The Laughing Monsters (8 page)

“Why do you tag along?”

“I’m one half of the entourage.”

“He assumes you’re devoted to him. I’m not so sure.”

“He assumes I’m devoted to getting rich. You know—exploiting the riches of this continent.”

“And is that really you? A cheap adventurer?”

“Why do you call it cheap? Adventure is glorious. I don’t understand why people put it down.”

“I can’t believe you just went off with that poor woman, in her silly-looking wig. Did you think to use protection?”

“This is a little crazy. Don’t you think it’s none of your business?”

“No. But don’t you think I have reason to be crazy?”

“Drink this coffee,” I said.

“Something’s wrong with him, Nair. In the middle of the night he gets these sort of, I don’t know what, nightmares, sleepwalking, talking in his sleep—really, I don’t know what.”

“Actual sleepwalking? Walking around in his sleep?”

“No, but—talking, thrashing—talking to me, but talking crazy, looking right at me, but he looks blind when I shine a light on him.”

“Night terrors. Right? Violent memories.”

“It’s driving me nuts. It’s scary.”

“Tell me something: When did you arrive in Africa?”

“Tomorrow will make it two weeks.”

“Just short of two weeks. Right on schedule for a meltdown. Nothing serious. A tiny low-grade implosion, let’s say, of your American personality.”

“I’ve traveled before. Don’t condescend to me. I’m crazy about a man who’s driving me crazy because I’m crazy about him. He won’t tell me anything. He took my cell phone.”

“Really? Jesus.”

“He won’t let me call home.”

“Your people must be frantic.”

“There’s only my dad, and we don’t correspond much anyway. He’s bitter at me since I started doing work at the Institute. Still, I mean, if I could call him—I would. If Michael would let me. Why won’t he let me? Is he always like this? Because it seems like something new.”

“It’s nothing new.”

“You’ve seen it before. Paranoid suspicions. Taking away people’s cell phones.”

“I’ve been analyzing Michael Adriko for a dozen years. First of all—you realize he’s a war orphan. He was born into chaos, and he’s pathologically insecure. He keeps a stranglehold on the flow of information because then it feels like his life can’t get away from him. But whatever you absolutely need to know, he tells you. Even though sometimes I’d like to torture him with electricity.”

“Don’t joke. He’s been tortured before.” It was true.

Davidia stood there holding her cup with two hands looking alone, and pitiable, and stupidly I said, “Are you really going to marry him?”

“That’s what I’m here for.”

“Do you really love him?”

She said, “Do you know who my father is?”

An unexpected query. “I guess not.”

“Michael didn’t tell you? My dad’s his CO—the garrison commander at Fort Carson. Colonel Marcus St. Claire.”

“Oh my lord,” I said, “oh my lord.” I jumped up to say something else and only said, “Oh my lord.”

“Until I met Michael, I’d only known two loves: love for my father, and love for my country. Now I love Michael too.”

“But you said your dad and you were on the outs.”

“It’s complicated. It’s family. I’d say we’re estranged. All the same, he loves Michael as much as I do. Everybody loves Michael. Don’t you love him, Nair?”

“I can’t resist him. Let’s put it that way.” And I added, “Oh my lord.”

*   *   *

I went to the lobby, more on the order of a vestibule, and ordered some coffee. Soon Michael came through the doors in a powder-blue sweat suit and put his hands on his knees and bowed like that, breathing heavily, showing the top of his big muscular shaved head. Then he stood and whipped off his sweatband and wrung it out over the floor.

I waved to him. “Come here, will you?”

He came over.

“Sit down.”

He sat down beside me on the divan, his leg against mine.

“Michael. You’re pissing me off.”

“Never!”

“Tell me once and for all, in full detail. What’s this all about?”

“Do you like Davidia?”

“I don’t want her here.”

“What-what!”

“Not if you’re up to what I think you’re up to. And if it’s what I think, then you’re fucking up, man. You’re fucking up.”

He stared down at the palms of his hands for a bit and then showed me his face: a soul without friends. “Let’s walk around. I’m still cooling off.” But first he went to the counter and called for the clerk and begged a cigarette and stuck it behind his ear.

I followed him out the doors and into the wash of red mud that passed for a street. The brief stretch of morning had already baked it hard. At this elevation the air was cool enough, but the equatorial sunshine burned on my back. It was crazy to walk.

Michael strolled beside me gripping my arm with one monster hand and with the other massaging my neck, my collarbones. His face shone with joy and sweat. “It’s good to speak honestly to you, Nair! Now it’s time, now I can do that. Now I’m happy. I was desolate, but now I’m happy. Ask me anything.”

“Jesus, Michael, where do we start? How about your military status?”

“I belong to nobody’s military. I was an attaché merely.”

“There’s a US Special Forces unit hunting around eastern Congo. Looking for the Lord’s Resistance. Were you attached to them?”

“That’s correct.”

“Did you run off?”

“That’s an ugly rumor.”

“Did you run off?”

“I didn’t run off. I moved away in support of my plan. My beautiful plan—and yes, yes, yes, we’re going to get rich, how many times do I have to tell you? Be patient. Soon you’re going to see something. With one stone, I’m killing a whole flock of birds.”

“Cutting through the muck—your status is AWOL.”

“Detached. Detached is more precise.”

“Next question. Are we messing around with fissionable materials?”

“Hang on, my brother.”

Over the last few days his speech had lost its American flavor, and his stride, I noticed, had an African man’s swivel now, and his shoulders rolled as he walked, like an African’s. The lane climbed steeply here. He stopped to get a light from a vendor and then he was many paces ahead, on a rise, jogging toward the crest while puffing on his cigarette. I caught up with him and he said, “My brother, do you think our wedding ceremony involves U-235?”—with a false and sickly grin. What an amateur. When it came to fountains of falsehood—a bold artist. But a simple denial, one word, a flat lie? No talent for that.

“Hold on,” I said, “let me catch my breath.”

A shirtless beggar in khaki shorts approached, smiling and dragging one leg and crying, “Sahibs!” The leg was enormous from elephantiasis, as if another whole man clung to him.

Michael yoked the man’s throat with one hand, in the web of his thumb and finger, and lifted him so his horny yellow toes dangled a few inches off the ground and said, “Nothing today. Ha ha!” and set him back down. We walked on. To me he said, “I jog at six every morning. Do you want to get in shape with me?”

“No. I want you to tell me about U-235.”

“Not yet. What else? Ask me anything, Nair.”

A bit more, not a lot, had been revealed. No sense driving further against this foam-rubber wall. “How about this one: You’re marrying the camp commander’s daughter?”

“The garrison commander. Yes.”

“This is too wonderful. Where’s the unit from the Tenth?”

“Close by Darba, Congo.”

“If we go up there—won’t he want her back?”

“Whether we go or not, he’ll want her back.”

“He won’t get a bunch of vigilante Green Berets on our tails, will he?”

Michael was silent in a way I didn’t like.

“Will he? I’m not up for risking any bloodshed. ‘Any’ means not one drop.”

“No, no bloodshed. They won’t suspect we’re anywhere near them.”

“Let’s just not go.”

“Not go?” He turned in a complete circle, seeking a witness to my folly. “He says ‘Not go’! Do I have to make it clear? Then I’ll make it clear. Let me make it clear about my clan. It’s as if I left a man for dead and ran away to save myself. Then the next day he walks into my camp covered with blood, ready to go on living. Can you imagine the shame you would feel looking in his eyes? That’s the shame that makes me go back to my village. Can I make you understand? I’m going to marry Davidia. She’ll be my life’s mate. We’ve got to launch our lives together properly, with the blessing of my people. How can I make you
understand
? This is essential, it’s not a gesture, it’s not a nice idea—it’s the essence of the thing. Without it, I’m nothing, and she’s nothing, and we’re nothing.”

As he expressed these ideas he followed them with his eyes, watching them gallop away to the place where they made sense.

“And we’re going somewhere called Newada Mountain?”

“Near there. I haven’t yet learned the exact location.”

“And yet you’re sure your people have reconvened.”

“I just know they had to come back together. It’s the natural thing to do.”

“It’s essential.”

“Yes. Essential. You say it like an empty word, but the word is full. It’s the truth. It’s about the essence of things. Nair, I can guess where you got your information about me. From Horst, or Mohammed Kallon. Fuck them. Officially I’ve deserted, but in truth I’m returning to the loyalty I ran away from. What is desertion? Desertion is a coin. You turn it over, and it’s loyalty.”

I agreed. “My, my. You’ve been thinking.”

“A soldier must never think. In fact, when you’re forbidden to think, it comes as a relief. Why did my mind start thinking?” His face was swollen with misery. “Nair, you’re the most important friend I’ve ever had.”

*   *   *

At five the next morning Michael had us traveling in a hired car through the darkness toward Kampala. As we approached the capital the traffic got thicker, and the air itself, with the smoke of breakfast fires and diesel fumes, and we raced under the attempted streetlights, many of them burning, turning the smoke yellow. Somewhere around here we’d get on a bus that would take us to the country’s northeast corner. We hunted up and down unnamed streets until the driver gave up and put us out, and then the three of us stumbled over gutters and potholes among the hordes of street denizens waking up to the long slow overclouded African dawn, begging for assistance—we begging; not them. Michael got us to the booking office of the Gaagaa line, as it was called, a five-by-five-meter space completely covered with people asleep, who didn’t mind being stepped on by others making for the clerk’s cage. The clerk showed us a seating chart, and I wrote my name where I wanted to sit, up front near the driver, and Michael put himself and Davidia across the aisle.

As we boarded the craft I looked up and realized it must have been dawn for half an hour, but the sky was so cloudy no real sunshine made it through. It was good having a cushion to sit on, even a gashed and moldy one, but I couldn’t understand Michael’s cheery attitude, his eagerness amid this fleet of debauched luxury liners exported from Malaysia or Singapore in freighter-size lots of wreckage, throttled and punched into taking a few more gasps, filing onto the roads with their busted television sets and torn-off seat belts, full of Michaels. We stowed our gear in racks overhead and Michael made sure Davidia and I each had a bottle of water and a box of Good Life butter biscuits. From some sort of church in the building behind us, on the second floor, above the public toilets, came a chorus of singing. Davidia arranged her long African skirt and pillowed her head on a folded scarf against the window and fell asleep. The passengers settled in all around, pulling their cell phones to their heads and talking. They smelled of liquor and urine and armpit. Michael now placed himself among them, resuming the mantle of African poverty—the way a civilized African does, relaxing the shoulders and calming the hands and letting down the veil over his heart.

The bus’s woman conductor stood in the aisle and addressed us, giving us her name and town and then bowing her head to pray out loud for one full minute in the hope this journey wouldn’t kill us all. She invited everyone to turn to the next passenger and wish him or her the same thing, and we did, fare ye well, may this journey not be your last, although one of these journeys, surely, will send us—or whatever parts of us can be collected afterward—to the grave.

Our captain was a small man in a crisp white shirt and gray trousers, with a beard and turban. He sat down and started the engine and rattled the gearbox, and in just a few minutes the speedometer, I had a clear view of it, topped 100 kilometers per hour.

Somewhere behind us in Kampala, somewhere in Entebbe, I could have found Wi-Fi, I could have sent an encrypted summary-of-activities to NIIA … Goddamn, such an SOA might have begun, you perfect assholes. You sent me into this mess but told me nothing relevant. Fully half of what I’ve learned, you already knew. You didn’t mention any U-235, did you, though I’m willing to bet you’d heard rumors, and that’s why I’m on this thing in the first place. And I’m not the only one on it, as I’m sure you’re also aware. You said nothing about Interpol’s interest, and as for Michael Adriko’s desertion, I had to hear about that from Mohammed Kallon, a cheap Leonean grasser. Are you after information? I might inform you that Michael Adriko travels incommunicado with his bewildered fiancée, who happens to be the daughter of the camp commander for the US Tenth Special Forces Group, and that yesterday I saw her brassiere lying around and it was white, imprinted with tiny pink flowers, but you probably know all about that too. In any case, if there’s something I know and you don’t, anything at all—you can wait for it at the bottom of Hell …

Three hours along the route, the highway changed from two lanes down to one. The rate of speed stayed at 100. Smaller vehicles drove off the road as ours sailed toward them. The big lorries, the twelve-wheelers coming at us with their manifestos painted on their faces—
AK-47 MONSTER—FIRE BASE ONE—GOD IS ABLE—LIVE FOR NOW
—gave us half the road’s width, and on our left side our own wheels traveled into the muck. None of these maneuvers required any reduction of speed on the part of anyone.