And then there was the story of my aversion to supermarkets. I would always become faint when I got up to the checker, slightly faint. My aversion cost me money, because it was so distinct a thing I’d go long distances and be willing to spend more in order to shop in little mom and pop places. Then one night when I had no choice I went to a Safeway. As I got to the checkout a woman going out the main door changed her mind and came back in my direction. She was an older woman, dressed in a particular way, and I was already in the penumbra of feeling faint, which seeing her deepened. She came back and got whatever she’d left behind on the counter and left. Her face was obscurely terrifying to me, like a death’s-head. But then I relived a moment when I’d been on line in a supermarket with my mother and a neighbor woman came up and made a furtive urgent gesture for my mother to come aside so she could tell her something. And as I watched them go I knew what it was. I must have been ten. This woman’s son had obviously ratted on me about some sexplay I’d initiated. I was known as the Fig Tree Girl among the little boys I preyed on and delighted in the shelter of a particular fig tree. Testicles fascinated me. Then there was my mother coming back looking like the most revengeful and, worst of all, most disappointed monster in the world. It was her disappointment that slew me, because she was seeing me as not normal, me her darling. Once I recaptured that moment of shame I could shop anywhere.
Light from the caves, Nelson said.
I got back to Pereira. Would he see him?
Certainly, Nelson said.
Dr. Pereira Attends
In came Pereira — a Tamil, from his coloring. He could give Nelson twenty minutes. Going in he was very brisk.
He had been totally unwilling to have me tell him what I thought Nelson’s situation was. I had barely gotten the words hyperpassivity and decompensation out of my mouth when he reminded me that he was very well used to diagnosing any kind of personality inversion.
The twenty minutes stretched into more like ninety minutes.
I could not believe the outcome. I felt like shaking him. He was small.
Nothing was wrong with Nelson, who was in transcendent mental health. And he, Pereira, was going to find some brochures to lend us, because Mr. Denoon was very very interested in a very fine school of Hinduism in fact created by a woman, the Marathi saint Muktabai. In all the country of Botswana there were many Hindus, but all were ignorant, to his knowledge, of the very fine bhakti school. All the great persons of bhakti were women, or many of them.
Pereira looked sternly at me. I am lacking a wife, he said. And I tell you if this man came to say This woman right here you should marry, I would go straight to her.
He was hoping to find time to see Nelson again.
War
I gave peace a chance for one more day. War was coming.
There were just a few foreglints of the dies irae. One was I lost patience over his attitude to meals. He had some inchoate idea that meals should be aleatory: there should be an array larger than would be usual of different things to choose from, with an emphasis on cold cooked grains, and one should eat homeostatically each time — a little of this, none of that, a little of this, and so on. Congratulations, I said, you have just invented the cafeteria.
I made myself get ten hours sleep the night before the war.
When I got up, I reassessed. It had to be. He was minimally more talkative, but it was still basically only responsively. He hadn’t made one phonecall. He’d talked vaguely about needing to go to a couple of the ministries but hadn’t taken any steps in preparation.
I fixed myself up more than usual. Breakfast was in silence. I needed protein for what I had to do, and ate eggs and cold sirloin tips.
He was hyperclean and splendid in his white raiment.
I was having my period, a heavy one. I’d stopped taking my pills for a while, why not?
I said You know we have to discuss things. I led him to a round metal table under a big acacia. We sat facing each other across it, in flareback wicker chairs.
First I got his agreement not to leave the table for at least one hour no matter what I said, how offended he might get. And that if he left for the toilet or a nosebleed he would come back. He was agreeable.
Is this roughly the picture of what happened to you?: you were en route to Tikwe and not paying attention and you rode under a tree and either one or two boomslangs dropped down on your mount.
Two, he said.
You were in black cotton soil, and so when the horse reared up and slipped you went half under him, which is when you broke your arm and ankle. And then the horse struggled up, with a snake still biting into its neck, but it had a broken leg and fell again.
Fortunately you were wearing your canteen — unfortunately in that you cracked some ribs landing on it.
You passed out. But later you came to.
You were unconscious long enough to get a bad burn on one side of your face and neck.
I got upset as I spelled all this out. I had notes on a pad on a clipboard.
You dragged yourself fifty feet to a termite mound that was under and half around a small tree. You saw your horse lashing around and making terrible sounds. You managed to kill it after this. You were in pain. The termite mound was like a recliner, a sloping shape.
At this point he volunteered to narrate, if I would turn the recorder off. This was new and, it seemed to me, positive. He wanted the tape recorder off because it would make him feel he had to go too fast.
I said Go day by day as much as you can.
He would try, but I had to remember it was all a continuum to him.
He put his palms flat on the table as he began, and he told the whole story with his eyes closed. I felt he was rising from some inner depth to do this, that it was painful. At points I could tell he was pressing his hands down hard. I myself was pressing my fists in against dysmenorrhea now and then. It was extremely peculiar. I felt linked to him, as though together we constituted some sort of mechanism.
He went slowly. I am condensing. He said the first scene he has clearly is in twilight, when he first smelled and then saw black-backed jackals converging on his horse. What he got to watch was this beast being torn to pieces. It was like hell. He has fragmentary recollections of having dragged himself back and forth from the horse earlier to get his food pack, in terror of the boomslangs, which had vanished by then, apparently. He was certain the jackals would come after him once they were through with the horse unless he did something.
At first the jackals ignored him, but then two of them came straying over. He had the conviction that terror, his terror, would doom him and that the first thing he would have to do was make himself into a nonreacting entity: that is, stop thinking and make himself as much like the ground or the trees as he could. He had to stop sending out waves of fear and supplication. It was a process of deidentification, he called it. It soothed him to have this task.
He found it hard to talk about how he got into this deidentified condition. It was a formula, a certain order of images he made himself experience. It was an inner contortion. It had to do with making himself not feel the passage of time. In any case the jackals left him alone.
I pointed out that another explanation was that the jackals — there were only four of them — had gorged themselves and that also he wasn’t quite yet their favorite food, carrion.