Another Kind of Madness

by Ed Pavlić

  She took out the second newsprint flyer. It seemed to pick up where the first left off. The cover featured a cartoon version of the bearded man suspended in an orb as if he was the sun. From his outstretched hand emerged lines of energy that fell upon the up-reaching hands of six beckoning followers. The message read:

  By Maharaj Ji’s Grace Nigeria is

  The New Holy Land Today

  At the bottom of the page read the same address on the Ibadan-Lagos Expressway. Inside, a small tract explained that all world holy lands were holy only when the spiritual leader, “the source,” was “physically there becoming the center or nucleus of the entire universe.” The energy emits only from “the God Father Power or the Living Perfect Master of the time and is never a historical matter.” Previous holy lands such as “Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Iran-Iraq, Indian, etc.” are now “mere historical artifacts, dead monuments … instead of receiving real peace of mind, security and the life guarantee, all forms of darkness are found there.” Bereft of “the source,” “they always resort to arms and other artificial means to maintain their status quo illusively.”

  Ndiya didn’t feel at all ironic about what she was reading. The description was certainly absurd if not insane but at the same time, the prose and graphics and the frailty of the document and Muhammad’s brief story of his family and, yes, even the radical insanity of the message itself, it all testified to something that she sensed couldn’t be dismissed. It was a disaster. Compared to what? She thought of their mothers, fathers, brothers. Family. She remembered Muhammad telling her: “If you’re not part of a family, you’re a ghost.” Then she thought about listening to “Free,” and her maps of the Great Lakes, and felt sweat gathering on her forehead. She remembered that Shame had played the song for her, out of nowhere, before going to the shower on one of those first nights. The sequence of nights was a little blurry in her memory now, but the sound of her life in that song when she heard it in his apartment was very clear to her. Or maybe she was clear to it? She felt a clarity—something that must be called sacred, she thought—absolutely sealed in absurdity floating just above her head.

  She closed her eyes and leaned back. She had the sensation someone was sitting behind her. It was a woman behind her. She felt the woman’s thin arms reach to embrace her. The woman was weeping in silence. She opened her eyes and the weeping woman vanished. Just then she realized what was missing from Muhammad’s room, what was different about the air there. The room had no flies. Flies were everywhere in Lamu. But she’d been sitting there all this time and not one fly had landed on her. The effect was lightness or emptiness, an open stillness that made it seem as if the air was missing a molecule, an irritant.

  The rest of the second pamphlet provided “a simple list of tangible advantages Nigerians are graced to enjoy and enjoying first and foremost for those who had already taken a step; so rise up and partake of this manna now also.” The “advantages” were enumerated one through eighteen. Ndiya skimmed down the list:

  1. You can stop any danger, threat or enemy from your home, office or area without any external support.

  2. You can talk or communicate with all the Ascended Masters: Buddah, Ram, Krishna, Laoci, Moses, Orunmila, Elijah, John the Baptist, Mohammad, Jesus the Christ, Oduduwa, Kofi Manu, etc…. through the New Holy Name—Satguru Maharaj Ji.

  4. You can communicate with your dead ones without fear for a Divine solution to your or theirs when alive that otherwise seemed impossible.

  6. You can know the true spirit of your wife, husband, children and relatives and effect a Divine change for them when necessary.

  7. You can develop technology without importation and colonial brain drain, using locally sourced materials.

  9. You can stop death in your home, on land, sea and air which is 100% guaranteed.

  10. You are protected from the predicted cataclysm of Armageddon and Nostradamus.

  11. You are shielded from all radioactive fallouts that are plaguing and dehumanizing the current world.

  13. You will know that black is not devil but purity, red is love, blue is danger, green is fertility, yellow is wisdom and white is peace.

  16. You don’t need to achieve your life goals, purpose and your God through tutered monographs, pentagraphs, candles, holy water, sutana, etc. from abroad. Everything is now, direct and immediate.

  At the bottom of the back page: “For power against all principalities and the secret to develop science and technology from within you,”

  Talk to Satguru Maharaj Ji on the following hotlines:

  and a list of eight numbers followed.

  A gurgling sound came from the other room. It gained force and then gradually gave way to a rising whistle broken by a dozen or so sharp cracks. After a short pause of silence filled with faint clicks and scrapes of barely audible culinary efficiency, Muhammad entered the room with a board on which he’d arranged two steaming cups and two plates of chopped mango, pineapple, and banana.

  –Sorry-o, I have no crisps.

  –I didn’t know you were doing all this. I’d have helped.

  –It’s no trouble.

  Muhammad gathered a pillow under his knees and sat cross-legged. He wore a long white caftan. Up one sleeve and down the full length of one side were medical insignia and the words IMAGEFIRST MEDICAL WEAR.

  –Ah. Spoons. I’ll be right back.

  Before Ndiya could say no, he was up. As if pulled up like a puppet on a string, Muhammad rose from his cross-legged position without touching his hands to the ground. He passed in front of the window at the far end of the room. The cloth of his robe was thin, almost a fine mesh or gauze. Backlit when he passed by the window, the outline of his wiry body stood forth like a negative of a negative. Across his back was a script in blue. Ndiya focused on the words: ANGELICA HEALTH CARE: RENTED NEVER SOLD. She smiled and shook her head. Thinking that this was when she should wonder where Shame was, she improvised on the code of Muhammad’s gown: “Borrowed never begged.” Or “Found not stolen.” Muhammad returned with spoons and a few wispy coils of grilled meat, which he unwrapped from a grease-spotted twist of newspaper.

  –So. What do you think of the Maharaj Ji Village World Headquarters?

  –Well, they’ve certainly covered the bases, haven’t they?

  She paused, wondering if that was offensive. She could feel a hard edge in her voice. Beyond that edge, she knew, lurked something she and Muhammad shared. The heavy pendulum arced closely behind her. Where she felt the word “shared” she heard the word “danger.” She hoped he’d sense the possibility that the distance in her voice was a pose. She hoped he’d leave that possibility alone. “Familia, indeed,” she thought.

  –The place was perfect for my mother, I think. It made her life, her body, into a vast maze in which she could never be found. We lived there together for almost two years.

  –Then what?

  –Then I hopped behind a tarp on a delivery truck and set off. I was sixteen. I don’t know if I knew, nor if I cared, at that time, whether I was seeking a way out of her impossible maze or a way into my own.

  After chewing on a few seemingly indestructible bits of the meat for long enough to wonder whether she’d be able to swallow them, Ndiya felt flushed. Her mouth began to throb. Her nose began to run and she thought she could hear her own pulse clicking behind her right ear.

  –It’s hot for you? Drink the tea, it will go away-o.

  The tea was also spiced and just below boiling. She took a breathy sip and for a prolonged second it felt like her mouth had burst into flame. She couldn’t taste the tea and it felt more like blinding light in her mouth than heat. In a flash the bright blast disappeared and the pain was gone. She could still feel the pulse in her tongue.

  –Now, have some banana.

  After the complex logistics of dealing with two small bits of suya, and while watching as Muhammad chewed thick ribbons of the meat and slurped scalding tea, Ndiya didn’t know what to say. The bites of banana w
ere also tasteless but produced a most incredible sensation of low-current electricity in her mouth. It reminded her of putting her tongue on the top of a nine-volt battery she’d taken from her brothers’ racing car as a child. There was a smooth texture, which she assumed was the banana, and there was an electric current spreading around her mouth. She suddenly wondered if she could talk.

  –Muhammad, what are the bags filled with?

  –Those? Just water. But it must be fresh, clear water. I change it weekly.

  –What for?

  –The clear water in the plastic scares the flies away. They won’t pass near them. They see their reflection but enlarged. Imagine. As a fly sees: about sixty huge beasts in every window. Flies don’t know what they look like.

  –What about at night?

  –It works at night too.

  –How?

  –I don’t know.

  –Do you think you’ll ever go back? I mean to see your mother?

  –No. Most likely not.

  –Why not?

  –She died in the maze. Four years ago.

  Ndiya stared at Muhammad. It felt like looking into an open well, dropping a stone and waiting for the tight, vertical sound of a splash. She waited but there was no sound, no splash. Muhammad tore off a riff from a twist of meat with his teeth and held it between his fingers like he was smoking. He slurped his tea. When he looked back up at her she could see his face held back a question he wasn’t going to ask.

  A new candle’s accusations have burned down to shifting accommodations with the dark. The wind rustles the trees and, after a few seconds, circles around the flame. The shadows from moths flurry down Ndiya’s arms. After a moment, the shadows flutter across Shame’s face. Ndiya has just changed the dressing on his arm. They talk while they wait for Malik to arrive. Blood and fluid slowly seep into the gauze. When the antibiotics do their work, Shame’s wound will heal and his fever will fade into the distance. She doesn’t know if it is the fever, the wound, or the healing, which seems to have actually begun, but Ndiya feels words, or something like words, change between them. Talk turns supple, maybe swollen, in their mouths. As she listens, she sees words unbutton themselves.

  –We’re invited to hide. We think we’re hiding from each other. It doesn’t work that way. I don’t have much to say about that version of the world. In a way we talk about nothing else, as long as we imagine words are what we say they are. I wonder, if words could speak, what would they say we are?

  Ndiya leans back and smiles. Shame’s eyes narrow.

  –A life, like a job, like a song, is never won or lost.

  –But what if the opposite of lost isn’t “won” but “found”?

  Shame nods and holds up his bandaged arm. He winces, feels a flock of knives, a pain net. He says,

  –And in that world, unless we figure out how to do—not just say—otherwise, “found” mostly just means gauzed, bandaged. “There” always points at a scar, and “here” points at a wound. Maybe that’s the difference? Maybe that’s all we get? Maybe that’s enough.

  Ndiya sits next to Shame on a bench at the long blue table in the courtyard of Goodman’s mansion. She sits forward and leans into his side, rests her cheek on his right shoulder.

  –Those doctors humpty-dumpty-ing me when I was a teenager, therapist after therapist. After that elevator, that exile. I mean, I can’t see into it, it’s like an electric cloud in me. Painful static. Someone must have undergone all of that. And what happened in The Grave did happen to someone, to many, many someones. I’m not sure who. Maybe everyone. And I’m not sure what. Does it really help to call one of them me? Which one? And why one? If I really sit and feel it, those questions are absurd, even vile.

  Shame doesn’t know exactly what she’s talking about, but he knows there’s no way to ask. He hopes she’ll continue. And he’s afraid.

  –Go on.

  –I guess what happened is who we are; nothing can be known about that if we’re not willing to be that, and to live. Do we ever know anything about it?

  –No. I don’t think we do. But is “no” enough?

  –Enough to what?

  –Enough to live.

  –No. I don’t think it is, maybe I used to. But if it can’t be known, how do we trust it?

  Shame notices tears streaming Ndiya’s face. Her chest hasn’t heaved, her breath is even. Shame feels tears drip off her chin and down his arm.

  –Maybe that’s how. Anyway, “no” doesn’t exist. There’s always just what she will—

  And Shame cuts her off:

  –And, now, there’s what we will …

  –And now there’s that, yes. Us. Is that a wound or scar?

  She glances up and Shame looks into her eyes. He doesn’t nod or shake his head. Ndiya continues,

  –We know there’s the disease, the danger, which is everywhere. Forever. It’s always always always part of what any “here” means. It’s the wound in any word, it’s what heats the blood in any body. It’s life, part of it. And at the same time, everywhere, there’s the insanity trying to translate itself into your name. Trying to stow away in your voice, to burrow its way into your words.

  –So, if I put my hand on you, do I place it “here” or “there?”

  Ndiya nods slowly, nods so slightly Shame wonders if she’s nodding.

  –That’s the question, isn’t it … and there’s no answer, really, because if I know the way to get from your “here” to my “there,” then, and exactly then, we have no word for what we are.

  –Ah. So my wound becomes your scar? Your “there” lives again as a wound I carry? But how do we know if there’s no word?

  Ndiya shoves him gently with her shoulder.

  –Well, you tell me, piano man.

  She leans back into his side. Shame reaches out and looks down at his hands in front of them. The shadow of a breeze in the candle crosses the backs of his hands. He turns them so his palms face them. Ndiya continues,

  –The first time we touched hands it felt to me like your hands wore gloves of themselves…. I put my hands on you and it felt … it felt like that’s where they were—

  Ndiya stretches and her voice softens into a blurry whisper, a gauze of sound:

  –Oh, the world will offer us its names; then, we’ll know what we know as we deal with that. That’s probably all we get. We owe the world that, to live in it—whatever it is. Whatever that means. Whoever that makes us. We owe each other that—

  –Well, maybe it’s neither here nor there.

  As if on cue, a sudden gust of wind almost blows out the candles. Ndiya and Shame hear a light rain begin to fall on the canopy over the courtyard. And then they hear Malik’s knock on the front doors.

  Shame didn’t know why he did it. He knew it wouldn’t work. But he plugged the phone back into the outlet one more time as the train came to a halt in the Mombasa station. Forty-eight hours of blind travel and broken sleep across how many time zones vibrated in his arms and legs. A few seconds after it stopped, the train felt like an oven under the late-morning Mombasa sun. He pushed the green button on the Nokia phone in his palm. Nothing. He wound the cord around his hand, slipped it off, and placed it in the top pocket of his backpack. Even in miniature, the habit of coiling up power cords. The efficient purpose and certainty of zippers. He was far from all that. The handle of Ndiya’s roller bag snapped up when he pulled. Swinging the backpack across his shoulders, he joined the slow movement of people to the exit of the car.

  When his feet hit the ground, a silence around him broke into a frenzy of motion. Even the concrete of the platform leapt into action. Tour guides called out and groups of already reddening tourists accumulated around them. Bag handlers in white shirts and hats pulled improvised carts in and about the crowd. Workers spilled out of the third-class cars to his left. He walked aimlessly for a few moments until, about halfway down the platform, he found himself next to a familiar shoulder.

  Gunther Godar loomed above a group of peo
ple. They stood next to a small pyramid of luggage and boxes. It had to be done. Shame parked his roller bag and tapped Godar’s shoulder.

  –Gunther, may I use your phone to call the person I’m supposed to stay with here? My battery is dead.

  –Of course.

  Godar handed Shame the phone and Shame took out the card with Su’s number. He dialed and she answered to say that she’d been expecting a call. He explained, the battery. She had two guests to attend to; his room was ready. She’d send Benson, a driver. He’d be there in thirty minutes. While Shame listened to Su, Godar and his small entourage slowly began to walk down the platform toward the parking lot. The seamless control in the way Su was scolding Shame quickly gave way to a calm tone of welcome. She said she’d be very glad to meet him, had heard much relayed between Kima and Sarah. Shame listened to her but mostly heard himself believing what she said and then listened to himself wondering why he believed her, instead of really listening to what she was saying. Shame kept pace with Godar’s slow march toward the parking lot, pulled along by his need to return the phone as fast as possible.

  –OK, Su. OK. Thank you. I’ll wait for Benson.

  Shame was not used to suitcases with wheels. He was nervous about the call, vibrating from fatigue and displacement. Meanwhile, he surfed an off-limits wave of thoughts about his reasons for leaving Chicago and what he’d left there. Many small things at once tumbled in the moment. Unconsciously reassured by the weight of his pack on his shoulders and trying to politely convey his gratitude and his regret at not having called, while listening and, incredibly, trusting the late-evening tone of Su’s morning voice, holding Kima’s card in one hand and Godar’s phone in the other, Shame had absently walked away from the roller bag, leaving it where it was on the teeming platform. Outside the gate, a hundred yards from the frenzy of the exodus, three motionless soldiers guarded the empty parking lot of the station from under a small stand of shade trees trapped in the center of the buckled and erupted sheet of asphalt.