The Laughing Monsters (7 page)

I’d spent five days in Freetown and learned nothing—except that I could have landed in Uganda to begin with.

The craft took off over the sea, made a tight, nauseating turn, and came in so low it bent the grasses in the field beneath. We had a close-up view of the highway heading north, and one last snapshot of Freetown: an accident on the road—a farmer talking with both hands, a twitching bloody goat at his feet, a car with all four doors open, a sign stuck inside its rear window—
SPLENDID DRIVING SCHOOL.

TWO

We got our Ugandan visas at the Entebbe airport without any trouble. Hungover from the long, rocking flight, with the two stops in between, at both of which they kept us suffocating in our seats for upward of two hours while the cabin’s temperature rose to match that of the surrounding tropical darkness, I, for one, wasn’t sure I was still alive, felt I might have entered some intermediary realm on the way to oblivion, and the smoothness of our passage among the Entebbe officials and through the terminal and out to the hired cars only mixed me up all the more. I thought we should go back inside and double-check these visa stamps. Michael said, “My people don’t like senseless trouble. It’s not West Africa. Relax.” He got us into a car, where Davidia fell asleep instantly, her head on his shoulder, and we sailed toward our beds. Cool air reached our faces through the driver’s open window—cool. From Lake Victoria, I gathered.

Thanks to Michael’s budgetary strictures we stayed at the Executive Suites, a place with resale-shop paintings hung crookedly, but in all sincerity, on some of its walls, a “bed-and-breakfast,” as Michael called it, a good two kilometers from the lake and from the real hotels. On a tour of its single story, looking for a bed that wasn’t broken, I counted fourteen rooms. We arrived a bit too late for the breakfast.

I spent much of the day wandering muddy lanes in search of a phone and soon got one, another Nokia. I took a late lunch at a table in front of a quick-shop calling itself Belief Enterprises and loaded the device with minutes and sent Michael a text: “Note new phone. Have lunch without me. I’m at a table eating chicken, while chickens wander around at my feet.”

Later Michael woke me from a deep nap by slapping at my door crying, “Nair, dinner is mandatory.”

For three seconds I was awake, felt ready for adventure, very nearly got my feet on the floor—woke again still later with no idea where I was.

I checked my new phone. Another hour gone. Hymns filled the air outside my window, some nearby congregation worshipping in song, and then the unintelligible reverberations of a sermon through loudspeakers. By the time the preaching was finished I’d taken a cold shower and located myself in Entebbe, and it was Sunday.

I found Michael and Davidia at a round white table in the patio restaurant embracing and cooing among the remains of their dinner, spaghetti, probably from a can. I wasn’t hungry. The happy couple drank Nile beer from the bottle and I had an orange soda and Michael told us we’d traveled southeast from Freetown about five thousand kilometers and had landed five kilometers north of the equator and twenty kilometers south of Uganda’s capital, Kampala, and three hundred kilometers east of the Mountains of the Moon and the headwaters of the Nile River; that the elevation was some twelve hundred meters, that we couldn’t expect temperatures to get above 30 Celsius, and that we’d better set our watches ahead to 8:42 p.m., because we’d lost an hour heading east; and then in a clear, sweet tenor voice he sang most of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” to his fiancée, accompanying Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, whose voices issued from the bartender’s boom box.

I went over and got the barman to switch it off and taught him to make a vodka martini and drank one or two of them pretty rapidly.

When I rejoined my comrades with another drink in my hand Michael said, “I was just explaining to Davidia—we’ll head north tomorrow for Newada Mountain. Or in that direction. North. Stanley explored there, looking for the source of the Nile.”

“More will be revealed,” I said. I was aware that lately I was drinking more than ever in my life. I couldn’t relax or feel like myself in this region without banging myself on the head with something.

“My village is there,” he told us, “in sight of Newada Mountain.” Next he said, “I’m being communicated with by a spirit. Something or someone is contacting me. No, I’m serious. The spirits of my ancestors, the spirits of my village.”

“What village? I thought you were some sort of—what the hell are you, originally, Michael? Some sort of displaced Congolese.”

“I am exactly that. A displaced Congolese. And now,” he said, “I’m going to replace myself.” He took hold of Davidia’s arm as if to hand her to me in evidence. “She’s along because I’m going to marry her. I want her to meet my parents.”

“I thought your parents were dead.”

“Not my real parents. My other parents. The whole village is one family. Everyone is my mother and father and brother and sister. If the feeling is right, we’ll be married right then and there.”

Davidia said, “Wait—if the feeling is right?”

“If you’re welcome. And I’m sure you’ll be welcomed. The bride is always welcome, unless she comes from a clan devoted to stealing.”

“And I’ll be your best man,” I said.

“The equivalent.”

“Nobody’s going to cook me and eat me, I hope.”

“People don’t quite understand,” Michael said, and he may have been serious, “to be eaten pays a compliment to your power.”

A couple of whores came in and sat at another table.

The boom box was back in operation. I talked Michael and Davidia into trying the barman’s martinis. They had a couple each, and danced with one another. Between numbers we listened to the song of a frog who sounded like a duck, an insistent duck.

“I knew it from the start,” I said. “Congo. I knew it.”

“Not Congo, no, not necessarily.”

Davidia said, “Isn’t it time you told us where we’re going? Where are your people located?”

“During the reprisals they were dispersed. We were uprooted and scattered. But they’ve reconvened. Relocated.”

“Where, exactly?”

“Where? Quite near to Arua, in the northwest corner of this country.”

“Uganda.”

“This country where we’re having our supper. Uganda.”

“Not Congo,” I said.

“Not Congo.”

“And how do we get there?”

“We’re taking the bus from Kampala.”

“Come on! We’ll take a plane,” I said.

“It has to be the bus. You can easily see why.”

“Why?” Davidia said.

He meant Horst, and Mohammed Kallon. If for some reason Interpol was on us, they could check the flight manifests out of Entebbe. I saw the logic. I disliked the conclusion.

“You’ll get to view the countryside,” he said to Davidia.

“Good! The bus!” she said.

“Arua is the birthplace,” Michael informed us, “of Idi Amin Dada. In the month of March they celebrate his birthday.”

“What? You mean the whole town?”

“Just a handful of people. But nobody stops them.”

The bus … Out of pity for us all, I didn’t laugh. “So we simply climb aboard,” I said, “and go away.”

“Yes. Day after tomorrow. Can you just come with me?”

“Sure. I’m drunk enough.”

“Good. Stay drunk.”

“What about you,” I asked Davidia—“are you drunk enough?”

“I’m in love enough.”

She had a somber glow about her, a smoldering vitality that warmed the air. She made me hungry. I wanted to smell her breath.

And the nightclub girls, one of them wearing a curly blonde wig, like a chocolate-covered Marilyn Monroe … The bartender didn’t talk to them and they ordered nothing, they only watched me, and waited.

Michael’s tongue was tangled in martinis—“I don’t want to be a thumb,” he said, “in the turd in the punchbowl of life.”

“What?”

Michael was drunk. That meant he was in pain. He gripped a pen, he was writing something on a napkin. He tapped me on the shoulder and handed it to me. In the pleasant darkness, I couldn’t make out the letters.

I told him, “I wouldn’t have expected you to marry black.”

Michael shook his head as if to clear it. Davidia stared at me. “What did you say?”

Right. What had I said? “The drinks are clobbering me. It’s the altitude.”

“You should have put food in your stomach,” Michael said.

Davidia said, “Explain your remark.”

“You mean defend it.”

“Fine. Defend it.”

“I’ll explain it,” I said.

“We’re waiting.”

“He’s always had a weakness for the Middle Eastern type, that’s all. The Persian princess sort of female. I apologize for talking out of turn. I do apologize.”

She laughed. She was angry. “Don’t twist yourself in knots.”

It was only for Michael’s sake I was trying to smooth things, but Michael wasn’t even listening. “Back to another subject,” he said. “I never answered your question about the Tenex corporation.”

“Tenex?”

“Do you remember? At the Freetown airfield. We were talking about uranium. Tenex handles U-235 material from dismantled Soviet warheads. Dilutes it to ten percent pure and barters it to the United States.”

“Jesus, Michael—again, the U-235?”

I’ve always thought it a laugh, Michael’s obviousness when he means to be sneaky. No stage villain ever looked more the conspirator, leaning forward into his face’s shadow, his head cocked toward the game, the trick, his right eyebrow going up, his lip curling in a sneer.

A quick, horrid intuition assaulted me.

Davidia placed her hand on my forearm and asked if I was okay. I said, “I’m fine, except I need to be smarter.”

“Smarter isn’t always better though, is it?”

“Good night.”

I went over and made an arrangement with the whore in the blonde wig. She stood up, and hand in hand we journeyed to my bed.

She was drunk, also in some way drugged, and she passed out when we were done—perhaps before we were done, and I simply didn’t notice.

*   *   *

Later I woke as the woman was leaving, and I locked the door behind her and lay in bed watching the Chinese cable station, a piece about fourteen baby pandas in the Shanghai zoo. A sudden rainstorm hit the roof like an avalanche and killed the city’s power and sent all of existence back where it came from. I thought of the woman wandering around out there in the roaring dark.

On my nightstand I found the napkin Michael had written on. By the light of my cell phone I made out the words, but not their meaning:

He’s my panda

from Uganda

he’s my teddy bear

they say things about him

but I don’t care

Idi Amin

I’m your fan!

—I read it several times. The rhyme scheme interested me.

*   *   *

Not long after six in the morning I heard, through the papery walls, the buzz of Michael’s clippers and the shower running next door, and soon I heard someone going out. A few minutes later came a light tapping. I was heating water for instant coffee—the Suites provided a drip brewer but nothing to brew in it, only a jar of Nescafé. The tapping came again, and I realized it must be Davidia.

I got close to the wall and said, “I’m awake.”

Her voice came quite clearly. “Come and see me.”

“Should we meet in the restaurant?”

“Let’s talk in here,” she said. “Come over. Or around.”

“I could easily come right through.” Talking through the wall like this, I felt how close our faces were.

The lights in the hallway flickered on and off. The door stood open. In the random illumination she waited in a yellow silk robe, barefoot. She stepped aside and I entered bearing my cup and my jar of Nescafé.

“Where’s Michael?”

“Taking his morning run.”

The air tasted damp from the shower. Her underwear was lying around. I smelled her perfume. But she said, “It stinks in here. Sorry. Sometimes he sits down and smokes half a dozen cigarettes one after another. Doesn’t say a word. Lost in his head.”

She picked up a cigarette from the nightstand and put the end in her mouth. Looked around. Perhaps for a lighter.

“Do you smoke?”

She threw it in the pile of butts in the ashtray and said, “I’m so stupid.”

“Let’s have some coffee. Do you have bottled water?” She gave me a liter jug and I set about heating water in the brewer.

She sat on the bed. “We had a fight.”

“I’m surprised to hear that. I mean to say—you were pretty quiet about it. I had no idea.”

“He wanted to be quiet. So he could hear you through the wall.”

“Hear me?”

“You and the girl,” she said.

“We were quiet too,” I said.

“We’re a stealthy bunch of idiots,” she said. “And I mean idiots.” She got up but didn’t know where to go. “I’ve been wanting to see you alone.”

“Why?”

She paused. “I don’t have a ready answer.”

“Did you have something you wanted to say?” Seeing I wasn’t helping, I added, “I’m only trying to help you figure it out.”

“I wanted to see what we were like together.”

“Oh.” I devoted myself to the cups and spoons and Nescafé. “What were you fighting about?”

“I thought Kampala was the destination. Now we’re going on to Arua.”

“But last night at dinner you were ready to swing with it.”

“‘Swing with it’? Who are you, Jack Kerouac? You reach way back into the last century for your Americanisms.”

“Nevertheless.”

“Sure, last night I was a real swinger. Alcohol affects me too. I didn’t realize he wasn’t telling us anything.”

“Michael doesn’t draw up plans. He weaves tales. Just let him be mysterious. If there was any way of hurrying him along, believe me, I would have found it by now.”

“This is why I had to talk to you—to compare notes. Can I trust you? No—I can’t, can I?—I mean, trust you to be straight with me. What are we doing? I mean, specifically, you two—what are you up to? There’s something going on, and he won’t tell me what.”

“There’s nothing going on in the sense of—going on. We’re traveling together.”