A twig snaps as I turn and move toward the road. Winds press against my back, guiding me out of the trees. My heart, my breath, is quiet. I am beyond fear, beyond any recognizable emotion, as though all my chest contains is a bundle of short-circuited wires. I’m only thirty-three and yet I feel like I’ve been walking the earth for hundreds of years. While crossing the street, I step in puddles that swallow my feet and ankles. The rain has slowed, but I still cannot see stars or the moon. Everything resembles a shadow.
My hair is damp when I boil water for tea in the morning. I run a hand through it and lose several strands. The creases in my hands are lined with dirt. I scrub them, but the black veins in my knuckles remain. I start packing, loading the bibles and church pamphlets into my duffel bag, then stop when I realize I’m only taking the things I would want to leave behind. On the radio, I listen to a report on the riot that has broken out in Kinshasa. Two police officers have been killed, stores and homes looted. Today I am going to the market.
I dress in a white shirt and tan pants, a belt pulled tight around my waist. I slip on sandals, knot my hair into a ponytail, and tie the carved bird around my neck. The string that it dangles from is weakening. Outside the air is damp and heavy, the sky edged with gray. I carry the bibles and the church pamphlets behind my house, and dump them into the same garbage can I used to burn the letters. I don’t burn these, though; the can is too wet and I’m out of matches. I just look down at them, at the soot smeared across the white pamphlet paper. I imagine them getting soaked by rains; I imagine leaving them to rot.
Beyond my house, images of mokele-mbembe are already scattered across the ground, the lines wavy and imprecise in the wet earth. I see five drawings on my way to the market. The village center is quiet. The school is empty, the windows boarded with planks to deter looters. I don’t stop to stare at the shuttered school, to touch the covered windows. The day Susannah came to see me, I nodded solemnly as she spoke, but her voice moved over me like a wave, her words somehow never hitting my ears, as though she was speaking to me through a thick sheet of glass. Who are we helping? she said, pointing out that we hadn’t even seen most of the children since the school closed. We were standing outside; the sun was so bright, the sky looked ablaze. I wondered about my burned house, if the last of the ash had finally been carried away by rain and new growth. I didn’t see how I could stay in the Congo much longer. The violence was increasing; the parish would eventually stop sending money. And yet I couldn’t imagine leaving, couldn’t imagine looking outside and not seeing the sprawl of green, not feeling the weight of the air.
I buy three yams from the produce stall, then wander through the cluster of stands, shaded by umbrellas that cast circular shadows. A man is selling dugout canoes carved from the tropical trees that grow in the forest. Another stall offers banana stalks and posho, a paste made from ground corn meal and sweet potatoes. People speak in various dialects, their words quick and sharp. I smell spices and sweat and rotten eggs. Two boys pass on bicycles, nearly brushing against me. The fish stall is closed, the owner’s stool knocked to the ground. I ask a woman carrying a sack of peanuts, and she says he left to join the protestors in Kinshasa.
I stop at a stall that sells clay ornaments and carved animals. I run my fingertips over wooden elephants, glazed tigers, their mouths agape, and stacks of clay bowls. The owner asks if I want to buy something, but I shake my head and begin walking toward the outskirts of the village, the plastic bag filled with yams bumping against my leg.
I navigate around two young girls squatting and drawing mokele-mbembe with strips of metal, their dark hair braided. The sky is flat and purple. I hear thunder. Oji’s house is in worse condition than the last time I saw it — white paint peeling, walls leaning inwards, tarnished window panes.
I stop when I see a man backing out of the house, gripping a pair of ankles. Another man emerges, holding elbows. The face is covered with a black sheet, but I can tell it’s a woman’s body from the length of the hair, which grazes the ground. Her hands are limp, her wrists thin as wire. Oji stands in the doorway. I am too far away to see if he is crying. The men carrying his mother are probably his uncles. I wonder where she will be buried. They load the body into the backseat of a truck and drive away, the taillights red smudges in the distance. Oji shouts and chases after them, momentarily disappearing from sight.
He returns with his head bowed, his arms twisted around his ribcage.
In the Congo, the dead are buried quickly, to keep them from returning as traveling ghosts. Later, carved masks will be placed by the grave, but her name will not be spoken again. The villagers fear the dead, blame them for nightmares and droughts, pray to them for healthy crops and solace.
I drop the bag of produce and run toward Oji. I call his name. He turns, stares at me for a moment, then reaches for my hand. We sit in the dirt. I have no words to offer, like my silence after the fire when friends and relatives called with their condolences, for what is a condolence but an attempt to bridge the unbridgeable. I cup my hand around the point of his shoulder. I wait for him to speak.
“Mokele-mbembe left the forest last night. My uncle found footprints close to his house,” he finally says, spreading his fingers. “They were the size of an elephant’s.” A misty rain falls for several minutes, then passes. Oji suddenly appears older, the tightness in his jaw and the heaviness of his gaze. He grinds the base of his palm into the soil.
“Does it rain in America?” he asks. “Where you are from?”
“Sometimes.”
“What did you leave there?”
“Not much,” I reply. “I was married once.” The night after the fire, I went back to the house and walked through the ash and burned wood and unidentifiable metal shapes. The heat wave had started to pass and the air was thin.
“Did you like each other?”
“Yes, we did. Sometimes we did.” I remember the way the ash spread, across my hands and face and clothing; back in the motel, I rinsed it from my hair. I searched for something I could identify, something we had used or loved, but it all looked as though it had come from another world.
“My parents did not,” he says. “Not really.”
I take Oji’s fist and uncurl his fingers, concentrating on the shapes of his knuckles. I reach into my pocket and place my husband’s coin on his palm.
“For you,” I say.
He rubs his thumb against the silver lion’s head. “Where is it from?”
“From far away. A place I’ve never been.” I tell Oji about my husband finding the coin on the floor of a holy place, that the coin traveled through many people to reach him. I tell him the coin holds secrets, pieces of lives.
Oji drops the coin into the square pocket on his T-shirt and flattens a hand against his chest. I’ve lost the desire to hold onto that last physical artifact of the life I once had, as though I was buried and re-emerged as a person who doesn’t believe in anything except the way existence rages on, furiously unconscious of when one life ends and another begins. Lightning cracks across the sky and the rain begins, slanted by winds. I tilt my head back; the falling drops resemble millions of clear marbles.