The Journey Prize Stories 21

by Various

  We were at the passport office the first time I saw this smile, suggesting something like appreciation for a particularly cruel joke, one with a wit that Christopher could not deny despite being its victim. He had looked at the passport clerk and then leaned forward and reached forward with his short, strong arms to grasp the edge of the counter. He took his weight through his shoulders as his knees bent, and then he looked up, just over the clerk’s head, to look at nothing and be distracted by nothing as he smiled appreciation for the witty twisting of his insides. There was no counter to lean on at the airport, and Christopher bent over, put his hands on his big thighs, and looked down. His chest heaved. He rose, closed his eyes for a moment, and dismissed his smile. He spoke again, in his “Mutual voice,” which we named years ago after the lucrative national spots he recorded for an insurance firm, when he, in his words, “took all the black out,” cooled his vowels and clipped his consonants to produce a flattened, actuarial authority. He said, “No, I am sure you will see that it is all in order; all is in order here. Look again.” The immigration agent did not look again; he glanced at Christopher and then at the impatient lineup, shrugged, stamped our passports, and thus we continued. No look for me, no signal that relief or anything else from the experience was to be shared.

  From the airport we took the tro-tro into the city. Twice as the little bus roared along the highway the power went out behind us, as though it had been on only for our passing, and I turned and saw the darkness where we had been. When we arrived I stood in the blue-tiled lobby, drained utterly, despairing and drained, while Christopher checked us in and asked the clerk about clubs in the city and the best highlife bands. Soon an eager circle of men materialized to share their enthusiasms for bars and bands, for brothers who sang, uncles who played guitar, and sisters who owned clubs, and they were inviting Christopher and me to dinners and parties, while he wrote down names, locations, and confusing directions. Only after one of these men interrupted to say, “Your lady looks so tired,” which drew much sympathy and offers to carry bags, did Christopher put away his pen and with me follow a solicitous clerk to our room.

  We have come for highlife. Christopher wants to hear it, not on record, not in a little Detroit club with an audience of the curious and the dutiful, but in its home, though he is emphatically not so naive as to believe he will be getting at something uninfluenced, some sound of an idealized, untouched continent, as he knows that the local musicians have been listening to the West for decades, playing guitars and horns, and that nothing pure exists now and never did. He hasn’t had to tell me these things and we haven’t talked about them; we’ve stopped talking in the old way. But I think he imagines that he will find something like the energy and meaning of doo-wop, of the original, not the anachronistic recreations. I know his position well; he’s clear that it hasn’t changed since he first wrote for Zoom. Christopher believes that the innocence, optimism, and beauty of doo-wop weren’t a pose, but they weren’t only what they appeared to be; they expressed defiance, insisted that these qualities could withstand the oppression, the humiliations, the decades of crimes against dignity, assaults on identity. In articles, at conferences, he has explained that doo-wop is as political, affirmative, and subversive as soul, hard bop, and gangsta rap. It is as connected as they to a tradition and history broken by slavery, and he hopes he will find something like it in the enduring exuberance of highlife and be uplifted before he dies.

  In the morning, with no music to seek out yet and no energy to risk a walk in the city’s sauna heat and confusion, we – Christopher – accepted a pitch from a share-taxi driver in front of the hotel to take us to the nearest fort outside the city. An hour’s hot drive later, we moved from share-taxi directly to guide, but Christopher soon abandoned the tour. I was surprised he lasted as long as he did in the wet heat, listening to the guide’s rote listing of the statistics – numbers of slaves caught per year, price paid per slave, numbers lost while being held waiting for ships to arrive, numbers loaded on board, numbers dying en route, hundreds of thousands upon thousands after tragic, unthinkable thousands. He headed off down the wide trail to the white beach. I followed. He went straight for the water, and he walked with such determination that I thought he might not stop till the waves came over his feet, or might not stop at all, and I asked myself could I watch him drown, but he halted at the water’s edge, stood on the hard white sand, looked south over the water, stared south at the shimmering water and blinding sky while I stood beside him, wondering what he was thinking about: enslaved ancestors desperate on the middle passage; innocence, optimism, and beauty; onrushing death? He bent down finally, cupped up a palmful of Atlantic, splashed it on his face, looked blankly at me, and then walked back, me beside him this time but just as distant.

  We never before let things separate us. I still remember our first months, when every day’s set of odd glances and misunderstandings, every foot in a mouth here or unsuccessfully hidden bit of anger there, was every night’s conversation before sleep. Once we entered a restaurant arm-in-arm, and the grinning hostess looked at me and said, “Table for one?” and that night we laughed hysterically together. Christopher always insisted that when people don’t understand it isn’t because they can’t. It isn’t because they’re not white or not black or not men or not women. It’s because they don’t want to understand and change. When one of us didn’t understand, then it was the other’s task to explain, and to say that a black man and a white woman could not understand each other was to admit and accept stupidity. But now he is truly different, for he will die soon and I can’t understand, Christopher believes that I can’t understand, which he says every time his face tenses so as not to signal that his body is no longer his own.

  In the early evening, after we both rested, Christopher arranged for a taxi driver to take us around the city. We visited a string of nightclubs along the central ring road, and when the music there proved unsatisfactory we moved farther out, to a makeshift metal shack with three tables, a guitarist, and a drummer; on to a passable small imitation of a seventies disco, complete with glitter ball and canned music; then a family home with a man rushing to get his guitar; then what seemed to be a wedding celebration with tables set up on the street and a full band that we heard for blocks as we approached, and where, as at every other place, we were warmly welcomed. I could not like the music, but only guess that I would have done so if I still had a right or a capacity to know whether I liked something. Christopher was not satisfied and we kept going, and it seemed to me that he had no true optimism, but was continuing just to make a point, a point to me; again he looked at me, waited, and then turned to the driver and asked him to continue, which we did till the city started to shut down and finally Christopher said no more, and we returned to the hotel. In their last conversation our driver told him that really one could not hear highlife in the city at all; it was necessary to get away, and he named the region and the town where the best, most authentic highlife bands were concentrated. The same collection of men who had given their advice the night before gathered again to assure Christopher that yes, everyone knew this town was the place to go for highlife, and it was a day’s bus ride away.

  In the night I was awakened by Christopher, who was beside me on his knees in the pose of the child, singing – trying quietly to sing but whispering, choking out the words, gasping, soaked in sweat despite the air conditioning, dripping sweat, his yellow night shirt soaked through and sticking to his broad back, and one of his outstretched hands shaking while he gasped the words, one at a time: “There’s. A. Moon. Out. Tonight.” He caught his breath and was silent, alerted to me, but I knew not to move, or speak, and to deepen my breathing in a successful enough imitation of sleep, successful enough, if not to fool him, then to allow him to pretend not to know and me to agree to pretend that I had not witnessed his agony and his urgent nostalgia.

  His nostalgia. Christopher was fourteen when his nineteen-year-old cousin, Jerry, with his girlf
riend, Andrea, drove all the way down from Halifax to visit him and his parents in Windsor for a week. In his family photo album there’s a picture of Christopher, short but already taking on his adult stockiness; Jerry, tall and wiry, looking very hip in his stovepipes and pleased with himself; and Andrea, a more voluptuous Diana Ross, on Jerry’s arm. In the story Christopher tells, his voice had changed early that summer, became its impossible, deeply textured bass almost overnight, and when Jerry heard him he exclaimed, “We’ve got our bassman!” He and Andrea said they had been singing doo-wop the entire trip, with Andrea taking the falsettos in her soprano and Jerry the tenor leads, but were frustrated that they didn’t have the bass. So Christopher was conscripted out of his book-reading loneliness and into the trio, and the family performance of The Capris’s There’s a Moon Out Tonight was, to hear Christopher tell it, the pinnacle of joy in an otherwise unrelievedly, archetypally wretched adolescence. When they were done Andrea leaned over, placed one hand lightly on Christopher’s chest, cupped her other hand around his ear, and whispered to him, “Girls always go for the bassman.” Jerry heightened the pleasure by hamming up some jealousy, exclaiming, “You stealing my girl? You making time with my girl?” Her lips brushing his ear, her fingertips on his chest – it was the erotic highlight of Christopher’s life, he told me in our only conversation about respective romantic histories, easily overshadowing later conquests, when his confidence had caught up to his liquidy bass and drew lonely, dreaming girls to wait in the dark for the late-night FM deejay to finish his shift.

  Christopher tells that story, the music part, not the sexy denouement, when he’s asked to explain what began his obsession with doo-wop, but for him it’s the unexplained that draws his attention, the puzzle about Jerry. “Why would he want to visit us for a week? God, my parents were the most uptight, the most dull, the most judgmental – why would he want to spend a week with us?” His theory is that Jerry planned to visit only a day or two before adventuring across the river to Detroit, but that he stayed for him, to rescue him, stayed to give his little cousin something to get him through the pain of the next few years. And Andrea seemed happy to join in and add her special bonus. He proposes the theory, then rejects it, because he cannot imagine anyone being that sacrificing, certainly not any nineteen-year-old guy with a world to explore and an Andrea to explore it with.

  Before they left, Jerry and Andrea gave him the latest record by The Marcels, which became the first record in Christopher’s collection. More importantly, they convinced his parents that they needed to buy Christopher a record player to play it on.

  The highway out of the city was a badly paved, potholed strip that became a dusty, rutted dirt road, whose curves we followed into the countryside as the afternoon became evening, past small villages where we sometimes stopped for more passengers, past farmers herding goats, children playing soccer. Twice I got off and bought food from street vendors. Christopher ate little. I didn’t ask how he was coping with the jarring ride. When we came to our destination, a town on the south shore of a long lake, Christopher began to rise from his seat and then fell back, and there was no smile then, no humour of even the most merciless kind to be found. He gasped loudly, and he started to cry for a moment before his anger and pride seized him. I was looking to see who might help me help him off the bus, but he stood then, and supporting himself with his arms on the backs of seats, made his way unassisted. I wanted so much to be able to help him but knew that I could not.

  My idea for a way to reach the source of his anger and soften it, to reach Christopher and soften him and make it so both of us could achieve peace, or something, God, something – this idea came to me from no particular place but seemed so right. That night I reached for him and just rested my hand on his hip, and as usual he did not roll away or even tense but was still, still and so furiously tolerant. I started to sing, softly, “Are the stars out tonight? I don’t know if it’s cloudy or bright,” and I knew that, as I continued, finally he would see that he was not alone after all, not so cut off and abandoned, and he would reach for me in the night when the pain came and not need me to pretend anymore. Even as I sang “cloudy or bright” I could hear the next line, “I only have eyes for you,” and I knew he would turn to me then, without speaking, but he did speak – before I had completed my breath and sung that line. He said, “No. Don’t do this,” and of course I saw that I had been stupid, and sentimental, and that nothing so false could do anything or help anything, and I was stunned that I had been so stupid and disrespectful.

  “I’m staying here till tonight. You go,” Christopher said to me in the morning. He had not gotten out of bed.

  “I’ll bring you breakfast,” I said.

  “Please go.”

  I ate breakfast at a market stand near the hotel, lingering over my food forever, till finally, though no one showed the slightest displeasure with my occupying a table in the shade of the lean-to that sold the food, I felt too embarrassed to stay, and I set out into the town.

  The heat was dryer, less heavy than on the coast, more fiery – shocking and hostile. Buildings – shacks – sharpened into focus and then shifted, their edges fuzzy, suddenly angling back, narrowing and rippling. I could see a large white structure down the dusty, rust-coloured road and made it my goal. It seemed near, perhaps a ten-minute walk. I looked at my wrists, half expecting to see my skin beginning to blister.

  The white building retreated as I advanced through the blazing air, and time seemed to pulse and bend in the heat along with the small shacks I passed and the green trees in the distance behind them. Was I getting closer? I couldn’t tell. No one was about – sane people hiding from the sun, I supposed.

  A young couple I passed walking in the opposite direction, the first people I’d seen on my walk, smiled at me, their eyes widening. I could tell that they stopped after I went by, and I imagined them looking back at me.

  In the yard before the white building, three men knelt on the ground, resting in the pose of the child, exactly like Christopher, and I pondered, amazed, the possibility of travelling all this way to find three afflicted as he was, suffering that way; perhaps this was a clinic, a rare medical outpost specializing in the treatment of his untreatable fate. Then they moved and I realized the absurdity of my heat-induced fantasy, remembered what I had read on the plane about the Muslim North and understood that these men were not practising yoga or coping with deathly pain: they were praying.

  Beyond the white building I found another small market where I was able to sit again in the shade, drinking melon juice. My embarrassment at lingering was not as compelling as my pounding, pounding head and my exhaustion, and I spent the rest of the afternoon there, the girl who was the proprietor treating me like her fragile patient, commiserating about the heat, offering water, juice, and advice, joined sometimes by others passing by or stopping for something to drink or eat, all seriously concerned about me. I turned down several offers of escort back to the hotel.

  Christopher was up when I returned, waiting, his eyes closed, hands folded in his lap, sitting in a chair under the ceiling fan in the small lobby. When I asked him what he had learned about music performances he told me that the desk clerk had said the town was empty of bands, that a festival was underway across the lake, and we would be taking the ferry in the morning, a twenty-four-hour ferry ride with several stops on the way till we reached the northern shore and the village where the highlife bands of the region had gathered.

  If we had made this long overseas journey before, we would have talked about everything. Christopher is dark, the darkest black person I’ve met, till here, where everyone is darker than he is. He would have joked but also admired, speculated, and invited me to speculate. We would have talked about the music we heard in the city, and the heat, the slave fort, the food, the taxi driver and the hotel clerk, the city and the beauty, the beauty I noticed without noticing, and we certainly would have spoken of the potential symbolism of our trip up the lake to join
the festival, about our pursuit of the music that seemed to retreat as we advanced.

  In the evening, in our small room, like a sleeper on a train, boiling, with the rumble of the engines coming through the window and the vibrations humming through the hot floor, I said, “Christopher, please talk to me. Please let’s talk.” He was lying on the lower bunk, on his back, and he looked at me and said nothing.

  “I know you’re angry,” I said. “I’m angry too. I’m angry that all my love for you can’t do anything, and it seems so unimportant, our love seems so unimportant now, and I’d do anything, really, I’d do anything,” and of course I started to cry as soon as I spoke, and I couldn’t finish my sentence.

  Christopher sat up and turned to me; he looked at me, incredulous, or disgusted. He was about to speak; he was going to say something to me about love, but then he grimaced, and he said only “Oh,” and again “Oh,” emitted each time as a gasp of pain and surprise, and he fell back on the bunk. He lay there, curled up, one hand gripping the edge of the mattress, and cursed through clenched teeth while I sobbed uselessly, uselessly, till finally his attack passed. Christopher rolled over to face the wall and covered his face with his hands. A breeze had come up and the ship had begun to roll gently.

  What I said was true. Our love used to count for so much, enough for so much else not to matter; for twenty-six years all my life’s problems, anything that threatened me, was disabled and finally dispelled by Christopher’s love. Everyone could hear his voice everywhere, in commercials, voice-overs for coming attractions, in-flight audio, syndicated public radio, documentaries, but I heard him speak only for me; in a voice deeper and warmer than he ever used for anyone else, he would close his eyes and speak my name.

  The village we have come to is a sprawling collection of circular grass huts. We have been told that the festival began two days ago, but we are in time for the last day. We are staying in someone’s home; some family cheerfully gave up their home for us. Christopher could not disguise being sick, and his insistence that he would not see a doctor was met with a collective insistence that he must, till he said again that he would not see anyone and a woman spoke loudly in a native language, and the discussion among the impromptu welcoming group that formed when we left the ferry simply moved on to the topic of whose hut we would stay in. We were given dinner and then, respectfully, our privacy. Now Christopher lies on his back, asleep, fevered, sweating, his breath shallow and sour.