Russell Banks - The Darling

I stood and walked to the window and looked down at the wet, gray street and the triple-decker houses that lined it on both sides. It was five-thirty in the morning. The sky was pinking in the east, out beyond the bay — in the direction of Africa. It must be midday in Africa , I thought. The street below seemed cold and colorless, as if it existed only in grainy black and white, and the radiators hissed and banged as the coal-burning furnace in the basement kicked in, and the darkened hallway smelled of corned beef and cabbage and moldy, wet, threadbare carpeting on the stairs. An empty municipal bus began its roundup of the first-shift mill workers. I could see my car down on the street where I’d parked it, the beat-up old Karmann-Ghia I’d bought in Cleveland. I’ll leave the car keys on the kitchen table for Carol, I decided. And a check for what’s left in my account.

“Okay, I’ll do it. I’ll go with you,” I said. “Providing we go now, this minute. If I wait around, I’ll change my mind.”

“Cool. What about Carol and the kid? Doncha wanna wake them up?”

“No. Let’s go now. I’m basically all packed anyhow. I’ve been packed for months. Half expecting this, I guess.”

“No shit? Don’t you want to say goodbye?”

“I hate goodbyes.”

“Man, you are cold .”

“Who is? Hannah or Dawn? No, you’re right,” I said and started towards my workroom to get the duffel with my belongings. “I am cold. Both Hannah and Dawn, we’re like icebergs.”

He smiled. “Yeah, well, you’ll see, man. Africa’s gonna melt you.”

AND SO, LIKE water following gravity, my course and rate of descent more or less determined by the lay of the land and by whomever or whatever happened to lie in my path or by my side, I came to Ghana, a place that on my mental map of Africa was located in the region marked “unexplored.” When you let go of your life like that, unexpected turns occur, and before long your life’s path has become a snarl of zigs and zags. It’s how one comes up with what’s called “an interesting life,” I guess. And my brief stay in Ghana with Zack was merely that, another zig, another zag — the makings of an interesting life.

It was more complicated than that, of course, but I didn’t realize it at the time it was happening. One never does. I was, in a sense, passively following Zack, who knew how to disappear safely and, as it turned out, comfortably in far-off Ghana. But he wasn’t leading me, and he certainly wasn’t dominating me. He was a facilitator, one of any number of people who could just as easily have played the role as he. Or the role of comrade-in-arms. Or lover. Back then they were all essentially the same to me.

The truth is, I used Zack. Just as I had used Carol. I wasn’t as passive as I seemed. Almost without knowing it I’d reached a point, long before I ran out on Carol and fled New Bedford, where I wanted desperately for my old life to be over and a new one to begin. But I had no idea how to go about it — without turning myself in to the FBI. And there was no way I’d do that.

It wasn’t the likelihood of spending a year or three or even more behind bars that kept me from turning myself in — I might actually have welcomed jail time, a few years to reflect and pay mild penance; a time to organize my warring memories into a coherent narrative. It would have meant publicly voiding my previous life, however, canceling it out, erasing all its meaning, and I wasn’t ready for that. Not yet. My life so far had cost me and everyone who ever loved me and everyone whom I had loved too much, way too much, for me simply to say, “I’m sorry, Daddy, and I’m sorry, Mother. I’m sorry, everybody. I have for more than ten years been making a terrible mistake. And, oh yes, everyone who was led to believe that I was someone other than I am, my apologies to you, too. It was all a dumb mistake, Carol. All of it.”

And besides, I had no better alternative life to propose. No meaningful future for me alone or me with anyone else. So it was jail time, and public confession and shame, or get the hell out of Dodge, lady. Disappear. I was like a late-stage drug addict, unable to admit her addiction because of the damage it has done. She goes off the map altogether and no longer associates even with other addicts. I grabbed my duffel bag and my phony passport and followed Zack to Ghana. That way I could keep my mask, and no one could see it for what it was. Except Zack.

WITHIN A WEEK of our arrival in Accra, we had rented from an ex — Peace Corps friend of Zack’s a small, two-bedroom, second-storey furnished apartment in a pink stuccoed building downtown, with a balcony overlooking the bustling street below and a view of the vast, open-air Makola market. Another week, and I had a job. Zack seemed to have friends everywhere in this city, at all levels of society — expatriate Englishmen, Ghanaian nationals, African-Americans in search of their roots, American businessmen, and ex — Peace Corps volunteers gone native — and he managed through a pal at the U.S. embassy to get me hired as a medical technician for a New York University blood lab that was using monkeys and bonobos for research on hepatitis.

My job was essentially a clerical one. I worked with the blood, not the monkeys, cataloguing and shipping plasma back to the States. I barely saw our simian donors and never handled them. Two years of Harvard Medical School under the name of Hannah Musgrave and my job, later, in the plasma lab at Peter Bent Brigham as Dawn Carrington had qualified me nicely for a similar, difficult-to-fill position here. In the days before computer checks, nobody checked. You could take off, put on, and mix and match identities like sportswear. You got caught only if you couldn’t do what you said you could. Or if someone informed on you.

Once I had my job and living quarters settled, it wasn’t long before Zack and I began to fall away from each other. Mostly, it was my doing. Back in the States — starting at Brandeis and finally in New Bedford — I’d been willing to dismiss his egoism and grandiosity as the typically elaborate feathers and coxcomb worn by just about every man I’d ever known in the Movement, without lowering my estimation of his political commitment and integrity. But that wasn’t possible here in Ghana. For ten long years, in the vain attempt to create a revolution, I and hundreds of women like me — and, yes, men like Zack — had literally risked our lives and sacrificed our families and friends and given up on the comfortable futures we’d been promised. It was who we were back then and now and who we’d be for the rest of our lives. We believed it. We insisted on it. We needed it. But for Zack, once we’d landed in Accra, all that turned into merely a stage in his life, a phase he claimed to have passed beyond.

I wouldn’t have been offended by his having designated those years a phase instead of a life, implying that it had been merely a phase for me, too, and I might even have been grateful for it. It might have provided the start of a way out for me. But in Africa, Zack quickly set himself up as a “businessman” of a particularly embarrassing and loathsome type. At least to me it was, especially then. And that, in turn, flipped him into a defensive posture, which only made things between us worse. For a long time, I said nothing to him about it. But he knew. My presence silhouetted his new life sharply against the brightly lit background of the old, and it made him angry at me, as if I were in charge of lighting.

He’d become a middleman. The bottom-feeder of capitalism. The enemy, as far as I was concerned. The Ghanaian economy had collapsed in the middle 1970s, and the inflation rate of the cedi, the local currency, was doubling by the month against the U.S. dollar. Small farmers and merchants were slipping so deeply into debt it would take generations for them to climb out again. These were Zack’s suppliers. He spoke Fanti and a little Twi from his Peace Corps days, and as soon as his shoulder had healed well enough for him to drive, he bought with the dregs of his trust fund a little red Suzuki motorcycle and roared off to back-country cocoa-farming villages and along dusty country lanes from one small market town and city to another and prowled up and down the back streets and alleys of Accra, buying up from desperately frightened debtors their last hedge against financial ruin — ancient Ghanaian artworks and religious artifacts, principally Ashanti gold. He bought the precious objects with American dollars at flea-market prices, then sold them the next day at a colossal markup to the agents and dealers for rich American and European collectors and galleries, who waited for him in the air-conditioned lobby of the Golden Tulip Hotel out by the airport. It was, as he said, “sweet.”