We named, enunciated, and made meaningful moues in my hand-held mirror. Helen, to her credit, did not lose interest. Because I had not shaved since moving into New Helensburgh, she had never seen my mirror before. It was a circle of glass in an aluminum frame, and she immersed herself in its silver flatteries as a swan immerses itself in water. Each word I shaped was a new excuse to go gliding on her own reflection. Sometimes, indeed, she got so far from our mutual purpose that I despaired of pulling her back. She liked the way she looked, and she had never mistaken her image in the glass for that of a two-dimensional stranger trapped inside the mirror’s imprisoning frame.
Helen—as if I required further evidence of the fact—was self-aware. My mirror, a miracle, had simply given her a chance to walk on the waters of her self-awareness. I tried to get her to say the word.
“Mwah,” she responded. “Mwah.”
Because she could not simultaneously hold the mirror and preen in its tiny window, she made me hold it for her. Repeating her disappointing approximation of “mirror,” she loosened the bandanna I had tied about her neck and lifted it over her nose and lips. For a brief moment, then, she was an Islamic lady proclaiming the privilege and the pain of purdah. Then, hoisting it upward, Helen transformed the bandanna into a blindfold, through whose misaligned threads she disingenuously peered at herself. Up and down the bandanna went, becoming in the process a mammy scarf, a pair of earmuffs, and even a masquerader’s polka-dotted domino.
“Say ‘bandanna,’ ” I urged my bride. “ ‘Ban-DAN-nuh.’ ”
“Bwaduh,” Helen said.
At that moment, trying to keep her bobbing face in the glass, I imagined myself the progenitor of an Ur-Swahili dialect whose descendant tongues would one day be spoken in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and Zarakal. Mwah and bwaduh—along with Ai, mai, and yooh—were precious little upon which to base such a fantasy, I realize, but it seemed to me then that Helen and I were making progress. Frustratingly slow progress, but progress nevertheless. I did not want to give up too soon.
According to Jeannette, I had not spoken my first recognizable word until I was well past two. Helen was far older than two, of course, but she had been exposed to bits and pieces of a comprehensive linguistic system only intermittently since my arrival. With our auspicious beginning (five “words” in as many days) as a base, given ten or twelve years, Helen might well acquire a real oratorical competence.
By the afternoon of our fifth day of language lessons, Helen’s five-word vocabulary seemed a historic accomplishment. I had not tried to teach her either my name or hers for fear she would ascribe to each an encompassing generic connotation, Joshua becoming “man” and Helen “woman.” Too, I had begun to feel a trifle guilty about having bestowed upon her the name of Thomas Babington Mubia’s favorite wife. Or maybe about the fact that for most Westerners this name apotheosizes a standard of feminine beauty having nothing to do with my lady’s primeval negritude. Our earliest vocabularies corrupt, and what I had learned in the household of Jeannette Rivenbark Monegal had of course influenced—i.e., corrupted—my vision of the world. As for my first name, believing that Helen would be unable to pronounce it, I never spoke it aloud for her.
“Mai mwah,” said Helen when we broke for late-afternoon communion with the other Minids on the fifth day. “Mai mwah.”
She had the mirror—her mirror, she had just called it—and before I could retrieve if from her, she left our hut to clamber along a winding parapet of stone to the hilltop where the other Minids were gathered. The old man Jomo was sitting in the shade of the only tree up there, a fig tree, while his consort Guinevere searched his back for lice.
Helen shoved the mirror under Jomo’s nose. This act affected him as if she had peeled off his rubbery face and slapped him with it. He reared back, threw an arm around Guinevere, and stared at Helen aghast. I tried to grab the mirror away from Helen, but she murmured, “Mai mwah,” and rebuffed me. Jomo, recovering, eased the mirror from Helen’s hand and bemusedly ogled his own flat features. Guinevere peered over his shoulder.
Other Minids began to gather, adults and children alike. Now that he no longer feared it, Jomo was jealous of his new possession. He had trouble ignoring the press of curious onlookers, many of whom squatted behind or to one side of him and extended their hands palm upward in patient entreaty. I stood aside and watched. Everyone wanted a moment with the mirror. Possession being nine-tenths of the law, no one moved to snatch the mirror from Jomo, but no one ceased begging, either. Even Alfie had squeezed into a forward position beneath the fig tree.
A slippery portion of himself in hand, Jomo devoured this delicacy while the others appealed to his better instincts for a taste of the same. How could he continue to refuse such a well-mannered plea? In fact, he could not. At last Jomo turned aside from Alfie and surrendered the mirror to his aged comrade Ham, who hunkered with his back to the tree trunk.
To demonstrate to himself the plastic amiability of the goon in the glass, Ham grabbed his nose, blinked his eyes, and tugged his earlobes. A dozen palms wobbled within a foot of his face, stoically demanding their turns, and finally Ham, like Jomo before him, gave in to community pressure. He passed the shaving mirror to Dilsey.
Despite his status as chieftain, Alfie was temporarily odd man out, for Dilsey handed the glass to Odetta, who relinquished it to her toddler manchild Zippy, who grew bored in a matter of seconds and let it slip into the clutches of the effervescent adolescent Mister Pibb, who yielded it to Roosevelt, who, perhaps in remembrance of our previous exchange of gifts, passed the fragile compact to me. Alfie, by now, was looking on with a lugubriousness that almost corralled my sympathy. However, I tore my gaze away, cried, “Wait here—I’ll be right back,” and hurried down the hillside to my hut. A moment later I was back among the Minids with an aerosol bomb of Colgate lime-scented shaving cream.
The habilines watched awe-stricken as I meringued my face with the shaving cream and then mischievously flicked lather hither and yon to witness their reactions. Horrified to see the lower half of my face foaming away, Bonzo and Gipper covered their eyes while the other youngsters gaped like spectators at an automobile wreck. Malcolm and Ham nervously palpated their own cheeks and chins to assure themselves the phenomenon was not contagious. Gibbering or singing, the womenfolk huddled against their mates for warmth or consolation. Helen, however, withdrew a good twenty feet, squatted on her heels, and put her arms around her knees.
Alfie sidled near. He extended his palm, a plea for my attention. I lifted the can of shaving cream and squirted a ball of foam into Alfie’s hand. He flinched but did not scuttle for safety.
Sniff, sniff.
The pungent scent of limes. This implied, even for a habiline, edibility. Seduced by the fragrance, Alfie tasted.
Pfaugh!
He spat out the offending foam and wiped his hand on the ground. Then his palm came up again, and I willingly gave him the aerosol bomb.
Suspiciously delighted, Alfie located the trigger atop the can and spilled into being between his feet a shin-high marshmallow monument. His thumb came up, and he and the Minids contemplated the result. Everyone was impressed, even the architect. He carried the can to the fig tree and put an epaulet of foam on Emily’s shoulder. When she fled from his ministrations, scolding him for decorating her, Alfie turned on Daddy Ham and bearded the old man with a snowy dab. Guinevere knocked the can from Alfie’s grasp and kicked it between his legs to Malcolm, who, fielding it as gracefully as Maury Wills sucking up a grounder on the second hop, underhanded it to Fred. Fred festooned Mister Pibb with a rope of foam and vaulted into the fig tree. Alfie, Roosevelt, and Mister Pibb pursued him aloft. While the remaining Minids hooted at these inept brachiators, I went to Helen, lifted her to her feet, and led her back down the hillside to our tent.
By this diversion I had saved my mirror.
Looking over my shoulder, I saw the branches of the fig tree dripping with boas of evocative whiteness, almost as if it had sno
wed in this arid equatorial region of prehistoric Zarakal. A moment later the Minids came charging into New Helensburgh after us, releasing fluorocarbons into the Pleistocene atmosphere and plastering the cracks in our hut with shaving cream.
All that night the odor of decaying limes hung in the air, scenting our citadel, and in the morning the lumps of lather decorating our huts had taken on the honeycombed appearance of bleached and abandoned wasp nests. As for the can of shaving cream, I found it a day or two later in the branches of a small euphorbia bush at the bottom of the hill. Just as I had led Genly into accidental suicide, I had led his compatriots into the temptations of littering and aerosol warfare. C’est la vie.
* * *
Helen and I kept up our language lessons. The mirror, which earlier had enabled me to confirm the forward placement of her reproductive organs, continued to prove a valuable aid. Unfortunately, its principal value lay in maintaining Helen’s interest, for she could not properly shape the words I tried to teach her, and her acquisition of an English vocabulary had stalled at ten or eleven words. Love, if you do not count pronouns, was the only abstract term among this number, but whether she recognized its possibilities as a verb, too, I am not yet ready to declare. She could parrot a sentence I had taught her containing this word, however, and I have often consoled myself on melancholy nights by pretending that she knew exactly what she was doing.
The sentence?
Why, “I love you,” of course. I do not record it as Helen actually pronounced it because such a transcription would give the sentence a comic cast. Although I am not totally without humor regarding my relationship with Helen, in this instance I do not like to provoke your laughter. All of us cherish certain memories, and Helen’s distinctive phrasing of the words “I love you” is one of mine.
Chapter Seventeen
Pensacola, Florida
July 1985
JOSHUA CAREERED THROUGH FIVE O’CLOCK TRAFFIC on his battered red Kawasaki, leaning first this way and then that, the beach a stinging blur of whiteness to his left and, when too many automobiles and campers blocked the asphalt, the sandy right-hand shoulder of the highway—his private corridor to Pensacola. He was dirty, sweat- and paint-stained, but if he tried to stop by the trailer for a change of clothes and a bite to eat, he would probably miss Blair’s arrival at the auditorium. He had to get there not merely in time to hear the Great Man’s opening remarks, but early enough to waylay him outside the building and let him know that Blair was not the only expert on East African Pleistocene ecology in the Florida panhandle. Joshua Kampa—a.k.a. John-John Monegal—was another, an expert with no formal training but a great deal of eyewitness experience. Indeed, he had convinced himself that his entire previous life had been pointing him toward this meeting with Blair.
Alistair Patrick Blair, the noted hominid paleontologist from the African state of Zarakal.
Weaving in and out of traffic, Joshua repeated the name almost as if it were an incantation, a mantra: Alistair Patrick Blair, Alistair Patrick Blair, Alistair Patrick Blair . . . By repeating the name to himself he convinced himself of the reality of the man’s visit and of the inevitability of his meeting Blair. The chant emptied his mind of every distraction, every possible impediment to his goal. The Kawasaki, at the bidding of some implacable Higher Power, was directing itself to Pensacola. . . .
Three days ago Joshua had read in the News-Journal that Blair was going to speak tonight at one of the local high schools. To raise funds for his researches at Lake Kiboko in the Northwest Frontier District of Zarakal, he was in the United States under the auspices of the American Geographic Foundation for a series of public lectures. This stop in Pensacola, a city not on his original itinerary, was reputedly owing to his friendship with an American military man who had once visited the Lake Kiboko digs with a contingent from the United States embassy in Marakoi, Zarakal’s capital. Whatever the rationale, Alistair Patrick Blair was in northern Florida, almost within shouting distance even now, and soon he and Joshua would be face to face on the walkway outside the auditorium.
After all, how often did a world-renowned authority on human evolution—not to mention Zarakal’s only white cabinet minister—condescend to show his slides and deliver his spiel to an audience of Escambia Countians? Never before, the paper had said. Blair had visited Miami before, but never Pensacola, and Joshua shot toward this rendezvous like a madman.
For twelve years, ever since he had begun to record his spirit-traveling episodes on tape, Joshua had read and thoroughly digested every book about Pleistocene East Africa, paleoanthropological research, and human taxonomy that he could lay his hands on. In most of these tomes Blair was mentioned as the coequal of all the most prominent fossil hunters and cataloguers to emerge after World War I, and only last year the Great Man had consolidated this position, at least in popular terms, by being the host of the controversial television series Beginnings. Who better than Alistair Patrick Blair, then, to answer Joshua’s questions, the questions of one who had actually visited the temporal landscapes that Blair’s work attempted to reconstruct? Why, no one. No one but the Zarakali paleoanthropologist was likely to confirm the legitimacy of Joshua’s dreams.
He arrived at the school nearly an hour ahead of time and sat on his bike at a point on the broad, palm-lined boulevard from which he could clearly see both of the doors by which Blair would be likely to enter the auditorium. His plan would be foiled only if the Great Man was already inside. Surely that was not possible. Blair’s time was too valuable to spend exercising his vocal cords with local school officials in an un-air-conditioned building. He would arrive from elsewhere, probably under escort.
The school’s parking lot began to fill, and people in loose-fitting summer clothes clustered in groups beneath the breezeway fronting the auditorium. Joshua’s digital watch said 7:43. Seventeen more minutes. Twilight was congealing. From the pocket of his fatigue pants Joshua removed a small notepad. On its topmost sheet he wrote his name, address, and telephone number. Then, beneath the telephone number, he drew a tiny, five-fingered hand and blackened its interior—except for a stylized eye in the very center of the palm—with hurried crosshatchings. A signature from his childhood, one that he believed altogether appropriate to his impending encounter with Alistair Patrick Blair. He tore the sheet from the notepad, wiped his sweaty hands on his ribbed T-shirt, and folded his message to the paleontologist with care. Many of the people arriving at the school for Blair’s talk stared at him, and he suddenly understood why.
A gnomish black man in dirty clothes sitting on a Japanese-made motorbike and fluttering a piece of paper between his fingers as if to dry it. He did not look very much like your typical paleontology buff, and his presence near the school was probably vaguely threatening to some of these people. A security guard in the auditorium’s breezeway—a heavyset black man—kept giving him the eye, too.
Five minutes later an old Cadillac convertible—a species of automobile so rare these days that Joshua could hardly believe this one existed—pulled up to the auditorium’s side door. Even in the thickening dusk, Blair was a recognizable figure in the convertible’s back seat. Joshua knew him by his high, tanned forehead; his dramatic white mustachios; and, his trademark on tour, a loose-fitting cotton shirt embroidered with tribal designs. Joshua kicked his bike to life and gunned it across the boulevard to the sidewalk parallel to the parked Cadillac. He put himself between the convertible and the steps leading up to the auditorium’s side door.
“Excuse me, sir. Excuse me, Dr. Blair. I’ve got to talk to you.”
The other man in the back seat—an Air Force colonel in a wrinkled summer uniform—half rose to scrutinize Joshua. “If you’ve got a ticket, young man, you can—”
“I’m going to buy one at the door.”
“Good. That’s the way to do it. You can hear Dr. Blair talk without presuming upon his time out here.”
“But I—”
“Come on, now. Move that contraption. He
’s got a program to deliver, and you’re holding us up.”
Joshua pulled away from the convertible, stationed his bike under one of the palms lining the sidewalk, and darted back through the crowd to intercept the paleontologist on his way into the building. Before anyone could screen him off from Blair or scold him for his unmannerliness, he thrust his message into the Great Man’s hand and hurried back down the steps to the sidewalk.
“Don’t throw that away!” he called. “Keep it, sir! Keep it!”
Blair glanced down at him curiously, touched his brow with the slip of folded paper, and, to the admonitory murmurs of the Air Force colonel and a second escort in civilian clothes, disappeared through the door at the top of the steps.
* * *
Inside, Joshua took up a position against the auditorium’s eastern wall. His heart was pounding. Blair and his companions had probably believed him a political activist, possibly one of the opponents of the controversial arrangement whereby the United States had funded, built, and acquired access to a pair of modern military facilities on Zarakali soil, a naval base at Bravanumbi on the Indian Ocean, and an air base in the desert interior. Global politics was not on Joshua’s mind, however; he wanted to survive the evening and exchange a few words in private with the paleontologist. He was beginning to be sorry that he had not taken the time to change clothes and eat. Most of those in the metal folding chairs on the auditorium’s hardwood floor—during the school year, a basketball court—were either pointedly ignoring him or trying to figure out where he had stowed his broom.
No Enemy But Time Page 17
