“True that.”
“A gravitational inevitability.”
“What goes up.”
“You said it, brother.”
DANCY MUND ARRIVES at the Sun Hotel in Gaborone along with his wife Gabriella and eleven pieces of luggage. The bellboy brings up the bags, helps Gabriella unpack, fills drawers and handles hangers. Dancy tells the boy – who is actually a man, a Barolong tribesman and chronicler of Tswana fables – to open then close the window, to check beneath the bed and in the bathroom for any prowling scorpions or spiders. He insists the boy stock the refrigerator with preferred drinks, provide the room with extra towels and soaps and lotions. For this, Dancy offers up a dollar, stands sternly by the door and waits to be thanked.
In the dining room, in the spa, on the nine-hole golf course and at the casino, Dancy and Gabriella enjoy the fruits of their travels, occupy the Kwanzaa Suite for two nights before packing up again and heading into the desert.
LAST MONTH HARPER convinced Benchere to sell six slots to people interested in working on the project. “Think Tom Sawyer,” the plan was to raise capital while acquiring free labor. As the cost of building the sculpture was high, Benchere gave in to the idea. The Munds applied and paid their fee; arrive now with all eleven suitcases in tow.
“Well now, well now,” Dancy approaches the truck as Benchere and the others park. “Hello, hello.” He comes at Benchere with hand extended. “A pleasure, sir. What is it the natives say? Sannu! Hallo. Le kae?” He is not tall, is sensitive to his height, is also burdened by a slight limp in his right leg, a product of a hip disorder. He attempts to compensate by displaying a gymnasium physique, bought and shaped with the help of a professional trainer. He moves swiftly, says again, “A pleasure Mike,” his voice pitched to boom. He has trim Anglican features, dark hair colored against the grey and deep black eyes.
Gabriella steps forward and introduces herself. Her voice is measured, tamped down, less ingratiating than her husband. She says, “Mr. Benchere.” Standing an inch or so taller than Dancy, slim like a Q model, narrow through the hips, with dyed orange hair covered in part by an Abercrombie and Fitch pith helmet, she has a practiced smile, intelligent and well fixed. Cool with her conversation, when she talks her voice contains insinuation and when she laughs her sharpest teeth show through.
Benchere greets the Munds as if he’s pleased to see them. In truth, he’s forgotten they were coming. On their application, the Munds wrote of being longstanding admirers of Benchere’s work. “Huge fans,” Dancy adds now. Together the Munds own Daybreak Motels, a chain of econo-lodges stretching in coordinated intervals through the panhandle, New Mexico and Colorado and further west. Since opening their first Daybreak in 1992, Dancy and Gabriella now own 112 motels, refer to themselves as impresarios of the interstate, intrepid investors, products of the dream, hardworking disciples of Lincoln and Reagan, reverential toward Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek and the capitalist ideal.
“We won’t keep you,” Dancy Mund says and grabs for Benchere’s hand again. “Go unpack. When you have a moment we can talk. We have some thoughts,” he looks toward his wife. “But not now. You go and get settled. A pleasure, Mike,” he repeats. “We are looking forward.”
KYLE, AS PROMISED, waits until Benchere lands in Africa before letting others know about the revisions to the Broad Street prints. He calls Carla at her office, starts her off with small talk then says, “So here’s some news.”
HALFWAY TOWARD THE hills, Deyna digs in the sand. She has on a sleeveless t-shirt, brown shorts and dark work boots. Her shovel is a KS-D all-steel spade. Benchere stares in her direction. What is she doing? He can’t decide. She digs shallow holes, inspects the soil and moves then several feet off. When the truck arrived, Deyna did not join the Munds to meet the others but kept on digging. From a distance, the shovel shines when turned to the light.
BENCHERE HELPS HARPER, Naveed, Daimon and Dawid unload the truck. The Munds remove yellow Flylow work gloves from their back pockets but otherwise don’t join in. Once the truck is unpacked, Benchere and Daimon set up their tents. Benchere has brought a General Purpose army surplus with a poly webbing grid attached to the fabric and connected to the poles for additional support against high winds. With a hip roof design, Benchere thought the ceiling would be tall enough, but the poles are just six feet, leaving him barely able to stand hunched inside.
He exits his tent and walks to an area a hundred yards north of camp. Jazz follows. The sun is white. Benchere’s shirt sticks to his skin. Sand covers the ground like a surface carpet. Shallow fissures run across the baked earth beneath. The seasonal rains have come and gone. Benchere paces fifty strides west, marks the spot with several kicks of his heel. He paces off another fifty strides south, then north and east, before going back to camp for a hammer and stakes.
When he returns, Deyna is walking toward him. Benchere pounds the first stake into the southernmost corner. Deyna’s hair is brown, pulled back and tied away from her face. Her features are Mediterranean, sharply cast, her cheeks high, her eyes warm and assured. She has the sort of shape which suggests orderliness, is trim through the arms and lower legs, a look of discipline if not restraint. There’s a fleetness about her though she does not appear rushed, is agile and familiar with the demands of outdoor work. Despite the heat her bare shoulders are not burned. She steps to where Benchere is crouching and says, “Hello.”
“Hello yourself.”
“Who’s this?”
“This is Jazz.”
“Hello, Jazz,” she gives the dog’s head a good rub, looks at Benchere again and introduces herself.
Benchere stands, moves the hammer from his right hand to his left. Deyna is an inch or so taller than Zooie. Benchere gestures toward her shovel, is curious still, tries placing her name on the list along with the Munds, assumes she is part of Harper’s select six, attempts to recall some bit of information provided, is about to ask what she was doing digging earlier when Deyna questions him instead. “Is this where you plan to build?”
“My sculpture? Yeah it is.”
Deyna scans the area then asks, “Why here?”
“What do you mean why here?”
“You’re miles from the nearest water source, the rivers and reserves, Lake Ngami, the Okavango River delta, Lake Xau, the seasonal ground flows that connect the natural reservoirs. This will get you some privacy, but the Kalahari is 120,000 square miles. There are thousands of sites you could have chosen.” She asks again, “Why here? What do you know about this place?”
Benchere shrugs and says, “What’s to know?”
“If you have to ask,” Deyna puts the blade of her shovel firmly into the ground. “Have you checked the soil?”
“For what?”
“Sand and clay beneath the crust. Granite, gneiss, basalt, manganese deposits, fossils, signs of uranium, chrominium, cobalt, platinum.”
Benchere takes the claw of the hammer and scratches his head, pretends for just a moment that the question has thrown him then answers, “The depth of the crust we’ll dig through to set the foundation won’t come near to hitting any mineral deposits. Clay maybe, sure, but we’ll add a concrete footing and stabilize the ground before we place the columns. This area of the desert is pretty much the same for three hundred miles in any direction. A few feet either way won’t make a difference. Now if we were closer to Francistown, to Selibe Phikwe, Gope or Lerala, we’d have to think differently about what we might unearth.”
Deyna releases the shovel’s grip and places her hands above her eyes. Shaded from the sun she is able to see Benchere more clearly. “Listen to you,” she says. “What’s to know? I’m impressed.”
“Don’t be.” Benchere turns and paces off to the next corner where he sinks the second stake then walks west and sinks the third. “I’ve learned what I had to,” he says about the desert. “What I just told you is pretty much all I have.”
He stays on his knees, rakes at the sand with his fingers, thinks of Deyna’s original
question – Why here? – and then of Marti. “My wife,” he says, can’t help, wants to answer Deyna now in broader terms, tells her how Marti first visited Africa, about the work she did near Serowe, Ibadan and Gaborone, and the way she described the area, Here is the root. Here is the origin of everything.
“It’s true,” Deyna lowers her hands.
Benchere gets up and brushes the sand from his knees, asks Deyna if she is an archeologist.
“Anthropologist.”
“But you like to dig?”
“I do. It helps with the process, knowing where things are buried.”
As they’ve only just met, Deyna’s sense of Benchere is raw, comes mostly from what she has read. That he has spoken of Marti serves notice. Here is the root, Deyna thinks. Her own reason for coming to the desert includes a curiosity toward the study of social phenomena. She anticipates probable developments, the draw of Benchere’s celebrity and the location of his project likely to cause a convergence, throw everything into the social soup.
She takes her shovel, walks to the center of the field, stands in between the stakes and calculates how tall the sculpture will be if the metals are set at 45 degree angles. She tips her head straight back and studies the distance. When she looks for Benchere again he is still standing on the far side of the field. She waves at him, not urgently but expressively, and says, “For something this big you’re going to need a spine.”
“What’s that?”
“A spine. Something to hold it all together.”
Benchere finds the statement perfect, has not expected her to say anything quite like this. “Seriously now,” he answers. “Who are you? A spine you say?” The suggestion gives Benchere back his good spirits. He slaps his thigh, calls out laughing, “Damn it all, don’t I know? Without question, we’re going to have one. A spine and then some, no doubt.”
7.
ZOOIE SITS IN THE YARD. THE GARDEN IN THE EARLY evening appears ripe with color. Venus is on the far side of the lawn. Zooie sips her beer, plays guitar. She thinks of Daimon, of Benchere and Marti, Harper and Jazz, Kyle and Daimon again. Two days before Daimon flew to Africa, she slept with him at her apartment. Afterward Daimon spoke of the Kalahari. Zooie refused to consider, put her mouth to Daimon’s ear and sang softly, “Ain’t no thing but a momentary fling.”
She sings a different tune now.
The shot in her hip is sore. She checks the time, rubs at her leg. Her duffle is stuffed with clothes brought from her apartment. When Benchere packed for Africa, he put a pair of Marti’s slippers in his bag. That morning Zooie woke in one of Daimon’s tshirts, his scent on her skin. She finds Daimon’s t-shirt now, puts it in her own bag, moves her duffle and guitar to the front porch where she waits for Kyle to come and drive her to the airport, thinks crazy, crazy, crazy the whole way there.
“BUSY BEES,” STERN says to Rose.
“They do like to swarm.”
“Where is he now?”
“There,” Rose points.
Stern wipes his face with a towel. He squints through the sun, looks for Benchere and asks, “Do you think he knows?”
“About us?”
“Us? No. He knows about us. I’ve seen him wave.”
“He doesn’t seem to care.”
“He probably thinks we’re reporters.”
“Or soldiers.”
“Here to protect.”
Rose says, “We could be with the BDP.”
“The BMD, BCP or BNF.”
“Could be,” Rose follows Benchere with the binoculars.
Stern changes his shirt, comes and sits in his chair beside Rose. “I don’t think he knows,” he says and Rose agrees.
THREE DAYS AFTER Linda’s adventure with the gaffer, she is called in by the network. They are, in a word, distressed. This is the word they use. They do not say disappointed as that would imply expectation. Hope has let them down before. They had hoped Linda wouldn’t screw up, had hoped she would employ some discretion and not make a sex tape that wound up on the internet. “We had hoped,” they say but know it’s too late for that sort of wishful thinking.
What are they to do now when the footage has already been viewed more than a million times online? One point three million hits in 36 hours, they tell her. An injunction after the fact? A civil suit? Why bother now? The bag has no cat. At best they can attempt a follow-up response on The Darling Hour, show a contrite Linda, or perhaps a brazen and indifferent one. The consensus, however, is that there is no point. A line has been crossed. Advertisers have bailed. Drugs are one thing but this? The tolerance toward Linda has faded, the spin impossible to doctor, what career she sought to salvage has dissolved into sludge. The exposure – ha! – is all too much. Protesters have gathered, demanding the show be cancelled. Those from the network shake their heads collectively and say, “Ahh Linda, Linda, Linda. What have you done?”
HARPER FINDS BENCHERE’S laptop and logs on through the VSAT LinkStar Geostationary satellite system. Across the internet, on the Huffington Post, the NY and LA Times, Slate and Cold Hard and elsewhere there is reference to Benchere’s arrival in Africa. In chat rooms, on blog posts and Twitter, keyboard theorists debate the significance of Benchere’s trip. Here in Africa, in Europe and the States, in the markets, cafes and on the street, people discuss the project, are fascinated by the whole idea. Is it art for art’s sake or something else? Motivated by their curiosity, two men from Madrid and a woman from Tanzania arrive at camp late that second morning. A clockmaker, poet, and pastry chef, they are drawn by an interest in Benchere and a want to be part of the scene.
IT TAKES TWO days to prepare the grounds; the storage area and cooking space, digging the straddle trench, the garbage pit and burn out latrine. Benchere works with Harper, sets the field for his sculpture, makes sure the generators and sanitation unit are hooked up, the equipment inventoried, the food well stored and metals on their way. Each night the temperature cools. A fire is made with the wood Naveed and Daimon gather. The loose drifts of camel thorn and bamboo crackle as they burn.
ON TUESDAY THE winner of the BAA Contest is announced. Heidi pools her prize with Mindy, Cherry and Sam, Doran and Nan, mixes the winner’s pot with what the others can afford. Together they buy six tickets, head to Africa with $141 dollars remaining between them. Landing in Maun, they go outside, bags in hand, and negotiate their ride.
ROSE SAYS TO Stern, “The last time I was in Africa I came this close to contracting dysentery.”
Stern looks at Rose, who is holding his thumb and index finger a half inch apart, and asks, “How could you tell you were that close?”
“Believe me,” Rose answers with absolute certainty, “There are things you know just by feel.”
NAVEED HAS WRITTEN out instructions for Skype. Benchere finds the piece of paper, tries Kyle, hits contact, sees his face in a small section of the screen. Unclear what to do next, he taps the surface and says, “Hello? Hello? Is anybody there?”
SHORTLY AFTER HER sex tape appears online the network officially cancels The Darling Hour. “We’ve seen enough,” the comment is delivered without irony. The press is less kind, lampoons Linda with, “Nice Golden Globes,” and “Talk about screwing your career.” Linda reacts to the ribbing with middle finger raised. In search of a place to regroup, she stumbles upon the Kalahari project, reads about Benchere’s travels. As owner of the seventh Benchere original, Linda interprets the timing as fate. She checks the airlines, visits her doctor for the necessary shots, packs a bag and slips past the paparazzi camped outside in the middle of the night.
THAT AFTERNOON THE final three paid workshop participants arrive in camp. Each is in their middle twenties, from Iowa City, a woman and two men traveling together as RIPPLE Africa volunteers. They have arranged to stop and work with Benchere before spending the school year teaching English and mathematics in Gaborone. Naveed welcomes them, brings them out to where Benchere and Deyna are finishing the straddle trench. Benchere pulls off his gloves, extends
his hand, offers them a chance to dig.
IN ZIMBABWE, DEMONSTRATORS protest the result from the recent election. In the Congo, members of M23 launch coordinated attacks across the county, while in Kenya, Uganda, Somalia and Chad grassroots protests and rebel attacks have each country on the brink of war. In the Sudan, airstrikes ordered by al-Bashir continue to drive people from South Sudan into the Nuba Mountains.
Out where the first metals purchased from Rianburg & Associates have arrived by truck, Benchere discusses the situation in Africa with Deyna. He takes a rag and the Weiman polish he’s brought from Tiverton and works the surface of his future sculpture until the steel beams glow.
ZOOIE ARRIVES IN a bush plane flown by a man running junkets from Maun to Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park. Daimon comes and embraces the surprise.
“Well now,” Benchere too, hikes in from where he and Deyna have been preparing the beams. He takes her bag, gets Naveed to find an extra tent. Later, Benchere and Zooie walk out in the direction of the acacia trees a hundred yards west. The day is more than hot and Benchere is wearing a tan safari hat, broken in and beaten down so that the crown collapses and the brim sags across the front. “Where did you get that thing?” Zooie can’t remember seeing it before.
Benchere touches his head. He is still processing Zooie’s arrival, is happy to have her; the familial bounty, not quite Marti but in its own way perfect now. He tosses an arm around Zooie’s shoulders, says in answer to her question about the hat, “It’s Daimon’s.”
REPORTERS DRIVE TO the desert hoping to land an interview. Benchere is affable, careful not to turn them away, mindful of their influence yet focused on the work at hand, he leads them around camp, shows them the field where the sculpture will rise, the metals laid out and waiting. He talks of his project as they want him to, denies that he has come for any reason other than art. “It’s all I know.” He challenges them to answer in turn, “What other reason could I have?”
FOUR NEW PEOPLE arrive that evening: a teacher, taxidermist, day trader and mechanic. Each is eager to become part of Benchere’s project. They approach and ask to be invited into camp, deliver personal appeals, pledge their talents. Benchere takes a headcount, surveys the area, says, “Let’s see here,” and turns the new folks over to Harper.
Benchere in Wonderland Page 8
