The Imaginary Lives of Mechanical Men (16 page)

“For God’s sake why? This place is a disaster. It’s killing every man who works here and the environment too.”

“You’re right. And, besides that, you own it—or at least your clients own it. And they can shut it down, make a few bucks by selling off the scrap, and win the corporate clean-up award all in one afternoon. Is that still the plan?”

“It doesn’t make any difference whether you sign or not. If you’re the guy they sent out here before me, then you already know that.”

“It can delay things, and that’s all we want.”

“It won’t make any difference in the end.”

“Nothing makes any difference in the end, Chuck. It’s the middle that counts. And, whatever else happens, it’s better than starving to death. Right? Every man out there understands that, except here’s what he understands that you don’t understand. When he starves, his family starves, and not just his immediate family either. Ever watch anybody starve to death? It’s like cancer without the tumors. But for every man who dies in the breaking yard there are ten trying to take his place. Why? Because where they come from it’s worse.”

“You’re preaching.”

“Damn right I am.”

“You’re preaching to the wrong person.”

“No, I’m preaching to the right person. You’re a scumbag, Charles. I want you to do what scumbags always do.”

“Which is?”

“Look out for yourself. Switch sides. I want you to drop a monkey wrench into the corporate makeover. I want you to lose your luggage. Whatever would cause a delay, that’s what I want you to do.”

“Wouldn’t that be a slight conflict of interest?”

“Not if you came over to our side.”

“Simple as that, eh?”

“Simple as that.”

“And what I would gain for myself out of all this would be precisely what?”

“If we can get a long enough delay, we can form a corporation under Liberian law, a genuine co-op where the workers would own principal interest. Then we could begin modernizing, cleaning up, and paying a guy like you.”

“Sorry.”

“It could work.”

“Maybe in the Land of Oz. Not here. You’ve got real problems out there, Robert. And I’ve got a plane to catch. So maybe next time. We’ll do the whole world peace thing together. Nice meeting you. But don’t get up; I can show myself out.”

“That’s what we thought you’d say.”

I feel a sudden chill. A door bangs shut. And it occurs to me once again that no one knows where I am. I look up from the pit of his amphitheater and see faces looking back. My head aches, and I understand that if I sit down with this man I will be negotiating for my life.

I stand very still, looking at Robert N’mburo for a long time, trying to imagine him organizing documents at a conference table. I try to imagine him in the finest suits and sitting in leather chairs. Summoning his morning coffee with the push of a button, like me. It is a leap my mind cannot make. Robert is too scarred and warped, too taken by the life he’s chosen, and probably, I realize, quite simply insane from the suffering he has seen. So I take a slow breath and consider my options. I do not sit. I do not make sudden motions. I do not look down at the churning sea.

I negotiate.

We begin with little things, the warp and woof of life among the lowly. I promise him oranges, dates, and cheese. Soy milk and wheat. Torches and winches and trucks. Within minutes we are outside of all reality, my own words sounding as hollow as those of any politician. Only the gathering darkness suggests that there can be any end to this babbling, to my judicious monotone. And although the man across from me seems mesmerized, I do not doubt the truth—that he’s following these words the way a cobra follows the flute.

I promise him medicine, tools, and fuel. Then books and building materials. Fresh water. Maybe a school. Whatever, in a word, might sound reasonable to a man who has lost his reason. But it is not enough. His darkened face grows darker, and I see the sadness that precedes some violent act. When he starts to stand, I know we’ve reached
the end. I’ve tried and found no argument-stopping words. Now it’s the shuffling mob or the foam beneath the stern.

And one last chance. Robert looks at my briefcase, raises his eyebrows in silent question, and seems unsurprised that I find the courage to shake my head. But it’s all I’ve got. We both know the gesture won’t help. And he starts to walk away.

From some deep well I hear a voice, quite clearly, proclaim, “Give me Sammy then.”

It stops him and turns his head.

And suddenly I’m saying, “There’s a midnight plane to Marrakech. Passports if you have the dollars. And if I can get him into France …”

He looks at Sammy and then looks at me, the muscles knotting at his jaw.

“I can do it. You know I can.”

“Not just to France. All the way to America?” He’s bargaining again. I can hear the hope in his voice and something else, a hint of something else in my own.

“All the way.”

“You swear?”

“On the life of my son.”

“And until he’s grown?”

“Yes.”

“You swear this?”

“Robert—listen to me. I can save him. You know I can.”

River Story

FOR SUSAN

Behavioral and personality changes are often the first signs of
CNS
involvement. Later more florid psychological changes may occur, with hallucinations or delusions. Reversion of sleep rhythm is characteristic, with drowsiness during the day, a feature from which the disease derives its name. Other nervous symptoms include tremor, most characteristically of the face and lips, and hyperesthesia, causing some patients to avoid common practices such as closing or locking doors. Without treatment, the patient’s level of consciousness progressively deteriorates.

—Quinn,
African Trypanosomiasis

I have the sleeping sickness. I believe that Brawley has it too, so I watch him very carefully.

I watch him focus on the flies, reaching rather than swatting with the hand that holds his cigarette. Half a swarm buzzes up through the smoke, settling on the lip of his glass, strutting like soldiers on parade, and he begins to quarrel without even looking in my direction. “Okay, here’s the problem,” he tells me. “World’s got no lost cities anymore, right? Blokes like you and me? This is it. I mean what I’m sayin’, Jocko. This—right here—is it.
That’s
the problem.” And pecks at the table with blunt fingers, scattering ashes without disturbing the insect world around him. “Jesus Christ, I’m sweatin’. What time is it?”

“Eight o’clock.”

“I’m sweatin’ like the dengue ’n it ain’t even eight o’clock yet. And lookit that fog. Out there on the river an’ all. You know wha’ that means? Means today’s gonna be stinking bloody hell and a half, that’s what.” While we watch the barge drift closer, waiting for the inevitable collision and the sharp, satisfying sounds of disaster.

I let the flies drink from the back of my hand. They are not tsetse flies; they’re handsome iridescent creatures, quick, alert, top-of-the-line flies, as green and glowing as peacock feathers. The tsetse is drab and slow, a gray-brown unattractive fly that drinks from below the skin. It owns this part of Africa. That’s what I’ve learned.

Brawley tries to smoke himself into consciousness, studying the grain of the tabletop, listening suspiciously to beggars and fruit vendors below us. Their bellow and cry. After a while he shifts his squint to a European couple besieged at one end of the market—something about them that he doesn’t like. “You know they got French tourists in Machu Picchu? You know that? Amer’can teenagers all over Kathmandu and no place to get lost at. You hear what I’m sayin’? I seen whole Jap families up there at Abu Simbel crawling across the feet of Ramses the bloody Second, that’s what. Flittin’ and crawling about. It’s like Edgar Rice Burroughs is dead in this part of the world, how you like that for a report on your life?”

“Nobody knows what you’re talking about,” I say.

“Oh right. It’s you, the Reverend Pogue as I live an’ breave. For a minute I thought I was talkin’ to Tarzan out here in the eight o’clock my-asma. Luxuriatin’ upon this lovely teakwood portico all cantilevered over the edge of hell drinkin’ French beer and waiting for them poor bastards out there in the mist to drown. That’s what I thought it was. My mistake.”

“I buy and sell unclaimed freight,” I say. “That’s all.”

“Right.”

The barge comes to rest about noon, impaling itself on half-rotten pilings near the inlet while the passengers cheer and sing, a rich chaos
of joy and relief. It all happens so slowly that they think they were safe. Kingfishers and spoonbills continue their feeding along the shore; even the tiny, nervous flycatchers in the overhanging branches give no more than a momentary flutter. No one in the market cries out. We simply stare. Even Verloc, the café owner, limps onto the portico carrying a pair of binoculars, counting his profit perhaps. Who can blame him? They are caught in the current, and we watch like dog-faced baboons while they gather at the rail and give the barge a heavy list, the three of us thinking they don’t even know, they don’t have any idea. Because at the first brittle crackling, at the slow shriek of wood upon metal, they cheer. And we watch. There is nothing you can do.

This is how they return from upriver sometimes, the pusher tugs as well as the barges. They do it without fuel or pumps or electric lights, steering for sandy shoals or the safety of mudflats or fragile pilings around some village where diesel fuel gets trucked in twice a month and then gets sold by the quart. Sometimes they drift farther down the main channel to Kinshasa or to us over here in Brazzaville, arriving like floats from some pathetic Mardi Gras, insanely populated, maybe four or five roped together, one leaky hulk after another sagging under secret cargoes and wild stories of Tutsi massacres inland, tributaries choked with bodies that nobody wants to hear about anymore. They stink of fish meal and manioc. They carry hollow-eyed women along the rail, and amputees, and stacks of zebra hides as stiff as cardboard. And live monkeys strung together like convicts. Parrots. Stork-thin children. Diseased chickens. They bring all the groaning, moldering rubbish of the river plus a drunken crewman or two. Except sometimes. Sometimes they bring enough opium or uncut diamonds in someone’s belly to make the whole rudderless voyage seem sane.

So I study Verloc’s face while he refocuses the binoculars. His only movement is a slight twitch about the mouth when the linesman saves them, a stick figure who goes leaping and tying off before the current can catch the stern and send it spiraling into dark water. I want to applaud, but Verloc and Brawley remain silent, suspicious. Perhaps it’s
the disease. We wait until the barge is secure, then Verloc sighs slightly and makes his voice as wispy as the fog. “Clever fellows, de Bantu. Like monkeys when dey need to be.”

But then someone is already mentioning the others, the abandoned ones, dark unopened metal boxes upon the water, and then immediately after that innocent remark Brawley is cursing, allowing the last of his energy to the proposition that someone is out of his mind.

“We need the money,” I simply say.

“They’re capsized, you fool, rockin’ in the water like corpses. An’ even if they got pockets of air, who would want to crawl inside a coffin? Jesus Christ! Tiniest thing’ll send ’em into the mud like crab baskets. ’Cept you’d be inside, wouldn’t you, drowning for a handful a beads.”

“Or diamonds.”

“Or nothing at all.”

“I’m just saying that, technically, they belong to us.”

“They belong to the river now.”

“Listen to me. You’re not drunk, you’re infected. If you’re not treated, you’re going to die, same as me. That’s all I’m saying. I’m just thinking about what it would take to have a future.”

“I’m not infected. I’m sick of living li’ a pig, that’s all.”

While they cheer. It’s what they all do when they reach Brazzaville; they dance and cheer. It’s their right. For some it is the first expression of hope in their lives. So why should we lie awake at night? Even horror has its limits. Something you would think God could learn.

Just before the first showers, a company of men draws the barge close to shore and shoves a plank out from the elephant grass while two freshwater crocs slather down the mudbank below us and drift out to investigate, low in the water, like ironclads from the last century. Then someone is helping Phoolan down the plank. Some ridiculous crewman who does it in the European fashion, with a slight bow as she sets foot on land. The most beautiful woman we have ever seen.

Brawley is picking a bit of tobacco off his tongue, snorting, “Over there, lad.”

But I’ve already seen her.

“That one’s lookin’ for God, she is. Time to get offyer arse.”

Though of course I cannot stir. It’s midday, and this is the well of lost souls.

She moves like music through the tumbling chaos, one hand holding a silk
llasa
over her head and shoulders, the other hand flickering among throngs of children, touching their faces, creating smiles. And they seem to know her. Even the beggars strain grotesquely for a passing touch, and her name precedes her up the hill until she reaches the constable’s stand and speaks to Old N’Reara in broken French. Something about a man, a lost husband, maybe a father, it’s impossible to tell. And then for one moment, when she turns bright gleaming eyes upon me, I grow young.

Later, after Verloc opens the café, I can see the humor of it all. The Americans are here in their canvas vests and straw hats that wilt in the heat. They think the sickness was wiped out along with yellow fever and smallpox, but the joke’s on them. And there are European women who take pictures from odd angles, struggling to get bougainvillea into every shot, their long legs glistening, breasts and buttocks shaped by sweat and all the time thinking, dear God, that they are in jungle. Food for flies. They believe I’m a picturesque drunk, some minor character left behind after the film crew’s retired. I try not to disappoint, but I’m losing focus. I have the West African variant of the disease, the kind that lingers in the blood for years while you watch yourself waste away. Hallucinate. Sleep. And that brings, oddly enough, long periods of wakefulness during which you cannot stop chattering. Chattering. There’s a drug called Suramin…. And she is so beautiful, so remarkably out of place, that someone must be dreaming.