The Laughing Monsters: A Novel Page 6

  I went over and got the barman to switch it off and taught him to make a vodka martini and drank one or two of them pretty rapidly.

  When I rejoined my comrades with another drink in my hand Michael said, “I was just explaining to Davidia—we’ll head north tomorrow for Newada Mountain. Or in that direction. North. Stanley explored there, looking for the source of the Nile.”

  “More will be revealed,” I said. I was aware that lately I was drinking more than ever in my life. I couldn’t relax or feel like myself in this region without banging myself on the head with something.

  “My village is there,” he told us, “in sight of Newada Mountain.” Next he said, “I’m being communicated with by a spirit. Something or someone is contacting me. No, I’m serious. The spirits of my ancestors, the spirits of my village.”

  “What village? I thought you were some sort of—what the hell are you, originally, Michael? Some sort of displaced Congolese.”

  “I am exactly that. A displaced Congolese. And now,” he said, “I’m going to replace myself.” He took hold of Davidia’s arm as if to hand her to me in evidence. “She’s along because I’m going to marry her. I want her to meet my parents.”

  “I thought your parents were dead.”

  “Not my real parents. My other parents. The whole village is one family. Everyone is my mother and father and brother and sister. If the feeling is right, we’ll be married right then and there.”

  Davidia said, “Wait—if the feeling is right?”

  “If you’re welcome. And I’m sure you’ll be welcomed. The bride is always welcome, unless she comes from a clan devoted to stealing.”

  “And I’ll be your best man,” I said.

  “The equivalent.”

  “Nobody’s going to cook me and eat me, I hope.”

  “People don’t quite understand,” Michael said, and he may have been serious, “to be eaten pays a compliment to your power.”

  A couple of whores came in and sat at another table.

  The boom box was back in operation. I talked Michael and Davidia into trying the barman’s martinis. They had a couple each, and danced with one another. Between numbers we listened to the song of a frog who sounded like a duck, an insistent duck.

  “I knew it from the start,” I said. “Congo. I knew it.”

  “Not Congo, no, not necessarily.”

  Davidia said, “Isn’t it time you told us where we’re going? Where are your people located?”

  “During the reprisals they were dispersed. We were uprooted and scattered. But they’ve reconvened. Relocated.”

  “Where, exactly?”

  “Where? Quite near to Arua, in the northwest corner of this country.”

  “Uganda.”

  “This country where we’re having our supper. Uganda.”

  “Not Congo,” I said.

  “Not Congo.”

  “And how do we get there?”

  “We’re taking the bus from Kampala.”

  “Come on! We’ll take a plane,” I said.

  “It has to be the bus. You can easily see why.”

  “Why?” Davidia said.

  He meant Horst, and Mohammed Kallon. If for some reason Interpol was on us, they could check the flight manifests out of Entebbe. I saw the logic. I disliked the conclusion.

  “You’ll get to view the countryside,” he said to Davidia.

  “Good! The bus!” she said.

  “Arua is the birthplace,” Michael informed us, “of Idi Amin Dada. In the month of March they celebrate his birthday.”

  “What? You mean the whole town?”

  “Just a handful of people. But nobody stops them.”

  The bus … Out of pity for us all, I didn’t laugh. “So we simply climb aboard,” I said, “and go away.”

  “Yes. Day after tomorrow. Can you just come with me?”

  “Sure. I’m drunk enough.”

  “Good. Stay drunk.”

  “What about you,” I asked Davidia—“are you drunk enough?”

  “I’m in love enough.”

  She had a somber glow about her, a smoldering vitality that warmed the air. She made me hungry. I wanted to smell her breath.

  And the nightclub girls, one of them wearing a curly blonde wig, like a chocolate-covered Marilyn Monroe … The bartender didn’t talk to them and they ordered nothing, they only watched me, and waited.

  Michael’s tongue was tangled in martinis—“I don’t want to be a thumb,” he said, “in the turd in the punchbowl of life.”

  “What?”

  Michael was drunk. That meant he was in pain. He gripped a pen, he was writing something on a napkin. He tapped me on the shoulder and handed it to me. In the pleasant darkness, I couldn’t make out the letters.

  I told him, “I wouldn’t have expected you to marry black.”

  Michael shook his head as if to clear it. Davidia stared at me. “What did you say?”

  Right. What had I said? “The drinks are clobbering me. It’s the altitude.”

  “You should have put food in your stomach,” Michael said.

  Davidia said, “Explain your remark.”

  “You mean defend it.”

  “Fine. Defend it.”

  “I’ll explain it,” I said.

  “We’re waiting.”

  “He’s always had a weakness for the Middle Eastern type, that’s all. The Persian princess sort of female. I apologize for talking out of turn. I do apologize.”

  She laughed. She was angry. “Don’t twist yourself in knots.”

  It was only for Michael’s sake I was trying to smooth things, but Michael wasn’t even listening. “Back to another subject,” he said. “I never answered your question about the Tenex corporation.”

  “Tenex?”

  “Do you remember? At the Freetown airfield. We were talking about uranium. Tenex handles U-235 material from dismantled Soviet warheads. Dilutes it to ten percent pure and barters it to the United States.”

  “Jesus, Michael—again, the U-235?”

  I’ve always thought it a laugh, Michael’s obviousness when he means to be sneaky. No stage villain ever looked more the conspirator, leaning forward into his face’s shadow, his head cocked toward the game, the trick, his right eyebrow going up, his lip curling in a sneer.

  A quick, horrid intuition assaulted me.

  Davidia placed her hand on my forearm and asked if I was okay. I said, “I’m fine, except I need to be smarter.”

  “Smarter isn’t always better though, is it?”

  “Good night.”

  I went over and made an arrangement with the whore in the blonde wig. She stood up, and hand in hand we journeyed to my bed.

  She was drunk, also in some way drugged, and she passed out when we were done—perhaps before we were done, and I simply didn’t notice.

  * * *

  Later I woke as the woman was leaving, and I locked the door behind her and lay in bed watching the Chinese cable station, a piece about fourteen baby pandas in the Shanghai zoo. A sudden rainstorm hit the roof like an avalanche and killed the city’s power and sent all of existence back where it came from. I thought of the woman wandering around out there in the roaring dark.

  On my nightstand I found the napkin Michael had written on. By the light of my cell phone I made out the words, but not their meaning:

  He’s my panda

  from Uganda

  he’s my teddy bear

  they say things about him

  but I don’t care

  Idi Amin

  I’m your fan!

  —I read it several times. The rhyme scheme interested me.

  * * *

  Not long after six in the morning I heard, through the papery walls, the buzz of Michael’s clippers and the shower running next door, and soon I heard someone going out. A few minutes later came a light tapping. I was heating water for instant coffee—the Suites provided a drip brewer but nothing to brew in it, only a jar of Nescafé. The tap
ping came again, and I realized it must be Davidia.

  I got close to the wall and said, “I’m awake.”

  Her voice came quite clearly. “Come and see me.”

  “Should we meet in the restaurant?”

  “Let’s talk in here,” she said. “Come over. Or around.”

  “I could easily come right through.” Talking through the wall like this, I felt how close our faces were.

  The lights in the hallway flickered on and off. The door stood open. In the random illumination she waited in a yellow silk robe, barefoot. She stepped aside and I entered bearing my cup and my jar of Nescafé.

  “Where’s Michael?”

  “Taking his morning run.”

  The air tasted damp from the shower. Her underwear was lying around. I smelled her perfume. But she said, “It stinks in here. Sorry. Sometimes he sits down and smokes half a dozen cigarettes one after another. Doesn’t say a word. Lost in his head.”

  She picked up a cigarette from the nightstand and put the end in her mouth. Looked around. Perhaps for a lighter.

  “Do you smoke?”

  She threw it in the pile of butts in the ashtray and said, “I’m so stupid.”

  “Let’s have some coffee. Do you have bottled water?” She gave me a liter jug and I set about heating water in the brewer.

  She sat on the bed. “We had a fight.”

  “I’m surprised to hear that. I mean to say—you were pretty quiet about it. I had no idea.”

  “He wanted to be quiet. So he could hear you through the wall.”

  “Hear me?”

  “You and the girl,” she said.

  “We were quiet too,” I said.

  “We’re a stealthy bunch of idiots,” she said. “And I mean idiots.” She got up but didn’t know where to go. “I’ve been wanting to see you alone.”

  “Why?”

  She paused. “I don’t have a ready answer.”

  “Did you have something you wanted to say?” Seeing I wasn’t helping, I added, “I’m only trying to help you figure it out.”

  “I wanted to see what we were like together.”

  “Oh.” I devoted myself to the cups and spoons and Nescafé. “What were you fighting about?”

  “I thought Kampala was the destination. Now we’re going on to Arua.”

  “But last night at dinner you were ready to swing with it.”

  “‘Swing with it’? Who are you, Jack Kerouac? You reach way back into the last century for your Americanisms.”

  “Nevertheless.”

  “Sure, last night I was a real swinger. Alcohol affects me too. I didn’t realize he wasn’t telling us anything.”

  “Michael doesn’t draw up plans. He weaves tales. Just let him be mysterious. If there was any way of hurrying him along, believe me, I would have found it by now.”

  “This is why I had to talk to you—to compare notes. Can I trust you? No—I can’t, can I?—I mean, trust you to be straight with me. What are we doing? I mean, specifically, you two—what are you up to? There’s something going on, and he won’t tell me what.”

  “There’s nothing going on in the sense of—going on. We’re traveling together.”

  “Why do you tag along?”

  “I’m one half of the entourage.”

  “He assumes you’re devoted to him. I’m not so sure.”

  “He assumes I’m devoted to getting rich. You know—exploiting the riches of this continent.”

  “And is that really you? A cheap adventurer?”

  “Why do you call it cheap? Adventure is glorious. I don’t understand why people put it down.”

  “I can’t believe you just went off with that poor woman, in her silly-looking wig. Did you think to use protection?”

  “This is a little crazy. Don’t you think it’s none of your business?”

  “No. But don’t you think I have reason to be crazy?”

  “Drink this coffee,” I said.

  “Something’s wrong with him, Nair. In the middle of the night he gets these sort of, I don’t know what, nightmares, sleepwalking, talking in his sleep—really, I don’t know what.”

  “Actual sleepwalking? Walking around in his sleep?”

  “No, but—talking, thrashing—talking to me, but talking crazy, looking right at me, but he looks blind when I shine a light on him.”

  “Night terrors. Right? Violent memories.”

  “It’s driving me nuts. It’s scary.”

  “Tell me something: When did you arrive in Africa?”

  “Tomorrow will make it two weeks.”

  “Just short of two weeks. Right on schedule for a meltdown. Nothing serious. A tiny low-grade implosion, let’s say, of your American personality.”

  “I’ve traveled before. Don’t condescend to me. I’m crazy about a man who’s driving me crazy because I’m crazy about him. He won’t tell me anything. He took my cell phone.”

  “Really? Jesus.”

  “He won’t let me call home.”

  “Your people must be frantic.”

  “There’s only my dad, and we don’t correspond much anyway. He’s bitter at me since I started doing work at the Institute. Still, I mean, if I could call him—I would. If Michael would let me. Why won’t he let me? Is he always like this? Because it seems like something new.”

  “It’s nothing new.”

  “You’ve seen it before. Paranoid suspicions. Taking away people’s cell phones.”

  “I’ve been analyzing Michael Adriko for a dozen years. First of all—you realize he’s a war orphan. He was born into chaos, and he’s pathologically insecure. He keeps a stranglehold on the flow of information because then it feels like his life can’t get away from him. But whatever you absolutely need to know, he tells you. Even though sometimes I’d like to torture him with electricity.”

  “Don’t joke. He’s been tortured before.” It was true.

  Davidia stood there holding her cup with two hands looking alone, and pitiable, and stupidly I said, “Are you really going to marry him?”

  “That’s what I’m here for.”

  “Do you really love him?”

  She said, “Do you know who my father is?”

  An unexpected query. “I guess not.”

  “Michael didn’t tell you? My dad’s his CO—the garrison commander at Fort Carson. Colonel Marcus St. Claire.”

  “Oh my lord,” I said, “oh my lord.” I jumped up to say something else and only said, “Oh my lord.”

  “Until I met Michael, I’d only known two loves: love for my father, and love for my country. Now I love Michael too.”

  “But you said your dad and you were on the outs.”

  “It’s complicated. It’s family. I’d say we’re estranged. All the same, he loves Michael as much as I do. Everybody loves Michael. Don’t you love him, Nair?”

  “I can’t resist him. Let’s put it that way.” And I added, “Oh my lord.”

  * * *

  I went to the lobby, more on the order of a vestibule, and ordered some coffee. Soon Michael came through the doors in a powder-blue sweat suit and put his hands on his knees and bowed like that, breathing heavily, showing the top of his big muscular shaved head. Then he stood and whipped off his sweatband and wrung it out over the floor.

  I waved to him. “Come here, will you?”

  He came over.

  “Sit down.”

  He sat down beside me on the divan, his leg against mine.

  “Michael. You’re pissing me off.”

  “Never!”

  “Tell me once and for all, in full detail. What’s this all about?”

  “Do you like Davidia?”

  “I don’t want her here.”

  “What-what!”

  “Not if you’re up to what I think you’re up to. And if it’s what I think, then you’re fucking up, man. You’re fucking up.”

  He stared down at the palms of his hands for a bit and then showed me his face: a soul without frie
nds. “Let’s walk around. I’m still cooling off.” But first he went to the counter and called for the clerk and begged a cigarette and stuck it behind his ear.

  I followed him out the doors and into the wash of red mud that passed for a street. The brief stretch of morning had already baked it hard. At this elevation the air was cool enough, but the equatorial sunshine burned on my back. It was crazy to walk.

  Michael strolled beside me gripping my arm with one monster hand and with the other massaging my neck, my collarbones. His face shone with joy and sweat. “It’s good to speak honestly to you, Nair! Now it’s time, now I can do that. Now I’m happy. I was desolate, but now I’m happy. Ask me anything.”

  “Jesus, Michael, where do we start? How about your military status?”

  “I belong to nobody’s military. I was an attaché merely.”

  “There’s a US Special Forces unit hunting around eastern Congo. Looking for the Lord’s Resistance. Were you attached to them?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Did you run off?”

  “That’s an ugly rumor.”

  “Did you run off?”

  “I didn’t run off. I moved away in support of my plan. My beautiful plan—and yes, yes, yes, we’re going to get rich, how many times do I have to tell you? Be patient. Soon you’re going to see something. With one stone, I’m killing a whole flock of birds.”

  “Cutting through the muck—your status is AWOL.”

  “Detached. Detached is more precise.”

  “Next question. Are we messing around with fissionable materials?”

  “Hang on, my brother.”

  Over the last few days his speech had lost its American flavor, and his stride, I noticed, had an African man’s swivel now, and his shoulders rolled as he walked, like an African’s. The lane climbed steeply here. He stopped to get a light from a vendor and then he was many paces ahead, on a rise, jogging toward the crest while puffing on his cigarette. I caught up with him and he said, “My brother, do you think our wedding ceremony involves U-235?”—with a false and sickly grin. What an amateur. When it came to fountains of falsehood—a bold artist. But a simple denial, one word, a flat lie? No talent for that.