There was one other thing that not sleeping was making him irrational on: the geyser. He tried not to be. But the hot water for the tub and shower came from a gigantic cylinder bolted to the wall above the bathtub, with electric coils in a collar at its base. It would crush anyone in the tub if it ever came loose from its moorings. And Lo took baths, exclusively. He was always obsessively inspecting the geyser, pulling at the mountings and feeling at the same time that he might be weakening the thing with all his testing. Hot baths were therapy for Lo. The giant tubs the British had established as normal all over Africa were a revelation to her. The shower stall was separate and safe.
He set the shower to spray just enough to get him rinsed but not enough to bother Lo. He was expert at showering quietly. He was used to the African workday starting when it did — ungodly early. She was still adapting. He liked her to sleep late. Small things about her made him emotional, like lying about her age to make herself older and more appropriate for him when they were courting. That was the kind of thing he loved. Or, recently, when he’d said he felt like Prometheus having his liver torn out every night and regenerating each day so it could be torn out again the next night, and she’d asked who Prometheus was. The hot water directly on his scalp was helping.
Walking was calming, and Carl liked the half-mile walk from his office to the medical unit. The embassy nurse wanted to see him. He knew he was overdue for his gamma globulin, but there was something more she wanted to discuss. He was going to plead with her for a state-of-the-art sleeping pill. He wouldn’t get it: she was to the right of medically conservative. The regular pills were no help. They would knock him out but not keep him out. Lo’s prescription for him was more exercise, as in jogging. The thought was torture. He was too tired for exercise. In any case, the problem wasn’t falling asleep, it was getting back to sleep once the Minister of Labor’s dogs started their demented crooning and baying and snarling and fighting or mating or tunneling under the fence to come skulking around the house, rifling his trash cans.
In Gaborone, when he walked, he used the network of dirt paths behind the houses — the “people’s paths.” Africa was humanity walking, or rather Africans walking. Whites rode. He was almost the only white ambulating along with the Batswana. People looked at him. It would be fair to say they stared. They were staring now, a little. He thought, They can’t get over my uncanny resemblance to Samuel Beckett. Immediately, he felt guilty. He did look like Beckett, but the thought was bad — the kind of thing Elaine would have broken up over. There were plenty of reasons to stare at him. He was tall and so forth. He remembered about his posture and straightened up. This part of Gaborone was like a university town someplace in the American Southwest, except for the walls and fences around the house plots. He had been in Africa so long that residential neighborhoods in America looked utopian — no property-line fencing to speak of, people’s lawns intermingling.
He should enjoy nature more. There were a lot of gum trees on this route. There were other trees whose blooms looked like scrambled eggs. Lo noticed everything. The first time she’d seen him naked she’d noticed that his right arm was permanently darkened by the sun, from the elbow down, from having it out the window as he drove around Africa on site visits. Sometimes Lo said his name in her sleep. It moved him enormously. It was proof of something. He doubted Elaine had ever talked in her sleep. But how would he know, because in those days he slept at night, and Elaine was on her guard to the roots of her being. Lo wanted him to show more interest in the local birdlife. He thought, When it comes to bird-watching, I say let the birds watch me. A colony of Cape vultures had a nesting ground in the cliffs near Ootse. There was supposedly a trail up the cliffs, so that interested parties could get close enough to look directly at the vultures or even interfere with them. Lo wanted to go. He might be able to manage that.
Just ahead, at the edge of the path, was a fruit stand — two upended cartons. The vendor was a Motswana matron wearing a housedress and a blanket over it like an apron. He was going to be irritated, he could tell. He stopped to look over the display of bananas and green apples. The fruit was less than fresh — probably it had been four or five days on the street already. Batswana merchants absolutely would not bargain. This woman needed to clear her stock. She should lower her prices drastically, for the bananas at least. But she had her unit price figured and would stick to it unto death. She knew what the other street vendors were getting and would consider she was being made a fool of if she took less. If he offered a lower price, she would think he was trying to take advantage of her. He had been through this. The fruit came from South Africa and was substandard to begin with—ondergraad. The Batswana wholesalers were stuck with long-term contracts for fruit the South Africans wouldn’t touch. He knew all about it. It was a scandal.
The vendor waited for him to say something. She decided to eat an apple. He predicted that she would take one of the best ones, not one of the least salable, and she did. Sometimes he thought southern Africa was specially designed to try the souls of small-business experts. He had had his difficulties persuading Africans elsewhere in the continent to be serious about business, but southern Africa was the sharpest thorn in his crown so far. He had to give himself mixed reviews at best for his performance to date — for his career — so he had to succeed in Botswana. This was not the best subject vis-à-vis his blood pressure. Botswana was probably his last chance to stay overseas. He ought to be able to succeed, because his main project was foolproof: it was all women, very tractable, making school uniforms for a guaranteed market — the state.
The settlement with Elaine had impoverished him. Because of Lois, he had to be overseas to recoup, because the housing and utilities were covered and they could save like bandits. If they demoted him back to Washington, he and Lo would end up living like graduate students — at that level. Lo would have to go out and cashier. It was unthinkable. Since he’d stopped, he had to buy something from this woman. He paid twenty thebe for a banana — four thebe more than his highest estimate. Still, the woman was looking implacably at him. What had he done? It came to him: he had forgotten to greet her before starting the transaction. That made him a worm, in her eyes. He moved on.
Secretaries and technical personnel tended to live at the embassy compound, a square of apartments around a microscopic swimming pool. One apartment had been turned over to the nurse, for a medical unit. In a previous incarnation he would have been interested in the nurse, Rita. She was single. She was low-forties and Hispanic, and tough. He liked lean women. He looked at the empty pool wrinkling and creasing in the noon sun. There was a woman he had read about, a prodigy, nineteenth century, who could sleep floating in water. It might have been a man. There had been two prodigies, one of them named Fraticoni, and one was the Human Magnet and metal objects stuck to him or her, and the other was the Human Cork, who could sleep floating.
The nurse was steely. This was a lecture. “I’m not giving you any sleeping medication,” she said. “I don’t trust you around medication. You scared us with your X ray. We don’t need this. You showed four strange round spots in your gastric region which we finally figured out had to be mineral-supplement pills with a lot of iron in them you weren’t absorbing. Does anybody at your house know what vitaminosis is? Maybe you can’t sleep because you’re irritating your nervous system yourself with whatever you’re taking. If you want to self-medicate, then self-medicate, but don’t come to me looking for sympathy.” There was more. Did he know too much niacin could turn his face red? Was he aware that it was natural for the body to require less sleep as it aged? He used to think Rita liked him.