He holds a guava to his chest. I offer my palm and he hands it to me.
“Shall we cut it?”
He nods.
I take a knife from the drawer and press the guava against the counter; juice oozes from the split skin. I cut his half into slivers and push them aside. He eats his portion in two wet bites.
“My uncle said mokele-mbembe killed a farmer yesterday and drug him into the forest.”
“I thought mokele-mbembe was an herbivore.” I turn on the faucet and rinse my hands in the sink.
He wipes his mouth on the back of his hand. “Same as a dinosaur?”
Some believe the creature is a sauropod dinosaur, a survivor from the pre-historic age. I read a description of the monster in a book once: inky eyes, skin the color of rust, a body thick with muscle and scales. “No.” I turn off the water and dry my hands on my jeans. “It means an animal that only eats plants.”
He circles the room, stopping at the foot of my bed and staring at the empty space over the headboard, his feet near a metal pan where water has been collecting from a leak in the roof. He points to the nail sticking out of the wall. “Where did it go?”
A clay cross, the color of a sunset, used to hang over the bed. Father Hughes gave it to me before I left for Africa. Send pictures, he said, folding my hand around the cross. He told me the congregation would want to track my progress. Seeing the cross above my bed always reminded me of my husband’s stories from Catholic school, the prayers he recited, his scapular and rosary, the crucifixes that hung at the front of every classroom.
“I took it down. I was worried it was going to fall on my head while I was sleeping.” At first, I blamed the images of smoke and ash that kept invading my sleep on my proximity to the cross, an emblem of how a life of goodness failed my husband. A few days ago, I loaded pamphlets from the parish, a stack of bibles, and the cross into a box and pushed it into a corner, but my dreams were unchanged.
His mouth droops. “I liked the color.”
I squeeze his shoulder; his skin is still damp. Once I saw his mother waiting for him outside the school, emaciated and wet-eyed, purple and red lesions molting across her forehead. It was the last time she left the house, Oji says when I ask how she’s doing. His father is even farther along, barely able to raise a hand from the bed. My husband and I never had children, never thought we were suited for it, so I am surprised to find myself enjoying having a child in my care. Sometimes we do arithmetic or reading lessons when he visits, or he tells me stories about the jungle. I worry about what would happen to him if I were to leave.
“I’ll look for another cross the next time I go to the market.”
He grins, his teeth small and white. “Like the one you had?”
I nod, surprised he prefers the rough, orange-red surface of the cross to something bright and glazed. I look outside; the rain has stopped and dusk is drawing color from the sky.
I take three potatoes from the glass jar sitting on the counter and drop them into a paper bag. Every week I fill the jar with potatoes and yams, but lately there has been less food at the market; some of the farmers have joined the rebels and others are frightened to be near the forest, where their crops grow. I pass Oji the bag. “Go before it gets dark.”
He nods and clutches the neck of the sack. He thanks me, asks me to visit him soon. I promise that I will. After the school closed and a rebel group vandalized a government building in a nearby town, Susannah, a missionary I taught with, came to my house. She had arranged to fly back to California and urged me to contact the US Embassy, to return to my home in Chicago. I don’t know what you’ve left, but it can’t be worse than what’s coming here, she said, handing me a slip of paper with her phone number. Last week, I bought a plane ticket and the flight is three days away and I still don’t know if I want to take it. From the window, I watch Oji leave, cradling the bag in his arms, his small footprints lingering in the wet dirt.
I wake from a dream curled and hugging my knees, my body slippery with sweat. I hear a dull roar, as though a seashell is pressed against my ear. Even before the fire, I had apocalyptic dreams. Collapsing bridges, falling buildings — all a precursor, I now believe, to the disaster preparing to overtake my life. I would describe them to my husband in the mornings, standing behind him in the bathroom while he shaved. Silly girl, he would say before tapping his razor against the side of the sink and rinsing his face. We met at Northwestern, and we were married for eleven years. The friends from college that I kept in touch with would, later in their marriages, complain about their husbands changing: he used to like going to movies on weekends, but now he spends Saturdays at the office or he painted my walls when we were dating, but now I can’t get him to take out the trash or he used to tell me everything, but now he acts like our conversations are causing him pain. My husband, however, stayed exactly the same, as though his traits were fossilized: practical, ingenious with crossword puzzles, bad at small talk, stubborn, quietly devout, capable of being both surprisingly pitiless and surprisingly kind. In all our years together, he was never frightened by his dreams, which was how I knew he kept believing in God.
Susannah’s number is in the woven basket I keep next to the bed. I take out the slip of paper and go to the phone affixed to the wall; the black cord is frayed and dangling. The dial tone ripples with static. It’s late afternoon in California. I call the number.
“I’ve been seeing the news,” Susannah says after se answers. “Everything is going crazy.”
“It’s nothing prayers can help.” Before the mail service was disrupted, the cheerful postcards from friends and relatives turned into worried letters about when I would be coming home. Last week, I gathered the letters and burned them in a garbage can behind my house. I ask Susannah what it’s like to be back in California.
“Strange at first,” she says. “The heat is different. Lighter.” When she starts talking about her husband’s ballpoint pen company and making pies for church potlucks, her words grow thick with static and I lose my way in the growl of her voice. I realize I can’t follow regular conversations anymore, as though the life Susannah describes is now as foreign to me as monsoons and jungles and legends of monsters once were.
The line goes quiet and she asks if I’m all right.
“Listen,” I tell her. “I might not take that flight. I’m thinking of changing my ticket, of staying a little longer.”
“Catherine.” The line clears momentarily and her voice rings through my body like a bell. “There is no ‘later.’ There is only leaving now, or not at all.”
I tell her about the schoolchildren. I see them roaming the streets, restless and unmoored as boats in a storm, or crouched beneath the overhangs of buildings, playing with half-deflated bicycle tires. I see their parents, so many of them sick or preparing to fight. I repeat the stories I ’ve heard about people in other villages who fled and, so they could move faster, left behind their youngest children to be killed or forced to carry guns for the enemy.
“We’ve done all we can for them,” she says. “You’re not going to change anything by staying.”
I tell her that I can’t explain it, but I feel like I belong here, and then the line bursts with static and goes dead.
I reach underneath the bed, drag out a small radio, and turn it on. The Department of State warns U.S. Citizens against travel. Fighting continues in Brazzaville, Kinshasa, and Liranga. The plan to implement national elections raises the possibility of civil disturbance. Unofficial armed groups known to—
I click off the radio. It’s raining again; water hammers the tin roof. Last year, summer rains submerged crops and uprooted houses. I heard stories of villagers wading through waist-deep water, of drowned animals and fallen trees.