She said she thought calling the poor the “pre-rich” was clever. She said his bright ideas should be thought of as insights.
“I’ll give you another example,” he said. “Answer this question. Do you like it in Africa?”
She said she did.
“But you can’t quite figure out why you like it, am I right?” he asked. “Because, I mean, hell, it’s inconvenient. Gaborone is dead at night, the movies are ancient and all mutilated because they have to come through South African censorship because that’s where the distributor is located. But still we like it here. Drought, poor people … Even when they get a decent movie, they mix up the reels. We want to be here anyway, but we can’t figure out why. Except that one night I figured it out. It’s because it isn’t our country and we can’t help what happens. We can offer people advice and we get paid for it. We get good vacations, we eat off the top of the food chain, we get free housing. Hey! but we’re not responsible for what happens if Africa goes to hell, because we’ve done our best. Also, at the same time, we’re not responsible for what happens in America, either, really — because, hey! we weren’t home when it happened. Say we get fifteen per cent compliance on birth control here, which is what we do get and which is terrific by Third World standards. O.K., it’s not enough. But what can we do, we tried. We told them. But we’re too late. We all know it, but somebody pays us to keep up the good work, so we say fine. Why am I telling you this? I forget.”
She said, “What we have here are night thoughts — that kind of thing. We all have them, Carl. You’re very intelligent. You’re excellent. I enjoy what you say. It’s very O.K. to have night thoughts. I find you really thoughtful. One thing, though, is you might want to spare Lois this kind of thing. I know it’s important to share night thoughts, but Lois seems so delighted about being here. Why cast a pall, if she’s really enjoying herself — do you follow me?”
“I’m not going to be a pall-caster,” he said.
“Like broadcaster — oh, wonderful! I enjoy you,” she said.
He said, “Here’s another example. Lying awake, I figured out the meaning of life one night. Not life in general, but my life … what my life is about. It’s about women. Women are the meaning of my life: taking care of them, looking for the right ones, trying to stay on their good side. The meaning of my life is the emotions women have about me. That is a fact. I think it’s interesting. I was amazed. When did I enlist for that? I thought I was doing something else.”
She said, “I want very much to help you. Let me pursue what I’m doing. Let me find someone, Carl. I’ll get back to you.”
He said to go ahead.
“Look!” Lois said to Carl, as he came in from work. She was elated about something. She stood there, breathing forcefully.
It was nothing self-evident. Was it a new piece of clothing or something from the sea freight that had just arrived? Her hair was the same as recently. He resented having to guess. He was already fully tasked. Also, there were echoes of Elaine involved — Elaine’s fury the times he had failed to notice some crucial purchase or that she’d bleached her lanugo.
“Carl, I can breathe through both nostrils at once! Look, my sinus thing is gone one hundred per cent! It was just about four this afternoon. It’s just gone away. I feel like I’m just flooded with air.” Her eyes were bright and moist. It was important.
She embraced him a little fiercely. He was already elsewhere. His mind was back on his mission. Ione had found a sangoma in a village fifteen minutes from Gaborone — a sangoma who seemed to know all about how to deal with problems like the dogs. So Carl had been right. Ione was giving him credit for guessing there had to be some ultimate mechanism in the culture for dealing with unbearable situations — whether it was witchcraft or not. In the United States it would be the Mafia. Ione had been skeptical at first. Now she was excited.
Lois was being grateful, pressing against him. She was easing his shirttails out. He was getting the idea. Lois slipped off a sandal and rubbed her heel against his calf. I can do only one thing at a time, he thought. There was no time for this.
“Don’t be so tired,” Lois said, pleadingly.
But tonight he had to get a dog bowl from Letsamao’s yard, somehow. He needed to plan. The sangoma had said to get hold of some object common to all the dogs. Carl needed to reconnoitre.
Lois was hurt. “You could at least put your briefcase down,” she said.
He did. “I don’t think you grasp how tired I am,” he said. He was all apology.
She was badly upset. She was liable to go to the bedroom, which would be perfect if she would stay put there long enough for him to get outside and spot the last locations of the dog bowls before night fell. Then he could recoup with her.
Lo announced that she was going to lie down for a while. She was giving him another chance. The implication was that if he was as tired as he was saying, it would make sense for him to lie down along with her. He acted blank. She left. The bedroom door closed loudly.
In the yard, he wandered along the fence, pausing to pick bits of refuse out of the mesh. The dogs were dining. There was the bowl he needed. It was white enamel. When the dogs were through, the bowl was twenty feet from where he stood. He needed an instrument. He needed an instrument that didn’t exist, except in comic books — a pair of monster accordion tongs. He would have to go over or under the fence in the dead of night. There was no other choice. It would be safer to go underneath. He could excavate in the guise of filling in tunnels dug by the dogs. A shallow trench would do it, something just deep enough to let him roll under the sharp bottom tips of the fence. Would he ignite the dogs when he got over there? He would have to see. He wasn’t physically afraid of the dogs, except for the two ridgebacks. The dogs were cowards, basically. Pretending to pick up a rock would make them shy off. Even if they did bark, he would be there and back so fast there shouldn’t be any danger. Also, the dogs knew him. And best of all, nobody at Letsamao’s paid any attention to the dogs, whatever they did. It would be safe. He would wear heavy stuff on his arms and legs, and heavy gloves, just in case. He wound a twist tie around the fence wire at the point closest to the dog bowl. He was set.
This would be work. It was manual labor. He wouldn’t mind it. The real beginning of the end with Elaine had been when he overheard her refer to herself as “labor” and to him as “management.” Naturally, he had let her snake out of it, believing her when she claimed she was only calling him “the management”—a different thing. Then, during the divorce, it had turned out that calling him “management” was nothing — it was praise, compared to other things she’d said.
Everything tonight had to be kept from Lo. He was grateful it was Lo that things had to be concealed from, not Elaine. Elaine would have been a participant, because she would have found out what was going on. Elaine was temperamentally a Roman empress. And especially in her tastes — she had worn herself out trying to force her needs through the eye of a needle: himself. Lo wanted less than he could provide. And she was still economizing. He would have to be certain she was asleep when he struck tonight, like a commando.
In the garage he examined the spade he would use. If Elaine had been a Motswana, she would be the richest woman in the country. More Africans should be like Elaine. It was too bad there had been no way she could go into business for herself — for the wife of a foreign-service officer, that had been impossible. Mostly she had been able to get only trivial jobs, like doing property inventories or managing the commissary, except for the one job she had done everywhere and done magnificently — writing the post-differential-payment report. Her reports were masterpieces. She could prove that any foreign-service post in the world was enough of a hellhole to justify twenty to sixty per cent more income in the form of hardship allowances for all hands. Everywhere they had gone, Elaine had been given the differential report to do. Nothing escaped her: windy seasons so brief that no one else noticed them, cheese shortages, mildew problems, no dry cleaning, obscure local diseases lying in wait. The differential report had spoken to her genius at faultfinding. He could imagine what she would have done with the dog problem: she would have turned it into gold for the entire mission. She could take an earthly paradise like Blantyre and make it sound like Pompeii in its last ten minutes. People confessed things to her, like unreported rapes and embarrassing ailments. When she was in the presence of concealed information, she knew it. In fact, if he had ever missed two staff meetings in a row in Elaine’s time, she would have known it and it would have meant cold meals, no sex — the whole works. It was bothering him that there might be some simple means of getting the dog bowl that would have been obvious to Elaine which he was overlooking. It couldn’t be helped. Tonight he would be a thief in the night, like the Thief of Baghdad, which he had just realized was the best movie he had ever seen.