Another Kind of Madness

by Ed Pavlić

  Ndiya woke up, put on a white cotton caftan that fell to the tops of her feet, and walked through Peter Goodman’s house. All the floors were polished concrete. The interior floors were covered with woven mats; two wings comprised the vacant property. Huge wooden doors opened off the street into a large courtyard open to the sky. Narrow paths divided patches filled with plants and trees that made a thick canopy of shade broken by patches where liquid sunlight fell to the ground through shifting spectrums of fading and accumulating green. If she stood still for a few minutes, tortoises began to move about, visible in the way they disturbed the underbrush.

  Inside the front doors, a path to the right led to a ground-level wing entered by a door in a wide wall patterned on the interior side with dozens of symmetrical niches. The niches varied in size according to some rule of proportion. In each niche was placed a bright ceramic object: a cup, a small plate, a broach. There were at least one hundred niches in the wall. As one stood inside the room facing back to the central courtyard, the pattern framed both sides of the door and continued in the space above the doorway.

  Saidi kept the house. His father had kept it for the owners before Goodman. Saidi was in his late twenties. He told Ndiya that the wall with niches was a trap for djinns. On her initial tour of the mansion, Saidi pointed and asked her to remove a small orange-glazed saucer from its place. He then suggested that she place her hand inside the opening in the wall and feel its shape. The space sloped up above the opening; it was far bigger on the inside than one would guess. The tallest point was in the middle at the center just inside the arch in the wall. Saidi said, “Is smooth, very smooth, yes?” She’d nodded. He smiled strangely at this. She felt he was watching her from a distance. She also felt a ridge of faint ripples in the center of the small, curved ceiling of the aperture. Saidi said the inside of each space was identical in shape, and smooth. He seemed emphatic about this smoothness. His eyes narrowed. He said the openings were made in the plaster by special (Saidi said “spee-shall”) workers. Long ago, he said, towashi did this work. At this term he frowned and shook his head as if in a mocking regret. He had two wives and, in a tone of frugality and pious self-denial, said he was saving for a third. His younger wife removed each piece and dusted it once each week, sometimes twice during the dry-season months.

  Holding the ceramic dish as if it was a poisonous lizard, he explained that djinn were attracted to the shiny objects. Then they were entrapped by the surprising height and confused by the smoothness of the space inside. Saidi handed the saucer back to her and asked if she’d put it back. She noticed he was wiping his fingers with his shirt. She asked, “You can’t?” He smiled and shook his head: “No, no, I have two wives.” When he said that, he brushed his hands back and forth over each other as if freeing them of sand or dust.

  When Malik had first brought her here with the idea that she and Shame should move in, he told her about waungwana, the patrician merchants of Lamu who’d modeled their mansions after the those of the Gujarat, north of Mumbai. He said the back rooms were where the women would have lived. At the far right was another small open courtyard with one tall date palm curving upward at the very center. A stairway led up to an office-like space with a window looking down into the narrow alley teeming with people and cats and donkeys outside.

  Inside the front doors of the mansion, a path to the left led to a stairway. At the top, a landing overlooked the central courtyard and a set of doors into the second-story wing of the property. There was one bedroom with a canopy bed and a green wooden desk. The wall at the foot of the bed was made of panels carved from mahogany. Each panel had rows of octagonal openings about the size of a tennis ball. Each panel could be unlatched and opened like a small door. Through that screen one looked down on a long, narrow swimming pool that looked more like a glass sculpture of a pool than a real one. If you stood in the bedroom and looked down at this moment, midmorning, you’d see Ndiya Grayson, nude, floating on her back across the diagonal line between sun and shade. Outside the bedroom a steep stairway led down to the pool and a hallway on the second floor led along the length of the water. The hallway was open on the left looking down over the pool and on the right stretched a concrete bench covered with pillows and a thin mattress. Windows over the bench looked out over Lamu Town toward the sea. At times the breeze whistled in the screens cut with the same mahogany pattern as the bedroom wall. The hall ended at a large bathroom with several narrow, paneless windows and stone fixtures: sink, toilet, and a large, open shower stall with a green-tinted, copper nozzle for the water.

  Each morning Ndiya woke up and walked the full property, entranced by how all the spaces were inside and outside at the same time. The openness was vertical, however; the spaces were all formidably walled off from their surroundings. These Swahili mansions carved spaces that extended up above themselves and into the heavens. After a few days she’d noticed that the pool and second-story wing were actually across one of the neighborhood alleys in a different structure altogether. The landing at the top of the stairway outside the bedroom had seemed strangely elongated. In fact, it was a bridge over the alley. The whole place was as much a sculpture as it was a dwelling. Malik said Peter bought the place and had it totally rebuilt so it would be a work of art. “Unreal,” she’d said. And Malik:

  –Well, yes. These waungwana families hovered over the towns on the coast and islands, held aloft by the men who were traders and the patrician women’s contempt for the washenzi, the trash, the workers.

  Malik’s eyes flashed, “Magic,” he’d said, laughing. Malik had a beautiful, open laugh full of bristling irony and sparkling contradictions. In fact, he was laughing at the look on Ndiya’s face.

  –Child, you ain’t in Kansas no more! Enjoy it, honey, you have earned it. This is Lamu, even the donkeys think they’re above working. And, you know, whatever these people are pretending to be, at least they’re not pretending to be equal to each other. We’ve both been to that rather obstreperous Broadway production, haven’t we?

  Malik had just about spit the phrase “equal to each other” at the street out in front of Peter’s mansion.

  ■

  Now, Ndiya floats silently on her back. Her mind attends subtle cables in the turbulence below. She closes her eyes and knows her position by the geometry of currents across her back and down her legs. The flame surface of her body cools as she crosses the line into the shaded end of the pool. She opens her eyes and lets the sculpted rectangle of endless sky fall on her outstretched arms. “Sky sushi,” she thinks. Sun-doused and maybe a little sense-drunk in an English banker’s faux-Indian, East African, Modern museum of strictly minimal opulence: “Here I am.” As she floats she feels elevated, as if the level of the water lifts her high above the pool, over the mansion, and holds her aloft, alone, above the town.

  ■

  How easily they’d fallen into this stenciled forgery, the precision of their lives lived, if that was the word, in symmetry with each other. It wasn’t life nor living, but she’d agreed to let some time unspool in the patterns that fell around them while they were here. “OK, no Shame in that,” she’d thought, laughing to herself. She smiled up at the depthless sky. “Me time,” that’s what she said. And it was a lie. Everyone she’d known, all the men, for sure, had left her alone with their absence when they weren’t there. No matter what she told herself, she knew she’d always considered the absence of those men a gift. Not so with Shame. As it had been in Chicago, he got up and left out. The weeks he’d spent with the boats before she’d arrived and now, of course, arranged by her, Shame and Malik and Malik’s partner were laying the groundwork for some kind of cooperative plan. Meanwhile, she woke feeling not Shame’s absence but a clarity, an almost surgical emptiness, as if the gap he left open was a lens of focus. My life, my life, my life, my life, she hummed, in the sunshine. “My life as a room with no ceiling,” she’d thought, as she drifted across the surface of the silent mirror in the sky. She’d float for a while, sw
im for twenty minutes, maybe do what she’d happened upon and then go down to Echoes and talk with Kate. Or maybe she’d look around for where Muhammad had parked his stand for the day and talk to him. Muhammad didn’t seem to mind. And Ndiya loved to listen.

  Sometimes she fucked the pulse of the water circulation jet, midway down the pool’s length, before getting out of the water. Most days she’d float on her back until she began to feel as if she were high above the town in an invisible shaft of shadow in the light, a column of shade in the blinding glare. With her eyes closed, she stared up into the vertical space tracing the shaft of shadow-light as it stretched out of sight. Unconsciously at first, Ndiya began to float upward toward a bank of fog and static in her body that she couldn’t see through. She’d drift across the surface of the pool until she found herself at the side near the circulation jet. She moved slightly if at all, breathed evenly. Afraid every time the pulse traveled through her. The fog and static appeared in her vision; shadowy figures moved about, came near the edge of her sight, and then returned to the depth of the static. She could feel other figures watching as if from inside her.

  In her life she kept a border between herself and all of this, sensed it only as distant trains or heavy pendulums far away from her. She’d only approached the fog and static by accident when pleasure and fear or anger washed together. Shame was the only man who’d ever noticed any of this. And he was the only one who hadn’t believed her lies about it. Still, he’d known not to press her about the truth. And then there she was. Aloft on her back, she stared into the shadowy figures who owned her clouded body. She climbed out of the water and reclined in a chair. She watched herself as if she was still up there, floating in an empty shaft high above the house. She remained passive. At least that’s what she thought. And she didn’t ask questions. And no, thinking certainly wasn’t the word. Ndiya tried not to think at all in the pool. It was a place to move empty and weightless. It was a transparent place in which she approached the clouds in the nearing static, where she stirred shadow into light, where she measured the presence of thunder and the promise of lightning.

  ■

  Two candles wavered on a long, blue wooden table. The polished surface of Goodman’s concrete floor always looked wet. The shadow of a breeze pushed the light into pools on the paths between overhanging palms and vines. The heavy leaves scraped and bumped in the treetops above the walls. At night, every few minutes they heard what sounded like tablecloths taken up and flapped free of crumbs. Hawk-sized bats with light brown fur and black leather wings careened through the airspace of the main courtyard; they tucked wings and dove in to swoop-drink from the invisible surface of the narrow pool. Almost all of this mansion’s rooms flirted with and then defied the idea that interior meant enclosed. Almost comically thick doors and labyrinthine moats of social structure buttressed these open interiors against the disease of danger in the streets. The openness was strictly vertical.

  Before he left for the evening, Saidi had chilled a bottle of wine and a pitcher of lime-banana juice on the likely chance that Malik and his partner, a German architect named Norbert, would stop for a visit. Three grilled snappers lay on the concrete kitchen counter under banana leaves. It was Malik who had contacted Peter Goodman about Ndiya and Shame living in his vacant property for a minimal fee to be discussed later. Shame had been skeptical, saying it felt a little too familiar, but he went along.

  The fevers and swelling had mostly passed. Shame’s left arm stayed in its sling. As the shoreline of the fever receded, the low throb of pain had become a murmur beneath the blurred border between sleep and waking life.

  A few weeks before, soon after Ndiya’s arrival, Malik and Norbert had explained their renovation and reconstruction of Baytil Ajaib to her while they ate breakfast in an alcove off the towering canal of their mansion’s central room. Baytil Ajaib had been a ruin. The two men had restored it into a modernized, traditional Swahili-style home and getaway for the discerning traveler. Norbert explained how they’d learned that modern materials such as plaster endangered the traditional architecture. Modern plaster, for instance, sealed the coral stone walls. They then retained heat and moisture and rapidly dissolved into sand from the inside. Malik said,

  –You’d think all this stone makes for a fortress or a castle. But, honey, like everything else here, it may look solid, but it’s actually more like gauze than stone. All these rooms are breathing, designed to remain cool in the heat. All around you here, what looks shut up is often wide open and what looks wide open, honey, it’s usually slammed shut or half the time it’s not there at all.

  Malik laughed and leaned back in his chair. Norbert explained that he’d experimented with local lime and sand that needed to be sifted together and aged, effectively fermented, into a dry solution. Plaster made from that mixture preserved the deceptively light and porous coral stone blocks by allowing the changes in pressure and humidity to pass through. Properly arranged and cared for they could last for centuries, as they had. Malik said that he’d come to Lamu to retire. He’d made a good life in banking.

  –Long story short—let me not paralyze you with boredom—I came down here to paint. To enjoy life.

  After all the research and trial and error that went into restoring Baytil Ajaib, they decided on two things:

  –One, what good is it to have all this figured out for our place when the rebuilt buildings all around crumble in ten years? And, two, you guessed it, girl, there’s money to be made down here. A lot of it. The history here, the climate, the architecture is incredible—it shouldn’t be allowed to disappear into the past.

  Their trouble was finding, training, and retaining decent workers.

  –Well, that’s Norbert’s trouble. I’m the bank, that’s trouble enough in a Muslim culture. Hell, in any culture.

  Ndiya made the connection immediately.

  –So, Malik, how would you feel about an investor that handles the labor issues?

  Without glancing at each other, Malik and Norbert leaned forward. Malik held Ndiya’s eyes. Somehow he was nodding but his head wasn’t moving. Ndiya had that feeling that Malik had been waiting for her, as if she’d just leapt into his outstretched arm. Then a wing passed in back of his eyes. She thought he’d blinked but he hadn’t.

  –Would you look at us? We can take this trivia up later, when we’re all together. Nydia, my child, you know what you and your mister Shame-Shahid need to do?

  –What’s that?

  –Take yourselves a sail. Charter a dhow. Go all the way to Kiwayu, near Somalia—a beautiful, sandy seal on a wide-open envelope. The place is borderless. Isn’t that right, Norbert? You can’t see where the sea stops and the sky begins. You feel like you don’t know if you’re lying still or gliding away. You all could use that.

  Ndiya leaned back and it felt like she was nose to nose with Malik. She smiled and nodded at him openly, thinking, “That’s the last thing in the world we need to do—”

  The joint worked as a sleep aid if nothing else. It wasn’t noise from the ancient train or daybreak that woke Shame. His mouth and throat were so dry it felt like his windpipe had swollen shut. Before he was actually awake, half able to breathe, he found the water bottle Sarah had sent with him and drank what remained. The compartment felt as if it had shrunk. It was the thick heat. After a moment he realized he was still en route to Mombasa. They’d left the high-country highlands with their wide fields and wispy acacias. They were now in the low, coastal region. The heavy sun already heating the roof of the train, he thought he could hear the groans of expanding metal added to the rhythm section of the orchestra under the car.

  A porter knocked on his door, announcing breakfast. He thought again about calling Su and the dead phone battery. There was an outlet in the wall of the cabin but when he plugged in the phone nothing happened. He took the phone and charger with him to the dining car. A waiter met him at the entrance and took him to a table where he was seated across from a tall white man who was the o
nly other solitary traveler eating. The man was red-faced and wore a thick shock of graying hair thrown back from his face as if he were riding a speeding motorcycle. When he sat the man greeted him in German, then in Kiswahili. Shame shook his head, “I’m sorry, I only speak English.”

  –Ah. Well, I knew you weren’t a Brit, a KC.

  –K-C?

  –Kenyan cowboy, a British expat hanging onto whatever’s left of his family’s stolen land.

  –No, I’m not that.

  –Well, you’re no tourist either.

  –No. I’m a traveler.

  –OK, traveler. I’m Gunther. Gunther Godar. I’m a painter and an activist.

  –Really, an activist?

  –Yes. In another life, I founded the Green Party in Germany. Now you could say that I have another agenda.

  A wildness in Godar’s eyes accompanied the velocity in his hair. His wet, reddened complexion seemed to radiate heat. The unbuttoned white shirt hung open down his chest. A tangle of braided and beaded strings dangled from his neck. He held his coffee in his right hand. A pair of thick silver rings stared across like a second pair of eyes. Shame nodded as Godar explained the crucial importance of his life and his work. He’d lived everywhere: India, California, Sri Lanka, Israel, South Africa. Now, he owned a compound he’d built on land south of Mombasa, in Diani, about two hundred meters from the beach. He was a filmmaker and a painter now. As he sat with his back to the motion of the train, Shame didn’t catch everything Godar launched at him. As Godar stressed the intensity and importance of every single thing that crossed his mind, Shame felt like he was hurtling backward in a way the lackadaisical speed of the train couldn’t account for. Godar’s eyes squinted as he emphasized how backward local traditions treated girls and young women like prisoners. Sculptures and paintings, even independent films, could draw out the imprisoned energies of these women, free them from their bondage in villages and families. His latest revelation involved the infusion of tantric philosophies and practices into technical features of modern painting and sculpture. When Godar said the word “tantric,” his eyes flung themselves, as if off a cliff, into the term.