Dave Eggers - What Is The What

I asked Father Matong why this man was his favorite saint, and why he gave me his name. The answer was not yet clear to me, though I believe Matong expected by that point that it would be. He took his hand off my head.

— I think you will have the power to make people see, he said.-I think you will remember what it was like to be here, you will see the lessons here. And someday you will find your own jailer's daughter, and to her you will bring light.

Most prophecies go unfulfilled. It's just as well. The expectations Father Matong put upon me took many years to fade from the forefront of my mind. But thank God they did. Free of this pressure, my head was, for a time, clearer than it had been in years.

It is just past midnight and Lino is asleep. Julian, no doubt tired of seeing our faces and being unable or unwilling to bring help to us, has retreated to an office behind the desk. Achor Achor is watching a documentary about Richard Nixon on the overhead television. He will watch anything about American politics, or any politics at all. He is certain to hold office in a new southern Sudan, should it really become independent. There are plenty of southern Sudanese in the Khartoum government now, but Achor Achor insists that he will only return to Sudan if the south votes to secede in 2011, which the Comprehensive Peace Agreement allows. Whether the National Islamic Front or Omar al-Bashir, the president of Sudan, actually allows this to occur remains to be seen.

Achor Achor's phone begins to vibrate on the table between us, turning slowly clockwise. As he is looking in his pockets, I lift the phone and hand it to him. Given the hour, I am reasonably sure it is a call from Africa. Achor Achor flips his phone open and his eyes grow round.

'It what? In Juba? No!' Achor Achor stands suddenly and walks away, past Julian. Lino does not stir. I follow Achor Achor and he hands me the phone.

'It's Ajing. He's going nuts. You talk to him.'

Ajing is a friend of ours from Kakuma who now works for the new government of southern Sudan. He lives in Juba and is training to become an engineer.

I take the phone.

'Valentine! It's Ajing! Call CNN and tell them that the war is on again!'

He's out of breath. I beg him to slow down.

'A bomb just went off. Or a mortar. They just bombed us. Huge explosion. Call CNN and tell them to send a camera. The world needs to know. Bashir is attacking us again. The war has returned! I'll call you back-call CNN!'

He hangs up, and Achor Achor and I stare at each other. There had been chaotic sounds in the background of the call, sounds of machinery and movement. Ajing, being in Juba, certainly should know what was happening there. My stomach drops to my feet. If the war were to begin again, I don't know that I could live through it, even safely here in the United States. I doubt any of us could. We live only knowing that rebuilding has been possible in southern Sudan, that our families are safe. But this, a return to blood and madness-I am quite sure I will not be able to bear the burden.

'Should we call CNN?' Achor Achor asks.

'Why us?' I ask.

'We live in Atlanta. You've met Ted Turner.'

This is a good point. I decide I will first call Mary Williams and proceed from there. I am dialing her number when Achor Achor's phone rings again. I answer.

'Valentine, I'm sorry. I was wrong. What a relief!' Ajing is still breathing heavily and seems to have forgotten the rest of his explanation.

'What?' I yell. 'What happened?'

It was a false alarm, he says. There was an explosion within the barracks, but it was an accident from within, a mistake, a nothing.

'Sorry to scare you, friend,' Ajing says. 'How are you, by the way?'

Lino is sleeping with his head tilted back, resting against the wall behind us, and I watch as it slowly begins to slide rightward, until the weight of his head is too much. It falls to his shoulder and he wakes with a start, sees me and seems momentarily surprised to see me. He smiles drunkenly, then goes back to sleep.

It has been an hour since Ajing called, and Julian has been replaced by an older white woman with a great cloud of yellow hair that sweeps up from her forehead and rolls down her back. I catch her eye. As I am about to approach her, in hopes of appealing to her, she gets up and finds something urgent she must do in the next room. We are no longer considered patients here. No one knows what to do with us. We are furniture.

And so I sit with Achor Achor.

With Tabitha, even hours of sitting in a waiting room would be electric. Like many couples in the first months of love, we were content in the most mundane situations. We did very little that might be considered glamorous or even imaginative; neither of us had money to spend on restaurant dinners or shows of any kind. We usually stayed in my apartment and watched movies or even sports on television. One summer night when my Corolla was being fixed by Edgardo, we spent the night waiting for and riding city buses. It was a night of waiting and fluorescent lighting, and yet it was a night of near-rapture. While waiting for a bus home from downtown, where we had took a walk in Olympic Park, she nuzzled my neck and whispered to me how badly she wanted to kiss me, to take off my shirt. Her voice was seductive on the phone, overpowering in person, explosive when hot in my ear. In the bus shelters of Atlanta there has never been such romance.

But when we were apart, she could be flighty and moody. She would call me seven times in one day, and if I was unavailable that day, her messages would become more agitated, suspicious, even cruel. When we finally would mend our relationship, and our phone conversations would again be enjoyable, she would disappear for days. Her absence would go unexplained, and when she reappeared, I was forbidden to dwell on why or where she had gone. I often struggled to keep up with and decipher her signals. 'Are you stalking me?' she would ask one week, while the next, she would wonder if she herself was the stalker. I was so puzzled by her behavior that I asked Allison Newton, my teenage friend, about it. 'Sounds like she has another flame,' she said, and I did not believe her. 'Standard behavior for that situation-she hides, she overcompensates when she returns, she suspects you of the things she's doing herself.' That was the last time I asked Allison for advice on these matters.

Hoping to find food of some kind, I leave the waiting room and walk the salmon-colored halls, passing photographs of the hospital's past administrators and the artwork of young people. There are watercolors and pastels done by students at a local high school, each work for sale. I inspect every one. There are many renderings of pets, four of Tupac Shakur, and two paintings of rickety piers extending out over placid lakes. The line of artwork ends at a long window looking into the waiting lounge. The room is dark, the patterns of the furniture a plaid of burgundy and blue. I see two vending machines, and am tempted to open the door. But there is a family there, asleep on the couch together. A young father is on the end, his head resting against a duffel bag he has placed on the couch's arm. Next to him are three small children, two girls and a boy, all under five, lying one against the other. Small pink backpacks lie at their feet, the remnants of dinner on the end table. It is likely their mother who is sick here. Beyond them, in the parking lot, a single tree is illuminated from below, giving its leafless branches a rose-colored glow. From where I stand, the sleeping family appears to be lying below this tree, protected by its great outstretched boughs.

Though I wish I could enter and buy something to eat, I do not want to wake them. Instead I sit outside their room and read words from Tabitha. I open my wallet and remove the page I keep there, three of Tabitha's emails. I printed them one night in advance of a phone date we had planned. I wanted to talk to her about her moods, her conflicting signals, and planned to cite the emails, all three written in the span of one week. That night I lost my nerve to confront her, but nevertheless I keep the page folded in my wallet, and I read the messages to punish myself and to remember the way Tabitha expressed herself to me when she wrote-far more effusively than when we were together. Rarely did she say 'I love you' to my face, but in her emails, written in the dark hours, she felt she could.