Dave Eggers - What Is The What

She left Kakuma before I did. This was extraordinary, for there were very few girls in the Sudanese resettled in the United States, and almost none who had parents in the camp. Tabitha claims it was luck but I believe her mother was clever throughout the process. When the resettlement rumors became true, her mother was brilliant; she knew the United States was interested in the unaccompanied minors. Anyone with parents at Kakuma would be far less likely to be considered. She allowed her children to lie, and she herself disappeared, went to live in another part of the camp. Tabitha and her three brothers were processed as orphans, and because they were young, younger than most of us, they were chosen, given early passage, and were even kept together once in America.

With their mother still in Kakuma, Tabitha and her brothers settled in a two-bedroom apartment in Burien, a suburb of Seattle, and all attended high school together. Tabitha was happy, was becoming an American very quickly. Her English was American English, not the Kenyan English I learned. When she graduated, she was given a scholarship by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to attend college at the University of Western Washington.

By the time I arrived in the United States, almost two years later, she had forgotten me, and I her. Not entirely, of course, but we knew better than to hold on to such attachments. The Sudanese from Kakuma were being sent all over the globe, and we knew that our fates were not ours to determine. When I settled in Atlanta, I had few thoughts of Tabitha.

One day I was talking on the phone to one of the three hundred Lost Boys who regularly call me, this one living in Seattle. There had been a cease-fire declared in southern Sudan, and he wanted to know my opinion, since he assumed I was very close to the SPLA. I was in the middle of explaining his mistake, that I knew as much as or less than he did, when he said, 'You know who's here?' I told him I did not know who was there. 'Someone you've met, I think,' he said. He handed the phone off and I expected the next voice to be a man's, but it was a woman's voice. 'Hello, who is this? Hello? Is it a mouse on the other line?' she said. It was such a voice! Tabitha had become a woman! Her voice was deeper, seemed full of experience, greatly at ease with the world. That sort of easy confidence in a woman is overpowering to me. But I knew it was her.

'Tabitha?'

'Of course, honey,' she said in English. Her accent was almost perfectly American. She had learned a great deal in two years of high school. We talked aimlessly for a few minutes before I blurted out the primary question on my mind.

'Do you have a boyfriend?'

I had to know.

'Of course I do, sweetie,' she said. 'I haven't seen you in three years.'

Where had she learned these words, 'honey' and 'sweetie'? Intoxicating words. We talked for an hour that day, and hours more that week. I was disappointed that she was seeing someone, but I was unsurprised. Tabitha was an astonishing Sudanese woman, and there are few single Sudanese women in the United States, perhaps two hundred, perhaps less. Of the thousands of Sudanese brought over under the auspices of the Lost Boys airlift, only eighty-nine were women. Many of them have married already, and the resulting scarcity makes things difficult for many men like me. And if we look outside the Sudanese community, what can we offer? With our lack of money, our church-donated clothes, the small apartments we share with two, three other refugees, we're not the most desirable of all men, not yet at least. There are countless examples of love found, of course, whether the women are African-American, white American, European. But by and large, Sudanese men in America are looking to meet Sudanese women, and this means, for many, finding one's way back to Kakuma or even southern Sudan.

But Tabitha, coveted by so many here in America, eventually chose me.

'Michael, please,' I say.

I want to bring him from my room and back to the kitchen, where I can see him and where I know he will not be alone with the photographs.

'I need to talk to you. I think you will be interested in talking to me.'

I am silly to think I might be understood by this boy. But young people are my specialty, in a manner of speaking. At Kakuma, I was a youth leader, overseeing the extracurricular activities for six thousand of the young refugees. I worked for the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, helping to devise games, sports leagues, theatrical works. Since arriving in America, I have made a number of friends, but perhaps none as important to me as Allison, the only child of Anne and Gerald Newton.

The Newtons were the first American family to take an interest in me, even before Phil Mays. I had been in the country only a few weeks when I was asked to speak at an Episcopalian church, and when I did so I met Anne, an African-American woman with teardrop eyes and tiny cold hands. She asked if she could help me. I was not sure how she could, but she said we could discuss it over dinner, and so I came to dinner, and ate with Anne and Gerald and Allison. They were a prosperous family living in a large and comfortable house, and they opened it to me; they promised me access to all they had. Allison was twelve then and I was twenty-three but in many ways we seemed to be peers. We played basketball in their driveway, and rode bicycles as children might, and she told me about the questions she had at school about a boy named Alessandro. Allison had a fondness for boys of Italian descent.

'Should I write him a long letter?' she asked me one day. 'Do boys like letters, or are they intimidated by too much information, too much enthusiasm?'

I told her a note sounded like a very good idea, if the letter was not too long.

'But even then, a note is so permanent. I won't be able to take it back. The risk is just so incredible, don't you think, Valentine?'

Allison was then and remains still the most intelligent young person I have ever known. She is seventeen now but even at twelve she spoke with an eloquence that was sometimes frightening. Her words then and now come from her mouth in perfect sentences, always as if written first-and in a low voice, her lips scarcely moving. I have been curious to see how she interacts with her peers at school, because she is unlike any teenager I've known. She seems to have decided, at age thirteen, that she was an adult, and wished to be treated as such. Even at twelve and thirteen, she wore conservative clothes and glasses, and with her hair pulled taut behind her head, she looked thirty. Still, she was not immune to adolescent fun. It was Allison who taught me how to program people's birthdays into my cell phone, and so I went about asking everyone I knew what their birthday was; it puzzled some but was a great pleasure to me, a pleasure born of some sense of order. Anne eventually suggested that I might in some way still consider myself an adolescent, having been deprived, as she put it, of a childhood. But I am not sure this is why I feel close to Allison, or why I feel sympathetic to this Michael.

Humans are divided between those who can still look through the eyes of youth and those who cannot. Though it causes me frequent pain, I find it very easy to place myself in the shoes of almost any boy, and can conjure my own youth with an ease that is troublesome.

'Michael,' I say again, and am surprised at how tired I sound.

The door to my room closes. I am here and he is there and that is that.

The morning after I passed the airfield, after I had slept for a few hours in the branches of a tree, I awoke and saw them. A large group of boys, not one hundred yards away. I waited for my eyes to adjust to the light and then looked again. There seemed to be about thirty of them, all sitting in a circle. A man stood over them, and was gesturing wildly. I knew the boys were Dinka and they were not running, so I climbed down the tree and walked to the group. It was difficult to believe that there would be such a gathering. When I was close enough I saw that it was Dut Majok, the teacher of older boys from Marial Bai. He seemed unsurprised to see me.