Fiddling with his watch, Teddy tried to calculate the hours he’d gained, or lost, since taking off from Logan. The number escaped him. And he’d always been so good with numbers. But his watch, once gravity’s yoke was shed, had developed a will and metabolism of its own. The hands were running fast, wheeling around in fitful, frantic circles, like drunks on a patio, like the legs of the animals in that moronic cartoon. It was always the same story too. A pursuit, a lunge in midair, and then a fall…
Once you left the ground, there was only one way to reattain it, he thought. The hard way.
To relieve the congestion in his head he chewed a stick of gum. It didn’t help, but it gave his jaws a first-class workout. Unfortunately the rest of his musculature was stuck in coach. The narrow seats had been designed for third-world survivors of scarcity and drought, not thick-waisted Americans with capacious backsides. No matter how he folded or unfolded his limbs, he could not accommodate his lumpy, swollen frame or achieve any comfortable distance between his knees and his face.
He picked up the in-flight magazine and flipped through the pages heedlessly, looking for the flight maps with their hubs and arcs, their arrowed paths radiating across the continents like an enormous web. The world was full of destinations. You could take off from anywhere and land anywhere: the web would bear your weight. For some reason this made Teddy fidget more, not less.
He got to his feet.
“Sorry,” he mumbled to the lady in the aisle seat. “I’ll try to make this the last time.”
Without putting down her book, she retracted her legs, ceding just enough territory for him to pass. He didn’t blame her; it was his fourth trip in two hours.
He padded shoeless down the aisle and wedged open the flimsy accordion door to the bathroom. People were burrowed in, reading or watching movies or nestled in sleep. He himself appeared to lack the constitution for long flights. His head thrummed like a tunnel; the membranes in his stomach fizzed and popped. He’d grown delicate over the years, it seemed, had lived a pampered and comfortable life. Now he had to toughen up for the long journey.
Coming back from the lavatory, he felt compelled to apologize to his seatmate again for making her perform yet another tedious do-si-do in the aisle. “Pfft,” she said, with an absent wave. “Why should you apologize when clearly you are not well?”
“I’m sure I’ll be fine. Just getting my sea legs.”
She eyed him worriedly for a moment—sea legs?—then went back to her book. She was not so old as he’d taken her for. In fact she looked roughly his own age, if not younger. Her hands were smooth. Her white hair, rising thickly from her temples, was knotted into a bun. As she read, she fingered a pendant that dangled at the base of her throat, on an all but invisible chain. With her ivory blouse and khaki pants and hoopy, silver, Santa Fe–ish earrings, she might have been one of Gail’s friends, one of those handsome, no-nonsense women she volunteered with at the food co-op, filling bins of free trade coffee and spraying mist over the organic vegetables. A serious and committed person. A woman of depth, substance, and discipline. In short, the very last person that he had any desire to converse with at this moment.
Not that she seemed so terribly eager to converse with him. Deep in her book, with a pair of rimless half-glasses perched on her nose and a plaid airline blanket draped across her thighs, his seatmate had the settled, self-sufficient aura of a scholar in front of a fire. Meanwhile Teddy squirmed by the window, looking down at the rough, slate-colored sea, all heaving and senseless below.
“Jesus,” he said, “will you get a load of this view. Unbelievable.”
The vastness, and the transient insubstantiality of the plane’s shadow upon it, made him expansive. As did the peripheral sight of the flight attendant bearing trays of food in their direction.
“I don’t understand why people complain so much about flying,” he went on. “I think it’s great, don’t you?”
“Perhaps to be up in the air,” said his seatmate, “does not agree with some people.”
“How about for you?”
“For me?” She peered at him over her reading glasses. “For me it is the best part.”
Her voice was reedy and low, with a dusting of some light, transitional accent. Teddy wondered if he sounded that way to her too, vaguely foreign, vaguely exotic. It seemed the best part of being a passenger, this shortcut to strangeness. You could be anyone to anyone.
She received her food without thanking the stewardess, then left it there on the folding tray untouched. He was already halfway through his chicken breast. And what a parched, anorectic old hen she must have been, he thought.
“Here,” she said, “take mine. You look very hungry, and I ate before.”
“Thanks.” He picked up her roll and gnawed off a hunk like a dog. “I ate before too, actually. Back in the airport. God knows why I’m so starved.”
“You’re a large man I think. It must take a lot to fill you up.”
“It does. Oh, it does.” He chewed the roll with relish. The texture was gluey; it wobbled the old fillings in his molars. But it was nice for a change to have his appetites understood and supported by a woman. “It’s nervous energy I guess. The happiest moments in life, they say, are starting on a journey to unknown lands.” He paused to swallow, before adding, “That’s Richard Burton by the way.”
“Yes?”
“The explorer I mean. Not the actor from Lion in Winter.”
“But unknown to whom?” she asked. “They are not unknown to the people who live there.”
“To me I mean. Unknown to me.”
She made a joyless, patronizing nod, as if he’d just betrayed some moral flaw in himself, some selfish, racist, imperialistic attitude for which he should be ashamed. But he couldn’t help it if his own feelings were more real to him than other people’s. Weren’t everyone’s? And wasn’t it selfish, racist imperialists like Burton who’d mapped out the globe in the first place, for reasons they themselves did not fully understand? The devil drives…Okay, he thought, maybe the Burtons of the world were products of their time. Okay, maybe that time had passed, and a good thing too. But Teddy wasn’t going to apologize for showing up late. At least he was here. At least he was here now.
“Please”—she proffered her tray—“go ahead, take the rest. Otherwise it will be thrown away.”
“Well, waste is a sin, right?”
“Yes. One of the worst.”
Of course gluttony was a sin too, Teddy recalled, but too late, the damage was done: he’d already eaten everything on her tray but the toxic wedge of lemon cake with its pale gelatinous glaze. Now he ate that as well. His days of holding back were over: he was on his way.
Only afterward, licking his fork clean, did it occur to him that he’d been wrong about Lion in Winter. Richard Burton the actor wasn’t in that film. That was Peter O’Toole. O’Toole was the lion—the great lithe, shaggy hero who roared and burned, who flew across the desert, blue eyes flashing, a pure bright creature of instinct. Burton was the introvert. The head case. Burton played the weak, tortured, vacillating types, the Hamlets, the Antonys, the spy quavering out in the cold, all those sulkers and brooders and tenured professors and defrocked priests.
And Teddy Hastings? What type was he?
He turned back to his seatmate. She had given him her meal; she seemed intent on either sustaining him or diverting him, he couldn’t tell which. “So what brings you to this part of the world?” he asked, as men of all types, he imagined, do. “Business or pleasure?”
“Neither one of those quite describes my mission, I’m afraid.”
“Mission?”
“Yes, I’m afraid so.” She smiled abstractly. “First I must go to Alexandria for our meetings and training sessions. Then after a week we arrive in the Sudan.”
“I knew it. You’re one of those Doctors Without Borders people.”
“Something like this.”
“Well, be careful. I hear they’re killing people down there.”
“Yes, I hear this too. This is why we go.”
“It would be just as good a good reason not to go too.”
“But there are always good reasons not to go, yes? Always, when you add them up, more of those kind than the other. Surely there are good reasons for you not to go where you go?”
“Oh, absolutely,” he said. “A long list.”
“So you see.”
Eventually she filled him in a bit on her own personal story. She was a retired nurse from Montreal, a widow with three grown children and a flat in Outremont. Nowadays she traveled a great deal. Gaza, Afghanistan, Chiapas. She spoke matter-of-factly of her travels, in a way that made him restless, gloomy. What was it about these people who moved so freely around the globe, while others could not find access to it at all?
“You seem a little young to retire,” he commented, wiping his mouth with a heroically soiled napkin.
“But I’m fifty-six. Is that young?”
“Christ, it better be.”
“Of course I miss my work at the hospital. But then they merged with another hospital, and I knew they wanted me to go, not bother them anymore with my boring appeals for more outreach to the poor. And then my husband died, pfft. So that was the end. I took the early option, and then I did the next thing you do when you retire and your husband dies after thirty years of marriage.”
“Oh? What’s that?”
“I went on a cruise. To be honest, I thought I would never enjoy such a thing. I had no wish to be trapped on a boat with so many old people, trying to have fun. But I did. I read and swam, and I discovered many interesting cocktails. I even had a shipboard romance. A very nice lawyer from Minnesota. It was his twentieth anniversary with his wife. But he wished to practice his French, he said.”
“That sounds like a joke.”
“I assure you, it wasn’t. This man took me quite seriously, and I him. The trip had cost us both a great deal of money, you see. We felt entitled to the full menu.” She smoothed her hair back. Her eyes had a languid light. “One day we were in the Dominican Republic, my friend and I. We took a drive into the mountains. It was a pleasant day, but I must have eaten something not good. I became very ill. It was a small village. There was no doctor. Someone told my friend of two old nuns from Belgium who ran a mission in the next village, so he took me there. When I saw how primitive this place was, I confess I was afraid. I looked at the cross on the wall and I prayed to God, which I had not done since I was a child. I believed I would die there. I felt it so clearly. I thought to myself, ‘I will never get back.’”
“Where was your boyfriend? He didn’t leave you there alone?”
“His wife was on the ship. He had no choice. And I wasn’t alone—the nuns were with me all this time. I was there in bed with them for six days. Long enough to create the world.” She smiled sadly, as if this were somehow a joke at her own expense. “Perhaps I think it is still with me a little bit. In the stomach. I will be in my kitchen, slicing a tomato, and I suddenly remember that village with no doctor, how afraid I was.” She was silent for a moment. “Io non mori, e non rimasi vivo. You understand?”
“Sure,” he said, though of course he spoke no Italian and hadn’t a clue. His thoughts were pounding ahead on their own tiny treadmill. “About your husband—can I ask what he died of?”
“Why? Are you involved in cancer research? Why do you Americans always feel entitled to know such things?”
“We’re optimists I guess. We like to think if we get the facts, we may be able to help somehow.”
“Yes, but this help you provide is so often destructive. Perhaps you should try helping less.”
“Okay, okay. Point taken.” Now that he was officially an American abroad, he would have to get used to this, Teddy thought: being hated and distrusted and called upon to apologize for every last thing—every offer of aid, every minor coup or limited incursion. Did you only become a real American when you left America? Exposed your innocence and privilege and your extra-large backside to the kicks and grievances of the world? “I didn’t mean any harm.”
“He died of lymphoma, my husband. To answer your question. And he was fifty-four, if you are wondering about that.”
Teddy grimaced: he had been wondering. He was tempted in the spirit of reciprocity to mention Philip, but what good would that do, laying down your dead like so many trumps. Piling up the sympathy points. As if there were any benefit to winning such a game.
He pushed back his tray and stifled a groan. His belly was roiling and tight. Eating most of her meal on top of his own had turned out to be, like most of his ideas these days, a lousy one. When was he going to stop lunging around so clumsily, mistaking appetites for inspirations? His bitter memories, his clenched intestinal tract, the very drift and sway of the plane—all channeled themselves now into one profound, unnameable emotion. He reached across the seat and took the poor woman’s fingers in his own big sweat-damp palm. “Is that why you travel so much? Because it’s too painful to stay home without him?”
“I told you, I travel on missions. So that someday when my granddaughter asks me what did you do when so many people were dying, I should have an answer.” She smiled at him coolly and reclaimed her hand. “Why do you travel so much? To make passes at widows and eat all their food?”
“Hey, I’m just being friendly. I’m a married man, for god’s sake.”
“Yes, I know about married men.” She was, he saw from her face, only teasing; he’d not offended but amused her. He appeared to have lost the ability to give offense. And he used to be so good at it too. “A woman traveling alone meets many married gentlemen along the way. I see what they are like, when they are between destinations.”
“What are they like?”
“Vulnerable,” she said. “So many stories and confessions. Everyone shares their little heartbreaks.”
“Want to hear some of mine? I’ve got enough for a whole book.”
“Forgive me, but I think no one wants to read such a book, if I may be honest.”
“Oh sure, go ahead. Be as honest as you like.”
“Yes? Okay, then also,” she said, warming to the task, “that shirt you have? It should not be worn with those pants.”
He laughed. Was this to be his new life? Being insulted by people he didn’t know on the way to places he hadn’t been?
“Doesn’t your wife tell you these things? I would never let my husband on a plane in such clothes.”
“My wife and I, we weren’t quite on the same, uh, wavelength when I left. Not that she disapproves of this trip,” he added quickly. “In fact on some level she’s probably all for it.”
“Probably?”
“She’s not the easiest person to read,” Teddy conceded. “I’m the transparent one in the family, or so they tell me.”
“So this is why you’re running away?”
“Hey, I’m not running away. I’m running to. Can’t anyone tell the difference?” People nearby turned his way; it seemed all of a sudden he was shouting. “I’m going over to see my daughter,” he explained.
“Ah.”
“We’re not sure what she’s up to these days, but we’re worried. She’s been gone for a long time. She went on this junior year abroad to China.”
“But we are flying to Africa.”
“See, that’s the thing—her junior year was last year.” He sighed. It was a chore, talking to new people, making yourself understood. “She’s got the travel bug bad. She was supposed to come back after China, but she went to Thailand instead. Then Cambodia. Vietnam. Then Nepal, and India, and on and on. Now Africa. Typical Danielle: even when she fucks off, she finds a way to overachieve. Care for a Tums?”
“No thank you.”
“She’s off the grid, basically. We e-mail her every week, but it’s like shouting in a void.” He popped another antacid in his mouth, cracking the hard shell between his molars. “Maybe once a month she drops by an Internet café and writes a few lines. Then the power goes off because of a monsoon or whatever. Just saying hi. And oh, by the way, she’s not coming back to school this year after all. Did she ever let them know this down at the Bronx borough president’s office to which she’d made a good-faith commitment? No. Did she get in touch with her suitemates at NYU so she has a room to come back to? No. Did she make contact with the administration office or the financial aid people or her academic adviser or anyone whatsoever to let them know her plans? No. Hasn’t had time. She’s too busy unwinding, see. That’s her word, unwinding. Which turns out to be code, by the way, for getting loaded on ecstasy and tooling around the beach in a sarong, while some horny Israeli guy just out of the army makes you his love slave. Why not just stay in college? It would have been easier and cheaper all around.”
“Sometimes a child needs to get lost,” his companion observed with irritating serenity. “Otherwise they never learn to find their own way.”
“I thought that’s what junior year abroad was for. You go to some other country and hang out in strange bars getting drunk with people who speak another language. But you don’t go abroad from going abroad. It’s like answering a question with a question.”
“Maybe your daughter likes being off this grid of yours. Maybe she’s found a new grid she likes better.”
“Yeah. That’s what we’re afraid of.”
Gloomily he peeled off another Tums, studying his reflection in the black window.
“And Africa?”
“Africa.” He shuddered; the word, even now, conjured in him a strangeness. He thought of all the explorers he’d read, all the times he’d lain on the carpet down in his basement gym, gazing up at the map, at that huge, top-heavy continent shaped like a question mark. “Christ knows. We’re still piecing it together. My wife thinks it has to do with the boyfriend.” He sighed. “She says she misses us. I mean, that got us worried, let me tell you.”
“Please, take a Kleenex. Your head is perspiring a great deal.”
“It is?” He wiped his forehead; sure enough, the tissue came back inlaid with beads of sweat. The pressure gauge in his forehead was oscillating wildly. He eyed the plastic vomit bag in the seatback in front of him with real seriousness of purpose. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me, I can’t seem to digest things anymore.”
“You must be careful. You are not someone who should travel by himself, I don’t think. Especially outside the capital.”
“You’re probably right.”
“If not your daughter, then I suggest you arrange for a guide. There are many guides now. You can find them outside all the hotels. So many important people coming to Africa these days for their special and unique experience. One week they tour around, maybe two. Then pfft—time to go home and raise awareness.”
“That’s kind of cynical, isn’t it? At least they’re over here trying.”
“Yes, you Americans like to try, don’t you? Trying is good, you say. Trying is almost doing.”
“Well, it’s better than not trying.”
“Is it?” Her gaze turned dry. “In what way?”
“All I mean is, who doesn’t want a special experience, when they’ve come so far? I know I do.”
“Perhaps you will have one then. But are you in condition for such a thing? You look so white in the face.”
“Don’t worry about me. I’m fine.”
Except was it possible to be perfectly fine and also not fine in the least? For all the reading Teddy had done, he was still new to the practicalities and procedures of the exploration business. Still given to rookie mistakes. He had, for example, according to the guidebook, somehow managed to pack the wrong shoes (loafers), the wrong luggage (suitcase), the wrong soap (Ivory), the wrong money (cash), and, he was increasingly certain, the wrong malaria pills entirely. He knew they were the wrong malaria pills because they appeared to be giving him malaria, not protecting him from it. But maybe that was how the pills were supposed to work: inversely, like a vaccine. A little dose of the thing you feared, to ward off the larger one.
For that matter he’d probably got the wrong vaccinations too. He was no doctor. He’d been in a hurry to get out, and the guidelines were ambiguous on the subject.
“Entirely your call,” Dr. Wainwright, who was a doctor, had told him back in Carthage. “I’ve checked the CDC guidelines. With the yellow fever, it depends how far out of the city you go.”
“I don’t know how far out I’ll go.”
“Then it’s difficult to advise you,” Wainwright said.
“Tell me, does the shot hurt?”
“A three-inch syringe needle in your arm? Of course it hurts.”
“And are there side effects to such a shot?”
“Of course there are side effects.”
“Like what?”
Thoughtfully, or with the appearance of thought, Wainwright leaned back in his chair, stroking the clefts of his angular chin. As Teddy himself used to do, chatting with some miscreant student in his office at school. Back when he still had an office. Back when he still had a school. “Death, principally.”
“You’re saying death is one of the side effects?”
“No, I’m saying death is the principal side effect.”
“And if I don’t get the shot—”
“That’s entirely your call.”
“If I don’t get the shot, and I wind up contracting yellow fever over there after all—what are the side effects of that?”
“Death, principally,” said that smug and mordant internist. He was beginning to really enjoy himself, no question.
“No others?”
To which Wainwright, his patience now exhausted, said, “How many others do you need?”
Nonetheless, if it was possible to feel nauseated and apprehensive and borderline malarial in a good way, that was Teddy’s condition at this moment, hurtling toward the Horn of Africa in a cramped, juddering box. It was more or less how he’d felt in the back of the police cruiser last summer, being carted off to jail in the middle of the night. All messy and new. A raw, bloody hatchling peering through the shards of his shell. At least this time he wasn’t going to be locked up when he arrived, he thought. Whether he’d be locked up when he returned was of course another story, a story he preferred not to read.
Meanwhile the seat-belt light had now chimed on. The engines were slowing, the plane banking into a slow, languid turn. His seatmate gathered her books together and stowed them into her carry-on bag. Then she took one last sip of her bottled water and screwed the lid shut.
Light came blasting off the wings. Below, unfolding like a carpet, lay the crescent coastline of Alexandria.
They circled over the bleached sprawl of the city. Tall minarets, spindly and lean, shimmered in the heat. There were fine hotels, citadels, and palaces with enormous gardens. Canals snaked out from the city center, writhing toward the outlying terraces of the suburbs, which were wrapped in a haze of dust. The Mediterranean was slipping away behind them, falling back into the clouds. Europe and all its artifices were fading fast, a dream they’d woken from and forgotten.
Beyond the last houses, the land looked parched, uninhabitable. Dust devils whirled across the hills. The saline in the soil glittered like frost.
He recalled a line from Burton: the sand softer than a bed of down. Well, it didn’t look soft from up here. But fortunately he didn’t want softness. He wanted things hard. And now he would get them. Once he crossed into the interior he’d be on his own, like any other nomad—wandering and exposed, looking for signs. The sands like a blank page unfurled below. You could make all the marks on it you wanted, he thought. Soon they too would be erased.
Now they were descending in earnest. Hydraulics groaned in the plane’s big belly. People were pushing up their tray tables, stowing away their trash. The seats shuddered and bucked. Teddy gripped the armrests. His seatmate closed her eyes. “Now this part I can do without,” she said.
“Me too.”
“It’s good we met. I will pray for you. That you have a good and productive journey.”
“Oh, you needn’t bother,” he said. “I’m sure it’ll go fine.”
“I am sure too. But prayer you see is never a bother.”
Some low, ringing note in her voice made Teddy examine her more closely. Then he saw it. The silver cross dangling at her neck, on its slim, immaculate thread.
I’ll be damned, he thought.
The plane went on lowering itself through the clouds. Dutifully the runway, a good host, rose up to greet them, to extend its smooth and welcoming services. Palm leaves fluttered in the wind. The ground sat baking in the sun, hot and red like the inside of a kiln. He watched his life scud by in wisps like so much exhaust. Soon they were right in the thick of it, and nothing could be seen through the white glare of the window, at least nothing he could name.
It was true his plans had been conceived in a great rush; many crucial details remained unresolved. For instance, after that one brief, bewildering phone call, he’d never heard back from Danielle. Whether she’d received his e-mails telling her of his plans, whether she’d be waiting for him at the airport, whether she’d be happy to see him, he had no way of knowing. And now it was too late: he was coming anyway.
He wasn’t going to apologize either. Did a lion, tromping through the bush to retrieve a missing cub, apologize? No, you heard a cry in the darkness and you went to it at once. That was the natural order of things. How a family—a species—endured. He looked around at his fellow passengers. The handsome and good-humored Egyptians with their shiny complexions, the slender, almond-eyed Ethiopians. Surely their children would be waiting for them at the airport. Surely their children understood that when you’ve been in the air a long time, all you wanted was to be greeted at the gate by a loved one who was glad to see you, to absolve you of your weariness and worry. Even if you went on to fight with them a lot later, which you inevitably would.
Danielle, God knew, was no stranger to fighting. She was fierce and taut, high-pitched as an E-string; no feats of shrillness or antagonism were beyond her. Where fighting was concerned, genetics had doubly blessed her, with her mother’s rhetorical skill and her father’s gross and blundering need.
So there would be plenty of fighting. Fortunately Teddy didn’t mind fighting. He didn’t even mind losing. It was the intensity he relished, not the winning. Just letting fly.
Well, he was flying now. He had both seats to himself: his seatmate had deplaned in Alexandria, having put together a little medical kit for him before she left, a Baggie stuffed with cipro tablets, multivitamins, and tiny sachets of antibacterial hand soap. Maybe when you’re born-again or whatever she was, you no longer required so much in the way of protection yourself. She’d said a quick, impersonal good-bye, and marched off down the aisle in her plain flat shoes, her suitcase rattling behind her on its tiny wheels like a compliant pet. Then she disappeared through the hatch, off to another ruined quadrant of the world.
Teddy looked down at the Nile, a ribbon of blue in its brilliant emerald-green basin—the river of destiny, the Egyptians called it—wending its way through the silted ocher of the Sudan. In Khartoum the great river split in two: the White Nile, gray as nonfat milk, forking south to Uganda, while the Blue Nile, which was in fact blue, bent east toward the Horn. But wait, he thought: that had to be wrong. The Nile tributaries didn’t split in Khartoum, but merged there, became one, and flowed toward the sea.
All the great explorers, Burton and Speke, Stanley and Baker and Grant, had documented this. They’d come ashore in Zanzibar and tracked the river north, following its hidden sources, the inland seas and underground reservoirs where it fed and steeped. He was all turned around, upside down. He couldn’t follow in their footsteps: he could only parody them, reverse them. Well, maybe reversal for some people was a kind of progress, he thought.
Anyway what did it matter? The paths had all been laid. The maps were long since full; no new worlds to explore. There are guides everywhere now. He had come too late. The age of imperial expansion was over. Now downgrades and deflations were in effect. What had once been a grand, heroic vocation was now a mere vacation, a holiday package wrapped with a bow. Duty-free. All those small, expensive comforts for sale at the airport—the headphones, the neck-rests, the portable game players, the downloadable language discs. Yes, they knew how to package the exotic these days, how to make it circumscribed and safe for people like him. And doubtless there were a lot of such people.
He reached for another Tums and cracked it hard between his jaws. Who was he kidding? He was no demonic romantic hero, no Richard Burton or T. E. Lawrence. He was only another amateur, chubby, middle-aged escapist with a camera around his neck and a virtual ticket.
The light was waning in the windows, the jet banking its way east now, over thorny stubbled mountains and highland plateaus. Not a soul in sight. He could feel the Horn out there like a magnet, drawing him forward by invisible current. Or was it backward? Back to the cradle, the primordial rift. The ancestral home.
Danielle was down there somewhere too. A child who’d chosen to get lost.
He rubbed his eyes. Calcified particles of sleep-stuff flaked out from the corners. How many hours had he been flying? It had begun to feel like one long, biblical day. He looked down at the hands of his watch, revolving in random circles. Useless. He took the thing off and stuck it deep in his pocket with his cell phone and keys and American coins, all those useless personal items he’d need to stash away when he arrived.
“Daddy, you’re here! My God…”
Tears sprang into Teddy’s eyes. All at once, with the familiar mass and musk of his daughter against him (her face burrowed in his chest, her hair, thick and unruly and rust-colored like his, tickling his neck), his exhaustion fled, the clenched fist in his stomach relaxed its grip. The whole trip was redeemed. Certified in advance. He clutched her close, inhaling the clean damp scent of her scalp, like some distilled essence of being. His entire life as a father of children clicked snugly into place and whirred away at the center of his chest like a pacemaker. Daddy’s here. My God.
Oh, you weren’t supposed to have favorites, he knew that, but of course everyone did, and this one (he’d never admitted it to himself until this moment; possibly it had never been true until this moment) was his. With this one everything came easy. This one was the outgoer, the live wire, the girl whose moods could be read on her face, who did not require a licensed psychotherapist or a Turing machine to decode. Unlike Mimi, she seemed to recognize and approve of him naturally. She had got to him first, known him when he was less uptight, less constrained—she’d adopted what was best in him and let the rest go. He could feel her bones thudding softly against him through the damp, sticky place where their shirts conjoined. Her arms were leaner than he remembered, tougher, more sinewy. Her time abroad for all its mysteries and deferrals had solidified her, rendered down the last of her baby fat. Now she was that most formidable creature, a grown woman. So he held on tight.
Every man who embraces a woman becomes Adam, trembling with gratitude that he’s no longer alone. That was how Teddy felt now. Like an exiled king reclaiming his throne. It was a moment to savor, all right. A moment to deposit in the memory bank against future withdrawals. Because really, how long could it last? Love for parents was a raging stream; for children there were dams and pools, and slippery stones, and little frothy resentments that piled up along the banks. Already she was beginning to squirm, take the first halting steps in an away-from-Dad direction. Soon she would break his hold. Soon like all fathers he’d be forced to let go.
“Hey, you’re not crying, are you?” She pulled back to get a better look. “Your eyes look a little funny.”
“It must be the lights.”
“Bright, aren’t they? They just redid the terminal. It used to be pretty dreary here they tell me.” Above their heads, across the vaulted ceiling, the white girders gleamed. It was an impressive structure, much airier and more modern than he’d expected. He felt obscurely disappointed. “They’ve been sprucing up the place, you know. For the millennium celebration.”
“The millennium? But that was over a long time ago.”
“It’s a different calendar here,” she said. “Technically they’re seven years behind us.”
“Ah.”
Other passengers were surging up behind them, red-eyed and intent, getting on with the arrival business as in any old airport. Unlike any old airport however the duty-free shop was empty, the currency-exchange dark, and there were no benches or chairs arranged in companionable clusters for an overweight, travel-weary person with a frayed meniscus to rest. Just as well: the brigade of lean, smooth-faced boy-soldiers smoking and smirking behind the Passport Control desk did not look tolerant of loiterers. Automatic rifles were slung casually at their hips. AK-47s? AK-48s? For all he knew they were Uzis. Well, they had their battles to fight, he supposed, and he had his. A cry had sounded in the darkness. The lion in winter was padding out on his big soft paws, in search of his pride.
And here she was. His honor girl, his A student, his lead singer. She gave him one last squeeze, then broke their embrace for good. “Wait,” she said, “why are you here?”
“You called, didn’t you? It’s been so long. Your mother and I were concerned.”
“I didn’t say you should come though.”
“Listen, I needed the trip. Christ but it’s wonderful to see you, Danny. I can’t tell you how much.”
“Well,” she said warily, “it’s nice to see you too. Let’s go get your bag.”
Down at the baggage claim, they stood side by side as the first massive suitcases tumbled onto the revolving belt. Danielle, with her mussed hair, peasant blouse, and thin, balloony cargo pants, looked like what she was—a college kid rousted half-willingly from bed. The toes that poked out from her flip-flops were long-nailed, discolored. A smell leaked from her armpits, musky and warm, not entirely pleasant. From the sideways look she kept giving him, she did not seem too impressed by his appearance either. “What?” he said. “What are you looking at?”
“Wow.” She rose on tiptoe, cupping his ears in her hands to inspect his shorn scalp. “Mimi wrote me about this. I thought she was kidding.”
“The new me. What do you think?”
“You look like a decrepit monk. That’s what I think. Plus it’s coming in all gray. What on earth were you thinking?”
“It’s hard to explain. It’s like one day you wake up and you’re in a box, and the only way to get out is to punch a hole in yourself. Go to war with yourself. Does that make any sense?”
“No,” she said. “But let’s face it, you were never big on impulse control, were you?”
She was speaking of him elegiacally, he thought, as if he were dead, a casualty of the oedipal wars, her long struggle to emerge from his shadow. Maybe he was. If so, it would explain this weightless, limbo-like sensation he’d been experiencing since he’d stepped off the plane.
Suitcases came wobbling by. None of them were his. Danielle stood beside him, radiating intermittent warmth. He had to restrain himself from pushing the hair off her cheek, an old habit, and curling it around her ear. He knew she’d flinch and move away. That was an old habit too.
“Well, it’ll grow back.” He made a point of looking in the direction of the luggage belt when he added, “I’m glad to hear you and Mimi have been writing each other. I didn’t know.”
“You weren’t supposed to. It’s none of your business.”
“I guess not.”
“What’s with this fugitive-from-justice stuff? What kind of trouble are you in back there anyway? Mimi says you’re the big buzz around town.”
“You know what small towns are like. People always gossip. It releases tension. Otherwise they’d get bored and have to become fugitives themselves.” He scanned the belt for his luggage. “You should hear how they talk about you.”
“I’ll bet.”
“You dropped out of college. You’re on drugs in Ladakh. You’re pregnant in Burma. You’re getting a sex change in Bangkok. You had a psychotic episode on the streets of Mumbai and had to be institutionalized against your will. And those are just the rumors I’ve spread about you personally.”
“I’m not coming back, Daddy,” she said, unamused. “Let’s get that straight right off.”
“Fine, fine. We’ll talk about it later.”
“No, I want to be clear right now, so there’s no misunderstanding. I’m staying. You can’t make me go back.”
“Settle down, Danny. No one’s making anybody do anything.”
“You’re here, aren’t you? It’s obvious what you and Mom are thinking.”
“Don’t be too quick to decide what Mom and I are thinking. We think all kinds of things we never act on.”
“Well, not me,” she said, pulling herself up straight. “I try to act on the things I believe. Maybe if you guys acted on what you believe, you’d be happier people.”
“Spare me the nineteen-year-old profundity, okay? I had a long flight.”
“Look, no offense, but no one told you to come. And I’m not nineteen, I’m twenty, remember? I turned twenty this year.”
“See, this is what I’m talking about,” he said, though in fact he was not sure he’d been talking about this at all. Nor could he have said with any certainty what this was. “A tree falls in the forest, and no one hears.”
“Plenty of people heard, believe me. We were in Annapurna. We threw this big rave for everyone at the teahouse, and Gabi made this incredible lemon cake with coconut frosting. His mom e-mailed him the recipe. You use rice flour, see, instead of regular.”
“The famous Gabi. Where is he, by the way? I’m eager to meet him.”
“That must be yours.” She pointed to his enormous potbellied suitcase, teetering drunkenly toward them on the revolving belt. She swooped it up before he could stop her. “Oof. How long are you planning on staying?”
“You were the one who said go to Costco. I got a hundred and fifty bucks’ worth of eyedrops and chewable vitamins in there. I could hardly fit them in the suitcase.”
“You should have let Mom deal with it. She’d have known how to pack.”
“Yeah, well, Mom was busy. She’s famously busy, as you know.”
In response to which Danielle’s brow crinkled up like foil. The radar of filial loyalty kept sweeping in circles. She may have been his favorite but he was not altogether certain he was hers.
“Here,” he said, grabbing at the suitcase, “I’ll take that.”
“I have it.” He marked the first sandpaper rasp of annoyance in her voice. First he’d presumed to appear in her life; now he was trying to take charge. Her dark eyes flashed; her plump lips pouted. Sometimes you had to go to war against your family too, wrestle with your fate like Jacob and the angel. And Danielle was a formidable adversary. She had her parents’ height, her mother’s shrewd, assertive gaze, and her father’s beakish and implausible nose. The rest of her was a combat zone in which his genes and Gail’s had skirmished to a draw. All the bone baskets of their ancestors lay sunken in her flesh. He stared at her now as if communing with their spirits, the living and the dead.
“God, Daddy, you’re not going to cry again, are you?”
“It’s just that you’re so skinny,” he complained. “Where in the world have you gone?”
“Hey, I’m right here.” Her voice was gentle but firm; she might have been talking to a child, or a blind man, or an imbecile. “I’m right here, and you’re right here with me. So let’s get going, what do you say?”
“I’ve got going. I’ve been going for a while now.”
“Mmm.” She patted the suitcase between them. “So I’ve heard.”
Outside the terminal he sniffed the air like a dog, reading it for news. So this was Africa, he thought. He’d readied himself for adverse weather, for blazing sunlight and tropical heat—looked forward to it even—but the sun had gone down hours before, and the air was cool and dry. A mild scent, like the smell of cough drops, floated down from the foothills. He followed Danielle to the curb, where a dumpy blue car waited in idle, belching out smoke.
“Look who I found,” she said.
A young man in a windbreaker sat behind the driver’s seat, talking on his cell phone. He gave Teddy a cursory glance, then shouldered open the door and got out. He was tall and lean, severe-looking, with a sparse mustache and an even sparser soul patch at the bottom of his jaw. Above his indrawn cheeks the eyes sloped and spread, like the eyes you saw painted on sarcophagi in museums. The phone in his long hand looked like a toy.
Now he snapped it closed and said agreeably to Danielle, “Hello, my mother.”
“Dad, Yohannes. Yohannes, Dad.”
“Excuse me,” Yohannes said, “but I hear of you many times. Mr. Teddy. The schoolmaster.”
“Ex-schoolmaster,” Teddy said, shaking hands.
“Ex?” Danielle looked at him skeptically.
“Long story.” He reached for the passenger-side door. “Should we get going?”
“No, no, please,” Yohannes said, “you must sit in the back, Mr. Teddy. You are very old.”
“The hell I am.” Irritated, he ducked into the backseat. He may have been old, but he felt like a child, sitting back there with his legs folded, his knees up close to his face. “Listen, go ahead and call me Teddy, will you? Or Ted. Or Mr. Hastings. That’s fine too.”
“Yes, of course, I will call you what you wish,” Yohannes said, gunning the engine into drive. “So not to disturb your mind.”
“Too late for that,” Danielle muttered. They careened around the rotary and onto the main road. She turned back to look at her father. “Bravo, by the way.”
“What?”
“He’s doing us both a favor, picking you up at the airport. And it took you, what, twenty seconds to insult the man three different ways?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. He likes me, I can tell.”
“Correction. He respects you. Because of your age. All he meant was the backseat’s more comfortable. But now that you’ve chewed his head off for no reason, being respected won’t be much of a problem.”
“Why does everyone keep talking about how old I am? I’m not that old.”
“For Africa you are. They don’t live as long around here as we do.”
“I’m not surprised. Look at this road. Look at this car. A Lada!”
“So?”
“So you know how they make these things? They take the worst parts from a Fiat and stick them in the body of a Yugo.”
“Please stop shouting, Daddy. You’re making everybody nervous.”
“Just trying to be heard above the engine noise.” Chastened, he looked out the window. Here he’d only just arrived, and already he was getting on her nerves. Family, he thought: what a project. “Why does he call you ‘my mother’?”
“Yohannes? Who knows? I guess it’s from my work with the babies. He’s concluded I have a maternal temperament.” She tilted the rearview mirror so she could watch herself fix back her hair with a scrunchie. “Shocked?”
“Not so much.”
“Well, I am. The more time I spend here, the more I keep surprising myself. It turns out there are all these sides of me nobody’s ever seen. Not even me.”
Teddy nodded. He was a little bored by this self-absorption of hers, this new fascination with the twists and turns of her own intrepid consciousness. How tiresome young people were when they started analyzing themselves. How much reassurance they required. Thrilled as he’d been to see her at the airport, he’d almost have preferred to be alone right now, learning his own lessons, making his own mistakes.
The buildings whizzed by. Danielle, giving Yohannes directions, draped her left arm proprietarily over his headrest. She had been a loner in high school, studious, self-propelled, but now she appeared to be accumulating friendships at a prodigious rate. Teddy himself was going the other way. Traveling light. His life was all he had. He was so tired of it, he could hardly keep his eyes open. Through a haze of woodsmoke he looked out at the palm trees, the billboards, the tin-roofed shanties, the unlit signs with obscure messages. It was as if they were moving and he were standing still. Those few streetlights that worked did so dimly; in their pale glow, the mounds of trash heaped on the sidewalks looked shadowy, menacing. Only later, settling into bed at the hotel, would it occur to him that they were human beings.
Meanwhile the car rocked along the cratered streets, its shocks jostling and squealing like accordion tones. “Babies?” he asked dreamily after a while. “What babies?”
“Never mind,” Danielle said. “You’ll meet them tomorrow. Here’s your hotel.”
“I’m not staying with you?”
“Oh, God, no.” She laughed so immediately and with such bitter amusement it almost spared him from injury. Almost. “Besides, you’ll be more comfortable here. It’s not the best in the city—that would be the Sheraton—but I thought you might like to stay in an African establishment. Go native, right?”
“Sure,” he said without enthusiasm. “Why not?”
“Also it’s really cheap. I figured you’d like that too. With your reduced income these days and all.”
“Very considerate.”
They turned into the narrow alley that led to the hotel. Some boys who’d been lounging invisibly on the sidewalk now sprang to their feet, shouting and running alongside the car, pounding on the hood. Yohannes ignored them. He shot up the driveway and pulled to the curb. “What’s that they were yelling?” Teddy asked.
“Farenji,” Danielle said. “Basically it means ‘white person.’”
“And is that a compliment or an insult?”
“A little of both. Better get used to it, you’ll hear it a lot around here.”
She paused, waiting for Yohannes to ease himself out of the driver’s seat and go around to release the trunk. “I’ll walk you in.”
“What about the bags? Will Yohannes get them?”
“He’s not a servant, Daddy. He’s my friend. They’ll send a porter for your bags.”
The lobby of the hotel was simple and clean. Polished wood, mirrored walls, slate floors. Teddy handed over his gold card and waited for the receipt. Danielle said something in Amharic to the desk clerk; both of them laughed. She’d been living in this country for what, two or three months, and here she was talking the language. But the young were like that, it seemed, freakishly proficient. Their inexperience only emboldened them. Stumbling into a strange room, they entered like lords and made themselves at home. The old of course were another story.
Suddenly, weary as he was, he was reluctant to let the girl go. “Stay with me,” he said, “just for tonight. They can bring in a cot.”
“No thanks. You snore, and I need my sleep. I’ll be back in the morning. We’ll have breakfast.” She hugged him again, briefly this time, with more air between them. “Night, Dads.”
“Night.”
“Tomorrow you’ll come to my place for dinner. I’ve turned into a good cook, you know. Mom’ll be, like, shocked. Hey, let’s call her tomorrow, okay? I haven’t talked to her in a long time. She’s probably pissed, huh?”
“She’ll get over it. She’s pretty forgiving as a rule. So am I.”
“I know.”
Oh, he was ready to forgive her everything, he thought, even this silly, transparent need of hers to shock her parents. Let the shocks come. They’d been taking shocks for years. Soon they might deliver a shock or two of their own. “I tried to call her from London, you know. When I changed planes. But no one was home.”
“She probably turned the phone off when she went to sleep. Doesn’t she do that when you’re not around?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I’m usually around.”
But of course Danielle usually wasn’t. Not anymore. As if to underscore the point, she was already skipping away, out to the curb, where the car was idling, and where Yohannes was talking on his cell phone again to some insomniac or other, waiting to get home.