out the front door, she felt the hard, dark center of her flare up.

Photography 100 ended. She earned an A. In the fall she took two more photography courses: Contemporary Photography and Techniques of the Darkroom. One professor lavished praise and offered to direct an independent study, saying, I think it’s best if we let you continue down this path you’re on. And Naima
was
on a path, she could sense it stretching out in front of her. She clicked and clicked. By the end of the semester she had won a student prize for her photo of the dead dog; people she had never seen before passed her in the halls and wished her well. In January a coffee shop called to offer a hundred dollars for a print of her first photo, the oak branches washed in light. By summer her work was made part of a group exhibition at a small gallery. It’s her patience, a woman murmured. These photos remind you that each moment is here, then gone forever, that no two skies are ever the same. Another edged in to declare that Naima’s work was perfectly ethereal, a sublime expression of the intangible.

She left early, escaping past a tuxedoed waiter with a tray of spring rolls, and marched into the dying light to take photo -graphs: a wedge of sunset through a bridge buttress; the spinning rosette of light left by the moon as it eased behind a building.

Late at night—it was April 1992—she felt that old feeling, the exhilaration of approaching a trail’s end at a sprint. She stood on the marble steps of the Natural History Museum and studied the sky. It had rained during the afternoon and now the starlight fell cleanly through the air. The light of galaxies bathed her neck and shoulders, lifted the tide of blood in her heart—the sky was only yards deep. She could reach through it and seize the frigid center, set suns swaying like tiny droplets of mercury. Deep and shallow: the sky could be so many things.

Ward was in the hall of butterflies, unpacking a box filled with dead specimens. It had been packed poorly and many of the wings were torn, their powdery designs smeared. He was lifting them out and piecing them together on the floor. She shook him by his shoulder and said, I’m leaving. I’m going home. To Africa.

He leaned back but did not meet her eyes. When?

Now.

Wait until tomorrow.

She shook her head.

How will you get there?

I’ll fly. Already she was turning, moving out of the hall, the soft sounds of her footfalls fading into silence. Although he knew she meant by airplane, later that night, alone in their bed, Ward couldn’t help but imagine her spreading her arms, opening her hands, and gracefully, easily, lifting her body over the plains and hills, toward the ocean.

A photograph—impossible towers of cumulonimbus banked against the horizon, livid with lightning—came to Ward in the mail. He shook the envelope but she’d sent only the photo. The next week another arrived: a lone rhinoceros silhouetted on the horizon, the trails of two falling stars intersecting above it. She didn’t write a word, didn’t sign her name. But the photos kept coming, two a month, sometimes more, sometimes less. Between them yawned Ward’s life.

He sold his house, sold the furniture and bought a condo in the center of the city. He spent his weekends buying things: a gigantic television, two tile murals for the bathroom walls. He redecorated his office: rare seashells on the windowsill, Spanish leather stretched over the desktop. He became especially good at his job. Over paella, over maguro and gyoza, he could get nearly anyone to donate to the museum. He learned how to make himself invisible, a listener who spoke only when the person he was courting needed reassurance or time to compose what to say next. He tweaked their consciences by describing children pouring into the museum, thrilled them by showing animated footage of digitized dinosaurs on the museum’s movie screen. His finale always involved a line like: We offer children the world. And they would clap him on the shoulder and say, Why not, Mr. Beach. Why not.

He did his best to see that the museum evolved. People wanted interactive exhibits, complicated robotics, miniature reproductions of Brazilian forests. He got to work before everybody else and stayed until everything had closed. He arranged to have a simulated ice age occur every forty-five minutes in a room off the lobby. He had a miniature savannah built, complete with sunning hippopotami, swaying acacias, a three-inch zebra being feasted on by a pride of tiny, meticulously savage lionesses. But still he was mourning, and something in his face gave it away.

How Ward Beach suffers so quietly, his neighbors said, the museum volunteers said. He should find someone new, they said. Someone a little more
grounded.
Someone with his taste.

He grew corn, tomatoes, snap peas. He sat by the window in a café and read the paper, smiled at the waitress as she set down his change. And every few weeks the envelopes came: nimbus clouds reflected in the wet pawprint of a lion; squall lines warping over the summit of Kilimanjaro.

Another year passed. He dreamed of her. He dreamed she’d sprouted huge and glorious butterfly wings and circled the globe with them, photographing volcanic clouds rising from a Hawaiian caldera, tufts of smoke from bombs dropped over Iraq, the warped, diaphanous sheets of auroras unfurling over Greenland. He dreamed of catching her as she flew through a forest; his arms were great butterfly nets; just as he held them above her, about to close the mouths of the nets over her, he woke, his throat closing, and had to lean gasping over the bed.

Sometimes, on his way home, walking through the empty museum, the heels of his shoes clicking over the floors, Ward would pass the fossilized bird he had sent back from Tanzania almost twenty years before. Its bones, caught as they were in the limestone—the curves and needles of its winglike arms, the jacket of its ribs—were crumpled; its neck was miserably bent; it had died broken in pain. What a thing, half bird, half lizard, part one thing, part another, trapped forever between more perfect states.

In his mail an envelope with a Tanzanian postmark arrived, the first in months. Happy Birthday, it said, scribbled in her lilting, girlish cursive. It was his birthday, a few days away. Inside was a photo
graph of dark, rich grass, deep in a gorge, bisected by a river, the flat panel of water shimmering with stars. He held it under his desk lamp. The grass, the curve of the riverbank—it seemed familiar.

He saw: it was their place, the stretch of river he had plunged into from a cliffside, where she had come to him, almost dissolving into the water. He withdrew the print from the light and set it facedown, and wept.

What did he regret most? Their chance meeting on the road, her decision to leap onto the hood of his truck? His decision to bring her to Ohio? Letting her go? Letting himself go?

He didn’t have her address, a phone number, anything. Twice on the plane he got up and walked to the lavatory to look at himself in the mirror. Do you know what you’re doing? he asked aloud. Are you crazy? In his seat he drank vodka like water. Far below his window the clouds revealed nothing.

He was forty-seven years old and he had walked into the chief curator’s office and given his two weeks’. He’d bought his ticket, carefully packed his clothes. These were all cliff edges off which he’d had to step.

In the wet air of Dar es Salaam he felt old memories come springing back: the familiar pattern on a woman’s khanga, the smell of drying cloves, the lopsided face of an amputee holding out her palm for coins. His first morning the sight of his shadow standing sharp and black against the hotel wall caused déjà vu.

The sensation stayed with him on the drive up the coast toward Tanga. The green and brown pan of the Maasai Steppe, punctuated here and there with thin spires of smoke; the sight of two dhows sailing out to Zanzibar: he felt he had seen all these things before, as if here he was, twenty years younger, driving up this road for the first time with a Land Rover full of shovels and sifting pans and chisels.

Some things had changed: there was a hotel in Lushoto now with a menu in English, and hawkers out front who offered glamorous safaris at ridiculous prices. The Usambaras had changed too: hundreds more terraced plantations had been cut into the hillsides; antennas stood blinking on ridgelines. But these changes—cellular phones and taxi-vans and cheeseburgers on a menu—didn’t matter. After all, he considered, wasn’t this the land where the first thick-browed humans walked, under these same brooding mountains, with these same winds bringing them smells of rain, of drought? He read in a guidebook that humans hadn’t witnessed the great migration of wildebeest and zebra up the Serengeti until 1900. A hundred years—in Ward’s field, a century was a finger-snap. What change could a hundred years bring? What small fraction of time was that for the animals who had been charging up and down that plain, teaching their young how to live, forever?

He slept deeply and peacefully and for the first time in years did not wake from a dream with something clenched around his throat. He drank coffee on the porch of his hotel and chewed a scone before setting off. He thought he would find her parents’ house easily—how many times had he made that drive: fifty?— but the roads were changed, wider and graded; he would round a bend and think he knew where he was but the road would suddenly descend when it was supposed to climb; he’d be at plantation gates when he should have been at an intersection. Dead ends, turn-offs, U-turns.

After days of winding through the hills he began to ask anyone he saw about her parents, about her, if anyone knew of a place where a photographer might develop film. He asked tea pickers,
tour guides, duka owners. A boy at the hotel desk said he mailed tourists’ film to an address in Dar to have it developed but that only white people dropped off rolls of film. An old woman told Ward in broken sentences that she remembered Naima’s parents but no one had lived in their home since they died many years ago. He bought the woman lunch and plied her with questions. Do you remember where they lived? Can you tell me how to drive there? She shrugged and waved vaguely at the mountains. The only way to find something, she said, is to lose it first.

He had not expected this, the waiting and wandering, the hot hours in a rented car. He began to park at road ends and follow footpaths into the fields. Blisters ballooned on his heels; he sweated through his shirts. But he knew this was the way to find her: he would have to walk the tracks that wound over the mountains. He would have to find a way to get his path to cross hers— she would not leave footprints this time, or wear a white dress, or give herself away.

Each morning he set forth and tried to get himself lost. He fashioned a walking stick, bought a machete, tried to ignore trail-side signs in Swahili that might have warned of buffalo gorings or the prosecution of trespassers. Welts appeared on his calves, insect bites studded his forearms. His clothes shredded and tore; he hacked the sleeves off a coat and wore it through the woods like a postapocalyptic vest.

After three weeks of day hikes he found himself on a thin track beneath cedars. It was nearly dark and he was completely lost. The track had taken him through so many turns he could not say which way was north or south; uphill might lead him out of the
mountains or farther into them; he had no compass, no map. Impossible clusters of vines hung in nets from the trees. Unseen birds screamed at him from the canopy. He hiked on, laboring over the tight, overgrown trail.

Soon it was dark and the sounds of night rose up around him. He took his headlamp from his pack and strapped it over his hat. Rain was misting over the leaves—large drops fell into the sub-story and dampened his shoulders. Before long he realized he’d lost the trail. He aimed his light in every direction—it revealed rotting logs, a shooting vine threaded around a trunk, great beards of moss hanging from the branches. A giant colony of ants was on the move, coursing along a column, overtaking a log.

He was almost fifty years old, unemployed, separated from his wife, lost in the mountains of Tanzania. In the thin beam of his light he watched a water droplet slide into the body of a red flower. He thought about how in a few days its petals would fall to the forest floor and crumple, and wither, and eventually be incorporated into something else, tree bark, a berry, energy rifling through the limbs of a salamander. He plucked the flower from its stem, wrapped it carefully in a bandanna and stowed it in the top of his pack.

He walked all that night, feeling his way, falling and staggering to his feet. When dawn came he could have been in the same place he’d been during the night—he had no way to know. Rain washed through the gaps in the canopy. He was drenched. Nearly everything he’d learned during his life was suddenly and perfectly useless. To walk, to find water, to look for a trail—these were the only ambitions that mattered. Part of him knew he should have been afraid. Part of him said, You do not belong in this place, you will die here.