Chris Abani - The Secret History of Las Vegas

Near where he lay, a rock still held the rusting scar of a sign that used to declare THE DIVISION COUNCIL OF THE CAPE — WHITE AREA: BLANKE GEBIED. He’d stubbed his toe on it coming down to the sand. A Boer somewhere is smiling, he thought. Everyone on the beach seemed to be having a good time and he couldn’t understand at first why he was so angry. Then he realized what it was; the air was heavy with it — amnesia.

Restorative, isn’t it, a woman next to him said.

What is, he asked, always precise.

The water, she said, the water and the breeze.

They had water and a breeze on Robben Island, he said. I’m not sure how restorative that was.

She took off her sunglasses and looked at him, intrigued by his non sequitur. He returned her look, taking in details: she was of indeterminate race, probably colored, he thought, and young, maybe thirty, and attractive in an unusual way.

I like the way the breeze makes everything seem good, she said, choosing her words carefully, responding not to his statement but to something unsaid, something she sensed.

Like apartheid, he said, unable to help himself. I imagine all the whites lying here during apartheid, the breeze and the water making it possible for everything to seem good, he added.

Yes, she said. I suppose you are right. There was a smile behind her words.

You seemed amused by it, he said, offended.

Not by it, she said, stressing the syllables. I am amused by your tone.

Why?

You just came back, she said.

Yes, he said, wondering how she could tell. His accent?

Gone for a long time?

Ten years, he said.

She nodded. It is a long time, she said.

Yes, he said. Too long.

She bit down on her sunglasses and sighed. It is not just time, is it? That bothers you, I mean.

No, he said.

Lost people to the darkness?

He was simultaneously drawn to and repulsed by her description of that time. It was darkness — of the spirit, the heart — but why that word? Why was it always used in the negative? It had been whiteness, a lightness that made it hard for the perpetrators to see the limits of their souls, not blackness, that destroyed them all. He wanted to say that but was held back by his knowledge that it was only partially true. Mostly, but not completely, and as his mother used to say, quoting a Zulu proverb, You cannot eat meat you mostly caught, only meat you actually caught.

Yes, he said, instead. My mothers.

She nodded, eyes sad for him. If she noticed the plural and thought it odd, she didn’t say anything. Perhaps she knew that it took more than one mother to raise a child through those times.

Nobody could stop the sickness, she said. Not even Madiba. It had to run its course. There was no blame in the loss of those times.

It seemed to him that there was plenty of blame and he had a share in that. There is always blame, he said. There has to be. What is life without it?

She smiled and said: Good old South African guilt, shared by all races.

I shouldn’t have to feel guilty, he said. I didn’t do this.

If she wondered what he meant by “this,” she said nothing. Instead she said: I know, but we all do. It doesn’t help anything though.

He nodded and looked away, suddenly tearful.

Let the water restore you, the woman said, replacing her glasses and falling back onto her beach towel.

He closed his eyes and listened to the waves, feeling the spray on his face. It did feel good.

Without looking at him, the woman spoke: I know this seems wrong, not like justice, but here we take freedom day by day, moment by moment: What else is there?

She was right. What did he know? He’d been gone ten years. My name is Sunil, he said. It seemed important to state who he was.

She smiled, still not looking at him. Welcome home, Sunil, she said.

Thank you, he said.

What the fuck did you say, Salazar asked him.

Nothing. I was thinking about Cape Town, about the time I went back. I was having a coffee in this café and I saw Robben Island from the window. I said to the old waiter serving me, if the island was visible every day how come they pretended nothing was going on? He smiled and said, It was often quite foggy in those days, sir, the island was rarely visible.

It’s a skill, Salazar said. Like witnesses who can’t remember anything at a crime scene.

Selective blindness made Sunil think of White Alice.

White Alice got her name from the locals in Soweto when she moved there from Cape Town. Her name wasn’t a result of her complexion — she looked somewhere between colored and Indian, no different really from the thousands of biracial South Africans who were caught between apartheid’s denial of mixed unions and its fear of miscegenation. It wasn’t unusual for people to try to pass as white. Those who couldn’t pass settled for delusion: claiming to be white, which is what White Alice had done. She told anyone who would listen that she had been born white but had turned black after an illness. No one believed her, but no one minded either. This was Soweto.

White Alice was Dorothy’s best friend. The two women became inseparable, spending at least an hour or two a day over at each other’s house, drinking sweetened tea and eating biscuits, complaining about life and the difficulties of loss. White Alice talked about her three children in Cape Town, all white, whom she hadn’t seen since her husband took them away from her on account of her sudden and mysterious blackness. When Sunil asked his mother about White Alice’s condition, she told him White Alice was probably just a very light-skinned colored who had passed for white for much of her life, but, as Dorothy said, blackness will always exert its revenge, and Alice had just grown into her true shade. It made sense. Sunil found out in medical school that White Alice might have been telling the truth. He discovered a condition called hyperpigmentation, a result of Addison’s disease, which had been known to darken the skin of white sufferers enough to alter perception of their racial heritage. But by then, White Alice had betrayed him twice, and his discovery of her condition and the pain it must have caused her wasn’t enough to engender his sympathy or his forgiveness. Not even when, on his eighteenth birthday, a strange white man who identified himself as Colonel Bleek visited him with a generous scholarship package for college. What good would it have done to stare such a gift horse in the mouth, so to speak? He’d asked only one question: Why me?

Alice Coetzee spoke highly of you, Bleek said. She recommended you for this.

Oh, was all he said at the time. But Sunil had since lived with the regret of not asking more questions. Like what would the gift cost him? He thought it particularly poignant that while taking German at college to better understand Freud, he found out that the word “gift,” in German, meant poison. In many ways, it seemed that the Germans had a real philosophical handle on life.

He wanted to tell Salazar all this. Instead he said: I’m sure you’re right.

A blue sky but not night. An eerie dusk, an unearthly light. A blue mist alternately obscures and reveals a field of blue grass in the shadow of a darkening sky. Alone, in the middle of the field, a dark tree spreads its black foliage across the frame.

Water walks toward the tree in the middle of the field, but no matter how fast he moves or how much he tries, he can’t reach the tree. It never moves but it is always just out of reach. The blue sky gets bluer and the blue grass waves through the blue mist like blue algae in water. Still, Water can’t reach the tree.

And the blue tree morphs, shifting in agony as its trunk twists to form a bristlecone pine, standing in the middle of an empty muddy field.