11

HABITAT FOR INHUMANITY

I.

Pulling up from the mess she’d made, Jennifer craned forward and then arced in a semicircle, looking around the cabin. No one else seemed nervous about what to do with their sick bags. If they’d even used them. Jennifer could feel hers, so recently ripped open and now bulging with evidence of her greenness, of this being her first time flying out on a trade and aid mission to Africa. Her first time flying anywhere.

It was steaming beside her ankle and the overhead air nozzle was on high, drying off her scalp and forehead. She was feeling cold-headed and warm-footed. She was looking for something to calm things down but too embarrassed to ding the stewardess to come over. Instead, she decided to remember that this was what it was like in her dad’s truck in the months after Christmas and before the spring thaw, when only the bottom heater vents worked. That was a comfort, remembering that time, that place, while squirming, while strapped into this one. As good as any sip of ginger ale.

She would send her parents a card from Africa, and if they had gift shops over there, maybe even bring something back for them. An exotic feathered fishing lure for Dad’s tackle box perhaps. Some tribal-coloured thimbles to adorn Mum’s sewing room. Jennifer spat into a napkin, a little bilious after-effect. She still didn’t like this backward homebody thinking. It was very small-town. Should have been behind her by now. But she needed it. The blipping screen in front of her explained that things were moving forward at hundreds of kilometres an hour, and sure she wanted her rise and hurtle forward to be this way. She just didn’t expect it to be so hard to stomach.

After the plane had left Ottawa airspace and settled into its southeast course, Jennifer had been pleased with how little she had shown by way of nerves, especially compared with Bokarie, seated beside her, looking very grim, his lips pursed and his eyes fixed out the window. She wondered if this was his first flight too, but that wouldn’t make sense. He couldn’t have canoed to Canada from Africa, after all. Perhaps it was the jitters of going back. She could understand that; she had been nervous about her first town hall meeting in the riding after the election. But it had gone well and suggested the town’s confidence in her rule. Three concerned citizens had shown up. Fewer, if you didn’t count her parents and Bokarie.

Speaking of which, he’d been mighty moody these past few weeks, falling sick whenever a planning session for the Africa trip was announced, asking for a transfer back to the riding because, he said, he missed his old customers. She nearly had to drag him across the icy sidewalks of winter Ottawa to get his passport photo done. He even came to her office one evening, just before they were to leave, to give notice. Said he wanted to go into ice dancing or skate sharpening or something. He sounded almost a little desperate, which was new for him. But Jennifer played it well. Leaning up and over her desk and down into him, she said she regretted that he no longer had interest in serving the public good but she could understand his desire to be an entrepreneur—that was a very immigrant thing. She said she was okay with his wishes and even that she would help him out as much as she could. She reminded him of how far he’d already come with her, the possibilities she’d made possible, indicating what could be done for him now from her latest office.

Afterwards.

Jennifer felt aloud that they had become professionally close enough, after their various struggles together, that she could speak plainly to him. She assumed he thought likewise and she was open to hearing him out. But her first. Bokarie was her ticket onto that plane to Africa. She wasn’t going unless he was. And she was going. And when they were over there, he was going to explain to anyone who asked what pink meant in his homeland. Because the whole of Canada was counting on him to show well on this trip; this would, incidentally, guarantee success upon his return and entry into whatever private sector he chose. He’d be greeted and rewarded, she promised, like a medalled Olympian. There was little better than that.

“But if you don’t show well,” she had continued, “well, maybe, Bokarie, you’re not so eloquent as I had thought. Maybe what you’d said at the first Little Caitlin rally was good enough for small-town applause but that’s all you’ve got in you.”

His eyes, which had been like broken slate until she said this, suddenly went narrow, hard and harsh. As she was expecting. LBJ attacked the men beneath him on their points of pride. To rip them open enough to make them need to overcome his scepticism. Bokarie nodded defiantly and cut out of the office and was gym-bag-packed and ready to go the next morning. Still, boarding the plane in front of her, he wasn’t jangling and bopping around like usual. He was stiff, formal. A walking plank.

While pleased that she’d convinced him, Jennifer had wanted to ask what was wrong with this going back. She decided against it, but doing so was like trudging home with something itching at your ankle when you just want to keep moving instead of reaching down to it and so you decide it will go away on its own. But it didn’t. So she accepted the little bites as the cost of forward movement. The extra wondering about why Bokarie’s not being fully himself had started up after she told him about this trip to Africa. To his homeland.

Jennifer knew to call it his homeland because rather than dowdy old home, which everybody had, homeland suggested something more rarefied, worthy of cherish, full with the delicate mystery of the distant places that newcomers came from. She liked these phrases, had memorized them from the introduction to an anthology of new Canadian immigrant writing that she’d found in the Parliament Hill library shortly after her triumphant entry into Ottawa.

She’d gone there, as she had to such places in the past, looking for material conducive to her design; this time, it had been to find the right terms to introduce Bokarie to her new colleagues. Not like the people back home, they’d want fancy wrapping for the import she was bringing with her. And so she consulted a glossy book of writings about the immigrant experience in Canada. New North Strong and Me.

But none of this thinking about Bokarie was of immediate concern. He was on board and he’d have to be back to his old self by the time they reached Africa. Of more immediate concern was the hot sour lump at her feet.

Jennifer blamed this latest smack of sick on their brief stopover in St. John’s to refuel and to participate in a tarmac ceremony involving the Governor General and a handful of starched and permed local potentates. Also present were the requisite award-winning area children’s choir and the stooped Legion colour guard. The fifteen-minute event was somewhere between solemn and congratulatory and intended to commemorate a recent commendable achievement that spoke to the long history of commendable achievements in this particular locality. Such sessions were regularly crammed into the Governor General’s schedule whenever she touched down somewhere in Canada Minor en route from Ottawa to Toronto or Vancouver or, as in the present case, when off to even more important elsewheres. She and her staff were fine with the disembarking and stiff standing in the strong wind while the bagpipe recording finished, and then the smiling purgatorial wait through a welcome address by a local leader or, worse still, a local youth leader, and then the Governor General’s own boilerplate two-paragraph address, and then the nodding graciously through an only just one more, pleeeease photograph session, before everyone waved and thanked and went back to their downloaded playlists and plane novels. On the return flight, the brief stopover was planned for an airport in Nova Scotia so that Madame GG could de-board and quickly officiate, alongside the chatty local member of Parliament, at a ribbon cutting for a centre newly opened to study freshwater parasites in the Maritimes.

For Jennifer, who had gone along uninvited to the St. John’s event and been unmovable and smiling from just behind Madame GG’s right shoulder the entire time they were on the tarmac, the second takeoff had been too much, too fast. The plane suddenly kicking up and galloping forward and then rearing back and buckling a little from the westerly winds and banking to the left but then righting its course and climbing, climbing, shuddering from a last little bit of rough air, and then a static-clung cockpit apology for the takeoff but nobody said it was easy visiting Newfoundland let alone leaving it, which brought off a good laugh in the main cabin save row 11 where Bokarie, who seemed self-lashed to his seat, wondered at this observation before deciding to laugh along. To keep up appearances. Afterwards he sighed and slumped and started readying his faces afresh. Meanwhile, Jennifer was grateful for the cabin full of laughter. It drowned out her catch and hiccup and retch.

At first she had been worried about whether her face was showing it to others. Showing that she didn’t belong up here, this far along in her career, this far away from the Ottawa Valley. A strong case could have been made in the spit-strung aftermath of her stomach’s knotting and unknotting, during which Bokarie had moved off, smiling and springing over her and into the aisle, where he was immediately snapped up by Madame GG, who beckoned him forward for a little chat.

II.

Wiping the last bits of wet chunk from her cheek and then from her hand, Jennifer peered around once more and noticed that the rest of the flight—the Governor General’s staff, the reporters brought along to document historic handshakes and hopefully a few cultural gaffes, the businessmen practising the place names they were looking to invest in, plus Bokarie, now front cabin and seated beside Madame GG herself—none of them, Jennifer sensed, were paying her any attention. Right now, this was fine. She didn’t even mind Bokarie getting prime-time face time without her. It couldn’t help but reflect back positively, provided he was his usual self. She leaned forward to watch and listen in a bit, just to make sure he was.

He was doing fine, giving a little crook of the neck and an interested grin and half-moony eyes while the Governor General recounted the story of the novel she had been just absolutely consuming! Prester John, by John Buchan. Written by one of her predecessors, a former head person of Canada himself. The story was of a Biblequoting rebel African king who took a simpleton white man prisoner while trying to conquer a nation with his loyal followers, only to get outsmarted by the white man and done in for his efforts.

Bokarie cracked up at this, a short hot HA! HA! HA! that shot through the cabin. Madame GG pulled back quickly, as if the standard poodle she’d been biscuit-feeding turned out to have distemper. The others in the cabin noticed and waited for more of an exchange before deciding on whose behalf to be offended, while Jennifer started fumbling with her buckle so she could intervene and stow Bokarie with the luggage. But then he apologized extravagantly.

“Please, Your Excellency, your forgiveness. I forgot myself. But my noise only meant I don’t think this Prester John book to be a very realistic story. People in Africa aren’t so easily persuaded to follow men who speak from the Bible. I know this to be true, from my own life story.”

Madame GG put a hand on his wrist and cocked her head sideways, empathetically cutting him off to assure him she knew this, and further that she wasn’t endorsing Buchan’s views, only learning from the past so as not to repeat it. Bokarie nodded and then thanked her for sharing and the two were fast friends once more. She noticed that Bokarie wasn’t wearing a new pink wristband yet and asked an aide for an extra and fastened it onto him to immediate hums and quick-focus flashes from the seats around them. Bokarie smiled violently for the cameras and was encouraged to tell the story of how pink meant the colour of the dawn where he came from, which he did with the vacant enthusiasm of a tour guide stuck on his last group of the day. Madame GG repeated the lines as instructed, working them into her inventory for coming conversations. Who would remember “Ich bin ein Berliner,” she thought, had an aide said it for Kennedy, even if it were a returning native? When she was finished with him, he was excused to another empty seat, where he curved against the window. He smiled out at everyone watching him and nodded his head in meekness and agreement, but behind this was something indeterminate. The others left him alone and went back to studying their host-nation cheat sheets, trying to keep straight their cultural and medicinal do’s and don’ts with respect to local food and drink.

Jennifer didn’t mind that Bokarie didn’t come back to be beside her. Probably because of the smell, she thought. No matter. He could report later on the conversation with Madame GG and also account for his laughing out. Fortunately, it had resolved itself quickly, before she had needed to intervene.

And anyway Jennifer liked this having more time and space to herself. She needed it foremost to do something about the sick bag, which she briskly marched to the bathroom with an in-flight shopping magazine draped over it. She also needed to start reading through her prep materials for the mission; she had the same sheaf the others had been given, which included the latest edition of Africa for Dummies, complete with a chummy grave foreword by Bono and Paul Volcker, and also a Coles Notes guide to Joseph Conrad. But more than anything else, she needed to get over her habit of returning homeward when she felt unsure of herself. All this thinking about Mum and Dad and how things were done in town, as if this could help her anywhere else. She’d been doing this since the baggage check, or really since her dad had cupped her cheek and left her at her new Ottawa apartment that day he drove them down.

She had to put all of this behind her, even, she decided, her WWLBJD questions. Johnson never went to Africa. He’d probably barely heard of it, being not just American but Texan. If she was going to get anywhere and anything more than ribbon cuttings and baitfish, she had to be past him, and past her parents, and past the riding and past the embarrassment of the sick bag and past all the rest of it now. She had to be for the here and the forthcoming. Her instincts in first coming to Ottawa had been right: that there was always more waiting to be had in the time to come. She grinned back at that moment in her bedroom when the results had been announced, at what she’d wanted then, how it had been so strange to feel as if that was enough. That with victory, things were wrapped up, over, done with, ended, and she had been happy about it, not wanting more than she already had. She was busting through that small-town politeness and Middle Canadian modesty, too.

Her stomach settling, the warm little heavy bag gone, and munching vacantly on a business-class sugar cookie to freshen up her breath, Jennifer congratulated herself. She was a few months in Ottawa and only nine hours, according to the blipping monitor, from her next get: a trade and aid mission to Africa, with a returning native as her chief attachment no less. So Jennifer had answered What Now. It was directly in front of her, a whole continent waiting for her to swoop in with her dawn-coloured bracelets.

And beyond that, beyond that— She stopped herself from picking out the pie tin before finishing a second piece. Too much sweetness too fast would leave a belly in rot for no good reason other than wanting more than could be swallowed down. Her stomach was empty now and calmly so and would stay that way until they reached Africa, at which point she would get her fill.

III.

From the first moment, the smell and touch of the place was confirmation Jennifer had arrived somewhere she understood. Everything was thick with mushy heat and ripe with the tang of gasoline. While the rest of the Canadian party wilted their way through the welcome proceedings, Jennifer soaked in it, the white-clad schoolgirls’ singing both national anthems in all official languages, the elaborate presentation of cola nuts, the equally elaborate sweetgrass ceremony by one of the Governor General’s attendants. Then the back-and-forth introductions of the main players while the respective seconds hung back and waited somewhere between nervous and desperate to be recognized and called forward.

Jennifer had planned to ask Bokarie to kiss the ground for the cameras, but then she noticed Madame GG look their way. Look for her, at her, at Jennifer, to come forward. So she pushed past. Dropped him like a slug. She marched over to join the Governor General and the already backslapping business leaders in meeting the always smiling President and his attendants and advisers, who were to a man Wharton-educated and returned home because that’s as far as they had to go to find employers still impressed by MBAs. There were reciprocal bows and scrapes and no, after you’s to the canopied car lane.

The short walk over was quietly humming with repeated requests for pronunciation and reminders of how long the flight was and re-clarifications about the time difference. Nothing much. Jennifer decided she could bust through and better all of this and so leave her mark on this mission from the start. She had devoured the prep materials as if she was night-before studying for an end-of-the-year final. But she had even more than that to work with, and not from Bokarie. She’d finally found her ideal audience.

Her lips opened.

“Mr. President, I believe we have something in common.”

He laughed heartily and nodded repeatedly, as did his advisers. A jovial way to avoid anything unnecessary or complicating coming up.

“Yes, we do. We were both recently elected to our offices. Congratulations. Though I must confess, thinking about my election experiences, I envy you.”

Even more intense laughter and nodding and a signal to bring the cars around and send the luggage on later because the heat was clearly getting to everyone and best let’s continue this wonderful conversation over air conditioning and cool tropical drinks. But Jennifer went on, hard-target in sight.

“Because, you see, the first time I ever ran for president—now of course this was back in a Canadian high school, not a nation rebuilt from the ashes for the fourth consecutive decade, like yours—but I did it just like you. I ran for president against no one. Only I lost.”

Absolute belly-busting bedlam and then immediate dispersal. Jennifer was invited to ride privately with Madame GG, who commended her on such a fine opening with the local leadership and then gave her a list of the leaders they were to meet. Many of whom, Madame GG assured her, would find her election confession equally endearing.

As they sped along the empty eight-lane highway from the airport to their hotel, their car’s wheels sticky from the freshness of the tar, Madame GG went in for more specific plans for the conference. She’d been thinking.

“Perhaps, Jennifer, when the opening speeches are done and we go into the one-on-one sessions, you can use that line to break some ice now and then, or reserve it for when they ask for something and I need some time to mull. And also, let’s plan to end with the presentation of the pink bracelets. By the by, having chatted with him in the plane, I don’t think we’ll need your Bokarie with us during the private meetings. Together we know enough of his moving backstory to explain why we’re thinking the colour we are. Just follow my lead in there. Fill in when I turn and smile at you like this. Understood?” This close to the Governor General, she could see how tight her face was, like dough stretched thin over a baking tin. Jennifer nodded at the bared bonded whites.

“Oh good, I’m glad you’re with me. Some members can be so possessive about their bring-alongs, they cry when I tell them they can’t have them in high-level meetings. Like babies denied their soothers! Yes, he’ll be good for the standard delegation pictures and maybe we’ll bring him along to a few minor receptions and perhaps have him share his thoughts for the home crowd when we get back. But you know, he got a little snappish at one point when we were talking on the flight over and frankly that makes him something of an unknown sum. In fact, Jennifer, why don’t you just remand him to his hotel room—suggest that it’s because you need someone you can trust on call in case there’s a situation. Call it the war room or the hardware store or the engine house. Men who work beneath women need packaging like that to keep them proud and happy to be there.

“Because as you can see, Jennifer, out your window, this certainly isn’t Ottawa, and that’s the last thing we need, an incident, involving one of ours who’s also one of theirs no less. Our press would love that, especially the reporter from the Progress. You know that poor newspaper was just bought by that American, Twin Chambers? You’ve no doubt heard what that right-wing radical corporate media mogul has already done to the newsroom and editorial. Cultural and intellectual butchery I call it, off the record of course. And you also must know how he’s gone on about replacing my position with a battery-operated ribbon-cutter and bilingual applause machine and said he’s allowed to say that because he’s a fellow Canadian. Calling himself that because he’s one-eighth Saskatchewan. A travesty of our funding formulas for underserved minorities. Anyway, he’d just love for something to go wrong on this trip for us, which I think of as an opportunity to show Canada and the world just what a Governor General can do for both. So let’s not give him pleasure, understood?”

Jennifer nodded again and liked this for us. But she also wondered where Bokarie was. Probably in one of the other cars. She hadn’t thought about him much since they dropped down and she was pulled up beside Madame GG for the introductions. Given how things were going so far and her wanting Madame GG to bring her along wherever she went, his getting left out, confined to the hotel, this was fine. All the more for her.

To pass the rest of their drive to the conference site, Jennifer joined Madame GG in marvelling at how efficient the country’s highway system was, how wonderful if this was an indication of Africa’s progress! Their driver nodded and smiled vigorously in the rear-view to encourage them to say more. As instructed.

The roads were absolutely emptied of traffic save military escorts and diplomat plates. There was none of its daily thickness of overcrowded pickups and horn-bleating taxis and lane-snaking, curse-making, double-backed scooters. Nor were there any chunky transports wheezing to the side, sick from all the downshifting en route from the outer provinces into capital-city traffic and so squatting, useless, on the shoulder while their drivers perfunctorily called out to the gambolling girls trying to sell their fathers’ fruit from stands set up around exit signs. Instead of all this, there was only an onslaught of billboards advertising the eternal health and well-being of monogamy and the ruling party. This blocked any views for visitors beyond the fresh-paved road and the gleaming white stalks of new hotels and business centres ahead of them. So Jennifer and Madame GG further missed out on the daily wear and tears of Middle Africa: the crumbling Caucasoid statuary, the erupted sidewalks leading to and from buildings the colour, shape and purpose of crushed cigarette butts, the high clumped mounds of garbage smoking with half-burned tires and a few cooking fires, the successive sets of model new apartment buildings for the people’s collective and united future—barely more livable than Baltimore tenements or guest-worker housing in Frankfurt.

In this particular Democratic Republic, residents of the capital city had been lined up for hot-plate handouts in advance of the government’s hosting this year’s international and All-Africa trade and aid conference. A proclamation was provided along with a gift. There was to be a patriots’ vacation week, during which time citizens were expected to not be on the main streets but instead devoting themselves to their family lives and tending to their new hot plates. Those who did venture out would be vacationed elsewhere.

Not that all stripes of African colour weren’t on offer for the very important visitors. In fact, they never had to venture outside the parapets of the conference site to get it. In addition to bulging Mandela-faced swag bags, the authentic glories of Africa were on offer nightly. Two shows, at eight and ten o’clock. There were Bushmen cookery demonstrations, native dance and hunting troupes, pantomime re-enactments of creation myths and colonial follies, and, always the favourite, a combination spelling/geography bee by top local students, the topic being capital cities and beloved leaders from around the world.

Of course, a few of the observer-status delegates at the conference and some of the younger aides with the major donor contingents had watched enough documentaries and read enough leaked reports not to buy any of these confections as representative. They snuck out from the conference at night and accepted rides from dangerous-looking unmarked cars waiting across the street, just outside the guard booth’s range. When enough money was offered, the drivers agreed to take their fares on hush-hush tours of the real Africa, as the request was invariably expressed. The drivers warned their riders in advance that they were going to see things that might shock them and received in response steely-eyed and earnest assurances that that was exactly what was wanted.

A nearby and rundown district of the city was chosen for these rough-guide glances, where a pregnant woman was seen standing and smiling ambiguously at a street corner; where a gnarled European aid worker was met who went on in cynical gnomic grandeur about the forces that really ran Africa; where pant-less children were called after in vain as they played at toy guns in vacant lots. After which the cars came upon an unexpected security checkpoint on the way back to the conference. The drivers panicked and swerved and saved themselves and their families, not to mention their riders, from untold sufferings in unmarked prisons. These tours happened nightly, and viral marketing in the buffet lines ensured their continued popularity.

Back at the conference, the enlightened congregated at the twenty-four-hour hotel bar, where they shared with each other how shaken and stirred they’d been by what they’d seen. Confirmations of their worst expectations. They planned to start up defiant blogs full of indignation and little-known statistics. They promised to link to each other’s to get the word out about the horrors and resiliencies of the real Africa.

The government had arranged the tours. The drivers were off-duty busmen who knew the right routes to take. Having exiled the documentary makers but failed to suppress the leaked reports, officialdom knew it would have crusading wall-climbers to deal with among the invited guests. It planned and paid out accordingly.

IV.

The speeches that opened the conference itself were a classic duet. Westerners declared that it was time the West finally recognized that it was time to do something about Africa. Africans announced this was not just another hand-wringing session but evidence of a new moment for an entire continent. Both sides agreed that history would no longer be a tragic guide or handouts wasted or promises mouthed, but hands would be joined and agreements would be reached and lives in need would be enriched. The beaming United Nations representative stepped to the podium after the last of these speeches and thanked everyone for their commitment to commitment. Then he announced into the shiny microphone, to great cheer and immediate hustling and bustling, “Let the dialoguing begin!”

The conference organizers adapted the principle of the sixty-second-date service in setting up the individual sessions between donor nations and would-be recipients. Delegations from African nations were assigned hotel suites with bottled water on ice and full audiovisual capabilities at their disposal. The best-prepared had short video presentations on offer, montage images of their nation’s past horrors and present struggles and future prospects matched, respectively, to choired ululations and heavy-stringed orchestrals and upbeat synthesizers. So readied, they received Western representatives for short meetings that were a combination of flirtation and coyness and oft-repeated mutual agreements against playing head games. Pastimes and future plans came up, as did needs and offerings, the baggage of former relationships and family histories, health and fitness concerns about the body politic, and, above all else, the type of world they’d like someday for their children. Noncommittal promises were made for longer meetings later on. Phone numbers and awkward affections were exchanged— half handshake, half hug—and then each side, after breath fresheners and index card reminders for their next date, dried their palms and adjusted their lapel pins and moved on, nervous to have someone impressive to show the folks back home but wary of committing too much too fast.

By the time they reached their last matchup for the day, the Canadians were tired, though they’d been pleased with their success so far. In addition to the pink bracelets and accompanying rationale, they presented each of their African counterparts with a sheaf of e-mail addresses that Madame GG had collected from everyday Canadians enthusiastic about making contact with everyday Africans. These were received with gratitude and passed on and made use of. Jennifer and the Governor General’s final meeting was with the brain truss of a tiny west central African nation, Atwenty. They had little information on the country even in the confidential prep materials that Madame GG had shared with Jennifer just before going in. A researcher had at least found a picture and brief article about the newly elected president, clipped from a Canadian newspaper from the previous April. He was smiling, en route to the People’s Palace.

Atwenty was a postage stamp of a country historically criss-crossed by colonial powers and more recently done in by persisting internal conflicts, including a particularly bloody event that had occurred a year earlier in its northern province. Though never above the fold, reports had been published in a few Western newspapers and there had been dispatches from a BBC team based there. After an American intervention led by a junior senator from Texas with long-standing interests in the nation, a peace-bringing new president with control over the military had emerged, not to mention a slaw of investment in that troubled region and plans for a national reconciliation campaign.

After introductions, the actors took their seats and beamed back and forth and resettled themselves and fluttered their papers until one of them spoke. Jennifer had gone first last time, so it was Madame GG’s turn. She went for dinner-party anthropology.

“Monsieur le Président, I’m curious about the name of your country, Atwenty. I know it’s terrible to confess, but it’s one of the few African nations whose current names evade me. Is it perhaps an ancient tribal designation for your lands and thus an act of cultural retrieval and reunification in the wake of the colonial departure?”

He laughed. A gold-toothed warm gurr.

“No, Madame, it is a joke.”

“Oh please, Monsieur, you must take pride in your nation, in its history, in its traditions! The people of Canada do, I can assure you of that, it’s something we can teach the world, I believe.”

“Good for you, Madame, but the name Atwenty is literally a joke. You see, it was the idea of our first leader after independence. He was educated in England and upon his return, when the government was trying to come up with a name that reflected the nation more truthfully than any of the colonizers’ New This’s and That’s, he proposed Atwenty. He explained that when he was living abroad, the only time he ever saw notice of his native land in a newspaper was a one-line reference on the first page with the direction to see A-20 for further details. So he thought this was the truest reflection of where his nation stood in the world. Atwenty sounded and looked African enough for people back then. It still does.”

The Governor General’s face was a thin polite blank through all of this. She wasn’t sure of how to read this president’s tone, whether she should have been outraged or sympathetic or chuckled in solidarity, and so she had nothing to give in response. Except the feeling that she was being quietly laughed at, which was unacceptable personally and nationally. Jennifer was simply confused. With only Canadian high school geography to work with, she was expecting some poetically aboriginal explanation of Atwenty. It should have meant “mighty meeting lodge between two rivers” or something.

The President’s first councillor, who was sitting next to him, whisper-reminded him that Canada was high on their wish list of donor nations, that it could offer them more than a couple of easily copied blue passports. The President nodded and changed his tactics with relative ease. He was an ex-army man.

“Madame, you can be assured that we have the very best people looking into how best to deal with this name legacy. I myself am only recently elected. Our beloved President-for-life, as you may know, decided that the recent butchery done to his tribe in our troubled Upriver region made it impossible for him to continue leading. With my support, sympathy and sadness at his departing, he has left the country to join a series of corporate boards. And so now, as the latest leader of this conflicted, impoverished land, I am faced with a series of challenges. They are too numerous to list in our short time together. But you can imagine. I can’t do this alone, of course. It’s an expensive task.”

The air was heavy with hint at these last statements, but the Canadians were ready for this. They’d heard the same lines at every meeting. Jennifer knew what was needed while Madame GG decided whether to open up her purse.

“Mr. President, I believe you and I have something in common—” Only Madame GG didn’t want a stay this time. She wanted her hotel bed and decided she didn’t care much for this president. He was the one too many of the newly elected reform-minded purse snatchers that she’d met that day.

“With apologies to my colleague, Monsieur le Président, you haven’t convinced me that the Canadian people should support your efforts to improve your lands. To be quite honest”—she threw those t sounds at him as if they were little spears—“I have little confidence that your nation is capable of moving forward right now. Nothing you’ve told yet suggests any progress beyond, well, frankly, one big man replacing another.”

“I can understand your frustration, Madame, and I can assure you I won’t be just another big man, as you say. I certainly don’t plan to rule for life, as my predecessors did. I’ve already set a term limit for my rule and shall respect it, God and the People willing. But you want more immediate evidence of progress, as you call it. I shall give you that, and also show you some evidence of the demons that have plagued us. But first let me share one of my recent decisions. This was part of the agreement for reconciliation and power-sharing that our nation’s great friend from Texas, Senator Jellyby, worked up for us last year. We were even on CNN for it. One of my first decisions afterwards was to name a woman to one of our most important positions. The one I chose wasn’t my sister or my daughter or even some ex-dictator’s widow, like you have when women get positions elsewhere, but her own man, as the saying says. She had previously worked as part of an NGO for women’s concerns in our capital city. Before that, she was a sex trade worker in a small village. She managed to escape that life and then devoted herself to making a difference in the lives of others. And as a nation, we have recognized her efforts with this appointment. She’s governor of the northern province. In which, as you may or may not know, is located the Upriver region so recently ravaged by a band of butchers. And I tell you, this governor is doing serious work, not ribbon cutting and the like. She has been commissioned to bring healing where it is needed, and also to lead an effort to bring the evildoers to account. And to support her, we have brought with us to this conference rare video footage of one of the nation’s Most Wanted giving a speech, the so-called Grin Reaper. This is a smiling killing machine of a man, a leader of poor bendable boys known to have a tongue sweet like honey and sharp like a blade. As you will see. We have brought footage of this madman at his work to raise awareness about the governor’s efforts, to give people like you a sense of who, of what type of evil, she’s struggling to defeat. Because she’s not having an easy time of it and hasn’t brought justice to anyone yet. And I’m sure I needn’t tell you,” he moved in for the kill, “Madame, or you either, young lady, how difficult it is to be a woman in governance, especially one with ideals. So when you make your decision whether to extend us funding, think not of this”—here he ran his fingers down his medal-encrusted bright suit—“but of her.”

The Governor General’s face was full with vague uplifting identification. She extended her hand with a swoop, dangling three pink wristbands from her fingers.

“Monsieur le Président, I underestimated you and apologize. You have made an eloquent case and I assure you Atwenty will receive the very strongest consideration when Canada sets its Africa aid budget for next year. More immediately, at another point in the conference proceedings I’ll be pleased to introduce you to some members of our business community who are with us today. But before all of that, please accept these symbols of our concern and interest, and do pass one along to that brave sister governor you mentioned. In Canada, these are worn to show that we are thinking of Africa these days. And when we do, we Think Pink. Because, as you no doubt know, pink means the colour of the dawn in the homelands of Africa. And with Canada’s support, Africans will at last greet rosy pink morning with the hope of a new day for themselves and their nations!”

He stopped grinning and nodding. His face and voice were suddenly very tight. He asked her to repeat what she’d said. Just the last part, about Africans greeting rosy pink morning. Madame GG obliged, unsurprised; it was a very elegant turn.

“Madame, may I ask where you discovered that description?”

“I wish I could claim it as my own, but in fact it came courtesy of my colleague, Miss Thickson.”

He snapped to Jennifer, who was ready with the phrases and story and curious to see if it would have the same effect on this listener as it did back home. Though he didn’t exactly look curious. Something more intent than that. His nostrils, she noticed, were flaring and his eyes were wide. She thought of how a horse looked just before it kicked out or bolted. But she could bridle this one too.

“And so, my dear, where did you find this phrase? Did you read it on the Internet or see it in one of these so-called documentaries?”

“No, Monsieur President, I know better than to trust anything I haven’t experienced directly. Think Pink.”

“Good for you. What?”

“I learned about the colour of dawn in Africa from a very courageous young man from there—sorry, from here, who joined our community in Canada recently. He’s well spoken and very talented and has worked hard against adversity to become what he is today.”

“Which is what?”

“My chief attachment—attaché.”

“My goodness! Good for him. And congratulations to you for seeing such potential where others might not have. Oh, if only we could meet such a man, he’d be such an inspirational message for people over here.”

“Of course! From what I’ve heard from Miss Thickson and seen and learned for myself, he’s been the same thing for Canadians in his time with us. Would you like to meet him?” Madame GG had decided that was enough prime-time face time for Jennifer and so intervened, sensing possibilities.

“You mean he’s here already?”

“Yes. Shall I send Miss Thickson upstairs to fetch him?”

“No, no, just tell us his room number and my associate Charles can go up with my assistants and escort him down.” Here the General gestured to the elegant and assured man sitting to his left and to the arm-crossed, lip-pursed wall of men in sunglasses and berets and camouflage that was arrayed behind him. Jennifer hadn’t noticed them since sitting down, having grown accustomed to their presence behind every African leader they’d met that day. She hadn’t thought of them as anything more than a thick stand of green-clad trees. But they were moving now.

“That sounds fine, Monsieur le Président. I’m so very glad we’re making this young man a bridge between our homelands.”

“As am I. Yes, everything sounds fine. And now we can watch a short video together before his arrival!” The President’s giddiness filled the room. He dimmed the lights.

V.

“He went homeland, back to his people, returned to his old way of life.”

Jennifer repeated the phrases she’d earlier practised with Madame GG for the fourth reporter to come back to her seat and ask about Bokarie’s absence on the return flight. When, as a follow-up, she was asked how much she felt this loss personally, by grubs hopeful of a little jungle-fever sidebar story to liven up their closing reports on the trade and aid conference, she claimed airsickness and ended the conversation, leaving them a little journalistic licence. But Jennifer wasn’t feeling sick, she was just trying to remember one speech and forget another. Trying to remember how LBJ had explained his decision not to stand for a second term. Trying to forget what she’d seen and heard in that video.

He had looked a little thinner and younger and his English was much better than what he’d used when he spoke up for Little Caitlin in Centennial Park, though she recognized some of that in it too. But this was definitely Bokarie at his business—cutting back and forth across the stage, frothing up the audience with his words and moves, smiling out at it all. After the last lines of the speech, This is why we will at last greet rosy pink morning from the moist earth that your fathers’ fathers left to you. Brothers! When they desire mercy, you shall make of them a sacrifice! For our sons, for our General, for our nation!, Madame GG had shuddered beside her, digging fingernails into her wrist, then gone hard metal and ready to do business.

Jennifer only caught snippets of the President and the Governor General’s rapid negotiations, which both sides wanted concluded before anything was brought back to the room. She was wrapped up with what Bokarie had been before, what he was now, what to make of that. Of him. Meanwhile, there had been an efficient and detailed agreement worked out. First, the turn-over of the suspect so as to help along the woman governor of the northern province in her efforts at returning justice to her lands. Second, Canada would relinquish any claim on the suspect, who had forfeited its support by becoming a citizen under wrongful assumptions. Third, the episode would remain confidential. Fourth, the episode would remain confidential. Fifth, an explanation would be prepared that was suitable for Canadian audiences as to why the suspect remained in Africa. Sixth, Atwenty would claim to have caught the suspect in another African nation. Seventh, the episode would remain confidential. This was a question of homeland safety on both sides, it was agreed. The President assured her that it would stay between them, especially since the suspect required a delicate interrogation to determine what had happened to the General mentioned in the speech. They gave each other their word.

Both wanted more.

Soon there were pledges of future visits from freight-heavy C-130 Hercules to Atwenty. These were conditional on the Governor General’s possessing political capital back in Canada that only an entirely successful trip to Africa would bring, or else she couldn’t press for these to be sent. The President understood her situation and said he would do all in his power to make sure no bridge was burned or broken between their glorious nations.

As he was showing them out after the video was done rewinding, the President wanted to break through the young one’s numbness. He couldn’t resist. Imagine the notes they could compare, trade. He asked Jennifer about what she had said earlier, what she thought they had in common. But when her lips opened, she had nothing to give.

Jennifer and the Governor General didn’t speak until they’d been in the elevator for a few floors. There had been a tense moment outside the Atwenty suite when a group of swaggering men came towards it from the right. Each decided she didn’t recognize any of them and ducked past. Which was understandable. There were so many such entourages moving around the conference.

“I can’t imagine what you must be feeling, my dear. Your Gannibal has turned out to be a cannibal. Living under an assumed identity like that—oh, what an affront! But let me give you some advice. Put all of this out of your head and come back to my suites and we’ll work out a good plan for what to do when we go back to our homeland, where the people and other things are more reliable. I’m sure you don’t need any explanation for why news of this incident would be as devastating to your career as it would be to mine. The PM will never let me go anywhere again. But let’s leave aside our professional concerns for a moment and concentrate on you.” Madame GG had decided that den mother to wayward cub was a better tack than worried farmer to suspected mad cow. Here she moved in and up to Jennifer, a look of fevered concern on her face.

“You must be feeling so duped by that monster, by how he capitalized on your and my and all Canadians’ tolerant natures, on how we go about accepting people from far away and take them at their various words for what they say they are. That such a terror and trickster could do such things to us! Well, it’s worthy of a Royal Commission. Not anytime soon, of course—we can’t let that rotten apple ruin everything we hope to pick and gather here. You’re quiet, and I completely understand you must still be in shock at such betrayal, so just follow my lead about what to do from here on until we’re through this. And as far as that Bokarie, that Grin Reaper, is concerned, let such inhumanity be a dangerous lesson learned from and leave it at that.”

His inhumanity. That was what Jennifer kept thinking about, as the plane took off and returned to Canada. Because more than that speech, or the things the President had told them about Bokarie, or how uncontrollably things had been mashing and blending and colliding in her head since then, she couldn’t get past Madame GG’s conclusion. Such inhumanity. But that wasn’t what Jennifer had found in the speech. Because he wasn’t just a poor suffering new immigrant, but something more, something else. And yet he wasn’t just a videotape of a genocidal African warlord either. Even if it had just been more rewarding, more politic, plain easier for everyone, himself included, to see him either way, to celebrate and punish and make use either way. But these were, because these were, shells. The whole thing. A shell game.

Bokarie had been torn away from her, but she didn’t miss him in any real way. She had only known a shard of blackboard and crocodile tears and outsized grins. But behind, there had been something terrifying, calculating, murderous, laughing at her and the rest. No. Someone. Jennifer wondered if he might just talk or dance his way out of this new situation he was in, just as he’d danced and talked his way into his old one. She knew that much about him, at least. He’d try. You had to admire this.

She wanted to go home and be done doing politics. She’d lost her appetite in Africa. She would serve out the one term and then see about something else. Maybe even that gym teacher if he was still around. Or perhaps become a civics teacher herself. She would give up her position, even if people would say this was evidence Jennifer Thickson couldn’t compete with the big men in Ottawa and beyond. She could, though, she knew that, which had to be enough for her. Because she’d tried for more and got it and then some. Which had led to something she’d never expected. Too much for her. So now the consolation prize of a return to the town, the farm. A habitat safe from the wide loud world and its pulls and pushes. But not that safe, Jennifer realized, thinking back and then forward. Because there would always be more drowned pigtails to dredge up and new Canadians to welcome. That is, if she wanted to get involved. But she wouldn’t, she didn’t, and was glad of this. Was glad. She was.

VI.

Jennifer’s mystical experience over, she left the mushy hot woods where she had seen the slugs wrap around each other and then the bird swoop down and take them still dangling and doing to each other and go back to its tree to swallow down and look for more. She didn’t notice the leech until she got home. There had only been a little itchy pull down by her ankle all the way back. Sitting in the mud room, she wrenched off a soaked shoe. She liked the THWUCK! sound that it made. One of her fingers brushed against a rubbery bump when she took the second off. It felt like a Band-Aid, only thicker, humped, rough, wet from the rain and the sludge it had moved through to get to her. She studied it. She’d seen leeches before.

Once, one of the cows, back when they had cows, had somehow made it over the corduroy road and waded into the crick across the way. After her father had dragged it to the barn by the back of its jaws, she held his hubcap ashtray for him while he cut the bloodsuckers off its belly with the lighter-hot blade of his jackknife. Little pink pucker lines were left where the fat black lines had been. Each one slid into the grey ash and curled up around the stubby butts, singed and dying but, she noticed, still trying to grab on to something and keep at its business. You had to admire this.

The cow had only groaned a little and shifted once or twice while her father cut away. So Jennifer wasn’t worried by the prospect of a knife soon slicing across her ankle. She could hear her mother on the other side of the swinging door. She was putting down the butter and bread and milk and corn and that bit of leftover roast on the paint-peeled farmer’s table they used for meals.

She watched her father through the small square mud-room window as he wiped his hands on the seat of his pants and walked towards his supper, his Ministry of Agriculture journals, and what news his wife and daughter had to tell of their days.

She looked down again at her ankle. She didn’t cry or scream or try to pull it off, not right away. She was tempted by the notion of keeping it until school time, to show off to others, to the town kids who just laughed when she asked to jump in on hopscotch. It would be evidence of how much she could do. Evidence of how much she could take. She would show them. Her mouth contorted with forethought, with impatience for it to be school days already. Ignoring her parents’ calls to the table, Jennifer watched the black band have at her, determined, fixed on her white freckled skin. Immovable, throbbing, growing. She felt a little weak from it, from the hot wet walk to her house in the bright close after-air of a sun shower, and now from breathing in the mud room, close and musky with her father’s workboots and the sweet tangs of the spare gas tank and old mosquito repellent. She wondered if she could keep it there long enough to get it working for her somewhere else. She could tell it’d keep going, that it would not stop of its own volition, even if it burst. Her either. But the idea made her feel tired with the time to come, with what she would have to go through if she wanted to catch what she wanted. It’d be easier if she were a bird like that one from the mush. Then she could fly down and scoop up and swallow down and go back up to a new perch each time, always with better sights of the next dangling bit waiting to be had. Her ankle started feeling thin around the bulgy bump. It was pulling at her. Taking more than she knew.

When her father came into the mud room to ask her if she needed a personal invitation to sit down to her roast beef, he found Jennifer in a weak-blooded fever, her lips opened, her ankle fish-belly white. He bent down and saw it and shook his head and had a good idea where she got it from and how. He told her she should have known better than to go and play beyond where she was supposed to. She was grounded the rest of the week for not listening or keeping to what was expected and asked of her. Then he told her to turn away while he got his knife out and did what had to be done. He cut and flung out the door, far from them.

She was drowsy, but she heard a splat against a tree trunk. So that was all. But maybe not. Maybe, she thought, as she was carried into the house, it survived the sudden slash across its body and the hurtling through the air. Maybe it had a taste enough of what it liked and wanted more and would come after it. Wounded, rejected, but insistent, implacable, moving against future banishment, already uncurled and crawling, getting back to the getting place.