A heat wave washed over Chicago last summer. The temperature hovered at one hundred degrees for days, train rails warped, the water levels in the lakes dropped, the city opened cooling centers. I tried staying inside and working on my latest batch of freelance articles — on everything from growing pepper plants on apartment balconies for The Urban Gardener to outdoor jazz concerts in Grant Park for The Chicago Traveler—but it was too hot to concentrate. When our air conditioner gave out, my husband and I found our own shadowed corners in the house, and it felt like I went days without hearing his voice. One night we fought, the same sort of argument that rose from the insurmountable differences in our own natures, to which there was never a solution. In bed, he turned from me and fell asleep quickly. I stared out the window for a while, at the moonlight shifting on the scorched lawn, then went downstairs to watch television.
I fell asleep on the couch, to the drone of a reporter talking about the latest in heat-related deaths, and woke with smoke in my lungs. The haze was so thick, I couldn’t see the four walls of the room; I heard the cracking of flames. Before I realized I was moving forward, I was running out of the house, into the driveway, to the neighbor next door. Running in a cotton nightgown that fell to my knees, coughing furiously, the asphalt blurring and glistening under the streetlights. After seeing the thick curls of smoke unfurling in the air, the neighbor called the fire department. I went back and circled the house, shouting for my husband when I saw smoke billowing from an upstairs window. I pushed the front door open and stumbled into the hallway; smoke had spread across the ceiling like a thundercloud. I heard footsteps behind me and knocked into two firemen; they draped a blanket over my shoulders and pulled me into the street. I remember the wail of the trucks and water disappearing into huge orange plumes, an oxygen mask against my face and the bloody soles of my feet.
The house melted into a heap of charred beams. I later learned the fire was electrical, caused by an overloaded circuit in our study. Earlier in the summer, my husband complained about an outlet sparking when he plugged in his computer. I suggested having someone check the outlets, but neither of us ever got around to making the call. After the funeral, I went to a motel. Family — my sister-in-law in Wyoming, my aunt and cousins on the East Coast, my brother and his Canadian wife in Montreal — and friends called and left sympathy cards at the front desk after I told the manager I didn’t want to be disturbed. Their messages were the same, all so painfully insufficient. You’re always welcome at our house for dinner and I can’t imagine what it’s like to be you right now and At least you’re still young and it’s not too late to start over. I unplugged the phone and closed the blinds. I listened to the noises seeping from other rooms. The boom of televisions. Arguments. The slamming of doors. Fucking. After a few nights, the sounds converged into a constant, lonely hum. I took long baths, sometimes staying in the tub after I had drained the water, time slipping forward, into the late night, without my awareness. I thought endlessly about what might have happened if I’d only thought, only been awake enough, to shout my husband’s name up the stairs before running from the house, wondering, if God really existed, why he didn’t reach into my chest and force the words out.
I tried going to Mass because I thought my husband would have wanted me to, but the prayers and the singing made the hollow feeling inside me worse, and the incense reminded me of the smoke that had consumed our house. During the Lord’s Prayer, I didn’t kneel, just sat upright in the pew, my hands flat against my thighs. After the service, I went to see Father Hughes, whom my husband had liked, and noticed the call for missionaries posted on the parish bulletin board, wedged between flyers for youth groups and daycare. I tore the flyer from the board and walked into Father Hughes’s office. Send me, I said, waving the paper. He shook his head and took the flyer from me; he said I would be going for the wrong reasons, not because I had something to give, but because I had nothing left. And then, two weeks later, I got a call from Father Hughes and within a month, I was boarding a plane for Africa. When I walked into the heavy air for the first time, I knew I’d found a place as strange as the world I’d come to occupy in my mind.
Before leaving for Africa, I hired a crew to clear the debris. When I went to the lot to pay the workers, they gave me a shoebox. I opened it after they left and found — amongst brass cabinet knobs, a silver cuff link, and a small copper dish — the coin my husband kept in his desk drawer, a shield engraved on one side, a lion’s head on the other. It was the one he found in Spain, on the mosaic floor of a cathedral, the lion’s head facing the stained glass sky. I sat on the curb, facing away from the flat, black square in the center of the yard, and watched cars pass on the street. After a while, I put the coin in my pocket and left the box sitting on the lawn.
The low-hanging Iroko tree branches scrape the roof. I dress, pausing to reach into the basket and feel the rough bottom until my fingers touch the coin. Outside the rain is light but steady. Water has pooled around my doorway. The roads are turning to mud. There are no streetlights. I cannot see the stars or moon. The darkness is vast.
I stop walking when I reach out and my hand brushes against bark and vines, thick and firm like the body of a snake. I think about what this jungle might be like in another month and promise myself to begin packing in the morning. I want to remember the quiet of this place, the unbroken darkness. Through the branches, I can’t see anything beyond the rows of trees. I step inside the forest and listen.
I hear nothing but rain. I walk until I can no longer see the silhouette of my house when I glance over my shoulder. Snakes, hippopotamuses, and crocodiles live in the forest. And, if you believe the legend, mokele-mbembe. The villagers say the monster is noiseless, that it never roars or groans, that when it moves through the forest, the sound of branches being snapped or water parted fails to echo. If nothing else, I believe this. The worst things in life stalk in silence.
I hear a rustling, followed by a chirp, and look up, at the dark form that has landed on a branch. From the rounded shape and short wing span, it’s probably a tinkerbird or a mousebird, although I can’t be certain without seeing the color. When I first came to the village, I found a book, Birds of the Congo, at a market. The cover was creased and faded; some pages had been torn out or folded down, different types of birds circled in green ink. As I stepped away from the crowd and opened the book, I wondered where it came from and who left it behind. From my reading, I learned over two hundred and fifty species of birds exist in the Congo, and government officials estimate eighty percent of the lakes and forests in the region are unexplored.
The bird reminds me of the afternoon in February we took the schoolchildren on a field trip to Brazzaville to see the Basilique Sainte-Anne and the Municipal Gardens, where small green birds perched on the tree branches. Before we climbed back into the vans that would carry us home, we let the children play tag in a square outside the gardens. I stood apart from the other teachers and watched the students run in ziz-zags, ducking and lunging, the girls shrieking whenever one of them was tagged. Oji was the fastest. He might have won the game if he hadn’t fallen and cut his knee. I sat with him on a bench, pressing a Kleenex against his wound, until it was time to leave. After we returned to our village, I offered to walk him home. It was then he told me the first story about mokele-mbembe. He said an American scientist and his assistant were paddling up the Congo River when the boat shuddered and a giant lizard-shaped head emerged. The monster craned its neck and stared at the men, then plunged back into the water. After the creature vanished, the river began to bubble and waves knocked the boat onto the bank. The men fled Africa and told other explorers to stay away from the Congo. When we reached his house, we went around the back and he showed me his drawings in the dirt, surrounded by sisal plants and flat, white rocks. He makes a new drawing at every dawn and dusk, some underneath the pointed sisal leaves, so they won’t be washed away by the daily rains.