Mark Dunn - American Decameron

“Count me out,” said Soumeya emphatically.

Ericka thought over the invitation. “Maybe for a minute. It’s still early. When do you think the lions usually show up?”

“Around one thirty,” jested David. “The embers are still warm. Come sit with me.” David reached into the small tent to help Ericka out. She was still wearing her safari clothes. She and Soumeya had been sitting up, playing cards.

The night air was filled with the sounds of nocturnal animals broadcasting their moods, summoning their mates, commenting upon their pursuit by other more predatory creatures. Is he pursuing me? asked Ericka of herself, as David led her to the dying campfire.

The two sat for a moment without speaking. David reached out and took Ericka’s hand. She sighed. She felt like some lovestruck middle-schooler. In Africa everything you usually think about yourself gets pushed to the margins. Those more primitive, more sublimated parts of you rise impudently to the surface. Sometimes the elemental manifests itself in child-reversion: the need for food, for human comfort and companionship, the need to have one’s many fears put to rest. Most children learn in time how to combat their fears, just as a visitor to Africa learns to make similar adjustments to better appreciate the wonders and riches of the continent.

“Can you believe that we’re here?” she finally asked her fireside companion. “And not on some fancy linen-tablecloth safari. We’ve become a part of this place, haven’t we?”

“I guess you can say that.” David poured Ericka a cup of Amarula. It was better layered above crème de Menthe in a drink that the British expats called a “Springbok.” But Amarula straight up would have to suffice this night.

“David, I don’t know anything about you.” Ericka was looking up into the cloudless sky at Southern Hemisphere constellations that were unfamiliar to her.

David took a swig from the bottle, scanning the black firmament overhead. “What would you like to know?”

“What do you do with computers? My brother-in-law works for Citibank on Y2K.”

David chuckled. “It’s interesting you should say that. I work for a group that’s doing something similar.”

“What is it?”

“The techno think tank that employs me — we’re addressing the Y10K problem.”

There was a roar. It didn’t sound leonine.

“Hippopotamus, I think,” he said. “One of the guides told me that nighttime is when they generally make the most racket.”

“What’s the ‘Y10K problem’?”

“It’s all the potential software bugs and glitches that might emerge when the calendar year moves to five digits. Everything’s set up for four digits, you know.”

“You’re being serious? That’s eight thousand years away.”

“There isn’t a lot of urgency to my job. Sometimes I sleep in.”

“I have to ask you something, David. I don’t know any way around it. We’ve got two more nights of safari and then those last two nights in Vic Falls, and then the trip’s over. Am I going to see you — I mean, ever again?”

David set the Amarula bottle down and drew his legs up to his chest. “That was really to the point.”

“When you’re a schoolteacher, you learn not to obfuscate.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“It means that I have to be very clear. I’m sorry, but don’t you think we’re starting to feel something for each other?”

“Yeah. Sure. Although I haven’t even gotten into your pants yet.”

“That was crass.”

“Was there some other way you wanted me to say it?”

“Just forget it. I’m sorry I brought it up. It just seemed like it was time to talk about where we go from here. Do you want to see me again?”

“Of course I do. But what I want these days doesn’t seem to matter very much. I’m in a kinda strange place in my life right now. Just kinda, you know, drifting .”

Ericka touched David’s shoulder.

“We’re all drifting. Things are so unsettled these days. In four months we’ll be entering a new millennium. I can’t even get my brain around that.”

“Call me in the year 10,000 and I’ll give you something to try to get your brain around.”

“I’ll bet we’re more alike than you think. We’re both looking for something. Maybe we’re looking for the same thing.”

“Could be,” said David. He reached over and pulled Ericka’s face toward his, and then gave her a long kiss. “I really want to get into your — I really want to make love to you, Ericka. I wish there was someplace we could go.”

Ericka thought for a moment. “We could go over to the showers. Do you have your flashlight? I could go into my tent and get mine, but Soumeya will try to talk me out of going.”

David got up. “I’ll get mine .”

“We’ll have to do it standing up. Those floors are icky.”

“Standing up is fine with me.”

“Of course, you know we’re not supposed to leave the campsite. We’re not even supposed to leave our tents once the fire dies down.”

“Would you rather we not? I’m okay with that.”

“I want you.”

“I want you too.”

The darkness around them was thick, almost palpable. Although David shone the beam of his flashlight on the ground in front of them, Ericka still took special care in where she put her feet. One of the female crewmembers had met up with a large snake of unknown hazard when she went to take her shower earlier that afternoon.

The two reached the dark cinderblock building that housed the sinks and showers. Within seconds David was pushing Ericka up against the wall and kissing her with unusual force. Ericka welcomed the sloppy animalism in his advance. She writhed and clawed in response. She groaned with matched volume. They ripped their clothes off and tossed them into one of the nearby sinks. David was inside her half a minute later.

“Whatever our differences,” said Ericka in that next bliss-filled post-coital moment, “I love you too much to let you go.”

Earlier, in the midst of fucking, David had said, “I love you, baby. Oh God, I love you, baby.” But now, spent and sleepy, he said, “Uh huh. Oh yeah.”

It wasn’t a lion that visited Ericka and David in the showers that tenebrous African night. It was a pack of hungry and prowling spotted hyenas.

Ericka was quite familiar with spotted hyenas. One of her students had delivered a paper on them when she had made the assignment in May (a rather self-serving assignment, to be sure) that each of her advanced biology students should take an African mammal (preferably one of the southern African mammals their teacher was likely to see on her late summer safari) and write a paper on it.

The gregarious spotted hyenas have long been regarded as maneaters. Some paleontologists have conjectured that predatory attacks by cave hyenas in Siberia delayed the migration of humans across the Bering Strait into what is now Alaska, perhaps for hundreds of years. Some of these facts flashed through Ericka’s head as David began shouting at the hyenas gathering in the doorway, chatter-laughing and bearing their canines.

Ericka picked up the flashlight set upon the side of the sink and began waving it. David grabbed up his pants and started flapping them at the animals, who continued to laugh — as was their hyenine wont — at the negligible defensive actions of the naked humans.

“Where is a lion when you need him?” David tossed to Ericka.

Ericka registered his display of manly pluck, even as terror continued to grip her. The two worked through loud shouts and the air-flaying of their disrobed clothing to push the three or four hyenas (in the darkness there seemed to be even more) out of the shower house. There was no door to shut, so the danger would not be averted altogether until the doglike creatures gave up on human prey for the night and trotted off to find their supper elsewhere.