When not busy serving his customers, Dillip continued to watch the TV, which now offered a discussion amongst three government officials concerning the troubles along the Kilombo, and since Rawley and I had for the moment exhausted our store of reminiscences, I told him what Dillip had said about Mobutu and his curse.
“Yeah, I’ve heard that story,” Rawley said. “It’s true enough the region has been going through hell since he died. But it’s impossible to tell which came first, the trouble or the story.” With the tip of his forefinger, he smeared a puddle of moisture around on the polished surface of the bar. “The old boy was mad, there’s no doubt of it. And not just at the end. When I was a boy I met him with my father. Tiny fellow with outsized spectacles, wearing a leopard-skin hat, and carrying a fetish stick. Young as I was, I could feel his insanity. Like some kind of radiation.” He clicked his tongue against his teeth, a disappointed sound. “I used to think I understood this place, but lately… I don’t know. Perhaps things have just gotten so bloody awful, I tend to complicate them. Make them into something they’re not. Oh, well. I won’t have to deal with it much longer.”
“Oh,” I said. “Why’s that?”
He hesitated. “I was planning to tell you this tomorrow; I thought it might make an effective cure for a hangover.” A pale smile. “I’m getting married next month. Beautiful girl named Helen Crowley. Extremely intelligent. Attached to the British embassy. She can’t abide Africa, however, so we’re going to live in London.”
“Damn! When did all this happen?”
“I met her last year, but things didn’t heat up until a couple of months ago.”
I was startled. More than startled, actually. Rawley was the whitest African of my acquaintance, but he was nonetheless African through and through, and I couldn’t imagine him being happy anywhere else. I asked if he was looking forward to living in England and he said, “You must be joking! A Third World country with a Second World climate. I can’t fucking wait!” He fiddled with his cocktail napkin. “But she’s… she wants… Hell, you know how it goes.”
I told him that I did, indeed, know how it went.
Rawley began to extol Helen Crowley’s many virtues, and it struck me that he was attempting to excuse himself for running out on me, as if he believed that by marrying and exiling himself to Europe, he was effectively ending our relationship. Which was probably the case. My plans for the future, albeit sketchy, did not include a sojourn in England. I felt a childish resentment toward him. Though we only saw each other half a dozen times a year, he was the one real friend I had, and I had come to rely on his accessibility.
He tried to play to me, asking about my love life, suggesting that it was time for me to find someone as he had. My responses were terse and unaccommodating. With part of my mind, I recognized what an asshole I was being, but I was too drunk to censor myself. Not long afterward, I made my own excuses, told him I would meet him in the hotel bar the next evening after I talked with Buma, and staggered off to bed.
The drumming of the rain against the window in the darkened room caused me to feel dizzier, less in control, and thus I can’t be sure what moved me to call Patience; but I think it may have been that Rawley’s betrayal—so my drunken brain characterized it—inspired me to attempt to counterfeit a romantic relationship for myself. That would have been in keeping with the infantile tenor of my thoughts.
To my surprise, she picked up on the third ring. “Michael! I’m so happy to hear you! When you coming home?”
My toaster, I thought. Still mine.
All during the call, Patience urged me to hurry home, saying the Congo was a dangerous place and she was worried about me. This was, I assumed, her loneliness speaking. But her expression of concern suited my fantasies, and I found myself murmuring endearments, making the kind of assurances that should never be made drunkenly or lightly; and when she offered similar assurances in return, rather than retreating from the edge of this moral precipice, I let her voice comfort me and fell asleep with the phone pressed to my ear.
Usually after drinking to excess, I sleep fitfully, tossing about, waking every so often, plagued by stomach pains and anxiety dreams; but that night I slept soundly and the only dream that came was not the typical helter-skelter of surreal adventures and circumstances, but had a clarity and mental coloration unlike that of any dream I had theretofore experienced. I was moving rapidly through shallow water, not swimming so much as being carried along by the current. Clouds of brownish yellow sediment stirred up by the passages of others before me obscured my vision, yet I could still make out reeds undulating on the river bottom, wedges of stone extruded from the bank. Within minutes, the water became cooler, deeper, greener, and I could no longer see the bottom. I was being drawn toward something, but what exactly that thing was, I did not know. While it was not in my nature to be afraid, I had a sudden comprehension of fear, of its potentials, and this caused me to become more alert to my surroundings, as might happen when food was near. But this knowledge was unimportant, for even had I been capable of fear, I somehow trusted the thing toward which I was being drawn; I understood that it was not inimical.
The current grew faster, the water darkened to a cold blue, and I was overcome by a great lassitude. All my strength was draining from me, yet at the same time I sensed that I was accumulating new strength of a sort I could not fully understand, subtler form of power than my old strength, but no less serviceable. In the distance I saw a glowing patch of brighter blue, barely a spot, but increasing in size with every passing second, and I knew that this brightness was the signal fire of my destination…
I’m not certain what woke me, but I believe it must have been a lightning strike, for I heard thunder, and lightning forked down the sky, illuminating tracers of rain. I was still half involved in the tag ends of the dream—it had been so compelling, it seemed to pull at me as inexorably as had that glowing patch of blue. Yet at the same time I was terrified, and my heart raced. Rain was pouring down my face, into my eyes, matting my hair, and I was utterly disoriented. The last thing I remembered of the waking world was Patience’s voice in my ear, a pillow beneath my head. I hugged myself against the chill, and realized I was outside, wearing only a pair of briefs. A flicker of distant lightning showed my immediate surroundings. I was standing atop the rock where that afternoon I had seen the crocodiles at their strange menage. Beneath me, water churned against the bank, and on the far side of the river, the shadowy crest of the jungle trees swayed against the lesser darkness of the sky, bending all to the left, then straightening, with the ponderous rhythm of a dancing bear. On every side, the crunch and tatter of windy collisions, and from above, the constant battering of thunder.
Even after I had recognized my location, I remained terrified. I had no idea what could have happened. The idea of somnambulism had not yet entered my mind; instead, it seemed I had been spirited from my bed by the force of a dream to a place referenced by the dream; though confused, I was not confused about that—whether it was a product of my drunken imagination or of something more inexplicable, I had been dreaming a crocodile dream. I began to shiver, and this was not entirely due to the cold. The toiling dark was full of dangers, and I would have to negotiate nearly a mile of it before reaching the hotel. But no other option was open to me. I shuffled about, afraid of turning abruptly and losing my balance, and as I took my first step toward the hotel, a deafening crack of thunder—like the parting of some fundamental seam—shredded the clouds overhead, and I was knocked onto my back by a blast of vivid red light. A foundry color, like the molten shell that encases a white-hot core of liquefied steel. It was as if I’d been cupped in a fiery hand for a split second and then cast aside. For several seconds thereafter, I was dazed by the concussion, blinded, my nostrils stinging with the reek of ozone; when my vision cleared, I saw that a dead tree close by the rock had been struck by the lightning and was ablaze, serving as a torch to illumine a considerable portion of the flats, causing puddles to glitter and shining up all the slick muddy skin of the place. At the landward end of the rock, no more than twenty feet away, blocking my exit, was a crocodile.