The Laughing Monsters: A Novel Read online

  Michael said, “Let’s wear collars, you and I.”

  “Dog collars? Do I look like a dog?”

  “Clerical collars.”

  “Do I look like a clerk?”

  “I think it would help with questions.”

  “It’s a lousy cover. Everyone wants to approach you.”

  “Who approached those Adventist people? We moved right through the checkpoints.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” I admitted. “I was asleep. But are you serious?”

  “It’s a joke. Come on, smile.”

  “I hate it when people tell me to smile. People like that disgust me.”

  “Nair, I have a bit of news: tomorrow afternoon we’ll board a plane for Accra. We’ll land in Kotoka International by next day’s dawning.”

  “I don’t believe you. Is that a surprise?”

  “You’ll believe me before too much longer. And then when I tell you to smile, you’ll smile.”

  We passed the night at Le Citizen Hôtel, mostly in the café, where we sent out for fresh clothes, and where Michael got me drunk enough to promise I’d drink no more if we reached Freetown in time to make my rendezvous—still about sixty hours distant, and still no closer on the map. Therefore, I gave him my promise … The room we took came with its own sink. I vomited in it.

  The next morning I lay in bed resting, or dying, while Michael went out to trip a lever, or touch a magic eye—in retrospect it looks that simple, the work of a finger—to set going his plan for extraction.

  Even now, as I write this, with everything, or a good bit of everything, having turned out all right, I feel irritated with Michael’s coy dramatics. I’m forced to give him credit, I admit that gratefully. We’ve crawled from the wreck, we’ve walked away, and all of that is Michael’s doing. I’d just sort of rather it weren’t.

  At noon on Oct 29, with 52 hours to go, we hired a car with one of my twenty-dollar bills, and in thirty minutes we reached the checkpoint outside Bunia’s airfield.

  A guard in khaki peered inside the car, had us step out a minute, waved his wand at us, ignored its squeaks, then prodded aside a couple of goats with his boot and unhooked a rope to let us through.

  Three flagpoles, two drooping flags, a red dirt runway. A concrete kiosk. In front of it some men in uniform loitered, laughing. Nothing else but a sort of restaurant with a wooden porch. I said, “I don’t see any planes.”

  “Do you see those Ghanaian uniforms?”

  “I see uniforms.”

  “Ghanaian. Wait here. But first give me money.”

  “How much?”

  “Everything. If we want to get out of here, we have to pay.”

  He left me in the café. I found nobody inside. There were some tables and a cold-box full of drinks—unplugged—but nothing zestier than Coke. I guzzled a warm one. Michael joined me after ten minutes. He sat down without a drink and said, “When we get to Accra, I’ll leave you at the airport terminal while I get the Ghanaian passports.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “You want diplomatic, or private?”

  “One of each. And while you’re about it, get me a medical diploma.”

  “I’m glad you don’t believe me. It heightens the enjoyment later.”

  “Care to reveal how we get there?”

  “Where?”

  “Accra, Goddamn it.”

  “Ghanaian Air Force, flying for the UN.”

  “The UN? Their planes are never on time.”

  “You’re very negative. Here’s one hundred eighty dollars back. The pilots were reasonable in their requirements.”

  At Kotoka International in Accra, he handed me a cube of Big G Original Gum in a red wrapper and said, “Here, keep yourself busy,” and next he went into the city and accomplished the unthinkable—although by then I was allowing myself to think it, because he’d gotten us this far, and because two Ghanaian thugs wearing dark business suits came in a Mercedes to collect him at the terminal.

  That’s where I sat for the next many hours—fifteen, I believe—until Michael returned around 11 that night.

  He found me at the Teatime Kiosk at Kotoka, where I happened to be writing my last communication to you, Davidia, or to you, Tina, or to both of you … He laid out on the tabletop four Ghanaian documents, a pair of them for each of us—one a civilian passport, and the other a diplomatic, both stamped with visas for Sierra Leone, Uganda, and Liberia. “I started to come for you, to get your photo snapped—but there was a fellow there, an English, who looked just like you. A perfect double. He agreed to substitute.”

  “This doesn’t look at all like me.”

  “It looks like you exactly,” Michael insisted.

  “Of course it does. To an African.”

  I can’t tell you my name, Tina. But don’t ask for Roland Nair.

  “I’m born in Kumasi, and you in Accra. Both of us on the same day, because we’re brothers.”

  “But I didn’t give you any money.”

  Apparently he’d paid none. “I told you—I saved the president’s life. I’ve told you many times.”

  “I don’t remember any such lie. President who? Mahama? Is that his name?”

  “No. It was in 2005. President John Kufuor. When we have privacy, I’ll open my pants for you.”

  “What-what?”

  “I took a bullet for him. I’ll show you the scar.”

  * * *

  At six the following morning, October 31st, we boarded a Kenya Airlines flight to Lungi International in Freetown.

  The whole trip, from the sorrows of Newada Mountain to the comfort of the National Pride Suites, took 71 hours.

  On the plane I said something which, though it came from my own mouth, I could scarcely believe: “Michael, if we don’t crash, I’ll make it on time. We’ll get to Freetown with five hours to spare.”

  It didn’t matter that a swarm of unforeseeables waited ahead, that anything could sink us. To be back in the running felt like triumph.

  “How much for your enterprise?”

  “What?”

  “How much will you profit, Nair, how much money?”

  “One hundred K US. That’s the price for betraying absolutely everyone.”

  “But, Nair—you didn’t betray me.”

  “Not quite. Not yet.”

  “The slate is clean between us.”

  “I tried to steal your girl.”

  “I take it as a compliment.”

  * * *

  When we landed here in Freetown, Michael took a car to the National and I took another, first to the Paradi Restaurant for the briefest and happiest of errands—retrieving a bit of computer equipment—and then to the Bawarchi, where I waited until my friend Hamid arrived with one hundred thousand dollars in a blue plastic pouch with a zipper. I held the money in my lap while he used his own computer to examine the goods, and then we parted ways. No handshake. But if the chance comes again, I think we’ll do business.

  Late last night Michael and I met with some men in the bar downstairs and arranged to hire a boat, a big one. Experienced captain, plenty of fuel, and next stop—anywhere. Abidjan, perhaps. Though neither of us has much French.

  Meanwhile we’ll confine ourselves to this building, because too many people know Michael by sight. We share a suite of two rooms. The air conditioner and TV seldom work—no generator at the National—so it’s hot, and it’s boring. This afternoon for entertainment I watched Michael cut the stitches in his arm with barber scissors and pull them out with his teeth.

  We’ll wait till after midnight to break camp.

  Maybe Liberia. Much is possible there. We’ll claim a patch of jungle and a strip of beach, and I’ll start my semi-honest account while Michael maps out a scheme or two for international conquest.

  We don’t have to put down roots. Maybe we’ll keep moving. Michael and I both liked Uganda. Why not? The climate’s pleasant.

  When I left him two hours ago, Michael was downstairs in the bar, bent over
a bulky very out-of-date video game machine, saying to it, “Pchew! Pchew! Pchew! In yo face, outa space!”

  For him, Davidia, you were simply Fiancée Number Five. But for me. Good Lord. For me.

  * * *

  Tina, you more than once predicted that the coldness of my heart would someday make you a bitter woman. I think you chose me for exactly that reason. You must have wanted it. If you’re bitter, you devised to become that way, and I think you chose me as your instrument. So stop it. Stop going on and on about it in my mind.

  * * *

  Maybe back to Ghana. Maybe Senegal. There’s always Cameroon.

  Or we might leave this continent behind us and fly to Kuwait, where Michael counts on a most enthusiastic welcome, having once, he revealed to me this morning, spent several months reorganizing and polishing every aspect of personal security for that country’s emir, Sheikh Sabah IV Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah, “thus prolonging his joy for many years.”

  I’m inclined to believe it.

  ALSO BY DENIS JOHNSON

  FICTION

  Train Dreams

  Nobody Move

  Tree of Smoke

  The Name of the World

  Already Dead: A California Gothic

  Jesus’ Son

  Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

  The Stars at Noon

  Fiskadoro

  Angels

  NONFICTION

  Seek: Reports from the Edge of America & Beyond

  POETRY

  The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly

  The Veil

  The Incognito Lounge

  PLAYS

  Soul of a Whore and Purvis: Two Plays in Verse

  Shoppers: Two Plays

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

  Copyright © 2014 by Denis Johnson

  All rights reserved

  First edition, 2014

  eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to [email protected].

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Johnson, Denis, 1949–

  The laughing monsters: a novel / Denis Johnson.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-374-28059-8 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-374-70923-5 (ebook)

  1. Political fiction. I. Title.

  PS3560.O3745 L38 2014

  813'.54—dc23

  2014016983

  www.fsgbooks.com

  www.twitter.com/fsgbooks • www.facebook.com/fsgbooks

  For assistance way beyond the call of duty, the author thanks Michele Thompson.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Denis Johnson is the author of eight novels, one novella, one book of short stories, three collections of poetry, two collections of plays, and one book of reportage. His novel Tree of Smoke won the 2007 National Book Award.