The policeman beckoned to me peremptorily. “Come along now. I have your possessions at the desk.”
“Buma,” I said. “The crocodile man. It was him, wasn’t it? He gave the order.”
“If you refuse to come with me,” said the policeman, “I will have you dragged from the cell.”
It was clear what must have happened. With Rawley no longer serving as a buffer between them and Buma, the police—with their superstitions, their belief in sorcery—would have been easy prey for Buma’s mind games. In fact, they probably had never thought that I was a real suspect in the murder. I was only a bone they intended to throw to Kinshasa, a stand-in for Buma, whom they were too afraid of to prosecute. What I didn’t understand was why Buma would have me set free. “Where is he?” I asked. “Where’s Buma?”
The policeman gazed stonily at me. “He is gone.”
“You released him?”
“He is gone.”
“Where… Where did he go?”
The policeman shrugged. He half-turned, then glanced back at me. “He left you a message.”
I waited, and after checking the hallway to make sure no one else was listening, the policeman provided me with the final piece of the puzzle.
“Have patience,” the policeman said. “That is all he told me to tell you. Have patience.”
It is as I said at the outset, you must not think of me as a reliable witness. Instead, you must read what I have written as you would testimony in a murder trial. You must weigh it and make a judgment according to the dictates of your experience. There is, I believe, one way to determine whether it is I who am mad, if—to justify my sins, perhaps even to hide a murderous act—I have conjured this story out of hints and intimations and a handful of anomalies; or if madness has infected the entire world, if the dying curse of a tiny African giant has poisoned all the waters, if crocodiles are fleeing that curse by becoming men, and if James Rawley was executed by means of witchery because he refused to drop his prosecution of Gilbert Buma. In order to make that determination, I would have to travel five days upriver from Mogado to a spot marked by a ferry landing burnt by Mobutu’s soldiers; I would have to walk inland until I came to a giant fig tree, and if then I were to find an albino rock python, it would be reasonable to conclude that magic and witchery have won the day. At the time of these events, I was not prepared to make that trip, and I remain unprepared to do so—the Kilombo is not a place to which I ever care to return. But perhaps a different kind of proof will be forthcoming.
Upon my return to Abidjan, I secured a visa for Patience and together we flew back to the States. Shortly thereafter we married and settled outside Ann Arbor, Michigan, not far from the Huron River. Patience likes being close to a river; she says it reminds her of home. Sometimes she will sit with me on the banks of the Huron, humming under her breath, and when she feels my eyes on her, she will cut her own eyes toward me and hold my stare just as Buma was in the habit of doing. I don’t spend a great deal of time wondering about her origins; that would be fruitless. Though I may not have taken her seriously if it hadn’t been for Buma’s message and all that attended it, I try not to question either my mental state or the happiness that has come my way. I teach at the university, I come home at night to Patience, to love. And despite the fact that our immediate world appears to be in a state of collapse, with political scandal and murder and random violence reaching epidemic proportions, we have managed to find a degree of contentment.
Lately, however, something has been happening that, I think, bears upon the matter at hand. Each weekend I drive to Detroit to teach a class at the science museum. The freeway, I-94, is a curving stretch of concrete along which flow thousands of cars, rather like the Kilombo both in form and in usage, and sometimes as I drive, a dreamlike feeling steals over me, I become distant from human thoughts and desires, tranquil in the face of the unknown, and I see myself gliding along that white riverine strip, a soul and flesh encased in steel, one of thousands of such entities, and we are all moving inexorably toward a far-off patch of glowing red, brilliant and flickering like fire, drawn to it by a force beyond our comprehension, but confident that when we reach it we will be transformed in a fashion that will allow us to survive the great trouble that afflicts us all, clear in the truth of our salvation… not the much-advertised salvation of religion, but salvation through the processes of nature, which often manifest in arcane ways and seem as wildly illogical as the consequences of a magic spell.
I recognize that there are at least two possibilities here. Either there is a natural process that is triggered by devastating environmental perils, one by which various of the imperiled are forced along a fast evolutionary track, crocodiles evolving into men, men into… some speculative form; or else my subconscious has constructed this entire scenario as a mechanism of penance and punishment for my self-perceived crimes, and the patch of fiery, cataclysmic red—to which I draw nearer each Saturday—promises the ultimate in transformations. A rationalist would favor the second possibility, but then of all humankind, rationalists are the most vulnerable to the effects of magic, the most confounded by the magical expressions of nature. As for me, I have no opinion. I am content to wait and learn, to have patience, to ask no questions, to accept what comes. For though you may not understand how this story ends, whether love is disproved by death, whether truth is revelatory or merely deductive, whether life itself is an elastic energy, a pure informality with the infinite potential of a charm, or a sad interlude enclosed by black brackets, one way or the other, I will soon know for certain.
HANDS UP!
WHO WANTS TO DIE?
Shit happens, like they say. You know how it goes. The cops are looking at you for every nickel-and-dime robbery they can’t solve, and the landlady hates your guts for no reason except she’s a good Christian hater, and everything in the world is part of a clock you got to punch or else you’ll be docked or fined or sentenced to listen to some ex-doper who thinks he has attained self-mastery explain your behavior as if the reasons you’re a loser are a mystery that requires illumination. Otherwise it’s been a kicked dog of a week. The boss man’s had you stocking the refrigerator sections of the food mart, leaving you alone in the freezer while he sits and swaps Marine Corps stories with the guy supposed to be your helper, so you come off work half froze, looking for something to douse the meanness you’re feeling, which could be a chore since you’re a piss and a holler from being broke and New Smyrna Beach ain’t exactly Vegas. Well, turns out to be your lucky night. Along about eight o’clock you wind up with a crew of rejects in a beach shack that belongs to this fat old biker, snorting greasy homemade speed, swilling grape juice and vodka, with a windblown rain raising jazz beats from the tarpaper roof like brushes on cymbals. There’s a woman with big brown eyes and punky peroxided hair who’s a notch on the plain side of pretty, but she’s got one of those black girl butts sometimes get stuck onto a white girl, and it’s clear she’s come down with the same feeling as you, so when the rain lets up and she says how she’s got an itch to sneak onto the government property down the beach and check out what’s there, when everybody tells her it ain’t nothing but sand fleas and Spanish bayonet, you say, “Hell, I’ll go with you.” Ten minutes later you’re helping her jump down from a hurricane fence, risking a felony bust for a better view of those white panties gleaming against the strip of tanned skin that’s showing between her jeans and her tank top. She falls into you, gives you a kiss and a half, and before you can wrap her up, she scoots off into the dark and you go stumbling after.