John Goldbach - It Is an Honest Ghost

Boris was taking the photos and I was writing an article. We’d pitched the idea to a magazine in Canada, that is, an article about East Africa’s arts scene, especially putting emphasis on its thriving literary scene, using this festival as impetus, a festival put on by a number of organizations, including a Kenyan literary journal, the University of Nairobi and a few foundations, et cetera. Anyway, there would be good writers and various artists kicking around so it made sense to write a piece. And the magazine loved the idea. Boris was already a de facto member of Nairobi’s arts scene, visiting the country usually once a year, though every time he came back he became more and more involved with local artists. This festival was a great reason to visit and the magazine was covering most of our expenses.

My head in hand, leaning my right elbow on the tabletop, I closed one eye so as to make out who was entering the hotel. My friend Mark, a poet from Chicago, would be attending, so I kept my one eye peeled for him. He’d emailed me saying he was getting in around midnight, but I didn’t see him yet and my second big beer was almost done.

I slowly finished the beer and then decided it was time to call it a night. Besides, the restaurant had stopped serving food a while ago and the bar crowd was thinning out. But then I decided to drink one more beer for the road. It was a poor decision, but I was strangely too jacked up for bed, even though I was beyond tired and full of alcohol.

At some point I felt a little sick to my stomach and left without finishing the third Pilsner.

When I went out to the lobby I was staggering a little. I’d lost my bearings. A young porter walked by and I asked him where was room 229, looking at the number engraved in my brass key. He said kindly, ‘Just this way, sir. Follow me.’

We walked past the pool and I stayed away from its edge — it was lit up underwater and looked electric blue with bright light. It was a bit of a blur.

The porter got me to my door and I pulled out a waddedup five-dollar U.S. bill I had in my jeans pocket and he refused to take it, laughing, smiling, so I said thank you and he kindly unlocked my door for me. Then, again I asked him to take the money and he did.

I closed the door and locked it and fell down on the bed. I lay there, supine, staring up at the ceiling, looking at its bumpy texture. Breathing heavily, I saw the tv high up in the left-hand corner of the room, tucked right up against the ceiling, suspended by chains. The remote was on the bedside table, so I turned it on.

Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid was playing and I felt relieved. The movie had just begun.

I propped myself up against the wall with a pillow, as there was no headboard.

The story’s about a woman — whose sin was motherhood . She has a baby boy and the father, an artist, isn’t in the picture. She can’t afford to care for the child, so she leaves him in the backseat of a fancy car, with a note: Please love and care for this orphan child.

Shortly after she leaves the child, however, some car thieves happen upon the luxury automobile and decide to steal it but then discover the infant in the backseat. They decide to leave the baby with some trash in a nearby alleyway, where later the Tramp finds him.

Unsuccessfully, the Tramp tries to rid himself of the baby, but when he reads the note — Please love and care for this orphan child — he decides to accept his fate as the infant’s guardian and he names him John, caring for him from babyhood to boyhood, but eventually the adorable little boy is taken from the Tramp by the ruthless authorities and both the boy and the Tramp wail for one another as they’re forcibly separated.

I choked up a little. I was exhausted and full of alcohol and vaccinations and more emotional than usual. When the Tramp is reunited with the boy, and they embrace tightly, crying, cheek to cheek, in portrait, I, too, felt like crying but didn’t. Instead, I started to fade off to the soothing rhythms of the black-and-white silent-era film.

The morning came fast and I hadn’t drawn the curtains and my room was full of sunlight and lightly playing gospel music. I’d left the tv on and some sort of religious programming was playing. I checked my watch and it was only six a.m.

I turned off the tv and went to wash up. In the mirror, my face looked sallower than the day before, my face looked more unshaven, and below my eyes looked blacker. I betrayed an undeniable ghostliness. I turned on the shower and got in the small tiled stall.

The hot water felt good and the washroom filled with steam. I washed my body hard and my face, too, trying to stimulate blood flow, though I washed my livid left arm gently, examining it and deciding that it was more yellow than black so it must be healing — slowly, but healing, I thought. No cause for concern.

When I got out of the shower I opened the washroom window, cranking open some glass flaps, so as to let out some steam, and I wiped down the mirror before brushing my teeth and shaving. I had no bottled water but I figured it was safe to brush my teeth with tap water. Even after shaving and washing up, I still looked sick and tired.

I returned to the room proper in only a towel and unpacked some books and put them on the windowsill. I took one, P. G. Wodehouse’s The Inimitable Jeeves , a gift from a friend, and lay back down on the bed to read some familiar stories of the great butler Jeeves and his charge, Bertie Wooster, the ultimate gentleman of leisure.

When Boris saw me reading the Wodehouse stories on one of the flights, after he, Tanya and I had all watched Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby , a Will Ferrell movie, on our respective screens on the backs of the headrests in front of us, he’d said: ‘Oh, Wodehouse is great!’ Then, adding, ‘We’re never more nostalgic than we are for a time that never existed.’

After a half-hour of reading, the pleasant and funny stories lulled me back to sleep for about an hour, and when I woke again I figured the restaurant would now be open and I could get some bottled water and a cup of tea. I was tremendously thirsty, with all the travel and the drinks. So I rose and dressed and put on sunglasses and went to go check out the restaurant.

The hotel was sort of an open concept — as soon I exited my room, I was outside, and then I turned to my left and walked by a couple of rooms and then I was at the outdoor pool, which in daylight looked inviting, more so than in my memory, and I turned right at the pool, walked down a few steps, and then was in the lobby, which I bypassed for the restaurant.

When I entered the restaurant, a young man in a white shirt and black slacks immediately asked me if I was there for breakfast. I said yes. Breakfast was included with the room. He asked me if I wanted to sit inside or outside and I said outside. He walked me to a terrace out front of the restaurant, a fenced-off area filled with tables and chairs, plants and flowers, to the side of the hotel’s entrance. I was seated in a wicker-bottom chair and thanked him and looked at the menu.

There were three choices of complimentary breakfast: one, a pancake, a sausage, with sliced mango and pineapple; two, yogurt and granola, with berries, and sliced mango and pineapple; or, three, eggs, sausage, potatoes, with sliced mango and pineapple. All breakfasts came with coffee or tea, toast, with jam packets and butter packets, and a small glass of orange juice.

I was impressed — it all looked pretty good.

A waiter approached, another young man dressed similarly to the maître d’, and brightly said, ‘ Hujambo, bwana? How are you today, sir?’

‘ Sijambo ,’ I said, remembering the phrase from the back section of the Kenya Lonely Planet . ‘It’s a very beautiful morning,’ I added.