Another Kind of Madness

by Ed Pavlić

  Shame watched the man work. He saw an unknown, underwater error and a way to bring it up into air, in the shade. It was an error that didn’t exist underwater, where the point was for water to reclaim its cousin, the wood. The worker had to bring it out of its element, above the surface, to force the error into being, to force something into being an error. Then fix that. Later the water returned, but the error in the wood, now no longer itself, could hold its own against whatever would happen where it had come from. If the man did his job correctly, it wasn’t just that the error in the wood wouldn’t appear again underwater. Immersed again, the error disappeared into a past in which it had never existed. By working across dimensions, the man found mistakes in the future and then repaired them, in effect, before they happened. Then he and the boat returned to a past in which the mistakes didn’t exist. This required the man to feel his way. He was a visionary, working. He was seeing by touch. They all were.

  Following the resonance of the work he watched, Shame remembered Francis talking about Kashif, “a searcher … in this country, that man is loved!” The song, Francis’s fist on the dashboard, and the way his voice scowled in French at the porter at the train station tangled together. Shame consciously decided not to add Sarah’s floating, space-eclipsing presence to the perplexing mix. Still, Shame couldn’t solve the knot of love and contempt. Instead, he blamed his confusion on the heat and sat for a minute beneath a tree. The heat had begun to draw the breeze off the sound that, at low tide, carried the smell of exposed muck more than the coolness of water.

  A small, lone donkey wandered near him and stopped with its face headed the way Shame had been walking. This meant the donkey’s freakishly large left eye seemed to be staring straight at him. Straight, in the case of a donkey’s stare, Shame noticed, described an axis in both directions exactly perpendicular to the direction its nose faced. Was that facing? Shame smiled at the donkey, thinking, “Headed in one direction, facing another.” The donkey’s implacable expression remained.

  Expressionless, perhaps, the donkey, a male, then leaned forward without moving the position of its hooves and peed. As far as Shame could tell, the left eye of the donkey was fixed upon him. The lake of donkey piss found a channel in the dirt road and began to depart toward the water. These donkeys were, Shame was beginning to realize, quite strange and often, he then began to suspect, deeply sardonic creatures. “No work. OK. It could be worse,” he thought. “I could be sitting downhill from a pissing donkey.”

  The donkey seemed to be wearing false eyelashes. The effect of the dramatically oversized lashes multiplied the mocking force, somehow adding an aggressive bent, or depth, to the idiotically neutral surface of the donkey’s gaze. Still, Shame wondered, who was the idiot, who was trapped in one dimension? Who was confused about what “straight ahead” meant? Who had arrived in Africa and found a place with no black people in it and another nowhere made of space that moved about in millipedes? Who was feeling around in the silky muck for an error in a past that didn’t exist?

  To distract himself from these dizzy thoughts, Shame changed the subject. He’d been surprised, in a way startled, to find that, in a so-called conservative Muslim region such as this, so many women wore long, false eyelashes. These women were totally covered but for their hands and a thin, exposed band between the bridge of their noses and eyebrows. Often the rim of the veil, the sheer, black plane of fabric that dropped from the bridge of the nose past the chin, was intricately adorned with silver embroidery or patterns of black glass beads. Shame gathered vaguely that all this was supposed to convey a kind of modesty. But the way these women’s exposure to the world had been narrowed, that narrowness, garishly or elegantly adorned, lent a force, even an aggression, to their gaze. The effect of meeting one of these women’s eyes was unlike anything he’d experienced. He’d felt obscenely exposed in his T-shirt and shorts, in his stupid American availability, his physical näiveté. “There I am again,” he’d thought. Shame. No wonder I’m not supposed to tell anyone that that’s my name.

  The day after he arrived in Kenya, he remembered, Su had driven him to a drugstore in Mombasa to buy toothpaste. In the aisle that held toothpaste as well as cold beer, DVDs and CDs, and a rainbow array of hair products, he found a woman fully covered in buibui. She was facing the rack of DVDs, swaying beneath the layers of her black robes to Whitney Houston singing “I Wanna Dance with Somebody.” She took steps back and forth, dancing in place, to the beat of this song Shame had always hated. At the bottom hem, inches above the dull, worn tiles of the floor, a bright flash of color caught his eye like a glimmer of refracted light in a muddy stream. The color was a flash of a privacy that was very different from its public costume. That made Shame think again for a moment about Whitney Houston. Shame considered the triangle made by that terrible pop song, its singer, and this buibui’d dancer in the DVD and toothpaste aisle in a Mombasa drugstore. It seemed a door to a private room, to many rooms.

  He bought a tube of Crest and two pilsners, pushed open the glass door to leave the air-conditioned interior of the store. He looked back at the woman still swaying as if entranced. The weight of the outside air landed on the right side of his face and neck. As he turned toward the car, a glowing tower of clouds began to pour a thick metal sheet of rain into its shadow. The rim of the shadow was just across the street. In a narrow crescent of sunlight beyond the hem of the downpour, another woman had stopped to adjust the cap of her buibui. As she untied and retied the string at the back of her head, a beaded bracelet on her wrist beamed an anthem of sparkles to Shame through the heavy weight of the equatorial rain.

  Shame snapped himself back and blinked at the absurd vanity of the donkey. As if he’d mistaken him for someone else, or as if he’d recognized Shame at a distance and had come simply to deliver this lake of piss for his close consideration, the creature turned around and walked back in the direction it had come from. Shame turned away from the donkey and looked further up the shore. A boat had appeared near the waterline. It hadn’t been there before. It was very low in the front and leaned radically to one side. At least two feet of the rudder was exposed, the rear third of the boat was above the surface. He could make out a few figures on the boat and a few more up to their armpits in the water near the bow. He decided to go for a closer look.

  As Shame approached, he found eight donkeys with large saddle-like pouches across their backs. Two stood with pouches loaded with rectangular blocks of coral stone, six blocks balanced on each side. Two others had loads of sand on both sides. A glistening spindle of a man came across the rocks at the shore with a sack on his shoulder. He had widely spaced, narrowly opened eyes and, Shame imagined, a somewhat irresolutely resolute expressionless expression on his face. It was as if the man wore a mask positioned a thousand meters from his actual face. He nodded his mask in Shame’s direction, approached another of the donkeys, and emptied half of the sand from the sack into each side of the donkey’s pouch. The pouch bulged with the load but it was clear that each side would hold several loads of sand.

  In a few paces Shame stepped up onto the rocks at the shore. Two men stood still on the boat. One leaned on a long handle, probably a shovel. A third man used a handheld scoop to shovel sand from a pile at the end of the boat into bags. When he finished a sack, he set it to the side and one of the four men standing in the water took it from the edge, wrapped a cord around the open end, hoisted it to his shoulder, and turned toward the shore. As he emerged from the water, this man’s impossibly thin looking legs appeared with each step until his white-and-blue sandals were visible. He carefully chose his steps, maybe fifty yards from where Shame stood watching. As that man grew near, Shame saw a head and two stone blocks come from the bow of the boat. The shirtless, shimmering body that held them rose step by step out of the water and turned toward him as well.

  The rocks Shame stood upon were on shore. The water had receded with the low tide; Shame felt an invisible screen between him and the world where all of
this took place. He glanced back at the donkeys standing stock-still, expressionless, holding their loads. The flagrant vanity of the lone donkey he’d encountered earlier, Shame thought just then, was more like an insolent vulgarity, as it stood in his mind between him and this scene. Suddenly it was perfectly obvious that the pissing donkey was insane. Then he thought to himself: “Me, a stevedore?”

  The thin man with the torn shirt passed him almost close enough to brush shoulders. It felt like an attempt to refute the fact—if that’s what it was—that Shame was standing there. These gestures were familiar enough from Shame’s experience in life and at work. The first was usually a question before it became a confrontation; if answered correctly, which really meant if answered at all, in any way, the question usually didn’t lead to confrontation. The first question was: Are you where your body says you are or not? Not answering was unequivocal; no answer being the clearest answer. No answer meant “I’m nowhere near where my body is standing.” In other words, it meant violence. No answer meant space had been stolen, was being stolen at that moment. There were people Shame had met who asked that question while they were already enduring the consequences of many, many nonanswer-answers given to them by the world they lived in. The world of space thieves worked this way.

  There were others who expected, and would at times demand, an answer-answer from space thieves. Confrontational as it might seem, this insistence was really a kind of obdurate openness—an acutely vulnerable hardheadedness—in the person, which was expertly covered up with a transparent sheen of aggression. No one at home would admit it, of course, but that’s what it was. So, when the answer-answer came along with some indignant obliviousness as to why the question had been asked in the first place (“What did I do to you?”), offering clear evidence of the person’s inability to get anywhere near where their body said they were, the result was predictable. Space thieves are always innocent, most often indignant. Such people bear no humility in the world. People, especially the most aggressively hopeful, react to pain in different ways. But very few are graceful about it.

  So, having in effect been asked, Shame dove.

  –Excuse me, sir? I’m looking for work?

  The man didn’t even pause on his way back toward the boat. He stepped clear of the rocks and passed the man with the stones who was now approaching the breakwater. The man with the stones was much taller, shirtless. The muscles in his stomach twitched diagonally on the side opposite each stride. The stones couldn’t be that heavy, Shame felt, because he took extremely long strides. He wore a thin, wispy goatee which gave his chin a sage effect. He was much younger than the other men but he carried something in his face that might otherwise pass for age. After unloading the stones into the pouch of a waiting donkey, he passed by Shame, stealing a quick glance. Shame was surprised to find that the man was wearing thin, wire-rimmed glasses. The bows bent behind his ears where his loosely curled hair disappeared into a freshly faded haircut. When he passed and after a few steps, Shame dove again. “Work?” The man hesitated and then took another step toward the shore.

  –Sir, um, mzee, I’m looking to work?

  The man pivoted on his right heel, his face tipped slightly backward to reveal a diagonal eyebrow, bright eyes, and a smirk pitched, Shame thought, loosely between curiosity and disbelief. It was, he assumed, the posture of a person who decides to talk to a stranger who appears harmless but is quite obviously mad. Shame thought, “So this is how you talk to a pissing donkey.”

  –I’m not the boss, my friend. He’s on the boat, you know. Kubwa. You’re not British?

  –American.

  –Ah. And you’re looking to—

  And here the man’s left eyebrow straightened and the right one tipped up.

  –not for, work?

  Shame paused to rehearse the distinction the man had drawn and emphasized with the eyebrow gymnastics. The comical twist had put Shame at ease and allowed him time to consider the question. Shame had always much preferred confrontations to passive allegations over stolen space. It was a test that Shame’s history working with the verb “to poise” had prepared him well to pass. The man stood stock-still, his face openly awaiting an answer. Finally, Shame smiled.

  –OK. Right. Yes, looking to work. That’s what I do.

  –You look?

  –Man, work!

  At this they both laughed, and the man’s posture unfroze and fell loose from his shoulders to his heels. He extended his hand, two thin silver rings on his index and middle fingers.

  –I’m Muhammad.

  –I’m Sh—I’m Shahid.

  –Oh, I see, that’s a shame—I mean, it’s a strange name for an American.

  Shame shrugged. The man smiled again and looked up at the sun squinting his narrow eyes.

  –Shahid. The American who looks to—not for—work. Maybe that makes sense after all. You know, me, I wonder what exactly we look to work for?

  He tipped his head to the side for Shame to follow.

  –The man, halas, to work for is on the boat, my friend. He’s Kubwa. This way, mind your step. The stones are sharp.

  ■

  Up close the men on the boat looked as Arab and, underneath that, as Indian as they did Kenyan. Their hair had a silky looseness in its curls and a sandy red hue in the sun. They all wore sashes of striped cloth tied around their waists instead of pants or shorts. They said they were brothers. Their boats hauled materials up and down the coast, mostly between the islands, but sometimes as far north as Ras Kamboni or even Kismaayo. He was told that there was no work today, the day was done. He must start in the morning when the work started. No, there was no place to wait. The boats unloaded up and down the coast depending on materials, tides, weather, destination, etc. When there was a delivery in or near Lamu, which was often, word was sent to Matondoni, on the other side of the island. “We’re all from Paté. Those men who work for us are from Matondoni. It’s a workman’s village, weavers and boat makers, lime burners. Lamu is a trader’s town. It’s for traders, merchants, imams, and their slaves.” There was a visceral contempt in the leader’s voice. “Did you see those pitiful donkeys?” The brothers laughed, sneering. Standing waist-deep in the water at the side of the boat, Shame asked, “So, you’re Kubwa?” The men all laughed looking down at him in the water. The leader put his open hand on his chest, and then gestured to the other two.

  –We’re all Kubwa!

  They all laughed again, looking down at him.

  –We’re almost done here. Tomorrow at dawn, if you want to work, take the path out of Lamu, just over there, toward Matondoni, three kilometers. You’ll reach a place where the paths converge, four of them. Wait there. If there’s work, some of these men will be coming from the village. Muhammad is their leader. You met him. He’ll lead you to where the work is. Of course, it might be back in Lamu. It might be elsewhere. They might not come at all. You’ll see then. It’s the only way.

  Shame nodded and reached out his hand. Kubwa held his shovel, staring at him blankly.

  –The pay is 250 bob per day. We’ll try you. OK. Tomorrow.

  Kubwa put his hand back on his chest and bowed imperceptibly. The fact was that he was simply interested in whether or not the American looking to work would really show up.

  –May I ask what the materials are for?

  –These? A garden wall at the Leakey residence. They’re English Kenyans. The grandfather was a famous scientist. He found the oldest human remains up-country in the Rift Valley.

  Shame didn’t know Leakey. “Yes,” the man at the back of the boat said, “it proved that we’re all Africans!” The three all laughed again. A short, silent man with one arm severed at the elbow leaned in to take a stone onto his shoulder, holding it in place with the stump of his left arm. He moved quickly back toward shore, swaying his hips, almost without disturbing the water as its border fell down his body and off of his legs with each twist of his hips.

  Shame said he’d meet them at the path. Or t
ry. He met Muhammad midway across the muck. When he told him that he’d meet them tomorrow morning, Muhammad, with the same how-to-talk-to-a-madman look on his face, pointed to the path.

  –Wait where the paths meet. Nzuri.

  When Shame reached the shore he found the waiting donkeys almost fully loaded. There was a white man leaning against a tree, smoking. He held a long stick in his other hand and wore his hair in a thin ponytail. He wore a loose short-sleeve shirt, shorts, and leather sandals. The shirt was unbuttoned. The man’s pale belly protruded into view. Shame began to nod hello, assuming it was someone from the famous Leakey family. Before he did, however, he noticed that though the man was looking in his direction, he’d made no sign at all that he’d seen him. Shame turned back toward Lamu Town. “250 Ksh per day,” he thought. “That’s the price of one breakfast sausage at Echoes.” A week’s wages would almost buy one person breakfast there.

  On the boat, one Kubwa said to another, in Kiswahili, “An American who works? I don’t think so.” “We’ll see how he works tomorrow,” said the other. “Likely not. He’s another agent. Or, maybe he’s another broken one who walked away from the base. We’ll see which.” To which the first Kubwa said: “Or maybe we won’t.”

  BOOK FIVE: ANGEL, UNARMED

  Preening and untangling, feathers in her wings …

  —CHAKA KHAN

  Each morning the dry-season sky wedged space between the equatorial clouds. The sun appeared over the high, narrow wall of perfect white plaster. A thick, curvy vine led up like a frayed rope had been thrown over the wall from the noisy alleyway on the other side. As the sun rose higher into the sky, a bright border cut the shadows like a leveled cup of flour, and light sliced into the space below and above the water. The roof, or lip, made by the surface could be invisibly still. The circulation jets in the wall were three feet down, placed opposite each other midway in the narrow length of the space. The propulsion caused no stir at the surface. The water deepened as the floor sloped from the near end and the glass-smooth stone steps toward the wall over which the sun was just then appearing. Bushes and plants grew along the foot-wide border between the water’s edge and the outside wall. On the opposite side were three heavy wooden reclining chairs strung with thick jute to make seats and backrests. The space was inside the mansion, half of which—including this room—was roofless and exposed to the elements. The effect of sculptural water and the geometry of the walls cast a vertical shaft of light that disappeared into the clouds.