The Imaginary Lives of Mechanical Men (18 page)

“Why don’t you shut up.”

“Oh, that’s a clever one. Can’t nobody get the best of you, can we now?”

“Shut up.”

Brawley drops his head into his hands. For a long time he says nothing, and I let the breeze take me away. I’m drifting out over the river where it’s morning again and the fog rises to meet me, where I can inhale and look gigantically down upon the ruins of conquest. I think of Conrad. Hemingway. I think of Louis Leakey in a dry gorge, brushing away a continent with his brushes. And of her.

From far away I can hear him saying, “They got a shipment. Over there in Kinshasa. Shipment from the States, couple of cases of that Surymin. N’Reara’s brother-in-law or somethin’. Says there’s a doctor’ll get you a course o’ treatment for a thousand dollars American. Might be just a rumor, might be true.”

“Why are you telling me?”

“’Cause. Blokes like you and me. Nothing else out there, Pogue. Nothing. Blue Nile’s already been discovered. Victoria Falls. Killymonjare-o. Zimbabwe. No diamond nuggets just lying there on the riverbank—not here, not anywhere else in Africa. You understand what I’m sayin’, Pogue?”

“I hear you.”

“No more Stanley and Livingstone. No more pyramids. No lost city of gold. This is it. This is all we get. No more safari. This, right here, is it. And I hate this fuckin’ hellhole. I don’t know how I got here in the first place. But I need another river, Pogue. A clean one.”

I remove my socks for no good reason and drape them delicately over a stanchion, trying, I suppose, to delay the instant when I open the hatch and inhale the darkness. So I think of socks. How disposable they are, how unnecessary in most of the world. How frightened I am of cutting my feet when I descend. So now I sit on the side of the pilothouse and lace my shoes tightly, making mechanical effort. Working with unnecessary precision, the way old fishermen mend their nets. And I am a painted man, coated with muck from half-wading, half-crawling across the mudflat, greased on the outside and unrecognizable even to myself. The air is damp, so I move comfortably without cracking or creaking.

The barge rests on its side in about eight feet of water, the stern fully submerged and the numbers 687 cut diagonally by the waterline. It’s singing to me. Creaking metal upon metal above me, a lower moaning from below. Wavelets nudging a log rhythmically against the deck. A trickle, a scratching from the stern. I catch myself thinking too much about the canted world beneath me, the microcosmic darkness, and so reach for the hatch. It swings open with surprising ease.

Vague light extends two or three feet along an iron ladder that’s been twisted into tendrils. I test it before giving it my full weight and then descend, more outward than down. Take my first breath of tainted air. It is a sweet smell, not the horrifying stench of earthly decay nor the
putrefaction of fish. It’s sweet, like molasses, and I decide to do without the handkerchief, pulling myself several more rungs into the hold and trying to judge the distance to the opaque glistening surface below. Then take a second breath and a third. Pause to tell myself that this is not a tomb. And wonder if it is only my imagination that the interior water level seems so far beneath the surface of the river. I try tapping the bulkhead with my knuckles, but it tells me nothing.

While my eyes adjust to the gloom, I try to orient myself to a world thrown askew. The barge’s port side will be the deck when I drop; the keel will be starboard; the man I am after will have been washed to the stern with other loose cargo. With a bit of luck I can be out in five minutes. Why do I hesitate? I hear flycatchers outside, the faraway grunting of crocodiles, even some human speech wafting across the water. Inside there is only a tiny trickle of bubbles coming from the submerged engine compartment. So why do I hesitate?

I ease myself over the handrail, hold my breath, and drop. It’s only a foot and a half before I hit metal, but the shock is multiplied by a thunderous doom and the subtle slant of the floor. The sharp pain comes first, a burning that tells me one ankle has been sliced by something I can’t see. I go sprawling, sliding into oily water, taking in great gulps as I struggle for air and stability. I’m afraid I’ll take hold of the sharp thing, but my arms are working automatically, my hands grasping for anything, legs pumping. I’m like a man trying to climb a slippery bank, not able to swim, not able to stand, only floundering ridiculously while his energy gives out. Finally I fall back shivering with the realization that I’ve swallowed a quantity of what I’m lying in. Water that is no longer water.

I think to myself I’m going to die for a pouch full of diamonds, and who says that God does not have a sense of humor? With that calm realization, I find that I can stand, the water being no more than ten inches deep. It moves. I’ve given life to dozens of floating objects: a carpenter’s saw with its black blade just under the surface, a wooden crate, two ebony masks, bits of plastic, a red and white gasoline drum,
a child’s toy boat perfectly upright and undamaged. And much nearer, almost at my feet, a gray, wrinkled hand. It’s a peculiar, dizzying view that I take in, like looking down from a cloud. Things are crooked, canted, static, fluid. There’s no horror now; I see a world with its own beauty—a soft coating of silt on the inner hull, a chemical sheen rising and falling with the ripples. I wade farther back into the darkness with no fear, looking for the man she described.

There’s no need to search. The barge is as suddenly familiar as my own house. They are clustered near the stern hatch and frozen in grotesque postures. Two of them clutched in each other’s arms like lovers, curious, twisted expressions on their faces. The next one lying with his face in the water, head bobbing quaintly because of the wavelets I’ve made. The others are tumbled together in an indistinguishable mass, their faces also gray and bloated. Nine of them in all. I wade toward them, sorting by size and shape, recalling the clues she’d given me: the armband, the shell necklace, the shoulder tattoo. In the end, though, he is the one who finds me. Something soft that caresses my calf, inviting me to stay a moment longer.

I do not jerk away but rather stoop to his level, contemplating his rest, raising the arm enough to see that scavengers have begun their work without human protest or hollow emotion. He’s simply sleeping, and I work my way back along the body until I come to the ankle. There, just as she has said, is a leather pouch.

Now I am outside, again contemplating my socks, cupping a leather pouch, its irregular shape the only evidence I need of my visit. I am sitting next to my crusted socks, dry, stiff shapes next to the pilothouse, dark liquid draining away from me in rivulets. A metallic taste in my mouth. The distance and detachment of the descent are leaving me, and now my hands are shaking as I draw open the bag. I hold it close to my stomach so they will not spill over the deck, and pour. Finally I understand.

There is one shape only, and I rotate it in my hand, tiny droplets of water sparkling in the late morning sun. Beautiful, exquisite in workmanship,
the variations in wood perfectly matching its true colors in the wild. It is a small fetish, one of the handsomely carved figurines from the central highlands, fine grained and alive, though strangely silent. An okapi.

We never saw her again. Brawley searched throughout the Old Quarter for days, then in the market and in the hotels along the Boulevard de 30 Juin. In the Cité. The shantytown. Everywhere there’d been glimpses and rumors. A beggar told me that he had seen her giving out coins, a beautiful, fair-skinned woman with green eyes from the north. And some of the children swore they’d got food from her while she’d been wrapped in rags and smiles, a fat grandmother with a basket of sweets. A prostitute. The wife of an emir. A spirit-bird. A cool breeze for an old man closing his eyes for the last time. They were certain, all of them.

After several weeks Brawley followed her—upriver—on one of the pusher tugs that promised to go beyond Kisangani. I waved as they went churning toward midchannel, and he waved from the stern. For a long time I watched him through the binoculars, strutting and squawking among the crew, drinking from a brown bottle and bending at the waist, choking, gagging, laughing, triumphantly strangled and hugely satisfied with himself. Like one of the parrots outside of Auguste Verloc’s café.

In the Picking Room

1

Okay, here’s my baseball fantasy.

I’m somewhere in that dry wasteland between first and second when I look up, and what do I see? On the far horizon I see a silhouette that might be the third base coach on a trampoline, already four feet in the air, knees almost touching his chin, and cranking one arm like a wild man. Which tells me I can make it even though baserunning is not my skill. Because in real life? I am too slow, too heavy, just too damn big for anything. But on this particular night, with the stadium lights like Hollywood, it’s going to be different. So I round second, pushing off from that bag like it was the end of the earth. Chugging for third. And about halfway there, I fling myself into the atmosphere, flying like a bulldozer dropped out of a cargo plane because I’m a hell of a big guy, and I get maybe one gulp of free air before I’m plowing into that powdery earth so hard that it cuts a trench under the glove. I mean throwing dirt like a meteorite striking the desert. And I slide, man, I slide until that left toe touches canvas at precisely zero miles an hour. Like a ballerina, Jack. And there he is. Blue is looking down on me like Sweet Jesus, dripping sweat and fanning air with both arms, telling the world I’m as safe as a baby in its crib, yes sir. While the crowd goes wild.

And I know that’s not much. But I don’t have much. And it’s the best I’ve got on most days because we live in a crumbling world and if I blink just once I’m back in the picking room. Picking cloth. I’ll be holding one hand like this, getting ready to whack the dust off my uniform, and then there he’ll be, Pardue or maybe Murtaugh, swinging around the end of the aisle, saying, “… the hell are you doing now, you moron?” And then I guess the crowd goes pretty quiet.

Because in the real world they don’t use binners and pickers anymore. The textile mills are failing, and the jobs are leaving for Pakistan, and there’s nothing on the horizon but scaffolding and empty bins. And maybe somebody yelling out over the floor, “Hey, y’all! Riggs is in Las Vegas. Doing his act.”

That’s what’ll make them laugh.

2

On the day they fired Kutschenko I was a binner, slow as an ox but steady enough to know I would last as long as Murtaugh. If the layoffs didn’t get me first. It was a simple job. You pushed a dolly of cloth into the picking room, found an aisle with vacant bins, and stacked the rolls—aisle 13, row 6, bin D—the boom echoing every time a roll landed. It was like heaving bodies into the sea. Lift and toss, lift and toss until the paper-shrouded rolls had disappeared into the deep. Then going back for the next load. Eight to ten times an hour. Because the aisles of the picking room were too narrow for a forklift.

So here is the point. One roll of hard-finished denim, papered and spooled, weighs seventy-five pounds. Ten rolls weigh a minute and a half. A hundred rolls weigh a lifetime. So that after six weeks your shoulders and arms were like steel. After a year you were Murtaugh. It’s why we earned what we did. They gave us money, and we gave them that hideous strength until we were somebody else. Nobody
lasted. Everybody was on the road to somewhere else. A binner is a machine that looks like a man.

So it was like six months before I mentioned it. At lunch, you know, laying back on a stack of boxes, Willie T. and Pardue rolling up their hot dog wrappers and shooting free throws, Murtaugh smoking one after another, and Kutschenko saying, “… the hell you doing in that notebook all the time, huh? You look like an ape readin’ a match-book.”

“I’m working on material,” I said.

“He’s working on material,” Pardue said.

“What kinna material?”

“What kinna material you working on, kid?”

“Ideas.”

“He’s working on idea material.”

“Will you shut the fuck up. What kinna ideas you working on? Like science ideas or like a novel or something?”

“I don’t know, I’m just thinking about giving it a shot, you know, doing a little stand-up. Sometime.”

“You mean like comedy?”

“Yeah, like comedy.” Which is what got the big laugh.

“Hey, you got a great start already, kid. All people talk about is how your head is bigger than a mule’s. Lissen, you gotta have college for that. I mean, you can be funny looking, but that ain’t funny, you know what I’m saying? You want to
write
funny, then you got to have the college.”

“I don’t know….”

“Like whatta you got right now, right there on the page?”

“It’s just an idea. It’s not really a routine.”

“We’ll tell you if it’s a routine or not.”

“Yeah, we’ll tell you. Is it a routine, or what?”

“It’s just a note,” I said. “It’s not a routine.”

“He’s got nothing,” said Pardue. “He’s working on a science book. I knew it. He’s a scientist.”

“You don’t know,” said Willie T. “It could be a routine or something. Let’s hear it, boy. Play your note.”

“Okay. Okay, here goes. Like, I was just thinking … did you ever notice how on television they advertise drugs that you don’t even know what they’re for?”

“Heartburn,” suggested Pardue. “You got your heartburn, and you got your cholesterol.”

“Cut it out, give him a chance.”

“No, I’m talking about when some announcer says like, ‘Ask you doctor about Thorexynol,’ and then, bam, your Thorexynol theme music will start up and your Thorexynol theme couple will go walking on the beach and there you are wondering what just got cured. They do that all the time now.”

“That’s not funny, kid.”

“I
know
it’s not funny, you dumbass. It’s got to be part of a routine, which I already told you I don’t have. What you do is work it into a doctor bit, see, like you go to the doctor’s office with a broken arm or, you know, impotence or poison ivy or something and ask the doc for some of that Thorexynol because that’s what the ad told you to do. Right? When it’s really for constipation.”