Another Kind of Madness

by Ed Pavlić

  Shame didn’t know what “tantric philosophies and practices” were; he didn’t really wonder about it. It all came at him too fast. He wondered about this feeling of being propelled backward in front of Godar’s zealotry and concluded that “tantric” must have something to do with spiders. He remembered his old roommate and felt like he knew what Godar meant. He smiled and nodded. The waiter brought muffins, poached eggs, jelly, and something he called “upcountry sausages” that Godar recommended very highly.

  Looking around for an outlet, he saw only one. Placed on a ledge above the doorway into the car, a phone was already plugged into it. Godar said that they had less than an hour before arriving in Mombasa. He called Mombasa “the island.” Shame ate the eggs and sipped coffee that was thinner and cooler than the air that came through the window and caught in Godar’s open shirt. He noticed that the upcountry sausages were the same color as Godar’s face and neck. He felt slightly nauseated by the impression that the smell of the sausages was actually coming from Godar like some kind of tantric funk.

  He rose to leave as Godar’s unilateral stream of conversation arrived at the insistence that Shame be his guest at the compound. He got up with Shame and made him come to his compartment so they could exchange addresses or at least phone numbers.

  When Shame returned to his berth he tried the outlet again. Nothing. He could feel sweat under his shirt so he took off his shoes and jammed one under the door to keep it from sliding shut. The new airflow made the heat worse, the space felt like a convection oven. He’d have to find an outlet at the station. The train slowed and curved through hills covered with hundreds of shanties and what looked like small mountainsides of trash. People and a few goats were walking the slope nearest the train. All morning barefoot children had run out of huts and rural compounds and sisal fields and down paths to stand near the tracks. As the train passed them by, they’d cease running and stand bolt upright, smiling and waving. Some suddenly froze in place and saluted military style. Now Shame began to smell the charcoal and diesel smells that had greeted him along the airport road in Nairobi. The groups of shanties grew more frequent, much larger. The space between dwellings collapsed until there was no visible pause between the rusted corrugated rooftops. There were lagoons between them. Some of the settlements were on stilts over the water.

  Finally, the train slowed to a crawl and passed very close to a huge mass of dwellings amid ground dotted with ponds and puddles. Up ahead, a few dozen children were lined up next to the tracks. Shame watched them grow nearer. They stood in rows by height as if assembled for a class photo. The littlest ones stood in front. One he glimpsed wore a torn plastic shopping bag as a shirt, its handles looped over the sharp curves of his shoulders. They smiled and waved. Shame noticed an older boy near the back. He wore a red top with long sleeves, white stripes down the arms and an insignia of some kind over his heart. He had zipped the warm-up jacket all the way. The collar stood up straight, rising to meet his chin. He smiled and waved too. As the train drew past, the older boy raised his right hand up under his chin and, with thumb extended and still brightly smiling, he nodded and drew his thumb across in the throat-cutting gesture. Then he pointed at the train, nodding his head gently, smiling, and repeated his imitation execution.

  A distant flame behind the boy’s face collided with Kima’s playful voice in Shame’s memory: “The train’s a colonial relic.” The relic bit was obvious enough. But Shame hadn’t really considered the colonial part until just now. This thought made the young man’s gesture into a forecast, or a confession, more than an imitation. At the table, Shame had decided spontaneously not to tell Godar anything about why he was there and who he was. He thought about that and he thought he could feel his throat swell. Godar’s torrential, tantric self-absorption had allowed him little chance and even less call to really introduce himself. But that wasn’t all of it.

  Ndiya was off-limits in his mind. The distant bells in Sarah’s levitating softness were shooting stars, at best. The tall boy’s stance, the chilled flame behind his eyes, and the pleasure he took in his calm gesture of vengeance felt like a current in Shame’s body. He shivered slightly, and a brassy taste filled his mouth. It wasn’t fear. It looked to him like what hope felt like. He felt another chill, though he knew very well he was hot. He thought maybe terror was what it felt like to stare coldly, irretrievably, as one’s own eyes stared back from someone else’s face. Who, Shame wondered, he or the boy, had been doing that just then?

  Ndiya thought she knew all about pain beach. But Kate’s approach to eye makeup highlighted another dimension entirely. A thoroughly elegant person, Kate wore a wide-brimmed, floppy black hat and a loose blue caftan, “Adire,” she’d said, hand-dyed with Yorùbá indigo by a collective of women outside Oshogbo. She owned Echoes and half of Buraka, the art gallery next door that dealt in imported fine arts from across the continent.

  Dusk was falling. Shame hadn’t returned from wherever he’d gone to work. Usually, when he did return early he’d eat something and sleep for three hours. She left Shame’s room just as Muhammad was unlocking his cart at the front of the neighboring building.

  –You off?

  –Sha—Shahid, is late. I’m going to walk to Echoes.

  –Let me guess, mango sorbet.

  –I’m beginning to think it’s laced with something, hard stuff.

  Ndiya smiled and looked away.

  –You want to come?

  –No, no. I have to wash off the day’s dust. I’ll be up very early tomorrow. A large tour group of Italians is due to arrive in Shela. I must be there to offer them authentic coastal barbeque. You know they don’t come all the way here to eat linguini.

  –You sure?

  –Yes. Plus, old Kate gives me the shivers. There was a woman where I lived as a child in Nigeria, a famous artist. They called her Iwinfunke, Adunni Olorisa. Her name was really Wenger. Austrian, I think. The woman was certified … well, she was magical. The real thing, an Austrian Yorùbá priestess! She gave me many, many nightmares. She spoke to the red earth. A magic woman whose skin had been peeled off, leaving her the color of worms you find under stones. Kate could be her daughter, or sister. No, no. Too many echoes at Echoes for me, my sister.

  –Why did they call her that, Iwinfunke?

  –I don’t know. We moved from there before my father ceased coming home from work. When the country’s highways replaced his rivers. If I see Sh—Shay-em—You know I’m not a local, woman, I can say the man’s name. I’ll tell him where you’ve gone as if he’d have to wonder. And, say, what about your name? A white woman with an African name?

  Ndiya smiled and looked down at herself. She rubbed her right forearm with two fingers of her left hand.

  –I’m not white!

  –OK, an American woman. Black American.

  Muhammad considered for a moment, again, Americans and their fanatical insistence on such strange little distinctions between them. So like the British in that way, he thought. He hadn’t met many Americans. The few he had met spoke so similarly that he couldn’t tell them apart. Ndiya said,

  –I don’t know. You’d have to ask my parents. I used to think it was because it was the ’60s, a fashion.

  Muhammad nodded. Ndiya continued,

  –Black pride. But now I can imagine. Look, you know, my mother’s last name was Monroe. My father’s was Grayson.

  –Colonial names. Yes, I understand. Many Nigerians have them …

  –No, Muhammad, not colonial names. Owners’ names and that’s all they knew. It’s all anybody knew. For ten, twelve generations. Think about that. Hell, they were almost brand names.

  As obvious as this was, Muhammad considered that he’d never really thought about it. He’d never actually gotten to know a “black American” anyway. To emphasize her point, Ndiya placed her forearm up next to Muhammad’s.

  –These are also family names, Muhammad. So, you know, somewhere in the South, the American South, there are counties full
of blonde Jenny-Mae Monroes and Miss Ann Graysons running around. My cousins! Now I can see that names like mine had nothing to do with pride, or maybe it is pride. Either way, I think my parents and that generation simply didn’t want us mixed up with them in whatever future they imagined was on its way. After the revolution.

  –Ha. I see. You, Americans. All your names should be Shay-em.

  Ndiya nodded and smiled. She wasn’t going to accept nor contest the point. She’d think about it, maybe. From around the corner came the sound of drums and a crowd of children. Irregular rhythms. The sound was moving fast and getting closer. Then six small children wearing all white ran past. With ropes looped in their hands, they dragged empty, bright plastic water containers behind them on the ground. One little boy stopped, addressed Muhammad as mzee, and announced something else to him in Kiswahili. Muhammad replied, “Nzuri, nzuri sana, sana,” and bowed slightly, placing his right hand on his chest. The little boy laughed and darted off to catch up with the receding sound of the water-container drums. Ndiya stepped off the large stone she’d perched on to talk with Muhammad and started down the hill into the maze of passageways that led to the water. She turned and waved to Muhammad who waved back.

  “Mzee” was one of the few Kiswahili words she knew. It was the first she’d learned. It meant “sir.” And she’d caught it in all manner of exchanges between men and boys. She thought to herself, there’s a name for an American. A girl. “Nzuri” she’d known. She didn’t know exactly what it meant, but she didn’t need to know. It was also a brand name for a line of hair products, so she figured she could pretty much guess what it meant.

  At Echoes Café, the light failed in the courtyard long before darkness fell outside. The high coral walls and the huge palm that provided shade during the day sifted dark from dusk in the early evening. Kate was distracted by an exhibit of paintings she was installing in a new venue she’d opened up on the waterfront. After a few obligatory questions, she kissed Ndiya’s cheeks and exited through a small doorway in the rear wall of the courtyard.

  Ndiya’s glowing flute of mango sorbet arrived and she took small scoops with a long-handled spoon carved from ebony. There was a large group at the oval glass table over her left shoulder. She’d noticed them when she entered because of the mix of people sitting together. There was an Asian woman—Chinese, Ndiya thought—and a black woman—likely British by way of the Caribbean, she guessed. She took the two men in jackets to be the husbands of the women. The man in matching, all-white kanzu and kofia with red embroidery was obviously local.

  The local man didn’t sit there like a guide, however, and the group didn’t broadcast the manic affect of tourists at all; they talked quietly among themselves, an audible word punctuated here and there, and laughter rose and fell from their table in a regular, unforced rhythm. Something was very attractive about the table behind her. It wasn’t the people, exactly, but a slow-swept effortlessness in the pleasure they took from each other. They seemed to be having a great time together but unlike the groups of people she was used to, they weren’t advertising it. These people weren’t devoting most of their energy to confirming how much fun they were having; this had left some energy, she thought, for actual fun. Ndiya didn’t really know why she thought this. Maybe she didn’t. But she felt it. She sat searching for a word for the feeling radiating from the table at her back. “Fun” wasn’t the word at all.

  It was already dark. Now the air cooled into night. Ndiya thought about getting a book from inside and reading before it became too dark. Certain phrases from the conversation felt like a breeze on the back of her neck. The voices moved like candles. She thought she’d heard an exchange in French but she couldn’t tell. Then a clear word punctuated the air, “Dialectics!” followed by a round of laughter. At this she turned around to look. The black woman had made the exasperated proclamation. Her arms were raised. She held her fluted glass of juice high in her right hand. The older, local man in white was laughing openly. His eyes seemed lighted by the voices around him. Just then he caught Ndiya’s eyes and nodded, tipping a glowing glass in her direction. Ndiya smiled back and raised her spoon in return. She turned around and went back to concentrating her full attention on the silken texture of the sorbet and the proliferating limitations of her vocabulary while the voices traveled the courtyard like invisible firelight. Maybe the word for what was going on behind her wasn’t “fun” but “flame,” she thought. Contrasting the occasional cooling phrases, it felt like sitting with her back to a distant fireplace.

  Ndiya was reluctantly finishing her beloved mango smoothness, she could feel the what-am-I-doing-here pulse knocking on the door behind her right ear. She wasn’t answering. Instead she flipped a coin that kept defying the odds and landing, again and again, on the same side: heads said, “You’re exactly where you need to be.” She wasn’t stressing it. Yet. The game was fixed; tails said, “You’re exactly where you’ve always been.” “Be happy to be back,” she thought. “Happy?” she wondered, and then, “Back?” “Fun?” “Flame?” None of the words came anywhere near her.

  When she walked through the narrow alleys of Lamu Town she heard loud whispers of women over the cries of babies from inside ground-floor windows. Small squalls of waist-high children blew past her on both sides, separating around her at the last moment like schools of fish. Men in twos and threes sat on the cement benches inside doorways, caps pushed back, talking like men talk. The sky hung down as if something heavy had taken a seat in the apartment above the strained celestial ceiling. She could feel the streams of smoke-scented air moving through the alleys. The air was somehow densely public, she felt, almost heavy enough to swim through. In a certain way, she thought, one could easily drown in this air. She thought back to how she’d felt on her soaking walk to Shame’s apartment the first time she’d come there by herself, on that singular evening of twilight. That distant planet. “Distant?” Behind that was the elastic familiarity, inside that the family she’d walled herself away from.

  Ndiya sat at Echoes with her last bite of sorbet. The radical differences here made it clear that it was all the same to her. She knew it all. She understood nothing she heard; she never had. The opacity of the language around her, here in Lamu, felt familiar rather than strange. It was a strangeness that drew her closer to what she saw, smelled, and felt. She sat there and retraced her route from Shame’s room to where she was. “Which room?” she wondered for an instant’s dim glow. The amber light at Echoes matched exactly the glow from the strange tubes in Shame’s antique stereo. The spaces of her life floated around her: Shame’s bed suspended in the defunct elevator shaft at 6329; his nearly empty, cell-like room across from Muhammad’s place, just up the hill. It was all one room, in a way. She knew that. And she knew it wasn’t. And she knew she didn’t. She smiled to herself and rubbed her hands loosely up and down her thighs. Then a surprise:

  –Comment allez-vous, mademoiselle?

  –Non, désolée, ah—I mean, sorry, I’m American.

  The local man in the white kofia dipped his head and looked at her over his glasses.

  –Child, you are American, aren’t you. Me too!

  Then, glancing playfully over his shoulder:

  –We had a bet. Yvonne said you were American. I said you were French, by way of Cameroon, maybe Gabon, certainly not Senegal! And here you are. Still, we might both be right.

  He then leaned down and took Ndiya’s hand in his, flicking his other wrist as if to erase the space between the obvious and the incredible. Then he put his other hand on top of hers.

  –Malik Weaver, né Daytona Beach, Florida, circa nineteen something-we-don’t-have-to-talk-about.

  He kissed her hand.

  –Malik, that’s my brother’s name. I’m Ndiya Grayson. I’m from Chicago.

  –Naturally, Ndiya Grayson. Naturally.

  Malik laughed, frowning.

  –’Vonne honey, you win. This child’s from Chicago. Well, you must come visit with us at Bayti
l Ajaib. We’re going there now.

  –Oh?

  –It’s where I live. It’s also a hotel.

  –Oh, no. I have a place—

  –Just a visit, Ndiya-Grayson-from-Chicago. Have a drink with, well, with them …

  –I can’t tonight. Maybe another time.

  –Well, certainly. How long will you be with us in paradise?

  –We plan to stay a while …

  –Ah, “we”? … so, you will have to visit us. Please do. Here’s a card. Just ask for directions to Baytil Ajaib. The name’s on the card.

  –Ask who?

  He looked down at her in mock surprise and theatrical annoyance.

  –This is Lamu, child. Ask anybody.

  Malik kissed her hand again. Then he reached out and, frowning, he cupped her hand in both his hands.