“Whores,” said Solomon, following my gaze. “Perhaps you would rather talk to whores.”
“I’m only human,” I told him; then I asked, “Here’s something I can approach from an academic stance. Tell me what you think of Mobutu.”
Solomon pursed his lips. “I’m not disposed to discuss this with you.”
“That’s fair.” The woman in the yellow dress was peeking at me over her friend’s shoulder; she caught my eye, covered her mouth to hide a smile, and whispered in her friend’s ear.
Solomon now began discussing American Negro writers he admired. In his opinion, James Baldwin, though a degenerate, was the most African of them all. I couldn’t decide if this bespoke a startling new comprehension on his part, or was absolute bullshit. Soon, accepting that I did not want to play, Solomon and his friends left the bar, but not before the man who had been asleep, who had heard nothing of the conversation, turned back to the table and, with shy formality, extended his hand to be shaken.
A few minutes later, the woman in the yellow dress—Elizabeth by name—was sitting beside me and had placed my hand between her legs, separated from her secret flesh by a thin layer of cotton. “Do you feel it?” she whispered. “Beating like the heart of a little bird?” Her eyes were large and beautifully shaped, her features delicate, her small breasts perfectly round. She had a strange spicy scent. The rains had begun—late, that day—and the drops drew a tremulous droning resonance from the tin roof; the bartender switched on her radio, and a man with a hoarse romantic tenor sang in French a song about a boy torn between lust for a city woman and longing for his village sweetheart. At that instant, my perspective on Africa was pervaded by dizziness and desire. Even when Elizabeth asked me for money (“You know, you will have to give me a present”), she did so sweetly, almost apologetically, in keeping with my mood, with the mood of that place and moment. And when I gave her more than the present she had expected, she slipped my hand beneath the yellow cotton and offered me access to the proof of her own desire.
There was a room attached to the back of the bar, just big enough for a cot and a table bearing a lantern, with a window covered by a plastic curtain imprinted with red roses. When the curtain was pulled back, you could see a banana frond caressing the pane, like the green foreleg of some large, gentle insect. Fucking Elizabeth made me think of Patience, though not with guilt or any negative emotion. She simply reminded me of Patience in her playful exuberance and—all things being relative—her guilelessness. I didn’t doubt that she might try to rob me, yet I knew that if she did it would not be premeditated, but the result of a whim, an irresistible impulse. One way or another, I wasn’t concerned. She already had almost all of the cash I’d brought from the hotel. And so, once I was happily spent, I felt not the least compunction against falling asleep in her arms.
If I had remembered Buma’s promise that I would finish my interrupted dream, I might have fought off sleep; but I did not, and the dream took me unawares. The glowing patch of blue in the depths of the river toward which I had been heading… I was past it, I had gone through it and was swimming up toward the surface. Swimming had always been second nature to me, but now it took all my strength, and I found I could not breathe, that it was necessary to hold my breath as I strained toward the light. I couldn’t remember very much of what had happened to me within the patch of glowing blue, but I did recall that it had been painful, and I was certain that whatever had happened was responsible for the physical changes I was experiencing.
At last I broke the surface, sputtering and coughing, so weak I could barely swim to shore. When I reached the bank, I scrambled up the side and to my amazement, I discovered that I was standing on my hind legs. Standing upright as did those slight dark creatures upon whom I sometimes fed. Then I glanced down at my body. My arms were smooth and unwrinkled, my hands clawless, and my chest was smooth, covered with a fuzzy growth. Tatters of my old familiar skin clung to my hips and legs, but it was apparent that my legs were much longer than they had been. I let out a bellow of fear and rage, and was stunned by the frailty of my voice. Then I noticed others of my kind ranged along the bank, their condition the same as mine—changed, enraged, frightened. And hungry. I had never been so hungry in my life—it was as if I had never eaten. I bellowed again, and my brothers and sisters joined me, making an outcry that altogether might have equaled in volume the cry that one of us could have sounded before the change. But it was loud enough to attract the attention of creatures like ourselves yet not like us. Five of them. Fishermen on their way home.
We ran them down in the bush and threw them to the ground and fed. My mouth was not wide enough for proper biting, my teeth too small and blunt, but I managed; and as I fed, fear vanished, and in its place came understanding… understanding such as I could never have imagined. The world, it seemed, was larger and stranger than I had known, and now that my home had been corrupted by dark forces, I would have to leave it behind and seek another home—it was for this reason I had been changed. But changed by whom? By what? That knowledge was gone from me—though I believed I once had understood it, the space in my head where it had been seated was now filled with curious information, theories, schemes, languages, and systems, things I would not have believed existed. Yet my grasp of them was total, and I realized that, armed with this knowledge, and with my old knowledge that—though I had forgotten much of it—still empowered me, I had the opportunity not merely to survive, but to rule. Men, I perceived, were not only frail of body, but of mind, easily swayed and easily broken, and I was convinced that I could dominate them.
There were six of us on the bank, one a young woman—with my human eyes I saw that she was lovely. Five of us understood all that had happened and what we must now do, but the woman was so young, so new not only to this world, but to the previous one, she remained confused. I instructed her to go into the city and to find someone who would take her to a safe place. In my mind’s eye I saw a man from a distant country. I described him to her, told her where he lived, and sent her on her way. Then I, along with my four brothers and sisters, set out into the country we could not have imagined, but that we now meant to make our own.
I woke from the dream to find Elizabeth straddling me, holding me down by the shoulders, a terrified look on her face. She told me I had tried to leave the room while still asleep, but she had pushed me back down. I assured her that I was fine, but I was not fine. I could taste blood in my mouth, I remembered the sensation of ripping off a strip of human flesh and chewing it juiceless, I heard again the crack of a neck bone. These things, and not the mad logic of the dream, the idea that crocodiles were changing into men in order to escape some magical pollution of the Kilombo, persuaded me of the dream’s validity. Even the irrational notion that Buma, newly human, had sent me a crocodile girl to protect seemed possible in light of these horrible memories. I could not overlook the possibility that Buma’s power was merely the power of suggestion, or that my mind had been wired for madness by my years in Africa, conditioned to accept the most insane of propositions and to create improbable scenarios from the materials provided by a fraudulent witch man so as to explain away dysfunction. But for the time being I preferred the prospect of supernaturally transformed crocodiles to that of insanity, and I let Elizabeth console me.
I was thoroughly involved in the process of consolation when I heard voices raised in anger from the bar, and shortly thereafter the door to the little room swung open, and Rawley—his face flushed, his shirt and hair drenched with rain—stepped into view. “My God, Michael!” he said, averting his eyes. Elizabeth squealed, rolled off me and covered herself. “Are you mad?” Rawley said. “You know these women are all fucking diseased! What the hell were you thinking?”