The Laughing Monsters: A Novel Read online

  They walked on, four abreast. I watched them get away. Toward the bottom of the hill a flashlight came on, and its spot trembled over the ground … I hadn’t learned the woman’s name or told her mine or even asked if she’d seen anybody like Michael.

  The sun had set. The West turned a densely luminous terrifying aubergine. I stood alone beside the queen’s tree. I tried shouting Michael’s name and got no answer. As far as I could tell, the queen slept on undisturbed.

  I looked into one or two huts. The people inside them ignored me, even when I called to them.

  Then the night came down, and I found this hut empty and came in and sat inside, right here on the dirt floor, and this is where I’ve lived for the last few hours—maybe till I die—probably of thirst. I haven’t had water since noon. Soon I’ll go down and drink from the toxic creek.

  [OCT 27 ca. 7AM]

  When a woman’s screaming disturbed my dreams I thought nothing of it—there’s always some woman or infant or animal screaming—and I stayed under the darkness in my head as long as possible before I woke up thirsty and frightened in this hut. I’m crouched in a corner. The female screams go on. A sound of hammering or chopping too—not rhythmic, just violent. I have to piss. I need water. A man screams also.

  This thirst is murdering me. Give me sewage—I’ll drink it. But I can’t look for the creek now. I’m afraid to leave this hut.

  * * *

  Davidia. I’ve had a look. It’s Michael out there. Adriko. Our Michael.

  * * *

  I’m not going out. I’m glad to see him—I came here looking for him—but I won’t make myself known until I have an idea what’s happening.

  * * *

  I see a lot of villagers sitting on the ground around the coffins and the grave and the dirt piles. Michael argues—battles—with a large woman. He and this screamer are the only ones standing, stalking one another in a circle ten meters wide, keeping the people and the coffins and the double grave between them.

  * * *

  I’m able to count twenty-nine sitting on the ground. Women wearing long skirts and tops with bold patterns and colors, men in sweaters or large T-shirts with washed-out logos, all of them looking as if they’d rolled in the mud and didn’t care. Two women with children laid across their laps. Both kids naked and bony and sick, eyes open and staring at another world. One woman in a brilliant but filthy wrap and headscarf sits on top of a dirt pile, her legs out straight.

  * * *

  Michael holds a machete two-handed. Sometimes he raises it above his head as if he means to chop the sun out of the sky. He and the woman scream in some kind of Creole or Lugbara unintelligible to me.

  * * *

  My guess: the woman is the village queen, La Dolce, down from her tree—I recognize her tennis shoes—and these people have gathered for the funeral of the two dead children, and Michael must have stopped it with his screams and his machete. He and La Dolce howl at each other to the point of strangling on their hatred, but not both at once—it’s back and forth—that is, it seems to proceed as a debate while they orbit around the others.

  * * *

  She wears a long black skirt and a man’s sleeveless undershirt torn off just below her breasts, which, by their outlines, are narrow and pendulous.

  She’s got a buzz-cut Afro on her hippopotamus head, eyes leaping from the sockets and eyelids like birds’ beaks closing over them—her mouth is tiny and round, but it opens to shocking hugeness, displaying many square white teeth. A broad nose like a triangle biscuit smashed onto her face. She’s fat and laughing, hips banging as she struts around, keeping the people and the coffins and the grave between her and Michael.

  The hair on Michael’s head is growing back. He tromps around in rubber sandals, blue jeans, a gray hooded sweatshirt, waving the machete with his left hand, slapping his right hand against his chest, where it says HARVARD.

  Mainly throughout all this I feel thirsty. I’ve had nothing to drink since yesterday afternoon, and all this drama—and the whole sky, and the earth—and the oceans—seem tiny beside my thirst.

  * * *

  One minute ago Michael started chopping away with his machete at the woman’s chair, which rests on the ground beside her tree, and she shimmied toward him majestically and plopped herself right down in it, daring him to keep up the destruction and split her in pieces as well.

  He’s speaking English—“I’ll destroy this place!”

  Now she doesn’t howl, but rather sings of her power, I think, sitting on her throne, and cries out I think Bring me food! Bring me food! until a woman delivers something on a plastic plate and backs away apologizing. La Dolce flings grain into her mouth, it spills all over her bare belly, which even from here I can see is covered with stretch marks. Water now! Bring me water! They hurry to bring her a liter of bottled water—bottled Goddamn water. She anoints her own head from it and sprinkles her face. The drops remain while she says to Michael in English:

  “I am El Olam—the Everlasting God!”

  They’ve stopped everything. He’s catching his breath. Listen, Davidia—his face frightens me. The blade is twitching in his hands.

  She laughs at him.

  I need water and I’m going out now before Michael kills her.

  [OCT 27 ca. 5:30PM]

  The sun is low and very red and mean. I can’t look west.

  Down to double digits: 94 hours to go. Plus 30 minutes. Still 5000 KM to cover.

  I’ve drunk my fill at the creek. No matter. The toxins work slowly. Thirst would have killed me by tomorrow. I’m resting beside the creek among some new associates, that is, four skeletal sad-eyed Brahma cattle and the three herdsmen who tend them. Later I’ll tell you all about these guys. I don’t intend to move from this haven, I’m at my leisure to write and also to drink, and not just water, and I’ll tell you all about that too, but first—as to this morning’s romp—

  When I came out of my hiding-hut, Michael was declaring again:

  “I’ll destroy this place!” With a sweep of his machete he said, “You people are crazy!”

  I stood by my doorway till Michael noticed. At first he didn’t, but the villagers watched me. Without the usual smiling and laughing, their mouths took up no room in their faces and their eyes seemed abnormally huge.

  The sight of me slapped Michael awake. His recognition of me seemed to travel up from his feet and when it got to his face I came closer, but not in reach of the machete.

  He looked around himself: a dozen or so huts; the one tree—deceased; two piles of red dirt; two purple coffins, and a hole; also his clansmen huddling together on the ground like survivors of a shipwreck.

  He said: “Where is she?” He meant you, Davidia.

  “The Americans had us,” I said. “Your outfit, the Tenth.”

  “Where is she, Nair?”

  “She’s gone. She got on a chopper and didn’t look back.”

  His spine withered. The weapon dangled at his side. “Sometime during Arua, she took her heart away from me. I felt it. In Arua, something happened.”

  I wanted to take him away from this scene and talk about that other scene, about you, Davidia, and the colonel and the prop-wash and the noisy cloud that ate you up.

  However: the Dolce woman strode up to my face and gave out a hearty, phony laugh and cried, “God knocked backwards!”

  Michael said, “This woman is insane.”

  I said, “You must be La Dolce.”

  She yelped, “You’ve got an English for us!!??” (I punctuate excessively because her manner came straight out of comic books. She communicated in yelps, whoops—what else—guffaws, huzzahs, preachments, manifestos—and I had to agree instantly with Michael that she was insane.) “You are right, because I am!!!—I AM LA DOLCE!!!”

  “What a stupid name to call yourself,” Michael said.

  She raised her face to Heaven and sang ha-hah.

  “I understand she’s the village queen or something.”

&
nbsp; “More than that. She’s a priestess of genocide.”

  La Dolce addressed her brethren, pointing at Michael’s head. “Do you hear the Devil talking in his mouth?”

  “She calls me her prisoner,” Michael said. “She tells them I’m being kept here by her power.”

  “She speaks good English.”

  “She’s from Uganda. She’s the cousin of my uncle.”

  La Dolce pointed at me now, almost touching my nose: “This one’s clan is called Bong-ko. Their lies make you laugh!!!”

  Michael said, “They know the truth about you.” I said What?—he said, “Aren’t you a liar? Why are you here without Davidia? If the Tenth got hold of you, how did you get away? Did you sell me for your freedom? How long before they come for me?” He raised high the machete. “I feel like cutting the lies right out of you!”

  The blade didn’t scare me so much—only the look of him. His beard was growing out in streaks and whorls. Nappy head, red eyes, fat parched lips. He’d plastered the laceration on his forearm with red mud. His greasy black face, his mangled sweatshirt, his mistreated jeans—all dabbed and smeared with it. His sandals and feet were tainted with the same African muck.

  “Michael. Lower your weapon. I need water.”

  “I can’t help you. Do you see her crazy eyes?” La Dolce sat in her wooden chair like an enormous toddler, broadcasting happy rage. “This woman is calling for a sacrifice. She wants to bury someone alive. If I don’t keep an eye on her, she’ll throw one of these people into the grave.”

  “Has she got more bottled water?”

  “She’s got a whole commissary.”

  “Where?—Please.”

  “Die of thirst, Nair. You sold me to the machine.”

  “I’ve got no time for your accusations.”

  “You should be the one to go in the grave with those children.”

  “Lower your weapon and help your friend.”

  “Sacrifice for sacrifice.”

  “Two things,” I said, backing away. “First, water. And then we get out of here.” I guess I looked stupid, stumbling off. And he looked stupid with his cutlass in the air, as if it was stuck there and he couldn’t get it down.

  I poked my head into several huts and found one stacked with half a dozen cases of bottled water and boxes of cereal and canned goods, its entrance guarded by a man leaning on a hoe. He took it up like a cudgel when I got near. I tried to bribe him with all my Ugandan shillings, then with US dollars—twenty, a hundred, two hundred—but he wouldn’t share.

  I experienced a sort of dislocation here. The next several minutes have gotten away from me, and I’m not sure I remember things in their actual order.

  I saw the villagers all standing around the grave, shuffling their feet in place as they moaned and trembled. They were dancing. Singing.

  La Dolce and Michael had resumed their own dance, circling the scene.

  I didn’t notice that the purple coffins had gone until they reappeared on the shoulders of four men coming two-by-two from behind me. The dead children, I assumed, traveled inside them. The crowd made way, still chanting and moving in a zombie trance.

  The diggers waited in their hole and each coffin was just shoved over into their double embrace and let down to the floor with a little sploosh, and then helping hands raised one of the men from his work, while the other simply stepped onto one of the coffins and clambered out on his own, leaving behind the smeary impression of his bare foot.

  La Dolce screamed at some length, and Michael spoke briefly in a much lower tone, both in Lugbara, I supposed.

  The mob circled the grave on their knees, shoving dirt into it with their hands. They tossed the piles back into the holes and then bowed their heads while their queen made a speech that included much repetition of “La Dolce, La Dolce.” When she got near me, she took up her theme in English: “What is that name? I am La Dolce Vita!! You know it means that life is sweet. That’s me. I bring life. Life is sweet. But first we must sacrifice. First God will take what he wants. He takes the babies into his jaws. Can we stop him?” She went among the crowd, looking into face after face, bending close: “Can you stop God?—Can you stop God? What about you?—Can you stop God? No!! You cannot!!! And now God is angry that you have not sacrificed. I know this because I am God!” I doubt they comprehended.

  Michael said to her, “The Newada people are not animists and sacrificers like that. This village used to be Christian”—he pronounced it Chrishen. Then he shouted, still in English:

  “Go home! The grave is full enough! Go home!”

  Many of the mob stood up and wandered away. Some of them wept, nobody talked. A dozen or so stayed with their queen.

  La Dolce watched the others go, and I got the sense that Michael had triumphed here.

  The queen performed a kind of slow elephantine dance, singing ha-hah, ha-hah. She pointed at Michael’s crotch and said, “I’m going to my sleep now. When I dream, your parts will turn into a white stone!”

  Michael laughed. It was false, but loud, from deep in his lungs. He said, “Woman! If I had diesel, I would soak you and burn you alive.”

  “La Dolce is going up!” The queen lowered her butt into her throne with an ostentatious lot of wiggling. The two diggers hurried to help her.

  Next to the tree stood a rough-hewn table with some items on it—a few liters of bottled water—empty—a whole cassava, some mangoes, and some of the green oranges they eat in this region. From nails hammered into the trunk hung plastic shopping bags by their knots, full of what I don’t know. Clothes, probably, food. A pole jutted from the earth nearby, and between it and the tree some bright things flapped on a length of twine—a scarf, a skirt, a T-shirt. A pair of white athletic socks. Stair treads had been hacked in a zigzag up the trunk, but La Dolce didn’t use them.

  La Dolce raised one finger and made a winding motion with it and two stout women and a man took hold of her rope. She laughed and laughed while, by a system of pulleys anchored out of sight above, they hoisted her chair off the ground, and she ascended into the boughs.

  We tilted back our heads to watch—the chair swaying, the rope rasping against the tree’s rough hide, the crowd’s murmurs and exclamations—ayeee ayeee—the wind coming across the expanse.

  She pointed down at Michael. “Hees name shall rot!”

  I remembered a spider I’d seen swinging in just such a manner from Michael Adriko’s toothbrush. I thought: Yes, everything’s coming together now.

  I wouldn’t have thought that anything could distract me from my thirst, but now I heard the sound of an engine, and a burst of hope lifted me. “Is that a car?”

  It was a cow. Another one also moaned.

  I said, “Shit. We can’t ride out of here on cattle.”

  Michael took a couple of strokes at the tree with his machete. He gave it up and seemed about to walk off somewhere.

  “Michael—I need you to focus now. I talked to some missionaries. Tomorrow they can take us out of here to Bunia.”

  “Good for them.”

  “Don’t do this. Jesus, man—not now. I need to get to Freetown, and I’m out of ideas.”

  “Leave me alone.”

  “I need your help.”

  “Leave me alone.”

  When he’s like that, he’s like that. I left him alone.

  I followed the path down the hill.

  While a humpbacked Brahma cow was loosing a stream of piss two meters away, I sponged up creek water in a dirty sock and squeezed it into my mouth. No liquid so sweet has ever touched my lips, until perhaps five minutes later—because gathered around a stump quite near to where I’d fallen on my knees, three remnant herdsmen had convened. One of them offered me a gourd. I thought he meant it for a water glass, but in fact it was already swimming with a filmy yellow liquid, pungently alcoholic, and I knew I’d come among my tribe.

  * * *

  Three fine men: one younger, two older. I forget their names. They have the puffy look o
f corpses floating in formalin. And three stunted, starving cows and one bull who drags his chin across the ground because he can’t hold up his own horns.

  As far as I make out through the language barrier, they’ve been trading off the last of their cattle for plantain and sugar cane, which they bury together in a formula that ferments and emerges as a remarkable beverage they call Mawa. I don’t think it’s good for the teeth—they’ve got none. But these dregs in the gourd, I’ll bet you, give strength to the bones.

  I can’t say whether they’re from Michael’s clan or some neighboring society. They wear rope sandals. Long-sleeved shifts of coarse cloth, brown or gray, depending on the light.

  I fell asleep by the creek, I woke from a long nap, and I’ve been sitting here writing away with no intention of leaving this spot because, if I take their meaning, a new batch of Mawa comes up from the earth around sundown, and I plan to be here for the resurrection. Prior to my nap, I only got a few swallows.

  I’m not going back up that hill to deal with Michael. I’d sooner take my chances on the Tenth Spec Forces than hang my hopes on Michael Adriko, the lunatic comedian.

  I should stay sober and alert for the sound of a blue-and-white Isuzu.

  Really? Kiss off. What difference does it make? It’s been two weeks since we left Arua and I’ve come altogether about fifty kilometers.

  [SAME-SAME, 6:30PM?]

  Oh, Davidia! Or maybe I mean

  Oh, Tina!

  Whichever is your name, I call to you, oh woman of my heart.

  The Mawa decants out of 2 five-liter jugs.

  The gourd bowl goes round and round.

  My flat black silhouette comrades. Right now they stand against the sunset. Behind them it looks like Dresden’s burning. I forget their names. I’ll ask again.

  —Oudry

  —Geslin

  —Armand

  Priests of the nectar, ministers to the flock, of whom I am one.

  If I can’t buy or think my way out of this by tomorrow, I’ll go back to the Americans and say, Prison? Fine.

  * * *

  My handwriting may be illegible—let’s blame the dark.