Johnson Denis - The Laughing Monsters

At this point I noticed that my head ached and that I felt, all around, unhappy. Here’s a confession: I’d puked while unconscious, and I’d lain all night facedown in my own sick. If I’d passed out while lying on my back I’d have drowned in it, and my labors would be done, but no such luck. Meanwhile Michael was saying:

“Life is short. But the time is long. I look back, I see so much, my childhood…”

While I lay in a woozy stew of crapulence — that is an actual word — Michael told me what he’d been doing since his escape from the Congolese Army: traveling without money, stumbling by the roadside, crawling through the fields like the Frankenstein beast. He spent two days camped near the US garrison, but couldn’t form a plan. I couldn’t help you, Michael said, I couldn’t help Davidia, I couldn’t help myself. There was nothing I could do. So I just came here — where again, there’s nothing I can do. My people are sick, insane, they’re burning their own huts, they don’t have any food. Not one of them can remember me. They know the names of my mother and father, my mother’s brother, my father’s two cousins who owned a business selling cloth and rope — but they don’t remember the children, not me, or my brother who died, or my two sisters who also died in the disturbances back then, when I left the clan. And poof, our existence is erased. And this woman, La Dolce. I’d like to kill her …

Michael went on to say:

“I believe I was nine years old the first time I killed someone. I’m not sure how old I was — I don’t know how old I am now, really.”

“Tell me it was a woman, or a child.”

“What’s the point of saying that?”

“I don’t know. I think you’re trying to be poignant, and I’m trying to undercut you.”

“There were two of them, and I don’t know who they were. It was during the reprisals. Our clan did nicely, you know, during the time of Idi Amin Dada, because he was Kakwa too. But when he ran away, the machetes came out against the Kakwa, and this creek ran with our blood. I returned here after the village was taken over … This is where it happened. I heard two people talking in a hut, only their voices, not the words, not even the kind of voice — man or woman or child — and I threw in a stick of dynamite. The hut was right over there. You walked through my first murders with your feet … Now I return once again, and everything is dead. Have I brought down a curse on my own clan? What have I done? Have I done something?”

I’d never known Michael to be afraid, not really. Certainly not terrified like this.

I lay there on my back, hanging on to my mind, or the equilibrium, let’s say, of my essence — then no longer hanging on, realizing there’s no point.

Michael said:

“And I was never with Tina. Even if I was with her before you came along, I would have told you.”

“I believe you. I was crazy. And there’s something I want to say as well. Are you listening?”

“I hear you.”

I sat up and looked straight at him and tried hard to make him believe this — because it’s true—“I’d never grass a friend. I might try and steal his girl and leave him to drown in shit while — well, while running off with his girl. But I’m not a snitch. Never.”

Michael tossed his machete into the pool and it sank.

“Holy shit, man. We might need that.”

“As God is my witness, and as long as I live, I shall never take another life. I shall never kill even one more person. I will die instead, if I have to.”

He’d stubbed out his cigarette half-smoked and rested it on the rock beside him. Now he straightened it out, took a matchbox from his pants pocket, and spent a couple of minutes lighting it and smoking it down to the filter and looking satisfied with himself. He tossed the butt at the water and stood up, offering me a hand. “Now it’s time to go. Where do we meet the missionaries?”

“At the road down the hill — the east side, where you come in.”

“When do we meet them?”

“I don’t even know if they’re actually coming. But the lady said sometime today.”

“Let’s go and wait for them. We need to get to Bunia.”

“Michael,” I said, “you can make it here, but I can’t. I’m no African. I’m like Davidia that way.”

“So where do you think you’re going?”

“I suppose it’s prison.”

“Do you think I’d let them put you in prison?”

“Is there any other way?”

“Haven’t I told you from the beginning? There’s always a plan for extraction.” He made a sound like a pig at a trough — sucking back tears. His pride in himself, at this moment, had brought on a seizure of sentiment. “After everything, it’s still the two of us.”

* * *

Davidia: As we walked out of the village, the hippopotamus-woman La Dolce roused her clan and harried them after us partway down the hill. She cried, “Laugh at them, laugh at them!” and then “Riez! Riez!”

She said: “Don’t touch them, don’t talk to them, do you see the Devil in their eyes? Riez! Riez!”

I didn’t think them capable of it, but one or two coughed up shreds of laughter and spit them at us. Soon the whole mob was yammering like dogs. Michael bowed his back. His head hung low. “Riez! Riez!” Like hens, like terrified geese. I followed behind him as he was driven from his family.

[NOV 1 6PM]

Dear Tina, Dear Davidia—

Again I’m writing to you by candlelight, but only because the power’s blinked out in our corner of Freetown.

We’re staying, now, at the National Pride Suites, which have nothing to be proud of. Out the window, West Africa: a lane like a sewer. Cockeyed shanties. Inexplicable laughter.

Downstairs there’s a bar, intermittently air-conditioned, fragrant with liquor and lime and the cologne of prostitutes, but I’m not a patron — I’m on an indefinite drinks moratorium, thanks to a bargain I’ve made with Michael. And without the drinks, the women seem stripped of their appeal.

In any case, I’m not one hundred percent. Nursing a bit of a belly — that Goddamn Newada creek. Apparently certain microbes thrive on heavy metals.

However, the small percent of me that feels all right feels absolutely wonderful.

I don’t need booze, or sex. I’ve spent the last two hours napping with my head on a sack full of cash. One hundred thousand US dollars. Minus recent expenses. Not a substantial cushion, just one thousand pieces of paper zipped up in a plastic carrier pouch, but oh how comfortable, and how sweet my dreams.

* * *

Tina, I hope you got out of Amsterdam. Hope you got away. Hope you didn’t sit there waiting for the poisonous fallout from my ruin.

Hah. “Fallout.”

But Tina, I’m serious: someday I’ll put it all down in words and send it to you, and I’ll enclose this last note on top. I don’t know what a thorough confession might do for you, or what it might do to ease this combination of dread and anger working at my insides … For whatever it’s worth, someday — the story from beginning to end.

And the end will be spectacular: Michael and I riding to Bunia in an Isuzu Trooper all heavenly blue and purified white packed with Seventh-day Adventists, and our intrepid machine rockets us through storms, crashes, earthquakes, I don’t know what, really — I slept the entire two hundred kilometers, except for a couple of times when the man on my left, a Congolese youth named Max, woke me to complain I was drooling on his shoulder. The trip ended at the mission’s church in Bunia, where those of us with religion went inside, and the two lost souls, Michael and I, stood under the awning of a cycle shop, trying to carve a plan out of the rain.

You have to remember, Tina, that the end wasn’t yet, that all I had was Michael Adriko, meaning all I had was bitterness and doubt — and 68 hours to make the next 4800 kilometers.