Another Kind of Madness

by Ed Pavlić

  –No. It’s no short, my friend! I had my mechanic wire the ignition through the washer switch.

  –Why?

  –Why? Are you serious? This is my third car in five years, man!

  –What?

  –Carjackings. Robbers. Now when they come to steal my car I’ll just turn it off, get out, and walk away. They’ll never get anywhere.

  Benson laughed now. Shame sensed an abrupt bend, if not a break, in the clean slate behind the driver’s face. Call it a translation. But it was also a transaction. Benson looked at the tourists and the men in polo shirts who were now handing bags down to colleagues on the ground.

  –A lot of bags coming into this country, eh?

  –Yeah.

  –Let’s go get yours.

  –Good, sure. That’s great. But Benson, look, you know, I thought you said, “People in Mombasa are honest,” you know, “Nothing can get lost in Mombasa,” and all that. Yet here’s your car wired for carjackings? Three in five years?

  Shame noticed Benson’s left hand rubbing his right wrist. At that moment, Benson’s eyes went cold. A person in the parking lot wouldn’t have seen it. But with less than two feet between them, in this theft-wired, dented Toyota Tercel, Shame felt that bent slate in back of Benson’s face turn to steel. That steel wasn’t cold. Something, maybe disbelief, scurried behind Benson’s eyes and something else, possibly a streak of fiery contempt but just as likely a glimpse of bone-deep fatigue, sat there too. It was an instant at most. Then Benson pulled the background of his face together and, as if addressing a group of small schoolchildren:

  –But the robbers aren’t from Mombasa. They were Kikuyus from upcountry. Nairobi.

  Looking as if he’d just related to Shame the most elementary information, Benson put the car in gear. Benson tipped the security guards 100 Ksh each with Shame’s money, and they headed south to the tantric arts compound.

  Kubwa was the family name. Over his weeks meeting the crew at the junction of paths and unloading cargo, Shame had learned one or two things about the operation. Their grandfather came from Gujarat to East Africa when the British were still ruling. His name was Chakor; no one knew his surname. One day in a rare loquacious moment Kubwa had said that Chakor meant a person in love with the moon. The man had worked as a clerk in Nairobi, but he hated the cold nights. So he’d moved to the coast, started a delivery business, and married a girl from Paté. Kubwa wasn’t exactly sure in what order these events had taken place once his grandfather had reached the coast. The grandfather was a tall man and quite fat. Naturally, he’d ended up with the surname Kubwa, which meant “very large.”

  Shame knew it wasn’t Friday. Other than that, he’d almost ceased keeping track of the days. Friday was obvious. The mosques would be packed, stacks of thong sandals piled up outside the front doors. Usually they worked a half day if that, if you could call it working at all. Most days they worked hard. Shame was used to that. Even after these weeks, the Kubwa men still watched him make circuits back and forth from the boat as if they’d been hypnotized. “A mzungu,” their eyes said to him, “who works? A mzungu washenzi?” Shame knew that look well enough. He’d encountered it for most of this life in one way or another, by whatever term, wherever he went. At that moment, he thought, “What am I supposed to do, spin around until I’m dizzy?” Amina from the gallery had told him what the word “mzungu” meant. This work, however, was difficult in a very different way from what he’d known at home. When he thought that, he could feel the word “home” pulse down his arms, in his hands, and then lie down to die in his brain. At home, it was about doing the work, the job was a thing done. And “done” didn’t mean finished, it meant enacted in a certain way, with given dimensions of one’s self, part body, part something else.

  At home, the labor interacted with his life in a way that gave the doing, and the word “done,” its meaning. He’d never thought about it before. Shame had rarely spent much, if any, of his pay. Doing that work had meant selling his body, in time and sweat, in time as sweat, to the owner of the company. “Done” went beyond the dense, repeatable connection to the physical labor itself, the weight, even the smell, of the materials, went beyond the way, in the summer, his body took thirty minutes to disappear, becoming a series of waves swallowed by the heat of even the hottest jobs. He loved that feeling. No job was hot enough. “Done” went beyond the way, in the winter, it took a little longer than that to generate an envelope of warmth that erased the first painful minutes of a cold job; labor in the winter felt like flying over the surface of the worksite. In the summer it was like becoming part of the way heat disturbs the air, as if he could walk with a load of brick while watching his profile on the ground come apart into a rhythm of shadows like a distant murmuration of starlings.

  Done was constant. Shame had always been glad that the crews he worked with were never idle. He felt sorry for the concrete crews, for example, who had to stand still, waiting to work for half the day, thinking about how cold or hot they were, or if their feet hurt, or wondering if they should take off their work shirt or put on long sleeves. Shame had never had to endure that kind of idle time. Putting his paychecks in the bank and living his vacant life in roadside motels, Shame had loved the way “done” meant selling his body by the hour and the physical density and variability of the time that resulted. When something was “done” it didn’t mean it was over. It almost meant the opposite. The older men told him that was because he was young. In truth, for Shame, it was because work, that vacant life, was a physical alternative to a bottomless, immaterial grief in Chicago. Mistakenly, cornered by a pain with no location in the world he knew, Shame had attempted to corral one dimension using the other. It didn’t matter, though. Either way, the work worked; it was always hard work but had never felt difficult.

  The difficulty with Kubwa wasn’t so much doing the work. In a way, Shame never felt like he was doing anything. These jobs always had a strolling quality. He couldn’t feel what he’d always known—without ever really knowing—as things getting done. He felt like he coexisted with this work. The job wasn’t anymore or less done when they quit in the afternoon than it had been at dawn when they arrived to find their first dusky glimpse of Kubwa’s dhow low in the water, heaped with whatever load he’d set up. Shame thought, maybe this work felt saved, kind of like money felt when it wasn’t meant to be spent. Or maybe these jobs were rescued more than they were done. And he knew that what he sensed about the kind of work he was doing was also what he knew about his time that, apart from the pay, which he hardly needed anyway, was really how he knew about who and what he was at any moment. If the job was done, that meant he was doing something, and if it felt rescued that meant something else. Maybe the work was saved?

  No, it wasn’t a rescue. Part of getting work done had always meant squaring off with a great adversary who moved when he moved, a kind of perfect sparring partner. Maybe a dance partner? Often enough, it was true, Shame had felt saved by his physical contest with the limits of a job, a serious game in which every second and all movements counted. He worked and watched his body eliminate needless motion. He savored the elegance, the physical intelligence, of the latest refinement, until he felt like his intricate circuits through whatever jobsite amounted to a controlled and threatened dance. It was almost grace. He felt none of that here. When he realized that much he sensed a swooping shadow, as if an invisible wing had gone over his head.

  On some days, these Kubwa jobs felt like injured friends he was carrying on his back. Even these thoughts were part of it. At home, his mind wasn’t thinking at work. He’d loved that. Thinking at work had been a dangerous distraction. All attributes of mind had to be physically enacted, had to be done. He couldn’t afford to split the body off and let the mind travel elsewhere. Here his mind felt strangely alive and autonomous. And he’d begun, again, to hear and feel the piano. While he wasn’t working, he’d realized, for the first few weeks, he hadn’t thought about or felt the draw of any music
at all. And, since working for Kubwa, he’d begun to wonder about Ndiya in Chicago. Maybe she was staying with Colleen or even with Kima. He knew this action in his mind was pointless. But without knowing it, he’d ceased unconsciously rebuilding that particular wall. And he wondered where he might find a piano.

  ■

  Someone was building apartments or condos above a restaurant on the way to Shela. The tide was coming in, so the boat was docked at the shore, which dropped off steeply. Unloading here meant climbing eight feet of underwater sand at an incline of about forty-five degrees, then over the dune and down to the donkeys. The beach was full sunlight, not a stick of shade. The bow nudged into the sand. At the back of the boat, the water was over twenty feet deep. The driver had spent the morning fishing until the heat drove the fish into deeper water. Muhammad, the foreman of the crew, and the Kubwas had begun to call Shame “the Wizard,” which they pronounced Wheezhard. The short, squat worker from Matondoni still hadn’t said one word to Shame. He might have stolen a glance at him but if so, Shame had missed that. Another with a little red under his complexion and dusty curls in his hair smiled his khat-tinted smile at Shame and wanted to feign a high five with his missing left arm every time their paths crossed on the job. He chewed continuously, working the stalks around between his teeth and gums, spitting out bits and replacing stems. He added an occasional stick of Juicy Fruit from his pocket. The gum cut the bitterness. Shame had also learned that Kubwa docked this small man 100 Ksh per day to account for his missing arm.

  It was late afternoon. A gusting wind from the sea was stacking up huge clouds over the mainland to the west. The rainy season was approaching. The load was gone. The boat now bobbed like a cork and carved a ridge in the steep slope of the beach as it disappeared inch by inch beneath the rising tide. Kubwa told Muhammad and the crew they could go and they vanished almost instantly. Then Kubwa waved to Shame. “Come.” He told him to take the two biggest fish they’d caught that morning and sell them to the restaurant. “1000 Ksh each. If they say no, try the hotel around the back.” They could split the money, but Kubwa’s tone made it clear that he wasn’t asking.

  Shame pulled himself up onto the wooden craft. He stepped over the bench along the side and walked on the rib-like slats to the stern. There, in a triangular opening created by the converging longitudinal beams and latitudinal slats of the boat’s mangrove skeleton, three large cruise missile–looking fish lay motionless. At first the fish appeared metallic, aluminum. But the color was in transit: a blue-tinged silver moved from head to tail, passing under a lattice of vertical shadows along the side of each body. The shadows resembled windows in a train speeding past. “Fuselage,” Shame thought, as if he’d never come across the term before, as if it meant “the stationary velocity of a metallic fish.” Every hour, two buckets of ice from the restaurant had been poured over them, making it difficult to tell where one fish ended and another began. He saw three Y-shaped tails. A cloud of flies cavorted in the pungent air.

  Barracuda. The heads were oversized like locomotives, Shame thought, as he gazed down at the strangely fixed image cast by this tangle of specialized marine engineering. Kubwa and his brothers watched Shame from behind but he had no sense of that. The eyes of the fish were obsidian discs with flecks of cobalt, none of it of much use, he figured, out of the water. He couldn’t really tell which of the fish was biggest; all, he guessed, were between three and four feet long. He decided to pick the two with the largest, louvered tailfins. Every day he’d seen fisherman arrive to the Lamu Town jetty with various cargoes they’d lay out on the concrete. They sold their catch to the markets and hotels. Holding them by their gills, the tails and flanks of the biggest fish dragging in the dust of the narrow streets, kids transported the fish to the buyers’ businesses. Occasionally, a shark or a sunfish would be too big to carry. These were strapped to the back of a donkey or draped over the handlebars and seat of a bicycle.

  Shame stared down at the fish. In a way mocked by the incessant cloud of flies and the strobe of motion in the metallic sheen along their sides, a Pompeian, archeological fixity beamed upward at him from the sleek bodies. Their eyes now javelins of sharpened emptiness. Standing a few feet from shore, waist-deep in the water, Shame had seen squadrons of these fish patrol the aqua currents of the sound at the tip of the island. They moved like underwater missiles. It was late in the day. He was tired and had utterly no interest in this outrage of ice and stillness. Shame removed his gloves and folded them into the back pocket of his cargo shorts. He decided he didn’t really care which was the smallest. It was close enough for Kubwa. An unknown angle of shadows moved in him as the men watched from behind on the boat. He reached down for the tail and gill-lip of the nearest fish. He braced himself for leverage to pull against the dead weight.

  Something spring-loaded and invisible snapped before Shame’s eyes. Flies vanished and a flash of light, or something like light, slashed through the scene of soft strobe and stillness. Maybe the flies stole the stillness? An explosive hail of ice flew in every direction at once. The day spun like a mad wheel of black brightness, as if the Earth was an eyeball rolled back in its socket. Some force tossed Shame on to his back. Time took a deep breath and his mind fastened itself to a tower of gray clouds in the sky as it rolled over, passed beneath him, and then fell back into its position overhead. Shame’s initial thought was that he’d been struck by lightning. Just beyond his feet he heard a tight, metallic racket as if the small outboard motor, full-throttle, had been thrown down a stone staircase. He’d landed with one of the latitudinal ribs of the boat across the middle of his back. He searched for pain. Was he conscious? Yes. He arched his back further. The horizon behind him revolved to reveal two Kubwas in his vision, upside down, laughing. “Yes-s. OK,” he thought. He thought the pain was in his back but when he moved to get to his feet he felt a loose vibration down his left arm. He looked but didn’t see his hand. A delta of blood had sprouted from his arm. An open slash from his elbow to his palm stared back at him. None of it looked or felt like part of his body.

  Gush, flow, or drip? These were the first questions he’d been taught for worksite injuries. He’d seen many but he’d never been hurt on a job until this. “This?” he thought in disbelief. His hand was still there. He pulled his shirt over his head and off with his right arm and wiped off the blood, revealing a surgical, eight-inch incision on the underside of his left forearm. Pain, throb, or none? Those were the next questions. He couldn’t tell just yet. So none? He wrapped his shirt around his arm, crossed the ends, bit one sleeve and jerked it tight with his right hand. While repeating the pain question, he felt a tap on his shoulder; he jumped and turned. It was Kubwa, holding a wooden-handled hammer with a steel ball-peen head.

  –Would you like a wee-pon?

  Shame took the hammer. Kubwa turned and absently stepped from slat to slat until he was standing with his brothers again near the bow. The three Kubwas laughed.

  The sky had tilted so that it looked like a soaring, diagonal roof. Shame felt sleepy. The hammer felt heavy hanging at his side in his right hand. He felt the press of his pulse behind his ear. He held his left arm up vertical from the elbow, now definitely more throb than pain or numb. The pain would come later, followed by the fever. He looked across the sound at the shore of Manda Island, the scatter of boats docked. Fifty yards or so packed with dark bodies and children on the sand, the only stretch of public beach left in the area. He felt lucid but he wasn’t. The spit in his mouth tasted like brass. He knew that was adrenaline, possibly shock.

  He was also keenly aware of the urge in his upper torso to turn and go after all three Kubwas with the hammer. Instead, he stepped back to the triangle. The bodies were motionless metal. The eyes glowed blue out of black discs. One fish looked much larger now. It bent into a U shape, head faced up at Shame. Its mouth, cracked open, was bright bone-white inside. A double set of incisor fangs began a triangle from the top jaw. A single set stood like stalagmites in the fro
nt center of the lower jaw. A few dozen spikes and at least one hundred tiny shards lined the edge of the cave-like opening of the mouth. The rest was white and glowing as if the fish had swallowed a searchlight.

  Shame realized two things just then. It wasn’t a frozen velocity he’d been staring at stupidly; it was more like a rigorous potential—if not essential—surgery. And the hammer in his hand wasn’t a weapon. It was a tool. He knew the weight in his right shoulder scaled another potential—if not essential—element. He’d always aimed violence into work. Now this? He knew nothing, really, about the weight of a weapon. On land, he thought, his brain with the essential tool had the upper hand. Removed from its element, a mouth full of essential scalpels couldn’t operate. It could only attack. Out of its element, an essential tool was reduced to a potential weapon. Shame saw that now. And so, when circumstance reduced tools to weapons, someone was in for a bad day. It all depended upon which element was which. Wondering whether he was thinking about the fish or the Kubwa brothers, Shame knew that if they’d met underwater, it would have been the other way around.

  Shame walked back along the shore with his blood-soaked shirt tied around his left arm. He didn’t like walking through the streets with no shirt so he bought a second-hand jersey from the first stall he came across: FLY EMIRATES. Then he stopped at the apothecary next to the President’s Inn at the edge of town and bought sterile dressings, hydrogen peroxide. He paid 350 Ksh of the 500 Kubwa had given him for the brutal murder and subsequent sale of two barracuda. The jersey and the supplies had finished the blood-money plus some. Arm flexed and held near his body, fist closed and up near his armpit, Shame walked in the teeming main street as dusk fell like an invisible rain of ochre dust. His arm felt like a prosthesis. It signaled its own rhythmic throb to the rest of his body as if his heart had migrated to the location of the wound and was beating from there. He felt his pulse at the base of his skull. He’d known that as one of the badges and incidents of intensity. “Badges and incidents”? He’d picked up the phrase somewhere, he didn’t remember where. He wondered for a moment what it meant. Then he remembered a phrase he’d come across during his first meal at Echoes: “Labor which gives form to desire takes from desire its form.”