Michael Bishop: No Enemy But Time

After a brief pause the Ugandan said, “I’ve been fasting for two weeks. A little sisal tea is the only nourishment I take during fasts, and when I fast, I hallucinate. I hallucinate the future, you understand, and earlier this evening, in Monicah’s presence, I saw you agreeing to let her participate.”

“Why would I do a crazy thing like that?” There was a quaver in my voice.

“To regain her good opinion. You’ve lost it, I think, for the same reason your mother, the writer, once lost yours. She tried to take advantage of your relationship for certain unworthy, short-term ends.”

“Monicah, is that what you think I’ve done?”

My daughter stared at me, virtually unseeing.

“She’s possessed, Mr. Kampa. You woke her before she could sleep off the effects of her trance.”

“You’ve drugged her!”

“With her full complicity, sir. In this state she communes across the years with her mother’s spirit. You never speak of her mother, Monicah says. For a while, then, I helped her become her mother.”

“Bring her back,” I commanded the Ugandan.

“Far better that we should go to her, Mr. Kampa. Surely you’ll take this opportunity to touch the spirit of your habiline wife?”

I glared at the man. The winter I had returned from the States to Zarakal, Thomas Babington Mubia had taken me to the world of ngoma by way of a Wanderobo incantation. There he had formally married my spirit to that of his dead Kikembu wife, Helen Mithaga, whom he believed a twentieth-century avatar of my Pleistocene bride. Later that winter Babington had died, but as far as I was concerned, Helen and I were linked forever, legally as well as emotionally, and my former mentor’s impromptu rite had formalized our bond even in the Here and Now.

“Did you truly love Helen, Mr. Kampa, or was your dalliance with her a matter of rut and propinquity?”

“Bring my daughter back and then get out of here!”

“Forgive me,” Dirk Akuj said. “Of course you truly loved Helen, and you would like to commune with her again.”

“Listen!” I barked. “Listen, you miserable—”

“But you do, sir. You do wish to commune with your long-dead wife, and I can help you do that.”

My resolve weakened and, intuitively recognizing that he had beaten me, he headed for the door: Dirk Akuj, a Karamojong physicist with ingrained animist sympathies. He invited Timothy Njeri and Daniel Eunoto into the suite, arguing that the participation of one of these two men would help me achieve a harmonious relationship with the ghost in Monicah’s body. The other security agent would stand aloof from the ceremony as an observer, a control. This arrangement would free us from the worry that I was utterly in Dirk Akuj’s power. However, neither Timothy nor Daniel looked eager to take part in this scheme. They awaited some word from me, but all I could do was stare bewilderedly at the girl on the bed.

Dirk Akuj crossed to his tuxedo jacket and removed from an inside pocket a pair of plastic bags containing what appeared to be leaf cuttings and roots. He opened the bags, shook their contents into the teakettle on the hotplate, replenished the water in the kettle from a bathroom faucet, turned on the hotplate, and decocted this potion for a good five minutes, all the while humming a tuneless melody. A pungent odor rose into the air with the steam from the kettle’s spout, a smell like minty ammonia.

Timothy and Daniel flipped a coin to see who would act as observer. The coin came up heads (President Tharaka’s), and Daniel retreated to the door to watch.

After stripping to his T-shirt and briefs and urging Timothy and me to do likewise, Dirk Akuj showed us how we should empty our lungs and inhale deeply of the fumes from the kettle. We followed his advice.

Then the three of us sat down in a triangle in the center of the room and began drumming our knees with our knuckles. The steam in the open kettle on the floor focused our attention, and soon the hotel was blinking in and out of existence in time with our drumming. Monicah gazed down on our ceremony as if from a great height. She seemed to blink in and out of existence on the off-beats.

I closed my eyes and time ceased to have any conventional meaning. History had been repealed, the future indefinitely postponed.

Then I opened my eyes and beheld around me a grayness pulsing with the promise of light. I was alone, but in a place with neither substance nor dimension. My hands had no body, my body no hands. Then a door swung inward, and my long-lost Helen was standing in this doorway, radiant in an immaculate white dress and apron. She was even wearing shoes. Her feet looked enormous in shoes, like monument pedestals. Tears freshened my cheeks, and I hurried to draw her out of the pale rectangle of the doorway.

“You shouldn’t be wearing these,” I told Helen, kneeling in front of her. “It’s demeaning for you.”

Her shoes were cheap blue sneakers with heavy rubber soles. I began unlacing them. My tears made it difficult to see what I was doing, but I got the laces undone and slipped her feet out of the sneakers one after the other. I stood, embraced her for an infinite moment, just to feel her body against mine, and rocked her in my arms like a father holding his child. Her starched clothing began to annoy me, too, and I loosened the knot supporting her apron, expertly unbuttoned her dress, and swept these items down her flanks to the floor, there to join my V-necked T-shirt and my beautiful Fruit of the Looms. She regarded me with tender puzzlement, but did not scold me for returning us to the innocent nakedness of beasts and Minids. Instead she closed my eyelids with her fingertips and settled one gnarled fist on my heart.

I opened my eyes again. The hotel suite had rematerialized around my double bed, which I was sharing with Helen Habiline. Praise be to Ngai and the mysterious potion of Dirk Akuj!

“Mr. Kampa—Mr. Kampa, sir, may I go now, please?”

The face staring down at me was that of a matronly Sambusai woman with intensely bright eyes and a full, healthy mouth. Astonished, I slipped out from beneath her gaze and over the edge of the bed. The woman was dressed in white, the costume of a hotel maid. I tried to sort out the implications of her presence. Looking around, I saw Timothy Njeri unconscious on the floor beside my teakettle—he was still in his skivvies, while I was buck naked—and Daniel Eunoto slumped in a corner sleeping the sleep of the sledgehammered. Monicah and Dirk Akuj were nowhere in sight. The sky beyond the picture window was a chastening blue.

“What are you doing here?”

“No one answer when I knock, Mr. Kampa.” She gave me an apologetic smile. “I came in to clean.”

“Before dawn?”

“Oh, no, sir. Much after. It’s nearly noon.”

A little more questioning revealed that she had been in my suite for almost two hours and that she was disastrously behind schedule. If I did not let her go, the manager would fire her, and she would have to return to a desolate mission outpost southeast of the Recreational Centre, where life was both hard and very dull. I wrapped a sheet about myself, gave her the equivalent of nearly fifty American dollars, and told her to catch up as much of her work as she could. I would protect her from the ire of the Sands management. The woman departed, thanking me.

I dressed and stalked about the suite trying to sort out my emotions. Dirk Akuj had hoodwinked us. His ngoma ceremony had been a cunning scam. Or had it? Timothy and Daniel would come round soon enough, I could tell by their breathing, but in the meantime I wanted to collect my thoughts without their help. Was it possible that for a moment—a brief moment, at least—my Helen’s ngoma had inhabited the comfortable body of the hotel maid? In spite of everything, I felt pretty good.