Another Kind of Madness

by Ed Pavlić

  –Your itinerary to the edge of beyond. You tell me your flight. Francis, my sister’s driver, will pick you at NBO. That’s the airport, Nairobi.

  –OK.

  –Sarah will be with him. She’s been keen to meet you, “the piano man.” She sends love. They’ll have a phone for you. You pay them $150. The phone will be charged with enough Ksh to call Jupiter. All set. They’ll take you to the train station. You could fly but two flights is enough. The train to the coast is a colonial-era relic. It’ll be a proper adventure. You’ll love it. You can lie down, relax. First-class is cheap, a few thousand bob. When you get off the train in Mombasa, ask for directions to the Blue Room. Write that down on the card. The Blue Room. Straight down Selassie from the station to Turkana. Everyone knows it. You can ask.

  Kima sipped his whiskey and pointed to the card.

  –Call Su, that’s her number, she’ll pick you up. You can stay with Su in Nyali till you’re unjetlagged, till you’ve made friends with the heat, then off to the edge of beyond. I say take a boat, or you can fly, the roads north of Malindi aren’t a good idea for mzungus. Don’t worry. It’s set. You’re good-good. The place will swallow you.

  –Mzungu?

  Kima looked at Shame and laughed. He put his left hand on Shame’s shoulder and twirled his index finger in the air outside his right ear.

  –That’s you, my brother!

  Detainment has its own grammar. In the precinct, Shame heard Man Two laugh outside the door. Then there was silence. He stared at his wallet on the table, untouched. Pieces of his life had come loose inside his body. A drop of sweat ran a wire of pain. A reaction had begun: the city gone centrifugal. Unlike the cinema in his brain blazing away in its shadows, this reaction was no movie. The cinema beckoned. Shame’s brain commanded, “Watch me think about it.” He refused. He trained his mind: table, chair, cuffs, scab. There was no time here; “when” meant “if.” If meant something unwritten on a facedown page. So he sat. He pretended he wasn’t spinning in the black sky of the yellow room.

  It couldn’t have been too long, though it might have been a week. Man Two entered the room by himself. It was the first time he’d come in without his partner. Shame guessed they were partners. He was wrong. Man Two carried a manila envelope. Shame remembered when he was little. He called them vanilla envelopes. He stopped remembering. His mouth felt like it was full of salt water, or sulfur, like swallowing would be fatal. The reaction had begun. Shame knew the rest would happen almost without him. He’d sit this out and watch the movie later.

  Shame feared that he’d spit on the man if he leaned close enough. That the hate, dislodged, would act on its own. He’d seen that happen to people, he’d seen people happen to themselves, to each other. His pulse was either racing or his heart had left the building. He couldn’t tell. The hate tasted like salt, an adrenaline shot in the heart, a brass hatpin through the tongue. Shame’s mind told him that the folder was empty: “Man Two is full of shit. Fuck him.”

  When Man Two sat down he placed the folder to his far right. During the preceding episodes, he had stood at the back of the room and watched. Shame had thought Man Two was white, like his partner. A breeze blew past behind Shame’s eyes, the memory of people saying that to him. Apologies, “Man, my bad, I thought you were white.” The conversation he didn’t need to hear when he got up and left a table: “Do you know, up till just now, I mean at first, I thought he was white?” Up close Shame saw that Man Two had eyes haunted by cats. He had sharp, spearmint eyes. His voice was low-pitched with a Southern song lost somewhere in it. He leaned forward on the table.

  –I don’t know who the fuck you are and I don’t know who you’re not. Tell you the truth I really don’t want to know. But you real popular, my brother. The sergeant wants me to show you these … these pho-tos. They’re not from this precinct so I don’t know what the fuck they’re doing here. And guess what, between us, I don’t want to know that either. Same as you, a coincidence. You and me, we just co-incidents.

  – …

  –Now, don’t talk. I mean don’t say shit. Till I ask you something. That’s the game. OK?

  –OK.

  –It’s like blackjack. I deal. Do you play cards?

  –No.

  –Me neither, I hate cards.

  Man Two slowly opened the folder with his left hand and slid the top photo onto the open flap. While sliding the photo over, he twisted his arm so his elbow and thumb pointed at Shame and he rotated the photo 180 degrees as he moved it into position. Man Two did this with a deliberate ceremony. The photo was now right-side up, facing Shame.

  –One Pren-tice Wright. DOA. Now, Mr. Wright must either have been very stupid or real sleepy. Because, do you know, he leaned his head back against the headrest of his Range Rover—nice too, brown leather, Bose system, V-8—while someone had a gun against, you know, right here, against the base of his skull. Dig it.

  Now, Man Two covers the first photo with one taken at profile.

  –Point blank. One shot. Bullet went through the sun visor mirror and hasn’t been recovered. We’re guessing it’s a special bullet, carbide tip. Forty-six shootings that we know of last weekend. Eight dead. Probably half of them between here and where this happened. And now here you are. And now the lieutenant insists I show you pictures of this? I’m going to guess that you’re going to say you don’t know nothing about all this, which is the fuck fine with me, my man, ’cause, like I said, I don’t want to know either. Am I right? OK, that’s a question.

  Shame paused. He searched for the breath he needed to speak.

  –Yes. I’ve seen him. Don’t know him. Didn’t know about the killing till now.

  –Hey, I believe it! I’d show you the rest of these, but I think you get the point. Did I say his hat didn’t even fall off his head? Nice too, brown suede. Driving cap. So, there, you know, like the kids say, “Everythang’s Gucci.”

  Man Two left the room. He left Shame with a new movie to watch. He still refused to look at the screen of his brain. He has no idea how long he sat there refusing to let his eyes reel, mind averted from itself. Then Man One came back in the room and uncuffed Shame. One last dare: Man One strolled slowly the long way around the table leaving his gun within Shame’s reach. Shame stared at the gun, he didn’t move. Then Man One picked up the pistol and fit it into the Velcro holster under his arm. He took Shame’s wallet and walked to the door. Then he turned and threw it at him. The wallet hit the center of Shame’s chest and fell like a dead bird in his lap. Man One:

  –Get the fuck out of here.

  At Echoes in Lamu Town, Shame had told Kate he was a traveler, but he knew that wasn’t really true. He’d been a worker and a kind of burrower. This was on his mind during the late afternoon as he walked the inland path over rock and sand, past clumps of trees that twisted their limbs together against the wind. They made near-visible moves, each one attempting to use the shade of the other. Time-lapse footage of such small groves, he imagined, would look like a judo tournament of fakes, blocks, and pivots. Here and there the groves had encased ruins of stone structures, which were held up as they were taken apart by vines and roots.

  The immediate problem: What to do with the Danish puzzle box he was carrying in his backpack? The second—illegal—pack of hundreds he’d brought from Chicago. He took it on a hunch, or maybe just to give himself a distraction from the stark fact of his leaving. The second problem: What was he? What was he going to be during this indefinite period of limbo? He had no experience being in places for no reason. With these questions playing in his mind like the contest between trees in the groves for shade, he kept walking. He passed around the back of the Peponi Hotel, a boutique luxury hotel with a conspicuous dose of Italian futurism in its past. In its present, it was half-occupied even though dry season was peak tourist season. Somali militia had stormed the hotel one night the year before and kidnapped three French guests. Stormed? The security guards had been undisturbed, leading to a wave of suspicion and
paranoia among the foreigners on the island.

  According to Muhammad, word around the suya stand was that an undisclosed ransom of undisclosed origin had been paid via M-Pesa. CNN International had reported a daring, successful commando raid that had freed the hostages and resulted in the unavoidable deaths of the kidnappers. Word was, on a Friday night, a few of those slain Somalis and a few of the US and French security contractors could be found spending their respective loot of undisclosed origin at Bentley’s, the only public bar in the all-Muslim town. Shame hadn’t been there yet. But he could imagine the Somali “militia” men and their hulky, sun-reddened foes reclined in adjacent lounge areas taking in the night breeze through the open windows. The Americans smoking hookahs and drinking beers, the Somalis drinking juice and chewing khat with sticks of Juicy Fruit, both fencing with the rapaciously friendly female “students” on “vacation” with their short shorts and false eyelashes. The bartender was, as Shame understood it, part Kikuyu, an upcountry Kenyan. He was friendly and well-read, kept a stash of books behind the bar, mostly dog-eared, orange-covered copies from the Heinemann Series. Muhammad had introduced him to Shame at the dock one morning: “Shahid, the Wizard of Oz, meet Satan, the bartender at Bentley’s.” Shaking his hand, Shame thought,

  –I can’t call myself Shame but the only bartender in this town is named Satan?

  Shame passed by Peponi and walked behind Shela, an upscale resort community populated, amid “rising concerns about security” in the region, mainly by local men paid to live in the mansions until their European owners were brave enough to return. After Shela, the path turned away from the dunes at the south end of the island and bent inland beyond the sea breeze and into the real heat. He walked along the narrowing path, through the thickening brush. Shade began to take on a copious texture of dim, nude flesh. The shadow of a tree could take him in its arms. Occasional stands of coconut palm, tamarind, or bamboo broke the thickening rhythm of brush and deepening heat. With the lowering sun, the flesh-limbs of their shade became longer liquid along the ground. The sand deepened too. There were fewer tracks. Most of them were from donkey caravans carrying water and rice to remote settlements in the island’s interior.

  After another mile, the path rose along a ridge high enough to afford a view to the east, across the channel to Manda Island and the open ocean beyond that. Shame sat down at the base of a large tree. As the sun set he saw a near-full moon rise to the northeast. He pulled a woven mat out of his pack and unrolled it, took out his water bottle and a trio of samosas wrapped in a napkin. The puzzle box sat, compact, at the bottom of the bag. He ate the samosas slowly, taking small bites. A sip of water diffused the oil and unlocked the residue of spices in his mouth. His tongue tingled over his teeth. There was a tangy flavor he couldn’t place. Muhammad had told him that most island recipes included tamarind, which was good for digestion and also offered a mild protection from the evil eye. Shame laughed at the juxtaposition. Muhammad didn’t. He’d added tamarind to the mix of peppers he pounded into the thin strips of meat before he grilled them into suya each morning after his dawn prayer. Fusion suya.

  Maybe he wasn’t fully in the correct time zone yet. Or possibly the hike in the deepening sand and blazing heat had exhausted him. After eating, Shame put his pack behind his head, he lay out on the mat and closed his eyes. Something touched his nose and he woke with a start. He didn’t know how long he’d slept. The moon sparkled high in the night sky. The sky was all surface; a sheer cloth of white light had wiped it clean of its sable depth and the usual diamond-milk infinity of stars. Nothing appeared to have actually touched his nose. He sat up and looked around. He’d dreamed but didn’t remember much. A little, dark Italian boy. Shame remembered him, and a few details followed. The boy sang. He asked Shame if he knew his sister. Shame said that he’d had a sister once but didn’t anymore. The boy nodded like he knew that already. That was all. Shame decided not to look for a place to stash his brick of cash in the dark, even though the moon lighted everything with its bright boneglow.

  He packed up his stuff and turned to go back down the hill toward Shela. He noticed an opening in the bush to his left, a path. By daylight that bush had been a solid wall. He’d stared at it blankly while eating his dinner, marveling at its tightly woven density. While he ate, even with his eyes purposefully blurred, there was barely an eye socket’s worth of indentation in the wall of branches and leaves and thorns. Now, an opening slashed vertical and jagged, almost in the shape of a question mark. He tilted his head at the novelty that such an opening, in view as plain as day before his eyes now, could have been invisible before. He half smiled. “Plain as night,” he thought to himself. He walked over to it and looked into the man-sized keyhole. A narrow path led his eyes ahead. He could only see a few yards because it curved to the right. He leaned into the space and the light changed. There didn’t seem to be any light in the path. Things were nonetheless clearly visible, as if they bypassed his eyes and were visible directly to the brain. He took off the pack, a little afraid because he didn’t feel afraid. He arched his back, turned sideways, and slipped through the opening. From there he reached back out and brought the pack through. He decided to go far enough to see what was around the bend.

  He felt himself breathing on purpose. It felt to him that, if he didn’t deliberately expand and contract his lungs, they wouldn’t work on their own. The effort at compelling himself to breathe, he knew, meant he was scared. But he couldn’t feel that. For a moment, he wondered if he’d been shot or stabbed in his sleep. Maybe there’d been something in his dream about hiding a gun? Was he in shock? Or dead? Thoughts, or just brief electrical pulses, arced his body like swallows and smoke through the dusk air over Lamu Town. He looked at the satin sheen of light on his legs. He wondered if it was still night or if it was now morning. Around the bend didn’t happen. The path curved on. He walked wondering how much of what-sized circle he’d completed. Within his reach coiled vines and entwined branches. The moonlight condensed on vines in the tangle overhead. As he walked, light followed along the vines above him like drops of dew, or like the eyes of paintings that tracked you through a room. The dead-stare kind of way a TV watched people in a room, even if it was turned off. Shame found himself waiting for the light to spring into action.

  After fifty yards or so, the path widened and then disappeared into a delta of narrower paths that fanned out and dissolved the way forward. He stopped walking. When he stopped, an intricate system of light appeared. It looked as if he stood before a complexly fractured crystal. Or as if moonlight had frozen into frost designs on a window. He took a step forward and the geometry before him blinked away. He froze midstep and it reappeared. He tried it again and the blinking action repeated. The off-on action of the light echoed a game they’d played at night when he was a kid, Freeze. Then he remembered, in his dream, the little boy held a pin in his mouth like a toothpick. He asked Shame if he’d like to hear a song. Or had he asked the boy to sing a song? Then one asked the other if he knew where to hide a gun. There it was. So there had been a gun in the dream. Then the recollection vanished.

  The broken crystal of dreamlight drew Shame ahead. He took one step at a time and focused on the first heavy threadbeam in the design that, after a few step-blinks, appeared to be within reach. He thought then of his first roommate in Chicago. His thigh itched under his shorts.

  –Is that you?

  He was smiling. Up close he saw that the design was an elaborate cathedral of spider webs. It continued overhead as far up as the light traveled. It seemed strung between paths in the fan of the delta. Shame went further, the design dimming or disappearing altogether as he stepped, appearing when he paused to plot his next move. “The opposite of real life,” he thought. “Plain as night,” he repeated out loud. A great place to hide. He noticed there were holes honeycombing the ground. “Nests,” he thought. “Maybe those had been in the dream too?”

  Three strands of silken light glistened at his wais
t. He ducked under them and stopped. A thigh-thin palm tree appeared like a frozen dancer or an open parenthesis. He hadn’t seen it. His nose almost touched it. He took half a step back and the tree disappeared. When he stopped there it was, glowing. He moved closer again and stopped, his breath against it. He leaned back to focus. The tree was wrapped in nearly invisible strands of silk. Almost invisible as well, a gauze of near-microscopic spiders moved between the strands. He backed up a step. The tree blinked away and then resumed its visible existence. From behind the palm tree a torrent of twisting branches funneled into the canopy. He crawled up under the overhang of the torrential bush, around the tusklike curve of the palm. There. In a kind of trance of certainty or dreamlike precision, he wrapped the puzzle box in a plastic shopping bag, rolled it in tape, and buried it in the sand under the bush. He counted thirty steps back out of the delta, along a path that diverged at two o’clock when the crystal appeared. Thirty steps at two o’clock at the mouth of the delta. “There,” he said to himself aloud, thinking of Ndiya and Colleen back on that distant planet, “is where here is.” He banished the thought.

  At the keyhole to the path he paused and put the backpack out first. When he stood up, he paused again. The pack looked like it hadn’t been touched, as if he’d left it there when he’d entered. Had he left it? Had he entered? He turned sideways, bent backward, and exited. He heard someone say,