Every time I wonder about where we're going and who we are, if I speak to Moses, I feel assured. If only you were with me now, Moses! You would be strong enough to carry us both through this horrible morning.
'Now, I know this sounds like a bad time to bring this up…' he says, and I catch my breath. 'But I'm organizing a walk…' I exhale. He says he is organizing a walk to bring attention to the plight of the Darfurians. He plans to travel from his home in Seattle to Tucson, Arizona, by foot.
'Achak, I want to do this and I know it will make a difference. Think of it! What if we all walked again? What if we could all get together and walk again, this time on roads and in view of the whole world? Wouldn't people take notice? We'd really be able to get people thinking about Darfur, about what it means to be displaced, chased, and walking toward an uncertain future, right? Call me back when you can. I want you to be part of this.'
There is a pause, when it seems that Moses has put down the phone. Then he picks it up again in a clattering rush.
'And I'm so sorry about Tabitha. Achak, I am so very sorry. You'll find another girl, I know. You're a very desirable man.' He pauses to correct himself. 'That is, to women, not to me. I do not find you desirable that way, Gone Far.'
He is laughing quietly when he hangs up.
CHAPTER 25
'There he is!'
I push through the front door to the Century Club and am met by Ben, the club's maintenance engineer. He is a thin man, with small hands and huge empathetic eyes and a great dome of a forehead.
'Hello, Ben,' I say.
'Whoa, you look wasted, son.' He rests his clipboard on the counter and comes to me, holds my face in his hands. 'Where have you been? You look like you haven't slept in weeks. And this!' He touches the cut on my forehead. 'And your lip!'
He holds my face and examines every pore.
'You get in a fight?'
I sigh, and he assumes this means yes. He drops his hands from my face and adopts a dissatisfied expression.
'Why are you Sudanese always fighting?'
I touch his shoulder and walk past. I don't feel like explaining everything that happened. I need to wash myself.
'Talk to me after you get cleaned up, yeah?' he calls out.
In the locker room I am alone. I take a clean white towel from the pile by the door and open my locker. Taking off my shoes is a miracle. My feet breathe, I breathe. Immediately I feel better. I throw them into the locker and undress slowly. I am sore everywhere; my body seems to have aged decades overnight.
The water is a shock at any temperature. As it becomes warmer, my limbs and bones grow more limber. I ease my head under the rain and watch the blood slip down my body and across the tile. There is not much, a tidy rose-colored thread that dashes for the drain and is gone.
In the mirror I do not look much different. My bottom lip is cut, and there is a sickle-shaped abrasion from my cheek to my temple. A small red spot now occupies the corner of my left eye, just one small drop in the center of the white.
I put on a T-shirt that is nearly clean, and the sweatpants and sneakers I keep at the club. Once the club's shop opens, I will buy another tennis shirt and wear it today. Though I have not slept, simply changing my clothes has created a dividing point between that day, those events, and today. I take a deep breath from the room and am overtaken. I collapse on the cushioned chair they keep in the corner. My neck has given out, and my chin hits my chest. For a moment, I am defeated. My eyes are closed, and I see nothing-no colors, nothing. I can't envision getting up again. My spine seems to have left me. I am an invertebrate, and there is comfort in this. I sit with this idea, following a course that would allow me to remain collapsed on this chair forever. It is attractive for a moment, and then seems less compelling than simply going to work.
I close my locker and soon regain myself. I have to be at the front desk in one minute; my shift begins at five-thirty.
When I get to the desk, I am relieved that Ben is gone. He feels he is more helpful, with his advice and opinions, than he actually is. If he knew what happened to me yesterday, he would have hours of suggestions about what to do, whom to call, where to file complaints and lawsuits. I sit down, alone in the foyer, and turn on the computer. My job is to check in members as they arrive and hand out brochures to prospective members. My shift is only four hours long on Mondays, and the club is not busy at this hour. There are regulars, though, and I know their faces if not always their names.
First is Matt Donnelley, who often walks in the same time I do. He runs on the treadmill from 5:30 to 6:05, does two hundred sit-ups, showers, and leaves. Here he is, a few minutes late, sturdily built, with a thin purple slash of a mouth. When I started at the club, he spent some time one morning talking to me, asking about the history of the Lost Boys and my life in Atlanta. He was well-read and sincerely interested in Sudan; he knew the names Bashir, Turabi, Garang. He was a lawyer, he said, and told me to call him if ever I needed any help or legal advice. But I couldn't think of a reason to call him, and since then we have exchanged only compulsory greetings.
'Hey Valentine,' he says. 'What's the good word?'
The first few times he said this, I thought he was actually looking for a certain word, something appropriate for that particular day. 'Blessed,' I said the first time he asked. He explained the expression to me, but I still don't know how to answer.
Today I say hello to him, and he hands me his membership card. I swipe it and his picture appears, twelve inches tall and in garish color, on the computer monitor in front of me.
'Gotta get me a new picture,' he says. 'I look like they dug me up, right?'
I smile and then he is gone, into the lockers. But his picture remains. It is a quirk of the computer system that the members' pictures linger on the screen until the next member passes through. There is probably a way to remove them from the monitor but I don't know it.
So I look for a moment at Matt Donnelley.
Matt Donnelley, at first it was a rumor. In the winds of Kakuma, people were talking about America. On a certain day in April of 1999, in the morning people talked about so many different things-soccer, sex, a certain aid worker who had been removed for touching a young Somali boy-and by sunset no one spoke of anything but America. Who would go? How would they decide? How many would go?
It started with one of the Dominics. He had been in the office of the UNHCR when he heard someone talking on the phone. The person had said something akin to 'That's very good news. We're very happy, and the boys will be very happy, I'm sure. Right, the Lost Boys. When you know how many you will take, please let me know.'
In days, those words had been repeated hundreds of times, maybe thousands, among the unaccompanied minors of Kakuma. No one could concentrate on anything, no one could play basketball, school was a disaster. Everywhere groups of boys, twenty or fifty in a cluster, were huddled around whoever had new information. One day the news was that all of the Lost Boys would be taken to America. The next day it was America and Canada that would take us, and then Australia. No one knew much about Australia, but we imagined that the three countries were close together, or perhaps three regions of the same nation.
Early on, Achor Achor appointed himself an authority on the matters of resettlement, though he had no unique expertise.