Russell Banks - The Darling

I started to get up from the table, when suddenly Zack turned and strode over to me, his face red and fisted. “Sit down,” he ordered. “I’ve got something to tell you.”

“Fine.”

I sat, and he looked evenly past my mask and into my eyes, as if about to confess that all these years he’d been in love with me. Or all these years he’d hated me. Instead, he said, “You’re here on false premises, Hannah, you know that?”

“No shit.”

“No, I mean it. I’m gonna tell you something you won’t like hearing, but if you’re set on leaving you probably oughta know it.”

“So tell.”

“You think you had to get out of New Bedford and leave the country, that you had no choice. You think it’s because you got caught in a stupid crossfire between me and some very heavy black dudes, et cetera, and it was the only way for you to protect Carol and her kid.”

“Yes. Something like that.”

“Yeah, well, it’s not true.”

“It’s not true? What’s not?”

“No. The truth is, I shot myself.”

“You what?”

“I shot myself. By accident. Did it with my own fucking gun, too, trying to stash it under the seat of my cab.”

I looked away and pretended I hadn’t heard him.

“There never was any black dudes or SLA. Or whatever, Black Liberation Army. I mean, there was, there is, but I never knew them, not personally. I only heard about them from some Weather guys in New York.”

“Why, Zack? Why’d you blame black men?”

“I don’t know. Shit, I guess I thought it would impress you if you believed I was tight with them. I bought the gun in New Hampshire, actually, at one of those roadside guns ’n’ ammo shops, and carried it around in the cab in case some jerk tried to rob me. Then I figured I better learn how to use it, so I drove out to some woods on the other side of Plymouth one night to practice with it. I shot off a bunch of bullets, then got worried about the noise and local cops, so I reloaded the damn thing and when I leaned down and tried to shove it back under the seat of my cab, I shot myself. I guess I forgot to put the safety on.” He shook his head at the memory. “Pathetic.”

“And you’re telling me this now? Jesus, why now?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “In case maybe you want to go home, I guess. You know, to Carol. To the States. And the truth is, the longer you’re here, the more guilty I feel about it. So in a way I’m glad you’re splitting. I mean, it pisses me off, but it gives me a chance to sort of clear my conscience.”

“But why did you come to me? When you shot yourself, I mean. Why didn’t you just go to the hospital?”

“I’d bought the gun with a phony ID,” he said and smiled wanly. “I was underground, babe. Remember? Like you.”

I didn’t know what to say to him. I wasn’t angry, that’s certain. After all, he’d given me exactly what I’d wanted and hadn’t dared to ask for. He’d provided me with an excuse to abandon Carol, her child, the New Bedford apartment, my crummy job at Peter Bent Brigham, my sordid and lowly role in the Weather Underground — everything that had become an intolerable burden to me. And along with the excuse, he’d handed me a plane ticket to Africa, a place located as far from my burden as I could have imagined. Here in Africa, I’d enjoyed his protection and advice, and he’d laid his old Africa hand onto my shoulder just heavily enough to make me capable in short order of shrugging it off. And now the dear foolish man was telling me that I was free to abandon him, too. Go on, babe, split. You want to be a loner now? Go ahead, do it. Do it without guilt, without embarrassment, without regret. You’re free, babe, free as a fucking bird.

I should have said, Thank you, Zack, a thousand times I thank you . Instead, I said nothing. I simply got up from the table, turned towards the door, and left my old life and entered a new life, as if walking from one empty room into another.

O R ENTERING A DARKENING SKY. And I was following the sun into it, flying like a petrel out along the westering Atlantic coast of Ghana towards Liberia, a tiny country wedged between Côte d’Ivoire and Sierra Leone, a place I knew not at all, where I had not a single friend or acquaintance to turn to, no old Africa hand to aid and abet me in my flight. I had little more than a man’s name, Woodrow Sundiata. And all I knew of him was that he was an assistant minister of public health in the government of President William Tolbert and had studied business administration in the U.S. and was said to welcome the arrival in Liberia of English-speaking foreigners with medical training of any sort.

Some weeks earlier, as so often happened, I’d found myself alone one afternoon in the NYU lab office in Accra with no work to do. Bored and restless, I’d opened a file folder marked “Confidential” and had cruised casually through a lengthy correspondence on official stationery between a Mr. Sundiata and my Ghanaian employers, along with copies of letters exchanged between Mr. Sundiata and my employers’ American bosses at NYU, including memoranda and cables to and from both employers and bosses concerning the good use to which the directors of the NYU blood plasma lab might put this mid-level West African official who was evidently eager to provide exclusive access to Liberia’s large population of chimpanzees, both in the wild and captive, in exchange for American-trained medical personnel and supplies.

Such an arrangement could eventually present us with a unique opportunity to obtain at relatively low cost a significant number of animal subjects without violating ITTA regulations and without alerting our competitors to this abundant new source of animal plasma. As we understand the situation in Monrovia, we are to provide Mr. Sundiata’s ministry with a few nurses and/or laboratory assistants on renewable six-month contracts, with housing costs and salary to be covered by our New York office, and a single shipment of sterile syringes and miscellaneous antibiotics (quantities yet to be determined). In return, the subject animals are thereafter to be placed effectively under our control. Please explore the matter further at your first opportunity. And confirm the above assumptions re: our anticipated costs …

The night I walked out on Zack at Afrikiko’s and abandoned the reality we’d more or less shared since college, I went straight back to the apartment, sat down, and, before I could change my mind, composed a letter to the Liberian assistant minister of public health, asking for a job interview, and the next morning posted it to him. Within a week, I had my answer.

ALL THESE MANY YEARS later, my first meeting with Woodrow still remains vividly clear to me. A ceiling fan turned slowly, stirring the humid air, but not cooling it. My body had been wet with sweat since the moment the plane from Accra landed at Robertsfield Airport. I entered the shabby, disordered office, self-conscious and anxious about my appearance. Compared with the heat and the nearly suffocating humidity here in Monrovia, the weather in Accra had been positively balmy. My hair was frizzled, and my white cotton blouse was wrinkled, and I knew that I had huge, gray sweat circles under my arms. Rivulets trickled between my breasts and down my sides. I felt fat, fleshy.

Seated at his desk, he flattened his hands and splayed his long, slender fingers and slowly, deliberately lifted his face to meet mine. Woodrow Sundiata, Assistant Minister of Public Health of the Republic of Liberia. He was a small, tight-bodied man with a large, nearly bald head, his complexion as dark as a bassoon. He was not a conventionally handsome man, but to me then and there he was sexy. His eyes were light brown, the color of tea with milk. I guessed his age — accurately, it would later turn out — to be forty. He was wearing a pale blue, short-sleeved guayabera shirt, starched and pressed, a heavy gold Rolex on his left wrist, and on his right a bracelet of tiny, white cowrie shells strung on braided leather. No wedding band, I observed.