Waking in darkness, he had no idea where he was, who he was, even that he was. He’d been deep in night’s well; he’d lost hold of the ropes that bound him to the surface. He blinked and stretched. The unshared bed seemed far too large; with all his bulk, he seemed to barely occupy it.
Outside, the drone of a siren. The sound had woken him, he realized. Some kind of alarm or emergency signal. Were they under attack? He remembered the soldiers at the airport. The travel advisories, the embassy postings. Armed conflicts were in progress all around the Horn. Somalia, Eritrea, Sudan. And those were only the ones you heard about. Doubtless there were others.
Slipping from bed, he padded barefoot to the window and drew back the curtains. What he expected to find he wasn’t sure—something like Jericho, he supposed. But the view told him nothing. The sky was oatmeal gray, sodden with mist. The ghostly silhouettes of banana trees swayed over the rooftops. Across the street two skeletal office towers leaned precariously against their bamboo scaffolding, listing in the wind. The window shuddered in its frame. The siren wailed on, insistent, like a tape in an endless loop.
Maybe he was dead, Teddy thought, and this noisy droning limbo was his afterlife. If so, it wasn’t much of an improvement.
He got down on his hands and knees. No point letting his body go to seed just because he was halfway around the world, jet-lagged and exhausted and under assault by some great, powerful voice he did not comprehend. But he’d forgotten the altitude. The push-ups left him dizzy, light-headed; the crunches stole his breath. After a while he lay on his back, inhaling whatever ancient dusts resided in the carpet as he waited for his heart to stop juddering in his chest. At last it was quiet. The room, the very world, seemed a vast, expectant place.
He went into the bathroom, showered and shaved, used the last of his mineral water to brush his teeth, and evacuated his bowels explosively. Then he came out in his boxer shorts with his hair still dripping and sat down on the bed to wait. It was not yet six. He heard voices stirring in the other rooms, footsteps thudding across the ceiling. Every separation between himself and other people seemed provisional, arbitrary. He wondered what Gail was doing at this moment. He was so many hours ahead of her now, it seemed impossible to reconcile their schedules.
His first day abroad, and the intrepid explorer was already homesick.
He picked up the remote and turned on the television. There was no signal.
“Oh, that,” Danielle said over breakfast. “Yeah, the call to prayer. It’s pretty intense.”
“Christ, I thought I was going out of my mind. You’re telling me you wake up to that every morning?”
She nodded. “The mosques have these huge amplifiers now. State-of-the art. It comes blasting out five times a day. For some reason morning’s always the loudest though.”
“And no one complains?”
“Only the tourists.” She smiled. “You’ll get used to it, Daddy. Everyone does. You’d be surprised what you get used to here.”
“I’m already surprised.”
They were sitting in the hotel dining room, eating cold eggs and toast, pale wedges of melon. The coffee was so good he was happy just for that, just to make contact with the real thing for a change, bitter and strong, close to the source. He drank it down black. Never mind that his stomach was rioting like a cellblock; he motioned to the waitress for more. A solemn-faced woman in traditional dress, she bent toward him shyly with her metal pitcher and smiled, as if nothing gave her greater pleasure than serving breakfast foods to white people from a rolling cart.
“Stop gawking, will you?” Danielle said when she’d gone. “They’re not that beautiful.”
“Come now. They most certainly are.”
“Okay, you’re right, they are. They’re absolutely gorgeous. Especially that one there.” Her eyes followed the path of a waitress at the far end of the room. “See that blue tattoo around her throat? She’s a Mursi. From the south. Supposedly the Queen of Sheba had a tattoo just like that.”
“Very fetching. Maybe you should get one.”
“Please,” Danielle snapped. “I hate it when people swoop in and start appropriating signifiers like that out of all cultural context. It’s so ignorant.”
“I was only kidding, Danny.” Signifiers, he thought. Good Christ. For a change he was almost glad she’d dropped out of college, or whatever she called this little impromptu sabbatical of hers. “Aren’t you eating? This fruit’s delicious.”
“Not hungry.” She was still steaming.
“Fine, I’ll have it.”
“People are so stupid.” He remembered this now, the girl’s righteous, ranting streak, her fast burn. Another genetic gift he’d bequeathed her. Once she got started there was no dialing her down. “There was this girl I met in Nepal, she had one of those Chinese-character thingies on her shoulder? Totally hideous. She thought it meant ‘dragon.’ Except then she actually went to China, and guess what? It really meant ‘roof.’ And it wasn’t even Chinese—it was Japanese.”
“That’s just the sort of thing Mimi would do,” he reflected sadly.
“Leave Mimi alone. She’ll be fine.” Danielle had a way of drawing herself up and baring her neck when she was concentrating, like a bird alert to danger. She was doing so now. “Tell me about this cancer thing. It was just a false alarm, right? I mean you’re okay, bottom line. Healthy as a bull and all that.”
“Are you asking me or telling me?”
Now they were both annoyed.
“I don’t have cancer,” he said. “I had what might have turned into cancer, or might not have. Nobody’s sure. For all I know it still might. Or might not. In other words I’m about where most people my age are.”
“Clueless?”
“In the middle. Somewhere between okay and scared to death. Above all, in no mood to waste any more time.”
“Aren’t you wasting time right now though? Playing hooky like this in the middle of the school year?”
“Not at all. So far, so good. Being here makes me feel closer.”
“Closer to what?”
Sipping his coffee, he hesitated. There seemed a thousand names for it. No one of them successfully made the journey, however, from his mind to his mouth.
“To bottom lines, let’s say.”
“Dear old Dad.” She shook her head and signaled for the check. “Well, if it’s bottom lines you want, I can show you some. You may not like them so much as you think.”
“So where’s this famous Gabi of yours, anyway?” They stood out on the sidewalk in front of the hotel, waiting for Yohannes. The air had a faint blue cast; it smelled of dirt and woodsmoke and diesel fumes. “When am I going to finally meet him?”
“That depends.”
“Depends on what?”
“Oh, you know—” Her eyes flickered away; her face went stony. “On how close hell is to freezing over, basically.”
Teddy reached for her hand. She conceded it without a fight.
“We were on this train to Asmara,” she said. “There was this Italian girl, Giulia? She was sitting across the aisle, all tits and big hair and these really cool sunglasses. She was having some problem she said with the zipper on her backpack. At least she said it was on her backpack.”
“Poor Pumpkin.”
“You know what’s funny? He told me right away he wasn’t good at monogamy. And guess what? He was right.”
“Oh well, fuck him,” Teddy said. “I never liked the sound of the guy anyway.”
“I’ll tell you what he is good at, though. Getting women to be nice to him. He’s good at that.” She smiled bitterly. “His whole life, women’ve been cooking his meals and washing his boxers out in the sink and changing their lives around just to be near him and his famous charm and charisma. The gift of Gabi, I call it. Good one, huh?”
“You were always clever with words. All your teachers said so.”
“Yeah. Bully for me.” She looked down at her shirt with controlled distaste, as if she’d spilled something on it that might not come out. “What is it with guys anyway? Explain it to me. Why does it get old for you so fast?”
“It doesn’t get old for everyone, Danny. The thing to remember is, you’re still a very young girl. There’ll—”
“Don’t. I’m tired of being told how young I am. It’s not interesting. The only people who think it is are people like you, because you’re not.” Her face suddenly brightened. “Hey, look, here’s Yohannes. Right on time.”
They watched the little blue car shoot toward them up the driveway.
“See?” Teddy said. “A lot of men are faithful. You can’t write them all off.”
“His girlfriend kicks him out early in the mornings. Her husband works nights.”
“Ah.”
“Don’t look so disappointed. He’s a really great guy. Come on, old-timer, get in. Time for the grand tour.”
The streets of Addis, whatever else they might have been good for—begging, pissing, sleeping, herding goats and cattle—were no place to drive. The intersections, choked with cars and blue jitneys, were exercises in gridlock, the lane markings strictly for idealists. Buses wheezed and hissed like burdened beasts, lurching their way toward the curbs. Traffic signals dangled overhead like plastic fruit, ornamental but ignored. Any order to the flow of cars—any flow to the flow of cars—seemed accidental, haphazard. People poured out heedless into the streets. Men in cheap suit jackets, holding hands; tall women in bright skirts and heels; children in flip-flops—all took their chances, working their way fastidiously between the car bumpers and then pausing at the median strip, drowsy and impassive, to watch the cars whiz past like so many flies. Nothing disturbed their poise. They were the original people—the blameless Ethiopians, in Homer’s phrase—the source material for the entire species. They’d waited six million years already. Waited out the Stone Age, the Ice Age, the dynasties and jihads of the Middle Ages; waited out the Jesuits, the Italians, the Chosen One of God, the Emperor Haile Selassie I; waited out his assassin Mengistu and the thuggish Dergue. So a little car traffic wasn’t going to fluster them now.
Yohannes honked the horn perfunctorily to warn them off, then gunned the Lada out into the rotaries. He steered the wheel with one finger, like a tycoon in a Cadillac. This was not his real work, he’d let that be known. He was a filmmaker. To support his projects he ran a video store with his cousin Teshome and went on errands for the foreign NGO types who administered the orphanage. Sometimes he took the kids on field trips; that was how he’d met Danny. Mostly though, from what Teddy could see, he talked on the cell phone. He was doing so now.
Teddy turned to Danielle. “Is there always this much traffic?”
“What do you expect? It’s a city.” She waved a hand toward the windshield. “You remember cities, don’t you, Dad? Places that don’t have cows and cornfields, where you can actually go out and enjoy yourself?”
“I reckon I heard of them, all right,” he drawled drily.
“God, we’ve got to get you out of that ridiculous town. Really, it’s getting kind of pathetic, don’t you think? The same little stores, the same little people, everywhere you look. How do you even breathe?”
“It can be hard to breathe anywhere.” He reminded himself to do so now. It wasn’t easy, with the stink of the diesel fumes, and his daughter’s smug new habit of wielding her independence over him like a club. Plus he disliked sitting in the backseat. He could hardly see where he was going. “As I recall, you used to like that pathetic little town. You used to talk about getting married and having children and settling down in that pathetic little town, in fact.”
“I used to play with Barbies too.”
“No you didn’t. You never played with dolls. You had no interest in make-believe at all. No fantasy stuff, just facts. Like me.”
“God forbid.”
They drifted through the slummy, shapeless sprawl. Dusty unpaved alleys wound mazelike behind the shops. Jackhammers pounded at the sidewalks. Half the buildings were going up, the other half, stripped to cinder blocks and rebar skeletons, coming down. From where Teddy sat you could hardly tell the difference. He rubbed his eyes, watching the signs flick past. How mediocre and jerry-rigged it was, this business of human occupancy. Nissan, Mobil, Reebok, Fujifilm. Danielle was right, he thought, cities were cities: everywhere you went, the Esperanto of commerce prevailed.
She was still talking in the front seat, pointing out the sights. The monuments, the museums, the government buildings, the emperor’s palace. Endearing, the effort she was putting in, showing him around. If only he were a better tourist. If only he weren’t so tired, so crabby. She turned to face him. “Hey, still awake? You’re awful quiet back there all of a sudden.”
“Just thinking.”
“Should we go up to the mountains? There’s a nice view of the city from there.”
“It’s your town. Whatever you say.” Maybe it was the altitude, the jet lag. Something was lagging anyway. Ever since he’d woken that morning to the terror and monotony of the muezzin’s call, he’d felt sunken in apathy, buried in it like a seed.
They turned off the main road and began the slow laborious climb through the foothills. The air grew cooler. Bark came peeling off the trees in long faded strips. Soon the roads were no longer paved, and instead of sidewalks there were grooves in the earth, narrow drainage trenches that stank of sewage. Deep tire tracks lay etched in the dirt. Mongrel dogs loitered in sullen packs, short-haired and indolent, like skateboarders in front of a convenience store. A young girl came trudging toward them down the mountain, bent double under a staggering load of wood. Danielle pointed her out. “That’s what you smelled last night at the airport. Eucalyptus. Acacia too. About eighty pounds of it I’d say.”
“But she’s just a kid. Why isn’t she in school?”
“No reason. It’s just this little problem they have that gets in the way. Poverty, it’s called.” She examined the girl in the rearview mirror. “She’ll sell that load downtown on the sidewalk for ten birr a bundle. Then she’ll come back up here for more.”
“Is that legal?”
“No. But the cops are foxes in a henhouse. If they catch her, they may beat her, or rape her. Or both. Unless they’re sober, in which case they may just let her off with a bribe.”
“I thought you weren’t supposed to burn acacia wood. It’s supposed to be sacred.”
“Who says?”
“The Bible. And there’s the Osiris legend too.”
He could see she had no idea what he was talking about. They’d sent the girls to Unitarian Sunday school, ten grand a year, filled their heads at bedtime with the best world mythologies, and neither of them retained a thing.
“Osiris,” he said pointedly to Yohannes, “was a great Egyptian king. Until his brother conspired to kill him, unfortunately.”
“Is a shame,” Yohannes agreed. “Between brothers there must be love.”
“Yeah, well, this one had issues. What he did was, he had his best carpenters make a sarcophagus from acacia wood and cover it with rubies. He told his brother the king it was a magic box from the gods. Whoever fit inside it would live forever. The king, being your basic greedy excitable type, climbed right in. Wham! They threw down the lid and tossed him in the Nile.”
“Not one of your really sharp great Egyptian kings, was he,” Danielle said.
“Ha!” Yohannes snorted appreciatively. “Good trick! So this king he then dies?”
“Yes and no. See, Isis, the queen, gets wind of this, and goes down to the river, and there’s the sarcophagus, floating against the bank. Lo and behold, an acacia tree’s growing out of the wood. Isis takes this as a sign—the king’s still alive. So she fishes him out of the river, and then, and I don’t remember how this part goes exactly, but she gets herself pregnant somehow, and then the king dies for real, and she buries him way out in the desert where no one can find him, and the gods are so impressed by how well she’s handled the whole thing they make Osiris lord over the dead. And from then on, according to the myth, the wood of the acacia tree was supposed to be sacred.”
“Yeah, well, it’s sacred here too,” Danielle said. “They use it for cooking. And it’s girls like these who have to haul it around.”
“What about the men?”
“Good question.” Danielle playfully punched Yohannes on the shoulder. “What about the men?”
“Men is too busy.”
“See? Patriarchal society,” she said, “just like your story. The women do the dirty work and make all the magic, and the guys sit around partying and chewing khat. If the women stop working miracles, this place’ll fall apart. And how do the men pay them back? By giving them HIV they get from their girlfriends.”
“Not me,” Yohannes said. “Safe sex. Safe sex only.”
“Yeah, right,” she said. “Famous last words.”
After lunch, Teddy was hoping to nap for a while and restore his strength. But it seemed Danielle had other business. They drove along the city’s western outskirts; to his eyes they were indistinguishable from the eastern outskirts. The same fetid streets lined with the same corrugated-tin shanties, everything jumbled together like worms in a bait box. People kept turning to look at him as they drove past, as if the paleness of his face were an advertisement for something. He had no idea what.
At last they pulled into the driveway of a square, high-walled compound. To signal their arrival Yohannes honked the horn twice. It appeared to be his favorite mode of expression.
“Where are we?” Teddy asked.
“I thought you’d like to see where your daughter spends her days. Give me a sec, I’ll go see what’s happening.”
She leaped out, slammed the door behind her, and slipped through the blue iron gate. The girl was as impatient with petty delays as he was. Good. He sat there scratching a bug bite on his elbow. Yohannes fiddled with the radio dial, skipping from station to station. Banana palms fluttered in the invisible breeze, nodding like chess players. Atop the whitewashed walls, shards of colored glass glittered in the sunlight like costume jewelry. You could do some damage to yourself, he thought, trying to force your way in here.
Meanwhile Yohannes had now found his desired music. He drummed on the dash with the flat of his palm. In the rearview mirror his eyes could be seen, bulbous and inquisitive, checking out the Leica around his passenger’s neck. “Your camera, Mr. Teddy. How much will it cost?”
“I don’t remember. It’s just your basic thirty-five millimeter. Here, try it out.”
“For me digital is better.” Yohannes hefted it in his hands. “Lighter to carry. But this looks quite good also,” he added charitably.
“Danielle tells me you’re in the movie business.”
The driver’s eyebrows lifted affirmatively in the mirror. “Yes, I and my brother. We are planning an action film now. Big scale. Good guys against terrorists. Prostitutes with golden hearts.”
“Sounds like a hit.”
“There will be many impressive explosions, you may be certain of that. In Ethiopia we like these films very much.”
“Americans too.”
“I like to go to America someday,” Yohannes said. “But it is very difficult to get the exit visa. Many people in Ethiopia will like to go to America.”
“Well, I’m sure there are many Americans who’d like to come to Ethiopia too.”
“So?” Yohannes snorted, incredulous. “I think they must be crazy people. The political situation in our country is very nasty. We are in danger all the time. When we shut our eyes, we are afraid.”
“Oh, we’re used to that.”
“Last year the police arrive, and I am taken from my bed in the night and beaten in the kidneys until I bleed.” Yohannes eyed him skeptically in the rearview. “Surely you do not mean in America you are used to this?”
“No, you’re right. Our fear is different.” The bite on Teddy’s elbow was itching miserably. Could he have caught yellow fever already? “But if no one likes this government of yours, how does it manage to stay in power? I thought you guys had a democracy over here.”
“Ah. But you must ask yourself this same thing. Who benefits for our government to be so militaristic? Who is the one who gives to our government the billions of dollars in development projects and aid funds? And why? So we will kill Muslims for you.”
“But you still want to come.”
“Yes, of course.” Yohannes sighed; the issue seemed too complex to explain. Then, as if savoring the taste of some fresh inspiration, his heart-shaped lips pursed thoughtfully. “Perhaps you would like to help me and my brother produce our film?”
“Me? I wouldn’t know the first thing about it.”
“Is not so difficult, I promise you. Actor fees are very low. The camera, the editing machine…maybe birr sixty thousand together. Please, I assure you, I will not go beyond your capacity.”
“Sounds like a lot.” He did a fast conversion in his head. It came out somewhere around $7,000. Roughly the value of his Pfizer stock. “It’s not my usual thing. But let me think about it.”
“Think, think,” Yohannes agreed. “I will wait for your answer. I swear by the names of God.”
Names? But then Teddy recalled that the Muslim God had ninety-nine names, every one of them flattering. So maybe Yohannes was a Muslim. He made a mental note to ask about this, to get a fix on exactly who the good guys were in this movie of his, and who the evildoers. Surely it wouldn’t do to invest in a propaganda tool for your own destruction. Unless of course part of you wanted that destruction. Wanted to burn down your life to its blackened foundations. Wipe the slate clean and start again.
Finally the iron gate, with a grudging squeal, swung open on its hinges. Yohannes gave Teddy back the camera and engaged the gears. No sooner had they entered the compound and parked then there came a tremendous thunk; it shook the car’s roof like a bomb.
Teddy ducked instinctively. He couldn’t help it. All day he’d been fearing an attack of some sort, and now here it was.
“Is okay, Mr. Teddy, is okay.” Yohannes was laughing. “It is only a football. No one is shooting you.”
“Yeah, well, the day’s still young.”
They were parked, he saw now, roughly in the center of at least four different games—hopscotch, jump rope, basketball, soccer—going on at once. No one appeared to object to their presence. A few of the children detached themselves and flocked over to greet Yohannes, who was clearly a great favorite. Only after they’d high-fived and chatted for a while did they cup their eyes against the window to check out the big old white guy dusting himself off in the backseat.
“How you doin’?” Teddy said agreeably. At this point he was used to being gawked at. “Good to see you.”
The children pressed closer. It was as though they’d been sent to free him from this shoddy, rattling cage in which he’d arrived. Remembering the boys outside the hotel, he reached for his wallet. “No need, Mr. Teddy,” Yohannes said. “They only wish to meet you.”
“Oh.”
“The children have heard that Danny’s father will be coming today. A great teacher from America. A very important man.”
“Who told them that?”
“I think Danny, must be.”
“An important man, eh? How do you like that?” He pushed open the door. No sooner had he extricated himself from the Lada than his hand was seized by a skinny long-faced boy with a shaved head. “And who might you be, son?”
“My name is Mekas,” the child said. “And please, what is yours?”
“Call me Mr. Teddy, I guess.” This foolish and insipid name seemed as good to him as any other. “At your service.”
“Mr. Tony, you must take my picture, so I will find a family in America.”
“Teddy.”
“You will help me find a family?”
“Okay, sure, no problem. Let me just get the thing focused…”
All at once Yohannes hissed fiercely in Amharic. The boy blanched and went still. His eyes, large and dark, receded into their sockets; his lips swelled up like tires. Then he ran off and disappeared behind an outbuilding at the end of the courtyard.
“What was that for?” Teddy demanded. “I was just taking his picture.”
“You are the guest. The childrens have been told this many times. They are not to take advantage of your kindness.”
“Well, where I’m from, the guest chooses for himself.”
“Yes, you do as you like,” Yohannes said, still angry. “This we all know about the Americans. You honor your own ways above others.”
Here we go again with the insults, Teddy thought. Indignant, he strode off across the courtyard on his own, determined to make his own mistakes, find his own friends. The children at least were happy to see him. They crowded in close, grabbing at the camera, admiring their reflections in the lens. Their breath ruffled the hairs on his arms; their fingers entwined themselves in his. It had been a long time since children had wanted to touch him, had done so voluntarily. Now he waded through their ranks like a man in a flood. They surged forward, bestowing unto him their odd, complicated names. Mesfin. Abebe. Tamrat. Ruweni. His own name in comparison sounded paltry and bland even to him. Made-up. His face was hot. He felt a pressure in his chest. Birds twitched and twittered in the juniper trees. Danielle, in accordance with her new policy of abandoning him whenever she could, was nowhere in sight. He appeared to have lost Yohannes too. There was no one to mediate or translate for him; no one to steer or instruct him in how to behave. He was happy about this and also a little panicked. He looked down to find two small boys hanging upside down on his pant legs, clinging like pandas to the trunks. “Okay,” he roared. “Off.”
They giggled and shook their heads. His mock-rage, if that was what it was, delighted them.
“So that’s how it is, huh? You want to live dangerously, do you?”
He gathered them in his arms and flung them high in the air, spun them like pizzas overhead. Everyone cheered. Why shouldn’t they? They were just kids. How natural it felt to play the old roughhouse games with them. The Ogre on the loose again. On some level, he’d never stopped being the Ogre, never given up being that shaggy, maniacal monster who bellowed and roared and chased kids around the yard, threw them over his broad shoulders like potato sacks, and dangled them upside down until they whimpered for mercy. Say what you would about the Ogre, for all his faults he wasn’t boring. He knew how to put on a show.
“Daddy!”
Another one, he thought. He was accumulating quite a crowd. All these awestruck children begging to be carried away.
“What are you doing?” Danielle said. “Are you out of your freaking mind? Put those children down before someone gets hurt!”
“Now let’s not get excited.” It seemed an unfair and lamentable trick of fate that his daughter, when appalled by something he’d done, sounded so very much like his wife. “I was just playing around a little.”
“Well, stop. These are children. They’re not your personal toys.”
“Fine.” In truth her righteous indignation bored him. What was all her travel for, if she was going to insist on the same old proprieties?
“You think this is why I brought you here? To terrify these poor kids with a sicko game like Ogre? God, I always hated that game too.”
“Untrue.” He shook his head. “Untrue and unfair.” And, he was tempted to add, unkind.
“Okay, maybe not always. But it got old, getting chased around all the time. My friends stopped coming over. Mimi’s too. We used to hide in our rooms after dinner sometimes, just to avoid you and that stupid game. Didn’t you know that?”
“Now you’re being spiteful.” The sun swam in his eyes. “You’re mad at me now so you’re trying to hurt me.”
“Face it, Daddy. You were the one who liked that game. Not us.”
“Face it, Daddy!” the children jeered. “Face it, Daddy!”
The tables had been turned: now it was the Ogre’s turn to be rendered vulnerable, to teeter from his great height, a giant encircled by flies, under the assault of all the many things he must face. He looked around the courtyard as if in a dream. His shirt was soaked in sweat, and like any old monster he’d begun to stink. “Okay,” he said to the kids on his back, “party’s over. Off.”
He bent low, like some faltering Atlas, so they could climb down off his shoulders. He couldn’t see their faces and so had no way of knowing if it was disappointment, or relief, that impelled them to disperse as quickly as they did.
“Find Yohannes,” he heard Danielle say to someone. She was already moving on to other business. She’d taken possession of one of the babies from a staff assistant and was now looking him over worriedly. “And then let’s call Doctor Dave.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. A touch of fever. No biggie.” With casual authority she cradled the baby high on her shoulder. “Listen, Daddy, I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings just now. I know you mean well, but these aren’t your children. You have to remember that. You can’t just plunge in without thinking and expect everyone to go along.” She touched her lips to the baby’s forehead, frowning. “Where’s Yohannes? We need someone to go on a meds run.”
“I’ll go.”
“You’ll never find the place. Let Yohannes do it. Mind fetching him for me? He’s probably out back as usual, shooting hoops.”
Teddy hurried off, determined to make amends. The kids had gone back to their games. The soccer ball the boys were using was flat. He made a mental note to buy them a new one. The girls were less focused on playing hopscotch, he noticed, than they were on the intricacies of braiding each other’s hair. But they could probably use some more chalk. From the kitchen he smelled charcoal fires, some peppery stew. He rushed through the courtyard, looking for Yohannes. The children had to swerve to avoid him. They knew an Ogre when they saw one, all right.
“You must take my picture, Mr. Tony. So you will not forget.”
Mekas again. The boy, with his shaved head and his sly listless expression, had arisen before him suddenly like a vision.
“Here, kid,” Teddy said, all but forcing the Leica into his hand. “Knock yourself out.”
Behind the courtyard, on the laundry lines strung over the alleys, T-shirts dangled like pennants. Every T-shirt on the planet, it seemed, was born in China, emigrated to America for a better life, and then was sent here to Africa to die. America was only a way station, Teddy thought, a middleman. It bought things cheap, then got bored, stuffed them into trash bags, and donated them at church.
He remembered the woman on the plane. Trying is almost doing. Then he remembered himself, wasting long afternoons on the sofa, worrying about a disease he didn’t have. His fingers idling dreamily on the remote, the world a flat pixelated screen on the other side of the room. Killing time. When really it was the other way around. Yes, death was a contagious disease, he saw that now. Philip had got sick and died. But what he, the survivor, had done with his vigor and capabilities, he who could rewire a radio and program a computer and construct enormous pieces of furniture with his own hands—what was the word for that?
He’d stepped into the coffin like a fool, and the box had refused to sink. His life bobbed up and down on the surface, stubborn and witless as a cork.
“Ah now, Mr. Teddy. You wish to play?”
Yohannes stood at the top of the key, smiling wolfishly, showing off his crossover dribble. Only there was no key. The court wasn’t much of a court, either. The ball had no tread. The hoop was a bent, rusted, oblong thing nailed on planks against the wall.
“No way.”
“Come now, one game. I give you the best guys. What do you say?” A predatory smile flicked across Yohannes’s face. There was not much respect for elders in it.
“I just got off a plane. I’d never keep up. Besides, you’re wanted in the office.”
“One game only.”
“Anyway I can’t play in these loafers.”
“Please now, look here.” Yohannes pointed to his own open-heeled sandals. The rest of the boys wore flip-flops, not that it appeared to slow them down any. Slim-hipped and coltish, they flung themselves around the court like kamikazes. At their age—thirteen, fourteen—adoption was less likely. He supposed they had to channel their energies somehow. “You are a strong man I think, Mr. Teddy. I believe you have some game in you yet. Maybe you school me, eh?”
Just what the world needs, he thought, another trash-talker. He stripped down to his T-shirt. The great mound of his belly swelled against the fabric. “Okay,” he said. “You’re on.”
The game itself went as games, in Teddy’s experience, often did: he huffed and heaved and threw his weight around in the paint like a bully, and in the end he both enjoyed himself enormously and lost when he might just as well have won. That he was playing against boys half his own height did nothing to restrain either his enthusiasm or his aggressiveness. After all, he too had been hammered on by grown men in his youth. He too had been pushed around the court by a hulking, hairy-backed butcher with love handles and bad breath. That was the male drill, the timeless rite of initiation. To mix it up out in the driveway, in the failing light, with the hot juices flowing, the gnats swarming your hair like a halo, the sneakers squealing and the mowers roaring like big sullen animals down the street…to feel an old man’s slick, foul-smelling torso grappling against you, hear his harsh grunts in your ear, the sound of a man fighting for breath in a constricted space, as if breath and space were privileges to be earned…this was a good thing, he believed, a thing to be craved and pursued like a birthright. So he went all out. It was what he did best.
What he did not do best alas was shoot or pass or dribble. Consistency in these skill areas was not his strength. Yet the boys on his team kept passing him the ball anyway, as if it amused them to watch this fat slob stumbling and cursing around the court, flinging up his wild erratic shots. His lungs were boiling. His glasses had completely fogged over. Eventually he sank a ten-footer from the baseline and the adrenaline began to flow. Then a fifteen-footer, falling away. A finger roll. Yohannes had been lying low, letting his young teammates do all the shooting. Now his eyes flashed, his brows locked together over his fine Abyssinian nose. “You are in the zone, Mr. Teddy.”
“Bah.” Teddy shrugged. “Law of averages.”
“Perhaps the law now will change.”
The two of them began going at it for real, throwing forearms and elbows, jostling for position under the basket. Teddy could hear his heart down in his chest, thundering like hooves. It seemed a good sound. He felt jubilant and strong. True, he was going to be sore tomorrow, but it would be a good soreness, the soreness that comes from exerting yourself too much. He knew about the other kind.
Unfortunately Yohannes, sensing introspection under way, chose that moment to pivot hard and drive right. Teddy was caught flat-footed; he had to resort to middle-aged hacker’s default mode and grab the guy’s shirt. For a moment they stood there locked in a bear hug, in the center of what would have been the paint had the court been painted or had any other features in common with a basketball court. Meanwhile the ball went bounding away down the baseline and across the alley.
Teddy chased after it, joyously, recklessly, in the grip of some heroic delirium. What was it about chasing balls that excited the instincts so? At bottom it seemed he was just another old dog with a pendulous belly, running back and forth for no reason and calling it a life.
Eventually the ball found its way to Yared, one of the boys on Teddy’s team, a short, droopy-eyed fellow with a measles-like rash around his mouth. Yared lifted the ball in his hands with a calm, impeccable solemnity, as if Mr. Spalding himself had entrusted him with it. Then he banked in a shot. Tie score.
Yohannes laughed. “What you say, Mr. Teddy? Shall we stop now, or is it joyable for you to finish our game?”
“You must be kidding.” To fly six thousand miles across the ocean only to end all tied up on this rutty joke of a basketball court—it would be worse than losing.
“Okay, so.” Yohannes took a step back and lazily popped a long-range jumper; it shot through the hoop like a pellet. “The school meets.”
“We’ll see.” Teddy bulled his way down the lane and threw in a hook. Yohannes answered from the baseline. Then each sank a long jumper. It went on that way for a while, back and forth, until Yohannes appeared to tire. He grew casual with his dribble, the ball left exposed. Teddy drew up tight, waiting for an opening. When it came, he lunged. The ball wasn’t there. Instantly he knew he’d been snookered, caught out of position far from the basket, overplaying his man. And if in retrospect he should have just conceded the head-fake and easy jumper that followed, this seemed only the latest in a series of bad mental, physical, and temperamental mistakes both on the court and off. Indeed, it seemed only fitting that his shaggy high-domed head—the source of these mistakes—should go on at this point to collide with Yohannes’s elbow and suffer a sharp, sickening crunch.
The day went dark. His glasses sailed off onto the asphalt; his eyes, exposed, filled with tears. His last sight before hitting the ground was of Yohannes polishing one final web gem, laying in, with a feathery touch, the winning basket. From somewhere nearby he heard splintering glass. It was a sound he had come to recognize.
“I trust you are not hurt, my friend?” The driver bent over him, looking worried, solicitous.
“Just. A bit. Winded.”
“Yes, I am very tired too.” In truth Yohannes was not out of breath in the slightest. “Come, we will go see Danny in the office. She will care for you like a mother.”
As it happened, when they hobbled into the common room, like soldiers back from a war, Danny was caring for other people like a mother—setting out tiny cups of juice and a platter of yellow, tasteless-looking cakes for the youngest children in the orphanage. Of course, it was Teddy who did most of the hobbling. His trousers were torn at the knee, his left leg seeping blood in two different places. He looked around for a place to sit, but all the chairs were tiny. They formed a dense, forbidding clot at the center of the room, like the terminal phase of some protracted Scrabble game. The walls were covered with maps of Europe and the United States. Curiously, there were no maps of Africa. But he supposed the children knew where Africa was.
“Ah,” Danielle said, “the prodigals return.”
“Sorry, it’s my fault,” Teddy said. “We were playing ball and the time got away.”
“I love it when guys bond. It’s so…selfish.”
“I already said I was sorry. Besides, you wanted us to be friends. Right, partner?”
“Partner?”
She flicked a little glare in Yohannes’s direction. He avoided her eyes. “You must tend to your father. He is in need of attention.”
“How do you like that?” she said to Teddy. “Known you one day, and he’s already got your number.”
“Very funny.” Wincing, Teddy worked at the geometrical problem of fitting his economy-size self into one of the dwarfish chairs. “I don’t suppose you have any Band-Aids around this place.”
“You’ll have to wait. It’s snack time.”
“Sure.” Blood was leaking through his pants, darkening the fabric. The smell of the juice and the cake reminded him that he’d had no lunch. “A couple of ibuprofen might be nice too.”
“I’ll see what I can find.” She poured out more juice. “So how was the big game?”
“Humiliating.”
“Your father is very strong,” Yohannes said. “Like Shaq. He is a man with great will.”
“Sounds like an epic struggle. Of course we’ve got a sick baby here desperate for antibiotics, but that can wait, right? The important thing is you two had a fun game.” She was silent for a moment, fuming. When she spoke again, she told Yohannes curtly, “You better get going now. Dr. Dave’s got a package waiting.”
“Okay, my mother.”
“Ask him to throw in some anti-inflammatories too. Shaq here looks like he’ll need them.”
When Yohannes was gone, she blew a sigh toward the empty doorway. “Great, now he’s pissed too.”
“Nonsense. He reveres you.”
“No, he doesn’t like the way I spoke to you just now. He thinks a woman should never sound harsh.”
“I don’t mind a little harsh.”
“I know. That’s what bothers me. I don’t either.” She put down the juice pitcher and wiped her hands on her shorts. Her little mouth was all bunched on one side, the lashes of her eyes darkly defined, like grass after a thaw. “I called Mom last night by the way. After I dropped you off. She was kind of in a mood.”
“Oh?”
“Imagine how stupid I felt. Here you’re like, ‘Oh, gee, everything’s fine at home, I’m just popping over to see how you’re doing.’ You guys should get your stories straight.”
“We intend to. Soon.”
“Meaning what? You’re telling me you don’t even know if you’re still together or not? That’s supposed to inspire confidence?”
“Grow up, Danny. There are bigger things involved than your confidence.”
She flushed, absorbing this. Now it was his turn to be harsh. With an automatic gesture she tried to toss back her hair, but it didn’t move—she’d secured it with a band. “Even so, you could have told me. How was I supposed to know you were getting separated?”
“Look, Danny, nobody’s getting separated from anybody. We’ve been married a long time. We’re not going to throw it all away just because of a rough patch.”
“A rough patch.” She went back to pouring out her little thimble-size cups of juice, like a nurse dispensing medicine. Her face was puffy with meditations and complaints, but her hands on the pitcher were as steady as you could want. Put this girl on a flag, he thought. Engrave her image on the prow of a ship.
“What about you and Yohannes?” he said. “What’s up with that?”
“None of your business. We’re friends. What’s up with you and Yohannes? If you’re thinking of investing in one of his quote-unquote movies, I should warn you, he has a rotten track record. Like as far as I know he’s never made one.”
“What about this action thing he’s doing? That sounds promising.”
“Oh, God, he told you about that? He and his brother, they sit around drinking beer all night watching Godfather movies and making notes. To give you an idea, they like the third one best.” She bent low, inspecting the bruise on his knee. “Hmm, looks like you’ve got a little gravel in there.”
“That’s okay. It doesn’t hurt.”
“I better take a look. This is no place for an infection.”
Frowning, she brushed off the fragments of stone and then blew softly on the wound to dry it. Teddy shuddered. After a sharp sting, the pain receded, and a cool, vacant sensation spread down his leg. “Better?”
“Yeah.” He looked down at her gratefully, a fairy-tale lion relieved of his thorn. “Much better, actually.”
“You know, if you really want to throw your money away, why not throw it away here where it can do some good? I mean, look at this mess.”
“What’s wrong with it?” Admittedly without his glasses everything was kind of softened and vague, a low-resolution affair. But he could see that the walls of the common room were painted a bright semolina yellow, like the petals of a sunflower, the bulletin boards dense with bashful smiling children in Alpine settings, the shelves so heavy with books and puzzles and Disney videos—Dumbo, Beauty and the Beast, The Jungle Book—they sagged in the middle, straining their brackets. “I like this place. I think it’s great.”
“Really?” Her tone was not casual; it wasn’t his opinion about the place that she was soliciting. “You’re not just saying that to be nice?”
“You know me. I never say anything to be nice.”
“True.”
“Of course I haven’t worked up the courage to check out the bathrooms yet—”
She laughed. “Best not to, I think.”
“But the kids seem happy, and that’s the main thing.”
“I have to say, Daddy, you’re blowing my mind here a little. This wasn’t what I was expecting. I was sure you’d be all over me about this. I thought you’d say”—here she put on her pinched, derisive Teddy-voice—“‘Hey, listen, Sweetpea, you’re wasting your time here. Go home.’”
“Well, the day’s still young,” he said. “Only I thought you said you were teaching English to these kids. I don’t see any classrooms.”
“You’re sitting in one. This is where we do geography. It’s also where we eat, and watch videos, and do art projects, and sing songs. It’s got a lot of uses. The other classes meet out there.”
“Where?” All he saw was a windowless metal trailer at the end of the courtyard. “That thing? Hell, it looks like a freight car.”
“It is a freight car. But until we raise funds for a proper building, it has to do. Dr. Dave, he was just in the States. He has this PowerPoint thing he does in churches and synagogues. They eat it up. He says in nine or ten months we’ll have enough to break ground.”
“Nine months!” It was a toss-up as to which unnerved him more at this moment—the children out in the freight car having to wait that long, or Danielle working here that long, or the thought of his lower back seizing up in spasms before Yohannes returned with the ibuprofen. Already he could feel a belt tightening invisibly at the base of his spine. “Tell you what. I’ll write your Dr. Dave a check. Speed things along.”
“You’re writing a lot of checks all of a sudden.” She made it sound like an accusation.
“So what? That’s my business.”
“Isn’t it more like Mom’s? Shouldn’t you call her first?”
“Don’t worry about Mom. Mom’ll be fine with this. She’s a great one for liberal guilt—half her work these days is pro bono.” What the other half was these days he didn’t know. But he was touched by the girl’s suggestion, her need to keep them in touch with each other, ongoing partners. For all her bravado and independence she was like any other child. Wishing for magic. Trying to coax a green shoot from the old sodden coffin.
“I don’t get it. Since when are you such a soft touch?” She yanked up one of her droopy spaghetti straps and hooked it over her shoulder blade. “You’re like the cheapest person I’ve ever met in my life.”
“Not anymore. Haven’t you heard? I’m a very important man from America. And now,” he said, “if you’ll excuse me, I think I better go lie down.”