We were driving across the South Sudanese border to Moyo, having heard that General Christmas was forming an alliance with the Sudanese People’s Liberation Independence Front—or SPLIF, which was hilarious, except for the dead people, huts burned, girls (of course) raped. But by the time we got there, SPLIF and General Christmas had squabbled; he had sulked off back to the Congo. Sam and I were itching, having picked up fleas in a shepherd’s hut.
Sam caught one and showed me: it was fat with blood, its abdomen the size of a pumpkin seed. I examined it. “How do you know it isn’t a bed bug?”
“Bed bugs are fatter, rounder, with shorter legs. It’s definitely a flea.”
As we drove on, I began to feel them crawling all over me, at first assuming it was my paranoia. But then I glanced over at Sam, and two monster fleas crawled out of his shirt, up his neck. I pulled open my shirt and saw three meandering across my chest. “Son of a bitch! Stop!”
Sighting a deserted spot, Sam pulled over and we got out. We tore off our clothes, shaking them, slapping them against the ground. Within seconds, several dozen people had materialized from the bushes. I considered how we appeared to them: two white people taking off their clothes and dancing around, possessed or deranged. Certainly, we were entertaining, for the crowd began to hoot and laugh, grown men bending over in fits, children howling and falling about. Sam released his inner stripper and shimmied for the crowd, pranced and gyrated, but when he approached his new fans to shake hands, they ran away screaming.
“See what happens when you take your clothes off!”
“Ach, Kay, they’re just jealous.”
We got back in the car, which was still full of fleas. Within minutes, we were covered again. There was nothing we could do; the car was infested. At the next village, Sam bought a large bottle of the local gin and began rubbing it over himself. I grabbed the bottle and took a swig, arguing that if it couldn’t prevent flea bites it could at least alleviate their effects. Six hours later we were in Juba.
Through his connections, Sam had upgraded us to the Hilton, a cathedral of marble and glass built on a former slum. We staggered into the gleaming lobby just after dusk, filthy and stinking of gin. A contingent of Chinese investors looked at us in alarm; the receptionist retained her tourism-school smile as she stretched her arm as far out as she could to hand us the key.
Sam turned to me, bewildered: “Is there something wrong with me, honey?”
“You’re just a bit dirty, dear,” I fussed him with my hand, dust lifting in a cloud around him.
We made the elevator, the doors shut, and we began scratching madly. Just as I had put my hand into my trousers to itch my crotch, the doors opened. A man was standing there. He was tall, Caucasian, carrying a digital camera. He calmly raised an eyebrow. “I’ll take the next one.” The doors shut gently.
Sam snickered, “Your future husband.”
*
A shower when you are filthy, sweaty, and tired is better than the best sex. There is something deeply sensuous in getting clean, you attend to your body as a lover might discover you, a process of increasing focus. I stood under the stream of hot water, watching it turn brown as it swirled down the plug hole. The water soothed my skin. I lathered the fragrant hotel soap, behind my ears, between my toes and fingers, in my belly button. It took five minutes for the water to run clear, three shampooings to clean the dust from my hair, then I stood like a supplicant at the altar of hot, clean water. Drying myself, I discovered I was covered in flea bites; I counted more than a hundred on my abdomen, constellations over my thighs and buttocks. I looked like I had the pox.
Sam was already at the bar. He’d bought me a whiskey on the rocks. He was very merry. He admitted he’d counted several dozen bites on his ass.
“How do you see your own ass?”
“In the mirror. Angle the door mirror in and you get the reflection of your backside off the bathroom mirror.”
“But why, Sam, why did you want to see your own ass?”
“It’s better than the front view.”
“Oooo. You sound like a woman, all self-critical.”
“You ever heard of mirror balls?”
“Do I want to?”
“It’s an affliction of middle-aged men. You can’t see your balls anymore except in a mirror.”
“I’m so glad I don’t have balls.”
“Me too.”
We were giggling and drinking when my future husband walked in. Sam nudged me in an obvious way so that I spilled my drink, then hailed him over.
“Hey.” Sam offered him the bar stool next to me. “Can we buy you a drink?”
The man laughed and took the seat. “I’m Michael,” he said.
“And we’re just colleagues,” Sam pointed to me. “Not even friends. She’s totally 100 percent available.”
“My pimp,” I smiled. “He takes 20 percent, just so we’re clear.”
Michael looked at me, and I realized he had not stopped looking at me since he’d entered the bar. I have since wondered if this is his trick, his shtick, how he makes all women feel special, how he makes Barb feel. He focused absolutely as if every movement I made fascinated him; it was an almost anthropological inspection. He studied my hands on the glass of whiskey, the pale freckles on my cheeks, the V at the base of my throat. It was weird and sexually thrilling.
After three hours of drinking and bar snacks, Michael and I left Sam chatting up an Ethiopian Airlines flight attendant. In Michael’s room, he peeled off my clothes. With his fingertips he touched my flea bites, and then he leaned in, connecting them with his tongue. In the morning we said goodbye, good luck, we didn’t trade emails or numbers. He was heading to Djibouti and me with Sam back to Nairobi. I did not think of him again.
Then, a year later, we bumped into each other in the arrivals hall in Lagos. He was with a crew on his way to film the Ogoni oil fields, I was covering the memorial of the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa. We were familiar, we were like old lovers. We immediately went to my hotel room, to bed.
“I have a map of your body in my mind,” he said.
“The flea bites? I looked like the London Underground.”
“No.” He laughed and put his face against my belly. “Your topography, valleys, hills, slopes.”
I believed him, I still do. Whatever the lies and obfuscations of our marriage, we were true in that beginning. I never imagined that those plump hours of happiness and room service would have to last us for years and years. How we would one day scrape the bottom of the jar, scrape and scrape until love was just gone, the last of the strawberry jam.
He asked me to the wedding of friends in Paris. And I invited him to Lamu for New Year’s Eve. How glamorous we were, how we grabbed the pendulum as it swung us lightly away from the slums and the war zones and the refugee camps, from the blood and the stinking latrines. We were journalists, we never stayed too long.