What is the What

by Dave Eggers

  When I first came to this country, I would tell silent stories. I would tell them to people who had wronged me. If someone cut in front of me in line, ignored me, bumped me or pushed me, I would glare at them, staring, silently hissing a story to them. You do not understand, I would tell them. You would not add to my suffering if you knew what I have seen. And until that person left my sight, I would tell them about Deng, who died after eating elephant meat, nearly raw, or about Ahok and Awach Ugieth, twin sisters who were carried off by Arab horsemen and, if they are still alive today, have by now borne children by those men or whomever they sold them to. Do you have any idea? Those innocent twins likely remember nothing about me or our town or to whom they were born. Can you imagine this? When I was finished talking to that person I would continue my stories, talking to the air, the sky, to all the people of the world and whoever might be listening in heaven. It is wrong to say that I used to tell these stories. I still do, and not only to those I feel have wronged me. The stories emanate from me all the time I am awake and breathing, and I want everyone to hear them. Written words are rare in small villages like mine, and it is my right and obligation to send my stories into the world, even if silently, even if utterly powerless.

  I see only the profile of this boy’s head, and he is not so different than I was at his age. I do not want to diminish whatever is happening or has happened in his life. Surely his years have not been idyllic; he is currently an accomplice to an armed robbery and is staying up much of the night guarding its victim. I will not speculate about what he is or is not being taught at school and at home. Unlike many of my fellow Africans, I don’t take offense at the fact that many young people here in the United States know little about the lives of contemporary Africans. For every young person who is ill informed about such things, though, there are many who know a great deal and have respect for what we face on the continent. And of course, what did I know about the world before high school in Kakuma? I knew nothing. I did not know of the existence of Kenya until I set foot in it.

  Look at you, TV Boy, settling into that kitchen chair like it was some kind of bed.

  He is using a trio of towels from our closet as a blanket, leaving his small pink toes exposed. I try not to compare his life to mine, but his crouched posture reminds me too much of the way we slept en route to Ethiopia. No doubt if you have heard of the Lost Boys of Sudan, you have heard of the lions. For a long while, the stories of our encounters with lions helped garner sympathy from our sponsors and our adopted country in general. The lions enhanced the newspaper articles and no doubt played a part in the U.S. being interested in us in the first place. But despite the growing doubts of the more cynical, the strangest thing about these accounts is that they were in most cases true. As the hundreds of boys in my own group were walking through Sudan, five of us were taken by lions.

  The first incident was two weeks into our walk. The sounds of the open forest at night were beginning to make us crazy. Some could not walk at night any more; there were too many noises, each a possible end of life. We walked through narrow paths in the bush and we felt hunted. When we had had homes and families, we never walked through the forest at night because small people were eaten by animals without any fanfare. But now we were walking away from our homes, our families. We walked in a line of boys, hundreds together, many of us naked, all of us defenseless. In the forest, we boys were food. We walked through forests and through grasslands, through desert country and through the greener regions of southern Sudan, where the earth was often wet beneath our feet.

  I remember the first boy who was taken. We were walking single-file, as we always did, and Deng was holding my shirt from behind as he always did. He and I walked in the middle of the line, for we had decided that this was safest. The night was bright, a half-moon high above us. Deng and I had watched it rise, first red then orange and yellow and then white and finally silver as it settled at the uppermost point of the dome of the sky. The grass was high on either side of us as we walked and the night was quieter than most. We first heard the shuffling. It was loud. There was an animal or person moving through the grass near our line, and we continued to walk, for we always continued to walk. When boys yelled out in the night, the eldest among us—Dut Majok, our leader, for better and worse, no more than eighteen or twenty—rebuked them with quick ferocity. Calling out in the night was forbidden, for it brought unwanted attention to the group. Sometimes a message—this boy was injured, this boy has collapsed—could be sent up the line, whispered from one boy to another, until the message reached Dut. But this night, Deng and I assumed that everyone knew about the shuffling in the grass and had decided that this shuffling was common and not a threat.

  Soon the sounds in the grass grew louder. Sticks broke. Grass crashed and then went quiet as the creature sped and slowed, running up and down along the line of us. The sounds were with the group for some time. The moon was high when the movement in the grass began and the moon had begun to fall and dim when the shuffling finally stopped.

  The lion was a simple black silhouette, broad shoulders, its thick legs outstretched, its mouth open. It jumped from the grass, knocked a boy from his feet. I could not see this part, my vision obscured by the line of boys in front of me. I heard a brief wail. Then I saw the lion clearly again as it trotted to the other side of the path, the boy neatly in its jaws. The animal and its prey disappeared into the high grass and the wailing stopped in a moment. That first boy’s name was Ariath.

  —Sit down! Dut yelled.

  We sat as if the wind had knocked us all down, one by one, from the front of the line to the back. One boy, I remember his name as Angelo, he ran. He thought it was better to run from the lion than to sit, so he ran into the high grass. This is when I saw the lion again. The animal broke across the path once more, leaping, it caught Angelo quickly. In a few moments the lion carried the second boy in his mouth, his teeth settled into Angelo’s neck and clavicle. He brought this boy to where he had deposited Ariath.

  We heard whimpers but soon the the grass was quiet.

  Dut Majok stood for some time. He could not decide if we should walk or sit. A tall boy, Kur Garang Kur, the oldest next to Dut, crawled down the line to Dut, and spoke into his ear. Dut nodded. It was decided that we should continue walking, and we did. It was then that Kur became the principal advisor to Dut Majok, and the leader of the line of boys when Dut would disappear for days at a time. Thank God for Kur; without him we would have lost many more boys, to lions and bombs and thirst.

  After the lions, we did not want to stop that night. We were not tired, we said, and could walk until dawn. But Dut said sleep was necessary. He sensed there were government army soldiers in the area; we needed to sleep and learn more in the morning about our whereabouts. We believed nothing Dut said because many of us blamed him for the deaths of Angelo and Ariath. Ignoring our complaints, he gathered us into a clearing and told us to sleep. But for some time, though we had walked since sunrise, no boy could close his eyes. Deng and I sat up, staring into the grass, watching for movement, listening for the pushing or breaking of sticks.

  No boy turned his back to the tall grasses. We sat spine to spine, in pairs, so we could warn each other of predators. Soon we were a circle, and those of us who slept, did so with our bodies radiating from the center. I found a place in the middle of the circle and made myself as comfortable as possible. Meanwhile, the boys on the outside of the circle were trying to move into the middle. No one wanted to be at the edge.

  I awoke in the night and found I was no longer at the center. I was cold, connected to no one. I looked around, only to find the circle had moved. As I had been sleeping, the boys outside were moving to the inside, so much that the circle had migrated twenty feet to my left, leaving me outside and alone. So I moved back into the middle, accidentally stepping on Deng’s hand. Deng slapped my ankle, shot me a look of disapproval, but then went back to sleep. I settled in among the boys and closed my eyes, determined to never a
gain be left outside the circle of sleep.

  Each night of our walk, TV Boy, sleep was a problem. Whenever I woke in the dark hours I saw other eyes open, mouths whispering prayers. I tried to forget these sounds and faces and I closed my eyes and thought of home. I had to bring forth my favorite memories and piece together the best of days. This was a method taught to me by Dut, who knew that we boys would walk better, would complain less and require less maintenance if we had slept properly. Imagine your favorite morning! he yelled to us. He was always barking, always bursting with energy. Now your favorite lunch! Your favorite afternoon! Your favorite game of soccer, your favorite evening, the girl you love most! He said this while walking along our line of sitting boys, talking to our heads. Now create in your mind the best of days, and memorize these details, place this day center in your mind, and when you are the most frightened, bring forth this day and place yourself within it. Run through this day and I assure you that before you are finished with your dream-breakfast, you will be asleep. As unconvincing as it sounds, TV Boy, I tell you, this method works. It slows your breathing, it focuses your mind. I still remember the day I made, the best of days, stitched together from so many. I will tell it to you in a way you will understand. It is my day, not yours. It is the day I memorized and the day I still feel more vividly than any here in Atlanta.

  CHAPTER 4

  I am six years old, and am required to spend a few hours of each day in a pre-elementary class in the one-room school of Marial Bai. I am here with other boys of my age-set, those within a few years of me, older and younger, learning the alphabet in English and Arabic. The school is tolerable, is not yet tedious, but I would rather be outside, so my dream-day begins when I arrive for school and it is canceled. You are too brilliant! the teacher says, and orders us home, to play and make of the day whatever we wish.

  I go home to see my mother, who I left only twenty minutes earlier. I sense that she misses me. My mother is my father’s first wife, and she lives in the family compound with his other five wives, with whom she is friendly, even sisterly. They are all my mothers, TV Boy, as odd as that sounds. Very young children in southern Sudan are very often unsure who the birth mother is, so integrated are the wives and their children. In my family, the children borne by all six women play together and are considered family without barrier or reservation. My mother is one of the mid-wives of the village, and has aided in the delivery of all but one of my siblings. My brothers and sisters are as old as sixteen and as young as six months, and our compound is full of the sounds of babies, their screams and their laughs. When I am asked to, I help with the infants, carrying them when they wail, drying their wet clothes near the fire.

  I run from the school and sit next to my mother as she repairs a basket partially chewed by one of our goats. I spend a long moment contemplating her beauty. She is taller than most women, at least six feet, and though she is as thin as any woman in the village, she is as strong as any man. She dresses bravely, always in the most glorious yellows and reds and greens, but she favors yellow, a certain yellow dress, the pregnant yellow of a setting sun. I can see her across any land or through any brush, can see her from as far away as my eyes can penetrate: I have only to look for the swishing column of yellow, moving toward me across the field, to know my mother is coming. I often thought I would like nothing better than to live forever under her dress, clinging to her smooth legs, feeling her long fingers resting on the back of my neck.

  —What are you staring at, Achak? she asks, laughing at me, using my given name, the name I used until it was overtaken by nicknames in Ethiopia and Kakuma, so many names.

  I am frequently caught watching my mother, and am caught this time, too. She shoos me off to play with my friends, and so I run to the giant acacia to find William K and Moses. They are under the twisting acacia near the airstrip, where the ostriches scream and chase the dogs.

  Moses was strong, TV Boy, bigger than I was, bigger than you, with muscles carved like a man’s, and across his cheek a half-circle scar, a dull pink color, where he’d cut himself running through a thorn bush. William K was smaller, thinner, with a huge mouth that never stopped filling the air with whatever he could think of. He spent every day, from when he woke on, crowding the sky with his thoughts and opinions and, more than anything else, his lies, for William K liked to lie a great deal. He made up stories about people and the objects he possessed or wanted to possess, the things he had seen and heard and that his uncle, an MP, had heard while traveling. His uncle had seen people who had the legs of a crocodile, women who could leap over buildings. His favorite subject of fabrications was William A, the other William in our age-set and so forever the arch-enemy of William K. William K didn’t like having the same name as anyone else, and thought, I suppose, that if he harassed the other William enough, he might renounce his name or simply leave town.

  Today, in the day I conjure when I need to, William K is in the middle of a story when I arrive at the acacia.

  —He drinks his milk straight from the udder. Did you know that? You get diseases that way. That’s how you get ringworm. Speaking of ringworm, William A’s father is part dog. Did you know that?

  Moses and I don’t pay William K much attention, hoping he’ll tire himself out. This does not happen this day; it never happens. Silence only alerts William K that more words and sounds are needed from the dark, endless cavity of his mouth.

  —I guess having the same name should bother me but I don’t have to worry because he won’t be in my grade next year. Did you hear that he’s retarded? He is. He’s got the brain of a cat. He won’t be in our school next year. He’s got to stay home with his sisters. That’s what happens when you drink milk from the udder.

  In a few years, when they’re circumcised and ready, Moses and William K will be sent to the cattle camps with the other boys, to learn to care for the livestock, beginning with goats and graduating to cattle. My older brothers, Arou, Garang, and Adim, are at the cattle camp on this dream-day; it is a place with great appeal to boys: at cattle camp, the boys are unsupervised, and as long as they tend the cattle, they can sleep where they want and can do as they please. But I was being groomed as a businessman to learn my father’s trade and to eventually take over the operation of the shops in Marial Bai and Aweil.

  Moses is shaping a cow from clay while William K and I watch. Many boys and some young men took cow-shaping as a hobby, but the practice does not intrigue me or William K. My interest in the activity is passive, but William K cannot ever see the point. He can’t see the pleasure in making the cows or in keeping them in the hollow of the willow, which is where Moses has stored dozens since he’d begun shaping them a few years earlier.

  —Why do you bother? William K asks.—They break so easily.

  —They don’t. Not always, Moses says quietly, still deeply immersed in the task of forming his cow’s horns, long and twisting.—I’ve had these for months. He nods his head to a small group of clay cattle a few feet away, standing crookedly in the dirt.

  —But they can break, William K says.

  —Not really, Moses says.

  —Sure they can. Watch.

  And with that, William K steps on one of the cows, crushing it into dust.

  —See?

  The word is barely out of his mouth when Moses is upon him, punching William K’s head, flailing at him with his thick arms. William K at first is giggling, but his mirth disappears when Moses lands a mighty punch to William K’s eye. William K squeals with pain and frustration, and immediately the tone and tenor of his wrestling changes. In a flurry he is atop Moses and lands three quick blows to Moses’s arms—crossed in front of his face—before I pull him off.

  In my dream day our scuffle is interrupted by the sight of a something so bright we all have to squint to see it. We rise slowly from the dirt and walk toward the market. Light shoots from the trunk of a tree in the market, near Bok’s restaurant, and we sleepwalk toward it, our mouths agape. Only as we are upon the
source of light we can see that it’s not some second sun but is actually a bicycle, absolutely new, polished to a gleam, magnificent.

  Where did it come from? Who owns it? It is easily the most spectacular object in all of Marial Bai. Its pedals are the silver of the stars, its handlebars exquisitely shaped. The color of the frame is different from any color previously seen in town, a mixture of blue and green and white, swirled together as in the deepest part of a river.

  Jok notices us admiring the bicycle and comes to bask in the glow.

  —Nice bike, right? he says.

  Jok Nyibek Arou, the owner of the town’s tailor shop, has just purchased the bicycle from an Arab trader from over the river, in a truck full of very new and impressive objects, most of them mechanically complex—clocks, bed frames made of steel, a teapot with a top that springs open, on its own, when the water is boiling.

  —Cost me quite a bit of money, boys. We don’t doubt him for a moment.

  —Would you like to see me ride it? he asks.

  We nod gravely.

  Then Jok gets on the bike, as gingerly as if he were mounting a mule made of glass, and begins to push the pedals with such care that he barely keeps himself vertical. The other men of the market, happy for Jok and jealous of him and also wanting a joke or two at his expense, greet his very slow rides with a string of insults and rhetorical questions. Jok answers each very calmly.