Dave Eggers - What Is The What

The lobby of the Century Club is stone quiet after eight a.m. The members are working out beyond the glass, stepping and running and lifting, and I watch them and think of adjustments I might make to my own regimen. Two months ago I began to work out sometimes after my shifts. The manager, a petite and muscular woman named Tracy, told me that I could get a 50 percent discount on a partial membership, and I have been using that opportunity. I've gained four pounds in those two months, and have, I think, increased the size of my chest and biceps. I don't ever again want to look in the mirror and see the insect that I was.

A new woman enters the club, someone I have never seen. She is white, very large, exceedingly graceful. She looks startled to see me.

'Hello,' she says. 'Haven't seen you before. What a wonderful smile you have.'

I try to frown, to seem hardhearted.

'I'm Sidra,' she says, and extends her hand. 'I'm new. I've only been here twice before. I'm, you know, making some changes.' She looks down at her girth shyly, and I immediately feel that I should say something. I want to make her feel better. I want her to feel blessed. I want her to know that she has been blessed. To be here now, to be alive as she is, to have lived always in this country, Sidra, you are blessed.

She gives me her card and I swipe it. Her picture appears, her smile sad and tilted, and she enters the gym.

Sidra, on that last morning I woke at four a.m. to make sure I could avoid any line at the water tap. When I arrived, there was no line, and I saw this as a good omen. I brought water home and took a shower. As I was stepping out of the shower enclosure, Deng Luol, who had booked my bed, was standing at the doorway.

— It's not even dawn, I said.

— I've never had a mattress, he said.-I have a wife, and she would dearly appreciate one. With this, I will be her hero.

He wished me a safe trip and left with the mattress on his head.

I dressed in my crisp new clothes and packed my things in a plastic bag. I had only my toiletries, one change of clothes, and my documents. There was nothing else.

Everyone in my house began waking up, and all were crying.

— Make the Sudanese proud, Gop said.

— I will, I said. At that moment, I believed I could.

I said goodbye to each of my Kakuma sisters, and to Ayen, who had been my mother for many years at the camp. It was a swift parting; it was too confusing to stay any longer. I left so quickly that I forgot one of my new shirts, and left my new shoes. I realized this later, but did not want to go back.

When I walked outside, I found Cornelius, the neighbor boy who had booked my bike. It was a good bike, a Chinese-made ten-speed, and Cornelius was already sitting on its clean vinyl seat, with the kickstand down, practicing riding it, pushing the pedals forward and back.

— Ready? Cornelius said.

— Okay, let's go.

There would be unblemished blue skies all day. I was willing to walk to the compound-I would catch the bus to the airfield there-but Cornelius, with his new bicycle, insisted on chauffeuring me. So I sat on the small seat over the back tire, my bag on my lap.

It took him some time before he steered the bike competently with me aboard.

— Pedal, boy, pedal! I said.

Soon he was steady and we got onto the main road to the compound. When we joined the road, we saw the other people. Hundreds. Thousands. It seemed half of Kakuma was walking on that road, to see off the forty-six boys leaving that day. For each person leaving, there were hundreds of friends walking with them. You could not tell who was going and who were the friends. It was a great procession, the women all so sad, the colors of their dresses blooming all over the cracked orange road to the airfield.

Cornelius was now taking us with great speed through the crowd. He rang the bell on my handlebars, parting the throng before us.

— Look out! he yelled.-Move aside, move aside!

Those leaving were sorry for those staying and those staying were sorry to be staying. But I could not stop smiling. My headache cleared momentarily during that bike ride and when we passed through the camp, riding on the back of my own bike, people stepped out of the way of the bike and yelled to me.

— Who is that leaving? they said.

— It's me, I said.-Valentine! It's me!

Cornelius rode faster and faster. The thousands of those I knew at Kakuma were now a blur painted in every color. They stepped out of their homes and ran after me, wishing me well in all my names.

— Who is that leaving? It can't be! they said.-Is it you? Is it Achak?

— Yes! I yelled, laughing.-I'm leaving! Achak is leaving! And they waved and laughed.

— Good luck to you! We'll miss you Achak!

— Goodbye to you, Dominic!

— Don't come back to this dirty place, Valentine!

And I looked at their faces as I passed, sitting over the rear tire of my bouncing ten-speed, and hoped that those people would leave the camp, though I knew that few would. The sun was strong when we reached the compound. Cornelius slowed and I leapt off. He had already turned the bike around and was heading home when he remembered to say goodbye. He shook my hand and was off. A boy so young with a bike like that? It was unprecedented at that camp.

I passed through the gate. Inside the compound, the other leaving boys leaving had gathered and were sitting in the yawning shade of the biggest tree in Kakuma. The flight was to depart at two p.m., but we who were leaving on that plane were already gone, already thinking, planning; mentally, we had already left Kakuma, left Kenya, left Africa. We were thinking of the kind of work we would do in the United States. We thought of school there, many of us imagining that we would, within weeks, be studying at American universities. One of the boys had a catalog for a college, and we passed it around, admiring the beautiful campus, the students of many ethnicities walking under the canopies of trees, past the buildings of raw-cut stone.

— I thought Jeremiah Dut was coming, one of the boys said.

— He wasn't approved. They found out he'd been a soldier.

The boys talked about that for some time, quietly, and we compared the lies we had told. Many of the boys had said their parents were dead, when only some of the boys were sure either way. After an hour of sitting in the shade, a plane came over the hills, looking very small and very fragile.

— That's the plane? someone said.

— No, I said.

At that moment, as it circled closer and finally landed, I was very sure that this was the plane that would take me to my death.

We stepped onto the plane, piloted by a Frenchman no larger than a teenage girl. There were forty-six of us on the flight, all of us having walked more or less the route I had walked. I knew none of them well; all of my friends were long gone. As soon as the plane's engines started, one boy vomited on my shoes. The boy ahead of me, smelling the vomit, expelled his breakfast on the seat in front of me. When the plane lurched forward, three more boys vomited, two of them finding the air-sickness bags in time. Beyond the retching, no one made a sound. Those of who could see out the windows were flabbergasted.

— Look at that building! A bridge?

— No, that's a house!

And inside the plane it was so bright. We had to lower the shades to rest our eyes.

The plane landed late on Sunday. No one had been to Kinyatta International Airport before, and all were astounded. The size of it all. It was much larger than the airfield at Kakuma, larger than any settlement we had ever seen; it seemed to have no end.

As evening came, we waited at the airport for a bus to take us into Nairobi, to Goal, a refugee processing center run by the International Organization of Migration. We would wait there until the next day, for our flight to Amsterdam and beyond.