The Laughing Monsters (19 page)

The coffin maker, already free of his cargo, charged back down the way he’d come. I moved to block his way. He skidded to a stop and leaned on his handlebars, tipping his bike to the side with one short leg outstretched and a toe on the ground, and when I asked him if this was Newada Mountain, he spoke his first words to me, saying, “Oui, c’est Newada,” and kicked off again, gaining speed down the hill, and I gathered he’d reach the wider road before full dark. A bit along in his descent he turned his head and spoke once more, calling, “—le lieu du mal!” which I think means the bad or the wrong or the evil place.

*   *   *

ATTENDEZ EN ANGLAIS:

FINDER PLEASE DELIVER THIS MATERIAL TO

THE UNITED STATES MILITARY GARRISON

NEAR DARBA, CONGO

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN (US MILITARY PERSONNEL):

PLEASE FORWARD ATTACHED MATERIAL TO

DAVIDIA ST. CLAIRE

C/O GARRISON CMDR COL. MARCUS ST. CLAIRE

US 10TH SPEC FORCES, FT. CARSON, COLORADO, USA

WITH GRATITUDE—KAPTAJN ROLAND NAIR (CAPT.)

JYDSKE DRAGONREGIMENT, HRN (ROYAL DANISH ARMY)

[OCT 27 ca. 12AM]

Davidia,

I wish I could record this silence. It’s like the bottom of the sea. In silence like this, my head makes its own noise—I can hear the moon, I can hear the stars. Once in a while a sick child croaks in one of the huts.

(I started to write this a couple of hours ago. I lit a candle, but the flame drew the nocturnal insects, including a moth big as a sparrow that batted out the flame in its forays and then crashed at my feet with its paraffin-spattered wings on fire and lay there flailing and burning for several minutes—all because of its infatuation … And then I saw the half moon coming up, so I’ve waited for its light to write by, sitting in the doorway of this hut. I’m guessing as to time of day, but the moon’s been waxing fatter and rising later and I remember it rose around ten pm when last I owned a watch.)

I won’t bother catching you up. Someday I’ll attach this to a full account. I’ll wrap it all in brown paper and tie it with string and plunk it in a DHL pouch addressed to you, or to Tina Huntington. Which of you am I writing to?

To you, Davidia. Just letting you know (should only this fragment reach you) that as of the date above, I was still alive.

For the third time in ten days, I’m a captive—not held by others, but stuck, no option for movement. In my universe, time and space converge on 3 pm Nov 2nd at the Bawarchi Restaurant in Freetown—remember the Bawarchi?—5000 kilometers and 112 hours from here and now. Not a clue how to get there.

I have some candles and matches, but as I say—the crashing bugs. I’ve got paper and pencils and a knife. The clothes on my back. 720 US dollars. 60K Ugandan shillings. No credit cards or plane tickets, no passport, no documented actuality. No pills against malaria. Every day, more African.

I think when the wind shifts I may be hearing the brook at the bottom of the hill, or people down there laughing, or weeping.

Several hours ago, Davidia, at dusk, I climbed this hill and arrived at the village of New Water Mountain. I stood among a couple dozen huts. No mountain visible. Hooves and feet had beaten the hilltop’s ground into a flat, muddy waste. The only splashes of color came from yellow twenty-liter water jugs—they lay all around. And two bright, child-size purple coffins. Beside the coffins, two old men scraped at the ground, one with a hoe, one with a spade, both men barefoot but wearing long sleeves and trousers.

Nearby, a man and a woman seemed to be taking apart one of the dwellings, removing its thatch, setting the materials aside. The woman stopped, laid her head back, and put her face to the sky—I expected a mournful howl, but she only trembled a bit, then settled her mind, it seemed, and returned to the work.

A giant leafless tree, an arthritic-looking horror, dominates the vicinity from the top of the rise (I can hear it creaking in the breeze right now as I write). Four people stood at the tree’s base, hallooing up toward the highest branches like hounds. One of them, a white woman, met me as I approached, and she said, “Are you wondering where the chickens went?”—I said I wasn’t—“And the goats? They’re all dead. And most of the children. Dead. Are you lost?”—I said a little—“You look disturbed.”—She meant drunk. I said I was.

She’d walked among several villages with these others, two women and a sturdy-looking man with a machete on his shoulder, all Africans. She alone was white—white and plump, probably in her thirties—and grimy from hiking, but hale and upright.

I said, “Jesus, I know you.”

“You know Jesus?”

“I saw you at the White Nile Hotel, didn’t I? You were swimming in the pool.”

“My husband Jim and I are from the North East Congo Mission of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.”

“I had the impression it was something like that.”

“It’s the Lord’s work,” she said, “but every day you want to kill somebody.”

The man with the machete said, “We must go, Mom.”

“I know. I just said so.”

She told me her husband had spent the day in Darba trying to find someone from the Ministry of Health so they could get some action up here. “Or the Red Cross or somebody. What a laugh. But we have to try.”

“What about Doctors Without Borders?”

“He’ll check with them too, but they like to stay close to Bunia for supplies. Close to the airfield. And the brothels. We call them Doctors Without Pants.”

The woman continually waved her hands and flicked her fingers as if battling with cobwebs, and I feared for her sanity as much as mine. She said, “We’ve looked at three other villages in the last two days. It’s the same thing for fifty kilometers around. The people are crazy, the water is poison, everybody’s dying. We’ve convinced them to evacuate—all but this bunch. They’ve got a queen who rules them from the treetop. Come over here and you can look.”

We joined the others. Several meters above us, between two large boughs, a chair was hanging. We could see the bottom of the chair, and a pair of feet, in white tennis shoes, dangling below it, and in the boughs above the chair were bunches of thatch, evidently to protect the owner of the feet.

“She won’t come down till morning, but we can’t wait for that. We’re meeting the reverend in Kananga. It’s two kilometers down that path. Or more.”

The feet up above seemed quite still. “Is she asleep?”

“I don’t know what she is. Are you gold, or hydrocarbons?”

“Pardon?”

“Are you with one of the companies? Which particular corporation?”

“None. I’m here looking for a friend of mine, but I haven’t spotted him. Or much of anybody, actually.”

We stood on a patch of brown earth littered with corn husks and cassava peelings. To the west I saw a couple of distant cell towers, lone trees, many huts—all in two dimensions, flat against the sunset. In the other direction, everything was bathed in a somber metallic light, and the two child coffins, ten steps away, seemed uniquely purple, a purple without precedent. Beside them, the two old diggers had nearly disappeared into the earth. I went over and looked. The margin between the twin graves had crumbled to make a single large hole. As they smoothed its sides with their tools, the men sloshed up to their ankles in muddy seepage, maybe the very stuff that had killed the poor tots.

She said, “Usually when somebody dies they do a big wake with a lot of howling and drumming, but they’ve had too many, and now it’s just a chore. The whole region is toxic, thanks to the lust for precious metals. This is the outworking of a spiritual travesty. Are you any kind of believer?”

“No.”

“We’re getting out of here day after tomorrow, and I am Goddamn glad.”

“How are you traveling?”

“Walking, for now. Jim has the Trooper. We’ll make one more swing through the villages, and then back to Lubumbashi. We’ll take a plane from Bunia.”

“Look,” I said, “if I find my friend, we’ll need a ride out of here. I don’t mind paying, and I don’t mind begging.”

“It depends on how many come in the car. Where are you going?”—I said I didn’t know—“Any decent hotel, am I right?”—I said yes—she recommended Bunia. “There’s quite a bit of UN activity there. Peacekeepers and such. It’s a UN town.”

“How far away is Bunia?”

“A couple hundred kilometers. It’s the nearest airstrip. The UN uses it, and some charters.”

“Please, ma’am. Please. We don’t need seats. Put us on the roof. Really. This is Africa.”

She thrilled me by saying, “We’ll probably come right through here day after tomorrow. We’ll do our best to take you aboard. Look for a blue Isuzu Trooper with the top painted white.”

“I’ll be looking for it, believe me.”

“In the meantime, you’ll meet the queen. Maybe they’ll elect you king.”

“Are you laughing at me?”

“After a while,” she said, “everything’s funny.” For one second—I think because of her bright anger—she seemed sexy. She turned to her friends. “Next is Kananga. Only a couple of miles, yes?”

They walked on, four abreast. I watched them get away. Toward the bottom of the hill a flashlight came on, and its spot trembled over the ground … I hadn’t learned the woman’s name or told her mine or even asked if she’d seen anybody like Michael.

The sun had set. The West turned a densely luminous terrifying aubergine. I stood alone beside the queen’s tree. I tried shouting Michael’s name and got no answer. As far as I could tell, the queen slept on undisturbed.

I looked into one or two huts. The people inside them ignored me, even when I called to them.

Then the night came down, and I found this hut empty and came in and sat inside, right here on the dirt floor, and this is where I’ve lived for the last few hours—maybe till I die—probably of thirst. I haven’t had water since noon. Soon I’ll go down and drink from the toxic creek.

[OCT 27 ca. 7AM]

When a woman’s screaming disturbed my dreams I thought nothing of it—there’s always some woman or infant or animal screaming—and I stayed under the darkness in my head as long as possible before I woke up thirsty and frightened in this hut. I’m crouched in a corner. The female screams go on. A sound of hammering or chopping too—not rhythmic, just violent. I have to piss. I need water. A man screams also.

This thirst is murdering me. Give me sewage—I’ll drink it. But I can’t look for the creek now. I’m afraid to leave this hut.

*   *   *

Davidia. I’ve had a look. It’s Michael out there. Adriko. Our Michael.

*   *   *

I’m not going out. I’m glad to see him—I came here looking for him—but I won’t make myself known until I have an idea what’s happening.

*   *   *

I see a lot of villagers sitting on the ground around the coffins and the grave and the dirt piles. Michael argues—battles—with a large woman. He and this screamer are the only ones standing, stalking one another in a circle ten meters wide, keeping the people and the coffins and the double grave between them.

*   *   *

I’m able to count twenty-nine sitting on the ground. Women wearing long skirts and tops with bold patterns and colors, men in sweaters or large T-shirts with washed-out logos, all of them looking as if they’d rolled in the mud and didn’t care. Two women with children laid across their laps. Both kids naked and bony and sick, eyes open and staring at another world. One woman in a brilliant but filthy wrap and headscarf sits on top of a dirt pile, her legs out straight.

*   *   *

Michael holds a machete two-handed. Sometimes he raises it above his head as if he means to chop the sun out of the sky. He and the woman scream in some kind of Creole or Lugbara unintelligible to me.

*   *   *

My guess: the woman is the village queen, La Dolce, down from her tree—I recognize her tennis shoes—and these people have gathered for the funeral of the two dead children, and Michael must have stopped it with his screams and his machete. He and La Dolce howl at each other to the point of strangling on their hatred, but not both at once—it’s back and forth—that is, it seems to proceed as a debate while they orbit around the others.

*   *   *

She wears a long black skirt and a man’s sleeveless undershirt torn off just below her breasts, which, by their outlines, are narrow and pendulous.

She’s got a buzz-cut Afro on her hippopotamus head, eyes leaping from the sockets and eyelids like birds’ beaks closing over them—her mouth is tiny and round, but it opens to shocking hugeness, displaying many square white teeth. A broad nose like a triangle biscuit smashed onto her face. She’s fat and laughing, hips banging as she struts around, keeping the people and the coffins and the grave between her and Michael.

The hair on Michael’s head is growing back. He tromps around in rubber sandals, blue jeans, a gray hooded sweatshirt, waving the machete with his left hand, slapping his right hand against his chest, where it says
HARVARD
.

Mainly throughout all this I feel thirsty. I’ve had nothing to drink since yesterday afternoon, and all this drama—and the whole sky, and the earth—and the oceans—seem tiny beside my thirst.

*   *   *

One minute ago Michael started chopping away with his machete at the woman’s chair, which rests on the ground beside her tree, and she shimmied toward him majestically and plopped herself right down in it, daring him to keep up the destruction and split her in pieces as well.

He’s speaking English—“I’ll destroy this place!”

Now she doesn’t howl, but rather sings of her power, I think, sitting on her throne, and cries out I think Bring me food! Bring me food! until a woman delivers something on a plastic plate and backs away apologizing. La Dolce flings grain into her mouth, it spills all over her bare belly, which even from here I can see is covered with stretch marks. Water now! Bring me water! They hurry to bring her a liter of bottled water—bottled Goddamn water. She anoints her own head from it and sprinkles her face. The drops remain while she says to Michael in English:

“I am El Olam—the Everlasting God!”