Another Kind of Madness

by Ed Pavlić

  –So, phone in the box. You have the numbers.

  –Oh, right. The phone. The ride, how much can I pay you?

  Sarah laughed and Shame felt her arms around him. She hadn’t moved. Shame thought to himself that Kima should have warned him about his sister. But how? And about what? Or, then again, maybe he had.

  –Let’s say $250 US.

  –OK. Let’s see.

  Francis counted the money.

  –You can change currency inside, if you like. Or, of course, there are ATMs. When you get to Mombasa station ask anyone how to get to the Blue Room. Then call Su, who will come pick you from there.

  Suddenly, Francis whistled, jerked his head, and scowled. A bone-thin, tiny young man, very dark, with his hair dyed blond, appeared. He wore sandals, shorts, and a lime-green T-shirt: SAFARI.COM. Francis motioned toward Shame’s bags and said something in what Shame guessed was French, and then to Sarah in another language—Kiswahili, Shame assumed. Sarah answered him and laughed. Shame interrupted to say that he didn’t need help with the bags. Francis waved away Shame’s interruption and pointed a few more scowling phrases at the tiny man.

  Francis shook Shame’s hand again, and walked back around to the driver’s side of the Peugeot and got in. Sarah turned to him:

  –OK. Mr. Shame, piano man. If I come to the coast, I’ll expect to hear some music from you. I might need to relax too. There must be at least one piano at the edge of the beyond.

  She stepped up to Shame and embraced him again. She kissed him on his ear with some lightness in the touch of her lips. He heard a high-toned bell ring in the distance. The sound of the bell came out of the nowhere-millipedes, the body search, and the inaudible whistle careening from invisible bush of black spaces and shapes. Shame thought it was the exact sound that the taste of a plum would make. Sarah stepped back and whatever plum-bell-flavored, glossy substance that surrounded her flowed back between them. Shame saw her step back but still couldn’t sense any space between them.

  –Oh, I almost forgot. Take these. Kima insisted that I give them to you.

  She handed him an orange packet of cigarettes. As he simultaneously attempted and gave up attempting to refuse the gift, Shame took the box from her hand and noticed a white circle with a brown horse’s head in it. The box read: Sportsman. Shame objected,

  –You’ve done enough, really.

  Sarah handed him a yellow box that read: KUBWA / RHINO.

  –Matches.

  –OK, why not. But I don’t smoke.

  –Well, you never know.

  Shame shook his head again but protested no further. He placed the pack and the box of matches in the top pouch of his backpack, looked back to Sarah and nodded, brows down. He felt electrically awake now, solid, like an oil of seriousness had been rubbed on his skin where the millipedes were a few moments before. Sarah smiled.

  –You’re not cold?

  –No, I was before. I’m warm now.

  Sarah almost mentioned that he was trembling but decided against it. Instead, she smiled again. Another distant bell rang in Shame’s ear. He looked off to his left as if in the direction of the bell sound. A train was leaving the station. Shame could see the outlines of people in the lighted windows. Others were reclined, and some lay flat on their backs on the roof of the train, legs dangled over the edge. Sarah waved and bent down to get into the car with Francis.

  –Be well, Mr. Shame. Su will help you. No worry no.

  Shame waved. He watched the car pull around the circle and out into the empty street beyond the parking lot. He turned to see the red lights on the caboose of the train trail off into the space beyond the curve described by the pounded silver surface of the tracks. The distant-bell sound of plum, he thought, the curved-silver taste of steel. The new nowhere.

  ■

  The gray metal door slid shut. The latch was turned so that the red DO NOT DISTURB tag appeared in the dial. The window wouldn’t close; a few mosquitoes had arranged themselves in manic orbits around the yellow bulb over the door. Shame lay on his back with the small Nokia phone in the palm of his hand. He stared at the bottom of Ndiya’s bag on the luggage rack above the bunk. The rack’s leather straps triangled their way back to the near wall casting shadows opposite. The shadows traversed the outside wall and disappeared into the space of the open window.

  Kima had been right. The train from Nairobi to Mombasa was a relic. A steel-rasping sound began as the train jolted, and jolted again, and again, before it achieved forward motion. The station slid from view. As the speed of the train increased, the rasp became a scrape and that turned into a spinning, continuous tone that hovered high, Shame imagined, in the human range of hearing. Soon a maraca scratch and something that sounded like a thick spring thrown down a flight of stone steps, dragged back up, and thrown down again joined in. Shame lay still, amazed at the cacophony. He tried to match vibrations in the thin mattress to punctuations in the sounds. He failed to connect the vibrations and the rhythm of the sounds. He imagined that the train’s speed had leveled off, though it appeared that they were not traveling much faster than a casual speed on a bicycle. Finally, as if to announce the cruising speed, a peal that sounded like a bassoon crawled through the thicket of sounds and settled into a low growl.

  The phone box also contained a pair of earbuds. He took them out and inserted them in his ears. He plugged in the phone. A cold wind played into the cabin from the window and spiraled up the leg of his jeans. Shame wondered if he should call Sarah. Despite the rigor of his concentration, he knew he had no bearings for where he was and knew he was headed toward even less familiar surroundings. Then he thought about the distant bell, the space with no distance, the hovering when Sarah should have been walking, the fluidlike substance that enclosed him when she kissed his ear. He decided that calling Sarah certainly wasn’t the cure for his lack of bearing. Then, like putting a coat over a puddle and calling it a bridge, he decided that, one, he didn’t want to impose and, two, that he couldn’t afford to admit that his reasoning was a cover-up. He decided that he’d treat himself as if he were looking in a mirror, knowing that the image wasn’t closed on the back. He would let this chaos of new nothings do whatever it wanted on the backside of his mirror.

  He’d played this game before. Then he looked down at the face of the phone and switched it on. An image of the phone began as a point of light and spun into view, the image increased in size until the phone vibrated and NOKIA flashed up, found its way to the corner of the screen, and the home page of the phone appeared icon by icon. A twirling in the corner revealed Kenya Orange, four bars of signal. At the opposite side an icon indicated full battery. He’d been told that people depended on these devices. He’d never owned one. In the early days of his time going to Earlie’s someone had asked him for his cell number. He had just arrived back in the city. The phrase stuck out in a way that made the whole situation obvious to him.

  –My cell number! No, there’s at least one thing I’ve been able to avoid.

  And at the time, he regarded anything that he couldn’t have afforded on his weekly expense check from the road as simply off-limits. It wasn’t for him. In ten years on the road he’d learned that income wasn’t to be spent. At times, soon after returning to the city, he wondered if his warped perceptions of his surroundings in Chicago weren’t simply the result of one simple fact: he had no debts.

  Amid the vibrations of the train, the word “debt” echoed. He also knew that money wasn’t the only kind of debt. He knew he owed Colleen, for instance. He didn’t know what, exactly. Muna, Pearlie, and them all owed him money, but that was hardly the whole story. Then the thought of calling Colleen crossed his mind. He knew he wondered, or, really, hoped, that Ndiya had decided to stay with Colleen. He knew calling was impossible so he let the thought cross over to the back of the mirror and keep on going. Kima? As he exiled all thoughts of calling Chicago he took out the card with the three numbers. Now, minus Sarah, there were two he could call.

>   He had to admit that there was something comforting about holding this device in his hand. It bent people’s presence, brought distance nearby. It wasn’t like Sarah’s plum-bells or the body-search air in Nairobi. But Shame noticed it, whatever it was. The possibility of calling someone pushed against the rhythms of the train massaging his back. It would have to be Su. He calculated the impression calling this late would make, as if manners were his worry. Just then the screen twirled, the phone icon spun backward diminishing in size until it disappeared into a point of light and the phone went dark.

  ■

  As if watching from beneath as they were poured into a clear glass bowl, Shame remembered his worries about the broken window and the cold wind when the train reached full speed. They were beyond the city and the soot-yellow sprawl of its sky. As he reclined on his backpack, he watched the night sky. Its crayon-scribbled darkness changed frames, a horizonless blackness. He remembered Kima’s line, “Don’t worry, the place will swallow you.” In a long, irregular loop of repetition, the train jerked back and forth like a spastic rocking chair, a movement that gave way to an easy lope as if the rails led across diagonal waves in the tracks. These slow spasms were structural, he thought. They left and returned and left again with their own sense of rise and fall; he wondered if they traveled the length of the train the way dynamics of a chord coursed the wires in a concert grand piano. Below that was the rhythm of the track itself, which was constant, and beneath that the percussive symposium in polyrhythm that was the train’s mechanical works. Amid it all he sensed that the slow-jog speed of the train was what it was going to be.

  Shame felt heavy in the bunk. He measured the train’s attempts to move in many different directions at once against the strength of the rails, which kept it all from coming apart, kept it all falling forward.

  ■

  He woke hovering above the percussion that just then felt as if all of it was trapped in and trying to tear its way out of the thin mattress beneath him. The train rocked back and forth on its loping way. It was almost 4:00 a.m. He’d slept three hours. He stood holding the rail of the luggage rack against the manic compulsions of the compartment. Something was missing. A wave of panic washed across but the bags, his shoes, everything was where it had been. Looking out the window he could now see low hills in the distance, everything doused in an amber fluid. The rhythm of the train made another attempt to vault from the rails. The motion passed through Shame’s body.

  Shame heard Kima walking behind him on the bass when they’d played together at Inflation. His hands ached for something to do. He thought of Sarah and those distant bells and wondered if he’d really heard them or not. And plums? He began to wonder where in the hell he was going. As if through black mortar with a clean silver trowel, his mind cut the thought. A huge moon had risen over the sloping horizon. It hung hardly an inch above the low hills. Distance collapsed into a substance illuminated by the moon’s hazy light. His mind unspooled as if on a reel with one end caught on the spiked plants that appeared to be cultivated in this region of Kenya. Sisal, he’d learn. He noticed that he didn’t really need to hold on to the rail anymore. His body anticipated the timing and direction of the train’s lurch and stammer. He stood still and closed his eyes, bent his knees, and surfed the trembling floor.

  Then he felt what was missing. The breeze was gone. No, he confirmed, the wind still spiraled into the cabin. But it had lost its brittle, upcountry chill. This breeze was soft against his face, around his neck. It felt full and warm, nearly liquid. With his eyes closed he couldn’t determine the exact extent of the space his body contained. The breeze changed shape as it passed across his body. But he couldn’t mark where the breeze began and his body ended.

  ■

  Shame never smoked but just then, in that boxlike compartment, a-clang in the train to Mombasa, he thought it might be the time to try. He unzipped his pack and took out the Sportsman packet Sarah had passed to him. There was no wrapper. He pulled open the top and discovered two rows of neatly twisted cylinders. With his nose close to the opening, he recognized the pine-needle scent.

  He lighted one end of the twisted paper and pulled in a moment of smoke. After a few lurches, he breathed out a stream of smoke that clouded around him, gathered and flowed out the window. He repeated the action. He’d witnessed this here and there when it seemed the smokers acted ridiculous, as if passing a joint between them was some occult and sacred ritual. Shame had never thought he had the option. As far as he’d thought about his aversion to drugs of all kinds, he’d decided that it was a kind of pact with what he wasn’t, a fidelity to the other side of the mirror, the blank part of the page.

  He blew another stream-cloud out the window and tossed the joint out after it. Noticing a faint burning in his throat and chest, he lay back down on the bunk feeling nothing special but maybe, an impression that his body was now far too long to fit where he’d been reclined most of the night. All at once the space embraced him, the breeze opened itself, again, even warmer than it had been. The wind’s skin became an even more viscous fluid with a twin inside his body. Unbuttoning his shirt, he felt very private as the thickening fluid filled the compartment and moved slowly as if it was being stirred with a long stick. He propped his foot on the outside wall next to the window. As the moon rose diagonally into the frame, its light grew sharper and brighter. He closed his eyes, imagining the bone-colored wash on the fields, the sparkle of stars being flooded from view by the moon.

  The border between his body and the world arched its back, sloped into his mind. A wave approached in silence. It rose through him and broke into a surf of nearly audible vibrations in his chest and arms. His body felt like a soft turbulence inside his name. A river moved through his clothes. He felt like some plasma-like jellyfish in a loose tide, a torn plastic shopping bag caught on a wire fence or tree branch. He wasn’t dead in Chicago; the rest would catch up. OK. He was headed down to the coast, the Indian Ocean. OK. One arm behind his head in a triangle, he found sleep came along like a tongue across the seal on an envelope.

  His initial weeks in Lamu proved that Shame knew nothing about idle time. As he knew he would, he needed work. As far as he could remember, he always had. Rare, however, had been periods where he didn’t have overlapping jobs, so this need was a foreign feeling much more than a familiar texture in his muscles, in his voice, in his dreams. Maybe it was the shape of the lens in his memory pointing back? He recalled a dim kitchen table, a window looking out on a snowy courtyard in the middle of the building. The scene floated behind his eyes. His father’s voice, 6:00 a.m. on a Saturday, “Rise and shine, daylight in the swamp,” or, “Chicago, the city that works.” The floor of his father’s pickup truck was a thick silver layer of cement dust and cigar ash.

  –Oh yeah, well, what would you do if a T. rex came up to you?

  –What would I do?

  –Yeah, what would you do?

  –I’d spit in his eye.

  Further back, another dim table, elsewhere, when his father was away on a job, his tiny big sister leading them in prayer before a meal, “Our father, who works in heaven—”

  Shame asked Muhammad, who asked around. There were always boats to unload. Muhammad said he didn’t know the pay. Shame said he didn’t care. The first day he went to the dock and waited until noon. Boats arrived across the sound from the airport on Manda Island. Private crafts from the hotels came and went. Every other man who walked by asked him, “You go to Shela? To beach? Smoke, smoke?” He shook his head. No boat arrived with anything he thought needed unloading. No one seemed to be there waiting for work, either. The sun came up and the dense dry-season sky rolled over, revealing its luminous silver back. A young man wearing a wrap around his waist and thong sandals strode past wheeling a smoky, sky-colored shark draped over a black bicycle. Shame stilled his vision and watched the shark pour across the frame of his sight. Its head draped over the handlebars and curved toward the ground. Blood drooled from its open mouth.
The shark’s eye was diamond black, a hole left unfilled by the world. Shame waited. Nothing continued to happen, Shame thought, in rather spastic actions, so he left.

  He went to Echoes for a lime-banana juice and a coffee, walked back to the dock. Still nothing. He walked the dirt road along the water headed out of town. At low tide, scores of boats sat aground and leaned to their sides. The distant boats looked like scattered toys left by children whose attention had suddenly been compelled elsewhere. He noticed a few men huddled in the mud and stones under the shade-side of the boats. Something was wrong about their postures. Shame kept walking. When the third man appeared beneath a blue sailboat—he’d been told these boats were called dhows—Shame was close enough to see that the man wasn’t huddled. He was crouched on his haunches, a worker. He moved in the shaded patch, knees totally flexed, wobbling side to side. Something was wrong.

  The fourth man solved the puzzle. A boat leaned aground even closer to the road. This man wore torn denim shorts and plastic sandals. No shirt. He held a tiny wooden mallet. It looked like he had several oversized toothpicks in his mouth. Then he stopped with his forefingers extended. He touched the smooth slime-sheen on the underside of the boat. His fingers moved gently back and forth, moving less and less, as if the hull of the boat was the stretch-curved belly of a lover overhead. He reached out and touched the boat above him as if he was finger painting a cathedral ceiling.

  They weren’t toothpicks. They were bigger than that. They were shims. The man removed one from his mouth and placed it before the spot where his touch had stopped. He put it back in his mouth and removed a second shim from his mouth and repeated the gesture. Then Shame watched the man pound the thin strip of wood into the crease marked by his fingers. The impact of the hammer seemed to create the space more than replace it. Shame felt the way work resonated in the body of the worker, and the way that resonance radiated into the world. He was thirsty for that.