by Dave Eggers
He could have just left. But Alan hadn’t had a vacation in two years, and Schwinn had counted on him being gone a week or more anyway, so he went back to the hotel, saw a sign in the lobby for a riverboat trip down the Rio Negro, and signed up. He went up to his room and spent the rest of the night on the balcony, watching the traffic on the road and the sidewalks, the children in their school uniforms out on the streets until eleven o’clock. For an hour he had watched one girl, no more than eight and lean as a country cat, wandering safe and alone with a stroller full of white roses. She sold not one.
In the morning, he took a quick flight to Manaus, the mouth of the river, and his first glimpse of it didn’t distinguish it much from the lower Mississippi, or really any river. It was wide, it was brown. He had signed up for the trip expecting dense and canopied jungle, and a narrow river winding through, monkeys visible from the water, crocodiles and piranhas snapping, pink dolphins leaping. But instead he arrived on the riverside, walked across acres of mud on a makeshift bridgeway built from pallets, and was soon on an old wooden paddleboat, three stories, looking as likely to float as an old clapboard church.
The days were simple and glorious for their simplicity. The passengers woke with the sun, dozed for an hour, and then spent another puttering however they liked, on the decks, looking dully at the passing scenery, chatting idly, playing cards, writing in journals, reading about the topiary. At eight or so, breakfast was served, always something fresh — eggs, plantains, melon, fresh breads, juice from oranges and mangos. After breakfast was another free block of time, and at ten or eleven, the boat would have reached a port of interest. One day it was an ancient village of thatched huts elevated above the floodplain, another day it was a hike through the forest, looking for snakes and lizards and spiders.
On the boat Alan slept more than he thought possible. The higher oxygen content to the air, the crew members said. Northerners slept a lot the first few days, they said. He found himself asleep everywhere — in his cabin, on the second deck, in his chair, everywhere. And always the sleep felt as good as any he’d ever known.
There were twelve herpetologists aboard, most of them over sixty, and Alan, and a young woman his age. This was Ruby. She was tall and lean, tightly coiled, short dark hair. The crew were all in love with her, and though they were all married, they made overtures toward her, and she carved them up. —Your poor wife, she said to the one of them, a married Peruvian, when he took her hand during dinner. You don’t deserve her, Ruby continued, whoever she is, wherever she is.
Alan had stayed close to her after that, just to listen to her talk.
After the day’s excursion, the boat would take off again, slowly down the river, and the afternoon would stretch out without a plan or obligation. Dinner was always spectacular, washed down with beer. After dinner, they sat on the deck playing cards or dominoes and hearing stories from Randy, the captain with two wives, and Ricardo, the assistant captain with many wives more. Later, the group would disperse to their cabins and Alan would sit on the top deck, almost invariably alone. From there he could see the broad unimaginable dome of the sky, the treetops passing left and right, the click and whir of birds and hidden monkeys.
Alan had not counted on any kind of romance on that boat, but he found himself sitting near Ruby at meals, and then walking with her during the hikes, and soon they were friends, some kind of pair. It might have been as simple as the two of them being the same age on a boat full of older people. And was he the only one willing to listen to her talk for hours a day? Something about the river air, the wide open sky, had her pontificating, she laughed. —Are you okay with listening to me babble? she asked, and he said he was, he was.
They walked through the jungle and she talked about the work she wanted to do, which sounded like saving the world.
—No, no! she said. That’s the opposite of what I mean. That’s what the flakes do and say. I’m talking about something far more serious.
She raged about people of great skill and empathy wasting their time on sideshows, on minor issues, trivial matters. She had a thing about animal rights. It wasn’t so much the pandas and whales that bothered her, but the cat-spaying people, the hamster-saving people.
—Fine, fine, treat them well, she fumed, meaning the animals. But all the money, all the lawyers and ad campaigns and protests for bunnies and rats in laboratories! If you could channel all that energy toward saving the lives of the world’s underfed!
Alan would nod. He didn’t know that there was a zero-sum equation at play. But this was exactly her point. The energy expended on nonessential issues was what was holding back any progress on the most pressing problems. Alan was in awe of her brilliance and energy, if not her anger. She was exasperated by the persistence of global crises that seemed to her imminently solvable. She wrote letters to senators, to governors, to people of influence at the IMF. She insisted he read each one, while she sat across the room, her look positively postcoital. She thought, each time, that she’d written the Magna Carta. Afterward, his job was to tell her that Senator Y or Z would be insane not to see the logic in her reasoning, all while trying to temper her expectations.
But this was impossible. There was no middle ground in what she wanted for the world, for herself, for a husband.
A machine roared alive. Alan turned to see a man in a small bulldozer. There were two other men nearby. They were about to start work on the nearby portion of the promenade.
Alan imagined some future legend among the workers at KAEC, the strange story of the American man, dressed for business but wandering aimlessly around the beach, hiding behind mounds of dirt and in the empty foundations of buildings. This had happened to him before — in an effort to disappear, he had made himself more conspicuous.
He walked back to the tent and found the young people sleeping in the plastic darkness. He rolled one of the rugs up and rested his head.
He was alone atop the riverboat. It was just before midnight, under the most star-choked of skies, as the boat pushed quietly through a narrow tributary, the wind hot and the fires far off. Ruby was standing at the railing in a threadbare yellow shirt, and Alan walked up behind her. Before he even reached her, though, she leaned back into him. He wrapped his arms across her chest and she turned quickly to him, and he fell into her, her mouth tasting of beer. They found their way to her cabin and spent much of the remaining days there.
They were married in a breathless hurry, but Alan felt early on that she was looking through him. Who was he? He sold bicycles. They were mismatched. He was limited. He tried to rise to her level, to broaden his mind and see things as she did, but he was working with crude tools. The saving element of his work was the travel, the various trips for Schwinn to new markets, and Ruby valued these greatly. In those early trips to Taiwan, to Japan, to China and Hungary, Ruby came along, and she was wonderful. She was charming as hell, radiant. She saw everything, met everyone. She was a dazzling guest, the most headstrong and intellectually curious and vivacious American any of them had ever known.
But she was embarrassed about Alan. He didn’t know half the people she talked about — dissidents and philosophers and leaders-in-exile. He would try to find an industrialist at the table, one of the husbands who knew unit costs and ship dates and not much about the potential for civil society in Sri Lanka. Sometimes he was lucky and they would hide together from the light of the idealists at war over the details of unworkable plans and unfundable mandates.
Her ideal mate, Alan knew then, would have been a Kennedy, a Rockefeller. Maybe Aristotle Onassis or George Soros. She needed a wealthy patron who had political influence, who could pull back the curtain of power and show her the levers and knobs. Who could fund her plans. When she was frustrated, when she saw him as sand in her gears, she got mean.
—There’s no such thing as “The One,” she once said. They were at dinner in Taipei, with a supplier and his wife. The couple had been married forty years. The idea that there’s just one
person in the world you’re meant to be with, it’s illogical, she said. She’d had a few drinks and was enjoying her own loud thoughts. The math just doesn’t work! Who you end up with, it’s really just an accident of proximity.
Alan opened his eyes in the tent by the sea. The young people were asleep. They thought he was a nothing, an irrelevant man. Did they know he had swum in the Rio Negro with crocodiles? That he had almost been torn asunder one morning, with his constantly cruel ex-wife the only person who fought for him then or any other day?
Alan had seen some of the crew members jump into the river occasionally, and that had prompted some discussion about crocodiles, and there had been lectures then and after about how rare attacks were, how they had no interest in human flesh unless the water was very low, unless there were extraordinary conditions and their usual food sources were scarce or gone.
So while the boat was docked at the village, a handful of the passengers were lured in, and swam without worry. It’s fine, they said. They stood in the shallows, and village children splashed nearby, everyone in the river and no one being devoured by giant reptiles. There didn’t seem to even be any in that part of the river, until a few minutes later, when there was a commotion from the other side of the boat. A crew member had been fishing, and had just caught a baby crocodile, the size of a shoe. Alan and Ruby rushed over to look at it, and indeed it looked every bit like the ones he’d seen in books. It had an unbelievable underbite and looked apoplectic.
He had no intention of swimming. But to see it there, flopping on the deck, knowing that it had coexisted so closely to the passengers and children in the shallows, proved to Ruby that there was no danger, so she jumped in, splashed about, and tried to entice Alan in, too. He declined, and afterward, she stood with him on the deck, a towel around her shoulders, leaning into him.
—You should do it, she said.
And that’s all he needed. He decided to go further, though, and found a rowboat on the boat, and put it on the river and himself in it. He figured he would row deeper into the river, and jump from the boat into the deep.
The rowboat was very small, more like a kayak in how low to the surface it was. He was rowing, his feet straight in front, and this seemed normal enough. But there was soon a crowd, the entire crew, watching him from the deck below Ruby’s, and they seemed very amused by his progress. So Ruby began watching with interest, and soon saw what was amusing them. The boat Alan had chosen wasn’t seaworthy, was full of holes, and it was sinking. The crew’s laughter increased as they watched him slowly sinking into the river, and once Alan noticed he was sinking, they laughed even louder watching how quickly he began trying to turn the boat around, to row back to the main boat before he sunk completely.
Alan had been told of the utter lack of danger from the crocodiles, that they would only strike something human if they were starving and the water level was very low, but still, there were anomalies to any animal-human détente — every week some zookeeper’s assistant lost an arm in the jaws of a tiger, elephants crushed their trainers underfoot — and here was Alan, sinking into the Rio Negro, about thirty yards from the boat, far enough away to ensure that if something went wrong, if the crocodiles deemed him food, no one from the boat would reach him in time.
Alan was trying not to seem panicked, trying to remember how unlikely, impossible really, any attack would be, but then again: What if? When he was about twenty yards away, the water crested the rowboat and swept in with alarming speed. His forward motion ceased, most of the boat quickly disappeared into the rusty water, and soon he was sinking in place, into the river, overrun as it was by crocodiles and whatever else.
He wanted badly to swim back to the boat, and quickly, but feared that the splashing would attract teeth to his flailing limbs. At the same time, he wanted to bring the canoe back to the boat, for it had been his idea to go for a row-around, a wonderfully stupid idea, he now knew. He didn’t want to let the rowboat, which he was holding between his legs now, sink to the bottom. And meanwhile he knew the dangling of his legs was probably being observed with great interest by the river’s flesh-eaters. And still the faces were laughing. There were even those among the faces that had become bored. They turned away from him.
Alan had a moment where he looked at the riverboat, thinking, Well, this really might be it. This could be the last thing I ever see. It’s a pretty boat, and on top of it, lovely Ruby, leaning over and now suddenly screaming.
—HELP HIM!
She was practically jumping in. She was bent over the top rail, trying to get the attention of the crew on the deck below.
—FUCKING HELP HIM YOU FUCKING ASSHOLES! Ruby yelled again, and repeated this and other versions of the directive until, a minute later, three of the crewmembers were in a rowboat and were upon Alan and towed him in.
XXII.
WHEN ALAN REACHED his room at the Hilton, his phone’s red light was blinking. There was a message from Hanne.
—Call me, she said.
He did, and she picked up on the first ring.
—What are you doing tonight? she asked.
Alan thought of his room, the desperate adventures to be had here. The bed, the mirror, the moonshine.
—Nothing, he said.
—Come over to my house. I’ll make something.
—Can I do that?
—Where I live, they don’t care.
—You don’t have to cook. I can take you out for dinner.
—No, no. It’s more fun to eat at my house. Easier, too.
He called Yousef. He got his voicemail.
—Call me. I’m heading to the home of a ladyfriend and need a ride.
Yousef would love that. Alan expected a return call any second, but after thirty minutes, nothing. Yousef had never been unavailable before. A dull worry rose up in Alan. Alan texted him and got nothing in return.
Alan had the concierge arrange a different driver, bought some flowers in the hotel lobby, and in an hour he was outside Hanne’s gate.
He rang the bell. He saw a shadow moving through an upper floor.
The door opened and there she was. She wore a sleeveless silk blouse and black pants. She was sleek, composed, her face aglow.
—Some flowers, he said.
—I see, she said.
The house was not unlike her office — it looked as if she’d moved in hours before. There couldn’t have been more than five pieces of furniture. A couch, a table, a few stiff wooden chairs. They walked past the kitchen, where a pot was simmering.
—I made a stew, she said.
Alan told her it smelled good, though he couldn’t smell much of anything beyond new paint.
—I have some wine. You’ll partake?
Hanne was holding a thermos and a child’s water glass bearing the image of a pair of cartoon fish. Alan smiled and she poured a pinkish liquid until the glass was half full.
—A friend here in the compound started making it recently. He’s South African. They’re the wine specialists.
Alan tasted it and winced. It was somehow both weak and bitter.
—That good, eh?
—No, it is. Thank you, he said, and drank a third of it in one pull.
—I got you more siddiqi, she said, and pushed another olive oil bottle across the counter.
—I can’t tell you how grateful I am, he said.
She laughed. —People drink more here than Finland.
She walked to the living room.
—Come and sit. It’s been a while since anyone’s visited this place.
They sat on the couch, occupying the ends.
—It must be strange here, he said.
—It is so strange. But it’s so quiet that most of the time I love it. The utter lack of social responsibility. You have no familial responsibilities, no real friend responsibilities. I’m lucky to have one guest a month. It’s monastic, which is a relief.
Alan nodded. He knew. —And then there are the embassy parties, he said.
—Not at all, he said. Everyone was doing crazy stuff.
Maybe that would do it, he thought, put her attempt somewhere in the realm of loony, something that no sane person would believe.
At that, a light in her eyes seemed to go out.
But just as soon, she recovered, forcing a smile.
—So I have news about the King for you. He’ll be in Bahrain next week. So you’re free.
—Oh, he said, unable to hide his disappointment. This wasn’t the kind of freedom Alan sought. He wanted to be free to give his presentation, to get confirmation of the deal, to pack and go home. He wanted to be free to leave the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
Hanne set the food out on plastic placemats, and soon she knew all the salient facts about him and he her. He had guessed she was divorced, and she was, but he had been wrong about her having kids. She had none, and that had been the agreement between her and her ex when they’d married. Hanne wanted none, and he wanted none. But then, five years in, he did. So they argued and drifted and soon he impregnated another. They were still married at the time.
The whole thing was very simple from then on, she said. She let McKinsey know she was up for far-flung assignments, and a few months later, she was in Seoul. Then Arusha. Then Jeddah and KAEC.
Soon dinner was done and the plates cleared and when Alan expected her to invite him back to the couch, or to lead him to the door with a yawn, she said, —You want to take a bath?
—A what?
—A bath. Just a thought I had.
—Both of us, you mean.
She laughed, dismissing it. —Just something that popped into my mind.
But then she wasn’t ready to abandon the thought.
—We can pretend it’s a hot tub.
He thought about this, but not soundly. He thought only that he would rather extend the night with her, however bizarrely, than be alone.
