I waited for the elevator to come back, and this time, as luck had it, it was full of people, including a very nice member of the co-op board. I looked at him and said, “That man just confronted me!” and burst into tears. In fact, I cried silently the whole time I was on the Elliptical Crosstrainer at the gym because, upsetting situation or no, I needed to get my workout in. The humor of this did not escape me. I was intermittently weepy all day, freaked out at the proximity of this guy, who is separated from me by a mere layer of wood panels, and possibly some plaster. Oh how this ruins my safe, sweet nest.
Then I set about trying to figure out what could be done. I spoke to lawyers, the police, the co-op board, mental health authorities, my parents, and assorted other smart people about what I can do and what they would do if they were so lucky as to be me. Some of them were funny. Like when I went to the police I said to the guy at the front, “I’d like to file a harassment report.” He said, “Who are you harassing?” I answered, “My downstairs neighbor is harassing me. He thinks I’m trying to kill him by sending electrical pulses through the floor.” The policeman said, “Well, are you?” I replied, “Officer. I’m not here to confess.” Similarly, when I spoke to the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill and explained what was going on the guy said, “Well—why don’t you stop sending the pulses down there?” Later he suggested that turning up the voltage might help. Everyone’s a comedian, and all I can say is, Take my downstairs neighbor, please!
For now, it’s unsolvable. Practical, sane, and assertive I may be (and we can debate that another time), but there appears to be no instant solution to this problem. Not only is it insane but it’s unfair. I’m quiet, and I help out my elderly neighbor, Esther. I hold the door-open button for others. I recycle. I keep to myself. I try to be good. I envy your ability to escape by coming home. I’m keeping in mind how relieved you will be to have certain amenities, all of which I already enjoy. I’m also considering, you know, others less fortunate. Compared with you, Kwale villagers, and plenty of U.S. citizens, my situation is not bad. But compared to me, it sucks. Every day in the paper there’s somebody who gets murdered by that weirdo down the hall. It’s so easy to envision the people I talk to now going around saying, “Oh my God, she was just telling me about this guy last week. She knew he was nuts. There was nothing she could do and now she’s dead.”
I’ll tell you, right now for the first time ever I wish I had an overprotective father who couldn’t stand to have his daughter in a potentially dangerous situation. Or, and this in light of recent events, I wish I had a fellow, wimpy or no, who would wake up at night when I hear this guy raving. As you would testify, company makes all the difference. Right now, I’m pretty alone. However, one of my doormen offered to “teach that guy a lesson,” which was so sweet it almost made me cry again. And a burly friend at work who used to be a bouncer offered to pay the guy a visit and shut him up. Stack came over and helped me finish a bottle of wine on a night when Freako was yelling, “You’re the guilty one” and “You murdering cocksucker. You have no right to live in an apartment” and other lunacies at top volume. These gestures stand out, and I appreciate them, but what I would give for the constancy of a companion. A big dog, maybe? Maybe now’s the time to indulge my desire for a weimaraner named Focus. Somehow this situation demands more than a cat.
I’m probably not in immediate danger (although the doctor I spoke to at Bellevue said that I was). I do feel safe behind my doors, and I now have a fireman’s key to the elevator so I run express down to the lobby. But this really has soured my dreamy apartment. So much for independence. So much for privacy. I’ve always taken off my shoes to walk around, as you know, but now I get a palpable wave of anxiety when a guest drops something.
Luckily, work, as the cliché goes, is something of an escape from my troubles at home. You would not believe some of what I do: look at the best ways for data to be shown; FTP files to the stager, that kind of thing. I barely use the phone now. Why talk when you can email? I still feel like I’m out of my field, since I work on computers without even owning a television. But maybe that’s what it feels like for a lot of people. Not forest rangers, but people who own tissue factories don’t necessarily have hay fever, do they?
Love,
H
KWALE
December 9
Dear Hilary,
There are eight munchkins gathered at the window nearest to where I am writing. They are contorted into pretzel-like shapes in order to watch me. I tried sitting on the porch, but there they lost interest and were just pestering me for tin cans. Peering in the window is much more fun. Then they can knock each other over getting the best view. You’d think they’d get bored since they’ve watched me a million times before, and I’m not wiggling my ears or anything.
We have a development in the “our house” front. Actually, not a development, more like a roommate. Our landlord has moved back here.Right here. It’s particularly crowded because he has a lot of relatives who come and go freely, and the house is not large to begin with. This eliminates any shred of privacy left to us. He’s quite polite, but since he’s an mzee (old person) and the landlord, he has the Kenyan right to boss us around. Especially me (I’m a girl). I don’t like it. It makes clear that the goodness we’re leaving behind in Kenya—the people in this village—we would have had to leave anyway, even if Peace Corps didn’t make us, since we’d go crazy living with this guy. Although not as crazy as I’d go living above your guy. Are you okay? I miss you.I’m not going to talk about it.
Kate
NEW YORK CITY
December 10
Dear Kate,
I’ve been better, I don’t mind saying. The last trickle of William is that he left me a bag of guilt gifts, including a fortune cookie. I broke it open and there was the fortune “Fire will prevail.” It took me a stunned minute to realize he must have had it custom-made to say what I’d said on his birthday gift. Also, folded up into a tiny scrap at the bottom of the bag, as if it were a wish that didn’t need to be found, was a prescription, written on his prescription pad, for “eternal happiness.” Every few nights Delia helps me fight the urge to call him. I ring her up with some brilliant conversation starter like, “Hey. It’s me. I’m not calling William, right?”
“Right,” says Delia.
“Right,” I say. “Um, why, again?”
I hate the idea that he continues to pay his phone bills, to button his shirts, to age, to eat, to read or not read the newspaper. I hate that he lives in real time, that everything he does involves the decision that he didn’t want to do it with me. Somewhere he’s filling up his gas tank and I’m thinking about how I’d like to see the way his arm looks doing that. I’m thinking about how he held his coffee cup when he drove. How his fingers looked, by themselves and against mine. How his sentences came slowly, for reasons I won’t find out. How tired he was, how sad and tired all the time and determined to be well and good. How I wanted to heal him, not by helping him or carrying him but by huddling next to him. How I wanted to have his whole world, to move it in some way across my body, or to digest it, to have it be at once foreign and part of me. I wanted him to talk forever for the sound of his voice, for what he said and what made him think of it and what it made him think next, for how it sounded in the trees or in a room, for what the room said back.
I keep locking myself out of my apartment. I have yet to descend into listening to Tom Waits on repeat, but I feel hollow. Is that a cliché? Well, good for it. I’m drowning in sorrow and you’re giving me a hard time? I want to be a hermit in a cave with a sunny ledge and a pet flower. This isn’t a breakup, Kate, this is a breakdown of what is right and good in the world. It has done something devastating to all that I am.
Now, Kate, will you hurry up and come home. Hurry and tell me this isn’t my life.
—H
KWALE
December 12
Dear Exile,
Everyone is awakening. I can hear mama
s sweeping the ground with stick bundles, roosters crowing, the radio with its everpresent theme song, and an occasional mother yelling, “Wey!” (short for wewe, as in “You, get over here!”). In a little while I’ll search down the matches and boil some water for tea. Then I’ll buy some fried mandazi from Nazmin, who sits with a bucket of them in front of the duka. She’ll wrap them in newspaper, and I’ll wake up Dave for breakfast. All this makes me a little sad. Soon, I’ll be gone. When we got home from shopping yesterday, about twenty neighborhood kids were singing and dancing an African dance on our porch. They ran toward us, giggling and welcoming us home, probably for the last time.
All this sadness creeps up only now because we’ve been busy with a flurry of loving goodbye rituals. As we give all our things away and have last visits, kids are giving us drawings they made with our markers, their mothers slaughter chickens or sew for us, and the men stop by for man-chats. It almost makes me doubt our decision. But then I remember school, and I know that we will certainly go.
Zaina (she’s the one who held my hand during the exorcism) and two of her friends just came over, wearing blue sateen party dresses covered by ripped kangas, to find out what time we are leaving tomorrow and to play cards. We played a game that they usually play without me because I’d never understood the rules to it. I had always thought it was something like hearts, since after everyone put a card in the middle, someone took the trick, but I could never figure out which card to play and could never figure out who would take the trick. For some reason, I never succeeded in understanding their explanations of how it was played either. As I tried to play today, it suddenly hit me—they weren’t using any rules, they were just playing with the cards in a gamelike way. It was fitting that for the last game I could join right in. Zaina gave me the brightest smile ever, and giggled, covering her teeth the way she always does.
I hope you still love me when I come home all twisted up.
Yours come Christmas,
Kate
NEW YORK CITY
December 13
Dear K8,
I escaped this weekend to my dad’s place in Connecticut, bringing, for support, Steven and Emily and Stack. Stack and I took a nature walk and I depetaled a daisy, reciting, “He loves me. He loves me not . . .” When the last petal was He loves me not, I changed the rules to include the daisy’s yellow center. I popped it off and tossed it up victoriously: “He loves me!”
At a slow, candlelit, family-style dinner, Emily had a few drinks and I got her to publicly admit that her marriage to my brother was merely a fringe benefit of her friendship with me. We slept in two adjoining rooms, and Stack and I had to tell Emily and Steven that we could hear everything and to give them a firm “no hanky-panky” rule. The best part was that at six in the morning up on the roof there sprang such a clatter that it woke everyone up. It’s otherwise completely silent countryside out there, and I think we were all staying silently in bed trying to figure out what the very loud, repetitive, awakening noise might be. I got out of bed and stared at the ceiling for a while, and then left the room. The place is a big, open barn, so from where I stood I saw down into the living room, where a bright red cardinal (not the perpetrator of the noise) was fluttering at the window. I whispered to Stack (who from our earlier walk seemed more into birds than I would’ve guessed) that there was a cardinal, but he declined to get up. Then, far too awake, I wandered into the bathroom, from which I had a good view of the roof. On the peak, perfectly poised in the very front of the house, was the culprit. There perched a woodpecker, pecking, oblivious to the hours we keep. I went to tell Stack, and suddenly he, Steven, Emily, and I were all in the bathroom, just staring at the bird. It felt like Christmas, with the four of us up too early, gazing in awe at our rooftop visitor.
In that moment I totally forgot how sad I’ve been about Strong, and scared of the neighbor, and everything else. What an unexpected relief it was to be in one place at one time. Who knows how long we would have stood there watching the bird destroy the house so prettily. Soon he got stage fright and was gone. As we filed back to bed, teeth chattering, Emily walked behind me with one hand on each of my shoulders. Stack made a bad joke about Pinocchio and the woodpecker, and I thought of something Delia says when she’s happy, “This is so enough.”
I guess this is the last letter I will send, Kate, and, in a way, I hope it reaches you before you leave. Given the choice, however, I’d prefer that you not wait for it. I want you home, thank you. Of course, I won’t cherish you so much when you’re here, within reach of balanced meals and hospitals, but I’ll still like you. I’ll even take your calls.
Maybe when you try to get a life here you’ll realize that finding an apartment in New York City is a little like squeezing a sac of spider eggs out of your foot, plus there’s the broker’s fee. Bring me a little something, and sleep on the plane so you can keep your eyes open when I see you. I’ll call your mother for a plan; I will do whatever I am told to do. I’m glad that you will be home soon, weary one. Home in time for gingerbread cookies (if you like that kind of thing) and the lit-up trees in Central Park. How about we go to the Angelika and watch movies for a whole Saturday?
With relief,
H
P o s t s c r i p t
Kate came home on Saturday, December 22—just in time for Christmas. It was pouring that day, and I left early to take the long bus ride to the airport. I sat on the bus, watching all the other passengers struggle to bring on their luggage. My wallet was in my raincoat pocket, and my hands were empty on my lap. I was still a basket case over William. I kept reminding myself that Kate was coming home, the way in a scary movie I look at my hands, the other moviegoers, and the walls of the theater to remind myself that when the movie is over I will walk out into daylight. As I stared out the window, I was overwhelmed by that mixture of yearning and nostalgia that emerges on moving vehicles. The timing was strange—all I really wanted was to watch Kate and Dave eat some real food and to delight in their homecoming, to see with my own eyes that they were finally safe. But it’s never really convenient to be miserable, and I felt lucky to have Kate’s coming home as a distraction that was large enough to be its own event.
When they walked off the plane, the mothers and Dave’s sister ran to meet them. The fathers and I held back. Kate and Dave were both bony and tired-looking, and Dave had an unexpected beard. I realized I’d been afraid that Kate would look unfamiliar, or yellow with malnutrition. She was scrawny, with an older look in her eyes, but she wasn’t as sun-damaged as I was afraid she’d be. Above all, she was walking and she was Kate.
At the water fountain she cried at the sight of water so translucent and cold, so accessible. Everything—the airport, the people, the cars—looked preternaturally clean and bright to her. After all the parents promised that I wouldn’t be invading family time, we drove in a caravan to Dave’s family home. We knew the returned travelers were exhausted. They couldn’t eat, not homemade lasagna, not ice-cream sundaes (though I did remarkably well considering my own suffering), and they couldn’t really talk. Kate wanted to shower, which she did, twice. Watching them made me remember those moments of extreme exhaustion, when the idea of a bed is so deeply appealing that it overwhelms all capacity to take the necessary steps to bring oneself there.
I just observed them, taking comfort in their physical presence. And they were taking the same kind of comfort, asking practical questions, delighting in kitchen appliances and plumbing. Dave told us that when he hugged his sister the memory of layered scents rushed at him: he could smell that she used shampoo and soap and perfume and laundry detergent. We looked at photos, but the travelers were too tired to explain what we were seeing. The wood-burning stove sent a soporific warmth into the room. Kate struggled to stay awake; the air was heavy with contemplation and weariness and we were quiet.
In the middle of that night I awoke in the narrow bed of one of Dave’s sisters. I was covered with several wool blankets and the window was sli
ghtly open to let in the sound of the nearby stream and the rain. I sobbed into the sound of the stream, hoping I wouldn’t be heard. Kate was back, and I knew, after some sleep and food, we’d reflect on this. But she had escaped her struggle and I hadn’t.We were off-balance and what would happen now? Once we lived together. Once we wrote letters. Sometimes she needed me, sometimes she sheltered me. Now she was downstairs, asleep, overwhelmed with circumstance, with few plans for tomorrow. Now I was upstairs in the same house, awake and alone in the quiet rain.
—Hilary Liftin
E p i l o g u e
I’m sitting on the subway with my shoulder bag and my bagel, on the way to my new teaching job. As we calmly speed uptown, my eyes wander a little. A part of a headline jumps out from the newspaper of the man in front of me . . . RIOTING IN NAIROBI. Before I can read any more, the man gets off. Suddenly, I realize where my body is and where it isn’t, and I have that funny sensation that everything in the world happens at the same time. I look around, and no one else on the subway seems to think this is strange.
Things have seemed this way ever since we’ve gotten back: un-strange. The hot shower works each morning, the food tastes familiar, trains come, and I generally understand both the words and the meaning when people talk to me. For the most part, I feel safe and in comfort, and I trust the people around me are not so very different. I feel lucky.
Dear Exile Page 13
