Malawi, Mon Amour

One of my favorite people in the world is a cousin of Francine’s or, to be more precise, as precise as one can be within the limits of the English language, her first cousin once removed. Pete Jones had a generic name, a unique story, and a disarming smile. I’d known him for a long time, since he was in junior high. Francine was close to her cousin Esther, his mother. They grew up together. Pete was a bright, ambitious boy: in the top five percent of his class, quarterback on his high school team, dated a cheerleader, had all the accompanying perks accorded to special young men in the United States. More important to his family was that he aced his SATs and was accepted by many of the schools he applied to. He chose Northwestern because he was a Midwest boy, but he never attended. Changed his mind.

He shocked everybody by enlisting in the army.

His decision was surprising, although it shouldn’t have been. He was quite articulate about why he wanted to join the army and fight. It was the summer of 2002, at the height of jingoism after the World Trade Center attack. He felt that the terrorists had hurt his country and he wanted his country to hurt them right back. Bush would soon declare his intention to bomb Iraq back to the Middle Ages, and our Pete felt that it was his personal mission to humiliate al Qaeda, the Taliban, Saddam, and all those people over there.

His mother vehemently disapproved of his decision. Esther and her son argued for weeks. Some of their yelling matches became legendary in their family. The phrase “What has Saddam ever done to you?” turned into a family catchall for situations that were completely crazy or nonsensical. Two Thanksgivings ago, Esther complained that her grandchildren were running around her dining table yelling: “What has Saddam ever done to you?”

Pete was shipped to Afghanistan not long after, then Iraq. He hardly spoke to his mother for three years. Their relationship remained strained until he returned home in 2006 broken and one leg short.

He told Francine that his youth was taken away from him in one ruthless swoop, in one cruel explosion. He was not yet twenty-two, on a desert road in Iraq with his troop. The vehicle had some malfunction. While they waited for it to be fixed, his superior denied him some minor request. Pete turned around, sulking and walking away, whining to himself, and kicked at a stone. He couldn’t remember much else other than waking up in suffocating heat in a makeshift hospital bed in a bright room with high windows and without his right leg below the knee.

He returned home an amputee, downtrodden and inconsolable. He immured himself within high walls of despair. His mother couldn’t get through to him. He wouldn’t speak to friends, wouldn’t leave his room, which Esther had kept intact waiting for his return. The VA therapist was not able to help and neither was Francine. I remember walking into the house one day after his return and experiencing an immense weight as soon as I crossed the threshold. Pete’s phantom leg would get cramps, which his brain thought of as real, and the house brimmed with a phantom gloom, which we all recognized as real.

Had he not sulked, had he listened to his mother, had he gone to Northwestern, had he anything, he would have remained a man. Without his leg, he said, he was half a one. He was no longer whole, no longer inviolate.

He was unable to talk to anyone, not his family, not his old high school friends. Everyone he knew seemed to be living in an insular world, desperately trying to stave off anything that would remind them of their own pain, and he felt he was nothing if not a reminder. He understood that his friends wanted to avoid him as much as he did them.

He decided that was no accident: losing his leg was what was meant to be. A teaching that he was not learning, a Buddhist karma or dharma or something. Not an accident, not random, not a desultory fluke. Fate could not be capricious. There must have been a point. He had done something wrong and had to pay for it with a miserable life. His great loss must have some significance.

As Francine says, “Insanity is the insistence on meaning.”

She has a talent, though, my Francine. At his lowest, his weakest, when she was unable to break through to him and his mother was at her wit’s end, Francine left him a book of poems by Frank Bidart, the first of which was about a man who had lost his arm. The poem began brilliantly with instructions on how to bandage your stump (firmly, firmly, in order for the stump to remain cone-shaped) and ended with a revelatory line about how blood, amputation, and rubble gave the city of Paris its grace. That, however, was not what Pete read in it.

In the poem, the narrator had an illumination: the solution to his pain was to forget he had ever had an arm. The lost arm had never existed. Pete had become obsessed with the image of who he was, a true man, of what was lost. Once upon a time he had two legs. There was a man called Pete who could walk without a hobble, who could run like an antelope, who could play the manly game of football. The memories crushed him, and he must therefore cut them off. He would start anew, seeking oblivion. Memoryless, he’d launch himself into a new world. And he did, or at least he tried.

Pete boarded a flight to Lilongwe, Malawi, with a small duffel bag and his prosthetic leg. Once again, during the next three years he would hardly speak to his mother, his friends, his family. He would try to reinvent himself as a packless wolf. He would later tell Francine that he couldn’t be around his mother because she reminded him of who he was. He felt that the way she looked at him day to day was a further violation. The wolf limped across the Malawian countryside, stayed in the poorest villages, helped build houses and dig wells, taught children in various small schools. For a while, Pete found a home in that country.

It was during his African sojourn that he and I grew close. He needed medical advice, and he had less of an issue with me than with Francine since I wasn’t his mother’s cousin. I began to receive calls whenever one of the village children became ill. I helped however I could.

He lasted for three and a half years in Malawi. The country had settled his mind and his nerves, he told me. Yet the longer he stayed, the more he realized that something about what he was doing in Africa was dishonest. He couldn’t put his finger on what it was at first. Yes, he was lonely, but that wasn’t exactly the problem. He was not among his people. The chasm between African Americans and Africans was immense. As time passed, he began to realize that whenever he visited a new village, he would feel guilty. He began to understand that he was using the pain of others to alleviate his own. He couldn’t keep going, he told me. As much as he was helping, he could no longer live with the fact that he was using the suffering of poor villagers to satisfy his sentimental needs. He needed them to suffer, he told me, in order to feel needed, in order to reinforce his privilege.

He couldn’t go on pretending. After all, he said jokingly, he wasn’t white.

One day while on his exercise walk, he heard the song from Titanic on his handheld transistor radio, and the damned thing wormed itself into his ear and made itself a home. He couldn’t get rid of the voice of Céline Dion looping in his head. And when he returned to the village where he was staying, a number of the women were humming the song. He saw that as a sign. His heart most certainly could not go on and on. He returned home.

Happy ending: back home he began to work with an attorney on the South Side who specialized in tenant rights. He was still there. Surprisingly, or maybe not, he fell in love with and married an Iraqi woman from Michigan. He worships his twin girls. And to this day, his mother is still trying to get him to go back to school.

He wanted to cut off his past, he once told me, so he could smother his dreams. His mass-produced dreams had all been designed for men with two legs. Whenever he looked in the mirror, though, there was only the inevitable image, the one leg. He thought he’d forgotten much while in Malawi, but it turned out he’d only put things aside. He’d locked his past in a kist that wasn’t terribly secure. It worked temporarily, giving him time to settle his soul. After a while, he realized that without his past he couldn’t be whole, yet he wasn’t whole anyway. He could keep trying to forget or ignore his past, or he could reclaim who he was. Neither choice would make him whole; neither would make him true. No amount of optimism could return what he’d lost.

What to do? Go on, he said. Go on and on, as much as he loathed that stupid song. Go on and hope for bespoke dreams.