YOU MUST NOT THINK OF me as a reliable witness, as someone immune to bias and distortion. Every story, of course, should by rights be introduced by such a disclaimer, for we are none of us capable of a wholly disinterested clarity; but though it is my intention to relate the truth, I am persuaded by the tumult of my recent past to consider myself a less reliable witness than most.
For several months prior to receiving Rawley's phone call, I had been in a state of decline, spending my grant money on drink and drugs and women, a bender that left me nearly penniless and in shaky mental health. It seems that this downward spiral was precipitated by no particular event, but rather constituted a spiritual erosion, perhaps one expressing an internalized reflection of war, famine, plague, all the Biblical afflictions deviling the continent -- it would not be the first time, if true, that the rich miseries of Africa have so infected an expatriate. Then, too, while many American and overseas blacks speak happily of a visit to the ancestral home, a view with which I do not completely disagree, for me it was an experience fraught with odd, delicate pressures and a constant feeling of mild dislocation -- these things as well, I believe, took a toll on my stability. Whatever the root cause, I neglected my work, traveling with less and less frequency into the bush, and sequestered myself in my Abidjan apartment, a sweaty little rat's nest of cement block and stucco with mustard-colored walls and vinyl-upholstered furniture that would have been appropriate to the waiting room of a forward-thinking American dentist circa 1955.
The morning of the call, I was sitting hung over, watching my latest live-in girlfriend, Patience, make toast. Patience was barely two weeks removed from her home village; city ways were still new and bright to her, and though she claimed to have previously observed the operation of a toaster, she'd never had any hands-on experience with the appliance. Stacks of buttered toast, varying in color from black to barely browned, evidence of her experiments with the process, covered half the kitchen table. The sight of this lovely seventeen-year-old girl (the age she claimed), naked except for a pair of red panties, staring intently at the toaster, laughing when the bread popped forth, breasts jiggling as she laboriously buttered each slice, glancing up every so often to flash me a delighted smile...it was the sort of thing that once might have stimulated me to insights concerning cultural syncretism and innocence, or to a more personal appreciation of the moment and my witness of it. Now, however, this sort of insight only made me feel weary, despairing of life, and I had grown too alienated to keep a collection of intimate mental Polaroids -- and so I was glad when the ring of the telephone dragged me away into the living room.
"My God, man!" Rawley said when I answered. "You sound awful." His tone became sly and knowing. "What can you have been doing with yourself?"
"Business as usual," I said, more brusquely than I'd intended. "What's on your mind?"
A pause, a burst of static along the long distance wire, after which Rawley's voice seemed tinier, flatter, less human. "Actually, Michael, I've some work to toss your way...if you're interested. But if this is a bad time ...."
I apologized for being short with him, told him I'd had a rough couple of nights.
"Not to worry," he said, and laughed. "My fault for calling so early. I should have remembered you're a bit of a cunt before you've had your coffee."
I asked what kind of work he was talking about, and there was another pause. A radio was switched on in the adjoining apartment; a soukous tune blasted forth, lilting guitars and Sam Mangwana chiding an unfaithful lover. From the street came the spicy smell of roasting meat; I was tempted to look out the window and see if a vendor had set up shop below, but the brightness hurt my eyes, and I closed the blinds instead.
"I've been put in charge of a rather curious case," Rawley said. "It's quite troubling, really. We've had some murders up in Bandundu Province that have been attributed to sorcery. Crocodile men, to be specific."
"That's hardly unusual."
"No, no, of course it isn't. Not a year goes by we don't have similar reports. Sorcerers changing into various animals and doing murder. Although this year there've been considerably more. Dozens of them. Hang on a second, will you?"
I heard him speaking to someone in his office, and I pictured him as I had seen him three months before -- blond Aryan youth grown into a beefy, smug, thirtyish ex-swimmer given to hearty backslapping and beery excess. Or, as a remittance man of our mutual acquaintance had described him, "...halfway through a transformation from beautiful boy to bloated alcoholic."
"Michael?" Patience stood in the kitchen doorway; the room behind her was wreathed in smoke.
"The bread won't come out the slots." She said this sadly, her head tilted down, gazing up at me through her lashes -- an attitude that suggested both penitence and sexual promise.
"I'll be there in a minute," I told her. "Just pull the plug out of the wall."
"Sorry about that, Michael." Rawley was back, his manner more energized, as if he'd received encouraging news. "This particular case I mentioned. We have a witness who's identified three men and two women he claims turned into monsters. Half man, half croc. He says he saw them kill and eat several people."
I started to speak, but he cut me off.
"I know, I know. That's not unusual, either. But this fellow's testimony was compelling. Described the beasties in great detail. Human from the waist up, croc from the hips down. Skin in tatters, as if they were undergoing a change. That sort of thing. At any rate, arrests have been made. Four of them deny everything. As you might expect. Under ordinary circumstances, I'd let them go. Despite the superstition rampant in these parts, prosecuting a case based entirely on an accusation of sorcery would be a ludicrous exercise. But in this instance, one of the accused has confessed."
I had been stretching the phone cord to its full extension, peering around the comer of the doorway to see how Patience was doing with the toaster cord. Now Rawley had won my complete attention.
"He confessed to killing and eating people?"
"Not only that. He confessed to killing them while in the form of half man, half crocodile."
I took a moment to consider this, then said, "The police must have tortured him."
"I don't believe so. I've spoken with him in the jail at Mogado, and he's not in the least intimidated. On the contrary, I have the sense he's laughing at us. He seems amused that anyone would doubt him."
"Then he must be insane."
"The thought did occur. Naturally I had him examined by a psychiatrist. Clean bill of health. Of course, I'm not altogether sure of either my psychiatrist's competency or his motives. His credentials are not of the highest quality, and there's a great deal of political pressure being exerted to have the case brought to trial. The big boys in Kinshasa don't enjoy the notion that someone out in the provinces might be practicing more effective juju than they themselves."
"It all sounds intriguing," I said. "But I don't understand how I can help."
"I want someone I trust to have a look at this fellow. A practiced observer. Someone with expertise in the field."
"I'm scarcely an expert in human behavior. Certainly not by any academic standard."
"True enough," said Rawley. "But you do know a thing or two about crocodiles. Don't you?"
This startled me. "I suppose...though I haven't kept up with the literature. Snakes are my thing. But what possible use can you have for an expert on crocodiles?"
Again Rawley fell silent. I had another peek in at Patience. She was sitting by the table, staring glumly out the window, the black toaster plug protruding from her clasped hands -- like a child holding a dead flower. She did not turn, but her eyes cut toward me and held my gaze --the effect was disconcerting, like the way a zombie might glance at you. Or a lizard.
"I realize this may sound mad," Rawley said, "but Buma... That's the man's name. Gilbert Buma. He's an impressive sort. Impressive in a way I can't put into words. He has the most extraordinary effect on people. I ...." He made a frustrated noise. "Christ, Michael! I need you to come and have a look at him. I can get you a nice consulting fee. We'll fly you into Kinshasa, pay all expenses. Believe it or not, there's a decent hotel in Mogado. A relic of empire. You'll be very comfortable, and I'll stand for the drinks. It shouldn't take more than a week." I heard the click of a cigarette lighter, the sound of Rawley exhaling. "C'mon, man. Say you'll do it. It makes an excellent excuse for a visit if nothing else. I've missed you, you old bastard."
"All right. I'll come. But I'm still not sure what exactly it is you want from me."
"I'm not entirely clear on the subject myself," said Rawley. "But for the sake of the conversation, let's just say I'd like you to give me your considered opinion as to whether or not Buma might be telling the truth."
PATIENCE WEPT when I left. We had only been together a few days, and our relationship had acquired no more than a gloss of emotional depth; yet judging by her display of tearful affection, you might have thought we were newlyweds torn apart in the midst of a honeymoon. I gave her enough money to last a couple of weeks and instructed her in the use of the apartment. Frankly, I didn't believe I would see her again; I assumed that I would return home to find the place trashed, and myself in need of a new toaster. The tears, I suspected, were the product of her fear at being left alone in the city, a situation she would address the minute I was out the door. But despite this cynical view, I was moved and tried to reassure her that everything would be fine. I told her I would call from Mogado and gave her Rawley's office number. Nothing served to placate her. As I rattled about in the cab on the way to the airport, peering out at dusty slums through the mosaic of decals and fetishes that almost obscured the rear window, I felt a twinge of remorse at leaving her so bereft, and I wondered if by conditioning myself to expect the worst of people, I had also blinded myself to their potentials. Perhaps, I told myself, Patience was something other than the typical village girl driven from home by poverty, on her way to death by knife or beating or STD; perhaps she was offering more than I had taken the trouble to notice. But the sentimentality of this idea was off-putting. I pushed it aside and turned my thoughts to what lay ahead, to Mogado and Gilbert Buma, and to Rawley.
My friendship with James Rawley had been launched under the banner of political correctness. Though not so obnoxiously pervasive as it had become in the States, the politically correct mentality was nonetheless in vogue during my year at Oxford, and I believe Rawley perceived that friendship with a black American would effect a moral credential that would immunize him against the stereotyping reserved for white Africans, thereby assisting his student career -- and it was for him a career in the purest sense of the word, a carefully crafted accretion of connections and influence. I doubt he was aware of this choice; it was more a byproduct of natural craftiness than of any conscious scheme. But I also doubt he would have denied the fact had I brought it to his attention -- he had an intuitive self-knowledge and blunt honesty that made it difficult for him to harbor illusions regarding his motives. For my part, it was not so different. Rawley's acceptance helped to ease my path at Oxford, and though the artificial character of the relationship was always a shadow between us, we never discussed the subject; we had sufficient affinities and commonalties of interest to allow us to finesse this potential problem.
For a long while, I considered the friendship abnormal, and I suppose it was to a degree, since from its onset it had not been informed by real affection; but as I grew older, I came to recognize that friends, like lovers, have their honeymoons, and that affection, like passion, lasts only for a season unless sustained by concerns of mutual advantage. Rawley and I had manufactured a friendship based on those concerns without the attendant warmth; yet over the years, our orbits continued to intersect, and a genuine warmth evolved between us. It was as if because we had never bought into the illusion of friendship, because we had initiated our bond on the basest of levels, an enduring and dynamic friendship became possible. Whenever I stopped to analyze the relationship, I couldn't be certain that I even liked Rawley; yet time and experience had inextricably woven together the threads of our lives, and our dependency on one another for counsel, money, a shoulder to cry on, and so forth had grown so deep-seated, we might have been an old married couple.
Though I had never been to Mogado, I knew what to expect. All African provincial capitals are much the same, both in essence and particulars, and Mogado's downtown area of dusty, potholed streets, a scattering of leafless, skeletal trees, and shabby buildings with cracked stucco facades, was not in any wise distinctive. Just enough people about to give the impression of squatters in a ghost town: a barefoot woman in a faded dress peering from a dark doorway; three skinny kids squatting in the dirt, tormenting a captive mouse snake; a toothless old man sitting at a window, gazing blankly into the past. Everyone else hiding from the heat. In the central square, dominated by a plaster fountain decorated with faces from which all feature had eroded, a pariah dog with a pelt the color of blanched almonds was poking about for bugs in a patch of sere grass. When my car passed close to him, he skittered away sideways, dragging behind him a shadow as thin as a wire animal.
The street sign on the corner nearest the jail was dented and weathered, almost unreadable. Peering closely, I saw it was inscribed with a date; I could just make out the month, November, and the slightest suggestion of a numeral -- doubtless commemorating some brilliant revolutionary passage whose spirit had suffered a comparable erosion of clarity. The jail itself occupied the basement and ground floor of the provincial offices, which were housed in a four-story edifice of pastel green stucco. A potbellied Congolese policeman with blue-black skin, a presidential air of self-importance, and a wen under his left eye sat in the anteroom behind a flyspecked desk, reading a French-language newspaper whose headline proclaimed a ferry disaster on the Kilombo River, the same muddy watercourse that flowed past Mogado. The crack-webbed wall at his back was figured by a large rectangle paler by several degrees than the remainder of its dingy surface; I took this to be the space where for three decades a portrait of the late unlamented dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, had hung. A ceiling fan stirred the air, but the faint breeze it created served merely to make me more aware of the humidity and the acrid stench of cleaning agents mixed in with a mustier scent, one I imagined to be that of blood and urine and sweat, the smell of old sufferings.
Rawley, the policeman told me, had been detained; he would join me that evening at the hotel. However, I could see the prisoner now if I wished.
I had presumed that Rawley would want to speak to me before my initial meeting with Buma; but now I suspected that his absence was by design, that he preferred to have my first impressions of the man be untainted by any further briefing on the case. I was tired from the flight and the drive, but I decided there was no point in putting things off.
A second policeman accompanied me down the stairs to a freshly whitewashed interrogation room at the rear of the building, furnished with a rough wooden table and two folding chairs. As I waited for Buma, I picked at the whitewash with my fingernails and succeeded in scraping away a sizable flake, revealing a dark undercoat dappled with rust-colored spots that were almost certainly dried blood. It would be nice, I thought, if Mobutu were doing time someplace a touch more tropical than Mogado, capering madly about in a red-hot iron cell, with snakes' heads protruding from his eyes and rats playing tug-of-war with bloody strips of his tongue.
The door creaked back, and the policeman, wearing an agitated expression, ushered an elderly white-haired man into the room and locked the door behind him. The man was dressed in a tattered shirt and trousers of flour sacking, his arms and legs in manacles. His head was down, and he did not look at me. He stepped behind the chair opposite, repositioned it so that it was sideways to the table, and sat, affording me a view of his left profile. Only then did he dart his eyes toward me, engaging my stare for a few beats before fixing his gaze on the wall. He smiled, showing a sliver of discolored teeth -- or perhaps it was not a true smile, for the expression held, as if this were the natural relaxed position of his jaws. His skin was coffee-colored, so crisscrossed with wrinkles that I initially assumed him to be in his eighties; but his musculature gave the lie to this impression. His forearms and biceps were those of someone who had thrived on a lifetime of physical labor, and his features were firmly fleshed and strong. It seemed that age had merely laid a patina upon him, and that if you could erase the wrinkles, you would be face to face with a man of hale middle age.
"Mister Buma," I said. "My name is Michael Mosely. I'd like to ask you some questions."
He was slow to respond, but at length, as if it had taken several seconds for my words to penetrate his cerebral cortex, several more for the brain to interpret them, he said in a baritone of such resonance he might have been speaking through a wooden tube: "They tell me you are another doctor."
"Yes," I said. "But not the same sort of doctor who interviewed you previously. My discipline is herpetology. The study of snakes. To be precise, I'm an ethologist specializing in the behavior of pythons."
This appeared to interest him. He turned the full force of his liverish eyes on me -- when I say "force," I am being literal, for I could have sworn I felt a sudden cold pressure on the skin of my face. That and his thin, false smile combined to instill in me a sense of unease.
"Pythons," he said, and gave ah amused grunt. "You will learn nothing about pythons from me."
"As you probably know," I said, "that's not the subject of my inquiry."
He lifted his large head a few degrees and appeared to be studying something in the corner of the ceiling. The most interesting thing about him to this juncture, I thought, was his stillness. After each movement, he seemed to freeze, not a muscle or a nerve twitching, and I wondered if this might not be the symptom of some pathology.
"Where were you born?" I asked.
"Along the river. A few days from here."
"What's the name of your village?"
"It no longer exists," he said. "It has no name."
Mobutu, I thought. Under Mobutu, many things in the Congo had ceased to exist.
"I'm going to assume," I said, "you committed the murders you've been accused of. If that's the case, why' did you confess?"
He lowered his gaze to the wall. "Because I wished to announce myself. Because I am not afraid of what may follow."
From his answer, I thought I understood him. Either he had participated in the murders, or else they had been done by someone else, and he had seen them as an opportunity. He was a witch man. A member of a crocodile cult. He wanted an acknowledgment of his power; once that acknowledgment had been made, and the cult's authority affirmed, he believed that no Congolese court would have the courage to convict him -- they would be intimidated by the threat posed by his sorcery. The entire process of accusation and confession had in effect been a public relations stunt designed to elevate the cult from a bush league operation, so to speak, to a place of honor in the complicated hierarchy of witches and sorcerers that had always flourished in the country, no matter what political regime occupied the halls of power. While Mobutu was in office, this sort of stratagem would have been met with swift violence -- no one was permitted to practice greater juju than the president-for-life; but now, with lesser monsters in control, it stood a chance of success. What I didn't understand, however, was whether he was a con man or if he actually believed his own bullshit.
"Would you mind telling me how you acquired the ability to transform yourself?" I asked.
He seemed not to have heard me, continuing to stare at the wall.
I found this intriguing -- it was my experience that most witch men would leap at an opportunity to present their magical credentials, to boast of their connections with various gods and elementals, to go on and on about the trials they had endured in their spiritual quests.
"The killings," I said. "Were they somehow related to the ritual that permitted you to transform yourself? Or were they merely...coincidental ?"
He let out a heavy sigh, and his mouth remained open, as if it had been a last breath; but then he blinked, and his eyes cut toward me again.
"These questions," he said, "they hide another question. The thing you truly wish to know is whether I am a liar or a fool. If I were a fool, I would have no answer. If I were a liar, I would not tell you the truth."
"You underestimate yourself..." I began, but he gave a dismissive wave.
"I have no need to ask whether you are a fool," he said. "You claim to be a doctor who studies snakes, yet your questions are the same as that other fool's. You think to trick me into revealing myself. Yet you are such a great fool, you can't see that I have already done so."
"All men are fools one way or another," I said. "But I'm willing to accept your judgment. Why don't you enlighten me?"
To this point, his movements had been measured and slow, something I attributed to the weight of the manacles. Now he whirled about and brought both fists down upon the center of the table, splintering it. This movement was so quick and fluid, I did not even have time to flinch, but was frozen by the violence; and as he leaned toward me, pinning me with his angry yellow gaze, I realized that the manacles would not be much of an impediment should he choose to attack.
The policeman's voice came from beyond the locked door, asking if everything was all right. Before I could respond, Buma told him to leave us alone. Immediately thereafter, I heard footsteps in retreat along the corridor.
"I wonder what's gotten into him?" I said to Buma, tamping down the coals of an incipient panic. "Whatever you're trying to sell, it seems you've found at least one idiot who's swallowed it."
He said nothing, remaining motionless; but I sensed a trivial relaxation in his tense posture.
I shifted to a more comfortable position, trying to present an image of cool indifference. "You were going to say...?"
Buma dropped his eyes to the iron cuffs encircling his wrists; after a bit he let out another sigh and shifted back about to face the wall. "It would be best for you to return to Abidjan," he said.
I was for the moment confounded that he knew where I lived, but then realized there was an obvious explanation.
"I'm not impressed," I said. "It's likely that Mister Rawley told you about me. If not Rawley, then one of your guards."
This time, I thought, his peculiar thin smile was in actuality a smile. "If you travel upriver five days," he said, "you'll come to a place marked by a ferry landing that was burned by the soldiers. Walk into the jungle straight back from the landing until you see a giant fig tree. It's not far. There you will find what you have been seeking."
"And what exactly is that?"
"A python," Buma said. "A white one."
I was almost certain I had told Rawley that I was searching for an albino rock python -- a healthy specimen would be worth six figures, and if it could be bred, I could make even more from the first litter. The money would free me from writing more grant proposals, from tedious research. From Africa. Yet I couldn't imagine Rawley being so chummy with Buma that he would let slip this piece of information -- if I had told him, I had done so only in passing; it would not have been in character for me to dwell on such a quixotic enterprise. Still, this was the only possible explanation.
"I suppose the snake's just hanging around the fig tree, waiting for me to catch it."
Buma shot me an icy glance. "If you go there, you will find it."
"Golly, thanks. I'll get right on it," I said. "And here I thought you told me I'd learn nothing about pythons from you."
"Then it seems you must assume I am a liar," said Buma. "Not a fool."
I had to laugh at this. Rawley had been right -- the man was clever; but I remained convinced that everything about him, from his reptilian mannerisms to his cryptic dialogue, was part of an act. Better conceived than others I'd seen, but an act nonetheless.
"Do you truly want answers to your questions?" Buma asked.
"Of course I do."
He turned to me again, slowly this time, and gave me an assessing look; he nodded. "It will be difficult, but you may be able to understand," he said. "Very well." He reached out and clasped my right wrist with his left hand.
In reflex, I tried to pull away, but my hand might have been stuck in an iron wall -- his strength was irresistible. He closed his eyes, squeezed my wrist until my fist opened; then he leaned forward and spat into my palm. With his free hand, he closed my fingers around the spittle, so that it smeared into the flesh.
"There," he said, releasing me. "My brothers and sisters will not harm you now."
"I thought you were going to answer my questions."
"Words can never convey the truth." he told me. "Truth must be revealed. And so it will be revealed to you."
He settled back in his chair, let out a hissing sigh.
"That's it? That's your answer? The truth must be revealed?"
Buma's eyelids were half-closed; his chest rose and fell, but very, very slowly, as if he were asleep. "Tomorrow," he said in dusty, barely audible whisper. "We will talk more tomorrow."
THE TOWN WAS tucked into a notch between low green hills, beyond which lay deep jungle, and it stretched for nearly a quarter mile along the banks of the Kilombo, thinning out to the west into a district of thatched huts and shanty bars. Farther to the west, separated from this district by mud flats, lay the hotel Rawley had mentioned, the Hotel du Rive Vert, a venerable structure dating from the 1900s, when European traders had plied the river, exchanging cheap modernities for skins and ivory. The rive was no longer reft, the grounds having deteriorated into patches of parched grass crossed by muddy tracks, sentried here and there by dying, sparsely leaved eucalyptus. Standing isolate amid this desolation, the building itself, a rambling white stucco colonial fantasy of second-story balconies and French doors and a red tile roof, had the too-luminous incongruity of a hallucination, a notion assisted by the presence next to the front entrance of a lightning-struck acacia with a hollow just below its crotch that resembled an aghast mouth -- it looked to be pointing at the hotel with a forked twig hand and venting a silent scream.
There was no sign of Rawley at the hotel, no message. The hotel bar, gloriously dim and cool and rife with mahogany gleam, was a temptation, but I didn't want to be drunk when Rawley arrived. I set out walking along the riverbank, thinking I might stop in at one of the shanty bars for a beer or two -- no more than two. The beer, I thought, would provide a base for the heavier alcohol consumption that would likely ensue once Rawley and I finished our business and got down to reminiscence.
This was toward the end of the dry season, and while the better part of the days were sunny -- as it was that day when I left the hotel -- the late afternoon rains were lasting longer and longer, often well into night. The land was so thirsty that by mid-morning of the following day, the streets were parched again, and wind blew veils of dust up from the flats; but there was a new heaviness in the air, and in the mucky soil at the edge of the water, you could see shallow troughs where crocodiles had lain motionless during the downpour, steeped -- or so I imagined --in a kind of bleak satisfaction, as if they believed that the mud and the river and the wet darkness were merging into a single medium, one perfect for their uses. Curiously enough, I did not see a single crocodile during the first portion of my walk. The flats reeked of spoilage and were strewn about with cattle bones and skulls, empty bottles, paper litter and fruit rinds; occasionally I passed a dead tree or a mounded puzzle of sun-whitened sticks and twigs that once had been a shrub of some sort. The river was a couple of hundred feet wide at this juncture, roiled and muddy, and the far side of the bank was occupied by secondary growth jungle, leached to a pale green by the summer drought -- from it came the sound of a trillion exquisitely unimportant lives blended together into a seething hum, just audible above the idling wash of the water. Flies buzzed about my head, and at my feet I saw the delicate tracks of crabs. But no crocodiles, no significant animal life of any kind.
On rounding a bend, however, I was brought up short by the sight of more crocodiles than I could have reasonably expected. Less than ten yards from where I stood, a wide, flat spur of tawny rock extended out from the Mogado side of the bank some twenty-five feet over the river, and upon it, slithering atop one another, stacked almost to the height of a man, were dozens of crocs, perhaps more than a hundred. Hissing, snapping, exposing their ghastly discolored teeth, groping with their clawed feet for purchase. A great humping mass of gray-green scales and turreted eyes and dead white mouths. I backed off a few paces, daunted by the closeness of so many predators, and by the strangeness of the scene. Not that it was entirely strange. During droughts, it sometimes happens that crocodiles will crowd together like this, pressing against each other in order to snare whatever moisture might have collected on the hides of their fellows; but in this instance, the drought had passed, and there was abundant water available. As I watched, one of the crocs dropped off the pile and went with a heavy splash into the murky water. Instead of making its way back up onto the rock, which I would have expected, it allowed itself to be carried off downstream, barely submerged, letting the current take it sideways, rolling it over partway to expose its pale, slimed belly, as if the thing were dead or moribund. Soon other crocs followed suit. This behavior was strange, indeed. I could think of no reason for it, except perhaps that toxic chemicals were responsible.
Before long, several dozen crocodiles had gone into the water -- the narrows just beyond the bend was thronged with bodies, but once past that point, the current picked up speed and scattered them out across the breadth of the river, carrying them along more smoothly, so it appeared they were all arrowing toward the same destination, like an amphibious hunting pack. The scene was disturbing, unsettling, and not simply because I had no good explanation for it. I could not, you see, accept that it had a rational explanation; there was about the crocs' actions a quality of purposefulness, of surreal functionality, that caused me to think I was witnessing something to which rationality as I knew it did not apply. Though I had been trained as an academic, I was not the sort to be troubled by slight shifts in the alignment of reality -- my personal life had been fraught with lapses into substance abuse and depression and various other altered states. But this particular shift seemed to embody a powerful, unfathomable value that outstripped my experience, and I was shaken by it.
I had lost my taste for native beer, but not my thirst, and I hurried back to the hotel, where I immersed myself in a large whiskey, and in the illusion of Europe granted by the beveled mirror behind the bar, with its deep reflection of dark wood, candlelit tables, and plush red carpeting. Two whiskeys more, and the potential threat posed by afflicted crocodiles receded into a blurry inconsequentiality.
The barman, a slender, dignified East Indian named Dillip, with pomaded gray hair, and a crimson sash accenting his white shirt and trousers, was watching television at the end of the counter: a news program from Kinshasa. Bodies were being hauled from a river. I asked him if this footage related to the ferry disaster reported in the morning headlines.
"No, sah. Somebody just kill these boys and throw them in the Kilombo." He shook his head ruefully. "Mobutu."
Mobutu, I reminded him, was dead.
"Even dead, he make trouble for this place. Many people along the river were not his friend. They try to assassinate him." He started to unload cutlery from a dishwasher. "You see, sah, at the end Mobutu was crazy from his cancer and the drugs. He does many crazy things. One thing, he tell his sorcerer to lay a curse upon the river. And now every town, every village along the Kilombo is poisoned by it."
"Poisoned?"
"Yes, sah. They say the sorcerer take a scrap of Mobutu's spirit and send into the river. Now nothing good can happen here." He made a gesture of regret. "Nothing good can happen anywhere. You see, the Kilombo it flows into the ocean. And since the ocean goes everywhere, Mobutu's curse have poisoned all the waters."
Despite the woeful character of this information, he imparted it with the air of a man glad to be helpful to a stranger, as if warning of a dangerous stretch of road ahead. Thus do most Africans, be they black or white or any shade in between, approach the subject of sorcery -- it is a simple conversational resource, no more extraordinary than talk of politics and the weather; and as is the case with those topics, though the news concerning sorcerous activity is generally bad, it's simply a fact of life, and nothing to get upset about.
I was about to ask Dillip more about Mobutu's relationship with the region, but Rawley chose that moment to put in an appearance. The next few minutes were occupied by a backslapping embrace and an exchange of crude pleasantries. And following that, I filled him in on my interview with Buma.
"So you think he's a talented thespian." Rawley had a sip of beer. "I must admit that was my impression at first. And perhaps first impressions are the most accurate in this instance. The longer I spoke with him, the more persuaded I was that something else was going on. Magic. Sorcery. That's why I wanted your opinion. Being born here makes me somewhat susceptible to these old frauds."
He didn't seem convinced of this, however.
"I want to talk to him again, if only to watch him work," I said.
"Yes, yes...absolutely. Talk to him as often as you like." Rawley gazed at his reflection in the mirror. On the face of things, he looked the same as always, but now I noticed that his trousers and polo shirt were rumpled, and his hair had been hastily combed -- a far cry from his normal pathological neatness. Dark puffy half moons under his eyes gave evidence of sleeplessness, and his ruddy tan was undercut by the sort of pallor that comes with illness or overwork.
"Fuck me," he said wearily, as if he'd heard my thoughts. "This business is sending me round my twist." He signaled Dillip, pointed to my empty glass, and held up two fingers. "I'm getting it from both ends. Kinshasa wants me to prosecute, but the locals are terrified that if I do, Buma's minions will slaughter them in their beds."
"Buma has minions?"
"He's never mentioned any. But then, as you yourself observed, he conveys a certain menace." The whiskeys arrived, and Rawley knocked back half of his; he lit a cigarette, leaned back and regarded me fondly. "I'm glad you're here, Michael. I really needed someone to get pissed with."
"Then it's not my vast wisdom you were interested in."
He laughed. "Strictly a ruse."
An accomplished drinker, Rawley knew how to pace himself for a long evening. Though I had a head start, I slowed my own pace and fell into his rhythm of sips and swallows, and before long we had achieved a relatively equal level of inebriation. Other patrons entered the bar. A distinguished, white-haired African gentleman in a dark blue suit sat alone at a corner table, sipping a brightly colored drink decorated with a tiny paper parasol, and stared into the middle distance. His face betrayed no expression, but I imagined I could hear the memory tunes playing in his head. A young French couple -- fieldworkers with a relief agency -- littered the opposite end of the bar with government forms and talked earnestly. Two bearded thirtyish men in jeans and T-shirts took a table by the door; they downed beer after beer in rapid succession, their mule-like laughter at odds with the atmosphere of colonial decorum. Germans, probably.
When not busy serving his customers, Dillip continued to watch the TV, which now offered a discussion amongst three government officials concerning the troubles along the Kilombo, and since Rawley and I had for the moment exhausted our store of reminiscences, I told him what Dillip had said about Mobutu and his curse.
"Yeah, I've heard that story," Rawley said. "It's true enough the region has been going through hell since he died. But it's impossible to tell which came first, the trouble or the story." With the tip of his forefinger, he smeared a puddle of moisture around on the polished surface of the bar. "The old boy was mad, there's no doubt of it. And not just at the end. When I was a boy I met him with my father. Tiny fellow with outsized spectacles. Wearing a leopard-skin hat, and carrying a fetish stick. Young as I was, I could feel his insanity. Like some kind of radiation." He clicked his tongue against his teeth, a disappointed sound. "I used to think I understood this place, but lately...I don't know. Perhaps things have just gotten so bloody awful, I tend to complicate them. Make them into something they're not. Oh, well. I won't have to deal with it much longer."
"Oh," I said. "Why's that?"
He hesitated. "I was planning to tell you this tomorrow; I thought it might make an effective cure for a hangover." A pale smile. "I'm getting married next month. Beautiful girl named Helen Crowley. Extremely intelligent. Attached to the British embassy. She can't abide Africa, however, so we're going to live in London."
"Damn! When did all this happen?"
"I met her last year, but things didn't heat up until a couple of months ago."
I was startled. More than startled, actually. Rawley was the whitest African of my acquaintance, but he was nonetheless African through and through, and I couldn't imagine him being happy anywhere else. I asked if he was looking forward to living in England and he said, "You must be joking! A Third World country with a Second World climate. I can't fucking wait!" He fiddled with his cocktail napkin. "But she's...she wants .... Hell, you know how it goes."
I told him that I did, indeed, know how it went.
Rawley began to extol Helen Crowley's many virtues, and it struck me that he was attempting to excuse himself for running out on me, as if he believed that by marrying and exiling himself to Europe, he was effectively ending our relationship. Which was probably the case. My plans for the future, albeit sketchy, did not include a sojourn in England. I felt a childish resentment toward him. Though we only saw each other half a dozen times a year, he was the one real friend I had, and I had come to rely on his accessibility.
He tried to play to me, asking about my love life, suggesting that it was time for me to find someone as he had. My responses were terse and unaccommodating. With part of my mind, I recognized what an asshole I was being, but I was too drunk to censor myself. Not long afterward, I made my own excuses, told him I would meet him in the hotel bar the next evening after I talked with Buma, and staggered off to bed.
The drumming of the rain against the window in the darkened room caused me to feel dizzier, less in control, and thus I can't be sure what moved me to call Patience; but I think it may have been that Rawley's betrayal -- so my drunken brain characterized it -- inspired me to attempt to counterfeit a romantic relationship for myself; that would have been in keeping with the infantile tenor of my thoughts.
To my surprise, she picked up on the third ring. "Michael! I'm so happy to hear you! When you coming home?" My toaster, I thought. Still mine.
All during the call, Patience urged me to hurry home, saying the Congo was a dangerous place and she was worried about me. This was, I assumed, her loneliness speaking. But her expression of concern suited my fantasies, and I found myself murmuring endearments, making the kind of assurances that should never be made drunkenly or lightly; and when she offered similar assurances in return, rather than retreating from the edge of this moral precipice, I let her voice comfort me and fell asleep with the phone pressed to my ear.
USUALLY AFTER drinking to excess, I sleep fitfully, tossing about, waking every so often, plagued by stomach pains and anxiety dreams; but that night I slept soundly and the only dream that came was not the typical helter-skelter of surreal adventures and circumstances, but had a clarity and mental coloration unlike that of any dream I had theretofore experienced. I was moving rapidly through shallow water, not swimming so much as being carried along by the current. Clouds of brownish yellow sediment stirred up by the passages of others before me obscured my vision, yet I could still make out reeds undulating on the river bottom, wedges of stone extruded from the bank. Within minutes, the water became cooler, deeper, greener, and I could no longer see the bottom. I was being drawn toward something, but what exactly that thing was, I did not know. While it was not in my nature to be afraid, I had a sudden comprehension of fear, of its potentials, and this caused me to become more alert to my surroundings, as might happen when food was near. But this knowledge was unimportant, for even had I been capable of fear, I somehow trusted the thing toward which I was being drawn; I understood that it was not inimical.
The current grew faster, the water darkened to a cold blue, and I was overcome by a great lassitude. All my strength was draining from me, yet at the same time I sensed that I was accumulating new strength of a sort I could not fully understand. A subtler form of power than my old strength, but no less serviceable. In the distance I saw a glowing patch of brighter blue, barely a spot, but increasing in size with every passing second, and I knew that this brightness was the signal fire of my destination ....
I'm not certain what woke me, but I believe it must have been a lightning strike, for I heard thunder, and lightning forked down the sky, illuminating tracers of rain. I was still half involved in the tag ends of the dream -- it had been so compelling, it seemed to pull at me as inexorably as had that glowing patch of blue. Yet at the same time I was terrified, and my heart raced. Rain was pouring down my face, into my eyes, matting my hair, and I was utterly disoriented. The last thing I remembered of the' waking world was Patience's voice in my ear, a pillow beneath my head. I hugged myself against the chill, and realized I was outside, wearing only a pair of briefs. A flicker of distant lightning showed my immediate surroundings. I was standing atop the rock where that afternoon I had seen the crocodiles at their strange menage. Beneath me, water churned against the bank, and on the far side of the river, the shadowy crest of the jungle trees swayed against the lesser darkness of the sky, bending all to the left, then straightening, with the ponderous rhythm of a dancing bear. On every side, the crunch and tatter of windy collisions, and from above, the constant battering of thunder.
Even after I had recognized my location, I remained terrified. I had no idea what could have happened. The idea of somnambulism had not yet entered my mind; instead, it seemed I had been spirited from my bed by the force of a dream to a place referenced by the dream; though confused, I was not confused about that -- whether a product of my drunken imagination or of something more inexplicable, I had been dreaming a crocodile dream. I began to shiver, and this was not entirely due to the cold. The toiling dark was full of dangers, and I would have to negotiate nearly a mile of it before reaching the hotel. But no other option was open to me. I shuffled about, afraid of turning abruptly and losing my balance, and as I took my first step toward the hotel, a deafening crack of thunder -- like the parting of some fundamental seam -- shredded the clouds overhead, and I was knocked onto my back by a blast of vivid red light. A foundry color, like the molten shell that encases a white hot core of liquefied steel. It was as if I'd been cupped in a fiery hand for a split-second and then cast aside. For several seconds thereafter, I was dazed by the concussion, blinded, my nostrils stinging with the reek of ozone; when my vision cleared, I saw that a dead tree close by the rock had been struck by the lightning and was ablaze, serving as a torch to illumine a considerable portion of the flats, causing puddles to glitter and shining up all the slick muddy skin of the place. At the landward end of the rock, no more than twenty feet away, blocking my exit, was a crocodile.
This was no ordinary crocodile, but one of nature's great criminals, as unruled in its own place and time as the tyrannosaur. A creature, a beast, a monster. Fully sixteen feet long, I reckoned it. The top of its massive head at rest was parallel with the mid-point of my thigh, and its open jaws could have accommodated an oil drum. With its scales gilded by the firelight, its pupils cored with orange brilliance, it would have been at home by Cerberus's side, an idol of pure menace guarding a portal into hell -- that was my first thought (if I can call those chill lancings of affrighted, garbled language that shot through my brain "thoughts"), that beyond the portcullis of stained and twisted teeth, deep in. its hollow tube of a belly, lay a gateway opening onto some greater torment.
The largest branch of the burning tree broke off and fell with a hiss into the river. In the diminished light, the croc's aspect changed from that of demiurge to the purely animal. A bloated grayish green lizard with a pale, thick tongue and cold mineral eyes and corrosive, rotting breath, a creature that would chew through my torso as though it were an underdone strip of bacon, then lift its head and, utilizing its powerful throat muscles, shift me down into its stomach, where -- coated in sticky acids -- I would quietly dissolve over a period of days, sharing the ignominy of a partly consumed river bass, its glazed eyes contemplating me with doting steadfastness as we lay together in our cozy, messy little cave.
To this point, disorientation had dominated my fear, but now my uncertainty as to what had happened was washed away by a single horrid certainty, and the disabling weakness that accompanies deep terror infused my limbs. My instinct was to throw myself into the water, but there I would be totally helpless. Instead, I tried to prepare for a quick sprint, a leap. If I jumped toward the bank at an angle from the middle of the rock, I might be able to gain a foothold and scramble up and make my escape. The odds of success were not good, but then the odds favoring any other course of action were far worse. It would have been helpful if the crocodile had bellowed, made a violent noise that outvoiced the wind -- that might have acted upon me like a starter's pistol and given me a boost of energy. But crocs only bellow when their territory is threatened, and I was no threat, I was mere prey. Its baleful regard was more enfeebling than any sound could have been, and I knew that at any second it would lunge forward and take me.
In the moment before I jumped, I had an incidence of perfect clarity. It was if I were receding from the world, leaving the body behind. I saw myself, a black, insignificant figure, a human scrap on a splinter of rock above turbulent water, facing a slightly less tiny creature with a tail, and the entire dark geography of the flats, with its one torched tree and a few smaller, flickering lights in the distance that might have been lanterns in the windows of shanty bars. I saw stitchings of lightning fencing the river valley, casting the hills in brief silhouette, bringing up the boxy shapes of Mogado from the shadows. I did not see my life pass before my eyes, but rather saw the sum of my life imprinted upon that unimportant landscape, and understood that in this cunning design with its drear prospect and trivial monster, all the wastage and impotence of my days, all my misused intellect and defrauded ambitions, all my torpid compulsions and arousals, all my puerile dreams and dissipated hopes and contemptible passions had found their proper resolution. And it was this sorry recognition, this abandonment of last illusions, that bred in me a liberating fatalism and freed my limbs from the grip of fear and let me jump.
I hit the side of the bank hard and slipped back. My feet touched the water, but I managed to claw out a handhold in the mud and hauled myself up onto level ground. Lightning strobed as I rolled away from the water's edge, and in those bright detonations I caught sight of the crocodile. Just a glimpse. It was in the process of turning toward me. Jaws agape. I flung myself away, and came to my feet running. Thunder obscured all other sound, but I could have sworn I felt the croc close behind, the awful gravity of the beast swinging its head round to bite. As I ran, as it became apparent that I was not going to die, I began to laugh. I stumbled, I fell half a dozen times, I tore my skin on stones, on dead branches, but I continued to laugh until I was too exhausted to do more than breathe. It seemed ridiculous that I should have survived. Silly. Life itself seemed silly, when there was so much death to be had. The average human activity in Africa was dying, or so I perceived it then, and to be spared in this situation abrogated at least the law of averages, if not other, more consequential laws.
I burst through the hotel doors, somehow failing to wake the African teenager behind the reception desk, and went into the bar, empty and lightless now, and helped myself to a bottle of whiskeys I sat down at one of the tables and had a restorative drink. Then I had another. I started laughing again, and this served to wake the kid at the desk. He peeked in the doorway, a startled look on his face; then he vanished, and I heard his footsteps moving away. Not long afterward, Dillip --wearing a fetching bathrobe of embroidered green silk -- made his appearance. His manner was at first stern, but on seeing my condition --all but naked, streaked with mud, bleeding, wild of countenance -- he stopped short of rebuking me. He went behind the bar, picked a glass from the rack and, with an air of prim disappointment, brought it to me. I thanked him and poured the glass half full.
"What can have happened to you, sah?" Dillip asked, hovering by the table.
I did not know how to tell him and only shook my head.
He drew up a chair and sat opposite me, adjusting the fall of his robe to cover his bony knees. From his expression, I gathered that he had not yet decided whether to be reproving or indulgent of my curious behavior.
"Do you require medical assistance?" Dillip asked.
"No," I said. "No, just a drink or two."
This did not sit well with him. "Sah, you must tell me what has happened. If something has happened to you in the hotel, I must report it."
"Nothing happened in the hotel." I pointed with the whiskey bottle. "Out there."
"Ah!" said Dillip. "You have been robbed, then. Bandits!"
I considered accepting this judgment; it would be easier than trying to explain the events of the evening. But when I put everything together in my head--my sleepwalking, the storm, the crocodile, Buma--I did not arrive at an American conclusion, but an African one.
"Not bandits," I said. "Mobutu."
AFRICAN POLITICS ARE frequently intertwined with the cult of personality. Perhaps because the land is vast, the men who pretend to rule it must proclaim their' own vastness, each in a highly individual way...ways that are rarely beneficial to those whom they have been elected to serve. For instance, not far from Abidjan lies the village of Yamosoukra, the birthplace of Felix Houphouet-Boigny, the former president of the Ivory Coast. Upon his ascendancy to' the office, the president initiated a building program designed to turn Yamosoukra into a new capital, one that would rival Brasilia. He had long held an admiration for St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, and so nothing would do but that he erect a copy of the church half again as large as the original close to the village, and to provide better access to this newly historic area, he ordered the construction of a six-lane highway. The need for six-lane highways in West Africa is slight, if not nonexistent. The first time I drove along the highway, at what ordinarily would be considered rush hour, I encountered Only one other person, an old man in a shabby brown suit riding a bicycle. That this building program nearly bankrupted the country was of secondary importance to President Houphouet-Boigny and his supporters; of primary importance was that in their minds this spanking new, empty, purposeless city and its various accessories established to the world the greatness of the man and suggested that he was not someone to be trifled with.
Mobutu Sese Seko favored more of a minimalist approach to achieving this same effect. It suited him to create a fearsome ring of security about himself and throughout Kinshasa, and to permit the remainder of the Congo (which he renamed Zaire) to fall into ruin. Beyond Kinshasa, the jungle overran the outlying highways, and the infrastructure crumbled, leaving a poverty-stricken populace without any resources other than the sweat of their brows. Did not this cruel policy express a godlike indifference to suffering? Was not a reign of more than thirty years funded by this unvarying indifference evidence of the man's invulnerability and power? Might not such a man use his dying strength to visit some final and lasting pain upon his people by means of a curse? And might not the people, disposed to belief in his godhood by thirty years of oppression, be so psychologically in thrall to him that by dint of national will they had managed to make the curse manifest, or--put more basically--they had caused it to come true?
This last was one of the questions I put to Buma the next afternoon. I was not in the best of shape. I felt cracked, things broken inside my head, the shape of my faith in logical process gone lopsided, and my hands trembled from fatigue and alcohol. Nothing I saw that day helped to right me. At the jail, the desk officer's newspaper told of a village twenty miles downriver destroyed by fire--lightning or tribal violence, no one could say, for there were no survivors--and a small headline below the fold reported that fish were dying by the thousands in a lake fed by the Kilombo. The cause was unknown.
"As long as you ask these questions," Buma said, "you will never know the answers." He was, as before, sitting sideways to me, gazing at the whitewashed wall, maintaining his customary reptilian poise. "Yet if you learn not to ask them, someday the knowledge will come."
"Yeah, uh-huh," I said. "If you sit perfectly still, the world will move through you, and everything is everything else. I've heard the same crap from slicker hustlers than you."
"You're angry because your dream was interrupted." He turned his head to me, his seamed face calm, that thin smile in evidence. "Don't worry. You'll finish it tonight. Then you will understand."
I didn't want to give him the satisfaction of asking how he knew about my interrupted dream; but I couldn't stop myself.
"Because it is my dream," he said. "Because I gave it to you." He refitted his gaze to the wall, and I imagined he was seeing through the whitewash to the bloodstained surface beneath, the dark Mobutu skin that stretched across the entire country--it could be covered up, but never truly obscured.
I didn't know what more to ask--most of the questions crowding my brain were those I needed to ask of myself. Questions relating to my behavior with Rawley, my overall stability. I had never before walked in my sleep, and though I had no knowledge concerning the causes of somnambulism, I assumed they must be pathological.
In spite of my confusion, my self-absorption, I managed to frame a question for Buma. Not a particularly intelligent question, but it would serve to occupy him while I thought of a better one.
"Who are you?" I asked him. "Who do you think you are?"
"Do you see, Michael? It is always best to be direct. All your previous questions have begged the issue. But this...this is to the point."
"Then why don't you answer it?"
"Sometimes I think I am a man." His smiled widened. "But then I remember that I am not."
"This non-responsive style of yours," I said, "it's the classic tactic of the charlatan. The cryptic answer, the knowing nod. All it suggests is that you have nothing salient to tell me. It's Obvious that you're a clever man, that you're using what you've deduced about me from our conversations to try and persuade me of your supernatural abilities. But I'm not buying it."
Buma let out a hissing breath, a sign--I thought--of exasperation. "Your assumption seems to be that by answering you I will be helping myself, and you further assume that I am not answering you. In the first place, I do not need your help. In the second, I have given you a dream, and I have confessed to murder. If you wait and listen and watch, you will learn the rest. You must have patience, Michael."
The word "patience" startled me. "What do you mean by that?" I asked.
He eyes swung toward me. "Have you ever watched crocodiles hunt? How they wait and wait, how they persevere. Time and again they will attack and fail, yet they remain persevering. Because they have patience. If I were the king of the crocodiles, I would be the king of patience. Patience is much more than a simple virtue, Michael. Surely you know that?"
He was doing exactly what I had said--probing, making rudimentary deductions, then using my reactions against me. But though I thought I understood him, this talk of patience led me to suspect that he had some connection with my Patience, or that he knew about her. A hundred wild suppositions contended in my brain, along with fantasies about crocodile kings with thin, false smiles and women who sat sideways and cut their eyes toward you rather than turning their heads; but I refused to give in to them.
"What...." I began, and then forgot the question I'd intended to ask; I searched for another and asked, for no particular reason, simply because it was the only thing that occurred: "The river .... Is there something wrong with the river?"
Buma got to his feet. He stepped to the wall, knocked against it with the sides of his iron cuffs, dislodging a roughly triangular section of flaking whitewash, revealing a large dark patch beneath. "Do you see this?" he asked. "This is what is wrong with the river. With all things. No matter how pure the surface, beneath it lies insanity and dread. Some will tell you it is Mobutu who is to blame. Others will say something different. They are each right in their own way. Mobutu. Poison. Bacteria. Curses. These are merely names for the incurable cancer spreading from the heart of the world, the terror from which life itself springs. We are all fleeing it. We try to swim away, we travel far from home, we tell ourselves it is a dream, we imprison ourselves in palaces, we speak to God on the mountain top. We can never escape it, however, because we are part of it. Yet we must try, because that is our nature." He sat back down, making a dull rattle with his chains. "Crocodiles understand this more clearly than do men. They are simple creatures, and simple answers do not elude them."
I was dancing with him now, he was playing me and logic could not stand against him. His words, though scarcely original, a medley of bleak cliches, had tapped into the core of my weakness, and all the fear I had nourished over long years in Africa, all the peculiarly African fear, the apprehension of spirits, of lion ghosts and magical presidents and the long-legged, licorice-skinned, lickety-split demons of the talking drum dancing with arms akimbo on the margins of one's campfire light, ready to pounce with their red-hot spears and golden teeth...all this was loose in me, raving like a storm inside my skull, and I had the unshakable presentiment that if I didn't move I would be trapped with this man who claimed not to be a man in that little white cell forever. I scraped back my chair, staggered against the wall, the wall infected with blood and darkness, and as I moved haltingly toward the door, Buma smiled at me. The cracks in his wrinkled, youthful face seemed to deepen so drastically, I thought his skin would fly apart into a kind of weathered shrapnel, releasing the all-consuming, crocodile-reeking blackness beneath.
"Remember, Michael," he said. "Have patience. No matter what befalls the world, whether fire or ice, if you have patience, you will thrive."
Dusk came suddenly as I left the jail, dragged in m it appeared--by flights of crows that swooped just above the rooftops, screaming down harsh curses on the people below. I badly wanted a drink, and since I was now persona non grata with Dillip, I headed for the nearest shanty bar, a construction of warped boards alternately painted pink and yellow and blue, furnished with picnic-style tables and lit by a kerosene lantern. All topped off by a rust-scabbed tin roof. The bartender, an enormous woman in a flowered dress, her hair wrapped in a white cloth, provided me with a bottle with a Jim Beam label that did not contain Jim Beam, but something yellowish-brown and vile and strong as poison. I drank it gratefully. Soon the woman came to resemble a deity, marooned by a spill of lantern light in the soft darkness behind a two-plank countertop, her shiny black plump breasts the source of all fecundity, her broad round face as serene as those faces at the corners of antique maps that signify the east wind. At another table sat three men, all young, muscular, two of them wearing polo shirts and jeans, the other jeans and a pink T-shirt decorated with the image of a pony. Pink T-shirt was fiddling with the dials of a transistor radio, bringing in static-filled reggae. Now and then he would glance sternly at me, as if he disapproved of my presence. But I didn't care. I was ablaze with the happiness that only a satisfied drunk can know, liberated from yet not unmindful of my troubles. They seemed manageable now. Even the pronounced possibility that I was experiencing mental slippage seemed a trivial matter, one that could be reconciled in due course. And what if I was perfectly healthy? That was a possibility, I realized, that I had not given sufficient credence. It was not utterly beyond the pale to think that Buma was the king of the crocodiles, or that Mobutu's curse was despoiling the Kilombo, or that Patience was more than a simple virtue. Then, too, it might be true both that I was slipping and that the world was mad enough to support crocodile kings and rule by voodoo. But it was unlikely that anyone could decide these questions, so why worry about them?
"You are an American Negro, I believe," said Pink T-shirt, who without my notice had come to stand by my table, his pals at his shoulder. I could not deny the fact, though I found the word "Negro" rankling. Pink T-shirt introduced himself as Solomon, and he and his friends, whose names I promptly forgot, joined me.
"Are you a student of history?" Solomon asked, enunciating his words with the profound dignity and slow precision of the very drunk. His friends did not appear capable of speech. Drifting, eyes rolling, almost on the nod. I told Solomon I was a student of snakes, but he did not respond to this; his impassively handsome face was arranged in a contemplative mask. "I am a student of history," he said. "At the university in Kinshasa. I have studied the history of the American Negro."
"I see," I said. "And what have your studies taught you?"
He nodded, as if I had made a statement and not asked a question. Tiny yellow circles of reflected lantern light lensed his pupils. "I am curious about the American Negro's perspective on Africa."
Having been elected the American Negro for purposes of the conversation, I felt a responsibility to offer something cogent in reply. "It's a complex subject," I said. "After all, Africa is not one thing, but many. And the American Negro is a term that embodies a number of perspectives."
In the gathering dark outside, two little girls in pale smocks came chasing after a huge sow, one of them flicking at her rump with a long switch.
"It is my thesis," Solomon said, regarding me with what I suspected he thought was an imperious stare, "that because he both venerates and despises the African, the American Negro stands closer to a white perspective on the continent than to the African. In effect, he is no longer part of the black race."
The black race, I thought. A mystery novel. A description of the River Styx. A nighttime cycling event. I wanted to feel respect for Solomon...or if not respect, then sadness. I suppose I felt a little of both. He had, after all, managed a university education--not the easiest thing to achieve in the Congo--and his simplistic take on his subject implied an unfruitful and outmoded agenda that was, in its historical context, sad. It was also sad that Solomon was apparently unaware of his subtext, in which--if he examined it--he would find reflected a specific variety of self-loathing endemic among failed or inadequately prepared African intellectuals. But what I mainly felt was annoyance. I had been involved in far too many of these spurious philosophical discussions to feel challenged by them, as Solomon--I believed--wanted me to feel. Though it was possible to gain insights from indulging in such quasi-intellectual pissing matches, the type of insights one gained were in essence judgmental and inclined to make you feel superior to the Solomon-of-the-moment. And even if those judgments were relevant, even if they illuminated some twist of African behavior, some intricate contradiction that in turn illuminated a fragment of colonial history or post-colonial politics, they tended to make you think that you understood Africans...and if you believed that, then you had fallen into the same sort of simplistic trap as had Solomon. As had many journalists and sloppy novelists, who transformed such encounters into pithy anecdotes. It was impossible to avoid making judgments, but why bother to deify them? No, annoyance was the proper reaction. Solomon was spoiling my drunk.
"You know," I said, as one of his friends slumped against the wall and began to snore. "I used to believe in approaching subjects like the American Negro and his perspective on Africa from an academic standpoint. But now, I guess I think that all this shit--y'know, life, Africa, the rules of chess, love, all that--I guess I think the best way to understand it is just to feel it along your skin."
Solomon took a moment to absorb this. "You are laughing at me," he said.
"Not at all. I'm speaking to you exactly as I would speak to anyone who said what you said to me. If what I say doesn't validate you in the way you'd like, I'm sorry."
Two young women entered the bar and began chatting with the bartender. One was pretty, wearing a simple yellow dress; she looked over to our table and smiled.
"Whores," said Solomon, following my gaze. "Perhaps you would rather talk to whores."
"I'm only human," I told him; then I asked: "Here's something I can approach from an academic stance. Tell me what you think of Mobutu."
Solomon pursed his lips. "I'm not disposed to discuss this with you."
"That's fair." The woman in the yellow dress was peeking at me over her friend's shoulder; she caught my eye, covered her mouth to hide a smile, and whispered in her friend's ear.
Solomon now began discussing American Negro writers he admired. In his opinion, James Baldwin, though a degenerate, was the most African of them all. I couldn't decide if this bespoke a startling new comprehension on his part, or was absolute bullshit. Soon, accepting that I did not want to play, Solomon and his friends left the bar, but not before the man who had been asleep, who had heard nothing of the conversation, turned back to the table and with shy formality, extended his hand to be shaken.
A few minutes later, the woman in the yellow dress--Elizabeth by name--was sitting beside me and had placed my hand between her legs, separated from her secret flesh by a thin layer of cotton. "Do you feel it?" she whispered. "Beating like the heart of a little bird?" Her eyes were large and beautifully shaped, her features delicate, her small breasts perfectly round. She had a strange spicy scent. The rains had begun--late, that day --and the drops drew a tremulous droning resonance from the tin roof; the bartender switched on her radio, and a man with a hoarse romantic tenor sang in French, a song about a boy torn between lust for a city woman and longing for his village sweetheart. At that instant, my perspective on Africa was pervaded by dizziness and desire. Even when Elizabeth asked me for money ("You know, you will have to give me a present."), she did so sweetly, almost apologetically, in keeping with my mood, with the mood of that place and moment. And when I gave her more than the present she had expected, she slipped my hand beneath the yellow cotton and offered me access to the proof of her own desire.
There was a room attached to the back of the bar, just big enough for a cot and a table bearing a lantern, with a window covered by a plastic curtain imprinted with red roses. When the curtain was pulled back, you could see a banana frond caressing the pane, like the green foreleg of some large, gentle insect. Fucking Elizabeth made me think of Patience, though not with guilt or any negative emotion. She simply reminded me of Patience in her playful exuberance and--all things being relative--her guilelessness: I didn't doubt that she might try to rob me, yet I knew that if she did it would not be premeditated, but the result of a whim, an irresistible impulse. One way or another, I wasn't concerned. She already had almost all of the cash I'd brought from the hotel. And so, once I was happily spent, I felt not the least compunction against falling asleep in her arms.
If I had remembered Buma's promise that I would finish my interrupted dream, I might have fought off sleep; but I did not, and the dream took me unawares. The glowing patch of blue in the depths of the river toward which I had been heading...I was past it, I had gone through it and was swimming up toward the surface. Swimming had always been second nature to me, but now it took all my strength, and I found I could not breathe, that it was necessary to hold my breath as I strained toward the light. I couldn't remember very much of what had happened to me within the patch of glowing blue, but I did recall that it had been painful, and I was certain that whatever had happened was responsible for the physical changes I was experiencing.
At last I broke the surface, sputtering and coughing, so weak I could barely swim to shore. When I reached the bank, I scrambled up the side and to my amazement, I discovered that I was standing on my hind legs. Standing upright as did those slight dark creatures upon whom I sometimes fed. Then I glanced down at my body. My arms were smooth and unwrinkled, my hands clawless, and my chest was smooth, covered with a fuzzy growth. Tatters of my old familiar skin clung to my hips and legs, but it was apparent that my legs were much longer than they had been. I let out a bellow of fear and rage, and was stunned by the frailty of my voice. Then I noticed others of my kind ranged along the bank, their condition the same as mine--changed, enraged, frightened. And hungry. I had never been so hungry in my life--it was as if I had never eaten. I bellowed again, and my brothers and sisters joined me, making an outcry that altogether might have equaled in volume the cry that one of us could have sounded before the change. But it was loud enough to attract the attention of creatures like ourselves yet not like us. Five of them. Fishermen on their way home.
We ran them down in the bush and threw them to the ground and fed. My mouth was not wide enough for proper biting, my teeth too small and blunt, but I managed, and as I fed, fear vanished, and in its place came understanding...understanding such as I could never have imagined. The world, it seemed, was larger and stranger than I had known, and now that my home had been corrupted by dark forces, I would have to leave it behind and seek another home--it was for this reason I had been changed. But changed by whom? By what? That knowledge was gone from me; though I believe I once had understood it, the space in my head where it had been seated was now filled with curious information, theories, schemes, languages, and systems, things I would not have believed existed. Yet my grasp of them was total, and I realized that armed with this knowledge, and with my old knowledge that--though I had forgotten much of it--still empowered me, I had the opportunity not merely to survive, but to rule. Men, I perceived, were not only frail of body, but of mind, easily swayed and easily broken, and I was convinced that I could dominate them.
There were six of us on the bank, one a young woman--with my human eyes I saw that she was lovely. Five of us understood all that had happened and what we must now do, but the woman was so young, so new not only to this world, but to the previous one, she remained confused. I instructed her to go into the city and to find someone who would take her to a safe place. In my mind's eye I saw a man from a distant country. I described him to her, told her where he lived, and sent her on her way. Then I, along with my four brothers and sisters, set out into the country we could not have imagined, but that we now meant to make our own.
I woke from the dream to find Elizabeth straddling me, holding me down by the shoulders, a terrified look on her face. She told me I had tried to leave the room while still asleep, but she had pushed me back down. I assured her that I was fine, but I was not fine. I could taste blood in my mouth, I remembered the sensation of ripping off a strip of human flesh and chewing it juiceless, I heard again the crack of a neckbone. These things, and not the mad logic of the dream, the idea that crocodiles were changing into men in order to escape some magical pollution of the Kilombo, persuaded me of the dream's validity. Even the irrational notion that Buma, newly human, had sent me a crocodile girl to protect seemed possible in light of these horrible memories. I could not overlook the possibility that Buma's power was merely the power of suggestion, or that my mind had been wired for madness by my years in Africa, conditioned to accept the most insane of propositions and to create improbable scenarios from the materials provided by a fraudulent witch man so as to explain away dysfunction. But for the time being I preferred the prospect of supernaturally transformed crocodiles to that of insanity, and I let Elizabeth console me.
I was thoroughly involved in the process of consolation when I heard voices raised in anger from the bar, and shortly thereafter the door to the little room swung open, and Rawley--his face flushed, his shirt and hair drenched with rain--stepped into view. "My God, Michael!" he said, averting his eyes. Elizabeth squealed, rolled off me and covered herself. "Are you mad?" Rawley said. "You know these women are all fucking diseased! What the hell were you thinking?"
I sat up, pulled on my briefs, and said sullenly, "Don't worry about it."
"Fine! I won't worry. But we did have a meeting scheduled. I trust you won't mind too much if I express some concern over the fact that you fucking failed to show up!"
I buckled my belt, shrugged into my shirt. "Just go easy," I said. "I've had a rough day."
"Oh, really? Yes, I suppose you have. Few of life's difficulties compare to the arduous nature of an evening spent drinking and whoring."
It was amazing, the amount of loathing I felt toward him--this bloated blond bug in his signature golf shirt and chinos, with his political dabbling and his tight-ass fiancee, who was he to berate me? "I don't think," I said tightly, "that my information has been degraded by tardiness."
"Degraded," he said. "Interesting choice of terms, that."
I finished buttoning my shirt; behind me, Elizabeth struggled into her dress. "Gee, what crawled up your ass, Jimmy? No, don't tell me. I bet the lovely Helen has something to do with it. What's the problem? She having trouble prying her knees apart?"
"You bastard!" He glared at me, puffed up with anger. "Here I throw you a bone for friendship's sake, and what do you do? You .... "
"A bone?" I said. "I'm not your fucking dog, Jimmy. I'm your boy. Whenever you get into trouble, you come running to rub my nappy head for luck. You did it at Oxford, and you're doing it now. Trouble with a Classics exam? Hey, Michael! Mind coming over and letting me knuckle your headbone. I'll stand for the drinks."
Rawley composed himself--he was above all this, he refused to get down in the gutter with me. "I'm not going to hold this against you. You're drunk. We'll talk in the morning, when you're capable of reason."
With a worried glance at me, Elizabeth squeezed past Rawley and vanished into the bar.
"Let's talk now," I said. "In the morning I'm gone." He appeared to take this as a surrender, an admission on my part of wrong-headedness. "Very well. But let's go back to the hotel. We might be overheard here."
"It's your game," I said. "We might as well play on your home court."
"Can we stop this?" He spread his hands as if to demonstrate he was holding no weapons. "Christ, Michael. We have ten years of history together, and this isn't the first time we've fought. If you want me to apologize for breaking in on you and the girl...I apologize. I've been under so much pressure, perhaps I haven't been sensitive to the fact that you're under pressure, too. If so, I apologize for that as well." He stepped forward, extending the hand of friendship. "Come on, man. What do you say?"
I had always been a chump for his diplomatic side, even though I knew it was entirely tactical, and that it came as easily to him as eating bananas to a monkey. I took his hand, I accepted his clumsy embrace, but I knew in my heart that we were finished.
"No problem," I said.
I BOUGHT A BOTTLE of yellowish brown poison from the bartender, and we set out toward the hotel. The rain had diminished to a drizzle, and as we crossed the pitch-dark flats, Rawley shined a flashlight ahead to show obstacles in our path, the beam sawing across broken glass and stumps and once a scurrying rat. I was very drunk, but my drunkenness was cored by a central clarity, and though my coordination was not good, my mind was charged with a peculiar energy that permitted me to think and speak with no sign of affliction. Between pulls on the bottle, I told Rawley about my conversations with Buma, the dreams, Mobutu's curse, and my encounter with the crocodile, the odd behavior of the crocodiles I had witnessed on the day of my arrival in Mogado. I gave it to him flatly, as if it were all plain fact, with no mention of my self-doubts or any other of my reservations.
"That's absolute nonsense," Rawley said; then hurriedly, not wanting to risk--I supposed--reinstituting an adversarial atmosphere: "I mean it sounds like nonsense."
"Like you said--Buma's impressive. He's obviously expert at mind-fucking people. Whether or not there's something more arcane behind that...It's not really important. Your problem is to decide whether you can successfully prosecute him. My feeling is that you can't. Imagine what he could do with a jury. Or with the court, for that matter."
Two young men passed us in the dark, walking in the opposite direction; they shielded their eyes against Rawley's flash and offered a polite greeting.
"I may have no choice," Rawley said. "I'm getting increasing pressure from Kinshasa. My ultimate problem may lie in trying to shift the blame for his acquittal away from me and onto the court."
"Why is this important? You're going to England. One trivial defeat won't spoil your entire record."
"My family will still be here. These bastards are capable of anything. If they get all in a twist about Buma, they might threaten our business interests. They might do more than that." He swung the flashlight in a short arc, the beam whitening the trunk and upswept branches of a dead tree, making it look for an instant like the skeleton of some strange animal, frozen forever in an anguished pose. "God, sometimes I hate this country."
We walked in silence a few paces; finally I said, "If I were you, I wouldn't mess with Buma. Suppose he's acquitted. Let's not even talk about whether he used to be a crocodile. Let's just say that he's a member of a cult, and once he's acquitted, the cult gets a lot of ink. A lot of power. He could be more dangerous than your friends back in Kinshasa."
"Unfortunately," Rawley said, "you're not me. And I'm not you. I have responsibilities I can't dodge."
And fuck you, too, I thought; I hope the son of a bitch bites you in half.
We were passing a point parallel to the rock where I had been trapped by the big crocodile. I mentioned this to Rawley, suggested he might want to have a look.
"Why not," he said.
We angled toward the river, walked along it for a minute or so, then Rawley's flash picked out that tooth of dark rock extending out over the Kilombo.
"No action tonight," said Rawley as he stepped out onto it. I remained on the bank. "Not a sign of a fucking croc," he went on. He swung the flash across the surface of the water and laughed. "Buma must have given them marching orders."
The clouds broke, and a thin silver moon like a fattened hook sailed up from behind them. Rawley came back onto the bank, shot me an amused glance. "Are you sure you weren't drunk?"
"You know me, boss," I said coldly. "I can't scarcely see nothin' `less I's drinkin'."
In the weak silvery light, with a blond forelock drooping over his forehead to touch an eyebrow, his face looked oddly simple, childlike. "We have a few things to work out, don't we?" he said. "I understand that, Michael. God only knows who we were back at Oxford. I can't even remember those people, except that they were complete fucking idiots. But I'm certain they weren't you and me. They weren't us the way we are now." He twitched the beam of the flashlight off along the bank. "Despite the shit people do to one another, we've stuck it out together. Perhaps not always for the purest of motives. But we have done, and I can't help but believe there's some good reason we've come this far. Don't you think that's a possibility worth exploring?"
His words were so unexpected, I couldn't muster a response; but I was, against my will, touched by them. Embarrassed, he turned toward the town and swept the flashlight inland; as the beam traveled across the ground, the light reflected off what appeared to be a row of yellow-orange jewels set atop a semicircle of dead logs. Logs with wrinkled, leathery bark and weird turreted structures atop their narrow snouts. Rawley let out a little gasp, as if he'd taken a playful blow to the belly, and focused the beam on the log closest to us. A crocodile. Not a very big one, maybe eight feet long. But some of its friends were bigger. There must have been fifteen or twenty of them, maybe more. Just sitting. Watching. Forming a barrier in every direction except one.
Rawley took a step backward onto the rock. "Jesus," he said. "Oh, Jesus." Another croc let out a ghastly hiss.
I was not afraid...not for myself, at any rate. It was as if the electric arc of fear had gapped and failed to engage my nerves. Perhaps I was too drunk to feel fear. Yet I was afraid for Rawley. He took another backward step, stumbled, and in doing so, went farther out onto the rock.
"No!" I shouted, beckoning to him. "Run! You've got to run! This way!"
I sprinted toward the crocodile closest to the bank. It was strange. I ran, it seemed, not fired by an instinct for self-preservation, but by the need to demonstrate to Rawley the proper method of escape. I may have felt a touch of fright as I hurdled the croc--it snapped at me half-heartedly --but it was nothing compared to the terror I had experienced the previous night. I landed awkwardly on one foot, spun half about, and fell hard on my chest. For the space of a few seconds, perhaps a bit more, I lost my wind. When I regained it, I came to one knee and looked back at Rawley. He had not followed my example. He was standing near the riverward end of the rock, made to seem small by the vastness of the sky that had opened up above him, with its scattering of wild stars and silver cicatrice of moon. His pale hair flew in the breeze, and the tail of his shirt fluttered; the beam of the flashlight struck downward from his left hand like a frail gold wand, his only weapon against the crocodiles massed and slithering toward him from the landward end of the rock. There was no way he could hurdle them now. Our gazes met. He said nothing, and at that distance, his expression was unreadable; but he must have known he was doomed. I called out his name and came a step toward him, thinking there must be something I could do. I screamed at the crocodiles, but they were intent upon him, crawling over one another in their eagerness for his blood.
Rawley whirled about, the flashlight beam drawing a yellow stripe across the bright water. He glanced back at me once more, a mere flicking of his eyes, not a signal or message so much as a reflex, a last hopeful engagement of life, and then he dived into the Kilombo, a racer's dive learned in his shining youth and practiced in the green pools of Oxford. The crocodiles surged forward. Rawley surfaced about twenty feet from the bank, just as the first of the crocs went into the water; he headed down river, stroking a racing crawl, aiming for a place some fifteen yards away where the bank jutted out. I didn't think he had a chance--a dozen crocs were in the water now, arrowing after him, their bodies only partially submerged, moonstruck eyes aglitter. But Rawley was making decent headway, and I began to hope for him. Then the croc nearest him submerged completely. A moment later he screamed and came twisting high out of the water, clawing at the air, a dark stain on his lips and chin. And then the croc took him under. The other crocodiles converged on the spot where Rawley had vanished, and the surface was transformed into a melee of thrashing tails and rooting snouts, a raft of scaly, undulating bodies, all splashing and bumping and skittering half out of the water as one croc slid up and across another's back in a display of murderous frolic. But there was no sign of the man they had killed.
I backed away from the bank; I felt unsound, unclear. Rawley's death had been real enough while it was occurring, but now it seemed I had imagined it, that I would have to re-imagine it in order to make it real. I was still holding my bottle, and now I hurled it into the river, as if it were damning evidence. And wasn't I culpable for having hated him, even if the hatred was transitory and the event itself a dire form of coincidence? Hadn't I brought him to the rock with murder in my heart?
The crocodiles began to swim away from the spot where Rawley had disappeared. Their fun was over. I sank to my knees, suddenly overcome by loss, and by the gruesome manner of his passing. I bent my head, pressed the heels of my hands against my brow, as if to compress the memory of what I had seen, to flatten it and make it so thin it would slip into a crack in my brain and never be found. The hypocrisy of my grief, coming as it did in such close conjunction with my internalized expression of loathing for Rawley, caused his death to weigh more heavily upon me than it otherwise might. Though I truly grieved, at the same time my tears seemed a form of indulgence, as if I were grieving for myself, for my own frail transgressions, or else trying to present a false appearance to whatever deity was watching, to convince him that I was sorry far my part in what had happened. And this duality of grief, this fictive quality overlaying the real, this sense of innermost duplicity, made my thoughts scamper and collide like confused rabbits on a killing ground. I thought my head would burst, I wanted it to burst, and I was disappointed when it did not.
At last I lifted my eyes. Not ten feet away along the bank, a crocodile was watching me. A smallish one, perhaps the same upon which Rawley had first shined his flashlight. Its jaws were slightly parted, its snaggled teeth in plain view, lending it a goofy look. A comical little death poised to pounce. My normal reactions were dammed up, and I could only stare at the thing. Numb, hopeless, and uncaring, I waited to die. Seconds ticked past, slow as water from a leaky tap. The croc began to seem familiar, almost human. Mad hilarity lapped the inside of my skull. I noted the croc's resemblance to George Bush. A distant relative, perhaps. An outside child conceived during a state visit. Then it bellowed, a glutinous, hollow noise--like a troll roaring in a cave--and that restored my natural animal terror. Its head jerked sideways, and it regarded me for a few beats with one cold gray eye, as if marking me for future reference. Then it whipped about, and moving in the ludicrous yet oh-so-efficient Chaplinesque paddling run of its species, it scuttled off into the shadows, leaving me to seek another solution to my misfortunes.
WHEN I REPORTED Rawley's death, the police in Mogado detained me; later that night, they charged me with his murder. There was no body, no evidence of any sort, except for the fact that I had been seen arguing with him, then walking with him in the direction of the river. No one reported seeing him afterward. Men had been convicted and executed for less in the Congo. I neither disputed nor affirmed the charge. In truth, I could not dispute or affirm it. Rawley's death lay at the center of a web of circumstance and possibility that could never be untangled. Unless one were to accept the explanation of my dream...or rather, Buma's dream. My three improbable escapes from the crocodiles of the Kilombo lent credence to this explanation, for had not Buma spat on my palm to protect me from his "brothers and sisters"? But I was not prepared to accept it.
Later that morning, the potbellied desk officer entered my cell and informed me that I was no longer under suspicion--I could leave; if I wished, I could return to Abidjan. I was in a state of shock and disbelief. "What do you mean?" I asked him. "I thought I was to be arraigned?"
He hesitated. "We've been told to let you go."
"By Kinshasa?"
The policeman dropped his eyes, as if embarrassed. "You are free to leave."
I considered the length of time it would likely take for the police to communicate with Kinshasa, then how much longer it would be before Kinshasa could get through their ritual rounds of squabbling and communicate an official reaction. "It wasn't Kinshasa who gave the order, was it?"
The policeman beckoned to me peremptorily. "Come along now. I have your possessions at the desk."
"Buma," I said "The crocodile man. It was him, wasn't it? He gave the order."
"If you refuse to come with me," said the policeman, "I will have you dragged from the cell."
It was clear what must have happened. With Rawley no longer serving as a buffer between them and Buma, the police--with their superstitions, their belief in sorcery--would have been easy prey for Buma's mind games. In fact, they probably had never thought that I was a real suspect in the murder. I was only a bone they intended to throw to Kinshasa, a stand-in for Buma, whom they were too afraid of to prosecute. What I didn't understand was why Buma would have me set free. "Where is he?" I asked. "Where's Buma?"
The policeman gazed stonily at me. "He is gone."
"You released him?"
"He is gone."
`"Where.... Where did he go?"
The policeman shrugged. He half-turned, then glanced back at me. "He left you a message."
I waited, and after checking the hallway to make sure no one else was listening, the policeman provided me with the final piece of the puzzle.
"Have patience," the policeman said. "That is all he told me to tell you. Have patience."
It is as I said at the outset, you must not think of me as a reliable witness. Instead, you must read what I have written as you would testimony in a murder trail. You must weigh it and make a judgment according to the dictates of your experience. There is, I believe, one way to determine whether it is I who am mad, if--to justify my sins, perhaps even to hide a murderous act--I have conjured this story out of hints and intimations and a handful of anomalies; or if madness has infected the entire world, if the dying curse of a tiny African giant has poisoned all the waters, if crocodiles are fleeing that curse by becoming men, and if James Rawley was executed by means of witchery because he refused to drop his prosecution of Gilbert Buma. In order to make that determination, I would have to travel five days upriver from Mogado to a spot marked by a ferry landing burnt by Mobutu's soldiers; I would have to walk inland until I came to a giant fig tree, and if then I were to find an albino rock python, it would be reasonable to conclude that magic and witchery have won the day. At the time of these events, I was not prepared to make that trip, and I remain unprepared to do so--the Kilombo is not a place to which I ever care to return. But perhaps a different kind of proof will be forthcoming.
Upon my return to Abidjan, I secured a visa for Patience and together we flew back to the States. Shortly thereafter we married and settled outside Ann Arbor, Michigan, not far from the Huron River. Patience likes being close to a river; she says it reminds her of home. Sometimes she will sit with me on the banks of the Huron, humming under her breath, and when she feels my eyes on her, she will cut her own eyes toward me and hold my stare just as Buma was in the habit of doing. I don't spend a great deal of time wondering about her origins; that would be fruitless. Though I may not have taken her seriously if it hadn't been for Buma's message and all that attended it, I try not to question either my mental state or the happiness that has come my way. I teach at the university, I come home at night to Patience, to love, and despite the fact that our immediate world appears to be in a state of collapse, with political scandal and murder and random violence reaching epidemic proportions, we have managed to find a degree of contentment.
Lately, however, something has been happening that, I think, bears upon the matter at hand. Each weekend I drive to Detroit to teach a class at the science museum. The freeway, 1-95, is a curving stretch of concrete along which flow thousands of cars, rather like the Kilombo both in form and in usage, and sometimes as I drive, a dreamlike feeling steals over me, I become distant from human thoughts and desires, tranquil in the face of the unknown, and I see myself gliding along that white riverine strip, a soul and flesh encased in steel, one of thousands of such entities, and we are all moving inexorably toward a far-off patch of glowing red, brilliant and flickering like fire, drawn to it by a force beyond our comprehension, but confident that when we reach it we will be transformed in a fashion that will allow us to survive the great trouble that afflicts us all, clear in the truth of our salvation...not the much advertised salvation of religion, but salvation through the processes of nature, which often manifest in arcane ways and seem as wildly illogical as the consequences of a magic spell.
I recognize that there are at least two possibilities here. Either there is a natural process that is triggered by devastating environmental perils, one by which various of the imperiled are forced along a fast evolutionary track, crocodiles evolving into men, men into...some speculative form; or else my subconscious has constructed this entire scenario as a mechanism of penance and punishment for my self-perceived crimes, and the patch of fiery, cataclysmic red--to which I draw nearer each Saturday--promises the ultimate in transformations. A rationalist would favor the second possibility, but then of all humankind, rationalists are the most vulnerable to the effects of magic, the most confounded by the magical expressions of nature. As for me, I have no opinion, I am content to wait and learn, to have patience, to ask no questions, to accept what comes. For though you may not understand how this story ends, whether love is disproved by death, whether truth is revelatory or merely deductive, whether life itself is an elastic energy, a pure informality with the infinite potential of a charm, or a sad interlude enclosed by black brackets, one way or the other, I will soon know for certain.
ILLUSTRATION (BLACK & WHITE)
~~~~~~~~
By Lucius Shepard
Lucius Shepard's first F&SF story, "Solitario's Eyes," was the cover story for our September 1983 issue. Throughout the 1980s, we had the good fortune to publish many of his lush and lyrical stories -- "The Night of White Bhairab," "Salvador," "The Jaguar Hunter," and "The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule," to name a few. His last appearance here was "The Ends of the Earth" ten years ago and it's awfully nice to welcome him back with this herpetologist's tale.
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