The Laughing Monsters: A Novel

by Denis Johnson

  I just saw a single firefly flash upward. Or a capillary exploded in my brain. The truth is I’m a little drunk too. And this won’t be one of those pitiful attempts to explain “how I got into this mess,” because there’s no sense calling it a mess until we see how it all turns out. Sometimes you just get stuck. That’s Africa. Then you’re on your way again without any idea what happened, and that’s Africa too. And while you’re stuck, if they give you a pen and paper?—you might as well.

  As to why I have no computer, it isn’t because they took mine away from me, but because as Michael and Davidia and I headed toward the Congo border in a Land Cruiser borrowed, now stolen, from Pyramid Environments, with our guide or abettor, a Congolese whose name I didn’t catch, Michael stopped the car on a bridge over some tributary of the White Nile River and said, Here we’ll toss our communications, and threw his phone out the window. Davidia chucked hers as well, and I was glad to get rid of everything (although my laptop and second keyboard were guaranteed GPS-untraceable, and my phone was already a replacement. I didn’t want the weight of them anymore, that’s all). It was sunset. Below us people washed their vehicles in muddy water up to the axles, the drivers splashing the red dirt off their rumpled pocked and sagging Subarus and such. Davidia said only one thing: “How long do you have the car for?”—“What?”—“When do you have to return this vehicle?”—“Oh—it’s flexible,” Michael said with a wide smile, as if describing his mouth, “it’s quite flexible.”

  My friend and your friend Michael Adriko, that is, and his fiancée, Davidia St. Claire. You knew I went to Freetown on a hunt for Michael. I found him all right, with Davidia on his arm, and I’ll catch you up on all the rest as time allows. To put it in shorthand, Michael’s enthusiasms, let us say, had us leaving Uganda in a rush for DR Congo on Oct 13, just a couple of days ago. We’d jumped from Freetown to northwestern Uganda, a town called Arua, where I last heard from you by e-mail and where I last saw your breasts, and I wish I’d downloaded them … Earlier, at Kuluva Hospital in Arua, while getting his flesh stitched together after a fight it’s pointless to explain, Michael had enlisted a guide to show us a hole in the border, because none of us had Congo papers. When Davidia and I got to the hospital, Michael introduced this man, a skinny little guy in bright blue trousers and a T-shirt that said, I Did WHAT Last Night? and told me to give him one hundred dollars.—When he’s got us through to Congo, I said.—Fair enough, Michael said.

  Daylight was almost gone as we got near the border, a good circumstance for people smuggling themselves, and we passed among groves of tall eucalyptus, Michael driving like an African, far too fast for the crumbling red-dirt surface, I mean fast, 90 or 95 KPH mostly, scaring the bikes to the side by means of constant beeping, using the horn much more than the brakes, oblivious to the children, goats, ducks, trucks coming at us, the overloaded busses appearing around road bends, leaning on two wheels, and women walking down the road balancing burdens on their heads, mostly basins full of “white ants”—centimeter-long termites they sell in the market as snacks. I’ve never tried them, but it’s a comfort to realize that every couple hundred meters or so across this land, a chest-high berm teems with nutrient morsels. One of these women crossed our path, her right hand raised to steady the pan on her head, blocking half her sight, she couldn’t have seen us, she kept walking into the road, Michael tried to veer, and we hit her, we struck her down, I heard her say “uh!” in a way I’ve never heard it said, never, and the jeep swerved, bounced, straightened, and kept on … I looked back, she was flung down on the clay pavement in the dusk, she looked lifeless. Davidia said, “Michael! Michael! She’s hurt!”—“She wasn’t watching!” he said angrily, going faster now. His shoulders hunched as he pushed the accelerator hard, and we were racing away from—what? A murder, perhaps. We’d never know. “Michael, Michael,” Davidia said, but Michael said nothing, and she said, “Go back, go back, go back, go back,” but we wouldn’t go back, we couldn’t—not in Africa, this hard, hard land where nobody could help that poor woman flopped probably dead in the road and where running away from this was not a mistake. The mistake was looking back at her in the first place.

  No words among us now, just Davidia’s sobbing, and then her silence. Michael drove a bit more soberly as we skirted the border, heading north. If we didn’t find our hole soon we’d come to South Sudan. The surface got terrible. I’m not sure it was still a road. We came into a village, and the guide muttered in Michael’s ear, and we went quite slowly now. Michael switched off the headlamps—he was only using the parking lights anyway—“Let’s enjoy the moon!” It was just past half-full, with that lopsided swollen face, that smile at the corner of its mouth. People strolled around under its strange orange glow. Kids played tag as if it were daytime. We went slower than the pedestrians through this crowded twilight, this thickly human evening. Sudden laughter from a hut, like a soprano chorus. What have they got to laugh about? Bikes without headlights floating out of the dimness. A man leans against a shack, cupping the tiny light of a cell phone to his ear.

  The guide said, “Stop.” He got out, shut the door, walked around to Michael’s window and spoke low.

  Michael told me, “Give him fifty.”

  “Not till we’re in Congo.”

  “We’re here. This is Congo.”

  “I thought you said one hundred.”

  “He’s quitting early. Just fifty.”

  I handed Michael a bill. The man folded it up small, then turned away and walked toward a hut, crying softly, “Hallooo.”

  “Who’s coming up front—Nair?” Michael asked.

  “I guess I am,” I said more or less to Davidia. Her face was invisible. For the last two hours she’d said not a word. We left the village behind and lurched along a half kilometer farther and stopped.

  Michael said, “The main road’s over that way, but we’ll never find it till we have some daylight.” He fiddled with his watch. “Set your time backward one hour. We’ve crossed into another zone.”

  We sat in the car saying nothing, thinking and feeling nothing, or trying not to, while the weather changed and the stars disappeared. The moon burned right through the overcast with a curious effect, seeming to hang just a few meters above us while the clouds lay behind it, much higher in the sky. Michael switched off the engine. We heard a multitude of insects ringing all around us like finger cymbals. The ringing stopped. Raindrops exploded on the roof and streaked down the dirty windshield.

  Stupid, stupid Michael said, “Congo! Here, we’re not in any trouble.”

  [OCT 16 2AM]

  How much time do I have to catch you up? They won’t move us tonight, surely. The party’s over and everybody’s snoring, sleeping on top of their rifles. The only one awake with me is a radio somewhere—a DJ talking French full-speed and spinning American country music. And two or three mosquitoes making their rounds. Very few mosquitoes at these East African altitudes, though when Michael and Davidia and I came aground in the dark just inside the Congo border, he, Michael—to pick up the journey again—said, “Many voices on the air tonight,” and rolled up the windows against the insects, because as a child he suffered malaria and a mosquito is the only thing on earth, I believe, that scares him.

  The car was stifling. I slept, or only suffocated—I saw the woman in the road in more detail, the wrap that covered all but her arms and shoulders in a pattern red or purple, in the dusk it could have been either, and her basin of ants rolling on its edge away from her like a toy, and she lay there as limp as her towel—the white cloth, that is, she’d rolled into a bun to cushion her head—stretched out straight beside her.

  Sometime in the night came Michael’s voice: “I’m moving.”

  We were both awake I’m sure, Davidia and I.

  “It’s very subtle. But there is definitely movement.”

  Davidia said, “Michael, quiet.”

  “I’m sliding down. I’m sliding off.”

  “Sshh.”

>   “I don’t know what I’m going to turn into once I’m on the floor.”

  She: “To hell with this. To hell with you.”

  “I itch all over.”

  “Don’t start your scratching. Don’t scratch.”

  He squirmed and clawed at his ribs, elbows knocking the steering wheel. “I’m in a cocoon. What will I be when I come out?”

  Davidia said, “He’s going mad. We’ll be holding him down while he screams bloody murder before it’s over.”

  “I’m coming out of my skin!” he screamed. Writhing. He bumped the horn and it honked and we all jumped, and then he got hold of himself and we got quiet again.

  When daylight came we found ourselves parked behind a church in the middle of a field, a big crumbling adobe building, salmon-pink, its tin roof corroded red. Beyond it lay a proper dirt road and a collection of low buildings, dark inside, the wind blowing through. But pots steamed and fry pans sizzled on cookfires all around. Without talking about it the three of us got out of the car and made our way toward the possibility of breakfast. I watched Davidia walk. Her long African skirt swayed and the hem danced around her feet as she floated ahead of me. People wandered around, others were just waking up, crawling from under a couple of lorries, dragging their straw mats behind them. Nobody remarked on us. Michael found us some corn cakes and hot tea served in plastic water bottles. He said, “Last night I became a lizard. Now I know what we have to do.”

  He went exploring, running his electric clippers over his scalp and his cheeks and his jaw as he walked around talking to folks.

  Davidia and I sat on a bench outside a shack called The Best Lucky Saloon and she said, “Boomelay boomelay bommelay boom and all that.”—“What?”—“Vachel Lindsay. Or Edna St. Vincent Millay or somebody.”—“Oh.”—“It’s a poem about the Congo.”—“Oh.” We watched a woman sitting on a stool, working on the hairdo of a little girl sitting on the ground between her knees, while behind her, standing, another woman worked on her hair … The buildings and shacks were gray and brown, everything streaked with red mud. I recall three green power poles, one broken and leaning and held up apparently by the wires alone.

  Michael came back with several bread rolls for each of us and said, “Some lizards can fly, so you pick up information if you become one,” and went away again.

  Davidia said to me, “You haven’t seen this before?”

  “What—seen him go through magical transformations, you mean, in the jungle night?”

  “Well,” she said, “when you put it that way”—she was kicking at a rock—“then it sounds as troubling as it really is.”

  “Maybe it’s a chemical problem. Are you taking something for malaria?”

  “Once a day. It’s called Lariam.”

  “Lariam causes nightmares. I take doxycycline.”

  “You said ‘transformations in the jungle night’—but where’s the jungle?”

  “The people cut it all down. They burned it to cook breakfast, mostly. And to make way for planting.”

  A hundred years ago it would have taken an hour to hack through ten meters of undergrowth. Now huts and footpaths and small gardens cover the hills. By 9:00 a.m. we were passing among them, back on the road, driving on the right side now instead of the left. Within 20 minutes we had a flat tire.

  Very briskly Michael raised the car on a jack and attacked the nuts with a tool and got on the spare—a different-colored wheel and a wrong-sized tire lacking any tread at all.

  We saw very few motorized vehicles. An occasional motorcycle, an occasional SUV, always, it seemed, stenciled with a corporate or NGO acronym. Passenger busses coming like racecars, nearly capsizing as they careened around the curves toward us, slinging dust bombs from under the wheels. A few lorries bearing cargo, laboring slowly; other lorries with smashed faces dragged among the trees and abandoned. Many, many pedestrians strolling on the margin or crossing side to side, looking up from their daydreams only at the sound of a horn. It was the holiday of sacrifice, Eid al-Adha, and Muslims walked on both sides of the road, some of the women lugging prayer mats as big as house rugs.

  The point is, our Land Cruiser stood out, and we couldn’t possibly face any officials. Before we reached any sizeable town, Michael drove off the road to detour, along little more than footpaths, down into gulleys, through patches of agriculture, knocking over stalks of corn and bushes of marijuana to get around the checkpoints and then back onto the real road, along which he sped as if he hadn’t only yesterday slammed this jeep into tragedy, again proceeding African style, all honking, no braking. A little boy ran right in front of the car, running at top speed as if hurrying to get killed. Michael swerved in time, mashing the horn and crying out the window in English to the boy’s family, “Beat that child, beat that child!” I watched to the side, keeping my eyes off the future. The fields were a light green, the color of springtime in the temperate zones, soft and even-looking, with here and there the slow white smoke of trash fires strung over them like mist. Late that day Michael pointed at the hazy distance and claimed he saw the hills of his childhood, the Happy Mountains, called by the missionary James Hannington, in frustration and disgust, the Laughing Monsters, and Michael told us of a forest in those mountains “where you’ll find pine trees about a dozen meters in their height, Nair. Bunches of ten evergreens, fifteen, twenty or more together. What do you call a bunch of trees—a copse? Copses of pines about a dozen meters in height, Nair. And these aren’t common evergreens, but their needles are actually made of precious gold. And you can gather all the needles you want, but if you get pricked by one, and it draws blood—you will lose your soul. A devil comes instantly at the smell of your blood, and snatches your soul right—out—of your heart. Remember,” he said, “when I told you never to have anything to do with the voodoo? Now you’re going to find out why.”

  “Michael,” I said, “was it your people who martyred Hannington?” and he only said, “Hannington was stabbed in the side with a spear like Jesus Christ.”

  The wedding would be blended into the Burning of the Blood, a weeklong ceremony, he said, “when we put away the bad blood of the war, and drink the new blood of peace. I tell you it is an orgy! Many babies are made. A boy conceived in that week will be a man of peace among his people. But only within wedlock. No bastard can be a man of peace.”

  At one point, as the dusk fell on us, he said, “Any moment now we’ll reach Newada Mountain. Tear out my eyes, and I could find it by my heart.”

  We turned onto a road that got muddier and muddier each kilometer until we were just mushing along through patches of gumbo separated by horrifyingly slick hard flats, but at least it wasn’t raining. “Fifteen kilometers more to Newada Mountain,” Michael announced, and after a couple dozen kilometers, three dozen, many more than fifteen, certainly, we took a shortcut, a footpath that delivered us into a wasteland, a stinking bog of red gumbo, the sort of mud you can’t stop in, even with four-wheel drive, or you’ll sink and never get going again. By full nightfall we’d determined that the stink came not from the bog, but from our vehicle. “I smell petrol,” Michael said, and the engine began to miss. “I’m not sure about the fuel pump,” Michael said, and the engine died. He cut the headlamps, and in the blackness quite vividly I perceived how an English missionary like James Hannington might have stood up to his buttocks in this sludge and wept, and heard the mountains laughing.

  The dead engine gave out small noises as it cooled. With the headlamps switched off we could measure the darkness, which was deep and thick, without moon or stars. Every now and then the frogs started up all around, and then stopped. From far off came a wild, syncopating percussion.

  Davidia said, “Are those jungle drums?”

  “Probably someone’s idea of a disco,” Michael said.

  “Well—let’s go,” she said, but we all three felt the impossibility of moving off on foot into the dark and the muck. Michael closed the windows and we slept the same suffocated sleep as the ni
ght before.

  And woke at dawn in the foundered jeep, with no better plan than to get out of it and pee.

  Michael and I stood on the driver’s side, Davidia squatted on the other. We’d arrived, we now realized, nearly at the limit of the red muddy lowland, at the feet of the mountains we’d seen by day, within sight of a place of twisted trees and lopsided shacks.

  “Take your packs,” Michael said. “Walk soft.”

  He meant us to understand that by a light tread on the superficial hard spots we might not break through into the gunk, although in many spots we broke through anyway. By tacking in search of better footing we spent half an hour making a few hundred meters.

  The village lay between a field of corn and a banana grove. Michael had called it exactly right—the main shack, among squat huts and other shanties, was the Biggest Club Disco, with a generator on the ground outside, not running. Michael took a tour while Davidia and I sat on a bench and watched the village wake up, men and women fussing over cookfires beside the huts, children, chickens, goats, all going softly and talking low in the chilly dawn. Michael turned up with three Cokes and quite a few biscuits wrapped in a page of the Monitor, a Ugandan newspaper, and said, “Watch these people. We don’t know their hearts.”

  “Why don’t you just say they’re not your tribe?”

  “It’s more complicated than that.”

  “No it isn’t,” I said. “Is this your clan, or not?”

  “All right, the simple answer is yes—they’re speaking my dialect, but it’s not my close family. It’s not the right time to reveal myself.”