2006 - What is the What (65 page)

‘T
here he is!’

I push through the front door to the Century Club and am met by Ben, the club’s maintenance engineer. He is a thin man, with small hands and huge empathetic eyes and a great dome of a forehead.

‘Hello, Ben,’ I say.

‘Whoa, you look wasted, son.’ He rests his clipboard on the counter and comes to me, holds my face in his hands. ‘Where have you been? You look like you haven’t slept in weeks. And this!’ He touches the cut on my forehead. ‘And your lip!’

He holds my face and examines every pore.

‘You get in a fight?’

I sigh, and he assumes this means yes. He drops his hands from my face and adopts a dissatisfied expression.

‘Why are you Sudanese always fighting?’

I touch his shoulder and walk past. I don’t feel like explaining everything that happened. I need to wash myself.

‘Talk to me after you get cleaned up, yeah?’ he calls out.

In the locker room I am alone. I take a clean white towel from the pile by the door and open my locker. Taking off my shoes is a miracle. My feet breathe, I breathe. Immediately I feel better. I throw them into the locker and undress slowly. I am sore everywhere; my body seems to have aged decades overnight.

The water is a shock at any temperature. As it becomes warmer, my limbs and bones grow more limber. I ease my head under the rain and watch the blood slip down my body and across the tile. There is not much, a tidy rose-colored thread that dashes for the drain and is gone.

In the mirror I do not look much different. My bottom lip is cut, and there is a sickle-shaped abrasion from my cheek to my temple. A small red spot now occupies the corner of my left eye, just one small drop in the center of the white.

I put on a T–shirt that is nearly clean, and the sweatpants and sneakers I keep at the club. Once the club’s shop opens, I will buy another tennis shirt and wear it today. Though I have not slept, simply changing my clothes has created a dividing point between that day, those events, and today. I take a deep breath from the room and am overtaken. I collapse on the cushioned chair they keep in the corner. My neck has given out, and my chin hits my chest. For a moment, I am defeated. My eyes are closed, and I see nothing—no colors, nothing. I can’t envision getting up again. My spine seems to have left me. I am an invertebrate, and there is comfort in this. I sit with this idea, following a course that would allow me to remain collapsed on this chair forever. It is attractive for a moment, and then seems less compelling than simply going to work.

I close my locker and soon regain myself. I have to be at the front desk in one minute; my shift begins at five-thirty.

When I get to the desk, I am relieved that Ben is gone. He feels he is more helpful, with his advice and opinions, than he actually is. If he knew what happened to me yesterday, he would have hours of suggestions about what to do, whom to call, where to file complaints and lawsuits. I sit down, alone in the foyer, and turn on the computer. My job is to check in members as they arrive and hand out brochures to prospective members. My shift is only four hours long on Mondays, and the club is not busy at this hour. There are regulars, though, and I know their faces if not always their names.

First is Matt Donnelley, who often walks in the same time I do. He runs on the treadmill from 5:30 to 6:05, does two hundred sit-ups, showers, and leaves. Here he is, a few minutes late, sturdily built, with a thin purple slash of a mouth. When I started at the club, he spent some time one morning talking to me, asking about the history of the Lost Boys and my life in Atlanta. He was well-read and sincerely interested in Sudan; he knew the names Bashir, Turabi, Garang. He was a lawyer, he said, and told me to call him if ever I needed any help or legal advice. But I couldn’t think of a reason to call him, and since then we have exchanged only compulsory greetings.

‘Hey Valentine,’ he says. ‘What’s the good word?’

The first few times he said this, I thought he was actually looking for a certain word, something appropriate for that particular day. ‘Blessed,’ I said the first time he asked. He explained the expression to me, but I still don’t know how to answer.

Today I say hello to him, and he hands me his membership card. I swipe it and his picture appears, twelve inches tall and in garish color, on the computer monitor in front of me.

‘Gotta get me a new picture,’ he says. ‘I look like they dug me up, right?’

I smile and then he is gone, into the lockers. But his picture remains. It is a quirk of the computer system that the members’ pictures linger on the screen until the next member passes through. There is probably a way to remove them from the monitor but I don’t know it.

So I look for a moment at Matt Donnelley.

Matt Donnelley, at first it was a rumor. In the winds of Kakuma, people were talking about America. On a certain day in April of 1999, in the morning people talked about so many different things—soccer, sex, a certain aid worker who had been removed for touching a young Somali boy—and by sunset no one spoke of anything but America. Who would go? How would they decide? How many would go?

It started with one of the Dominics. He had been in the office of the UNHCR when he heard someone talking on the phone. The person had said something akin to ‘That’s very good news. We’re very happy, and the boys will be very happy, I’m sure. Right, the Lost Boys. When you know how many you will take, please let me know.’

In days, those words had been repeated hundreds of times, maybe thousands, among the unaccompanied minors of Kakuma. No one could concentrate on anything, no one could play basketball, school was a disaster. Everywhere groups of boys, twenty or fifty in a cluster, were huddled around whoever had new information. One day the news was that all of the Lost Boys would be taken to America. The next day it was America and Canada that would take us, and then Australia. No one knew much about Australia, but we imagined that the three countries were close together, or perhaps three regions of the same nation.

Early on, Achor Achor appointed himself an authority on the matters of resettlement, though he had no unique expertise.

—They will take only the first in each class, Achor Achor said.—I think I’ll go, but most of you will be left behind.

This view was contradicted by most of the boys, and soon enough by the facts. The United States planned to resettle hundreds, perhaps thousands of the young men of Kakuma. It became the sole occupying thought in my mind. Resettlement was known to happen to refugees from camps like ours, but the conditions were always extreme and rare, reserved for well-known political dissidents, victims of rape, others whose safety was continually threatened. But it seemed that this undertaking would be something very different, a plan whereby most or all of us unaccompanied minors would be taken and brought across the ocean to America. It was the most bizarre idea I had ever heard.

It took days of discussion to conjure an explanation for why the United States would possibly want us all. It is a fact that this country did not have an obligation to resettle four thousand young men living in a camp in Kenya. It would be an act of generosity without any material benefit for them. We were not scientists or engineers, we did not have valuable expertise or education. Nor were we from a country, like Cuba or even China, that would be embarrassed by our defection. We were penniless young men who would do our best to go to college and become better men. Nothing more. These considerations increased the strangeness of it all.

We did not know much about America, but we knew it was peaceful and that there we would be safe. We would each have a home and a telephone. We could finish our educations without worrying about food or any other threat. We conjured an America that was an amalgam of what we had seen in movies: tall buildings, bright colors, so much glass, fantastic car crashes, and guns used only by criminals and police officers. Beaches, oceans, motorboats.

Once the possibility became real in our minds, I expected to be taken at any time. We had been given no timetable, so it seemed possible that one morning I would be in class and the next moment I would be sitting on a plane. Achor Achor and I talked about how at any moment we had to be ready, because there would likely be a bus one day, and it would be going directly to the airport and then to America. We had ironclad agreements that ensured we would not forget each other.

—If you’re in school when the bus comes, I’ll run to tell you, I said.

—And you’ll do the same for me? Achor Achor said.

—Of course. And if I’m at work, you’ll find me?

—I will, I will. I won’t leave without you.

—Good, good. I won’t leave without you, either, I said.

In class, I tried to concentrate but found it impossible. I was constantly watching the roads, looking for the bus. I trusted Achor Achor but feared that we both might miss our ride. It occurred to us both that there might be only one bus, and whoever made it on that bus would reach America—no one else. This made our day-to-day existence difficult, with the two of us on the lookout every hour of every day. For weeks, our only relaxation came at night, when we were sure the bus could not or would not come. The planes could not fly at night, we reasoned, so the bus would not pick us up at night. We also came to the conclusion that the bus would not come on a weekend, so we relaxed on those days, too. This was all very odd, of course, because no one had told us about any bus, let alone its schedule. We had conjured our theories and plans based on no facts whatsoever. But in those days everyone had their own theory, each as plausible as the next, for nothing seemed impossible anymore.

It was very surprising for me, for Achor Achor and the rest of us when, after two weeks, the bus had not come. We wondered if there were obstacles, and what exactly they were. Outside of the unknown and uncontrollable factors, there were those we knew quite well. The Sudanese elders of Kakuma, a good portion of them, did not want to allow us boys to go to the United States.

—You will forget your culture, they said.

—You will get diseases, you will get AIDS, they warned.

—Who will lead Sudan when this war is over? they asked.

Because many of the unaccompanied minors assumed that it was these elders who were holding up the process, a meeting was called between our leadership and theirs. Hundreds attended, even though only a fraction could fit inside the church where the meeting was held. A crowd twelve deep surrounded the little corrugated-steel building, and when Achor Achor and I arrived—we were to be among the youth representatives—there was no chance of finding a space inside. So we listened from the outer ring of those gathered outside. From the church came yelling and arguing, and the standard fears were expressed: of our losing sight of our customs and history; doubts that the emigrations would ever really occur; and what the loss of four thousand young men would mean.

—How can our country recover when we lose the youth? they said.

—You are the hope of the country, you boys. What will become of our country if there is peace? We risked our lives to have you educated in Ethiopia, we brought you here to Kakuma. You speak many languages now, you can read and write and are being trained in other trades, too. You are among the best educated of our people. How can you leave when we’re so close to victory, to peace?

—But there
is
no peace and there
will be
no peace! a young man said.

—You have no right to hold us back, said another.

And so on. The meeting went late into the night, and Achor Achor and I left after standing for eight hours, listening to the rhetoric circling and spinning off in a dozen directions. Nothing was settled that night, but it became clear to the elders that they could not control these four thousand young men. There were too many of us and we were too hungry to move. We were a small army of our own now, we were tall and healthy and hell-bent on leaving the camp with or without their blessing.

The first step in leaving Kakuma was the writing of our autobiographies. The UNHCR and the United States wanted to know where we had come from, what we had endured. We were to write our stories in English, or if we could not write adequately in English, we could have someone write it for us. We were asked to write about the civil war, about losing our families, about our lives in the camps. Why do you want to leave Kakuma? they asked. Are you afraid to return to Sudan, even if there is peace? We knew that those who felt persecuted in Kakuma or Sudan would be given special consideration. Maybe your family in the Sudan had done something to another family and you feared retribution? Perhaps you had deserted the SPLA and feared punishment? It could be many things. Whichever strategy we applied, we knew that our stories had to be well told, that we needed to remember all that we had seen and done; no deprivation was insignificant.

I wrote my story in an examination booklet, its small pages lined in blue. It was the first time I told my story, and it was very difficult to know what was relevant and what was not. My first draft was only one page long, and when I showed it to Achor Achor, he laughed out loud. His was already five pages long and he hadn’t reached Ethiopia yet. What about Gilo? he asked. What about Golkur? What about the time we ran to the planes, thinking they would drop food, and instead they dropped bombs, killing eight boys? What about that?

I had forgotten that, and so many things. How could I put everything down on paper? It seemed impossible. No matter what, the majority of life would be left out of this story, this sliver of a version of the life I’d known. But I tried anyway. I tore up my first version and began again. I worked on it for weeks more, thinking of every last thing I had seen, every path and tree and pair of yellowed eyes, every body I buried.

When I finished, it was nine pages long. When I turned it in, the UN took a passport picture of me to attach to my file. It was the first such picture of me I had ever seen. I had been in group pictures before, my head a blur in a crowd, but this new picture, of only me, staring straight ahead, was a revelation. I stared at this photo for hours and held the folder close for days, debating with myself whether or not this picture, these words, were truly me.