The Laughing Monsters: A Novel

by Denis Johnson

  “Hold on,” I said, “let me catch my breath.”

  A shirtless beggar in khaki shorts approached, smiling and dragging one leg and crying, “Sahibs!” The leg was enormous from elephantiasis, as if another whole man clung to him.

  Michael yoked the man’s throat with one hand, in the web of his thumb and finger, and lifted him so his horny yellow toes dangled a few inches off the ground and said, “Nothing today. Ha ha!” and set him back down. We walked on. To me he said, “I jog at six every morning. Do you want to get in shape with me?”

  “No. I want you to tell me about U-235.”

  “Not yet. What else? Ask me anything, Nair.”

  A bit more, not a lot, had been revealed. No sense driving further against this foam-rubber wall. “How about this one: You’re marrying the camp commander’s daughter?”

  “The garrison commander. Yes.”

  “This is too wonderful. Where’s the unit from the Tenth?”

  “Close by Darba, Congo.”

  “If we go up there—won’t he want her back?”

  “Whether we go or not, he’ll want her back.”

  “He won’t get a bunch of vigilante Green Berets on our tails, will he?”

  Michael was silent in a way I didn’t like.

  “Will he? I’m not up for risking any bloodshed. ‘Any’ means not one drop.”

  “No, no bloodshed. They won’t suspect we’re anywhere near them.”

  “Let’s just not go.”

  “Not go?” He turned in a complete circle, seeking a witness to my folly. “He says ‘Not go’! Do I have to make it clear? Then I’ll make it clear. Let me make it clear about my clan. It’s as if I left a man for dead and ran away to save myself. Then the next day he walks into my camp covered with blood, ready to go on living. Can you imagine the shame you would feel looking in his eyes? That’s the shame that makes me go back to my village. Can I make you understand? I’m going to marry Davidia. She’ll be my life’s mate. We’ve got to launch our lives together properly, with the blessing of my people. How can I make you understand? This is essential, it’s not a gesture, it’s not a nice idea—it’s the essence of the thing. Without it, I’m nothing, and she’s nothing, and we’re nothing.”

  As he expressed these ideas he followed them with his eyes, watching them gallop away to the place where they made sense.

  “And we’re going somewhere called Newada Mountain?”

  “Near there. I haven’t yet learned the exact location.”

  “And yet you’re sure your people have reconvened.”

  “I just know they had to come back together. It’s the natural thing to do.”

  “It’s essential.”

  “Yes. Essential. You say it like an empty word, but the word is full. It’s the truth. It’s about the essence of things. Nair, I can guess where you got your information about me. From Horst, or Mohammed Kallon. Fuck them. Officially I’ve deserted, but in truth I’m returning to the loyalty I ran away from. What is desertion? Desertion is a coin. You turn it over, and it’s loyalty.”

  I agreed. “My, my. You’ve been thinking.”

  “A soldier must never think. In fact, when you’re forbidden to think, it comes as a relief. Why did my mind start thinking?” His face was swollen with misery. “Nair, you’re the most important friend I’ve ever had.”

  * * *

  At five the next morning Michael had us traveling in a hired car through the darkness toward Kampala. As we approached the capital the traffic got thicker, and the air itself, with the smoke of breakfast fires and diesel fumes, and we raced under the attempted streetlights, many of them burning, turning the smoke yellow. Somewhere around here we’d get on a bus that would take us to the country’s northeast corner. We hunted up and down unnamed streets until the driver gave up and put us out, and then the three of us stumbled over gutters and potholes among the hordes of street denizens waking up to the long slow overclouded African dawn, begging for assistance—we begging; not them. Michael got us to the booking office of the Gaagaa line, as it was called, a five-by-five-meter space completely covered with people asleep, who didn’t mind being stepped on by others making for the clerk’s cage. The clerk showed us a seating chart, and I wrote my name where I wanted to sit, up front near the driver, and Michael put himself and Davidia across the aisle.

  As we boarded the craft I looked up and realized it must have been dawn for half an hour, but the sky was so cloudy no real sunshine made it through. It was good having a cushion to sit on, even a gashed and moldy one, but I couldn’t understand Michael’s cheery attitude, his eagerness amid this fleet of debauched luxury liners exported from Malaysia or Singapore in freighter-size lots of wreckage, throttled and punched into taking a few more gasps, filing onto the roads with their busted television sets and torn-off seat belts, full of Michaels. We stowed our gear in racks overhead and Michael made sure Davidia and I each had a bottle of water and a box of Good Life butter biscuits. From some sort of church in the building behind us, on the second floor, above the public toilets, came a chorus of singing. Davidia arranged her long African skirt and pillowed her head on a folded scarf against the window and fell asleep. The passengers settled in all around, pulling their cell phones to their heads and talking. They smelled of liquor and urine and armpit. Michael now placed himself among them, resuming the mantle of African poverty—the way a civilized African does, relaxing the shoulders and calming the hands and letting down the veil over his heart.

  The bus’s woman conductor stood in the aisle and addressed us, giving us her name and town and then bowing her head to pray out loud for one full minute in the hope this journey wouldn’t kill us all. She invited everyone to turn to the next passenger and wish him or her the same thing, and we did, fare ye well, may this journey not be your last, although one of these journeys, surely, will send us—or whatever parts of us can be collected afterward—to the grave.

  Our captain was a small man in a crisp white shirt and gray trousers, with a beard and turban. He sat down and started the engine and rattled the gearbox, and in just a few minutes the speedometer, I had a clear view of it, topped 100 kilometers per hour.

  Somewhere behind us in Kampala, somewhere in Entebbe, I could have found Wi-Fi, I could have sent an encrypted summary-of-activities to NIIA … Goddamn, such an SOA might have begun, you perfect assholes. You sent me into this mess but told me nothing relevant. Fully half of what I’ve learned, you already knew. You didn’t mention any U-235, did you, though I’m willing to bet you’d heard rumors, and that’s why I’m on this thing in the first place. And I’m not the only one on it, as I’m sure you’re also aware. You said nothing about Interpol’s interest, and as for Michael Adriko’s desertion, I had to hear about that from Mohammed Kallon, a cheap Leonean grasser. Are you after information? I might inform you that Michael Adriko travels incommunicado with his bewildered fiancée, who happens to be the daughter of the camp commander for the US Tenth Special Forces Group, and that yesterday I saw her brassiere lying around and it was white, imprinted with tiny pink flowers, but you probably know all about that too. In any case, if there’s something I know and you don’t, anything at all—you can wait for it at the bottom of Hell …

  Three hours along the route, the highway changed from two lanes down to one. The rate of speed stayed at 100. Smaller vehicles drove off the road as ours sailed toward them. The big lorries, the twelve-wheelers coming at us with their manifestos painted on their faces—AK-47 MONSTER—FIRE BASE ONE—GOD IS ABLE—LIVE FOR NOW—gave us half the road’s width, and on our left side our own wheels traveled into the muck. None of these maneuvers required any reduction of speed on the part of anyone.

  We slowed down only for the accidents, getting on the margin to steer around a small wreck, later another, and then we met a big one that stopped traffic both ways. I’d been nodding off and opened my eyes on a smashed lorry, a smashed pickup truck, a car upended and torn down the middle and sprouting limbs and drippi
ng with blood. Pedestrians peered into the shattered windows without too much discussion or excitement. It must have just happened—ours was the first vehicle to come along, nothing to block the view. A baboon crouched on the bank of the roadway watching. A second observed from fifty meters on. Neither acknowledged the other. I noticed a bicycle bent in two tossed down on the grass. Michael clicked his tongue. “They just won’t slow down.”

  While we waited for some force of civilization to take charge of the catastrophe, people descended from our bus to stretch their legs, eat their snacks, laugh, talk, relieve themselves. The three of us joined them at the roadside. Davidia shaded her eyes with a hand and studied the baboons studying us.

  Michael said to Davidia, “He’s talking to you,” pointing to an old man who approached us. “He is a magician.” He looked less than magic, instead looked tiny and silly, sucking on a long purple sugarcane. “He says we are all captives of this world. We were stolen while we were asleep and we were carried here, and now we’re held captive in this world of dreams, where we believe we’re awake.” While Michael translated, the magician laughed and hacked at his stalk of cane with his two or three teeth, snorting. He smiled brightly at someone he recognized across the road and turned away from us as we vanished from his mind. Michael said, “Someone just has to drag that pickup truck to the side, and we’ll pass through.” He went back into the bus. In twenty minutes the driver sounded his horn. People began climbing aboard. Michael told me, “It’s not as bad as West Africa. But it’s still a hard land.”

  All were aboard but one. In the field beside us Davidia, herself, was peeing—she gave everyone a big smile as she rose from her squat and dropped her hem and hitched her waistband with a very African, very female shimmy of her hips. I felt I was seeing her for the first time.

  * * *

  In Arua we took rooms at the White Nile Palace Hotel. Here was the palace, but we’d crossed the Nile twenty kilometers ago. We arrived at night and formed no impression of the surrounding neighborhood except by its sounds—goats and cattle, arguments and celebrations. Surveying the parking area and later the tables in the café, I judged we’d come among missionaries and relief workers—Médecins Sans Frontières sorts of people with good, big SUVs and clean hiking shoes. The grounds were well-kept and our quarters were comfortable. I hadn’t quite expected that.

  At dinner Michael was nowhere in evidence. Davidia and I shared a table with an elderly, exhausted French woman of Arab descent who told us she studied torture. “And once upon a time before this, I spent years on a study of the Atlantic slave trade. Angola. Now it’s an analysis of the practices of torture under Idi Amin. Slavery. Torture. Don’t call me morbid. Is it morbid to study a disease? That’s how we find the cure for it. What is the cause of man’s inhumanity to man? Desensitization. The numbness of the perpetrator. Whether an activity produces pleasure, pain, discomfort, guilt, joy, triumph—before too long the soul grows tired and stops feeling. It doesn’t take long. Not too long at all, and then man becomes the devil, he laughs at his former scruples, he enslaves and tortures without compunction.” The woman’s taut, quivering neck, her mouth opening and closing … Halfway through her dessert of ice cream with chocolate sauce, without a word, she got up and left the table.

  “Is she coming back?”

  “No. She’s paying her bill,” I said.

  “She seemed possessed.”

  “You attract a certain type, don’t you? Orphans and magicians and circus people. You draw them to you. I don’t know how.”

  “I’m interested, and they feel it.”

  “Where’s Michael? I haven’t seen him since we checked in.”

  “As soon as we dropped our bags on the floor, he went out.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know. ‘Seeking word.’ That’s all he said.”

  “More will be revealed.”

  * * *

  But not revealed immediately. Whatever Michael was working on, it kept him away a lot the next two days. When it wasn’t raining Davidia read airport novels by the pool, in a tropical two-piece with a wraparound skirt, while I sat in the thatched shade with my laptop open on the bar, looking busy. The pool was kidney-shaped. Why? Why shaped like a human organ? Frequent downpours kept it brimming over. People rarely swam in it. An arm’s length above its surface, pairs of mating dragonflies whipped to and fro. Once in a while Davidia unwrapped herself down to her bikini and dipped herself in the water.

  For restaurant and poolside music, American country tunes with a dash of rockabilly, the same forty-five-minute tape played all day long.

  I wrote to Tina:

  Well, no internet this AM at the White Nile Palace (Palace for Whites) Hotel. Writing off-line at the moment. No Wi-Fi here. We have to queue up for internet at the manager’s office.

  A light rain began. Davidia left the area with a wave. She had very high, very round breasts. She wore sandals whose red color against her brown feet looked somehow violent. I reached beside me for my coffee and knocked it from the bar, and it shattered all over the tiles. I’d put myself on a seventy-two-hour moratorium—no spirits, no wine, no beer. A somber young waiter with a push mop came to look after the mess.

  In its relationship with Emmanuel, the manager, the office computer is sort of a cartoon villain, coming up with some new way to thwart him every time he approaches it—this time it was a warning beep that wouldn’t stop—and his procedure is to start whacking whatever parts look whackable and twisting wires like they’ve been bad little wires and taking hold of the monitor with both hands and shaking the shit out of it, and today he gave the wall plug a good hard kick—not so stupid, really, because you do often get new results around here by wiggling the wall plug. Or snapping it with your finger. The people who work under him all know how to handle the computer just fine, and if the network’s up, they can make it happen, but Emmanuel, he just starts right in on the contraption like he’s carrying out an old vendetta, and I’ve learned not to ask him to try, except for entertainment.

  I tried and deleted several ways of getting onto the next topic, and finally wrote—

  Have you heard anything from Grant or that Major Kenworth guy, or any of those other boys in Sec 4?

  —Section 4, Internal Inquiries, counterintelligence, the spy catchers. They hunt the traitor.

  Let me know if anybody comes over from there just to say hi. I’ll tell you what it’s all about later on, when we’re together again.

  —and deleted the final sentence and wrote instead, “I’ve put in for an opening over there, to tell the truth,” and deleted to tell the truth, “and if I have a shot at it, if they’re interested in me, they’ll probably do a little snooping.”

  * * *

  I woke and dressed fast without showering, ridden by a desire, an absolute lust, to get it all done this very moment, plus a feeling I wouldn’t get it done at all. I skipped breakfast and flagged one of the motorbikes waiting outside the hotel, and we traveled as fast as the engine could propel us toward the Catholic radio installation. Gripping my laptop with one hand and my life with the other, I made up my mind not to ride one of these things again. The night’s rain had slicked the road going into town, and quick maneuvers around potholes or out of the way of death sent us gliding in zigzags over the red mud. Bursts of adrenaline drained me and calmed me. The forward charge slowed down as we mounted a long steep hill toward three large towers in a compound of low buildings, the Catholic communications center.

  At the gate a uniformed guard searched me, and a laminated security pass went around my neck. The guard walked me over to the nearest of several adobe buildings, and there a kind woman in a nun’s habit led me to a large room and sat me down before one of three computers at a long counter against the wall. She took a chair by the door. For the moment, it was just the two of us. I logged on with a password and immediately logged off.

  While I waited, I heard the roar of a soccer game drifting up from the school at the b
ottom of the hill.

  Pretty soon a blue-uniformed Ugandan soldier entered the room. I sensed him coming but stared at the screen until he touched my shoulder and said, “Please come,” and led me to the Secure Communications Environment, the “SC lounge,” or the “SC café.” It looked like the room we’d just left. Only one computer console here.

  This place had nothing to do with NATO, except in the way of “courteous exchange,” as it’s called in the business. The safe communications here were an operation of the British, MI4 or 5 or 6 … May I reveal a fact? I don’t know how many MIs there are. In any case, it was nothing to do with NIIA. As far as I’d been allowed to know, NATO maintained no safe sites anywhere in Uganda for communications. The Americans like to say “commo”—I think it’s silly. Using my own laptop, I checked my list of e-mails. One from NIIA. I didn’t open it.

  Another one, from Tina: a photo taken in a mirror, her face hidden behind the camera and her breasts exposed. Not a word of text.

  I sent her what I’d composed off-line, and added:

  Nothing has happened since I wrote the above. I’ve spent my time listening to the BBC on a little radio or watching the images of Al Jazeera on the satellite TV, when the TV works. Emmanuel has permanently bested the hotel’s computer and it just sits there half dead. Nobody can use it now. It’s not a communication device anymore, it’s capable of making a few high-pitched noises understood only by itself. Therefore I just took a half hour’s trip across town to the Catholic radio station compound, where they have a media center with three computers & Wi-Fi.

  Don’t forget to let me know if you hear from Sec 4.

  —and felt I was hitting the thing too hard and deleted the last line and wrote:

  I thank you from the bottom of my scrotum for the glimpse of your beauties. I hope I can assume they’re yours.

  Nothing from Hamid. I’d expected nothing. It was my turn to talk.

  I switched to my own keyboard. As he’d suggested, I didn’t use the American Standard. For a lark I used PGP, and in accordance with Hamid’s wishes I rotated my proxy after every fifteen words: