Three Weeks in December (9781609459024) (14 page)

The hunting blind that had seemed so clever in the light of day abruptly looked different. He had had the Indians build a four-sided version of the kind from which he commonly hunted ducks and only now did he question the wisdom of his design. The foot-tall gun slot running the width of each of the four sides, he saw, was a potential window for the lion's paw to reach through; none of the sides were reinforced enough to take a direct charge. And then there was the lack of a roof.

A second lion answered to the south maybe half a mile, later another responded from the east. Jeremy concentrated, trying to guess the animals' locations and number. Perhaps there were fifteen lions out there, most of them silent, or maybe there were only two noisy ones, circling the camp. He did not know if any of them were the man-eater.

Sitting on his stool, the rifle pointing out the gun-slot, he noted the thorn fence that surrounded these tents appeared shorter than it had in daylight. He knew this fence to be ten feet tall, but in the darkness, with the rumbling calls of lions in the background, it appeared so much shorter.

The rain started again, slowly at first. The drops tapped out their beat on the brim of his hat. Da dapdap dap, he said. At a canter she had rocked like a chair, her belly sometimes wheezing. The storm began to gather strength, the rain drumming straight down. After a while it was hard to see the walls of the tent nearest him, much less keep watch for anything that might jump over the boma ten yards away. He hunkered over in the torrent, the water streaming down his back.

At some point, the lions' roaring stopped. He dozed lightly on his stool, dreaming of Patsy's labored breathing, the weight of her head in his lap. The gun was hugged tight to his chest, the strap wrapped twice round his arm for security. He told her again of his sickness. In the dream, she whispered back.

He jerked awake. The rain had stopped, the camp quiet around him. Had that rough breathing come from his dream or somewhere nearby? In the dark he could see no movement, could barely make out the ground four yards away. How well could a lion see anyway? The animal hunted at night the way a house cat did. Probably it had better night vision than he did, as well as a good sense of smell. He squinted through the gun slot at all the dark lumps around, half of which he was not sure he remembered seeing earlier in the evening. Rice sacks? The trailing edges of tents? Every breath he took echoed inside the blind. Was that dark shape over there a stack of lumber?

He remembered the way the clearing had looked after the lion had eaten, covered with blood and small gritty pieces.

As the minutes passed, he spotted nothing moving. Perhaps if something had been nearby, it went away. Perhaps it just stayed and watched. Each time he turned his head to look behind him, his hair rustled audibly on his collar.

It was strange how alone he felt in here now. He told himself he was within calling distance of several dozen men. He had people around him all day long; more than seven hundred lived in camp; during the day he was always giving them orders, surveying their work, constantly interacting. Yet this was not the first time he had felt alone in camp. He was the leader, the only American, a white man surrounded almost entirely by brown.

Dawn finally came, grainy and yellow. Throughout the night, he had heard no screams from anywhere in camp. Even through his tiredness, he felt such relief. Perhaps things would get better with time.

It was perhaps an hour after lunch—hunched into his fatigue, overseeing the digging of the canal that would reroute the river out of the way while they built the bridge—that he heard the outcry from camp. “
Sher, sher
,” came the screams of many men. For a moment in his exhaustion, he thought they were yelling, “Share, share.” Did they want more water, more pay, his quinine? Then he comprehended his mistake and, before the first runners reached him, he was sprinting back. The simple act of conveying himself from one spot to another took so long without Patsy, his breath high in his throat. His pith helmet kept flopping forward obscuring his sight.

Alan had told him that lions tended to nap during the day's heat, preferring the mask of darkness for their hunting. In the bright light of day, they were more cautious of humans, would never approach a large group. However, their lion did not seem to be aware of this, for a little after two in the afternoon she wandered in through the gate of a boma that had been propped open first thing in the morning. By this point, the hospital was overflowing with patients laying on cots in the shadow of the gate. The two men who had their eyes open must have believed the lion walking by them was a fever-induced hallucination. They had watched with interest, turning their heads to follow her. It was not until one of the hospital staff strode around the corner of a tent that anyone started screaming.

In their confusion and fear, the men afterward could not come to agreement about her exact size, certain only of tawny weight and rawboned grace and that she was bigger than they had imagined any lion could be. She had ignored all the yelling to stroll into the tent from which, three nights ago, she had dragged her first victim. When she came out, she held the victim's leather satchel in her mouth. With the healthy men screaming “
Sher
” at her—“tiger” in Hindustani—and banging jerry cans from their hiding spots behind tents and up in trees, the malaria patients too sick to even roll under their beds for protection, she wandered by them all, out through the gates, stopping occasionally to shake the satchel from side to side, like a kitten with a play-toy.

By the time Jeremy arrived, she had disappeared without a trace into the nyika.

 

During that night, three men died of malaria and one of yellow fever. As though the satchel was entertainment enough for the lion for now, she did not roar or reappear all night.

After breakfast, Jeremy ordered the men to pack up their tents and bomas. They moved a mile back from the river, back under the paltry shade of the nyika. This retreat Jeremy ordered to protect them from the river's clouds of mosquitoes and the attendant malaria. A fifth of the Indians had contracted it now.

Many of the Indians refused to walk to the latrine forty paces from each boma unless someone with a gun accompanied them. They believed Jeremy was moving the camp to get away from the lion.

Having spent another near-sleepless night in a hunting blind (this time, one with a sturdy roof), Jeremy asked Ungan Singh to find Otombe.

A
unt Tilda was chasing her, her arms out for a hug, her wide body filling the hall. Max fleeing silent and deadly serious. Her mother strangely just stood there, smiling at the scene.

Tilda cornered Max and stepped forward, hands out. Her odor of floral perfume and sweaty intimate areas. She grabbed Max and, in the ensuing struggle, ripped a chunk of skin off the girl's arm. The flesh coming off not bloody and ragged, but all of one color, like a chunk of play dough. Her aunt pressed the flesh into her chest, patting it down until it merged in seamlessly. Then she tore off another chunk. Each piece of flesh became her own, part of her determined normality, fused into her body permanently. Max understood her aunt had done this to other children, many of them, those who were different, erasing them entirely. This was why she weighed so much.

Max shuddered awake, gasping.

Unlike other kids, she had never screamed at nightmares. Just woke up gasping and rigid in her bed. Then she would roll out of the blankets and run to her mom's bed to stand beside it. Not touching, not speaking. Standing a foot back, breathing hard and staring at her mom's hands and their tired freckles, concentrating on her smell until, calmer, she could lie down, not on the bed beside her mom, but on the hard predictable floor. There she could finally sleep.

Jerking awake that night in the darkness of her African cabin, she breathed for a while, then climbed out of bed with her blankets to sleep on the floor.

 

The next morning they set off again to search for the gorillas. About a half a mile up the mountain, Mutara, Yoko, and Max moved off the game path they'd been climbing, onto the gorillas' trail. This was not like following a deer, a spread-out series of subtle clues: a hoof print here, a twig turned there. No, the trail of each gorilla looked like a giant bowling ball had been rolled through the jungle. Broken branches and crushed vegetation, each individual shoving and munching through the underbrush.

At first Max followed directly behind Yoko on the same trail, but branches occasionally slapped back into her face as Yoko let go of them, so she copied Mutara's strategy and walked up a different trail. All the paths interwove, the gorillas heading in the same direction. Bushes snagged on her clothing. Ferns and grasses brushed against her, soaking her clothes from the shoulders down. She was huffing, head down, concentrating on keeping up with the others.

 

As her hormone levels had begun to change with adolescence, Max's startle reflex got more extreme. A few of the kids in school noticed and occasionally screamed just behind her or clapped their hands in her face. High school filled with such casual cruelty. Within sight of her own adulthood, she understood for the first time she was likely to be alone throughout her life.

And so, eight times during high school, she brought different boys back home to have sex with her. It was her best guess at a solution. She hoped the boy would sit with her afterward for a few minutes. Maybe he'd talk to her at school sometimes. It seemed to work for other girls. As the kids streamed out of school at the end of the day, she would walk up to a boy she selected for the color of his shirt or the shine of his belt, and ask him if he were willing.

In order to endure the act, she had requirements. In her house with the boy, she stated them clearly, ticking them off on her fingers. The boy's weight could not rest on her at any time. There could be no kissing. His hands could not touch her.

Having listed her requirements, she shucked her pants off and got down on her hands and legs, waiting for him to kneel and start.

Even under these conditions, she vacated her body as best she could. She was proud of herself for this new ability, busied her mind reconstructing favorite smells.

Throughout the act she knelt there as unmoving as furniture.

As soon as he was finished, the boy would stand up, move back fast. He'd pull his pants up, averting his eyes, his actions uneasy. He'd leave without a word.

There was the silence afterward, the room alone.

After a bit, she'd wiggle her way between her two futon mattresses, so one was on top, one beneath. She lay there for hours with her head sticking out the far side, a human sandwich. The hug of the mattresses comforted her, dependable and utterly still.

And her mind would begin to work—at first occasionally, and then unceasingly—on the problem of imagining some kind of adulthood for herself, any kind of adulthood, that she would consider worth enduring.

The ninth time she tried sex, the man pulled out halfway through, began to punch her and then to kick.

He made guttural noises in the back of his throat, spit came from his lips. She'd met him an hour earlier on the way back from school. He'd appeared physically healthy, had asked her name, been polite. Having given up on the boys from school, she'd wondered if an adult might be more ready for a relationship. Had decided to test the theory.

One of his work boots caught her in the mouth. She heard something crunch inside, wet sticks breaking.

The pain and anger overwhelming—an entire lifetime of trying very hard.

She moved faster than she knew she could. She grabbed the back of his boot at the top of his swing. Yanked hard. With his pants around his knees, he fell badly. His head hit. She was already on him, jabbing her thumbs into his eyes, all her weight, all her might. She was screaming, “Fuckity fucking fuck.”

He twisted out from under her and ran.

After two blocks, she gave up chasing him. Stood there on the street corner, wearing nothing from the waist down except a pair of gray kneesocks, watching until he disappeared from view. Then she walked home and called her mom at work. On the phone, even while she explained that she needed to be taken to the emergency room, she kept her lips pursed so the pieces of her teeth wouldn't fall out. Sitting down ever so gently, she worked on breathing, waiting for help.

 

Three birds exploded out of a tree above. Max jumped at the movement, caught a glimpse of large mascaraed eyes in faces of raw skin. She looked away. The birds' laugh was shrill, the beat of their wings prehistoric.

“What were those?” Max asked.

“Hornbills,” said Yoko.

A few minutes later, a tiny deer burst from the bushes by Mutara's feet and galloped off through the underbrush. Not much taller than his knee.

“Duiker,” said Mutara.

It began to rain. They pulled up their hoods. A persistent patter fell on their raincoats and the leaves. In the wet, the scent of earth and rotting wood rose in the air. They pushed on, following the gorillas' trails.

 

Three weeks after the man attacked her, she'd gone to Gramps' home. Had thought it all out. Gramps was at church, the side window didn't have a lock. Her mom believed she was doing homework at the library.

She wiggled through the window. From his bedside table, she fetched the key and a bullet and went downstairs to unlock the gun cabinet. She pulled out his .45. Used to being thorough, she'd researched at the library how handguns work, had thought each motion through. She had no hesitation in loading the bullet. She knew she would not need more than one; she would not flinch.

Her decision about what method to use had come to her during the root canal to repair her teeth. The dentist had hairy fingers. He leaned his hip against her shoulder, put his hands in her mouth, breathed on her with his minty breath. She'd taken three Klonopin before this appointment, had been taking one every four hours since the man kicked her. The panic was so much worse now. A person passing within three feet filled her body with the white-eyed fear of a fawn. At the dentist's, in spite of the tranquilizers, in spite of her willing herself still with all her considerable determination, her body squirmed away from his touch, wiggling back in the chair.

The dentist told her to stay still, his tone irritated. He didn't know anything about her except the two missing teeth. He told her not to be a wimp.

With the metal of his retractor in her mouth she decided on the gun. She was sixteen years old.

To avoid a stain on Gramps's furniture or floor, she walked outside to her favorite tree in the backyard, a shaggy willow. She ducked under the circle of its branches and sat down inside its green and secret room, leaning back against the trunk. She pointed the gun upward. Such a purposeful weight. A coiled steel muscle.

Putting the barrel in her mouth, she closed her lips around it, like suckling from a baby bottle.

It was early fall. A few leaves fluttered down. The piles of leaves smelled of sweet decay. In the distance she could hear a neighbor mowing, the aroma of fresh-cut grass.

She clicked back the gun's safety. Paused. Finally here.

While she waited in this moment, other smells began to float up in her mind, unbidden and whole. Smells are processed in the brain right next to the limbic system, the site of emotions. This proximity is why smell—more than any other sense—can sweep an attendant emotion right in with it. The scent of a pencil—wood and lead—clenched in her sweaty child fingers in first grade. The smell of a copper penny held just under the nose during recess while all the others played.

The gun was warmer by now in her mouth, the barrel slightly wet from her lips.

The warm fragrance of her mom's glass of red wine as she helped Max with her homework. In the backyard, by herself and relaxed, pine needles crushed in the hand. Fresh-picked mint from near the shed. Crawling under the porch, hidden and safe, the earthy aroma of secret mushrooms. On the wind, the salt of the sea. Caramel candy. Watery paint. Her nose pressed against her arm, the sweet saltiness of her own child's body.

And then an image came to her and it stayed. Her mother's chair, the green one where she sat each night to read books and articles about what was beginning to be known as Asperger's. Worn into its velour was the outline of her mom's buttocks, the silhouette of her spine, the imprint of her sheer determination.

Max remembered her mom after her dad's funeral, the way she used to stare at a wall for the longest time. Whenever Max flash-glanced at her, her mouth was slack, her face empty.

Max weighed this memory against the hum of silence around herself in the crowded high-school halls.

The understanding struck her that simply the fact that she was sitting here, a gun in her mouth, meant she had given up all hope of a normal life, had let go of it fully.

For a long time she considered the space where the hope had been, turning the lack of it over in her mind.

When she finally took the gun out of her mouth, she had changed.

From that day on, she no longer tried to copy the ways others made friends or boyfriends, instead immersed herself in whatever really interested her. Plants. Smells. Chemistry. She read her first ethnobotany book, about a researcher among the Kiowas in the 1930s. She stared at the photos. A tall man with glasses perched neatly on his nose, his clothes crisp, he posed beside nearly naked Kiowas who stood so solidly there. A clear case of which object doesn't belong. Still he was with them—the distance between his body and theirs the same as the distance between each of their bodies. He was part of the group because he knew about something they all considered important. Plants were the language he'd used.

 

The ascent up the mountainside got steeper. The rain fell harder. Max couldn't see much with her hood on, her head tucked down as she worked to keep her balance.

No one was talking. Glancing over, she saw Mutara's mouth was open with the effort of the climb.

She leaned into her movements, huffing.

 

A few months after the man had attacked her, she asked her mom to help her learn how to read human expression. She needed to be able to understand neurotypicals better, not be so surprised by their actions. She was still taking four Klonopin a day.

Together they learned that researchers had broken down facial expressions into individual muscular actions and given each of those actions a code. Contraction of nostril wings—E7. Chin boss protruding—G3. The scientists hoped that one day, using a system like this, computers might be able to read human emotion. As though she were a computer, she had to memorize these codes and their attendant movements. Then she and her mom worked their way through every Disney movie. They freeze-framed every facial close-up in order to code the muscle movements—B3, H4, C1, and F2—then correlated the codes to name the emotion.

As she got better at literally decoding the facial component of a conversation, she got better at predicting the words and actions that would follow. Less surprised by humans, she became less stiff in her interactions and people began to respond to that. She eased back to two Klonopin a day.

In college she discovered email. In written communication, her strengths of logic and sheer factual knowledge came to the fore. Her flat tone of voice and averted gaze didn't matter.

She majored in botany, minored in chemistry. Senior year, she won the Ashe prize. Other students, and then professors, began to ask her opinion. In grad school, she found herself around researchers with obsessive interests and, occasionally, poor social skills. A world in which she could find a home.

Then the year she started her postdoc (at a farmers' market one Saturday) she noticed cucumbers. She already loved plants, so in a way the idea seemed only natural. Cucumbers had no confusing social rules, no expectations, no demand for conversation. Once a week she would go to the market, sorting through the different options, considering texture and size, until the farmer behind the table began to stare.

If she couldn't find an organic one, then back at home she rolled a condom over the cucumber to avoid possible pesticides.

Sometimes she talked to the vegetable. Told it about her day and her work and what she was learning. She relayed the information the way she needed to, going into the details, no matter how minute, not explaining any vocab or research, not stopping herself every few minutes to inquire about the other's life, simply following her thought process with enthusiasm. Letting the words tumble out. The way she'd always wanted to.