The Laughing Monsters: A Novel Read online

  “Who do you think you are? Long-lost Ulysses?” Then I felt embarrassed for him. I could see by his look that he thought exactly that. “Michael, is this Newada Mountain?”

  “By my reckoning, it’s very near.”

  Davidia wasn’t suffering any of this. “Get us some real food,” she told him.

  “Sit there,” he said, as if we weren’t already slumped side by side on the bench.

  When he’d gone I moved close to her, hip touching hip. I said, “He’s using you for something. Something mystical, superstitious.”

  “Like?”

  “I don’t know. Kidnapping one of the gods and coercing the others to … rearrange the fate of us all.”

  She made a sort of barking noise, with tears in her eyes. “You’re crazy.”

  “As crazy as he is?”

  “No. Once in a while.”

  “It’s time I got you out of here.”

  “You don’t have to say it twice.”

  “Then let’s go.”

  “Go how?”

  “We’ll walk.”

  “Where?”

  “Uganda’s that way—east.”

  “How far?”

  “I don’t know. But it isn’t getting any closer while we sit here.”

  “What will he do?”

  “Nothing. He can’t hold us at gunpoint.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he hasn’t got a gun.”

  Something was happening, suddenly, to every person in the village—as if they choked on poisonous fumes—and their voices got loud, and we heard a vehicle in the distance. Davidia asked me what was wrong, who was coming, what kind of car. “I don’t know,” I said, “but I don’t give a shit—we’ll hitch a ride out of here or kill them and take the fucking thing.” Then we heard other engines, several vehicles, none of them visible yet. Somebody had a gun: one shot, two, three … then the rest of a clip. At that point our own jeep, three hundred meters away and to the right of us, burst into silent brightness—the boom of the explosion came a second later.

  Davidia and I stood up simultaneously from the bench. We watched a white pickup truck scurrying across the landscape at a tangent to us, driving hysterical villagers before it, sparks of rifle fire bursting from the passenger window and soldiers standing up in the back and firing too, when they could manage it, as they bounced and swayed and hung on.

  I turned toward the nearest copse of larger trees, and discovered that it was besieged by other vehicles. I felt relief when Michael came toward us in a hurry calling, “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go.”

  The banana grove seemed a possibility. Anywhere, really. We proceeded in a sort of innocent, unprovoked manner, nothing wrong here, just walking.

  We entered the grove. Behind us came a hush, then a man’s rapid voice, many gunshots, and the uninterrupted keening of a woman somewhere, and soon the whole village, it seemed, was crying out, some of them screeching like birds, some bawling, some moaning low. Every child sounded like every other child.

  As soon as we’d put a little distance between us and the din of souls in the clearing, I sat on the edge of a pile of adobe bricks and wrapped my arms around my middle. “My stomach’s a sack of vomit.”

  “I’ll give you ten seconds. Then double-time.”

  “Where’s Davidia?”

  “I’m right here.” She was behind me.

  A woman burst onto the path ahead of us with eyes like headlights, running with her hands high in the air. Bullets tugged at the banana leaves around her.

  I lost my head. I see that now. We’d moved a hundred meters along this path, breathing hard, our steps pounding, before I formed any clear intention of getting up and running. Of my panicked state I remember only others panicking, the faces of tiny children swollen into cartoon caricature, the long wet lashes and pouting lips and baby cheeks and the teardrops exploding like molten gobs in the air around their heads. I remember shoes left behind on the ground—flip-flops, slippers, whatever’s hard to run in.

  Michael collided with my back, gripped each of my elbows from behind, and propelled me along. Davidia kept pace, clawed at our clothing, at the banana fronds too, and got in front of us, then away from us, and Michael steered me off the path and hugged me, stopped me.

  “You can’t outrun bullets.”

  “Yes I can!” I meant it.

  He pointed amid the grove and said, “Go ten meters and get down.” He watched while I obeyed, then was gone.

  Multiple guns now, and many fewer voices.

  I lay on my belly. A few steps from my face the grove ceased, and to the right the gumbo bog took over, and for an unquantifiable period I watched a heap of something burning out there before I understood it was our vehicle. Part of the driveshaft remained, a wheel with its tire, and around these two things only the shell, still giving out small flames, and surrounding that, the red earth steaming and smoking.

  Michael came along leading Davidia by the hand.

  I stood and followed them along the edge of the grove and toward a cornfield. We stopped to watch the white pickup truck charging at us, plowing down the stalks until it slid to a stop almost in our faces, a spiffy little truck with fresh gold lettering across its front windshield: ALL EYEZ ON ME. Soldiers leapt from the back of it, and the three of us walked before their guns.

  We waited in front of the disco while they wrapped up the looting. Most of the villagers had escaped—no more screams, only the soldiers’ whoops, their panting and shouting, and much laughter. The young recruit responsible for us drifted some distance away, dazzled by the excitement, but rather than running, Michael and I sat Davidia on the bench and stood in front of her as camouflage because we didn’t want anybody noticing us, noticing Davidia, raping Davidia—and they raped a couple of women behind the disco, a young one and her mother, who in their terror seemed almost apathetic, almost asleep, and who afterward walked away brushing the dirt from their bare arms and the fronts of their torn shifts. It took the commander a full hour to bring his troops to order. He mustered them in front of the disco, thirty or so young men in green cammy uniforms, and went from face to face lecturing bitterly, pointing often at the shreds of our Land Cruiser out in the wasteland. Apparently rape and looting were lesser crimes than blowing up a good machine.

  Michael said, “Did you see the fireball? Petrol vapors. I told you the fuel pump was ruptured.”

  [OCT 16 6AM]

  I know Michael’s sleeping. He’ll sleep through a barrage. I don’t know where he’s being kept, or Davidia. I hope they’re together. I’m in the main hut with the commander, along with ten or twelve other men, the number changes, they come and go. It’s a spacious hut, an open-air corral, really, with low adobe walls under a thatched roof, a cafeteria table, a tattered couch, three broken chairs.

  They’ve got my pack, my extra clothes, passport, cash—4K in US twenties, fifties, and hundreds. They left me my Timex watch, out of contempt for the brand or perhaps for the concept of time itself. They stole my penlight too, but they’ve lent it back so I can write by its tiny glow.

  Why take everything but the watch and the light and my ballpoint pen, and then give me this lined paper torn from a schoolroom notebook, 42 sheets of it? I’ve sat up all night scrawling on them because I’m too terrified to sleep. The liquor’s worn off and I’m going mad. When I’ve filled these pages they’ll be included, I suspect, with some sort of ransom demand.

  The roosters are calling. Nobody’s stirring yet but one person out by the latrines—a young woman in a dirty linen shift, barefoot, hardly more than a girl, hacking a trough in the earth with a vicious-looking short-handled hoe, a trough in the earth shaped, I’m afraid, quite like a grave.

  [OCT 16 8AM]

  The commander claims to be regular Army but could easily be lying, or just confused. His cammy uniform bears no insignia. Beneath his open tunic he wears a T-shirt with the faded emblem of a bottle on it, soda or beer. He calls himself a general, won’t say
his name. Drives his own little cream-colored Nissan truck, the one that says EYEZ ON ME.

  He takes me for the leader, because I’m the white one.

  Last night, after discovering that my bad French and his own bad English render idle conversation impossible, he nodded toward the small cassette player on his table and punched a button, and it played a song called, I believe, “Coat of Many Colors,” by Dolly Parton, over and over. Just that one song, repeating. This wasn’t psychological warfare, but a sincere attempt at hospitality.

  This morning he shared with me his general’s breakfast: strips of tripe in a broth smelling pretty much like kerosene. It took me a while to get it all down and set the bowl aside. The meal came with dessert, a sugary pudding sprinkled with the legs, if not more, of some sort of insect.

  [OCT 16 12 NOON]

  After breakfast, when I thought everybody was still sleeping off last night’s liquor, they all jumped up on the general’s shouted orders and mustered in the clearing among the huts for the very quick court martial of the recruit who blew up our Land Cruiser.

  When they’d made a circle and wrestled themselves to attention, all thirty or more of them, the general’s aide-de-camp, his main henchman, dragged the youngster out of a hut barefoot and stripped down to ragged gray shorts and stood him up before the fresh-dug grave. His hands were tied behind him with a winding of black rubber. Perhaps from a tire’s inner tube.

  I made up part of this audience of dazed, half-dressed soldiers. Davidia and Michael stood across from me. They were many feet apart. Davidia looked unhurt, unmolested. The magic of her US passport must be working.

  Michael, with his Ghanaian document, enjoys no immunity. He caught my eye and turned sideways—his arms were bound behind him, but I couldn’t see his hands for the press of the crowd. He smiled and shrugged.

  Our general faced us taking a similar posture, hands behind his back and feet apart, and addressed the whole group briefly—in a localized French, I think—before tearing off his sunglasses and turning on the malefactor and lecturing him in the face for five or more minutes, screaming into the kid’s open mouth, right down his throat. During this harangue the general’s henchman strutted back and forth in his mirrored sunglasses and helmet, slapping his pistol against his palm, until it was time to push the kid to his knees and put the gun to his head. The youth wept and bawled while the general shouted him down to silence. When all was quiet, he counted down from trois!—deux!—un! and the henchman’s hammer snapped on a empty chamber.

  The general laughed. Then the troops all laughed too.

  The general pushed his henchman aside and drew his own pistol and raised it high and pulled the slide back as if demonstrating how to cock this particular weapon and pushed the barrel hard against the kid’s neck and forced him down onto his face, and bent over him like that while he sobbed into the dirt. Some of the troops exclaimed—the general would get it done!… He stared hard one by one at each face, saying nothing, until he’d forced them all into a state of pensive sobriety. He worked his shoulders. Shifted his stance. Planted his feet. Still playing, I felt sure of it. But the pistol was cocked, and one small mistake makes a murder, and in Africa, so the old hands assure me, the first one pops some kind of cork, and they don’t quit after that.

  Ten seconds passed. Once more the boy spoke out—a pitiable, wrenching sound, his face like a newborn’s—trying to direct his words backward to the man about to dispatch him.

  The general fired one loud shot into the sky. Again the exclamations—fooled us two times! He turned his back on the youngster and leveled the weapon at the crowd, aiming in particular at Michael Adriko’s face.

  Michael bared his teeth and wagged his head and played the clown. Nobody laughed. On either of his shoulders lay a black hand, but his guards seemed not to know who the general referred to when he cried in English: “That one!”

  Or maybe they didn’t know the words. He said that one, that one, that one until the two men unslung their rifles and prodded Michael forward to the edge of the ditch. The general held out his hand and wiggled his fingers for one of the weapons, an AK, the kind with a folding stock and a pistol grip, and he swung it around and jabbed the barrel at Michael’s chest.

  Michael stepped backward into the ditch and stood with the young recruit in a ball at his feet while the general put the barrel’s mouth against one of Michael’s eyeballs, and then the other, and then the first again. Michael dodged his head and clamped his mouth around the barrel and sucked and French-kissed it with his tongue, the whole time looking up into the general’s face as if wooing a woman. Oh, Michael. If one voice laughs … Perhaps the general would laugh. But the general had been carried beyond his instincts and had to wait for Michael to decide what happened next. Michael drew his head back and averted his gaze, and the general seized on that as a sign of surrender and returned the rifle to its owner and stooped, hooked a hand into Michael’s armpit, and helped him out of the ditch. He spoke softly to Michael, and Michael answered softly. I don’t know what they said.

  Another minute, and the party was over, everyone dismissed, they were taking Michael back toward the smaller huts. Apparently they kept him separate from Davidia.

  As he passed, he said to me, to Davidia, to the sky’s blank face—“We’ll be fine. I’m talking to these people. A few of them are Kakwa, like me.”

  Somehow he’d not only cheated fate, but also coaxed it to lend him a cigarette, which one of his guards was lighting for him as they dragged him back to his prison. Puffing, squinting, he hopped along as if often in the habit of smoking with his hands tied behind his back.

  I got close to Davidia. Before they separated us again, I said to her, “Are you all right?”

  She said, “Yes. Yes. Are you?”

  [OCT 16 1:30PM]

  I’m back in the general’s quarters. “Coat of Many Colors”—“Coat of Many Colors”—“Coat of Many Colors”—

  My pen’s got a fresh cartridge, but the ball keeps skipping. This encourages more deliberate penmanship.

  Tina,—

  Tina. I doubt you’ll see me again in the flesh. I may as well embrace candor. With every stroke of this pen I’ve wanted to say it: I’ve lost my heart to this woman. I’m in love with Davidia St. Claire. The sight of her blinds me. This morning, the nearness of her outshone everything going on among these violent men.

  Right now I feel two ways. I’m grateful Davidia’s all right. I’m sorry that Michael isn’t dead.

  FOUR

  Online again—bathed and shaved and revived after eleven hours’ sleep, plus three cups of coffee brewed American style—I wrote to Tina:

  You’ll be hearing from the boys in Sec 4, and I suspect you’ve been briefed to some extent already by your own bunch.

  I regret your involvement, nothing else. But your involvement—deeply.

  I don’t mean to be curt, just brief. I don’t know how long I have the machine.

  They’ll intercept this communication, I suppose, and blackline half of it—but friends, please, let me tell her this much unredacted:

  Listen, Tina, when the boys from Sec 4 come around, remember you work for the US, not NATO, not really. I’d urge you not to speak to them. In fact there’s no reason why you shouldn’t just go back right now to DC. Or even home to Michigan.

  Thanks, chums. Thanks for letting me transmit that bit of advice.

  I just want to be careful not to overstep with my hosts. Who are they? Well fuck, as we Yanks like to say, if I know. Friends of Intelligence. Meaning allies of stupidity.

  That was snotty. They’ve been cordial. I should delete it.

  —But I saw them coming for me and pressed SEND.

  * * *

  On the afternoon of the second day, my backpack, my own toiletries, and freshly laundered underwear—also my own—appeared on my bed. But not my watch.

  And not my clothes. We still paraded around in red pajamas of cotton-polyester, the same material as the white sh
eets on our beds—not cots, but barracks beds. And we still possessed the olive socks, shorts, and undershirts they’d issued us. We’d been allowed to keep the shoes we’d arrived in.

  “We” being myself and one tentmate, a Frenchman, Patrick Roux, not Patrice, a tiny man with a sparrow’s face and giant horn-rim spectacles, and a five-day beard and bitten fingernails and a personal odor like that of linseed oil … or was my sensitive nose merely sniffing out a fake, a plant, a snitch?

  The Congolese Army couldn’t reach us here. I could sleep knowing I wouldn’t be prodded awake with a gun barrel and then shot; though I rather expected to be greeted one morning with some delicious coffee and informed of my arrest on a charge of espionage.

  * * *

  After supper on the second night, I wrote to Tina online:

  I won’t outrage you with pleas for forgiveness. I hope you hate me, actually, as much as I hate myself. And no explanation—nothing you’d understand—only this: the other day Michael asked me if I really want to go back to that boring existence. I said No.

  They’ve reviewed and returned some dozens of pages I filled by hand. None of it, apparently, impinges on their plans for world domination. If I somehow crawl free of this mess, I’ll transcribe and transmit those pages to you, and I may even take time one day to set down an account of things, everything, beginning—17 days ago? Really, only 17 days?

  They’ve made a few things clear. I’ll get one hour’s online access per day, sending to NIIA recipient(s) only (including you), and I’d better be careful not to compromise in any serious way what they’re up to down here—or else what? They’ll take away my red pajamas?

  Right now I can tell you I’m still in Africa. Behind loop-de-loops of razor concertina wire, shiny and new. Behind barricades four sandbags thick and nearly four meters high.

  I suppose they’ll redact this too, but for what it’s worth: I’m here thanks, I’m sure, to Davidia St. Claire, thanks to her relation with the US Tenth Special Forces Group, in whose hands I now find myself. I believe yesterday I caught a glimpse of their fearless leader, Col. George Thiebes himself, out there on the grounds. Commander of the whole 10th. I’m pretty sure I was meant to.