The Imaginary Lives of Mechanical Men (17 page)

I see bobbing black figures swarm over the barge, taking bit by bit the color and the cargo like a string of ants. I can’t be sure; I’m floating
where the clear bubbles float, just this side of consciousness. I can see that they are leaving behind a wreck, bilges weeping rust, sheet metal buckling around the pilothouse. I can see that. I think I am talking to someone too. I tell her that the last item is an okapi, one of the slender, short-necked giraffes that live in the upper basin near Kisangani. Gentle animals inhabiting dense forest where their larger cousins can’t live. Better get a shot of this; they’re extremely rare. No, I say, okapis don’t have the spots or the long neck of the plains giraffe. Yes, they look a bit like llamas with short hair and intelligent faces. Most don’t survive the trip to Western zoos. This one is a young female who’s already sensed the crocodiles gathering beneath the stern; she’s stamping and straining in fear, wearing a raw place on her neck where the twin ropes rub. When the men try to lead her away, she goes into a frenzy, kicking and thrashing like a horse, drawing the reptiles half out of the water, jaws levered wide and hissing in anticipation.

Brawley ambles over to us while the fat woman is snapping furiously, and he begins a running monologue over her shoulder. “It’s got no animal language, you know, the o-kapi. Lives its whole life in silence like your true giraffe of the savannahs. ’Cept for that kind of barking sound that you hear. Prolly just trying to get its bref. I mean if you had six blokes on you an’ a rope around your neck, right?”

“What if it falls over the side?” her husband asks.

“Not bloody likely. Live o-kapi’s worth a year’s pay to any of them black fellows down there, dead one’s not worth beer money.”

Finally the barking becomes no more than a hoarse cough, and the animal lets them tie its legs together and wrestle it to the deck. Four of the men hold her while two others try to drive away the crocs with long poles, poking them and provoking a grotesque, churning dance beneath the stern. After a half hour nothing has changed. One of the men goes below deck and returns with a pipe, giving half a dozen two-handed blows to the okapi’s head before it slumps. Then they carry their prize to the warehouse with no further trouble and lay her beside the other supplies.

I’m inexplicably angry. My hand shakes. I remember Brawley reaching for the flies and hate him with surprising suddenness as I sink toward sleep. It’s early afternoon, and the beautiful safety of sleep. It’s coming, I can feel it, the leafy shade like a familiar blanket slowly drawn up to the shoulder and nestled beneath the chin. I can barely hear them now, the fat German tourist in a tirade, Brawley’s smooth cynicism; and I would not take the Suramin if a priest offered it as communion. I’m almost there. A slow blink gives me the beautiful woman once more, how she stands out among the jostling bodies below us. Like royalty. They won’t even step into her shadow. And I can smell the rain now, thickening, preparing itself while the voice I can’t escape whispers, “Lovely face, absolutely lovely. Don’t need a sharp eye for that, eh? Wonder what she’s brought to market. I mean besides the obvious.” And when I awake, she’s there on the portico with Verloc, his hazy image snickering and bobbing just like the toothless old men who shield their eyes and lift the open palm.

Brawley’s trying to drag me awake, hoarse with the hilarity of his message. “Hey Pogue,” he seems to be saying. “Hey Pogue, guess what? She’s a thief.”

I blink, still lost within a world of green.

The bougainvillea along the south shore of our inlet begins at the water’s edge and rises in a tangle so thick that the Sangha people call it monkey puzzle after a tree that grows along their own tributary in northern Zaire. Creepers and mango build canopy upon canopy in bewildering variation until there’s no way to distinguish the surge from anchoring earth; it’s simply a green swell that hovers over the last few stalls of our pitiful Casbah and threatens the café itself. During my first year in Africa I would sit on Verloc’s deck waiting for one of those autumn storms that gives the impression of being lost at sea and imagine myself on a doomed voyage where drowned sailors mysteriously appear from the depths and speak meaningless clues before being washed overboard again. Ghostly strangers uttering nonsense. Once Verloc himself
stepped out into the rain babbling incomprehensibly about teak, insisting that it was not an African wood, did not grow within a thousand miles of Congo. So intensely that for weeks afterward I thought he was insane. Brawley had to reassure me that he was merely drunk. So I’m not surprised to wake inside a dream and hear a ghost croaking, “… one of us actually, come to make our for-tune I believe.”

“What are you saying?” I manage.

“I’m saying it’s time to wake up. Grab opportunity by the balls and all that.”

“I don’t …”

“Looks a bit Chinese, don’t she? I mean up close and all, not the color of your ordinary bush babies. One thing for certain, she ain’t local. That little trick she’s got on looks like a sari? You don’t see nothing like that south o’ Cameroon. Makes you wonder, don’t it?”

“She’s a thief?”

“Well, she wants summit off one of them wrecked barges you was yamming about. Wants it bad enough to negotiate if you get my drift.”

“And she doesn’t speak English?”

“Look at that face, Jocko. That look li’ an English face to you?”

“So how did she know to come to us?”

“Anybody could’ve pointed her this direction; we’re not a secret enterprise, you know. This is opportunity, Pogue. Some smiles before she slips away. Besides, what was you saying about needin’ a housekeeper now, one that can get by in French, eh?”

“What exactly does she want?”

“Look. All I know’s she spent an hour at the pink hotel. Where the diamond merchants are, right? And then the gods, the gods, Pogue, set ’er down here at which point you start playin’ detective. That don’t go in this part of the world.”

“What’s her name?”

He turns to Phoolan for the first time and addresses her in halting French. “You got to forgive the reverend, miss, he’s been a bit
paralyzed since his big discovery. But no need to worry; we got all the records
and
the salvage rights. You come to the proper place.”

She does not seem confused or frightened.

“We deal with all the big companies, we do. Import, export, whatever. My partner here has just temporarily lost his capacity for astonishment. He’s actually very glad to make your acquaintance.”

She sits in the rattan chair and studies me, rather like a queen. Her face is unwrinkled, the dark brown of the river itself but not the ebony of inner Africa. Her eyes are neither kind nor cruel but simply ancient, while the lips seem unnaturally thin and serious. She wears her hair like the Arab women of the north, long and straight, almost like another garment. When she moves, her bracelets make a tiny musical response. And she says to me, “Very well, I will stay.”

Brawley breaks in before I can speak. “Of course there’ll be a slight fee. You know, for the recovery itself and the tax we got to pay to, ah, local authorities.”

When she does not flinch, does not take her eyes from me, we know that it’s diamonds.

It’s early morning, and I am alive. I see shadows as sharp as zebra stripes and hear the drone of a single fly. The fog will be rising soon, but for the moment there are no ambiguities, and I know that there is someone in my house. I smell her. It’s such a welcome certainty that I simply walk toward the
ktala
, where we cook and eat during the rainy season, and she is there. Like magic. But I am not sleepwalking. I am not dreaming. She is there, and I am acutely aware of her face, the familiar beauty of it and also the mystery. I see her rocking over a wooden board, kneading in the Western manner, pushing the dough with the heel of her hand and turning the mass into itself, keeping her arms straight and rolling the wrists so that the bracelets chime delicately and her breasts are shaped into loaves.

Who is she?

I try to remember and see a kaleidoscope of changing shapes.

It is such a clever disease, forever changing its mind. At times I hear colors and see sounds that no sane man can imagine. At other times I simply sleep. Some days I babble to invisible beings, and some days they babble back. It’s no fool for consistency. And today I am here, alone, in the moment. Have no memory at all.

There is a woman in my house. I see her. I feel her every movement from across the room, the warm dough yielding to her hands. It is impossible, I know, but I hear her hair rustling against itself and the soft exhalation at her lips. She is there. So intensely there that the walls give way and blur.

Is she my wife?

What is her name? I open my mouth, but it’s no use.

I try twice again. There’s nothing there, until finally I realize that I don’t need a name because the air is heavy with bread, as moist and inviting as earth’s womb, and that I’m a willing prisoner. I am happy. This is the opposite of what I fear. She is real, but my memory of her is lost in the past. I’m standing in the present, listing the things I know, counting them off in my mind, one through four, until I have to shrug and smile. Because there is a woman in my house, so beautiful that she creates the world around us.

Her voice, I think, is a voice I’ve known all my life. She says, “Why does he call you that?” Without prelude, without looking in my direction, the way a wife should say it. “Why does he call you a priest?” In English.

And something possesses me. I feel words forming, tumbling out in perfect order, and I am not dreaming, not remembering. I’m being born. I say, “It’s his little game.”

“A game?” she says. “It is his little game?”

“I’m not a priest, but a long time ago, when I came here, I was a missionary. A Mormon missionary.”

“Roland Pogue.” As if the two names don’t fit together. “You are no longer missionary?”

“No.”

“But American?”

“I don’t know.”

“Both of you are
nagana
—sleepers?”

Now I’m chuckling, like a drunk trying to untwist his tongue. “I’m not anything at the moment. I buy and sell unclaimed freight. Is that what you want to know?”

“You are making a joke?”

“Yeah. I’m making a joke.”

“A Moslem cannot do such a thing. It is forbidden.”

“Not Moslem, Mormon.”

She considers but does not reply for a time. Finally, she says, “You steal from the dead?”

“No, His Excellency Chundai Boraka, second cousin of the Interior Minister, steals from the dead. We just get a cut for keeping the books straight and tidying up a bit.”

“You are a joking man, Roland Pogue.”

“Not really. Let me tell you something: a human being will do any damn thing in the world for a nickel. I know. It’s what I’ve come to believe. Anything to survive. And that includes me and you.”

“You mock us. You mock the gods.”

Without knowing her name I know what will happen. I realize now. I feel peace. I feel a tranquility that I’ve not felt for years, as deep and comforting as sleep. Because I remember what is happening. That soon she will turn and take me into her arms, drawing every fiber of my being into her. Like the first man who fell on his knees before the first woman and pressed his face against her and knew it was a taste of the eternal.

“Who are you?” I whisper.

And not yet turning, she tells me, “I am the goddess Phoolan.”

It is a strange disease. There are times when I am content to call it reality and times when I think I will go mad without the treatment. It comes and goes. I see things. I hear voices. I doubt the world, and the world doubts me. But at this instant I am certain of one thing,
that she is in my house. And one thing more. That I am awake. And yet one more. That this eternal moment is all I need. “I’m not sure I understand.”

“I don’t require your understanding,” she says. Kneading the dough, rolling her wrists the way they do, and lifting her breasts to me.

“I don’t think she trusts me,” says Brawley.

It’s afternoon. I’m saying to him, “What makes you think that?”

And he is telling me, “Because she wants you to go into the hull. Alone.”

“When did she tell you that?”

“Yesterday. While you was spreadin’ goodwill among the less fortunate of the earth.”

“What exactly did she say?”

“She said she knew which barge it was ’cause o’ the numbers on the side. That most of it was above wa’er and she’d tell you when the time was right.”

“She’d tell
me
?”

“Right.”

“I’d be going in alone?”

“Lissen to me. Lissen! You can go crazy when this’s over, right? You can go to sleep. You can go native. You can go to hell or Hi-waiee, don’t nobody care. But I seen this much with my own eyes—are you lissenin’ to me!—I seen ’em smuggle out diamonds big as your fucking ’ead. Right? Now the question is wha’ are we gonna do—ask one of your pi’aninny friends to go in for you?”

“I was delivering medical supplies. Yesterday I mean. I was delivering medical supplies out at one of the squatter camps.”

“Don’t you go babbling off on me, Pogue, I’ll smack you three days from tomorra.”

“I went back to the mission for a while. I took them some supplies. That’s all.”

“Fine. I’m not worried about yesterday or the day before that. An’ I don’t mind your porkin’ the missus or followin’ her around like she was the Queen of the Nile, but this ’ere is business. And good enough business means we get out o’ this hellhole forever. Make a clear start.”

“I’m not going inside one of those barges.”

“Yesterday you was interested. Three days ago you’d dive into a sewer for a dime. Now you got scruples.”

“Forget it.”

“Lissen to me, Pogue. She’s a thief. In this part o’ the world a thief is a profession, not a crime. Survival. That’s wha’ we talkin’ about, innit? Survival.”

“I said no.”

“All right, but think about this. How come she picks you, eh? Cause you’re the only whiteface bloke around? Cause o’ your debonair charm? Your vast powers of men’al concentration? Why you? Answer me that.”