Johnson Denis - The Laughing Monsters

As he expressed these ideas he followed them with his eyes, watching them gallop away to the place where they made sense.

“And we’re going somewhere called Newada Mountain?”

“Near there. I haven’t yet learned the exact location.”

“And yet you’re sure your people have reconvened.”

“I just know they had to come back together. It’s the natural thing to do.”

“It’s essential.”

“Yes. Essential. You say it like an empty word, but the word is full. It’s the truth. It’s about the essence of things. Nair, I can guess where you got your information about me. From Horst, or Mohammed Kallon. Fuck them. Officially I’ve deserted, but in truth I’m returning to the loyalty I ran away from. What is desertion? Desertion is a coin. You turn it over, and it’s loyalty.”

I agreed. “My, my. You’ve been thinking.”

“A soldier must never think. In fact, when you’re forbidden to think, it comes as a relief. Why did my mind start thinking?” His face was swollen with misery. “Nair, you’re the most important friend I’ve ever had.”

* * *

At five the next morning Michael had us traveling in a hired car through the darkness toward Kampala. As we approached the capital the traffic got thicker, and the air itself, with the smoke of breakfast fires and diesel fumes, and we raced under the attempted streetlights, many of them burning, turning the smoke yellow. Somewhere around here we’d get on a bus that would take us to the country’s northeast corner. We hunted up and down unnamed streets until the driver gave up and put us out, and then the three of us stumbled over gutters and potholes among the hordes of street denizens waking up to the long slow overclouded African dawn, begging for assistance — we begging; not them. Michael got us to the booking office of the Gaagaa line, as it was called, a five-by-five-meter space completely covered with people asleep, who didn’t mind being stepped on by others making for the clerk’s cage. The clerk showed us a seating chart, and I wrote my name where I wanted to sit, up front near the driver, and Michael put himself and Davidia across the aisle.

As we boarded the craft I looked up and realized it must have been dawn for half an hour, but the sky was so cloudy no real sunshine made it through. It was good having a cushion to sit on, even a gashed and moldy one, but I couldn’t understand Michael’s cheery attitude, his eagerness amid this fleet of debauched luxury liners exported from Malaysia or Singapore in freighter-size lots of wreckage, throttled and punched into taking a few more gasps, filing onto the roads with their busted television sets and torn-off seat belts, full of Michaels. We stowed our gear in racks overhead and Michael made sure Davidia and I each had a bottle of water and a box of Good Life butter biscuits. From some sort of church in the building behind us, on the second floor, above the public toilets, came a chorus of singing. Davidia arranged her long African skirt and pillowed her head on a folded scarf against the window and fell asleep. The passengers settled in all around, pulling their cell phones to their heads and talking. They smelled of liquor and urine and armpit. Michael now placed himself among them, resuming the mantle of African poverty — the way a civilized African does, relaxing the shoulders and calming the hands and letting down the veil over his heart.

The bus’s woman conductor stood in the aisle and addressed us, giving us her name and town and then bowing her head to pray out loud for one full minute in the hope this journey wouldn’t kill us all. She invited everyone to turn to the next passenger and wish him or her the same thing, and we did, fare ye well, may this journey not be your last, although one of these journeys, surely, will send us — or whatever parts of us can be collected afterward — to the grave.

Our captain was a small man in a crisp white shirt and gray trousers, with a beard and turban. He sat down and started the engine and rattled the gearbox, and in just a few minutes the speedometer, I had a clear view of it, topped 100 kilometers per hour.

Somewhere behind us in Kampala, somewhere in Entebbe, I could have found Wi-Fi, I could have sent an encrypted summary-of-activities to NIIA … Goddamn, such an SOA might have begun, you perfect assholes. You sent me into this mess but told me nothing relevant. Fully half of what I’ve learned, you already knew. You didn’t mention any U-235, did you, though I’m willing to bet you’d heard rumors, and that’s why I’m on this thing in the first place. And I’m not the only one on it, as I’m sure you’re also aware. You said nothing about Interpol’s interest, and as for Michael Adriko’s desertion, I had to hear about that from Mohammed Kallon, a cheap Leonean grasser. Are you after information? I might inform you that Michael Adriko travels incommunicado with his bewildered fiancée, who happens to be the daughter of the camp commander for the US Tenth Special Forces Group, and that yesterday I saw her brassiere lying around and it was white, imprinted with tiny pink flowers, but you probably know all about that too. In any case, if there’s something I know and you don’t, anything at all — you can wait for it at the bottom of Hell …

Three hours along the route, the highway changed from two lanes down to one. The rate of speed stayed at 100. Smaller vehicles drove off the road as ours sailed toward them. The big lorries, the twelve-wheelers coming at us with their manifestos painted on their faces — AK-47 MONSTER — FIRE BASE ONE — GOD IS ABLE — LIVE FOR NOW — gave us half the road’s width, and on our left side our own wheels traveled into the muck. None of these maneuvers required any reduction of speed on the part of anyone.

We slowed down only for the accidents, getting on the margin to steer around a small wreck, later another, and then we met a big one that stopped traffic both ways. I’d been nodding off and opened my eyes on a smashed lorry, a smashed pickup truck, a car upended and torn down the middle and sprouting limbs and dripping with blood. Pedestrians peered into the shattered windows without too much discussion or excitement. It must have just happened — ours was the first vehicle to come along, nothing to block the view. A baboon crouched on the bank of the roadway watching. A second observed from fifty meters on. Neither acknowledged the other. I noticed a bicycle bent in two tossed down on the grass. Michael clicked his tongue. “They just won’t slow down.”

While we waited for some force of civilization to take charge of the catastrophe, people descended from our bus to stretch their legs, eat their snacks, laugh, talk, relieve themselves. The three of us joined them at the roadside. Davidia shaded her eyes with a hand and studied the baboons studying us.

Michael said to Davidia, “He’s talking to you,” pointing to an old man who approached us. “He is a magician.” He looked less than magic, instead looked tiny and silly, sucking on a long purple sugarcane. “He says we are all captives of this world. We were stolen while we were asleep and we were carried here, and now we’re held captive in this world of dreams, where we believe we’re awake.” While Michael translated, the magician laughed and hacked at his stalk of cane with his two or three teeth, snorting. He smiled brightly at someone he recognized across the road and turned away from us as we vanished from his mind. Michael said, “Someone just has to drag that pickup truck to the side, and we’ll pass through.” He went back into the bus. In twenty minutes the driver sounded his horn. People began climbing aboard. Michael told me, “It’s not as bad as West Africa. But it’s still a hard land.”

All were aboard but one. In the field beside us Davidia, herself, was peeing — she gave everyone a big smile as she rose from her squat and dropped her hem and hitched her waistband with a very African, very female shimmy of her hips. I felt I was seeing her for the first time.